by Mary Horlock
Modernism had taunted Joe, Nazism terrified him. The war, the war, the war, it hadn’t ever ended. It was only getting worse.
The year was 1934. Two more years of shrinking prospects. Nancy Gray, the artist’s wife, was no longer acting a part. Unhappiness hung around her, a mix of bitterness and regret. She mostly blamed her husband for their current situation. She hadn’t minded leaving her parents – London had offered better prospects than Dundee, a small town teetering on the brink of ruin – but Dundee now seemed safer, a world she knew. When Joe had convinced her to move south she’d been full of excitement. Until all their savings were gone. London had meant to offer fresh opportunities, new contacts, untold adventures. It hadn’t come good on any of its promises and neither had her husband.
Tite Street had been an ideal, but the reality of living lay elsewhere. The Sutherland Hotel, a converted Edwardian town house near Paddington Station, had become their ‘temporary lodgings’ for the last two years. Nancy would never adjust but Joe tried not to notice. He kept piling on the promises, and she would pace back and forth in their ground-floor room like a tigress in a cage. Joe reasoned it was not such an unpleasant sort of place but Nancy assured him it could never feel like home, and having recently been ‘men only’, there had been audible mutterings over whether it was an appropriate setting to bring up a child.
Nobody knew what to do with young Maureen. Nobody knew what to do at all.
It wasn’t the memories of the war that so haunted Nancy but this lingering and disappointing aftermath. She knew they weren’t starving, but here they were with no prospects and no security. Joe had managed to secure a few portrait commissions, but the last one, Lord Brocket in His Garter Robes, was never paid for in full. Brocket had died suddenly, leaving a Nazi sympathiser son who wouldn’t honour his father’s commitments. How Joe fumed. The world was going to ruin.
‘You must give up Tite Street.’
Nancy wasn’t trying to be cruel – she merely wanted Joe to see the world for what it was. She wanted him to accept there was no more room for dreaming. For once Joe did as he was told, but as he crammed his easels and canvases into the room they shared, it only seemed to enforce the sense of homelessness. Joseph Gray, the indefatigable optimist, was slowly losing his faith. He had fought hard against fashion and now, when he looked in the galleries on Bond Street, he saw nothing he recognised. The Surrealists and Abstractionists were busy making waves with an elite group of collectors to support them. What did they understand of the real world?
‘War means Air War and that Air War means inescapable and horrible death to hundreds and thousands, or millions.’11
Rarely a day went by when he didn’t read it somewhere. Nancy felt he was becoming obsessed by it, but debating the world situation distracted him from his personal problems, and at least she didn’t have to endure it. She had taken on the role of bread-winner, having been lucky to find work with a barrister at Lincoln’s Inn. Of course, returning home each evening, she never felt lucky. She began to avoid Joe. If Maureen had been there it might have been different, but Maureen had gone.
It had seemed like a sensible plan: one of the residents of the Sutherland knew a family in Herne Bay who were willing to take another child. Nancy and Joe considered it a better environment for their daughter.
‘They have a young girl the same age as you, and there is a very good school nearby. You could be sisters.’
Maureen was a shy child held back by a quite considerable deafness. Joe blamed himself for that – he had always been a little deaf, and the war had only made him more so.
‘You must not let that stop you or slow you down,’ he assured her. ‘Just like me, you will make good friends.’
They went together to inspect this new home, a new possible family and school.
Maureen held tight to her father’s hand, but she rather liked the idea of having a sibling and she was made to feel very welcome.
Joe knew it was safer, better. For a small weekly sum his little girl could be taken care of. She’d have security and stability – two things her parents couldn’t give her. Herne Bay was certainly a pleasant place, with clear sea air and a beach and esplanade. Joe loved Maureen so much it made him ache, but he was sure it was the right decision. They walked to the clock tower, then on to the pier.
‘I will visit at weekends or you will come to us. I will write and send you postcards. Mind you do the same.’
