They packed their paints for the journey in a large trunk. “What we used to do,” John Loker remembers, “was buy a half-hundredweight tin of white lead paint. Then we used to buy small tins or big tubes of titanium white and mix the two together for our white paint. We also bought lots and lots of tubes of different-coloured oil paints. We needed an easel, so we smuggled one out of Bradford College and took it with us.”2 When they set off for the south-west from Paddington station, the trunk, which they struggled to carry, went on the scales and weighed in at two hundredweight. Eventually they managed to get all their stuff on the train and set off for Cornwall.
Penniless as they were, the best accommodation they could come up with on arrival was some way out of St. Ives, up a steep hill on the road to Zennor, where a farmer gave them the use of a derelict barn in return for their cleaning it out. “It was chicken droppings on chicken droppings on chicken droppings,”3 says Loker. They spent hours scrubbing it and putting disinfectant down, and finally laid their sleeping bags on the stone floor with every intention of staying there for some time. The following morning, they borrowed a wheelbarrow from the farmer and went down to the station in St. Ives to fetch the trunk, which they then had to push up the hill. While Loker organised setting up the barn into some kind of studio, Hockney went off to the post office in St. Austell, to which they had arranged for their mail to be sent. Events had moved quickly: he returned with a cheque for £24, the first half-payment of the landscape prize, and a letter offering them a cottage in the Suffolk village of Kirton for £3 a week.
“The upshot was that we decided to go to Suffolk there and then,” Loker recalls. “The only problem was we were unable to cash the cheque anywhere because we didn’t have a bank account, so we decided that the best course to take was to go and see Barbara Hepworth, who we knew was rich and who lived nearby. Arrogant as we were, we just turned up on her doorstep, knocked on the door and asked if she could cash a cheque for us. She was very friendly, and organised to have it cashed by the Newlyn Art Society. As it turned out, we didn’t do any painting in Cornwall. All we did was clean out someone’s barn for them. We took the trunk to the station, returned the barrow to the farmer and set off on the train that night.”4
The journey to Suffolk was long and tortuous, involving going through London and changing trains, but when they finally arrived they were delighted with their accommodation: an old horseman’s cottage in the grounds of a much larger house, with an outside lavatory and no bathroom. Their landlords, John and Margaret Burton, lent them bicycles and they became familiar figures cycling around the local countryside looking for suitable views to paint or draw. They worked happily like this for a few weeks, Hockney painting small landscapes, few of which have survived, and Loker slightly larger ones, until they ran out of money, before the second half of the prize money was due. After three days without food, Loker, driven by desperation, went scavenging in the fields and came back with what he thought were some turnips. He scrounged some Oxo cubes from the Burtons’ maid, and boiled up what turned out to be not turnips but sugar beet, which made an inedibly sweet mush.
“It was then that I got a clear notion about life,” says Hockney. “We were on the point of starving, so I rang up my parents, reversing the charges as you could in those days, and I explained to them that we had absolutely nothing, and by that I mean not even threepence. I told them that the second cheque for £24 would be arriving in a few days and could they possibly send something for us. The next day I received a postal order for two and sixpence. When I opened it I spent two shillings of it on a packet of cigarettes, but at that moment I thought to myself, ‘From now on, you’re on your own, David.’ What I didn’t realise at the time was that, aged twenty, that was a very, very useful thing to know. I suddenly felt freer, that I’d finally escaped the family.”5
By this time Hockney and Loker had fallen somewhat out of favour with their landlords who, their novelty value having worn off, now saw them not as tame young artists, but rather as scruffy students who kept an untidy house and cleaned their paintbrushes on their trousers. But in the long hours of painting and cycling around the county, they had made other friends, two of whom, Ken Cuthbert, a local artist, and his friend Denis Taplin, a future gallery owner, invited them to exhibit at the Felixstowe Amateur Arts Show.
