Untold Stories

by Alan Bennett

  Lacking metropolitan masterpieces, Leeds chose a handier refuge, Temple Newsam. I like to think the pictures were loaded onto a tram and taken the little ride along York Road, through Halton and up that leafy incline by the municipal golf course to Temple Newsam House. It was a trip I’d done several times with my grandma. The contrast, though, was revealing: in London a get-away in the nick of time to a remote and romantic haven; in Leeds a twopenny-halfpenny tram-ride. From as early as I can remember, life – or at any rate life in Leeds – never quite came up to scratch.

  But now we are in the Art Gallery sometime in 1942 and Standard 3 from Upper Armley National School has been brought into town by our teacher, Miss Timpson, to see an exhibition to do with Ark Royal Week. Miss Timpson is a thin, severe woman with grey hair in a bun and the kind of old lady’s legs that seem to have gone out now, which begin at the far corners of the skirt and converge on the ankles. We have looked at the fund-raising thermometer on the Town Hall steps and now Miss Timpson has shepherded us into the back of a crowded hall in the Gallery where a choir of orphans from the Boys’ Home and press-ganged into the Sea Scouts are singing and whistling ‘Pedro the Fisherman’.

  Entertainment was scarce in those early days of the war but even I knew that this performance was no crowd-puller and it’s not long before the attention of Standard 3 begins to wander. Except that there’s not much else to look at, just one large picture that hasn’t been evacuated, because either it’s too big or is of no artistic merit. Merit not really at the top of their list, two of the bolder boys in the class, Rowland Ellis and John Marston, have gone over to take a closer look.

  It’s a vast work, acres of paint varnished to an over-all brown, and it depicts the aftermath of some great battle, the kind of battle that’s always being described in the Bible with mountains of dead and piteous and imploring wounded. Night is coming on and women wander over the field comforting the wounded and searching for their loved ones. Prominent among these is a striking figure (what my mother would have called ‘a big woman’) – bold, scornful, with her many bangles proclaiming her a person of some consequence. She stands astride a wounded warrior, possibly her consort and certainly someone with whom she is on familiar terms, because she has torn aside her bodice and, standing back from the prostrate figure, displays an ample breast.

  Some of the boys in Standard 3 (not me) have begun to nudge and snigger. But I am thought to be a shy child (sly would be nearer the truth) so I hedge my bets, keeping one eye on Miss Timpson while stealing looks at this extraordinary canvas.

  The sight of a breast so insolently displayed was, even in the hygienic context of art, not a common sight in 1942 so it was hardly surprising that Standard 3 had started to smirk. But the gallery was gloomy and the picture was gloomy too, so it was only gradually one made out what it was this brazen woman was doing with the breast, and as it became plain Standard 3’s mirth turned to awe.

  Seemingly without shame, the lady, who may have been Boadicea (though she also bore some resemblance to Mrs Hutchinson, the vicar’s wife), was squeezing the contents of her breast into the (presumably) parched mouth of the injured warrior. Novel though this procedure was, what really staggered Standard 3 was the accuracy of her aim. The range was at least three yards. Of course she may have been all over the place before she got it right but certainly at the moment of depiction her perfect lactic parabola was dead on target.

  Perhaps I was less surprised at this achievement than the others. I knew boys who could spit as accurately as that and I took this to be a possible female equivalent. I could not spit, at any rate over any distance, and had none of that copious supply of saliva that the more brutish boys seemed always to carry in readiness. I think I knew, even at the age of eight, that not being able to spit would mean not being able to do a lot of other things too (dive, throw a cricket ball, piss in public, catch the barman’s eye), that not being able to spit was only the tip of an iceberg so vast that it would float beside and under me all the length of my life. However.

  A hiatus before the choir struck up with Bobby Shaftoe brought us back to Miss Timpson’s attention and she suddenly caught sight of her class, myself included, clustered round the picture. Now, whereas Miss Timpson would expect nothing better of boys like Rowland Ellis and John Marston (both of whom could of course spit) than to be found sniggering at rude pictures, this had never been my role. I was not that sort of boy and here I was about to be tarred with the same prurient brush as the rest. But I was a precocious child and no sooner did I perceive the danger than I retrieved the situation.

