In the short time that Eric Ravilious was of working age he produced a massive amount of work for such a young man. He died while serving as an official British War Artist when the aircraft he was aboard crashed off Iceland. He was 39 years old.
At the time of Ravilious’s death there were various projects underway that the war disrupted. As manufacturing was halted, these commissions were put on hold while the country had to economise.
Eric Ravilious – Design for London Underground Plate, 1939.
One of the projects Ravilious had started was for a commemorative plate for the ‘New Works Programme’ of 1935-40 that London Transport had begun.
It was an ambitious extension of the Northern and Bakerloo lines northwards, and the Central line both east and westwards. Although the engineering work was well advanced by the outbreak of war, the project had to be abandoned and was only partly realised in the post-war years. Thus the commemorative plate designed by Ravilious was never produced.
The early Underground train lines, originally owned by several private companies, were brought together under the ‘Underground’ brand in the early 20th century and eventually merged along with the sub-surface lines and bus services in 1933 to form London Transport under the control of the London Passenger Transport Board (L.P.T.B.).
The ‘New Works Programme’ was to develop many aspects of the public transport services run by the L.P.T.B. and the suburban rail services of the Great Western Railway and London and North Eastern Railway.
The investment was largely backed by government assistance as well as by the issuing of financial bonds and was estimated to cost £42,286,000 in 1936 (approximately £2.59 billion today).
Of the four vignettes Ravilious chose, three were of construction and one was of the predicted Grand Opening, with a tube train and swash bunting along the platform.
One of the vignettes of construction show men being lowered in buckets into the tube shaft. These were likely non-station locations where the soil was excavated out and the steel and concrete lowered in, like the workers. It was a typical practice in mining.
Men in a small-scale drop lift.
Another of the pictures shows workers putting up the frames for the tube tunnels and station platforms. The wiring being bunched on the sides of the tunnel.
The two workers pictured here are bolting the rivets of the metal into place. The image when manufactured, would have been a black and white transfer and the colour would have been a translucent enamel paint.
The three heraldic devices show the county badges of Essex, Hertfordshire and Middlesex.
Middlesex Heraldry
Buckinghamshire Heraldry
Hertfordshire Heraldry
The plate would have been one of the last commissions of Frank Pick, chief executive of the London Passenger Transport Board. Pick, who retired in 1940 and died the next year, had worked for the Underground since 1906.
Pick had become publicity officer responsible for marketing and it was at this time that, working with the company’s general manager Albert Stanley, he began developing the strong corporate identity and visual style for which the London Underground later became famous, including the introduction of the ‘Underground’ brand.
One of Pick’s responsibilities was to increase passenger numbers, and he believed that the best way to do so was by encouraging increased patronage of the company’s services outside peak hours. He commissioned posters which promoted the Underground’s trains and London Transport buses as a means of reaching the countryside around London and attractions within the city. Throughout Pick’s career his over-riding passion was for architecture and design, and his adventurous approach and choice of collaborators is famous.
Ravilious had other work planned for London Transport, some posters and wood engravings. During his lifetime he did see some of his work used, a set of his wood-engravings were used for the covers of the Country Walks books in 1936.
1936 cover to Country Walks, 3rd Series with a Ravilious Design of Two Cows.
The Country Walk books were by Charles White and printed for London Transport to show people the possibilities of using the Underground and Bus network. Inside they had maps and planned walks showing how to get to the locations using London Transport.
Each of the three volumes had a wood engraving by Ravilious on the cover. The second volume had a Mill, the third featured the Two Cows wood-engraving.
A print from the original woodblock with Two Cows to the left, and Hull’s Mill, Castle Hedingham to the right. 1935.
The two images were engraved on the same block of wood and printed together as one proof. On the left a cow and a bull in a field, separated by a stone wall; on the right a horse standing next to a mill stream, with watermill (based on Hull’s Mill, Castle Hedingham, near Great Bardfeild) in the background.
Below is the original drawing for Two Cows, reversed in design as a woodblock always prints backwards.
Eric Ravilious – Two Cows, preliminary study for a woodcut, 1935.
The pencil design is remarkable for another reason: part of the design was turned into a watercolour featuring two Cows in the same pose.
Eric Ravilious – Two Cows, The Fry Gallery, 1935.
The book Away We Go by Oliver Green and Alan Powers, documents more of the other work that both Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden did for London Transport, mostly their designs for press adverts.
Ravilious Engravings by Jeremy Greenwood, The Wood Lea Press, 2008. Moving Metropolis by Sheila Taylor and Oliver Green, Laurence King, 2001. Ravilious and Wedgwood by Robert Harling, Dalrymple Press, 1986
During last summer I visited Ickleton Cemetery Chapel, between Ickleton and Hinxton. The chapel is Victorian and Grade II listed. Built in 1883, in an Early English style, flint with limestone dressings and knapping to the sides and a slated semi-circular roof end.
With double doors to the side is a mortuary chapel and a coffin cart rests inside.
In the graveyard are a set of unusual metal sand cast headstones. Probably made by a company who made fireplaces. An old chap who looks after the graveyard told me that some of them had been stolen, probably for scrap metal as a piece of corrugated iron on top of the compost heap had also been stolen.
The painted grave is one of his relations, and he had repainted them to look as they did when put in. Others have rusted however.
One of the best books I read in 2016 was Emma Smith’s Maidens’ Trip, a story about life on the wartime canals. In 1943 Emma Smith joined the Grand Union Canal Carrying Company under their wartime scheme of employing women to replace the boaters.
The Canal system had been in some decline since the rise of the railways in the 1880s, but wartime efforts to save money on fuel and get maximum efficiency out of the countries infrastructure facilitated a temporary change.
The Re-issued cover of the book.
Smith set out with two friends on a big adventure: three eighteen-year-olds, freed from a middle-class background, precipitated into the boating fraternity. They learn how to handle a pair of seventy-two foot-long canal boats, how to carry a cargo of steel north from London to Birmingham and coal from Coventry; how to splice ropes, bail out bilge water, keep the engine ticking over and steer through tunnels. They live off kedgeree and fried bread and jam, adopt a kitten, lose their bicycles, laugh and quarrel and get progressively dirtier and tougher as the weeks go by. I was rather annoyed to have missed the BBC Radio4 adaptation of it but hope to see it on BBC Radio4Extra in the coming year.
