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There are a few good examples of John Piper’s work in Cambridgeshire. They are mostly his stained glass. This time is his work in the Chapel of Robinson College.

The college was founded by David Robinson, a philanthropist who had grown up in the city, working in his father’s cycle shop and making his money from his TV and Radio rental company. In the 1962 he was making £1,500,000 a year and in 1968 he sold it to Granada for eight million.

He found the Robinson Charitable Trust, giving money to Addenbrookes who built the Rosie Maternity Unit, named after his mother, that replaced the Victorian hospital on Mill Road. And two wings, to the old Papworth Hospital and another to Evelyn Hospital.

In the late 1960s he left Cambridge University 18 Million to found a new college, and in 1973 they set to work planning the college. The Architects Gillespie, Kidd and Coia who designed a brutalist style castle. With large red brick building with modernist portcullis designs and towers. The Chapel is a bizarre shape, with a set of medieval style balconies for the congregation as well as a flat platform for rows of chairs.

Like with many of his windows, Piper worked with the glass maker Patrick Reyntiens, who translated his designs into glass and taught piper the practicalities of making windows. They would work together planning, painting and arranging the windows in the design and production.

There is a small window in a side chapel and another large window in the main chapel. When questioned about the smaller window Piper explained the design:

There is a small devotional chapel with a window of stained glass of modest size, which shows the Virgin and Child and the Magi bringing gifts. This scene is set above The Sleeping Beasts of Paganism, and in the lowest section are the first and last acts of the Christian story – Adam and Eve with the Serpent to the left, the Last Supper to the right. My designs, with fullsize cartoons, were all interpreted in glass by the Reyntiens studio at Beaconsfield with their usual sensibility and brio. The inspiration for this design was a carved stone tympanum in the Romanesque village church at Neuilly-en-Donjon (Allier) in central France.

John Piper

The larger window has the feel of a Monet painting and typical of Piper’s work, has a slow gradient of colour from yellow to green and then blue on the edges.

The subject of the stained glass, which I designed, is a modern ‘Light of the World’, with a great circular light penetrating and dominating all Nature’

John Piper

Piper had become interested in stained glass after being mesmerized by it as a child on a visit to Notre Dame. He wrote about the medieval designs of stained glass and was able to translate his works into windows when he was first asked to design one for Oundle School Chapel in 1953.

In the photograph below, you can see the chapels original set up when completed. Surprisingly, the lecterns and altar were also designed by John Piper in collaboration with Isi Metzstein. Isi was a German Jewish architect who aged 10 was placed on a Kindertransport and raised in Britain. He trained as an architect for the company that built the college and then worked at the Glasgow School of Art.

Piper formed an excellent working relationship with Isi Metzstein , and became concerned not only with the stained glass, but with all manner of furnishings as well : the wooden cross and candlesticks , the tapestries and altar cloth.

June Osborne – John Piper and Stained Glass

Here is a video that never really got finished for XL Records. Money, funding and time got in the way. But here are some photographs of me, painting with bike lights and LED tubes in, what was, Park Street Car Park in Cambridge.

In 2016 I started this blog. I was inspired by a blog called Shelf Appeal and I thought I had something original to say. This blog has given me many friends and from them and my writing I have had two books. There are more to come I am happy to say. I have posted every Thursday over that time. This post is actually something I always earmarked to write about. It was a small piece of ephemera I found in a book.

It is a donation slip, and from the wording on the back, it sounds like it was hand posted through a door, to be collected by one of the charities representatives.

The charity is the King George’s Fund for Sailors. During the turbulent days of the First World War, thousands of lives were lost at sea – many of them young sailors – and the public wanted to support those who were fighting, as well as their dependants. To help direct their hard-earned funds, a central organisation was established: King George’s Fund for Sailors, now called the Seafarers’ Charity.

Below is a memory of Mrs M Scholes of Stansted from a publication of memories of Essex People, When I was a Child (1985). It is a children’s memory of the First World War and I found it really interesting the view point a child would have on the conflict.

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We were a family of five children living in Surrey on the edge of an open common. Life seemed to go on quite normally for us until 1916, when my Father was called up. Before that year I can only remember taking part in a school concert which we gave for wounded soldiers. I was rather intrigued by all those men being dressed alike in bright blue suits with white shirts and red ties, but I am sure I had no conception of why they were there, or how they came to be wounded. I knew the war was in France, and that they crossed the English Channel to get there, and that they lived in muddy trenches, but that was another world. From time to time we heard booming noises and we were told that they were the guns in France.

The day came when my Father had to go. My Mother was terribly distraught and the bottom seemed to fall out of life in the home. But it was August and summer holidays from school.

