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First published by William Collins Sons & Co Ltd 1991

This edition published in paperback 1996

Copyright © Kenneth Pople 1991

Kenneth Pople asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780002556644

Ebook Edition © JUNE 2016 ISBN: 9780008193287

Version: 2016-06-07

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Preamble

Part One: The Early Cookham Years 1891–1915

1 The Coming of the Wise Men

2 The Fairy on the Waterlily Leaf

3 John Donne Arriving in Heaven

4 Apple Gatherers

5 The Nativity

6 Self-Portrait, 1914

7 The Centurion’s Servant

8 Cookham, 1914

9 Swan Upping

10 Christ Carrying the Cross

Part Two: The Confusions of War 1915–1918

11 The Burghclere Chapel: The Beaufort panels

12 The Burghclere Chapel: Tweseldown

13 The Burghclere Chapel: The left-wall frieze

14 The Burghclere Chapel: The right-wall frieze

15 The Burghclere Chapel: The 1917 summer panels

16 The Burghclere Chapel: The infantry panels

17 The Sword of the Lord and of Gideon

Part Three: The Years of Recovery 1919–1924

18 Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem

19 Travoys Arriving with Wounded Soldiers at a Dressing Station at Smol, Macedonia

20 The Last Supper

21 The Crucifixion, 1921

22 The Betrayal, 1923

Part Four: The Great Resurrections 1924–1931

23 The Resurrection in Cookham Churchyard

24 Burghclere: The Resurrection of Soldiers

Part Five: Return to Cookham 1932–1936

25 The Church of Me

26 Portrait of Patricia Preece

27 The Dustman, or The Lovers

28 Love on the Moor

29 St Francis and the Birds

30 By the River

31 Love Among the Nations

32 Bridesmaids at Cana

Part Six: The Marital Disasters 1936–1939

33 Self-Portrait with Patricia Preece

34 Hilda, Unity and Dolls

35 A Village in Heaven

36 Adoration of Old Men

37 The Beatitudes of Love

38 Christ in the Wilderness

Part Seven: Resurgence 1940–19

39 Village Life, Gloucestershire

40 Shipbuilding on the Clyde: Burners

41 The Scrapbook Drawings

42 The Port Glasgow Resurrections: Reunion

43 The Resurrection with the Raising of Jairus’ Daughter

44 Christ Delivered to the People

Part Eight: The Reclaiming of Hilda 1951–1959

45 The Marriage at Cana: Bride and Bridegroom

46 The Crucifixion

47 Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta

48 Envoi

Footnotes

Sources and Acknowledgements

Notes and References

Index

About the Publisher

I will make the poems of materials, for I think they are to be

the most spiritual poems,

And I will make the poems of my body and of mortality,

For I think I shall then supply myself with the poems of my soul

and of immortality. …

Walt Whitman: Starting from Paumanock

Preamble

I often think I would enjoy writing more if it were not dependent on thoughts logically following each other. But I think this limits the capacity of thought and cuts it off from something which in its undisturbed condition it can deal with and perform.

Stanley Spencer¹

IN 1938, some of Spencer’s friends and associates urged him to assemble his thoughts into an autobiography. They included his dealer Dudley Tooth, the newly appointed director of the Tate Gallery John Rothenstein, and the publisher Victor Gollancz, whose wife had been, as Ruth Lowy, one of Spencer’s fellow-students at the Slade and an early patron.

Their intention was to help him. His personal life was in shreds, his finances in disarray, his time largely devoted to saleable but ‘pot-boiling’ landscapes, his hallowed visionary work misunderstood and largely rejected. A judicious autobiography in which he could explain his ideas and motives might, it was felt, restore his prestige.

Spencer’s first reaction was one of caution. If, he argued, the public already found much of his visionary work ‘funny’, would they not find his explanations more so? Then suddenly he became enthusiastic. He would indeed write an autobiography. But it would not be assembled in the normal chronological arrangement. It would be a leisurely ‘stroll’ through his life, with pauses, diversions and retraces as the mood took him, a putting down on paper of the events, thoughts and feelings of his entire life to date. Nothing would be omitted. But neither would anything be stressed. The reader, making the journey with him, would be free to find the clues to his life, thinking and art, as Spencer himself had, often in strange and unexpected places.

The promoters were aghast. Some editing, they urged, must be accepted: ‘You are being offered a chance that you would be absolutely crazy to turn down,’² fumed Dudley Tooth. Spencer remained unmoved: ‘I would rather a book on myself and my work were a confused heap and mass of matter from which much could be gathered than risk something of myself being left out in the interests of conciseness.’³ The venture collapsed.

Spencer, despite the travail of his circumstances, was blithely unrepentant. The fact was that, seized by the idea, he had already started on the project in private and was to continue it for the rest of his days. There was no discernible pattern to his writings. He would compose extensive essays in thick notebooks, but equally make random jottings in scrapbooks, on drawings, on scraps of letters, on old envelopes, on anything to hand. He seldom kept letters but would draft replies, often unposted because having sorted out his thoughts in them they became more valuable to him in his own possession than in that of the intended recipient. Others were unsent because on reflection he felt their sentiments were too confessional or, in other moods, too accusatory. By the end of his life the writings totalled millions of words, heaped into several trunks into which he would dip to reread, reannotate, re-paginate, rearrange. ‘You can burn those,’ he told his brother Percy when he knew his time was measured. But by his death, in December of 1959, the matter had passed from Percy’s hands, and in any case Percy did not want the responsibility.

To read them now is a disturbing experience, for they are expressed with an intensity he would normally have denied the public gaze. They have been sieved by scholars for references to his paintings, but, interesting though these are, they offer little in the way of immediate illumination. Spencer knew this. They are written in a code, a language of his own which appears to be the language we also use, but is not. The language was born not of secrecy but from the impossibility all artists face, in whatever medium, of finding in the words or images or symbols they are given to use that universality their imagination perceives. In them his thoughts flow like a stream of consciousness, turning and twisting, so that the reader is soon lost in a tangle of developments and, if he or she can summon the will, must go back again and again to re-chart their course over even a few of the many thousands of pages. The surprise is that to each development there is invariably a beginning and an end; however many diversions Spencer took on the way, he usually knew both his direction and his destination. His imagery, bizarre and esoteric though it often seems, captures both the exuberance of his associations and the precision with which he externalized it in his art.

In venturing today into this study of Spencer’s life and art, boldness is offered; but it is boldness disciplined by the sense of the totality of his experience. An artistic interpretation which ignores Spencer’s material existence will remain truncated. Yet a biography which blinds itself to the revelation in his paintings of the facts of his existence can only perpetuate the superficiality which saw him – and sometimes sees him still – as whimsical or innocent or unworldy or even as blasphemer or pornographer. His oddities are, like the highly personal and visionary paintings he undertook, sudden flashes of lightning, often charged over long periods, which momentarily illuminate climaxes in a continuous procession in his mind, an inner pageant. The pageant overwhelmed him. To its service he dedicated both his art and his everyday existence. When he could reconcile them, he knew happiness. When they conflicted, he was torn. The demands of art invariably won, but the cost in material sacrifice could be cruelly high.

It would be a rash interpreter who claimed complete elucidation for so complex a personality. Spencer used his art to explain himself to himself. As with the poetry and prose of his contemporaries Eliot, Pound and Joyce, it is the exactness of personal detail in Spencer’s paintings which makes so many incomprehensible or uncomfortable. But the paintings were not intended to prompt discomfort. He lived in hope that the public would catch up with him. His art, perceived through sympathetic understanding of his life, can reveal a transcendent outlook, an intriguing and majestic vision of life which some may dismiss as no more than typical of his time, but which most may joyously recognise as having eternal and universal import.

A work of great art – pictorial, musical or literary – reaches out and touches some profundity in our nature independently of its maker. Awed, we may wish to know more of him or her. The quest is often disappointing. We can know nothing of Homer, little of Dante or Shakespeare. Of later artists, of whom we can search to know more, we sometimes ask ourselves how such fallible men and women could produce such sublimity. The purpose of this study is not to dissect Spencer and his art. Rather is it to recapture through the medium of his own words that sense of the wondrous and mysterious through which he became someone other than the everyday artist people thought they knew, and entered a heaven of his own which he felt he had to strive, through imagery, to share with us. Thus the narrative pauses at some of the major paintings representative of the main periods and events of Spencer’s life and offers suggestions as to their emotional origins. (The majority have been chosen as being available in public galleries. They may not always be on display, but can usually be seen by prior arrangement.)

Throughout this book, Spencer – Sir Stanley Spencer CBE, RA, Hon. D. Litt. – is referred to as ‘Stanley’, not as a mark of familiarity, but in order to distinguish him from his many brothers, and especially from his artist-brother Gilbert, with whom he was sometimes confused. Textually his writings have been rendered into conventional spelling and punctuation, no easy matter at times when he was in full flight. Occasionally bracketed insertions have been made to catch the sense of his often elided thought.

The obvious starting-point for the search for Stanley’s inner pageant must be the Thames-side village of Cookham where, in the cool unsettled summer of 1891, on 30 June, he was born.

PART ONE

The Early Cookham Years

1891–1915

CHAPTER ONE

The Coming of the Wise Men

I am actually old enough to remember the Victorian Age; and it was almost a complete contrast to all that is now connoted by that word. It had all the vices that are now called virtues; religious doubt, intellectual unrest, a hungry credulity about new things, a complete lack of equilibrium. It also had all the virtues that are now called vices; a rich sense of romance, a passionate desire to make the love of man and woman once more what it was in Eden, a strong sense of the absolute necessity of some significance in human life.

G. K. Chesterton: Autobiography¹

COOKHAM VILLAGE lies some thirty miles from London along the favoured stretch of the Thames from Henley, past Marlow and Cliveden, to Boulter’s Lock and Maidenhead Bridge. It rests on the slightest of rises at a point where the eastward-flowing river makes an abrupt right-angle bend south against the bluffs of Cliveden Woods. Lying within the elbow of the bend, the village is in effect an island, for the river may once have made its course on the other side of the rise, isolating it today by its low-lying remnants – Marsh Meadows to the north, Cookham Moor to the west, Widbrook Common to the south, and Odney Common to the east. These water-meadows often flooded in Stanley’s boyhood, and the winter rising of the river was anxiously watched, as Stanley’s brother Sydney notes in his diary for January 1912: ‘I went up the river and saw the heron high in the air flying towards Hedsor, dim in the rain. A peewit and a seagull met, exchanged compliments by numerous tumblings, then went their several ways. Cattle were taken off the Moor this morning and pigs from Randall’s styes this evening.’² For this reason extension of the village has not been possible and under protective preservation it remains virtually as Stanley knew it in his boyhood.

A few cosmetic alterations have occurred. The malthouses whose cowls once dominated the village have gone, the blacksmith’s forge is now a restaurant, the village shops have become boutiques or tea rooms, Ovey’s Farm in the High Street is now a residence, its barns a garage and filling station, and the former Methodist Chapel is now the Stanley Spencer Gallery. But in its structural appearance the village remains much as it was in the early decades of the nineteenth century when Stanley’s paternal grandfather arrived from Hertfordshire to help build the superior residences locked inside their high red-brick walls which Victorian genteel wealth and the new commuter railway system from London were imposing on the neighbourhood. A builder by profession but a musician by inclination – he inaugurated a village choir – Grandpa Julius prospered sufficiently to produce two families by two marriages, thus giving Stanley a profusion of ‘cousins’ in the village. His Spencers were the product of Grandpa Julius’ second marriage.

For the two sons of the marriage, Grandpa Julius demolished a row of small cottages in the High Street and replaced them with a pair of semi-detached villas. The elder son, Julius, occupied Belmont, the left-hand villa facing from the road. He had a family of daughters – Stanley’s ‘girl-cousins’ – and was managing clerk to a firm of London solicitors. The younger son, William – ‘Pa’ to Stanley – occupied the right-hand villa, Fernlea, and was a dedicated musician. The piano and violin being Victorian social accomplishments much in demand, he set up as the local music ‘professor’, cycling to teach the children of the grand middle-class houses – Rosamond Lehmann remembers a ‘gentle old man with a white beard’ – and welcoming the humbler in his home.³ The succession of little girls sitting in the hall awaiting their piano lesson was a long-standing Stanley memory, and he did much of his early painting to the accompaniment of their halting efforts.

Pa supplemented his income by acting as church organist, mainly at St Nicholas, Hedsor, in the advowson of Lord and Lady Boston. Lord Boston had been one of his piano pupils, and in those days of discreet patronage the Bostons did much to help their church organist. They allowed him, for example, to enjoy the study of the stars in their private observatory and on one occasion met his expenses on a cycling holiday along the south coast while his wife, Annie, relaxed at Eastbourne. From his Pa, Stanley asserted, he took his ‘sense of wonder’, and from Ma his small frame and his sense of the dramatic. Ma was an excellent mimic, a gift which Stanley inherited and could use to social effect.⁴

Ma – Anna Caroline Slack, but Annie always – had been a soprano in old Julius’ choir when Pa married her in 1873. Their eldest son, William – ‘Will’ – was invited at the age of seven to play Beethoven before the Duke of Westminster and his guest the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) at the nearby mansion of Cliveden. The Prince was so impressed that he presented Will with a piano. At fourteen Will gave a public concert at the prestigious Queen’s Hall in London, and under the Duke’s patronage studied and graduated at the Royal College of Music. There he was followed by his brother Harold, a violinist. Today the elder of their two sisters, Anna – Annie always – would have followed them, but the custom of the day decreed that she act as helpmeet to her mother and as a not altogether willing nursemaid to the two youngest sons, Stanley and Gilbert. There were eleven children in all. Florence (Flongy) was the younger sister. The other sons were Horace, who delighted in conjuring and did so professionally; Percy, a keen cellist; and Sydney (Hengy). Stanley was ‘Tongly’ and Gilbert ‘Gibbertry’, presumably as derivations of childish attempts at pronouncing their names. A pair of twins died in infancy.

Will was about to be offered a teaching post in Bristol when he suffered a nervous breakdown.⁵ In Ma’s view it was brought on by Pa’s relentless pressure towards the highest professional standards, a characteristic which all the siblings inherited in their various careers. The collapse necessitated expensive medical treatment at Virginia Water and impoverished the previously thriving household so much that Percy had to give up the prospect of articles with his uncle Julius’ law firm and take a job at a neighbouring sawmill; half his meagre pay went to the family. In the crisis Florence took a post as governess, and Sydney, who intended to go into the church, had to restrict his studies to night schools and crammers, later supported by Will. For, having recovered, Will had obtained a post as piano master at Cologne Conservatoire and had there met and wed Johanna, daughter of a prosperous Berlin family.*

In few families can there have been such close identity of interests and passions. There was the devoted and scholarly respect for music which the children shared all their lives. Pianos, violins, violas and cellos were part of their upbringing. So were books, for in all the siblings lay the fierce intent to expand their knowledge and imagination through literature. Will and Sydney kept detailed diaries, lovingly preserved by Florence, who herself had her family recollections typed and bound. Pa’s idealistic venture at promoting a village library failed from sheer high-mindedness in the choice of books. All the family were inveterate talkers, for Pa encouraged discussion, especially at mealtimes, on any topic from politics – they were Liberals – to poetry, philosophy, psychology or religion. He worshipped Ruskin. The family were soaked in the language of the King James Bible, for Pa adopted the prevailing custom of family Bible-reading, a habit Stanley was to continue all his life.

The family possessed astonishingly retentive memories both auditory and visual. Will could memorize a page of music or a restaurant menu at one reading, and Stanley could instantly replay a once-heard piano piece which interested him. The acuity of Stanley’s visual memory was a cornerstone of much of his painting. Images from a multitude of sources – places, people, gestures, happenings, books, newspapers, paintings, exhibitions – flooded his mind and could be recalled when needed, even years later, with photographic accuracy.

As a family they were encyclopaedic acquirers of information and catholic in their interests. All were immersed in a countryman’s instinctive and unsentimental solicitude for nature. Percy, in his role of big brother to Sydney, Stanley and Gilbert, took them birdwatching. Sydney’s diaries are full of rhapsodies: ‘Went up Barley Hill in the dark and gathered poppies and a little corn. I love to see the poppies looking jet-black against the corn. Saw three glow-worms. …’⁶ Pa’s sense of wonder never palled: ‘I crossed London Bridge on Tuesday and could have stood for hours watching the flight of the seagulls – surely the acme of graceful motion. And yet the people passed by without a glance. …’⁷ Will, translating Heine: ‘I discovered that we have no word which quite gives the feeling of Wehmut. “Full of sadness” means more than “sadly” but not quite the same as “sorrowful”. This brought to my mind a word I had not thought of for years – “tristful”. I think the goddess of poetry herself must have helped me to think of it. It more nearly gives the meaning of Wehmut than any word we have.’⁸ And Stanley: ‘The marsh meadows full of flowers left me with an aching longing, and in my art that longing was among the first I sought to satisfy …’⁹ but, as we shall see, not always in the manner we might conventionally expect.

With these characteristics went an inbuilt instinct for mastery in whatever they undertook. Will, for example, who had been speaking German fluently for years, one day made a slight mistake for which Johanna corrected him.¹⁰ Appalled, he promptly devoted an hour and a half every day to the complete memorization of every detail of German grammar. A similar search for perfection could make Stanley an exhausting companion. As a family they loved charades and games, and were determined solvers of puzzles and problems. Occupied by an erudite question of musical interpretation, Will could divert time to finding the highest score possible at dominoes. Percy’s essential function at the substantial London building firm of Holloway and Greenwood, to which he had ascended from his sawmill, was, according to Stanley, ‘getting the aforesaid gentlemen out of scrapes’.¹¹ Gilbert became a considerable bridge player whose skill was in demand at Bloomsbury parties. Horace’s aptitude in conjuring was not an unforeseen eccentricity but a deeply rooted family characteristic. Above all they shared a continual search for comprehension and validity in experience.

‘Home’ had a special meaning for Stanley. His childhood memories would recur time and again in his paintings. Home was where he was ‘cosy’, tucked up in the safe embrace of those who loved him and shared his values.* At home he was shielded from the incomprehensible threats which lurked in the world outside; threats quite specific from some of the village boys who were contemptuous of his slight build and tried to bully him – he was to find a defence in the sharpness of his tongue – or from those villagers who had “no means of understanding his exaltations and thought him ‘funny’. Home was where he first experienced the impact of those feelings he came to know as ‘happiness’. His happiest feelings, as he frequently emphasized, were those of a baby safe in the known confines of its pram, gazing in wide-eyed wonder at the larger world it saw beyond; except that in Stanley’s analogy the larger world was not only physical but, more significantly, metaphysical – what he called ‘spiritual’. Home meant handholding, the sanctuary he found as a child when walking with Pa or Annie lest the sensed terror of becoming lost befall him. It represented that peace of mind in which his and mankind’s spirit is free to soar untrammelled by emotional bewilderment. All his life Stanley’s deepest commitments were to be to those who, like his family in childhood, were willing and able to handhold, to set fire to his imagination and help solve the deep mysteries which beset him.

Stanley’s schooling took place at his sisters’ dame school, a corrugated iron hut in the next-door garden; Pa was disdainful of the new state product, the village National School. A born educator, Pa had started the school with the help of two local ladies, the Misses George. When they emigrated, his daughters took over. At school, even though taught by his sisters, Stanley became convinced that he was not bright in the scholastic sense. Indeed there were times when he felt himself a ‘dunce’, for he had no facility in the linear logic so necessary in mathematics or in narrative writing. Composing formal or business letters was a penance to him: ‘I have written a letter and hated it, it is so young. I do not mind being young, but it comes out in such an objectionable manner in my letter.’¹³ But in school drawing lessons he came into his inheritance and found that he could ‘become a boy like any other’. For then his mind functioned as he needed.

Stanley’s compulsion to take up art bemused his musical father.* But typically Pa devoted his persistent energy – which Stanley inherited – to winning for his son the best possible training. It began in 1906 – 7 with lessons from Dorothy Bailey, a young local woman who had some leanings as an artist.¹⁵ This was followed by a year at Maidenhead Technical College, mainly drawing plaster casts. Then, initially under the financial patronage of Lady Boston, who had herself studied at the Slade, Stanley was accepted there. He travelled each day by train. For the first few days Pa escorted him. When Stanley felt confident to go by himself, he refused to diverge from the known route unless he were given detailed information beforehand. This unadventurousness was due not so much to timidity as to an innate characteristic which insisted, both in his everyday life and in his art, that he should always know exactly where he was, what he had to do and why, and to a reluctance to take guidance on trust.

To cosmopolitan London thinking, such precision was misinterpreted as parochialism. In the summer of 1911 Henry Tonks, the formidable drawing master at the Slade, decided that Stanley needed his experience of the world widened and arranged for him to stay with a farmer friend at Clayhiden, near Taunton. He might as profitably have sent Stanley to the moon. Sydney, the brother who perhaps most clearly understood Stanley, saw the pointlessness of the exercise: ‘I beseeched him by all the love he had for me not to go. But he went.’¹⁶

Stanley tolerated the event on an everyday level, but the drawings he managed were purely formal. The place meant nothing to him compared with Cookham and its associations. Tonks realized he had made a mistake and did not repeat the error. But in a letter to Florence, Stanley chanced to describe a farmworker he had seen there: ‘the old man that I drew, a labourer, was most pathetic. He had knocked off work owing to the heat and looked very ill. His face was beaten and cut with the sword of age. You could divide his face up like a [jigsaw] puzzle.’¹⁷ Yet this vivid comment came from the ‘dunce’ who at the time could not for the life of him compose a business letter. The quality of Stanley’s mind is becoming apparent.

CHAPTER TWO

The Fairy on the Waterlily Leaf

All my drawings are self-portraits, and no amount of ‘abstract’ or what-not will conceal from that.

Stanley Spencer¹

AT THE SLADE, which Stanley attended from 1908 to 1912, his talents were quickly recognized. In 1909 he was awarded an endowed scholarship and became financially, if modestly, independent. ‘Our genius’ became the epithet half enviously, half affectionately given to the young Stanley by his fellow-students. It did not prevent some of them from ragging or playing practical jokes on him, which he tolerated good-humouredly, except when directed at his art and its integrity. His dedicated nature had little patience with the public-school-type humour prevalent among some of the well-heeled young bloods there. Goaded on one occasion beyond endurance, he silenced one tormentor by pouring white paint over his new suit.*

It was the custom for the students, girls included, to be known only by their surnames. Stanley became not Spencer, but ‘Cookham’. Among the star students of his years – Allinson, Gertler, Nevinson, Currie, Brett, Raverat, Japp, Carrington, Wadsworth, Roberts, Bömberg and Rosenberg – was Gwen Darwin, granddaughter of Charles Darwin, and reared in the academic atmosphere of Cambridge. Six years older than Stanley in age but perhaps a lifetime older in practical experience, Gwen took the young genius under her wing. He needed sympathetic guidance, a spiritual handholder.

The Slade students then were in the forefront of the Edwardian counterblast to Victorian materialism and sentimentality. It was an exciting age in which to be young. In contact at the Slade with lively young minds inevitably fascinated by the new modernism, Stanley encountered moments when his cautious and deliberate absorption of experience was misunderstood. His celebrated reply when asked at the Slade what he thought of Picasso – that he, Stanley, had ‘not got beyond Piero della Francesca’ – was considered supercilious. But Stanley did not mean to be patronizing. His mind was an instrument which sought connection, and the operation required time. Although he understood the aims of modernism and indeed shared its essential techniques, the fragmentation of its venturing repelled his instinct for totality. Starting from Pa’s advocacy of Ruskin and Tonks’ enthusiasm for early Renaissance painting, Stanley found in medieval art a serenity which matched his aspirations. Artists then, he argued, were integrated members of a stable culture. They were workmen – stone carvers in the Gothic north, mosaicists and fresco painters in the classical south – whose everyday talents were devoted to the beautifying of the churches, chapels, abbeys and great cathedrals which across Western Europe dedicated political power and economic wealth to the glory of the God who had accomplished them. Ruskin, in his opulent prose, set one such painter in his time:

Giotto, like all the great painters of the period, was merely a travelling decorator of walls, at so much a day, having at Florence a bottega or workshop for the production of small tempera pictures. There were no such things as ‘studios’ in those days. An artist’s ‘studies’ were over by the time he was eighteen; after that he was a lavatore, a ‘labourer’, a man who knew the business and produced certain works of known value for a known price, being troubled with no philosophical abstractions, shutting himself in no wise for the reception of inspiration; receiving indeed a good many as a matter of course, just as he received the sunbeams that came in at his window, the light which he worked by; – in either case without mouthing about it, or merely concerning himself as to the nature of it.

