David Hockney

by Christopher Simon Sykes

  Sunday Lunch, Hutton Terrace (illustration credit 2.1)

  His form master, Mr. Ashton, was frustrated by his lazy habits and the knowledge that he had real ability. It was as if he couldn’t be bothered. “He still does not really believe,” wrote his loyal supporter, Ken Grose, in his December 1950 English report, “that an artist needs occasionally to use words,” while his report at the end of the Lent term in 1951 was abysmal. His geography was “very lethargic,” “he makes little or no effort with any of his mathematical work,” and even Mr. Grose couldn’t find a good word to say for him, simply writing: “There is no point in his coming to English lessons.” Though he continued to be first in art, even in that subject his teacher reported “little progress,” and the headmaster demanded periodic reports on Hockney during the next term, a sure sign that his future at the school was in doubt. “Is he really silly?” Mr. Graham wrote at the bottom of the December report. “He can’t afford even to pretend to be.”5

  The decline in Hockney’s schoolwork did not escape his parents’ notice as he became more and more untidy, his school notebooks increasingly desecrated by doodles. Linking these facts, Laura had the idea of sending him to a neighbour, Mr. Whitehead, a teacher at the Bradford School of Art who gave calligraphy lessons in his spare time. “He obviously thought I was talented,” Hockney recalls, “and people like that, if they find some talented person, will give their lessons for free so my parents didn’t have to pay. I remember he used to chew hard little sticks of Italian liquorice, which made his teeth all black. He was old-fashioned and smoked a pipe, and I used to go to him once a week and be given some exercises to do. He taught me how to use a pen and to make the serif so that the curve was perfect. I liked it because it was teaching me about form, so at least I thought I was learning some skill. He was eager to have a young pupil who was obviously keen and it made the whole business of not being allowed to go to the art school easier to deal with.”6 It was an inspired idea of Laura’s, and Hockney’s schoolwork began to show immediate improvement. “I have been very pleased with his work and his general attitude,” wrote his form master at the end of July, while the headmaster wrote simply: “Most encouraging. His best term so far.”7

  “Untitled” (date unknown) (illustration credit 2.2)

  Over the next two years, Hockney managed to keep his head above water, in spite of the fact that his natural desire to clown around often overcame the need to pay attention. He developed a reputation for being funny, and made every effort to live up to it. If this meant tripping over when he came into the classroom, then he would do exactly that. He was an excellent mimic. Nineteen fifty-two was the year of a new radio show that was, the Radio Times announced, “based upon a crazy type of fun evolved by four of our younger laughter-makers.” Their names were Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe, Michael Bentine and Spike Milligan, and the show was called The Goon Show. At a time when almost every family in the country gathered round the radio in the evenings to listen to such programmes, Hockney’s impersonation of Henry Crun, a character played by Peter Sellers, was certain to raise a laugh. A natural anarchist, he would arrive at school without wearing his cap and blazer if he could, which gave him semi-heroic status. “He won the art prize every year,” Laura was to remember, “but at speech days we couldn’t understand the reaction of the other boys when David went up for his award. They stamped their feet, booed, clapped and shouted and made a terrific noise. We spoke to the head about it and he said it was because David was so amusing.”8

  “Untitled” (date unknown) (illustration credit 2.3)

  At the same time as playing the clown, Hockney was also growing up. When he accompanied Laura every Sunday to Methodist chapel, she may have looked upon him as the perfect son, but there was a lot going on in his life that she didn’t know about, not least his burgeoning sexuality. “There were loads of things I never told my mother,” he remembers. “Actually, I didn’t tell my parents anything that was going on.” One night, for example, he went off on his own to see a film in one of the local fleapits. “I was sitting near the front enjoying the picture when a man sitting next to me suddenly reached over and took my hand and placed it on his erect cock. I remember thinking, ‘I can’t tell my mother about this.’ I enjoyed it and it gave me a lifelong love of cinemas.”9

  Sex was simply not discussed in families in the 1950s, and most children found out about it by trial and error, or from dirty jokes and graffiti in public urinals. They learned precious little in school. The novelist Derek Robinson recalled that, at the institution he attended in Bristol, “the two periods of biology scheduled to cover human reproduction left many of us more confused than before. That tangle of plumbing created in chalk on the blackboard; did it really have something to do with our bodies? There was a rumour that sex was supposed to be fun. It didn’t look like fun. The way the biology master described it, it sounded slightly less fun than unclogging a drain with a bent plunger.”10 For Hockney, it was Scout camp that provided the stamping ground for sexual exploration.

