James Holland, 20th Century Artist

Rochester Art College and the Twenties

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.

Remembering the Royal Dockyard at Chatham

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.]

 

Advertising in the Thirties

This piece was written by Holland himself and is illustrated with an advertisement he drew for Shell and another set he did for a tobacco company.

FITZROY STREET

By my last College year I had forsaken the Fulham Road for Fitzroy Street, having a room at No 8 Whistler Studios, a house which disappeared during the War or the post-war years, but had housed many well-known artists, from Whistler himself, Sickert, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell.  Today the site is occupied by advertising agency offices; then Fitzroy Street and its continuation Charlotte Street were near slums, noisy and dusty, with many crowded rag trade workshops and antique furniture factories.  Soon after my Shell work developed I was approached by an advertising agency to discuss a proposition and a vast brown Daimler, with chauffeur to match, arrived to convey me to this appointment.

Lord and Thomas was a leading American Agency group with a European office in London, and then handled the large and rewarding Shell account.  The arrival of Jack Beddlington at Shell as Publicity Director obviously had the Agency baffled.  For one thing, he was new to the advertising game; equally clearly he had little respect for American advertising or for its accepted practitioners.  The only certainty was that he approved my drawings, since he sent them to the Agency to be used in the current campaigns, so they took the understandable course of offering me about twice what I might earn by teaching in an art school, to join their staff.  It was not a hard decision to take, like most second steps on the primrose path.

 

Small as the Agency was by post-war standards, when the leaders might employ staff of many hundreds or a thousand, it handled in addition to Shell some important accounts, the most demanding being a great US tobacco corporation, which was on the point of launching an American style cigarette on the British market.  The parent company was based in Chicago, its head alleged to be the Czar of tobacco advertising and the villain of at least one huckstering novella of the period. 

The new cigarette was to resemble the Lucky Strike brand and carried the caption “It’s Toasted”, though what the benefit of this alleged processing was supposed to offer I can no longer recall.  It was to be soft-packed in the American or continental manner, quite unlike the British Gold Flake Craven A tradition, to mention only tow of the popular brands of the day.  The launching campaign therefore had to overcome a number of native prejudices, and was to consist of showers of testimonials from all facets of British life - jockeys, poets, actors and actresses of course, politicians, leaders of society, night club entertainers, writers, dramatists, artists, legal eagles, columnists, trainers, boxers, City men, bon viveurs, debutantes and the peerage in general.  I do not recall now any bishops or law lords contributing, but certainly the Sitwells, Lady Diana Duff Cooper, Margot Asquith, Lord Castlerosse I do remember, no less than the panic that overtook the chief copywriter when a cablegram from Chicago commanded “Get testimonial signature George Bernard Shaw.”

 

It was a testimonial to the power of the press and well-financed advertising that for two or three weeks this innovation was forced into the top-selling brand position, an eminence it could not sustain once curiosity had been satisfied.  It eventually declined to be one of those less familiar packs that only the most sophisticated and eclectic of tobacconists would choose to display.

Many of the required testimonials were secured in the small hours, in night clubs and cabarets, and the agency staff would be expected to stand by until one or two o’clock in the morning, when the two London directors would return, not always very sure of foot or speech, to hand over the night’s haul to be rushed through the necessary processes and appear in the first available editions.  When all had been put in hand we adjoined to a nearby family hotel much favoured by returned colonial officers and missionaries, where the younger members would be dissuaded by the management from playing football in bathrooms and corridors and we would bed down, to saunter back to the Agency by the following midday to repeat the routine, sometimes for a week at a time.  It was possible to buy a way out of any difficulty, as for instance when the Daily Mail instituted a Truth in Advertising campaign that seemed to threaten the claim that the tobacco was toasted.

Enlightening as was this intensive experience of old style advertising techniques at their most cynical, it was not for this I came to feel, that I had spent my years as an art student, and when the inevitable happened and Jack Beddington transferred the Shell account to a smaller British agency, I felt that my loyalties and interests lay more with the account than the Agency and offered my resignation.

This was received in the best tradition of the taciturn business man, the managing director dropping a bundle of pound notes in front of me with the valediction “No ill feelings, but don’t come back this afternoon.”  Sensible enough in retrospect I decided, though unexpected at the time and very deflating.