  ‘Miss,’ I asked innocently, ‘is that what they mean by succouring the wounded?’

  ‘No, Alan,’ said Miss Timpson crisply, ‘it is what they mean by smut. But very good. Do any of you others know the word “succour”? And what are you smirking about, Rowland Ellis, perhaps you can spell it?’

  ‘S-U-C-K-E-R,’ says Rowland Ellis proudly, and is mystified to get a clip over the ear.

  ‘Come along, children,’ says Miss Timpson. ‘Next door there are some ladies demonstrating how to knit sea-socks. We may pick up a few tips. And pay attention all of you, I shall want you to write a composition about this when we get back to school.’

  Where that ‘After the Battle’ painting is now I’ve no idea and nor has the Gallery. So utterly has it disappeared that I began to think I had imagined it; but my brother remembers it, several viewers remember it and the Chairman of the Cultural Services Committee, Bernard Atha, remembers it, so I’m not just romancing. Still, I suspect it’s no loss to art, or even to memory, because if it did turn up it would probably seem much milder now than it seemed to our eight-year-old eyes then.

  For all Miss Timpson’s strictures, one of the earliest lessons a child learns in a gallery is the propriety of art, that art and antiquity make it quite proper to peep.

  ‘It’s all right if it’s art.’ I was once in the Hayward Gallery at an exhibition of Indian painting, Tantra, and there was one panel on which a goddess, I suppose, was having everything possible done to her through every conceivable orifice by half a dozen strapping young men and enjoying it no end. Looking at this were two very proper middle-aged, middle-class ladies. Eventually one of them spoke:

  ‘Goodness! She’s a busy lady!’

  WILLIAM HOLMAN HUNT, The Shadow of Death, 1870

  This painting is perhaps the most famous in the Gallery, Holman Hunt’s The Shadow of Death, in which Mary sees Jesus’ death prefigured. There’s a larger version of the painting in Manchester but this one was the original, slightly smaller than the other versions so that Hunt could carry it around with him and make alterations as he went.

  He painted the picture on location in Palestine and went to elaborate lengths to get the background and fittings right. The body of Christ belonged to one model, the head to another, who was not at all Christ-like, a notorious villain in fact and on one occasion before he painted him Hunt had to go to the local gaol and bail him out.

  It’s not at all plain what Jesus is supposed to be doing, apart from casting the appropriate shadow; I suppose he’s meant to be stretching after a hard day’s work, but it hardly looks like that. What always used to puzzle me as a child was that apart from the hair on his head Jesus (I mean not merely this Jesus, but any Jesus) never had a stitch of hair anywhere else. Never a whisper of hair on that always angular chest; God seemed to have sent his only begotten son into the world with no hair whatsoever under his arms. This rang a bell with me, though, because I was a late developer and at fifteen was longing for puberty. So Jesus’ pose here is exactly how I felt, crucified on the wall bars during PE, displaying to my much more hirsute classmates my still-unsullied armpits.

  St Cyril and St Justin thought that Christ must have been (or should have been) mean and disgusting, ‘the most hideous of the sons of men’. This cut no ice with the powers that be. Louis B. Mayer had nothing on the Early Fathers. They knew that someone with billing and his name above the title coul
dn’t be a slob. So never a fat Jesus or a small Jesus even, and always a dish, though of course we must not say so.

  And so serious. Scour the art galleries of the world and you will not find a picture of Jesus grinning. Jesus enjoying a joke. A God who rarely smiled, a man who never sniggered. Did he see jokes, one wonders? And were they ever on him?

  There aren’t many pictures of Jesus in the Gallery, which suits me as my threshold for Jesus pictures is quite low. The later they get the harder I find them to take, so that by the time we get to the nineteenth century Jesus is uncomfortably close to the only slightly sicklier versions we were given to stick in our books at Sunday School.