Staring out at the flat, grey sea, Joe promised Maureen that everything would come right. He still believed it would. Nancy, back at the Sutherland, wasn’t as sure.
Maureen didn’t realise then but something very precious was coming to an end.
‘We would never live together as a family again.’
Poor Joe. Denial means many things: it is a refusal to admit the truth, the blocking out of difficult facts, and it is also a form of protection. For Joe, denial was essential to his survival. He had to believe his luck would change. He knocked on doors and telephoned magazines, hoping to find commercial work. He didn’t give up, although the sad fact was he had lost his daughter. Did he realise he was losing his wife as well? To anyone who looked long enough, the signs were already there: it was in the tilt of her head as she turned away, it was in every word she didn’t say aloud.
Poor Nancy. She had fallen in love with Joe because he was passionate, exciting and, yes, a bit of a dreamer. Now, the very things that had drawn her to him made their lives so impossible. It was hard not to feel duped, a little betrayed, by her own desires as much as his. She was facing facts even if he couldn’t. She knew Joe loved her, but it wasn’t enough. Love, in fact, seemed to complicate everything.
They were as stubborn as each other, and as unhappy, and so they avoided talking about it. What could that possibly achieve? No. Instead they needed distractions, to escape their unhappiness with the world and each other, and so they stayed together but grew apart. Each night followed the same pattern now there wasn’t a child to tend to: they’d sit at different ends of the residents’ lounge. Joe passed the hours reading and rereading the newspapers. Nancy channelled her energy into a new-found love of bridge.
Bridge is a complicated game of memory and skill, it requires practice and focus, and it has one defining trait – the hand you are dealt does not automatically decree how successful you will be. Nancy played constantly and ruthlessly, but her success was not singular. Bridge, after all, is also a game of pairs. She found herself an equally talented partner.
Dick Orr-Ewing was another long-term resident of the Sutherland Hotel. He was charming and clever, with just a dash of the exotic mixed with the heroic. He was born in Jamalpur and christened Arthur George Ewing, had served in the King Edward’s Horse, been made a lieutenant and awarded an MBE for his sevice in Iraq. After the war, Dick had gone to Cambridge and trained as an engineer, which is when he’d dropped in the ‘Orr-’ to his name, perhaps hoping to be confused with or mistaken for a baronet. Dick could out-bluff even Joe – he was full of tall tales from distant places, a bit of a self-created colonial fantasy, if you will – but his professional qualifications were true enough. He’d spent much of the last decade in Calcutta building dams and bridges and roads. He could speak several languages, and was regarded as quite the expert on the uses of reinforced concrete. But now, like everybody else, Dick was out of work and stranded at the Sutherland.
He had been one of the first residents Joe met and they’d formed a solid friendship, recognising in each other that shared survivor’s spirit. And there was another connection: Joe had studied engineering before going to art school, the plan always being that he’d work as a ship’s engineer and go to sea like his father. Unfortunately, Joseph Gray Senior had proved no kind of role model: a violent drunk who had crashed and sunk at least two ships, and had in fact died at sea. Joe became an artist to make himself anew. Did he regret his choices now? Perhaps. He saw something in Dick, a fragment of a self he might have been. The two men shared newspapers
and discussed the inevitable, impending conflict. They knew it would be devastating. Dick had seen first-hand the impact of aerial bombing in Iraq. They talked and talked.
‘Well, if there is another war, at least Dick will be employable. Everyone needs engineers.’
Nancy only had to say it once.
Joe measured out his reply.
‘I have a plan,’ he said.
And he did, he truly did.
The year was 1935. Not a good year for starting a new business, but they went ahead regardless. Joe and Nancy were now in partnership with Dick Orr-Ewing, producing greetings cards, of all things. It had been Joe’s idea – and yes, it was part of his plan. Dick had put in a bit of money at the start, whilst Joe made the designs and used his contacts to have them printed. All three would then sell them door to door.