It was Easter, and with money in my pocket, where else to head but to Paris.  There, two days later and after midnight, I was sitting with a painter friend in the Rotonde at Montparnasse, when in the mirror I was facing I saw the agency staff descending the staircase that lead from the dance floor.  Shutting my eyes on what could have been a drink inspired vision, a slap on the shoulder established the reality of the encounter.  It seemed that after my defection, Chicago had launched a cereal campaign for a hypothetical continental market and the whole crew had been flown over at short notice to work on this in Paris.  It was in character that they were flown back just as unexpectedly, as we were later assured by two young ladies in afternoon negligée left to mourn their departure in one of the expensive hotel suites they had occupied.  It was equally in character that shortly afterward, on a similar Paris foray, the managing director expired in embarrassing circumstances, and the misadventures of his colleague, which involved protracted convalescence in a Swiss clinic and his resignation, lead to the London office being drastically re-organized by its American overlords.

I was now freelancing, chiefly for the English agency which now handled the Shell account.  Nothing could have been less like the American approach, more English, even amateurish, than the operating of this agency.  It was owned and more or less consisted of a middle-aged copywriter who had made his name with a regular miscellany for Fortnum and Mason.  At some time this had been described by George Bernard Shaw as the only contemporary comic writing he found admirable or words to that effect, and this benediction was used extensively in the agency’s own publicity.  This self-declared misogynist lived with an aged mother near Westminster Cathedral, from which he set out every morning with stacks of flimsies covered with ideas, captions, copy and sketches so enigmatic that they in turn required explanatory captions - “This is a man looking at the moon through a telescope and seeing a filling station with petrol pumps etc.” 

Almost every day I was summoned to collect a batch of these inspirations to see what I could make of them visually, summonses which often started with adjurations to avoid marriage if one would have a productive and rewarding life.  Beddington had at this time taken on as personal assistant Nicholas Bentley, who claimed that one of his previous jobs had been as circus clown, and continued as office clown by filling the misogynist’s umbrella with confetti when opportunity presented itself.  This freelance life gave me, if not the best of both worlds, some opportunity to do my own work, and I was able to exhibit the occasional painting or print at a variety of exhibitions.

This was the beginning of the thirties, and few decades have been more fully written up, or with greater insight than the late twenties and the thirties, the years when the post Great war generation was coming to maturity.  Evelyn Waugh, Christopher Isherwood, Anthony Powell and above all George Orwell have given their own accounts of the period and there are many others.  But writers and poets were not the only creative people to be affected by the unsettled intellectual climate, my only reason for offering my own reflections on the years so well described in the work of the authors listed above.

Orwell, in “Inside the Whale”, claims that as early as 1934 and 35 it was considered eccentric in literary circles not to be more or less “left”.  “Communism” was simply something to believe in; here was a Church, an army, an orthodoxy, a discipline ... the Communism of the English intellectual is something explicable enough.  It is the patriotism of the deracinated.”  Orwell and re-read for his uncompromising analysis of his literary contemporaries; in the same essay he comments that while the outstanding writers of the earlier years, the twenties, were of very varied origins - and most of them at some time had to struggle against poverty, neglect and even downright persecution ... nearly all the younger writers of the thirties fitted easily into the public school, university, Bloomsbury pattern.

While artists and graphic designers have come from a wider class range, including those in which flourish the artisan skills, they are not so quickly responsive to the moods and trends of the age, and the retreat to the Ivory Tower need not always be a reproach.  With few exceptions the more advanced painting of the twenties might be described as Post Impressionism anglicized.  Much of it marched under the banner of Significant Form, a phrase the significance of which was never very clear.  Content mattered little, manner and treatment everything.

 

End of a War

On the 8th May, it seems appropriate to publish Holland's perspective on the end of the War in Europe.  The family has nothing suitable to illustrate this piece but Sal Shuel has kindly supplied two Lilliput cartoons to start and end the text.  The start point is Jim Boswell's cartoon for Lilliput for the end of the War in the East, while the entry ends with a self portrait cartoon Holland supplied to Lilliput, illustrating his activity at the end of the War.  Other more relevant works may be in various Ministry and Museum archives.

