Joseph Gray's Camouflage

by Mary Horlock

  Mary Horlock worked as a curator at the Tate Gallery Liverpool and Tate Britain, and has written widely on contemporary art and artists. Her first novel, The Book of Lies, was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. She lives in London.

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  The Book of Lies

  For Alice Maureen Barclay

  Patron

  Fiona Paice

  With special thanks to

  Darian Leader

  Paddy Whitford

  Dear Reader,

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  Contents

  Preface

  1 A stands for Aeroplane: his is the eye That Camouflage tries to defeat; this is why

  2 B is for Bomber: he’s coming so fast, If he can’t see you quickly, why, dammit, he’s past

  3 C is for Camera. Try to confuse The enemy’s reading of aerial views

  4 D is Deception, which plainly implies You’ve got to tell Jerry some credible lies

  5 E is for Enemy: keep him in doubt When you must make a mess what that mess is about

  6 F is for False Work, which will serve to distract The enemy’s eye from the genuine fact

  7 G is for Garnishing, this should be wound To copy the texture and tone of the ground

  8 H is for Hiding, so please keep it dark, And remember to go in the shade when you park

  9 I is for Invention, consider the new Ways to conceal our secrets from view

  10 J is the Job which has got to be done: The Camoufleur knows it and so does the Hun

  11 K is the Knowledge of how to combine Doing the job with leaving no sign

  12 L is for Lay-out: the way that you face Is of vital importance so choose the right place

  13 M is for Maintenance of the disguise: Leaving covers unchecked is always unwise

  14 N is for Nets which are simply a frame For the garnishing on them, so garnish the same

  15 O is Opacity over the gun, You must garnish opaquely, but think of the sun

  16 P is for People moving around, Do so at night and merge with the ground

  17 Q is the Question you cannot decide, But the Camouflage officer’s there as a guide

  18 R is for Regularity, huts in a row, Or guns equidistant are certain to show

  19 S stands for Siting, for Spoil or for Scrim: 3 covers 2 but on 1 sink or swim

  20 T is for Tracks, which will photograph light, And disclose your activities; keep them from sight

  21 U is the Use you make of dummies, So the enemy can never trust what he sees

  22 V is for Vision, this means more than sight, Use a strategy to keep your scheme tight

  23 W is for Waste. Please do not forget Steel wool is much harder to replace than a net

  24 X is for Extras, there will always be some, But think economically to get the job done

  25 Y is for You, sir, on whom will depend The success or the failure of all in the end

  26 Z is for Zeal with which you apply These few simple principles – do have a try

  Retrospective

  An Ending

  Select Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Supporters

  Copyright

  Preface

  This story starts with a picture: a vast turquoise sky, an endless yellow beach, a mother and her child playing in the sand.

  My grandmother lifts a trembling hand and points towards the smallest figure.

  ‘That is me.’

  She now has a room measuring nine feet by five. There isn’t much wall space, so the picture hangs in the corridor outside, beside the sign: ‘No. 18: Maureen Barclay’.

  Maureen Barclay is a widow and there are many here. Some don’t know where they are, nor do they remember the lives they have lived. Maureen is different; she remembers plenty. But with this blessing comes a curse: the older she becomes, the more she worries what she might soon forget. She has moved into a nursing home quite by her own choice, but as she downsizes, reducing her life to the essentials, the more she is stripping back memories, the memories embedded in clothes, objects, papers and pictures.

  There simply isn’t room for them here.

  The only solution is to pass them on to the people she trusts. She has given me many things over the years – her love and time above all else – and now she surrenders a most treasured possession. It is a pencil-drawn self-portrait of her father and my great-grandfather, Joseph Gray. This is the man who first painted that small child playing on the beach.

  Joseph Gray is an artist most people have never heard of, but for much of my early life he was the only artist I’d ever heard of. His paintings filled all the rooms of my grandparents’ flat and much of my own family home. Smoke-filled streets and blitzed churches lined our staircase, thickly painted still lifes crowded in corners, restless seas churned over each mantelpiece. While the houses of my friends contained candy-coloured Impressionist prints or tastefully anonymous landscapes, we had this curious mix of styles and subjects, all courtesy of an artist I’d never even met.

  But at least I knew what he looked like. I would stare for hours at this pencil-drawn self-portrait: darkly piercing eyes under hooded lids, a wide curving nose, a proud, rounded jaw. With a crumpled hat pulled low on his head, Joseph Gray stood straight and returned my gaze. Now that’s what an artist should look like, I thought.

  The first time I met Joe was through this drawing, and the first time I saw London was through his paintings of the Thames. I was told he’d been a war artist and because of the prints on our staircase – images of St Paul’s ablaze, a city in ruins – I assumed this meant the Second World War. I was wrong. Joe had fought in the trenches of the First World War and, once invalided out, had become an official war artist to The Graphic newspaper. He was later commissioned to paint battle scenes and portraits of fallen heroes, with his prints and drawings making their way into museums up and down the country.