How exactly the sentiments matched Stanley’s! First written in the 1850s, they were published in reprint by George Allen in 1900 as Giotto and his Works at Padua. Gwen lent Stanley a copy. The glory of the subject was to remain evergreen throughout his life. The apprentice Stanley had no problem with his sunbeams; what he needed was the technique to manifest them. Although Stanley absorbed the excitements of the times, he rebuffed attempts at the Slade to recruit him to partisanship. The function of the place was simply to teach him to draw.

Academically, the Slade emphasized precision in line, a feature which reflected the forceful personality of Tonks. A surgeon by profession, he had long been fascinated by art and was delighted to be enticed into teaching by his friend Ernest Brown, the Slade Professor. A tingling of apprehension would herald his visits to the students working in the lofty hall of the men’s Life Class. The college organized a sketch club which held periodic competitions on set subjects, usually biblical. The entries, submitted anonymously, were judged by Tonks, and the prizes were welcome, especially to the poorer scholarship students. Unfortunately Stanley seldom won,* not because his draughtsmanship was inferior but because his compositions were judged not to illustrate the set theme effectively. Herein lies the first indication of a misunderstanding of the intention of Stanley’s art which was to dog him all his life, and which indeed persists in some respects to this day.

Most of Stanley’s early drawings – he had not yet seriously ventured into painting – are entries for these competitions. However, The Fairy on the Waterlily Leaf was drawn at the request of a Miss White of Bourne End to illustrate a fairy story she had written.⁴ She must have been surprised at the result. Stanley’s fairy is no elfin figure, but a substantial young lady impossibly posed on two waterlily leaves which in real life would instantly have sunk under her weight. But of course this is not real life, so Stanley portrays the prince who woos her as a Renaissance figure. He was copied from one of Stanley’s Slade life-class studies of a male model there called Edmunds.

The fairy too was drawn from life. Her name was Dorothy Wooster (Worster). She and her sister Emily were cousins and had been school pupils with Stanley and Gilbert. But the significant fact about Dorothy was that Stanley was boyishly attracted to her, as was Gilbert to Emily, despite their father, the local butcher, being parentally suspicious of the young Spencers’ interest in his daughters.

Stanley’s patron had evidently asked for a drawing showing the love of a prince for a fairy. His method of imagining it was to assemble from his own experience images with which he could reproduce the emotion of that theme. The prince was in love with his fairy; he, Stanley, was in love with Dot. So he simply draws her in the situation, buoyant and beautiful because she is loved. The fact that she would sink like a stone was irrelevant: to Stanley the reality of the imagery is subservient to its emotion. However, Stanley admits that the fairy would be small, so he diminishes her by extending the wheat-stalks on the left. There would be water, so what better location than one eventful in his boyhood memory, a little sandy beach by the bank of the Thames where, Florence tells us, all the Spencer children loved to play when young. Simple, one might say, almost ‘primitive’.

But there is in the drawing a curious detail. In the top left, three flowers or marsh plants are reflected as though on the surface of a pond. In many future paintings we shall find similar detail inserted apparently randomly. Yet its presence can change the entire emphasis of the work. In this case, it suggests that Stanley has turned the smooth surface of the pond from the horizontal to the vertical, so that it becomes a reflecting plate-glass window. The world beyond it is enchanted, its apprehension as intangible as the world Stanley entered when he heard fine music played; the flower reflections have taken the form of musical crochets. The fairy is an emanation from that world, but when the magic ends must return to it. The prince, being of the ‘real’ world, cannot enter that land. Stanley ruefully confesses in his letters that he never had great success with the village girls – ‘buds’ to him – and his anticipation at walking and talking with them was invariably disappointed when they failed to match his soaring expectations. Still, he was asked for a drawing of love, and so his love for Dot, which is the love of the prince for the fairy, which is the theme of love in the drawing, becomes a transcendence of the physical into that magic state Stanley cannot yet attain but which he knows to be the spiritual, ‘heaven’.

The authoress rejected the drawing. Its heavy, earthy presentation failed to meet the ethereal romanticism she evidently expected. She must have been as puzzled and offended by it as Stanley was puzzled and disappointed at its rejection. The two minds simply did not meet. In July 1919 he gave it as a wedding present to Ruth Lowy, whose family lived near Cookham. She and Stanley often travelled together on the train to London and the Slade, and she had bought some of his early work. Neither Ruth nor her husband, Victor Gollancz, could understand why Stanley had selected it as a gift. They asked him what it meant. Stanley was again disappointed. It did not, he told Gollancz, mean anything: ‘I do not know that my picture is called anything. The lady on the waterlily leaf is a fairy if you please, and of course the boy on the bank is Edmunds, but honestly I do not know what the picture is all about. You might give the persons depicted a different name for every day in the week with special names for High days and Holidays.’⁵ ‘I was loving something desperately,’ he was to say of these years, ‘but what this was I had not the least idea. I took the first thing I came to and proceeded to draw it.’ His drawing, an honouring of the dawning in his awareness of the miracle of love, derived from deep personal feeling, still unclarified. He meant the figures to be universal. Was this not apparent? Did he really have to spell it out? How could he?

CHAPTER THREE

John Donne Arriving in Heaven

God will speak unto me, in that voice and in that way, which I am most delighted with and hearken most to. If I be covetous, God will tell me that heaven is a pearl, a treasure. If cheerful and affected with mirth, that heaven is all joy. If sociable and conversable, that it is a communion of saints.

John Donne: Sermon CXX, preached at St Paul’s.¹

IT IS NOW 1911. Two Stanleys are emerging. The Stanley in the tangible world is exploring. His schooling, his reading, his discussions, particularly with his sisters as teachers and with his brother Sydney, begin to reveal that world to him at the physical level. The embryonic world-space of childhood Fernlea extends to the wider geography of Cookham village. The magic for Stanley of the one pervades the other. The cowls of the malthouses behind Fernlea rotate in the wind like the eyes of God. The blacksmith’s anvil rings like the cries of the damned in Dante’s Inferno. Known possessions of villagers, once treasured, appear miraculously as discards on the village rubbish heap. Builders mysteriously carry ladders to unseen destinations. Swans are caught, carpet-bagged for their annual marking, and trundled astonishingly down the High Street in wheelbarrows. Summer steam-launches disgorge hordes of excursionists on to the riverside lawns of the Ferry Hotel, beings as remote to Stanley as those who come for the annual regatta, effete young sprigs in boaters and blazers who lose their punt poles in the river, or fiercely athletic men who swim and row, both with elegant women in tow, whose new, less corseted Paris fashions startle: ‘In Cookham the idle rich have been having some sort of competition for the best bosoms and busts. Ladies patrol the streets boneless utterly. There is one thing, they keep the dogs from barking.’²

His family-feeling, the reciprocity of home, is tentatively projected outwards to the places and people of Cookham. The places become inwardly, privately, his. But many of the people are too individualistic to be absorbed. Sometimes he achieves response from them, often not. He views them occasionally with passion, frequently only in amusement or sardonically. If they are to be absorbed, they must die for him in their material form and be reborn as emanations from the place-meanings Cookham holds for him.

Places in Cookham mean specific spots – meadows, riverbanks, trackways, copses – in which he finds, or suddenly found, an ecstasy of sensation. He does not know why they bring such ecstasy, he only knows the sensation to be joyous and to spark creativity.

We swim and look at the bank over the rushes. I swim right in the pathway of sunlight. I go home to breakfast thinking as I go of the beautiful wholeness of the day. During the morning I am visited, and walk about being in that visitation. Now everything seems more definite and to put on a new meaning and freshness. In the afternoon I set my work out and begin my picture. I leave off at dusk, fully delighted with the spiritual labour I have done.³

Always the drawing came first. When he begins at last to paint – Two Girls and a Beehive (1910) is thought to be his first – he sometimes makes a preliminary wash to test the compositional effect. Then he often measures a pencil grid across the drawing with draughtsman’s exactitude. He covers the canvas with the equivalent grid scaled up and sketches the outlines of the drawing in their co-ordinated positions on the canvas. Working usually from one side or corner, he almost blocks in the paint to create solidity of form. In early paintings the paint is applied thickly, but later, in the heat of passion, sometimes so thinly that the underlying outline shows through or is reinforced. Oil was his favoured medium. He was virtually self-taught in its use, and later claimed that at the Slade he was given only three or so days’ painting tuition, working on a single model: ‘three days out of four years!’

After Will’s breakdown Ma won the right to promote her values rather than Pa’s in the upbringing of the youngest sons. She liked them to accompany her to Sunday worship in the village Methodist chapel. As the boys grew older, the fundamentalist nature of the chapel worship failed to provide the richer fare they needed. Stanley, on the road to discovering his ‘metaphysicals’, as Gilbert called them, pleads for help from Gwen:

You must understand that I have had a thorough grounding in Wesleyan Methodism. I have listened to a thousand sermons and would like something to counterbalance this. I would like to read about St Francis and St Thomas Aquinas. I have come out of the Chapel sometimes shaking with emotion. Gil and I used to get so excited that we could not face the prayer-meeting. By the time I had reached the prayer-meeting pitch I felt I was ready to break down. The end of the prayer-meeting was ghastly always, a man would say in a whisper: ‘Is there any poor wandering soul here tonight who has not heard the call of Jesus? He is passing by, passing by …’ A long pause. Of course, I used to feel that I had done wrong in not going up to the stand to acknowledge my conversion, as you are supposed to do. … About this there was a wretched clammy atmosphere, and it used to get well hold of you, and it has not gone yet.⁴

Among the books Gwen lent him was a selection of John Donne’s Sermons. Stanley could not grasp all their meaning, but was excited by a glimpse of spiritual nourishment which seemed to him to exceed the doctrinal exhortation which had been his gruel till then. The earthly joy his Cookham-feelings gave him must, he thought, be equations of the eternal joy which is the Christian celebration of heaven. Those places in Cookham which are associated with such joy must therefore be ‘holy’.

Widbrook Common is, Florence tells us, the heaven which John Donne approaches in Stanley’s next major painting, John Donne Arriving in Heaven. Reading John Donne, Stanley seemed ‘to get an impression of a side view of Heaven as I imagined it to be, and from that thought [fell] to imagining how people behaved there. … As I was thinking like this I seemed to see four people praying in different directions.’⁵ In the painting, heaven becomes an infinity in which the saints are placed in a compositional balance which reflects exactness of feeling.* The Common was a favourite picnic spot of the Spencers and well worth the walk there, even on a hot day, as Florence recounts:

Sutton Road [the main road towards Maidenhead from the ‘east end’ of the village] was an alleyed shadeless desert which must be traversed if one would win through to Widbrook Common, loveliest of commons, and when in the course of time … at Cliveden the old Duke of Westminster was succeeded by a gentleman named Waldorf Astor, the pilgrimage to Widbrook on hot summer days became well-nigh intolerable … for he stretched a glaring brick wall, of immense height it seemed to us, surmounted by broken glass, along Sutton Road, blotting out the view of Cliveden Woods which had until then helped our journey along. Mr Astor, familiarly known to us as Mr Walled-off Astor, was afraid, we were told, that his son would be kidnapped … perfectly preposterous in the familiar Cookham of our hearts.⁷

The wall must still be ‘traversed’ if one wishes to reach Widbrook Common, now a nature reserve. But the Common has no cliffs. These, Florence tells us, are derived from the same Thames riverbank which appeared in The Fairy on the Waterlily Leaf. Since the two are geographically distant, Stanley is not being illustrative. He is not saying, ‘I see Widbrook Common as heaven.’ Instead he is assembling from his experience places in which he had mysteriously felt the sanctity of ecstasy, and is collaging or conjoining them to convey a feeling or concept of heaven. The places are not intended as symbolic or universal. They have no meaning outside his experience of them. He presumes we all have such places in our memories which evoke similar feelings for us, and that we are able to recognize that those he shows in his painting are but signposts to personal feeling. It is that feeling which he is trying to capture and to universalize.

Stanley presented his painting at the Slade for comment. It did not please Tonks, but it came to the attention of Clive Bell, who was setting up with Roger Fry the second of the two seminal post-impressionist exhibitions of those years in London. The first, in 1910 at the Grafton Galleries, had burst like a bombshell on a largely insular British public, creating a furore and dividing the art establishment into the reactionary and the progressive. Bell selected Stanley’s painting for inclusion in the 1912 exhibition also at the Grafton Galleries where in the English section it was hung with works by Wyndham Lewis, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, Henry Lamb and Roger Fry to match the corresponding works of Cézanne, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, and Kandinsky in the Octagon. Critics, viewing it, suggested that it indicated Stanley’s endorsement of post-impressionism. Some pronounced that he had not got it quite right.⁸

Once again Stanley was flummoxed. Others were defining his work by standards which had no meaning for him. The classifications of critics or art historians were their invention, not his. Stanley could be representative in so far as he took imagery from the real world; visionary in so far as he arranged it on the canvas in unexpected, often subconscious, juxtapositions; expressionist in so far as his aim was to convey personal emotion; symbolist in so far as he cast certain experiences in images which he will repeat as visual shorthand, and imitative in that he sought a visual style of the representational which, whether by instinct or example, came close in his early works to matching the attributes of impressionism. One such invoked the use of colour to replace the normal light and dark of shadow and sunlight, so that at its most exciting impressionist painting appears shadowless, its detail diffused not by light and shade but by luminous colour. In John Donne Arriving in Heaven Stanley used diffused colour in this way – except that he also inserted a sunlight which is fiercely low and hard, throwing pronounced shadows. Why? No doubt because he needed a device like the reflected flowers of The Fairy on the Waterlily Leaf to point up an emotion in the painting which was of importance to him. The strongest shadow, that of John Donne himself, zigzags to emphasize the verticality of the riverbank. The cliffs could be barriers. John Donne can see heaven beyond them, but he has not yet attained it. He is, writes Stanley, ‘walking alongside Heaven’; as, we may assume, was Stanley himself as he quietly read Donne’s sermons and poetry.*

It is at this point that Stanley departs from post-impressionism. In its perfect forms such painting deliberately avoids kinesis, drama, the sense of the onward march of events. It asks no questions, suggests no answers. It may portray activity, even action, but seldom intent. Each picture is a snapshot of a moment caught with subtlety but without regard for past or future. Respectful though Stanley was of the intensity of its concentration, such stasis could never fully satisfy a young explorer desperate in a sensed world of miracles and mystery to record his moments of discovery and illumination.

John Donne Arriving in Heaven is a totality which celebrates the excitement Stanley feels in journeying towards a concept of joy he knows exists. But in detail he is still a novice struggling through music and literature to master truths which, if they ever come to him on earth, will do so only through time and experience.

CHAPTER FOUR

Apple Gatherers

All my life I have been impressed with the idea of emergence – a train coming out of a tunnel, for instance.

Stanley Spencer¹

OUTSIDE COOKHAM – in London, at the Slade, in Taunton Stanley was the visitor, observing. But within Cookham he was emotionally the lover, absorbing: ‘I liked to take my thoughts for a walk and marry them to some place in Cookham,’² he was to say years later of his adolescence. When the place in question became sufficiently ‘holy’, Stanley’s ‘marriage’ could be almost literal, as he confessed in 1912 to Gwen Darwin: ‘I never want to leave Cookham. … I have taken some compositions [drawings] to a little place I know’ – it was off Mill Lane – ‘and buried them in the earth there.’³ Gilbert remembered that Stanley had been reading Thomas Browne’s metaphysical Urn Burial. Stanley told Florence that he put his drawings into a tin ‘and while I go up and down to London, I often think of them. This is sentimental, but it does not matter. I shall go on being so. This is all very confidential, mind.’ It had to be so because his Slade fellow-students would have ragged him unmercifully had they known.

Gwen understood. Years later she too was to describe her own childhood feelings for, of all things, the cobbles of her grandfather Charles Darwin’s patio:

To us children everything at Down was perfect. … all the flowers that grew at Down were beautiful; and different from all other flowers. Everything was different. And better.

For instance, the path in front of the verandah was made of large round water-worn pebbles, from some beach. They were not loose, but stuck down tight in moss and sand, and they were black and shiny, as if they had been polished. I adored those pebbles. I mean, literally adored; worshipped. This passion made me feel quite sick sometimes.⁴

At this probationary period in his creativity, Stanley was instinctively circumspect. Perhaps in his day and milieu there was less temptation than today to reject imbibed precepts. In any case, his innate caution would have inhibited rebellion. His mind worked associatively forward from received experience. Thus in disowning the ‘clammy atmosphere’ of his Methodist prayer-meeting he was not dismissing the basic assumptions of orthodox Christianity, but trying to reconcile them with some wider concept he was sensing. Such accretion of new experience to old expanded both. So the encompassing instinct implanted in him – the desire to absorb himself into the being of all around him – must be capable of such transcendence, and such was his approach to Apple Gatherers, painted during the Christmas – New Year vacation of 1911 – 12.⁵

The title had earlier been set as subject for a Slade Sketch Club competition and Stanley developed the painting from his drawing for the competition.* He began it at Fernlea, but when the house became crowded over Christmas, Gilbert records that he then used the empty Ship Inn, a cottage at the head of Mill Lane, once a tavern. Oddly enough, among the debris there were piles of stored apple trays. Sydney was fascinated to recount Stanley’s progress in his diary:

We had a kick or two with the football in Marsh Meadows and then went to Maidenhead to Miss Heybourne’s where Stan made purchases for his painting, I paying as his Christmas present. (2 January 1912)

Stan got on very well with his painting. The group seems to be more substantial, more at one with itself than it was. He has covered the neck of the lowest figure with a long curl which has redeemed the head to my fancy. (4 January 1912)

Stan is now engaged on the head of the chief woman figure in the painting. (5 January 1912)

Stan is now on the heads of the four men. He takes his own mouth in the mirror as a copy. Stan’s arm for the woman, too. (6 January 1912)

‘Stan’ was still working on it on 21 January, although by then it was nearing completion. Gilbert later asserted that Stanley painted it over a Resurrection he had done, and subsequent tests have substantiated that this must have been so.⁶

With so many of the Slade competitions being set on biblical themes, one might expect that the phrase ‘apple gatherers’ would bring to Stanley’s mind the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. But, however associative the topic, Stanley had no wish to be so obvious in his rendering: ‘there is no symbolic meaning whatever intended in The Apple Gatherers, and I cannot account for the fact that I have divided the sexes in the picture.’⁷ No Adam and Eve, no Garden of Eden, no biblical literalness. The Bible was allegory of great truth, but Cookham too was such a book if its pages were read with vision. Adam and Eve, the male and female in Creation, the apple, the seed. If the questioning of God and man’s subsequent disobedience led to knowledge of good and evil and a feeling of estrangement from God expressed in prudery, could it not be that the purpose of sexuality was to bring humanity back to God? When all Stanley’s Cookham-feelings drove him to that conclusion, how could he use traditional imagery? He would trust his own feelings: were they too not God-given?

From a place in Cookham he would personify his feelings, embody them in visual manifestation: ‘I wanted to see the beings that certain places would of their own spiritual essence bring forth. … I wanted the persons in the picture to continue without interruption what the place had begun in my mind and for them to be the material outcome of the place.’⁸ The place he chose was ‘a place on Odney Common where looking towards a grassy bank towards Mill Lane I had the feeling for that picture’. The spot had no orchard, so it ‘was not in my picture at all; it was the place I thought about because it seemed to bring the thought of this picture in my mind. It helped me to the frame of mind to produce this idea.’

Stanley simply transferred the place-feeling, as he had done with the river bank and Widbrook Common in John Donne Arriving in Heaven, to a known orchard, in this case one which grew in a garden beyond Fernlea, and painted that. Such transferences of associated feelings characterize all Stanley’s work. Again it is the emotion which he wished to universalize: ‘It is significant to me that in my early religious pictures done at a time when I was innocent I wanted to include in the concept the idea of men and women. I think the Apple Gatherers does say something of the fact of men and women, something that does go past and beyond the usual conceptions to whatever the relationship is.’⁹

The figures in the painting are not merely expressing a discovery of erotic awareness. They are expressing Stanley’s nascent comprehension that the purpose of the representation of males and females in his painting would be to come together in ‘fusion’, and thereby to celebrate the unity which was beginning to mean for Stanley an unfolding of the ‘identity’ of God. Why God should appear in disparate form as male and female was to Stanley a mystery. He could not accept that any division was connected with concepts of guilt or sin or punishment or banishment or the wrath of God.* To Stanley the miracle was that our instincts impel us to attempt a reconstitution of the original and ultimate unity, the Alpha and Omega. No wonder the figures in his painting are hesitant! They are being born of Creation. They see God.

In a letter of the time to his fellow-student Jacques Raverat, Stanley told him that Apple Gatherers was as significant in his thinking as Jacques’ own painting The Dancers was in his. Jacques Raverat, six years older than Stanley, was the son of a French businessman at Le Havre who combined intellectualism with a worthy propensity for making money. The latter gained him an elegant estate in Burgundy, the Château de Vienne at Prunoy; the former persuaded him to send Jacques for a liberal English education at the progressive Bedales School near Petersfield. First at the Sorbonne and then at Cambridge Jacques read mathematics, became a stalwart of the Rupert Brooke circle, and met Gwen Darwin. Gwen’s interest in art led her determinedly to the Slade in 1908 in the same student intake, as we have seen, as Stanley. A recurring illness first manifest in 1907 persuaded Jacques that his true interest also lay in art, and in the spring of 1910 he too joined the Slade. While there he and Gwen married in June 1911. Perhaps Stanley had been a little adoring of Jacques’ bride:

C-o-n-g-r-a-t-u-l-a-t-i-o-n-s! As soon as you have more babies than you want, you might give me one. Must have a wife before you can have a baby. Rotten, I call it. I used to have to eat my bread and butter before I could have my cake. Same thing. I don’t think there is any just cause or impediment why you two should not be joined together in holy matrimony, but you might have let me know earlier. My God, if I’d heard the banns …!¹⁰

Honeymooning in France, they sent him a ‘having-a-marvellous-time-hope-to-see-you-soon’ postcard.*¹¹

Unlike the free wild creatures of Jacques’ The Dancers, leaping Matisse-like on some ethereal shore, the figures of Stanley’s painting are contemplative, tremulous. Like Stanley himself, the figures stand on the threshold of a wild discovery and are amazed.* When the painting was later exhibited, Stanley was disconcerted to find its theme interpreted as a portrayal of sexual attraction. But to him this was neither its prime intent nor an aspect he wished emphasized. He wanted to ‘go past and beyond usual conceptions’. Why then, his critics argued, show the sexes separate? Again Stanley was baffled. He could ‘not account for the fact that I have divided the sexes in the picture.’ Of course he could not. If he showed them separate, that was because they were posed in the only way he could as yet manage; for in the sublimity to which he aspired he had as yet no experience of the sexual ‘fusion’ whose meaning he was struggling to understand. If his admirers could not grasp from his painting what he was trying to say, then there was little he could do to help them: ‘I feel rather like the young man who when he thinks his girl is admiring his thoughts and ideas and feelings finds that it is the way his hair curls which is the real attraction.’¹⁴

But to those like the Raverats who genuinely understood, Stanley’s joy in his painting was incontestable:

The picture was the first ambitious work, and I have in it wished to say what life was. … I felt a need for my religious experience expressed in earlier paintings to include all that was a happy experience for me. One can’t, I know, make endearing remarks to a canvas before you begin to paint on it, but I felt I could kiss the canvas all over just as I began to paint my apple picture on it.¹⁵

CHAPTER FIVE

The Nativity

Study me then you who shall lovers be

At the next world, that is, at the next Spring,

For I am every dead thing

In whom Love wrought new Alchemy.

John Donne: Poems¹

ONCE POSSESSED of an overpowering idea, Stanley would all his life tenaciously worry its development through a succession of paintings. The desperate desire to resolve the paradox of duality became spiritual in Apple Gatherers. In The Nativity, also painted in 1912, the longing became religious.

If from the title we expect a conventional interpretation, we shall be surprised. Stanley is a will-o’-the-wisp who leads us unsuspectingly into what we think is familiar territory only, Puck-like, magically to change our surroundings, so that we stand bewildered, disturbed, abandoned, even resentful, according to our preconceptions.

What is it in his painting which so suddenly changes terrain we thought we knew? It is his composition, the transformation of content into visual presentation, which disorientates us, so that only slowly and perhaps incredulously do we begin to find our bearings. Many, in Stanley’s day, never found them, and simply relished the surprise. The message, to his chagrin, was all too often dismissed or devalued.