 

Strange days, the end of a World War.  Surely the actual moment of victory, the day of surrender, should be a day never to forget.  Yet while I can remember everything about the 11th November 1918 - the visit to my secondary school of the Chairman of the Governors, a local builder whose grammatical infelicities delighted us all, to announce a day or half-day holiday.  The school’s torch lit procession after dark to the playing fields where a celebration bonfire had been assembled and even a few fireworks obtained, the neighbouring street celebration, with kitchen chairs and heaven knows what household goods being thrown on the street fires.  My father, having vainly attempted to reach an appointment in Hammersmith, fighting his way through the celebrations outside the Exchange to return from Liverpool Street in early afternoon. 

Yet I can recall little of the end of the Second World War, a bonfire on a Chiltern Common so fierce that up rooted green hawthorns burnt like tinder - but this was the end of the war against Japan surely?  Perhaps no people should be called on to celebrate the end of a world war twice in a lifetime.

The flight from the Ministry of Information (MOI) was spectacular.  Many of the specialists could hardly have been more anxious to get back to their peacetime practices or stake a part in the immense field of post-war rebuilding.  I was offered and was glad to accept the Chief Designer (Exhibitions) post in the Central Office of Information, a rather skeletal organization to carry on some aspects of the MOI’s functions on the demise of that Ministry.

Robert Frazer became Director General of COI and Cecil Cooke, most sensitive and kindly of executives, headed the new Exhibitions Division.  With survivors from the MOI team and recruits demobilized from other wartime setups, we had a team equipped to deal with post war demands. 

One of the first such demands was to publicize the work of the Control Commission for the British Zone of Germany which was taking over the administration of that devastated region from Military Government.  This involved short notice visit s to the Zone with a War Correspondent’s Pass, though without the uniform that normally accompanied that appointment.  In consequence we were hauled out of the theatres, canteens, and clubs and centres such as Bielefeld, Herford, Minden by indignant Town Majors bellowing “Who brought those civilians in here?” to be followed by a confrontation between our Conducting Officer and the irate officers on which the production of our laisser passer, signed by the responsible Minister, eventually won the day.

To climb into a ramshackle Dakota, with blackened windows, barely lit by the feeblest of bulbs, secured to metal benches running the length of the unlined fuselage, to emerge on a bleak airfield to encounter for the first time the notorious Volkswagen and bounced over ice covered roads to Bunde, near Minden, HQ for Military Intelligence.

With the script and caption writers we were based at Intelligence Headquarters and from here, with carte blanche to visit any part of the Zone, we operated.  Belsen was memorable, not for its horrors, the worst of which had been buried or burnt by the time of our visit, but for the contrast between the environment of Lüneberg Heath, so like the Surrey countryside, and the many survivors still living in the huts, many with numbers tattooed on wrists, all with a grim story to tell, the heroic efforts of the Red Cross to provide something.

This abrupt encounter with Germany after defeat was difficult to evaluate.  We were taken wherever in the Zone we felt would give us the most comprehensive picture of the problems - to Belsen, Hamburg, Essen and the Ruhr.  No fraternization between occupying forces and the native population was allowable or excusable; rumours spread - new swastikas had been seen on walls and snow banks.  The military machine functioned efficiently, it had plenty of practice; the civilian takeover by newly set up Control Commission less so.  It was soon apparent to us that some very wide boys had insinuated themselves into the organization and were rapidly carving out profitable little enclaves for themselves and their business associates in the United Kingdom.

After the War years and the image the press and radio had built of the German scene, there were surprising adjustments to be made.  At Belsen for example, were we expected a desolate sea of mud, was situated in gorse and bracken covered country very similar to Surrey and Hampshire and adjoining spacious and well designed SS barracks decorated with heroic murals of the Teutonic Knights - a juxtaposition more horrifying than a monotone consistency of squalor.

 

Behind the wheel

The Holland family seem to have an affinity with Australia - my aunt told me that one of her great uncles was deported there for sheep stealing, and Holland's son and one of his grandsons now live in the Sydney area.  This post was written by Holland's son, another James, shown in this sketch.

 

Holland was an enthusiastic if at times erratic motorist, whose driver's license dated from the times before such trivialities as passing a test inhibited prospective knights of the road. His first car was a machine of dubious provenance held together by string and sealing wax, and nicknamed by the various brave passengers willing to travel with him as "The Flying Bedstead". Somehow or the other, he managed to persuade this vehicle to run from London to Wiltshire on occasions. 

