James Holland, 20th Century Artist

The Three James's

This piece was written by Holland, and introduces the Three James's - in their day a cartooning force to be reckoned with.

Students and art historians researching cultural and political movements of the Thirties must encounter evidence of anti-war and anti-fascist activities as the Artists International Association and Left Review and so may find references to the Three James’s.  Neither an acrobatic trio nor a musical group, they were three young artists who had decided, in that ominous decade, to devote what skills and time they had to supporting graphically and in unequivocal terms the broad front of the Left.  Impatient of the mild posture of artists who were prepared only to be represented by typical gallery pieces to demonstrate their condemnation of war and reaction, they felt that desperate situations demanded unmistakeable exposure.  The pen and the brush needed to b a great deal more outspoken if they were to have any effect.

These were not the only artists or creative workers to be active in this situation; their special contribution was that they were near enough in age, and that they shared conviction, skill and opportunities which while not identical, were close enough to align them on the same targets.  They were artists by training and intention, graphic designers by occupation, illustrators and cartoonists by conviction.

Young artists, illustrators and designers, looking toward a newer broader public turned to print making techniques, particularly lithography.  So James Boswell and James Holland joined the evening lithography class at the Central School of Art in Southampton Row, which was tutored by James Fitton, an outstandingly gifted draughtsman and painter from Oldham.  There they met Pearl Binder, Lynton Lamb and others who found this medium responsive and not unnecessarily precious.  So enthusiastically did they exploit these qualities, working on stone rather than plates, that newcomers had few opportunities to get their work put through the press by those excellent printers, the Devenish père et fils.

The evening classes became an available outlet for their anti-war and anti-fascist sentiments.  As a consequence, Boswell, Fitton and Holland were asked to produce a pamphlet “It’s up to us”, providing visual impact for statistics and quotations emphasizing the dangers of the blindness of the government of the day to what was happening overseas and at home.  This was a very successful effort and is still a most effective piece of visual propaganda, though very few copies can be in existence[1].  It lead to “the Three James’s” being in growing demand for many other assignments.

The Three James’s backgrounds were widely different.  Fitton was a few years the oldest.  The son of a Lancashire trade union leader, he had met at his Oldham home many of the stalwarts of the first Labour government, and his origins were Labour rather than Socialist.  Very much a Lancashire lad, he was intensely ambitious and in pursuit of fame more than fortune, he came to London where his outstanding graphic skills found him a place in advertising.  Intelligent rather than intellectual, Fitton was never swept away by political theorising from the extreme Left.  The conservatism of the British working class was an attitude he well understood.

Boswell’s background could hardly have been more different.  The son of a New Zealand schoolmaster he had been brought up in a small town in the North Island and received his education and art training in Auckland.  Strong and solidly built, a rugger player and powerful swimmer, he found London had its disappointments and frustrations and the English often effete, and he cast himself in the role of the wild colonial boy.  He was a man of bold gestures and disliked finessing in any form.

James Holland’s background had more in common with that of Fitton.  Born in Kent, his father was employed by the Admiralty in Chatham dockyard and elsewhere, and he grew up in the Medway towns and a London suburb.  He won scholarships to the Royal College of Art and in his second year there met Boswell.

In recalling the late Thirties, it is difficult today to be entirely objective and to dismiss hindsight.  So much political naivety, so much disinterested idealism was in evidence, sometimes to be diverted and disillusioned before it could be converted into effective action.

The two developments in the increasing campaign against fascism and war brought their lithographs and drawings into a widening audience.  The Artists International Association was founded and the monthly Left Review was published.  In the early days of the AIA, their work when exhibited was perhaps noticed as being more professionally competent than the politically motivated but less technically assured efforts of many of the earlier members, but as the Association expanded, became less doctrinaire in pursuit of a united front among artists, so their contributions took on an aggressive posture.  Boswell was the most committed of the three and became and active though not uncritical Party member.  Fitton and Holland with more direct experience of working class life and ideals remained what would not be considered left wing Labour, with some belief in the effectiveness of a broad front of Left inclined organisations.  They were of course extremely naive in the light of what we have since come to know of the alignments of that inter-war period.  Many illusions have since been exposed, many causes betrayed, but no post-war criticism is acceptable that does not understand the threat that lay over Europe, that grew more menacing week by week and beyond the capacity and courage of the West to resist.

