In an earlier article, I mentioned the 1936 Three James's Desk Diary. Social realism was very much the thing in the Thirties for Holland, and his cartoon which goes with the diary page for the first half of February shows the depressed state of a dockyard with derelict buildings and workers with no work. This image appeared in the Left Review originally.
Scanned from 1936 James Fitton, Boswell, Holland
This painting comes from Holland’s post-War period in the late forties and fifties, when he was still attracted by social realism, but had the opportunity to use larger canvases and more colour. The subject is a dock area, and could be anywhere around the British coast – Hull and Lowestoft are possible sources of inspiration. The impression is of an early morning, once work has started at the docks but before wives and school children are out and about. The composition invites the viewer to walk on round the corner, to see what is beyond the pub.
This is a large painting and consequently spent time in Holland’s garage, subject to extremes of temperature and humidity, which hasn’t helped its condition. When I unearthed it from a pile of other works and asked if I might be allowed to take it away and give it wall space, Holland cleaned it up with his patent mixture of “terps and linseed” and signed it, and then looked at it for a long time. “I’d forgotten about this one – it’s good but it’s a bit bare, let me add some people.” I made a deal with him that he could add some people if he travelled to my house to do it – in some ways it is a shame he didn’t make the journey, on the other hand I actually like the lack of people. Here’s why.
For a few years I lived in Wallsend on Tyneside, near the Swan Hunter shipyard. The pub on the corner looks very like the one that used to stand just south of the Metro station, called the Carville Hotel. This (in my day) rather unpleasant dive always put me in mind of the yard workers’ pub known locally as the Penny Wet. That was actually the Station Hotel further up the hill (demolished in the 1960s to make way for the Forum shopping centre). The name was given as it was where dock workers got a penny tot of rum or similar before heading into work in the shipyards.
The painting does not show Wallsend – there is no steep slope down to the river for a start. However the traditions would have been the same up and down the coastline, even if the names of the pubs were different, and this would still have been the place of the shipyard workers.
The Penny Wet, oil on board, c1960, in a private collection
While cruising on eBay recently, my husband spotted a James Holland lithograph for sale. He entered the fray and we were very pleased when he got the winning bid in and we were able to take ownership.
The lithograph dates from 1938 (although someone has written 1930 on it, where it is signed James Holland, you can also make out '38 which runs into the black print) and is very much from his social realism period. It is also very much in the style (although darker and busier) of the cartoons in the 1936 James Fitton Boswell Holland Desk Diary they produced with the Martin Lawrence press, containing drawings from Left Review.
The image (badly reproduced below) shows teams of fishwives working in the open air to fill barrels with herring or similar, and from other pictures we have around, seems to be set at Lowestoft.
In 1954, Holland and his wife, Jackie, travelled to Amsterdam to visit their friends Royston and Marie Cooper, who were spending time there. The resulting sketches and paintings provide more evidence of Holland's love of ships and ports.
This study of a crane is a case in point, as is the following image of boats in port.
There are a number of sketches of Ijmuiden including this one.
While this image shows Dutch men in what we might now think of as traditional costume.
The countryside outside the city and port was less captivating however, and in the sketch book, Holland only included this image.
Finally, among the sketches of local scenes, there is also a stolen moment, showing Royston Cooper.
Holland visited St Malo on the Brittany coast many times, and was fascinated by the town and its surroundings. On early visits, he was mainly restricted to St Malo and Dinard towns, but when in later years he and his wife took a car with them, they could also explore the coastline to Cancale and St Cast. He was never particarly keen on the Mont St Michel however, due to the numbers of tourists that went there, and the consequent crowds and elevated prices in the village itself.
A favourite hotel was the Chateaubriand, and this sketch of the square outside shows why - a constantly changing vista to sketch.
This was used on his return to Pembury to develop a number of oil paintings of the same view.
St Malo was heavily bombed during the War, and the stone tenements had to be rebuilt in the 40s and early 50s to bring the town back to its former glory.
As befits a town not far from the bay of Mont St Michel and its legendary tides, St Malo also has significant tides and a bay dotted with islands, many of which have been used over the years for prisons and forts. You can reach some at low tide by foot, but others have to be visited by boat.
The coast road from St Malo to Mont St Michel takes you past another small bay with this island - the isle du Guesclin - before reaching Cancale and its renouned oyster beds.