  He had joined the Cubs at primary school; by the time he went to grammar school he was a member of the Fourth Bradford East Scouts from Eccleshill Church, and celebrated for his very particular participation in the annual gang shows (variety shows at which all the Scouts would sing songs and perform sketches to raise money for local charities) in which, standing onstage with a large easel and a drawing pad, he would do lightning sketches of the Scoutmaster, the vicar and other local people, to great applause. When the group went on camping trips, he would keep the logbook, filling it with drawings and cartoons that depicted their various activities. “David would always make us laugh,” remembers Philip Naylor, a friend of his brother John. “Once at camp he climbed right up into the high branches of a tree and announced that he was the King of the Twigs. Then the branch gave way and he plunged earthwards, and for quite a while after that he was known as ‘Twiggy.’ ”11

  “David is off at last with a pack almost as big as himself,” wrote Laura in her diary on 30 December 1952. “… an old Scoutmaster … is allowing the boys to camp in a stable where there is a stove and plenty of coke. They do have good times these days.”12 “When I was in the Boy Scouts,” says Hockney, “I used to be quite naughty, but you’d never talk about it. I mean, you’d put your hand on someone’s cock, but you’d never mention it later. I liked the camping because it was sexy. It was an opportunity to get into someone else’s sleeping bag. We were just kids, teenage boys messing around.”13

  Hockney at about ten, in his Cub cap (illustration credit 2.4)

  Hockney had a bit of a crush on one of the boys on this trip, David Johnson, who was the captain of the school rugby team. “… they are big pals,” wrote fellow Scout Mike Powell. “… the two Davids found a flooded air-raid shelter and Johnson decided he would dive in and investigate, but he had no swimming kit. It had been raining all week at camp and to minimise the number of soakings we were having, my patrol leader had the idea of making some of us wear swimming trunks. Hockney looked at me and said, ‘Take off your trunks and give them to Johnson.’ I sheepishly did so, quickly slipping into some shorts. David J., school rugby captain, squeezed into my tiny costume and promptly jumped in. The water looked horrible in there and he was soon out, handing back my trunks now stretched to twice the size. The Scoutmaster was so annoyed with the two Davids for being somewhat irresponsible that he ordered them both to take a P B [public bath] in a stream by the camp. They both stripped completely, lay in the stream and the Scouts had to scrub them both with soil-filled turf we had recently dug up during the building of the latrines.”14 On her son’s return from this trip, a week later, on 8 January, Laura noted, “David came home from camp. He has had a fine time and is looking forward to going again. He certainly does get much out of life.”15

  The early part of 1953 was clouded for Laura by the sudden death in her sleep of her mother, Mary, on 19 February. “Today seemed strange and empty outwardly,” she wrote the following
morning, “—but a strange feeling of calm and quiet within, something I have never experienced before.” The funeral took place on 24 February. “The service at Eastbrook was beautiful—not mournful, but more like an Easter service, as fitted her beautiful life—just called to a Higher service, and quite ready,” and afterwards Laura took Hockney to visit Bradford Regional College of Art. She was armed with a good reference from his headmaster, Mr. Graham, and some of his drawings, and the following Friday she wrote: “I took some of David’s work to the College of Art—and Mr. Rhodes, the Principal, and Mrs. Peters, the head of the Commercial Art department, were very much impressed and assured me that definitely commercial art should be David’s career. We want to give him a chance—but shall have to apply for a grant from the Education department.”16

  Hockney sat the all-important GCE exams in July. The papers that have survived give an extraordinary glimpse of a boy sitting in an examination hall, daydreaming and doodling. In his French paper, for example, which required translation of a scene set in a Paris hotel and featuring Madame Noublard, her daughter Jacqueline and the manager, le Gérant, he made no attempt at the work, merely writing, “I’m afraid I know no French but will draw some pictures instead.”17 Caricatures of “Madame Noublard et sa fillette et le Gérant” are drawn at the top of the page; the word “Bluebeard” is mysteriously written at the bottom. Not surprisingly he failed the exam. He did rather better in English literature, which required the design of a stage set for Twelfth Night, and he naturally scored the highest mark for art. He scraped through in most of the other subjects, covering all the exam papers with little sketches.

