1

Bryan Ingham, Painter, Etcher,

Sculptor
Bryan Ingham was born in 1936 in Yorkshire and died at
home in his studio on Helston, Cornwall in the summer of
1997 of cancer. During the last six months I travelled every
fortnight or so from my home in Devon and spent time with
him recording a conversation that ranged over his life, his
experiences and his opinions. This is the transcript of those
conversations. It is largely unedited and in publishing it I
recognise that one or two persons referred to by him may
conceivably be hurt or offended, but that is certainly not my
intention. The document demonstrates the quality of the
man and also his weaknesses, and it is to give that rounded
picture that both he and I have worked.

At 63, his death was a premature end to an artistic journey

that was if anything increasing in vigour and creativity.
Naturally reclusive, living in isolation for a long period in a
hidden cottage on the Lizard, his work started to get the
recognition it deserves in the last few years, as his last
London shows demonstrated. He was, in my view, the finest
etcher of the latter half of the century, and often his
painting is of similar quality. In latter years he started to
explore his interest in sculpture, already apparent in the
technique brought to his copper plates.

As his memoir shows, he adored women, food, books and

poetry, but all took second place to his first love, the work
which is his true memorial.

In publishing this record I would like to record my

appreciation and thanks to: Stella Benjamin, Sally Losey,
Eiluned Morgan, Vince Tutton, Josephine Goodden and
Francis Graham Dixon.

Note: the chronology of the conversations hops around, but

I have left the words as they were spoken to retain the
coherence that it otherwise has by reason of Bryan’s lucid
account.

The illustrations are not intended to do more than add

flavour to the text and are not intended to do full justice to
Bryan’s work.

I trust that the rest will be understandable without further

explanation.
 2

***
B Not for the first time in one's life one is appalled at the
quality of one's diction,- how one sounds strangulated - not
at all as one imagines

J This distorts peoples’ voices quite considerably.

B There's a sort of precocity in my manner of speaking

which is not what I hear inside, not my manner of speaking
at all, but when I hear myself I sound like a cross between
Professor Joad and Dr Roy Strong.

J God Help us! Roy Strong does sound ridiculous doesn't he?

B He's making a real arsehole of himself at the moment.

J What, with this garden thing?

B With his autobiographical diary, published this week

(which I'd like to read). Not very profound, I think.

J He's a very clever chap, and clever at promoting himself.

No doubt about that. I'm afraid I'm prejudiced. I've never
liked the look of him, so I've never given the fellow a
chance.

B It becomes easier and easier to dislike him as he becomes

more and more calculatingly eccentric - Dr Strong the
loveable English loony. Of which he's very much aware - very
much a role he plays, whereas somebody like Beaton grew
into his role - Cecil Beaton....

J Yes.

B Another self-made creation, but plausible, whereas Roy

Strong isn't plausible.

J Well, I think Beaton had a talent, a real talent.

B Oh Yes.

J I don't know enough about Roy Strong to know whether

he's talented or not. The only way I've come across him is a
sort of self publicising curator.
 3

B He was brilliant at the Portrait gallery. His first

appointment. He did stir it up from being a dusty place to
being an important place. At that time I used to do some
very objective portraits, -head on subject sitting right here,
drawing board resting on my knees and on theirs. Very
intimate -an immediate contact - good drawings, they were.
I wrote to him in his capacity as Curator of the Portrait
gallery and said I would like to do a series for the museum
of various people of today - I can't remember exactly who - I
think one was David Sitwell and I think one was John Lennon
- it was half a dozen suggested people. I didn't enclose any
drawings just the letter, and promptly had a very good letter
back saying I like your idea, bring your drawings along let's
discuss the project.. And I never did anything more about it.
Which is regrettable. But that was a sign of a good
professional - on the ball.
¬¬ tape cut¬¬¬

B But that was a side-line, because they were never given

proper rifles - it was real Dad's Army stuff.. They did night
manoeuvres on the moors outside Totley, based on a little
farmhouse that was also an ale-house -no more -called the
Grouse Inn

J No bar just a room?

B Yes, seats like this set around, and a piano And it was
discovered that Father could play the piano. Give him the
music, and he could play....the Merry Widow ...uumm... that
sort of music. So this incongruous group of old men, mostly
older than Father would stumble up on the moors for two
hours up there and then you come back to base and then
another group goes out but meanwhile George -Father- had
to stay and play the piano to keep everyone entertained. So
he would play the piano through long nights in this
moorland farm, drinking plenty of beer. And consequently
when my friends in Germany asked me what did your father
do during the war I told them "he played the piano against
Adolf Hitler". [J laughs] He was very popular, but that was
his war-time career. And sadly so. It wasn't what he wanted.
He would have like to join in to do his bit. You have to be a
very unusual person I think to be a conscientious objector -
you'd have to have a very clear mind.

J How old would your father have been at the time the war
started?

B He was born in 1908.

 4

J So he would have been just over 30. So he would have

remembered the latter part of the Great War wouldn't he?

B Yes. Then he was courting Alice Mitchell, my mother, who

lost at least one brother in the Great War. Father's mother
lost her husband. Yes, he remembered the Great War.

J He wasn't a Totley man was he?

B Oh No.... no They came from very specific places, very

particular roots From a small woollen mill town in the Calder
valley just west of Halifax - Soley Bridge and Mother came
from just the other side of the moor that separates the
Calder valley from... I forget the name of the valley, which
was heavy wool industry. Most people were in the woollen
trade as dyers etc

J Both your grandparents were in the woollen trade... what

did they do?

B Mother's parents were. Father's parents were small time

shopkeepers. Uncle Willy - the most famous of the relations
- had what was supposed to be the first motor car in
Yorkshire. He went to the Great Exhibition in Paris, when
would that have been ...and he went up in a balloon , a hot
air balloon. So he was quite a lad. He was a stationer and a
printer and he had a printing works down by the Calder
canal.

J Did you meet your great grandparents?

B Yes. But I've only relatively dim memories; I was nine by

the time I knew him, {Willy} and I can picture him very
clearly. He was a wag ...a comic... he sang on the stage on
the small local circuit. He sang baritone songs... such songs
as "Where is my wandering boy tonight?" {-sings} that type
of sentimental Victorian/Edwardian ballad, not really like my
grandfather, who was a bit more strict.
 5

Hebden Bridge II Etching

J He was a shopkeeper?

B I'm not quite sure. The Ingham side, my father's side, were
considered a little bit above the Mitchell side who were
considered a little bit raffish,- my mother's side. Bigger
family. Not quite so straight-laced. The Inghams tended to
be a little bit correct - socially correct - Grandfather signed
the pledge at an early age, his early thirties; he thought he
was becoming an alcoholic and took the pledge. It was quite
commonplace then. But father said he always has alcohol in
the house for guests. And Grandma had a hard life. Two
sons in a street with a three storey house with two
bedrooms, living room, scullery, cellar, outside lavatory.
Front yard as big as that... yellow flagstones. Every Tuesday
scrubbed with these special sandstones, the steps coming
up to the house scrubbed yellow and each one finished with
a white edge. Every house in the street had that type of
pride. Monday was wash day. A steep cobbled street on a
steep deep valley, right down to the woollen mills at the
bottom .The Calder and the Calder canal at the bottom and
the great woollen mills and the houses of commerce. Steep
cobbled streets with the houses back to back. You had a
neighbour through that wall, but they were in the other
street. Monday was wash day. In the middle of the cobbles,
if you look closely, you will see a round hole like on a golf
green where the iron poles kept in the cellar came out to put
the line out. Terrific competition - who should get their
washing across the street first. All done in the cellar with a
 6

thing called a copper. It was a gas fired instrument a

scrubbing wash-board. Hard yellow soap - a hell of a job.
Grandma Ingham was nearly always one of the very first in
the street on Monday mornings. Tuesday morning it was
"Right, right Bryan, go down to Beckwiths and get me a
yellow stone and a white stone. Tell him I'll pay him
tomorrow" and I'd go down "Please Mr Beckwith Grandma
says she'll pay tomorrow" [chuckles] Yes..... It was the same
rivalry with the lighting of the house. The lighting was gas.
There was always a roaring fire in the room...most
wonderful. My uncle never left home, -father's younger
brother- he had a beautiful library, - about as many books as
I've got here. Sporting authors very largely. Surtees.
Surtees was his passion. And Seigfried Sassoon. He was a
bachelor was Uncle Leslie. So that way we had a lovely
atmosphere, and the gas lamp. And the gas lamp was
activated by a penny in the slot, and bizarrely that was
placed at the top of the cellar steps over the cellar door. At
the top of the cellar steps you would open the cellar door
from the scullery. A step down and a steep turning to the
right down to the blackness of the damp cellar. You would
turn like this over the steps going down, and up there was
the machine you had to put the penny in, and to do that you
had to drop yourself over the black gaping hole of the cellar
to rest upon the meter, put the penny in and turn the thing
and then push yourself back.. There were little old ladies
doing that all the way down the street without crashing
down into their cellars! So of an evening you could be
reading a book and the light would suddenly become
dimmer and dimmer and someone would say "The gas! The
gas!" and then there was a terrific rush and scuttle to find a
penny 'cos there was no special box for the pennies as you
would imagine "Hev yer got a ..have yer gotta penny Leslie"
[chuckles] and the lights would get dimmer and dimmer and
someone would rush into this hellish trap and fling
themselves over the black hole. And lighting up was the
event. In the windows the aspidistra, the lace curtains - and
nothing wrong with either of those things - they were the
tradition of the day - one would look through the lace
curtains and the street would be in darkness. I remember
saying "Grandma, I can't read my book any more. Can we
have the gas?" "Oh I don't know Bryan. Has Mrs Beckwith lit
up yet? No? When Mrs Beckwith lights up, then Mrs
Greenwood will light up and we'll all light." So you had to
wait for this signal thing to go up the street "Oh it's all
right, Mrs Greenwood's lit up. Right" So we got this
apparatus going with the chains and the slight hissing of the
mantle. Very, very comforting. That with a big roaring fire
and the fine blue-tiled surround and a handsome polished
mantelpiece with those brass jugs -heavy jugs- and the
 7

piano in the back of the room. It was only a small room. The
piano was used regularly; excerpts from Rigoletto and the
lighter Italian operas and the pleasant library. A very
cultured little household, typical of its period.

J Was it typical of that street?

“Noon” Etching 1988 (an exceptionally large plate)

B No, well maybe it wasn't typical. No I suppose nobody else

had a library but then nobody else had a son called Leslie
Ingham who stayed at home and lived with his Mum. No
maybe not typical but something of the same quality of life
was there.

J So your Ma and Pa started their married life together but

not at your Grandmother's?

B Yes. Soley Bridge , as I say, in the Calder valley. Mother's

small town, or village, Greetmond outside Elland, is literally
over a hump over a moor with the rivers parallel . So Father
used to walk over this moor about six miles when he was
courting. How they met originally I don't know.

J Was there opposition to the union?

B No, but father's family were inclined to petty snobbery

and thought that the Mitchells weren't quite up to them. No
I don't think there was any serious opposition. They
married. They were both by that time I think in the clothing
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trade, Mother working in a shop-milliners' shop- Father in an

outfitters shop.

J What was the year - could you work that out?

B No, father was about 30 at the time I was born; they were
a similar age - about two years difference.

J So it was 1936 you were born so he would have been 28.

B Yes

J And your Mama was how old,- what was the age
difference?

B Two years. So then they were both working in Halifax and

then business took them to Bradford.

J Were they working together by then?

B Oh no not at all. They were living in flats as people did in

those days in rented accommodation I was conceived in
Bradford but Father had the misfortune - one of his staff had
had her hand in the till ...(- yes at this time he was a
manager of Milletts - now this is pre-war of course,- Milletts
became more famous after the war for their ex-military
gear-) one of the staff had stolen while under his
managership, so he was sent into exile, and he was sent to
Preston. And this of course is a great misfortune of my life,
if I took such things seriously, because I was born in
Lancashire in Preston Infirmary. Of pure Yorkshire stock. But
I could never play for Yorkshire at cricket because I was not
a Yorkshireman. I'm a Lancastrian. By no allegiance
whatever, only by the chance of the circumstances of that
birth.

J That's a quaint notion.

B Well, I think it set everything in motion. I.... I'm not at all...

I don't take this seriously. I'm in no way distressed by such
things. I was also born on the 11th June so I'm high Gemini,
so they tell me, and I know little about these things but
everything I've ever read or ever been told about Gemini
characters is applicable, so there must be a lot of truth in
the star sign theory. I'm and absolute total Gemini. The fact
that I spent 25 years as an etcher, that I spent a couple of
years as a sculptor but that I'm really a painter, that I've
always had a least two, usually three of four properties
wherein I might live. Always, as poor as I may have been, I
 9

always had a flat in Fournier St Stepney. Whilst I was with

Stella and she did know that.

J Fournier St? Someone I'm dealing with at the moment lives

in Fournier St. Lovely Georgian houses.

B Oh beautiful. At that time I had a lady painting colleague

whose husband was a solicitor and he had quite a lot of
money and I said to him "You work in the city of London.
Why do you live in Islington. Why do you not live within
walking distance of your offices? There's a house on the
corner of Fournier St. Absolutely perfect in every detail,
apart from the dossers on the doorstep, for £12,000. If I had
£12,000 I'd buy a property in this street." But we're
digressing.

J Digression is always agreeable. You haven't bought this

place - you're renting this place as well?

B Oh yes. Why should I buy it? It's good value for the people
who are letting it to me. I'll leave it in better shape than I
found it. Sadly, it won't be used in the same way I don't
think. Someone might take over the studio. I've got
somebody in mind. Andrew Lanyon.

J Peter Lanyon's boy?

B Yes a smashing lad, super lad. Works in a polytunnel on

the old ???? railway

J That must get hot in the summer

B And cold in the winter. And cluttered. How he does it I

don't know and yet he produces these beautiful books, so I
thought that by the time he's 50 which he is soon, he might
start thinking he needs to change his style a bit. So that
would be nice if someone did that.
But just to go back to that Bradford/Preston business.
Nobody ever calls me a Yorkshireman. I can't say I regret
that because I'm not a clubbable person. I don't really need
to feel I'm a Yorkshireman. At the age of 14, when one had
dreams of opening the batting for a county club it would be
for Yorkshire. I had a trial for Yorkshire at one time. Just
purely on the strength of a superb leg glide I executed
against a fast bowler. And he was so impressed he organised
this trial at Bramhall Lane, not knowing I was not a
Yorkshireman, and I went along to this trial and of course I
wasn't remotely at that standard, but I'd got the leg glide
from cigarette cards based on the great Ranji. You just
turned the bat, rolled the wrist, both very high - the
 10

opposite to the cut, a shot I could -can- still do if I'm playing

well .... Well, it got me a Yorkshire trial. But I could never
have taken it up. In a sense that set a pattern which has
remained, of not quite belonging. I've not needed to belong,
not needed or wished to belong necessarily. Now I'm a
Lancashire/Yorkshireman living in Cornwall, very happily.
With good friends here and well liked, well accepted. But I'm
not a Cornishman.

J perish the thought....

B I've got to have my two or three different places, like

Jollytown, Tremayne - and Kiora as I had. Now I'm getting my
different places all into one yard, at last. A sign of maturity
perhaps.

J Kiora was where?