In the early 1960s, Holland was Head of Faculty of Visual Arts at Birmingham Polytechnic. In those days, Birmingham and the Black Country, where his wife's family lived, were rather bleak and industrial areas, much in need of regeneration. Holland was weekly commuting between Birmingham, London and Kent, which cannot have been easy in those days. In addition, and perhaps influenced by his students, he tried his hand at the more abstract. All these influences combined to give Holland's work at the time a rather dour, yet highly impactful tone. In later posts I will explore the inland industrial views that were typical of this time, but the following three pictures show this evolution in his favoured shipyard scenes.
This study of a ship in dock is fairly typical, in that the colour palette is minimal and little colour or attention is given to the background detail, however the work is still figurative and true to his social realism roots. This is quite a large work, and there is a similar image on a bright blue background - the background colour was often reliant on what colour paints Holland was using for priming the board and for decorating Romford Cottage.
[Ship unloading, oil on board, framed, signed, available for purchase.]
This image of ships through a metal bridge is rare for this style in that the picture is relatively small – less than an A4 piece of paper including frame, but at the same time, the viewer needs to stand back from the work to appreciate the subject. The framework of the bridge and the view beyond framed by the bridge construction was another theme that interested Holland at this time.
[Ships in Dock, unsigned, framed, oil on board, available for purchase.]
This work is perhaps the most abstract that Holland undertook and was not highly regarded by him in later years. The ship funnels can be clearly seen, but for the rest of the image, one could say that Holland had had a fit of the Mondrians and the Jackson Pollocks!
[Abstract Shipping, oil on board, unframed, unsigned, in a private collection.]
Today's piece was written by Holland when reflecting on his childhood and a part of Kent that played a significant part in his life. The text is incomplete, and when (or if) we find the remaining section, it will be added as Part 2.
CHATHAM DOCKYARD RECALLED
The closure of the Royal Dockyard at Chatham attracted the attention of many whose previous acquaintance with that establishment must have been of the slightest, bringing forth as it did, stories of “dockers standing in tears at the final ceremony.”
There were of course, no “dockers” as such at Chatham or the other Royal Dockyards. The dockers’ function is to moor, load and unload cargo-carrying vessels. The ships of the Royal Navy were seldom concerned with cargoes, and their large crews could handle all the docking and loading requirements. The dockyard’s role was to build, and more importantly perhaps to maintain and repair warships of all types. The men who did this - generally known to the Navy as dockyard maties, included shipwrights, smiths, boilermakers, riveters, joiners and carpenters, patternmakers, riggers, electricians - all the army of skilled men needed to construct and keep a warship in service condition. White collar workers as well as labourers were also employed; there were also sail making and flag lofts in the yards. Naval and marine barracks adjoined the dockyards, which were the home depots of all RN ships.
Chatham had been the nearest dockyard to London since the sixteenth century, though there had been various lesser establishments on the Thames at Deptford and Woolwich. The road that led from the dockyard gate to London went through an area of Chatham known as The Brook, notorious for many dens and brothels where sailors, pay in their pockets and en route for the capital, could expect to be robbed , or worse. As late as the mid 1920s this welcome for Jack Ashore was in evidence, and one read in the local police court news of police raids on disorderly houses of elderly dames being sent to jail again and again for brothel-keeping in The Brook.
Sailors, marines and soldiers were a transient population. The permanent residents were the dockyard men. They lived in Chatham, in Old Brompton, some in Rochester and Strood, but by far the greatest number in New Brompton and Gillingham, and the similarity of much of that district to a Midland or Northern industrial town was due to dockyard workers many of whom had come from the North. A network of tramways covered the Medway towns and carried the men to the Yard, which started work at 7 o’clock or earlier. Open topped trams loaded with workers converged on the Main Gate, a rather impressive brick castellated structure still to be seen. Under the eyes of the Dockyard Police, the men streamed through to their workshops. At frequent intervals one would be stopped a random and frisked for matches which were forbidden in the Yard. A naked gas jet burned under the entrance arch at which the homeward bound would light pipe or cigarette.
Chatham could handle “first class battleships” of the early years of the century up to 16 or 18,000 tons. I clearly remember being taken aboard H.M.S. Goliath in 1911 by a much-loved uncle who was a sergeant of marines and being hoisted into the muzzle of one of her 12 inch guns.
The larger warships which succeeded this period did not, probably could not, attempt the long and winding approach from the river mouth, and would lie in the estuary, off the satellite yard of Sheerness. Workers who were taken daily by picket boat to these ships were known as “time-in-lieu men”, since they could not return home for a mid-day meal and so returned from work an hour earlier than the regular men. The appearance of time-in-lieu men dispersing from the Yard was the signal to prepare for the homecoming of the workers in general.