While reading the Smith book, for reference I had the ‘The Canals of England’ by Eric de Maré with his beautiful photos of 1950s Britain. Below are a selection of the pictures.
By the end of the nineteen-sixties a lot of the canals where in poor condition and it was only until the mid nineteen-nineties that they were cleared out and seen as tourist attractions.
Eric de Maré – The Canals of England, The Architectural Press, 1950 Emma Smith – Maidens’ Trip, Putnam & Company, 1948
Between Walton-on-the-Naze and Harwich, is Landermere, a hamlet made up of an old pub and some cottages built next to a quay on the river. In the 16th century it is rumoured to have been a former smugglers’ bay due to its close proximity by boat to the North Sea.
This article is a set of biographies of the extraordinary people who have lived in this place with around 15 houses, mostly in the last 100 years. Some of the shining lights of 1950s British art seemed to end up in this tiny place in Essex, rather like Great Bardfield.
John Hutton – A sketch of Landermere.
Landermere Wharf, a small dock which, as well as being used for hundreds of years to bring in heavy goods, was also once a commercial concern. First used in Elizabethan times, it was sold in 1760 to Richard Rigby who also owned the post at Mistley. The main cargoes were coal, corn and Scandinavian timber.
Remote coastlines have always been a problem for customs men, particularly around inland bays such as Hamford Water where boats carrying contraband could be moored, waiting for a suitable opportunity to approach the wharf and offload. The King’s Head pub used to be situated near Landermere Wharf, and reputedly lost its licence in 1913 after a smuggling incident. ♠
Gull Cottages, Landermere, c1950.
Sir William Withey Gull (Queen Victoria’s Doctor – Ripper Suspect)
Adrian and Karin Stephen (Brother of Virginia Woolfe)
Nigel and Judith Henderson (Daughter of Adrian and Karin)
Eduardo Paolozzi (Artist, Murals in Tottenham Court Road Station)
Basil Spence (Architect, Coventry Cathedral)
John Hutton (Artist, Coventry Cathedral)
Sir William Withey Gull
Gull was born in 1816, on the River Colne, aboard a barge called ‘The Dove’, then moored at St Osyth Mill, Saint Leonards, Colchester.
William’s father John Gull was 38 when he was born, he was a barge owner. William’s mother was 40. William was the youngest of eight children, two of whom died in infancy. When he was 4 the family moved to Landermere.
His father died when he was 10 years old and is buried at Thorpe-le-Soken. After her husband’s death, Elizabeth Gull devoted herself to her children’s upbringing on very slender means. She was a woman of character, instilling in her children the proverb “whatever is worth doing is worth doing well.” William Gull often said that his real education had been given him by his mother.
Gull attended a local school kept by the local clergyman. At fifteen he first began to study Latin. The clergyman’s teaching, however, seems to have been very limited; and at seventeen William announced that he would not go any longer. Gull became a pupil-teacher in a school kept by a Mr. Abbott at Lewes, Sussex. He lived with the schoolmaster and his family, studying, but also paying his keep by also teaching Latin and Greek to the boys. At this time he became acquainted with Joseph Woods, the author, architect and botanist. He formed an interest in looking for unusual plant life that would remain a lifelong pastime and eventually turned his mind to biological and medical research. Gull was introduced to the director of Guy’s Hospital, Benjamin Harrison. Harrison was impressed by Gull’s abilities and Gull was given patronage to study and work as apprentice at Guy’s Hospital in 1837.
Gull, encouraged by Harrison, determined to make the most of his opportunity, and resolved to try for every prize for which he could compete in the hospital in the course of that year. He succeeded in gaining every one.
Guy’s Hospital in Gull’s time.
Aged 26, Gull was appointed to teach Materia Medica at Guy’s Hospital. A Year later in 1843, he was appointed Lecturer on Natural Philosophy. He also held at this time the post of Medical Tutor at Guy’s and was appointed Medical Superintendent of the wards for lunatics. At 30, he earned his M.D. degree at the University of London, and gained the gold medal. At that time this was the highest honour in medicine which the University was able to confer.
In 1847, Gull was elected Fullerian Professor of Physiology at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, a post which he held for two years, during which time he formed a close friendship with Michael Faraday (at that time Fullerian Professor of Chemistry). In 1848, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians.
In 1887, Sir William Gull suffered the first of several strokes at his Scottish home at Urrard House, Killiecrankie. The attack of hemiplegia and aphasia was caused by a cerebral haemorrhage, of which the only warning had been unexplained haemoptysis a few days earlier.
Urrard House, Killiecrankie
He recovered after a few weeks and returned to London; but was under no illusions about the danger to his health, remarking “One arrow had missed its mark, but there are more in the quiver”. Over the next two years, Gull lived in London, Reigate and Brighton, suffering several more strokes. The fatal attack came at his home in 74, Brook Street, London on 27 January 1890. He died two days later.
The term anorexia nervosa was first used in 1873 by William Gull to describe this condition.
Postscript:
Dr. Thomas E. A. Stowell suggested in a 1970 article in ‘The Criminologist’ that Sir William Gull, the Royal physician, attempted to certify Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, who was the Ripper.
Stowell claimed that his main source was Gull’s daughter Caroline who was married to Theodore Dyke Acland. Having studied under Acland, Stowell referred to him as “one time my beloved Chief”. Stowell was an executor of Acland’s will.
Stephen Knight, in his 1976 book Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution went even further, claiming that Jack the Ripper was actually a three-man team, with Gull as the actual killer. Knight alleged that Gull was a Freemason and the killings were carried out according to Masonic ritual. Knight claims that Gull afterwards became insane and was certified in an asylum under the name “Thomas Mason” and a sham funeral service carried out in the pretence that he had died. Cited as evidence in support of the theory is the fact that Acland signed his father-in-law’s death certificate. While Acland’s actions were unusual and were not encouraged, they were not illegal.