B Lady St. Shall we eat now, Joss......

~~~~~~~~

Bryan had been explaining that he had done a cycling trip

from Sheffield to Southampton - one day - to stay the night
with friends and to return the following day. However a
couple of miles from their destination there was an
accident....

J So at the age of 18, you were charging around the

highways and by-ways of England on your bicycle colliding
with motorbikes.

B Collided with.

J You still remember who was responsible!

B They were ever so apologetic, I can remember it even now.

He had a female pillion passenger. She was flung into the
street. It was totally my fault.

J How the hell did you get home? You must have gone back
by train or something, did you?

B Well we'd been going to stay across from Southampton in

the New Forest in a Gypsy caravan. And that's where we
stayed.

J How did a Gypsy caravan arrive in your life?

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B That was the uncle of the colleague with whom I rode. He

was an eccentric was the uncle. He built himself a log cabin
in the forest - without planning permission - and lived there
very happily. And invited Jack -my mate- how old did I say
we were -sixteen?

J Sixteen? what year would that be? About 1950, {1952} just
after planning permission was required...

B Well, we had a lovely time. It didn't spoil anything at all.

Except my Mum and Dad went into that pub that Aysel
telephoned me from -The Crossed Scythes- and another
bicycle mate of mine, Owen, who hadn't been involved with
this journey, his parents came across to Mum and Dad and
said "Oh we are so sorry about your poor lad" and went on
about the accident and of course Mum and Dad didn't know
anything.

J So you got a ticking off over that?

B I don't remember

J You were any only child, Bryan were you?

B Yes, yes absolutely.

J Did that weigh on your Mama, or was that something that

was intended?

B For some medical reason, she couldn't have another child.

I never chose to ask. it was some medical
reason...mmm...that was it. And we were very poor, couldn't
have afforded another child. Very poor, very poor. Mother
would take in dress and clothing alterations for neighbours;
if a wife's ballgown was too long she'd bring it round to Mrs
Ingham and say can you shorten this by tomorrow afternoon
at 3 o'clock. It would be worth 5 shillings Mrs Ingham. For
that price she'd have it back.

J Did she enjoy sewing, or was this a chore to her?

B She enjoyed sewing but she hated this pressure of work.

Without that, Father was spending the money. He was down
at Millett, working at a big store in East London. His
ultimate boss was Joseph Collier. And Father was brilliant at
his job, so he got sent off to all places. Belfast, Glasgow,
London, Manchester, these were regular trips. So there he
was with fine three piece suit, hard stiff collar and lovely
silk tie and expenses in his pocket going shindigging round,
leaving Mother and son not quite {chuckles} starving but
 12

nearly so; sometimes we were living on bread and dripping

whilst Father was wasting the money, - not wasting it,
enjoying it.

J So there was friction?

B Not greatly, no.

J Were they a happy couple at that stage?

B Yes.....yes. Very.....But Father had his flings, as men do.

And not very subtle about it

J But he always came home?

B Oh yes... yup yup. He was a bit on the charismatic side.

J I only met him of course when he was very old. Very

charming. And not concentrating on being charismatic at
that stage.

B At this stage, when he was in his most high-powered job,

which he gave up -walked out later- when he was doing this
job for - I can't remember- ten years maybe, he was in
charge of departments in a clothing store. That meant
having maybe 40 staff directly under his supervision, of
which 35 were women. So it was inevitable thing that a
lively dynamic attractive man would attract lively ambitious
shop-girls, as he did. It never came to anything serious.
There was never a serious show-down.

J What was your Ma's attitude to that? Was she philosophical

about it? Or do you think that was something she became in
later life..or...

B Something we never talked about. One didn't talk,

regrettably, with such intimacy with one's parents. Each
year we become a little bit more confident, don't we - tell a
bit more. But by the time our parents die we haven't really
exchanged all the confidences we would like to have done.

J I'm sure that's right. -{long pause}- So when your Pa took

on the job for Collier was that the time you moved to Totley
or had you moved before?

B No, we were already there.

J And the move to Totley was presumably a step up for them

was it?
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B Oh yes. A new house. Pre-war it must have been between

1936 and 39 they moved from a suburb of Sheffield up to
Bradford after to Bradford, after to Preston, then back to
Sheffield, and then the chance to buy their own house, I
suppose on the mortgage system. So they were well
installed there before the war. So it must have been 37/38.

J When did they leave Totley?

B When I was in the military, so I'd be 20 years old (J 1958)

Could be. Father gave up his job. You see, Father was very
good at this job. He was in charge of...he was a buyer. You
know that technical term in the clothing trade - and a lot
depended in those post-war years on personality. And his
bosses would send Father away to say Belfast and he would
come back with a lot of Poplin shirts. Some with collars
attached, and if you could get socks and a few gross of
vests and pants, good. So it was up to him. He had contacts
- friends - contacts and he was a very simple man in the
nicest way. On those trips he'd be dressed with a bowler hat,
striped trousers, black jacket, dark waistcoat, hard collar
and silk tie. He would visit a mill the next day in a small
town outside Belfast and stay in lodgings, thought he'd go
out for a drink and drank a glass of beer and he'd pub down
one side of the street and then the other side of the street,
and come back saying "Charming people, lovely people". He
was vulnerable as hell.... as a man obviously with a bit of
money, as a man who was standing out from the local norm
with his dress.

J Vulnerable's a funny word to use. Perhaps he relished

being different?

B Well he wasn't different, I mean he was high conformist on

these outings.

J then why vulnerable?

B Well vulnerable in that he was what he looked like, an

English clothing textile man coming over to our village or
town with money in his pocket an easy then to nobble him
and take his bankroll or do whatever. But he found nothing
but good will wherever he went, and largely through his
ingenuousness and to his simplicity and I use the word
simplicity in a good sense.

J Did he literally carry a bankroll when he went over there.

Presumably he authorised the purchases didn't he?
 14

B As he walked down one side of the street in the little town

outside Belfast he probably would have £60 in his pocket
which is £500 today, that sort of money. {end of tape side}
--Just tuck in now, everything must go.

J Perhaps that's what your Father said down on the Falls

road.

B We went - to break the sequence slightly- we went

drinking down in Stepney one evening. I took him to my
favourite haunt of all those places, and one that was
particularly rough, frequented by African deposed chieftains
high on what...carbolic soap?! and distinguished Indian
gentlemen -complete con-artists, Cockney wide boys. Father
and I, we decided to play bar billiards against a couple of
these chaps. I was well known in this pub well known,
accepted as a face {rest inaudible}
Father always did especially well dealing with the Jewish
elements in the clothing business which was highly
stratified. He gained their trust and their love and he
reciprocated it. He had some wonderful, wonderful friends
in business, who finally owed him nothing but continued to
respect him and love him and never forget to send him
Christmas presents.

J D'you still hear from any of them?

B They stopped with Father. Until his death he was still

receiving generous parcels of for example sports jacket and
two pairs of trousers, perhaps a suit, three bottles of
whisky, or two bottles of sherry, three boxes of chocolates
for Mother, from Mr Sandy Dewhurst, for example. The last
person Father worked for. Never made a penny for
Dewhurst, only lost money - through force of circumstances
- that's another story why, and another story why Father
stopped the big time buying expeditions. He was having to
drink a lot and socialise a lot and it was getting on top of
him so he gave it up totally.

J Was there a crisis to make him do that or did he suddenly

make a decision?

B No, no. He decided. The great Jo, Joseph Collier, came up

from London to Sheffield to see Father and said "George,
reconsider your position. If you want a post in London...tell
me what you want and I'd like to help."

J And he wouldn't?

B No.
 15

J Simply because he wanted a change of environment or..?

B Well we all get... what we now would call stress -they

didn't have that word then.

J and this was what, in the early sixties?

B Before that. I was in Germany at that time

J With the military?

B Hmm.

J Of which more later...

B the good thing about doing this, Joss, on your machine, is

that you can pick up and say " Now lets talk a little bit more
about [J yes exactly] why did Father leave his high flying
job... It'll give {unintelligible) possibly to the next set of
interviews when we can fill them in.

J It's really just a question of rambling on until we feel we've

got it all clearly in order. Then we'll find something we've
missed and make a Horlicks of the whole thing! It's really
just to get the basic outline down onto tape. I'm doing it in a
rather ad hoc style here. I suppose another way to do it
would be to ask you to write a sort of chronology, a simple
chronology.

B That can come.

J I think this is as good a way of doing it as any.

{long pause}

B He was given by Jo Collier a heavy silver cigarette case

when he finally made the break with the firm. people don't
use cigarette cases now do they?

J Sadly, like snuff boxes, it becomes a collectors item doesn't

it? What happened to that?

B I think I gave it to Yorick. I hope he's still got it. It's

probably full of Amsterdam joints by now.

J That's exactly what it should be for. You would have given

it to him if you hadn't thought of that!

B At least I've my appetite. You're out of potato.

 16

J I've done immensely well; I must say this lamb is just

excellent. It melts in the mouth doesn't it?

B Tomorrow evening I'm going to Josephine for supper and

the night. So tomorrow lunch time we can make a
respectable salad out of this left over.

J At lunchtime I don't need to be fed very much anyway.

B I'd like you to have one of those horse and jockey pasties.
When I was living at Jollytown and Andrew Johnstone used
to come fairly regularly. And we had one set meal. And that
was boiled sheep, it was breast of lamb. I'd chuck a couple
of those and a couple of onions and let them simmer gently.

J caper sauce?

B No, nothing so refined. I think we had a few potatoes but

basically it was just this greasy, marvellous lamb...

J You're like my wife -carnivorous!

interval for burning pan

J How long did you stay at Josephine's?

B Not sure. Could be about ten years. Not all the time. one
or two years I commuted from Jollytown to Tremayne and
then slowly I saw the potential of Tremayne and Julie had
left having put in skylights and concrete floor. So I said to
Josephine if I make it really habitable can I use it for three
quarters of the year and when your family want to come
round and use it....No, she said you do that and you have
the use of it. So I spent, I remember £4,000 on making the
ceiling and the floor and the woodwork and the stove. And
Josephine never asked a penny rent. I've given her pictures
so....I think they were good value. But they bought a picture
at this last exhibition for five thousand quid.

J Well that's a nice sort of affirmation..

B Well it rather embarrasses me because it had been lying

around in the studio, and she really only needed to say I
really like that.
****
B About 4 years ago when I was in Spring St in that lovely
room and Sally was sat down on one of the low down seats,
nearly eleven o'c;lock at night and I go across saying
" Look, Sal, let's sleep together tonight ,Sal"
 17

"I don't think this would be a good idea, Bryan."

"I don't mean anything sexual let's just lie together."
"They all say that, Bryan"
{Both laugh} and then the following Christmas three or four
months later I sent her a Christmas card that said "Happy
Christmas to Sal. They all say that!" She's sitting on a
beautiful portrait in a little letter I wrote to her when I first
came down to Cornwall living in Kynance Cove, serving in
the Cream tea trade. I'd have been about 22 years old, and
Sal sent me a letter. We were friends, and it was a letter
written on an old typewriter and the spelling was bad and
everything was bad about this typewritten letter and she
said I hope you'll excuse my bad typing. Of course I had
nothing much to do in the evening, oil lamp on the table. I
took her typewritten letter and wrote her back a letter in a
similar vein, but done in HB pencil on hard white paper
exactly copying the type and the mistakes in the type so it
looked absolutely like a typewritten letter except it had
taken days or maybe weeks, I can't remember -ages- to do
this half page letter in response to hers. And a long time
later I said to her did you get my letter? Oh yes, yes. I said
did you get the joke? She said what joke? I said I'd done it by
hand, not typewriter. But no, she'd thrown it away.....

J Oh dear..

B It could have been Andy Warhol before his time! Shall we

go and sit down now and relax.
{pause}

J So Bryan describe to me the alchemy by which from cycling

across the roads of England at the age of 18 you ended up
by becoming an artist. You had National Service at some
stage. Did you go straight out of grammar school to National
Service?

B No, no, no. The beauty of that and I mean very much
was.... I left grammar school at 16 - I left it a bit early
because they didn't have any interest in me , in art, music,
universities. Never that was discussed. Quite normal.

J But they encouraged your artistic side?

B No, no, well absolutely not, no.

J Had you been aware of it?

B No

J You didn't know you could draw or....

 18

B There was a stage I think in the 3rd form or maybe the 4th
form where there was a split where selected pupils could
take music or art and I was chosen for neither, though I have
a very good eye and ear for music and obviously a certain
raw ability for visual art. So I've got not great respect for
that particular place. Either one left I think at about fifteen
and a half to carry on one's cycling career. I had two O
levels. I was allowed to take four, and I succeeded in two.

J Which were they d'you remember?

B English Language and Geography. Narrowly failed in

English literature, and... I can't remember what the other
one was. Mathematics, I would think. Mcleod{??} The
Headmaster announced one morning after our trial
examinations. The results were out of a hundred. The
headmaster announced to the assembly "I have to report
something that has never been done before, and I hope
never will be done again. In the mock examinations in
Mathematics, Mr Bryan Ingham has scored nil." It had never
been done , ever. Of course everyone surreptitiously
clapped and cheered and the headmaster treated it as a
joke. The only man ever to do that. Took a lot of doing!

J I suppose you avoided writing you name at the top of the

notepaper.....

B Chemistry, physics all horrible horrible horrible... So no I

was glad to get out of there - I don't want to talk about that
place very much. Only one good person in that place. Was
an English teacher, who had been seconded because of ill
health, and his name had run around the school - Paddy
Kershaw. Teacher of English. And I must have met him in my
last year at the grammar school. And Paddy Kershaw would
recite passages from Shakespeare in a way that made them
lively. I can still remember Paddy Kershaw describing a man
with a snuff box "Twixt his finger and his thumb he took a
pouncet-box..." I can't remember how it goes on now {nb:
pouncet-box was in fact a pomander-a pierced box.} I've
had too much to drink but....he brought the great speeches
alive, but more than that he read one's essays, which we
had to do for English and he would write as much after my
essay as I had written in my essay saying "I think this a very
interesting idea, and I think you've got a good start. You got
a bit lost in the middle and the conclusion is a bit weak but
nonetheless a good effort - do keep this up...why don't you
try..." and so on. He really got me going. And I'd go out on
long bike rides looking at country houses and landscape,
noting down details which I suppose I thought would
 19

impress and as I wrote down "The lime grove to the old

sixteenth century manor house I observed....." I would write
like this. And Mr Kershaw would write "Very good, but a
little bit solemn - just relax a little bit" And that put one
right, right in the way. Only had him for maybe a term or two
terms. The only teacher who really encouraged me

J What about your fellow pupils; d'you still remember... d'you

have any contact with any of them?

B No...no All gone. But the last time I saw Paddy Kershaw,
cycling back from my tailoring job in Sheffield. About three
miles out of Sheffield is a cricket ground. Pub on the left,
pub on the right. Great big tree. I couldn't say an oak tree or
an elm tree, half way across the cricket pitch. And I stopped
my bicycle to walk down to the pitch. A late summer's
afternoon/evening. And then I saw it was the stocky
asthmatic figure of Paddy Kershaw bowling leg breaks to
the opposition, and shrewdly, and getting them out and I
thought yes, you're my man Mr Kershaw! That was the only
good memory I had out of my grammar school.

J And you went out and took a job straight after grammar
school, did you?

B Yes, well then at that age you knew you had to go into the
military at 18 - no option unless you wanted to go to Art
school or university, and that had never been discussed at
my grammar school. I decided I wanted to go to Art school

J What decided you on that, if you hadn't done any drawing

or anything of that sort?

B Well I had. I'd done drawings from...well a young age.

J So that was entirely self taught. Had you no..mentor?

B Yes as a boy scout where you have your triangular badges

on your sleeve - you had your housewife badge which shows
a broom head. Were you ever a scout?

J No, I managed to avoid it, thank God.

B Well it was very important in my life.

J Was it?

B Oh absolutely, absolutely. I was very very fortunate, but

that's another story to tell at a separate stage.
 20

J Well, hang on, just go on with it for the moment. It's

important in a sense that we should keep the thing going.
What I'm trying to get at is where this draftsmanship came
from.

B Well, a part of this badge hunting was I liked drawing, so

why didn't I go for my artist badge? And the lady examiner
for the artist badge was I suppose a middle aged blue rince
lady who did water colours about that size on Watman board
of Cotswold cottages and hollyhocks and roses. Beautiful
pictures, beautiful pictures. Lovely pictures. And we spent
an evening together and she showed me her pictures. I
thought they were so wonderful she gave me one. She said
you passed your badge, on the strength of my watercolours.
And then I used to go out into Gillyfield wood with a little
block and paint my water colour of a little lych gate with at
the bottom right hand corner "a beech tree" - that sort of
thing. But by that time I knew I was a bit interested in art,
and one of my cycling mates Owen looked a little bit like the
man from Arles in the portrait by Vincent Van Gogh, and
Owen and I were a little bit in love - we never consolidated
that, great pity we never did, but we were very fond of each
other and that Van Gogh portrait stayed with me until I went
into the military and then in the military well, I was very
fortunate, I shared accommodation with somebody who'd
been at the Royal College of Art as a designer. And he
encouraged me and he set up still life subjects and I started
painting. In RAF Celle in Germany. And I painted on
hardboard. About so many pictures from top to bottom
{indicating level with hand}.

J So that's stacked?

B Yup.

J Shit!

B Pallet knife, thin paint, everything. The sort of rubbish you

have to get through before you really start to get on. But I
had all the time this good John Wheatly Pickle who stood by
me and encouraged me. And after a while in the RAF
billeting system, there were 3 of us in a room about this
size. German barracks. Nazi barracks. Then we managed to
get rid of one person so there were two of us. So then I set
up an easel, my paints and bit I became known to the
corporals and sergeants and Flight sergeants and Flying
officers and Flight lieutenants as "that arty chap who can't
really be pushed into our mould. All right let him go his
way." And they gave me a lot of rope. And that's when I
 21

painted all those rubbishy pictures. From postcards of

Bavaria and Scandinavia and still-lifes..

J D'you have many of those left?

B Just one belongs to my mothers nephew Stanley up in

Yorkshire. Not a good picture. Vat 69 whisky with a candle in
it with wax running down, a half finished oil painting. A thick
leather-bound volume painted in the Dutch tromp l'oeil
manner. Not worth keeping. But still extant. All the rest
were destroyed. But that whole military thing will keep for
another tape, another evening

J I have a feeling that the thing is going to come together

quite organically. One is on a thread here, and one should
stay on the thread. So when you came out of the military
you had served your apprenticeship as it were by getting all
that...all that banality out of the way

B yup, yup.

J And what happened then?

B Well I'd told my Father at one stage, one holiday I

suppose. He said " Now, lad, what're you going to do?"
We've missed out now a most important stage, the two
years I worked in the tailoring department in Cole Brothers
Sheffield.

J This was prior to National Service?

B Yes.

J Yes I'm taking this thread through at the moment on the

artistic side.

B After that, when I was home on leave one time my Father

said " Now, lad, what're you going to do?" hoping that I'd
then say well, I'd like to become a commercial buyer like
yourself, Father, or can you find me a post or go back to Cole
Brothers where they thought very well of me and become a
departmental head myself and wear a black jacket and
striped trousers. There's no sneering at that at all. I
respected all of that absolutely. I loved it. And I said "No, no
Father, I've decided. I want to become a painter." " Oooh!"
he said, and his face lit up. "Oh, this is a bit strange. I
always wanted to be a painter myself, lad and as you know
we were poor in those days and I had to go and work at that
greengrocer down Tool Lane..." 100 yards from the house
that I've told you about.. he worked in the greengrocer
 22

where they also served game and Father'd had to paunch

overripe hare and rabbits - all game. He didn't want that at
all. He wanted to be a house painter, that was his wish. But
he had to start like that work at the grocer and paunching
hares.

J So when his face lit up he thought you wanted to be a

house painter?

B He immediately thought I wanted to be a house painter

and he said "Oh, lad, I'm so pleased. I always wanted to do
that but you know how it went and pauching those bloody
hares. Maggots as big as your finger! Some of these people
kept them ten days hanging, until they were crawling.. but
that was my job, so all right, I did that and then got out of
that then got into my other jobs in the clothing trade and so
on, a painter that's what.." I said "Dad, I think you're
misunderstanding. I mean an artist." "Bloody 'ell!" said Dad
"Bloody 'ell!"
His face fell. That's what he said -bloody 'ell. And he didn't
pursue it. I don't remember now but I think he said in the
same conversation well right, lad, if that's what you want to
do I'll support you. And he did.

J What, morally or..

B Materially. £3 a week. Three pound notes every Saturday

morning in my letterbox. Rent in those days was thirty
shillings to three pounds a week. My rent was £3 a week. I
earned my money dish washing. Every Saturday morning
there was a letter from Father, written in upper case - he
didn't do joined up writing 'cos no one could read it - always
upper case. Wonderful letters, saying what he'd done
-"RIGHT LAD, GORDON CAME OVER FRIDAY AFTERNOON.
WENT OUT UP THE DALES. STOPPED FOR A GLASS.." and
then he'd describe the whole jaunt.."FINISHED UP WITH
LOVELY HAM AND EGGS AT GIGGLESWICK. NICE POT OF TEA,
AND THEN SLOWLY HOME. LOVELY DAY. GORDON'S IN GOOD
FORM. TOLD SOME GOOD STORIES." reflections like that.
With three pound notes every Saturday reliably. But whilst I
was in Germany I started thinking about where could I go
for my art education. So I applied to the local school
Dewsbury and Batley Technical and Art College, and they
wrote back a very civil letter saying they'd give me £80 a
year grant as I was living with my parents and give me the
education. And I thought, well, that's not a good idea. Well it
was an attractive thing. I could have lived well, been a
provincial big-boy, but I thought no I've got to go to London.
I wrote to St Martin's which was the big college of the time.
Enclosed my sketch books and my drawings. Very bad, very
 23

poor work. I remember with embarrassment one double

page of my sketch book. Drawings of my army boots on the
table in front of me. Black graphite pencil on shiny cheap
paper and at the bottom "Left Boot" "Right boot" in brackets
(with apologies to Osbert Sitwell).{Both laugh} How
pretentious and horrible can you be at the age of 19?

J I'm sure they'd seen worse. What did St Martin's say?

B They accepted me. maybe they accepted me on the

strength of my naivété and pretentiousness, not on the
strength of my skill.

J Well, it obviously wasn't all bad. And you took it up?

B And I took it up, absolutely. And of course it was the place

to be. On the edge of a very lively sewer {??} just after the
coffee bar revolution. With the drinking clubs. A wonderful
time. Again, that's for another tape. I'll tell you about..

J When did you go to St Martins. That would be what 1952

B I went when I was 21. I was born in 36.

J So you went up to St Martin's in 1957 then.

B I know, when they let me out of the military after 3 years -

I wasn't intelligent enough to do 2 years - had to do 3 years.
And that again is a very good story. I remember that
summer I was let out in June and I had my place at the end
of September in St Martin's . And I took my bicycle and rode
around England. I rode down to South Wales down the Welsh
Marches, stopping in Shrewbury and Worcester and places
like that in Youth Hostels. Wonderful, wonderful time.
Worcester. And all these places were not buggered up at
that time you see. They hadn't knocked down the old
seventeeth century ruins to make the car parks, they were
still there. And the old bookshops were still there. And
bookshops were very important - I was buying books all the
time. So that was a wonderful summer of liberation. One
was under pressure in the military though I got away with it
enormously and loved it and hated it. It was a very fine
testing ground. I learnt so much then. My contemporaries
didn't know me particularly well. They called me Professor,
though I wasn't overtly wise or learned or whatever but I
was Professor. If there was any difficult argument to be
solved.....

¬¬end of Tape 1¬¬ [they would ask me to resolve it]

{Start Tape 2}
 24

J So, have you got Anthony Powell's new volume of diaries

booked?

B I'm at a crossroads in my reading, I don't know whether to

read the books I've always wanted to read or read the books
I haven't yet thought of reading, if you know what I mean. I
don't know whether to read all the Surtees books that I
haven't yet read or whether to settle down with Dance to
the Music of Time and read it in sequence having read four
or five of them - not easy going - or conversely to start
reading Dickens.

J Well, while you're busy trying to decide, I suggest you try

Patrick O'Brian. That'll keep you quiet for a while.

B I'm an absolute snob when it comes to reading.

J Well I can tell you one thing you won't find anything higher
class. When the history of literature of the 20th century is
written, Patrick O'Brian will be right up there.

B What do you think of Dance to the Music of Time, have you

read the sequence?

J No I haven't. I hadn't come across Anthony Powell until I

read a little bit of his diaries which are about to be
published in the Telegraph about a week ago. They're not at
all literary in the literary diary sense...

B Soft option, are diaries, of all writers. They're lovely

reading and easy reading

J Well I'm a great man for a soft option occasionally, Bryan! I

just tripped over it..

B I like biographies increasingly. It amazes me whatever

people did.
J have you seen the Daily Telegraph books of Obituaries.
They are wonderful bog reading. Superb.

B Hugh Massingberd.

J Yes, he's the editor. But the people who write the obits,
they're quite a wide team. There are two volumes now. I've
only got the second book , which is absolutely wonderful.
Everything from Albert Pierrepoint to some horse coper who
was known right through the gypsy community. And an
English nanny who lived in the Loire all her life and became
a heroine of the French Resistance. Its marvellous stuff. The
 25

joy of it is that none of the obituaries is more than a few

pages long so you have this series of staggering lives laid
out for you.

B I love the Obit page. I enjoy it practically every day. You've

not yet , Joss, got to the age where the first thing you look
for is the date of birth. If it's 1937 it's Christ, but if its 1910
it all to the good. Of course the military buggers are the one
who live longest aren't they?

J Those wonderful old boys. Superb. Been torpedoed three

times. Survived on a Arctic raft for three weeks covered in
ice and shit and fuel oil and one thing and another, and then
go on and have a distinguished career in ICI and die at the
age of 95....
{long pause}
So you started at St Martins, but you met Perth when you
were at the RCA. Did you go from St Martins to the RCA?

B Yes, yes.

J So you did, what three years at St Martins?

B Four.

J And did that lead to a formal qualification or..

B Yes. and then Carel Weight, Professor Carel Weight, would

come over to the St Martin's and have a look at the people
that Frederick Gore, head of the painting department would
suggest as being likely applicants and against all the odds I
was suggested as an applicant for the RCA; nearly missed
my chance through being too glib, too articulate. Making
them think I thought I knew it all while I knowing absolutely
sod all, - was quite clever with what they wanted to know. I
heard this afterwards. and I was accepted at the RCA which
was very fortunate.

J What was the course you were accepted on?

B Just post-graduate three years. No teaching at all really.

But a lot of good company, valuable contacts all that sort of
thing. But I've recently read a novel by a man aged I
suppose about ten years, fifteen years younger than myself
who studied at Wakefield Art college, only down the road
from my Dewsbury and Batley College of Art. And I could
have been a part of that set-up. And.... what living in
London, Soho, Charing Cross Road drinking clubs, the artists
the broken-down people the tarts, what that did for one's
education compared with the lads at Wakefield studying
 26

under second-rate teachers. They were maybe learning a

little bit about drawing and we were learning a little bit
about drawing and learning a hell of a lot about other
things, about life. And the distinction, the difference is
forever.

J As far as technique, draftsmanship and so on was it St

Martin's that put you on the right rails?

B Yes, yes we had very good teachers there, taught us

drawing. Hard objects to draw and some very good teachers.
I could quote all of their names. Excellent names. Very
unplanned{?}. This stepped studio with a........ model or an
out of work Shakespearian actor with a G string clutching a
spear down on the rostrum and there you are drawing it, -
not very exciting. And the teacher would tap you on the
back and say come, let's have a look at the
drawing...{unintelligible}.......a good teacher, about the last
generation of quality teaching. Vivian Pitchforth, - was in
the first world war - stone deaf - he was a gunner- and when
he came into the studio of course the door - CRASH! Bang!
And you'd think what the hell??? Just Mr Pitchforth coming
in without knowing he was.... and he would write notes, and
we would write notes to him. He'd tap you on the shoulder
and in broad Yorkshire accent: "RIGHT, LET ME SIT DOWN
LAD YOU'RE GOING WRONG ON THAT LEFT LEG" And you'd
stand up and he'd sit down and he'd draw that left leg
relative to everything else so well so beautifully -all skill.
and then he'd go "FOLLOW THE LINE NOW YOU SEE HAVE
THE BALANCE OF THOSE FROM UP, PIT OF THE NECK,
FOLLOW IT DOWN RIGHT BY HIS PRIVATE PARTS AND THEN
GO DOWN DROP IT AND JUST GO ACROSS...." that's how he'd
talk. And that was fine teaching. You don't get that sort of
teaching any more. No, no rewards for that sort of teaching.
You did your best, and your drawings weren't very good. But
they got better. You see nowadays they encourage the
students to be artists. Mr Pitchforth wasn't thinking I'm an
artist, he was thinking I was a young lad who couldn't really
see where the weight of the volume and the stresses were
placed, and he could demonstrate that. In ten minutes with
basic lines. And one could respect that he was on to the
right thing. No question - I didn't question his artistic
credentials. He was a watercolourist, painting big landscape
watercolours. It didn't come into it though. I knew that he
could see..

J they weren't half bad either.

B No, not at all, none of them were bad. Archibald Zeigler, a

lovely Jewish man. I'd be sitting down and making his
 27

comments he'd always go to the back of the room and wash

his hands. I don't know whether this was a Jewish thing.
He'd go right around the whole class, twenty students, and
after every session of drawing he'd go back and wash his
hands and come to me, the next student. These were lovely
teachers.

J Did you ever come across a man called Luard

B Luard? No

J He must have been teaching at the Slade at about the

same time.

B The Slade was correct, traditional, an excellent place. The

Royal College of Art was a little bit louche. And
retrospectively, I don't think the Slade would have crushed
my spirit, but it might have done, and the Royal College of
Art didn't do a lot for me but didn't crush me. I benefitted by
being with the wide boys!

J And the social life that went with it or..

B Yes. The Bonzo Dog Doodah Band... all those funny things
that were happening up and down the road. The Slade
College were always great rivals with the Royal College at
that time. But the Slade was always purer, always more
English and more correct. And this really brings me back to:
conceived in Bradford, born in Preston, brought up in Totley,
a mile short of the Derbyshire border in South Yorkshire, not
quite fitting or belonging. A living too perfect for me to have
been a Slade boy. If I'd been born and bred in Bradford and
then been accepted to the Slade via St Martin's, then I
would have had a very classic upright education. But I didn't
quite get that. I got a rather more rickety glamorous
education, which I then threw away of course. Do you
understand what I'm saying?

J Yes I do. Why did you throw it away?

B Well, I never played on my background or taken advantage

of it.

J You don't want to become a sort of art establishment

figure?

B I could have been, totally totally totally. I could have been

a Royal Academician by the time I was 35 etc etc. But no, I
had no turning toward that way. I'd come to Cornwall
amongst other things and made friends and so on...
 28

Now all the people who were violently anti RCA violently anti
RA -that's another story for another tape - are now all Royal
Academicians, and it was I who recommended them to cross
that line from outsiders to become insiders. I recommended
them, and now they are the power, although I never did it
myself. I'm quite proud of that.

J Who are you thinking of?

B Peter de Franseer,{??} who'll probably be the next

President of the RA, Joe Tilson, Sandra Blow -Oh a whole
heap of them. Who were violently against the RA at the time
when the RA was looking after me very well, when I was at
the Royal College with Professor Weight, my mentor, and
they treated me wonderfully. I had two pictures five foot by
eight foot hung centre piece in Gallery 3, the gallery, - the
gallery on opposite walls, the most prime positions in the
whole summer exhibition and that's happened on numerous
occasions when I showed there. Never been rejected. Sold
pictures for a lot of money. And then they dropped out on
me. Meanwhile, Tilson and de Franseer, Peter Blake were all
muttering "this is the establishment you don't want
anything to do...." I said "Look, you can say that, you'll
never improve it. Why don't you join it. They've asked you to
join it, well, accept their invitation." And now I see they're
all in the high echelons of that..

J Running the show?

B Yup. No, I think I'm going to go to my grave as non-

clubbable and proud of it. I mean in a town like this if one
were an RA they would think the world of you, what little
they know. But it's much nicer just to be as one is.

J What happened to make you want to do without all that?

B It was nothing strong, just...

J Not a single thing it was just organic...?

B Yes, absolutely, nothing dramatic at all. After the RCA,

One year of teaching, living in my studio in Stepney for my
seventh year. Then a wonderful year in Rome, and then,
having discovered Jollytown I thought that's where I must
go, so another year after Rome back in Stepney, and then
out to Jollytown.

J, What year would that have been? About 1965?

 29

B Maybe, thereabouts yuh, yuh 1968 I began etching and I

was at Jollytown then.

J Did you have a studio down here?

B It was shortly after I moved down here. Then I moved

over the St Ives.

J You were in the Digey with Stella at one point.

B I was making a mistake there.

J Did you?

B Always had Jollytown. I did stay there a lot in the end and
so on.

J But you had a studio in Porthmeor Studios.

B Yes, at one stage. I was never really at St Ives.

J You were becoming a bit of an item there, actually at one

point. perhaps more that you're remembering now? {pause}
to my younger observation anyway.

B {to the cat} Katy, What d'you think of that pile of meat?
Good girl! You deserve a treat.

J Did you know Stella in London, or was Stella the reason

you moved down here?

B No, not at all, no. I met Stella in..... The first summer I
spent at Jollytown was with a Yorkshire sculptor who was my
neighbour in the British School at Rome. We shared a lot....

J What, male or female?

B Including the redhaired XXXX Sxxxx.

J I see, right…..

B And I set off on my lambretta one January morning. I

remember putting my arm around Jim and saying "Look after
XXXX, I'll be back in two months. And bugger me, he did.
When I got back I was out of the picture, ha ha.

J Did that upset you a lot?

B No, all red head girls are thick and fast!! Oh my God, yes...
That's another tape as well! And when I came back to start
 30

life at Jollytown with Jim Weston - it must be the second year

I was here, I brought some of my paintings back from Rome.
He'd finished in Rome. He'd got four months with no
commitments. Yes yes that's right. I'd been living in London
in that previous era and I'd cleared up there and finally got
to Jollytown in late summer, the summer when Tommy
Simpson, the bike rider, died. Can you remember that?

J Didn't he have a heart attack on Mont Ventoux?

B I travelled down in the removal wagon from Stepney to

Jollytown with tears streaming down my face- that was fairly
recent news. Then Jim arrived and we agreed he would stay
three months at Jollytown. And I've never spent a happier
three months in my life. If ever you want a recipe for
domestic bliss it's two men living together in clear cut
circumstances "Jim, I'm going to do the cooking and the
marketing. You do the cleaning and the washing-up
etcetera" "Right" And we never had a cross word. And that
was the year I grew some cannabis plants, that were so tall.
Thick as my wrist the main stems. We harvested these and
laid them out on straw up in the spare bedroom. We weren't
very good at rolling the complicated joints, but we managed.
He'd never smoked in his life. And we set off to party at
Brill, which is near Constantine. Of course a six foot lady
with very big breasts had taken an interest in me and failed
to meet me at the New Inn, Mullion, one evening. Later it
transpired she had a very good reason but I stayed in the
New Inn at Mullion until closing time waiting for this big
bosomed lady who didn't arrive, and I rode my Lambretta
back having drunk barley wine as I remember. And of course
I rode...well the road went round like that and of course I
carried straight on, knowing full well that the road went
round, but there was nothing I could do about it. Have you
ever had that experience, where you're riding in the middle
of the road and then on the wrong side of the road and you
know you can't do much about it? Terrible. Very drunk, very
drunk.... So I walked back from where I'd had the accident
with my bike, walked back about 4 miles covered in mud. Jim
up the ladder "That you?" "Yes, Jim" "Why're you so late?"
"Bit of a problem on the road, I think I'm badly injured, come
and have a look. Daren't look at it myself", and my hands
were terribly cut. Jim came down the ladder. We lit the
candles and I put my arms out " Right, doctor first thing in
the morning." "Right, Jim" Went to the doctor first thing in
the morning got all these bandages and etcetera then went
then to that girl’s party at Brill. And that was the time I
plucked the first bit of the hashish. Rolled the joints as
though I 'd done a bit of this before. And we were so stoned
before we even left Jollytown. We had a 15 hundredweight
 31

van with sliding doors and it was a misty Cornish late

summer evening. and I suppose we were going about 15
mile an hour. Really weird really {?} Ever so stoned. We
stopped at the pub in Mullion to buy a bottle of Rocamar...

J Oh my God....

B You remember....

J And Nicholas...... and the pink……

B And I just couldn't believe what was happening there. Jim

was sat there by his girl saying I'm all right I'm all right so
we found our way to this party and that's where I met Stella.
It's a long long story.

J Of a party at Brill. Stoned.

B Very stoned with my big breasted admirer still in the

running. But I met Stella and rather fancied Stella. And I
admired the way she was drinking her beer. One by one the
drinkers disappeared. Jim and me slowly became the two
active males and running around and Stella that's your
name isn't it, Stella, have another glass of....so right
through 'til dawn, Jim and I ran, and people were collapsed,
went away. Stella went away said If you want to find me,
you'll find me in the Sloop on a Saturday lunchtime. And that
was our introduction.

J She was with Benny at that stage?

B Finishing.

J I just remember Benny.

B That's that drawing that you noticed on the board, on the

floor today
The landscape from the window. that was when she was
moving out from Benny's property We were popping purple
hearts together at that time.

J Oh bloody hellfire....

B that was the very first night we heard Sergeant Pepper

the LP. We arrived through our haze of dope to a house on
the top of a hill. Thick mist. We said, well this must be it. It
could have been anywhere. And like up there there was a
table for about 12 and they were all sat round eating. Jim
and I walked in. Nobody I recognised. No hostess. Jim said
"Is this right y'know..?" So we found our way into another
 32

room where the gramaphone was and put this gramaphone

record on and it was Sgt Pepper. And then about an hour
later our hostess arrived and everything was good and then
it was an all-night party.
Then it was dawn. Everybody had gone The room littered
with half-drunk glasses of beer, draught beer. And we drank
and finished the beer off, washed the glasses, swept the
floor, all the glasses put upside down on teatowels. Left it
immaculate. the sun came up about half past six. Jim said
we need some cigarettes where's the nearest town. I said
Falmouth. He said well you go down to Falmouth and pick
me up on the way back and we left the place like that. We
left it immaculate. Perfect guests. That's when I met Stella.
Never did get it together with the big bosomed lady.

J well you did much better than that by the sound of things.

B Stella wasn't impressed. I'd got my arm by this time in a

sling after the drinking accident, and the bandage got
dirtier and dirtier and Stella told me afterwards she said to
herself what the hell am I doing going out with a guy like
this. Rough. But we brought her out to Jollytown and she
wasn't impressed at all, what with my dirty bandage and our
poverty {chuckles} She thought I've been through all this it
isn't what I want at all...I want some nice rich smooth man
to make life easy....

J Well....

B Nine years together, Stella and I. Plus the fun of bringing

up Yorick whom Benny Seroto had tyrannised. Yorick was a
weed. He was in a terrible state. He'd have been about nine
years old. And he'd been used to being bullied at every
meal, being told don't do that and... Benny was very bad for
him. And I was good for him. I had the opportunity of
parenthood, and I loved it. He was just the right age for me
as well. Playing football with his mates down the car park at
Porthgwidden and so on. The little boys would come up and
"can Bryan come out?" {laughing} Stella was "Oh, what sort
of a man have I got here?!"

J It was nice at The Digey, I remember that.

B Well, we've not done very well with the Roquefort cheese,
which I always say is the best cheese in the world.

J Well I had a good go at it at lunchtime. No, I shall be seeing

the little people if I do that.. if you're tossing and turning at
night, the last thing you want is Roquefort cheese last
thing. Definitely.
 33

{end of tape for 12th May 1997}

{Start tape for 13th May 1997}

B It would be about 16 or 17 years ago in the evening in the

kitchen at Jollytown with Stella and Isabelle literally just
pulling the cork on a bottle of Piesporter when a head
popped over the hedge and said {german acent} "Please I
am lost can you help me?" So we hauled this German lady in
to the kitchen, offered her a glass of her native wine. She
was not interested; she had to get to Mullion. Well as you
know Jollytown to Mullion is along the cliffs, what, about
three miles, a good three miles. Up and down to sea level
and up again. And there was no more than thirty minutes of
daylight left. So I said well you can't go that way, you'll fall
over the cliff and disappear for ever. "Oh no, I must go that
way" I said you can't. I said I'll take you on my motorbike.
"Oh no, no, my husband is walking from Mullion and he has
torch.." So we had to let her go. I was wearing clogs at the
time I remember. I said you must do as I do now and I broke
into a run of a hundred yards, quite fast, and then a brisk
walk of a hundred yards and then a run of a hundred yards -
she was by my side, until we got to the cliff path. I said now
you cannot fail to be aware of the cliff. You must be very
careful , you've got about 25 minutes before it's very dark
indeed and I don't recommend this. Off you go. So she
{laughs} ran off into the sunset and next day to my chagrin
I saw coming down the track a green Volkswagen saloon,
rather nice and old and battered, with lots of hands coming
out and waving Teutonic greetings. And it was she, with her
husband, with her three children, come to say thank you.
Which I didn't welcome at all, because I was hoping for a
quiet time with Stella. And although I was quite short with
them, I couldn't deny their good will. They gave me a big
bottle of Schinkenhaage, half a dozen bottles of good
Bremische beer, a large piece of salami with a bunch of
flowers tied to it. All typical of this family as I've since
discovered. And so they really imposed themselves on me
and became friends without my encouragement very much.
And then that year or the following year they bought some
etchings which, as you remember, to sell an etching , which
was £35, was a big big event. And they bought three
etchings. And then another year they said can we take a
cross section of your work back to Bremen because we'd like
to show them to some galleries. I let them do that, forgot all
about it and a couple of years later I had a telephone call
from a very excited Seigfried Mattern saying the Kunsthalle
of Bremen wish to show your etchings in the
Kuntverstein{??} Kabinett. Well I was so ignorant at that
time that I thought the Kunstahalle Bremen I thought was a
 34

post ofice on the corner of the street selling fluffy toys and
souvenirs. "I don't want to sell my etchings in this
Kunsthalle, what is this Kunsthalle anyway" "The most
distinguished museum in Northern Germany." So I agreed to
that. What they'd done was to take my work to Bremen's
leading art critic a man called Herr Albrecht - sounds a bit
Wagnerian - and Herr Albrecht had said yes, this is to be
taken seriously, it's the real McCoy. They weren't quite sure
whether they'd picked a bummer not being sure of their art,
so that reassured them and he in turn spoke to the director
of the Kunsthalle, who said as it happens there is a slot
between Matisse and Kokoschev{?} {laughing} And at the
same time they showed my work to a distinguished
gentleman in Worpswede, the man who founded the Atelier
House scheme which is a complex of studios, six studios
down in the water meadows to which young artists -or old
artists, artists of any age, from all over the world are invited
by a jury of six people who've seen their work and if
appropriate they come over from Chile, from New Zealand,
from Eastern Germany as it used to be, from Russia, from
Czechoslovakia. In a quiet way it was Herr Martin Kauscher's
way of making reparations. Though somebody once told me
what he did in the war. He was a window dresser in Berlin
{laughs} I can think of no more surreal occupation in this
totally ruined city than getting up and going to work for
your department store.

J You'd be bloody lucky if there were any windows to dress..

B Quite, quite. Anyway Herr Kauscher is a fine man and this

was his brainchild. It started with a committee and one by
one he like a cuckoo chucked them out of the nest - he didn't
want any help, any advice from anybody. He knew what he
wanted to do. Right down to the extent of if a light bulb
would fail in one of the studios, the artist would phone up
the Kauscher household and Martin Kauscher would come
down on his bicycle with a new light bulb. Up until his sixty
fifth year. Wonderful man. Anyway, he saw the etchings, saw
the Kunsthalle show and without me going before a jury he
said he'd like me to be their guest for nine months. I said I
can afford to be poor in Cornwall but I can't afford to be
poor in Germany. He said don't worry about that, I'll get you
money from the German government in Bonn. And he did.
And I was taken out to Worspwede and shown the studios.
And I was appalled. I thought Worpswede looked like middle
class mid America. Neat little gardens, neat little houses,
not at all the shambling romantic village one had been led to
believe through the pictures of Ahle Bendel Moderson and
Heinrich Vogler. They were painted about the turn of the
century, of course. and I went back to my friends and I said I
 35

could never live there. It's an awful place. Never, never

never. They were practically in tears. And I think I let it ride
for a year, and I can't remember why or how but
circumstances changed so I said that yes, I would be
grateful for this scholarship. And so I went for nine months.
At the end of nine months I was doing so well that I said may
I stay for another 3 months. yes , you can, but you'll have to
stay in this little cupboard underneath the stairs in the old
Rathaus. I said well frankly I'm more at home here in this
cupboard under the stairs than I ever was in the luxury
studio with its washing machine and its bath hot water that
would come up to the rim. Every modern contrivance in the
the studio - it was quite unnecessary. So I stayed under the
stairs which adjoined the etching department and I liked
that part of it so much that the following year I said could I
come now not as an official guest but as an informal guest
under the stairs that way I would do scholarship people out
of a place. In fact it was suggested to me, I don't think I
asked. Anyway, I became very popular in the village. They
loved to have a resident Englishman. Loved, love English
people. And one who would talk to them in English even
better. And my German speaking ambitions disintegrated.

“Worpswede” - Collage

J Well you obviously got to understand quite a bit.

B Yes, not as much as people think. I think really the extent

of my foreign languages in Italy, France or Germany is I can
go into a bar or a restaurant and speak with good accent
plausibly about the things to hand. I can order my food and
drink as though I'm a perfect linguist. And it only needs for
a child to wander in and look up at me and say something...
 36

J...and you're stuffed

B {laughing} No idea, totally stuffed....... "Guten Abend ...

ah ja, heute ich must ein kleines bier, ein und drei, bitte,
und korn, korn normalische, ja. danke shon."

J preparing to distend the liver..

B And the village having this artistic heritage just as long as

Newlyn, almost to within a year, as Newlyn has been a
colony of artists, so has Worpswede. And the people are
very self-conscious about this. They think it's a very special
legacy. They think the Worpswede artists were very special
indeed. In fact they're not, they're very provincial and
rather boring. Interesting in their own historical period but
in the broadest way not at all.

J In terms of landscape is there any inspiration there?

B Scarcely at all. It's flat as far as the eye can see. There's
one tiny little hill of a couple of hundred feet called the
Viabel with a church on top, and that's the only distinctive
break in the landscape. It's not unattractive land. Often with
sandy cobbled narrow roads cutting a straight line for miles
and miles. Sandy sides to the road. Birch trees growing up.
Birch trees are the tree of the district. Sand and peat and
drained land is the nature of the land. Still drained with
dykes between the meadows. The whole lot was first
drained in the eighteenth century by a man called ??????
{Unintell} Quite famous. He turned it from useless land to
prosperous farmland. An attractive landscape, but again the
Worpswede people imagine that one goes back year after
year to pay homage to Paolo Becker Modelson and to gasp in
front of this landscape. Where here any square mile knocks
it into a cocked hat. Once they actually come here, the
penny drops. One's kidding them a bit to say Oh what a
beautiful landscape it is there. They'd like Lincolnshire, I
suppose. But, for the first time in my life I found as an artist
I was treated with respect by ordinary people. By the garage
mechanic or the man in the grocery shop, or the old farmer
in the pub, and that was the first time I experienced this. I
went into the pub the first time having done the shopping,
and I said Ein bier, and the fellow behind the bar asked me
aren't you a stranger here. What are you doing? I said I'm
staying at Verdebein. What do you do? I'm an artist -
kunstler - Oh......and the old farmer sat there and shouted
across in German Give the young man a schnapps. I was told
later that this old farmer never bought anybody ever in his
whole lifetime a drink but to welcome an English artist...-
give him a schnapps.
 37

J Very nice.

B Yes, yes and I found that that status held with every social
group. One was a person to be cultivated as an Englishman
and as an artist and as a guest. And the momentum of that
welcome was never lessened. If anything it increased.
Almost to an embarrassing degree. They loved to hear
English stories. And English jokes. I told them English jokes
and they would love it. And you could hold a whole room
with a story. Something you wouldn't dream of trying in an
English social environment. It's largely thanks to that that I
developed a taste for telling stories. I would paraphrase a
Conan Doyle story. The Friends,- a very strange story, and
I'd been invited to a birthday party, and it was completely
German speaking. We came in from the garden and sat
around this enormous round table, we'd have been about
forty guests, and I haven't opened my mouth once, and the
chatting was general and drinking. And I though well I've
got to make my party contribution and then go. I can't just
silently go wouldn't be good form, so I chose a gap and then
said clearly and slowly. "Now I know most of you understand
English quite well. I would like to tell you a little story. It will
last about five minutes." And I had my audience like that
and the story all hinges on a punch-line "It is I." And the
tension you could feel in the room was wonderful. The
English seem to have lost the ability to listen.

J Well, to an extent they've lost the ability to tell stories, but

that's not just an English phenomenon. The oral tradition
isn't what it was, is it?

B So from that time I've been back with only two exceptions
for about fifteen years sometimes staying about five months
or so and working seriously - always working. Always at the
end of my stay I have a studio show where I will put my new
work the etchings into mounts as you see having been
scattered around the workshop, put out in earlier years a
burgers invitation to the studio, Kentel 6, Easter Saturday.
The lads would come to drink the beer. The chicoria would
come in the morning to look and I would always make a lot
of money. A lot. One year about four years ago I closed my
bank account because I'd gone legitimate with the tax
people in this country so I didn't have an overseas bank
account. It seemed silly. So I'd closed it, so I asked that
everybody paid in cash. For my Sunday exhibitions I would
have a girl to look after the cash, a girl to look after the
serving the wine and the schmalzbrot and a girl to look after
the coats, and I would be free to circulate. A very busy time,
and very well organised. And this particular "cash" day I
 38

sold a huge amount something like six or seven thousand

pounds. It was a huge huge amount anyway several
thousands of pounds. All in 10, 50 and 100 DM notes. And I
was leaving two days later. And I had to put it into my tweed
overcoat. That pocket folds down like that, this has got the
overflow in there and this pocket has got a bankroll....... I
actually left 2000dm in an envelope in the wardrobe left
behind. Completely didn't miss it until Herr Kauscher
phoned me up in a state of great excitement. Have you
discovered your loss yet Bryan? No. You left 2000dm. Oh?
And when I arrived at Gatwick I thought the cleverest thing
would be to start changing this into large denomination
English notes, and I was very clever, I went to different
exchanges around the airport rather than going to one with
this suspicious pile of money. So I suppose I gave a great
problem to the security service watching me trot from one
cambio to another with piles of notes - highly suspicious! So
It has always been very - a very supportive friendly place,
Worpswede. I'll tell you more about it another time.

J Was it in Worpswede you met Aysel?

B Yes. Yes. I almost met her in Amsterdam the year before. I

was staying in Amsterdam with Giselle Dailly, widow of a
very famous Lord Mayor of Amsterdam. Whose name is still
currency though he was mayor either in the late fifties or
early sixties. But you've only got to mention the name Dailly
and people will smile and offer you a drink. He was very
greatly loved, and so his widow is very respected. It was
towards the end of my stay when I said I must take you out
for an evening, Giselle. So we went to various bars and had
a meal and we were walking back to the ???Heerenbrach???
when a black haired witch- like figure leapt out of a crowded
bar with her arms wide open "BRYAN!" And it was Natascha
Ungeheuer from Berlin. So we went in to join Natascha and
her man Johannes Schenk, the alcoholic poet, and they were
with a young Dutch girl, a long-haired girl, who I thought
looked rather attractive. So I contrived to get together with
this girl and went back home with her the next night and
stayed for a few days. And I remember the girl saying I know
Natascha and Johannes because they are staying in an
apartment which is open for guest writers and they are
leaving tomorrow and I know from experience they will leave
total chaos and the place will be stuffed from floor to ceiling
with empty bottles, cigarette ends and domestic chaos. My
job, apart from being a translator, a Dutch/German
translator, is to clean this flat, and prepare it for the next
guest. The next guest is a Turkish writer, a woman. I thought
well, that's interesting, I'd like to meet her. Anyway the
Turkish writer didn't stay for more than a couple of days.
 39

Typical, you see, even in those days. She was given this
scholarship with accommodation maybe for three months,
and within two days she's scuttling off somewhere else,
because something was wrong. In this case there was a very
good reason. She'd heard by telephone that her father had
died. And the same day she heard that her mother had died
in Izmir.

J Oh, goodness.

B Yes, so obviously she was very shaken. I don't know where

she went but I never did meet this Turkish writer. And it was
not until the holiday there in Worpswede that I met the
Turkish writer and in the course of conversation this came
out that she had been the one in Amsterdam that I almost
met. Yes, that would be, I don't know eight or nine years
ago?
Johannes Schenk had a very distinctive style of dress. He
dresses near as dammit as an orthodox Jew. Peculiar shape
black - greasy black- hat, black overcoat, black three piece
suit with waistcoat tightly buttoned over his belly. He was a
very well loved poet, but he was killing himself with alcohol.
We would go, Natascha, Johannes and myself, I in my Irish
tweeds and Natascha in her furs and extravagant Berliner
makeup, thick black hair - a very handsome woman, big
breasted and Johannes, like the orthodox Jew, portly, half
drunken and very dignified with it, walking with the special
dignified gait of the half drunk, to have a drink in the Cafe
America, a very big, rather grand cosmopolitan bar in
Amsterdam. And when we made our entrance it was always
dramatic, everybody craned to watch the three strangers
being shown to their table as though we were royalty; the
commotion we made among the bourgeoisie and American
tourists and so on. The waiters loved us, they'd give us the
best tables and smile and make us very much at home; that
was rather nice. They're great friends, Johannes and
Natascha. They liked stories. They could tell stories; I could
listen for an hour to them and then I could talk for an hour
of English stories and stories rather than jokes.

J Is he still drinking?

B No, he gave up about three years ago. Totally.

J Excellent.

B I think he's about four years younger than me. I think it

was that or die very quickly. For the last couple of years of
his alcoholism he was in his own world. He'd start his day,
he'd take his writing material to a rough workman's bar, and
 40

he'd sit in a corner and drink maybe three of four beers and
not do any writing, go home promptly like a workman going
to have lunch, sleep in the afternoon and then come early
evening he'd leave Natascha and go on his drinking rounds.
And he had a very eccentric way of drinking. He would
always order a large beer, but he would only drink the first
two centimetres from the top and then he would call the
waiter and say no this drink wasn't right and please bring
another. In the knowledge that he was paying for the whole
drink. And he drank like that all of the time, all of the time
never with apparent gusto or relish - just the first couple of
inches of the beer and then send it back. But drinking
schnapps along side it. Korn or whisky. I was in a bar with
him - a night club - drinking whisky, and Johannes insisted to
the barman it had to be twelve year old whisky, and he
sipped it and he said no that's not twelve year old whisky
take it away, I want twelve year.... and then he got very
awkward. And he'd sit in the night-club until maybe four
o'clock in the morning. Maybe make it home, maybe finish in
a bush in somebody's garden, and off again in the morning
for two or three beers and the pretence that he was working
on his poems. And he developed a phobia. He wouldn't allow
anybody to touch him. Couldn't shake hands or have any
physical contact. Even if you sat too close he would start to
protest. Strange mannerisms with the alcohol.

J It must have been very awkward for Natascha.

B Very strong woman. Very powerful painter. Painter of

Berlin neuroses. Of waiting rooms; of airports; of
transatlantic liners departing; of telephones - of stress.
Painted in lurid colours - electric pink...orange - very well
painted, very realistic. Start in one corner and carry on. She
would look at an empty canvas for maybe three or four days,
chainsmoking, locked in a tiny little room in our printmaking
area with a dirty mattress on the floor - she'd lie on that
mattress just looking at the mattress. Camel after Camel
after Camel, and not talking to anybody. And that was her
gestation period and then she would begin work on the
canvas with a minimum of drawing but everything would be
fixed, every detail. And they're highly detailed pictures - of
clocks just ticking up to the particular hour, an aeroplane
taking off and another one ghosting in, and of somebody in
a state of panic and a drunk in the corner and a portrait of
Johannes looking very beautiful with his long hair and his
Jewish hat. Strange pictures, and sought after - she sells
almost all she's done. Very genuine, very genuine. And a
fine strong woman. Ungeheurer means monster or
something of that order. [Quite a few Germans have bizarre
names like that. I knew an Ingol Golembiefsky.... you've
 41

heard of a Golem (J: Hmmmm...) its another form of

monster.] Natascha didn't know her parents, brought up in
the Black Forest by rough people, ran away to the street
theatre, travelled extensively in England without paying