“We were a bit arrogant at first,” Loker recalls, “thinking we didn’t really want to show our work in that kind of environment, but we were short of money and he said they would put some screens up and we could have our own exclusive corner, so we decided to do it.”6 The evening of the private view got off to a bad start when Hockney’s cycle light fell off into the front wheel, catapulting him straight over the handlebars and writing off the bike, an incident unlikely to further endear them to their landlords. But when they eventually limped into the show, they were overwhelmed with people rushing up to greet them and demanding to know the prices of their work. “We were selling drawings for two and sixpence, next to nothing really,” Loker remembers. “I even sold a five-foot painting for six or seven pounds. But it was a fortune in those days and we were suddenly rich. We’d made about equivalent to half the value of the scholarship and that meant that we didn’t have to go home. The paintings were mostly landscapes but they were landscapes in which we were trying to do something slightly different. The workings of the paintings were all there to see. They were serious pictures for us. The way we painted was the way Derek Stafford had taught us, which was that unless we were totally committed to our work there was no point in painting at all. And we were willing committers.”7
At the end of this idyllic summer, Loker returned to Bradford College of Art and Hockney reported to the Ministry of Labour and National Service in Leeds to be assigned employment. His first job was as a medical orderly in the skin diseases ward of St. Luke’s Hospital, Bradford. He lived at home and worked long hours at the hospital, a salutary experience. His jobs included putting ointment on the patients, one of whom, a pot-bellied old man whom he particularly loathed, had to be regularly dabbed with calamine lotion. The old man took pleasure in standing stark naked in front of the shy young orderly and reminding him, “Don’t forget the testicles, David.”8 “I swept the floors, put the ointment on, and was the caller in the afternoon bingo games. If the TV broke down, or if you didn’t give them anything to do, they just sat and scratched. I was also the runner. I used to collect all their bets, mostly sixpences and shillings, and take them to a porter who took them to a bookie. I soon knew which patients won regularly, so I backed the same horses and won too.”9 There was no time for painting and Hockney used to scrub the floors singing, “Roll on September 1959!” The one pastime he did indulge in was reading. Even though he’d never been abroad, he decided to take the time to read Proust, because he’d been told that À la recherche du temps perdu was one of the greatest works of art of the twentieth century. He struggled through it, feeling that he wasn’t sure he was getting that much out of it. “I remember that asparagus was mentioned in it,” he says, “but I didn’t even know what an asparagus was.”10
Living at home, Hockney was at close proximity to his father’s increasingly vociferous political views, which had made him a celebrated figure in Bradford. Kenneth left copies of Peace News on Bradford’s buses or on benches in the city parks, and he hired billboards and painted slogans on them in bright colours—BAN THE BOMB or BAN SMOKING or END HANGING NOW—adding fairy-lights during the Christmas period. He worked so hard for Sidney Silverman’s anti-hanging bill that when it was finally passed in June 1956, he was invited down to the House of Commons for the final vote.
None of this carried much weight with Laura, who felt her husband’s role should be supporting the family, not squandering money on such causes. Audrey Raistrick, a fellow Bradfordian and a founder member of CND (the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament), remembered going round to the house in Eccleshill one winter morning to collect some goods promised by Kenneth for the Daily Worker Bazaar.
It was a cold and snowy day and Laura was busy shovelling snow off the front steps. “I greeted her warmly,” she recalled, “and asked if Mr. Hockney was in. ‘No,’ she replied. ‘He’s out doing good!’ ”11
Kenneth’s political campaigning also took the form of enthusiastic letter writing, usually several a day and often using pseudonyms, such as K. Aitch, K. Kenlaw, and the Russian-sounding K. Yenkcoh, which was simply Hockney reversed. He wrote not only to newspaper editors and publishers, but to politicians and world leaders such as Nasser, Stalin and Mao Tse-tung. He encouraged his children and their friends to question everything. “He taught us a lesson,” John Hockney remembers. “He purchased the Soviet Weekly, China News, The Times, Manchester Guardian, Daily Express and Daily Mail, Peace News and the Daily Worker. He then asked Margaret, David and me to read about a particular incident that was reported by all the papers, and asked what we thought. All of us were confused as the reporting varied so much, depending on the persuasion of editorial licence. He told us, ‘That is why you must always find out the truth yourself; you cannot always believe what you read.’ ”12 Into Hockney he drummed the adage “Never mind what the neighbours think.”
