This piece was written by Holland as one of a series of sections in a planned autobiography that never quite happened. Here he reminisces about his life as a student in London.
STUDENT LIFE
In converting the Royal College into what was essentially a School of Painting, or certainly Fine Art, Rothenstein was diverting it from the original intention that it should be primarily a centre of design education, though he was perhaps not the first nor the only master to exert such pressure. I have frequently quoted his warning to recalcitrant fine art students - “If you can’t do better than this, you will find yourself in the Design School” - and indeed a few students did from time to time find themselves so transferred, though whether this was to their eventual disadvantage was far from certain. “Illustration” was his damning indictment of much painting, “Magazine illustration” the ultimate and unforgivable condemnation. It was not done for the painting student to be concerned about his post-College future. Something would turn up, a patron, a part-time teaching job, a successful exhibition. Re-reading the memoirs of some of the outstanding writers who were at Oxford or Cambridge during the Twenties, Cyril Connolly, Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh, I have been aware that in our rather less hallowed environment, much the same moods and values prevailed. Perhaps we had no Sligger Urquart, unless Rothenstein’s own manipulations qualified him for that role, no Hypocrites Club, though several of the senior students were able to frequent the Chelsea Arts Club. But the euphoria, and the refusal to look to the morrow we seem to have had in common - though ours was not so exclusively a masculine society.
So powerful was this euphoria, it seems that many graduates found it unduly difficult to adjust to a less favoured way of life, while a few found it impossible to leave their cloisters, and were pointed out to visitors as mild eccentrics, who having come up, could never bring themselves to go down, and continued to haunt the scenes of their undergraduate days.
While none of my contemporaries would have wished to haunt for long the graceless buildings which housed the College, the influence of the College, both its teaching and its student life, has also been persistent, and for many years it was reasonably possible to detect the former RCA student among the practitioners and lecturers one encountered. A guilty twinge can still assail the College-trained painter who reaches for a pigment not admitted to the recognised College palette - at least for my generation.
Ours was not an exclusively masculine society, and in numbers the women students were not far behind the men, possibly equalling them, though their distribution between the various Schools was less even, with, as might be expected, some concentration in Textiles and craft based design studies. They came (and still do) from a wider spectrum of social backgrounds than did the men. Bedales, Cheltenham and Roedean contributed their quota, while the public schoolboy was not so often encountered among the men. Perhaps the restricted range of professional careers open to even the brightest girls at that time kept Art and Design in the possible list, while fewer public school boys would be encouraged to pursue a course that could lead to the penury of the vie de boheme.
The girls I remember in the fashions of the period, which were certainly “artistic”, and with renewed interest in the Twenties and Thirties can be seen from time to time in the fashion pages. Loose, Liberty-style smocks, hand-woven and calf-length skirts, sandals and long skeins of hand painted wooden beads made up a refined peasant ensemble, while hair was plaited and wound into headphones, which almost certainly derived from the earlier Russian ballets rather than the spread of radio, and which, on sturdy red-cheeked Slavonic maidens could be entrancing, but was rather less so on the slimmer British girls. For the more worldly, bobbed and shingled hair, the boyish chest and the brief skirt of the period was de rigeur.
As a co-educational college, we enjoyed a much more relaxed relationship between the sexes than did the universities at this time. I do not remember that this lead to a great many problems. A few of the most senior students, probably ex-servicemen, were married, but open living in sin or co-habitation was almost unknown. On the other hand, as would be expected, many students paired off at various points in their college days, and how intimate these affairs might become was recognised as being their own business. On my visits as a lecturer and assessor to students in Polytechnics and colleges I know how frequently they are not only married but are frequently parents before they are halfway through their courses - though the sequence is not invariable - with all the consequent responsibilities.
I have tried to suggest something of the nature of student life no doubt seen through the rosy mists of Time. This came not only from the life of the College and Common Room, but from the town itself in the Twenties. Certainly it was a more varied environment and offered a wider choice of interests and entertainment than in the decaying centre of recent years. Cinemas from the fleapits of Fulham to the gorgeous palaces of Leicester Square theaters, from variety at Waltham Green Empire to the Russian ballet at the Lyceum or Coliseum, Tchekov at the Q Theatre, Cochran Revues at the London Pavilion, and the long-running Beggars Opera at the Hammersmith Lyric. Nor were these pleasures beyond the pockets of most students if they were prepared to queue for a short while for gallery or pit.