money at all - just with the clothes she stood up in, - had
adventures every inch of the way and eventually settled in
Berlin right up against the wall, in what now is the most
sought-after district of all, Kreutzberg, which at that time
was hell on earth, Kreutzberg - Oh totally, bars, drug
addicts, white faced people selling them drugs, and then
you had the ugly Wall at the bottom of every street vista
covered in graffiti. She had a studio there. With a tiny
bathroom, with the bath full of coal briquettes, as I
remember. She didn't go in for bathing. And Johannes had a
factory, as he called it, and industrial building across on the
other side of the courtyard so that they could be
independent ...{Unintelligible} And I suppose... I know
Johannes lost his factory with the Wall coming down, and I
suppose Natascha has been priced out of her studio now. It
was quite close to the Brandenberg Gate - highly desirable
properties. But they spent their time between Berlin and
Worpswede. Johannes is a Worpsewede born man.

J Oh is he?

B Two half brothers who live in the village. Both mildly

crackers. One a painter, one a designer. Both likeable
people. One who's renounced alcohol and the other, Tobias,
with whom I spent many many hours. A crazy guy. Quite
normal to go into the workshop at nine in the morning and
find Tobias there in a bemused state with a bottle of brandy
and he'd pour you a great tumblerful and all good intents go
by the board, so there you are chainsmoking and drinking
cheap brandy at nine in the morning before wandering off to
a beer house together - and events just take over, like in a
fairyland. Enjoyable...very enjoyable! And I was as bad as
any of them. I would visit my friend Kurt Schonen, a rather
correct etcher, I would visit him at one period at 11 in the
morning with a half bottle of Polish vodka and a bottle of
tomato juice. And poor old Kurt would be working away
seriously on his commissioned aquatint, but he'd be obliged
to pour out the drinks and join in...almost a matter of
honour....I've never behaved like that in this country - it's
possibly part of the charm. You become a slightly different
person I suppose. And I think those wild very rough days will
increasingly be a thing of the past. As Johannes
straightened out, probably I don't drink as much now. The
young generation may be not as crazy. So they all become
the stuff of legend, but not of everyday occurrence. Would
 42

you like to walk down the town to the coffee shop - just for a
walk?

J Yes, that would be nice, it's a lovely morning.

{later}
B It's still confidential as I say, I 've never told anybody, but
that was the summer after the Profumo affair. And as I
signed the visitors book upon leaving, I noticed that the
previous signatures were John Profumo and Valerie Hobson.
In other words that's where the government had hidden
them away. That's confidential, I've never spoken of that at
all. Of course he was great chums with Alec Douglas-Home,
who was just down the coast. they were great friends. Was
he finally Lord Home again or was he Sir Alec, I can't
remember. He died about four years ago...

J He was the Earl.

B But he gave up that to take the Prime Ministership in the

urgency following the scandal. It's very interesting that in
spite of the scandal - Perth was one of Macmillan's men - in
spite of the scandal they were still standing together to
support the disgraced member, which I think is nice
Conservative culture.

J And indeed Profumo went on and has had a distinguished

career in charitable works since hasn't he?

B Yes. I read recently somebody who had been disgraced in

public life - I can't remember who it was - that person asked
Profumo very recently, in the last year or so, do you ever get
over it? Does one ever get over it - will I ever get over it.
And he said "No." He just made one colossal mistake -
unbelievable.

J It was misleading the House wasn't it, that was the

problem.

B Yes, he lied to his superior officer. Barefaced lie. And

people then lampooned Macmillan for having trust. Well, if
you can't have trust among your own caste it's a sad day for
public affairs. - Not that that was Macmillan's caste, -
apparently Macmillan always made a great song and dance
about being from humble working class crofters origins. He
was. Only two generations. He liked the cloth cap, the
workers image rather than the landed aristocratic one.

J It's certainly not the one that follows him down the years is
it?
 43

B Well, he created himself didn't he? Like so many people.

He became a totally unique figure in public life Wise, witty
and everybody now thinks rather sad. With that horrible
Boothroyd knocking off his wife for twenty odd years, I
think. A fact known by everybody. Boothroyd was a chum of
the Kray brothers. I passed them in Charing Cross Road one
evening and he was wearing one of those very flash type
camel hair overcoats. And ironically where I passed them
was just outside the first Chinese retaurant in London which
you may remember was Freddie {???Bilmans???} The boxer.
Put all his savings into a Chinese restaurant. The first one in
London. People flocked there because of his celebrity and it
finally lost money and he couldn't keep up his payments
with the Kray protection racket and he was shot just around
the corner up an alleyway. Shot dead.

J By the Krays, presumably.

B Never proved. I know this story from a man who was on

the boxing circuit at that time. He gave me all the detail,
background etcetera. So it was funny passing Boothroyd
and a Kray just outside the restaurant where Freddie had
either just been killed or was just about to be killed around
that period of time.

J And you met Perth through the rector of the RCA?

B Yes, through John Loon who was the Bursar I think, and
Perth had asked him as a neighbour up in Perthshire, Have
you got any young artists in your art college in London who
can do a job on restoration? I suppose Loon probably spoke
to Professor Weight. That was my first year at the College,
when I was the Golden Boy. They'd sent me a piece of paper
at the end of my first year to say "Dear Ingham. This is to let
you know {end of tape 2}..........
{start tape 3}
Royal Scholar, I don't know whether it entitled me to some
arcane modes of behaviour denied to ordinary mortals
whether I could walk up Picadilly with my right trouser leg
rolled up to me knee or....

J A hogshead of claret is sitting somewhere waiting for you!

B Very interesting how I went from that elevated status

within the following two years to getting, if I remember
correctly, a third, third degree. That's another story. One in
which there remains some bitterness and irony in my soul.
Anyway as Royal Scholar that was in praise of the realistic
painting I was doing at the time, the paintings I was
 44

showing at the Royal Academy painted in tempera, very

skilful, so obviously I was seen as something of a skilled
one, apart from anything else. And working at Stobhall
Castle for about six weeks prior to my visit had been a lady
from the -was it called the Ministry of Works or the
Department of the Environment, who was the country's
leading restorer and she had been confronted with the
problem. A false ceiling had been removed leaving beams
which were painted on the inside with a sort of gesso chalky
paint in designs of flowers and acanthus leaves and the
bottom of the beams were to which the false celings had
been fixed and most of the design had come away. With
astute reading you could just pick up enough clues to
recognise that the design continued from one side
underneath and back up the other side as an organic whole.
well, this woman had laboured for weeks and weeks and
weeks on just one flower about the size of a rose. It was a
rose. And it was so patently done in the wrong manner -
these journeymen painters were quick workers, they
wouldn't hang around spending six weeks on doing a flower.
So she'd got it all wrong, so she was sent packing back to
Whitehall or wherever she belonged. And I was the next one
wheeled on, and I said well, I'm not going to attempt to do a
chemical restoration and it's going to need as much fakery
as restoration, call it what you will. Creative restoration if
you like but that's the only way it can be done. Well, let us
see what you can do. Start on this beam in the Priest's
Room. Which was so uncomfortable and so cold. I was
standing on a board, on a bed and leaning back like that. So
you can imagine eight hours a day in a stone cold Scottish
tower was not the greatest fun in the world, but I enjoyed
the work, and I found the paints I'd taken which were largely
water based paints - emulsion - that sort of thing, were
appropriate. And I'd taken things like wire wool, razor
blades, tapers and white powders, possibly soot. So as I
worked along the beam then I would rub in adequate
material or maybe smoke from lit tapers until a time that the
whole thing melded imperceptibly - you could not tell that
the underpart of .... 1573, I think was the date the beams
were painted - well, by the time I'd finished you couldn't tell
which were just painted and which were done all those years
ago. Four hundred years, yup. So Perth was very
enthusiastic, and I finished that Priest Room, and when I see
it now I'm just astonished that I could have done that. Very
impressed. Maybe it means nothing to anybody else But I'd
known the beams were almost like that {indicating the raw
timber beams of the studio roof} with just a trace of a
design on them. So that was the first job, and other beams
were revealed and I carried on. Maybe I'd go up for a week
once a year and so it ticked over. he always paid me
 45

generously, but not foolishly. I never put in a bill. when the

subject cropped up of how shall I pay you Bryan, I would
always say I leave that entirely to you and he was as I say
generous but not excessive, except that is for the very last
time, when I did a lot of significant work to a small folly
which is not much bigger than that room there...{unintell}
...and I did some panels imaginatively in the manner of the
rest but pure invention, on new wood panels which I then
distressed with hammer nails, chisels, soot, fire, everything.
And he was absolutely thrilled by that work, and if I
remember rightly he bought one of these little sculptures
for a thousand pounds which was a big price and he paid me
for my weeks work two thousand pounds. Or was it
£2,500....I think I came away from a week's work with
£3,500. Which was ever so generous. But we were both on
an absolute high this work having unexpectedly worked out
- with a big input from his angle. A very difficult man to
please. He wouldn't give you your head and say it's
wonderful. He'd argy bargy and get what he wanted. And I
learned how to without compromise control that. So that
very last session was particularly gratifying. He drove me
down on the final Sunday afternoon, drove me down, himself
driving, down to Perth railway station. He said I won't drop
you at the railway station, it's forty minutes yet before the
train. He dropped me at the Grand Hotel across the station
yard. Of course my father, when he was on his buying trips
once told me a story that he met a man in Scotland who was
greatly disfigured about the face, but he was also very well
known, well loved and he had a thing that at that time was
known as a Golden Rail card, which meant he could travel
anywhere - I don't know exactly - but Father had done some
business with this man, who had then said "Now Mr Ingham
I'd like to have a good drink with you before you get on the
train," and Father said "Yes, that's lovely but is not the train
due to leave in five minutes?" "No problem at all Mr Ingham,
let's just go and have a word." And they walked up the
platform to the old puffing train and the man hailed the
driver and said, "Hello, Angus, this is my good colleague
here from Yorkshire, Mr Ingham; we're going across the road
for a drink. Don't leave without us - we won't be longer than
25 minutes. " "All right, sir." {chuckles} So father went and
drank with this man in this hotel. That was one of Dad's
yarns. So on this euphoric high I thought now this is the
time I must enter this rather forbidding Grand Hotel and
make myself comfortable. And I did do, and it was very
genteel and very nice. And I sat at a round table and a
white-coated waiter came up, and I said I'd like a large
Glenfiddich and possibly a pot of tea. "A pot of tea, sir, yes,
but our licensing does not allow whisky at this hour." I said
"Damn the licensing. I've had a particularly successful day
 46

and I want to drink my own good health, so bring me the

whisky and the pot." "Very well, sir" And so I was well
served, enjoyed my half hour there, and that was really the
climax to the work I did up there.

J Excellent.

B Another job I did was when he decided to build, adjoining

the rather unusual complex of tiny dower house, small
manor house, chapel and turrets around a kind of green
courtyard, with a cypress tree in the middle of the
courtyard. He decided on the edge of the ravine to build a
library, which the architect came to describe as it was going
through the various phases as "the Laird's buke room" - I
can't do the Scottish accent - and the library of course was
done in the original materials, stone and the step in the
gable ends, everything so beautifully done that you would
not now know that it had not been built in the sixteenth
century. And to furnish the library, at the far end
overlooking the River Keyne, there's a large wall with a
chimney piece. And he found a very beautiful marble
fireplace of substantial size. Beautiful. And then he found an
enormous carved wood frame. Huge frame - absolutely
superb. I can't remember...over six foot tall. And he decided
he would like within this frame - for the frame framed
nothing but empty wall - within this frame he would like a
windometer. I believe there are only two or three examples
in Great Britain. One in the Admiralty. So you have a large
dial with points of the compass and the iron hand attached
to a rod going up the chimney attached to a weather vane,
so at a glance you can see that the wind is North nor' east
veering to east. So that was a lovely idea. So it was my
commission to paint this, to make something that would fit
inside this magnificent frame, carrying the information of
the points of the compass and as a decorative item uniting
the marble fireplace, the carved wood within this very very
neat space. A hell of a job. And we always thought very well
together. We could bounce ideas back and forth - never had
disagreements. And he said well I've got an eighteenth
century map of Irish landed owners estates, let's have a look
at this. A big folio volume. With beautifully drawn field
patterns, acreages mentioned probably, tinted with
watercolour. He said how about doing something like this
incorporating my eight farms, the River Tay, Stobhall Castle
itself. I said this is fine, this is wonderful. I can do this in
London. So I had cut by a woodworker in Bethnal Green
-then there still were small woodworking firms up there - a
circle cut out with bevelled edges in a panel about so big
square - I'm going by memory. So that gave an element of
relief to my design, which I still employ in my pictures today.
 47

But this element of relief meant I wasn't doing illusionism

within a very positive physical frame. My paint work was
going to have a similar strong physicality to the naked
marble and to the carved wood. And he supplied me with
various maps of his holdings and so on. And I made this
design and it crept over the relief and down and across, and
the points of the compass were painted in nice lettering and
I think some vignettes of a view of Stob Hall, maybe the size
of an orange and so on And the whole thing painted with a
surprising yellow, a lot of yellow. very odd colouring. It was
painted at the time of Pop Art and I suppose there was a a
bit of that influence in the work - it was a work of its time,
though aping previous historical times and also being its
own man in that nobody has ever in living memory done
such a thing. So it's a subtle amalgam. And I worked on that
in my studio in Stepney, in the Spitalfields weavers loft I had
there, just opposite Sophie, Jewish Sophie, her husband Sid
was five foot one, had an Errol Flynn moustache wore snazzy
camel overcoats. Every morning at 8 am went up west to his
furriers workshop. Sid who was called after the film then
popular, El Cid, that was a funny little joke. Well they lived
opposite in Hanbury St. And Sophie with her big bosoms
would lean out of the window and address the woman living
below my studio, Mrs Goldstein, "Goldstein, Goldstein!" and
then there'd be dialogue across the street. And Sophie was
ever so interested in my private life, as well as Goldsteins
private life, as well as Tony the homosexual, who lived in the
red plush apartment below Goldstein. So it was lovely
household! And Sophie was a sweet woman. And when I
happened to mention to Sophie can you let me have some
ice tomorrow evening? "Certainly, Bryan, but why do you
want ice?" I said well I've got guests coming and I know that
the lady likes to drink vodka on the rocks. "A lady...is she a
lady?" I said well as a matter of fact she is. " And who
are....?" So I had to tell her that Lord and Lady Perth are
coming to visit my studio to see a picture that I'm doing for
them. And so on the evening in question, six thirty in the
evening {laughs} Sophie very carefully dressed for the
occasion is leaning out of the window looking for I think a
gold-plated Rolls Royce with a pennant flying to park
outside in the cobbled street, and to her absolute dismay
and disappointment and I lost so much face, they arrived in
a Mini Minor! {Both laugh} Came up the filthy steps to the
studio and loved the work, liked it very much and so it was
dispatched to Scotland where it looks terrific. I'm very proud
of that.

J Did you do the indicator as well?

B That would be done by a blacksmith in wrought iron.

 48

J But you didn't paint finish it or..?

B No, no, that's left in its raw material. And then a year or
two later, I returned and he'd installed a billiard table in the
library. Beautiful things in there like Ming animals, and
horses this size and dogs, beautiful stuff - now it's all high
security. After his grandson came up and and said Grandad
you're crazy, you've got X million lying around this building,
you've got to have high security.

J Such a bore isn't it.

B Yes, so all that's done now, and of course he's got a lovely,
a wonderful library. He tended to go in there on Sunday
afternoons, after lunch. Go and sit on the long soft sofas. Or
before lunch if he had guests for gin and tonics before
dragging them across the courtyard to the Dining room. But
to complement the painting I was very touched to see that
Lady Perth had chosen a carpet would it be - what is it
called - Aubusson? Do they still make carpets?

J I think they probably do. The French Aubusson, yes

B I think this was specially made. And it was of a colour to

complement the painted material inside the carved frame.

J Well, it's a nice thought.

B So the carpet was well as least as long as this building {35

feet approx} and the carpet must have cost thousands upon
thousands of pounds, and I thought that was very nice. I
can't remember whether that's still down there or not. So
yes, that was one of the very satisfactory things I did. Some
of the restoration work was just pure bloody hard work,
hands and knees, scratching and scraping. Always cold.
Come back and have a hot bath before lunch. Come back
and have a hot bath before dinner just simply to warm up
again. Couldn't do it now....couldn't do it now. Regardless of
my condition. One of the best little yarns to come out of it
was the entrance to the chapel where he'd uncovered some
side panels. So deep {indicates 18 inches) by fourteen foot
long at a guess and very defaced, but I soon saw that it was
a recurring motif of a bunch of grapes, but then only one
bunch would be visible, and you could just see where
something had been a yard further on and just see if you
measured the next yard what had been there but didn't
know you were going to be able to pick out the design so I
more or less had to paint those from scratch. More so than
the beams in the Priests Room. And I studied the best
 49

example ,and I studied the brushwork, the calligraphy, and

they were done a bit like the great French painter Raoul
Dufy who employed a flick of the wrist and got in a circle a
black grape. So there was no way you could laboriously copy
that sort of thing. So I got into my stride on that and
completed two or three passages, two or three areas in one
morning and went to have lunch. I never had a siesta -
straight back out after lunch - I hated it! Sleepy eyes at half
past two in the afternoon, keep at it until six. His lordship
would always arrive at a quarter to six to review the days
work. So I knew I'd got to keep going. He was very clever!
{chuckles} I went back in the afternoon, and I was studying
this bunch of grapes, and My God they were masters, these
itinerant Italian chaps. Just look at that. That hand has
traced that just like that four hundred years ago..just like
that...........THAT's the one I did this morning!! {Both laugh}
That's true.

J Very satisfactory!

B That's enough about Scotland for the moment. Lets save

your tape ¬¬
{In the garden at Helston}
B The bloody painkilling tablets aren't working any more and
the bloody sleeping tablets aren't working any more - or at
least they let me go to sleep about four o'clock in the
morning. 'Til ten o'clock today. It's SHAMEFUL being woken
up at ten am, as I was this morning, by someone knocking
on the door. I feel a sense of shame if I'm not ticking over by
nine o'clock. I take the tablets two hours before bed and
then I toss and turn, and I get a horrible strong pain all here
{shoulder} and right down the arm, and I think that's due to
the illness rather than the treatment. Which is a change of
focus. Because so far I've been suffering more from the
treatment than the illness. So I wonder whether things are
escalating. My GP told me about a month ago -two months
ago when I had a violent pain here {shoulder} and that was
after the biopsy thing and he said no there's a relationship
in your nervous system between here and wherever they've
done something, he said, so I know exactly what you're
talking about, that pain that you describe. And this is the
same pain. Not as intense, but more prolonged. And of
course a bit in this arm as well. So I need to see the bloke
fairly soon. And I will do on Tuesday, and he's a very good
man. Very frank. Sort of man who smiles and says you're
going to drop down dead in about three weeks, sir.
{chuckles}

J Hmm ... it's better to know, I think.

 50

B Oh absolutely. God, I had a bad experience today. About

this time last year a girl who was very sweet, single, invited
me for lunch. She works in the wine shop; she won't be
there tonight and last year...she worked long hours so she
does all her shopping once a week in a rush around Tescos,
which is against all of my principles, and she buys, like
ready made sauces - mayonnaise, barbecue sauce, exotic
dips....last year she gave me trout with vegetables, and the
trout was distinctly....badly cooked...you can finish a trout
very nicely with capers and a drop of wine or malt vinegar,
for example. Flame it up a bit and sear it. But this was ohh
flabby on the plate, and I'm sure it was just slightly off as
well, just faintly off. And it took me all all my troubles to get
through that trout. And I thought, well she's such a sweet
girl that she's welcome to call on me any time, but I'm never
going to go for lunch again. She'd been at me as a treat to
ask me to come - would I have lunch. Oh I've got so many
visitors, I'm so tired and I've not been to well this week. I'd
run out of excuses and I was pinned down to this Sunday,
before I got your card otherwise it would have saved me I
could have been giving lunch to a Welshman... and so I had
to go for lunch. And you know, she imagines she's a really
good cook. Very strange. She gave us asparagus, which you
can't go wrong with, with half a hard boiled egg. But then
the whole thing smothered in this disgusting mayonnaise
that she said she'd improved a bit by adding a bit of
supermarket cream and so on which really was horrible.
Really horrible. And the second course she said it's home
made tagliatelle much better than the dried stuff. I said well
the Italians don't think that way, the Italians think that dried
pasta is how it should be. Home made is usually like
cardboard. So up that comes with a chicken breast. So
you've got a great wodge of tagliatelle and a great wodge of
chicken breast side by side on the plate and yet again
smothered with another instant.... chicken breast sauce I
suppose. And pasta so coagulated that when you lift a
forkful half the plateful comes up. And it's not al dente, it's
undercooked, with the texture of cardboard and the chicken
tastes of nothing at all, because it's a battery chicken and
the sauce impregnates its nasty insidious flavour on
everything anyway. And after that there was to be a
pudding. I left all my pasta, manfully ate the chicken, and I
said I'm not eating well these days. And she said Oh there's
a lovely sauce to go with the pudding...... ohh.... I'd had
enough of those sauces by then. And ominously one bottle
of wine which we started drinking before the meal, so that
by the time you sit at table there's half a bottle left for two
of you. And you know you're going to run into trouble by the
end of the aperitif it's going to be time for the second bottle
as you're just starting to feel a bit involved. Yes, so that
 51

took from about twelve o'clock to about half-past three.

Very sweet of her, I appreciate it. She just doesn't know that
she's hopeless. And I suppose that's an average British
housewife.

J Don't depress me like that! It is staggering the amount of

ready made up food that is sold. I never ever use it, but they
must sell a hell of a lot of it because there's so much of it.
Somebody must buy it.

B Well you see it reviewed in the newspapers now.

J Do you?

B Yes.... it might be Madras chicken curry, and then all of

them Sainsburys, Waitrose and Tesco will all be assessed --
Waitrose gets four stars for a pungent well flavoured
authentic tasting curry or Asda saying unspeakable- no
stars at all...So people buy that sort of stuff.

Hello you lot ( to the jackdaws) what's all this noise about?
No use pretending you're young ravens! (much squawking
off)

J They're making a good try at it though.

B A very good try... (calls) You're only bloody jackdaws! Very

nice, they're often in the garden hopping around, pecking
away.

J That's what they're beefing about I suppose we shouldn't

be here..

B Oh no they don't worry about us they come as close as the

nearest tree.. it might be you they're worried about.... yes
that must be it.. "what the hell?" they're saying in Jackdaw
language. (pause) I had the Dorian-Smiths over for lunch
last week. Very nice time we had as well. Excellent. And I
asked him about the Estate manager post in his island..

J Oh yes?

B And he said they got thousands of applications {both

chuckle} because he said they advertised it discreetly..

J But then somebody picked it up.

B And it got into the national press and they were deluged.
And they have chosen somebody. I said what a pity, I know
 52

just the man. Of course it would be a major uproot wouldn't

it to do something like that? But you could commute.

J No... you couldn't. One would have had to give it one's full
attention. It would have been fun but I think Mrs Wynne
Evans would have gone on strike - too far from Harrods.... or
Harvey Nichols these days!! {pause} You spent quite a bit
of time in Berlin didn't you?

B Not a lot. I've been there a few times. Never had any
money when I was there. Walking around with big holes in
my shoes through frozen slush. The coldest winter this
century.... headlines... calculating am I going to spend this 3
deutchmarks on a miniature of vodka or beer in a pub where
I can sit over it for an hour, that sort of thing. Very
depressing place. This collared dove {pointing} it was eaten
by a cat this morning.

J It looks as if it’s had a bit of a drubbing.

B There was girl from across the road who woke me up and
said can I put it in your garden. {to the dove} all right,
we're friends.
I like them. I find them sympathetic.

J It's a sweet little thing, isn't it?

B {to the dove} Well that's not water. What can we do for
you?

J Did she feed it?

B I don't know. She said she'd put it out at the bottom of the
garden, and she thought it would survive.

J As long as can fly. And get away from cats. Her main
feathers seem to be all right.

B Yes. {Long pause} Well, that's a clever place you've got!

J Very tame isn't it?

B It is , yes. {assorted clucking noises from both to bird}

Doesn't look too good on its wing. Don't know what they
feed on do you?

J Bird seed. Bird corn. When I go out and get some vino, I'll
see if I can find a bag.
 53

B I got something a Polish girl left. Some form of seed that

they cook. { to bird} you wait there, and we'll see if we can
tempt you. { to J} can I get you a refill whilst I'm up there?

J That's kind. {pause in tape}

B That's right come and have a look at your supper { pause}

It's badly damaged. Do you think it'll heal naturally?

J I suppose they must heal, but the question is whether its

broken or not. You'll probably find you've got a bird person
in Helston somewhere. {long pause}

B Somebody's bought the property next door.

J What, with the black stuff?

B Yup. Very nice little cottage They'll use the shop as a

workshop and let the cottage. I said what do you do. She
said I work in pewter. His car is registered in St Ives. I can't
think of anything in pewter which is cherishable, can you?

J Not really, it's not a very attractive substance is it.

B It might have been OK when there was nothing else,

seventeenth century..

J Very unattractive stuff really. {looking a the seed packet}

To try to work out what that means in Polish you'd have to
go a bit.

B It's one of those pulses that swells up horribly. Probably

similar to the stuff they make in, now what's it called...knib,
Bremer knib, which is similar grain to that I have it it's a
little bit like haggis.

J It has offal in it and stuff

B Yeh, and it's served with apple sauce. Very nice. But it
makes you feel very strange for about two days. Does the
system a lot of good {J laughs} If the bird eats that, you'll
probably find it leg upwards in the morning. It'll have died
happily.

J It doesn't look too good to me.

B No

J {tapping a slab he's sitting on} Is this a well?

 54

B More like a sewer. Not quite sure. {long pause}

J I spoke to Francis this week. He sounded in reasonable

nick.

B Has he managed to sell anything for you?

J No, but he's only got two pictures of mine anyway, one of
which has just got back from Hong Kong ¬¬arrival of visitor
break of recording¬¬

Later indoors:

B Stella has fled St Ives at the moment. She's at Jollytown.

J Oh really? How nice.

B Very nice. She asked, which was even nicer, because really
it's Timmy is paying his way with it and looking after the
place, so it's really up to him. But no, they thought it was
correct to ask and I said yes and I said to Timmy it's not
really any of my business, but I don't like the bloke. Stewart.
Have you met him?

J No.

B Been her lover since... since I left the scene. He's a bloke
I've never liked. And the thought of Stewart playing the hard
man in what in a spiritual sense is still my place I don't quite
like. I told Timmy this and Timmy said he agrees absolutely.
And he agrees with my feelings about Stewart. But I said
really Timmy it's nothing to do with me so I leave it you and
to Stella to make your decision on that. It's not for me to
say. There's nothing to say Stella can't take her lover there,
is there?

J Well, it's a bit difficult to, isn't it. But equally if she's aware
of your feelings she knows how to play it.

B Of course she's aware of everybody's feelings. Nobody

likes him. And I wrote to her. That's the sad thing.

J Well he must have something going for him if he's been

around so long.

B Whatever the subject is, be it tin mining or coal mining or

fishing, he's done it a straight in with this he-man
conversation. Used to make wrought iron gates, shoe horses
- he's done everything. Total shyster, total waster. Spends all
his time in the pub . Or he did not, apparently. One of the
 55

things I don't like is that he's been so bloody rude to me a

few times. You know just man to man, like in the Sloop. "Oh
hullo" and ostentatiously get back with the boys, the men,
the in crowd, the fishermen you know... arrr... if you can't
stay with someone one knows a lot about for a quarter of an
hour well it's hard luck. So he's the sort of man who'd be off
with a shotgun over the cliffs and playing the countryman
and know all about Kynance and so on within a couple of
days, and well I don't fancy it, though as I say it's not my
decision really.

J Well... you made the point.

B Timmy said Stella was going to put it to me. Though she

doesn't know he's been extremely rude to me on three
occasions, because she's not been involved. But then, there
might be some jealousy there on my part, who knows.

J I think there probably is a bit!

B Jealousy wouldn't be the right word, but some such thing.

J Well, you're quite possessive about Stella, aren't you? Still.

B No. No, not at all. I'm very grateful that she still considers
me a close mate as she does. so it's very nice to see that we
do have a reciprocating relationship.

J Well, you certainly do.

B We never had enough intellectual stimulus, she and I, that

was the only trouble.

J Do you think intellectual stimulus is an absolute essential

in all human relationships of a close sort?

B Maybe if one's starting again... maybe not, you know,

maybe with wisdom one sees that you can't have
everything. And with a girl like Stella one had a lot.

J Certainly.

B She was lovely in bed, she was lovely in the kitchen. And
she was a fine hostess. That's three quarters of the way to
nirvana isn't it?

J You mad bugger, is all I can say to that.

B No, no. No regrets. No. I don't think she quite appreciated

me for what I was worth in those days either.
 56

J You mean artistically?

B I mean in all respects, I think she begins to see it more

now. I mean, she loved my Dad. His vices and his virtues she
absolutely adored. They got on together in a way that she
and I never did. They really were brilliant together. And I
feel she and I are much more like Dad and she were twenty
years ago. And also at that time......that noise {goes to deal
with kitchen. Long pause.} also at that time my social
relationships were compromised very much by extreme
deafness. Ironically she found a way round Father's
deafness...I've never thought of it that way...That was a
barrier between she and I, it really was. And also she had
too many women friends visiting too often who wouldn't
listen to a man. They were slightly of a feministic trait.

J It was that time as well wasn't it. Quite a lot of agressive

feminists around at that stage.

B Yuh yuh, and they weren't prepared to hear you out. They
would interrupt, and there was always a shortage of
sustained conversation; it was all choppy agressive stuff.
And I suppose they've all mellowed a hell of a lot since then.
But I think basically as an artist- it's a pity we don't have a
better word in our language; the French have painter don't
they - je suis peintre -

J You can say that.

B yeh, but then you're no different to the man who paints

the windows. You can't call yourself a painter, it doesn't
work.

J You say... yes you have to use the noun don't you. I paint
pictures.

B Yes, but one uses the dreadful word artist, which puts one
alongside all sorts of weirdos, queeros, poofters and God
knows what. As an artist I'm quite sure you're better off
living alone. Quite possibly {chuckles} as a man I think
you're better off to live alone.

J Well you've tested this theory so you've obviously proved it

by observation?

B It was very ideal to have girl friends two hundred miles

away who would come and visit for three days. That was
perfect. One of the big loves of my life, Sue, Sue Chudley.
Part heiress to the Letraset fortune. It went on for maybe
 57

three years. For most of that time she lived in London, but
we corresponded, maybe three letters a week, that sort of
thing. And that was a very passionate affair and I really
believed in that and then she decided that it wasn't a good
idea and withdrew just as I went to Germany for the first
time. And that left me as devastated as I've ever been. And
that exacerbated by being in a foreign country plus the fat
that I'd got loads of money for the first time in my life from
the German government, so I could buy a bottle of Schnapps
and a bottle of Pernod and a bottle of brandy and three
bottles of wine and lock myself in the studio and have a
good cry. There's nothing like getting totally sozzled on
Pernod. Have you ever done it?

J No.

B It's disgusting. You become just so maudlin....

J It's so disgusting you could stay sober on it!

B I like the odd one.

J I like it on figs.

B Hmnn, we're shrewdly out of figs.... a German girl came to

visit me at that time because she was frightened I'd blow my
head off or something - but I didn't have a shotgun there.

J You were as bad as that.

B Oh yes, yes.

J Well, why did she suddenly pull the plug?

B Umm... I'll come round to that in a moment. As it says in

the Robert Graves poem - you know? - about the creatures
living in a cave in Wales, and the punctuation of each verse
is {Welsh accent} " I was coming to that" {J laughs}
Splendid poem if it's well read. Needs a Welsh man to read
it....yes my german friend had lots of doctor friends and
they doled me out sleeping tablets by the day. I mean, I
didn't put two and two together at the time but of course
later on I realised they thought I was in a dodgy... I don't
think... I wouldn't have done it there anyway, because it
would have ruined the whole....it would have been extreme
bad manners.

J Yes.
 58

B I played with idea that I might go to Amsterdam and jump

in a canal (J laughs}

J Well, that would have been fairly sort of untidy as well.

B She was fifteen years younger than me. I think I was

drinking too much whisky at the time as well, and probably
got not...not very nice sometimes. Never physical, but not
very nice, as a man can be with certain drinks. And whisky
at that time didn't..didn't suit me. She had a daughter aged
three, a tiny little daughter, Joanna - Jo -, who I absolutely
adored. That broke my heart as much as anything, because I
really looked forward to bringing Jo up, as I had done more
or less with Yorick. This would have happened about sixteen
years ago. And I was extremely poor, and as I say she was
very rich, but she didn't throw it around at all, it was mostly
in trust investments and so on, still is I think. But that made
for a slight disparity between us; it's very difficult when
you've only got one and six in your pocket to do the sort of
thing you'd like to do with the girl who's got five pounds in
her pocket.

J Well, I don't know about that, but certainly some of them.

B Well we were a bit sensitive anyway about money - about

my lack of it. And I was violently against art schools and art
school teachers and it was her ambition to teach in
Falmouth Art School, which put a bit of a rift between us.

J It was her ambition for you to?

B For her to. She'd taken up art maybe two or three years
before.. and had a great respect for my work and for me, the
way I'd carried on through thick and thin. But she wanted
overnight to be my equal and so there was a strong rivalry
element or her part which I saw as being potentially
dangerous. But I didn't make the decision, she made the
decision, and she made it very plain to me. It could have
been done a lot better at a better time; she stopped off on
the way from staying with her father who pottered round
the Aegean in a yacht as an expat. She stopped off in
Worpswede for two nights more or less to say I've decided
that we're going to finish completely. But I'd already decided
that I was going to have my year in Worpswede, but if she'd
wanted to come and stay there she could have done. Or not.
So I'd made my selfish decision which was the necessary
one. And I sat in the garden about four days ago...- we've
been in touch, written letters, cards, catalogues. Occasional
telephone call. She heard I'd married a Turk from somebody
in a fishing port in Brittany which is pretty rum isn't it? Run
 59

into a stranger from Cornwall, you get talking... you come

from Cornwall - which part of Cornwall etcetera etcetera,

J The reverberations of your sex life reaching around

Europe.. {B laughs}

B As I say a few days ago I was sat in the garden with my

vest off for the first time exposing my scar, about which I'm
just a little self conscious though it's not ugly now. I heard
"Hullo, Bryan." I turned round and thought I know this
face....Sue! Hullo. She said we've just come from Jollytown -
thought you were still there. We met Stella, we had a lovely
conversation and I said is he all right to visit and she said
yes. We had a lovely afternoon, and she was with her second
husband, or third husband, there were two after me. He was
a really nice bloke. I liked him. I could see they were right.
He's the sort of man who can do anything. Wood worker, he's
built a boat. I think he's sailed it. He's the sort of man who
does everything. Now they've got a smallholding and about
forty sheep and a few cows and she's still farting around
with this sculpture and he's making woodwork. And when he
went away for an hour - went off to Trelowarren - we were
talking about our... about the circumstances of our parting
and I think I said to her (a propos nothing) I still feel about
life Sue as the hackneyed Edith Piaf song "je ne regrette
rien". She said I'm glad to hear that. I said though.. I think
we might have made something together. She said so do I.
And she said, you know I was in strange state around that
time. (Well, men never notice that do they?) and she said
sometimes I think I blew it. Well that's nice because
sometimes I think I blew it as well. So we're both happy, and
we both have that feeling that just yes it could have worked.
In a much more vibrant and passionate way than with Stella.
That's what I missed with Stella - we did have rows but they
were dreary rows. Sniping carping rows, whereas with Sue
they were flaming rows, you know, plates flying, doors
banging, that sort of thing.

J More sporting.

B I was relieved to see that her lovely big breasts were now
sort of flopping down over her tummy somewhere and she
never had much of a bottom like her mum.

J {laughing} You bugger!

B And when I first met her Mum I thought, Oh dear what a

sad backside! I studied Sue again and I thought yes still
she's got no backside to talk of and her hair is very drab.
 60

She looked nice but she didn't look... you wouldn't think this
had been the passion of sombody's...

J She didn't stalk in and make you eat your heart out,
anyway.

B No.

J Well, that was very considerate of her. She probably had a

bandage specially put round them to make them look
droopy!

B And I got on with her man really well; in fact they've got to
come down in a month to collect his furniture from
Trelowarren Craft Exhibition, so I said well you could stay.....
{break in recording} So I wouldn't offer bed and breakfast
to an old flame unless I felt it was now just a very nice
friendship. And I look forward to the time. I'd got no food in
the house. Completely impromptu- one packet of spaghetti
and one tin of tomatoes. And they went to the car and
brought two bottles of wine and we had a smashing.... a
smashing time. I thought well I'm not jealous of you, matey,
either. Nice looking lad -reminded me a bit of Yorick,
actually. Curly hair, slight squint in the eye. not that way,
but that way - a slight imperfection. Good background, good
stock, nothing too grand. So.... we're nicely back in touch
now. Yes it's always nice to lay old ghosts like that isn't it?

J Yes. yes it is.

B Make the old ghosts make room for young ghosts.......I

don't feel very randy at the moment. Must ask the doctor
about that. Of course, being ill makes you attractive to
women. Did you know that?

J I can't say I had noticed that, no.

B Well, in my observation. I've been kissed on the lips by so

many girls between the age of seventeen and fifty in the
last month.

J I this because you can't do anything about it otherwise

you'll burst your stitches or... so they can do it with
impunity.

B I don't know. I suppose I could do something about it if it

got down to it. But I don't see much reason for doing that at
the moment. I'm not in the mood for a constant relationship
at the moment, for a start. I'm in the mood for lots of
attractive people.
 61

J Were you always monogamous?

B No. Would any man ever say yes? But reasonably so. And
certainly respectful; I covered my traces if I had to very
well. Stella would never have forgiven me if she'd known I'd
had it off with anyone else. And by and large I didn't, but
there were just the odd occasions which I've never
mentioned even now.

J Well, one obviously shouldn't.

B Some of the lasses, they know you've got different

friends, and they accept it and presumably ¬¬end of
tape¬¬

*****

B I remember each station the guard would get out with his
green flag and his silver whistle and his watch chain and
each station or halt Nancegollen, about five stations; each
station garden was an absolute beauty with roses and
marigolds and Michaelmas daisies in the autumn. It was
idyllic. Idyllic. And they'd shout out the name of the station.
D'you know that poem by er..Thomas
I forget his first name.

J R.S.?

B No not R.S., the gloomy one. Not the Welsh one. Killed in
the first world war. Wrote a very famous poem called
Adelstrop, name of a Gloucestershire village. "Yes I
remember Adelstrop. Only a name." And he goes on to
describe how the train stopped, somebody coughed, nothing
happened and then a blackbird started singing and all the
birds of Gloucestershire you could hear back into space and
into distance. A beautiful evocation of pre 1914 England,
really. Yes. {pause} I remember going back on that line,
taking pictures from Kynance Cove that were three foot by
four foot, which is pretty big, with heavy wooden battening
on the back. Landscapes of Kynance that I'd painted during
the summer, tied up with rope, one massive one under each
arm. Heavy stuff. And the first time going back, I remember
getting on the train at Gwynnear Road to Paddington and I
packed two pasties from the local baker. And I'd never had a
Cornish pasty in my life. I went to Henry Triggs, he used to
bake good bread so I thought this was something really to
look forward to. And it was one of those corridor trains with
compartments, and my compartment was quite full. So I
rooted in my rucksack and brought out the first pasty and
 62

everybody looked at me enviously and I bit off the end, and

the train lurched, and I must have lurched slightly, and the
entire contents which were cubed potato and turnip and
nothing else {laughing}, sort of shot out all across the
railway carriage floor leaving me just the husk of dried
pastry. the worst pasty ever, ever made.

J D'you remember those ones Ferrell made in St Ives? God,

they were like reinforced concrete.

B Yes.

J I used to cut them in half and put a fried egg on top. {B

laughs} Shows I was made of steely stuff!

B To what do you attribute your success, sir??!!

J Yes, exactly.

B Time to have a look at what Pauline has made for us. Buns
and then it's that heavy cake.

J Looks like Parkin doesn't it. That'll do you no harm.

B Look at that.

J What's that?

B Pasty.

J Good God, is it? Fucking hell, that's a yard and a half of

angry gristle!

B I have to give you that. I go down a bit and have a cheese

poof. {both laugh} Like what they used to give us in the
bowel operation ward. I told you that story. I tell you how
bad the food was in Treliske.

J Yes, you said it was foul.

B Normally they would come and you would tick off your
next days menu. And it always looked quite nice. Cubed
potatoes, carrots and roast lamb. I thought this is lovely. It
had all been cooked in South Wales. Well I was eating
nothing, and then just covering it over with the covers so
they couldn't see that, and then they'd just take it away. the
plate cover was so heavy they couldn't tell whether you'd
actually eaten your sliced carrots. One evening they
advertised Cheese and Onion patties. I thought that sounds
as if it could be quite tasty. But the four other old gentlemen
 63

who'd all undergone or were about to undergo similar

surgery had all decided on the same choice. So we were
presented with our cheese and onion pattied which were
about as big as a base ball, almost spherical and you ate it,
and it was like one of those things- the sort of fishcake you
used to get in the war where you couldn't make any
distinction between the potato fish or seasoning - it's all
ground into a grey meal

J Generally scunged!

B Yuh, so this was like that. Well I ate about half of it, and I
thought well this is really one of the most disgusting things
I've ever, ever eaten, so I left the rest. And then you always
needed to lie back after the endurance of eating hospital
fare and see the other men lying back - they all polished off
their jelly and blancmange and custard - it's surprising how
old men are gannets - amazed at it. Lie down and then
ffrrrrrp! {J laughs} ffrrrrpp! And then everything got out of
control -FFFRRRRRP! FFRRRRRRRP! FFRRRPPPP! And it went
on like that...

J A competition?

B NO! Everybody embarrassed. Everybody doing their best

to contain themselves. But these patties had such a
devastating effect on we crippled, bowelly {laughing}
what's the correct word....bowelly challenged.... and Oh my
God, by the time dawn came,- the nurses rush in at about
six o'clock and switch all the lights on - the air in that ward
was absolutely fetid; I had to ask the nurse please, throw
that window open, wide open. And I told my GP Dr Coward
this story as a pure joke, and he listened with a very serious
face, and he said {shocked tone} they should never serve
food like that in a bowel ward. {Both laugh}

J Dream on... How funny.

B Now, you must be ready for your supper. I'll start to

serve..

{Break in recording}

B None of that delicate - bring to the boil reduce the heat

and simmer for 25 minutes - I'm afraid I like it anyway,
Joss....

J It looks wonderful

B And I think you're man enough to take it.

 64

J I think I probably am. Cheers.

B What's this wine. What do you know about that?

J Buzet. (long degustation) well it's mis en bouteille a la

propriete so it's genuine enough. I don't know where Buzet
is; it looks to be in the Gironde. "On the banks of the river
Garonne" Well that must be where Ma used to live in the
Duras part of the world.

B That was a very evocative postcard you sent - the rooftops

in the Cevennes.

J Yes.

B That brought it to life more than a hundred hours of talk.

J I was a rather touristy postcard but it's a hard landscape,

you know, when you have to make your roofs of slabs of
stone three inches thick. All the timbers in those roofs are
more or less complete trees to hold the weight up. Yes, it's a
splendid landscape.

B You could almost smell the woodsmoke that must

permeate the district.

J Well, it does where there are habitations, but there are

vast areas that have no habitations. It is very wild.

B This is probably a comparatively expensive wine.

J Inexpensive?

B Expensive, well, about six pounds.

J It's well made, and it will do no harm whatever.

B I expect it was bought in a supermarket, because

everything else he brought as a present was from the
supermarket, including supermarket bread, which I take as
an insult {chuckles}

J Well the thing about supermarket wine is that supermarket

buyers are so powerful that if you get a good supermarket
buyer penny for penny you're going to be getting a much
better buy.

B {unconvinced} Yuh.
 65

J I've certainly had some wonderful guidance from Mr

Malcolm Gluck, the Guardian wine column. He produces this
annual book called Superplonk which is a guide to
supermarket wine.

B Which newspaper is that?

J The Guardian.

B I don't read that one.

J Nor do I, but I read his Superplonk books which come out

every September and give the full list for every leading
supermarket in the country of all their wines. Of course if
you go into the supermarket and you look at the ticket and
you haven't had a bottle before, you haven't got a clue what
it's like. and he scores them very well on a combination of
price and quality and umm... out of twenty, and you know
very well that if you've got a bottle of Gluck wine with a
score of sixteen or more you're in for an exceptional
experience whatever the price. This is delicious {scraping
his plate}. So he fulfils a valuable role.

B I understand. {pause} I put a big glossy book next to your

bed. With some lovely photographs of the great vineyards,
which will mean a lot more to you than to me. French and
Alsatian and German vineyards and small estates and
growers and so it. It's a nicely produced book. Whether it's
well informed I've no idea.

J How did we get off the subject of your discreditable

diseases? I think the thing switched itself off at the critical
moment, didn't it?

B Ah yes..... at the appropriate moment { J laughs} Can't

talk and eat anyway. {J laughs}

J It's as good an excuse as any!

B Tell you what I did do with Sue the other day, and her
young man James. We'd had two and a half bottles of wine
mostly between..

J Have some of this?

B Yes, I'll try that. So we were in a partyish sort of mood.

And I was describing this experience - a nice young
Welshman from Devon comes down and makes recordings
for the BBC archives {both chuckle} and I was telling her
how shocked and disappointed I genuinely am to hear hear
 66

my own diction intonation, intonation, timbre - everything

about my voice is a surprise, an unpleasant surprise. And
how the last little bit I heard - admittedly it was only a little
bit - how I sounded like Dr Roy Strong. And then out of
nothing, I did I think something like a three minute solid
monologue impersonation of Dr Roy Strong that was
BRILLIANT! Now if you'd recorded that it would have been a
classic! I'd just got it right; the words flowed. I was talking
about Italian gardens...

J We could never have afforded the lawyers fees!

B {chuckling} Strange isn't it. I've never attempted to

impersonate that man before but I know I got the voice, and
I got the manner and I got the Tuscany and the English
garden and that rather twee sort of manner.

J That rather anally retentive sort of style.

B {to his cat} Now, Katy, enjoy your chicken breast. Or was
that pigeon breast? {long pause} I mentioned Philip
Larkin's collected...you could call them journalistic pieces.
You know his poetry?

J Mmmn.

B And then he wrote as a hack, like so many people. And he

wrote very well. Endless prejudices. I'm trying to think what
the third P it is that he totally dismisses. Picasso, Parker -
Charlie Parker and a third P are the biggest abberations of
the twentieth century - have done more damage - he
argues. He was so uninformed you see.

J How anybody could argue that about Picasso....

B It shows they're foolish. In that respect.

 67

“Head” Oil 1980

J Or ignorant. Or just wanting to make an argument. Was he

just showing off, being self-indulgent, or d'you think he
really believed it?

B Oh really so. The same as Evelyn Waugh who said the

same. Evelyn Waugh, come to think of it had a list of P's
which includes plastics, Picasso...

J And penises?

B Oh, he was alright in that department. Son's still turning

out that dreary stuff in the daily Telegraph, Auberon.

J It's not always dreary. I'm rather fond of him, actually.

B I'd like to be, but I don't find him very interesting. I find
him a bit stretched. You see I don't think it's enough for a
person to be a journalist. To be a poet like Larkin....

J Nobody's just a journalist and nobody's just a painter.

B Well he is.

J He must be a man as well. He must be a father and a....

B Yes, but creatively, creatively.. Auberon Waugh first came

to note as a very young author of something called the Fox
 68

Club Saga. And it was thought he was going to be a novelist.

And it fizzled out and writing for money took over. And I
think that's a cop-out. In nearly all cases.

J Well I'm not arguing from Auberon Waugh's point of view,

but merely from my own observation, and that is that
somebody who's sufficently intelligent may realise that they
are not sufficiently talented to proceed along the lines of
creative output. And therefore they have to do something
else. My own career as a singer for example; when I was at
school I was very very keen on singing. I sang quite a lot. I
did solo oratorio work.

B Really?

J And I enjoyed singing very much. Very much. I enjoyed

performance, but it was very clear to me by the time I was
about twenty one or twenty two that I was not a musician,
and that to survive in the market place as a singer you had
also be able to read music and to assimilate it quickly and to
interprete it well and ... and to be in short a musician, which
I wasn't. So I stopped. I thought either you do it or you don't
do it. So I stopped, and I haven't sung since. Karen my sister
criticises that, but I believe that to be the right decision.

B I think its arguable. People aren't born with a natural

ability to read music on sight. It's a skill that has to be
learned, possibly more than reading a book.

J Oh certainly, I accept that. But even reading by interval.....

I just had the sense, the awareness that I was not a
musician. I went on a course at Coventry Cathedral once and
I think it was John Carol-Case was doing the tutoring, who
was a very fine voice, and he listened to each of us singing a
few bars in the rehearsal room. And I sang my bars, and he
looked as if somebody had hit him behind the head with a
sandbag and he said that is pure gold, he said. That is pure
gold. And you must do this that and the other and he gave
gave me an immense amount of instruction, leading up to a
performance in the cathedral which we each had to do,
which is a massive building, Coventry Cathedral. One had to
stand on the altar steps and sing a solo. I stood on the altar
steps and sang my solo absolutely as I thought I should.
About half a tone flat all the way through. And I realised,
you know, when I came down the steps, and everybody was
looking at me as if I'd shat on the mat. I couldn't hear the
organ, and I wasn't aware of doing that. And I thought, what
on earth is the point of trying to sing for a career. Had I
been told I was flat I would have sorted it out, but when
 69

you're up there on your own, nobody tells you. No, it was an

interesting lesson for me. And I thought a sensible move.

B Yes. {pause} Well, have some more beans.

J So going back to Auberon Waugh I think it's a little hard to

criticise giving up his novelist career. He may have gone
through a process like mine.

B Not as a novelist but to settle.... perhaps it's far more

than I know. He's editor of something as well isn't he - the
Spectator.

J He's the editor of the Literary Review.

B Well maybe he's more involved in literary matters than I

know of, but I do find his daily piece in the Daily Telegraph
seems to be a strain, as though he's looking for something
to write about.

J I'm sure he is!

B And he's a bit heavy-footed with his ironies and cynicism

and etceteras. What he has to say in a whole broad column
could usually be said in three sentences. Or Peter Simple,
the original Peter Simple, could have said it. But the original
Peter Simple is dead, isn't he?

J Yes. I think Auberon Waugh's column is very variable, but

when it's good he's very funny indeed. He relies an awful lot
on the hyperbole of setting up a hypothetical and taking it
to an absurd extreme, you know. But when it's funny it is
really funny.

B In so many ways one is in agreement with his right wing

views. But one can also see, as one could with his father, the
crassness of so much of the opinionation. And the
unfairness and the insensitivity and the vulgarity of it as
well.

J I agree with that.

B And as for Auberon Waugh's... Autobiography I think it's

called rather than Kingsley Amis whom I'm reading at the
moment called Memoirs...of course Amis doesn't give a toss
about style, he's just stringing together lots of yarns and
stories and reminiscences of people. Lots of language comes
into it and it's not carefully written it's sloppily written.
Well, it's disappointing, but then you don't expect it from
him, possibly.
 70

J Oh I don't know, he can write very well.

B Well most of us never got beyond the first one....

J Lucky Jim

B ...which we all think is a masterpiece. Downhill all the way

from there. Iread one called. I read one called Girl Nineteen
which I bought in an Oxfam shop.

J Girl Nineteen. Not a promising title.

B About a man... shall we say of your age, Joss....

J If you're feeling aggressive!

B ...a sort of Terence Conran figure, very successful big

house in Hampstead devoted family, wife etcetera and his
wife happens to go into the chest of drawers and look into
his underpants drawer and she sees packets and packets
and packets of nicely coloured new underpants. And she
knows that he's having an affair. That's her way of keeping
tabs on him. His girl friends become younger and younger
and younger so that somebody calculated that by the time
he's sixty years old his girl friends will be ten years old,
something on that scale of things....well, that wasn't a very
clever book, really; doesn't make much reading. But Lucky
Jim I think is one of the great books of the time. And he was
obviously a very nice fellow. I think he went wrong as well
you see. I think he went wrong with alcohol which soured his
relationships. He was a beautiful looking man. And so were
his wife and young son. The notorious Martin. Everything
looked perfect. Celebrated writer. And everything dribbled
away, and I think he became as an artist of less
consequence than the person they all considered a failure,
Philip Larkin.

J Who considered? Contemporaries?

B Yes, Philip Larkin would never be invited to posh literary

dos.

J He would now, of course...

B Philip Larkin would never be spoken to by Anthony Powell

or Evelyn Waugh. Or Cyril Connolly or the so-called elite of
the time. He was a total outsider. Amis was on the fringe of
it, but a bit dodgy, so he was accepted by some of
them.....he made friends with Anthony Powell, but not with
 71

Waugh. He hated comedy as being second rate and was

snobbish and so on. It's a good book to read, a good book to
read...

J From a painting point of view do you put yourself in the

same category as Philip Larkin in the sense of being an
outsider.

B What a good question. I never thought of it that way but

the Hull university librarian, conscientious, good at his job is
really not too far away from living at Jollytown, solitary
confinement for twenty five years.

J Well, I was just thinking when you were talking about

Kingsley Amis and the established elite... well I was thinking
of our last conversation about the RA and all that how you
told all the people that you knew there years ago not to be
so bloody stupid and to accept the fact that the RA was
there and it would be better to be in it to change it than to
scorn it from afar. Now they've gone on to do just that and
you having given them the advice are now not in it.

B Yes, and no hard feelings of course.

J It doesn't worry you in any way, but it's an observation.

B Yes, very good, very good.

J I imagine your canvases are fetching as much as theirs,

B More.

J Exactly {laughs} so I mean....one should not OF COURSE

think in these terms but.....

B There was a nice little review in the Independent a couple

of weeks ago about the exhibition, nice little colour
reproduction, and it was quite sensible.

J Francis, I think has been doing quite a bit of PR. He had

somebody on the Telegraph there last week.

B He doesn't do enough. We need a lot more of that. This is

partially what the - I'll show you, you can read it for yourself
- but the essence was that Ingham is a popular painter and
his paintings sell and are enjoyed by people.

J Well there's a danger in that, as there is a danger in

anybody who says, you know, any praise, but I don't think
it's a danger you need to worry about. For somebody to go
 72

on next day to say that these paintings are poor because

they're decorative but anodyne or something. One is
suspicious of one who says Ingham is a popular painter. One
feels that may be saying he's being bought by people who
don't really understand painting.

B It was qualified by something to the effect of "in the best

sense of the word" and "full of erudite references" etcetera.
It was a praising review.

J Good. Well it's about bloody time.

B Francis isn't very clever in that respect.

J Well, Francis has had a basinful personally hasn't he? In

the last year or so. My observation of Francis over the last
year is that he was a man on the edge of a nervous
breakdown.

B What, before divorce etcetera or business as well?

J Well divorce, business and everything. Divorce is an

expensive business. But he's coming out of it now. He's
perkier this year than I can remember him for ages. And I
think you will find he's effective from now on. He's obviously
turning his attention to that sort of thing a fair bit. I told
him what we were doing, and he was very enthusiastic and
God, he said, I'd love to come down with you, he said, when
you go and visit Bryan down there. we'd have such a laugh
together...

B Yes we would.

J You know, get on the train.

B Yes that would be fun. The art expert and the

psychological expert cross questioning!

J You're only saying that because I asked you that question!

You still haven't answered it of course!

B It's a good question as I said. Yes, obviously one would

identify with, not with the wilful, crapulous outsider, but
with the person who decides, having experienced the modes
of fashion, having been in London in certain vital years, I'm
very fortunate that I was, and I'll talk more about this at
another time, in London at the time of St Martins, at the
time of the first coffee bars, the afternoon drinking clubs,
Robert McBride and Robert Colquoun two notorious Scottish
drunken painters offering advice to young upstarts like
 73

myself when Colquoun said to me one evening just the two

of us in a pub, The Pillars of Hercules, I bought him a pint.
Distinguished artist, absolutely down and out. Knows so
much about painting. And he said in his Ayrshire accent
which I can't begin to do and who do you admire as an artist
as a young art student like yerself. And I said Oh..... I love