Following Stowell’s article, Colin Wilson disclosed that ten years before it was published, Stowell invited him to lunch at his club and tried to convince him that they were thinking along the same lines on the Ripper mystery. He told him, “Jack the Ripper was the Duke of Clarence.” Later, Wilson said that he contacted Stowell to ask him if he might mention the theory in some articles that he was about to write and although Stowell refused, saying “Her Majesty might not approve”, Wilson had the distinct impression that Stowell hoped the he would mention it. He said, “He (Stowell) had been sitting on this thing for 30 years and would have welcomed the chance to test public reaction.”
In the 1988 mini-series Jack the Ripper, Acland was played by Richard Morant.
Poster for Jack the Ripper (1988)
Adrian and Karin Stephen
Photograph of Adrian and Karin together in 1914. NPG, London.
Adrian:
Landermere was the former home of Adrian and Karin Stephen. Adrian Stephen (1883–1948) was the younger brother of Thoby Stephen, Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell and the brother-in-law of Clive Bell, Duncan Grant and Leonard Sidney Woolf. This naturally forged him as a member of the Bloomsbury Group. By his mother’s first marriage, he was also a half-brother of George and Gerald Duckworth of Duckworth Publishers.
Virginia Woolf eventually accused Gerald and George, of having sexually abused her and Vanessa when they were children and teenagers.
One of main highlights to a biographer for Adrian Stephen’s life would be the precursor to the Dreadnought Hoax, the Zanzibar Hoax at Cambridge in 1905.
“Prince Musaka Ali and his suite” were in fact students (L-R) Adrian Stephen, Robert Bowen Colthurst, Horace Cole, Leland Buxton and ‘Drummer’ Howard. In this guise, they hoaxed the Mayor and citizens of Cambridge, 1905.
Adrian was a student at Cambridge University with Horace de Vere Cole at the time when the Sultan of Zanaibar was know to be visiting England. A telegram was sent to the Mayor, ostensibly from a government official.
Cole, Stephen and three other friends then dressed up in robes and turbans and arrived at the railway station where they were met by the Town Clerk who took them to an official reception by the Mayor at the Guildhall. After the reception, charity bazaar and tour of the sights, they were taken back to the station, where they made their escape. The story was then given to the Daily Mail by Cole and became famous. The Mayor wanted the student sent down but was persuaded by the Vice-Chancellor that this would damage his reputation further.
In 1909 Adrian had an affair with Duncan Grant but in 1914 Adrian married Karin Costello, a philosophy graduate of Newnham College, Cambridge. Virginia Woolf once wrote of Karin “A good cob of a woman, but so hearty and without shade or softness. Age will harden her … and her family will coarsen her.”
During the World War One, Adrian Stephen, like most of the Bloomsbury men, was a conscientious objector. Through the war years Karin and he worked on a dairy farm in Essex until 1918.
Through Duncan Grant he met Lytton Strachey (Duncan’s cousin) and also Lytton’s brother, James Strachey. James Strachey and his wife Alix were the first translators of Freud into the English language, and the first professionally qualified and practising psychoanalysts in Britain. Their enthusiasm rubbed off onto Adrian and Karin, and after the war they both decided to become analysts, an ambition fulfilled for Adrian in 1926 after completing a medical degree. They went on to be keen followers of Freud’s methods.
With the coming to power of Adolf Hitler and the rise of Nazi Germany and antisemitism, Stephen’s pacifist views changed. At the outbreak of the war in 1939, he volunteered to become an army psychiatrist and in 1942 he become an army doctor at the age of 60. He died in 1948.
Karin Stephen:
Karin had a remarkable life at Cambridge University as a student. After a pause in her studies from ear trouble she came back and was awarded a double first in Mental and Moral Science. She was elected a member of the Aristotelian Society. Her tutor was Bertrand Russell and he would later become her uncle by marriage. She wrote ‘The Misuse of Mind: A Study of Bergson’s Attack on Intellectualism’ published in 1922.
After Adrian’s death, Karin’s health deteriorated. After a life of deafness and manic depression in 1953 Karin committed suicide leaving her daughter Judith the house in Landermere.
Judith Stephen and Nigel Henderson.
Nigel, Judith and Drusilla ‘Jo’ Henderson in the garden of 46 Chisenhale Road, Bethnal Green, 1952
Nigel Henderson (1917-1985)
Judith Stephen (1918-1972)
Nigel Henderson’s parents divorced when he was young. His mother, Wyn Henderson, creatively inspired him to pursue a career in art though her friends and connections. At the beginning of her career Wyn managed ‘The Hours Press’ for Nancy Cunard (the first person to publish Samuel Beckett) in Paris and found herself mixing with Surrealist artist and poets. After a quarrel with Cunard, Wyn returned to London to live in Gordon Square, the heart of the Bloomsbury Set. The young Nigel saw an early performance of Virginia Woolf’s Freshwater in Vanessa Bell’s studio and stayed with Bell and Duncan Grant at Charleston.
Nigel Henderson – Wig Stall, Petticoat Lane, 1952
Nigel was able to meet Max Ernst on a trip to the south of France in 1932, Ernst inspired him to become a full time artist. At this time in 1938, Wyn was managing Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery ‘Guggenheim Jeune’ at 30 Cork Street, London. Peggy Guggenheim was an airess of the mining
Guggenheim family and her father had died on the RMS Titanic. The
gallery links helped Nigel meet Marcel Duchamp as well as Jean Cocteau
and Wassily Kandinsky.
Nigel studied biology at Chelsea Polytechnic in London from 1935–1936. He then worked as an assistant to Helmut Ruhemann from 1936–1939 restoring old master paintings. In the late 1930s Henderson developed paintings inspired by Yves Tanguy, another of Guggenheim’s artists. Nigel displayed two of his collages at the gallery. Peggy Guggenheim closed Guggenheim Jeune with a farewell party on 22 June 1939 having made a loss of £600 in the first year.
Henderson put his passion for art aside to join the war effort as a pilot in Coastal Command. In 1943, he married Judith Stephen, daughter of Adrian and Karin Stephen. The niece of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, Judith had graduated from Cambridge when she met Nigel. She was stationed in Bethnal Green as part of a social anthropology project. Judith’s access to the working class and poorer parts of London inspired Nigel to go out and photograph the nearby people and shops. He also continued to experiment with collages and the physicality of photography, he achieved abnormal effects by using various techniques such as altering negatives and placing images on light-sensitive paper to create Photograms.