  On his last speech day, when he went to pick up the customary art prize, the whole school gave him a huge cheer. “He has undoubted ability in art,” wrote his form master on his final report, “especially in cartoon and sign-writing work … we have enjoyed his company.” The headmaster bade him best wishes on his new start. “He will be glad to get rid of the figure of fun,” he concluded, “and to establish himself as a sincere and serious person by steady work and merit.”18

  Hockney left with a skip in his step only to meet another hurdle—in the previous few months his parents had modified their enthusiasm for his going to art school. This was partly for financial reasons, and partly to be fair to his older siblings, all of whom had left school and gone straight to work. Paul in particular had wanted to be an artist, having got credits in art in his School Certificate, but had failed to find a job in commercial art and had ended up as a clerk in a firm of accountants. Philip had gone to night school to study engineering, and Margaret was training to be a nurse. Encouraged by the views of Mr. Rhodes, the principal of the art college, that their son’s work had commercial potential, Kenneth and Laura now encouraged him to go out and find a job as a commercial artist.

  Mr. Graham helped out, arranging an interview with Percy Lund Humphries & Co., a Bradford firm of printers, binders and publishers, and to please his parents Hockney went along with their wishes, putting together a portfolio of lettering and other things he thought commercial artists might do. This included a series of drawings of the various textile processes he had seen—Sorting, Washing, Drying and Carding—on a school visit to the local Airedale Combing Co. He also arranged to take the portfolio round to other studios and advertising agencies in Leeds. Lund Humphries turned him down, saying that he was not suitable for their class of work, while most of the other firms suggested that he return after attending art school. With his heart still set on going there, “I told my parents then,” Hockney remembers, “that it was essential for me to go to art school to get a job. I was determined. I would have cheated and lied and used every trick in the book to get there.”19

  Finally convinced, Kenneth and Laura applied for a grant from the Education Committee, and the sum of £35 was awarded, the first instalment of £11 to be paid in November 1953. In the meantime, his rucksack on his back, Hockney set off for a six-week holiday job to earn some money, helping with the harvest on a farm in the East Riding. This was a summer job he had been doing since he was fourteen, a gruelling cycle ride of fifty-four miles to Foxcovert Farm in Huggate, high up on the Yorkshire Wolds. A continuation of the chalk hills of Lincolnshire, the Wolds undulate gently from the River Humber to the coast of the East Riding, occupying an area of about 200,000 acres. Up until the nineteenth century, when they were first cultivated to meet the agricultural needs of the Industrial Revolution, they were little more than a barren wasteland, devoid of trees and vegetation, unvisited by Victorian tourists and largely ignored by artists such as J. M. W. Turner, James Ward and Alexander Cozens, who painted the more romantic grandeur of the West Riding. Yet the summers that Hockney spent working on the land here remain etched in his memory.

  “When I first came to the Wolds,” he remembers, “I cycled every-where and I quickly noticed the very beautiful cultivated landscape, so different from West Yorkshire and amazingly unspoiled.”20 There was no farmhouse attached to Foxcovert Farm; the farmer, Mr. Hardy, lived in a house in Huggate. The seasonal workers, all young boys, lodged in outbuildings, the accommodation consisting of a dormitory on the first floor, with three big shared double beds, and a room below for eating and cooking. Across the foal yard was a room known as the “Slum,” which was for recreation and contained a large coke stove, a settle and a dartboard. Each day the boys were out in the fields by seven, helping to bind and stook the corn, and they worked there till seven in the evening, when, exhausted, they would wander down to the local pub, the Huggate Arms. Here the young Hockney, free from parental restraints, tasted his first pint of beer. His mind was never far from home, however. “He once sent us a parcel containing a dead rabbit,” Laura remembered. “The poor postman couldn’t wait to get rid of it. He said, ‘I don’t know what’s in this parcel, but it stinks to high heaven.’ David thought he was sending us a lovely meal!”21