In his Nativity, the three Wise Men have come to visit. They are presented thus in a preliminary drawing. But now two of the Magi have become, surprisingly, the males of two pairs of lovers who meet as the emotional focus of the composition. The third remains a kneeling worshipper. The lovers are absorbed in each other and are oblivious to the presence of the Holy Family. This is not unexpected in view of the fact that Stanley intended the Holy Family to be not a tangible presence in Mill Lane, but visual imagery to convey his awed sense of sanctified discovery. Joseph, the figure on the right of the painting, is portrayed not in the manner of most traditional Nativities as the remarried widower of legend, an old man past sexual capability, but as a virile and romantic young man in a blue Botticelli robe, ‘doing something to a chestnut tree’.*

Despite this, the tree is in blossom, not fruit. The imagery is of the new life of spring; hardly relevant to a traditional Christmas scene. Precisely what Joseph is doing to the chestnut tree is left to conjecture, but his young thoughts are perhaps linked imaginatively to the erect chestnut candles with which it is girdled. Contrary to orthodox religious interpretations, it is suggested that he has every reason to be suffering sexual frustration. Mary, although a mother and his wife, is still a virgin. God has chosen her over Joseph’s head to become the link with the coming of creativity, a prodigious role in which he, Joseph – Stanley – has as yet no part.

Joseph is thus separated from Mary, who stands full in the centre of the painting, large, sombre-robed, almost masculine in appearance. Amy Hatch, another ‘cousin’ of Stanley’s, posed for her. She must, like Dorothy Wooster, have been a sturdy girl. ‘Monumental’ is Stanley’s own adjective for her in the painting, meaning that like a monument in a public place she is unnoticed by those who pass preoccupied. A miracle has been bestowed on her. Its physical form lies in the crib at her feet, added according to Stanley as ‘an afterthought’. For of course her concern in Stanley’s presentation is not so much with the child as with the wider meaning of creation, that which lies beyond the fence, the world where flesh-and-blood lovers meet in mutual delight. A separation – that of unfulfilment – exists between Mary and her spouse, and there is a division – the fence, the barrier of inaccessibility – between them as spiritual manifestations and the real world. Florence wrote:

neither is it strange that the grandchildren of a builder who was also a fine musician should have been consciously or subconsciously interested in the structural significance of walls and fugues. Cowls, walls and railings have from the first, I think, provided the fugue subjects of many of their works; the cowls, walls and railings which absently focussed our attention as children and about which as children our first thoughts and impressions played.⁵

Like Mary in the painting, Stanley is gazing in wonder and longing at those who are about to enter a comprehension of the renewal of creation as experienced on earth. Indeed, the pairs of lovers may be drawn from Stanley’s feelings when Will or Harold or Florence married; the emotional amputation of departing siblings is a common enough experience in families. Rapt in the adoration of their beloveds, the Wise Men who came to see the birth of God have in that miracle become themselves part of the perennial birth of God, and advance to affirm the universal sacrament of life. Beyond them, in the background field, sheaves of corn seem stooked at harvest. Beyond again are the trees of Cliveden Woods, some of which seem to be turning into autumn brown. Perspective has become a series of compositional waves. Each wave is a season. A fourth dimension has been added to the canvas. Time itself has been compressed.

The secret of the painting stands revealed. It is a hymn to fecundity, to the compulsion and universality of the sexual instinct in its broadest concept, to that miraculousness of the process of creation which humanity has always seen as holy. Mary and Joseph are not simplistically the figures of accepted recognition, nor are the pairs of lovers those of poetic romance. The whole must be God. Mary and Joseph are primal figures dressed in Christian symbolism whose profoundest meanings go back beyond their own time, past the known gods of old, back to our earliest awareness of the sources of our existence and our survival.

The figures in Stanley’s paintings are symbols of our primeval consciousness, of the thrust of male fertility and of the protectiveness of female parturition; the duality of fecundity. In his struggle to understand, Stanley is returning to a literal beginning, to the implications of his earlier reading, for example, of The Golden Bough, to the ‘embryonic fish’ of his contemporary Wyndham Lewis, to the understanding which was to obsess another young genius of his generation, D. H. Lawrence, however differently expressed. In the painting, Stanley tells us, Mary and Joseph are ‘related in some sacramental ordinance’. It is as yet beyond his comprehension. Stanley is still physically Joseph, virginal, restricted in experience to ‘doing something to a chestnut tree’. Yet in some spiritual sense, glimpsed if unrealized, he is also Mary, the mother who is fulfilled in that ultimate act of creation, the birth of God. Stanley’s inability to resolve the dichotomy troubles him. He is as yet a child in comprehension, relegated to a crib (an ‘afterthought’) at the feet of the majesty of creation. ‘The painting’, wrote Stanley, ‘celebrates my marriage to the Cookham wildflowers.’⁶

There were some who glimpsed his meaning, but few who might have felt the power of what he was trying to say, and fewer still who would have sympathized. To the devout of the day he was toying dangerously with the pagan sources of Christianity. Yet to him the apparent unchangingness of Cookham was becoming revealed as the everlasting rhythm of the mystery of death and rebirth, of the miracle of the emergence of exquisite form from meaningless chaos, of the marvel of that gift given him to fashion into art – into ‘compositions’ – the random chess or domino or draughts pieces which the world of the senses emptied into his brain. The same forces which compelled Cookham into the renewal of spring were those which moved his hands into creativity and his spirit into ecstasy. He and Cookham were united by that force, ‘married’, so that creation – birth – emerged from disorder – death – in each.

Spanning the two was the seed. In front of the kneeling Wise Man in The Nativity a plant grows, its pattern boldly shadowing him to draw our attention to it. It is apparently a sunflower, that traditional symbol which will appear in future paintings of Stanley’s as the promise of seedburst to come. As Stanley wandered enraptured among the wildflowers of the Cookham water-meadows, blossoming then in uncontrolled profusion, he was overcome not only by an aesthetic beauty he would glorify in later landscapes and still-lifes, but by an awe of their greater role as silent witnesses to the compulsion of fecundity. Like a woman adorned for her lover, each flower flaunted its beauty as sexual invitation, honouring its instinctive purpose as the provider of the seed for future life. The seed was in Stanley himself too, as it was in all animate things, in the men, women, girls, babies, trees, flowers, corn, lambs or beehives of his early compositions. As an animate thing it had been nurtured into existence through what scientifically might be called a ‘conducive environment’, but which to Stanley was the protection, the security, the peace, the ‘cosiness’ of its ‘home’. Thereby it had been brought to its power of fertilization, the token of an ultimate fulfilment dedicated beyond any urge of immediate satisfaction to the compulsion of rebirth, the cosmic coming-together of male and female elements, the drive of creation. That above all was inevitable and holy, and each of us is a priest in worship. It is surely no coincidence that most of Stanley’s early paintings are set in spring or summer, and show meetings, conjoinings or emergences. The exhortations of John Ruskin have Stanley as firmly in their grip as earlier they had held Proust and Tolstoy.*

Stanley’s painting won the Summer Picture Figure Composition Prize of £25 which was shared with a fellow-student. It still hangs today in University College, London.

CHAPTER SIX

Self-Portrait, 1914

All original artists, I am certain, have always worked without reference to their work’s effect on spectators other than themselves; and they have always assumed that their work has intrinsic value when they themselves have honestly and competently passed it as exactly the thing which they had set out to do.

R. H. Wilenski: Preface to The Modern Movement in Art, 1927¹

I have just bought Cookham’s great picture of the Apple Gatherers. I can’t bring myself to acquiesce in the false proportions, although in every other respect I think it’s magnificent. I’ve made great friends with him, I went down to the place Cookham two Sundays ago and spent the afternoon in the pullulating bosom of his family. There are too many of them, six out of nine were there, beside the parent-birds, and they are very gregarious, so I never got Stanley to myself; but it was an amusing experience.²

THE LETTER-WRITER was Edward Marsh, scholar, wit, man-about-town, patron of up-coming artists and poets, and at the time private secretary to Winston Churchill. The letter was to Rupert Brooke, then (1913) travelling in America and the Pacific:

The father is a remarkable old man still in his early middle age at about 70 – very clever but – I beg his pardon, I mean ‘and’ – a tremendous talker, and frightfully pleased with himself, his paternity, his bicycling, his opinions, his knowledge, his ignorance – due to the limitations of his fatherhood of nine – his radicalism and everything that is his. … Gilbert is an artist too but only six months since. Stan had only about two things to show, he does work slowly.

Until the 1910 and 1912 London exhibitions of post-impressionist paintings, picture collecting had been largely confined to the purchase of traditional Victorian themes or the resale of Old Masters. But now a fashionable interest was developing among progressive connoisseurs in acquiring the work of young British painters, an interest encouraged by the more enlightened London galleries, by the formation of new groups of artists such as the London Group or the New English Art Club, and by the coming together in loose assemblies of intellectuals and aesthetes. Such an assembly was the celebrated Bloomsbury Group, one venue for which was the Bedford Square home of the startling Lady Ottoline Morrell. The Contemporary Arts Society, formed by Lady Ottoline and Roger Fry in 1910 to acquire the work of up-and-coming artists for national collections, was a product of the new outlook.

Not all the collectors were wealthy enough to indulge their enthusiasm at will. Some, like the ‘prodigal collector’ Michael Sadler, who had been Steward of Christ Church, Oxford, in the days when the Reverend C. L. Dodgson – Lewis Carroll – had been a tiresome Curator of the Common Room, and who was now Chancellor of Leeds University, had to restrict their collecting to the use of such cash as they could raise extra to their emoluments. Edward Marsh was one of these. Although not at all wealthy, he was the recipient in addition to his salary of a fossil pension which had unexpectedly descended to him from a ‘mad aunt’ and which was paid periodically on account of a distant forebear, the Prime Minister Spencer Perceval, assassinated in the House of Commons in 1812. This surprising bounty was used by Marsh to buy paintings, originally the conventional old masters, but now from ‘all those bloody artists’ as Rupert Brooke described them.*

Stanley was encouraged to display Apple Gatherers at the Contemporary Arts Society’s summer exhibition of 1913 at the Goupil Galleries – the galleries in which the young Vincent van Gogh had once worked as an assistant. The significance of the painting was quickly spotted. Among the visitors was the painter Henry Lamb, then twenty-eight or so, who wrote to congratulate Stanley. The Gauguinesque influence in the painting appealed to Lamb, whose own work, particularly of Breton fisher-folk, was perhaps similar in style. He was a fringe member of the Bloomsbury Group at the time that Clive Bell was acting as buyer for the Contemporary Arts Society. Lamb and others confidently expected that Bell would agree to the purchase of Stanley’s painting for £100, wealth to the young artist. But Bell, obsessed with his art theories, vetoed the purchase.* There was consternation at the decision, and Lamb was so incensed on Stanley’s behalf that although by then painting in the west of Ireland he wrote to offer £30. Sydney recounts in his diary the family delight: ‘Stan corroborated the happy news that Florence brought me last night. He has had an offer of £30 for his picture the Apple Gatherers from a Mr Lamb. I am so glad about this.’⁴

Stanley had not yet met Lamb and knew little of him or the intrigues about the painting. So he not unnaturally assumed that Lamb had offered the £30 because he admired the painting; which he did, but this was not the reason for the offer. Lamb felt that an injustice had been done to a young and worthwhile painter. Although he could ill afford the £30, he ventured on the purchase because he was convinced he could resell the painting at a higher price and thereby blaze abroad the obtuseness of a self-appointed arbiter of taste. In much the same way he had taken up public cudgels the previous year in a battle with French officialdom to support young Jacob Epstein’s controversial tomb in Paris of Oscar Wilde.

Stanley delivered the canvas on 3 November to Lamb’s London studio at the Vale of Health Hotel, characteristically insisting on precise details of how to get there.⁵ The Vale of Health had been developed in a restful hollow of Hampstead Heath – Leigh Hunt had once lived there and the young Keats wrote poetry there – and the subsequent hotel included artists’ studios arranged in pairs each side of a central staircase. Lamb’s was on the third floor. Outside, lawn terraces overlooked the Heath and a small lake, a scene which forms the view through the window in Lamb’s celebrated portrait of Lytton Strachey.⁶ However, it was not long before Londoners discovered the hotel’s position on the edge of ‘Appy ‘Ampstead ‘Eath and turned it into a holiday pub with a funfair adjacent and drunken fighting at closing time.

None of this troubled the steely and imperturbable Lamb, who reported to friends his first meeting with Stanley with a mixture of amusement and astonishment. As Lamb took Stanley that afternoon round the galleries of London, he who had spent years in France worshipping in the studios of painters he admired, suddenly found himself elevated to the status of a respected guru. They called at the imposing Chelsea home of Darsie Japp, who had overlapped with Stanley at the Slade in 1908 – 9 and who had already bought his Two Girls and a Beehive.⁷ Stanley was awed by Japp’s background, prosperity and savoir-faire. To him Japp, like Lamb, ‘knew everything’.

A bemused Lamb sent Apple Gatherers to Michael Sadler in Leeds, suggesting £60 and assuring Stanley that he would give him the extra. Stanley, who had accepted with equanimity the rejection of the painting, was surprised and gratified, and told the Raverats: ‘Lamb has sent the preliminary payment of £30. If he has to sell it – and he thinks he will – any profit he makes by so doing he will give me. He is very good. He said: “What can you expect from these fashion-mongers?” But I do not altogether blame the Society.’⁸

Worried that it was lack of ready cash which was preventing Lamb from being able to retain a painting he admired, Stanley courteously told Lamb in his quaint ‘business-letter’ style:

I feel crossed [pulled in two directions] about that picture because all the time I am wanting money I am wanting you to keep the picture. You understand I can wait. You see, for another year or so I shall not be having to spend a lot – I seldom do – and if I live as I have been doing until now I shall be able to get through without danger. I tell you that I do not worry about money but I [have to] think about it.⁹

Sadler was prepared to offer only fifty guineas, a sum he had recently received for some extra-mural work. But in the meantime Edward Marsh had come forward as a bidder. At the instigation of Mark Gertler he had been keen to acquire a Stanley Spencer work. Apple Gatherers was in his sights when Stanley and Gertler fell out over their opinions of Cézanne. Marsh felt he could not offend Gertler, whose work he equally admired, and had tactfully to wait until the tiff exhausted itself. He then invited Stanley to spend a weekend at his apartment in Raymond Buildings, Gray’s Inn. Stanley was impressed: ‘I spent a weekend with Eddie Marsh. I had Darsie Japp and Gaudier [Brzeska] for dinner one day and Gertler and a man named Nash* the next. … Marsh took me to tea at a Miss Nesbitt’s; the elder of the two Miss Nesbitts is very nice. She is an actress and she seems to be so unlike what I imagined an actress to be.’¹⁰ Cathleen Nesbitt was then on the threshold of her long and distinguished stage career. She was deeply in love with Rupert Brooke.

It must have been on that occasion that Marsh ventured to Stanley his wish to purchase Apple Gatherers. Like Sadler, he could not offer more than fifty guineas and Stanley would have to wait for payment until the next allocation of the Perceval pension. Stanley reported the offer to Lamb. He let Stanley decide. Stanley chose Marsh.†

The deal was completed in December. Marsh hung the painting in the small guest bedroom of his flat. It joined his embryo collection of contemporary artists – Augustus John, Duncan Grant, Mark Gertler – among his considerable collection of quiet eighteenth-and nineteenth-century works. Seeing them there Paul Nash commented: ‘Apparently there has been a recent phase among the English progressives which might be called “The Apotheosis of the Dwarf”. Groups of dwarves by Gertler and Spencer seemed to menace me from every wall.”¹⁴ Rupert Brooke, returning from Tahiti in June of 1914 and staying in the guest room, promptly christened the painting ‘the Bogeys’. This, thought Marsh, deflated, was ‘a disappointing reaction’.¹⁵

But for Stanley these were halcyon years of both hope and accomplishment. He remained at Fernlea but acquired a ‘studio’, Wistaria Cottage, a then empty Georgian house at the east end of the High Street in need of structural repair. He rented it from his cousins the Hatches for eighteen pence a week, and liked it for the quiet and for the light from the east-facing rear windows which overlooked the extensive gardens of St George’s Lodge as they sweep down to a branch of the Thames at Odney Common, a location in which he was to set his Zacharias and Elizabeth (1913–14).

The family visited frequently. Will would come over from Cologne in the summer breaks while Johanna joined her family in Berlin. Harold and his wife Natalie – a dancer from Gibraltar were occupied in light orchestral work, abundant then. Horace’s conjuring took him on music-hall engagements at home and overseas. Annie remained reluctantly but dutifully at Fernlea, taking charge of a succession of live-in maids or domestics, for Ma was now confined at times to a bathchair which Stanley would cheerfully push the three miles or so into Maidenhead and back. Florence had married a Cambridge don, J. M. Image, brother to Selwyn Image, Professor of Fine Art at Oxford and an expert on stained glass. Sydney, having worked like a Trojan to matriculate, was overwhelmed by the delights of scholarship, for he had been accepted as a divinity student at Oxford. Percy remained an administrator with his London building firm, and kept a fraternal eye on Gilbert, who was starting his Slade course and, like Sydney, back at Fernlea in vacations.

Stanley’s acquaintance with Henry Lamb continued: ‘I have seen a lot of Lamb recently when I was having my teeth done a few weeks ago. … He had me at his place and he played me – God alone knows what he didn’t play me. I went there twice, and he did heaps of Beethoven, the Diabelli Variations. I was glad to hear a lot of Mozart¹⁶ [with J. S. Bach, Stanley’s favourite composer]. His playing is very good; he gets everything clear.’ ‘Getting everything clear’ – vital to Stanley, in music, in literature, in art, in vision.

Both Gilbert and Stanley were attracting the attention of cognoscenti. Several brought excitement into the lives of Ma and Pa by asking if they could call to see the artists at work. Edward Marsh was followed by Henry Lamb, who during a stay at Marlow walked over to Cookham in March of 1914 and for the first time saw Stanley on his home ground. On 30 May of that long hot summer he was in Cookham again on a ramble with Percy, Gilbert and Stanley, during which Percy took them birdwatching, and ‘told the tale of the birds’. During the visit Gilbert showed him his final painting in a trio he called The Seven Ages of Man. Lamb was so impressed that he submitted it on Gilbert’s behalf to the Contemporary Arts Society. It was Lady Ottoline Morrell’s turn to act as buyer. To the family’s joy she chose it in June for purchase at £100.* Thus Gilbert achieved the success so narrowly denied Stanley. Lamb promptly wrote to Gilbert to warn him that at their next meeting the drinks were on him.

Intrigued to meet the brothers, Ottoline herself came with her husband the Liberal MP, Philip Morrell, by train in July for tea at Fernlea and a walk along the Thames with the family. Stanley had just finished his first oil self-portrait, in which he painted himself in a mirror tilted to see part of the ceiling. The effect is to emphasize the jaw and mouth. Did the Morrells, one wonders, sense that in the set of the face and the quest of the eyes, the owner was beginning to see visions denied to many?†

During the visit there was, according to Sydney, ‘keen discussion’ of Mozart’s music, and ‘much fun’ over the taking of group photographs, Ottoline being an enthusiastic photographer. The Morrells stunned the Spencers by airily hailing a local taxi for the return journey. A few weeks later Ottoline, having been offered the use of Lady Ripon’s box at Covent Garden, reciprocated by inviting the Spencers to a Mozart opera. Evening dress was required. Ma was no problem, and Pa had an aged dress suit. Ottoline arranged for Gilbert to be pinned into one of Philip’s, while Stanley disappeared into Edward Marsh’s, which he had lent for the purpose. The procession of the party into the opera-house was a spectacle long-remembered with hilarity by the participants.

Darsie Japp was another welcomed visitor. He had previously visited, and walked ‘twenty miles into Buckinghamshire’ with Stanley; the Thames at Cookham forms a boundary between Buckinghamshire and Berkshire. On their return to Fernlea they were given boiled eggs for tea by Ma, a simple fare which Japp enjoyed, for, he told Stanley, ‘I shall have plovers’ eggs tonight.’²² In August Henry Lamb visited again. Will was there from Germany. Sydney captures in his diary for August the echoes of that last summer before the impact of war: ‘Yesterday Henry Lamb came down and spent some hours with us. We walked to Odney, then to Cliveden. … Suddenly we all concluded we wanted to bathe. So Gil fetched towels and Guy Lacey came with us. The water was delicious. Coming home, Lamb begged Will to play the Hammerklavier Sonata.’

Significant though music was to both Henry Lamb and Stanley, it was a mutual recognition of the importance of art which drew together in friendship this otherwise contrasting pair. For all his more worldly literacy, savoir-faire and sophistication, Lamb seems to have shared with Stanley those moments of self-doubt, even of despair, which all artists suffer. But whereas Lamb’s bouts of despondency would become prolonged, Stanley’s natural buoyancy would quickly lift him to the surface. Perhaps Lamb occasionally needed the help of such optimism from his new friend. Eight years older than Stanley, he was a son of Horace Lamb, a distinguished professor of mathematics, later knighted. He had almost completed the medical course intended for him when he suddenly abandoned it, married the notoriously sensual model Nina Forrest, his ‘Euphemia’ – it was said to be a forced marriage – and went to Paris to study art, particularly under Augustus John. There his marriage disintegrated. He returned to England in 1911 to help extricate John from a relationship with Ottoline Morrell which was becoming tiresome. A slim, pale man, according to Lady Ottoline he was as fascinating to women as he was attracted to them. But essentially he was a man of wide cultural, social, musical and artistic sensibilities. He and Stanley shared an honesty of purpose and a clarity of outlook which all their lives resented pretension. When they met it, their reactions differed. Where Stanley would rant or grumble in protest, Lamb would pick up his lance and charge. The jousting blow he delivered to Clive Bell over the Apple Gatherers affair was not mortal, but at least gave him the satisfaction of displaying his contempt. Neither he nor Stanley was greatly interested in material possession, nor in money save as the means to artistic freedom. But both remained in thrall, despite all obstacles, to the ‘divine fire’.

Artistically, Stanley’s prospects were encouraging. His work was increasingly recognized among connoisseurs, even if not always for the reasons he intended. Materially, it sold. By 1914 he told Gwen: ‘I have £52 in the bank and I think I shall take the money I have in the Post Office Savings bank and make a deposit account at the London County & Westminster Bank where I already have a current account. I think you get 4 per cent interest.’²³ He also asks Gwen’s advice on whether he should increase his contribution to the family housekeeping; he was paying his mother £1 a month, perhaps £10 a week now. Interesting projects were in the offing. In 1913 Jacques and Gwen Raverat had made moves to get Stanley and Eric Gill involved in illustrating and lettering a version of the four gospels. Gill, however, declined the project as too onerous, and the Raverats, it seems, were modifying it to discussions of an illustrated version of Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, with drawings by Stanley, woodcuts by Gwen, layout by Jacques and lettering by Gill. Rupert Brooke was urging Edward Marsh to promote a theatrical venture with text by himself, scenery by Stanley, and Cathleen Nesbitt as the leading actress.²⁴ Marsh had already in 1912 published the first of the anthologies of contemporary verse he called Georgian Poets. Stanley enjoyed the volume – ‘Marsh gave me a book of English poets. I like Rupert Brooke because he knows what teatime is’²⁵ – and suggested a companion series of ‘Georgian painters’ to include Gertler, Currie, Nash, the Spencers, Seabrooke, Roberts, Rosenberg, Nevinson, Wadsworth and Gaudier-Brzeska. In addition Stanley was diverting Jacques Raverat’s aborted four gospels project towards an associated scheme which was gradually to assume dominance for him in later life: the building of a long gallery – ‘chapel’ – in which the artists’ paintings would illustrate the Life of Christ in terms of their own developing experiences through life.

But all were to come to naught. The times were too troubled. Rupert Brooke, due with Jacques Raverat to join friends on a camping holiday at Helston in Cornwall, sends Stanley (‘Dear Cookham’) a letter which sums up the feelings of the perplexed young men:

I wish I knew about painting. I’ve left Raymond Buildings for months. I don’t know when I shall be back. I’m glad I was there when you came. I’m going sailing and walking with Jacques for ten days or so. At least I want to. But this damned war business. … If fighting starts I shall have to enlist or go as a correspondent, I don’t know. It will be Hell to be out of it; and Hell to be in it. I’m so depressed about the war that I can’t talk, think or write coherently. God be with you.²⁶

He never made his trip to Cornwall.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Centurion’s Servant

Here we part with the year 1913 which has had many joys for me and few sorrows. What has 1914 got locked up in its bosom for me and mine? We shall see in time.