the Pre-Raphaelites. You must be fucking jokin' he said
{chuckles} with such furious anger you might say that I
didn't say more... So it was a good time to be in London to
learn what it was all about. One went to parties and knew
some of the Bonzo Dog Doodah band and then at the Royal
College. Ron Kitaj was having difficult times and David
Hockney and so on and so on and so on.

J Kitaj seems to be having continued difficult times.

B He wasn't there. He's always quoted as being there at the

same time as Hockney. Well he wasn't. But that's neither
here nor there.

J You've read this latest thing about him panning the critics.
Moving to California.....

B Yes, it's very sad. Very sad.

J What is your view on him.

B Well, I don't know enough about him. There's a whole

trough of strawberries brought to me this morning by the
farmer's daughter. With big bosoms.

J You feel the big bosoms add flavour?

B Yuh! one of my oldest plates.....{pause}..... it's a rum do

that Kitaj business. I wish I was better informed about it.

J He's obviously been badly bruised by the whole thing.

B It the nineteen sixties when so-called Pop Art got off the
ground, about 1962 from memory guess, he was seen as one
of the founders of the Transatlantic movement and his own
pictures were erudite, very skilful, very strangely
constructed, very interesting pictures. Very interesting
pictures. Usually using literary themes, usually European
literary themes, even Jewish European literary themes. And
the erudition usually above the average viewer, or the
average critic, or the average artist, the average anybody.
And the titles were often cryptic. Of course this appeals to
some for whom it must be clever, it must be profound, and
irritates others. So it seems to me that he painted these
 74

pictures for say a decade - I may be completely wrong - and

there was always the sense that one day the major galleries
in the world were going to pick him up and hail him as the
major British painter - he was assimilated as a British
painter - of the century. He was going to occupy the position
that's possibly shared at the moment by two very dubious
crowned heads, Francis Bacon, the late Francis Bacon, and
Lucien Freud. Now their pictures sell for a million pounds
apiece etcetera, and their critical reputation is untouchable
high. It won't last. It won't last because they're not great
painters in my opinion, and I think I know what I'm talking
about. So Kitaj was seen as being the golden.... the golden
hope, and of course David Hockney sprang up and took off
like a rocket and took a bit of the glamour out of it. And
Hockney and Kitaj were mates. Still are, I believe, which is
nice. And then I don't know what happened all the time I
was down at Kynance Farm doing my etchings. In my
quarter century of solitary confinement I don't know what
was happening in London and I don't know what was
happening with Ron Kitaj. But it appears he was slowly
building up a chip on his shoulder about this and that. About
art politics, art dealers and all the rest. As is inevitable if
you're living in that milieu. I'd chosen to get out for that
very set of reasons. I'd eight years in London. I knew what
the scene was. Could have been one of the flash boys of the
late sixties. Had good reviews and notices in Young
Contemporaries etcetera. Got galleries interested. I could
have played it like that and got a reputation of sorts, but I
knew that was wrong. It was premature and it wasn't
appropriate so I came to Cornwall. But he didn't. He stuck
there and things went sour for him. And the next time he
comes into my area of vision, which as I say was so sparsely
populated was only two or three years ago before his big
retrospective exhibition. and I saw two paintings
reproduced which were to me - and you can't necessarily tell
from a reproduction but you can usually form an initial
opinion - I like that or I don't like that - one of a lady writer
walking down the street, painted from the back in a very
sketchy style. They were laughably bad, if anything can be
laughably bad, they were terribly bad pictures. Awfully bad.
A bit the same as I feel about David Hockney's present
exhibition, which I haven't seen though I've got the two
catalogues. Just not good, though Hockney's are a lot
better.... It seemed in that last London show, he showed a
lot of these bad pictures. And of course the critics are often
young, and they don't have memories, and they go and
attack, and they attacked him very cruelly I believe . as an
artist and as I don't know what, as a poseur. All of the
pictures apparently had descriptive pieces by the side - this
is an evocation of Vienna in 1911. Dr Freud was at that time
 75

talking with..... - long footnotes to every picture which got

up peoples' noses. he made them feel inferior, who knows.
And so young critics... {end of tape}

{Start Tape 5}

B It's very reprehensible that critics can pinpoint the entire

career of an artist through one exhibition. I express that
badly. The critic goes to the exhibition. Who is this guy Kitaj,
I've heard about him, he's supposed to be a wunderkind.
Now he's seventy years old. God, I don't like these pictures ,
and then writes a slamming, sneering, cynical, critical
review. I think the critic has to have much more
responsibility than that. He has to know what does Mr Kitaj
have for breakfast, and what are his tastes in sculpture and
literature, and does he have a favourite critic or does he
hate any critic. They have to get a little bit into the subject,
rather than on the evidence of maybe a dozen bad pictures,
a dozen very bad pictures - I'm imagining that last
exhibition, I don't know - maybe amongst a dozen very
promising pictures. Very easy to slam the bad pictures and
to write this man off as a disaster, and I believe that's what
happened in many many cases. Well that..that...that.. that's
very unfair isn't it?

J Well I think there's an argument - probably quite a good

argument - that if you hang your paintings or whatever in
the public eye, you have to expect the flak or otherwise that
then descends on you. So you know that if you've hung
twelve bad pictures, then you know what's coming to you.

B Yes, if you know it. But you may not know it. You may be
going through some mental aberration of which you're
totally unaware. You may be painting bad pictures...

J But then the critics are doing you a service in putting you
on the right rails.

B Well they can express it in respectful terms, possibly.

J Well, does it matter?

B I think it matters very much.

J But surely you're only going to take notice of a critic who

has followed your career. You're going to give weight to a
critic who has actually appreciated your pictures before.
Who says Mr Kitaj's quality is not borne out by this
exhibition and it's a pity that he seems to have lost his way
for the time being. Or something of this sort. And gives a
 76

reasoned summary of why. That is obviously something

you're going to take notice of and is perfectly valid. Clearly
somebody who goes into the Sun or the Daily Express and
says this man Kitaj doesn't know how to paint, we've just
been down the Whitechapel Gallery and I've never seen such
a lot of shit in my life, well ,any rational individual, including
the painter, is going to say well I've never heard of this guy
in my life. He's been down to this exhibition and he doesn't
like it, he's decided to pan it, and I give his opinion the
amount of weight it is due. Which is fuck all.

B Oh no, I'm afraid people take a lot of weight from the

reviews, from the newspaper, from the Evening Standard.
Brian Sewell had them all panicking..

J Oh I love him! I adore him!

B Ha!

J He's a wonderful old queen, don't you think?

B Yes! me too, me too, me too! About four years ago I said to

Francis out for the launch...

J Francis was one of the guys who signed that letter against
him.

B Exactly. I said to Francis, now come on Francis, I think

Brian Sewell writes as much common sense as anybody on
these subjects, he's always been bemoaning the lack of
quality in contemporary art, so let him see that there is
quality around. And I don't give a damn what he'll say
because I feel confident that he will see that there is
something there to be appreciated. So Francis rather
reluctantly agreed and sent off a letter to Mr Sewell.

J I'd love to have heard the conversation!

B And a beautiful letter came back from Mr Sewell, saying

Dear Mr Graham- Dixon, I'm very surprised that you invite
me to your soiree on the 27th. I do remember that you were
one of the signatories to that most offensive letter and of
course I will never come to your gallery. He put it much more
beautifully than that - very flowery, lovely language. It was
a letter to smile over and cherish. And I felt well, that's a
pity, because he's refusing to see my pictures because of
.....

J Yes, that is a great mistake, actually.

 77

B I thought - as one does, one thinks of good ideas and then

one doesn't do it - I should write and say dear Mr Sewell, I'm
not responsible for the actions of my dealer. It was my wish
that you should come and see my pictures, I respect much of
what you've written. I respect the fact that you wrote
favourably about Ben Nicholson's retrospective....

J How much time does this show go on?

B Til the 7th.

J Well, I think you ought to pick up the 'phone and ring him.

B Well I don't operate like that. When the Ben Nicholson

retrospective was on about four years ago again Andrew
Graham-Dixon gave such a sneering review of this dead
venerable English master who whatever you say, you've only
got to look through so many books to see that there was a
very original artist. Highly original and extremely creative
artist. And you can't dismiss him. There's been nobody like
him in Britain this century. You can say I don't like that sort
of work or this or that but that sort of work - but it's a very
wide range of work. But Graham-Dixon went on sneering
about these kipper coloured pictures and .... very offensive
language. Not critical, but offensive. And so many of the
reviews of that Nicholson exhibition were offensive. And the
one sensitive, intelligent, with a bit of insight, was in the
Evening Standard, by Brian Sewell. And I think that's what
made me decide to say to Francis, - it must have been about
the same time, - let's invite Mr Sewell along because he
does appreciate good contemporary art. And of course he's
often got such a lot of rubbish to go and see, - more than his
due share, because he's provocative and people like baiting
an angry poodle, and he behaves like that so much of the
time that fodder - let's get Sewell along and see what he
does to a slice of Francis Bacon, and he'll come back spitting
and fuming probably, saying homosexuality doesn't
necessarily have to be like that...

J Ha Ha.

B And I'm sure it doesn't, by God!

J I think if it did there'd be a good deal less homosexuals in

the world, that's for sure!

B So I would expect of any critic or anyone who's written

about my work, and two distinguished people so far have,
the first Brian Robertson who is the - how d'you pronounce
it- the doyen, the doyenne, the old master of British art
 78

culture. Mounted all those famous shows through the sixties

at the Whitechapel. Introduced Britain to American art, to
Rauchenberg, Jasper Johns, Elsworth Kelly, everybody you
can think of was through Brian Robertson as an elegant
young man in those days. I was on the fringe of the circle
that he was choosing and never wanted to be chosen 'cause
I wasn't ripe. Some of my colleagues did want to be chosen
and they weren't, and they were disappointed and it
wouldn't have been appropriate, - he had a good eye in
other words, an honest eye. Well, when Francis showed him
some pictures in Great Sutton St and asked would he write
2000 words for X magazine, I forget the one, Art and Design
or whatever, Robertson looked at the pictures and said yes, I
like this work, and so he was packed off down, to come to
Cornwall. Josephine kindly let him stay overnight at
Tremayne. So we had as we're having now, a long evening
together, then a good meal with Josephine, and then a long
morning and a nice lunch with Aysel down at Lady St. It was
a beautiful visit, and we talked a hell of a lot, he more than
I, he's a compulsive raconteur, and of course he'd met
everybody. He'd tell his stories about Dufy or Picasso or
whatever. And I always remember him leaning over a
painting that was propped up on the seat, called Tremayne
Still Life, and he said "You know, I didn't know people
painted pictures of this quality any more" And I thought
well, that's very nice to hear, - that was a very spontaneous
remark. I thought that was very nice to hear. and he wrote a
smashing review, perceptive, putting my work in historical
context, which it needs; he'd taken the trouble to see the
light in the studio. He mentioned that, he mentioned how
the light affects the work of,,,I can't remember... Dufy... L.S.
Lowry... how my light was late morning in a Cornish studio.
Because he'd been there, and we'd talked and drunk a lot of
whisky together and we'd swapped yarns and we'd swapped
opinions. We'd a lot of people in common, of course, though
with an age difference. So then the man is qualified to go
back and say well, I think Ingham's art lies too much on the
side of eclecticism; I would like to see the man have more
courage and be his own....but that's what he could have
said. What somebody might say. What people almost
certainly will say at some stage, but which is not true. He
knows where my art stands in the twentieth century, and in
a Cornish Art context etcetera because he took the trouble
to come down two times, and both articles are worth
reading. They're amusing, they're beautifully expressed.
And the same with the critic Mel Gooding. He, again, a
professional. Francis suggested the name. I said I've heard
the name, I don't know the man. I said but I'm not prepared
that he write an Introduction to my catalogue on the
evidence of seeing my paintings propped up around the
 79

basement before they're hung for the exhibition. If he wants

to write about me he must come down and see them in the
studio - almost ready framed, most of them, - and we must
spend a couple of nights together. Again, we did that with
the same success. Josephine a marvellous hostess of course.
Switch off at half past eight after a hard talk and whisky
drinking and go over to Tremayne, drink nice wine...lovely
meal...talk about other matters...sleep half past nine in the
morning back for another three hour session. Then down to
the Blue Anchor for a pasty and a couple of pints and then a
taxi to Redruth for the afternoon train. And a bloody good
article came out of that. With a good jouranlistic mind
who...he took notes, did Mel, but not a lot. By God he
remembered so much. He didn't use one of these machines.
But he quoted and he remembered nuances, turns of
phrase...speech. Very, very high quality critical journalism.
Well, to be written about by people like that, yes. to be
written about by somebody who might come into the gallery
and say, well, this looks like Paris 1914 to me, who's this
bloke? Easy to do and easy to damn my entire career just
through walking through the present show, if the critic
wished to be unpleasant. And I would say to that critic, Look
you bastard, I've lived down at Jollytown, I've made all of
these etchings, I've made all of these sculptures. I've
studied here. I've studied there, I've done this and I've done
that, I've dropped this, I've dropped that. I know a little bit
more about the whole damn thing than you believe that I
ever do know.

J The bottom line is despite the fact that you haven't had a
great quantity of attention from the critics, your canvases
are fetching good money.

B Yuh, yuh yuh. Well they're fetching the sort of money

which really for an artist is the ideal money. If by having a
show every two years I'm managing to make enough money
to last you the next two years, to be able to drink two
bottles of wine a day, have whisky in the cupboard and well,
go to Italy if one wants to...

J Your shows have done a bit better than that, haven't they?

B Not when it's all pared away. He must have made, I would
guess about £140,000. that's not just the show, that
includes three other expensive pictures. Well £140,000 is a
lot of money. Double it and it's a quarter of a million pounds.
Make it £420,000 and that's what I've just read Elton John
paid for a David Hockney flower piece. Now that is absolute
bollocks, but then I think Elton John is absolute bollocks as
well! So I'm glad that my pictures are bought by people who
 80

maybe have to think do we get a new car, or do we buy this

picture... £12,000 ....£14,000 that's a lot of money. Well
that's a big decision. But it's an aesthetic decision. And if
they settle for buying the picture...God they really want it,
they want it for what it is. Not for a bank vault or prestige...

J That's right they're still within the range of anybody who

actually decides they want to prioritise, and have one, yeah.

B Well, that is really perfect for the artist's lifetime, I think.

How sickening it would be if say if Mr Saatchi - who
apparently does go into Francis's gallery occasionally - if
he'd come in on the first day and said yes, I'll take the lot.
Now I don't believe in that man's eye, judgement, aesthetic,
anything.

J Would Francis have sold them all?

B I suppose he would have had to. And then they're out of

our hands completely. Then they could be hidden away for
forty years, or they could be shown when.....no, the fact
that the people who want the pictures can still afford to buy
them and give me a good living.....but not a big living...

J What would you have done... and this is a

hypothetical...what would you have done if you'd had a call
from Francis saying I've had Mr Saatchi in the gallery and he
wants to buy the whole show. What do I do?

B Well, that's a very difficult thing to answer honestly.

Francis had the pictures this time about three months
before the show, and in that time he told me over the phone
Oh I've already sold six or seven. Well, then you know you're
off to such a good start that it's going to be OK. Then I
would have been able to say, tell Mr Saatchi he can have
four, but no, not the lot, because that's not genuine
collecting. I find it flattering and touching that Pete
Townsend, whom I like as a man, respect as a man, in his
present incarnation, though I loved the pictures of him when
he used to jump up on the stage - have you ever seen those
photographs - he was playing his guitar, and he would leap
in the air like Rudolf Nureyev. His thighs would be like that
and his legs would be like that! At that sort of height, you
know in this sort of frenzy of The Who. So he was obviously
great in that phase, but now he's a mature man and a very
nice man. He calls in occasionally. I was flattered that he
bought five pictures. I don't think he bought five of the best.
I think he could have done better if he'd bought the big one
for fifteen thousand, that would have been a real collector's
eye, but he doesn't quite have that, but he buys them
 81

because he loved them and he knows my work he knows my

sculpture, he knows my graphic work and he respects it. He
said I respect the fact that it all comes together, and this is
one of the things that I, Pete Townsend, am seeking too in
my writing, my poetry and my music, my productions. In
that sense he sees us on a similar broad pattern. Still, for
someone to buy five pictures, that's a bit questionable. You
think oooh, you know I'd rather it were three and somebody
else bought three. But for him to buy five, no that's great.
And he bought that plaster head of Aysel four or six years
ago and he told me one time here I couldn't live without that
thing around me, it's absolutely a part of my life. I think
that's so right.

J That's how it should be.

B Yes, I'm sure Pete Townsend isn't spending a quarter of a

million pounds on a David Hockney flower painting. Elton
John is buying himself what...prestige??

J Who knows.

B The guy who picks up the tab after the dinner party..

J Well, maybe he liked it.

B Yes, but they're not worth it. Even if you like it common
sense must prevail. You can't buy a contemporary picture
for half a million pounds. You can spend half a million much
more creatively, I'm sure. Even if you bought cashmere
jumpers....

J I wish I could say that it isn't the case, but I do think that
you know the idea that if you have the money that you can
spend half a million or a million pounds on a contemporary
painting is well established now. I suppose somebody like
Elton John who probably hasn't got a clue except about what
he feels like buying, says well yes, good name, half a million,
yes OK. As simple as that.

B Yeh. I suppose the root of the problem, and you know I

hate saying bad things about David Hockney because you
know I respect the man, I like him, I was one of his very
earliest champions at the Royal College. Some of my
colleagues were....

J Yes, he wasn't universally liked at the Royal College, was

he?
 82

B No. I said this is a real talent...this is a real guy. And in

fact I introduced him to Kasmin who became his first big
dealer. Nobody knows that..that's a little anecdote... and I
don't suppose either Hockney or Kasmin would remember,
but we were waiting outside the V&A lecture theatre there
was an entrance from the RCA from high up. There was a
lecture theatre with tiered seating. Well up at the top of the
tiers there's a little door and through that door are the
corridors of the RCA as we could walk from the RCA down
into the V&A tea room down through a baize door and then
we were in the museum. And in this instance we were
waiting outside the lecture theatre, and the lecture was to
be given by a man called Larry Rivers, who two or three
years later was internationally famous as a New York Pop
artist, a Jewish artist (not very good in my opinion). He was
a whirlwind artist and one of the highest prices of the day.
His pictures were selling at enormous prices along with de
Kooning, Pollock and so on. He was part of the chosen in-set
of New York. Well, we didn't know that at the Royal
College,and we'd been told by Professor Carol Weight that
we had to attend this lecture and we all went Oh Christ
another bloody lecture. We were standing outside saying
D'you know this Larry Rivers...No, never heard of him.
English is he? Never heard of him Old is he or young ..Never
heard of him. And David Hockney was in this group. Before
his hair was dyed. Rather an ugly fellow in fact. Takes care
to be photographed full frontal, where he looks lovely. But
look at him sideways and he's got a very bent neck. Very
ape like structure from his shoulders. And with cropped
brown hair he was rather ugly, ugly looking chap. And a
chap with big spectacles, who I recognised down in
Marlborough Gallery a couple of years earlier smoking
Gauloises cigarettes, a secretary in Marlborough Gallery,
and that was Kasmin, who then opened his own gallery. Well
I recognised this Kasmin fellow, and he said to me, who's
this fellow David Hockney, is he around here. And I said yes
that's him, David somebody wants to meet you....And that
(chuckles) was my modest role in bringing them together.
Not that they wouldn't have found each other without me!
The lecture was an absolute hoot. It was wonderful.
Professor Weight is a very bad public speaker. (Imitates)
Rather hhhh high pitched sl...sl...slightly st...stammering
voice. So he stood by the microphone. Next to the
microphone was a sloping book lectern and this black haired
Italian-Jewish looking dago character from Manhattan, sort
of shuffling around. Professor Weight got out of his duties
wonderfully. He said (imitates) Our speaker to..to day is the
distinguished American artist......er Larry...er....Rivers... I
know I don't need to tell you anything about him....Mr
Rivers. (Both laugh) And then Larry Rivers went into a
 83

routine, and I've often wondered whether it was calculated.

Did you ever see the Marks Brothers film where they stow
away across the Atlantic, first of all in barrels and then they
become general stowaways around the ship and to get off
the ship they get uniforms of explorers...- sort of khaki drill,
and they all have beards. And they're ushered on to the
shore in New York, and they're greeted by the Mayor of New
York and I think the President of the United States, and
they're put up onto the podium and the microphone is put in
front of Harpo, and of course Harpo as we know doesn't
speak in the films. So there are carafes of water on the
podium, so Harpo takes a drink of water, and the crowd falls
silent, and he's looking round with those wonderful
expressive eyes, takes another drink of water, and this
scene carries on for for about thirty seconds until finally
he's drinking the water like this and the water gets into the
glue of his beard and swings aside and then the chase
begins again. Well, Larry Rivers began his lecture, after
such a bad introduction by Carol Weight, began his lecture
in exactly the same way. He took a sip of water, put the
glass down. Looked up at this very distinguished English
institutional lecture hall, and then took another sip of water,
and carried on in just the same way. And I've often
wondered whether he was playing a game with us or
whether he was just genuinely nervous. Then he gave his
lecture, which I don't think made much impression. There
were no slides or pictures to be shown. Didn't leave much
impression, I don't think. But it was an important day. It was
the day when a living American Pop artist came to the RCA.
It was a significant day. I'm obviously decribing it from my
point of view. Maybe somebody more au fait with the subject
would interpret the whole affair in a completely different
manner, but that's how I saw that. So did I digress!??

J Well, we started with Ron Kitaj's ennui with the critics and
went on organically from there, didn't we?

B Yes, yes. I think for the time being we can leave it. (Long
pause) I'm going to take my sleeping tablets now, because it
takes about six hours for them to work. I get to sleep at
about four am. But my lady doctor has given me the name of
the ones I should be having.

J Has she? Oh good. The ones you were getting in hospital?

B Yeh. She's a lovely contact to have. And would you believe

it...I can tell you because you'll probably never meet her and
you won't talk about it. So I'm going to tell you. She's known
for about a year, and she was diagnosed about three weeks
ago as having multiple sclerosis. And possibly a fairly
 84

rampant form. She went to India recently and went

completely blind in one eye and then recovered. We've
talked about this you know. We talked about the advantages
and disadvantages of having a potentially curtailed life. And
it's not all disadvantages at all. There are so many positive
aspects. And she embodies these as well. She wants to do
so much, - she does so much. And at the back of her mind
her time is limited. She might be severely crippled or she
might be dead. Or she might go on for forty years. But its
changed her attitude and her attitude is nothing to do with
being sad or sorry for herself. Isn't that strange. Only
twenty eight. Lively, beautiful, everything.

J Multiple sclerosis can be a really fickle disease. You can get

really very very long periods of remission. The daughter of a
friend of my mothers has had it now for about twenty five
years and she's still perfectly, I don't say perfectly OK, but
still perfectly functional. She has periodic problems. But it's
also true that if you get it in the virulent form you can be in
a ghastly state in a really short time.

B She plays the violin, to a high standard. Not quite

professional, but a high standard. And I was asking her what
various symptoms she gets and she said I lose a lot of
sensitivity in this hand, but that's not so important because
it's the bowing hand. But the other way round that little part
of her life would go. But this mutual awareness gives us a
solidarity which is quite fun. You can joke about it. You
know, let's get another eight of us and hire a minibus and all
go to Blackpool... you can be quite silly about it. I suppose
you can as long as it's not really painful. When that starts
well then maybe the fun stops altogether. And if that does
start well, that's another game altogether.

J That's worrying you at the moment?

B No. I've had a good talk with Mr Whiskey Daniels, and

asked him whether these pains are relevant or whether
they're something else...they could be rheumatism or
arthritis or God knows what. No, no and I'm not worried
anyway, because if things got too worse, I know what to do.
It's as simple as could be. Not to linger on, not to embarrass
ones friends, not to cause distress all round but to make a
dignified exit. I think there's no question about that.

J These things are not easy to talk about.

B Don't you agree with that?

 85

J I do, I think certainly... One of my dogs died earlier this

year. It had a sudden acute condition which came on, and
he'd been fine, he'd had thirteen years of happy life and so
he suddenly got this acute condition. I suspect it was a
tumour on the base of his brain, and he died in agony over a
period of about two hours. He had a first fit, so I zoomed him
off to the vet, and the vet gave him some injection, he was a
perfectly charming, well-meaning young man who didn't
have a fucking clue. And I brought him home and he then
had another worse fit and as I say died in agony, in dire
straights. But I have to say not for very long. I had to get
the vet out to have him put down, as I didn't have a
shotgun, and my neighbour refused to shoot him - he said
that shooting dogs is not as easy as all that, which I can well
believe, - umm.. and the relief I had when the vet appeared
and gave Barney his injection.... umm.... was absolutely
immense, you know there was not a shadow of regret about
it. The fact was it was something that had to be done and
the only regret if any was that I wasn't able to do it the
moment he needed it

B Yup, yup.

J And I reflected at the time when I felt so relieved, what a

curious thing it is that we can do that for our animals but
find it difficult to do it for our fellow human beings. Ummm
we create these artificial walls of...

B Sentimentality.

J Well, it's not sentimentality, I suppose it's distrust, really.

If we really all trusted each other, then we would trust each
other to put each other down when were in our extremity. As
it is because there are strange people around who do it not
when you're in your extremity, but because it's convenient...

B I'd never thought of it that way. I'd never thought of

distrust...

J It is distrust. It is simply to safeguard against being done

away with by an avaricious relative or a jealous wife or
whatever. It's the human sin that has produced the human
suffering. If we hadn't...

B But if the sufferer himself says in private consultation

with his consultant, there's no chance of recovery or
remission? No, sir, there isn't. And how long is this likely to
carry on. Is it going to escalate. Yes, it is going to get worse.
And it could carry on for six months. Well, I don't think the
quality of things are right even now, so give me a fortnight
 86

to see my friends and have a last round-up, and then come

and see me with your tablets in a fortnight.

J I don't think this is something you can discuss openly with

a GP. Certainly on the record. I think it depends. It's a lot to
ask, because the fact is that if anyone wants to commit
suicide there are probably plenty of well informed and
effective ways of doing it without actually asking somebody
to risk their career by doing it.

B Well, I don't think it has to be like that. I think one can

build up a stock-pile of potentially lethal tablets. The dosage
is eight a day and you get a months supply and you don't
use them, so you've got enough to kill yourself.

J Fair enough, but I think it's important to check with

somebody who understands that one's doing the right thing.
For example nobody should ever try to commit suicide with
aspirin or whatever 'cause they may just bugger up their
liver....you know.

B Yes, I agree it's got to be done efficiently.

J But I don't think you should be thinking in these terms at

all, unless there's something you haven't told me.

B No, well it's only part of the general speculation.

J Well you've had two doctors say to you you've got three or
four years. Frankly in my view if you've got the mechanics
saying that the chances are you've got as good a chance of
making a complete recovery as dying!

B Yes. I think so. But one has to be prepared for...for the

other course. And one isn't prepared to linger for a long
time, just a nuisance to oneself and everybody else. One's
got to have plans in mind.

J Well this is the process of mind that anyone who gets

cancer tends to think. It would be idle to suppose otherwise.
Certainly , when I got my melanoma I went through that
process of thought.

B Well, then you're prepared. Foolish not to think about it.

J The great trap is to think too much about it.

B Yes, well I don't. I do think of the extreme embarrassment

I will cause if I live to the age of 84! That would be good
fun...
 87

(end of tape)
(start new side)
B Presents, cards bottles of wine, strawberries, raspberries,
cream, pasties, every day every day every day. I'm being
killed with kindness at the moment, which is wonderful of
course, but... of course soon that'll stop. Nice in the evening
here isn't it?

J It's lovely. It's warmer now than the last time I was down. It
was quite chilly in the evening when I came down before,
but it's definitely summer now.

B The electrician still only has the one heater working

properly. the other two are to be fixed.

J The storage heaters in the studio?

B Yes. Otherwise it would be quite chill.

J Well the studio when I was here last time was fine.

B I haven't changed the bed linen since you were here, but
the only person who has slept there since you has been the
lovely Zigritte Martin, who slept there two nights alone, with
her husband on the floor, so you're in good company.

J What was her husband doing on the floor?

B Oh they've been married for eighty eight years... no, I

don't know. They may have jumped on each other, who
knows, I don't know. They have separate bedrooms at home
and only jump on each other sporadically.

J Very wise.....(long pause for a piss) Tell me about your

National Service.

B Are we recording now?

J Yup, we're always recording!

B A very worthwhile time as any man of my generation will

tell you. You must have escaped it by.. a few years

J Yes

B The great virtue of National service was that one could

leave grammar school after the examinations aged about 15
and a half having secured an O level in Geography and an O
level in English language, and then one could look for a job
or be a waster, or what ever for two years. But there was no
 88

fashion in those days for being a waster; you wouldn't live

at home without working - you'd be kicked out by an old-
fashioned Dad - Go out and get a bloody job... My father was
in the clothing trade, Milletts and then after that John
Banners, and I don't know how it was arranged but I had an
interview to meet a distiguished old battleaxe of a lady
called Miss Cole who was the owner of a a huge
departmental store in Sheffield called Cole Brothers, she
was last of the family. Old maid real Victorian. Smashing
woman. Gaunt, thin, hair in a bun. Rather well spoken. And I
had to go and be interviewed by her. With my mother, with
my two O levels. For a job in the Gents outfitting
department, understood for two years. And yes, the
interview was a great success. I liked Miss Cole and
respected her and we obviously got on well enough. And so I
was given a job, and became the junior in...... Upstairs was
the tailoring department. Bespoke suits. Ready made suits
of the highest quality. Chester Barry I think they were
called. Daks. All the best names in the tailoring trade of the
time. Beautiful heavy silk dressing gowns at twelve
guineas...wonderful... wonderful quality we sold.....hello
Katy.......and downstairs was more the more plebiean
department opening to the street where they sold shirts
underwear, ties socks etcetera. But that was a bit more
plebiean. The staff wore black jacket and striped trousers.
White shirt, hard white collar, discrete tie. I as a junior was
allowed to wear a dark three piece suit, silk tie, hard collar,
black shoes... conforming, but not quite to the black jacket
and striped trousers standard. So I was in the upstairs, the
tailoring, the "posh" area. It was anarea about six time the
size of this lined with beautiful jackets suits, jackets and
then cubicles where you measured your customer..- I
learned how to measure the arm and the depth of the sigh-
d'you know the word sigh?

J Sigh, no I don't.

B Yes that's the cut underneath the armpit. I would like a

fairly generous sigh, a customer might say. Or keep the sigh
fairly tight. Possibly gone out of the language now, old
tailoring terms. I knew how to measure the inside leg. I
could measure a man for a suit for two fittings. It wasn't
possibly the highest quality - it wasn't Savile Row - but it
was high. And a fine suit would cost, I think, about fourteen
guineas. Which was probably a lot of money. We also sold
wonderful camelhair overcoats... oh what's the name of that
special.....Crombie! We sold Crombies. They were something
like twenty five guineas, and weighed half a ton. And we had
really distinguished clients of course. Sheffield has always
been a prosperous city. Or prosperous among the factory
 89

and the steel owners and so on. And I had a boss who had
the splendid name of Mr Surtees, and his name was even
Richard Surtees; I don't know whether he had an S as well.
And he had gold pinces nez, silver grey hair brushed rather
like Earl Haig. And a florid complexion, and a violent temper
which everybody feared. And I as tyro had respect
certainly, but if I thought he'd said something that was not
right, correct, I would say excuse me, sir, but I think it
should be.....and if he felt so inclined he would say It is as I
say young man; and I would say No sir, I think it is as
......and then...blazing rows.... he would go bright purple,
run around the shop regardless of customers, shouting and
Impudence. Young pipsqueaks from Grammar school and all
this sort of thing. And early on in my career.... there was a
store room of that {indicates} size, that had narrow shelves
which were full of bolts of cloth..tweeds... being in Yorkshire
we had all the fine cloths. And he said to me one day that
storeroom hasn't been cleaned out in my time here. It's in a
terrible state and nobody knows what's in there. I said I'll
clean it out, sir. He said it's filthy, its a terrible job. It was. I
said no, I'll enjoy to do that. And I tripped right down and
got all my fine clothing off and spent something like four
days taking these bolts out, brushing them down, wiping
with damp cloths, hoovering. I made that storeroom
immaculate. And I got dust in my throat, my hair...I was
filthy. It was the most horrid job you can imagine. And I
loved it! I got to prove myself like that. And after that, well
he really respected that I was a good lad, he didn't
say much about it, he just said well done, that's nice...well
done.....not much more said, but I knew I'd won my spurs,
through that. Saturday lunchtime we would get men in,
sometimes with their wives, sometimes without, who has
obviously had a glass of beer in the pub, 'cause I coukld
smell it. By no means drunk, but in those days if I smelt beer
on a man's breath, I thought I was dealing with a raving
lunatic. And I remember there was one occasion when I was
introducing various lovely hunting style narrow waisted full
skirted jackets to a gentleman -- 38 long- they had all these
measurements; you could have a 42 portly or a 32 short, a
42 long or a 42 long leg they were all graded. and this man
was trying on jackets, and he said, it's a lovely Cheviot
tweed is this, I said it's a beautiful cloth, sir, it's a form of
thornproof. He said no, no, no this is a Cheviot. I said no, sir
it's a thornproof. It's a Cheviot! It's a thornproof! It's a
Cheviot! Ha Ha! And this developed into a sort of Marx
Brothers huge row, at this impudent 17 year-old sales boy. I
was right, and he was wrong, but of course I should have
said yes, of course sir, it suits you perfectly. Instead of
which we had a blazing row, and then Mr Surtees would
come and see such a thing happening and come across and
 90

say Sir, are there any problems here? The young man is
saying that this is a thornproof and I'm saying it's a Cheviot.
I'm sorry, sir the young man's been with us a year. He's a
good young man, but will you leave us now Mr Ingham, I'd
like to take over. {both laugh} And when I left that shop he
gave me a silver propelling pencil, and as an ex schoolboy it
was about the most dreamy gift that you could have,
absolutely like a silver watch to a fifty five year old ex rail
man. Inscribed from Mr Surtees. It brought a tear to the eye,
did that.

J You lost it I suppose?

B It got squashed at one stage. I treasured it for some

years, of course, it got lost as all things do. And the great
beauty of this place was that it was about six stories high.
And if we went straight through into the next part you had
to pass the great fitting cubicles which were about twice the
size of my lavatory cubicle there which the ladies corsetry
cubicles, where they had special ladies who measured ladies
to have whalebone elaborate structures suchas...do people
have these made any more?

J It's a dying art, but I think theatrical costumiers still do it

don't they?

B Yes, well there were fitters. Special fitters. The ladies on

the old side who specialised in that trade and then down the
rest of the department, twice the length of this were the
long glass-topped counters of the girls selling lingerie of
every description; the ladies and the girls were all 21,
22...24 years old, Sheffield lasses, all in uniform, all
attractive. And there was I a seventeen year old
loose......what's that noise?

J Must be that furniture arriving.

B It might be my pen being blown by the wind {pause while

investigates and calls} Oh Hullo. Wondered what the noises
were....only you. Bye Bye.
So you had this run of beautiful ambitious ex -not grammar
school girls, secondary school girls, and the ratio would be
one boy like myself to forty attractive girls. And you'd go up
another flight - another flight would be the accounts
department where you had to go with your cheques and bills
and the girls behind the counter would flirt with you, and
the most exciting of all was to go into the very attic of this
building which really were Victorian attics with skylights and
bare floor boards, - up to this last floor, where they did
pressing of...if goods had arrived badly creased, they were
 91

taken up there and if goods had to be lengthened or

shortened they'd be taken up there and there was a long
table about the length of this room with maybe about
twenty girls around, sewing, and machines going. And such
beauties these girls were. There was a couple of old stern
harridans looking after them. And that became one of my
jobs. I might have to take ....I'd say to Mr Surtees this jacket
sleeve looks not so good sir, I think I'll take it upstairs and
get the girls to....Do that, Mr Ingham. And off I'd go, and as
you opened the door, all the girls eyes would look... and it
was like the tobacco factory in Kabul...you know...there was
one girl with rich black hair and big eyes who used to ogle
me in such a way.... I was so immature...I couldn't take much
advantage....somehow I inveigled this black haired big eyed
tough Sheffield girl - these were the less posh ones upstairs
- these were the working girls, with callouses on their
hands, who lived down by the canal. I took her to the
pictures one night. In those days it was the thing to get your
arm around the back of the girl so you'd sit and look at the
picture like this...so ridiculous...did you ever go through
that? (J affirmative grunt) Yes obviously the more natural
thing is to hold hands and then maybe just straighten the
thigh or just across the bosom casually but this ...you had to
go into this static arm aching position around their
shoulders, which was no good for anybody 'cause the girl
was still upright and....so you're watching the flim like this. I
went through the film like that and I'd bought a box of Black
Magic chocolates, and I'd taken her upstairs, and I think
she'd never been upstairs in a cinema in her life. And she
ate the chocolates, or the best part of them, then I walked
her down to the bus station where she had to get her tram
to go to the working class district Attercliffe and then just
for a short while I put my arms round her and we kissed, and
she was a little bit more...she was a mature woman... I was
a seventeen year old schoolboy nerd. All she wanted was to
be taken round the corner into one of the bomb sites for a
stand-up job or whatever, but certainly for a bit of full erotic
love making. But I didn't know about that. I thought a box of
chocolates and a kiss would be a wild night. I didn't take her
out again. She told me months later..she said I was very
surprised at you. I said what d'you mean? She said Oh, I'm
not going to tell you. I took it as a compliment and
{chuckles} she looked very disappointed. So all of that was
the preliminary to your question. The National Service. And
that was a marvellous way of growing up between sixteen
and eighteen years old. Going back on the number nineteen
bus back to Totley - six miles - with a packet of ten Sobranie
No 7 cigarette, d'you remember them? Never tasted a
cigarette like it. I used to smoke about three a day, one
going home on the bus. Sometimes I'd sit with my
 92

intellectual pals who would talk to me about - or we would

talk about books, and at seventeen we were all pretentious,
we were all reading Aldous Huxley and Arnold Bennett and
poetry. We were self-educated, really. As I say that was the
preliminary to the military experience, which I'd like to talk
about another time when I'm fresh, because I enjoyed the
military experience and I enjoyed HATING it, fighting it, and
it was character building and it did me a lot of good. And it
was a great period

{break in recording}

B I can't remember how far we got with Art School.

J Well you'd given the outline; that you'd gone to St Martins

and on to the RCA and you dealt with a couple of your
professors at St Martins... the names escape me at this
moment.

B Archibald Zeigler, the Jewish man who washed his hands

after his students.

J Yes, and somebody else who was a First World War veteran

B Vivian Pitchforth.

J Pitchforth. Indeed.

B Deaf as a post. Royal Academician. A marvellous teacher.

Broad Yorkshire voice. His accent hadn't changed, I suppose,
since the trenches. Since he was a bombardier. And when we
hear recordings of people from the early part of the century,
voices were more characterful then than now. And his was a
Yorkshire voice. Very characterful, and of course very loud.
Of course he didn't have a sense of judgement there. A very
patient teacher. No...no art came in to it. Nothing arty. Just
drawing. Basic stuff. Did we get to the Royal College of Art?

J Well we got to the RCA and you'd mentioned Carel Weight

and...

B I should remember this having read it last night......

J I think one touched on both schools more on personalities,

more than what it did for you as it were, and that's an
aspect which one should...

B Say that again, sorry.

 93

J One touched more on the personalities that you met there

than on what happened to you developmentally, really. The
effect it had on you. And what did St Martins do for you as
opposed to the RCA.

B As I mentioned in our last talk I was accepted into St

Martins with 2 O levels which.... ten years later you would
have had to have half a dozen O levels to go to a bloody art
school. In those days you could go to an art school without
such qualifications. In fact many people went instead of
going to grammar school. Went straight to art school. When
I passed to go to Netheredge...Good Heavens.... when I
passed to go to my grammar school, on the list that one was
required to make was Sheffield Art College. It's hard to
believe that one might have been at Art College at the age
of twelve. Hard to believe. But I'm sure that was the case.
Anyway a lot of people went to art college at fifteen or
sixteen. John Royland, who is now a very celebrated
contemporary artist, went to Sheffield Art College, I think
straight from school, whist I was working at Cole Bros.
Occasionally we would travel back on the bus together, he
dressed in a British coat worn a la Augustus John sketching
in the trenches - there's a famous photograph of John with a
trimmed beard and a captain's insignia and hat, drawing. I
don't think he ever went near a rifle. And so John Royland
had adopted this style and had a rucksack with lots of
delicious oil painting brushes sticking out of the top. So I in
my three piece suit with hard collar was very proud to sit
next to this bohemian character who'd been painting
somebody's daughter in Sheffield. He then went to the Royal
Academy Schools, and we met up again when I was at St
Martins, three years later I suppose. So I was accepted into
St Martins on very very weak qualifications. Poor drawings
as I've said. Silly adolescent literary jokes written in my
sketchbooks. Particularly featuring the Sitwell family who
had captured my imagination at that stage, being
Sheffielders themselves...though regretfully I never went to
Renishaw. Never have been. Would like to go....So I'm
arriving at St Martin's. One remembers the first day and
looking round at one's fellow students and wondering
whether one had got it right in terms of clothing, was it
necessary to have a beard to be an art student, must one
wear corduroy trousers and were suede shoes still de rigeur,
and yes, I found I'd got it fairly right, with a tweed jacket
and corduroys and big silk scarf knotted round the neck. Yes
I was off to a good start in that direction! And the thing
about St Martins was that we received, as I've previously
mentioned, wonderful training.
The days were split into different classes. Like maybe a
morning would be life drawing and afternoon the
 94

composition, in other words painting a half-imperial picture

in gouache water paints in an afternoon to a set theme.
Berwick St market or Leadenhall market or my memory of a
country village market - that sort of thing, which involved
figures and still life groups and so on. So the pictures were
necessarily pretty awful but is was a very good way of
covering a lot of ground without pretentiousness. At the end
of the session the pictures would be pinned up and the
teacher would go around them saying I don't like this
because of this and that, and I think this is admirable
because you see how the student has balanced his forces,
and I like this one because of the strong use of colour and
this one is tonally very sensitive... I admire that. And then
the pictures were virtually thrown away. Nowadays at the
art school, or later, students from the outset were invited to
paint art. And would spend two months on a picture. Like
deeply symbolic of your inner neuroses! But you weren't
learning anything about picture making, and probably you
weren't doing your neuroses any favours at the same time.
Just a sort of wanking exercise really, and as such
deplorable. So I'm grateful for the education I got there. We
were also invited to study perspective, which I couldn't get
on with, architecture, a little bit of wood engraving, taught
by a dear old country man called Clifford Webb, who came
up from Sussex (where else), in his heavy tweed suit and his
great grey sideburns he'd become like a nineteenth century
John Bull farmer, with his tall slow loping countyman's walk.
You'd see him passing up the Charing Cross Rd among the
wide boys and the spivs. And his idea of teaching was to
gather three or four of us - there'd be no more than that in
his class - he'd demonstrate the tools, the way sharpen
them, the way to handle them. He'd show us good examples
of the craft, but best of all he'd tell us stories. Well, through
the stories I don't suppose we learned anything about wood
engraving at all, but we did learn about, well, history, recent
history, art history of a very specialised nature. For example
a very distinguished contemporary of his, Gertrude Hermes,
who I believe is still alive, the most distinguished wood
engraver, possibly, of this century. Dear old Mr Webb would
refer to Gertrude Hermes as Dear old Gerty, and we loved
this sort of thing. He told me once how he was
commissioned to do the illustrations for Arthur Ransome's
first book the first of the series Swallows and Amazons, and
this was set in Cumberland and so off Mr Webb went, met
Arthur Ransome, in fact rather a strange person, and did his
drawings right through the whole book, submitted them
back to the author, and the author was furious. He said that
drawing is all wrong. It's hopeless. Why, said Mr Webb,
rather hurt. The rock that Titty was sat on was not that
shape at all. I could take you and show you the rock, you
 95

just haven't got it right. And so on that level he lost the

commission, which could have been a very remunerative
lifetime's work virtually. And I think that after that Arthur
Ransome elected to do the drawings himself, so he would
get the right rock and the right shape for Titty and the right
distance of lake and so on. So that was wood engraving. I
remember one of our group was a lovely, I think African,
boy... bit older than most of us. Good natured... big
sparkling teeth. Not over-bright I don't think. he hacked
away at the wood engraving not very successfully, but just
about good enough to get through our examination which
was called the National Diploma in Design, Intermediate, I
think it was called. The NDD followed two years after that; it
was a four year course at St Martins. And this African lad,
we had one day to make our wood engraving which was then
printed and submitted to the assessing board somewhere in
Great Britain. the block and the print. And I elected to do do
Wuthering Heights - Heathcliffe stood on a rock looking for
Cathy - very much in the tradition of sentimental book
illustration of the time - not very clever work at all, but
adequate. And the African boy thought he would do barges
on the Regent's canal which was fine and he even made
quite a nice job of engraving the names on the barges, but
of course he made the elementary mistake which would
have failed him totally of failing to recognise that the print
taken from the block would be in reverse, so on the block he
would have had to engrave the name of the barge in
reverse. Well, when Mr Webb saw this mistake at the end of
the day, the only day we had for the examination - the work
had to be sent away the following morning - Mr Webb was
heartbroken for the young African lad. And so he broke all
the rules, he said now here's another block, here are the
tools. Go home, remember what I've just told you about
reversing the lettering, and do the whole thing at home
tonight and bring it in tomorrow morning and nobody will
know, and nobody will say anything and consequently the
boy passed his examination. That was the sort of sweet
nature that some of our teachers had.

J That is very nice.

B Yes, you still come across his work in books of the

nineteen thirties. A dormouse climbing up a sheaf of corn.
Very much in the I suppose the Georgian poet style of
imagery. Then after that we had a further two years to go to
get our National Diploma of Design which would then make
us eligible to take our Art Teachers Diploma, which was a
one year course. The we could have gone away to a
secondary school or a grammar school or a private school
with that private diploma to become an art teacher, which of
 96

course I never wished or intended to be. So the third year,

the first of our final two years, we were put into the proper
painting studios, and full-scale life drawing studios where
everything was quite a bit tougher. and we were then
encouraged to paint with oil paints, for the first time for
most of us. Not for myself, because I'd wasted much of the
government's time as a lowly airman by painting literally
hundreds of oil paintings in my office in RAF Somer, near
Hanover, Germany. I think I described in an earlier talk how I
painted a stack of pictures so tall. Well now I can say to the
recording machine a yard tall of stacked hardboard pictures
which is quite a quantity. So I'd got a bit of familiarity with
handing oil paint. And I found myself at the very top of the
stairs in St Martins a peculiar little space that wasn't in a
studio. It was wasted space at the top, the very top of the
building. And I set up my little easel and chair and pallet
there. the staff looked askance, but being used to oddities
they let me go ahead. They said all right if you want to work
there you can work there.
{break in recording}

B And I painted my first paintings in Tuscany, a place where

I stayed over the last four years twice. He rents a place and
then lets out the bedrooms to about a dozen friends. Vince
Tutton. Has a daughter you might of heard of who was quite
famous - there was a tragedy in their life. Daughter married
a neighbour at the Tuscan farmhouse, by the name of
Jonathan Zito.

J Oh, Christ! He was the guy who got stabbed through the
eye by that lunatic.

B Jane carried on working asking the Thatcher govt why

such a situation prevailed, why such people were let out
prematurely etc,. He should never have been out this man.
And in the course of it she's become the absolute authority.
{new tape} Like Vincent, beautiful Welsh voice, very
articulate, very quick minded. And apparently one time was
interviewing the woman, would it be Gillian Shepherd who
was Minister of Health at the time. Quite a hard-faced
woman, I believe, and it was quite a long television
interview and everybody who's seen this interview says Jane
seems to have absolutely took the woman to pieces in her
arguments, wiped her absolutely clean. Made a Minister of
the Government look like an inarticulate fool. With her own
knowledge of the facts and her own passion. She's slowly
trying to give it up now and make another career. But she
spent four years of her life doing good work for the Zito
Trust, which is now well established and the money goes
towards providing facilities etcetera. So that's one major
 97

tragedy that Vince has ridden in his life, and there've been
one or two other things as well. So he's a man of great
dignity, courage.

J And he's a good painter?

B Yes, very good. Very good. Very undemonstrative. Very

calculated. Thoughtful. He'll sit in front of a subject for
many hours looking and then put down the essential lines or
changes of light and go back to the same subject in Italy
year after year. The same clump of trees. Yes, very fine, very
honourable. Never going to be a star because his work is
quiet. It's not modest - it's very tough - but it's quiet. Elton
John, as we said last evening paid nearly half a million for a
David Hockney, would not begin to see any virtue at all in a
large drawing by Vince Tutton. He's an artist's artist, or a
"good eye" man artist. His work is durable. It will last. So to
go back to our theme....

J St Martins.

B St Martins

J I was going to ask you..

B Yes?

J When you were doing the wood engraving did you feel that
what you learned from him then later informed what you
were doing in etching?

B No. Not really. Not really. For a start etching is an intaglio

process; the ink is in the lines. Wood engraving, wood cuts,
lithography, are all surface printing. So it's a different way
of thinking. And, really I didn't go deeply enough into wood
engraving. It's a very meticulous craft. No room for
mistakes. One skid of your bull sticker - that was one of the
lovely names for the tools - and the block was ruined.
Nothing you could do about it. With etching, with acid, you
can do do anything. You can etch a plate until it's a thin as a
wafer and back it up with a bit of metal behind. You can
have etched out image after image after image and still end
up with a very rich fine image at the end of the process.
That's the great beauty of etching. the method is - the
drawing method- is empirical; you make some lines, you
don't like them, you stop them out with varnish so the acid
won't bite those lines, so it's as though you never drew
those lines, you draw some more lines, you cover the whole
plate with lines you take your varnish and you paint out
some of them that you think aren't necessary. You drop it in
 98

the acid. You etch it for a certain length of time. The longer
you etch, the deeper the line and the more ink the line will
hold. You take a proof; you don't like the look of the proof,
so you can by certain processes remove all of those lines
and virtually start again, but with a surface that has already
been heavily worked. So you're not working on the
equivalent of a virgin canvas. You're working on the
equivalent of a canvas that's been wiped down with a turpsy
rag and had paint thrown at it and then wiped away, and in
that bit of dark there J M W Turner might see a clump of
trees, and in that bit of chrome yellow just to the left up in
the sky he might see a shaft of sunlight. And so the picture
grows. As Leonardo said, looking at an old graffitied mottled
plaster Italian wall, there's your picture, you're half way
there. You can pick out the faces the postures the attitudes
from the broken plaster and the graffiti etcetera. Like
looking into the fire, and seeing castles and faces. Whereas
wood engraving takes a methodical caste of mind; you have
your preparatory drawing, you transfer it carefully onto the
block and then you follow that meticulously with a range of
maybe six tools. And a very limited variety of marks that you
can make with those tools. You can make wedge shaped
marks, you can make almost circular marks, you can make
multi-line marks... there's a lot you can do but it's limited,
and the sort of man who's a wood engraver almost certainly
will wear a tie and a collar and have well-groomed hair and
his gramophone record collection will be annotated,
collated, indexed. He'll be a man on top of things who will
work from nine til eleven and then let his eyes rest for an
hour, and then twelve til two and then maybe have a lunch
of salad and boiled eggs...ahh he'll be a very sensible chap.
As opposed to the etcher, who might be the leariest drunk
on earth and yet get the most rich results. Not that etchers
are necessarily drunks, but it doesn't come amiss, a touch of
that as well. That's the difference.

J Sorry, I interrupted you. You were at the top of the stairs...

B I was at the top of the stairs. And literally one painted

one's first serious art school painting. And this was a two
foot by four foot - rather and unusual format, double square
- of primed hardboard. We always battened them with wood
at the back so they wouldn't warp which I don't think was
necessary, but it was part of the religiosity of the
thing...one took a pride in mitreing the corners and so on... I
was living in Lyndhurt Way, Peckham at the time, and
opposite our house was a large patch of waste land which
had been bomb damaged in the war with one remaining row
of houses, which again were bomb damaged and half the
house had been sliced away so you could see where the
 99

staircase had gone up you could see the wallpaper in the

bedroom, you could see the pale patch on the wallpaper
downstairs where a portrait of the king had hung so you had
an interior view of the lives of Londoners in 1941, and they
were rather attractive cottage houses anyway, probably
built about 1850 1860 with the gradual expansion. A bit
older than Mr Pooter's house, about 20 or 30 years before
the pretentiousness of the flight of steps up to the porticoes
front door, but basically the same type of house but on a
more earthy cottage level. And the houses were fronted by
maybe five acres of tussocky wasteland with purple
loosestrife and what was that beautiful flower that grew on
all the bombsites after the war? That purple flower?

J Valerian?

B No, not valerian. I forget the name but it grew

everywhere, all around St Pauls, as though the war had
unearthed seeds that had been in the land for generations.
So, it was a lovely subject, and by fluke or whatever, I
painted a smashing picture, my first real picture after the
student and military pictures. nd it really was a good
picture. and the paint was confidently applied, quite richly
applied. I remeber there was a clump of dandelions in the
near foreground that were painted almost with a pre-
Raphaelite intensity, how I painted the shape of the flower
in white and then glazed a deep orange paint thinly over the
white so the flowers glowed, and the wallpaper was
intricately painted with patterns, and the brickwork was
delineated and the fenestration was carefully done, with a
broken or shattered window here and there. And it was a
good picture, a very good picture. And it surprised me, and
more importantly it amazed my teachers. I remember even
the Principal, Edward J Morse, was hauled out of his office
by the Head of Painting, Gregory Gore, to see this amazing
that the third year student who had so far ben a quiet
nonentity had painted. And Mr Morse was very impressed,
and I was very encouraged. And the picture was later
framed and they recommended that I send it to the Royal
Academy Summer Exhibition, which I did, and it was sold.
And I painted two or three more versions of the same
subject, my technique changing all the time becoming more
the technique of Holman Hunt or Ford Maddox Brown.
Thinner paint, more glazed. And a second version of the
same subject was hung in the following years RA exhibition.
"Landscape at Peckham" it was called. And that sold for 125
guineas which whenever it was, was quite a lot of money.
And I rushed off down to the City of London and bought a
beatiful eighteenth century sugar caster with its
provenance and everything, from one of the old City firms,
 100

as a present for Mum and Dad, a souvenir of my first major

sale. And they kept that all their days, and on their death I
gave it to the friend Eluneid Boardman. I don't have the
lifestyle to accommodate that sort of thing and she
appreciates it very much.

J These two paintings were sold. D'you know who has them?

B I know...the first one I think and another painting of that

period, was shown at the art gallery just down Exhibition
Road, just down the road from the Royal College, in Sloane
St . A gallery called Grabowski. A Pole. A very enterprising
Pole - he had some very important exhibitions of young
artists. Maybe the first showing of David Hockney, Derek
Bowsheer {?} Patrick Caulfield maybe. The leading lights of
the RCA. Well, he showed one of my pictures and that sold.
And I think that sold for £25. I remember, I remember that
sale very well for two reasons. One was going back on a
number 52 bus to Peckham. Well, that wasn't the right bus