The influence of the Dockyard affected all activities in the Medway towns and many families were wholly dependent on it for employment. My grandfathers had both worked in the Yard, and one had died in the Yard before my birth. My maternal grandmother found herself still young, but penniless and with a large family of small children. She went to work long hours in the Flag Loft, as later did her eldest daughter, who eventually was in charge of that department. Her only son also went to the Yard and two daughters married dockyard men. Another married a sailor and yet another a marine. My father and his brother grew up as apprentices, though both were eventually out-posted by the Admiralty.
When the Dockyard flourished, the towns flourished; when retrenchment was the order, towns, trade and everybody suffered.
The Royal Dockyards employed both skilled and unskilled labour. I do not know how the unskilled were recruited, but entry to the skilled ranks was by examination. Every year the local schools, elementary and secondary, ran their Dockyard Exam classes for boys of 13 or 14. On an appointed day the lads presented themselves to sit a written examination. The successful gained admission to the Dockyard School - the same pattern operated at Portsmouth and Devonport. According to their marks, the boys had the choice of which craft or trade they would enter. They became apprentices, spending their mornings in the School and the rest of the day at their trade in the workshops. As might be expected, the School concentrated on mathematical and technical subjects, technical drawing being well taught, but an excellent curriculum in more liberal studies was also maintained.
This admirable system, though important in the history of education, is little enough known, but those educationalists who do encounter it have been very impressed by the amalgamation of education and training, a system still to be improved on.
At the end of his seven-year apprenticeship, the by now skilled young man would be employed in the Yard and after a period of satisfactory service could become “established”, his job guaranteed and a pension assured at the conclusion of his working life.
The great days of Chatham as a dockyard and garrison town were perhaps the half-century before the outbreak of the 1914 - 18 war. We still had the world’s greatest navy, with a fleet in every sea to protect many foreign stations. Naval and military barracks were in full use; the Royal Engineers had vast barracks at New Brompton, at the centre of which a grand equestrian - if that is the right word - statue of Gordon of Khartoum mounted on a camel, replica of the original in the Sudan, faced the East. The tale was told of a high-ranking British diplomat, recalled from the Nile, asking his small son what he would like to see again before leaving for England. “Gordon” was the reply that rewarded the Empire builder. Hand in hand they gazed at the statue. As they turned away the boy enquired “Who is that man sitting on Gordon?”
Sunday morning was a great weekly occasion, with marines, royal engineers and at times Scottish regiments marching to Church Parade at the Garrison Church, bands playing, brass bound white helmets flashing, bagpipes wailing.
War was the testing time. The dockyard was never busier, working day and night. Every day ships were being sunk by mine or torpedo, and every time a Chatham based warship went, down, more blinds were kept drawn in the little terrace houses of Chatham and Gillingham. But endless work brought relative prosperity to dockyard workers and the local tradesmen.
With the ending of the Great War, the workforce at the Yard was drastically cut, and men employed at levels of responsibility suddenly found themselves demoted, back at the workbench and lucky to be there. Ships that had been built in great numbers during the war years, heavy and light cruisers, above all destroyers, lay in long lines in the lower Medway, a permanent review of the obsolete, until they were one by one towed away to the breakers yards of the North.
These were lean years for the dockyard towns. But not only had these southern towns; the industrial North and the north Midlands no longer needed the work forces for wartime production. Unemployed workers and ex-servicemen, with no hope of a hometown job, headed south in search of work, renewing a traditional migration. During the periodical slumps of the last century, when development outran demand, mechanics and industrial workers trudged from the North, from the Black Country and the Midlands, to the supposedly prosperous South. Many of the workers at Chatham were probably children of these earlier migrations rather than offspring of Kentish peasants.
With my parents I had returned from London to Gillingham as part of the post-war retrenchment. We had found a house between the railway station and the ground of Gillingham football club, in those days remarkable only for the tenacity with which every season it applied for re-admission to the Third or Fourth Division. Down this Via Dolorosa a slow and sad procession crept daily, a mendicant procession of tuneless singing men in ex-army trousers and boots, some accompanied by wife and small children, turning as they slowly walked to scan the empty windows of the little terrace houses.
There was at this period a spate of lugubrious songs that could have been written especially for these despairing minstrels. “City of Laughter, city of tears, what are the secrets you hold ... hearts that seem bright will be breaking tonight in the City of Laughter and Tears.” “Just the tears of an old Irish mother”, “Smile awhile you bid me sad adieu”. There were rather more cynical, sophisticated ditties to be heard at the time, but not in the streets, “When you’re all dressed up and no place to go”, “Ain’t we got fun” and the abject “Buddy won’t you spare a dime?”