Sydney Spencer, 31 December 1913¹

TUESDAY 4 AUGUST 1914 was Florence’s birthday. She had come to Cookham to enjoy a celebration party at Fernlea. During the afternoon, Herbert Henry Asquith, long-serving Prime Minister in the Liberal Government, announced in the House of Commons the delivery of an ultimatum to Germany demanding the withdrawal of her troops from Belgium, to whose neutrality Britain was committed. Florence had cause to remember that day:

On the afternoon of August 4th – my birthday – 1914 I was pacing the Causeway at Cookham with my brother Percy, gravely discussing with him the family scene, when he said: ‘Of course, I shall have to go.’ ‘Not you!’ I cried sharply. ‘A family of seven sons’, he replied, ‘could not stand aside, and if I went, perhaps the younger sons will not have to go.’ I listened dumb-stricken …²

The ultimatum expired at midnight. There was, as expected, no response. On Wednesday the 5th, the recruiting offices opened.

Joining the forces was voluntary. The older married brothers, pianist Will and violinist Harold, seemed unlikely to be affected, except that Will now found himself trapped in England, his wife Johanna in Germany. In the patriotic fervour which swept the nation, Sydney in Oxford dismayed his parents by joining the Officers’ Training Corps as a cadet. The rolling-stone brother Horace was trying to get home from West Africa, having suffered a shipwreck from which he escaped with his life only because he was a strong swimmer. Percy stuck to his resolve and joined the Warwickshire Regiment.

Henry Lamb put his medical training to use by becoming a volunteer dresser in a private military hospital in France. Darsie Japp, an excellent horseman, was proposed for a commission in the Royal Artillery; field guns were still pulled by teams of horses. Rupert Brooke joined Churchill’s recently formed Naval Division – a forerunner of today’s Marine Commandos – as a platoon commander. Gaudier-Brzeska went back to France to join his infantry regiment. Jacques Raverat too crossed over to France and was both chagrined and alarmed to be rejected for military service as medically unfit.

Stanley, like most young men then, had no idea of the meaning of warfare and was attracted to the notion of joining the Royal Berkshires as an infantryman. But it is unlikely that he would have been accepted, on account of his slight stature; he was 5 feet 2 inches tall and weighed 6 stone 12 pounds. In those early days of the war, recruiting followed peacetime standards and the minimum requirements for infantrymen precluded Stanley. However, he and Gilbert compromised by joining the Maidenhead branch of the Civic Guard, an unauthorized but encouraged pre-recruitment training organization, the activities of which consisted mostly of marching and drill. Such team activity required a suppression of self to corporate perfection which appealed to the metaphysical in Stanley, and with the rest of the Cookham contingent he would return at night exhausted but exhilarated. He and Gilbert also joined the Bray brigade of the St John’s Ambulance Corps. Provided they could acquire the First Aid Certificate, they would be eligible to join the Royal Army Medical Corps as medical orderlies in the Home Hospital Service, the only basis on which Pa and Ma would consider letting them go.

But if such was their outward behaviour, internally the shock reverberated. It was not so much the danger of going to war which troubled Stanley, for he was seldom concerned for his physical circumstance. Rather it was the spiritual dilemma which disturbed him; the question whether he should offer up his painting, his creative destiny, to the unheeding Behemoth of military service which had no need for it. If he joined up, would he, in his words, ‘commit a sin against the Holy Ghost’?

It is possible to deduce several hints in Stanley’s work during 1914 of the seriousness to him of his perplexity. In The Betrayal, painted in that year, Stanley used St Mark’s account of the arrest of Christ in which a young man who ‘lay hold on Christ’ – Stanley shows him holding Christ’s hand – is so startled by the violence of the proceedings that he tears himself from Christ’s clasp, loses his robe in his haste, and flees from the scene naked. Stanley set the main figures in the back garden of Fernlea against a black wall and makes the young man pale in tone, so that he glows white. So intensely did Stanley feel about the painting that he sent the Raverats an annotated sketch. Even after the painting was finished, he continued to be preoccupied with the theme and made a subsequent pencil-and-wash study in which the wall is rendered lighter in tone. Against it he inserted another of his pronounced shadows; it is that of the young man fleeing, and emphasizes his being torn from the handhold of Christ. That the subject reflects Stanley’s disturbed feelings about the war is apparent from the unusual way he has in the study shown Peter drawing his sword to strike off the ear of the High Priest’s bailiff. The scabbard has been rotated until it points upwards. He later told a confidante that he based the image on the army drill for unsheathing a bayonet; this was to rotate the scabbard in its belt-holder or ‘frog’ and withdraw the bayonet downwards, a drill he must have learned from his Civic Guard training and incorporated into the study.

Stanley is surely indicating that he sees himself, like the young companion of Christ in the Bible version, as forced to flee naked from the handholder of his creativity. He is in shock, being compelled to betray his destiny. In a letter to Gwen Raverat he desperately asks her: ‘What ought Gilbert and I to do in this war? My conscience is giving me no peace … advice from you would greatly relieve me, even if you said I ought to go to the Front. … I have been so disturbed that I have not been able to concentrate.’³ Sydney, at home for the Christmas vacation of 1914, records in his diary the unusual fact that ‘Stan made a bad bed companion last night, he kept rolling over and pulling the bedclothes with him.’⁴

In the same vein, Stanley writes to Henry Lamb: ‘When you see how Gil’s painting is getting on, you will say to yourself “Oh! He must not go to the war!”’⁵ Gilbert’s painting was The Crucifixion. In stark, angular composition it shows the Cross in process of being raised from the horizontal to the vertical. But the figure outstretched on it is Pa, and those hauling him up are five round-faced, dark-haired young men uncannily like the Spencer boys; from which we may suspect that Gilbert is telling of his sympathy for the old man, whose headstrong sons, so anxious to go to war, are emotionally crucifying him. Is then Stanley’s The Centurion’s Servant a comparable allegory, the visual equivalent of a personal nightmare or sleepwalk? Arguably so. Not only is this the first occasion on which Stanley places himself recognizably as the subject of a visionary painting, but even more decisively he stands back to watch himself in his experience by placing himself as the centre onlooker of the kneeling figures, the one who seems to show no emotion but curiosity or contemplation.

Stanley had begun to think about the biblical story (Luke 7, Matthew 8) in 1913, conceiving it as a double picture, one section showing the messenger running to Christ, the other Christ’s miracle in healing from a distance the centurion’s servant or batman. As with all his paintings to date, he envisaged exterior settings. But ‘this seemed beyond me, although in trying to imagine what the scene would be like, I began to find my mind in very outdoor places. I vaguely remember willows and sunlight in certain parts of Cookham.’⁶ The imagery, however, would not materialize and ‘in that baffled state my mind wandered into some shade, and in doing so I wondered what the scene would be at the house where the servant actually lay, seven miles away. Here I seemed to find better foothold.’ The imagery began to take shape. It would be Stanley’s first use of an interior, a considerable step in that paced progression which characterized his development. The interior would be a sickroom, a bedroom. So somewhere in his experience he had to cast around for a bedroom which by its association of feeling would recreate for him the sense of the miraculous to which the painting was dedicated.

Why, one might ask, did Stanley not select any bedroom, or indeed invent one? Not merely in Stanley’s failure to do so but in his actual inability to do so, we glimpse one essence of his genius. Truth demanded not just a bedroom but the only bedroom possible for the revelation: ‘I don’t think it struck me then as it does now that the room I selected as being the bedroom in which the servant was to suddenly revive was our own servant’s bedroom. I mean [that it was purely coincidence] that they were both servants and both in bedrooms.’ Stanley’s memory had settled on the servant’s attic bedroom at Fernlea not because it classified itself as the bedroom of a servant; still less because the servant was a female. He is more than anxious to disabuse the reader of any connection between the mystery of the event and the possibility that the servants were mysterious to him as female, or that the room was mysterious to him, as some rooms were later to become to him, because he was not allowed to enter them. On the contrary, ‘there was never any ban on one going into the attic and I remember that up until shortly after I began to go to the Slade I usually used to sit by the gable window and talk to the servant dressing, and quite innocent [even at] about 19 or 20 years of age’ – ‘quite innocent’ because the maids were usually local girls taking an occupation before hopefully getting married. The reason why Stanley picked the servant’s attic bedroom was because:

The attic had a dark recess in which was the big bed, and the china knobs could be seen now and then when the door was open, and when [one day] I passed the door I was impressed to hear her talking to some invisible person, [whom I imagined to be] a sort of angel. This [in fact] was the servant next door. She was talking through the wall, as our own attic and the one next door had only a wall between them. This I did not know till later. When she came down in her afternoon frock from this room I almost expected her face to shine as Moses’ did when he came down from the mountains.

Stanley is transferring to the painting that sense of awe he felt on the day he heard the servant talking to her angel, to recreate the holy sense of awe which must have overcome the centurion and his servant on that day two thousand years ago when they knew the joy of salvation from death. He transfers the manner of its arriving to recreate through the medium of art his own joy at finding himself the recipient of a miracle too. He is himself the subject of the painting, as he describes:

The running attitude of the figure on the bed was arrived at through a consideration which did not materialize. I had originally thought of depicting the meeting of Christ and the centurion [as an exterior]. Then, when I was feeling there was too much out-of-doors element in the idea, I considered also including the scene in the servant’s bedroom showing his miraculous recovery. I thought I would like to have two pictures in one frame, with a frame between them as division. In the meeting picture, the centurion was to repeat something of the position of the servant lying on the bed which can, I think, be seen to be similar in position to a person walking, only it is lying down. As I lay on my bed one evening in our front bedroom, I realized that I was in such a comfortable position that I would love to take that ‘just-me-happy-on-the-front-room-bed’ and plant it, with all its fact elements retained, into the other picture. I tried this many times, but it did not come as I wanted and finally I painted the bedroom idea alone. I at this time liked to gaze round the Church when praying and feel the atmosphere I was praying in. In the picture I have remembered my own praying positions in the people praying round the bed, because I knew the state of mind I wanted in the picture was to be peaceful, as mine was in Church, even though the miracle had occurred.

How compressed are Stanley’s descriptions of his great paintings! The figure on the bed is ‘a person walking only it is lying down’. Visually it is the messenger running to meet Christ of the aborted exterior panel; but spiritually it is the distress of Stanley’s dilemma transferred en bloc into the bedroom scene. Yet, conversely, the ‘state of mind’ he wanted to express in the painting was to be ‘peaceful’, so that ‘the miracle had occurred’; so ‘peace’ is invoked from the terror through his recollected feelings of lying comfortably in bed ‘in our front bedroom’, but even more from the sensations which overcame him when he gazed around during prayer in Cookham church to catch the ‘atmosphere’.

Later he adds: ‘The people praying round the bed may have something to do with the fact that in our village, if anyone was very ill, the custom was to pray round the bed, and I thought of all the moments of peace when at such moments the scene might occur …’ – ⁷ and there was in Spencer-family recollection an episode in which one of the older boys developed pneumonia. Watched over anxiously by the womenfolk, the stage in the illness was at last reached when young Sydney was sent to run to Pa at Hedsor to tell him that ‘the crisis has come’; a message which reached Pa’s ears as ‘Christ has come.’

The Centurion’s Servant, like The Betrayal, marks a crisis of its own in Stanley’s development. Before it, all his painting had been done in the unfettered joy of creative metaphysical-spiritual discovery. Then, suddenly, the impending war introduced a brutality in existence until then unsuspected. Its darkness broke his arcadia, left him in shock. He had to find a way back to comfort and assurance, and in this endeavour he recognized The Centurion’s Servant as a watershed in his art. Never again would he be able to recreate exactly the feelings of ‘innocence’ which pervaded his earlier paintings, a loss he would ever lament. But in the destruction of that innocence the marvel to him was that he was given the means to find reconciliation. We may venture what they were.

In all his visionary pictures, no matter what the titled subject, Stanley is ultimately depicting a cluster of associated experiences, or ‘memory-feelings’ as he called them. They are chosen so that the feeling he draws from them matches the current feeling he is trying to express in his painting. This happened for him joyously in his earlier paintings when metaphysical revelation could be visualized from his happy feelings about moments and places in Fernlea and Cookham. But now that he is in shock the match cannot be made directly, for he has no store of shocked memory-feelings. Should he paint reflexively and let his anger show? Such was the response of many painters, especially of the artists of the coming war.

But Stanley’s genius is such that he has an added layer to his personality which lifts him above the merely reflexive. Since his distress is greater than can be shown in even the most hurtful experience he can recall, he relates their feeling to a more powerful source, one which will convey the intensity of the required terror: in this present painting, the Bible and one of its happenings. The story he selects describes terror. But its significance is such that in doing so it is able to reveal the possibility of release from terror. The centurion is terrified; Christ in healing his servant releases him from his terror. For the centurion a redemption has occurred. If Stanley is to find a corresponding release from present terror he too must go back in memory-feelings to a remembered redemption of his own and link its feeling to the power of the biblical event. In composing his picture he will show a moment of personal terror in one part, and then reveal its redemption in another. In this respect an event which happened powerfully in the Bible has already happened for him, even if less emphatically, in Cookham. ‘If I had not had that subject, I could not have drawn any of that picture,’ he was to say of one religious painting.⁸

What he is doing in The Centurion’s Servant is that which he will struggle to do for the rest of his life when baffled by the painful. As he grows older he will accumulate memory-feelings sufficiently vivid to match and redeem some bewilderments. But there will also be occasions when his distress will be so agonized that only a return to biblical example will suffice to indicate its intensity. There will even be instances when he is unable to find any forceful match at all between his feelings and the redemption of memory. Then he will be left frustrated, unable to compose his picture, or else forced to use memory-feelings which are ‘incompetent’ and which in his opinion dilute his intention. But when he can find a match, as in this instance, the ways he finds for expressing it will be a continual surprise and wonder.

The process by which Stanley arrives at his notions is subtle, perhaps subconscious, perhaps instinctive, but invariably logical in metaphysical terms, and always precise. To convey it, he first states the fact of what is taking place. This he depicts so transparently – and in later work with such honest directness – that we should not be tempted into thinking that he intends self-revelation from a desire for self-indulgence. The emotion inherent in the content, even when related to the event he so strikingly depicts, is not used as direct imagery; such use would be sentimentality. Although the imagery of the picture is personal, it is there to transcend the personal. It may be of interest and indeed of help to know that clues to the imagery can lie somewhere in his writings. But detection does not necessarily establish the true notion of the painting; the clues are merely signposts. Once Stanley has found his imagery in the personal, then the associative emotion determines the visual pattern or arrangement in the depiction; the composition. In redemptive work, provided that the imagery to hand was what Stanley called ‘man enough to do the job’ – there could be no compromise with the ‘Holy Ghost’ – there will be great, even vital, significance in the painting: a redemption, an emotional movement from one state of awareness to a higher. It is this triumphant discovery which The Centurion’s Servant records.

In this sense it seems cogent to argue that there was in Stanley’s make-up a quality which makes him a dramatic painter. His visionary paintings capture an instant of tension between a before situation and an after situation, like a strip of movie film stopped in the projector. Each painting is that crucial freeze-frame which exactly pinpoints the moment when we become aware that a change is about to happen – The Nativity – or is happening – Apple Gatherers – or has happened – The Centurion’s Servant. The freeze-frame is not a random moment. It is the consequence of decision, more particularly of commitment. Its effect is a catharsis, a purging, the moment in drama when the confusion of reality is suddenly dissolved into spiritual comprehension. At that moment, the preceding is clarified and linked to the now inevitable. The past cannot be undone, but it can be apprehended in some awesome synthesis of meaning. A god has come.

Redemption to Stanley was the miraculous means by which he got himself, through his pictures, to where all was ‘holy, personal and at peace’; in other words, to his feelings for ‘home’. His pictures are not illustrations of redemptions. They are in themselves a reaching to redemption. It is irrelevant that the past in The Centurion’s Servant may be a recollection of some serious Spencer family illness or that Stanley has portrayed the future as an expression of ‘cosiness’ in bed, its valance echoing those of Edwardian prams. Neither the title, nor its allusions, nor its associations are to be taken at face value, and to do so is to limit, even destroy, their meaning. Particularly with this picture Stanley felt that critics might decide its presentation derived from an unpatriotic reluctance to go to the war. The thought of such possibility could never be allowed to interfere with the form of the work. If the content came to him vividly, then it must be valid, demanding expression without dissemblance. Only so could a path be cleared through confusion to meaning. The best precaution he could presently take against misinterpretation was to conceal the painting, even though the clarity he found in its execution convinced him of the truth of his feelings:

My bed picture is an example of how a picture ought to be painted. Everything in that picture, colour particularly, was perfectly clear, and the way to get the colour decided in my mind before I put brush to canvas. The result was that it was done in no time, it was done like clockwork. … What pleases me is that I have learned the reason why the picture should be done so as to let me see the idea without having to plough through incompetent [irrelevant] detail that has no fundamental bearing on the idea.⁹*

Stanley’s excitement at his achievement is obvious. Some outside force is acting on him, easing his mental suffering into that state of peace through which he can joyfully offer tribute. His picture ‘lets him see’ his idea in uncluttered clarity. The joy it gave him sprang not from the fact that the picture indicated a solution to the perplexity from which it originated; the imperative of physical reality continued to assail. Rather his joy sprang from a discovery that the making of the picture discharged his emotional distress. It was a redemption. In it, reason became the servant of imagination, imagination of feeling, feeling of revelation, revelation of comprehension, and comprehension the miraculous gift from some exterior power. The process was religious. When in later years an art critic interpreted it as the reaction of children caught in an air-raid, Stanley’s contempt was vitriolic*

For the time being, however, nothing was done with the painting. Stanley stored it in his room at Fernlea while he settled to other work. One such was among the first of what must be called his ‘landscapes’: the painting of Cookham, 1914.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Cookham, 1914

Excuse my muddle-headedness and slowness, when I see anything I see everything, and when I can’t see one thing I see absolutely nothing.

Stanley Spencer¹

SUPERFICIALLY The Nativity and even John Donne Arriving in Heaven can be classified as landscapes. But Stanley would not have regarded them so. For him landscapes, like still-lifes and portraits, captured tangible objects in real time. They can be called his observed paintings. Unlike his visionary or compositional work, observed paintings were invariably painted or sketched in situ, where possible in contiguous sessions. In them detail is precise and often continued full into the foreground, a technique which gives such paintings wide-angle clarity of definition and the strong visual impact resulting from great depth of field.* An ancillary of the method, the use of a high-angle viewpoint, occurs in his first major landscape, Cookham, 1914, and has been proposed as imaginary,³ because Stanley often used such viewpoints in subsequent visionary work. But he never did so, we can be sure, in observed paintings. There will exist an exact spot near Cookham which shows the scene precisely as Stanley saw it. It has been identified as near Terry’s Lane in Cookham leading up to Winter Hill, a little beyond Rowborough House.⁴

In the most compelling of Stanley’s landscapes, we glimpse the power that place had for him: ‘My landscape painting has enabled me to keep my bearings. It has been my contact with the world, my soundings taken, my plumb-line dropped.’⁵ Meticulousness of detail was not an arbitrarily adopted style. He could paint in no other way, for the precision in his personality was the physical manifestation of his inner search for veracity. Cookham, 1914 was the forerunner of a magnificent procession of observed paintings, hundreds in all, so decorative and so sought-after that he found himself frequently leaning on them for income. At times he complained of having to churn them out. Sometimes his complaint was justified because he was too rushed and the result mechanical. But in less hurried times he could enjoy the contemplative opportunities they afforded. We should not be deceived by his wail; it reflects only annoyance that he had to give them precedence at periods when he wanted to concentrate on visionary work.

Place, for Stanley, meant objects observed in relation to one another. In a newly observed scene neither the objects nor their relationship would have an immediate impact. Only when he drew some associative inference would the place take meaning. The process needed time. Given time, the place would assume for him an identity from his perception of its components. Change one, and for him the entire identity of the place changed. Thus his more powerful landscapes became connections between himself and the spirit of the landscape which had imposed its identity on him. At the moment of imposition, of connection, the place became an entity, a stasis.

Thus his landscapes in general lack figures. An animate figure, however discreet, would be an intrusion in the stasis of the scene. But stasis does not imply passivity. Each landscape in which place sang for Stanley revealed to him a necessary natural creation which would persist whether or not man interferes. He told Edward Marsh, who bought Cookham, 1914,⁶ ‘I think the true landscape you have of mine has a feeling of leading to something I want in it, I know I was reading English Ballads at the time and feeling a new and personal value of the Englishness of England.’⁷ It is in the brooding calm of their existence that the power for Stanley of such landscapes rests. They are simply being.

When then is the distinction between such paintings and his visionary work? Why were the latter more significant for him? Essentially it was a question of how fully he could join himself to whatever he was painting. In observed painting, even the most sympathetic, he was not able wholly to amalgamate himself with his subject: ‘It is strange that I feel so “lonely” when I draw from nature, but it is because no sort of spiritual activity comes into the business at all – it’s this identity business,’ he was later to write.⁸ Place became ecstatic for him when it became wholly subjective: ‘It must be remembered that whatsoever I talk about is the whole thing, by which I mean that if I refer to a place, I am talking of a place plus myself plus all associating matters of personal characteristics respecting myself.’⁹ He saw it through a filter of personal associations which transfigured it into metaphysical meaning.

But when it came to the visionary paintings this raised a pictorial problem: ‘I need people in my pictures as I need them in my life. A place is incomplete without a person. A person is a place’s fulfilment as a place is a person’s.’¹⁰ But figures depicted in the same way as he portrayed the detail of merely observed places or objects would destroy the stasis, even when his feelings about the figures made them its fulfilment. They could not be shown in that way, even when they were derived from people he knew and were associated with the place.

Stanley’s solution was not to paint the detail in such pictures as it could be observed. The places would be real, but not painted objectively. Nor would figures: they could be real persons but would emerge from his composition in a transfigured form. Both place and people would be reconstructed visually out of his metaphysical relationship with them, after contemplation and invariably in the quiet of a studio. Thus when Stanley paints visionary effusions he is not painting a real place, even though he makes use of one; he is not painting real people, even though he is using them; he is not even painting his feelings about both, though he is making use of them. He is painting a transfiguration of experience. *

This did not mean that he painted such pictures with less meticulousness than he painted his observed scenes. On the contrary, the transfiguration involved him in the most exact choices, for it demanded forms of expression which to the untutored eye can appear to be distorted. If he had to use such distortion of detail, then it had to be in tune with the emotional content of the whole. The balancing act in this process made composition frequently an agony, especially in his novitiate years:

I have [only] as yet been able to see something I want to write or paint in a disarranged state. It is as if I had seen a box of chessmen and had no idea of how or in what order they were to be placed. But I would know if a domino or some draughts got into the box that they had nothing to do with the chess pieces. I know to the last detail what does belong to the game. I only don’t know yet the order. It is a big ‘only’. I have noted in all my various desires that they have a relationship to each other and that they or many of them, come together to suggest some clue as to what their final form will be. This final something, the thing that ecstasy is about, God alone can give the order and reveal the design.¹³

His own expressed distinction between his observed and visionary paintings was that the observed paintings ‘had no memory-feeling’. Memory-feeling was the mainspring of transfiguration. Only when memory-feelings crystallized as moments of metaphysical illumination would people and places merge for Stanley. Then the figures would become personifications, incarnations, of experience through which Stanley strove to approach the meaning by restoring the experience. But the miracle to Stanley was that the attempt to capture the illumination, to approach the meaning, enabled him to compose a work of art based on the sensation of the originating experience but in an imagery which transfigured it and gave him a joy and happiness he could find in no other way. It is a true source of art: certainly of Stanley’s art.

CHAPTER NINE

Swan Upping

‘What do they mean by religious art? It is an absurdity. How can you make religious art one day and another kind the next?’

Picasso¹

MYSTICISM? EXORCISM? ESCAPISM? SUBLIMATION? Stanley’s astonishing access to the disjointed memory-feelings of his subconscious, and his creative ability to associate them, in whatever random or involuntary way they might have come to him, into patterns of meaning – paintings – which constructed for him a metaphysical world alternative to the physical world, all these could fascinate a psychologist: as in fact they were to do in later life. Through his midwifery of the metaphysical from the physical, his redemption, Stanley was evolving a unique form of expression, a language.

Modernism was arriving, its battle-cry ‘directness is all’. Directness was to be achieved by dismembering an object, event or sensation into its apprehended constituents and then clinically and unsentimentally reassembling them into a taut form which, however surprising it might at first appear, was to the artist more truthful in re-fashioning the essence of the original than contemporary representational art could offer.

