Soon after the heaving bombing of London, the Blitz, commenced I was offered the post of art master at a south east London grammar school. The very successful headmaster had been killed in a raid, and the incumbent art master had wisely decided to move his young family to a less vulnerable area. I was glad enough of the job, and I already knew something of the excellent reputation of this school. Built on low and swampy ground on the borders of London and Kent, the school was strategically placed to get all the air raid alerts – and most of the raids – for the two areas. My academic responsibilities consisted, during the early weeks, of escorting groups of boys to the sodden covered trenches in the school grounds the record number of such excursions in one school day being nine. The boys seemed to be the least affected by the incessant day and night raids, and when they showed one snapshots of heaps of brick and slate and said with some pride “that’s our house sir”, it was difficult to know if commiseration or congratulations were expected.
Camping in a Hampstead flat, the early morning winter journey, often before the All Clear had sounded after a night of raids, could involve finding a way through streets deep in rubble and broken glass, with police, heavy rescue squads, firemen and bomb disposal crews still at work. Nor was the evening return any more pleasurable, the warning sirens wailing before home was reached. As daylight raids gave way to the nightly Blitz it was possible to concern myself more with my teaching activities.
My predecessor, an enthusiastic and eventually well-recognised art teacher, had set very ambitious standards throughout the school, backed by the unfortunate headmaster. The staff included a group of bright young Cambridge graduates and the upper school reflected their lively and uninhibited influence, though the jejune frankness of the Sixth Form was hardly appreciated by some of the older masters, and I found it difficult to return the appropriate reply to the bulldog pipe-smoking sixth former who insisted “personally I can’t bear to look at anything earlier than Picasso.”
As the prolonged night blitz on London tapered off, life became more controlled at the school, only fire-watching duties making their demand when with the agreeable handicraft master I spent several nights a week on Parker Knoll cushions arranged on a study floor, sleeping more sweetly than I can remember having slept before or since. The older schoolmasters then, if not today, were expected to acquire or cultivate a degree of mild eccentricity, and we were not without a few of these. One had taken to heart the official plan to grow more food, and beside sowing the playing fields with buckwheat, had built a catwalk from his first floor flat to a neighbouring flat roof, down which his two or three hens teetered every morning until it was time to install them in the portable pen constructed on the carrier of his cycle, through the bars of which they peered as he rode down the High Street on his way to school. It was the same master who woke us from our fire-watching slumbers at midnight to satisfy his urge to cycle at top speed down the considerable length of the lino-covered corridor that extended from end to end of the extensive school buildings.
Teaching art and design at this secondary level I found both challenging and rewarding, particularly if by making an unexpected approach I could persuade boys to look with newly opened eyes at what went on around them. Is it a national failing that we don’t want to see the world in which we exist? In trains running through the most romantic and beautiful scenery, in planes flying over the Alps or over an enchanting coastline it is apparently a sign of ill-breeding or naïveté to look out of the window. Instead the worldly-wise and blasé traveller throws himself into his seat, opens his executive type briefcase, and is buried in business papers or a paperback until the end of the journey. Give him a coffee table book of coloured photographs of mountains or sea and he is engrossed by it. It seems that we have little confidence in our capacity to see our world for ourselves, and need to be told what to look at and when. We depend on the news reel, the printed page and television to package the visible world for us and label as ‘fit for human consumption’.
As some sort of routine re-established itself and we re-adjusted to new circumstances, I found more and more demands for work reaching me from various sources. A weekly cartoon for TRIBUNE, then under the editorship of Aneurin Bevan was one commitment, which involved a phone discussion to decide on a subject and how it might be treated, then producing the artwork for despatch by an early train. The cartoons produced under these conditions were topical enough, but hardly marked a milestone in political cartooning, though occasionally a more than usually apt idea might spark some response from the readership. The Ministry of Information was also commissioning with increasing frequency ideas and artwork for its Exhibitions and Displays Division, and eventually it made more sense to join that Division than to try to cope with its requests while engaged in full time teaching.