As a biologist, Henderson was fascinated by the universe revealed by the microscope. As a pilot, he was familiar with landscape perceived from the air. His experiments with cameras, enlargers and developing combine the
two perspectives. What looks like a study of cellular structures turns out to be a photograph composed of bomb debris.
Nigel Henderson – Collage, 1949.
He enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. At Slade he befriended Eduardo Paolozzi and William Turnbull. With Paolozzi, he formed The Independent Group in 1952. The Independent Group’s other main members were Lawrence Alloway, Richard Hamilton, John McHale and Alison & Peter Smithson. They had their meetings at the Institute of
Contemporary Arts in London.
Following the suicide of Judith’s mother Karin Stephen in 1953, the couple moved into Judith’s Landermere family home in 1954 and bounced between there and London for the rest of their lives. Paolozzi moved across to the road at Gull Cottage in 1955.
From 1965–1968 and from 1972–1982 he headed the photography department at Norwich School of Art while working on independent projects.
A Christmas letter from Nigel Henderson in Landermere to artist Chris Mullen.
His obituary quotes: “I want to release an energy from trivial data. I feel happiest among discarded things, vituperative fragments cast casually from life, with the fizz of vitality still about them.”
Although part of the Independent Group and using ‘found objects’ to make art, Henderson’s photography and design was also more old fashioned and documentary styled than the Pop Art of Paolozzi.
Sir Eduardo Paolozzi
Eduardo Paolozzi taken by Frank Thurston, NPG, 1988
Paolozzi was born in Leith in north Edinburgh and was the eldest son of Italian immigrants. His parents owned an ice-cream cafe in Leith. Paolozzi’s father was an admirer of Mussolini and sent Eduardo to a fascist youth camp in Italy every summer where he acquired a liking for badges, uniforms and aeroplanes.
Eduardo Paolozzi – Reality, Tate, 1964
In June 1940, when Italy declared war on Britain, Paolozzi was interned (along with most other Italian men in Britain). His father, uncle and grandfather were among 630 Italian and German internees killed when the ship carrying them to Canada, the SS Arandora Star, was sunk by the German U-Boat, U-47, on 2 July 1940.
Being 16, Eduardo spent three months in Saughton jail, Edinburgh, rather than put on a boat. Upon his release, Paolozzi helped his mother and sister, Yolanda, make and sell ice cream while he attended the Edinburgh College of Art learning calligraphy and lettering.
Moving to London he studied briefly at Saint Martin’s School of Art in 1944, and then at the Slade School of Fine Art at University College London from 1944 to 1947. In the post war years of 1947-1949 Paolozzi moved and worked in Paris. Like Henderson, he became acquainted with Alberto Giacometti, Jean Arp, Constantin Brâncuși, Georges Braque and
Fernand Léger.
On moving back to Britain he moved to 9 Paultons Square, Chelsea in London. His studio was full of hundreds of found objects, from toys and books to tools and models. Part of this studio has been re-created in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.
In 1951 he married Freda Elliot, a textile designer. In the mid 1950s
Eduardo Paolozzi moved to Landermere to work and raise his family. He
had followed his friend Nigel Henderson. Paolozzi moved across to the
road at Gull Cottage in 1955.
Together with Nigel Henderson he established Hammer Prints Limited, a design company producing wallpapers, textiles and ceramics that were initially manufactured at Landermere Wharf.
Eduardo Paolozzi – Newton after Blake, 1993–94.
Paolozzi came to public attention in the 1950s by producing a range of striking screenprints and “Art Brut” sculpture. He was a founder of the
Independent Group in 1952, which is regarded as the precursor to the
mid-1950s British and late 1950s American Pop Art movements. His
seminal 1947 collage “I was a Rich Man’s Plaything” is considered the earliest standard bearer representing Pop Art.
Paolozzi’s graphic work of the 1960s was highly innovative. Using silk screen printing he was able to use and modify the colours of found images in the Pop Art style. The resulting prints are characterised by Pop culture
references and technological imagery. In 1979 he was asked to design a large scale mural in Tottenham Court Road Underground station, London. The mosaic’s frenetic design was intended to reflect the station’s position adjacent to Tottenham Court Road’s large concentration of hi-fi and electronics shops.
Paolozzi’s design for Tottenham Court Road on London Underground
Some of this mosaic has now been removed in the expansion of the station
for Crossrail. These parts are due to be reconstructed and installed in the University of Edinburgh.
Paolozzi was appointed CBE in 1968 and in 1979 he was elected to the Royal Academy. Paolozzi was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1989 as a
Knight Bachelor.
Part of the surviving mosaic in Tottenham Court Road Underground station.
He was promoted to the office of Her Majesty’s Sculptor in Ordinary for
Scotland in 1986, which he held until his death. He also received an
Honorary Doctorate from Heriot-Watt University in 1987.
On Desert Island Discs, Paolozzi’s luxury item was a Hurdy gurdy.
Hammer Prints Limited
In 1954, with Paolozzi, Henderson established Hammer Prints Limited, a design company producing wallpapers, textiles and ceramics that were initially manufactured at Landermere Wharf.
Interior of the Henderson’s house at 46 Chisenhale Road, Bow, covered with Hammer Print prototypes.
Henderson and Paolozzi were registered as the company directors along with Judith Henderson who acted as secretary. Working from a studio at the Henderson’s home, they developed over eleven designs that were screen printed onto wallpapers, textiles and ready made ceramic products.
It’s aim “To purchase, sell, manufacture, hire or act as agents for the sale of textiles, wallpaper, statuary, ceramics, furniture and photographic equipment and materials”. Paolozzi’s notes stated ‘it is the object of Hammer Prints Ltd that an attack be made on the craft field using the silk-screen as the media to be exploited. ♣”
In 1955 the wallpapers were manufactured by Cole and Son (who also printed Edward Bawden and John Aldridge’s designs) and their textile designs were
produced by the Lancashire firm Hull Traders from 1958.