Breakdown en route to Aldermaston (left to right: John Loker, David Hockney, unknown) (illustration credit 3.2)
Over the Easter weekend of 1958, CND held the first of its Alder-maston marches, a four-day anti-nuclear protest march from Trafalgar Square in London to the atomic weapons establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire. Hutton Terrace became a hive of activity, with Kenneth busy painting posters in the attic in his best suit, much to the annoyance of Laura, while Hockney and John Loker sorted out their own posters printed by Rod Taylor. “They were the kind of thing I was doing in graphic design,” Loker recalls, “with big bold letters. I remember one that I particularly liked which just had huge letters filling the whole page saying BAN THE BLOODY BOMB. Bloody was painted in red.”13 Taylor bought a clapped-out old car for a few pounds, and he, Hockney and Loker all piled in and drove down to London for the march, a saga of punctures, changing tyres, bumpers falling off, and cold nights spent in sleeping bags in church halls that was to be repeated over the next few years.
The autumn of 1958 was a happy time for Hockney. John Loker had left Bradford College and, as a fellow conscientious objector, had decided to fulfil his military service in Hastings, doing agricultural work. With Peter Kaye and Dave Oxtoby, he rented a cottage where Hockney joined them at the end of September, and for a while he, Kaye and Loker worked as apple-pickers at an orchard along the coast in Rye, following the itinerant harvesters, and collecting anything they might have missed, such as the fruit from the tops of the trees. Because their names were Hockney, Kaye and Loker, they called themselves Hockeylok Apples Inc.
When the work started to get monotonous, Hockney decided to apply for another hospital job. “We are beginning to get things ship-shape down here,” he wrote to his parents on 10 October. “(That doesn’t mean we’ve moved into the sea.)” On 21 October he told them, “I commenced work at St. Helen’s Hospital Hastings yesterday. It is alright. The ward is rather similar to the one at St. Luke’s … Dad, don’t worry about my appearance at the hospital, we are keeping house very well, and in fact I think we can congratulate ourselves. We even washed some sheets the other day and I ironed them all—and they were ‘Persil White.’ ”14 As an orderly in the heart patients’ ward his jobs included bathing the patients, and occasionally those who had died. Hockney struck up a friendship with the mortuary attendant and on more than one occasion found himself eating his picnic lunch surrounded by the bodies of the dead.
With one year left before starting at the Royal College, Hockney began to think about painting again, and he and his friends enrolled for Monday-evening life-drawing classes at Hastings College of Art. He also wrote to his father on 21 October instructing him to dispose of his surplus pictures. “Dad, if Mr. Ashton is interested in buying pictures cheap, all those stacked in the attic can be sold, apart from the Road Menders. This painting is on a canvas worth at least £5, so that would be ‘cheap’ at anything around say £10.” He was sending paintings to the Yorkshire Artists’ Exhibition, to next year’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, and had already started three new pictures and done quite a bit of drawing. He finished the letter by telling him that they had had a visit from David Fawcett, their fellow student at Bradford. “… he was saying that this new school he is teaching at wants some original paintings, and they are interested in young painters, so he’s put our names forward—not bad eh.”15
While Hockney worked out his time in the hospital, John Loker and Peter Kaye were employed on a farm, initially pulling mangles, a really horrible job. On the whole, however, it was a good year. “At weekends,” Loker recalls, “Norman Stevens, who was already at the Royal College, used to come down and bring various students with him. Dave Oxtoby used to visit from the Royal Academy Schools with friends, and we used to go round the countryside seeing things like the Lewes bonfire, where they burn an effigy of the Pope. They were some great times, and it gave us the opportunity to meet some students of the Royal College, and occasionally we used to go up to London and hang out with them, so when we actually got there it wasn’t so strange.”16
When Hockney finally arrived in London in September 1959, he was entering one of the best art schools in the world at a time when it was on the threshold of one of its most productive periods. The Royal College of Art was spread about South Kensington in what the principal, Robin Darwin, described as a series of “shacks and mansions,”17 with some sites a quarter of a mile from each other. While the main premises on Exhibition Road, behind the V&A, housed the School of Painting and Graphic Design, the School of Sculpture was in a shed in Queen’s Gate, the School of Fashion in a large house in Ennismore Gardens, and the Junior and Senior Common Rooms were in the Cromwell Road. However unsatisfactory the set-up, the college’s results spoke for themselves: recent graduates included Peter Blake, Frank Auerbach, Robin Denny, Bridget Riley and Richard Smith.