It may seem a far cry to a puzzled young painter cloistered in an English village. But the link existed. Picasso’s exploration of cubism remained as solidly based on real objects as Stanley’s compositions did on places. Proust’s happiness in his cobbles² was echoed in that of Gwen in hers, his mysterious feelings about his hawthorn blossom by Stanley’s for his Cookham wildflowers.* James Joyce exactly recalling sensation, even of the cloacal, parallels Stanley sitting seemingly for hours on the outside loo at Fernlea with a worm or newt on his bare thigh to relish its movement against his skin; a habit his family, awaiting their turn, found infuriating. D. H. Lawrence, celebrating sexuality, presages Stanley having an ‘interesting discussion’ with young Peggy Hatch ‘on the relative sizes of our legs just above the knee, but only just above’,⁴ or tentatively feeling the penis of a boyhood companion and wondering at its softness,* or in the quiet of Wistaria Cottage imagining a girl ‘squatting’ before him, then feeling a ‘warm glow’ at the spectacle of the uncovered legs of girls as they played in the straw, or momentarily breathless at the sight of a girl bending to retrieve a ball through railings.⁶ For each artist, the minutiae of physical sensation demanded a place in the totality of experience, even if for Stanley their expression in pencil or paint was still hesitantly circumscribed.

The parallels cannot be pushed too far. Modernism was more a state of mind than a specific movement. In the best of it can be found the sense of awe without which no artist can accomplish – Picasso shouting from his studio, ‘I am God! I am God!’ The disjunctions of Joyce’s Ulysses or Eliot’s The Waste Land parallel the many-layered but essentially unified compositions of Stanley’s The Nativity or of The Centurion’s Servant or of the many visionary paintings to come. The awe, the impetus to truth, is ‘spiritual’, ‘religious’. It pervades the work of the great modernists, even though many rejected canonical faith; as did Stanley in liturgical literalness. But ‘spiritual’ and ‘religious’ it remained for him, and we must continue to use his adjectives in that sense.

If Stanley’s interpretation of Christian tradition seems sometimes less than orthodox, he saw no point in divesting his art of its power. When such a magnificent paradigm lay at hand, one with which he was familiar from childhood, why squander its resources in crafting, as did so many of his contemporaries, some less apt device? If Cookham was ‘heaven’ for Stanley, it was because the Bible was the first text he had known which offered integrated interpretation of the disparate mysteries which were beginning to possess him. He would not always accept its interpretation literally, but it would remain a yardstick against which he could measure future texts and alternative explanations. For he remained convinced of having been vouchsafed a miracle, that what he saw happening during his adolescence in Cookham had already taken place for him in a deeper sense in the Bible of his Fernlea boyhood. Each Cookham occurrence was for him no more an event in isolation than were the Bible stories Pa had read to him. Each was a drum-roll in his as yet dimly discerned pageant of revelation, and it was his unsolicited destiny to relate the majesty of the one to the other, to take the elements of experience and fuse them into an assembly of spiritual meaning.

Swan Upping demonstrates this particularly well. One of the elements he chose for the composition was the foreground cameo showing two men at work on a punt; a second is that of the two girls carrying cushions to a punt – the sun is in the east, it is morning; the third shows a waterman of the Company of Vintners and Dyers bringing Thames swans ashore for marking. Connecting them, the boardwalk and towpath spike their way towards the lawn of the Ferry Hotel, flag raised to proclaim its services to passing river traffickers. Mr Turk’s boathouse is on the right, and beyond it arches Cookham Bridge.*

Each cameo is a little pocket of feeling. Stanley does not directly describe its nature, but its significance can be extracted from allusions in his writing. Part of his Cookham feelings related to his delight in the occupations of the villagers. The purposefulness of their daily activities made them for Stanley participants in some ritual, as though Cookham were a church, its inhabitants communicants, himself a priest. Not all the villagers gave him this feeling, but those that did became part of his abiding joy:

I hear Mr Johnson’s little boy call ‘Harry, Harry’ down below in the street and I hear his scuttling feet across the gravel as he runs past our house. Our back iron gate swings open and hits the ivied wall [of the house] out of which it is built with a bang, and then quick steps up the [side] passage, then the sound of the milk can opening and of the jug drawn off the window cill.⁸

The men tending the foreground punt capture the feeling. Stanley does not tell us who they are but, like the milkman, they are part of his Cookham ritual: men in their physical work, wage-earners, providers of the means to home-making, ‘nest-builders’, angular in presentation.

The girls behind them share the ritual, but differently. Their function is domestic. The cushions they carry are femininely rounded and patterned, suggesting softness. The girls who actually worked at the boatyard for Mr Turk on busy days have had their identity changed by Stanley.⁹ He has, he tells us, substituted for them the Bailey girls. William Bailey was a local builder and also an accomplished artist, and the family was a joyous strand in his Cookham feelings: ‘Somehow M. S. or Miss Roberts could never quite give me the significance of Cookham that the Bailey girls did, or any other Cookhamite such as Mr Worcester [Wooster?], Pa, Mrs Croper [Cropper?] or Mr Francis or Mr Pym or Mrs Bailey or Mr Hatch. It’s just heaven reciting those names.’¹⁰ It was Dorothy Bailey who gave Stanley his early art training. Her personality caught his imagination, induced his ‘love’: ‘Walking upon the Causeway between white posts placed at the eastern end is Dorothy Bailey. How much, Dorothy, you belong to the Marsh meadows and the old village. I love your curiosity and simplicity, domestic Dorothy.’

Stanley renders unidentifiable the figure bringing ashore the carpet-bagged swans, his elbow lifted, a sack worn for protection against angry beaks and wings. Yet he too is part of the mysterious ritual which makes Cookham holy for Stanley, and which in this painting he has localized along the river because, he says, when in church one day the sounds of river activity filtered in and took on the aura of the religious atmosphere he was experiencing at worship:

My Cookham feelings were really this, that I felt this Ascot-fashion Boulter’s-Lock Sunday Bank-holiday terrific physical life could be tremendous seen spiritually, and this desire on my part was intensified by the fact that Cookham had as far as nature aspects were concerned and as far as the different jobs that were done there (boats and boat-building etc) an affinity with the Bible and the Bible atmosphere. So that in a way all the things that happened at Cookham happened in the Bible. … Of course in this idealizing of Cookham people it was more just my own idealizing of them, my own feelings of perfection projected on to them …¹¹

If interpretation of the painting stops at this point, it may seem a straighforward rendering of an artist’s powerful place-feelings; three episodes or transformations of experience chosen from many possible, and assembled visually to define an otherwise intangible totality of meaning. But, Stanley being Stanley, we may guess there must be more. The imagined high-angle viewpoint, the packed composition, the geometrical arrangement of components and the density of colour give a charged intensity of feeling which the pacific cameos so far described do not explain.

The high-angle viewpoint was one with which Stanley had been experimenting in visionary work. Its use in Swan Upping was not merely a technical device to shorten perspective and compress into proximity detail normally invisible or discreet when seen from ground level. There was an emotional element. In the back garden of Fernlea grew a large walnut tree which overhung neighbouring gardens. At harvest the Spencer boys would climb into it to shake down the nuts and, as Sydney described and Stanley later drew, sometimes clambered to do so on to a neighbour’s ‘tin sheds’, much to his fury. Stanley as a boy loved to climb alone into the tree. There was always wonder at the unexpected vistas revealed, and also a feeling of isolation, of remoteness, of godlikeness; very much the feeling in the painting.

The angularity given the towpath has, it has been suggested, affinities with cubism and vorticism.¹² At the time, Stanley’s former fellow-students Nevinson, Wadsworth and Bomberg were experimenting with the styles, and Stanley was interested to see their work. However, the towpath actually does zigzag as Stanley shows it, the abrupt changes of direction being caused by the property boundaries of the riverfront cottages. Stanley’s artist’s eye instinctively registered such minutiae. But, as with all his visionary work, the painting of the scene was not done from actuality. On the contrary, as he stresses in his description, he drew the scene from memory, returning only afterwards to compare his drawing with the reality and to congratulate himself on the accuracy of his observation.

The comment is significant. Stanley is not painting the scene as a landscape. He is deliberately painting it through the filter of ‘memory-feeling’. The resulting configuration is subservient to the feeling. Of course, most original artists do this. But where many of his contemporaries developed the distortion to carry their meaning, Stanley reverses the process. He aims to bring the configuration of his memory-feeling into as accurate a parallel with the observed as he can, convinced that the more accurately he can do so, the closer he will draw to the power of the associations inherent in the memory-feelings. He will never expect to match the two exactly. There will always be some distortion. When it increased alarmingly in later years, he felt that he had lost this first and early vision, the ‘innocence’ in which he was happiest.

If therefore there is cubism or vorticism in Stanley’s reconstruction of that part of the scene, it is less because he accepted the tenets of those styles than because the angularity was truthful to the place and could be brought into the picture to convey a directness of feeling which would counterpoint the more rounded imagery of the figure associations. But an even more striking counterpoint is evident in the upper part of the painting, the bridge section, which is mysteriously different in feeling from the relative calm of the foreground scene. In the bridge section a wind blows, rippling the water, flapping the flag, sending clouds scudding across the sky, streaming the hair of the male figure as he gazes towards Cookham, towards the female figure at the bridge end where the branches of the fir tree seem to extend her feelings to him in sympathy.

Looking back, Florence thought that the male figure on the bridge was the last detail Stanley painted before having to lay the painting aside; he had begun applying the paint from the top. She was evidently hinting that the figure represents Stanley’s foreboding at being torn from Cookham by the onrushing winds of war, and the entire top scene can suggest such an emotional dread. But, if so, Stanley was being neither narrative nor illustrative. He was surely doing what he did in The Centurion’s Servant, striving to transcend the distress of an unavoidable physical necessity by calling this time on the spiritual resources of his Cookham feelings.

That he felt he was succeeding is evident from a later reference to the painting. He began painting it, he said, in Ship Cottage, and at one point army recruits were undergoing field training in the vicinity: ‘seeing the manoeuvring of troops going on outside, I felt if only there was not this war, what could I not do?’¹³ He conveyed the feeling in a paean to the Raverats: ‘I am in a great state of excitement, quite a treat to feel like it. I hear the voice of the acceptable year of the Lord, I want to draw everybody in Cookham, to begin at the top of the village and work downwards.’¹⁴

What might have been accomplished had Stanley been able to carry out his enthusiasm! Swan Upping, like The Centurion’s Servant, is a hymn of joy to the miracle given him to redeem the apprehension of the unfamiliar through the peace of the known and loved. ‘There is’, he said in later life, ‘greatness in that painting.’¹⁵

By the time Stanley was composing it, the intricate lines of trenches and barbed wire had been lengthened across Europe from the English Channel to the Swiss frontier. In the Balkans the tragedy of the Dardanelles was about to be played out and Rupert Brooke to die on his way there of a blood infection. On Germany’s eastern frontier, preparations were under way for those Teutonic hammer-blows which were virtually to knock Russia out of the war. At home, volunteers flocked to swell the new Kitchener armies under training. Stanley and Gilbert remained in Cookham, continued their painting and kept up their drill and ambulance training. Stanley read as enthusiastically as ever: ‘I am still reading Dante. I have only just finished Hell. I like reading anything like that very slowly. It is wonderful the part where Virgil embraces and carries Dante. …’¹⁶ Handholding?

Alas for Stanley, into the creative exaltations of his Cookham feelings, the upheaval of the times kept breaking. He sensed his isolation from his brothers – ‘My brother Percy who entered the army as a common private is now a lance-sergeant. My brother Horace who is in Nigeria is guarding prisoners. …’ – and, even more forcefully, his isolation from village opinion:

In the barber’s yesterday a married man who had been in the South African war and was just going to the present talked a lot about how he had done his bit and was waiting for the young men to go, but they did not seem to. He waited for me to stand up … and looked me up and down. ‘Now, Master Spencer, you ought to be in the army, you know. Here am I, a married man with children, and I am going tomorrow. Yes, tomorrow!’ My answer was to stand and look at him like an idiot and a lout, and the fact that the barber had parted my hair made me feel more so. ‘Why haven’t you joined?’ he asked. I tried to become dignified but only became more foolish. ‘Well, at any rate,’ I said, ‘I hope you will believe me that there is some honour in a civilian and when he says he cannot, it is because he cannot’; and with that I strode out, feeling I had made a thorough mess of myself. … It is terrible to be a civilian. God says: ‘You must go, but I give you the power to obey or disobey this command.’ If you do not go, then you feel something has gone from you.¹⁷

Moreover, as time passed and the wounded – mostly at this early stage of the war regulars, territorials or reservists – came home to convalesce, a further puzzle presented itself: ‘It is funny the difference between the wounded soldiers and the ones not yet gone to France. The ones just going look at you and say: “Be a man. We’re British. Will tha join Kitchener’s Army?” But the wounded are always quiet and never say a word about our not joining. …’¹⁸

In May 1915 Stanley sent the Raverats a sympathetic note about Rupert Brooke. Inflation, virtually unknown within living memory, was beginning to be an unsettling phenomenon. Jack Hatch was dropping heavy hints that he would appreciate an increase in the weekly eighteen-pence rental Stanley paid for use of Wistaria Cottage. Should he and Gilbert go? Percy had gone. Horace was on his way home from Africa to join up. Sydney knew that he would be going, and was snatching for those moments of remembered joy that many imminently campaigning soldiers know:

As I came on through Weston [Weston-super-Mare] Woods towards the Old Pier the sun poured down upon the wet sands of the bay. The woods, the green grass and dark furze bushes with fringes of fire crept down as far to the shore as possible. The gulls were lazily crying to each other in the hazy distance and the whole of creation seemed to speak of peace. … I dawdled and picked flowers. I lived and breathed and exulted for a dreamy hour in that old land of peace long vanished for me. … With all the grim prospect of the present, how grateful I am to a God who gives respite to his creatures and makes the full enjoyment of such an afternoon still possible.¹⁹

Back at Fernlea, each of the youngest brothers wished to protect the other, and their parents wanted to shield both. But, by May, Gilbert ‘has passed his St John’s Ambulance exam. He has got orders to go to Eastleigh.’²⁰ Eastleigh, near Southampton, was the clearing hospital for the Southern Command group of hospitals which took the brunt of the casualties arriving from France. Rapid expansion of the service demanded more medical orderlies. At the last moment Gilbert’s orders were changed. He was to proceed to Bristol and there enlist in the Home Hospital Service of the Royal Army Medical Corps for duty in a newly created hospital, the Beaufort War Hospital, on the outskirts of the city.

Back in Cookham the family eagerly awaited Gilbert’s news. Pa consoled himself with the thought that ‘the discipline will do him good’, for Gilbert was regarded as the wilder of the two youngest brothers. When his letters came, their message was disconcerting: ‘Gil says that they intend to kill him if they possibly can. He works from 5 a.m. to 8 p.m. … the way he is living is unhealthy … the men are horrible … they have not inoculated him and yet there is enteric in the next ward. He wrote his letter to us in bed, he gets no rest. …’²¹ Gilbert stressed that Stanley should not follow him, at least not to the Beaufort. The work would be too heavy, and he should aim for a convalescent home.

To no avail. Stanley too had now passed his St John’s examination – ‘which was a farce as only about three questions were asked and I don’t remember being asked or answering any of them’²² – and was at last able to persuade his parents to let him volunteer. On 23 July he sent postcards to his friends. To the Raverats he wrote: ‘Am going to Bristol. Ma seems very well about my going away. Sydney now has a commission and is a 2nd Lieutenant in the Norfolks.’²³

Stanley put on his straw hat and Burberry raincoat-it threatened thunder – and, carrying a gladstone bag, made his way out of Cookham by a roundabout route along Sutton Road. He had slipped quietly from home to avoid emotional farewells, and taken an unusual direction to minimize lingering memories of the village. On the way the thunder-shower broke and his straw hat was ruined. When he reached Maidenhead Station, he was embarrassed to find that his father had cycled in to see him off and was the only fond parent there. The little party of volunteers presented their Civic Guard instructor with a stick with a horse’s head handle and then, as the train moved out, Pa compounded his son’s embarrassment by calling out to the orderly in charge of the party to take care of him as he was ‘valuable’.

How could they know that he was to become one of the century’s most celebrated artists? Who would tell the ‘rather superior but nice young man’ from the Maidenhead branch of W. H. Smith’s that the eager, talkative, wiry and boyish young man sitting opposite him was someone whose paintings were already attracting attention? To the others in the party he was just another recruit, good at drawing and something of an artist. But, like Stanley, they knew that as the train drubbed westwards they were being carried away from the familiar and, in Stanley’s case, the beloved. The agony of that day was to infuse one of Stanley’s most remarkable paintings, his Christ Carrying the Cross.

CHAPTER TEN

Christ Carrying the Cross

Painting with me was the crowning of an already elected king.

Stanley Spencer¹

ACADEMIC CATALOGUING stresses the chronological dating of an artist’s work. In Stanley’s case, the exact date of painting may bear little relation to the emotions of its genesis. He could, as in The Centurion’s Servant, be attracted (1913) to a theme for one reason, fail to find any suitable visual association, let the project gestate and then (October 1914) discover that his current emotional circumstance provided just the trigger he needed. In subsequent paintings the gap could extend over many years. On the other hand he could happily paint a picture, keep it unseen for years, then suddenly produce it out of current context. So too he could produce what seemed to be a new work but one which proved to be essentially a reworking of themes in earlier works. Stanley’s life and art cannot be compartmentalized. Both were a vast rolling pageant in which each new painting related to what had gone before and would illuminate those which were to follow.

Consider his emotions on that day of leaving Cookham for the war. There was natural apprehension about how he would fit into his new life. But the greater fear was that of the rupture of his Cookham spiritual life which he guessed must follow, and of the hurt to his father who valued him and his mother who, despite her brave front, was anxious for him. He was the last of their sons young enough to go: ‘In the months that followed the declaration of war, I [Florence] was called upon time and time again to stand by the younger sons as one by one, letting their little mother down as gently as possible, they took up their Cross and went.’²

Christ Carrying the Cross, an evocation of the Fourth Station of the Cross, can be interpreted as a flowering of such feelings. It was not in fact painted until after the war, in 1920, but its detail is so apt to Stanley’s recorded description of the day he left home that a correspondence is inescapable. We can begin with the three figures in the centre of the bottom part of the picture to the right of the line of five men looking through railings. This trio, Stanley says, depicted himself and friends: ‘As youths we stood in a gate opposite our house [presumably the gate of Ovey’s Farm] and watched people go by on Sundays and in the evenings. The three men in the central part of the bottom of the picture form the onlooker part of the scene’³ – so that by implication all the others are participants. Once more Stanley stands outside an emotional situation in order to watch a transcendence of his feelings into visualized allegory. He later likened the scene and its watching youths to a newspaper account of crowd reaction at the funeral of Queen Victoria. The journalist, anxious to convey the solemnity of the occasion, proclaimed that ‘women openly wept and strong men broke down in side streets’,⁴ an overstatement which became a catchphrase, and one which Stanley would merrily quote on occasion.

‘To the left of the picture is a wide street coming towards the spectator, through the iron palings at the side of which other men peer down at the stooping figure of the Virgin.’⁵ There being in reality no ‘wide street coming towards the spectator’ at the side of Fernlea – the house shown in the painting has been coalesced into Fernlea-Belmont – Stanley has emotionally eliminated all the buildings between it and Sutton Road, the ‘wide street’ down which he went on his way to Maidenhead to avoid lingering memories of Cookham.* He has thus slid together in association the two notions of ‘home’ and ‘departure from home’. Fernlea-Belmont has taken the situation in the village of the Methodist Chapel. Ma, who felt the parting so keenly, has become metamorphosed into the Virgin Mary, not because Stanley saw her sentimentally in that guise, but because he is sympathetically capturing in the transfiguration the utter agony of her feelings. She is a distraught figure barred from her son by the ‘iron palings’ – Stanley has given them the semblance of military spears – ‘at the side of which other men peer down’. Examine these other men. Each is a manifestation of a white-faced, agonized Stanley. They are the five Spencer sons gone to war of Gilbert’s Crucifixion.

Stanley ‘looks down’ on Ma, for in the kinesis of emotion in the painting, Ma is now a receding, diminutive figure, appearing as she must have done when in boyhood he climbed the walnut tree in the back garden of Fernlea, the tree from which he could ‘survey the worlds not only in our own garden but the other gardens beyond’,⁷ so giving him once again the feeling of distance and isolation which this sad occasion invokes. As an associative element, the feeling is brought into the picture as the ivy which covered the neighbouring cottage, The Nest, in which an elderly couple, the Sandells, now lived. Stanley’s grandmother had come to live at the cottage when old Julius died, his business being continued by a son of the previous marriage, Stanley’s ‘Uncle John’. Old Mr Sandell had been one of the firm’s employees and was allocated the cottage when the grandmother died.

A resolute Christ – with the profile of Pa – is escorted by four soldiers whose winged helmets reproduce those worn in early Renaissance paintings.* Followers, or disciples, are with Christ. He too is about to round the corner into Sutton Road, to leave behind his lingering memories of Jerusalem. On the right, men shoulder the ladders of Bosch’s version of the event to mount Christ on the Cross, but for Stanley they are Fairchild’s builders’ men counterpointing the tension by carrying their ladders to some prosaic job at which they are due, the imagery of Cross and ladders interlinked. They go about their business indifferent to the young man in a raincoat and straw hat who carries his gladstone bag up the street; just another recruit off to the war like so many other young men of the time. Passers-by hold up their hands to shield their eyes from the low July sun as they watch.* From the windows of Fernlea-Belmont a congregation of figures, echoes of Stanley’s family, of himself in childhood happiness, of his uncles, aunts, cousins, friends and family maids, look out to reinforce his memories of home. Old Mr and Mrs Sandell, whom the family loved and who loved them, are at the side window of The Nest. The lace curtains blown out by the draught from the open windows on that sultry summer day have been transformed into wings. The onlookers in their silent commiseration have taken on the protectiveness of angels.

When some years later the Tate Gallery showed the painting, they mistitled it Christ Bearing His Cross, which for Stanley implied ‘a sense of suffering which was not my intention. I particularly wished to convey the relationship between the carpenters behind him carrying the ladders and Christ in front carrying the cross, each doing their job of work and doing it just like workmen. … Christ was not doing a job or his job, but the job.’⁸

The comment is again significant in interpreting not only this painting but much of Stanley’s visionary art. He is warning us away from seeing the painting in terms of pure emotion. However sad his feelings and of those around him on that day, the painting is not ultimately about those feelings, and he is not imputing them to Christ. Christ is simply doing the job he has to do, as Stanley, off to the war, is doing what he has to do. The job, the fact, the event exists in its dispassionate reality. Stanley’s struggle to use recalled emotion in the creation of visionary allegory meant that he had to detach the emotion from whatever event aroused it for him. Throughout his life, the struggle, both in behaviour and in art, will continue, making his actions seem detached at times. When, for example, in his letters or writings he reveals strong feelings about an event, they are seldom concerned specifically with the event itself or with the cause of the event, but with his own or others’ ability – or more usually inability – to appreciate the implications, the transcendence, he finds in it.

Such detachment however does not imply that he was anaesthetized to the emotions he was recalling. Twice in his comments on the painting Stanley refers to the three onlookers – himself in recollection – as ‘louts’, a strongly condemnatory epithet in his vocabulary.⁹ The most likely reason is that the dilemma he is recollecting in the incident is so strong that he finds it necessary angrily to belittle it. He transfers the pain of his self-searching to painted representations of himself watching his more visionary self dredging from his memory-feeling the painful visual elements so necessary to composition. Like someone half in and half out of a bad dream he introduces a defensive technique to limit his pain. He turns himself into a doppel-Stanley. Indeed in this case the procedure armours him sufficiently to be able to tell a later friend with some good humour that he is aware that his depiction of Fernlea-Belmont ‘looks rather like a diseased potato’.¹⁰ But there speaks the everyday Stanley. The visionary Stanley knows that the imagery, strange though he finds it, is exact to his purpose. It is, he says, ‘wonderful’.

In this painting, Christ Carrying the Cross, Christ the Son of God is preparing for the final agony which will redeem his creation. Stanley too is entering an agony with the same inevitability. He will endure whatever befalls him in the implicit trust that he too must find redemption in his own purpose and creativity. In the top right of the painting Stanley inserts, out of its true position, one of the cowls of Cookham’s malthouses. His grandfather is said to have had the building of them. The eye of God is upon him.¹¹

Stanley has given the painting flat tones and an unfamiliar, abstract quality, almost a floating sensation. Looking back, he doubted whether it conveyed the transcendence he sought: ‘The Cross, as far as its position in the picture is concerned is right enough. But I still feel it is a pity that I failed to arrive at the notion I had hoped.’¹² The Cross and its transfiguration of the material into the spiritual is the theme of the painting. When Stanley’s dealer subsequently asked him if he should catalogue it as Christ Carrying His Cross, Stanley again furiously corrected him. Its title, he said, was Christ Carrying the Cross.13 The Cross is universal. It represented for Stanley, as he assumed it represented for all, a necessary submission to the perpetual confusions and frustrations of existence from which it is our purpose to seek redemptive meaning. All Stanley’s powers of spiritual awareness would be needed if he was to find the true meaning of the agony of the next four years.