His pride and joy, however, and the vehicle that I remember most fondly and clearly, was a 1929 cream and black Rolls Royce similar to ones featured in the film "The Yellow Rolls Royce". This wonderful car with its running boards, curious flip-out indicators and, of course, its Flying Lady figurehead was a thing of beauty, but was almost entirely impractical, living as we did at the time in the centre of London. The Rolls made its appearance on special occasions only for several years, spending the rest of its time in a garage waiting as often as not for spare parts and even tyres to be made specially for it. 

When the family eventually moved to Kent, the Rolls came too and provided considerable interest and sometimes downright disbelief amongst ramblers walking down a country lane who suddenly spotted the car through a gate. I think though that my abiding memory of the Rolls came in the summer of 1968 in my last term at Preparatory School. On a beautiful summer's day I won half a dozen events at the School's Sports Day, and came out to the car park clutching my various cups to find half the boys at the school (and almost all of their fathers) clustered around the Rolls. Needless to say, they weren't there to admire my trophies!   

The following sketches date from 1975 and were drawn from memory. Represented are the first 6 cars that Holland owned.

 
 

[six cars, sketches, water colour and ink, 1975, in a private collection - order of ownership down the page 1, 3, 5, 2, 4 and finally the Rolls as 6]

Shortly after my brother's notable victories at his Sports Day, the Rolls was sold to an American and with the proceeds my father bought a maroon Austin 1100 - a very practical car for a growing family, but lacking soul.  He did not bother to sketch his later cars.

 

His god daughter remembers...

When she spotted this website, trawling for links for Jim Holland and Jim Boswell, Sal Shuel got in touch and offered to write a contribution [below].  I found this photo of Sal among my father's things when we were clearing his studio a few years ago.  As with many things in the studio, time had taken its toll a bit!

 

James Holland was my godfather; a really nice godfather who didn't bother with my catechism and treated me like a Real Person. There were three Jims - James Fitton, James Boswell and James Holland. James Boswell was my father. They were all good friends but the Hollands and the Boswells were close. When he married Jackie I went to the reception. I always thought her one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen – beautiful when young and still beautiful as she aged. She had eyes which crinkled up when she laughed which she did a lot! I babysat for young James occasionally. When I married, Jim Holland supplied his own car – an aged, white Rolls Royce and when my first son was born, Jackie was his godmother.

The three Jims met in the late twenties as students and produced astonishing work, particularly to anyone interested in the politics of the Thirties. They worked together in the lithography evening classes which Jim Fitton taught at the Central School of Art and the three of them produced a constant flow of brilliant satirical cartoons. Occasionally it's not easy to decipher who did what. They tended to live in each other’s pockets and they didn't have much money. Eventually they all married and settled down in order to support families and the lifestyle they fancied.

The working lives of Jim Holland and Jim Boswell in particular followed a similar pattern. They both belonged to the same groups, clubs, and organisations. They supplied illustrations for the same publications. The war took them off in different directions but they remained friends. Jim Fitton became a respectable RA. Jim Holland worked miracles with the Festival ship Campania in 1951 at a time when resources were limited and then helped to put the Society of Industrial Artists onto an economic and professional footing. He and Jim Fitton both worked in advertising. Later he took to teaching like a duck to water. Jim Boswell worked for Lilliput for five glorious years, was heaved out along with a lot of the staff for enjoying himself too much and being subversive, painted a mural in the Sea and Ships Pavilion at the Festival of Britain then bit the bullet and edited a house magazine for Sainsbury's - which gave him the freedom to take up painting again.

Jim Holland had a great love of anything connected with the sea and his paintings of harbours and working shipping are second to none. We have a lino cut of Polperro which was his Christmas card sometime in the distant past. It's framed on our crowded wall and we won't shift it.

I loved Jim Holland. He was kind and understanding and fun and cared deeply for all the things in which he found himself involved. When my parents parted company in the mid sixties, he was desperately torn between the two of them but he was one of the few people who understood that I was as torn as he was. A nice man. A really nice man.

 
Sal and Jim Boswell and the infamous Rolls, photo courtesy of Sal Shuel.