Left Review was a regular outlet for their cartoons and illustrations and a recent critic and historian has suggested that it was the Three James’s contributions that readers turned to most appreciatively, thought whether this was true of the dedicated Marxists is doubtful.  A frequent criticism from this quarter was that too often they portrayed the working classes as downtrodden, victims of an inhuman system, hopeless and too down-and-out to resist exploitation.  From a political, an Agitprop angle this was true, but where to find evidence of proletarian militancy?  Boswell, the most politically committed, took this criticism seriously and many of the lithographs he produced at this period included heroic lorry drivers as vast and square as their own vehicles, defying the forces of reaction, marching against Fascism with miners and dockers.  But he did not forget the less heroic aspects of working class life in the back streets of Kentish Town, the cafes and amusement arcades of the North London inner and decaying suburbs.  Having taken a job in a design studio in the City, he found a new field for satire in City tycoons and their Tatler-featured horsey women became his prey.

The role of the cartoonist, the graphical artist, is a curious one.  It is almost entirely critically destructive, whether mildly and well-tempered or bitterly and savagely.  If crisis and tension are the atmosphere in which the political cartoon flourishes or can be effective, then much of its function can disappear when as a result such tensions conflict.

To revert to the mid Thirties, certain writers and artists had founded an outlet for their work, including re-appraisals of existing standards, in Left Review, edited by Edgell Rickword.  Many of the contents of Left Review, not least its cartoons, now appear naive; the capitalist still wore a top hat and watch chain and smoked a fat cigar, and Colonel Blimp typified the Establishment.  But the re-alignment of total war involved the whole community and issues were no longer demonstrable in such simple terms of black and white.  In the circumstances graphic comment needed to be more subtle, less explicit.

If Left Review had any sort of successor in the graphic field it was perhaps Lilliput which appeared in the happy and prolific period after the War until its premature demise with its stable companions Picture Post and Leader magazines.

 

 

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[1] Tate Galleries Archive has one

Romford Cottage

Over a long life, Holland owned and rented many different properties.  His sometimes unconventional ways of dealing with property transactions are referred to in John Mortimer's autobiography - it was news to me that he ever owned property in Kentish Town, but it is there in "Clinging to the Wreckage"!  After a number of years of saying that he didn't want to own property again, Holland fell in love with a rather ramshackle cottage in the wilds of Kent near Tunbridge Wells.

He bought the cottage from a friend's mother, with a certain level of wheeling and dealing to ensure that she was able to enjoy the fruits of the sale and not the owners of the rest home to which she retired.  Mrs Stephens and Miss Godfrey, her compagnon, were believed to haunt the cottage for a number of years after their deaths.

Romford Cottage was a built on a long established small plot ceded from the Abervenny Estate in the 1700s, but the cottage my father bought was built in around 1850, after the first building had been destroyed, and was thrown up as a temporary structure of two "two up two down" cottages with facilities out back and a plot of land to each side.  The temporary nature was demonstrated admirably by complete absence of foundations, floor boards laid on bare earth, single bond brickwork downstairs and wattle and daub walls upstairs faced with Kentish weather board.  The rafters were split tree trunks with bark still in place, and heat was provided by small hearth fires in all four front rooms.

Holland had the back offices removed and a one storey studio built on, moved the bathroom upstairs, rewired and decorated the cottage and that was about it.  While intended initially as a weekend cottage, by early 1964 Holland had made the decision that rather than keeping flats in London and Birmingham, the family would move to Kent and he shared digs during the week in Birmingham and then in Leicester, where the work was.  When he finally retired, the cottage became home full time until his death in 1996.

There are a number of sketches and prints of the Cottage among Holland's work.  This sketch from 1975 or 76 was done in the garden looking to the side of the building that had an interesting oriol window.

 

The history of the cottage also fascinated Holland, particularly when he finally obtained the full set of deeds to the property including the original sale of the parcel of land from the Abervenny Estate, which implied a duty of an annual ground rent which never seemed to be rescinded.  This drawing, which was a Christmas card one year, shows Holland's view of what it must have looked like shortly after construction.

 

School days remembered

This extract was one of a number of similar pieces that Holland wrote about his time at the Mathematical School in Rochester - I will meld the best bits into one coherent whole when I can.  The illustration is related only by being a memory of familiar scenes from his childhood.

SCHOOL DAYS IN ROCHESTER

In 1920, I went to the local grammar school in Rochester.  Actually it favoured mathematical subjects rather than grammatical as was reflected in its name - the Sir Joseph Williamson’s Mathematical School, Rochester.  From the school windows you looked down towards the Medway a matter of a few hundred yards away.  We could see all that was happening on the river - the shipping, the river landscape, barges (hundreds of them), ships, coasters, cement works, small quaysides etc.  It was an interesting and lively landscape.