  Now, as Maureen’s life shrinks – she has one cupboard to hang her clothes, one chest of drawers – so mine must expand. On each visit she surrenders new memories. First she hands me a file of old art reviews from the 1920s (‘Mr. Gray has done wonders’, ‘Mr. Gray may be ranked with the great battle painters.’1); the next week there are photographs of actual pa
intings with titles like A Ration Party or After Neuve Chapelle. Then comes a huge cardboard roll jammed full of newspaper articles: sheet curled upon sheet (‘June 1916 – A Day in the Life of a Trench, by our correspondent, Joseph Gray’2).

  I think again of the pencil self-portrait, dark eyes haunted by what he’s seen.

  ‘It is a shame,’ Maureen tells me. ‘Nobody knows about him now, nobody remembers him. He lived such a life, he did such extraordinary work.’

  I nod slowly, familiar with that lament, and reach over to give her hand a gentle squeeze. Despite the passing of the years there is something unresolved at her core, a sadness buried deep within. Maureen has lived a vivid life, created a large and loving family who adore her, but sometimes I catch a glimpse of the little girl on the beach, still looking for her father.

  She refers to Joe often, as a war artist, a painter and etcher of note, and reminds us how successful he was once. That once was long ago, but it is what she clings to. She cannot really grasp the rest; why she never saw him after, where he went and what he did.

  ‘There was, of course, another war.’

  She uses her long ebony stick to prod at an ominous file abandoned at her feet.

  ‘To serve in two world wars. It’s hard to understand. Can you take this, please. I’m sure you’ll find a use for it.’

  I lean casually to pick up the file but am instantly defeated. It spews yellow papers and is as heavy as a brick. It bears the cryptic label: ‘Steel Wool: Camouflage’.

  ‘Camouflage,’ I repeat, as if it is a question.

  Joseph Gray was a good artist. My grandmother maintains that with a little more luck he might have been great. She is frustrated by the injustice of it all, by his failure to find a proper context. She has a point. After risking his life in one war Joe shouldn’t have had to struggle through the next decade, fighting to get his paintings seen.

  But just because something can’t be seen doesn’t mean it isn’t there. For the uninitiated, the word ‘camouflage’ can be traced to seventeenth-century France: ‘camouflet’ was a slang word that meant a puff of smoke blown into someone’s face to dupe them.3 Another derivation is the French verb ‘camoufler’, which originally meant to make up for the stage.4 The Oxford English Dictionary’s first example of published usage is when, on 25 May 1917, the Daily Mail reported, ‘The act of hiding anything from your enemy is termed “camouflage”.’5 This makes it sound so simple, but camouflage is never just a matter of concealment; it is fundamentally about deception. You must fool someone with a surface resemblance, make them think they understand what they see, yet what they see is a lie.

  All the facts sit in this heavy file, crammed full of reports and memorandums, photographs and drawings. I’m not sure how much of it Maureen has actually read, but I kiss her goodbye and take it away, struggling down the stairs that only the care-home staff ever use. I pass a few elderly residents slumbering in their comfy chairs. One pale, hairless gentleman repeatedly wipes at an invisible smudge on the table in front of him. I think of the stories lost, or so well hidden they will never be told.

  Later, in my own home, I confront the file of scraps and secrets. There’s a photograph of Joe in what I’d guess as middle age, standing on a grassy hillside. He is smiling coyly and if I look closely I can see why. It’s not a grassy slope at all but a canopy of fake undergrowth hiding something. What? There are three more photographs showing a vast framework under construction, and hundreds of bombs stacked below. The view from underneath is astonishing: a man balancing on a wire like a trapeze artist at the circus. There’s so much more. I find drawings for ‘dummy trees’, ‘dummy farmhouses’, ‘movable hedges’; more photographs of landscape which isn’t really landscape. It’s magic. No, it is camouflage.

  Art and camouflage are not obvious allies – the former makes something unreal recognisable, the latter makes something real unrecognisable – but for my great-grandfather one paved the way to the other. Joseph Gray spent one war representing reality, and the next misrepresenting it.

  Here, in this file, I find pages of a tattered manuscript entitled Camouflage and Air Defence. There are memorandums and reports written on War Office letterhead, addressed to ‘Major Joseph Gray R.E.’, a camouflage officer and adviser on matters of civil defence, an ‘expert in structural concealment’.

  Maureen is proud of her father’s work, but by the time Joe wrote this book so much was being hidden. He would meet and fall in love with another woman, a woman some fifteen years younger than him. ‘Concealment is an art, and like every other art reaches perfection only through much practice.’6 So declared the War Office in 1937, at the very time when Joe was leaving his wife and only daughter, making himself disappear from the family he’d once been part of.