We went out looking for dragon flies and stag beetles, newts and frogs and toads as usual. It was only at night that we realised that things had changed. My Father came home at first in mufti and said that he had been marching somewhere in London all day, but after a few days he came home in khaki with horrid putties wound round his legs, a greatcoat which was too long for him and a nasty peaked cap over his eyes. He had lots of brass buttons which had to be polished without getting white stuff on his coat. The Army gave him a button stick to do this, which we children thought was very cute.

He did not come home for long. He was sent to Aldershot and only came home on leave after that. We settled down to wait for the postman every morning.

Both my parents were great gardeners. We grew all our own fruit and vegetables and I my mother taught us older children to weed and hoe and harvest the crops, so that all would be in order when Father came back.

My father was sent to France in March 1917, and we began making up parcels of things he liked. I had to take them to the Post Office about one mile from our house. I had just learnt to make a Yorkshire parkin so this had to be included. I can remember my mother making a sort of chocolate from cocoa butter for the parcel. It was poured into tin lids to set. We never knew what happened to these parcels as, in May 1917, my father was reported missing and that was the last we heard of him.

During those three months, we children used to go to the bedroom window when we knew that the postman was coming down the road, so as to be the first to report that there was a letter from Dad. Unfortunately it never came. My mother advertised for information in the Territorial Gazette. I can remember a soldier coming to see us and saying that he was with my father when he was shot in the face. My mother always seemed very sceptical about this and so we never felt we really knew what had happened. We cannot be surprised when we read the terrible history of those battles today.

I can remember a night when we looked across the sky, and saw the Zeppelin coming down in flames over Potter’s Bar. I asked my mother if there were men in it. When she said that there were, a chill horror came over me, a horror that remains with me to this day, man’s inhumanity to man.

Perhaps my last memory of the First World War is of November 11th 1918. There was little going on in our district, but we heard of the rejoicing and celebrations in London. My mother felt she had lost so much. She was now faced with the prospect of bringing up five children alone so there was little cause for rejoicing in our house. It was a sad day for us. I have found it a sad day ever since. Man seems to have learned so little from it. The Cenotaph was erected in London in memory of the men who fell. If those men could rise up on Armistice Day, would they feel they had made the great sacrifice in vain? I wonder.

It’s not often that I see something so graphic it captivates me totally. As most people know, my obsessions tent to be for the Great Bardfield group of artists and the endless differences in their work. But what attracts me to a work really is the technicality of it.

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Long before I discovered the work of Great Bardfield, I was rather obsessed with the American artist Christopher Wool, having found a set of his books in the (now closed) Galloway and Porter shop in Cambridge. His work is rude, bold, graphic and he repeats images. It is likely as inspired by the screen prints of Andy Warhol as it is of graffiti. I had a large work by him that I managed to find in a London auction in 2005 that I sold to buy more ‘Bardfield paintings. It was a screen print on metal and over a metre in height.

Wood’s work tends to be simple typographic phrases or patterned designs. He has silk screens of different patterns that he uses over and over, mixing them with other designs and sometimes working hard to erase them with areas of colour or pure ink. With colour, smudged, warped by moving the plate while printing… the works are in a constant decay and evolution.

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The echos of this obsession were brought back to me when I discovered the work of William ‘Bill’ Bickerstaff, An artist who draws in fine pens and has created a set of drawings of the Cambridgeshire landscape.

What at first looks like a photograph with ink rollering over it turns out to be a set of intricate works and markings on paper with pen and roller ink, as seen in the details below.

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Some of the work would have been sublimely pretty and has echoes of Elisabeth Vellacotts detailed drawings of tree studies, but Bickerstaff takes these drawings and gives a danger to them. In many ways they remind me of Paul Nash works and what he would be doing today, if he were alive. They have the feel of a double exposure on a camera film, something that needs more attention from the viewer to decipher.

The ability to draw out the overlooked elements of life is something I admire and then to subvert it into something far more interesting is a rare thing to find. So many artists are armed with the skill to depict the world around them but few can push it further and make their own work far more textured than the reality.

The series below of linocuts layered in colour with erosion of the ink show far more awareness of textures to create a landscape than the typical use of linocuts with thick black inks and bold colours like a stained glass window, in Bickerstaff ‘s work way the ink is applied gives a texture that is much more photographic than you’d expect it to be, it has the feeling of a memory that is always being eroded by the mind’s own perception.

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This is a post about a Japanese Garden in Scotland that was constructed in the years before the First World War under the patronage and enthusiasm of Ella Christie.

Ella Christie was born in 1861 and her family bought Cowen Castle in Clackmannanshire in 1865. Ella inherited the estate in early part of the twentieth century and traveled all over the Orient, from India to Tibet and Malay in 1904 and then to China, Russia and Japan from 1906 to 07. While in Kyoto, she met the du Cane sisters Ella and Florence who were in Japan researching and writing a book that caused a sensation when it was published, The Flowers and Gardens of Japan (1908). They inspired Christie to return to Scotland and make a Japanese garden.