PART TWO

The Confusions of War

1915–1918

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Burghclere Chapel: The Beaufort panels

‘An ideal place for a sick man. No wonder they so rapidly recover.’

King George V to Lieutenant-Colonel R. Blachford, Superintendent of the Beaufort War Hospital, September, 1915¹

IN LATER LIFE Stanley was to assert that after 1919 he resolutely ‘turned his back’ upon the Great War. In the sense that he did not use his experiences in the way that many of the war poets and artists used theirs, his assertion is valid enough. But to interpret his statement as discounting all war influence in his art is patently absurd. War memories can be traced in many later paintings, and without some knowledge on our part of their origin in his war service, the force of these paintings is diminished. For Stanley, as for countless young men of his generation, the shock of war was to prove ineradicable. Only time, or in Stanley’s case an attempted sublimation offered comfort, and the greatest of the redemptions he undertook was the Sandham Memorial Chapel at Burghclere painted between 1927 and 1932. Of the sixteen side-wall panels in that masterwork, ten re-create the Beaufort War Hospital.²

The hospital, Stanley’s ‘roaring great hospital’ – it had 1600 beds – had been hastily converted three months earlier from the Bristol Lunatic Asylum. Most of the thousand or so inmates, men and women, were moved to rural asylums, about eighty being retained for domestic duties. Assigned to the patronage of the Duke of Beaufort, the ad hoc hospital was a typical 1860s institutional building comprising a central administrative and service block from which ward wings extended right and left. Across these, at intervals, other wards ran transversely, enclosing small courts. The right half, facing the building, had been the male half, the left the female. The male hospital staff had been ‘volunteered’ into the Royal Army Medical Corps with rank appropriate to their status; the superintendent and medical staff as officers, the administrative and supervisory staff as sergeants and corporals. The female staff, having no surgical nursing qualifications, became auxiliary nurses, augmented by Red Cross nursing volunteers and supervised by an intake of army nursing sisters from Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service who, as most old soldiers will confirm and as Stanley was to discover, were formidable authoritarians. There Stanley joined a number of young volunteer orderlies like himself. Because they were known only by surname, and Gilbert, having arrived first and being bigger in build, was mistaken as the elder, Stanley was invariably referred to as ‘young Spencer’.

The first panel on the left wall in the Burghclere Chapel, showing a Convoy of Wounded Soldiers Arriving at Beaufort Hospital Gates, hints at Stanley’s impressions on arrival. The wounded were shipped to Southampton from France or to Avonmouth from the Dardanelles and were entrained in ‘convoys’ to Temple Meads Station in Bristol. From there they were ferried to the hospital in a motley collection of vehicles or, as in the case of the ‘walking wounded’ in the painting, in requisitioned omnibuses. At this still excited state of the war, they were cheered through the streets of Bristol by passers-by. A convoy could consist of several hundred patients and the duty staff had to work frantically to register, examine, bath and install them with their kit – the Sorting and Moving Kitbags panel.

The orderlies, normally two to a ward, came under the jurisdiction of the Ward Sister. Their duties combined those of a modern hospital porter with those of a ward auxiliary. They had to make beds – Bedmaking; do dressings, as in scraping the dead skin from a patient’s foot in Patient Suffering from Frostbite; and scrub and polish everything in sight – Ablutions, Scrubbing the Floor and Washing Lockers:

I have done nothing else but scrub since I have been here. I think it has done me good. I think with pleasure of the number of men I have bathed every Wednesday morning. I have to bath patients at 6.00 a.m.; I do it in an hour and a half. When I am seeking the Kingdom of Heaven I shall tell God to take into consideration the number of men I have cleaned and the number of floors I have scrubbed, as well as the excellence of my pictures, so as to let me in.³

Stanley found himself fetching and carrying from the Stores and Kitchens – Filling Tea Urns; preparing tea – Tea in the Ward; and sorting and fetching the ward linen and laundry – Sorting Laundry – together with other activities he records in his memoirs but did not illustrate. Later we shall need to ask ourselves why he chose these specific events for painting.

In addition to ward duties, the orderlies were required to attend military parades and to join in physical training: ‘I remember being rather glad the sergeant who took us on our morning’s route march and double had a girl at one of the cottages en route, so we were allowed a long halt outside this cottage and sometimes she came out and reviewed us pawing the ground and champing at the bit.’⁴ It was a long day. Reveille was at 5.00 a.m.; on duty from 6.00 a.m. to 6.00 p.m. or even 8.00 p.m., with breaks for parades and meals. Off duty, the orderlies could on occasions get a leave pass into Bristol until 10.00 p.m.; they would be inspected for their turn-out by the gate sergeant, Sam Vickery. Otherwise they could relax in their quarters or play cards, chess or billiards.

Their duties were regulated from the office of the Hospital Sergeant-Major, William Kench. He was one of the few men Stanley met who utterly terrified him. Even the ‘most martenesh’ of the Sisters avoided him if they could. He was, says Stanley, ‘a gigantic man, whose eyes paralysed me. … He was quite terrifying enough even when he did not wear puttees. But if you came anywhere near him when he did wear puttees’ – that is, when he was in formal parade dress – ‘God help you!’⁵ Stanley remembered in particular his huge hands, and the way he walked with them stuck into his tunic pockets so that only his ‘fat thumbs’ protruded. Then aged fifty-three, Kench had served when younger in the Royal Marines and had joined the Asylum staff as Head Male Nurse about 1906. He lived with his wife and family in a hospital house and had the habit of exercising his large Airedale dog in the hospital grounds. Only one orderly, according to Stanley, ever had the temerity to try and make friends with the dog. Stanley himself, in passing it, ‘felt all apologetic, sort of, saying to myself, well that’s all right. … I would imagine the expression on my face would be stern but hopeful and guarded. Not a bit of it – terrified and furtive more likely!’

Kench’s office was off the corridor system which runs transversely through the administrative block, windowed and tile-floored at the reception end but darker and stone-flagged where it entered the main service area at the rear. A clerk did the paperwork and one of the male ‘loonies’, known as ‘Deborah’, acted as Kench’s orderly or runner: ‘His face was long and egg-shaped with a short scrubby white beard and bald head. I felt he could claim some mystical discipleship with the Sergeant-Major. If the Sergeant-Major was God, Deborah was St Peter. He slunk about with short shuffling steps and never looked up. If he did, it was only when he thought no one was looking.’ Whatever Stanley’s strictures on him, Kench was evidently an NCO of the old type doing his best to knock into shape a clutter of intelligent, hard-working, responsible, but largely unmilitary volunteers and, more urgently, to keep control of a rumbustious horde of lively young convalescents delighted to be in Blighty for a while and out to make the best of their luck.

Stanley found himself assigned to a group of wards towards the end of the male wing which surrounded one of the newly built operating theatres.* His reactions in his memoirs and his letters offer a valuable glimpse of the unique way his mind worked. Except for occasional comments, he was not interested in recording his activities. He is silent too on highlight events at the hospital which excited the other orderlies – a royal visit by King George V and Queen Mary,* hospital billiards and chess matches, sports competitions, stage shows and entertainments, the daily gossip of any closed institution. He was not supercilious or forgetful about them, indeed they amused him as greatly as they did the other orderlies, but they had no bearing on his need to analyse and explain to himself his art and vision. It was to the service of his vision that all else had to be subordinated, and he saw the hospital and his life there only in the light of its contribution or damage to his creative life. Thus his writings on the hospital – indeed his war writings generally – give a picture of life which does not intend to be descriptive, but explains only those spiritual or visionary aspects of the total experience which held meaning for him.

With this in mind, we can begin to define more precisely how Stanley saw the individual aspects of his hospital experience. Although disorientated at first, physically and emotionally, it did not take him long to adjust physically. His essentially cheerful nature, his sense of responsibility in his duties, his meticulousness and honesty of purpose, together with his prodigious energy, made him a likeable and respected comrade. Unlike Gilbert, he felt no resentment: ‘Please send me my St John’s Ambulance Certificate as soon as you can, as they want it. It is quite all right down here. You get your food all right but you have to push for it. But you get plenty, at least for me. They seem to be quite reasonable, I mean the sergeants etc.’⁶ But his emotional disorientation was more alarming, because that same sensitivity which so elevated his creative instincts made him fearful of failure in a situation which all his instincts told him he should honour, but to the everyday reality of which he knew his values could never fully subscribe.

Stanley could only let impressions flow into him. There was no possibility of any counterflow outwards in imaginative creativity. The disciplined routine of the hospital not only did nothing to encourage creativity, but by the rigidity of its system damped down the least spark of it. Leaves – thirty-six hours every month – were too short for Stanley to do more than turn over his abandoned paintings at Fernlea in nostalgic recollection. As far as the hospital was concerned, 100066 Pte Spencer S. was merely a cipher; two legs and a pair of working hands. Individuality was to be suppressed in conformity with military and medical demands.

Unlike the more restless Gilbert, Stanley, in so far as his duties were concerned, was not at all rebellious. He understood and acquiesced in the need for the suppression of individuality, ‘not to be in the least degree out of my slot.’ The trouble was not that he was unwilling to adapt, but that he found it difficult to do so, and felt depressed and inadequate when he failed. ‘Tickings off’ from sergeants and Sisters which washed over the majority of the orderlies haunted the sensitive Stanley, not in a nervous sense, but because he could not integrate them into his more questioning view of life. Whatever he sensed as natural and instinctive – and therefore joyous – was incomprehensibly forbidden. Even to whistle a few bars of Chopin while passing a ward where a gramophone played was sufficient to earn him a ticking off from a Sister, so that he began to feel that if the sky were blue or the sun shone or the Sergeant-Major remarked in his hearing to the Colonel that it was a glorious day, none of this related to him. The blue sky and the sunshine became equated in his mind with the hospital itself; all including the ‘luscious girls’ who visited belonged solely to the Sergeant-Major. Private Spencer was of no more significance in that world than the stripes on the Sergeant-Major’s shirt, on which every stripe had to match exactly every other in willing deference to their owner: ‘Why should I have been so sensitive to these things, I wonder? Because I had always been easily crushed and because I was sociable and loved human contact when it was harmonious and [was] horrified at the sign of hatred in anyone of myself.’ Stanley’s use of language remained idiosyncratic throughout his life. It is impossible that anyone in the hospital ‘hated’ him; quite the reverse. But by Stanley’s etymology anyone who continually ticked him off or criticized him was not being ‘friendly’, and as the opposite of friendliness can be interpreted as ‘hatred’, so they were, in a deeply argued sense, giving ‘sign of hatred’. By the same reasoning, anyone who kept insisting he do things their way, especially when he was having difficulty in doing it at all, was being ‘bullying’. Hatred and bullying combined to produce an ‘alien atmosphere’ in which he felt his spirit ‘crushed’ in the sense that he was denied the spiritual ‘harmony’ in which his free-ranging mind had the comfort to wander at will.

It is of some importance to reiterate that these sentiments pertained mainly to Stanley’s inner self. They were feelings that he found difficult to explain easily to most of his comrades. One who understood was Lionel Budden, a young lawyer from Dorset, for he and Stanley had discovered that they shared a common interest in music – Budden was a skilled violinist who often organized hospital concerts – and the pair enjoyed long discussions together in walks around the hospital grounds and into Bristol. To the rest of his fellows Stanley was a friendly, hardworking comrade, as amused as they by the incomprehensibilities of military logic and the antics of authority. Perhaps with his ‘obsession for art’ as one orderly there described it in letters to his girl,⁷ he was rather more than they an unmilitary square peg in a military round hole; but, for all that, none found him a dreamy incompetent who could easily be put down or trifled with. His sensitivity may have inwardly torn him apart at times, but he was never a wilting flower in the exterior sense. He had no hesitation in proclaiming his dogmatically puritanical views on such matters as drink, betting and casual sex, but he had the tact not to force his convictions on others. In any case, most of the orderlies were young men of similar background and held comparable views. Nor would Stanley tolerate any mockery of himself or his opinions; he could defend himself with waspish quick-wittedness, as surprising to the recipient as it was wounding.

In the middle of the corridor which connected MC Ward with Ward 5 were three steps which were the unwritten dividing line between the two wards. It is intriguing to find Stanley pondering the significance of these steps in the way he remembered his garden walls at Fernlea. Like the party wall between Fernlea and Belmont, the steps became for him subtle symbols of the division, so apparent in his early paintings, between different ‘atmospheres’. Like his garden at Fernlea, Ward 5 as ‘his’ ward was part of his emotional ‘cosiness’. But when in his scrubbing he reached the three steps he was in a quandary. If he went on and scrubbed the steps, was he trespassing on another ‘atmosphere’, another Sister’s empire and another orderly’s preserve? On the other hand, if he failed to scrub the steps and was thereby ticked off by his own Sister, had he in fact failed to define his proper world? He was perfectly willing to agree to either course of action, but the precise clock-like characteristic in his thinking which made his drawing so accurate in line compelled him to seek mental assurance and to ‘know’ which alternative was correct: ‘I never attempted to dodge any of the inevitable duties. My “dodging” consisted of meeting squarely all the innumerable but analysable shocks which continually beset me.’

All his life, Stanley’s greatest dread was disturbance to the equanimity, the ‘spiritual harmony’ which he continually and painstakingly evolved for himself in any situation. The state of equanimity was built up by ‘analysing’ the puzzles which had beset him in that situation; it was as though he were mentally and emotionally standing outside the situation and formulating his role in it in the way he showed himself contemplating himself in The Centurion’s Servant or was to portray in Christ Carrying the Cross. The possibility of something happening to disturb that equanimity was to him ‘fear of attack’, and he was to attribute much of humanity’s irrational behaviour – sin, evil – to defence against the possibility. He himself loathed being put into a position of such defencelessness.

Says Sister S., ‘Tell Mrs D. [Miss Dunn, the former Asylum Matron] that for the last meal there was barely enough for twenty-two patients, let alone thirty.’ So I am called upon to deliver a slap to this formidable lady. I have to say something, as I know I shall be questioned by Sister S. on my return. I was continually having to be a buffer between two opposing parties.

Such orders, which involved competitiveness or the possibility of failure or the humiliation of a disclosure of personal inadequacy, were ‘shocks’. Under normal circumstances, Stanley could cope with them, find his way through them. But ‘everything at the hospital was so quick’. Shock followed shock too quickly for meaningful adjustment.

There were a few quiet backwaters where Stanley could for a time find calm. He could occasionally slip into the laundry cupboard by the Sister’s office in Ward 4B, always leaving the door open, to refresh himself by thumbing through his precious Gowan and Gray art books. These small inexpensive handbooks were a source of mental comfort and several were among his effects when he died. He found congenial too those sections of the hospital wherein the Sergeant-Major’s writ did not run – the hospital laundry, even though under Miss Dunn, or the Stores, under the Quartermaster-Sergeant, ‘Mr’ King, whom he later described as the Pope to Kench’s Mussolini. These were havens where he could momentarily recapture something of his Cookham life. For similar opportunities of contemplation, Stanley welcomed being sent on routine journeys to other parts of the hospital such as the X-ray department or the pathology laboratory which were in the original female wing. The mirror-image sensation which had captured his imagination in the Fernlea-Belmont neighbourliness at home continued to fascinate him at the Beaufort. In the former female wing everything was repeated but the other way round, and on each journey he had the sensation of entering a looking-glass world.

None of the daily shocks, the reprimands, the agonies of being made responsible for actions not in his power to accomplish, the long hours of tedious physical work and the barren intellectual atmosphere which gave so little opportunity for the contemplation so vital to his nature – none of these would have mattered if only he could have assimilated them into a revelation of some deeper meaning: ‘I did not despise any job I was set to do, and did not mind doing anything so long as I could recognize in it some sort of integral connection with the spiritual meaning that demanded to be clarified.’ The problem at the Beaufort was that the ‘integral connections’ would not materialize in his mind, leaving him confused and frustrated. One of the ‘shocks’ was the frequency with which the ‘atmosphere’ of his ward kept changing:

Every bit of change, no matter how slight or often, would be felt [by Stanley] and the arrival of a convoy – two hundred or more would arrive in the middle of the night – was the most disturbing change in this respect. One had just got used to the patients one had, had mentally and imaginatively visualized them. One’s imagination, once it had taken hold of the whole of an affair, cannot conceive of anything in that affair being altered or different or in any way being added to or detracted from.⁸

But now, at the Beaufort where ‘everything was so quick’, although the essential significance of the ward remained inviolable – ‘unchangeable’ – the visualization Stanley needed to express it would, like a will-o’-the-wisp, disintegrate before he had the time to establish it: ‘What will the world be like tomorrow? What about Courtney and Hines when the beds between them are filled? The significance will remain as an eternal factor, but another God-creation takes place in the night, and I will find it in the morning.’ In his repeated attempts at image-forming Stanley found himself like a puppy chasing its tail, going pointlessly round and round: ‘At Bristol there was no essential change, but on the contrary anything that occurred there was clearly intended to ensure the continuity of its unchangeableness.’ Creatively, the hospital was a ‘nothing-happening’ place.

When thus thwarted, Stanley could give way to anger at those who were apparently baffling him by their obtuseness. There were the other orderlies: ‘It is the utterly selfish spirit of these orderlies that makes me wild. … being here is wasting time to no purpose. …⁹ There were the ward Sisters: ‘Ill-natured, cattish, conceited Sisters who are also incompetent; they make the nurses and orderlies their servants.’ And there was the place itself: ‘There is something so damnably smug and settled-down about this place. … If I can, I am going to transfer into something else. I would give anything to belong to the Royal Berks.’

His frustrations were not improved when in September Gilbert was posted away to the main RAMC depot at Tweseldown in Hampshire; Stanley and Budden took him to Carmen at the Bristol Hippodrome on the eve of his departure. Then a fellow-orderly named Tomlin whom Stanley and Gilbert liked took sick and died unexpectedly. Finally, one of the lunatics went berserk and, although Stanley was not shocked in the medical sense, his feeling for the inhumanity of the man’s suffering made the event one of horror for him:

I always get the feeling of a man possessed by devils when I see a man in a mad fit. I remember one man, he was perfectly all right, and then suddenly he was cast down and it took about ten men to hold him. He was put into a room, a padded cell at first, but that was not big enough to hold him, so they spread about 12 mattresses on the floor of a room and put him in there. There he raved a day and a night and spat at everybody, especially when he was being fed. The Sister used to hold his food to his mouth while two or three men held his arms down. His face gave me the feeling that he wanted to pray that the devil would come out of him. He was taken away, but is now all right – in his right mind. Nothing like this is shocking, but to know a man and like him and to know that man is going mad is awful.¹⁰

So when during October or November of 1915 a notice was pinned on the hospital notice-board asking for volunteers for RAMC service overseas, Stanley thought about it for some days. His parents were the main obstacle. Henry Lamb had written to say that he was about to undertake a crash course at Guy’s Hospital in London to complete his interrupted training as a doctor. He would be commissioned in August 1916 and wanted Stanley to wait and become his batman. But, Stanley decided, he was ‘too impatient’. When he eventually signed the notice, his was only the second name. But gradually thirty-eight more were added, including that of Lionel Budden. Stanley did not immediately tell Ma or Pa and asked his friends not to do so. In those still early months of the war, even though more than a year had passed, medical standards remained high. Of the forty volunteers, only fourteen were passed. Stanley was youthfully gratified to find himself among them and to learn that Budden too would be going with him. However, army bureaucracy took its time. Some of the volunteers did go, but those like Stanley and Budden in the main batch were kept kicking their heels. In the meantime, several surprising things were to happen to Stanley.

The first was that he was scrubbing the floor of the Dispensary one day when a one-legged Dardanelles patient came in, thrust a newspaper under his nose, and demanded to know, ‘Is this you, you little devil?”¹¹ Flabbergasted, Stanley read an account of a New English Art Club exhibition in November in which his painting The Centurion’s Servant was highly praised. It transpired that Henry Tonks, having used his surgeon’s training to advise on the establishment in France of the many private hospitals and convalescent homes which British patriotism was endowing, had returned to London and, among other activities, set up an autumn exhibition of the New English Art Club of which he, Steer and Brown were the virtual founders. Not knowing where Stanley was, he had written to Pa to ask if paintings were available and, without telling Stanley, Pa had sent The Centurion’s Servant and another work.* Stanley’s reaction was one of fury at Pa’s action and of horror at what the press might make of his picture. Mercifully, however, no reviewer put any untoward interpretation on it, and all praised it for a variety of qualities, most of which Stanley had not intended.

In a closed community like the hospital, the news that young Spencer was a ‘name’ spread quickly. The effect was, said Stanley,

extraordinary. The matron, a great gaunt creature before whom Queen Mary looked quite a crumpled little thing, came down the ward with a veritable sheaf of dailies under her arm determined to track down this great unknown. Even she looked a little less grim and gaunt. These notices were very welcome to me. I had been terribly crushed. They gave rise to such teasing remarks from the Sisters as, ‘When are you going to get that commission, orderly?’ having scented I was a bit different, or thought I was.¹⁵

It was not only the hospital staff who found the event of interest. In the residential suburb of Clifton, a tall elegant young man of twenty also read the notices and recalled Stanley as a celebrated predecessor at the Slade. He had studied there with Gilbert, but had not met Stanley. His name was Desmond Macready Chute – the ‘chu’ pronounced as in ‘chew’ – and he was a collateral descendant of the great Victorian tragedian Macready. His actor-manager grandfather had run the Theatres Royal in Bristol and Bath and introduced as ingénues stars of the calibre of Ellen Terry. Although Desmond had innumerable aunts, uncles and cousins, his own branch of the family had been scythed by consumption. His father had died in 1912, and now only he and his mother Abigail remained to carry on the family theatrical business, centred by then on the considerable Prince’s Theatre in Bristol. Tall, good-looking, highly intelligent, literary in bent, deeply read, a capable organizer – he had been Head of School at Downside – a dedicated musician, sensitive pianist and competent artist, his artistic and religious aspirations soared beyond the limitations of the family theatre. He was, however, withdrawn by nature and showed a tendency to ‘nervous prostration’. His indifferent health precluded thought of military service.

The ties between the Prince’s Theatre and the Beaufort were particularly close – visiting artistes freely gave their time to military hospital entertainment – and it cannot have been long before talk of Stanley reached Chute. The result was another surprise for Stanley:

It was about this time when I was wondering how to get the mental energy to make the work bearable … that I had a visit from a young intellectual of sixteen who, like Christ visiting Hell, came one day walking to me along a stone passage with glass-coloured windows all down one side and a highly patterned tile floor. … I had a sack tied round my waist and a bucket of dirty water in my hand. I was amazed to note that this youth in a beautiful civilian suit was walking towards me as if he meant to speak to me; the usual visitors to the hospital passed us orderlies by as they would pass a row of bedpans. The nearer he came, the more deferential his deportment, until at last he stood and asked me with the utmost respect whether I was Stanley Spencer.

This account of their meeting is repeated several times in Stanley’s later reminiscences and misled biographers about Desmond’s age. In fact it is somewhat dramatized. Writing to the Raverats at the time, Stanley is more factual: ‘Desmond Chute is a youth of 20. … When I first met him … I was on my way to the Stores. …’¹⁶

All his life, Stanley would show a tendency to overcolour some experiences. Invariably they are experiences in which he suffered some ‘spiritual’ hurt. The tendency was part of his make-up, part of the process by which he transcended the hurt in precisely the way he used his art. At all other times his accounts of experiences are accurate. In this case the spiritual hurt lay some years ahead. At the time Chute’s arrival was salvation:

If I were able to express how much this hospital life and atmosphere was cut off and out of the power of any other power than itself, I could make it clear what I felt at the moment of meeting. Compared with the crushed feeling the place gave me, the army and the war took upon themselves something of the feeling of freedom that one felt about civilian life in peacetime. The appearance of this young man was a godsend. He was terribly good and kind to me and appreciated the mental suffering I was going through.

During the first months of their friendship Desmond was fit, and they were able during Stanley’s time off-duty to explore Clifton together. Engrossed in conversation, they must have made an odd-looking pair, Desmond well over six feet tall, slim and languid, with reddish hair and the beginning of a beard, and Stanley a slight, dark-haired and brisk figure beside him. They contrasted too in personality, Desmond intellectually reserved, Stanley the eager terrier zigzagging after ideas which would set his imagination alight. There were visits to Desmond’s home, sometimes with Budden, to meet his mother and his aunts. There were visits to the bookshops of Bristol where fine secondhand bargains were to be found. There were ‘at homes’ at Desmond’s friends and with the Clifton hostesses of the day:

I go down to Mrs Daniell’s to hear some singing on my half-days. Mrs Daniell has a fine voice and so has her daughter. I felt quite ‘crackey’ with delight to hear some duets out of Figaro and they sang them well. They sing heaps of early French things. A young Slade student named Desmond Chute does the arranging for these visits and he plays the piano. I shall always feel grateful to Mrs Daniell.¹⁷

Desmond for his part found Stanley an ideal pupil. For although he was four years younger than Stanley and lacked Stanley’s intuitive genius, his love of literature and music matched Stanley’s instincts.

