Beryl Sinclair is one of those names that I love to find. Born in 1901, Beryl Bowker was the daughter of the Dr. G. E. Bowker, a Physician at the Bath Royal United Hospital. She lived with her mother and father in Combe Park, Bath. She studied at the Royal College of Art alongside Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious.
She was both a painter in oils and watercolours, as well as a potter.
Eric Ravilious – Morley College Mural – Life in a Boarding House, 1929
At the RCA she was known as Bowk. Ravilious painted her twice that we know, once into the Colwyn Bay Pier Murals by Ravilious in the kitchen with a plant and then again in one of the ‘lost’ Ravilious oil paintings – ‘Bowk at the sink’, 1929-30.
Eric Ravilious – Newhaven Harbour, 1935
She married Robert Sinclair, a London author and journalist, who wrote the Country Book on East London in 1950. The painting above by Ravilious was bought from the Zwemmer Gallery by Beryl Sinclair.
Beryl Sinclair – Regents Park, The Horseguards
They were living at 170 Gloucester Place, London. It might explain why many of her early paintings are of Regents Park as it’s less than 200 metres away.
Beryl Sinclair – Regents Park, Sussex Place
In 1939 she was part of the Artists International Association – Everyman’s Print series contributing two prints, The Row and Riding Procession. The AIA Everyman Prints exhibition was opened on 30 January by Sir Kenneth Clark.
In the early 1940s she was the Chairman of the Artists International Association.
Essentially set up as a radically left political organisation, the AIA embraced all styles of art both modernist and traditional, but the core committee preferred realism. Its later aim was to promote the “Unity of Artists for Peace, Democracy and Cultural Development”. It held a series of large group exhibitions on political and social themes beginning in 1935 with an exhibition entitled Artists Against Fascism and War.
The AIA supported the left-wing Republican side in the Spanish Civil War through exhibitions and other fund-raising activities. The Association was also involved in the settling of artists displaced by the Nazi regime in Germany. Many of those linked with the Association, such as Duncan Grant were also pacifists. Another of the AIA’s aims was to promote wider access to art through travelling exhibitions and public mural paintings. ‡
Beryl Sinclair – Lake District
In late 1940s she was the Chair of the Woman’s International Art Club. The Women’s International Art Club, briefly known as the Paris International Art Club, was founded in Paris in 1900. The club was intended to “promote contacts between women artists of all nations and to arrange exhibitions of their work”, it provided a way for women to exhibit their art work. The membership of the club was international, and there were sections in France, Greece, Holland, Italy and the United States.
During WW2 she was part of a touring exhibition of art:
John Aldridge, Michael Rothenstein, John Armstrong, Kenneth Rowntree, Beryl Sinclair, and Geoffrey Rhoades. The paintings are touring Essex. They have already been to Maldon, Colchester, and Braintree. †
She then joined the Council of Imperial Arts League in 1952 becoming the chairman in 1958.
During the war she was commissioned by Sir Kenneth Clark to execute paintings for the Civil Service canteen. She also contributed to the Cambridge Pictures for Schools scheme. She exhibited at the Royal Academy, New English Art Club, the London Group, Women’s International Art Club, Artists International Association and shows at Leicester Galleries. Her work is in the collection of the Arts Council, The British Government, The Council for the Encouragement of Music and Art, Buckinghamshire County Museum
When married she moved to White Cottage, Grimsdell’s Lane, Amersham in Buckinghamshire. She died in 1967.
Beryl Sinclair Studio Pottery Mark.
† Chelmsford Chronicle: Friday 13 November 1942
‡ Wikipedia AIA
It is not easy for us to experience the shock of new things. At our fingers today we can type into the internet anything from Japanese Flute Music to American desert road signs and get the answers we expect. Television also exposed us to the world and so now, few things shock us. But try to think what you might have felt seeing an impressionist painting for the first time, if you had only been surrounded by Titian’s; or the wartime work of Paul Nash would have said to you if you had been surrounded by Constable paintings all your life? And where did you see these new paintings, was it in a gallery or in the press with an editorial of the erosion of society? Pick up any book on art history textbook and you won’t find anything considered modern in there until the mid 1920s.
John Constable – Wivenhoe Park, Essex, 1816
Paul Nash – The Ypres Salient at Night, 1918
This rejection of a fear of the new was felt by Frank Rutter, who in 1905, set up the French Impressionist Fund, with the support of the Sunday Times. This fund was open to the public to donate to, for the acquisition of an impressionist painting to be given to the National Gallery. Contributions slowly mounted up to £160, sufficient at that time to buy a top class Impressionist painting. This was mostly supported by the intellectual circles of London, from Virginia Woolf to Sickert. Rutter’s choice of painting to be picked was Monet’s Vétheuil: Sunshine and Snow, however the National Gallery did not accept work by living artists in 1905; and the gallery trustees also found Manet, Sisley and Pissarro, who were all too advanced. Rutter wrote: “They were certainly dead – but they had not been dead long enough for England”, adding “I nearly wept with disappointment.” The compromise was Eugène Boudin’s Entrance to Trouville Harbour, 1888. The National Gallery accepted this painting, although Rutter didn’t believe he was a true Impressionist, being at the start of the movement, but he compromised to get something rather than nothing, in the collection.