We were most impressed and delighted by the Diagheleff Russian Ballet seasons, with many great post-Nijinsky stars. The programmes were generously compiled. In one evening we might get a recent favourite, perhaps the Three Cornered Hat, followed by an innovation, sometimes a first performance, Reynard, Les Noces, le Pas d’Acier, and concluding with a well-established and Russian tailpiece such as the Polotsvian dances from Prince Igor. Another Russian arrival was the Chauve Souris cabaret company under Nikita Balieff, which delighted the eye with its many brilliant numbers and the ear with the compeer’s manhandling of the English tongue.
Diagheleff and Balieff came from the East, from the West came the Negro Blackbirds company, making a comparable impact on the London scene. The delightful Florence Mills headed the caste. Never had dancing, such gusto and abandon been seen on-stage or to judge from the stories circulating at the time, off-stage, since the all black company was taken up in a big way by London society, then in its most party throwing mood.
In a quite different tradition, Nigel Playfair’s stylized version of the Beggars’ Opera at the Hammersmith Lyric repaid many visits. Sets and costumes had been designed by Claud Lovat Fraser, and the ballad score arranged for a small group of period instruments, mostly played by several elderly ladies and related members of the same family, who were alleged to knit assiduously between numbers and during the very long run could have completed many garments. This version was a charming charade, artificial and entertaining as a pantomime. The stylized pannier dresses had their influence on contemporary fashion, Polly Peachum and Lucy Locket becoming popular pottery figures, and many a telephone was coyly concealed under the ladies ample pannier skirts.
Yet another tradition, the Celtic Twilight, was represented by Rutland Boughton’s opera The Immortal Hour, which also had its effect on the modes and style of the period. These were the outstanding and well established shows; many others had only little less impact.
The later Shaw plays were making their first appearances at various theatres, the Astaires were in musical comedy, Tom Walls and Ralph Lynn were in the Aldwych farces, Chaliapine appeared in a Russian Opera season, Tchekov was to be seen by going to Kew, and all were accessible to the student, however modest his purse. For the musical there were excellent Saturday Chamber concerts in the V&A Museum and the new Chenil Galleries, adjoining Chelsea Town Hall sent to the College free tickets to similar concerts conducted by a rising young conductor, Barbirolli. The Proms at Queens Hall, under Sir Henry Woods’s baton, did not require the promenader to queue for hours or days, nor were they regarded as a jolly undergraduate rag. Happy days when, outside the College, the impecunious student had a wide choice of Lyons, ABC and Express tea shops for a cheap meal, with the fish and chip saloons of Fulham and Chelsea or the coffee stall on every other corner to provide the late snack.
The usual tipple was “half and half” or mild and bitter, often drawn from the wood. When in funds, one might be able to afford a Friday night lager, the cheapest drink available - at the Cafe Royal, to sit at its marble top tables, on the red plush banquettes and watch the notable and the notorious at other tables, Arnold Bennett, James Agate, Constant Lambert, Augustus John. After ten or eleven o’clock it was legally necessary to eat, or at least purchase the Cafe’s uninviting ham sandwiches, however reluctantly, if drinking were to continue.
This then is a glimpse of the town in which the students of the Twenties and Thirties found themselves, altogether an easier, busier, more crowded place, with a bustling night life in the streets not only of the West End, but also of the inner suburbs. The weekly climax was Saturday night, with the theatres, cinemas and dance halls crowded and seldom a table to be had at the Lyons Corner Houses in the Strand, Coventry Street and Oxford Street. Street entertainers abounded, notably a team of “spoon bashers” with barrel organ support, alleged to have appeared on stage in Petrouchka, a troupe of sand dancers, and the crippled woman singer of Indian love lyrics who so impressed Anthony Powell that she recurs in the Dance to the Music of Time sequence of novels.