I joined the school half way up as it were, in the fifth form at the beginning of the school year, with another chap about my age, but a much more sophisticated person than I.  He was a wonderful character.  His name was Andy Webber.  He and I were about 15.  He had a rather curious background.  He had gone to the dockyard school to be apprenticed in the dockyard, but then decided he wanted to teach in elementary schools, and since he was rather a bright boy, his application to transfer was received with some sympathy. Having been an apprentice and knocked around with a more worldly bunch of chaps, Andy was very much a man about town.  He knew all the current stories that lads of 15 are not expected to know much about, at first hand any rate.  He was a snappy dresser and when he went home to Gillingham, he forgot all about school, donned his hat, lit a cigarette, and went off to the pub to survey the local girls. 

The most remarkable thing about him was that he had become a very good conjurer.  He had all the necessary equipment, full tails, all the conjurer’s patter and the saucy talk while he did the tricks, which were surprisingly sophisticated.  After a term or so there was a house concert, where he turned the whole thing round from an amateur exercise into a professional show.  He and I, although we had absolutely nothing in common in our upbringing, got on well together and I think of him now with considerable affection and interest.

At the Mathematical School there was an art master who came in one day a week only, as he was headmaster of the Art College.  If you were anything special, you were put in his care.  His name was George Ward and he was a very gentle and kindly man, who took great interest in me and what I was doing.  I was beginning to make drawings of the river front at Rochester, shipping and so on, which I was doing in line and wash and drawing with ink.  He sent a number of my sketches to an annual exhibition which is held by the Royal Drawing Society in London.  Apparently they made quite a sensation and I was awarded the President’s prize - the President’s Star - which was presented to me in London by HRH Princess Louise.  It made quite a sensation in the school and the local paper.  People, certainly members of staff at the school, started realising I had something of a flare for artwork.  I was given lots of work to do for school posters for Gilbert and Sullivan performances and such like.  The Headmaster, who was the least sympathetic man in the school as far as I was concerned, said at morning assembly “There is only one boy allowed to grow his hair long, and that is Holland, because he is an artist”.

Having passed the necessary general examinations, I went to the local Art School, which was just a short distance away from the Mathematical School.

 

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.]

 

Sketches of me

It is perhaps a little unfair of me to include sketches of family members and none of me.  It is also unfair that I include Sal Shuel's memories of being drawn by her father and none of my own.  This first one is in a sketch book from 1975 and shows me trying my own hand at doing some art work.  The resulting oil painting of a bowl of fruit is without talent, but Dad clearly had fun sketching me painting fruit!

 

The next image is one of those tricky moments when an artist has a moment of inspiration, in this case with a clash of colours.  I was stuck on that staircase for nearly an hour until Mum decided that she needed to go upstairs and I really wanted my breakfast!

 

The final image is one that was done to try to get the facial angle right from the previous sketches and was done a while later.  Any enthusiasm from me for this particular picture was long gone, as is clear from the sketch - 12 year olds are not always keen on this sort of thing!

 

A glitch at Typepad

I apologise for the lack of posts recently to provide more information on James Holland, his life and work. Unfortunately the platform hosting this site seems to have a problem with layouts (being able to make paragraphs for example) and will not load photographs or images for the moment. I will seek support and hope that normal service will be resumed shortly. Apologies.

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.

 

The joy of an artist in the family

While living in our house, there was always the risk of having to pose for an impromptu sketch or (if you were lacking vigilance and a useful occupation for a Wednesday morning) even the Art Class, there were many compensations with an artist in the house.

I have indicated that holiday memories were more likely to be captured on canvas than by photograph.  Christmas cards were always special and for years my father would create a special lino cut (the seagull, Polperro Harbour and Lowestoft Harbour all served along with other).  The challenge for my mother was that Dad would start with a piece of lino and work from that, but never thought when starting that the piece of lino should really be in line with a normal envelope size.  It was Mum who had to find the right size envelope for sending out the prints without folding them!

Birthdays for my mother and for me meant a special card, drawn in secrecy, and highlighting some achievement or hobby for the relevant year, with other family members and pets all part of the scene.  There will be a collection of these as a photo album in due course.

There were also pictures to provide comfort and solace.  When I was an au pair in Hamburg in 1982, I felt rather homesick for a time, and as part of my letter and packet of goodies from home one week, I received the portrait below of my dog, along with a letter "from" him, keeping me up to speed with news from home.

 
[Caspar Self Portrait, 1982, pen and felt tip on paper, in a private collection]

 

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.