Maureen, a fleeting weekend visitor to the Sutherland, was baffled by the new enterprise. Because of her deafness there was plenty she didn’t hear, and living apart from her parents, there was still more she didn’t see. There were now so many gaps in the puzzle they had become, but she loved them all the more for it, and she imagined them quite without flaws or imperfections. Her mother seemed especially lively now – smiling and vivacious.
Clearly Dick Orr-Ewing brought out the best in people. It was important, Maureen felt sure, to band together when times were so difficult. She admired these three adults for not giving up, for finding a way through, and it was even better when they tried to include her. Dick had suggested she make her own little design to be sent to the printers, and she had sketched a cat, a small cat asleep in front of a fireplace. A nice domestic image.
Yet something wasn’t right about this picture.
Their business, Ray’s Prints, wasn’t going to make anyone rich. Joe had thought it a good plan, but it wasn’t the plan. No. If anything, this new venture was a stop-gap, a cover story. Joe could sketch out a few card designs in five minutes. What truly occupied him took up a lot more time.
‘No attempt is made in these pages to consider every aspect of the subject, but the writer has endeavoured to indicate the more important aspects of it, and to discover those possible lines of advance most promising of results in view of modern aerial developments.’
When Maureen first read the notes she didn’t understand them.
‘The writer is, he believes, the only British artist closely identified with military circles since 1918. He has maintained his study of military matters and has been particularly interested in the increasing power of the aerial offensive.’12
Maureen read on. ‘The writer makes no claim to specialised military knowledge beyond that acquired as a temporary soldier, and subsequently as a civilian student of military matters, but he has also had a practical training, as before adopting art as a profession, he studied engineering for three years.’13
Maureen pulled away. Her father had studied engineering? She never even knew. She wanted to ask him, but he wasn’t there. Joe was becoming very good at disappearing. One minute he’d be hunched over his old typewriter and then he’d be off doing ‘research’ at some secret location. It was all very mysterious, and it was also quite annoying.
Maureen watched the clock in the hotel lounge; she watched it and she waited. She wanted to see her father. Nancy and Dick didn’t seem to mind his long absences, but she did. She was going to ask him what he was doing; what was taking up so much of his time and taking him away from her.
When he finally appeared in the lobby, laden down with papers, he looked thoroughly exhausted. His expression only brightened when his daughter ran towards him.
‘Ah! There you are!’
She loved that his mood lifted so swiftly.
‘But I have to go soon,’ she warned.
He nodded as if he knew, as if there was already a secret between them. ‘Let’s walk.’
Joe loved to walk, to be outside, but Maureen was conscious of the time ticking by, and the train that would take her back to Herne Bay. Her father seemed to understand and was already propelling her out of the door.
‘Let’s take a turn around the square, shall we?’
He glanced behind him for a second, as if to check something.
‘How nice to have some time together, just you and I.’
Norfolk Square is not a square, in fact, but a long and elegant rectangle bordered with tall plane trees. Joe walked quickly, rapping his old stick on the railings as they went.
Maureen walked by his side, looking and feeling serious. There were questions she wanted to ask him, but she wasn’t sure exactly how. These were times when so much went unspoken, when nobody wanted to give voice to their worst fears.
Still, she quickened her pace and made her confession.
‘I read some of your notes, Dad. I hope you don’t mind.’
Joe cast his eyes downwards.
‘So you know my secret.’
But she didn’t, not really, not then.
‘Will there be another war?’ she asked.
Her father stopped in his tracks. He nodded. ‘There is a real danger, yes. I’m sure you have heard that already. But we can do things, we can find ways to protect ourselves. There are different ways to fight . . .’
Maureen nodded like she understood.
‘Your notes . . . what are you going to do with them?’
Joe opened his eyes wide. ‘Well, I am writing a book. I am going to send it to the War Office as soon as I can.’
Maureen blinked. A book? The War Office?
Joe was walking ahead of her. ‘I happen to know a chap there.’
Maureen nodded to herself and took a deep breath.