When I [Stanley] used to visit him, he used to translate so much [of the Odyssey] and then read it in the original. Mind you, if he was to read about two pages he could go through to order, whether he had the book or not. Sometimes when we have been out for a walk – wonderful walks – I would begin to ask him about some particular novelist and he would go through the whole novel quoting pages and pages, quite unconsciously.¹⁸

In the spring of 1916 Desmond suffered one of his attacks of nervous prostration, and their meetings had to take place in Chute’s bedroom:

When I think of the wonderful quiet evenings I have spent in Chute’s bedroom with the sunlight filling the room and Desmond surrounded by the wildflowers which he loved [in later life Chute became a knowledgeable gardener]. I used to sit looking out of the wide-open window and listen to him translate Homer and Odyssey, Iliad and Cyclops and the men escaping under the sheep, oh my goodness, it really did frighten me.¹⁹

It is noteworthy that Stanley is affected as much by the drama of this forefather of all adventure stories as by its verse.

I have looked at different translations of Homer, but nothing to approach Desmond’s. … Our evenings were so satisfying. He read me Midsummer Night’s Dream one night and on another night he read me As You Like It. I think it is a wonderful play. The colour of Chute’s hair is a brilliant rust-gold. It glistened as the sunlight fell on it as he sat up in bed reading. … He reminded me in character of John the Baptist. Of course, having studied at Downside, Desmond has a natural grace that makes it satisfying to be with him. [Chute was a devout Roman Catholic]. I mean he has a mind so quickened by God that you can do nothing but live when you are with him.

It was Desmond’s patient coaxing which at last gave Stanley a glimpse of the spiritual meaning to be found in his military life. Desmond was reading aloud from St Augustine, and there Stanley found a quotation, a notion, which seemed to provide the key to the redemption he so desperately sought: ‘St Augustine says about God “fetching and carrying”. I am always thinking of those words. It makes me want to do pictures. The bas-reliefs in the Giotto Campanile give me the same feeling.’ The quotation is a paraphrase of a passage from St Augustine’s Confessions: ‘ever busy yet ever at rest, gathering yet never needing, bearing, filling, guarding, creating, nourishing, perfecting’.²⁰ Other passages in St Augustine could have similarly inspired him:

Therefore He who is the true Mediator – inasmuch as by taking the form of a servant he became the Mediator between God and Man, the man Jesus Christ – in the form of God accepts sacrifice along with the Father, together with whom he is one God. Yet in the form of a servant he chose for himself to be sacrificed rather than to receive it. … In this way he is at the same time the priest, since it is he who offers the sacrifice, and he is the offering as well.²¹

The dedication of Stanley’s whole existence, the sacrifice of himself to the spiritual sources of his art, destined his art to be a ‘mediator between God and Man’, a perpetual theme in his writings. If he had not enlisted but stayed at home painting, he would have continued to ‘accept’ or ‘receive’ the sacrifice of himself to his art. But by volunteering into the army, he had yielded the nobility of sacrifice demanded by his art to lesser commitments which had no relevance. He had reduced himself to the role and status of a ‘servant’. The function of a servant is to ‘fetch and carry’, to ‘do things to men’. By offering to deny his spiritual destiny as artist, he had deliberately ‘chosen to be sacrificed’. The fact that such sacrifice might mean not only artistic but physical death was inconsequential. Sacrifice was a sacrament and Stanley was both priest at this particular sacrifice and the sacrifice itself.

Some such metaphysical revelation – the theme of Christ Carrying the Cross – must have come to Stanley as an ‘emergence’, an exaltation. The meaning to his presence at the Beaufort, ungraspable till now, could at last be visualized. Its impact was joyous. He worshipped and even, in his fashion, loved Chute, who already understood it and had shown it to him. For, at last, with understanding came the urge to compose, to draw, to capture his comprehension:

The sunlight is blazing into the corridor just near the Sergeant-Major’s office and I say inwardly, ‘Oh, how I could paint this feeling I have in me if only there were no war – the feeling of that corridor, of the blazing light, and the Sergeant-Major and his dog – anything, so long as it gave me the feeling the corridor and the circumstance gave me!’ If I was Deborah, the lunatic who doesn’t know there is a war, I could do it. His sullen face and shifty eyes – I envied him the agony of being cut off completely from my soul. I thought in agony how marvellously I could paint this moment in this corridor now. And if at any time this war ends, I will paint it now, that is with all the conviction I feel now; but it can only be done if I feel assured that I am not suddenly going to be knocked off my perch. No! Not quite like that, because that can easily happen. No! Not that! But it was a belief in peace as being the essential need for creative work, not a peace that is merely the accidental lapse between wars, but a peace that, whether war is on or not, is the imperturbable and right state of the human soul; and that is only to be found in the peace of Christ.²²

The crucial sentence in the passage must be the curious, ‘I envied him the agony of being cut off completely from my soul.’ It seems to predicate a notion that in our instinct to find a place in which we cannot be ‘knocked off our perch’ – a state of being ‘home’, at ‘peace’ – we seek those miraculous moments which lift us beyond the physical where we are isolated into our separate existence into a spiritual world in which we are not only at one with each other but with the form and meaning of creation itself. Our lives are Odysseys to reach those joyous states. Only in achieving them can Stanley’s desire to paint have meaning. Deborah, however mysteriously, was permanently in such a world, and even if his state was not one Stanley sought for himself, he felt it ‘agony’ that he could offer only sympathy in comprehension, not the empathy of truly spiritual identification.

If the recording of such visionary ecstasy was still impossible at the Beaufort, Stanley at least found the motivation to start drawing again. With his growing reputation came requests for portraits from staff and patients. In later lists he remembered a dozen or so. He was out of practice and the earliest ones dissatisfied him. But later ones ‘showed a great improvement’.²³ He invariably gave them to the sitters. Only one seems to have survived, that of ‘a tall chap in the cookhouse’. Stanley does not give the sitter’s name, but it was Jack Witchell. Having been a grocer in civilian life he had been detailed not to the ‘cookhouse’ as such, but to the stores. The head was drawn in Jack’s small autograph album, and Stanley had to run the top of the head across the fold in the leaves. ‘You would smile, dear, to observe young Spencer sketching me,’ wrote Jack to his girl. But the event was more of an ordeal than Jack had anticipated, involving two sessions of two hours each. During the second session Jack played chess with Lionel Budden, ‘so that I look half-asleep’.²⁴ Even so, Stanley did not finish Jack’s ear, an omission which is artistically comprehensible, but which irritated Jack’s precise storeman’s mind. He pressed Stanley to finish it, but ‘he would not’. However, Jack found the drawing ‘very pleasing and quite like me’.

At last Stanley was becoming reconciled. Work went on in the same routine, but even the most fearsome of the dreaded Sisters now treated him with consideration. Being on draft, Stanley was given his overseas injections and was invited to attend lectures and even to watch an operation on an elderly patient named Hawthorn; he was fascinated by the proceedings. But it must have been with relief that his draft of ten men learned that their departure was imminent. It was now well into May 1916: ‘I think it will be Salonika. The Sergeant-Major says so, anyway.’²⁵

Suddenly, at short notice, they were off. Jack Witchell, writing to his girl on 12 May, saw them go:

Budden and nine others have just gone. They had only twenty-four hours’ notice and we gave them a jolly good send-off. Am sorry to lose Budden, he is one of the best men I have ever met and I trust we have not seen the last of one another in this world. Spencer was also with them. I should have been with them. I was able to get their autographs just before they left.

There are only nine signatures in Jack’s album. Budden’s is there, but the missing name is Stanley’s. Probably he had permission to spend his last evening with Desmond Chute and so missed the ‘jolly good send-off’. Desmond had only just managed to make a pencil sketch of him in time (now in the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham).

Their departure left a gap: ‘They will feel us being gone,’²⁶ declared Stanley, and indeed they did, in more ways than one. To his letter Jack Witchell adds a sad little coda: ‘Am feeling a bit down today.’

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Burghclere Chapel: Tweseldown

Drinkwater used to work in a place where the clouds touched the hills where he worked.

Stanley Spencer to Desmond Chute¹

STANLEY’S group of volunteers was destined for the RAMC Training Depot at Tweseldown, near Fleet in Hampshire. But because the Beaufort was administratively responsible to Devonport Military Hospital the party had, by the exigencies of military logic, to proceed to Hampshire by way of Plymouth. Arrived there he immediately wrote to Desmond: ‘We left the Beaufort yesterday Friday morning. I swept the ward out yesterday morning with George [one of the inmates whom the orderlies used to tip to clean their boots]. I felt a bit sad, poor old George was so upset. Have brought my Shakespeare with me. Remember me to your mother and aunt.’²

The draft, being in transit, had little to do at Devonport apart from attending morning parades, persuading the mess orderlies they were entitled to meals, and working out which among the unfamiliar naval uniforms in the town they were supposed to salute. Stanley was able to catch up on his correspondence. Gilbert was in Salonika as an orderly in a Field Hospital. Harold and Natalie, their orchestral work disrupted, were filling in time as cinema pianists at Maidenhead, but aiming to move to London where Natalie, who had fluent Spanish, hoped to work in Intelligence. Horace, back in England, had in March married Marjorie, ‘the youngest of the Hunt girls’;* ‘she is a nice girl and we are all fond of her’ wrote Pa to Will. Transferred to the Royal Engineers, Horace was then posted to France, but by October was to be back in England in hospital after two bouts of malaria. Percy too was in France, in a Field Headquarters, and had been mentioned in despatches. Sydney was an officer instructor in the Home Training Battalion of the Norfolk Regiment. Henry Lamb was at Guy’s Hospital completing his training as a doctor. Edward Marsh, frantically busy, nevertheless found time to propose a small Civil List grant for a struggling writer called James Joyce, then in Zürich. To Switzerland too, Will had departed, to be reunited there with Johanna as two among thousands of international refugees – Lenin also among them – who then crowded that neutral if bureaucratic haven. Will was doing little work and Johanna, barred from returning to Germany, was dependent on infrequent money sent from Berlin; Will had to reduce his monthly allotment to Pa from £8 to £6. Johanna’s brother, Max, was reported missing, and Will was anxiously trying to discover from the War Office if he was listed among the Germans taken prisoner.⁴ There had been floods at Cookham and fierce gales had uprooted hundreds of trees there.

Stanley was not sorry to leave for Tweseldown after a few days. The hutted camp was on the open slope below the racecourse on the down. He was delighted to be able to see the sweep of the sky again: ‘Training is all out in the open, and this is what I like.’⁵ It was, however, strict. The Kit Inspection panel at Burghclere records Stanley’s dislike of the mindless regimentation of depot life. The purpose of the training was to fit him for active service in a Field Ambulance. The function of a Field Ambulance is essentially to collect the sick and wounded from front-line fighting units and to convey them back to Field Hospitals, giving them on the way such emergency aid as could be provided in the Advanced Dressing Stations which the Field Ambulance would set up. Stretcher drill, practical scouting – searching for stray wounded during a battle – the recovery of wounded from the difficult confines of trenches and dugouts, the handling of mules and wagons – normally done in action by Army Service Corps drivers – operation of the vital watercarts with the testing and purification of water sources, and, of course, first-aid and medical procedures, all these topics had to be learned and practised. At the time Stanley thought that the training, though interesting, would not apply to him, as he was convinced that only the strongest and most resourceful orderlies would be assigned to Field Ambulances; he assumed that he would be detailed to hospital work overseas.

Desmond Chute wrote every day, pouring out the stream of encouragement begun at the Beaufort. Stanley wrote to the Raverats: ‘Chute has sent me a translation of Odyssey Book 6, the coming of Odysseus to the Phaiacians [it was a personal, hand-written translation, not a copy of another’s] and as I was hut orderly today I was able to go through it this afternoon. It is all so nimbly written … that you feel you have the original wonderful rhythms with you.’⁶ To Chute himself he wrote:

It is grand to take your translation out of my haversack and read it during intervals of drill … I should like a photo of you. Now that I am here I look back on the time I spent with you and it appears so beautiful to me. It clears my head which gets muddled at times.⁷

The illumination provided by St Augustine’s ‘fetching and carrying’ continued to enthuse his imagination:

When I used to have a full day at the Beaufort, full of every kind of job you could think of, I felt very deeply the stimulating effect ‘doing’ had upon me. … ‘Doing things’ is just the thing to make you paint. I have washed up the dinner things at the Beaufort a hundred times. How much more wonderfully could a man washing plates be painted by me now than before the war. … Every necessary act is like anointing oil poured forth. … I am looking back on Beaufort days and now that I am away from it I must do some pictures of it – frescoes. I should love to fill all the hundred square spaces in this [wooden frame] hut with hospital work [paintings] but I have a lot to get over, especially my bed picture propensity. …⁸

A curious thing was unsettling Stanley. He was discovering that as his experience and understanding broadened he was seeing his earlier work with fresh eyes. He had just been home on leave and found that his pictures there, although good, were perhaps not as successful in conveying the deeper substance of his vision as he had thought when he painted them. It was a problem which was to engage him all his life. He could only paint from the personal association of a specific time. What was to happen when subsequent associations became more apt?

I really feel at times doubtful if what inspires me will really reach out and achieve all the qualities and perfections that a work of art should contain. I have always gone on the basis that pure inspiration contains within itself all the necessary apparatus, practical and spiritual, for carrying it out. If I have found that in carrying out a picture the carrying out was not doing this or not giving me any great pleasure, then I have concluded that the initial inspiration was somehow wrong or else had to go arm-in-arm with some notion to which it was not perfectly related. But I have not put it down to lack of knowledge; knowledge, that is, as separate from inspiration; something I ought to know and study quite apart from what I want to express.⁹

So in letters home we find Stanley pestering, pleading with, cajoling whoever will listen – Florence, Henry Lamb, Desmond Chute – for books and reading-matter.

An unexpected piece of news which pleased him was that two friends wanted to buy his ‘Kowl’ painting – Mending Cowls, Cookham. One was Henry Lamb, the other James (‘Jas’) Wood. Stanley had met Wood before enlisting. He was a young man of independent means and outlook who had studied painting in Paris and Germany, and had reluctantly – he saw no point in taking up arms against his old Bavarian friends – joined the Royal Field Artillery. As both were known to Stanley, he wanted both of them to have it, but tactfully he left them to sort it out between them. Lamb won.

As a recruit stationed at Trowbridge in Wiltshire, Jas Wood was miserable for many of the same reasons as Stanley had been during his early days at the Beaufort. Since Trowbridge is not far from Bristol, Stanley thought it might help Wood to meet Chute:

Am going to write to a man named Wood and ask him to come and see you. His military life is getting on his nerves and in fact he has had little chance at any time of doing what he would have done. He has just sent me a book of Donatello, and the other day he sent me a book on the life of Gaudier-Brzeska which you mentioned as having seen in George’s [a Bristol bookshop]. I hated Gaudier when I knew him but I agree with you that he is extraordinarily true and certain in his drawing.’*¹⁰

To Wood, Stanley wrote:

I rather envy you being in the RFA [Royal Field Artillery] and for the draft. Chute has been sending me [pictures of] a series of corbels in Exeter Cathedral. … This life quickens the soul. I am laying in a goodly store [of ideas]. I am still thinking about the Beaufort War Hospital which the more I think about it, the more it inspires me. … I am determined that when I get the chance I am going to do some wonderful things, a whole lot of big frescoes. Of the square pictures there will be The Convoy (I have that) and The Operation (and that). … I think there is something wonderful in hospital life … the act of ‘doing things’ to men is wonderful.¹²

Stanley’s training was nearly over. By August 1916 he was telling Henry Lamb, by then commissioned as a doctor in the RAMC, ‘It is true that we are just going. We are even now ready, down to writing our wills. If you have your clothes [uniform] come in them as you will have less trouble getting into the camp.’¹³ It must have been a brief visit, but it cheered Stanley: ‘It seemed almost too good to be true when I saw you coming down the street. I felt these times were over. It seemed uncanny.’

Pa came over to Tweseldown to see him, because during Stanley’s embarkation leave at Fernlea, he had by chance been away visiting Florence in Cambridge. To Desmond Stanley outlined the reading he was taking:

I have sent home my large volume of Shakespeare. Impossible to carry it. Much better to have a play sent [individually] as desired. I am able to take the Canterbury Tales, as it is more pocketable. Also the little blue book you sent me [perhaps a Missal]. Some Gowan and Gray art books and, if possible, Crime and Punishment. The Garden of the Soul. …¹⁴

News came that he was to leave with Lionel Budden and some 350 others on 23 August. They had been issued with tropical kit. So by train to Paddington and thence to London Docks (‘much sound of steel and repairing of ships’) and aboard the hospital ship Llandovery Castle, ‘the wedge widening as we moved away from the quayside, the throwing of letters to be posted by the be-ostriched-feathered Cockney women come to say goodbye.’¹⁵

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Burghclere Chapel: The left-wall frieze

Am reading Blake and Keats. I love to dwell on the thought that the artist is next in divinity to the saint. He, like the saint, performs miracles.

Stanley Spencer to Desmond Chute¹

ALTHOUGH in 1916 Salonika with its mosques, narrow streets and polyglot population still had the appearance of a Turkish city, it had long been freed from Ottoman rule. Its importance as a port lay in its situation as the only outlet for Macedonia, the heartland of the Balkans. Possession of this ancient land of mountains, wild terrain, pastoral villages and unsurfaced roads had been disputed by its three neighbours, Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia – the latter roughly the southern half of modern Yugoslavia – in the Balkan Wars of 1912. The three contenders, unable to agree on ownership of Salonika, had been persuaded in the 1913 Treaties of London and Bucharest to make it a free port.

The outbreak of war in 1914 set the three contenders glowering at each other again. Serbia allied herself with France in an effort to avoid the fate of her northern neighbour Bosnia, already gobbled up by the Austro-Hungarian Empire; it was a Bosnian student protest culminating in the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria while on a conqueror’s visit to Sarajevo which had sparked the Great War. Bulgaria on the other hand allied herself with Germany, but hesitated to make any aggressive act for fear of formidable Russian and Romanian armies gathered to her north. Greece, in whose territory Salonika lay, was neutral but split in allegiance, her new King favouring Germany and Austria–Hungary while the Prime Minister, Venizelos, urged support of France, Britain and Russia.

By 1915 everything was changing. Russian military power had been virtually eliminated by the German offensive eastwards in the spring. Austria–Hungary had decided to resume her conquest southwards from Bosnia to annex Serbia. The attempt was not very successful until the Bulgarians, satisfied that there was now little likelihood of serious Russian or Romanian interference, decided to join in. The tough Serbs, able to hold off the Austro-Hungarian attack from the north, could not cope with the additional Bulgarian flank attack from the east. They begged help from France, who in turn demanded support from a not over-enthusiastic Britain. Two French divisions and one British were nevertheless landed at Salonika just in time to learn that the battered Serbian armies had given up and were retreating in bitter winter weather away from them over the mountains into a neutral but suspicious Albania. There the French and Royal Navies rescued them and took them down the coast to Corfu to rest and refit. In the meantime the small French and British expeditionary force, meeting head-on the full panoply of the elated Bulgarian armies, fell back to a defensive line around Salonika and howled for help.

The Greeks to their south remained inactively neutral, still undecided which side to join. Reluctant to provoke their hostility, the Germans persuaded the Bulgarians to halt more or less along the Greek frontier. Given this breathing-space and using the free-port status of Salonika as a pretext, the Allies began landing a motley of reinforcements, French, British, Indian, colonial, even a token brigade of Russians. Over the months more formations arrived, including Italians and the Serbian armies from Corfu re-equipped by the French and with British field support. The line lengthened across the peninsula to the Albanian frontier, and the opposing armies settled into an uneasy confrontation across the formidable hills and valleys which divided them.

This was the complex situation into which Stanley and Budden stepped from their lighter on to the waterfront of Salonika. The sea journey had been a wonder to Stanley: ‘the sea turning a pale delicate green as it shallowed a little before the straits of Gibraltar … the pumice-stone corner of land that is Africa, the sea being a dark-blue lapis colour – a Reckitts blue as Budden called it – and looking west, blood-red as the sun is setting …’²

But so overwhelmingly did the impressions arrive that even at the sedate speed of a sea journey Stanley found himself unable to digest them as he wanted: ‘Change; but more outrage than change. … One is going beyond as a human what one is made by God to do. One should grow with experience, and one does not do that at that artificial speed. Had I walked to Salonika, I could have changed in exact proportion as where I got to on the journey. …’³

There was, however, consolation because he had a companion with whom to share them: ‘It was nice to have Budden. I really did not think [his friendship] was so just what I wanted. It was like discovering yourself.’⁴ Alas, at Salonika: ‘Maybe because of the law of the army, one of which is tallest on the right, shortest on the left, we became separated beyond all hope. It was our only difference. So we were marched off to different camps. We grinned at each other as we solemnly marched off to our various destinations.’

This account to the Raverats – he says the event took place on the quay as they landed – again has a ring of over-dramatization. The losing of Budden was a hurt to his spirit.* At the time, he wrote to Desmond Chute: ‘I had to part with dear Lionel Budden at the rest camp here. I have no idea where he went.’⁶ He went in fact to the 36th (Serbian) General Hospital at Vertekop, some forty miles inland, one of the hospitals provided by the British to support the reconstituted Serbian army. He had his violin with him. Another disappointment for Stanley was to discover that while he was on the way there, Gilbert had been transferred from his Field Hospital at Salonika to service as a medical orderly on a hospital ship. The brothers must have passed each other in the Mediterranean.

The feel of an army on active service, with its heterogeneous scatter of signposts, tents, camps, dumps, wagons, traffic and groups of khaki-clad men everywhere about their tasks is very different from that of an army at home. Despite the apparent confusion there is an air of purpose. The British front line was some thirty miles north of Salonika. Veterans back from the front were anxiously interrogated by Stanley’s newcomers: ‘What’s it like up there, chum?’ From the base camp Stanley could see the hills where the opposing armies lay entrenched. To his left rear lay the impressive massif of Mount Olympus, changing in appearance with the seasons and the sunlight, and pointing the way southwards into neutral Greece. On his left ran the valley of the Vardar (modern Axios), debouching into the Gulf south of Salonika but with its northern source deep in enemy territory. It formed the left boundary of the British sector and was the gateway to the Monastir road, the essential supply route for the other Allied armies inland to the west. On his right a rolling plateau gave way in the distance to the valley of the Struma river (today the Strimon), wide and fertile in its main course, but marshy and malarial at its estuary east of Salonika. Beyond the valley rose steeply a long wall of forbidding mountains forming the main Bulgarian defences in this area, the Struma sector. To attack there, the British had to cross the Struma valley in full view of the enemy, a distance of five miles in places, and the main road across it, the shell-swept Seres road, was to become as notorious to the men of the Salonika army serving on this sector as did the Menin road at Ypres.

If Stanley were to face directly north, he would have seen on a cleaf day, rising above the plateau which separated the Vardar and Struma valleys, the rounded summits of two hills, known to the French who first made their unpleasant acquaintance as the Grand and Petit Couronnés. Like Monte Cassino in a later war these seemingly innocuous but highly fortified hills effectively blocked any British advance. Beside them lay Lake Doiran, five miles in diameter. Around its fringes and stretching from the Struma to the Vardar, a distance of about fifteen miles, lay the main British front line, the Doiran sector, a maze of trenches and gun emplacements finding what cover they could among the ravines that seamed the slope. It was on this sector that Stanley was to get his first experience of active service.