  REMBRANDT VAN RIJN,

  Christ Returning from the Temple with His Parents, 1654

  Excepted from these irreverences is the Rembrandt etching Christ Returning from the Temple with His Parents, who don’t look like the Holy Family at all but peasants out for a walk complete with dog. He’s one of Rembrandt’s frisky and utterly non-symbolic dogs. Maybe that’s why he’s frisky, because he knows he doesn’t have to represent fidelity or trust or anything at all from Hall’s Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols. He’s just happy to be All Dog.

  ATKINSON GRIMSHAW, Park Row, Leeds, by Moonlight, 1882

  Anyone who knows Leeds will find this painting, Park Row by Atkinson Grimshaw, almost a documentary record (the church apart) of how the street looked as late as 1960, which was when the city fell to greed and mediocrity.

  Some silly people on the right nowadays wish the sixties hadn’t happened because that was when people discovered sex and pot-smoking. I wish the sixties hadn’t happened because that was when avarice and stupidity got to the wheel of the bulldozer. They called it enterprise and still do, but the real enterprise would have been if someone in 1960 had had the clout and the imagination to say, ‘Let us leave this city much as it is, convert it perhaps, replumb it, but nothing else.’

  If they had, Leeds today would have been one of the architectural showplaces of the kingdom, a Victorian Genoa or Florence, on the buildings of which many of its banks and commercial properties (like the one in the right foreground) were modelled. Instead it’s now like anywhere else.

  ANTONIO CANOVA, The Hope of Venus, c.1818–20

  I’ve included this sculpture by Canova simply as a reminder. In all the fuss there was earlier this year about retaining his Three Graces in this country I saw no mention of this or other sculptures by him that were already in public galleries here and which were comparatively unregarded. Now it’s true that Leeds has only one lady not three, but whereas the Three Graces are in a bit of a huddle here you can at least see Venus in the round.

  PATRICK WILLIAM ADAM, Interior, Rutland Lodge, Potternewton, 1920

  Interior, Rutland Lodge: vista through open doors, 1920

  GEORGE CLAUSEN, A Girl in Black, 1913

  The name Sam Wilson suggests some bluff mill owner standing foursquare on the hearthrug with his thumbs in his waistcoat, holding forth about the shortcomings of the workers and generally laying down the law. In fact Sam Wilson seems to have been a discerning, if rather conservative collector and his house at Potternewton must have been crowded out with the pictures he left to the Art Gallery in 1915.

  I’ve chosen three, two which I remember from childhood and the third, by George Clausen, because it appeals to me now. The two pictures of his house by Patrick William Adam aren’t remarkable as paintings but I used to look at them and think that this was the kind of house I would one day like to live in – a place of hushed, handsome rooms, and rooms that gave onto other rooms and rooms beyond them, all bathed in a subdued aqueous light and the setting for a life of great elegance. Nothing could be further removed from our homely (but entirely comfortable) kitchen–living room in Otley Road.

  This vision of gracious living remains a vision (and now an unwanted one) though the sense of long views through a house still gives me pleasure when I walk through the upper floors at Temple Newsam.

  JOHN SELL COTMAN, On the River Yare, 1807–8

  Refectory of Walsingham Priory, 1807–8

  A Ploughed Field, c.1808

  I can see that in aesthetic terms my liking for Cotman’s watercolours is related to my fondness for the Camden Town school of painting. With both the colour range is quite narrow, the closeness of the tones imparting a kind of glow to the paper or canvas and which, more than subject, line or setting, draws me to it.

  I can say nothing about the composition of these wonderful works though even I can see that the man’s red cap at the centre of On the River Yare is an inspired touch. Part of the pleasure, I’m sure, is nostalgic, a longing for England as it once was – or perhaps never quite was, as Cotman creates as well as records a world.

  On a more prosaic note, the crow that hangs from the stick in A Ploughed Field is a feature of the countryside that has always puzzled me. Displaying the carcasses of crows (and also moles) is (or used to be) a favourite device of gamekeepers though quite to what end I’m not sure. Perhaps the farmer or gamekeeper is simply advertising his skill as a killer of crows and catcher of moles. But it seems to me that the unfortunate creatures were also strung up as an Awful Warning. The unshot crows and unsnared moles were meant to take note of the carcasses of their unlucky fellows and take the lesson to heart: in future they must Mend Their Ways (i.e. not behave like crows or moles). It seems flippant when spelled out but there is some unthought-out notion like this at the back of such displays, deriving, I suppose, from the assumption that potential human wrongdoers would be deterred by the bodies of thieves left hanging on gibbets.