Cowcumber by Hammer Prints, Printed by Cole and Sons, 1955.
Coalface, Cowcumber, Hessian and Sgraffito were the first to become available
from January 1955. Barkcloth, Big Drawings, Newsprint, Portobello and Townscape followed whilst Sea Beasts and Toys were developed for a range of ceramic tiles, lampstands, bowls, trays and furniture.
Sgraffito by Hammer Prints, Printed by Cole and Sons, 1955.
Hammer Prints exhibitions were held at the Studio Club on Swallow Street in December 1955 and from 10 December 1956 to 4 January 1957. The Castle Bookshop on Museum Street in Colchester also held an exhibition and sale of bowls, tiles, scarves, textiles and wallpapers from 21 April to 5 May, 1956. The designs were for sale in Liberty and Habitat.
The collaboration between the artists lasted only a few years with Henderson working on designs alone until 1962. The artists continued to receive royalties on their design work from Cole & Son and Hull Traders until the company was dissolved in 1975.
Colour choices for Sgraffito by Hammer Prints, Printed by Cole and Sons, 1955.
Basil Spence
Spence was a Scottish architect, most notably associated with Coventry Cathedral in England and the Beehive in New Zealand, but also responsible for numerous other buildings in the Modernist/Brutalist style.
Basil Spence and his wife Joan took a holiday cottage at the far end of the Gull Cottage row which they used for weekends and holidays.
It was while Basil Spence was laid up with influenza at Landermere that he occupied his time working on designs for the architectural competition for the new Coventry Cathedral – only a part, of course, of months of work on the designs.
But Basil Spence’s decision to enter this competition, and his ultimate success against 218 other entries in August 1951, was later to alter beyond recognition the lives of the Spence and Hutton occupants of the cottages at Landermere. Basil Spence wrote of John Hutton:
John Hutton in his studio, engraving the Coventry Glass, 1964.
I had no hesitation in recommended John Hutton for the great glass screen as he had worked with me on many exhibitions and I had found him an artist of great quality, a true draughtsman and one who knew the glass engraving technique backwards. Moreover, he was a delight to work with, practical and trustworthy. †
On Desert Island Discs, Spence’s luxury item was Spaghetti.
John Hutton
John Hutton – Painting during a spell of sick leave in Tiberias, 1942.
John Hutton was born on the New Zealand and is most famous for his glass engravings on the Great West Screen of Coventry Cathedral. Known as the ‘Screen of Saints and Angels’ the Coventry work features 66 larger-than-life figures that took ten years of creation, for which he received
instant acclaim in 1962 alongside other artists like John Piper and Graham Sutherland.
He was first married to the artist Helen ‘Nell’ Hutton (née Blair), an
artist from New Zealand in 1934. Two years later the couple set sail
for Britain to help their artist careers. For John the move gave him
commissions for murals on the S.S. Orcades for Orient Line and later, a large mural design for the Festival of Britain.
The war found Hutton working as a camouflage officer in a unit designing
anything from fabrics for uniforms in different terrains, to ways of concealing airfields runways with paints and chalk to look like fields from above.
He had three children with Helen, all boys: Warwick Hutton, who was an artist, Macaillan Hutton, an architect, Peter Hutton, a teacher.
John and Nell had been invited to a party at the home of Karin Stephen (the widow of Virginia Woolf’s brother, Adrian) in order to meet Bertrand Russell. Nell recalls that it was an especially good party – “lots to drink and Bertie Russell very jovial.” But the really good thing that emerged from the party was the discovery that Karin Stephen owned a cottage on an Essex estuary which she was prepared to let. It was Landermere Creek, near Thorpe-le-Soken, and perhaps it was the “lots to drink” atmosphere of that party which fostered a swift decision, for on 7 April 1949 the Huttons left London and moved to Essex. The twins (Warwick and Macaillan) were nine years old, and a completely changed life lay before them. ‡
John Hutton – Nell Hutton at Landermere, Private Collection, 1951
The Gull Cottages were coastguard cottages, used more for the policing of smuggling than the saving of lives. When the tide was in the mash land of birds and reeds became wide rivers that went miles inland.
Hutton moved to Landermere in the King’s Head to start with, before moving into one of the Gull Cottages where he had a glass studio in the garden. Eduardo Paolozzi used it to make his sculptures in, he described it thus: “a glass shed, which was home-made and always leaking, it had been inhabited formerly by a glass artist much used by Basil Spence called John Hutton… But he seemed to have limited means, and there was a lot of DIY there. ♥”
John Hutton – Chalk Plan for the Coventry Window, 1952.
Among Hutton’s other public commissions were six larger-than-life Angels for the South and West doors of Guildford Cathedral.
With the opening of the new Shakespeare Centre at Stratford-upon-Avon,
Hutton was commissioned to make life sized etchings of famous actors,
but altered his brief to ‘Shakespeare’s Characters’ and portraits of Ophelia, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet. Nineteen characters were engraved into glass. Hutton selected the 19 characters based on two main criteria: 1) The character is instantly recognisable to any viewer. (read:
non-scholars)
2) The character can stand alone without any background detail or
overwrought attention to costume.
John Hutton – Mural for Furniture Exhibition Stand, British Industries Fair, London, 1949
At the Civic Centre of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, he created a glass
screen representing some of the great inventions of the city with the
help of his son, Warwick Hutton. 1975 he became first Vice President of the newly founded British Guild of Glass Engravers (Laurence Whistler was first President and Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother was its first Patron).
His second marriage was to Marigold Dodson, they had one daughter, Katie Hutton. His windows are in buildings all over the world and his glass engravings, paintings and murals in global national collections.
John Hutton – Women At War, Mural for Crosby & Company Ltd, 1946.