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To make her plans a reality, Ella Christie looked at the grounds around her family castle and dammed up the local river on the estate to make a lake. For two months she hired Taki Handa, a garden studio from Studley College of Horticulture for Women and they collaborated on how to re-landscape the area. They called the garden the Shãh-Rak-Uen, The place of pleasure and delight.

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With the help of other Japanese garden designers and horticulturalists the gardens were developed and the planting continued. The Head of Soami School of Imperial Garden Design, Professor Suzuki came to the gardens to teach the local gardeners the art of pruning trees and shrubs as well as advising on the locations of planting. Suzuki referred to the gardens as ‘the best in the Western World’. In the years to come with the publication of the du Cane’s book in America and other books by authors like James Condor, Japanese garden design took over the world.

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One of the first places the West would have seen a Japanese garden was at the World’s Fair in Vienna, 1873 as part of the Japanese pagoda. It caused a hype as illustrated newspapers depicted it, as seen in the illustration below of the Empress visiting the gardens in front of bowing officials, on a bended bridge, more familiar to people from the willow pattern of China, the other popular reference for the masses.

Ella Christie had created a beautiful garden at the right time, for in 1910 was the Japan-British Exhibition in Shepherd’s Bush. Lasting for six months, it sparked a revival of interest in oriental design and gardening with over 8 million visitors. It sparked a large range of chinoiserie decor, from screens and fans, to furniture and tin-tea caddies.

In 1925 Shinzaburo Matsuo moved to Scotland to become the garden keeper for Ella Christie, having lost his family in an earthquake in Japan. He worked the garden for twelve years until he retired in 1937. Christie died in 1949 and the castle was demolished in 1952. The gardens survived until 1963 when teenagers vandalised the site, pushing the stone lanterns into the lake and burning down the teahouse and bridges.

The gardens underwent an extensive restoration in 2008 by Ella’s great-great niece and since then bridges have been replaced and the lanterns restored from the lake with a review of the plantation of the site.

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This restoration inspired me, for though our visions of labour might have been set in to motion, in the end, nothing is ever lost.

A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit

Leslie Wood was an English artist and illustrator who worked on covers for Punch and during his time was rather famous but seems is only remembered by bibliophiles.

Born in Stockport, England he studied at the Manchester College of Art and Design. In 1943, Wood showed some of his work to Faber and Faber, and was soon commissioned to take over illustration of Diana Ross’ Little Red Engine books, and went on to illustrate many other children’s books.

Below are some examples of his work next to the final published ones. I have been buying up his works for some time and many of them are in the form of these storyboards that the publishers printed and returned to him after. This is a book by Erik Hutchinson, who wrote a few children’s books including this one of a swallow on it’s migration home.

One of the problems with collecting things is the volume of stuff you end up with that are interesting. This book is one of those. I don’t think it’s an interesting volume but what I liked was the Mudies Library sticker pasted inside the book and designed to hang over the outside.

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With some very crude photoshop I have re-designed how the original label would have worked and it’s really the simplicity of only using one label to brand the book for the library.

Charles Edward Mudie was a publisher and in 1842 founded a lending library, which he called Mudie’s Select Library. Subscribers paid one guinea per year for an unlimited number of books, but could only borrow one volume at a time. With branches all over London as you can free from six options in the label above.

In 1876 Heffers books were founded by William Heffer in Cambridge and soon they became a publisher too. With many shops in Cambridge, today we eulogise their gallery at 18 Sidney Street, Cambridge.

A major brand in Cambridge in the late 1990s they had six shops in the city, each catering to different areas of the business. The Trinity Street shop was the largest for both general books and text books. Rose Crescent – Classical Music, King Street – Art Supplies, Grafton Centre & St Andrews Street – General books.

The Sidney Street shop at that time was for new best sellers on the ground floor and stationary with an art gallery on the top floor. As seen in the photograph above, it was a traditional setting on two levels, with roof lights.

In 1949 Bryan Robertson became curator at the Heffer Gallery in Cambridge and for a year he hired the Newnham student and cookery writer Jane Grigson to help run the gallery. Although he was only there for three years, he helped bring in fashionable artists and ceramics and helped change the gallery from selling reproduction prints of the university colleges and Victorian watercolours.

One of his first exhibitions was of New Paintings by Francis Rose, Cecil Collins and Merlyn Evans held at Heffer’s Gallery in Cambridge in 1950. The next year Josef Herman exhibited in a solo show.

As curators changed over the years the gallery would have a routine of exhibitions of historical works, maps and archaeological prints, and then modern art. From the advert below from 1955 Heffer’s are promoting the latest new ceramics by Lucie Rie and Bernard Leach. By this time they had their own picture framing department, so it’s not uncommon in East Anglia to find the Heffer’s label on the back of pictures that were framed there.

The fate of the gallery came when Heffer’s sold the business to Blackwells in Oxford who closed many of the shops in the city in order to focus on the Trinity Street shop.