  LUCIEN PISSARRO, Wells Farm Railway Bridge, Acton, 1907

  ANDRé DERAIN, Barges on the Thames, about 1906

  I remember thinking as a boy, and without knowing anything about Les Fauves, that this was quite a fierce picture and being rather pleased with myself that I liked it. The colours were so bold and uncompromising and, literal-minded as I was then, I knew that they were untrue and that the much muddier Camden Town version of London on view elsewhere in the Gallery was closer to the real thing.

  I like the unashamed way the blue crane turns red when it’s crossing the line of the blue bridge and the cheeky toy train in what, I suppose, is a version of Southern Railways green, puffing across to Broad Street. A nice exhibition (I’m sure there’s been one) would be the English scene through French eyes. It would include Derain, Monet, Pissarro (of which Leeds has a good example) and Agasse, two of whose slightly sinister paintings were in a recent exhibition at the National Gallery.

  Derain had a sad end. He behaved rather disreputably during the Second War and was one of several artists, including Vlaminck, who went on a sponsored tour of Germany and at the Liberation was denounced by Picasso. Tall and burly, he was a boxer in his youth; he died in 1954 after being run over. When asked if there was anything he wanted his last words were: ‘A bicycle and a piece of sky.’

  WALTER RICHARD SICKERT, The New Bedford, 1916–17

  MALCOLM DRUMMOND, The Coconut Shy, c.1920

  HAROLD GILMAN, Mrs Mounter, 1916–17

  In Sickert’s House, c.1907

  Portrait of Spencer Frederick Gore, 1906–7

  JEAN EDOUARD VUILLARD, Mlle Nathanson in the Artist’s Studio,

  c.1912

  SPENCER FREDERICK GORE, In Berkshire, 1912

  Interior with Nude, c.1907

  It’s said that when people come to London they settle near the station where they first arrive. Thus north of Euston (the station for Liverpool) one finds the Irish; Southall (near to Heathrow) is the centre of the Asian community; and even the Australians in Earls Court fit into the theory because once upon a time British Airways had its passenger terminal there.

  I conform to the theory myself: King’s Cross was the station I arrived at and for thirty years I’ve lived not far away in Camden Town.

  Though the dreadful Camden Lock and its attendant touristification has driven out anything resembling normal life from
large areas there are still parts of Camden Town that haven’t changed since Sickert, Gilman and Gore were painting here at the turn of the last century.

  Sickert lived all over the place, and briefly in the street where I live now, but his blue plaque is in Mornington Crescent. Spencer Gore was nearby, though his lodgings were demolished in the thirties to make way for the Black Cat cigarette factory, itself an Art Deco monument but stripped in the 1960s of everything that made it distinctive.

  When I first moved here part of the New Bedford music hall was still standing, and the site is vacant even today. I like Sickert’s painting of it though the picture of his I would have chosen was of the front of St Mark’s in Venice. This used to hang in the Gallery in the 1950s but it was only on loan and has now been reclaimed.

  I came backwards to French painting. I like Vuillard’s interiors but it was Harold Gilman’s I knew first so that I came to Paris via Camden Town. There is no patriotism involved but I think it’s a pity that so many modern English painters are ranked a poor second to their French contemporaries. The reasons are as much commercial as artistic; their prices remain relatively modest because few Americans know much about English twentieth-century painting, though a notable exception was Vincent Price, who had several Camden Town pictures, picked up for what in international terms was a song. Leeds owes most of its splendid Camden Town pictures to the taste and foresight of Frank Rutter, who was Director here from 1912 to 1924 and who said of Gore, ‘He was the most lovable man it has been my privilege to know.’ In some ways the most refined painter of the group, Gore died quite young from pneumonia just when his paintings were beginning to be flooded with sun and light.