Eugène Boudin – Entrance to Trouville Harbour, 1888
In the 1920s art galleries were also not free to enter, and were mostly obsessed with paintings from 100 years in the past. I think it is fair to say the public of Britain was not an engaged with the art world and so that, and so without the demand of an audience, there was no reason to change in the hanging of galleries; it was still an old-boy-network. For the modernists, their efforts of self promotion was to mix collectively in magazines that era. These mostly feature, poetry, pictures and prose. They also have an underground feeling, from Blast to Words and Letters, they all have the look of 1970s punk zines, cheap paperbound magazines done on a small press or duplicator.
However, the vibrations and shockwaves of Post-Impressionism and the modernist movements of the First World War (Vortist, Futurist, Dadaism) had been washed around in an ocean of ideas, and these lapped like water at the feet of the art students of the 1920s. From this era of artists, the new ideas formed into two camps: the minimal modernists and the maximalist surrealists.
The modernists were mostly British. The most accoladed of these young artists today are Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, who took the ideas of primitive sculptures and ethnographic items and thought about what modernism really was by rejecting was it wasn’t. Though the teaching of the British art schools at this time still was looking to Italy and Europe for definitions of aspiration, many of these students had all been aware of Egyptian and pre-Columbian sculpture from local museums and magazines, and they had observed the same effects of those on Impressionist painters. It is also very likely with all the colonial propaganda of the British Empire, they were more exposed to the ancient worlds and tribalism of Africa, though with empirical projections of the ‘savage’ than of aboriginal artists. But we know Hepworth and Moore most certainly observed ancient artifacts during 1921 in the British Museum, Moore making hundreds of sketches and after learning how to carve sculpture, would reference these inspirations.
These young artists wouldn’t have made it alone. Older artists like Picasso were getting public attention and these young students were all championed by the art critic and poet, Herbert Read who was their life-long supporter. The British students had exhibitions and became part of the 7&5 Society and that was a nucleus for what was hip and happening in the avant garde art world in 1934 and 35; though the exhibitions they had were not sensations, they focused the press attention on this group and the movement looked more mainstream as a group.
At attitudes of the British public to art had changed in the 1930s, but by this point, modernism wasn’t so new, and art deco white sugarcube houses were appearing all over the country. Magazines also were hungry for content and twenty years on since the First World War, these ideas had become palatable and intriguing to their readers. When Henry Moore became an official war artists during the Second World War he was already famous by this point. I think it was Moore’s shelter scenes of the London Underground (as make-do bomb shelters) that added a level of emptaphy with the public and helped elevate his contemporaries after the war.
Henry Moore – Shelter Drawing, Seated Mother and Child, 1941
This is a visual diary of my day in Grantchester, while visiting the studio of the potter, Elspeth Owen.
On the edges of Cambridge, Grantchester is now known more for the television show of that name, but the village has meaning to different generations. To the scollar, it was once the home of Rupert Brooke, and when cycling around, I met a pilgrim looking for the Old Vicarage, Brookes home for a time, where this pilgrim was looking to sit down and read from his book of verse. To the student in the late 1960s, Grantchester is a picnicking area immortalised by the Pink Floyd song Grantchester Meadows. Since then it has been an area for students to drink and be social, joggers to get fit and tourists to seek a beautiful chocolate box village or a place to punt to. The village itself extends out on the roads that link it each end to Cambridge, with the centre being a triangle of pubs and the church. Not far down the road however, in the shade of the trees is an old cricket pavilion. It is the studio of the pottery Elspeth Owen.
This pavilion, like Grantchester Meadows, is owned by Kings College, but Owen has been a tenant there for 47 years. The tree lined seclusion of the hot July heatwave only lead to the surprise of not being alone at all. The studio was full of buyers and locals curious of the interior. Though Elspeth Owen is far from being unknown.
An experimental artist working with clay, photography and live art. She has taught and performed in many different settings village primary school, the Open University, special schools, the Museum of Mankind, the Taxi Gallery. She was one of the women who started the Greenham Common peace camp. She likes to forget the boundaries between life and art.
Visualizing Anthropology – ed. Anna Grimshaw and Amanda Ravetz (2005).