of course and it took me right down the Old Kent Rd, which
meant I had to walk up Albany Rd as far as Camberwell
Green and then... but that was the first bus that had come
by and I was waiting at Trafalgar Square bus stop, rather
drunk after an evening in the Pillars of Hercules, and having
spent every last penny. And the conductress was one of
these lovely plump black ladies, and I sat at the seat at the
entrance to the bus, so that if she turned nasty I could
discreetly jump off. And I hoped that she wouldn't come and
ask for my fare until the journey was well advanced. Well,
we were well into the Old Kent Road before she came and
said Fares please. I wasn't drunk, but I'd had two or three
pints of mild beer. And I said, Now do excuse me and I will
get off the bus if you wish, but I don't have any money at all,
and I'd really like to go as far as Albany Rd, and if you'd just
turn a blind eye I'd be very grateful. And of course she was
a great character, and she grinned and said OK, man, you
just sit there quietly, and if the Inspector comes you just
jump off quick! I said thank you very much. And I arrived
home that evening literally penniless with no money to
come in in the next weeks, to find a cheque from Mr
Grabowski for twenty five guineas. twenty five - a lot of
money again. So, I remember the sale of that painting and I
also remember the exhibition was reviewed in the Daily
Telegraph by a critic called Terence Malawi (?) and I called
myself in those days, because I wanted the family name to
be given a viewing - I'm called George, my father was called
George, his father was called George and his father was
called George. So instead of calling myself Bryan Ingham I
called myself George B Ingham. Slightly pretentious it
seems now. Well I got a rather unfavourable review, if I
 101

remember, from Mr Malawi, who commented not very

favourably about a landscape painting by George B Wigham,
which I also remember with affection as the first time my
name had appeared in print. I think it would be a good alias,
if ever I need an alias. And third painting of this particular
lot sold to a businessman in Golden Square, Soho, and he
asked me to deliver the painting after the RA closed, and
said would I come to his office at say 11 o'clock in the
morning and he would be ready for me. And I carried the
two by four framed painting under my arm from Piccadilly
up to Golden Square - a short walk - and the man, very
distinguished - a gentleman - received me very graciously.
Sat me down. We had coffee, talked and he said I've a little
place down on the Cap D'Antibes where I like to get away
when I can, but I don't use it very often, and if you'd ever
like to go down there, you're very welcome to use it. Just get
in touch with me here at the office and we'll arrange dates
and I'll let you know the form. Like so many gifts one has
been offered in life, one just didn't take advantage. One said
thank you very much and forgot it forever. And yet, that
would have been an entree into God knows what. A
clientele, or social life or just the sheer beauty of being at
Cap D'Antibes...

J Why didn't you go? You felt he was just being polite?...

B One just didn't. One never thought more about it. There
was enough going on in one's life without seeking
opportunities. One thought just well that's very nice and
literally forgot it.

J Presumably you've got no record of who he was or

anything?

B No, not at all. He bought, as I've never mentioned. He

bought the painting for a hundred and twenty five guineas,
which was quite a high price. And years later - well maybe
about six years later, I had a strange letter from a woman in
London, and I didn't like the tone of the letter. And she
enclosed a photograph, and it was the same painting. She
said I own this painting. Whether she was related, or
whether it had been auctioned I don't know. I own this
painting, and I notice it is not signed. Would you please sign
it for me and I think some parts of the foreground are not
finished. So I thought well, no that's too much. there was
nothing gracious in the letter. There was no I really enjoy
the painting but can we discuss it together and could you
come for tea and just put a signature on, but no, she was
rather bossy and I didn't answer her letter. Impolite but I
didn't. And then a few years after that the distinguished
 102

dealer Julian Hartnell - Mason's Yard, Duke St, St James,

wrote a letter. Could he come down to Cornwall and meet
me. So, fine. Got him very drunk in the Blue Anchor. he was
quite a drinker, member of the Chelsea Arts Club, but he
couldn't take the Spingo. I suddenly realised after about
four pints that he was going West quickly ( J chuckles ). So I
shoved him into a fish and chip shop and left him - by this
time we'd done our business. And the business was he was
now owner of this painting, and he thought he had a client,
and had I got any studies for the painting? Yes I had, I had a
sketch book which had - I can show you later - which had
studies for the painting along with all sorts of other things, -
just a little sketch book. he said could he buy the sketch
book. I said well, you'll only break it up won't you. Only a
few of these watercolours and sketches are worth framing
and selling. he said well, that's what I would do, yes. I said
I'd rather keep it as a sketch book unless you offer me a lot
of money for it. And he said well I don't know what you
mean by a lot of money. I said neither do I. He said well
would a thousand pounds be a lot of money. Well it was not
a bad offer, really, and I suppose I could have got one and a
half thousand pounds on that. And I said no, no, no, much
more serious money that that. So we dropped the sketch
book idea. And later on I received a letter from him saying
yes , he had got a prospective client, and would I do him a
favour and write the topographical details of this picture.
Just where it was. Lyndhurst Way. Now it is a public park
with sodium lamps. The red brick dining room where we had
breakfast lunch and tea, Ma's Dining Room, old fashioned
booths, huge plates of meat and boiled potatoes for two
shillings. She loved us did that lady. She was peeling
potatoes in the back room and half past five in the morning,
and she was open about half past six. Tramps came in there.
Road sweepers. Everybody went there. Everybody went
there. Clean, respectable, and she did all the work herself. A
saint of a woman. And she gave us tick-credit. Big mugs of
tea. Poached eggs on toast at teatime. Spotted Dick
puddings. Custard. you know, all the good genuine trad food
well cooked. Lots of boiled cabbage. Well her old dining
rooms were wiped away with the bomb site and with the row
of ruined houses. So I wrote - I can't remember - maybe a
thousand words about Ma and the dining rooms, because
she needs to be in history. Unsung hero like so many people.
About the bomb damaged houses - how now it's anodyne
park. Etcetera. And he wrote me back a very gracious letter,
and we've been in touch ever since. He never paid me any
commission on his sale, but he sold the painting for eight
thousand pounds, about two years ago, maybe three years
ago. To the Guildhall Museum, where I believe they have a
collection of paintings of London. Of historical interest, of
 103

topographical interest. So it's gone into a very worthy and

distinguished collection. And the right sort of collection.
Because I wouldn't want a painting like that to crop up in
the sale rooms as representative of my work, because it no
longer is representative, and it was very much a stepping
stone phase, this Pre-Raphaelite influenced type of work.
Well around this time, Professor Weight of the Royal College
of Art, Head of Painting, would come over to St Ives - over to
St Martin's rather - and Freddy Gore, son of Spencer Gore
the distinguished artist who was killed in the trenches in
1916, I think, founder member of the Campden Town Group,
- Freddy Gore, another kind man, would have earmarked
three or four students for Carel Weight to come and meet
and see their work, have a talk. And it was really a short-list
of possibilities for the Royal College of Art. Almost short
cutting the formal application business, which might mean
nine hundred students applying for twenty places. As
extreme as that. Not as many as that in my day , but a lot.
So already one's on an informal short list. Nepotism came
into it, or a word similar to that - it was a little bit.....

J You'd been introduced, sort of thing

B One of the boys, sort of thing. One would never have had
that treatment had one been at Dewsbury and Batley
Technical and Art College as I was invited to go. Had I gone
there I would have submitted my work along with the other
niine hundred hopefuls, and without a doubt been rejected
by the Royal College. So, as I say St Martins treated me very
well. And in passing over to the Royal College I had to
submit my work. On the morning of my interview, I decided
that the painting I was working on in my Stepney studio I
must show, becaus it was different to anything I'd done
before. Now Carel Weight loved these street scenes I was
painting. They were not unlike his own, and in a three foot
by four foot paintings I did of the Elephant and Castle
building, red and white stripes, I did one with a mad looking
figure with upraised arms in front representing, I suppose, a
form of angst that one felt at that that period of one's life,
twenty five year old. Wasn't quite enough to leave it as a
painting of the Elephant and Castle, one had to have a
figure with a mask just slipping from her face or some such
symbolism, slightly surreal, creeping in. Well, this was up
Carel Weight's street - he loved this. And so I think I would
have got in quite easily. But on the morning of my interview
I thought no, I must take this attempted Tondo circular
painting which was an attempt at a cubistic still life of
orange porcelain oil lamp on a table top with various
objects. Not cubistic, but in that direction; it was definite
break from the previous Pre-Raphaelite influenced work,
 104

though I was still a long way from discovering cubism. And I

remember I had to hire a car to get this painting from
Stepney to Exhibition Rd. And for some reason the car was
an enormous Daimler. So there I was sat in the back in my
best tweed jacket like Lord Jim, driven (laughs) to the RCA in
a lovely Daimler. And I've often wondered whether that
painting got me in to the RCA or almost excluded me.
Because their form of interview was there'd be maybe half a
dozen teachers gathered in a big circle and a red chaise
longue, which became quite famous historically, on which
sat Professor Weight. And one was invited to sit next to the
Professor and then the panel of six or eight would ply one
with questions. Brought out the pictures one by one. What
did you mean by that and so forth. And I heard how Peter
Blake was one of the panel, and he as a naturalistic painter
admired the work very much so was almost certainly on my
side. Professor Weight I'm sure was. Ruskin Spear, to whom I
took an instant, and mutual dislike, I'm sure spoke badly
about me; we never got on and I'm sure he was strongly
against this rather mannered affected young quasi
Yorkshireman who seemed cockier than in fact he was - in
fact I was quite modest, but I had a manner that made me
appear very self-confident, and I could speak with
confidence and answer their questions rather than
mumbling and doing what was expected of a student. And I
heard afterwards, possibly through Peter Blake, that I came
within a whisker of not being accepted on the grounds that I
was painting skilfully well enough, confidently,
professionally enough, not to need the three years at the
Royal College - somebody else would benefit better. Well, in
fact nothing could have been farther from the truth. I
needed shaking out of this Pre-Raphaelite idealism and
plonking down into the twentieth century. That didn't
happen at the Royal College, but it happened slowly though
the College experience, through my colleagues, not much
through the teaching. Then at the end of the first year of
the Royal College. I may have mentioned this because I'm
quite proud of it, I received from the Bursar, a Mr Moon, John
Moon, on crested notepaper a typewritten notice saying,
Dear Mr Ingham this is to inform you that you have been
voted Royal Scholar of the year 1961 or 1962 or whatever.
And I received that, and I didn't question it, I didn't ask any
questions. And nobody ever told me anything about it. And
so what the implications were, being Royal Scholar, whether
it was just purely a minor honour or whether it in fact it
entitled me to walk down Piccadilly with my trousers rolled
up to the knee or some esoteric.....

J Could have entitled you to a hogshead of claret or

something!
 105

B It could well be. And again in those days one didn't take
this along to one's professor and say well, I'm very gratified
and touched by this. Can you tell me how this has come
about? What are the implications, but no, I said not a word.
And the way that the College teaching was they said very
little to me or any other student about anything. So that just
was scrap of paper I kept somewhere, I think. And the irony
of ot was that between being the top scholar of twenty five
in the firts year, by the time the third year came and pour
Diplomas were to awarded, I was so naive, I didn't know that
Diplomas came in grades. I thought you either failed or were
RCA or Associate RCA. I didn't know that there was the
university system. You could have a first or a 2.1 or a second
or whatever. And I well remember that morning looking at
the list and starting at the top and right down to the very
bottom (and I may exaggerate), but I got a third degree.. I
like to say I got a third third; in other words I was just a
whisker from not having a degree at all. And the reasons for
that were not that my work had declined, but that my work
had changed and moved, and I worked in this manner and
that manner - I was finding my way. And I'd made plenty of
enemies among the staff by my as they saw it arrogant
manner or by my self-confident manner. I shouted at Roger
de Grey, we had a blazing shouting row because he told me I
must move my work from here up into the mural room that
was three hundred yards away, and I was working on a five
foot by eight foot board, and I thought this was very unfair
and I say we had a blazing row then, and I think at the
second time. Of course he finished up Sir Roger de Grey,
President of the Royal Academy. So I wasn't choosy about
who I crossed swords with. I had a terrible row with
Professor Carel Weight just weeks before the Diploma Show.
And he said I think you'd better leave, Bryan. And I said I
think I had better leave this institution. There's no
alternative is there. Goodbye, sir. And I stormed out of his
office. And I can't even remember what the row was
about..... I think I'd disliked a criticism he'd made of a
painting where he'd misunderstood the whole point of the
painting. The point of my painting being that it was painted
in a posterish manner. And he'd criticised it as being painted
in a posterish manner rather than in an artistic manner. And
the theme of the painting we'd been given was Men and
Machines. I'd painted like a big poster of the Tour de France
with beautiful lettering underneath saying Il Campianissimo,
the Champion, the title given to Fausto Coppi, the greatest
Tour de France rider ever. Well, he didn't understand this
painting and gave it a very scathing review in front of all the
students. I was angry. I went to his office and said I think
you were very unfair and I don't like it....and it developed
 106

into a... well a very nasty row. And I literally walked down
Exhibition Road full of anger and I got about as far as
Cromwell Rd and then I thought well a) you're being
extremely rude to a distinguished man who's been very kind
to you, very helpful to you. That's one reason to go back and
apologise. b) it's only a few more weeks to go at the College,
surely you can stick that out, get your Diploma. It was just a
very crass thing to do. So I turned on my heel, walked back,
knocked on his office door. He looked at me with benign
surprise. I said Professor Weight, I 've come to apologise, I
was very much in the wrong in speaking as I did, and I'm
very ashamed, and please forgive me. And we shook hands.
I'm almost crying as I tell you that story (he was) He was
gracious enough to say all right Mr Ingham, It's all right
forget that.

J And you were gracious enough to forget that you'd been

feeling rather miffed about him misunderstanding your
painting.

B Yes, well, one should be able to take that sort of

professional criticism in your stride. I think that relates back
to what we were talking about last night. Let's leave it at
that now, Joss.

J Time for a beer definitely.

B Yes (end of session)

B Now whereabouts were we? We were at the RCA.

J We were talking about your spat with Carel Weight.

B Yes. yes, yes. That was just weeks before the Diploma
shows. And I would very much like to see, I believe they
keep files on students. I wonder if they keep them forever,
because I'd love to see my files, because I know I'd got some
real enemies there, and I'd like to know just which ones they
were. But I speculate that one is a man called Leonard
Rosiman RA, have you come across him? Rather precious,
not totally unlike that man...it was with Vince... we were
talking about a man standing at the bar this lunchtime, and
I said I take an instinctive dislike to that man , I think there
is something false about his dress, his mannerism, his
attitudes and you can see that as a Helstonian, he's not
liked, he doesn't fit in, there's something wrong about him.
Well, I didn't feel over happy with Leonard Rosiman who'd
come from Edinburgh College of Art down to the Royal
College. Bit of a smooth operator. And one summer, just
before the summer holiday, he asked me, I don't know why
me, whether I would be prepared, during the summer, to go
 107

to his studio in Edwardes Square, custom-built studios,

Edwardian sort of thing, there's a nice pub in the square you
know (J grunts agreement) Well, the studio had a north
light, and it was a lovely summer so you would walk along
the beautiful suburban, privet smelling avenues to get to
the studio and then you'd get to this rather gloomy constant
lit studio. He asked me would I prepare with a certain
underpaint that he'd had made up, something like eight
wood panels which were let's say about nine foot by four
foot and stretched from about here to the door so that's
what twenty five foot long. And he wanted four coats or
seven coats, I can't remember. And then he said, if you've
got time, you can from my maquette, which was so big, you
can sketch in the drawing, which was of the waterfront at
Liverpool. It was a mural commissioned for a major bank at
Liverpool. And then, when you've done that, if you've got
time still, - he was expecting to be away for two weeks,
three weeks I can't remember, - you can thinly with
turpentine block in the colours. But you must follow my
maquette pretty accurately. Well, a maquette eighteen
inches long for something twenty five feet long is not a very
good guide. Anyway, I got working on this priming job and
did it surprisingly quickly. And then went home to my studio.
I think I was living in Thurloe Square in South Kensington, in
a cupboard, at the time. And the work developed so quickly I
got the whole thing squared up to correspond to his
squaring upon the maquette. I got the outline of the
buildings drawn in, the Liver Building, the birds, and
everything. And I began to think, well, this is fun. (J
chuckles) So then I put the first lot of underpaint on, the
browny greys and the reds, where he'd indicated that on the
maquette And I was being plagued by a girl at that time,
and she wanted to come and make long, long telephone calls
from his bedroom upstairs, where he had a bedside
telephone. And for some reason I didn't like to tell her not to
do that. And then I became aware of his drinks cupboard.
And at that age, twenty six, I suppose, you'd never really
seen a drinks cupboard in your life. So it was great to have a
couple of shots of brandy in the afternoon and so forth. And
so daily life continued in the studio with the painting until I
was at least at the stage which he had wished me leave the
thing for him to carry on and do his masterly brushwork and
so on. But I thought no, this is a bit like the painting I've
been working on my own. And my painting is much more
interesting because I've got light reflecting from the
windows, and the windows on the actual twenty five foot
long painting each window would be say the size of one's
hand. So, instead of leaving little grey blank spaces, as in
the tiny maquette, I thought no, I'll give him a reflected
sunset in the windows. So then I started painting reds and
 108

blues being the sunset reflected from the windows. And I

thought all these colours are a bit drab. Instead of all this
ochrey umbery colour I'll jazz it up with a bit of Venetian
Red. And so I carried on. I drank the whisky I drank the
(tape break) gin, and then we started to taking nips out of
the sort of bottles like Pernod and Campari and so forth and
at the back of my mind I was always saying we must replace
these bottles before he comes back. He never sent a
postcard. And I didn't think of it at the time because I hadn't
read the book or seen the film but what it amounts to is that
one did an absolute Gulley Jimpson. D'you know The Horses
Mouth, by Joyce Carey?

J No.

B Oh, well you have to know the book. There's an excellent

film, with Alec Guiness playing the role of the artist, who is
lent a luxury penthouse flat by a lady admirer and her
knighted husband. And I think the idea was that he would
paint a nice painting to go over the marble fireplace. Well,
he started painting murals all over the walls and then a
chum of his from the Queen's Elm, down the Fulham Road or
Finches, said he'd nowhere to work on his major sculpture,
so somehow they installed a block of stone as big as my
lavatory cubicle there in the flat and there was a naked
woman there posing day after day like this, and then if I
remember rightly, the floor of the penthouse started giving
way and the stones sinking down, and then the knight and
his lady arrive back unexpectedly. Meanwhile the silver had
been pawned, everything had been pawned for food and
drink and paints. So they came back to total devastation.
Well, I'm afraid that's how it was when Mr Rosiman (J
Laughing) came back. Instead of having the good manners
(as I see it!) to write from Elba where I think it was he went
for his holiday to say I'll be back three days early, I arrived
one morning at my usual time of about nine o'clock and to
my horror I saw a row of suitcases in the entrance hall. And
he was there looking at this finished, completed, wonderful,
mural that would have done Gallery 3 at the Royal Academy
a great favour. It was a splendid thing in my most rhetorical
manner! And he looked at me with white anger and I
thought well, there's not a lot of point in hanging round.
And he said what have you been doing upstairs?
I said what do you mean? And he took me upstairs, and
upstairs the temperature was like the major hothouse at
Kew Gardens. It was about 120 degrees. And I said well I
haven't done anything upstairs. I haven't used your bed
or.... and then I realised that the idiot girlfriend had been
fiddling round with plugs for the telephone and one day she
put on the electric heating, and so that had been on for days
 109

and days and days at full blast. So that the whole place was
like a tinder box ready to burst into flames at a moment's
notice. So quite rightly, he was a bit upset about that. And
we didn't even get round to the drinks cabinet (both
laughing) I just beat a hasty retreat and he never gave me
the fifty quid that was to be my pay and he'd said if you do
more than I've asked - if you lay it all in in monochrome
colours - I'll pay you a bit more. It was pretty mean anyway,
fifty quid, but I never got a penny from him! And from that
day until now, he's never looked me in the eye or as a tutor
ever spoken to me at all. So I suspect he was one of my
downmarkers within the College staff. So that for my career
to go from Royal Scholar to third third in three years, I think
this episode was instrumental in accelerating the process
(Both laugh). He'll probably finish up as President of the
Royal Academy; he's a smarmy little go-getting guy.

J He's that sort of guy?

B Yes. His pictures are very clever - too clever by half. And I
often wonder what happened to the mural. I've even
thought maybe he just sent the whole thing off to Liverpool
and they said yes, it's wonderful. 'Cause I can't imagine that
he'd have scraped it all off to start again. Yes, so that was
one of my tutors there. There was another tutor called Colin
Hayes, another Royal Academician, another nonentity. Never
had the guts to address you face to face. And I discovered
they would sneak around looking at one's work sketchbooks
when they knew that you were down the road in the Hoop
and Toy, the pub or away or whatever. And sometimes you'd
hear "Oh that Hayes man was snooping around your place
the other day". And dammit not long ago, a few years ago I
saw a book in a Falmouth bookshop called "Techniques in
Painting" by Colin Hayes and I looked at the index, and sure
enough, Bryan Ingham, pretty sure he spelt Bryan wrong;
that would have been consistent, and I looked, and by Christ
there was my five foot by eight foot "Doorway and window
in Stepney" a sort of highly realistic almost trompe l'oeil
painting of a shop facade in a state of decrepitude, one of
the types of painting I was doing at that time. And a rather
flowery description of the skills of this sort of painting and
how the artist had employed tempera etcetera, etcetera.
And of course the painting was reproduced in quite large
size upside down, which makes a total total mockery of it,
because the painting included posters ripped off walls, and
revealed posters underneath. There's one man living who
still insists that that was collage and I said no, it was paint
to simulate collage,- that's a part of the joke of the whole
thing. So to reproduce this painting upside down is a
mockery and an insult.
 110

J It was printed upside down?

B Printed upside down. But can you imagine all the trickery
he must have done, to get the photographer to photograph
this painting, unbeknown to me and then to reproduce it
without asking permission or even to say after he'd done it.
Well, you might be interested that there's a painting of
yours in my book. Not at all. So... I thought little of that man
and I'm sure showed it. Then there was another man called
Donald Hamilton Fraser the ultimate in unpleasant....how to
describe it .... six foot two tall, trendily, sharply dressed,
Viva Zapata moustache, cropped dark hair. The
Spanish/Italian look of the sixties. Rather autocratic or
would-be aristocratic manner. Who came into my painting
cubicle once in the three years and insulted my painting so
vigorously for about half an hour that even I was speechless
with astonishment and rage at this unprovoked attack. And
then, whenever I tried to catch him to say hey I want a word
with you - you said some strong things to me now let me
answer some of the things you were saying. But no, he was
too sharp for that he would disappear into an office given
half a chance or disappear round the corner of a corridor if
he saw me at the other end, and so he managed to avoid me
for the best part of two years. So these were some of the
people who said I suspect Oh, let's give that bastard, let's
fail him or give him the worst degree we possibly can. And
meanwhile my painting was developing. I'd discovered I was
becoming too clever with oil paint, I could do a lot with oil
paint, so I started painting with household emulsion paints.
On hardboard. Because you get no help from the paint - no
comeback - the painting is only going to be as good as it is
in terms of structure, shape, general dynamic. You're not
going to get away with effects. So I made life deliberately
hard for myself. For about twelve months I painted like that.
Then I had a period of experimenting with egg tempera,
painted one of the biggest egg tempera pictures ever to be
shown at the RA. Again five foot by eight foot - that's about
the size of that bookcase. Hung in the centre of Gallery
three, the most prestigious gallery. Since time-destroyed. A
painting of a ruined colliery building in South Yorkshire with
a quotation from a song done in beautiful lettering across -
an old mining song , a mining lament from the Bladen
disaster I think it was called. "The owners have sent some
white lilies to pay for those poor colliers lives," No. " You've
heard of the Gressfield explosion" Some such song as that,
anyway. So this was my last, poignant, reference to the
working class industrial landscape of South-West Yorkshire.
So anybody with two ounce of sensibility could see the sort
of things I was working out of my system. I was working out
 111

the sentimental, or the literary dross and at the same time

pulling myself up by the bootlaces as a studier of art,
twentieth century art. And quite a feat to keep the whole
thing on the road at the same time. Well, they saw that just
as pure inconsistency. Disappointing to Carel Weight that I
was no longer painting figures screaming in front of derelict
buildings, etcetera. But I had the last laugh on all of this.
And by the way if this sounds like bitter memories. Not ever,
ever. Not remotely. I cherish these memories. I cherish the
Gully Jimpson assault on Mr Rosimans poncy bloody studio, I
chuckle every time I think of it, and I do that quite happily.
Our final Diploma show took place over a period I think of
two days, in the studios of the Royal College. We were each
given a space maybe fifteen foot by fifteen foot, partitioned.
Difficult to hang things on partitions, - most of mine were on
hardboard with the wooden battening I've described. So I
didn't get on well with the hanging because at that stage of
my life I was very short tempered, irascible. Doing things
like knocking a nail into a surface that wasn't prepared to
receive a nail and the nail would bend over, and maybe
you'd dent the hardboard or hit your thumb, and that would
send me into tremendous rages. And that happened to one
of the best paintings I couldn't get the thing right, it fell
down and I just jumped up and down, up and down on this
hardboard thing until it was a totally totally ruined object.
And a painting that I quite dearly loved. And so I was very
angry with myself and very upset. And I remember at that
juncture, mid-afternoon the day before the shows opened I
thought Sod it, Fuck the whole lot. And I went down to the
Toy and got nicely drunk and then came back much later
that evening, and found that a dear friend had hung the
whole bloody lot for me, and quite nicely hung as well. David
the boy from the South of France we met the other day at
the Graham-Dixon gallery. The French intellectual look-alike
with the staring eyes and the black curly hair, for whom life
always went wrong. The one who believed until the age of
fifty that he was of Greek Armenian descent, and he
telephoned me one day and said Not only do I learn now on
my fiftieth birthday I'm of Greek Armenian descent, I'm
Jewish as well! So dear old David had hung the exhibition
and it looked quite good. So instead of getting my come-
uppance because the degrees were published for all to see,
Heads of Department came from Edinburgh from
Manchester from Exeter, from all over the country. Out of
the twenty five people showing their diploma work in this
exhibition six were offered jobs, part-time teaching jobs,
which was our main objective. The rest, the rest nothing at
all. Now it probably sounds like exaggeration what I'm going
to say. First of all a man introduced himself, he said - I'm an
art dealer over from Washington DC, and I have a gallery
 112

there, The Corcoram Gallery (which I've come across time

and time again - very famous gallery) and he said, I so
admire that portrait. I said well, that's my lover. He said,
well, I'd like to buy it, and I said well, I've more or less given
it to her. He said, are you quite sure; I'd pay you a very good
price? I said well, you've caught me because I can't really do
anything about it. So he presented me his card and said
"Look when you've got a collection of smaller works together
like this portrait together, let me know and I'd like to show
your work in Washington DC". Thank you very much, very
nice. And then a man with expensive suede jacket, suede
shoes, trendy narrow corduroys and carefully groomed
longish hair, who now we would take for a film producer or a
television producer, you know the type, or even an architect,
came up to me and said I'm Norman Adams, you probably
know me or know of me. Well I didn't, but he's quite a
famous painter - again a Royal Academician - and said I'm
head of Fine Art at Manchester, and we have a job there
which is a full time teaching post. I didn't know what that
meant. I've since learnt, - stability for life, plus a higher rate
of pay. He said I'd to fill this teaching post, but I'd like to do
it in an unusual way, I'd like to do it with two artists whom I
like. I've got somebody else in mind, and if you would like to
do this, you can get together with the fellow, you can work
out your own timetable for the year, inother words you could
teach for a solid term and not at all for the next term, or you
could teach alternate days, you could work exactly how you
want. Well, this was a remarkable offer, a prize job. And as I
say security, though I wasn't looking for security. So I said
well, thank you, I'll think about that. And then he put his
foot in it by saying, of course I'm an anarchist myself. And I
mentally looked him up and down in his two hundred guinea
suede coat and his Jermyn St suede shoes and I thought,
you're a pretty poncy anarchist aren't you? I thought I don't
like the look of you, - don't quite trust you. And he said I
only teach three days a week at the college and I've got a
cottage up in the Yorkshire dales, and when I'm teaching at
the college I live in my van which I park round the corner.
Well, that was quite nice and anarchistic, but I just didn't
quite like the bloke. So I said I'll think about that. Then
somebody else, from I can't remember, somewhere up north,
said we admire your work very much and we'd like to offer
you a Fellowship and it would be worth....I can't remember
at all....it would be worth £400 a year and necessitate you
working on the premises for a third of the year, something
like that, and be available to talk to the students
periodically. Another fantastically generous offer. So I said
thank you. And they all wrote the details down. And so
offers of this quality kept coming in until a notorious figure,
a great guy called Gerry de Rose, Gerrard de Rose, who was
 113

head of painting at Maidstone. About five foot tall, ugly as

sin, and the most notorious womaniser in Europe - a
successful womaniser - approached me. He painted highly
lifelike portraits in black and white which were always
importantly hung in the Royal Academy. He said would you
come and join my teaching staff? You can do it as you like, a
whole week or two days a week, so many days per term.
Maidstone is only an hour from London, got a nice staff. And
I thought, yes, I like the sound of this one. And I said Yes,
all right, that sounds jolly good. So I signed up for that one,
and then a couple of tweedy characters from Farnham
approached me and said was I looking for teaching work, I
said a bit of part-time would be nice. They said would you
like to do two days a week for us? I said well I've taken on
one commitment, but if these two can be worked so that I'm
not doing too much teaching, then yes. An hour from London
again. So I accepted these two jobs, and then other job
offers came in and counting the fellowship and the senior
lectureship etcetera I had thirteen offers of work in the one
day from that exhibition. As I say five other colleagues had
an offer of part-time teaching and the other twenty of the
group with their first and second degrees didn't get
anything, were not offered anything. So I said to myself
well, if that didn't speak for my three years at the Royal
College, with what I'd been struggling to do, if the staff of
the College couldn't see it, it seems that the staff of every
other college in Great Britain could see it. So that was
enormously gratifying. Then to cap it all, the second day
well, I thought it would be quieter on the second day, I
thought I've done all I need to do, I don't want any more
work, there's no point my spending time watching people
coming through these studios. the one without jobs were
still standing by their paintings anxiously. So I trotted off
back to the Hoop and Toy, and spent the better part of the
day drinking down there. I came back, and somebody said
Oh you've just missed him. I said who? Somebody wanted to
buy that painting up there. I said Oh shit, I could do with
that twenty five guineas. For the painting of a tabletop. I
said any idea who it was? The Marquis of Queensbury. I
thought Fuck, I'd like to meet the man as well. He was on
the staff of the College, - ceramic department I think. But I
never saw him, and there was never any correspondence
about the painting. So that was the one loss I got through
not attending as fully as I should have done. Well, that was
an honourable Diploma show. So that was my third third!
And the job I chose at Farnham, well I made a bad choice I
think.

J Why was that?

 114

B It was a deadly place. It was shortly after that

amalgamated in 1968 with Guildford College of Art where
they had a lot of student unrest. And a whole troupe of
highly second rate teachers were plonked down onto the
Farnham staff. And to a man they were loathsome. Horrible
men. Chips on their shoulder, looking over their shoulder.
Mediocre in every respect. And the atmosphere at Farnham
changed following that event.

J What about Maidstone?

B Maidstone was great fun. Really good. After a few weeks I

got to know the staff who taught on the same days as I,
maybe a Monday and Tuesday, say. We'd meet at Victoria
station in the coffeee house there as it was. And then we'd
travel up in an open carriage together, a pleasant journey.
And through their - well I enjoyed the work - the first day
was a bit anxiety making. I was confronted with twenty five
students, the Head of Department said now this is Mr
Ingham, ex Royal College of Art, he's going to teach you
drawing. And I'm thinking what the hell can I say about
drawing? I couldn't write half a page of a lecture about
drawing. I thought the only thing I can do is to get this
whole mob down by the canal with half-imperial drawing
boards and pencils. So I said you all know Maidstone. Yes.
You know it better than I, well between point X and point Y,
half a mile stretch of canal, I would like you to choose a site
and make a drawing of whatever you choose, and I, in the
course of the day will come and look at whatever you're
doing. Don't go away, don't be slacking because I'm not
looking over your shoulder every two minutes, I'll catch up
with you. So off they go and I think well, that gives me a bit
of breathing space to think think what the hell I'm going to
talk about. And damn me. the very first student that I came
to he was sat with his half-imperial drawing board askew on
his knee with a piece of paper not pinned to the board but
moveable on the board. So I looked over his shoulder and
thought well this is very bad set-up and I said I can't quite
make out what it is you're drawing. He said Oh I'm drawing
those trees and that building over there, pointing to his left.
I said well, you know you're making life very difficult for
yourself. I said let's go from the very first stage. First of all
your paper needs to be firmly affixed to the board, and the
edges of the paper parallel to the edges of the board. Well,
why?? Just do as I say. So he got that pinned down. Then, I
said, your board needs to be with the angles at exact right
angles to yourself. He had it like that with the paper like
that. So now we'd got it so. So I say you look at the right
hand side of your board or the left hand side of your board
and you carry that up and into the air, however you care to
 115

call it and you've got a straight line and that straight line
corresponds to the edge of your board, now d'you
understand? Yes. I said right, and now let's face your
subject. So then this necessitates turning round his stool, so
now he's facing his subject,- he has the board like this on his
knee. I say now you look at that tree, and as you look at that
tree you can follow it down onto your board and make the
pencil mark that indicates that tree. It's all one one gesture
of mind and action. And you look over there and you do the
same, and the same. And you look at that horizon line and
you decide where it's going to go and so on. And from that
rudimentary, but very important lesson, - nobody teaches
like that now - nobody would dream of that sort of thing, - I
found I could teach, and I found I was a good teacher. And I
found I knew masses about drawing, but I hadn't known that
I knew. That I'd obviously worked out over the seven years
of art school. And so to teach like that for three years was
wonderful for oneself, for the teacher because you were
dragging your ideas out of the murk and showing them the
light of day and saying yes, now I understand. So one gained
a lot through this experience of teaching. I did that part
time for about a year. I was allowed by Jerry de Rose, who
was always nothing but charming and accommodating. I'd
say look I've got a block of three days at Farnham next
month. Can I have next month off and then make up the
time. Whatever you think, Bryan, just get it down in the
desk diary and write it - he was efficient - does that suit
you? I'd say it's wonderful, thanks good, good. Then I clicked
with one of the models. She virtually seduced me and
started coming up to Stepney every weekend. And I learned
that she'd been had by every member of staff, and I got,
through her, (she treated me not as a member of staff, but
as a sensitive and nice young man, whereas they were all
slavering beasts and their habits were unspeakable). It was
very very amusing to hear what really goes on in an art
school like that. It was later exposed and there were a lot of
people sacked and a lot of scandal. They would literally,
these staff, see the incoming year of girl students, almost
like a slave market. Sort of I think I'll have that one yeah.
And I'll go for the black. And that's how they did it and it
worked every time. The girls all thought they'd get high
marks and prizes and so on. But that said, Jerry de Rose was
very very sweet. At the end of that year, thanks to the
goodwill of Carel Weight again, I was offered a travelling
scholarship, a Leverhulme post-graduate award. Coming
from the soap baron of Port Sunlight. They had a big office
in Fetter lane of which a few years earlier, it had been my
job to clean the lavatories in this office. One of my money
earning jobs office cleaning in the morning, - dishwashing in
the evening. So I said to Jerry de Rose, I'm off for a year, I
 116

suppose that's the end of my job. He said, no. No, you come
back when you come back. Enjoy your year in Italy, and
there's a job here. we get on well, I like your teaching. I said
Oh well, that's smashing. We shook hands on that. That's
the last I saw of him. I didn't go back. but another bonus of
this was that one of my models was the then not very well
known Quentin Crisp. And he used to plead with me to make
my poses, or his poses rather, shorter. He said the harder it
is, the more dificult, the more it hurts the more I feel I'm
doing the job. He said a good model, a good pose, should
have to concentrate every second. And he said I can do
ninety second poses which will astonish you. I said all right,
let's....there may be a touch of masochism, sexual
strangeness in this. But he did, he was a terrific model and a
very, very fine body. He must have been, well, fifty, then.
Got the blue rinse and the jaunty trilby even then. The
generous makeup. Way before his time. So it was fun
working with him, but the great perk was the evening train
back, when the art school staff would occupy maybe two
banks of seats facing each other, and the rest of the long
carriage would be full of workers of various types, plus
prison official from Maidstone jail, solicitors, barristers with
their sacks over their shoulder, in general fairly highly
respectable clientele. Well, Quentin Crisp loved nothing
more than to know that he'd got an audience. And he had
beatiful diction and a wonderful turn of phrase as you've
probably heard in interviews and so forth. So he would
entertain ostensibly the art school group, who always
seemed to be in the middle of the carriage and you could
see people's newspapers being lowered and eyes popping
and mouths falling open as he told most outrageous stories
about naughty bobbies and spanking his bum and things
that were not disgusting - not obscene - but highly anarchic
- anarchic I think is the word. Just devastatingly funny, and
so that was Quentin's hour of absolute joy. I think probably
he worked at such a school because it gave him such a
theatre on the way home {chuckles}. Are you all right?

J I'm fine, yes. Where did you live? You lived in Thurloe
Square in your RCA days. Where did you go then.

B I lived in a rather a fine place in Stepney. Hanbury St off

Brick Lane. Now one of the trendiest addresses in town. But
in those days you could buy, or you could have bought - I
tried to persuade a rich friend to buy - a Georgian house in
Fournier St that was complete in every detail inside and out.
Basement fitted out with fitted Georgian dresser. Great open
fireplace, I don't think a dumb waiter but there could well
have been. Pure pure panelling, balustrades, glass
everything eighteenth century. Twelve thousand pounds,
 117

you could buy such a house. And this man was a solicitor,
worked in the City. Lived in Islington. I said why on earth
don't you walk to work rather than commuting. I said, a
house like that is going to appreciate enormously. But he
couldn't see it. he said I don't like the dossers on the step. I
don't like the winos and the meths drinkers, and I don't like
the fact that it's adjoining the synagogue. So all right he
didn't buy that particular one. But Stepney at that time had
not been colonised by artists. There were just three or four
scattered over quite a wide radius. And I was fortunate in
seeing an advert in a shop window in Chelsea: "Studio to let.
£16 a month" £4 a week. A normal rent would be thirty
bob/two pounds for a flat in Redcliffe Gardens -everybody
lived in Redcliffe Gardens in those days, Redcliffe Square..

J Nothing changes!

B So I went to see this studio, so called. The ground floor

was a tailor's shop. I introduced myself to the cutter -
proved to be a Lancastrian - I haven't told you this? No.
Spoke with quite a broad Lancashire accent. He said. well,
it's not my property. I work for Alfie Marron. He's the
landlord of the place and he owns this tailoring business.
That's Alfie on the photograph, with David Whitfield, and
that's another photograph of him with Jerry Lewis. Typical
show-biz. Little Jewish Alfie sort of looking up at the big hulk
of David Whitfield in an Alfie Marron suit. His door was
always plastered with these things. Jack Downey was the
cutter. He took me upstairs. Four flights. Threw open the
door. Oh.... It was about forty foot long by about twenty five
foot wide with a huge window at the southernmost end with
views over the back yard and roofs of all these pure
eighteenth century buildings - not a modern building in
sight - and Christchurch Spitalfields, by Nicholas
Hawksmoor, dominating the view. Best view in London! And
then to walk down the studio to the Hanbury St end, small
windows, almost Elizabethan casement windows. And above
the skylights. And it had been a Spitalfield silk weavers
workshop, that's how it had been designed, as a weaving
workshop. I never saw anywhere more perfect in my life. I
said well, this is terrific. I'm a bit worried about four quid a
week rent, but I said, Mr Downing, I desperately want this
place. So we went back down to his cutting room. I said is
there anybody else after it as far as you...he said no, no, no.
And I said well can you get in touch with Mr Marron and
arrange that we meet because I'd absolutely love to have it.
Good, good... And I could see we were going to get on, and
rather grandly took a ten shilling, red-brown ten shilling
note out of my pocket and I passed it across and I said that's
just good-will, Mr Downey. No, no, no I don't want anything,
 118

I don't want anything Mr Ingham, no, no, no. I'll make sure
you get it, don't worry. I thought well that was very sweet.
So I looked into....you look tired.

J No, no I'm all right actually.

B Not bored?

J No, no I'm fine. And you were living and working there
were you?

B Yes, I met my landlord, who proved to be an absolute

beauty, an absolute beauty. About five foot tall. Stocky.
Ambitions in the acting world; he'd played minor parts in
things like Carry On films or television series. He once said
to me Did you watch so-and-so last night. I said no, he said
Well, that was me coming out of the khazi with me braces
down, didn't you catch that? No, I said I must have missed
that {both chuckle} he said "Do you know..".he was really
Jewish, really Jewish, and laughed at himself all the
time....."they say I'm racist. Me Alfie Marron they say I'm
racist". He said "down in that basement, you can smell
we've got two from St Lucia - I don't mean offensive I mean
their cooking". And there was indeed a very distinctive St
Lucian cooking smell. Lovely couple they were, young. He
said "I've got two blacks down there, lovely people, get on
no problem, no trouble at all..First floor, who've I got, Tony
Bailey, queer as a coot". Tony with his blue hair swept back
like that, his entire suite was furnished in red velvet with
black tea cups and enormous gilt mirrors, and I kept
thinking he probably did a bit of drug peddling because
people kept ringing his bell at all times of night and day.
{end of tape} Stocky man, thick-set, with very dignified but
unmistakeably homosexual style, who would leave the
house immaculately dressed at six in the evening, dressed
in a camel-hair overcoat, you know the style, to go up West
to where he was a bar man in some fashionable night-club,
and he'd come back at two in the morning. So that was the
first floor. And Alfie says, "what have I got above? I've got
Goldstein". Goldstein, being Mrs Goldstein who was about
seventy five, had no relations left in the world. All her hair
was falling out. She was constantly moaning and a drain on
anybody's goodwill. A complainer. But a sweet lady And he
says "I've got her. Can I get rid of Goldstein, of course I
can't. As long as I've got the place she's there. There's
always a place for Goldstein. What do I have next to
Goldstein? That bloody Polack". That was a tailor, who
worked independent of the ground floor tailor, and literally
worked cross legged at his bench. And honestly slept under
his bench at night.
 119

J Did he really?

B Yep, I went there. It was only a tiny room, about that size.
I gained access once. He spoke scarcely any English and just
sat there with his needle and thread all day long. Never saw
him in the street. So there was the displaced Pole. And then
we're up to the final storey, my place. he said "and who
d'you think I had living up there? I tell you. South African.
Queer. Drug addict. Police raids. Colin McInnes, writer. Very
famous. Dedicates his books to me, to Alfie Marron. Lovely
feller, lovely feller"!! {chuckles} Have you ever heard of
Colin McInnes? {negative noise fr J} Very celebrated writer.
Notoriously rude man. He had the bell system fixed so that
the bell didn't ring. He'd got a large painted cut-out of a fish
and if somebody rang the bell the blue eyed fish would
attract your attention. He was a great lover of black boys
and spent most of his time in black clubs in Soho and down
Cable St. Hashish and marijuiana and heavy alcohol. One of
his books called Absolute Beginners was made into a film
not too long ago with David Bowie either singing or playing
the lead part. Set in Notting Hill. Time of the Notting Hill
riots. Set around the time of lambrettas and that period of
London. A writer of some note; also wrote for things like the
Times Literary Supplement, New Statesman and Nation. A
literary figure, not a hack writer. A very good man. I met him
years afterwards in the French pub. I knew him by sight, by
photographs - I'd never met him - I said Oh, I used to lived in
your ex flat down in Hanbury St. Oh yeh. I said, d'you ever
hear any news of Alfie Marron? If you want to know news
about Alfie Marron, go and ask him yourself, mate. So I
thought well, fuck you, that's the end of that. And
apparently this was his standard behaviour to everybody.
The Queen Mum as well as to me. And he'd had an
arrangement that from the street you open the street door,
which was a big, heavy wooden door. You entered the foyer
with the tailor's shop going off the the right. But to gain
access to the rest of the house you had a second door and
that was sheet metal, plate metal. You had a second key for
that and then my door upstairs had a whole variety of
Chubb locks and complex systems of locking; he was
obviously quite paranoid. And Alfie told me with a chuckle
one day that...Have you heard what's happened to McInnes?
I said no. He said he was in hospital of some grave
complaint, and they served a summons for bankruptcy, and
shortly after that the police came to tell him that he was
under arrest on drug handling charges {chuckles}

J So he'd had a good week...

 120

B He survived it. So that was Alfie Marron "they call me a

racist"! You make up that household for a soap opera and it
would be written off as being....

J Over the top.

B Absolutely, absolutely. And to serve all this were two very

broken down rickety brick built lavatories in the back yard.
Ground floor. So it wasn't the most hygenic of places... And a
cold water tap of course.

J So you didn't have a loo upstairs?

B Oh no, no. You had to go all the way down. Including Mrs
Goldstein, with her chamber-pot covered tactfully with the
Jewish Times or whatever. It was a very happy time, was
that. But when I was accepted at the Royal College of Art, by
this time I was working in Luba's Bistro in Yeoman's Row,
down from....is it the Coach and Horses..

J The Bunch of Grapes, I think it is.

B Bunch of Grapes, that's correct. So I was chief dishwasher.

Only dishwasher, but I was Chief dishwasher!

J Luba was the aunt of a friend of mine.

B Was she, really?

J David Page, who was a picture dealer mate of mine who'd

worked at Waddingtons. She was his aunt. I gather she
didn't have a licence, and you took your own wine there.

B Yep, and the Hooray Henrys used to plunge their wine into
the simmering water that held the pots of sauces and so on
so that within five minutes they'd have a gently bubbling
Cote du Rhone. Oh she was a wonderful person. A lovely
person. I know it's a cliche to say that about a big fat
emotional sentimental White Russian lady, but....She'd had
a hard life and she was a joy to work for. She had a volatile
temper and there were scenes and rows. Not with myself in
this case - with other staff. One member ran amok with a
meat cleaver one evening and had to be disarmed, I don't
know who did it, but he had a serious mental breakdown of
which that was the culmination. So I was working there
something like five nights a week. So it seemed pretty daft
getting back to Stepney and I had a pal who had a cupboard
in the corner of Thurloe Square, which was five minutes
walk away. So I made an arrangement with my pal to swap
places on a temporary basis for one year or two years, which
 121

we did, and then we swapped back again. So.. the Royal

College to Thurloe Square is five minutes walk. Thurloe
Square to Luba's five minutes walk so it was a very nice
circuit. Working for Luba, well there was a good team. The
chief cook - the grill cook or the frying cook - I don't know
what the term is. Not the person who made the sauces-
that's where the skill is- and I think Luba did this in the
morning. The sauces were always made and they were
wonderful. And the things like the pirosshki and galuptsi
were always ready and that was the quality of the place. But
there were always people wanting steaks, pork chops and so
on. So there was a cook whose job it was to do the frying.
Then there was a vegetable chef. There was a chef who
looked after the sweets and the salads. A general handyman
who unblocked drains or threw out drunks; he was the one
who went mad with the cleaver. And myself. A team of about
five in the kitchen, and then three or four waitressing.
Nearly all, if not all, related to Luba. One delicious tall
homosexual, as camp as they come. Lived in Paris for years.
He was an absolute scream. Sort of Kenneth Williams gone
over the top sort of thing. And one of the privileges of the
dishwasher was any half finished bottles of wine left by the
customers, which was commonplace, was put next to the
dirty dishes - that was the dishwasher's perk. And if you
remember the place the kitchen was open to the restaurant
with a partition about that height. So as you walked in the
place my sinks were on the left and the piles of plates with
glasses were there and there were my three or four bottles
of Barsac or Cotes du Rhone and so on. And you needed it
because you sweated like hell. But after a while, I don't
know how it came about, once or twice I'd managed after I'd
done my first hour between six and seven washing the big
heavy pans that had held last nights curry and... big greasy
pans. Quite hard work. Not dishes - it was get all the pans
clean by the time the first customers come in just after
seven. And if I got that done with ten minutes to spare,
Luba would say well go up the road if you like and have a
drink, have a quick break. So I'd trot up to the Bunch of
Grapes and they used to sell a very good draught cider, you
remember.

J I never used the pub really.

B Yes, well they had a little corner bar on the corner of was
it... Knightsbridge and Brompton Rd...it was split into about
five bars with great glass partitions. And I'd go in the
workmans' bar. And have a good pint of cider, which set you
up. I can't remember how it began but Harold, the later-to-
go-beserk fellow, said he wouldn't mind a glass of cider. And
another member of staff said they'd appreciate a glass of
 122

cider in the course of the evening. So I said is this all right,

Luba, I'll get cider for everyone. She said yes, yes, yes. She
said you, you take that bucket, Bryan. God knows how much
it held, but literally I used to walk up with a plastic bucket
that size, order my pint and say fill this up for the
restaurant, please, and they filled it up and I paid with
Luba's money. And I would take this bucket back, and they
made a space for it in the big refrigerator, and the cider
would go in there and we'd feed off that through the course
of the long night, six 'til one o'clock. And I also with my red
wine chasers you might say. And of course sometimes the
kitchen got a little bit chaotic, and Dolly the frier, a lovely
little Cockney woman, tiny, archetypal Cockney, she would
bring her own Guinness, five bottles. And by the time she
was on bottle three she was going. Bottle four she was
nearly gone and bottle five flames would be coming up from
her pans {chuckles} And Luba rode it all, you know,
shrugging her shoulders and saying " Do I employ such
people. What do I deserve?..." and she would have her
favourite maudlin song that she would go into... I only
remember the first line. She would sing {sings} "If I could
live my life again...." {both laugh} such maudlin sentiments.
And the poofter waiter running around and camping it up
with the guardsmen with their {chuckles} hot Cotes du
Rhone wine and the surly little French waiter - son of
Janine?- niece of Luba, they were all related. It was a
complete magnificent mixture. And of course the company
was wonderful.

J I think David's mother was somebody called Leda, who was

Luba's sister.

B Oh Leda , I'm sure that rings a bell, sure that rings a bell.

J Leda was lovely.

B Did she wait on table?

J She may have yeh.

B I'm sure. I can see the face. I'm almost sure. She was a
kind one. There was one scatty one. The saturnine boy, who
wanted his own restaurant, and the outrageous camp fellow.
yes, yes I'm sure, I'm sure.

J Leda still lives up there in Courtfield Gardens. But Luba's is

shut, of course now.

B Yes.
 123

J Luba died, didn't she?

B I suppose so. I remember there used to be a young man

probably highly educated, with rounded shoulders and very
shabby tweeds, who'd come in about half past six. Often
followed by and old genteel lady very obviously down on her
luck. And Luba would serve the genteel lady with a bowl of
borscht and then the old lady would go. No payment. But
she used to rag the round shouldered failed student - that's
what he looked like - he was probably about 35. And she
would shout at him in what seemed an offensive manner,
but it wasn't, it was all part of the game..."Eh, I suppose you
want big bowl of soup from Luba?" He would nod and that
would be set nicely before him, always at the same table, by
the door. No other customers yet come in. And then she'd
say "And NOW what d'you want? I suppose you want the
biggest steak Luba has?" So they'd cut him a piece of steak.
The steak was often served with boiled rice. And he'd never
say thank you - I can't remember him speaking. And then
when he was finished and ready to go she would say " Yeh,
now you want two of Luba's cigarettes, don't you, here you
are." And she would more or less throw the cigarettes onto
his table. "And off you go." And off he'd go. And that routine
was repeated almost every evening.

J Luba was obviously a very sweet woman.

B Oh, she was, she was. She would say to me "Now Bryan, I
know it's not a nice job, but this galvanised dustbin goes
outside every night with all the raw materials, cabbage
leaves and so on. You clean this for me, scrub it out. I give
you five shillings extra." I said Luba that's a bargain, yeh.
And it wasn't such an unpleasant job, so that was my last
job usually. There were two. One went out and one was
clean. Scrubbing out the dustbin became part of the job, but
it was always five bob extra. Then around midnight, the last
customers had gone, or almost gone, - maybe a couple
cooing over a candlelit table, she'd say " Come on come on",
and we'd all stop working and we'd all gather round the big
circular table maybe eight of us, nine of us. One cook in the
kitchen - I think it used to be the saturnine waiter. "You want
steak, Bryan" That would be lovely, yeh. "Rice?" Yeh. Or
sometimes galupsi with that lovely rich sauce or sometimes
piroshki. And we sat down and there were bottles of half
empty wine - always enough to drink. And we'd have a good
talk about the evening, a good laugh, maybe until half past
one. And a genuine meal, you know, a real meal. And then
ah yes, I can't remember where this fits in, but at one period
I then had to walk back to Clapham South. Which was one
hell of a way.
 124

J What, from Luba's?

B Yes.

J Shit, that's a long way.

B It lasted for several months. I can't remember why I was

there and not at Thurloe Square or Stepney. But Clapham
South, yes. I used to go up Lavender Hill if I remember
rightly, across one of the bridges - Battersea Bridge. I was
stopped by a policeman one night who shone his light in my
face. At about two in the morning, I was exhausted. And he
shone his light in my face and said what are you doing? And
I just shouted at him: I just said I'm walking home to 37 so
and so Road Clapham South, and I 've just been working as a
dishwasher from six to one and I'm absolutely knackered
and I'll thank you not to shine your FUCKING TORCH IN MY
FACE! And he said I'm sorry sir, I apologise, I apologise. It
works when you make this sort of reaction.

J When it's genuine which it obviously was, yes.

B Yes yes. No, they were good times, good times. Lovely
times. I'd go in there afterwards with a guest when I left
college. A couple of time at least. And Luba had been there
and we had a smashing meal. It was always a bit expensive
to what one could afford in those days. And I'd then gone up
and asked one of the girls for the bill and Luba would come
across to the table " Eh, Bryan, nothing to pay nothing to
pay. You're my guests." and put an arm around us both. Oh
Luba, that's sweet of you but I don't expect it, because I
want to come back again. "Oh, well you pay next time." And
the next time the same thing happened. She married he
butcher, who was a young, good looking LAD from east
Anglia. he could only have been in his late twenties. And
this was towards the end of her career. He flirted with her
and she fancied him, and so they got married. And I believe
they were happy.

J Oh, that's good.

B Yeh. Sometimes there would the Pepe the Spaniard who

came in and played his guitar. Before taking the hat round.
She would say come in on Mondays and Thursdays if you
like. And he was a lovely original Spaniard, playing nice light
music from table to table. A bit more ambiance. He asked
me once - he knew I was a painter - "Have you ever in
London exposed yourself?" {laughs} And another regular
customer was a shabby looking chap with a bald head and a
 125

beard but obviously a personality and quality. Usually with

two or three guests. And that was the painter Euan Euglow. I
just read in the art rag of this week that his exhibition at
Roland Brows and Delbanco coincided with mine and has
been a sell-out, and his best price a hundred thousand
pounds. And he was always impoverished. Always stuck to
his guns, as far as I know he never married. He lived for his
art. The most difficult art you can imagine, painting from
the naked figure, month after month with the same model in
excruciating poses. Having to pay the model. He stuck it out,
always being ignored by the art establishment. "Freud is
great. Bacon is great." Do you ever hear of Euan Euglow?

J No.

B Far, far finer painter. History will show. And now suddenly
he'd getting his recognition, in his seventies I suppose. So
he was another nice person to see. We just knew each other,
even though I was a student and I knew he was a
distinguished painter. We sort of waved in the restaurant.
Yes lovely days, lovely days. Well, I think that's the end, the
end of that.....

J What happened then?

B Well around the time of this Diploma show at the Royal

College of Art - I've described it in some detail - students
from the major London colleges, the Slade, the Academy,
what we arrogantly call "The College" - it's never called the
Royal College, it's the College, "Did you go to the College?"...
are invited to submit applications for the Roman