References:
† Phoenix at Coventry: the Building of a Cathedral by Basil Spence, 1962 ‡ John Hutton by Margaret Brentnall, 1986 Henderson Letters: Fulltable.com Website ♠ The Essex Coastline, Then and Now by M.P.B. Fautley and J.H. Garon, 2004 ♣ Nigel Henderson & Eduardo Paolozzi: Hammer Prints Ltd. 1954 – 75, 2012 ♥ Frank Whitford Interviewing Eduardo Paolozzi – Sir Eduardo Paolozzi, Tate Archive C466/17/F4988-A Nigel Henderson: Parallel of Life and Art by Victoria Walsh, 2001 Eduardo Paolozzi by Judith Collins, 2014
On my bookcases I have a rotation of new and old books that I face out, depending on the designer. Some John Minton or Edward Bawden dust jackets, or pamphlets. But the book I normally put out, for the absolute beauty of the illustration is Roof Over Britain. It is illustrated by Abram Games and for the beauty of it, it is normally to be found for under five pounds. I have contemplated getting another to frame on the wall.
The topic is of the Anti-aircraft defences during the Second World War. It is an odd thing how patriotic the art of WW2 makes one feel. The lines of the soldiers face are almost like a German statue, it is all very modern.
The Front Cover of ‘Roof Over Britain’, 1943.
Born in 1914 to Latvian and Russo-Polish parents in Whitechapel, East London, Abram Games joined the Army in 1939 and was quickly designated the role of draughtsman. By 1942 he had been promoted to captain and was the only Official War Poster Artist for the rest of the Second World War.
Abram Games in his studio, 1941
After the war his freelance career went from strength to strength with commissions for the Festival of Britain, the United Nations, Shell, Guinness and the BBC. After a career spanning over 60 years, Games died in 1996 leaving a legacy of daring, distinctive and elegant images.
Justly famous for his innovative and bold poster commissions, Games claimed that the perfect design employed ‘maximum meaning, minimum means’. As a design student they are words I loved, communication first as part of design.
The Back Cover
Abram Games – Salute the Soldier – National Army Museum, 1944
The model for the booklet looks to have been one Games used many times judging by the similarity of the ‘Salute the Soldier’ poster.
In 2014 Games’s image was used on a stamp for the Remarkable Lives series for Royal Mail.
Abram Games, 1st Class Stamp, Remarkable Lives Set, 2014.
Over, It lies among the orchards, but the fishermen know it well, for the wayward Ouse broadens out where the ferry takes us over the border to a delightful little inn (In Holywell). But Over will not let us hurry away, for it has a handsome church which the centuries have ’ tilled with interest without and within. Its sanctus bell has hung in the bellcot for 600 years, and all that time the spire has been pointing the village folk the way to Heaven. The tower is older still, a landmark in this valley since the 13th century. †
It was as the sun was going down that I got to the St Mary’s Church in Over, it had been a lovely day and the setting sun lit up the pale brick and plaster work.
Like with Swavesey church there are some carvings, the choir seats on one side are carved with mythical beasts and birds.
Here are some angles and below a cow like beast with wings. Edit: The cow with wings is the symbol of St Luke the Evangelist, patron saint of painters – Paul Bommer.
On the other side of the chapel the choir seating is older, the tip-up seating hid the medieval misericords.
Misericords were set on the underside of the hinged seats in the choirs of churches. They had no religious function but gave some support to the monks and clergy in the long parts of the services when standing was required. This explains the name ‘misericord’, which comes from the Latin for mercy. The decoration was often amusing and sometimes moral. ‡
Here is a Rams head and Devils or Cows to the sides. Below the full image of the chairs show how the seats flap down and the decorations on the corners.
Above a traditional Green-man image carved with beard. Below a more devious looking Green-man or woodland spirit with leaves brushing beside the head, another beast and then leaves and coats of arms for the Abbot of Ramsey who would have given the parish money to decorate and repair the church along with the Abbot of Ely.
Outside the church is no less decorative than the interior as the image below shows, the gargoyles were the original way of spouting water from the roof while looking decorative. It has now been replaced with the modern piping and emergency spout for heavy rainfall or if the pipe is blocked with leaves.
The carving of them is not only wonderful but so inventive. A sheep, a maiden with a potty or jug. I am unsure of their age but I love the folk nature of the design and that everything should be functional and decorative.
The owl caught the sunlight as the full force of the sunset glowed across the building.
From outside the date celebration window is reflected in part thought the leaded squares. Below the image is the window in full with coats of arms and the dates 1254 when the building was much simpler, to how it is today.
To the other side of the church and the light was catching the trees and headstones.
Above the door on the back of the tower is a wonderful carving, what might be Mary is in the centre of a
Botticelli like shell and the faces of men around the sides, the top left in a wig reminding me of Samuel Pepys, who’s family origin from the near-by Cottenham.
At the end of the Graveyard you can see into the next garden and there is a huge statue of a Roman on a Horse, looking over a 8ft high hedge.
Michael Rothenstein was born in 1908 in Hampstead, London and the youngest of four children of Sir William Rothenstein and Alice Knewstub. His brother John became a director for the Tate Gallery and had connections with the Bloomsbury Set.
Howard Coster’s photo of John Rothenstein; Sir William Rothenstein; Michael Rothenstein (standing), National Portrait Gallery, 1939.
Michael was homeschooled and studied art at Chelsea Polytechnic
and later at the Central School of Arts and Crafts (1924-27). His mother was American and his father British, the family home was also a social and happy one.
If we accept the frequent probability of children’s rebelling against the lives and pursuits of their parents – or at least their parental environment – Michael Rothenstein’s early years might well have destroyed any burgeoning of a creative disposition. But as a child and as a young man, he actively enjoyed the not affluent but very comfortable style of an artist’s household in which Augustus John, Wyndham Lewis, Edward Burra, Stanley Spencer, David Jones, Edwin Lutyens or the young Henry Moore were received and he often rubbed shoulders at supper or tea parties with Walter de la Mare, Barnett Freedman or Robert Graves.†
Affected by lingering depression due to myxoedema, he did little art making during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Despite this, he had
his first one-man show at the Warren Gallery, London in 1931.
Michael Rothenstein – Three Women by the Sea, Jerwood Gallery, 1938.
His work and style of the late 30s and early 40s was part of the neo-romantic water-colourist set that artists like Thomas Hennell, Claude Muncaster, Eric Ravilious and Paul Nash had been championing for a decade. These watercolours are best showcased by the work he created for the Recording Britain project.