Owen took a traditional route into ceramics, that was to work with the materials and experiment. She got into Oxford, arriving on her birthday aged 19. Her time there gained a third class degree and she got a job with Encyclopedia Britannica as an editorial assistant. Not having a formal art school education isn’t really surprising, many of the great potters took to ceramics because they were apprenticed under others. Owen became involved with a community of people in Dartington and there she first made pots and got involved in feminist politics. The first pot she made was thrown on a wheel and fired without glaze, she recalls not liking the result. Marriage followed and children. After a diploma in Social Administration at LSE, Owen became a social worker. She moved to Cambridge in 1966, living at first on a houseboat on the river.
Owen took a B.A. in modern history at Cambridge and started a family. In the 1960s she became involved with the First Women’s Liberation group in Cambridge. Their first action of defiance to the press was to push pushchairs across King’s College grass. She moved to Granchester to school her children. In 1974 she went to evening classes to learn the skills of the potter after becoming inspired by Mick Casson’s tv show The Craft of the Potter on the BBC and liking the pots of Dan Arbeid who was living in Audley End at that time.
Owen then went to the Cambridge Technical College (now called Anglia Ruskin University) and was taught by Zoe Ellison who ran the Cross Keys Pottery in Cambridge with her husband Jan Ellison. At this time she read Finding One’s Way with Clay: Pinched Pottery and the Color of Clay by Paulus Berensohn. Not having to use a potter’s wheel was a more intimate way of making pots and in 1975 Owen moved her studio into the Cricket Pavilion in Grantchester.
Several exhibitions happened but it is likely to say the big break for any potter in the 1980s would be to be taken on by Henry Rothschild’s gallery Primavera.
Originally set founded in 1945 in Sloane Street, London, Primavera became the authoritative selling space for craft in Britain. The Cambridge branch of Primavera was opened in 1959. The London branch closed and the Cambridge branch was managed by Ronald Pile. Following Rothschild’s retirement in 1980, Pile took over the shop, which he ran until selling to Jeremy Waller in 1999.
Owen has exhibited in an extensive list of galleries and exhibitions, in national craft circles and has been written about by Tanya Harrod. Her works can be found in the V&A and Fitzwilliam Museum, to name a few.
Ian Nairn, was a maverick young architectural journalist, who invented the word “Subtopia” in the mid-1950s, when the Architectural Review ran a campaign against unsightly clutter and the blurring of distinctions between town and country.
Nairn drew upon a recent road journey he had made, stating that the outcome of “Subtopia” would be that “the end of Southampton will look like the beginning of Carlisle; the parts in between will look like the end of Carlisle or the beginning of Southampton.”
He continued uncompromisingly: “The whole land surface is becoming covered by the creeping mildew that already circumscribes all of our towns. Subtopia is the annihilation of the site, the steamrollering of all individuality of place to one uniform and mediocre pattern.”
Gillian Darley brings together lively original archive featuring Nairn himself, Gilbert Harding, Sir Hugh Casson, Sir John Betjeman and others, to re-trace the story.
She talks on location in Southampton with the architectural photographer Gareth Gardner about his new project to re-trace and photograph once more the locations which Nairn visited. In the studio, she explores the original and contemporary picture with the architect Janice Murphett, and the architectural writer, Gavin Stamp.
And she wonders whether, if the short-lived and unhappy Ian Nairn were alive today, what would he feel about the British landscape?
To me, the discovery of the Hobson Gallery, in Cambridge is rather surprising. Short lived, it opened in the late 1970s and was located at 44a Hobson Street, Cambridge, above where Reeds hairdressers are now. It was opened by Karen Wright, who ran it showing a surprising abundance of contemporary art, below is a list of all of the exhibitions I could find.
1978: February. Ted Hughes reads from Moon Bells and other Poems, recorded by Norwich Tapes.
1978: 4 April-6 May Chris Castle. Drawings, graphics, photos and paintings.
1978: 21 May-8 July. Ivor Abrahams. Prints 1967-78, & selected sculpture, a retrospective exhibition.
1978: 18 July-19 Aug. Malcomb Ryan
1978: 1 Oct-4 Nov. William Tillyer. Paintings, watercolours and graphics.
1982: 5-23 October. Paintings by Julia Ball and Ceramics by Elspeth Owen.
1982: 2 Nov-18 Dec. Prints from the Eastern region : an exhibition selected from open submission.
1983: David Kindersley Workshop. 12 Alphabets.
1983: 12 April-7 May Michael Ayrton : sculpture, paintings, drawings, prints 1954-1975.
David Hockney – Portrait of Karen Wright, 2002 (The David Hockney Foundation)
The owner of the gallery was Karen Jocelyn Wile Wright. An American editor and journalist. Born in 1950, in New York. She was educated at Brandeis University (BA), before coming to Great Britain to study History of Art at Cambridge University (MA), then moving to the London School of Business Studies (MSc).
As mentioned before, she was the founder of the Hobson Gallery, 44a Hobson Street, Cambridge, UK. This ran from 1975 to 84. In 1985 she worked for Bernard Jacobson’s art gallery in Cork Street, freelanced helping with art shows at the Whitechapel Gallery and then in 1987 Wright became a co-founder of Modern Painters Magazine with the art critic Peter Fuller.