Scholarships of which there are graded versions, a twelve
month version at quite a good income, a nine month version,
a six month travel version and so on. And already I was very
familiar with Italy. Everybody knew that. My tutors knew
that. I desperately wanted to go to Italy for a year after
leaving College. That would complete my education. And I
applied. I don't know who formed the jury. But I was not
successful. And regrettably, at least two of the ones that
were successful never left London. Ever. One spent it on a
customised psychadelic motor car which he'd drive up and
down the King's Rd in nineteen sixty three or whatever a la
John Lennon, and I thought that was pretty disgusting. And I
was very, well I was upset that I didn't get one. I felt that
with my track record - I'd already had two Italian
Government scholarships - it was obvious that my cultural
direction was Italy rather than America, which was the
prevailing fashion by then. All the ambitious artists were
getting...
 126

J You say you'd been to Italy before? When had that fitted in,
when you were at St Martins?

B Yes, well right from the age of sixteen.

J You went when you were at Coles?

B Possibly just before I went to Coles, yes. I went to Lake

Garda with my Uncle Leslie. I wanted to travel to le or is it
La Lavandou in France and Hyeres and Cap Ferrat. And
Antibes and - what's the most fashionable one there?....St
Tropez. And I read library books about these places. These
places were natural fishing ports then. This was the early
fifties some time. I'd bought books second hand books, and
read library books about all these places. And I had the
maps. And my parents had said all right you can go. Yes, I'd
be about fifteen and a half I think. I don't know how I was
going to get there. Train and then walk I suppose. Then at
the last minute Uncle Leslie, father's brother, said - I
suppose they'd fixed it up between them, parents, grown-
up. Not a good idea to let Bryan go at that age. Leslie said
well, I want to go back to Italy, and I'd like to go to Lake
Garda, and Bryan will love that. So I went with Uncle Leslie
to Lake Garda to a village called Tremsin, wonderful place.
Stayed in a hotel Stella D'Oro. And after seven days Uncle
Leslie started going mad. The very first signs of it. Not that
anybody would call a nervous breakdown, because it went
on for years. And then he finally hung himself.

J Did he? Oh Good God.

B Yes. he tried once or twice to kill himself. But by God he

went mad in this hotel. Nothing that anybody else would
recognise. For example some paranoia it began with. We
would hear the peasants singing in the fields as they were
making hay. And Leslie had been stationed down at
Sorrento, Amalfi, Maiori, during the war. So he had some
Italian friends and he spoke some Italian. And one afternoon
he said can you hear what they're singing, Bryan. I said no, I
can't understand the language. He said they're singing
about me. I said what do you mean? he said they're mocking
me. He said yes, and I noticed it when we went down past
the tobacconist, people were talking about me. They
stopped talking as soon as they saw me, but they were all
talking about me. I said what do you mean? And there was
no homosexuality instinct, though he was never married.
Unless this was profoundly repressed. But he never ever
made any pass to myself, with every opportunity - we even
slept in a double bed in the Stella D'Oro. We certainly did in
Soley Bridge, and never a hint of that. And he said we've got
 127

to get out of here, we've got to get out straight away. And
suddenly we were embarked on a nightmare journey back to
Sheffield. Non-stop from this remote village, which involved
a taxi down a thousand feet, down to the lake side and a bus
at dawn to Desenzano, a train from Desenzano to Milan, a
connection to Milan to and so on and so on. And I remember
we were in Paris at dawn the next day, I can remember the
wet cobbled streets, Paris as you think Paris used to look. I
remember we went into a bar for a coffee. And he said "It's
happening here as well. They're all doing it. Haven't you
noticed?" I said no, no, you're imagining things. He said "No,
no, no." He said "I know what they're saying". I said what?
He said "They're saying I'm mad". I said but you're not mad.
He said, "Well that's what they're saying, that's what they're
saying. They're all saying it. Come on". We gulped our coffee
and then another train to wherever it was, Newhaven... and
the sea... the boat was like that in the harbour. The only
time I've ever been seasick. In fact before we left harbour.
And he kindly took me down into the lower part of the ship
where there were these bunks which were specially
designed for people who were going to be seasick, I don't
know whether they still have them, it's a sort of monster
vomitorium that's staffed and stewarded and cleaned up
and so on. When I say seasick, you don't bring anything up
necessarily because I'd had nothing to eat for twenty four
hours. Nothing to eat, no food no food no food at all. No
stopping to buy a croissant or anything - we'd got to get
back to Sheffield. Because he'd got to read the newspapers.
Because it would all be in the newspapers. And that, that
that was an awful journey over the channel and then up to
London, and then I remember the train from Kings Cross to
Sheffield was so crowded, we had to stand all the way and
it's the only time in my life I've fallen asleep on my feet. I
don't know whether it's considered possible or not. An old
soldier will tell you it is. Well it is. And we finally got the bus
from Sheffield back home, and astonished parents - what's
happened what's the matter. And he explained that it would
all be in the newspapers tomorrow morning. My mother
found him sitting at the bottom of the stairs at about six am
waiting for the newspaper to come through the letter box
and he grabbed it the moment it did. And of course nothing.
And then he tried to kill himself in the bathroom, I think
slitting his wrists, I'm not sure. And they kept me out of the
house. That was just a couple of days later. And then the
police were brought in and I was interviewed, and so on and
then he was sent on this awful electrical therapy, and was
never the same man again. He'd been, well he'd been a very
fine man indeed. He was a hunter. Otter hounds and
principally beagles. Wore fine cut breeches, jodphurs, fine
boots. Of course a foot follower. He had an otter pole as tall
 128

as that door. Eight foot metal tipped pole with which he

stalked through the streets of Halifax at dawn on the way to
some distant meet up in the Yorkshire dales. He was the one
who used to take me to the art galleries in York and Leeds
and Liverpool. His idea of a day out was to say Bryan would
you like to come to York, and we'll have toasted teacakes in
the posh teashop Terrys, where the officers used to go with
their Sam Browne belts -impressed me enormously - the
waitresses in black with little white aprons, and then he'd
take me to his favourite second hand bookshop in
Stonegate. I got to love the smell of old books and I'd buy as
many books as he would buy, so we'd both be laden, and
then we'd go to the art gallery and especially to look at his
favourite nude, a very sexy thing by William Etty, the
Victorian painter who specialised, like so many Victorian
painters, in very, I won't say very erotic, but in sexy
paintings, that went under decent titles like "At the Spring"
and so forth with a voluptuous beautiful woman. Painted in
the RA schools. And we'd go to York Minster and we'd walk
the walls. We'd go to the cattle market and then we'd go
home on the train. And that was the day out. Well obviously
that's an important part of my cultural background. So that
was the man he was before this tragedy began.

J It's very lucky he didn't put you off Italy altogether.

B Well it certainly didn't. I'd like to go back and see if that

hotel is still there, and stay in the same bedroom. It was a
wonderful place. No tourists, no tourists. And he was a great
man for itineraries. the old Bradshaw guides. He could work
out routes all around Europe, just for fun. He travelled all
around Scotland on secondary lines. Highly planned. He
would write of in advance to hotels. I've still got a lot of his
bills and correspondence and Horse and Hound copies in a
case downstairs. So you'd see that he paid ten and six at the
Stags head, Lidderdale for bed breakfast and evening meal.
L Ingham or L Ingham Esquire. He knew how to live. He
drank, but not excessively. He was his own man. Just...he
wasn't eccentric, but he was by the standards of the day.

J How long after this incident did he kill himself? Was it a

long time or...

B A long time, yes. Yes. He was on various courses of

treatment and drugs and so on. He lost a lot of weight, no
longer looked like his previous self. Rarely drank.
Occasionally he could be persuaded to have three or four
Guinness at a sitting and then he'd perk up and almost be
like the old Leslie, but more often he'd say no, no, I don't
want to go to the pub. He lost the paranoia, as far as we
 129

could see. And he finished up working in an ironmongers

shop wearing brown overall coat, the lowest of the low.
Whereas after his military days he'd been foreman in I think
it was Crossley's carpet factory...with about forty girls
beneath him. Very responsible job. He would have gone
very high in the mill trade. And all of that went. Had no self-
confidence with women, that was one of his troubles. And he
was too much of a gentleman. He would do anything rather
than offend anybody. So he might well have thought, no,
this woman is really attractive, but it would be bad manners
of me to say, would you come to the opera with me next
Thursday, get the train to Manchester, they're doing Lucia
de L'Amore. I think you would enjoy it - he would not give
that invitation, because he would think that would make her
uncomfortable and embarrassed. So he would keep most of
that to himself. Though there were women who adored him.
A lot of my taste in books comes from his library. At
Christmastime, he used to love reading things like the Hunt
Breakfast from Handley Cross. Mr Jorrocks or Soapy Sponge
arriving at I forget whose stately mansion - he loved it and
he'd laugh and chuckle. And his upright piano with two
candles, and he played the piano very well from music. At
Christmas time he would play Christians Awake, and all the
fine old carols, and he would play exerpts from the operas.
Donicetti was his favourite. And Tosca. he'd developed all
these tastes in Italy. And he had very fine Italian
watercolours on the walls he'd bought from artist friends
he'd made. { tape sound fails here}
{Bryan went on to describe the death of Uncle Leslie and his
funeral and to recount how with Carel Weight's help he
obtained a Leverhulme Award for travel in Italy, and Tape 8
picks it up as he is cycling around Northern Italy.}
B I left my bicycle there. And there was just one incident
before I leave that, which relates back to Maxine, plump
dark-haired girl. A couple of girls came to the youth hostel,
Geordies. One was very very big. Not fat, but very plump.
Very attractive. And we spent an evening walking around
the town together. We went for a drive in motor car with
somebody, up into the mountains, and then spent the dusk
and the dark of the evening lying on the sands - the youth
hostel was only twenty five yards away - lying on the soft
dry sand at the top of the Adriatic, just cuddling and kissing
and so on. Nothing heavy. And she said the next day they
were going to Venice, hitch-hiking. And one didn't think far
ahead in those days, did one? So I said Oh that's a great
pity, I'd have loved to see you again. I woke up in the
morning early, and I thought I've just got to see that girl
again. She was terrific, I want to know that girl. And I
dashed up into the ladies dormitory and they'd gone. And I
found out from the office that there are two youth hostels
 130

in Venice, one on the Qai Decha island, the other I know not
where, so I wrote a brief letter, - I only knew the girl's first
name, Sandra, I can't remember... please, please contact
me. I don't know what contact address I gave, because I was
floating around. But I was determined that I should see this
girl again, and just so angry with myself that I'd not taken
her home address, her English address or whatever. But no,
never saw her again. I bet she has nice feelings about the
evening as well,- it was a very good-hearted time. So I left
my bicycle in the garage of the hotel, and said I'll be back
for it. When d'you think you'll be back for it? A year or two, I
don't know. All right, that's OK, it's not in the way. So if you
do want an old fashioned red Italian bicycle, it's now been
there for thirty two years and it's probably quite a vintage
model because it was already dangerously close to a
nineteen forties vintage at that time! And then I took one of
those lovely Italian buses. Chit...CIT they used to be
called...cheet. Very comfortable, with sun blinds to draw
across the windows. On mountainous, precipitous roads,
very fast, honking the horn. Stopping in busy litle villages,
all piling out. Drink of water in the fountain in the piazza
and then onwards, onwards. Then I arrived in Florence. By
that time I'd decided for the rest of my stay in Italy, another
ten months or so, I must have a scooter. I found a garage,
tiny, tiny, hole in the wall garage such as they are in the
back streets. I had a look for it the last time I was in
Florence. Couldn't find my way at all. Saw a lovely
lambretta. Creamy white, plae blue. With pale blue on white
number plates, which were Florentine number plates -
FI...Firenze - so I thought well this is a real bonus, because I
can go anywhere in Italy with Florentine number plates.
Better than Roman number plates, because the Romans are
hated - a Neapolitan would have blown it up - or a Napoli
number plate the Romans will kick it into the gutter and
pour petrol over it, but Florence, you're fairly safe,
reasonably respected. I paid £40 for the scooter, and it gave
me wonderful service. It was a pig in a poke, but they're
honest, the Italian people, the workmen and so on. They
didn't sell me a dud. Oh, and then such times I had, I can't
remember just where or which way my route went....I
remember I spent time up at La Spezia, Livorno, the Cinque
Terra, and then down that Mediterranean coast road past
Civatavechia, absolutely fancy-free. Lightly dressed. A la
Italia. Not standing out anymore as an Englishman, but
wearing protective clothing, mainly high-heeled spotted
dotted white pointed shoes, real gigolo stuff, narrow white
trousers, pink check shirt, close cropped hair, dark glasses
whilst on the bike. Every inch the Italian Dago! That
certainly was...one can't think of a more perfect itinerary.
Sorry, Katy, love but you're in the line of fire {protest from
 131

cat} Come here, come here {meow} yes. Can you think of a
more blissful existence. Day after day, knowing it can be
week after week, month after month, just getting up in the
morning, looking at a map, and thinking, Oh that looks
interesting, that village where the road stops at the top of
that mountain. Four thousand feet, not too high, I'll go there
today. And you go there, and they've never seen an
Englishman in their life. Really, there are such places, just a
mile off the motorway, where they goggle at you. I
remember passing...passing the piazza in such a dusty, fly-
blown village to enter through the plastic stripped curtain to
go into a bar as a priest was coming out of the bar, and he
made a gesture with his right hand, and I automatically
made a swift sort of bogus religious gesture with my right
hand. And in a split second realised that he was merely
moving his right hand to squash a fly on his forehead
{chuckles} The bar was just thick, black with flies, I mean
this was what, nineteen sixty three or so. Such insanitary
places they were. And so life went on like that week after
week. Until towards the end of the summer I thought it
would be clever to get some sort of base, but I had no plans,
no ideas, no forethought. But I happened to be in Rome. By
this time I'm riding the scooter like an Italian. It's the only
way you can survive in Rome. You ride very fast, you brake
very very quickly. You start very quickly at the traffic lights.
You're not ill at ease if you're elbow to elbow with your
fellow scooter riders, and you ride in the middle of the road.
And if you follow those rules, you're quite safe! If you dither,
like an English person, you see their cars lying by the side of
the road every few hundred yards! On their sad GB plates
where they've tried to do After You Percy stuff and then
been bonked into {chuckles} by the Fiat cinquecentos. So
by the time I got to Rome I really was whizzing round the
city and there was a certain bella figura manner where
you'd have your feet splayed off the running board, not
within the running board but you heels on the running board
and your feet splayed, that was very, very stylish as well, so
what with the high heeled white shoes and the white
trousers, one had the lot {J laughs} and by this time very
handsomely brown and well travelled, and I thought, I'd look
up this British School. Where they didn't think fit to give me
a scholarship...to! I was very lucky to be let in. It was before
the term had started, and the servants were extremely
reluctant to give anybody admission. You walked up a
massive flight of stairs to a set of doors fifteen foot tall by
fifteen foot wide, with one little inset door, so you rang the
bell, and it echoed down the corridors, and the little inset
door would be opened a few inches by a white coated
servant "Eh? Que?" So one had to do one's best to charm
one's way in. I can't remember that detail, but I did get in.
 132

And luckily for me there were two young English artists

already arrived there, Mike and Mary Fairclough, -you've
probably met them,- and we sat in the garden, talking about
this and that. Plenty in common. And they said well, there's
been always a spare, an empty, studio. If you see Signor
Bruno, he's the man in charge of the booking arrangements,
you could well have a good chance. And so I did that and
Signor Bruno was very friendly. I'd got good credentials - it
didn't mean a lot to him, but I think he recognised that I
wasn't just off the street sort of thing. And they let me have
this lovely huge studio, which is I think the one that Dame
Barbara Hepworth had when she was there. It was a
sculpture studio. It had big double doors. I think some lifting
equipment. And then you had a tiny bedroom, up a wooden
staircase. So as you woke up in the morning you could look
over the balcony, down into the studio. Just one cold water
sink, and the bathrooms across the corridor and across a
courtile, a courtyard, was the dining room, the refectory. It
was a very grand, high ceilinged affair. Well, being showed
round I thought -this is bloody paradise! And it was ever so
cheap. It was less than I would have been paying for a bed
and breakfast. Then I think I went away for a week or two,
and then I came back and yes, my studio was waiting for
me, and the other Rome Scholars had gathered and the
architectural historians were migrating through. Lady
Wheeler was a big shot there, I seem to remember. The
badly treated wife of Sir Mortimer. Who was called Rick,-
doesn't go well with Sir Mortimer Wheeler, does it? A dodgy
sounding bloke. Womaniser. Egotist. I think. Shouldn't say
that. And it must have got round to November time because
it was announced that we were going to have a bonfire
party and invite the contents of the Danish Academy to
come down and party with us. And that turned out into a
memorable evening where two of us got off with sensational
women. Which carried on through a lot of the time in Rome.
Not the only women in our lives,- of course it was a very
woman-full period. Probably the most woman-full period of
one's life. I don't know whether that was the high-heeled
white shoes, the sun tan or what, but a very successful
period. And of course at the age of thirty one was just
coming to terms with sex, and multiple lovers and so on.
One was reaching one's prime then. Not twenty. So that was
very memorable. the food they gave us in the refectory was
absolutely magnificent. It was high class restaurant style.
One was invited to the long table, the high table, to sit with
John Ward-Perkins, the Director, or two other long tables
where you sat wherever you fancied. So there was no
hierarchy - everybody moved around all of the time. All of
us sat at the top table and sat where we chose at the other
tables. I soon recognised that the head waiter and general
 133

factotum, a man called Giacomo, was a very useful man, and

I took to him, as you do take to some men. And I think he
took to me as well. So very quickly without language we had
a good understanding. On minor things like he knew I liked
two plates of spaghetti before the meat course at lunch
time, so I would always get my two plates of spaghetti very
unostentatiously - the best service you can expect. And
there came the day that Giacomo said in his not bad English
that he had a girl friend in the mountains and tomorrow was
his day off and he had no transport, could he borrow my
lambretta. Giacomo, delighted! So off he went on the
lambretta, very very pleased. The next day he says, very
good I have tightened up the exhaust screw, and it needed
adjustment and....in the end he became my mechanic as
well as head waiter! Didn't get on very well with the Director
of the place, John Ward-Perkins. Who was an an
archeologist. Big fish in his pond. Expected everybody to
kow-tow. And all his archeological staff did. He was a tyrant;
he had people working in the attics, like in a Bronte novel -
you didn't see them for weeks. They'd come down white
grey and palsied for a bowl of minestrone once every three
weeks! And then back to glueing up his wretched shards. I
was off to a dramatically bad start with him. On the very
first evening of the autumn term, it was his tradition to
throw a cocktail party before dinner in the refectory. And
most art students don't dress for dinner. It would have been
much nicer if we did, - if we had worn black tie, but that was
no longer the style and I didn't have black tie, but I did the
next best thing, and I went all in white, with maybe a
modest tie - I don't remember, with my white trousers, and a
lovely white linen jacket, white shoes. And I looked pretty
good! And I entered this large room I saw the cluster of
cocktail partiers down at the end, and discerned a figure
who was obviously the boss, and he was dressed all in white
and so I {chuckles} like two ladies at a party who are
wearing the same pin striped suit, he glared at me. He was
not amused at all. That I was stealing his sartorial thunder.
From that moment onwards we didn't get on. But it didn't
matter a damn of course. And it was such that...well, I'm
losing chronology here because I remember now being in
Rome in the January/February days when tourists are never
there, and it being bitterly cold, and I remember being in a
very hilly suburb of Rome outside a steeply cobbled street
with a tram-car track going up and the big flashes of
electricity coming from the poles of the tram-car lines, and
the banging and the blustering of the thunder, and the great
lightnings lighting everything up vividly, and the lights in
the bar going out totally and then going back on again
dramatically, and then the rain coming down like rods. Just
straight down, rain that you could cut through, rain like
 134

we've never seen in this country. And on the juke-box

intermittently was an English Caribbean pop song "My Boy
Lollypop", which would date it to about nineteen sixty...

J Lulu.

B Was it?

J I think it was Lulu, yes.

B And I found that Rome was a very exciting place to be in

those times. I did my bit of church bashing, and museum
bashing. Buit that wasn't my passion. My passion really was
the life as lived day to day in Italian towns, villages and
cities. rather as I told the meeting in Fetter Lane, the
business men when they said are you interested in 15 th
century Italian art, Mr Ingham. Yes, I am, but I'm more
interested in 20th century Italian cinema, for example. So
that was what I nosing out, the smell of contemporary Italy.
My chronology now goes very wrong because there was one
period when I ran out of money, - it must have been the
following year, - springtime. My money came in three
installments, from Fetter Lane to the Banco di Laboro in
Rome, and I calculated I had something like six weeks before
the next bit of income and the equivalent of something like
seventy pence a day for that period of time. So I couldn't
afford to run up a mess bill and one paid for one's meals as
well, and we lived quite high. We would often go into Rome
after dinner. We would have dinner at eight, and at eleven
o'clock little groups would mutter shall we go and have a
spaghetti ala carbonara down the Via .....I
forget....somewhere down by the football stadium. So we'd
often turn out at eleven and go and have a second delicious
spaghetti and more wine. So we spent quite a lot of money. I
borrowed a tent, and took my Vespa down to Terracina,
which used to be a favored place in the old Roman days - I
think emperors would build their villas on the farthermost
rocks of the Terracina peninsula. Since fallen into some
decay. And south of there was a little village on a hump
called Spellonga. And joining Spellonga and Terracina a long
perfect clean beach, I suppose about eight miles in length.
So I set out my tent in the dunes about half way. And settled
down for I think about five weeks, - the weather was good.
Outside my tent I built a little fireplace with stones. My
prime job of the day was to gather driftwood sticks for the
evening fire. The second job of the day was to walk four
miles down the beach in bare feet to the village, and buy
two large bottles, I suppose litre bottles, of local wine,
which was called Frizzantino - no labels, just a screw top, if I
remember, a beer bottle top. The sort of stuff that's
 135

dangerous at Sainsburys supermarket, I'm sure. Buying it

and walking it back along the beach was delicious. And a
good chunk of bread and Brunetto, which I think is about
three and a half ounces of Mortadella sausage, and that was
it. And one litre was for the lunchtime feast, and then the
siesta. And then the late afternoon job was collecting
bleached plastic, of which there was a lot. Toys, childrens
dolls - arms, feet, legs. Kiddies prams, cartons, boxes,
bottles, bright colours all faded into pinks and bathroomy
greens and turquoise, beautiful, beautiful stuff. Beautiful
shapes. And down this eight mile stretch of beach I made
three primary heaps, which got to be about man high. And I
admit, I did fantasise about having a lorry to carry this all
back to England as working material, it being so beautiful.
But of course I didn't. It was left on the beach. Occasionally
when I felt I could indulge myself, I would call at the Youth
Hostel. There was a wooden chalet, with a wooden
verandah. A very friendly place. And they made meals. And I
would say, I'm not sleeping here. I'm sleeping up on the
beach, but can I have the lunch? Which was very cheap. So I
varied my diet that way. And of course there I met a lovely
girl from London. We went walking down to Spelonga, the
rain clouds came in, the sea broke over us, we got drenched
and we were laughing and we were hand in hand and we
burst back into this chalet, late for lunch and radiant with
the zest of love {chuckles} We kept in touch. I knew her in
London for a year or two after that. There I met two lovely
German people, and we went into Terracina in their deux
chevaux one evening and found the sort of restaurant I
don't think exists any more. Just a bare room with a naked
light bulb. About four rickety formica topped metal tables.
Plastic bucket seats. And a knife and a fork and a bit of
paper for the table cloth. So primitive. And we ordered fish,
and it was one of the best meals any of us had ever, ever
had. We had the most memorable, wonderful evening you
could dream of. For a matter of shillings. They sent me a
card about four years later remembering that evening. And
so then back into Rome to collect the next installment of
money, and to meet my mum, who'd come to Rome, my
aunty who'd never been abroad before. The came in a coach
party. And got into the spirit of it wonderfully well. Later
came my father, dressed in his handsome three piece
tweeds. Highly polished shoes. Englishman's pipe. Never
been...well....he'd been to Belgium, when young. Never been
to Italy. Travelled by rail. Arrived looking as fresh a daisy,
except he was grossly drunk.

J A second-hand daisy!
 136

B I spent much of my time giving him talkings-to. The

following day I took him over into Trestaveri, which then was
the rough quarter. Today, it's quite chic. It was definitely still
a rough quarter. And I took him to the roughest cafe-cum-
restaurant that I knew, which was at the west end of
Trestaveri. Under enormous plane trees the tables were set
out. Again with paper table cloths. And working men,
women and rogues drinking. And I'd been told on good
authority - more than one authority - that that was the place
where pickpockets would congregate to discuss their
programme for the next day. It was next to one of the big
markets. And there are petty thieves, and never leave a
bicycle down there and don't take the scooter down there
because you might find the front wheel has gone, but you
still have the scooter. It was notorious. So Father thought all
this was marvellous and we sat up under the plane trees in
the sunshine and drank a couple of quarter litres of wine,
white wine, the Frascati wine, and Father thought that was
marvellous. And for some reason the next day I was fully
occupied. can't think why. Unusual, with my father as a
guest. But I said you're going to have to look after yourself.
Take care now. You stand out as an Englishman. You know
the are a lot of villains in this town, and whatever you do
don't go to any of the places I took you to yesterday. Don't
go that side of the river, and certainly don't go to that café
under the plane trees. Oh, no lad. Right, lad, yes. And make
sure you've got a card that shows your hotel, so if you get
lost you can show it to anybody. So I thought everything was
foolproof, but Father being a bigger fool than most off the
leash, by himself, rubbing his hands, alone in Rome....Well, I
saw him the next day, what did you do, Dad? Well, shall I tell
you, lad? I say yes...yes, come on you'd better tell me. He
said well, I went back to that cafe under the plane trees. I
said Oh.... and what happened? Well it was very quiet at
first. I sat by myself and ordered one of those carafes of
wine. And there a few chaps sat at a table nearby, and they
kept looking across at me. I said, well, I'm not bloody
surprised, with your pipe and your tweeds and your polished
brogues. And after a while he said, I don't know whether it
was me or them, but they said, you have a glass of our wine.
And so he was invited to take his chair over to their table.
And being the sort of man he is of course straight away he
was ordering, not knowing how to do it, God knows what,
you know a litre of wine of wine, or half a litre for
everyone...anyway. And without the language, he said, we
had a lovely time. they were lovely fellers. I said well, what
did they do. He said, well, one was a taxi driver. I said well,
how did you know that. he said well, he took me home! I
said, oh aye, well what happened? he said well when it time
for me to go, well....I was a bit legless. I'm not used to this
 137

wine you know. So they asked me where I was staying, and I

took out the card. Campo di Fiore, the oldest hotel in Rome.
The Campo di Fiore was the biggest hang-out of spivs after
the war. It was where bicycle thieves were shot, by Vittorio
de Sicca. And it still has a reputation for being a rough
square. So the taxi driver took him back. Said now there's
your hotel. And here is my friend in the trattoria...took him
down three steps into the trattoria, sat Father down at a
table, said to the proprietor, now (it went something like
this), this English gentleman has had a glass or two too
many. Give him a good bowl of soup, plenty of bread, no
more wine, and then help him across the road - he's number
five in the hotel opposite, and I'll settle up with you later, -
don't let him pay anything. And that's what happened. He
had is meal, which settled him up very well, they helped him
across the road to his bed, and he got up and his wallet was
there and everything is there. Every opportunity for a
monster mugging, and as always he got away with it
through his simplicity and decency. And of course you can
imagine what I said...You stupid...I don't know....you make
me really angry....for God's sake....{laughs}. The next thing
was to get him to ride on the back of the scooter. I said the
only way I can show you Rome is by us whizzing around the
city, we can go everywhere. No, no, I won't go on the back of
that thing. He'd tried it at Jollytown and he'd jumped off half
way across the airfield, jumped off and fallen off. And I said
well, it's going to spoil it if you don't, because we can't be
walking and bussing, it's too hot for that. Anyway, come in
this bar and we'll have a chat. Buon Giorno, due grappa.
What's this, lad? Oh it's a little drink, not very strong. Drink
it in one go. Lets walk down the street and have a talk about
it. We walk down the street to another bar. Signori? Buon
Giorno, due grappa. And after maybe the third one, I said
now, traffic's very quiet at the moment _ the biggest lie I've
ever told, Roman traffic is elbow to elbow any time of night
or day. I said come on, let's just have a little trial. Eh, all
right, lad. And he did. And I said for God's sake sit still, don't
fidget about. 'Cause that's so dangerous...And there we
were, down the middle of the road, six rows of traffic,
Brmmmmm...!! No crash hats. And of course that made it.
He was very excited. Never having done that in his life. So
that was a marvellous visit, was Father's visit. I've got a
photograph of him somewhere, getting back on the train at
Rome terminus. Still with his suit and pipe, every inch the
English gentleman. They don't travel like that any more, do
they? With their shell suits and their slob outfits. Well, give
us a rest a moment, Joss. {end of tape}. Where were we at?

J Well, we've hopped about quite a bit, really. You didn't

really tell me about National Service, you just touched on it.
 138

B Let's go back to then. Did I tell you about working in the

tailor's shop?

J You told me briefly about that. You worked for a couple of

years in the tailor's shop before going into National Service.

B It was I think particularly fortunate in those days, the late

nineteen fifties, that a young man aged eighteen had no
option other than to go into the military. Your commitment
was only a two year commitment but unless you asked for - I
forget the word - a deferment, - if for example you had a
place at university or art school one could have
circumvented it, and in fact I would just have missed it had I
gone to art school for three years I think or four years. But
there was no thought of that. I decided I wanted to go to art
school at the age of sixteen. But I was quite happy to do this
National Service. And I went to the recruitment place in
Sheffield, and told them I wanted to be a sailor. And I don't
know why, but I don't think they took me quite seriously.
They gave me an examination to sit, and I came extremely
low down on this examination. And they told me, and this is
quite truthful, they said we can only offer you a nine year
engagement as a stoker. I think they were pulling my leg a
wee bit there... but anyway there was no place for me in the
Navy. The army, I don't know, I don't think I was attracted
to, and the Air Force, well, I wasn't passionate about that,
not being of flying instinct. But we settled for the RAF. But
again on my exam results, I wasn't bright enough to go as a
two year engagement, I had to sign on for three years,
otherwise I would have had to go in the Pioneer Corps, again
whether they were pulling my leg, I don't know, but anyway
I had no option other than to accept a three year
engagement rather than a two year engagement. Well, that
as it proved, was a great blessing. The fine thing about
National Service, and everbody says it,- all my
contemporaries were all saying the same thing,- it should
never have been stopped, it's a wonderful discipline for a
young man, it's a great education in itself, and sure, it is.
There you are in a hut in the middle of England,
Bedfordshire, Cardington, with twenty five wildly assorted
youths. Farm labourers, ex miners, old men as well as young
men, rebels, spivs, complete mix, twenty, twenty five of you
in the room. I was particularly lucky in that my Uncle Leslie
as a farewell gift gave me one of those beautiful editions of
a Shropshire Lad. Houseman, I don't know whether you were
aware of this, had all those reprints of his famous work, he'd
paid for them himself. He didn't make money out of
Shropshire Lad, he put it all back into making it readily
available, and it has been one of the best sellers of this
 139

century as you know. My copy was leather bound. I suppose

you know the little pocket copy, no illustrations. And after
the preliminary eight weeks of, what did they call it, square
bashing, Basic Training, I think they called it, which really
was very, very hard, Very hard, up at six in the morning,
strip down all your belts and your brasses and blancoing,
brassoing and spit and polishing your boots . And I got off to
a jolly good start as it happens, because the day after we'd
been sworn in as members of our Queens legion, we were
asked to produce our Identity cards, which we'd been given
the previous day, a little blue card called a 1250, it's your
most important document while you're in the service, and of
course I'd lost mine. Typical thing to do, but I'd lost it. So I
was told that I was on a charge. I didn't know quite what
that meant. And I was marched into the CO's office
{imitates RSM} Left right, left right, left. And the CO heard
the evidence and said, Well, confined to barracks for one
week. And I thought well, that's a joke, because we're not
allowed out of the bloody barracks! So I went out with a big
grin on my face. But of course it wasn't as funny as I'd
thought. Confined to barracks meant you had to report to
the guardhouse I think at 6 am, do one hour's menial task
like scrubbing the floor or polishing the floor on hands and
knees in your work kit. Then you had to rush back and in
about ten minutes buckle up all your belts an brasses and
be on parade immaculate, and then at twelve noon instead
of relaxing for half an hour, you were off to the guardroom
again for another session of spit and polish and bullshit. And
it's all that a living man could sustain. Just to keep going
without dropping further into the shit day by day. Very easy
to do that. To get off to a bad start, and to remain at square
one. There was a magnificent physical specimen called Ross,
who came from the Isle of Ross. he was about six foot four
and as handsome a Highlander as you ever saw. Probably
came from a clan of mad chieftains of fighters with
claymores. And he could not accept discipline. And he
suffered a similar fate, but wouldn't knuckle under when
there was option but to do that. And he was still there, at
the end of eight weeks he was still in his so-called first
week, because he'd been on jankers all the time. He's
probably still there for all I know {J laughs}. So that's pride,
you see. They had to break his pride. What affected me was
that all the lads in the billet gathered round, one saying,
Well, I'll do your blancoing and another, Well, I'll do your
brassoing, and when I dashed back with minutes to go
before On Parade they all dressed me and made sure I was
accoutred in correct style, so the fault could not be found.
So in the very first week I became a personality in that
particular intake. Not a leader of the pack, but a person who
was treated with some respect and affection by one's
 140

colleagues. Very good. So that did no harm at all. Then,

later, I discovered that I had a talent for spit and polish on
the toes of boots. Literally do it with spit and polish, and a
rag and a spoon, and you go in tiny tiny circles over and
over and over a boot cap hour after hour until you get those
boot caps shining so you could literally shave in them. Well,
I was the best in the billet for doing that. So I would do
anybody's boots in exchange for my webbing and my
brasses etc. I was very happy just to sit on the bed spit and
polishing and other people doing the other jobs. We had
three weeks of that - four weeks - before we were allowed
out of camp, and then we were allowed out, no,no,no, we
were allowed home for a brief weekend during the eight
weeks, by which time every second word had become fuck.
This was de rigeur. Nobody spoke any differently. What's the
fucking time? Everything was....and you didn't have plugs in
the wash basins in the communal wash house, so you
learned to tear off strips of lavatory paper and stick those at
the bottom of the bowl, so you could fill the bowl just
enough to have an adequate wash. So those are two
important things that one learned in that initial period. And
of course the first week that one went home, one was
rushing round the house saying, what's for fucking supper,
Mum? What's the fucking time {chuckles}

J That must have gone down very well!

B: Yeah, we all compared noted afterwards and it was just

the same. Then, thank God, that was completed. And we
were sent to Shropshire, to Bridgenorth, by roundabout
country railway line, that would be late summer, hot late
summer. Magical ride from Cardington, Bedfordshire, to
Bridgenorth, Shropshire. I've never traced the route on a
map. One looked out the window and suddenly there was
the Iron Bridge of Coalbrookdale. One had never seen it or
heard of it, but there it was. In its 1850's splendour, with
woodsmoke drifting in the air. Thoroughly romantic place.
And so Fate had taken me where Uncle Leslie's book had
anticipated. I was in Shropshire surrounded by the Long
Mind, and Clee and Wenlock Edge, which Leslie insisted was
pronounced Wennock Edge, but I've never heard anybody
before or since call it Wennock Edge. And we settled down
there for another, very enjoyable period. Let out of the camp
periodically. Excursions into the town, Bridgenorth, about
four miles away. Smokey little pubs. Wonderful old-
fashioned pubs Like the Blue Anchor. Very few left now.
Every pub was like that. Go down three steps into a dark
smoky interior, with old men smoking shag tobacco,
speaking in lovely broad Midlands accents. Very friendly.
Lovely. Went to a dance one night. Clicked with a young girl.
 141

She said you can come back to our caravan if you find a
bloke for my mate. So I thought I'd got just the fellow in the
old Scot, who was the retired coal miner, who was a married
man in his late thirties. Undernourished white shrimp of a
man. With a dialect you could not penetrate - you couldn't
talk to him. But I put the proposition to him that if he would
dance with my lady friends girl we were all right for a night
in their caravan. So that's how that finished. I can remember
the evening in the caravan, the four of us on the double
bed. And then I can remember climbing over the wire fence
at dawn. How one got from the caravan back to the
camp.....these things are blotted out by memory aren't
they? Very strange how memory edits. And I can remember
how we were running and crawling across open spaces so
the guards would not see us, until finally...we'd have been in
serious trouble, serious trouble. That would have been a
glasshouse job, - proper prison. But we got back, and then
of course, absolute heroes! The first two men to break the
rules and then get off with a couple of girls. Every
detail....most of the details I didn't understand when they
asked me, Did you do this and did you do that? I tried to look
knowing and smirk, but I didn't really know quite what I was
expected to have done. Anyway that furthered one's
standing. As a two GCE grammar school boy one was
climbing high in the echelons of squaddy land. Then we
were asked one day, where would we like to go. And we were
given a choice of places. And one of the places was
Singapore. So I thought, well, that sounds interesting, I'd
like to go to Singapore. And what trade would you like to do?
Well. I don't have a trade. I didn't want to be a photographer
or a carpenter. If I'd had any sense I would have learnt
something, I would have learnt photography. But I didn't
have any sense, so I simply said I'd be a clerk, which is
really the lowest of the low. Any fool can be a clerk. No
qualifications. So they said alright, you can be a clerk if you
want to go to Singapore. So the next thing, a list is posted
up, and yes, I can be a clerk and I'm going to RAF Celle near
Hanover in Germany. Well, that was as near to Singapore as
I got. But it was a very, very happy choice, because living in
Germany at that time, late fifties, we were on what they
called Active Service, which meant we were paid a small
supplement. We were only a few miles from the Russian
border, and of course there was great excitement about
invasions from the east and so on, so it was quite a
stimulating place. We were allowed out of camp; we were
allowed out into Hanover and into the lovely black and white
"faschwerk" town of Celle with its Schloss. And one could
even go out in civvies. And we had some beautiful times. I
bought the three piece suit from Hector Powe, lovely
thornproof tweed, with double breasted waistcoat, and
 142

suede shoes. Quite the dandy. And dressed so, myself and a
couple of pals would go on pub crawls around the taverns
and finish up with bratkartofel and roasted duck or speigelei
or stammermachs - ham on slices of brown buttered bread
with an egg on top - delicious peasant food cooked, always,
by old ladies. Who would turn their back room into a dining
room to make a bit of money. Of course they had no money.
They were devastated. And they were lovely old-fashioned
cooks these ladies, and not unfriendly, not unfriendly at all.
On one notorious occasion we broke out of camp dressed in
our tweeds but we'd ascertained that the post office wagon
would be leaving the guardhouse at a quarter past five in
the evening, and being pals of the officer in command of
post, we said well could we hide beneath the post bags, just
before the wagon popped to the guardhouse, where it would
then be waved through. And Pilot-Officer Boothlay, a wild
Scot, said of course. So we did that, and we had a wonderful
night out. That was the evening we went to the grandest
hotel in town. A fine long menu of classical French/German
cuisine. And we drank wine. And afterwards we always
drank cherry brandy for some reason; that was the "in"
drink. And we were in such good spirits, in such a good
mood. And we smiled to see these two soldierly six foot six
army figures strolling across the heavily carpeted salon,
with their red caps (chuckling). And with one standing
behind my mate Doyle and one standing behind myself. And
yes, we'd been nabbed (laughing) so we were carried off in
chains and put into prison. That was a small adventure.
During this time as a clerk it was slowly established that I
was either useless or I did not wish to be of any use. My way
of dealing with the discipline and the frequent absurdity of
the situation, of doing a job you had no heart for, of being
somewhere you would never have chosen to be, - nobody
would have chosen to be doing three years National Service,
don't get me wrong, one made it into a pleasure, but one
didn't want to do it, none of us wanted to do it. So some
responded by throwing themselves into it, and studying and
going up in rank and becoming corporal and even becoming
sargeant in three years and earning good money and
learning worthwhile trades like accountancy and book-
keeping, technical trades or driving. And I chose to, not
mentally, but in a sense to stagnate, not to develop. I
belonged to a small coterie of what would be called
intellectuals. We talked a lot about books, about Ezra Pound
about Aldous Huxley, about TS Elliot, about the fashionable
avant-gard artists of the day that you would expect. It
doesn't follow that we understood their work necessarily.
Though a lot of it did stick. We were nuts about Dylan
Thomas - of course he was still alive at that time. We'd give
readings to each other from Under Milk Wood. I first heard
 143

Beethovens Ninth Symphony at the gramaphone and record

club. I bought a heap of 78 rpm gramaphone records of Igor
Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. So we were a cultured little
group drawn from parts of the headquarters. But
academically in military terms I was a definite failure. And
so I realised I was being pushed around from one office to
another. Quite sensitively, to see if I could find myself a
place. I became the assistant to the dentist. And I didn't like
him. But the job was very easy, but no I was passed on from
that to another office, and then to become secretary to the
Flight Sergeant in charge of administration in the
Headquarters. So he was quite important. And I became the
filing clerk. I had access to all the files appertaining to
business on camp. Secret, Top Secret, Confidential, it was
my job to file away papers, to know where to go for so-and-
so's Court Martial I'd be able to put my hand on that file and
read all the juicy bits. How he'd been knocking off a German
national and got into a fight with street thugs in Hanover
and so on and so on. It was quite interesting. But what I
didn't really understand was the flight sergeant was as
obvious a little poofter as you could hope to see. He was
little and round with piggy little round eyes and a smirk, and
everything about him was slightly oily, slightly greasy. And
he would play... his passion was golf, which he pronounced
goaf - I'm going to play goaf this afternoon. And he did his
best to strike up a sort of eye-fluttering relationship with
me. I just about understood what was going on, but I didn't
know much about that sort of thing. But I didn't like it. So it
was time to move on again. And they finally put me into a
big office - the size of this - with a German national, they
were called GSO.... German what was it I can't remember...
and they were dressed in crude felt Grau, a crude cheap
green cloth. And they were the ones who had to do the
menial tasks in this enormous headquarters. So our
Commanding officer and Adjutant would be dressed in fine
barathea cloths, we would be well dressed and these
wretched Germans were dressed almost like Russian mujiks,
if that's the word. And of course most of them had a chip on
their shoulder... they didn't show a lot of affection toward
the British conquering staff. And my chap, - he was under
me, and I was the lowest of the low - I never went up in rank
in all of the three years, which takes a lot of doing. Even
people like Peter Ustinov and Peter Cook actually gained a
rank in the process of doing their National Service - my chap
was called Herr Blanke, Mr White, bald headed, short, tubby.
Lovely grin...smile I should say. And it was his job to type -
God knows what, nothing important, but he sat in his corner
typing and I sat on the other side by my window writing
poetry, and when I'd perfected a poem, I'd walk across the
office and give it to Herr Blanke, who would then spend the
 144

rest of the day laying it out in the most beautiful way on the
paper and typing out my latest poem. The poems were
influenced a lot by such poets as W.H Davies, -"Oh what are
we, to stand and stare/ we have no time..... I can't
remember quite, but that sort of ballady stuff, and Herr
Blanke thought these were wonderful, and told me I would
be a great poet in civilian life. And we then discovered a
mutual love for Italy and we would talk, fantasise, and he
would talk about Goethe and his travels in Italy, and
compare notes about where we'd been. To Gardazee, to
Lago di Maggiore, Perugia, Oh we became very very fond
friends. And we were undisturbed in this office. And the
office had two functions. One I was receipt, at least weekly,
of an enormous sack, from England which contained what
we called Amendments. The lads who were keeping the
squadrons, the jet planes, up to date, worked from manuals,
and these technical manual were in the constant process of
being updated. So an amendment might say...."Page 85 para
15 (a) instead of five turns of the screw now make seven
turns of the screw. So this had to be cut out and pasted into
every one of the master copy of the amendments which then
theoretically went out to the squadrons and then returned
to me. And I suppose it was quite important. And I didn't do
it! I never did it. These sacks arrived, and I found a corner
where I could put them, and they mounted up until it
became a sort of job where you can't go back and start
doing it, -it had got too bad. It just mounted up and
mounted up. And there was a constant nag there, -
occasionally an irate technician...sergeant, flight sergeant,
technical sergeant...would come in a say what about
amendment July 57? And I'd look in the latest sack....ah. this
is the one, it's just arrived, not got round to dealing with it.
Here you are. Occasionally there would be that. But apart
from that these sacks just gathered dust. And
mounted....mounted. So that was a bad thing at the back of
my mind because I don't suppose most of these
amendments were important , but one may have been
important, and a plane could have crashed...a war could
have have been lost.. And the other branch of my duties,
much more interesting, I was in charge of the stationery for
the whole of the camp. This was particularly for the
Headquarters. So if you as a sergeant in charge of a part of
the admin office needed 50 sheets of carbon paper, you
would come and knock on the little flap that I could put up
and peer at you through with my door locked...yes? And I
soon found because everybody who came to see me wanted
something I could get away with very very loose behaviour.
So I soon dropped rank for example; instead of yes,
sergeant, it might be yes, sarge, or Oh Hullo, or just, Yes?
And that would throw them a little bit, but they wanted
 145

something so they couldn't just say - Do you know whom

you're addressing, address me as sergeant, young man, or
you'll be on a charge. They didn't do that. -Have you got
fifty sheets of carbon paper, blue? Hmmmn. Don't think so,
don't think so. Bear with me, just a moment. Put the little
shutter down....{laughs} go and smoke a fag in the
corner...carbon paper like this. Go back and say, well...we've
got a bit of a problem here. I've got black. Is that any good?
Oh yes, thank you very much, thank you very much! It's all
right, all right, for you it's a pleasure....Id give them their
black.... But again, as the sacks were piling up my stock of
stationery, which had been a very well equipped store, was
going down, because I had to make a requisition notice
every month to RAF Kidbrook, South London, saying, I want
five thousand buff envelopes, manila envelopes and so on
and so on. And again I didn't do it. All I did, all, literally, was
draw pictures, paint some pictures - I'd got my paints in the
office. And I'd got all sorts of silly sayings pinned up that I'd
culled from the classics like a quotation from Ezra Pound
about standing "Favella in tempesta" a butterfly in Hell
{chuckles} I thought that was a rather clever thing to have
pinned up. Doman, Domani, manana. And then writing my
poems, and Herr Blanke bringing this little book up to its
completion. And occasional locks on the door. And I had one
particular bete noir. A very ugly grey haired flight sergeant
in charge of pay. He was a powerful man and he was a
disciplinarian. And he would shout at you. Outside
headquarters. "Airman, adjust your cap." If you were
wearing your beret at a bit of a jaunty angle. All that sort of
thing. Well, by this time I was really getting into my stride
at RAF Celle, with the intellectual bohemian crowd, and I'd
taken to not wearing socks, as I suppose a display of non-
conformity. And I'd taken the stiffness out of my beret so
that the badge just under the beret hung more like an onion
sellers beret than an airman's. And my boots had gone grey,
because I no longer ever, ever polished them. And the laces
had become broken and broken so my boots were held on by
just maybe twelve inches of lace that secured the middle
part of the boot. And then very, very baggy unpressed
grey/blue grey trousers. And I no longer walked with a
straight back with thumbs down etcetera, but short of
shambled as one imagined Jean-Paul Sartre might walk.
Another mate of mine at the time, a highly intelligent
German Jewish man called Hermann, about this time had
taken to walking every where with one foot in the gutter.
Wherever he went, anywhere, he walked with one foot in the
gutter. It was part of the same silly game we were playing.
Well, obviously, my flight sergeant was aware of this. And I
could see he was on a knife edge what to do about it.
Because the big dream of his life. He came and knocked on
 146

my door. Oh, good morning flight sergeant, can I help you.

Yes, I want a hard cover A to Z index book. Very grand
books. Oh, they're ever so hard to come by, you know that
don't you? Yes, yes. And I say, And I've got some on order. I
can't let you have one now. Oh can you...-I can't give you
idea, but what I can you, for yourself, I can let you have six
HB pencils straight away now, just between you and me.
Oh...thank you very much. You see, he didn't quite know
which way to jump. I'd give him six HB pencils and he'd trot
off, not knowing whether he'd won or lost that particular
round. And then it got to a state where my store was
literally empty shelves. I'd scarcely got anything, and
people were beginning to talk. News was getting round that
things weren't happening as they should do. Now at that
time I was particularly fond of phoning up different offices
with a sheet of tissue paper between the telephone and
oneself and assuming voices and identities. So I would
phone up the general headquarters office, which was
peopled by about six people at typewriters, and I would say
{assuming plummy accents} Oh. Hello...RAF Farn here...can
you hear me? Yes can hear you perf...Now this is Pilot
Officer Smithson. I think you know me actually. Oh yes sir..
--- So I'd do that sort of thing and send them on silly wild
goose chases. So I thought I can put this to better use. So I
telephoned a stationery department, ascertained who the
officer in charge of stationery was at RAF Wildenrath, about
sixty miles from us. The same style. {plummy} RAF Celle
here. Look we've a bit of a fix old boy. (Having introduced
myself as PO somebody or other) Been let down by the
chappy in our stationery office. Got bugger all here. Can you
let us have a few goods if I send a lorry over, just pile it all
on the back of the lorry would you? Appreciate it greatly.
Jolly good. Thanks a lot. Our chap'll be over tomorrow, good,
good. So then we had to arrange to steal a lorry. So we know
the transport officer, -we've got a bit of dodgy business can
we borrow a lorry for tomorrow. And my mate Raymond
Morgan, the Swansea Welshman, could drive, though he
didn't have licences or anything. And off we toddled on that
excursion. I remember just driving off. Narrow cobbled
streets ten foot wide. Across open countryside lined with
cherry trees. D'you know those Mid-European streets? I
don't remember any traffic. I don't remember any towns, I
just remember those idyllic lanes over rolling countryside
and a great sense of excitement. A nd when we got to RAF
Wildenrath, they were waiting for us. We said we'd been
sent by PO so and so. The officer in charge was very civil
and said well, you chaps better have a bit of breakfast while
we're loading up the wagon. So we sat down in the NAAFI
and were entertained with a very handsome breakfast as I
remember and lo and behold our lorry was full to the top of
 147

the very stuff we wanted. So we trundled off back and get a

few friends in the know to help us unload at dusk while the
headquarters were quiet, and then my shelves were full
again. So that was one of the more interesting coups that
we brought off.

J And they never found out about it?

B No, No. You see I think one had soon learned the fairly
basic thing about it, being in the military - it must be even
more so in wartime - nobody knows what the hell is going
on. All you have to do is assume a tone of authority and
you've got your authority. They were all in the dark from top
to bottom. And all of the non-commissioned officers are so
shit-scared of their own rank and standing that they won't
take an initiative. And ferret out something suspicious, they
will look the other way. So it didn't take a lot of psychology
to recognise that! And so it happened that my flight
sergeant in charge of pay came again knocking on my little
wooden door. And I'd got everything that he'd dreamed of by
this time! And I put the A to Z index books deliberately on
the very top shelf above my desk. And the only way you
could get to this very top shelf was by literally standing on
the desk. So this time I said, Now, Flight, (Flight is how you
address a flight sergeant, it's a bit familiar is that) Now
Flight I don't want you standing around in the corridor. You
come in, I'll unlock the door. Now it's this A to Z book isn't it?
Yes. Well, I've made big efforts and I've secured one or two,
and you're top of my list. Oh, I'm really pleased about this,
thank you. So I brought him across the office and then I
stand on my chair, and pulling my trouser I stand on the
table of course exposing about four inches of grey naked
ankle above my dirty boots and below my unpressed
trousers, and I could feel his eyes go out on stoppers, like
something in the Beano, and I could feel him like an animal
quivering with supressed rage. And again he had this
terrible dilemma of whether to pounce and have me flung
into irons in the jail and risk not getting his book, or
whether to gulp, stomach his pride and walk away with his
book. So of course I presented him with his book and still
trembling he went off down the corridor with his prize...
That was my biggest victory. Fortunately one left RAF Celle
before the dust covered sacks were discovered. One left
there with a fairly louche reputation. The card one was
given to offer to prospective place of employment, mine
read, "A/C1 Ingham is an artistic type of Airman." That's all
it said.

J That was it?

 148

B{laughing} Yes. {Both laugh}

J So you were in RAF Celle for all three years?

B Yes, I suppose for a good two, two and a half years. And
one discovered a strange anomaly. That on a three year
term one was allowed 52 days leave, quite a lot. Which
included travel passes back to England etcetera. As a two
year man one was allowed fourteen days over the whole two
year period, and in addition to that, one could have a travel
warrant, certainly if one had mates in the Headquarters
head office, one could get a travle warrant to take one fifty
miles over any border. So I could go from Hanover to Paris
and pay maybe a couple of pounds... [end of tape side]
There was an extremely decent Northumbrian, or I should
say Geordie, chap who was the head clerk, he was a
sergeant in the the Headquarters. Three year man, like
myself. But the sort of man who whatever he does, makes a
job of it, does it well, and he was incredibly efficient. Eric
Goodacre. Often wondered what happened to Eric. And he
said to me one time well, at Easter time, I'm going to go
down to Rome, and then I want to go to Assisi and then I
want to go to Perugia, would you like to come with me? So I
said yes, wonderful. I'd already been to Italy aged sixteen so
this would be aged eighteen and a half. Eric booked the
hotels in advance, right in the centre of Rome. Lovely old-
fashioned hotel in Perugia. The travel arrangements were
perfect. He knew an old man in Rome who became our guide
and took us round every where we should have gone, round
the Campo di Fiore etcetera. That was a wonderful holiday.
And then having done that with a companion, I began to do
that alone. And one year I'd calculated how many days
holiday, or leave as it was called, I'd had in that year, - I'd
had a hundred days leave in either either Paris, the Italian
Lakes, or Perugia. And that was a wonderful bonus. Through
the Alps, waking up at dawn. Bleak station between the
steep mountains of Doma D'Osala, Oh wonderful! And with a
lot of money in one's pocket. 'Cos one was richer than the
Germans, richer than the Italians. One could afford anything
really without knowing it. One time I went to Paris in
January, and I decided to take the overnight train to
Marseilles, and walk along the South of France. Had a huge
ex-commando rucksack, full of oil paints
and a sketching easel. Wearing a long English riding coat,
you know those old white riding coats we used to wear, and
an enormous woolen scarf down to my ankles, just stopping
where the day's walk finished. Just walking along roads,
main roads, not a country walk. Wonderful. Taking a lift form
a motorist here, meeting somebody there. Lovely time. So
that was a great education. So by the time one came out at
 149

the age of twenty one, having applied to go to Dewsbury

and Batley College of Art, which was the neighbouring place
to where my parents were living, or to St Martin's, which
was my idea, which was in London. They both said yes on
very little evidence of work. Sketch books mostly. And of
course I chose the St Martin's option. Let out of the military
in I think May/June. Art school in the middle of September.
All those months of freedom to oneself, in an England that
still hadn't been buggered up. I took my racing bike and just
rode around England, through all the old cathedral cities,
visiting the second hand bookshops, sleeping under hedges,
sleeping in youth hostels, bed and breakfasts, finally down
to Swansea to meet my ex-military mate Raymond Morgan.
Who lived in Rodney Street. Which is a street about a mile
and a half long of back to back houses. No motor cars. Just
beautiful old-fashioned working class dockland street, such
as used to be. Raymond had told me about his father,- many
a story about his father George, who was chronically work-
shy. He was a highly interesting state of that particular
condition. He'd got it in a galloping variety of work-shyness!
So I stopped at a pub at the end of Rodney Street and said
I'm looking for a mate of mine called Morgan. And everybody
in the pub laughed. And I said well what has he done, why
do you laugh? Now, they say, d'you want Morgan next door
or Morgan three doors down, or Dai Morgan or Morgan the
bread over there, and we've got Morgan the bicycle a bit
further down. They're all bloody Morgans down Rodney St.
So I set of walking down this hot sunny street without my
bike , - Oh I'd left my bike in Herefordshire, - and evry few