Michael Rothenstein – Kilburn Church from the South, V&A, 1940. (Recording Britain)
In 1941 Rothenstein moved to Great Bardfield, staying first at ‘Place House’, where John Aldridge also lived, before moving to ‘Ethel House’. As his style progressed away from the Recording Britain project he could be more abstract and free with his artworks, moving to Great Bardfield gave him a community of artists and a resource of subjects to work with. He started a long association with the Redfern Gallery, with his first show in 1942.
Michael Rothenstein – Autumn, 1947.
The community of Great Bardfield in the 1940s had Rothenstein in contact with artists like John Aldridge, Edward Bawden and Kenneth Rowntree. Bawden moved to the village in 1925 and Rowntree in 1939. Following Rothenstein over the next decade would be George Chapman, Stanley Clifford-Smith, Audrey Cruddas and textile artist Marianne Straub. The village would go on to hold events and make it one of the artistic centres for East Anglia alongside Colchester and its School of Art.
During 1945 he submitted a lithograph for the Schools Prints series, ‘Timber Felling’, it was the fifth print of the first series and is one of his most recognisable works. He also illustrated the Sussex volume of Visions of England in 1947.
Michael Rothenstein – Timber Felling, 1945. (Schools Prints SP5)
In 1948 Rothenstein would learn about lithographic printing with the two sisters, Frances Byng-Stamper and Caroline Byng-Lucas whom had set up Millers Press in Lewes, East Sussex. Their express purpose was to revitalise the art of lithography in the French style, art-lithography having become unfashionable in early twentieth century Britain and seen as the tool of a ‘commercial artist’.
Together with new lithographs, over the next few years Rothenstein would print many monotype experiments at his home in Great Bardfield.
Michael Rothenstein – The Cockerel, From my collection, 1950.
In the 1950s he embraced printmaking over painting working in every area of the medium. In 1952 he travelled to Paris to the ‘Atelier 17′ studio to work with Stanley William Hayter – the surrealist print-maker; under his influence it is credited that Rothenstein started his bold experiments in printmaking. The prints he produced were modern and colourful and very chunky mixing woodcuts with screen-prints or etchings. In this form of work he had discovered his true style making the farmyards and fields of Great Bardfield into lively prints.
Michael Rothenstein – Quarry (White Cliff), V&A, 1955.
The first stages of the printmaking revival started with the boom in book sales and publishing from 1900. As publishers looked for more artistic illustrators the medium jumped into the art world with limited edition framed prints becoming more popular into the 1930s. Lithography, lino and the woodcut were the springboard in the 40s and 50s for large scale limited edition images that could be presented as art in multiable copies; with a painting you only have one sale, with a print you have many. Rothenstein, with his ongoing experiments into printmaking, found himself with a younger set of artists pushing the boundaries of printmaking and riding the British wave of Pop Art.
Michael Rothenstein – Horse and Sunrise, From my collection, 1974.
Horse and Sunrise is made with wood timbers bolted together in a frame like metal type is in a letterpress. The centre is made of two more woodblocks of (1) the sky and land, and (2) the green hill top shading. The horse is a screen-print layer
Michael Rothenstein – Sunrise at 36,000 ft, From my collection, 1973
Sunrise at 36,000 ft is a woodcut with multiable pieces of wood bolted together and a colour intaglio print with multi-colour shading, blending and intaglio details. In the 60s Rothenstein started to construct box pieces made from found items. Painted or covered with his prints they blurred the perceptions of painting, sculpture and printmaking.
Michael Rothenstein – Sun Box II, 1975.
The works that set Rothenstein into becoming a Pop Artist are mostly the ones with screen-print overlays, like in the Marilyn Monroe print.
Michael Rothenstein – Marilyn I, From my collection, 1978
The fundamentals of Pop Art are using ‘found objects’ to make major commercial artworks. Like Warhol and Lichtenstein, he blew-up the size of pictures from newspapers and bolted them with real items in his boxes.
Michael Rothenstein, for instance, has applied boundless energy to extending the range of the relief process of wood and lino, sometimes combining them with screenprint and photo-screen. ‡
Michael Rothenstein – Crash Box I, 1973
Michael Rothenstein, Crash Box Assemblage, Tate, London, 1974
In 1936 he married his first wife, the artist, Betty Fitzgerald, who was later known as Duffy Ayers, and the couple had two children. In 1956 he divorced Duffy and in 1958 married Diana Arnold-Forster. Not long after the 1958 Great Bardfield summer exhibition the couple moved to the nearby village of Stisted, Essex.
Rothenstein was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy (ARA) in 1977 and a Royal Academician (RA) in 1984. His works are held in international collections.
Michael Rothenstein – Black Mast, Dalmatian Sea, From my collection, 1958.
† Obituary: Michael Rothenstein by Bryan Robertson, The Independent, 1993
‡ Printmaking in Britain by Richard T. Godfrey, 0714818380, 1978.
Olive Muriel Cook was born in Cambridge on 20 February 1912, the daughter of Arthur Cook, a librarian at the University Library for 56 years, and his wife, a dressmaker for Robert Sayle (John Lewis Partnership). She was educated at the Perse School before gaining a scholarship to Newnham College in 1931, where she read Modern Languages. She obtained her MA in 1942.
Olive Cook – I Am the Ancient Apple Queen, The Fry Gallery
Her first job was that of art editor for Chatto and Windus, followed by supervisor of publications at the National Gallery (1936-1945), where she worked with Kenneth Clark and Arnold Palmer. She met and became friends with official war artists including Eric Ravilious, Thomas Hennell and Stanley Spencer, and it was during this time that she met Edwin Smith, whom she married in 1954. In 1945 she left the National Gallery to devote herself to her own writing and painting and she and Smith started to write and illustrate articles for The Saturday Book edited by Leonard Russell, to which they both contributed annually until Edwin’s death.
She took a two week painting course at Sir Cedric Morris’s Benton End school in Hadleigh Much. She is now one of his forgotten pupils of the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing. The other prominent artists of the school are Lucy Harwood, Lucian Freud, Maggi Hambling, David Kentish, Bettina Shaw-Lawrence, Lucy Harwood, Joan Warburton, Glyn Morgan, Valerie Thornton and top legal scholar Bernard Brown.