The magazine was backed by Bernard Jacobson and David Landau, founder and then editor Print Quarterly. However, three years into the magazine, aged 43, Fuller died while driving to Cambridge to see Wright in 1990. Wright bought Fullers share of the magazine and took over the editorship in the same year. In 1994, David Bowie was invited to be on the magazines board and accepted. Bowie’s work writing for the magazine was interviewing artists (other than one response to the life of Jean-Michel Basquiat and reviewing the Johannesburg Biennale). Wright was the editor until the magazine was bought in 2004 by the American company LTB Media. In 1998 Wright published The Penguin Book of Art Writing with Martin Gayford, the colouring book Colour for Kosovo in 1999. The Grove Book of Art Writing in 2002 and Colour in 2004.
In 1998 Wright edited William Boyd’s famously fake biography of artist Nat Tate (Named after the National Gallery and Tate). A joke on the art world that included Gore Vidal and David Bowie all providing endorsements and attending the launch party of the book.
She has been writing freelance for various newspapers, most lately, The Independent.
Edward Bawden – Frontispiece from ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’
This is the obituary of Edward Bawden by Quentin Blake from the RSA Journal, February 1990.
Edward Bawden was born in Braintree in Essex in 1903. His father was an ironmonger, and Bawden has claimed to be, from his father’s point of view, something of a failure in that he did not follow him into that calling. He went instead to Cambridge Art School and then to the Royal College of Art. There (where he also met Eric Ravilious) he was influenced by Paul Nash, who was a visiting tutor at the time.
The Nash influence is evident in his earliest work, but Bawden very quickly found his own way of doing things, and a variety of commissions, many of them from the Curwen Press, which in those days (the late twenties and early thirties) was able to commission work much as a good design group might today. Among these projects were many small drawings for advertisements and brochures, as well as illustrations for books. Some of these were tasks that many another illustrator would have thought humble enough not to demand much attention but Bawden carried out the smallest drawing with complete professionalism and engagement. Each is beautifully and economically designed, with an unerring sense of the effect of the drawing on the page, and spiked with idiosyncratic wit and vivacity. In 1932 Bawden married Charlotte Epton; they had two children, Joanna and Richard (himself an artist). They lived at Great Bardfield in Essex, in the house that Bawden’s father had bought for him. Bawden’s practice continued to expand. It embraced book illustration, posters, prints, watercolours, murals and wallpaper; and this despite the fact that he lacked what any young illustrator today would regard as an essential piece of equipment, a telephone. Urgent messages came, apparently, via the butcher next door.
All this was interrupted, or at least given a new direction, by the outbreak of war. Bawden was appointed an Official War Artist. He travelled in France, in the Mediterranean, the Middle East and Africa. He seems to have relished even the vicissitudes. In 1943 the ship on which he was returning from the Middle East was torpedoed and he spent five days in an open boat. “There was quite a lot to watch’, he observed characteristically, in a recent interview for the Artist’s and Illustrator’s Magazine, ‘sharks nosing round all the time, plenty of dead bodies floating about in different positions.”
The rich store of work that he brought and sent back in these war years was perhaps less about the experience of war than about Bawden discovering new possibilities of his art in the traditional British role of the solitary traveller. ‘Ravilious and I were detached observers, watching and waiting…, he once wrote. It was this balance of detachment and enthusiasm that helped to give his work its distinctive quality; and explains his success at giving an intimate sense of England that was nonetheless free of nostalgia. Love is expressed by the quality of observation. Bawden was an observant traveller in Essex as well as among the Marsh Arabs, and saw with the same eye.
After the war he was immediately back to another forty years of work: impossible to mention it all. His unsentimental eye for the Victorian was just right for the Festival of Britain, and his huge, coloured, spirited Lion & Unicorn presided over that pavilion as it has done, subsequently, over so many degree-giving ceremonies at the RCA. Particularly significant, it seems to me, were the books that he illustrated for the Folio Society such as Gulliver’s Travels and Rasselas. Not ‘commercial’ editions nor éditions de luxe but books as they should be: balanced, intelligent, witty, well-designed. In the early eighties (and in his early eighties) the Folio Society invited Bawden to illustrate a book of his own choice. The Hound of the Baskervilles took them completely by surprise but it became, once again, an emphatic and characteristic work.