The unemployed singers were interspersed with other processions. The local cemetery lay on this route. You could travel from the station to a League match or your eternal relegation or promotion. During the years immediately following the War various epidemics took their toll, Spanish Flu in particular claiming many victims, aftermath of what was one of the most squalid wars in history. Several times a day the sounds of a military or naval band, playing the Dead March, would precede the passing of a procession drawing the flag-covered coffin on a gun carriage, followed by a firing party of the dead man’s messmates. Within the hour the procession would return at a brisk pace, the band merrily playing “The Girl I left behind me”, or some other more or less appropriate air, on the return to barracks or ship.
The Dockyard and the towns became increasingly an environment from which escape was to be sought. At intervals of several years, the Admiralty held examinations among the Royal Dockyards to prepare lists of men who might be offered promotion either at home or at one of the many naval dockyards overseas as jobs fell vacant. Gibraltar, Malta, Singapore, Hong Kong, Bermuda were among the station overseas. My father always sat these exams, came out near top, and then steadfastly declined any overseas posting, to my great disappointment, and so was passed over until the next examination was held. Eventually came an offer in the South Coast area, and our proximity to the dockyard came to an end.
My last encounter with the Yard was during the 1939 War. It was my assignment in the Ministry of Information to design a travelling exhibition to show the work of the destroyers in wartime.
[This story will be continued when we find the rest of the manuscript.]
In developing a painting or a study, Holland could work very quickly, or he could be meticulous and picky, producing a number of versions until he was happy with an image. There are for example at least three versions of Approaches to Birmingham, which will feature later in the year when we look at his work from the 1960s.
In 1976, Holland produced a number of small images of boats he remembered from his childhood in the Medway towns.
[From a sketch book, 1976, watercolour and pen, in a private collection]
He then built up an image of smaller boats loading their goods onto a larger vessel, ready to head out to sea.
[From a sketch book, 1976, watercolour and pen, in a private collection]
This was finally worked up into this magnificent oil painting, of which he was justifiably proud.
[Coaster loading cement from barges in the Medway c 1920, oil on board, signed, framed, 1976, exhibited at the Art Connoisseur Gallery, London, 1997, available for purchase.]
The scope for capturing lively scenes at Lowestoft fishing harbour was immense and Holland was particularly fascinated by all the angles from which boats and activity could be viewed. This scene is a particularly active one - presumably the boats were unloading a catch given the numbers of seagulls depicted. The image is very strong and very lively, and although quite dark in colour palette, it is a picture that is easy to live with because of that activity.
Oil on canvas and mounted on board, c1960, signed, framed, exhibited at the Art Connoisseur Gallery London 1997 and at Chatham, available for purchase.
There is an occupational hazard and a feature of sketching and painting by the sea which cannot be ignored - seagulls! In later years, Holland generally worked outside wearing a floppy hat against sun and other things, so was spared some of the more unfortunate accidents that can happen. However he did find that seagulls tended to pose rather. In this painting of Cancale harbour, the seagull in the centre would apparently not move until he had been painted.
[Cancale, Brittany, 1986, oil on board, signed, framed, exhibited at the Art Connoisseur Gallery, London 1997, available to purchase.]
This earlier lino cut of a seagull was derived from sketches done in England, France and Holland. The clever part of this particular lino cut is that it was designed to be printed on dark paper, so only the green, white and yellow blocks were made. This was used as a Christmas card in the 1960s.
[Seagull with fish, 3 colour lino cut on black sugar paper, undated, unsigned.]
The final gull picture has something of a history attached. When he finally took retirement in about 1980, Holland started an art class for friends in the Tunbridge Wells area. When the weather was favourable, the group would visit gardens and set up their easels. On a couple of occasions they went off to southern France, where some members had properties. During the winter, finding subjects was less easy however. People could be persuaded occasionally to sit for their portraits, although not always flattered by the results. Sometimes class members worked from photographs.
Frequently Holland would resort to setting up still life groups as subjects, and anything was suitable for this - dolls, musical instruments, flowers, fruit, bottles, drapery. Occasionally supper would be commandeered for the purpose - game in feather or fur, fish, on one occasion a very large Savoy cabbage. One week a friend produced something that could only be described as road kill that he had found in his garden, thinking it would make a good subject for the class. Sadly he produced the item on a Thursday, and that week there was no Friday class, only a Wednesday group, for which it was too late. My mother refused to have it in the house for long, so Holland painted a loving portrait of the bird, and then with his friend, buried it away from the ravages of foxes and dogs. The art class missed out on a memorable subject.
[Herring Gull, 1987, oil on board, signed, framed, exhibited at the Art Connoiseur Gallery, London 1997, available for purchase]