 

Two Jameses - Holland and Boswell meet

Today's post is the first of a number dedicated to the Three Jameses, and describes in Holland's own words, how Holland and Boswell met while both at the Royal College of Art.  The illustrating photograph was very kindly supplied by my godmother, Sal Shuel, who was herself the daughter of Jim Boswell and the god daughter of Holland.

SECOND YEAR OF ART COLLEGE

The first year of university and college is usually interesting enough, new influences, new friendships, new values.  The student returns after the first long vacation, to a now familiar scene from which some familiar faces will be missing, and there will be an influx of newcomers to be looked over with the critical eyes of a year’s experience.

In my second year there was, among the new men, a stockily built and raw-boned New Zealander who made it apparent that he had not arrived in any mood of colonial humility, rather as an aggressive Gaul, or perhaps Scot, in an effete Rome.  James Boswell, like his namesake and distant kinsman, to whom he bore a facial resemblance, came from a Lowland Scots family, which like many others had settled in New Zealand.  We took an instant dislike to each other, a dislike that in a matter of weeks changed to considerable enjoyment of each other’s company, perhaps chiefly because our backgrounds and experiences had been so different.  In spite of his assumed role of the wild colonial boy, he brought with him more knowledge and a greater understanding of European culture, with a wider background of reading in both English and French, than all but the rarest native student, and it was possible to understand something of the intensity of the urge to get to Europe that had persuaded his most tolerant mother to leave Auckland with him and his sister to set up a home in a Kensington flat.

They had arrived during the vacation, in the dust and heat of a London summer, and Boswell, a powerful swimmer, had soon discovered the YMCA baths in Tottenham Court Road, and there fortunately met up with a group of lively men of his own age, who though diverse in occupation, shared a studio flat in Kennington.  One of them was George Coulouris, so well-known for many years both here and in the States as an actor of character, and then the most extrovert of Greek Lancastrians.  A pianist and journalist, a student of French as well as two or three, more conventionally employed at least during working hours, made up this explosively argumentative group.  Mrs Boswell was happy to feed her son’s many friends at whatever hour they might unexpectedly turn up.  What was more, she was prepared to endure with every appearance of mild enjoyment, their endless flights of intellect.

Boswell thus started his college life with a wider range of London contacts and interests than did most students, and the College never became for him the focal point that it was for his contemporaries.  His painting was frankly theatrical and lacked the controlled drawing that might have made its flamboyance more tolerable.  Rubens, the young Cezanne and the brushwork of Vlaminck might have been the recipe.

In his company and that of his companions I became more aware that beyond the Yellow Book and the Georgian poets, beyond Mansfield and de la Mare there were the Symbolists, there was Baudelaire and les Fleurs de Mal, there was Eliot and the Waste Land, there was Lyndham Lewis and The Enemy.  I came to know pubs other than those around South Kensington, the Fitzroy, the Plough near the British Museum and the notorious haunt of Harold Munroe, the Swiss pub and the York Minster in Soho, not that I was a copious drinker, my limits in entertainment then being soon reached and exceeded.

During my second year I became secretary of the Students Sketch Club which existed only to stage competitions and an annual exhibition in the V&A of work produced outside the College supervision in the summer vacation.  Awards were offered in various categories and distinguished or at least compliant Academicians and others were invited to judge these categories.  Being all for progress and the young idea and with the support of my contemporaries, a number of the judges who had served for many years were dropped and I approached artists who had not been connected with this feature of the College.  Among these were Wilson Sheer, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, all of whom agreed to act and brought a less predictable aspect to the occasion.  In addition we invited the Minister of Works, Sir Philip Sassoon, more significantly known as a gilded leader of London Society to open the show and he rose to the occasion by buying a selection of work that I doubt ever found its way into his collection.

During my final and post-diploma year I was offered a share in a small exhibition at the Warren Gallery in Conduit Street.  Opened by Dorothy Warren, a lively young girl about town that later was to become notorious for exhibiting the D H Lawrence drawings and watercolours that were seized by the Police on the orders of the Home Secretary Johnson Hicks, while Dorothy Warren’s prosecution on obscenity charges was to follow.  I produced enough work to make up my share although I have never ceased blushing when I recall its immaturity and effrontery.  An unexpected outcome was that the participants were invited to visit a Mr Jack Beddington at Shell Corner Kingsway to discuss perhaps doing some work in the company.  I believe I was the only one to respond. 