In the spring of 1989 I visited Bawden in his studio in Saffron Walden. We looked at both the wallpapers he had designed in 1928 (printing them from linocuts on the floor of his bed sitting room in Redcliffe Road) and a new linocut of a frog that he had just completed, sixty years later, to go on sale at his new exhibition at the V & A. It showed no diminution of authority in its handling. On that occasion we walked down from the Fry Art Gallery, where Bawden’s work appears among that of other Essex artists, to his home. Bawden was using a stick, and, though he didn’t much seem to need it, at one point he staggered slightly. His friend, the artist John Norris Wood, who was with us, said ‘Be careful language for use at sea. Edward. You’re falling into the gutter’. Bawden picked up the message through his deafness. ‘It’s where I belong,’ he said cheerfully. ‘It’s where I belong.”
However, he was not in the gutter, and nor, indeed, is his reputation. It is gratifying to think that he lived to see it enhanced anew, with a range of exhibitions, interviews and commentary. Yet I wonder if I am alone in thinking that we have not quite yet arrived at a full estimate of his worth. To have found a way of being modern without being ephemeral; to establish a high quality of design without foregoing idiosyncrasy; to master so many disciplines, and continue to do so over so long a period: this seems to me no small achievement.
And his working life is in itself a strengthening example to anyone involved in art and design. One is heartened, and not surprised, to learn that on the last day of that inspiring life he was at work cutting a new piece of lino, starting a new print.
Here is a heck of a biography of an extraordinary woman. From artist to trapezist. The etching below is one I own and inspired the research, mostly thanks to the Ben Uri Gallery.
Margaret Kroch Frishman – Chinese Boy, Etching. 1962.
Printmaker and sculptor Margret Kroch-Frishman was born into a well-off Jewish family in Leipzig, 3 Jan 1897. She studied printmaking at Leipzig under typographer Walter Tiemann before moving to Berlin, where she continued her studies under printmaker Hans Meid and painter Karl Hofer at the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts.
It was in Berlin that she met Oskar Kokoschka, who helped her secure studio space. Since she received no financial support from her family, she also worked as a trapeze artist at the Busch Circus to cover her living expenses. In 1923 she married Marcel Frishman, a cartoonist to the satirical weekly Simplicissimus, and began herself contributing illustrations to periodicals. Following Hitler’s accession to the Chancellorship in 1933, Kroch-Frishman and her husband moved to Copenhagen, Denmark and then fled to Belgium, where they lived between 1934 and 1939, including a period at an arts centre for refugees at Berchem-Sainte-Agathe, outside Brussels, also helping a number of their relatives escape from Nazi Germany.
Photograph of Margret Kroch Frishman by Marcel Frishman, 1930s
In 1939, when their visas expired, Margret and her husband were forced to return to Berlin; Amazingly, within two days, they got out of German to France, where they managed to board one of the last boats departing from Toulon, France for Melbourne, Australia. There they joined Kroch-Frishman’s elder sister and her husband Berthold Monash, cousin of former commander-in-chief Sir John Monash.
Despite such connections, in Melbourne she took on a variety of menial jobs, including working as a cleaner, after her husband enlisted in the army in 1942. Even with some of the members of their family in Australia, in 1951 the Frishman’s left Australia, immigrating to England and settling at the Abbey Arts Centre for artist refugees in New Barnet.
After her husband’s death in 1952, Kroch-Frishman moved to a flat at 17 Gerald Road, Belgravia, with her son Martin. The top two floors were the flat of Sir Noel Coward, but in 1956 he left England as a tax exile, living in Bermuda, Switzerland and Jamaica. Margret Kroch-Frishman lived on Gerald Road until 1966 when she moved to a studio house in Steeles Road, Belsize Park. She exhibited in London until her death in 1972.
Her lithographs and etchings were exhibited in London at the Ben Uri Gallery (1951 and 1952), at Wildenstein & Co (1961), and at Manchester’s Tib Lane Gallery (1967). She also made regular trips to Israel, France and Italy, befriending and exhibiting alongside a number of late Italian Futurists (Galleria d’Arte Giraldo, Treviso, 1966). After seeing an exhibition of her work in Venice, de Francia said: ‘The nuances of the colours, which often give the impression of the finesse of a watercolour, the skilful dosage of tones and the clarity of the impression have the chromatic equivalents, in the musical sense, of an extremely personal balanced and totally honest visual language.
The etching at the top of this post was from the Cambridge Pictures for Schools Collection of Works to be loaned to Schools. #104. Being so early in the council collect, the information label has Nan Youngman’s handwriting on the back.
Though this is a work I have for sale, it is a good excuse to write up on an artist I have long admired and owned.
George Hammond Steel was born into an artistic family in Sheffield. Both his father, G.T. Steel, and bother Kenneth Steel, were artists. George’s mother would die in December 1940 in the Sheffield Blitz attacks by German bombers. They were living at 123 Hunter House Road, Sheffield.
George and his brother studied art at Sheffield School of Art under Anthony Betts. George then attended classes in Birmingham and London. Exhibited RA, RBA, RI, Leicester Galleries and Paris Salon.
