This piece was written by Holland in 1987, and describes his time as a student at Rochester School of Art. He also makes comparisons with more modern schemes of art tuition. At the time he wrote this, he had recently retired from being a Governor of Chatham Art College, the successor to Rochester School of Art and now part of MidKent College. I have not provided a link to the College as the photos are unrecognisable as the institution I remember very fondly.
ROCHESTER SCHOOL OF ART - THE TWENTIES REMEMBERED.
After the 1914 - 19 War, my family returned to Medway and the Dockyard in 1920, and I was sent to the Mathematical School, already with a modest reputation as a boy artist.
George Ward, the Principal of Rochester School of Art, was also a visiting master at the Math, and was glad to encourage a pupil who didn’t spend the Art period juggling with the studio bric-à-brac. He arranged for me to go to evening classes at the art school, and in due course I became a full-time student there.
The School occupied the top floor of the existing building in Eastgate, with some rooms on a lower story, reasonable accommodation for its functions. These were varied. Occupation art and design education was directed at the Board of Education Examinations, which could lead to the Royal College of Art, with Scholarships and Exhibitions for the fortunate. B of E examinations started with Drawing, a necessary preliminary to more specialized courses in Painting, Sculpture, Engraving, Commercial and Industrial Design. The objective for Rochester was the Drawing Exam, unlike the larger colleges of the North and the Midlands, which dominated both in numbers, facilities and awards, with the West Riding being the most generous in supporting its students. If there was a North/South divide at the time, it was the reverse of today. The great Northern cities were wealthy centres, glowing with civic pride in their vast town halls, museums and colleges, and students from the South and the Home Counties could only envy and admire.
The B of E Drawing Exam imposed a tight schedule in five areas of study. Drawing from the Life, with a memory exercise involved, Drawing from the Antique, also with a memory test, Perspective, Architectural Drawing and History, and as I remember, Memory and Composition. On these a far from liberal curriculum was based and considerable degrees of skill were attained. I am not convinced that any more successful foundation for a career in art or design has since been evolved.
Facilities at Rochester were adequate for this. George Ward, a gentle and likable version of Rudyard Kipling in appearance, had been a Travelling Scholar of the Royal College of Art. His specialty was charming watercolours of Cotswold cottages and local river scenes. The second master, an elegant ex-officer, taught architectural drawing and penmanship. The ripest character was Mr. Tingley, who ran a Craft Guild near Chatham. He taught Perspective and History of Architecture, the latter with erratic brilliance as far as the Gothic was concerned. A Falstaffian figure in a Norfolk suit, rather deaf, he had a fund of bawdy reminiscences of the local clergy with which he regaled us when we cycled out to visit Kentish churches and from which lady students had to be shielded.
Other specialists visited the School, and there were instructors for the Painting and Decorating classes, and for a group of disabled ex-servicemen who were being taught jewelry and watch repairing, but the character of the School was created by the three staff members above-mentioned.
As I remember, life classes took place in the evening sessions from 6 to 8, since for models we depended on an amiable dockyard worker who cultivated the Body Beautiful, winning awards and frequently appearing, suitably posed as a Greek athlete, in the health and strength magazines. His trade as a tiler had developed ample back muscles and a manly chest front and back we found limited his possibilities, but attempts to supplement his services from the many servicemen stationed locally were seldom successful.
The school possessed a number of casts from the Antique, Venus de Milo, Antinous, Discobolus, the Belvedere Torso, a favourite because of the absence of head, arms and legs, but tricky to draw, the Clapping Faun, and the Boy and Goose, both of which Roman efforts I soon came to loathe. The Exam required you to draw one from a short list, a further requirement being that you also drew a different cast from memory, perhaps the most disliked feature of the Exam.
Architectural drawing was firmly based on the Classical orders, and you would again be given a short list of examples from which to reconstruct Doric, Ionic or Corinthian as employed in a Greek or Roman structure, but the History paper was less austere, and you could demonstrate you familiarity with Gothic or Renaissance structures. Perspective again involved a measured exercise and a freehand project.
The school was open day and evening from Monday till Wednesday mid-day, and from Thursday until Saturday noon. When I became a full-time student I was aware that I was creating a problem of some sort for the staff, and this was under discussion, serious discussion. At length I was taken on one side and told that if I came back on Wednesday evenings I could join the Men Only life class working from a female model. I was warned to be very discreet. The class was almost clandestine, since it was feared that there would be among the Cathedral clergy some who would have a lot to say if the news got around. Conditioned by this warning, when I first appeared in the Life Room I felt myself blushing from head to navel, and I dare not look in the direction of the model’s throne. Eventually the rather meagre and mature model Lady seemed unlikely to arouse any uncontrollable passions in my youthful breast, nor displayed any particular surprises.
About a dozen of us were working for the B of E exam described above. Two considerations could decide your suitability for such a course - you were either very good at Drawing, or you were rather hopeless at anything else. This did not perhaps apply so generally to the girls whose career opportunities were much more limited than the men’s, and they mostly came from a more genteel background.
In the Twenties the private car was not a common sight and was owned by comparatively few citizens. Trams ran on several routes through the main streets from Rainham in the east to Strood in the west. The river was busy with coasters loading cement from the extended works on the far side which coated the City with gray dust, with Baltic cargo ships with timber and wood pulp from the up-river paper mills, with colliers with coal for Cory’s wharf, with oil seed cargoes from Africa, and everywhere Thames and Medway sailing barges to be seen at turn of tide or change of wind as many as sixty or seventy would be under sail as a flotilla, a splendid sight. They moored in tiers of a dozen or more, and sometimes in bad weather would sink at their moorings when water broke into their cargoes of cement.
On Saturday nights, Chatham High Street was Hogarthian; the road carpeted with peanut shells, military and naval patrols frog-marching their drunks to barracks and the smell of draught beer everywhere. Bernard’s Palace of Varieties was notorious worldwide, wherever sailors met ashore, the ultimate in cheap and cheerful entertainment.
This was the lively environment in which the Art School pursued its cultural course, an environment with which the Medway towns are today de-militarized and a commuters’ dormitory. Of course there have been the many interim phases, my recollections cover not more than the first half of the Twenties, before I left for the Royal College and London. I still remain aware of what I owe to the Art School, primitive and naive though its operation must seem in comparison with the complicated structure and sophisticated equipment of art and design education today. If there was a philosophy of art education in the Twenties, it was that Drawing is the beginning and end of all graphic expression and without realising this nothing worthwhile can be achieved. Drawing was from nature and the natural form, with no intervention of the camera, unselective and falsifying.
There was a weekly cattle market held in Corporation Street, and every Tuesday morning some of us were there to fill sketchbooks with cattle, sheep and pigs and get in the way of drovers and farmers, but a more enlightening occasion than a visit to the nearest photo library.
The College today has as little in common with the Art School of the Twenties as a modern comprehensive has with Tom Brown’s Schooldays. Much has been gained, much has been learnt, but at my age I may be permitted to recall, and regret, something irreplaceable that has been lost with the years.