The square looked glorious in the dying sun, the trees casting the most spindly, haunting shadows. Maureen stared at her father’s back. He lifted his head and looked skywards like he always did. He usually had some little observation, he’d notice some small detail and point it out to her. But now he stayed silent, lost in his own world.
Then he turned. ‘Tell me, what do you think of Orr-Ewing?’
Maureen found she had to think for a minute before she replied.
‘I like him very much. Why?’
Joe nodded, sniffed. ‘No reason.’ He turned back to the path and they carried on walking.
‘Touch of the tar-brush, I reckon.’
Maureen wanted to ask what he meant by that. It was a strange thing to say. But her father was gazing up at the trees. A gentle breeze lifted their leaves and he had stopped, narrowing his eyes to study this small movement.
Maureen walked around him, opened her mouth to speak, but he raised a hand to shush her. She followed his eyes and waited for him to tell her what it was he’d spotted. He didn’t. He stayed entirely silent.
Not for the first or last time, Maureen wondered what it was that her father saw so clearly, that she herself couldn’t see.
Notes
CAB = Cabinet Papers
CD, TC, CDTC = Camouglage Development and Training Centre
HO= Home Office
IWM = Imperial War Museum
PREM = Prime Minister’s Office Records
TNA = The National Archives
WO = War Office
Jack Sayer, ‘The Camouflage Game’, refers to his unpublished, hand-written memoir, courtesy of Gillian Ward.
To avoid repetition, the majority of quotes from Joseph’s letters to Mary are not noted. Unless stated otherwise, they form part of the Barclay family archive. Similarly, images reproduced form part of this archive, except where credited otherwise.
1 J. Gray in a letter, 28 September 1932, IWM First World War Art Archive, ART/WA1/386
2 Dundee People’s Journal, 5 October 1918
3 E. Blaikley in a letter, 9 February 1929, IWM First World War Art Archive, ART/WA1/386
4 J. Gray in a letter, 28 September 1932, IWM First World War Art Archive, ART/WA1/386
5 E. Blaikley in a letter, 19 October 1932, ibid.
6 J. Gray in a letter, 28 September
1932, ibid.
7 ‘Mr Baldwin on Aerial Warfare – A Fear for the Future’, The Times, 11 November 1932, p. 7
8 J. Gray in a letter, 28 September 1932, IWM First World War Archive, ART/WA1/386.
9 Harold Dickens’s comments in his diary, courtesy Harold Dickens
10 J. Gray in a letter to A. Paterson, 24 July 1928, from the Paterson Family Archives, courtesy Andrew Paterson Collection
11 Boyd Cable, ‘When War Does Come: Terrifying Effects of Gas Attacks’, in Sir John Hammerton (ed.), War in the Air: Aerial Wonders of Our Time, Amalgamated Press, London, 1935
12 Joseph Gray, Camouflage and Air Defence, p. 1, IWM Archive Major J. Gray Documents.4273
13 Ibid., p. 3
is for False Work, which will serve to distract The enemy’s eye from the genuine fact
Camouflage and Air Defence exists in several forms. Its ageing, crumpled sheets escape out of the cardboard folder that holds it. It looks fragile to the touch, with some pages creased and folded. There are typing mistakes and handwritten annotations in pencil and red ink, exclamation marks and underlinings. The two copies held in the Imperial War Museum are not identical. ‘Copy No. 4’ has this written across it: ‘not published at request of Brigadier J. S. Wilkinson, on behalf of General Staff. 1936’.
John Shann Wilkinson. The connections are there to be made. The last man to commission Joe as a war artist was the first man to consider him a future camoufleur.
Camouflage and Air Defence a draft for a proposed book by Major (then Mr.) Joseph Gray, was submitted to General Staff, War Office by the author through me towards the end of 1935. I was then Deputy Director of Movements and Quartering and interested in Passive Defence. Mr. Gray’s work was an exhaustive study of the possible utilisation of Camouflage as defence against modern air attack. The author particularly stressed the necessity of developing big scale static camouflage and decoy operations.1