He lived at Ashdon, Essex. His work was exhibited widely; at the RA (where he had 15 submissions from 1926), RBA, RI, RWA, Leicester Galleries, Glasgow Institute (7 works) and Paris Salon. Steel had his first one-man exhibition at the Graves Gallery in 1941. His work has been bought by a number of provincial galleries, including Sheffield and is represented in several Public Collections.
The subject matter, though a boating one, is unusual for him. It isn’t a harbour but an inland lake. Painted in 1955 it was five years before his early death. The confidence in it is remarkable. This painting was exhibited and bought in Leicester Galleries ‘New Year Show’ January 1956.
This is from an artical in the Countryman in 1941. I thought it was a refreshing perspective on the Women’s land army. It also features an illustration by Mary Fedden.
FACING THE FACTS It is no use expecting impossibilities of these land girls of whom Mr. Hudson is hoping to see 30,000 on the farms, Their pluck, patriotism and good humour are not in question, but spirited, diligent and sturdy though many of them are, and doath though their employers would be to lose them, the unremitting and efficient work of the regular working women on the farms in Scotland and in some parts of England is nothing fo go by. These women are brought up to the job. They have strength, they know how to take care of their health, they have acquired skill, and they are part of the community in which they live. We believe in women workers and in the Land Army – without it, it will be impossible to get the work done that has to be done – but it will do no harm to print the following letters.
Mary Fedden – As we hope we look | As we generally do look.
A LAND GIRL IN SUSSEX Few people realize the extreme arduousness of the agricultural labourer’s life. The billeting question is very difficult too, especially where a land girl is only earning the minimum of 28s a week. I do not know how girls can manage away from their homes on even the highest wage (34s in Sussex) when they have to find board and lodgings, underwear, soap, shoe repairs, etc. In the other women’s services they are ‘all found’ and the rest is pocket money. Also in other services there is a hope of promotion for the hard-working and intelligent girl. You have to be a country fanatic, like me, to stodge on month after month with no prospect of advancement. I think it highly unlikely that many ordinary town girls will become like this. The farm labourer, male and female, is brought up to it.
Another thing – in other services you join and are sure of your living. In the Land Army you may get a job or you may get stood off in bad weather and have to wait for the dole, which means a lot of fiddling about. Again in sickness you have to struggle for yourself, and if you have an accident the compensation money (which is much less than your lost wages) comes about two months after you are up and doing again! That has been my experience. Unless a girl has some savings to tide her over these accidents, etc., I don’t see how she can manage in the Land Army. I expect the various committee members have plenty to do and I don’t know whether they are paid or not, but so far as I can see round here there is no attempt made to visit places of work and see whether the girls are getting a fair deal or not. The girls I have met and questioned are invariably keen on their work and most of them seem hopelessly and foolishly enthusiastic in that they work far longer hours than they should and will. They become fed up and overtired. I’m afraid I sound very much against the farmer, but it is only human nature to work a willing horse too much.
All the girls I have met round here seem to have settled down well and are stones heavier! A few gave up last winter because jobs weren’t forthcoming after training and they couldn’t afford to wait around. Others chucked it after coming to a real dirty farm after training at a posh agricultural college.
Personally I should think the only solution would be a State-subsidized Land Army which would provide security for the girls without worrying the farmers to death. That, to my mind, is the worst drawback of all, for, although no one joins with the idea of earning good money, yet it is a nightmare to be faced with lost wages in bad weather or no care in sickness. Another point is that unless care is taken to stop enthusiastic girls overdoing it we shall have a lot of female invalids later on due to lifting heavy sacks of potatoes, etc.
I have been working for sixteen months now and enjoy the life but have lived at home and make extra money b writing. However, I think that for the average girl the life is extremely hard and boring, as few of them are interested in nature-study or country pursuits, and the occasional rallies and polite pattings on the back from gracious ladies do not make up for their usual amusements, etc. Many girls are quite misled by the recruiting talk and think they will be with lots of other girls and spend their time dashing about on a tractor, and are fed up when they end up hoeing a beet field for about a month and never see a soul.
Of course a lot of farmers are appreciative and the girls get on well; also an intelligent interested girl can do a lot to stir up some of the stick-in-the-muds. At the same time farmers and workers have to learn to pull together a bit more; I know farmers who are still out to do the worker in the eye, and the workers, in return, just slack off. For instance, when daylight-saving makes a loss of working hours in the dark mornings the farmers suggest that the labourers shall forfeit their weekly half-day. It is true that the workers have an actual hour less work every day, but you can’t do anything with that bit of dark morning, while you can do your shopping or gardening on a Saturday afternoon, The worker would rather give up part of the dinner hour every day and put a spurt on if there was some definite amount of work to get through. There is too much domination of hours and rights on all sides. I think the farmers are a bit grinding and many workers are lazy toads. I know I can get through a lot more than many men in a day but not so much as the really old honourable men. You should see how some men gossip and smoke! One last word, the need for going to bed early is absolutely vital.