people around, and I must have walked about a thousand
yards, and I saw a figure in white tunic shirt - that is without
the collar - and a pair of scruffy old grey flannels and a pair
of white plimsolls, sitting on a windowsill, hands in pockets,
obviously totally at ease with himself and the world. Walked
past him a couple of feet. Walked back and said, George
Morgan? Oh yes, boy. You've got a son Raymond? Oh you're
Bryan from the bloody military, oh come in! And we had such
time, such a whale of a time. Afternoon drinking. After the
pubs closed they drew the curtains and locked the doors,
and we drank our beer through until the evening, and then
went midnight bathing, - Swansea beach was just under the
railway arch. Followed in the footsteps of Dylan Thomas that
was not at that time a theme park what d'you call it, well
like what they've done with Robert Louis Stevenson; there
wasn't a Dylan Thomas Trail at that time. there probably is
now. This is the pub where of course Rodneys aunt used to
work, one of Dylan's favourite drinking pubs. the one that
Dylan describes so beautifully in the last story in his
collection of stories, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog.
The last story is called is called One Warm Saturday or
 150

something to that...a most beautiful story, a wonderful

story. And he describes an evening in this pub where he
meets a tart and goes off back to a tenement, with a few
drunks and his lovely tart. Any way, Raymond's aunt used to
work there and she said
Oh, dirty minded little man! He used to write me poems and
I threw them in the waste bin, they were filthy! {both
laugh} So it was still very much a living contact. Not many
people knew about Dylan Thomas. They did in Swansea, and
a few literary folk, but no more than that. Very exclusive - I
liked that! And so one pottered around England in that way.
In Worcestershire or Leominster... I was thrilled to see a
battered old van with the name of a pop group scrawled on
the side, - pop groups were unknown in those days, and this
was Chasman Devitt and his Skiffle Group - you probably
know their famous song Freight Train? (sings) Freight train,
Freight train, going so fast....

J Oh that one, yes.

B That one. The Vipers they called themselves, not the

Weavers, which was the American group, but they were very
influenced by the Weavers, the Vipers. And I stared at this
band, parked in a suburban avenue, and I thought, you
know, I'm in touch with great things. I could have become a
groupie then and there had they appeared! And then so to
Art School come the September at St Martin's, about whiich
I think we've already spoken.

J What...your parents had moved hadn't they. They'd moved

down south hadn't they?

B No, No, they didn't move out of the county. They moved...I
always think of them as pure West Riding...Halifax, Elland,
Bradford. But they they moved to Dewsbury. They moved to
a small mining town {unintell} called South Empsall. Lost
money in that shop. By this time he was no longer in the big
time. He was supported by... Katy you might be blocking the
sound waves {cat protesting} , yes... So by this time they
were living outside Dewsbury in a village called Thornhill.
Thornhill. And Father had a drapers shop called Mutton
House, a real Arnold Bennett, old fashioned place with a
mahogany - wide staircase with a mahogany balustrade
going up to the firts floor, that was fitted out in fine
Victorian fashion, and a kitchen let into the back - a great
mantlepiece with big open fire that was always full of hot
coals. And a bottle of sherry on a big old table. A very
distinguished place. But almost a s soon as they took the
shop over they started knocking down all the back to back
houses around there. For miles in every direction. And that
 151

of course had been his trade. And putting the poor folk into
high rise flats miles away.

J One of the great mistakes of the age.

B Oh, grotesque. But even then one could see it was wrong.
I used to rail against this and I was in a minority. But one
could see it. I used to argue that these houses were good,
could be refurbished. A lot of them stone-built. Outside
lavatory. It would have been very easy to make them into
dignified houses as they were. That was awful. but doubly
awful that a 21 year old student could say then what people
are just beginning to say now.

J I think people did say it at the the time. The tenants

themselves said it at the time.

B Ah maybe they did yeh.

J So your introduction to the joys of sex was in the course of

your National service was it or were you precocious?

B Oh, no. No, no, no! Very slow in those days! A sort of
fumbling process really. No clear cut big event that set one
on the way. One monstrous big chance that I missed. I think
that's why I've pursued a certain type of particularly plump
dark haired woman ever since, to try and make up for this
one embarrassingly grotesque failure, oh dear, oh dear...

J Why? Why the failure? You didn't realise you were being
invited, or...?

B Yes. I still suffer from being ultra well behaved. And to be

well behaved, you didn't do all sorts of things. And you
didn't take advantage of a young woman whose parents
were away for a week-end.

J Good Lord....

B Yes, terrible, terrible, terrible! There's still a residue of

that, I think, in that regard.

J You have to scrape around to find it though! {laughs}

B She invited me to her house, this would be when I was

about seventeen, I suppose. Maxine, she was called. She
was absolutely plump and voluptuous and.....wonderful. She
plied me with drink. We rolled around on the carpet as one
used to do in those days. And then she said she was hot, so I
thought, Oh, she's hot. She went upstairs and came down
 152

wearing a negligee and I thought Oh well, she'll be cooler in

that. So we carried on our groping around, and then she
said It's hot in here, let's go up into the bedroom. And she
lay on the big double bed and I didn't consolidate things.
Can't believe it! But that was seventeen years old, you see.
At a certain stage I said, It's time to be going now, Maxine, it
was a lovely evening. Thank you for the gin. I just can't
believe it, can't believe it. Ha! I mean that would have been
the most perfect start, because she knew a fair bit more
than I, though not sufficient to detain me, - she was still
very shy as well obviously, but she couldn't do much more
than she had done, could she, poor dear.

J Lord, no.

B No. So sexual affairs just came in slowly and.....not

particularly dignified or handsome I don't think...just bit by
bit, as I imagine it is for most people.

J Well, of course you were at art school at the beginning of

the sixties, weren't you? B Yes. J So right in the early part of
the permissive era.

B. Well, the late fifties or the early sixties. Philip Larkin has
a lot to say for the generation the decade or a couple of
decades older than myself. What's his famous poem about
Sex began in nineteen sixty four....I think they were
probably less adept and promiscuous than my generation;
we did slowly get off the ground, but it was a slow process,
with no golden dawn of awakening. But as Larkin says in so
many of his poems, that's how things are. There's a lovely
poem where he describes his railway train stopping
travelling England by an unfamiliar line and sees Coventry
and.... Oh let me read you the poem, stop the machine a
moment. ^ Poem I just touched on which is rather oft
quoted:

Sexual Intercourse began in nineteen sixty three

Which was rather late for me.
Between the end of the Chatterly ban
and the Beatles first LP
Up 'til then, there'd only been
a sort of bargaining. A wrangle for a ring
A shame that started at sixteen
and spread to everything
Then, all at once, the quarrel sank
everyone felt the same, and every night became
a brilliant breaking of the bank,
 153

A quite unloseable game

So life was never better than in 1963,
Though just too late for me,
Between the end of the Chatterly ban
and the Beatles first LP.

Can't remember the first line, dammit, dammit, dammit.

{Pause} Now this poem by Philip Larkin who is, what,
twenty years farther back in history than oneself, so it
doesn't quite echo one's own experiences, in fact not at all.
But there's something vaguely relevant. It's called
I remember, I remember.

Coming up England, by a different line for once,

Early in the cold new year, we stopped
And watching men with number plates
sprint down the platform to familiar gates,
"Why, Coventry!" I exclaimed. "I was born here."
I leant far out and squinnied for a sign
that this was still the town that had been mine
so long, but found I wasn't even clear
which side was which. From where
those cycle crates were standing had we annually
departed for all those family hols? A whistle went.
Things moved. I sat back
staring at my boots.
Was that, my friend smiled,
where you have your roots?
Oh, only when my childhood was unspent,
I wanted to retort. Just where I started.
By now I'd got the whole place clearly charted
Our garden first, where I did not invent
blinding theologies of flowers and fruits
and wasn't spoken to by an old hat.
And here we have that splendid farrow ley
I never ran to when I got depressed
The boys all biceps and the girls all chest.
They're coming forward. Their farm where
I could be really myself. I'll show you come to that
the bracken where I never trembling sat
determined to go through with it.
Where she lay back and all became a burning mist.
And in those offices my doggerel was not set up
in blunt ten point, nor read by a distinguished cousin
the mayor, who told my father
"There before us, had we the gift to see ahead..."
"You look as though you wish the place in hell," my friend
said
"Judging from your face."
"Oh well, I suppose it's not the place's fault, I said.
 154

Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.

I do love his dry ironic self-deprecatory tone, and of course

the tone of the period too.

J Of course you very much loved the place you were brought
up. You're still very fond of Yorkshire.

B Yes, but in a lot of ways I'm like that because I left the
Derbyshire/Yorkshire border at the age of 18 and never went
back. Thornhill before that I never belonged except as a
student going home for a few days. South Empsall before, a
wonderful mining village with wonderful miners who invited
us into their houses to drink bottled beer around their black
polished fiery grates and ovens. Lovely people. I could
identify to a degree, but I didn't belong to any of those. No
more than I belonged to Soley Bridge and Grandma Inghams
Victorian style and Uncle Leslie's nine foot long metal tipped
otter pole and hobnailed boots - going out beagling or otter
hunting. All part of my experience but I couldn't say that
was my background. So as far as that goes I can identify
with Mr Larkin...

J Well, wasn't it your background, though? Why do you feel

it was your background, because plainly it was your roots. It
was what you came from.

B I like backgrounds to be a bit more consistent than that.

For a start, as a Yorkshireman, I should have been born in
Yorkshire. I wasn't, so I got off to a bad start.

J Many people would say that was a sort of lawyers quibble.

Why should it matter?

B Well, maybe it doesn't matter at all, it doesn't unduly

worry me. But it's a fact.

J Well it obviously weighs very heavily with you, because

you mentioned it more than once.

B Doesn't mean it weighs heavily. It means it's there. For

example, during those schoolboy years mabe no more than
two years I don't recall. Living with Grandma Ingham at
Soley Bridge, walking with her at Hebden Bridge, London
Foot, Hebden Store Icould have passed similar flannel-
shorted sandalled ragged arsed youths of my own age and
one might have been Ted Hughes, and one might have been
Sir Bernard Ingham. Now they've become and are
vociferously Yorkshiremen. because somehow they've never
left it. And I have. David Hockney's a Yorkshireman, even
 155

though he's lived in California for 25 or 30 years. But he's a

Yorkshireman. And all the attributes and the defects are
seen in those terms, whereas I do feel that with my own
here and there from Hanover two years to Soho four years
to South Kensington three years to Stepney for seven years
in between those times to rome for one year to Cornwall for
many years, 30 years, I 've lost the right to think of myself
as a Yorkshireman. I'm not a mongrel, but I'm not a
Yorkshireman. I'm not a Cornishman.

J It's funny because I think a lot of your friends and people

who know you would think of you as a Yorkshireman. Even if
you don't think of yourself as one.

B Well, I'd be pleased to hear that...but...I can't identify....

J Last time you touched on the fact that when you first came
down to Cornwall you worked in a restaurant.

B A cafe.

J A cafe. What brought you down to Cornwall?

B Two of my colleagues in St Martin's College, in the long

holiday, I think of the first year. I remember seeing them off
at Paddington railway station and they had six pounds
between them and their ticket to Cornwall, and they were
going to spend the summer in Cornwall. The summer turned
out to be non-stop mist, sea fret drizzle and heavy rain for a
six week period. So they slept up under bushes and under
hedges. Must have had quite a rough time. And they got
picked up down in Kynance Cove by Old man Merrifield who
lived in Smuggler's Cottage in the cove. They just
happended to emerge from under a bush one early morning,
nine o'clock, as he was walking up the gloomy track, and he
said what the devil are you doing, and they said well we've
been sleeping under the bush; we're artists and we're
travelling in Cornwall. And Harold had a reputation for being
a grumpy old sod. But of course like all grumpy old sods, he
had a heart of gold. And he said, well you can't live like this.
And he said I've got a job I need doing. What is that? He
said I need a sign painting that will say SMUGGLERS
COTTAGE, CREAM TEAS, with the prices underneath that,
and I can hang that outside the cottage and get more trade.
If you will undertake to do that, I will let you sleep in that
little stone hut on the other side of the river there, above
the cottage. A bothy or barn about 8 foot by 10 foot,
perfectly adequate. And of course they leapt at that, and
Harold being a kind soul at sundown he would go up and
say, Do you boys want a bowl of soup, because we've
 156

cooked too much? And so that became an evening ritual and

theoretically they worked on their Smugglers Cottage Cream
Teas Price List, but never I think got beyond "SMUG"! or
"SM" and it was never completed. But they parted good
friends and Joan, Harold Merrifield's wife said if you know
anybody in London, any more student friends who would like
to come down and work for me next year serving cream
teas, doing the shopping, washing up, cutting sandwiches.
Can't offer any wages, but...free accommodation. So I
accepted that, thoroughly enjoyed it and came back I think
three consecutive years for about six weeks each time. On
wet days, I was allowed a day off and given a ladies bike
with a Sturmey Archer gears and a basket on the front to go
pottering round Mannacan doing brass rubbings, as one did
in those days....and on the very first afternoon down here I
walked up the other side of Smuggler's Cottage up to the
top, the moor, and lay down in the heather and went to
sleep. And woke up, looked all around. And in the distance I
could see that long stone cottage. So asked what is that
place, and they said it's called Jollytown, and people were
living there at that time, and I walked over and snooped
around...each year I did the same. And one year I met the
father in the meadows at dusk. And I was picking
mushrooms in his fields, and he said "It looks like you've got
a good crop of mushrooms there, boy." And I said yes, yes
these'll be lovely for our tea. Quite overlooking the fact that
they may well have been coming to the fields to collect their
own supper (chuckles). I said, I'm interested in that house.
Does anybody live there? He said "No, d'you want to see it?"
I said yes. And they showed me round the place with a stub
of candle no more than an inch and a half, which he kept
always in a weskit pocket. Funny, he never had a whole
candle, just an inch and a half stump. And he held it with
the hot wax dripping on to his horny hands - all sense of
physical outrage long since departed - I've seen clegg flies
settle on his cheek and leave a great red welt and he'd just
absent mindedly wipe his cheek as though a butterfly had
landed there. And then he said "Well, what d'you offer me,
boy?" Rent this was. And I thought well, is this a pound a
week job or is it a thousand pounds a year; I'd no idea.
Anyway, by that time I had to go back to the Royal College of
Art for another couple of years. And then I had to finish my
teaching commitment for a further year, and then go to
Rome for my splendid year in Italy. When I came back the
place was empty, and I was offered the place, the whole
place, for a pound a week. Eighteen rooms, the whole of
Jollytown, with the interconnecting door. No furniture. Not a
scrap. Just empty. A pound a week. And every time I went
out for a walk and came back and saw the building, I just
laughed. I thought I'm going to live here for my life, for a
 157

pound a week. Wonderful. And that's virtually how it's

turned out. I'm very lucky....
I think we'll break now Joss if you don't mind.
{later}
B How much time does that have?

J About ten minutes, probably.

B As you know I've always loved Italy. That's not too

strong a word. It's one's centre of gravity, I suppose you
might say. At one time I thought I'd inevitably live there.
My time as a student in London the axis was to New York.
All the artists of my generation and a bit older were off on
Harkness scholarships to America. Some of them sank
without trace. Some came back bloodied, and one or two
made the grade. But that never did appeal. But Tuscany,
and Umbria particularly, did. So having left the Royal
College, taught for a further year, part-time, undergone
the, -what do we call it?... -the examination, by the
Leverhulme board. I passed that. They said I could have a
scholarship that would last for nine months. And I had a
bit of money saved, so I reckoned I could go to Italy for
twelve months. So off I set. Can't remember the time of
year, though it must have been spring or summer. I stayed
with friends in Maturato, which is the county town of a
province called Marque. Over on the Adriatic coast.
Maturato a hill town forty minutes drive from the sea.
Unthreatened by tourism or populism of any sort. My
friends were two English lads who were teaching English
to Italian soldiers. Teaching by one of these methods. In
other words, my pals didn't speak good Italian
themselves, but they had the classroom talking like
parrots, and that was all that was required. They lived
with a charming peasant family, Signor Lucelli, and they
said they would put me up for a month if I cared....and
this we did; it was a merry time. A lot of two litre bottles
of white wine and trips in Fiat Cinquecentos to little
mountain villages looking in old half-forgotten painted
churches, talking a lot...telling jokes a lot... a very happy
time. And there I bought a bicycle, an old, rather old
fashioned Italian bicycle with upright handlebars, painted
dull maroon. I thought I would begin my stay in Italy by
touring over the favoured lands by bike, rather than
vespa. So Crispian Pigott - a Wykhamist - his one claim to
fame is that he was spanked on his bare bottom by Ted
Dexter! And a lovely man, a man as nice as his name. You
can only be a certain sort of man if you're called Crispian
Piggott, and he was every inch a Crispian Piggott. He
drove me over the mountains to Perugia with the bike
strapped on the top, and then left me in Perugia. I found
 158

modest accommodation, and then set off on a pilgrimage,

seeking paintings by Giotto, but mainly Piero della
Francesca, and of course it was a real eye-opener to go
along white dust tracks over the mountains, often
scarcely roads at all, between one village and another,
and walking through the landscape portrayed in Piero's
paintings. Absolutely unchanged. The white rocks, the
copses of olive trees, the occasional cypress, the white
lanes, the glaring light, and one was sweating one's way
through this in shorts, singlet and sandals. Almost a
penance. I remember pushing the bike up great mountain
roads and maybe walking uphill for two, three hours, with
sweat pouring off, stopping at any stream you find to
bathe and drink water. But a damn sight better than going
on what I'm sure is now advertised as the Piero Trail -
that's another trail that they've got. And I found the little
chapel at the village of Monterci. And it had to be opened
by an old peasant, because people didn't go there, though
it was by this time recognised. Michael Ayrton had
discovered it in the 1950's. Searching for a lost painting
by Piero, and he came across a stone hut as big as that,
you know, in a vineyard garden. And asked the old boy if
he had the key, and the old boy let him in. And there were
wheel barrows and little old petrol machines from
studding the ground and hoes and general implements
and mud, and thick with dust at the end, this heavenly
Pregnant Madonna by Piero della Francesca, which
probably hadn't been appreciated as a painting for four
hundred years. And so it was Mr Ayrton who put it back on
the Piero Trail. And then the wonderful Resurrection
painting in the Borgo San Sepulchro close by of Christ
standing up out of the tomb and his disciples asleep all
around him. So that was wonderful, and then I beat my
way back to the Adriatic. Over the mountains, over the
Appenines, I suppose. Fetched up at a rather louche Youth
Hostel on the Strade Stratale Adriatico, the main road that
zooms down the coast, which then wasn't too bad, it was
just like the A1 (!!) at the same time in history. And the
Youth Hostel was also an hotel, and they served very
dodgy food, with very dodgy waiters. By dodgy I mean
chips with spaghetti, for tourists, that sort of thing. The
owner was Italian, married to an English tart who, as they
do, had gone there, enjoyed the season, got knocked up
by a local waiter, and decided to throw in her lot and
accept for that. There I used to take my lunches well away
from this hotel. Up a little back street I discovered a tiny
restaurant that would rate under the manner of Cucina,
which I always see as the lowest. It's not quite the word,
but let's say Cucina, then Trattoria, then Ristorante, then
God knows what - Hotel Hilton! But Cucinas were few and
 159

far between. They tended to be family run. Maybe just an

old lady. Maybe just ten customers at lunchtime, -
regulars. Clean paper down in lieu of napiery, and a menu
that you would be told. What was on, no picking and
choosing. And Tuesday was Minestrone, Wednesday was
thick macaroni, Thursday was spaghetti al vongole, that
sort of thing. And there was a peculiarity about the place,
- they only served his wine, which was a good local white
wine in half pint tumblers rather like our English beer half
pint tumblers. Which is all well and good, but the likes of
us tend to get through a half pint tumbler pretty nifty,
while we're waiting for the bowl of minestrone to arrive.
And he was such a fatherly figure. The first time we went
in totally suspicious. Never seen a stranger in his life.
Everybody else there'd look at you out of the corner of
their eye and then avert their head as though you'd got
the Bubonic. But the second day, a grunting recognition.
The third day over the second tumbler of wine you get
into conversation with one of the other customers about
bicycle racing and you mention the the name of Tommy
Simpson, and then Gino Batalli, and Fausto Coppi, and
then you're shaking hands and crying tears and
remembering great races and great results and by that
time you're totally assimilated into the place. And at the
end of the meal he would say in Italian "Did you enjoy
that?" "Wonderful." "And tomorrow we have spaghetti al
vongole. You know vongole? Fruit di mare..." "Si, si, si."
"Good." And it was only one sitting. One o'clock. You
couldn't drift in at quarter past, or half past eleven for a
meal. No just one sitting. And that was just so nice. So
finally I got into the habit of having my aperitif the first
glass, and then the second glass with the meal, and then
if I was feeling good and the company was good, maybe
I'd buy the customer one or he'd buy me one, and finish
up having, I suppose, a bottle and a half. Not a lot. And
roll away, very very happy, to the hot, bleached seaside
streets, and back to the youth hostel, to lie on the camp
bed through the heat of the afternoon. {end of tape}

B The work one was doing in Rome followed on from the

very uncertain, changeable work one had been doing at the
Royal College. One was still developing very much, and in
Rome I was beginning to see a bit more clearly what I
wanted to do, and that was to paint larger pictures, seven
foot by nine foot sort of format, with a strong physical
presence, paint glued-on accretions, -maybe a lady's blouse
found in the Borghese garden bushes, or bits of old wood, or
anything. And I would stick these disparate items on to my
boards and smother them with paint, and set myself the
formal problem of hiding the alien bits to make the paint
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surface, to make the painting as physically real overall as

the obviously tactile component parts were physically real,
but to lose that obvious reality. And in a sense that has been
a continuous preoccupation. But at that time I was doing it
in a more non-figurative way. So one was seeking to evoke
place, and one was doing that by scale and by texture and
by colour, and not by form, and not by imagery, and not by
implied pictorial space. That was all very well, it was a
fascinating area, and I still enjoy it, but it isn't quite enough.
One has to offer a bit in a finished object, I think. Though to
stand in front of a seven foot by nine foot painting it does
surround you. Like broken terracotta walls or the wonderful
medieval doorways that have been patched, painted and
renovated over five hundred years where you get a sheet of
lead banged in with big heavy tacks and next to that an area
where on painting the house or the scooter or the farm cart,
the peasant has rubbed his oily brushes onto the stone and
you get the most beautiful build-ups of non-figurative colour
all deeply evocative of the landscape. And there's browns,
greys, greens, dark colours, streaks of vermilion. Beautiful
passages in themselves. So the challenge was to
incorporate some of that beauty into the pictures. Which I
was doing reasonably well, but not quite well enough.
Ultimately the aim wasn't quite high enough, because I think
you have to employ form and implicit space within the
picture too. So it took me long time to get round to that. But
certainly the paintings were ....more like paintings than
anything I'd done at the Royal College, or London
afterwards. But I left them all in Rome. I left them all just
lying around where they were.

J And what happened to them? I wonder if they've still got

them.

B I was told that Mrs Ward-Perkins gave instructions very,

very swiftly and crisply for them to be destroyed {chuckles}
The same happened to my poor cat, who I discovered. Under
a motorcar in Tresteveri. A white cat, skinny, starving, yet
confident enough to come and I held it and I thought, well,
I'll take you back to the British Academy and fatten you up.
And that was very, very badly received by the Ward-Perkins
but I stuck to my guns, I said it's living in my studio and it
will be fed with the left-overs from our lunches and dinners.
And I bought some very deep little plastic box affairs with
lids and they were left out on the sideboard and so a couple
of chunks of wild boar that hadn't been consumed would be
scooped into the box by Giacomo, my friendly waiter, "fer il
gato". And we called the cat Gato, "Cat", and Gato began to
have three course meals lunch and dinner, and delicious
puddings and souffles and sorbets and....wonderful food,
 161

and she grew into a very handsome cat. But she suffered
the same fate as my paintings. The moment I left I heard
that Gato was carried down to the pit in central Rome, one
of the old preserved temple sites which is now well below
street level. Full of cats, all stray cats are chucked down
there and then, inevitably, fed by dotty English ladies. Who
devote their life to it. So Gato, from the slums of Trasteveri
to the heights of Valley Julia via Granchi Cesar Duro. A year,
or six months, of richness, fine foods, and then there she
was heaved back down into the pit. So that's what happened
to my paintings and that's what happened to Gato. It could
have been a worse fate for Gato.

J Well at least she was in with her mates and being looked
after by endless devoted English ladies....

B Yes. Yes. So that gave me an indeterminate year in

Stepney, having decided to give up the studio. My landlord,
Alfie Marron who I've told you about, lovely Jewish man who
says (puts on accent) "they call me a racist..." (chuckles) He
was big friends with Lucien Freud. And Freud at some stage
had seen the studio. And Alfie said to me confidentially,
"Look, that Freud, he's rolling in money. He desperately
wants the studio. So you ask him just what you want, to take
over from you. It's nothing to do with me at all." Very nice of
Alfie to do that. And I'd met Freud on a couple of occasions,
and I just did not like him at all. Not at all. Disliked his style,
his manner, and I still dislike him and dislike his paintings.
And he asked me in the French pub, could he have the place
and I said no, I hadn't decided what I was doing with it. And
I saw an advert in the Times, "Studio sought in East End" So
I contacted the man. It was an associate Royal Academician
called Tony Eyke ?? (Ike) who's now a Royal Academician.
And I said are you looking for a studio. He said yes, and I
said well, come and have a look at this one. And it was a
wonderful place, I think I've mentioned, off Spitalfields, a
weavers loft, with an open fire. The only sad thing about
this yarn is what wonderful pictures of Christchurch
Spitalfields, Freud would have painted. Of course it was the
most magnificent rooftop view you could imagine. And Freud
was not bad at doing that. Instead he painted crummy stuff
in...North Kensington I think. Backyards of horrible squalor.
So some good paintings were lost. Eyke loved the place and
said what do you want, to take it over? I said well, I paid £22
for the gas cooker, and I paid the same amount for the
studio easel which used to belong to Sir Lawrence Alma-
Tadema. the finest studio easel you ever saw. The biggest. It
was so big, the place where you hold your painting, you'd
got every ratchet from slow to sort of ...wonderful thing.
Took a year to get it up there. It had to be dismantled and
 162

hauled up through the windows - windows taken out. And I'd

left my departure so late I just couldn't face doing that. So I
said well just give me £22 for the gas stove and £22 for the
studio easel and take me out to lunch. At one of the market
pubs. So we had steak and kidney pie and boiled potatoes
and shook hands on it, and I think he's been there ever
since. And made good use of it. And I think done a lot of
Christchurch paintings. Now of course it's the modish
address of all. To look over those places. Which does irritate
me a little. How we'd discovered an area that was
unexploited and then suddenly every twerp in the colour
supplements is going on about this "just-discovered" 18C
area of London and I suppose one feels a little bit of jealousy
there.....

J Well, you probably had the best of it.

B Yes. There were some other painters, - there are always

one or two everywhere, and then that nasty couple Gilbert
and George moved into Fournier St, where I had a basement
flat next door to them. But I didn't like them and didn't talk
with them, and they didn't talk with me. They were just too
arrogant for words. Though we came from the same college,
St Martin's. They had been indoctrinated by the notorious
Anthony Caro, who destroyed so many student aspirations
with his dogma and with his cheap philosophy. He did a lot of
harm to the development of British art, did Caro. And in the
meantime just produced hideously bad sculpture. Ever since.
But that's another day.

J Well, if Gilbert and George is part of his legacy to English

culture, then one could do without it.

B They're two of the most famous artists in the world, you

know.

J I know, and it shows what the state of art is, or art

appreciation, when people spend their time looking up each
others arseholes to be appreciated as artists.

B Yes.

J I'm afraid I get a bit irritated by it, that's all.

B And a bit disgusted as well.

J Yes. I realise one is in danger of sounding like an old fart

but if that makes me sound like an old fart, so be it.
 163

B No, there's nothing decent or innovative, truly, about their

work, I don't think. Apart from plumbing depths unspeakable,
unspoken depths which is not necessary in any society. Every
society has its modest social taboos. Whether you wear a
loincloth or cover your breasts or whatever, there are little
private decencies which are adhered to. And to pretend that
it's in the interests of elucidation to strip these things away
is fatuous. Crass....crass.

J Well, it's not as if it's alleviated by any decent painting or

anything like that.

B Oh no.

J After all Francis Bacon, for God's sake, his subjects are
quite often pretty revolting, but the man's such a
consummate painter that, you know, the works have a
validity. Don't they?

B Up to a point. History will sort him out, and it will sort

Freud out, and they're not major artists, either of them.

J Not Francis Bacon?

B No...no. And the fact that he was always on such a strident,

hysterical key all the time.....

J Was he?

B I think so..

J The nature of his work, you mean?

B The nature of his work, yes, the content of his work.

Buggery. Mainline drugs. Vomiting. All the side-effects of
those activities. Plus gross misuse of alcohol. I don't think it's
telling us a hell of a lot, really. And I don't think it's
particularly well painted most of the time. And I think he got
poorer and poorer as a painter.

J I went to a gallery show of his in Paris a few years ago.

There were some tryptychs in there that were I thought very
beautiful. They were very large indeed, and the subjects
were not in any way unpleasant. I was rather impressed
actually. I didn't see any from his really nasty stuff.

B Well, those will be from his earlier period. He painted a

series of homage to Van Gogh which could be seen in the
light you describe. And he was much more painterly. But
latterly I think he came to rely on certain formal devices
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which were abused, and a not very clever manipulation of

paint either. And I find it hard to take, somebody trudging
around in such a gloomy state of mind. A millionaire with a
face-lift. I don't know...it doesn't ring quite true. Baudelaire
or Jaques Villaut or such folk were nearer the true self-
destructive process, the illumination. I certainly think that
Lucien Freud is dreadful in what he's doing. Without
humanity, without sympathy, without love, without affection.
Just sneering, arrogant put-downs, they seem to me to be.
And very brashly painted; I don't think it's good painting at
all. A well-known London dealer said to me a few years ago.
"You must remember that Lucien Freud is not a first rate
English figurative painter. He's a second rate German
figurative painter". And there's some truth there. And I do
think that these angsty guys will sink fairly low in public
appeal. I don't think that work will remain in the way that
Hogarth, for example, is still a fit diet for our time in history.
(J Oh. yes) In the same way as David Hockney's last thirty
five years of output, that will sink without trace I think
too.....without trace...it'll sink as quickly as it's allowed to
sink. Once people are paying a million pounds for a painting
it's very hard for anybody to..

J To allow it to become anything but excellent!

B to say that it's anything other than the real thing. So that's
really buying your place in the next hundred years of history.
But ultimately I believe Elton John paid just under half a
million pounds for one of those David Hockney flower
paintings, which however you look at it were very horrible
paintings. Admittedly I've not seen the real ones, I've only
seen reproductions, but they're bad, they're bad, something
wrong. But if the exhibition sells out for eight million
pounds....

J It still doesn't mean they're good, does it?

B No, but it means they've got to be around, and they've got

to be talked about publicly as being great, if privately a
whispering campaign develops. Nobody has dared to whisper
against Freud. Or Bacon. Or Hockney. I think there are just
signs of all three being questioned. The trouble is there are
so few objective traditional painting critics around to have
the authority to voice an opinion. One chap who was in a
position to do that was called Peter Fuller, and he was killed
in a motor car crash in the peak of his career in his fifties.
And he wrote strongly against bad work, and highly
supportive of relatively under-acknowledged work. But the
whole modern art establishment is really under the aegis of
Nicholas Serota. And he's responsible for this year's all
 165

female Turner Prize list, none of whom, it is said, are painters

or sculptors. One girl I heard in interview said "Well, I make
quilts, and I do things with wire,.." and she was talking like a
confused 26 year old ex art college girl finding her way. As
she must be. But why put her into the main stream of
international art? Dangerous for everybody, surely. And I just
can't understand it. But he's the boss, you see.

J Yes I'm not sure how well he helps the cause of painting at
all...

B I wonder.....

J Certainly on the strength of the Turner Prize. As you know

Brian Sewell has long been inveighing against it, and I rather
agree with him.

B Yup, and one can only but agree. One might think he goes
over the top too often, Mr Sewell, but there's a lot of common
sense.

J Yes. But it's his style to go over the top isn't it?

B And then again, I don't think it's personal prejudice, but I

don't think that a thing like the Turner Prize, which can be
the making of an artist, as the Booker Prize can for a writer,
not just the immediate financial reward, but it should surely
be available to artists over the age of fifty rather than under
the age of forty or whatever the thing is. Most of the many
good artists are doing their best work when they are fifty or
sixty, certainly not when they're thirty. And to give them a
prize for work done at the age of thirty is inviting them to
consolidate on what they have achieved so far, rather than
carry on evolving, exploring. Which takes a lot of doing.

J I'm not sure that prizes for art, or indeed literature are
particularly useful for anybody really apart from publishers
and art dealers. Certainly literary prizes have turned into a
complete junket, haven't they?

B Well they do seem to attract, and to reward, people of not

dissimilar character. The go-getter, the professional
careerist. And we all know that the best painters are not
careerists, they're people with a vocation. And, I suppose,
with the best writers, too......I'm sorry, I feel so ill, Joss, I
don't know what to do. Stop the machine.
{later}
B Thank you, there might be a few pauses in the course of
this, because I've got to try to say things that I'm not terribly
sure about some of the time. I think the best way is to go way
 166

back as we have before in these interviews and say why did

you want to be a painter...well, I think there we can say it's
an instinctive thing rather than an intellectual thing. Why did
you want to be a dry stone waller or a pig farmer or a fighter
pilot. Some people are passionate about wanting to do
certain things and to be a painter I think one.... the first
attribute is certainly not talent, as the layman believes, it is
what we would now call a sense of vocation, what in those
days in the 1950's my religious education teacher, a dear old
man called Mr Folston would call stickability. That was his
advice based on a lifetime...he was a..an Albert Schweitzer
figure, he even looked like Albert Schweitzer, one hadn't
heard of Albert Schweitzer at that time...straw boater, softly
spoken, grey ragged nicotine-yellow moustache; a gentle
sweet man and he said if we to get anywhere with our lives
we must remember, - Stickability. And I think one could quote
that to the young art students.

J Are you saying that if you've got stickability and no talent

you can be an artist of considerable quality?

B Yes. yes. I think so. Did Cezanne have talent? I suspect not.
On seeing the early work which goes goes up into his fifties, I
think.... But he certainly had stickability and he had
intelligence. Obviously one can't generalise.

J Well, particularise for a moment. You were talking about

Cezanne. I find it difficult to believe that somebody without
talent could produce the paintings of Mont St Victoire that he
painted. I see that he painted it a million times, you know,
but in fact each time he painted it said something different.

B Well, well that is an artist at the top of his powers where all
the dross has been shed away through many decades of
intelligent application.

J. So what are you left with once its been shed away? If it's
not talent.

B A certain clarity, I suppose. Clarity of intent.

J Rather like a description of the poet's art which I read, by a

man who was trying to avoid defining poetry at all costs,
very sensibly, saying that it was the ordering of words to
produce a greater intensity of meaning.

B Well, I think that's nicely expressed.

J You're saying really the equivalent thing in the visual

sense?
 167

B In as far as a not particularly intelligent person, that is

myself, can grasp what other people are thinking and saying,
yes, I think the poet there is saying the right thing. Van Gogh
to me was not a talented person, a talented artist, but a very
special person with other attributes that are uncovered as he
pursues,- through his stickability,- as he pursues chasing his
goal, which he has a great sense of. And he gets close to it.
But the evidence of his earlier work, you would pass it by in a
junk shop in Truro. Early drawings of London by Van Gogh,
like early drawings of London by my Dad or like your son,
Nicholas, say Oh that's good it's nice, I can recognise this,-
got all the windows, got the proportions about right...well,
that's not talent, that's just a basic ability. And that is built
upon. My experience at art school was that broadly speaking
the girls were talented and the men were very very slow
indeed.

J Which were the artists?

B Nobody you would know by name now.

J Well, there are so many that we don't know by name, but

which would you have said would have ended up as artists

B Oh the dumbos, the ones who met in the pub and growled
about how difficult it was! Keith's problem in always
producing a drawing with a head that was too big for the
torso. And then we go in a break and look at how fellow
students work up on the easel or down on the donkeys. Ah,
no.........Mina Martinez always has a perfect proportioned
lively, lovely drawing! Or at the Royal College my colleague
Gillian Whitby - beautiful, sensitive drawings just off the top
of her head, just out of her very being. But maybe its
very..............Mina went the way of illustrating for television -
she worked for Jackanory for about twenty years, and
became quite...quite rich, bought a house in Fulham after
about three or fours years work for television, and
presumably now is very very well off materially. She was
using her talent in a different way. She never wanted to be
whatever it was some of us were then trying to be. So.... I
can't remember where I'd got to...Oh just one more thing...

J I was sidetracking you....

B ...talking in terms of artists as opposed to untalented

artists there's a smashing book by Wilenski over there which
analyses various details about various painters' work. It'll
show how John Singer-Sargent could produce a visual illusion
that had no relationship to an organic fact. And then he
 168

could, - I haven't looked at the book for years but if my

memory serves me, -could contrast this by a detail of an eye
by Vermeer or Holbein or many people where the work is
topographically correct of this little detail as well as being
artistically satisfying. So Sargent got away with flair and
exhibitionism, brushwork etcetera which made him the most
popular painter of his time, a high Edwardian painter, and
every panel is....they're splendid looking things, but they
don't bear analysis because they're fudged, every genuine
problem is fudged. But then he's got enough icing to cover
what isn't quite right in the cake mix, and he gets away with
the icing, because very few people of course get round the
icing; the icing is the proof of the pudding, there aren't many
summer pudding experts, you know who really want to know
the ratio of raspberry to loganberry to tayberry.

J If you've got a summer pudding with icing you've got a

serious pudding!

B {chuckles} Oh, I've left the icing behind. So we're trying to

learn a very difficult craft at our first art school. Just to go
back briefly, before we go to art school we want to be an
artist and we want to show interest, therefore we've done
some things, and anybody who's ever painted a picture will
be told by other people, oh it's good, marvellous. So you've
got a bit of encouragement there. So you say yes, I'm going
to go and study this subject, maybe imagining six years you’ll
do it, as being a cabinet maker, your eye may become more
sopohisticated or refined but you know your joints, you know
your tools, you know your materials you know your wood,
and you can put together a beautiful piece after six or ten
years of apprenticeship. Maybe that's what we boldly
imagined when we went to St Martin's and it was very very
difficult. And the good thing of art education in the fifties
and the early part of the sixties was that we were not
encouraged to be artists, to express ourselves.

J You were telling me about your lovely deaf drawing teacher.

B Mr Pitchforth? J Yes. B We were taught to see where the

weight is, where the balance is, what the relative internal
proportions are, very very nuts and bolts stuff. And
extremely difficult to grasp. With the consequence that not
many people do. And without a forceful art education maybe
its even more difficult, almost impossible now. Anyway, we
were fortunate. I think one only started to go wrong at art
school after maybe the second year at St Martins, where
tacitly one was encouraged a little - to express ourselves, our
feelings towards the world, society, whatever. And then little
groups and coteries began to emerge. Like there were the
 169

Social Realists - lads of my own age,- they knew no more

about anything than I did. A little pocket of them came from
the Potteries which were still functioning with their bell
ovens, and these lads came from great generations of
grandad and great grandad, potters related to the crafts of
that district. So my contemporary fellows, at the state of
development that one feels for one's father and grandfather
at that stage, would paint Social Realist picture at that
stage, which amounted to painting with a khaki and grey
pallet, pale faced, round shouldered figures, trudging up and
down dreary cobblestone streets with never a speck of
sunshine or a gleam of wit, humour or joy. So one asked , well
what is it you're trying to do? Well, it's Social Realism, we're
protesting. Well what are you protesting? You're trying to
iconoclise (is there such a word?) your forbears, trying to
give them dignity, and at the same time you're complaining
that the jobs that gave them dignity turned them into sour-
faced old men with round shoulders. Well, that was one
particular faction; it's a stage of growing up isn't it? And
they were making a mistake which I was maybe to make
later; that of confusing your half-chewed private cultural life,
not to say emotional life I suppose, with the disciplines of
that which one was trying to learn. Art. So one was on the
right lines as an artist as long as one was listening to Mr
Pitchforth and trying to get the masses and the stresses and
the balances right... And with the lovely Jewish-born teacher
I forget his name but it'll occur to me...I've mentioned his
name before anyway...he wanted us to see exactly what Mr
Pitchforth saw, but he wanted us to put a bit...a bit of
passion into it as well. So at the end of drawing. So at the
end of drawing a particularly fruity young model, Mr
Pitchforth would never comment upon the physical type, but
Mr Zeigler - Archibald Zeigler - would say ...I could show you
an artist who really would have made something of this
model. And he brought in a book of Jules Pascal - Jewish,
Paris, libertine, bohemian. They were drawings, brothel
scenes, ladies together frequently. Not dirty pictures at all,
gentle, nice pictures. So he encouraged us just to cross the
border into self-expression. But by and large, self-expression
was a dangerous thing, and it was during the last two years
of St Martin's that I started to employ self-expression along
with my topographical abilities. So I did a beautiful 3 foot by
4 foot ....it can only be called a topographical painting of the
Elephant and Castle building, red and white stripes. A poor
take-off of the Tuscan medieval architecture. And I did it
correctly down to the last window and the last bit of polished
stone. And in front of this I had to put a distorted figure with
upraised arms, a bit like that... and wearing a half slipping
mask.
 170

J This is the painting that went down so well with that chap
you did the mural for? {I meant Carel Weight rather than
Rosiman}

B Well there may have been – I don’t remember expressing

that - a slight cross-over.

J I thought he was quite impressed by that.

B Well, I don't recall that at all.. But the mural was

certainly...it left out the poetic bits of the half strangulated
figure which was a figure of complaint, the way society is
going...etcetera etcetera expressed in very adolescent
terms. It would have been a more powerful work without the
silly figure. With the silly figure, if the picture was still
extant, I'd be very embarrassed to see it, but without the
figure it was really saying what I wanted to say without over-
egging. So I painted quite a few over-egged things! That's
where my pictures, including the life paintings,
*&&&&&&&&7777777777777777=’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’hjjjjjjjjjjjjj
jjjjjjjjjj777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777
77777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777
7777777777777777777777777777777777777777771began
to look a little bit like...Oh, they might have come out of a
book of Gothic saints; I painted one life model a very sparse
boney fellow called David, seated. And I chose to paint him
sat as close as two foot away from me, which of course is no
way to paint visually, so you were painting from your head, I
suppose, and reconstructing the figure. And maybe in a
sense it was quite a strong picture, but it was pretty daft.
And at that time I should have been going through other
phases of art which I'd skipped completely. The Camden Town
School, Walter Richard Sickert, - such an intelligent and
articulate man and such a wonderful painter. Tone and colour,
though the colour was khaki and panes grey and opacities
and very thickly applied crumbly paint. And he could "paint"
in inverted commas, whereas my picture of turning David
into a Gothic saint was not painting at all. It was a form of
decoration using thin glazes underpainting the flesh with
terre verte as did Frangelico, Piero della Francesca and so
many people since right into the nineteenth century. If only
my teachers at that time had, ideally, given me a kick up the
arse and said, you know,- what's all this ABOUT young man.
Let's go and have a pot of tea round at Patisserie Valerie and
you tell me your thoughts about modern society and where
you live and how you get on with your Mum and Dad and....
but they didn't. They did as Art teachers tend to, encourage
one and get quite excited about you expressing yourself. So
I, expressing myself, I think, wasted a lot of time. And on that
level, that was the level upon which I was accepted in to the
 171

Royal College of Art. Carel Weight being the power, the man
to say yes or no. And he was very impressed. Nobody of my
age or generation was trying to paint like this. And I was
looking hard at the Pre-Raphaelites. Nothing wrong with
that. Not so much at their self-expression, ironically, as at
their technique, the way they could render the landscape. I
wasn't really interested in Lorenzo and Isabella, or the Druids
hunting the early Christians. They seemed as daft to me then
as they do now. But the actual language he was employing,
landscape, skies, was very very beautiful. Nobody could be
called a fool for going wrong, going wrong at that particular
signpost. Of course Carel Weight's work is all about self
expression, with a very good basic quasi-pre-Raphaelite
technique. And his paintings, Mr Weight's, are as
individualistic as the man. So he in his fifties, or sixties
maybe, was rattling along his pre-destined road. But I
wasn’t. But I was accepted for the top college of the day.
Probably a lot better had I applied for the Slade or …I didn’t
apply for the College you see, I was invited to apply, which
means you’re really certain to be accepted, - back door sort
of thing…on the evidence of the paintings I’ve described. To
the Slade I would have had to apply, and they would either
have thought I was a big risk or not for them. But had I gone
there they’d have taught me how to use opaque paint, how
to put two slabs of colour side by side and they’d read
spacially – beautiful. We were never taught that – it’s a great
pity. And I still can’t do that sort of thing. I’d love to be able
to paint. I call that proper painting, - or one aspect of proper
painting. Anyway there I was with an interview for the Royal
College on the strength of these slightly dotty late
adolescent pictures. I suppose I would be aged 24 or 25, we
were all adolescent at that age in those days, I think. They
probably are just the same now, but they hide it better. And
at the very last minute, just before my interview, the day of
my interview…I think I was even sat in the corridor, waiting
for my interview in the gloomy Victoria and Albert museum
building, part of which was the Royal College of Art. And I
thought I must show them the painting I’m working on now.
Which was a circular picture – I think I’ve described it - of an
orange oil lamp on I think a circular table with objects of still
life and it was a tentative, slightly half-witted attempt at
cubism. Sort of second-rate periphery of cubism…Metzinger
or three or four of them…I can’t remember their names now.
Who never quite understood it, and painted not very good, I
think, slightly decorative pictures. And I decided I’d got to
take a taxi back to Stepney and return with this picture that
was about four foot square on hardboard battened by heavy
2 by 1 timber. All of my things had to be made like that, - I
think there’s a clue there for later development. Well I got
back with the painting either late for my interview or in time
 172

for my interview, and that was brought in along with the

other spooky Pre-Raphaelite adolescent pictures and one sat
at the left hand of Carel Weight on a red chaise longue, that
is famous… and the rest of the panel asked one questions.
Most of the panel I learned since or I’ve come to think were
pretty dozy people, and not on my wavelength at all, and not
even in sympathy with me at all. But there was Peter Blake,
whom I met in Soho pubs. I had admired him. He was thrilled
to talk to an art student who talked Pre-Raphaelitism. He
loved for me to tell him all I knew about William Holman Hunt
and his holidays in Cornwall and so on. So that made a very
good link between Peter Blake and I. So I suspect he shouted
very strongly for me. And possibly Carel Weight did. And…..
the rest of them, Colin Hayes, Hamilton Fraser, Leonard
Rosiman, all tight-arsed little buggers – no generosity, no
spirit, no flair, no guts. Err…I thought I did very well because
I jabbered a lot. And this late painting, the late-comer to the
collection, I must have told them that I went back to collect
that because I felt you’ve got to see that. Whether that
swung everything in my favour or almost swung everything
out of my court….one day it would be interesting to see the
file, if you could get access to the files of the Royal College of
Art. They must have student files. I’d be really interested –
I’ll probably never see it myself – but you know just how
much they…. put me down a lot I think, how much some of
them really almost personally hated me and how much some
of them tolerated and how much some, not many, supported.
There was a strong element of that, I always felt it – and I’m
not paranoid! It doesn’t mean a thing, even though I refer to
it at other stages of the College career, where I was
accepted. But I was accepted at this literally crossroad of
what I needed to be doing. And I spent a year painting really
very half-baked pictures, realistic pictures, awful pictures. A
blue plastic bowl on a scrubbed deal table. Trompe l’oeil as
far as I could make it. Peter Blake bought that one. And I
hope to hell he’s lost it! It surely must have been awful…
Another one dispensed with the plastic bowl…{end of tape}
and that was not too bad a painting, in that it had no subject
matter. It was just a table top running up to a narrow horizon
at the top, parallel to the picture plane of great white wall.
And that painting was bought from my diploma show by the
Arts Council. But apart from that painting…as I say most of
them were pretty daft, I think. They included a big five foot
by I think twelve foot triptych based on a building in West
Riding Yorkshire called Scout Hall. A magnificent – not sure of
the period – Jacobean?..three story building with great
mullion windows in dereliction. Very spectacular. I think that
was reproduced in the Royal Academy Illustrated, I’m not
sure. It was shown at the Royal Academy. But again it wasn’t
a sensible picture. By sensible I mean it was nothing to do
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with [Link] to do with the language at all. It was

just to do with a place and my feelings about the place. And I
think that a perceptive teacher at that stage could have
again taken me out – this time it would have been down to
the Polish café in South Kensington and given me a lemon
tea and a cream cake and asked me what was I trying to do
with painting and gently to suggest that there are other
ways of looking at painting. So slowly, during my three years
at the college, I was leaving that sort of thing behind and I
think I described to you how I thought I was becoming over
facile with the brushes, the sable brushes, the egg tempera
and the highly diluted glazes. The egg tempera, the highly
diluted glazes. (sounds of clattering outside) That thing all
right with this trolley?
J Yeah, they’re kicking a pepsi can.
B Oh are they?
J It’s all right, go on. How are you doing? Are you…d’you want
half an hour to recuperate?
B No. I’ll think we’ll keep going for a few minutes. It’s
suddenly got very hot. Has it for you?
J No, but I think drinking this wine has brought me out into
what in the eighteenth century would have known as a
laudable sweat!
B Ah, yes…well maybe you should carry on with the
medicine…. (both laugh) So I remember where I was…I
became very skilled -not very- but I became skilled with the
mediums, the oils and the various grounds and supports that
one uses on paintings and so on…I felt I’d become over-
skilled. So that is when I went into painting with tinned
emulsion paint. And I did that, I think, for about the last
eighteen months of my stay at the College. Tinned emulsion
paint is a bit of a two fingers to the fine art department. I
was deliberately wearing sack-cloth, though it was a good
thing to have done, quite sensible. But they didn’t see it.
They didn’t really, I think, appreciate my confusion. I’m
criticising them now as teachers. Not too much, because one
doesn’t expect too much…
J Did you discuss it with them or…
B No.
J So it would have been a bit difficult for them to mind
read…

B We didn’t have very close relations really. And one might

meet in the pub. The pubs – The Anglesey or The Queen’s
Elm or Finches. And then the chap would be well away from
 174

personal problems at the RCA. I know I’ve been a better

teacher in my varied teaching experience than anybody I
met at the RCA. I’ve not been as good a teacher in a
specialist sense as Mr Pitchforth or Bateson Mason, the man
who always gave us Woodbine cigarettes when he stopped
to talk. That was his entrée to a conversation. Dear man,
very sensitive. Or Mr Zeigler. They were teachers, they were
good teachers. In fact St Martin’s was packed full of very
good teachers. Not all to one’s taste, but teachers. Artists,
all artists, but teachers. Whereas there was nobody at the
RCA who was an artist and a teacher. The ones who ought to
have done the teaching were the ones who kept deliberately
low. {break} The one who ought to have been doing the
teaching. The one who ought to have been the dogsbodies
and the wise men of the world going around amongst us
twenty-five year olds, boys and girls, slightly confused –an
exciting time in history – early sixties –they ought to have
been capable of sensing our problems , our needs. Not on a
profound psychological level. J I suppose there would have
been a pastoral programme whereby you had to see them
on a regular basis to discuss how you were getting on, then
it would have been a bit easier to pick it up.

B Yes, there were. We went generally to various of these

men. Beulah. Robert Beulah. So-called distinguished Royal
Academician. He would come and see one mid afternoon,
after lunch time drinks, which I think were large gins, and
he’d put his arm around one’s twenty six year old shoulders
and say “You can draw, you can draw, boy. You’re all right.
Nothing I can say to you. You’re a good one” Quick hug and
away. Well that might be nice once until you’ve sucked the
sugar off it, and then you find there’s nothing there. So I
certainly do have a genuine complaint about the teaching at
the College. Of course on the other side what one did get
from being there at that time was a very lively group of
colleagues, students, good quality folk, several of whom one
still hears of. Big wastage rate in this racket! So by the time
one left the RCA, one was not a lot clearer with regard to
one’s language in painting. One was making 90% error out
of the 100% trial. And I don’t think it’s differed a lot in post-
college years. There’s never been a time where I could say,
now I know what I’m doing where I’m at and what I’m going
for. That arrived, that time, if it has arrived, about five years
ago – ten years ago let’s say to be generous to myself or to
be more strictly accurate with the last exhibition of
paintings just finished in my sixtieth year – then I can just
about begin to see my language, where I stand in relation to
the modern world, to historical and general etcetera. I can
begin to see it. Only now. And that’s on of the many reasons
I’ve got no upset or complaint about my surprise physical
 175

condition that is going to cheat me out of maybe ten years

of active work which admittedly would have changed the
balance of my work. But I don’t feel frustrated, I feel I’ve
done enough to show where I was going. But given another
ten years I could have produced a substantial body of
slightly more qualitative (sic) work, I think. But I don’t feel
cheated. Because it doesn’t really need an extra ten years,
it needs another fifty years, and at the end of that period
one would say the same again. So in a sense this isn’t a bad
time for the curtain to come down. I’ve had my little burst of
sculpture, and I’ve had my 25 year burst of etching. I have
broken through at last with the painting and if there isn’t a
lot to be seen, well at least there is something to be seen.

J. Certainly. Very much so.

B. So the year after the college, before that wonderful year

in Italy, was spent in the studio in Stepney, struggling yet
again. Painting twenty foot long – was it twenty?- fifteen
foot…. Seven foot by twenty I think it was – a so-called
Transcription of the Battle of San Romano, which I finished
in the Stepney Studio, or up to a point…And it was made – it
was a physical thing, it was made out of old doors, furniture,
projections er…illusionistic perspective going in to the
picture frame. It was quite a fruity picture, quite a fine
picture. It had all to be unscrewed to come down to
Cornwall.

J. Where is it now?

B. Well, it was in store in Cornwall for a long time and then a

little bit got used for a chicken run, and then a bit used for
this or that, and then finally what is left is totally decayed.
Totally decayed. It always would have decayed within thirty
years because it was so ill prepared. There was sort of…it
was an arrogant picture, one I flung together with
machinery…- what do they can those guns that screw in
nails? I had that sort of thing and I cut my own mitres and
joints. I was reasonably handy with woodwork, not very, but
reasonably. But when I came to Cornwall, I realised I had no
electric, and I didn’t have a room big enough to put it up, so
as I say it went into store for many years until I rediscovered
the bits and tried to start it all over again, and it’s
downstairs now in a half-finished state. Never, I suppose, to
be finished. The theory at the back of my mind was it would
be the painting I’d still be pattering on at the age of eighty
three when I’d got, you know, just an hours patterent (sic)
in me, and the photographer would come and they’d put a
palette into my hand and I’d dip a brush and I’d go poke,
poke, poke and then they would say “ and this is the
 176

masterpiece he’s been working on since 1961, as yet

unfinished.” But it’s going to be unfinished. Well. I think
that takes us up to Italy and then there’s a natural join in
our narrative so I think possibly we’ll switch off for a
moment now.

B. I think probably one of the greatest problems for the

young artist today, I’m sure, be it dancer, sculptor or
painter, is to know which direction to take. In the late middle
part of this century one was confronted with so many
options in a way that I think had never been available to
artists before. But in 1850 you could have been an academic
painter, or an oddball who painted cats or birds nests or
butterflies, a visionary artist like Samuel Palmer, a little
earlier, but basically the options were fairly well defined,