I emphasize that it was emphatically not done to flirt with commerce and industry and so risk prostituting one’s talents in the market place, however I needed money to pay my bills and so went to meet the tempter.  Entering his office confirmed my worst suspicions.  This suave, elegant, frock-coated figure, almost Sir Jasper of the melodramas, had clearly not invited me for anything that could be to my advantage.  However, having introduced me to his father and brother, who happened to be in the office and were obviously in the same conspiracy, he suggested that I should do a drawing suitable for reproduction, for the then generous fee of fifteen guineas.  This I did and posted the result to him.  By return came a cheque and an enthusiastic letter proposing I undertook a series of press advertisements.  Wealth untold!  My scruples were forgotten.  Perhaps I did bring a fresh eye to a skill that had become very conventional; certainly now looking at the one or two pulls that have survived more than fifty years; I am impressed by their ingenuity.

 
James Holland, James Boswell and Betty Boswell, photograph courtesy of Sal Shuel.

 

Childhood Sunday

To give a slightly different perspective on Holland, I have decided today to put up a piece about his childhood.  In later years, Holland made many starts at writing up his life and work, although we are left with a rather patchy picture, as some elements of his life were recounted several times, while other bits are only alluded to or not covered.  It will take the family a while to put together a coherent story, but for Easter Sunday, this piece on childhood in the Edwardian era seemed appropriate.

For a child growing up in the early years of the 20th century in a southern industrial island, every day of the week had a distinct flavour, if only by reason of what one could anticipate in the way of meals.  Not surprisingly, Sunday stood further apart from the preceding and following six days - the Day of Rest.

However welcome it was to grown ups, I had no great liking for the Sabbath.  Breakfast would be late, games would be forbidden either outdoor or on the parlour table, midday dinner would include unwelcome vegetables that had to be eaten and horrors such as fat meat, though fruit pies and puddings adorned with thick custard which followed, were welcome enough.  Best clothes would be worn and once dinner was finished we were sent off to Sunday School.

From the age of 5 to 15, I disliked and finally despised this institution as I came to realise it was a device to get children out of the house on Sunday afternoons and allow parents to retire to sofa or bedroom for a blessed hour or two.  From the infant stage I remember the coin one was given for the collection, taken up while we sang this very mercenary chant:

            Hear the pennies dropping

            Listen as they fall

            Every one for Jesus

            He shall have them all

 

            (Chorus) Dropping, dropping, dropping, dropping,

            Hear the pennies fall

            Every one for Jesus

            He shall have them all.

I also remember a big girl called Vera - a name I have subconsciously since regarded with suspicion - who regularly dropped her penny down the gap between my Eton collar and neck, and I can still recall the sensation of the cold coin sliding down my warm back to tinkle on the floor, unexplained, at some importune moment.

It was just as well it was not my spiritual welfare that mostly concerned my parents, since as we moved house, it was the nearest Sunday School - Wesleyan, Congregational or whatever - that I was sent.  A dissenting tradition at first ruled out Church of England, while Roman Catholic or Quaker where held to be too extreme, but within these limits, everything was possible.  At a much later date we attended - at my father’s insistence - a town parish church, and I was then at an age to find some pleasure in the service, and more in the socially conscious sermons of an impressive young curate.  But this was in contrast with the puerile and ill-informed efforts of Sunday school or Bible class teachers, often prosperous, semi-literate, local tradesmen, whose platitudes one despised with all the superiority of grammar school fifth and sixth formers.

To return to the earlier period, after Sunday School came Sunday tea, and then we assembled either at my maternal grandmother’s little house or at one of my aunts’ homes or even at our own house.  A cold supper, roast beef, pork, mutton, pickles of all sorts, with cheese to follow.  Cards were not admissible on Sunday, so uncles and aunts, of whom I had my fair share, would gather round the upright piano.  The ballads thereafter rendered had to be suitable for Sunday evening: not “Any old iron”, or “My old Dutch”, nothing in the lusty music hall tradition.  “Where my caravan has rested”, “Little gray home in the West”, “Down the Vale”, these were admissible.  The mawkishly sentimental “Friend o’Mine” touched the emotions:

            When you are happy, friend o’mine

            And all your skies are blue

            Tell me your hopes of fortunes fine

            And let me join with you.