A LAND GIRL IN WALES There is a general misconception that the Land Army girls are recruited largely from the urban population. Of sixteen who were training with me at the Henry Ford Institute five or six were farmers’ daughters and half the others were country bred. The very heavy mortality of the early days of the Land Army was, it is true, largely among the town-bred ex-shop assistant, typist, factory-worker type, who had not in the least realized what the job meant and were not physically up to it and in some cases too squeamish to face cleaning stables or burying dead lambs. It was the fault of the recruiters who were so anxious to show spectacular numbers that they did not warn recruits that they were committing themselves to long hours, dirt, outdoor work in wet weather and, very frequently, to a seven-day week. I think present recruitment is much better and the percentage of failure will be less.
Hours are a problem. The original stipulation was a 48-hour week, but it has proved quite impossible for farmers to work the girls different hours from the men, and men’s hours vary from 48 to 54 without overtime or Sunday work. In hay harvest a 14-hour day is quite normal (7 a.m. till 9 p.m.), and 12 or 13 hours in corn harvest. It isn’t possible to let the girls off earlier because a full team is always necessary to keep the balance even between field and stack.
What women workers in India are able to do. Put up by hand, no folks used.
Loneliness is a real trouble where girls are working singly on small farms, What they want is not mass entertainment but individual invitations to Sunday lunch, tennis, or even family evenings. Most of the L.A. seem to come from homes more educated than those of the cottagers (or even the farmers) with whom they are working and they miss the more intelligent (or intellectual) conversation of their homes and previous friends, The loan of books would also be much valued by many.
A MIDLAND FARMER’S WIFE Several farmers round here have had very good girls for some time. One farmer has three from Birmingham who are first class, he says. It really depends on the farmer as much as on the girls. The most urgent thing is milking and care of stock. In these there is no doubt that a great many women excel.
TWO SOUTH COUNTRY FARMERS Many of the girls know as little, of course, of the realities of rural life and farm life as most townees. And much of the work they gallantly essay is physically beyond them. They do it slowly and imperfectly. And when the first excitement has worn off, they are sometimes dispirited by their inefficiency, When they are thrown back on themselves, their opportunities of marriage having been diminished by the War, they are heart-sore. Land work, even though to sustain the Home Front, can seldom seem as exhilarating and satisfying as the life in the Services that their men friends are leading. Also, unlike the soldiers, sailors and airmen, the girls are not ordinarily working with a large company of comrades. It must often happen that they are almost alone, with very little social life, recreation or entertainment. If they are not in some measure self-sufficing as readers or students, and have no special devotion to the countryside, the life must seem to many of them dull and toilsome.
It is not backache only that is the matter. Many girls at work in towns are underfed. Even if in the country they have not to put up with chancy fare but have satisfying meals, there are those among them with a stupid fear of putting more flesh on their bones than the women of the films or cheap fashion papers seem to manage with. Again, these newcomers to the country seldom realize that early rising and hard work day by day on the land means early to bed. What with one thing and another, many a well-meaning land girl has sometimes in her early days been not far from hysterics. She feels lonely, incompetent and fatigued. In the result, the employer is as dissatisfied with her as she is dissatisfied with herself. Often a sensible farmer or farmer’s wife or some understanding soul in the village gets matters on a better footing before dismissal comes about; but it is not seldom for employer and employed to part company without regret. Nothing can be done with a silly girl, and it cannot be expected that there will not be some very ordinary young persons among the recruits to the Land Army as to the Army itself, but by taking thought, much more can be done than is perhaps being done with some of the apparent failures. Because of the national extremity, it is vital that the best wits
of the countryside shall be brought to bear on a human problem. Cannot some of the girls be given sounder notions of hygiene?
In August 1918 a survey was taken of 12,637 Land Army members (writes Dame Meriel Talbot in the Times’). The returns included 5,734 milkers, 293 tractor-drivers, 3,971 field workers, 635 carters, 260 ploughmen, 84 thatchers, 21 shepherds. Can we doubt that with the extension of physical fitness, the development of motor-driving and every kind of outdoor sport, members of the present Women’s Land Army are capable of surpassing the pioneers?
A FARMER IN HAMPSHIRE On my farm I have five land girls, and on the whole we are pleased with them, one with cows, one with poultry and three on the arable. We have had to get rid of one,a good girl, from the dairy, because she wouldn’t go to bed at a reasonable time, and couldn’t get up early. There is a camp too near the farm! There are bound to be misfits and faults and shortcomings on both sides, and I doubt if you can do anything about it, except leave it for time to solve. You can’t put ‘gumption’ where there isn’t any. You can’t make an unhandy man or woman handy, and literacy and good manners don’t mix with their opposites.
I think we on the land have to do the best we can, and, in this machine-age, if we are left a certain minimum of skilled key men we can rub along with second-rate labour, male or female. And I’d sooner have girls than second-rate men, if they will try.