  The full-time workers consisted of the foreman, the stockman, a man to look after the horses, and the shepherd, an old man called Tommy Jackson, who never washed and used to chew and spit tobacco. “The thing that struck me,” says Hockney, “was how feudal it all was. The farm labourers all referred to Mr. Hardy as ‘The Master.’ Nobody in Bradford would have called their employer that, not in the mills anyway. It was a terrific experience. The job was boring, but I took home eight pounds at the end and it instilled in me a love of the landscape which I never forgot.”22 After six weeks on the farm he returned to Bradford to prepare for his first term at Bradford College of Art.

  Hockney arrived late, his grant having been delayed for two weeks, but his reputation preceded him: his calligraphy tutor, Mr. Whitehead, had told his class that a boy who would soon be joining them could knock spots off the lot of them. Not only that, he cut an intriguingly theatrical figure. After six weeks working in the fields, he was very tanned, in stark contrast to the pale complexions of the other students. He was also eccentrically dressed. Clothes rationing had just come to an end, and he and his father had taken to going to their favourite shop, Sykes Wardrobes, a high-quality second-hand clothes dealer that specialised in acquiring deceased estate wardrobes, including shoes. “You don’t need money for style,” Hockney says. “It’s about an attitude. People dressed pretty conventionally then, but I’d pick up things to make me look a bit different and which I wore out of a sense of mockery.”23 Dave Oxtoby, a painting student who was to become his close friend, remembers sitting with a fellow painter, Norman Stevens, in the life class at the moment when David first came in. “He was wearing a shirt with a high-starched wing collar and a black pinstriped suit with trousers that were far too short. He had on a bowler hat, an incredibly long red scarf, and he was carrying an umbrella. I turned to Norman and I said, ‘Look at this guy, he looks like a Russian peasant. He looks a right Boris.’ ”24 This caused some embarrassment for Hockney, who was already struggling to keep his composure in the face of being confronted with his first ever nude female model. The name stuck, and througho
ut his time at the college he was always to be known as “Boris.”

  Climbing the wide stone steps and entering the pillared portico of the grand old Victorian building that was Bradford College of Art was the achievement of a dream for Hockney. It was all he had thought of for the last three years: to be in an environment where he was going to be learning about nothing except art. “I was interested in everything at first,” he wrote. “I was an innocent little boy of sixteen and I believed everything they told me, everything. If they said ‘You have to study perspective,’ I’d study perspective; if they told me to study anatomy, I’d study anatomy. It was thrilling after being at the Grammar School to be at a school where I knew I would enjoy everything they asked me to do.”25 Mr. Whitehead had told him that quite a lot of students who went to the art school wasted their time there by not doing much work. “I was careful to tell my parents,” he remembers, “that I would not be one of those people, and I did work very hard and quickly noticed all the students who didn’t.”26

  The principal of the college in the autumn of 1953 was Fred Coleclough, a bureaucrat who liked every department to be run as though it was the army. So far as he was concerned the business of the college was to turn out commercial artists who would have successful careers in the advertising and printing trades. He had little time for painters, as Hockney was quick to discover. “When I was asked what I wanted to do,” he recalls, “I said that I wanted to be an artist. They didn’t appear to understand what I meant by this, and asked me if I had a private income. They knew I’d been to grammar school and probably thought that I was a bit superior. I said I didn’t know, because the truth is I had absolutely no idea what a private income was. They then told me that if I wanted to do something practical, I would be better off going into the graphics department.”27 Happy at this stage to agree to anything, Hockney lasted just two months in this department, studying commercial art under John Fleming, who supported Coleclough’s views on student training. All the while, however, he had one eye firmly fixed on the painting department.