  I have grown up with Joe’s presence – in his paintings, prints, fragments of stories – but this only ever seemed to reinforce his absence. I want to find Joe for Maureen, to find the man and make him whole. It’s the very least I can do, but it won’t be easy.

  A complete draft of Camouflage and Air Defence is lying sealed in a box in the Imperial War Museum. Dated 1935 it is marked ‘SECRET’, ‘CONFIDENTIAL’ and ‘Not to be published by order of the War Office’. It was intended as a guide to concealment and deception in a modern, mechanised war and proposes a range of strategies to protect from air attack. Joe was one of the first British artists to be recruited to the cause of camouflage in the 1930s, and it became an abiding obsession. He went on to invent a new kind of covering material – steel wool – that could be used to create artificial landscapes, covering vital sites and protecting them from the Luftwaffe. There is a sample of this material in his archive – bristling papery fragments painted in greyish green – and more photographs, ‘notes on research’, testimonials that bear witness to his knowledge and expertise. It was presented by the woman who was for a time his most precious secret. Her name was Mary Meade, or rather, as I discover much later, Kathleen Mary Meade.

  I am Mary Kathleen, which seems a strange coincidence.

  Maureen had four daughters. My mother, Patricia, is the eldest. She was the only grandchild to meet Joe.

  ‘Was I named after Mary Meade?’ I ask, when I realise the connection.

  There’s a long pause down the telephone.

  ‘Well, not really,’ replies my mother. ‘But I liked the name and I liked her.’

  It takes a moment for me to understand.

  ‘You knew her?’

  ‘Oh, y-es, and so did your aunt Victoria. They became close after Joe died. In fact, Victoria has some of the letters that Joe wrote to Mary during the war, when they first met and fell in love. You should ask to see them, they are really wonderful . . . just don’t mention it to your grandmother.’

  My aunt Victoria arrives at my door within days, looking furtive and flustered. She hands me a bundle.

  ‘They are love letters,’ she says quickly. ‘Mary kept all of them, but I haven’t mentioned them to your grandmother and I’m not going to. I know she’d find it painful. I mean, she wouldn’t want to read them . . . but I don’t see why you can’t.’

  How swiftly I have become the repository of family secrets. I’m not sure if it’s right, but I read the letters anyway.

  ‘Darling Mary . . . I love you devotedly and entirely and until I met you I did not know what love was. I will never leave you unless you want me to go.’

  ‘My dearest Darling . . . I was sorry if I was difficult but I can’t camouflage what I feel and I won’t try to. I am at the moment in a very vulnerable position. Do you really love me (I dare you to try not loving me and see what happens!)’

  It seems deception was quite Joe’s speciality, but was it an art he learned or a talent he was born with? I read and reread his letters then return to the Imperial War Museum and scour the archives of other camouflage officers, trying to fix him in a wider context. There are lecture notes on blending in and how to spot bad cover, private papers and photographs. ‘Having tw
o lives makes it so difficult,’ notes one officer in his diary.7

  I also find a poem. It is called ‘The ABC of Camouflage’ and is a jaunty alphabetical guide intended as an instructional tool to make troops ‘camouflage-minded’8. It stays in my head so it’s obviously effective. How I wish Joe’s life could be made simple, broken down to an ABC. Perhaps I could try, using this poem as a starting point, and so I plot two intertwining histories – one personal and particular, the other more objective and collective – Joseph Gray and camouflage.

  But how can I get close to a man who was so good at hiding, a man who had made camouflage the fabric of his life?

  I begin with the first story I ever heard about Joe, from 1959. My mother, Patricia Barclay, was nineteen years old, a coltish teenager with kohled eyes and a pixie cut. Having secured herself a place at Glasgow School of Art, she had big ideas and a huge portfolio, which made her own mother anxious. Maureen feared her eldest daughter was making the wrong choice, and perhaps that history might be repeating. She felt out of her depth but was too proud to admit it.

  ‘If you want to be an artist then we should go and ask one for advice,’ she said. ‘We shall go and see your grandfather.’

  Patricia didn’t hide her shock. She had assumed her grandfather was long dead, since nobody had ever told her otherwise.

  Without further explanation they took a train from Paddington down to Marlow, the small town where Joe and Mary had made their home, and he was standing on the station platform, stick in hand, waiting for them patiently as if he’d been waiting half his life. As Patricia stepped out of the carriage and met his gaze, she felt certain they had met before, and then she realised it was only the shock of resemblance. Maureen and Joe shared the same eyes, the same nose and cheekbones; it was like pieces of a puzzle falling into place. After the briefest of introductions Joe took his daughter and granddaughter to his house to meet Mary, and they sat on benches in the rambling garden, drinking tea from mismatched china.