A SCOTTISH LAND GIRL Women farm-workers often have to pit their strength against men. Everything is made men’s size – the heavy tools, the thickness of sole necessary to keep out the ‘glaur’, the size of the enormous straw bunches and hay-bales. Now if a woman is given work within her strength she can go on all day, but five minutes of lifting heavy bales, with the best will in the world, will tire her out for an afternoon (between four and five hours) – bales that a boy could lift (there must be some anatomical difference). If she is strong-minded she can often save herself; for instance, in fanning corn, she may be told to fill the fanner by lifting the grain up in a heavy basket the height of her brow – if she uses a pail instead she can equally well keep the fanner going, but ‘it is not done’ the others will say (this happened to me only this week). But what does the land girl get out of her new life besides ‘rude health’ and a good deal of fatigue? It must be remembered that people on farms are still merry – such merriment, whistling and jokes as in time of War you find only among soldiers, sailors and others engaged in active service. The older labourers are still interested in their craft for its own sake, apart from production of food. This gives a steadying background.
The definiteness and richness of the country character with his telegrammatic (or poetical) way of putting everything appeals to every girl. He makes ‘story’ for her. She is delighted with a clear outlook that you now so rarely find in towns (compare the weather talk of the stable before yoking time in the morning with the glib repetitions of shop girls). The newcomers are allowed to melt into the communal life in a most kindly and welcoming way (I find it hard to get an evening to myself) – there are dances in local granaries and all the excitements of human happenings: births, deaths, removals, marriages and miscarriages.
I am working in the poultry now. A Japanese ‘sexer’ comes every week the day after we have hatched to divide the boys from the girls. The girls we sell as day-old pullets. Imagine my horror when I was asked to take and drown all the boys. I felt like Herod. Did it just once, but have said never again.
ABOUT THE SCOTTISH BONDAGERS How many English people know the word? The dictionary definition is, ‘A cottar bound to render certain services to a farmer’. To-day a cottar is a farm servant who occupies a cottage on the farm as part of his wages. The word recalls the time when both men and women were serfs. It has now come to mean women workers only. The picturesque costume, with differences in the colour of the skirt, and in some places the wearing of a sunbonnet instead of a wide-brimmed straw hat, as described by ‘Scottish Home and Country’, from which the illustration is borrowed, is one of the few female national costumes surviving in Great Britain. The skirt is of stout orange and black drugget, requiring three yards of material, and has thirty-eight pleats. The binding is done with a bright-coloured braid. The gay apron is worn of course after work is done. The garibaldi is of bright print, buttoned down the front. Over the hair a kerchief – a square of print folded in a triangle – is worn, with the two ends tied under the chin, giving a nun-like effect. What is not shown in the photograph is a small brightly-coloured or tartan-fringed shawl which is pinned closely to the neck, the two ends thrown over the shoulders to fall down the back. In wet weather the bondagers are ‘breekit’. They pin their voluminous skirts together at the knees and wear a coarse apron or brat. Straw ropes are wound round the legs to protect them from the wet and mud.
James Radley Young, trained as a painter and modeller at Sheffield School of Art and went to work in Poole in 1893 for Carters Pottery, (later Carter Stabler and Adams, and then Poole Pottery), following his half brother Edwin Page Turner, who was head of design at that time. At this time one of of Young’s main jobs was having to scale large mural designs that Carters were known for making. With Young’s skills as an artist and learning about glazes in the pottery, many of the designs Carters made became more elaborate and could adorne buildings without the damage painted works receive.
Tiles for the The Tangier pub, Portsmouth, built in 1912. The design by James Radley Young in 1911.
Having left Carters in 1901 Young set up his own pottery called Hammer Pottery in Haslemere, Surrey. There he designed a series of garden pots for Liberty’s, known as the Celtic range. Other designs in the series were by Alfred Knox. However the pottery failed in 1911 and he returned to work for Carters.
The recession during the War enabled him to develop his interests in Spanish and Portuguese pottery, leading a team of the otherwise unemployed women modellers. The designs were very much in the spirit of the Arts and Crafts Movement, whereby individual pieces were handmade, following centuries of tradition, and were intended to be useful as well as decorative.
These works made during the First World War by Young, looked very much like the style of the Bloomsbury Group at the same time, due to the simple nature of the brushwork. The Bloomsbury Omega studios opened in 1913 and they must have been influenced by Young as much as he would have been by them. They also both shared an interest in Egyptology.
The style developed from simple unglazed ware into glazed pieces decorated with sprigs or bold stripes. The sprig design was to become a theme echoed in Poole pottery for the next half century.
The designs of the decoration where not the only impact that Young had on Carters, as having run his own pottery, Young took to having a more, handmade look to the pieces and they were thrown on a pottery wheel.