Olive Cook – Portrait of Michael Rothenstein Reading – The Fry Gallery, 1947.
She wrote ‘Suffolk’ in 1948, ‘Cambridgeshire: Aspects of a County, 1953’, and children’s books illustrated by George Adams in 1954. That same year saw the publication of ‘English Cottages and Farmhouses’ with text by Cook and photographs by Smith, their first major work for Thames and Hudson. After their marriage they lived in Hampstead where they had a large circle of artist and writer friends. More joint books followed including ‘English Abbeys and Priories’, ‘British Churches’, ‘The Wonders of Italy’, ‘The English House Through Seven Centuries’.
Olive Cook – In The Garden
They moved to Saffron Walden in 1962, where Olive Cook pursued her passion for the preservation of the countryside, her book ‘The Stansted Affair’ presenting the case against the development of the airport (1967). They purchased the Coach House in 1967, remodelled and decorated it in their own inimitable way (see photos in Series 9). Sadly, Smith died of cancer at the early age of 59, leaving Cook devastated. However, a woman of great spirit, she rallied and continued to further the reputation of her beloved husband, producing ‘Edwin Smith: Photographs 1935-1971’ in 1984, and continually promoting his work through exhibitions and in books of others, such as Lucy Archer’s ‘Architecture in Britain and Ireland 600-1500’.
Her own writing also continued: she wrote the libretto for ‘The Slit Goose Feather’ composed by Christopher Brown, ‘Tryphema Pruss’, illustrated by Walter Hoyle, as well as the introduction for his ‘To Sicily with Edward Bawden’. And, in the 1980s she along with Iris Weaver was instrumental in establishing the Fry Art Gallery in Saffron Walden, writing biographical sketches of the artists of the North West Essex Collection deposited there.
Olive Cook had an enormous capacity for friendship, as the hundreds of cards in her papers attest, and although she had no children herself, she was clearly a great favourite with those of her many friends. Right up to the end of her long life, messages came pouring in. She died on 2 May 2002, aged 90.
Olive Cook – Edwin Smith with Flowers and Ducks, National Portrait Gallery, 1954.
Edwin George Herbert Smith was born on 15 May 1912 in Canonbury, London, the only child of Edwin Stanley Smith a clerk and his wife Lily Beatrice. After leaving elementary school he was educated at the Northern Polytechnic, transferring to the architectural school at the age of sixteen. He then won a scholarship to the Architectural Association, but for financial reasons gave up his course and worked as an architectural draughtsman for several years, most notably for Raymond Myerscough-Walker. >From 1935 he became a free lance photographer, though painting remained his first love, working briefly for Vogue as a fashion photographer, but mostly concentrating on the mining community of Ashington in Northumberland, the docks of Newcastle, and circuses and fair grounds around London.
In 1935 Smith married Rosemary Ansell, daughter of Henry Ansell, a confectioner. Their son Martin was born in 1941, but the marriage ended in divorce two years later. By this time Smith was living with Olive Cook, whom he married in 1954. Smith was also a writer, producing photographic handbooks, including ‘All the Photo Tricks’ (1940), for Focal Press. But he is best known for his photographs of architecture and landscapes, both of Britain and Europe. His books include: ‘English Parish Churches’ (1952), ‘English Cottages and Farmhouses’ (1954), ‘The English House Through Seven Centuries’ (1968), ‘England’ (1971) ‘Pompeii and Herculanaeum’ (1960) ‘Rome: From its Foundation to the Present’ (1971). Many were collaborations between him and Cook: his photographs, her text.
In addition to his photographic output (60,00 negatives are now at RIBA), Smith was also a prolific artist. When at home, not a day went by without him drawing or painting. Throughout his life Smith produced water and oil paintings, drawings, linocuts and woodcuts. And in later years at Saffron Walden, he drew up architectural plans for local properties. It was only after his death that exhibitions of Smith’s work appeared.
He became ill in the spring of 1971, but his cancer was not diagnosed until a few weeks before his death on 29 December. There is a poignant account in one of his notebooks written by Olive and addressed to him three months after he died, recounting in detail his last day.
Cook inherited Smith’s estate on his death, 29 December 1971, and towards the end of her life deposited his huge photograph collection of some 60,000 negatives at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) along with their letters to each other. The remainder of his papers became part of her archive at Newnham.
Every time I go to Saffron Walden I walk past the Fry Gallery and into Bridge End Gardens.
My Father was born around the corner and I remember being taken to the gardens as a child. My father’s memories of the gardens were quite different from today. During WW2 they had been dug up and used to grow vegetables in the Dig For Victory campaign. They were somewhat restored but it wasn’t until the 1980s that the work was put into making them into somewhere you would want to go.
Lately they have added a visitors centre and in that is a large plaque with illustrations by Christopher Brown, below are some details of his illustrations of the garden sections and photos of mine.
The drawn plan is by Christopher Brown who studied at the Royal College of Art where he first met, then later assisted, Edward Bawden. Christopher made his first trip to Saffron Walden to visit Bawden in 1979. Over the course of subsequent visits they sometimes walked through the Garden, which was in a sorry state at the time. Returning to the town for this commission, Christopher believes Bawden would appreciate the restoration work.
Bridge End Gardens were built on fields on the edge of Saffron Walden and covers an area of 2.7 hectares (7 acres). The area was set out as gardens from around 1828 by Atkinson Francis Gibson and his wife Elizabeth.
From 1838, his son Francis Gibson – who was interested in horticulture and had also completed a garden design for his sister – began creating a new garden with the help of a local nurseryman William Chater. The hedge maze was planted around 1870, by which stage the garden was under the management of a local agent and was used as a venue for shows by the Saffron Walden horticultural society.
The site opened to the public in 1902 and the borough council took over responsibility for its management from 1918, designating it as a ‘public pleasure ground’.
In 1987, the garden was listed with English Heritage. In the same year, the maze was replanted and the kitchen garden cleared. Between 2002–2006 the garden was restored back to the 1870 plan. The kitchen garden reopened between 2009 and 2011. †
This statue I find covered with feathers or flowers, some local person is always decorating him in various organic items.