Stanley cannot have remained many days at the depot after he had lost Budden. He was reading Ruskin’s Modern Painters, and told Desmond that he was ‘starving for music’:

Write out little scraps of music that I know. … Would it be too much to write out and send me a copy of some of those songs Mrs Daniell used to sing? By Jove, I shall not forget those times! I shall visit Bristol when I come home and we shall have to ‘go our rounds’ once more. I shall have a lot to tell you. Do send me out some little book, a good Dostoevsky that I have not read or something by Hardy. Send me some Milton or Shakespeare.⁷

He must have been surprised to find himself posted not to a hospital as he had expected but to the 68th Field Ambulance. This was ‘up the line’ somewhere on the Doiran sector. A twenty-mile train journey took him to the railhead at Karasuli (Polikastron). Sitting on the wooden seats of the carriage and looking out of the window, he had his first real impression of this new land, ‘I was entranced by the landscape – low plains with thin lines of trees looking through trees to further plains of fields, and here and there a figure in dirty white. It was not a landscape, it was a spiritual world.’ ‘A spiritual world’: thus the first intimation of the overpowering grip that these parts of the Macedonian landscape were to have on his imagination, and which were to have such influence on both the future of his war service there and on the paintings at Burghclere. The scenery in its changing seasons from spring green to summer brown to winter snow and starkness; the whitewashed stone buildings; the patient peasants in the fields; the wandering flocks of sheep and goats, and the donkeys of this still backward land – all these intensified his admiration for the early Italian painters he so loved: biblical landscapes in an early Renaissance setting. It was as though so many visions of his youth had become reality. A travelling companion offered him a Horlick’s Malted Milk tablet. He took it casually, lost in his thoughts, until he realized how ‘wonderful’ it was, and was profuse in his thanks.

At Karasuli, where the train journey ended, he assembled with a little group of RAMC men and ‘my life in Macedonia began’. Travelling with painful slowness in ration oxcarts, they were taken along the main supply road, the ‘Karasuli-Kalinova track’. Although busy with traffic and lined with dumps and depots, the road was unmetalled. To Stanley’s countryman eye, all such roads were ‘tracks’. This one ran at the foot of the south-facing slope of a line of low hills to the right of which was Lake Ardzan and reminded Stanley of the road at home along Cockmarsh Hill. Over the crests of the hills and down the northern slopes facing the enemy ran the series of deep front-line ravines, the products of violent summer thunderstorms. These ravines were the principal access routes to the British trenches, and where they made breaks in the crests of the hills travellers came into view of the enemy and offered tempting artillery targets. So part of Stanley’s slow journey was made in the dark: ‘the quiet atmosphere, some man on a horse conducting us to a place in the direction of Kalinova, the oxen swaying from side to side, their heads stretched forward under their yokes, and the grass fire like a huge dragon stretching the length of Lake Ardzan and reflected in it, the wild dogs, and seeing during the night that they did not get at the meat, a heavy stone on the tubs …’. Later, he came to know that ‘most of what was vital to me in Macedonia was felt along that track. Whatever number of kilos it is, ten or twenty, each is part of my soul. When I think of the places along it and the different parts of this continuous hillside, for me to describe them is to describe something of myself.’ Once again Stanley is drawing feeling from his identification with places.

The 68th Field Ambulance was located at ‘a place called, I think, Corsica.’ Almost certainly this is a soldier’s corruption of Chaushitsa, a small, abandoned village some eight miles from Karasuli. ‘I slept on the side of the hill with another man, stars overhead, grass fields, and Lake Ardzan twinkling below. … Quiet, and murmuring of men’s voices, rather comforting. It was dark when I arrived and I had the feeling of not knowing what world I would wake up in. I peered into the hillside and seemed to discern the white objects of bivouacs, or the glowing object of a tent with a candle or hurricane lamp.’⁸

What he awoke to was, of course, his section of 68 Field Ambulance, and the atmosphere of his first impressions is captured in the Burghclere frieze. The bivouac lines are on the right. Each soldier was issued with a waterproof cape eyeletted down the sides. Two of these, lashed together down the ridge and supported like a small tent, made a simple shelter for the two owners. The ‘glowing’ tents were bell tents reserved for more official or medical purposes. The one in the painting into which an orderly is entering with a cluster of the canvas buckets in which bread was carried, was probably the ration tent. The scene is viewed from high above Lake Ardzan, looking northwards across the Karasuli-Kalinova track towards the hillside which rises to the crest of the slope and then disappears down the ravines to the British front line and enemy-held hills beyond.

It was now September. The front was relatively quiet. Much of Stanley’s training on active service revolved around new ways of handling patients. In such broken country, wheeled transport was limited to the few main tracks, and stretcher-bearing was prohibitively fatiguing except where unavoidable. The accepted method of conveying wounded in the forward areas was the ‘travoy’ or French travoi. Two long flexible shafts of wood were fastened each side of a mule. The rear ends, steel-tipped, were left free to drag along the ground. The stretcher with its patient was strapped between the shafts. One shaft was longer than the other to minimize bumping over potholes, but as the patient was then tipped sideways and in any case tended to slide down the stretcher, the orderly had the tiring task of holding him under the armpits if he could not keep himself on. An Army Service Corps driver led the mule.

Over marshy ground, two mules were used, with the shafts slung between them. This was the doolie, or ‘dooley’ as Stanley calls it, a term possibly derived from the French in India: douillet means ‘gentle’, especially in relation to the sick. When he arrived, Stanley’s section was testing a ‘cacklet’ – French cacolet – which comprised two chairs slung in makeshift manner each side of a mule, with a more lightly wounded patient in each. Being light, Stanley was given the part of the patient. He noticed that the harness was chafing the mule and was gratified that his officer took immediate remedial action. Mules, which came mostly from the Argentine, were expensive and Stanley had great sympathy, as he did with all animals, for the hardships imposed on them by man’s unnatural demands, even though he frequently complained of their obstinacy – ‘my arms used to ache trying to pull them round during turn-out rehearsals.’ Although alert and sure-footed when the going was difficult, they had the maddening habit of simply lying down and dozing off when the weather was hot and the going easy, greatly to the amusement of the lightly wounded occupant of a doolie who sank slowly to the ground while Stanley and the mule driver struggled in vain.

From Corsica it was a relatively short journey northwards over the crest into the ravines leading to the firing line. Periodically the section was called forward to retrieve wounded from the battalion aid posts and take them to field dressing stations. The largest of these ravines was the Sedemli (or Cidemli) ravine, which led to a dressing station in the ruined mosque at Smol, an abandoned village near the entry to the ravine. A local attack by units of 22 Division on an enemy position called Machine Gun Hill had taken place in mid-September, soon after Stanley joined the ambulance, and the shock of the incident and the scene at the Smol dressing station printed themselves on his mind. Often his duties were carried out at night, the stretcher party groping its way in the darkness past ammunition dumps, gun batteries, supply columns of mules and army signallers mending their broken telephone wires. Sometimes, in the confusing maze of side ravines and gullies the simplest method of moving in a consistent direction was to leave the tracks and keep to the watercourses, splashing along in the streams and stumbling among the boulders. Even so, one of their officers – the officers were of course doctors – one night nearly led Stanley’s party into the Bulgar lines. The clatter of steel-shod travoys was a sound Stanley never forgot, and all through his life any sudden metallic noise would recall the memory. Artillery fire would sometimes harass them: ‘The little man I was with up the Cidemli ravine said he thought he could smell something [poison gas shells] and then became silent. He was in hospital next day and remained silent [shell-shock]. I don’t know if he recovered.’

Odd items fascinated Stanley on these journeys – the white shells of tortoises burned in grass fires, or Bulgarian letters, photographs and picture postcards scattered about the ravines from an early French counter-attack of 1915. These abandoned mementoes of another life, of a ‘homeliness’ even though foreign, seemed to Stanley a link with the universal in man. He ‘liked the feel of the Bulgar’. Sometimes, the journeys were even less enviable. He and a corporal were detailed to open up a new burial ground and chose a spot beside the Kalinova track. They had to bring those who had died of wounds at the dressing station back for burial, doing their best to mark the graves with issue crosses, not always available.*

After a few weeks, Stanley’s section of 68 FA moved from Corsica a few miles along the track to Kalinova itself, a former Graeco-Turkish walled village long since abandoned. Stanley loved to wander round the empty streets imagining the life that had been lived there. No longer the raw inexperienced ‘rookie’ he had been at Corsica, shaken by the first brutal realities of war and gently ribbed by his comrades, Stanley now began to feel himself ‘that special being, a soldier on active service.’ He was among friendly comrades, accepted as an equal. Emotionally he had ‘emerged’ from the confusions of his first impressions and had made himself ‘cosy’; quite literally so in the physical sense, for as the autumn weather grew colder he and a companion, George Dando, made themselves a comfortable dugout roofed with flattened petrol tins, with even ‘a fireplace and a little mantelpiece with a chimney stack’. ‘As I look back, I think what a different “me” it was to the “me” at Corsica.’

To his delight, the parcel of books he had requested from Chute duly arrived: ‘Mass Companion, Keats, Blake, Coriolanus, Michaelangelo, Velasquez, early Flemish painters, box of chocolates …!’ He began drawing his comrades again, and as usual when he felt reconciled to his circumstances, a resurgence of his ‘Cookham-feelings’ occurred.

Such hopes produced by some harmony between myself and my surroundings. … I felt that the hope and the consequent constructive and productive resource in me by simple drawing heads and so forth, the war would melt away like a snake charmer … the snakes would all forget. I had a Gowans and Gray Claude Lorraine and a repro in it of The Worship of the Golden Calf – wonderful pastoral scenes, a lot of vases, and men and women dancing. What has happened, I thought? Why doesn’t everyone chuck it and behave in this way?

Lifting a stretchered patient over barbed wire in the dark on one of his details, Stanley accidentally cut a puttee. The new puttee issued to him was of inferior quality and lacked the elasticity of the original. A painful swelling formed on his leg, gently poulticed for him by a fellow-orderly.

His feelings persisted even when the pain in his leg sent him down the line to hospital. He wrote of the patients there, ‘I do anything for these men. … I cannot refuse them anything, and they love me to make drawings of photos of their wives and children. … An Irishman asked me what I thought of the “afterlife”. I said that as the very being of joy exists in that it is eternal, it is only reasonable to suppose that life which only lives by joy must necessarily be eternal.’ This deeply metaphysical answer, the source from which so many of Stanley’s greatest paintings sprang, must have flabbergasted the questioner, ‘If these men have not gripped the essential, there is one grand thing; they are part of the essential.’

Stanley told Florence that he had heard from Gilbert, whose stint on a hospital ship had now ended and who was serving in a hospital near Alexandria in Egypt: ‘I have had a beautiful letter from Gilbert. He is in Mustapha, Egypt, and he wrote me about the possibility of getting to be with me, but on the day his letter arrived my leg was so painful I was unable to walk. … I had a swelling on my shin and at last it was opened and the matter removed. It was an abscess, but it was deep down under the flesh so that you could not see it. It is healing well now.’⁹

With the leg healing, Stanley assumed he would soon be back with George Dando in his dugout home. But before he could be discharged, he contracted a high temperature, diagnosed as malaria. So at least another three weeks’ hospital sojourn became necessary. The strains of malaria prevalent in the area were not generally fatal to healthy young men, but once in the bloodstream the sickness recurred at intervals and was very debilitating. The usual treatment was seven days in bed with massive doses of quinine, five days as an ‘up’ patient and then ten days or so convalescence, usually at the depot. Weak and exhausted, the victim would then be returned to his unit for temporary light duties.

Stanley must have spent Christmas at the hospital, although he makes no mention of it. At the end of January 1917 he was discharged to the RAMC Base Depot. From there, clutching his movement order, he prepared happily to return to his unit. It was only when he opened the order that he realized it directed him not to the 68th but to the 66th Field Ambulance. Dismayed, he felt a mistake had been made, but it was then too late to correct it. Oddly enough, the 66th FA was stationed at Kalinova, where he had left the 68th. So on arrival he felt even more disorientated: ‘Now I felt I was what I wasn’t. I still felt a lot of unget-at-able me was going on in the 68th’ – the ‘eternal’ quality of experience for Stanley. But ‘I fitted in, became a 66th Field Ambulance man and was pleased to note that families in their nice characteristics are not so dissimilar.’

Being convalescent, he was detailed for ‘light duties’, mainly in his section cookhouse which was simply a limber upended with a tarpaulin over the shafts.

Beginning early in the morning I would cook rashers for sixty men, two each. On my left as I knelt in a little groove cut in the ground for a wood fire, I had a wooden box full of rashers. On the fire was a dixie lid in which the rashers were fried. In my hand I had two flat pieces of wood with which I picked out bunches of rashers. … The cookhouse had a cook called The Black Prince, a grim-looking man who … Arabian Genie-wise, usually appeared when one had done something wrong. One day I was reading Paradise Lost and supposed to be watching a side of bacon that was simmering in the dixie. I smelled faint burning, but I was too late. He loomed out of the darkness with his black dog, gave a kick at the dixie and sent the lid flying, and up rose a column of smoke. …

Despite this King Alfred episode, Stanley found the sergeants and men to be as friendly as those of the 68th and settled to enjoying their banter and their different personalities. He spent much time on picket-duty, guarding the camp at night. For him, this was no hardship; he never needed long sustained spells of sleep. His graphic memories of the sights and sounds of the night – the dark shadows of pye-dogs scavenging among the tents, the hooting of owls – remained stored in his mind with the hundreds of others of these war years which were to erupt in such glory at Burghclere.

Many of these memories are incorporated in the left wall frieze. On the left, a solitary figure washes a shirt, using water heated in a couple of mess tins over an alfresco fire of twigs: ‘a more ideal means for scrubbing shirts than one of these smooth shiny granite boulders could not be found’. Stanley jokingly described to Florence how he would wash his shirt ‘by numbers’ – in army drill fashion – so that none remained unsoaped. Above the bell-tent, the upended limber with its tarpaulin cover shelters the section kitchen where the Black Prince reigned and where Stanley, concentrating on his Milton, dreamily burned the bacon. The ritual washing-up of mess tins is adjacent, and at the first line of bivouacs the cooked bacon and fried bread is being doled out. Towards the foreground, Stanley – all the figures are emotionally Stanley – his mess tin prudently fastened through his epaulette, uses an acquired bayonet to pick up litter; RAMC personnel were unarmed. In the angles of the arches below, a pye-dog scavenges among the heaps of discarded tins waiting to be buried, and the heads of mules, penned into a gully, are visible. The men in the right-hand line of bivvies are receiving a welcome issue of fresh bread. Stanley had few complaints about the food, but fresh bread – which reminded him of bread, butter and jam at tea at Fernlea – was a welcome substitute for the more usual army biscuit. But ‘I do not pine for anything now that I’ve got Shakespeare. He beats the best bread ever baked.’

On the right of the bivouacs some of the section are at work on a fatigue, humping stones to reinforce a track. It may have been the recollection of such a fatigue which prompted one of Stanley’s lighthearted letters to Florence, who always insisted that whatever the circumstances, his letters should amuse her:

The other day I was having a rest after working … and I was thinking and thinking and pursuing this exercise in the same sort of way that our brother-in-distress the tortoise does. I say ‘in distress’ because he is so distressful – he is always trying to do the most impossible things. Well, when I had not got any Think – noun substantive – left [the interpolation is a gentle jest to Florence about her grammar lessons in his schooldays] I began reading Joshua, goodness knows why! Well, I saw the High Priests and the mighty men of valour going round the walls of Jericho and blowing on their rams’ horns, and then I heard the sound of falling walls and buildings, and then I saw men rushing in on every side massacring men, women and children. Well, I thought, this seems all very nice [he is either being ironic or he means ‘nice’ in the sense of a picture building in his mind] but something very nearly stopped me getting to this ‘very nice’ part; it was the part where God commands Joshua to detail one man out of every tribe to carry a stone from out of the centre of Jordan where the Priests’ feet stood firm and to take them to where they would lodge that night. Oh, I thought if God’s going to be detailing fatigue parties, I’ll be a Hun!¹⁰

In the angle on the right, one of the party is using an improvised tamp – it appears to be a broken travoy shaft – weighted at the top with a padded stone and rammed down by blows from another tamp. The objective, Stanley says, was to break up the large stones into smaller pebbles, which were then set vertically like cobbles and rammed down to make the surface. The entire scene is a composite of Stanley’s recollections of the 68th and 66th Field Ambulances. The orderlies wear winter service dress. There is a preoccupation with purposeful activity, keeping warm and fed, maintaining tidiness and organization – all attributes of Fernlea homeliness, his indication that he had found in the landscape and atmosphere of the Vardar hills another home.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Burghclere Chapel: The right-wall frieze

You ought to hear the wild geese out here. They fly over us night and day and it is mysterious to hear them in the night.

Stanley Spencer to Florence¹

STANLEY was with the 66th Field Ambulance for only a few weeks before ‘a rotten cold and running nose’ sent him protesting back to hospital. It was a sinus infection. At the 5th Canadian Hospital he found two Hardy novels he had not read, and enjoyed a version of Lycidas which he had handwritten for himself: ‘as for Milton, I rest myself upon him’. There were more portrait drawings, many on the large leaves of a big autograph album with which a Canadian Sister supplied him. He replied to a letter from Florence: ‘I got the London Univ. Coll. Pro Patria and Union magazine today which contained a lot of real interesting news about a lot of my old Slade friends. … Do tell me about Mrs Raverat’s baby! When I heard about it I laughed for sheer joy.’²

At home the war was beginning to bite. The early Zeppelin raids on London and the east coast had given way to pattern bombing by fleets of multi-engined German bombers, the Giants and Gothas, and any who could were seeking refuge outside London. Ma and Pa were on wartime rations. Stanley had allocated them 3s 6d a week from his pay, a considerable proportion, and made them a gift of £5 – perhaps £200 today – from his savings.³ Coal was short; ‘old’ Sam Sandell from The Nest, aged eighty-five, cheerfully sawed them firewood. Gwen Raverat sent sacks of apples. Sydney’s educational ability and his success in achieving high marks in every training course he was sent on – bombing, marksmanship, anti-gas – kept him, to his annoyance, in England as an instructor. Percy was due to be sent to England to train as a staff officer. Harold and Natalie had moved to London, but the unforeseen slaughter in the terrible battles of the Somme in 1916 had introduced conscription; men and unmarried women who had been earlier required to ‘attest’ their willingness to be called up now found their vows invoked. Even the thirty-seven-year-old Harold might be netted (he was, but only for Home Garrison duty). Horace, back in France and promoted to corporal, was periodically pulled out of the line to entertain generals at mess parties.

Recovered and discharged from hospital in the middle of March, Stanley found himself for the third time back at the RAMC Base Depot. Once again he suffered a change of destination, being posted to a newly-formed Field Ambulance, the 143rd, still stationed at Salonika. The mountain snows were melting and warm spring days arriving: ‘The flowers are out – primrose, violet, celandine and many others unknown to me; I passed such wonderful ones today’.⁴ The sudden arrival of spring in the remote Macedonian hills is still an event of beauty. But for the combatants of the British Salonika Army the flowers were more a worrying omen than a joyful harbinger. A spring offensive was being prepared.

The armies along the Allied front were under the command of the French General Sarrail, who had distinguished himself in the anxious days of 1914 in France. A head-on attack up the Vardar valley was the most obvious course, but impracticable in view of the impregnability of the Bulgarian defences there. So Sarrail’s plan was to start an attack with French and Serbian forces inland. They would fight their way across the mountains of the interior so as to reach the upper Vardar valley in the rear of the Bulgarians on the British sector. As this began to achieve success, the enemy facing the British would be compelled to withdraw troops to counter the threat, and at this point the British would attack to catch the Bulgarians in a pincer movement. It was a classically obvious plan, indeed the only feasible one, and the best of the Bulgarian troops with German Jaeger and Mountain battalions were positioned in the hills to prevent it. The reason why Stanley was passing such ‘wonderful’ wild flowers was because 143 FA was on the move to support the coming offensive. However, as a new and untried formation it was evidently being sent to a relatively unimportant sector, the part of the Struma valley about twelve miles east of Lake Doiran where only feint attacks were planned. Its destination was the abandoned village of Todorova.

Stanley, of course, had no idea what was happening. Privates were never ‘told anything’, although the infantry, watching the build-up of gun batteries and field ambulances in their rear, had a shrewd notion of impending events. The journey to Todorova was excruciatingly slow. It took eight days to cover the forty or so miles. The weather was hot. But ‘at least my mind arrived at Todorova with my body’.

The village of Todorova, or such of it as remained from the earlier Balkan Wars, caught Stanley’s imagination as Kalinova had done: ‘It seemed to me to be a place right in the north or north-east … I think some of the flowers there were the remains of private gardens when inhabited; no signs now, no buildings. … A rosebush in the sun, I remember, and I was surprised to see a cloud of dust where it stood one day. The dust blew away and there was the rosebush shaking – a dud shell.’

The French and Serbian offensive in the centre of the Allied line began in early April. But despite initial successes – the capture of Monastir was one – resistance was too strong and the advance petered out. The value of the supporting British attack on the Doiran sector was now in question. Sarrail, indeed, saw no point in it and did not expect it to take place. Nevertheless on 24 April General Milne ordered the assault. The infantry battalions, moving upwards towards their objectives over open ground, were mown down by Bulgarian machine-gun crossfire, and when they sought cover in the ravines of no-man’s land they found themselves caught in pre-registered shellfire of pinpoint accuracy. With great courage a few small gains were made, but most had to be yielded as too exposed. Some of the assault battalions – they included the 7th Royal Berkshires – were decimated. On 8 May the attacks were called off. The result was stalemate. Six thousand men had been lost.

Nothing further was possible. Indents for replacements from home were not welcomed by the War Office. All available manpower was needed for other summer offensives being planned both on the Western Front and in Palestine. The French war leader Clemenceau, asking to know how his ‘Army of the Orient’ was faring, was told that they were consolidating their gains and digging in. ‘Ah!’, he remarked caustically, ‘les jardiniers de Salonique!’ The phrase stuck, and the Gardeners of Salonika they remained. The problem now was to keep up the morale of the troops during the heat and boredom of the coming summer and the misery of the next winter. Offensive patrolling, loathed as futile by the infantry, was ordered to maintain their fighting spirit. But at the same time entertainments and sports were organized, ad hoc theatres built behind the lines, and a soldiers’ newspaper, the Balkan News, was published from Salonika by a spirited Englishwoman.

Not that Stanley saw much of this, although a male-voice choir was organized in his Ambulance, of which he became a member. His life at Todorova was essentially one of killing time. His section was camped in the narrow, steep-sided ravine shown in the frieze at a point where the torrent ran down the edge of the plateau to the Struma below, where Todorova itself was sited. He painted a flowery sign for the sergeants’ latrine and went swimming with a cookhouse orderly whenever flash-floods formed rock pools. His sergeant allowed him, when off-duty, to wander away and he would seek some lonely gully where among the harmless rock-snakes and lizards he could be alone with his thoughts, his letters and books. The Raverats, with a civilian’s incomprehension of a soldier’s lot, were urging him to contact a cousin of Gwen’s, a rising composer who was also an orderly in a Field Ambulance; his name was Ralph Vaughan Williams. Stanley was pleased to have news from Florence of Sydney – ‘Hengy the Henker’ – who had continued during his military service to work diligently towards his academic qualifications, and was in the spring of 1918 to be awarded the degree of Bachelor of Arts at Oxford: ‘Bless his heart, I would love to see him.’⁵

Percy had been posted for his staff-officer training to Trinity College, Cambridge, where Florence’s husband was a don. Stanley was still hoping to arrange for Gilbert to join him, but, as he gently pointed out to the Raverats, the army did not extend itself unduly in the interests of private soldiers. Even Florence was complaining that his letters did not contain much news, to which Stanley replied with some asperity that it was not a fault in him, for nothing was happening. However, he had one piece of good news. Henry Lamb had arrived in Salonika as a medical officer with a Field Ambulance and ‘according to the place where he says he is, I must be quite near him’.

Stanley was, he decided, a ‘different me’ again at Todorova, a more reflective, inward-turning ‘me’: ‘As far as Nature went, I felt on such a personal footing with it, and it had all seemed to have something to do with my individual self, that I forgot the war and the army, and continued to some degree my Cookham life, namely a feeling of integration with my surroundings.’⁶ The Burghclere frieze is obviously intended to convey something of Stanley’s summer calm and waiting, of men ‘forgetting the war and the army’. The figures, in the timeless way of all soldiers, occupy the empty hours by being given something to do. On the left of the picture a line of men pick away at a torrent bed, dislodging the brown and white pebbles of the limestone landscape in order to make a mosaic of regimental badges – the RAMC and Royal Berkshire badges are there – as well as a Red Cross air identity circle. In the river-bed, in the rock pools where Stanley swam when it flooded, more pebbles are collected, used no doubt in the army game of housey-housey played by the little group of men in the centre; it is a form of bingo, and the only gambling game then permitted in the army. Below them a pair of pack mules passes along the watercourse. The figure scrubbing his summer shorts forms a link with the man washing his shirt in the opposite frieze. On the right, an open-shirted orderly, his identity discs dangling about his neck, idly throws a stone at something in the stream. All are dressed in summer kit. These are the days, if not of wine, at least of army tea and roses. For Stanley they celebrate another ‘emergence’ into his precious world of spiritual peace and creativity, his world of harmony, of ‘my integration with my surroundings’.

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