The pattern was consistent.  Two verses in a cheerful mood followed by one in a minor key:

            But when the light grows tremulous

            And the last lamp burns low

            And one of us - or both of us

            The long lone trail must go

            Look with your dear old eyes in mine

            Give me a handshake true

            What ever fate our souls await

            Let me be there!  Let me be there!

            There with you! (fortissimo)

Embarrassing these were (even more so the hearty “Drake is in his hammock” and other bluff Devonian shanties sung with great gusto), they now appear as perfect period pieces, sung by such accomplished artists as Benjamin Luxom and Robert Tear, who have the good sense to render them straightforwardly, without comment or condescension.

A history of a people might be written entirely in terms of its popular songs both vulgar and polite.  But to return to my own story, the escapes for me, from what I thought to be false and meretricious, was provided by a favourite aunt, who presented me every birthday and Christmas with a Dickens volume.  She possessed a gramophone and records which included as well as Gilbert and Sullivan, Tannhauser, the Ride of the Valkyrie, the Baccarole from the Tales of Hoffman, which I insisted on hearing before Sunday evenings drew to a close.

It was however, the constraint of Sunday that had the longest effect, and until I escaped into more tolerant and carefree environments, where Sunday counted little more than any other day.

 
[Holland with his little sister, Kathleen, Studio portrait c 1914]

 

James Holland 1905 - 1996

 

James Holland was born on the 19th September 1905, at Gillingham in Kent, the son of a naval blacksmith.  He was educated at the Mathematical School Rochester, at which he won the President's Prize from the Royal Drawing School and a painting scholarship to Rochester School of Art.  In 1924 he attended the School of Painting at the Royal College of Art in London, when the Principal was William Rothenstein, his tutor was Paul Nash and his contemporaries included Henry Moore, Edward Bawden, Barnett Freedman and James Boswell.

Holland held his first exhibition while still at the College and organised the RCA Sketch Club, where he came in contact with leading painters of the day including Wilson Steer, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell.

In the late twenties, Holland went to live in Whistler's old studio in Fitzroy Street and worked as a painter, illustrator and designer, exhibiting his early work at the Warren Gallerty, the Zwemmer Gallery, the Bloomsbury Gallery and the Royal Academy.  At this time he started working on advertisements for Shell and illustrations for dailies and magazines including Country Life, Night & Day and Lilliput.  Together with James Boswell and James Fitton - the "three James" - Holland produced many anti-fascist and anti-war cartoons for Left Review and other publications.

In 1937 Holland worked with Misha Black on the Peace Pavillion in Paris.  The "three James" with Diana Uhlman, Edith Simon, Pearl Binder, Millicent Rose and Misha Black helped form the Artists International Association.  He was also a member of the London Group and the New English Art Club.

In 1940 Holland joined the Ministry of Information, working with Misha Black, Milner Gray and James Gardner on exhibition designs including gas showrooms, a replica coal mine and the Empire Exhibition in Glasgow.

When the Festival of Britain was proposed in 1948, Holland became part of a team comprising Misha Black, Ralph Tubbs and James Gardner under the leadership of Hugh Casson, the Festival's Director of Architecture.  It was decided each member of the team should design a section of the site.  Holland chose "Sea and Ships".  To his delight, the First Lord of the Admiralty offered him the aircraft carrier Campania to tour Britain as a floating exhibition hall of which he was the designer in charge.  When the Exhibition closed, he was appointed OBE.

 

After the Festival he returned to advertising and freelance illustration and was involved in reactivating the Society of Industrial Artists, serving as President of the Society in 1960/61.  He became interested in design education and was a member of the DES working group and the Coldstream Committee.  In 1963 he was appointed Head of Faculty of Visual Communication at Birmingham Polytechnic and subsequently became a visiting lecturer at Leicester Polytechnic.  He was assessor and Governor at several art colleges and in 1971 took on the post of Education Officer for the Society of Industrial Artists and Designers (now the Chartered Society of Designers) where he used his experience to help structure increasingly more professional design courses.  In 1980 he wrote Minerva at Fifty - a history of the Society.

Thoughout his life, James Holland continued to paint and write; and whilst in retirement in Kent enjoyed running an art class.  He completed his last painting two weeks before his death on the 7th January 1996.