Robin Darwin had already wrought miraculous changes at the college since arriving, on 1 January 1948, to discover “Morrison Shelters doing duty for printing tables in the Textile Department … no drawing offices anywhere in the College, and only two studios for the whole School of Design; nor was there a lecture theatre. There were virtually no records of any sort, no paintings or other works by former students … A single secretary served the whole of the College …”18 An unconventional figure, Darwin had been secretary to the British Camouflage Committee during the war, where he had brought in artists to work alongside architects, engineers and scientists. Striking in appearance—“brooding with thick dark hair, heavy spectacles underlined by an equally heavy moustache, a piercing eye that stared one down, a merciless tongue, an old Etonian tie and a dark double-breasted business suit, a perpetual cigarette”19—he had become a brilliant administrator as a result of his wartime experience, and by appointing lively professors and letting them manage their own departments in the way they wanted he soon had the place up and running. The senior tutor was Roger de Grey, a distinguished landscape and still-life painter, who was not afraid to speak his mind, and alongside him were Professors Carel Weight, Ruskin Spear, Ceri Richards, Robert Buhler, Colin Hayes and Mary Fedden, the first woman ever to be employed at the college. By the time Hockney arrived the college was thriving, and there was a real buzz about it. He arranged to lodge with Norman Stevens in one tiny room of an Earls Court boarding house, 47 Kempsford Gardens, owned by an actor, John Bennett. Hockney wrote home on 3 October, “Dear all, I have settled down and am working hard. The digs (one room with two beds, gas ring and wash basin, and kitchen, toilet and bath downstairs) are about 10 minutes walk from the college or a 3d ride on the tube …”20
Skeleton, 1959 (illustration credit 3.3)
On his first day at college, Hockney felt like “a little provincial. I thought that, coming from a place like Bradford, everyone else would be much
more sophisticated than me.” Though he soon found out that this was not the case, he did suffer from the occasional teasing about his then quite thick Yorkshire accent. “There was quite a lot of ‘trooble at mill’ stuff to begin with, which I’d never really come across before. It didn’t worry me. In fact, it quite amused me, though I did sometimes bite back. I remember saying to someone who was taking the mickey, ‘Well, if I drew as badly as you, I’d keep my mouth shut.’ I wasn’t intimidated at all.”21 It had also occurred to him that going to the Royal College when he was that little bit older was probably a good thing, as he would get more out of it, and he had Norman Stevens to keep an eye on him. “My first impression of David and Norman,” remembers Roddy Maude-Roxby, the editor of the college magazine, Ark, “was of these two northern lads who were like a comic double act, and they both spoke as if each other’s mother had told him to look after the other lad. People used to imitate their accents as well, but I think they were quite at ease with it. They both had a great sense of humour and a lot of rapport with people.”22
The students Hockney met in those first days were an unusual mishmash, most of them stepping out into the world for the first time. Of those his own age perhaps the most sophisticated was Allen Jones, a Londoner, who had not only attended another leading art college, Hornsey School of Art, but had already travelled abroad, in particular to Paris, where he had fallen under the influence of Delaunay and had come back to paint large, colourful, abstract canvases. A jazz lover with a penchant for wearing three-button suits, at first Jones felt a little out of place among his fellow students. “When I arrived at the RCA,” he recalls, “I seemed to be the only person not from the provinces. The only time I had heard north country accents was when I heard comedians, so I was always expecting punchlines every time anyone spoke with a northern accent even though it wasn’t funny.”23
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