you were an academic painter or you were somewhere
running parallel to academic tradition. Even the Pre-
Raphaelites shared the tradition of draftsmanship, colour
etcetera. And it’s only with us that these simple traditions
began to break up, in France, the latter quarter of the
century did choice become a little varied. So now, we’re
talking about the School of Paris, about 1910 onwards. All
the nuances of different movements, different ways of
seeing, different ways of thinking. Fauvism or
Impressionism, or the science of coloured dots a la Seurat,
etcetera, etcetera. Just to come back to our own country,
possibly until 1950 there was something that might vaguely
be called a British tradition, exemplified by painters like
Walter Richard Sickert, and then classier people like Sir
William Nicholson and all manner of good straightforward
visual painters, painters who painted what they saw, and
added their own interpretation of what they saw. But fairly
limited and fairly straightforward. By 1950 odd the options
were becoming more varied, and my early experience in
London from whenever it was, - 1957 – the options were
becoming still more wide and even overwhelming. American
painting was something new and that particular branch of
American painting, of abstract expressionism, and colour
field painting, where the public would be confronted by
enormous canvases, ten foot by ten foot, the canvas soaked
in blue or red or green, sometimes very elegant, sometimes
very beautiful, contemporary with that in Paris a post
existential painter like Bernard Buffet, painting angst in
landscape and tired clowns and working folk. Very
seductive, very attractive to my pals who painted their
plainest workers from the Potteries, one would think.
Though on the whole I don’t think they were bright enough
to get on to it, or to actually see it in a different
interpretation. So they sank without trace, like the
Potteries! Sank without trace, maybe to be resurrected as
 177

theme park artists….Then in Paris there was a school called

Pachism, a very genteel version of abstract expressionism
where you flung the paint around and invoke the paint to
express your internal, your inner confusion, angst, joy,
whatever. There was one clown at the time, highly
fashionable at the time who would dress himself in I believe
medieval armour and then run around his studio with his
paintbrushes flinging paint on very long, very narrow
horizontal canvasses, jestable work. And the canvasses
would be called Le Bataille de Crecy or Agincourt or
whatever. So that was a rather daft European version of
what the Americans were doing a little bit better with their
so-called abstract expressionism. So, what’s a student to do
in the middle of all of this? One had scarcely recognised
Cubism, the penny hadn’t dropped. One saw that Graham
Sutherland was unassumingly wrong tack with his creepy
vegetable still lives, again expressing weariness,
unhappiness through distortions of organic objects, twisted
thorn trees invoking Christs thorn collar predicament! And
so…that seemed a little bit half-baked. Francis Bacon was
doing his thing, which to me always did seem a little bit half-
baked. Snap out of it, man one wanted to say. And Nicholson
was doing something which seemed to lead to higher
pastures. I think that’s true, as well. His work can still be
seen in that context. So some of our die-hard students were
getting well stuck in to Euston Road and Camden Town
school paintings. Sludgy pictures of not-very-interesting
parts of suburbs of London. Like Frank Auerbach, who
stayed by Primrose Hill for three quarters of a lifetime.
Enough for him. But he found his own language. As did
Nicholson, through a lot of trial and error. As did Sutherland.
The point I’m trying to make is that there was really no cut-
and-dried language for the well- equipped, intellectually
stimulated and mentally growing young student, aged 28, to
come out of College and say yes, well I subscribe to this or
that school and it seems the obvious thing for me to do, to
be painting in this or that manner. No, there seemed to be
so many options, alternatives, that one had to go running up
this alleyway and back down to the secondary road and then
venture out on to a main road and then nearly get squashed
flat by some great rolling force, which would then disappear
into the distance never to be seen again, so you venture
out…..I often thought the analogy rather than a road is that
of a tree. Stick to the trunk and you’re going upwards, the
boughs are going upwards quite confidently, then come the
minor boughs, then the twigs. When you get to the end of
the twig you’ve nothing for it but to burst into leaf or to
trace your steps back down the twig to a bigger branch and
to a bigger branch until you feel secure there again, and
then to start exploring. So I think the problems of the
 178

twentieth century artist have been much greater than…

probably any other time in history. The medieval artist went
to his guild, to his master, to the workshops. And then he
learned to draw – in the manner of his master. And he learnt
to look at the landscape in the true manner of his master.
But we’re invited to see a cosy bit of landscape through the
eyes of a wild man or through the eyes of a half-baked
Pachist artist like Craigy Aitcherson or of a sexually
tormented man and so on for a thousand people. We don’t
know what to make of it all. There ain’t a language and
there ain’t even a subject.

J. Isn’t that in a way a luxury?

B. A luxury?

J. Yes, Not to be constrained by a certain style or a certain

manner.

B. I’m sure there’s a tremendously clever and appropriate

quotation to be floated in there, but I don’t know of one. But
a freedom without boundaries – is that freedom?

J. Well, the boundaries are still there aren’t they? The world
around you, the canvas in front of you.

B. You can do anything. So when you wake up in the morning

you’ve got your white bit of board. And you can put the
paint on like Duarto or like Severini or like Frank Auerbach.

J. Or like Bryan Ingham!

B. Increasingly one hopes like oneself. But it’s a long way to

find that – like oneself. I mean it would be a very ideal
apprenticeship, but it does mean that the apprenticeship
goes on for a long time.

J. But don’t you think that for the ancients it took just as
long except in a more contrained environment?

B. No. No, I don’t think so. No I think they were down to

brass tacks very early in their careers. Working for the
master and then having apprentices working for them. No,
no, I think they were out of the starting traps very promptly,
very quickly. And then with the inventors, so-called, of
impressionism for example. They opened up a seam that
was adequate for one lifetime. But it isn’t rich enough a
seam for our lifetime too. I don’t think one would be a very
interesting painter if one said, “ Well, I’m an out-and-out
Impressionist”. Because a lot of very interesting things have
 179

happened since then, that one feels the urge to incorporate,

to synthesise, to amass. And this is at once a pleasure and a
great problem. It does mean a massive wastage from
experiment during one’s development. And so it’s not
surprising that many, many artists in their early days, their
thirties let us say, become lost. Added to the problems of
being a full-time artist as opposed to being a student, in
some cases supporting a child or a wife, the more foolhardy
ones a motorcar and a house….
[end tape 11]
[start tape 13]
B…In Bad Godesburg? Bad somewhere anyway. Quite a long
way {from Worpswede}, and it was a big exhibition, framed,
all up on the walls, looked very good. And the woman who
realised it I had met and she made great claims to being a
serious collector – it had been her father who was the
collector. And she followed the value of works in her
collection on the stock market or local Christies/Sothebys;
she could tell you that Willi Baumeister was coming down
and that Klee was still climbing. And she wanted a bit of text
to give her an idea of how to pitch her talk, so somebody
gave her a bit of text, whether it was myself or my friends
the Martin family, and presumably it was a handwritten text,
which she then made into six boring pages of typescript
with which she then bored the arse off everybody at the
opening, as they do! But very early on in the text: “Mr
Inham is a painter of European traditions, he is a follower of
Braque and Picarro”. And this name Picarro ran right
through the whole thing, and she read that out. Isn’t that
astonishing! A woman who’d come all the way to Worpswede
in a huge sparkling Mercedes – three times bigger than
yours, Joss – dressed all in leather, you know, all new
chicorea. Art collector, potential galeriste, and…

J. A great collector of Picarro, obviously….

B. Picarro, yuh, yuh. Well, that’s apropos of nothing…. So

Nigel Farrow and Elfriede Winter came down to visit me; not
having seen Elfriede for seven years, never having met
Nigel Farrow, not knowing much about Scholar, except I’d
bought their Catalogue Raisonee of one of my heroes
Anthony Gross. And they wanted to look at my etchings.
Which was a hell of a job at Tremayne, because I didn’t have
everything organised. So I’d got something stuffed in a
bottom drawer there and oh,…horrible. But I managed to
pull out enough portfolios to give them a good view of my
etchings – überblick – and Nigel Farrow was very, very
enthusiastic. He’s a rather dry looking middle aged stick of
a man, cadaverous cheeks, quite likeable. And to see a man
like that suddenly lose his dryness and become enthusiastic
 180

is very heartening. And, yes he was really enthusiastic

about the etchings. And particularly about the little suite of
German etchings where I used pieces of coloured paper -
printed over pieces of colour with German typeface, letter
press and so on. And he said “Oh, we can make a book of
this, we can make a book of this!” And Elfiede said “No,
Nigel we’re going to make a book of the etchings.” “We
could do both, we could do both!” I thought this a good
picture of enthusiasm, I like it. So I said, “Well, the next
thing as I see it is for me to come back to you with a mark-
up of the book of etchings, a dummy. And then for us to
start talking in more detail from then onwards. Well that, as
I say was three or four years ago, and it sort of lapsed. I
wrote away to a man at the Fitzwilliam Museum with a
collection of my work. Somebody had said he would be
interested in writing a text, but I emphasised I wanted a
long text, and I wanted it written very much from art
historian/print making expertise plus some knowledge of
myself and Jollytown and Cornwall. So it’s a fairly wide brief,
a fairly tricky brief. Anyway, that fellow wrote back after
about a month, returned the material, said he was sorely
tempted and he really would like to do it, but the pressure
of work etcetera. Then I let everything drop. At the last
London exhibition, Elfriede approached me with a new idea
for Scholar Press, which I think I’ve probably mentioned,
how they would like to produce some hand-made books by
distinguished artists making…and I said no Illustration –
decoration, you understand that. That’s important. And she
said, we’ve got three poems here to start with and they all
happen to be about rivers, one in German, one in French,
one in English. And at that stage I said yeh, fine, thinking I
could non-figurative decorations to marry with a text in
French by Apollinaire, or in German by Heinrich Heiner, or in
English by Edmund Spencer. Then they came to visit me here
still on that project, saying would it be an idea to have an
American poet as well, and to have The Hudson or the
Potomac, is it called. And that sent us scurrying away into
all sorts of weird and wonderful but essentially dull poetry.
And I started thinking a little more seriously about it and I
thought there’s nothing in any of these poems for me.
Nothing at all.

J. Well what would seem to me appropriate, if you’re going

to do something like that it should be your choice, I
suppose. You should choose the poems you’d like to
decorate. You’ve got a wide knowledge and a very eclectic
taste in prose and poetry, and you could produce a lovely
selection. Why don’t you do that?
 181

B. Well, I’ll carry on telling the story in sequence. No, we’ll

come back to that, it’s the right point to make. I then
showed them the mock-up I’d made of the back-burner
project, the book of my etchings. I know I showed it to you,
but I show it to you again very very briefly, just to refresh
you – you could switch off, Joss,{pause} and that
incidentally is the same format for the book of etchings as
the catalogue on sculptures. And I do believe in uniformity
of format wherever possible. And I say, for those landscape
format etchings to be shown, well, even half size reduction,
would mean you’d have a book so deep {indicates}. Well,
where would such a book fit on even my versatile shelves? It
would just be a bloody nuisance. And I’ve got such books,
which just finish up in the junk room ‘cause you can’t house
them. So I want a book that’s very portable, accessible, but
not as dealer-downmarket as the Catalogue raisonnee, but a
book that could become a little treasure, a book that one
might take on holiday with hard cover and so on. Well, they
were very enthusiastic about that. So then I said to them I
can’t further this etching project without assistance. There
are plates in Germany, there are plates in London, things
need printing up, things need rescuing. The whole of my
downstairs stuff needs to be reasonably catalogued. And
then I can say well, that plate, that plate, that plate, they’re
to be thrown away, I don’t want to keep the less successful
or failures. And they said, well, we know just the person to
do this. I said well, it must be a woman. Yes, they said it a
woman, just by chance. I didn’t push my luck by saying an
attractive woman I thought I’d take just what God sends!
And they, Elfriede, wrote a very good follow-up letter to this,
and I thought well meanwhile I’m not going to come out with
what I think about the hand-made fine book. If they’re
happy for that to be on the back-burner and for this to take
precedence, that’s good, because I think really there’s only
going to be time for one, and that will be the etching one.
That’s the important one. That’s totally important if the
chap to whom I leave my etching estate, Simon Marsh,
copperplate printer, he could turn the stuff into money if he
gets them printed, if he sets up a good marketing thing with
the dealer chap, who works for architectural artists. The
dealer chap is also a friend of Francis, so between them
there’s a lot of potential money down the stairs, with
etchings printed and etchings not yet printed. But to really
launch the stuff you need to have one good book putting the
person into the marketplace. And then follow it up with
exhibitions etcetera. Well that’s all their job. So I’m happy
to let the fine art book quietly in the background now and
get this one going. But it occurred to me, you know, that the
obvious only comes round very slowly, doesn’t it? All
rivers…..River Thames – sod all to me, Pont Neuf what’s it
 182

look like – I don’t know. And being the sort of conscientous

bugger one is one would feel, even though one is not going
to make literal drawing or anything, one would feel obliged
to go to Paris and look at the Pont Neuf, and walk up and
down and maybe draw it, or buy a postcard…one would feel
obliged. I thought, well I’ve done all that all my life, I’ve got
sketch books full of material I’ve never used. What do I
really like drawing? What do I really run and draw? The
things I put in the previous book. Trees and landscapes and
jugs and flowers.

“Spotted Jug” – Painting circa 1993

J. And the occasional naked woman…

B. Possibly. But what’s the biggest touchstone I’ve got for

that sort of thing? I only need Jollytown, and that would be
another idea. Tuscany. And then I thought again, why not
go to Tuscany with your own transport, being driven, of
course. And do lots of big, heavy 6B black and white childish
drawings of mountains and trees, I can see it as such, in a
fairly big format. But not four precious pages with four
precious poems. But twenty pages and a quotation from
Twilight in Italy, by [Link], something that really
gets the spirit of it. And then the rest of it is just a sketch-
book. I thought well that’s something that I would love
doing. So it would make a bloody good book, and OK if they
don’t like it it doesn’t matter because I’ll probably never get
to do it anyway. So that’s where I stand at the moment.
 183

J. Well, as I say it were ever to be done you should pick your

own material.

B. Yuh, yuh.

J. Perhaps put some literary material of your own in, if only

a short piece. I think you should certainly write your own
introduction. As you say it doesn’t need a lot of poems at all,
it’s really just a…

B. Well that’s just where they started from. It’s a good start.

J. Yes, the odd poem or piece of prose, perhaps, which you

feel is apposite or indeed which you’re fond of, which says
something to you….

B Nobody’s written about Italy better than [Link].

His finest writing is encapsulated there. He can evoke the
smell of a lemon or the taste of dust like nobody else. So
that would be a lovely idea, and if I make a bit of a recovery,
so I was going to go with Allie, she’s got a sort of camper
van. And I thought if I had a sleeping bag and ground sheet
so one could sleep out as well as staying in hotels and
pensions.

J. It would be much more doable from your point of view if

you went to the expense of flying and hiring something over
there.

B. Yeh, I thought that, I thought that today.

J. Well it wouldn’t be that expensive, because you could do

an Alitalia fly-drive or something, and rent a combi over
there.

B. Probably that’s the best way.

J. Because hammering right across is going to knock the

stuffing out of you.

B. It was funny with this birthday party on Saturday. I

thought, well this is a bit of a test. We’re not going to Rouen
or Nimes or Lausanne or Montreux. We’re going to Ruan
Minor, seven miles up the road. And I can say when I came
back from that trip, beautifully looked after, wonderful
comfortable seat, umbrella over my head, couldn’t have
been looked after more graciously. Came back absolute
wreck.

J. You didn’t smoke any dope or anything!?

 184

B. No….just a couple of glasses of wine and just totally

knackered. So that make me think seriously about……so
simply, if you’re still all right for time, Joss,{J. Yes good}
Switch this off, I’ve got to go downstairs.
{end of tape13}
{Start Tape 14, Bryan is talking about Leslie Illsley)

B . One would say to Leslie, so you’ve been up to your tricks

have you? What was it this time? And he would say…Doreen
O’Casey. Well, how bad was it? He would say I’m not sure.
Pretty terrible I think. Isabel was in tears, anyway. I said
well that’s par, but Doreen is bit stronger…..yes, well…..
handsome bunches of flowers he used to have to give away
every week after an hour’s session on the Sloop, when the
little halves of lager got too big for him. Then he would
attack the Penwith and through the Penwith he’d attack
Breon and through Breon he would attack the Irish and so
on…Always picking superb subjects and hitting the nail on
the head, so that genuine apologies were called for. I missed
him a lot. I rather lost touch; I used to know him in London
at St Martins, before any St Ives. I used to meet him
occasionally.

J . Was he at St Martins as well?

B . He was. Although just where and how I can’t remember.

There were three tarty girls with very pronounced bosoms
and extreme mini skirts – very, very beautiful girls with
dreadful faces, like Greek women. Magnificent bodies,
narrow waist, full hips, thick black hair and then they turn
round to reveal those huge noses and red voluptuous lips.
Well, he got involved with one of those and gave her a baby.
I’m not sure whether they married or not. But that held him
up for many years; he had to pay this woman a huge amount
of money maintenance for this slightly retarded daughter.
Whether she was genuinely retarded of whether she just
chose to live on junk food…she became very fat and slobbish
and then started hanging round in St Ives doorways aged
14, that sort of….well on the road to Sodom and Gomorrah
before she even got into mini-skirts.

J . That must have depressed him…

B . It did, it was a constant burden. And then he got into

debt, by being encouraged by the Tommy Trevorrows of the
world who made making £5,000 cash in your pocket per
week sound like something we could all do, and they all
carried bankrolls, all the solicitors and property agents. So
Leslie thought this was money for old rope, but of course he
 185

came in a the wrong time and lost a lot of money through

bad advice.

J. On property?

B. On property, yeah. He thought he was being clever,

though he bragged about it – he couldn’t keep quiet about
anything, and that’s not the way to do it. Tommy bragged,
but he usually bragged when he had the bankroll in his
pocket. So he was deep in with all that, with all that gang.
So by the time he went to Newlyn he was almost broken
financially with the maintenance of the debts. And he just
had this very strong Lancastrian woman Judy who believed
in him and who kept him…who kept him at it. And they set
up Troika again in Newlyn. And she used to drive Leslie over
to the workshop in Newlyn. The last times I saw him, she’d
drive him there about eleven in the morning from Sancreed,
out that way,- Trewellard – and he’d go straight in the back
room of the Dolphin and drink there until she picked him up
after work at four o’clock.

J. Terribly destructive stuff….

B. Absolutely, he was drinking halves, arguing, talking.

Mostly arguing. Scarcely any time spend doing and scarcely
any time spent in the workshop at all. So that’s when one
thought he was going to die of alcoholism. And I was very
impressed to see his pictures yesterday. Bloody hell, what a
talent there! A talent such as I don’t have a fraction of. It
takes all sorts as we know, different forms of application
and ability. But he’d got talent.

J A lovely eye for colour.

B. Terrific. Absolutely. And he could be dead cynical, he

could do pot-boilers in biro pen – he liked drawing in biro
pen… put them in nasty little cheap frames up in his local
pub, the Trewellard Arms. Visitors would buy them for 30
quid. And that was 30 quid. But at the same time there was
always a bit of a resentment that he wasn’t being taken
seriously by the establishment.

J. Can’t have it both ways really…..

B. Yeah, but then the establishment such as it ever was over

there, the Herons and the Frosts and the Filers, are all such
cold fish that they’ve got no emotional language with which
to mix with a person like Leslie. Leslie was too sharp, too
deep, too hard. Too talented for them. So all they could do
 186

was smile, sneer and brush him under the carpet. And be
very very patronising if they had to say anything.

J. Did he ever have a show in St Ives?

B. I don’t think so. Judy said there were two letters, 8 weeks
after his death from different sources, each showing great
interest in Troika pottery. Organising exhibitions, writing
about it. Which were done – little pamphlets. But she said if
only he’d known that before his death it would have given
him so much encouragement. And yet one didn’t know that
he needed it, really. One thought he was quite happily set in
this self-destructive, cynical approach. Which was a shield.
As his general agressiveness. And it’s a long story, at least
father, possibly grandfather, but a least parent. His other
brother Brian, a similarly tormented man. Wracked with
angst. It comes out in his work. Tormented souls.

J. What were the parents?

B. Father was a butcher. All his life. I think quite proud of it.
I think and a bully. I think they’d been badly bullied.
{long pause}
J. How are you getting on?

[Link] we have a break?

{break}

B. …crossing the river near Lynton we went to a tea-

shop…

J. Yes, at Watersmeet, in the West Lyn and East Lyn valley,

where the two join, in that National Trust part.

B. You had a friend there, owner of the teashop…

J. Oh…no.. that wouldn’t have been Watersmeet, that would

have been Tarr Steps.

B That’s right, that’s it.

J. A lovely part of the world. They’ve left there now, but the
place is much the same.

B. It would be great fun to be having afternoon tea,

wouldn’t it?
 187

J. Yes, it’s a lovely spot. Mind you at this time of year it gets
a bit hectic. It’s one of the two most visited spots on
Exmoor.

B. Really?

[Link] other being the Oare valley.

B. I made an etching of that eventually. There was a jug in

the window that I did a number of sketches of.

J. I’ve still got some photocopies from the sketches you did
at the Mill.

B. Of the animals.

J. And of the jug in the window with the mirror on the left
hand side.

B. Yup…yup…..well, I think we could start. There may be

some overlapping with previous information, inevitably. I
want to try and muster my thoughts and talk about the
etching period, which as I described…..On coming down to
Cornwall I began making sea-drift constructions in the
empty rooms of Jollytown. Which would be wonderful if I’d
carried on, ‘cause it would be a very strange place indeed.
But I didn’t carry on for the main reason I felt that I couldn’t
do that particular project any justice without a full
complement of electrical tools at which I was adept at using
at that time. Not skilfully but adequately. And it wasn’t the
sort of work I wanted to become craftsman, cabinet maker
and cut my joints beautifully by hand, because that didn’t
seem relevant to what I wanted to do. So anyway, I
abandoned the white-painted sea wood reliefs which were
some form of extension of the big constructions I’d left
behind in Rome – nine foot by six foot – scraps of wood,
paper, clothing from the Borghese Gardens in Rome smeared
across large surfaces, layered with further layers of wood
and paint all on which to be working but without the
ultimate focal point. Such work produced very, necessarily,
very raw images, at the same time very non-referential
images. They were physically what they were. And I’ve
always hoped that for a work of art to be that that, {it
should my edit} to [sic] add the points of reference with the
observed as well as the here and now physical world. –A bit
tricky to explain what I mean I don’t know whether that will
make sense, when it’s printed out. I may have to think again
and try and write that down. I wanted to be making in such
pictures let us say an illusion of four inches depth as well as
a real four inches depth. But no point making the four
 188

inches depth unless it’s about something, and these

pictures didn’t want to be about anything other the four
inches depth consolidated by surface, by colour, by texture
etecetera. But somehow, zooming out the core…. the
essence of the picture, the pictures, were without a core,
pictures without essence….is it recording…

J. yes…

B. Good. So that was the dilemma. And then being

confronted with the wild landscape of Kynance, not to
mention Cornwall, with the very delicate beautiful light
that we have here,- which I can still remember, the very
first morning, experiencing that light - and observing
the sky to be a sort of robin’s eggshell blue, so delicate
and pure, unlike anything I’d experienced. I hadn’t been
taught, as I might have been at the Slade School, to mix
up oil paints and to be able to plonk down in very juicy
hoghair brushfuls of opaque yet translucent light space-
creating colour. They were taught that, painting a la
Priga. I’d been allowed, unfortunately, been given my
head to go forward with using glazing techniques,
painting thin layers of colour over modelled
underpainted colour often using terre verte {spells},
the colour of green earth, the colour the Italian
primitives of the Cinquecento would use. In painting a
head Fra Angelico would have modelled the head from
light to dark in the terre verte and then float over this
skeins of delicate fleshtones, the yellow ochres, diluted,
very heavily diluted. And slowly build up a very luminous
and flesh-seeming limb or head. The knocking, - if you
care to go to the door you’ll see a jackdaw out there
plumping a snail to bits.

J. Oh, Is that what it is? I was wondering what on earth it

was. I thought it was just a noisy neighbour.

B. I used to think it was eccentric plumbing, such a you used

to get in Camden Town bedsits.

J. It’s the Jackdaw, having escargots for tea…

B. {laughs} Escargots for tea….So that method of glazing

and the painting, I think it allows for a hell of a lot of
fudging in pure paint terms. You can mince around the
periphery without really plunging into raw painting. And a
chap who can mix up that lovely eggshell blue in juicy paint
and then put a little square of white and indian red which is
a pantile roof and a streak of autumn wind {???} painted
into the wet eggshell blue and you’ve got the blue mountain
 189

of Provence and that’s real painting, that’s beautiful

painting. Live around it – I’m slowly coming round to it now.
To say, in parentheses yet again, there so many bloody
alternatives in making a painting. Everything has its
alternative. Every, every, every, everything. So that any
painting that ever gets finished is an absolute thrill. You
know the joke about the 5000 chimpanzees armed with a
typewriter apiece and allowed to bang at random for five
million years, one of them will come up with a
Shakespearian sonnet eventually. Well it seems to me that
that’s about the odds the painter has when he starts a
picture. The picture could be a bit taller, a big longer, a bit
smaller, and bit bigger. It could be on a rougher canvas, or
on a smoother canvas. On a shiny board, on a rough board.
It could be scored, it could be built up it could be dotted, it
could be smeared. And so on and so on… Anyway, I guess
there’s a bit of digression there, but I didn’t have the means
at my disposal to bring my very, very limited achievement to
point its head in the right direction and to say, -Now, this is
Cornwall. I am thirty. I’ve been painting seriously for fifteen
years, now I can get started on painting. ‘Cos I couldn’t, ‘cos
I didn’t have the language. And that’s when self doubts can
set in. It’s probably at that juncture that most people fall by
the wayside, become part-time postmen, until offered
promotion unless….But I didn’t want that, and my life was
geared to making things. So, I took to drawing. Pencil. Not
enough to draw on a sheet of paper, not enough to draw
simply in a sketch-book; to draw on a piece of paper that
had been wilfully stuck down on a piece of board, and then
maybe the virginity of the paper, desecrated with pigment
or stain, coffee or tea or mugs until the paper was more
friendly, less assertive, and then to float my lines over that
surface. And hopefully to get a degree of the physicality I’ve
always been after, and the visual objectivity that I’ve always
wished to include in the marriage. And think some of these
paintings were quite successful. The board was then stuck
on another, larger, often variably random coloured board,
and then the whole thing nailed in rather crude ways
together and then dropped into a box-like frame
construction behind glass. So by this time I had made my
object, but somebody else had made the frame –but it
finished up as an object.
Well this was quite satisfying and this carried on for a little
while and I think I could even go back to that. Using blocks
of referential colour, a green or a magenta in memory of the
flower in your picture…
J The campion?
B The campion… Fond of that campion red; fond of the
various lush and dry greens we have here and the ochres
and then the strips of blue and grey horizons that catch our
 190

eyes from a motor bike or a motor car or between the clefts

of the valley. So, simple little images emerge as simple little
blocks of colour accentuating the vagaries of the line. Yes, I
think that still is a nice formula for making paintings,
drawings, whatever…evocative of Cornwall, or Tuscany. It
might not work in Norfolk, and it might not work in the
Orkney Isles, but it works in one’s chosen locales.
So that plodded on for… maybe a couple of years… and as I
have mentioned I was commuting at this time. For two days
teaching per week up at West Surrey College –Farnham
College of Art as it was more simply called in those days. A
converted grammar school, in the High street, next door to a
rather posh pub called the Wheatsheaf, and a rather posh
restaurant called the Bishop’s Mitre. In other words it was
the remnants of a good English market town in the early
sixties. Still a very pleasant place to be. I used to ride the
motor-bike from Jollytown, change my clothing in a back
alleyway in Penzance, put on what I considered adequately
grand clothing for commuting and teaching, in other words
change out of motor-bike boots into shoes etcetera. Jump on
the overnight sleeper. Twenty five shilling ticket each way
for the sleeper reservation. A few beers with the steward in
his little cubby hole. Sometimes me buying the beer,
sometimes the steward buying the beer. Always a good
yarn; got to know all their names; they all addressed me by
name. Mostly Irish: Good evening, Mr Ingham, sir, and what
d’ye fancy drinking this evening? Would be the first
question.
And then we’d sail magically out of Penzance station, along
the shoreline, seeing Marazion silhouetted against the full
moon sky on occasion. Very lovely way to start your two
days work. The hell of Paddington at six am the next
morning, the scuttling figures, the tube across London to
Waterloo, and thence one hour and ten minutes up to
Farnham. Two pleasant days teaching. Simple teaching.
Teaching as I thought they needed. Not following any master
plan of any head of department.
I thought a student needed to know elementary things like
foreshortening. I could set them little exercises, little
tricks… where I could establish that a student, seeking to
draw objectively, in other words accurately, could in a
drawing 18 inches square be 10 inches out in proportion.
Unbelievable. Now I tended to think that until a student had
mastered such lurking errors, pitfalls….not much point in
talking about Jackson Pollock’s latest jerk-off or whatever….
To do this, to encourage this, visual accuracy, I would set
the simple problem of drawing a table top from a position
directly confronting the narrow end of the table and the
student seated at my present eye level (B was sitting in an
armchair) and I’d say, -Right, simply draw that table top in
 191

proportion. So the student would confidently assess that the

front of the tabletop is so wide, and in the knowledge that
the three foot wide table is six foot long the student would
then draw the depth, the length of the table to be virtually
twice that. So they would have drawn a map, a plan of the
table. But they wouldn’t have drawn what they were seeing.
And what they were seeing…. to their extreme irritation, I
would say, -Now let me sit down, Let’s find a unit, with an
outstretched arm and pencil. Let us find a unit that fits into
this table top four times. So we juggle until we’ve got a unit,
we go one…two…three…yup make it a bit more…one…
two..three…four. Right that unit there fits into the front of
the table four times. Now let’s see how far it fits into the
table as we are looking at it from front to back. A half of
that unit. So we’ve got four to a half in terms of units. Now
let’s move to your drawing. You’ve got this so that’s four,
lets break that into four…one…two… three… four. So that’s
that. We’re agreed on this That’s four, and your drawing is
four. Now lets go back…according to this present unit your
table is one…two…three… four… five…six units in
regression. Six units against four. And what did I say it was.
Half a unit against four. Therefore that means you are out by
…eleven? You’re out by eleven units.
It’s all very clear on the paper when doing this exercise. So
let’s measure those eleven units…one…two …three…and
let’s do this on your drawing….and so we establish that the
drawing so much is the observed depth of the table top is
so. But according to you, Student, it is six of these. Two…
three… four…five… six So it seems to me that you’re twelve
inches out on a drawing that’s only eighteen inches square.
Is that possible? It’s a tricky little exercise but it’s horribly
true. And underlying that is the truism that we try and draw
what we know rather than what we see. Well, at that stage
of their visual education I believe in them being capable of
drawing firstly what they see, and then utilising that ability
in whatever way.
Obviously if you want to make a drawing of that table top to
take to your village carpenter you’re going to make a
drawing as in plan, and that would be the drawing, and the
carpenter would have no problem he’d say that’s three to
eight, fine. But if that’s your three then what are you seeing
of this now, because you know its eight, you’re going to
make your drawing go on and on and on until its got what
you think it ought to have. Rather than the shrewd measure
that it does have which is no wider than an ice cream wafer!
So simple little exercises like that I believe are necessary,
and lots and lots of other things. And it was all interesting
because I was formulating these exercises for myself –
nobody had taught me any of this. I hadn’t read any master
books on drawing theory and so on. It was very elementary
 192

but if you can’t do something elementary you’re not going

to be very well equipped at a later stage. And so I believe in
it. So that’s the sort of fun and games I’d have with this
group of students from nine to half past four. Sometimes a
student would arrive just as I’d finished my ten minute talk
before starting the day’s work and I’d say to this student –
There are twenty of us in this room, we’ve waited twenty
minutes for you to arrive, so what’s that…two twos are four
– four hundred minutes, how many hours is that?

J. 6.6 hours.

B. Right. You’ve wasted 6.6 hours through your tardiness

and now you expect me to go through the whole programme
again, and I hope it will be a lesson to come in future that
I’m not going to say a fucking thing to you. If I can get here
from the tip of southernmost England and be here an hour
before the lesson I’m sure you can manage it from
Guildford….You see one didn’t seek to ingratiate oneself
with the students, and this was just the time when all the
teachers were doing just that. The teachers would say to the
students – Call me Joss – I’m Bri, Brian. We’re mates
together – we’d shake hands in funny special solidarity
ways. I used to say, -No, no, if you want to learn to draw
come to my classes; I’m not interested in your soap-boxes
and I’m not interested in art school politics. I know there’s a
lot of crap and I know that so much of it is wrong but you’re
not here to sort out wrong and right in student education,
you’re here to get yourselves an education. If you want to
fritter your time on other more exciting things do so by all
means, but don’t waste my time. And that was the
understanding. And of course I lost a lot of students very
quickly. And of course you lose a lot of staff support when
you’re being tough, when you’re not being one of the
student teachers with moustaches - like Che Guevara they
all looked like at that time. They even wore bloody berets in
1968! But I did have some good students.
Anyway that’s just digressing a little bit about what one did
when one went up there. One stayed overnight with a pair of
excellent trenchermen, Mike and Mary Fairclough, both liked
their beer, wine and food, and they always gave me a very
comfortable bed, and so we’d spend lovely evenings
gossiping drinking quite a lot, and always splendid, usually
pasta, but made… made from Italian recipes, just that little
bit better than than you or I generally – or that I - ever come
across. – Are you tired Joss? Would you like a glass…..

J. No, no, I’m fine actually, it’s just this heat making my
eyelids droop. I’m all right….
 193

B. Yes, yes. And then back to Paddington, back to see Sally

and Gavrik, perhaps have a couple of glasses in the
Gyngleboy and then onto to overnight sleeper. Off the
sleeper at 8.30 in the morning at Penzance, up the alleyway,
change back in to to rough boots and the clothes, the rest
all stuffed into a bag around one’s neck and the big loud
hurrah as one went motoring along towards Marazion, by
the side of the sea, the light sparkling on the water.
Wednesday morning – the rest of the week is mine – shout a
few obscenities to art school, art teachers, students… the
whole bloody lot! And back to Jollytown to see how many
eggs the chickens had laid. And I used to make outrageous
concoctions with up to half a dozen eggs mixed with
softened onions and honey..

J. Bloody hell!

B. I’d read that this – I don’t know where – that it was a

special with cumin, and that other very lovely fragrant spice
– I’d read that this was an aphrodisiacal dish favoured by
the middle eastern potentates, so I had that for my health’s
sake! And then to walk around the meadows in the evening
peering over the cliffs with a shotgun…bang off a rabbit…
back home and paunch it in the meadow…skin it straight
away sometimes from field to pot, the rabbits went. Not
always, - sometimes hung for a day or two.

J. Better hung a bit, aren’t they?

B. Well, yes…. A very young one… I do remember one or two

instances where I’d gone out, been back within forty
minutes and been eating within a further hour.

J. That’s not bad, is it….

B. But normally I’d paunch them and then hang them until
necessary. They don’t really need it… a day maybe. So they
were happy days at Jollytown. But even so it was it was an
interrupted week for an artist… of course it always takes
you a day to settle back, doesn’t it? So that was Wednesday
gone. And I used to visit Stella at a weekend, so that would
be maybe Saturday lunchtime or Saturday evening, so I
suppose my working week was down to Thursday, Friday,
possibly a bit of Saturday. Until I took a studio in St Ives,
and maybe did a bit more then.

J. But you’d probably been working stuff out during your

teaching hours as well, hadn’t you?
 194

B. Possibly. All the time I was teaching I was learning, and

when I stopped learning from what I was saying I thought
well that’s the time to give up teaching, it’s no longer fresh,
it’s routine.

J. And you were also using the trips to London to develop

your etching weren’t you?

B. Well, that comes on cue, because after one or two years

of these pencil on paper on wash on board on board in a
box-like frame, that bean to be not quite adequate so then I
looked towards etching, and there was a small etching
department in the old grammar school, and very charming
technical assistant, as they were called they earned their
bread more than any other member of staff – they worked!
Kept the place clean, kept it stocked. I think that no so-
called lecturer would have the with or the experience to do…
lecturers were parasites. The ones who came in four days,
they were full time. Could not be dismissed. There for life,
and a pension thereafter.

J. I’m sure that must have changed by now, surely.

B. No, it’s even worse now, I think….you see in my time

there was still money allocated for part-time teachers,
where you’d go to the Slade or the Royal College to the
“slave market” at the end of the
Diploma and choose somebody you wouldn’t necessarily
want for four days a week on your staff but somebody you
thought would bring a bit of life to things.
¬ end tape

J. It’s the heat that’s making me comatose. I might just have

a drink of water…Can I get you one?

B. Yes, yes, that would be nice. (pause) They prescribe…Oh

wonderful, thank you…. They prescribe different sorts of
laxative pills….you know that’s one of the preoccupations of
all hospitalised people….is how you’re functioning…

J. How your bowels are doing…

B. Yup. It’s a general topic of conversation! Well, I cope

fairly well with
this, but I do have to take something… either liquid or
whatever. And they’ve all got their side effects. And it
usually results in a good old fashioned belly ache. Really
quite, quite strong guts ache. You know…. when, when
you’ve done your performance, and then it’ll lurk around for
a day or two…
 195

J Giving you a cramp?

B. Yeh, yeh…

J. I can tell you one thing my wife swears by… she had to
spend various weeks in hospital during having Nicholas and
various other things. And she discovered that Libbys Orange
juice is a wonderful natural laxative.

B. Really?

J. Yes, if you can stand orange juice….

B. Oh. I can.

J. Well, Libbys particularly….I don’t know what its got in it,

but it’s
miraculous!

B. well that would be much better.

J. Well give it a go…

B. I’ll give that a try…

J. It certainly worked for a number of people in that ward, I

can tell you.

B. Really… Oh. Well that’s a good tip. I took receipt of some

new stuff yesterday which is a liquid as opposed to the
previous tablet. And my God, it tasted horrid! And it had its
adequate effect, but …it’s not nice spending days with
chronic bellyache. These things are only minor, but you get
two or three of them chugging on at the same time….

J. Discomfort isn’t minor, it’s a pain in the neck…

B. I don’t know if there are any real definitions for pain. I

don’t suppose there is any way of really measuring….
genuine pain.

J. Very difficult…

B. I told my chap, Dr Daniel, a few weeks ago how many of

these I was
taking and at what intervals, and I said well I don’t want to
exaggerate…when I’m taking this I wouldn’t call it pain,
pain. Lt’s just…

J Discomfort?
 196

B. Yeh. And he said no, no, no, if you’re taking that many of
those at that interval that is considerable pain. Well that
made me think. Of course nobody really knows. We’re all
you see, locked within our own bodies, aren’t we?

J. Yes, you can only really reference it by your own

experience, and I suppose as good a way of any is to ask
yourself out of ten how painful is it, you know?

B. Yup, yup….well, we’ve done that, on a chart. Mrs McMillan

was thrilled to be able to look very important with this
chart, making people look like Leonardo da Vinci drawings…
and then you have to say where the pain is on a scale of
words, severe, very severe, intolerable, off your fucking
head to ……

J. yes.

B. And then again you’ve got different, as the doctor said,

we have different interpretations and reactions to pain.
Tolerance is the word he used, tolerance. But I can’t
complain. So that was a little touch of travelling up to
London leading us up to.…Etching. 1968.
About the only anniversary I can remember in my whole life,
literally. I couldn’t tell you what year I was married. I
couldn’t tell you off the top of my head when I went to St
Martins, or when I left the old Royal College. The only date
is 1968 I began etching. And the only number, as they say of
all ex-military men, is my military number 4156816. Sah!!
Pretty clever how they do that to us isn’t it?

J. Three weeks beating your brain with a bog-brush,

probably!

B. Yuh. I think I described how, last week, when I first

sniffed the waxes, the oils, the heated metal of the etching
process, how I immediately thought this is not for me. I
don’t like these smells….And how completely wrong I was,
because those smells have become very cherished smells,
-even the smell of the acid. Everything to do with the
process. So….I knew nothing about etching, having avoided
it at RCA. It was not a particularly esteemed branch of any
art school course. I’ve even heard one of those so-called
lecturers, full time tutors, say of a student, - Well so-and-so
can’t draw. So he’d better do etching. _ that was very much
the attitude. In other words, etching was seen as a process
whereby you disguise your tracks. You disguise the fact that
you can’t draw, by making all sorts of mess all over
everything and making the image well nigh unintelligible
 197

through chemical processes, which nobody else can follow

or understand, so you come out the winner with a smug
expression and say - Oh that’s open bit and that’s aquatint.
And nobody dared question you any further! The fact that
it’s disguising feeble, feeble visual dynamics never came
into it. So etching was seen I think as a bit of a soft option
with people who’ve got plenty of time just to potter around
and lose themselves in corners for years. So I got in the
habit of carrying grounded plates back and forth between
Farnham and Jollytown. Drawing them at Jollytown, taking
them back, biting them in the acid at Farnham. And then I
slowly realised that the two phases are not really to be
separated – It’s not a big drawing session and then a big
biting-stroke-etching session and then a big printing
session; these things can overlap consistently. Until in my
latter years as an etcher, after say 25 years, I would often
start with a well grounded, craftsman like grounded plate.
But then break every rule in the book, take no state proofs
to see what the plate was actually looking like, just go on
working in the relative dark, judging what I could see bitten
into the plate, occasionally rubbing ink into the lines to get
a gauge, but not actually inking up a printing until I deemed
the thing finished. And the last two plates, two of the most
ambitious plates I ever did, went through six or seven states
like that and were well nigh true to what I wished without
any state proof.

J. That must have been very satisfying.

B. Well, something of a tour de force! But it’s more than

that. You’re inviting into the arena, the metal, the acid, the
heat….The nuances. The acid will work differently under
different conditions. You could leave a plate in the acid
overnight, for ten hours, and it would not come to any harm.
In a cold room. But leave it in this temperature for an hour,
and it would bubble and churn away. So you have to have an
approximate understanding of the chemistry, the mechanics
of things. But then you gain that. And the more you gain in
confidence, the more you invite chance in. And the more
chance comes into the process, the more risk comes. And I
suppose those components make for a good gymnast – not
just an impeccable technique, which would make for a
creditable gymnast but throw in an impeccable technique
that you’ve chosen to throw to one side. Bring in risk, bring
in chance, then if it comes off you’ve got something that
cannot be emulated. And that something is a really powerful
etching. And it is for that reason that you see so few
powerful etchings, because 99% of regular etchers don’t like
to leave go of the ropes; they want to keep quite close to
the bank all of the time, quite close to safety. And especially
 198

in Germany, they want to control the medium absolutely.

And we could actually in Germany go out and buy a textbook
that would tell us that if we’re working with an X percent
proof nitric acid against a copper plate in a room
temperature – we measure it – eighty eight degrees, nitric
degrees on its scale… correlate these etch for ten minutes
for line like hair, for twenty minutes for line like..etc….every
damn weight of line would be tabulated in this text book.

J. Reference tables.

B. Yuh.

J. Quite useful.

B. Absolute junk. Absolute junk! Other than for a pedant

without an idea in his head. I could sit on the end of a
telephone - have Kurt Schoenen in Berlin on the other end.
And I could say – Now, you’ve got the textbook Kurt, it’s 86
degrees here and the acid is 46 I want to bite a mid-grey
tone aquatint. Oh. One minute, Brian… flip, flip, flip through
the pages. You are giving it seven minutes for mid-grey
tone. Fine, right and so we could make the etching. But it
wouldn’t be a very good etching. I suppose very, very briefly
we should mention… what is etching. Etching is a means of
incising a metal –normally- plate with marks which will then
hold ink which will then print onto dampened paper
reproducible marks. When I say reproducible I mena it will
allow us to print fifty times…from the same inked up mark
we will get the same impression on our paper. It’s a
controlled and fixed mark we have on the etching plate. To
achieve the mark…. To go back one step, our metal plate will
be covered with a thin film of wax. We will then seek to
remove the wax from here and there. The removal of the
wax will be called drawing. The drawing can take place with
a point a series of points, with roulettes of various degrees,
with any object that will cleanly penetrate the wax rather
simply smear the wax about the surface but not break the
wax through to the metal. We need to expose the metal. A
good etcher will tend I think in 1997 to have a range of tools
at his disposal. He will have little spiked roulette wheels on
wooden handles which if rolled like…like that, will produce a
gravel path of marks. He will {unintel} rockers which can be
used in different ways to achieve different patterns of
marks. He will have a straight needle which can produce a
straight pen-like mark…consistent, equidistant lines. He
could use tools used in the old-fashioned house-painting
trade, tools which simulate, which create effects simulating
wood grain etcetera. And any one of these tools used in a
conventional manner will make a sequence of marks. Which
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can be added to or which can be erased by the simple

expediency of painting over the mark, that is the exposed
metal, with an acid resistant varnish. The good etcher will
find he’s not only using a range of tools. With those tools
he’s also making inventive marks; he’s not merely drawing
as in a pen drawing. He’s not merely cross-hatching as in a
nineteenth century illustration; but he’s building up
different figurations, marks…..He will find obviously that if
he draws with his pen-like tool very quickly, he will get a
different character of mark than if he drew very slowly. And
if he draws at a speed between quick and slow he’ll get a
yet different quality of mark. So put those different
variables together and you might have a plate that is drawn
with quite a rich variety of potential printing marks. So then
we can slide the whole plate with the back side of the metal
well varnished, so the acid is now working simply where
we’ve made the drawing, the marks. We can observe or we
can sense, or we can even smell when the acid is working –
if the acid is working. If it is working quickly, savagely, or
otherwise. Let’s imagine we have four parallel lines amongst
these more imaginative marks. After ten minutes I decide
that line one of the four is etched to such a depth that if I
were to take the whole plate out, print it – wipe it free of
wax, cover it with ink, wipe the ink away - and print the
thing in the normal manner, line one, as well as all the other
lines would print the weight of a human hair. But I don’t
want to do that to all of the lines, I want to do it only to
certain lines. So those certain lines I paint out with varnish.
The ones I wish to be arrested early in their development.
That might be five seconds, it might be five minutes, it
might be five hours, depending on strengths and various
things. Strength of mark, strength of acid etcetera.. I might
put then the plate, with the lines stopped out in varnish, put
it back into the acid for further ten minutes, take it out,
judge that the second of my equally drawn lines is now
printed, etched, deeper than the first one. So I paint that
out with varnish to arrest its development, and so on… the
third line I might think I need to be quite thick, so I might
leave that one in the acid for one hour. And then when it
comes out of the acid I might poke it with a needle, I might
feel through the tactile sense that yes that is quite deep, it
will hold a lot more ink than the first or the second one. I
might then paint out that in varnish and let the fourth line
go. And the fourth line I might wish to be very very strong, a
heavy black line, holding a lot of ink. And I might let it go for
an hour or I might let it go for a day. And if I’m in control of
the job to a degree…or rather than control if I’m confident in
what I’m doing I might think yes, by all means, let’s let it go
for twelve hours. Let’s only look at it once every hour, so I
stop fussing now. As long as the wax doesn’t come off all
 200

over – as long as the ground holds up, - we’ll let the plate
etch. And so at the end of ten hours and twelve hours we’ve
got the same four lines, one printing like a whisper and one
printing almost like a black piece of string. But they all
started their life as uniform. Now, it’s on those two simple
principles of the character of the mark made and the tool
that made it and the variety of the etching imposed upon
those marks. That’s really the whole battleground of
etching.

J. Do you not work the plate after you’ve taken the wax off
sometimes?

B. Let’s say we’ve done that with the plate. So we’ve got
some lines stopped out at one minute – whatever it was, and
ten minutes through to ten hours. We’ve got a variety of
lines made by a variety of means. So this is the exciting
time. We wipe away all of the wax with a solvent. We warm
the plate, cover it with ink wipe the ink away form the
surface leaving only the lines and marks, the marks being
called the intaglio – Italian word. And then we need soft
blankets. We cover our inked up plate with a sheet of gently
dampened paper, probably an expensive paper, soft paper.
Cover that with two or three blankets of different character
– soft and hard blankets. And roll that through a mangle-
type press. So the rollers, the pressure of the rollers pushes
the ink down to the bottom of the intaglio. And then we
gently peel away the sheet of paper which is now a print.
And that’s always a very exciting moment. And nine times
out of ten it’s always disappointing. Because it’s never at all
what you imagined; even allowing for the fact that the
image is reversed. So you’re seeing something quite in a
different light, in reverse. But invariably, the student will be
surprised to see the balance of black mark to white paper is
not at all what they had imagined, when it was question of
wax-free marks to the wax ground one would always
imagine that there were a lot more marks on the image than
in fact there are, the first time round. But there’s nothing
lost. We can clean away the ink, put on a fresh ground, mark
the first print “first state” and go through the whole
process – reground the plate, add more drawing to the
plate. If we wish we can allow the first state print to dry we
can spread a bit of tracing paper over that and we can draw
on the tracing paper over the print to see where we need
different marks. More marks, different character marks,
deeper marks, deeper lines. And we can set about doing
that then through the new wax ground. And the new bout of
etching. Print that and we’re at the second state. Many
etchers never get beyond a first state; they will think that’s
it, marvellous. What they tend to be doing is translating the
 201

equivalent of a pen and ink drawing into a pen and ink

drawing that can be multiplied fifty times or a hundred
times into an edition. But they’re not using the medium of
etching. They’re just using it as a reproductive process.
Well, that is pusillanimous, second-rate and not really worth
talking about. Now a good etcher may by the time there’s a
third state or a fourth state have pulled the whole print
together. And by the time he pulls the fourth state proof he
may say whoopee, that’s it! Its got all the variety I need, its
got every detail there that I…that I’m dreaming of.. that’s it,
that’s finished. Or he may need to carry on. The most I’ve
done was for I think twenty six states. That’s exaggerated.
And that was one of those nudes of Sarah John where I
removed a lot of work, scraped a lot away, added work, and
it went on over a period of years. I think generally speaking
between four and six states you ought to get what you
want. Not with the first state or even the second state
because you don’t quite know what you want when you
start, and you only begin to see it in printed and etched
terms when you really started using those components as
part of your vocabulary as long as you’re still drawing like a
draftsman you’re not making an etching. Or not to my way
of thinking. Would it be a moment just to pause now, Joss?

J. Absolutely if you’re…

B. How much time is there there? ¬ tape paused¬

J….We’re doing very well, actually

B. One of the fascinating things about etching, and I used to

tell my students at Falmouth this. I would have maybe eight
students per week, some who’d done it before, some who’d
done it and forgotten it, some who knew what on earth it
was all about! And I would tell them quite honestly I could
teach you all you need to know about etching for the rest of
your life in one morning. And then you can add to that. And I
having been doing it as it was then for fifteen years for
twenty years, as it is now for call it twenty five years, am
still adding to my repertoire of modus operandi. Of
possibilities. But the basic stuff the students and I could
foregather in Mr Rembrandts studio in Amsterdamplatz,
handle his big wooden press, look around, yes, there’s the
hot plate, there’s the tarlatan there’s the inking-up dabber.
Where are your acid trays, Van Rjin? Ah yes, under there.
Jolly good, you use Dutch mordr- Ah you’re Dutch! Of
course! You would use that. Well, we might choose to use
something else. And we could settle down and learn the
rudiments of etching in a studio …how old? Four hundred
years old? And in fact the more sophisticated refinements
 202

that have been stuck onto the tail of etching in the last few
years – as on the tail of every process known, be it
typography or silk screen printing or any process – those
few oddments that have been stuck one are virtually
useless, they are superficial, spurious, not-needed-on-
voyage little sophistries.

J. Such as what, in etching?

B. Well, some etchers may favour spraying their plates with

acid. Some may favour combinations of photographic
sensitised plates and so on…some of these techniques are
quite old, and some could be used to good effect, so I’m
contradicting myself a little there! But basically everything
you need to know about etching was almost exposed for us
by the very first known etcher, a lad who goes under the
splendid name of Hercules Seghers, and he produced some
of the first colour etchings ever. Which are quite as effective
as anything done today. So…so we don’t really need…we can
still regard etching as a means of exploration, of discovery.
And as a means of personal discovery it is absolutely
invaluable. And I think that really is what I was hoping to
talk about at the beginning of this tape. How etching, how
learning the processes of etching, helped to lift one out of
this narrow, or even shallow, arena of pencil on wash on
board which in turn came from the wood constructions,
which in turn came from the big Rome painted
constructions, all of which in their way had been found
lacking in some area or other. In different ways I had found
them not ultimately satisfactory. And it was with learning
the etching techniques that the visual possibilities of
graphic, visual graphic art began to unfold again. So the
title of this tape is How I saved my painting life by becoming
an etcher. And I think we can carry on from there in the next
tape.
¬¬¬end tape`¬¬start tape15¬¬¬

J. Right.

B. Before resuming I’m remembering with this heat one

can’t help thinking of Italy, and I’m thinking of the studio in
Rome, in Via Granchi, at the British Academy, and I’m
thinking of my big pictures the size of the book case
(indicating) and how there is a sort of inevitability about
such paintings, and if I had those long-since destroyed
paintings lined up down the yard there and dressed just in
shorts and singlet and great pots and tubes and pallets of
paint it would be just the most natural thing in the world to
develop them the little bit that they still could be developed.
They could be enriched. Call made absolute.
 203

J. Have the British Academy got rid of them?

B. Oh. I’m sure. I’m sure.

J. Did you ever check?

B. I think I was told by somebody who came there the year

after – I think so. He said that Mrs Ward-Perkins flung my
cat into the cat pit as described earlier and Mr Ward-Perkins
supervised the immediate even instant (chuckling)
destruction of my paintings. Heh, heh! Don’t know why, but
I used to worry a lot of grown-ups in those days! It’s hard to
think that such an innocuous, ingenuous, simple-minded
little soul could arouse such passion and anger amongst
mature people. Heh, heh!

J. Well it didn’t seem to worry you at the time, either….

B. No, it didn’t, then or now. You see the problem…I suppose

the problem was that they all thought that I knew a lot more
than I did know. They couldn’t believe that anybody could be
just as simple and ordinary as I was, and imagined I was
playing highly complicated intellectual and emotional games
with them all. Whereas I wasn’t. If they’d taken me at the
lowest common denominator they’d have found me there.
An amiable chap!

J. Hmnnn…

B. Well, it’s the old thing of seeing ourselves as others see

us.¬¬break¬¬
So, back at Jollytown, carrying copper plates between
Penzance railway station and Farnham. Got off to a very
good start with very good teaching. Firstly from the
technician, John Butterworth, a little Lancastrian fellow,
passionate Manchester United supporter, who literally, quite
honestly would take to his bed for at least two days had
Manchester United suffered a particularly notable defeat.
Hard to believe!

J. Actually went to bed?

B. Went to bed. Darkened room. I visited him there. Two

days. Total silence. Darkness. Cold water. That’s what it is to
be a passionate supporter, and I suppose United there are
none more passionate….He saw the great game against –
who was it ….-Benfica - when United won 5-3, Georgie Best
got a hat trick – one of those great great nights of football.
He could still cry when talking about it. No mob violence
 204

there at all! Just imagine him walking under the palm trees
passing groups of bemused Europeans and John saying in
his broad accent “Gereat! Gereat!” that was his fondest
adjective. Anything that was above good was “Gereat!
Gereat!” So he was fine teacher, was John. And he took a lot
of care with the preparation, not with the aesthetic. How to
make a good ground and so on. And like many craftsmen he
took it far, far, far too far. Like many etchers. They do tend
to make a great mystique out of the niceties of
technicalities. Unnecessarily so. It’s simple and it’s
complicated, but it doesn’t need jazzing up with hushed
voice and the plate ground has to be totally perfect, and
after a year or two I think well, bugger that! I can paint
stop-out varnish across that and I may have to draw a
thicker line there. And I would let a bit of chance come into
it and intervene. I think that’s why he remained a
competent and dazzling etcher, but never a very interesting
etcher. And then the people I stayed with overnight, the
Faircloughs, whom I’d met in Rome. Their father was Wilfred
Fairclough, well known principal of Kingston-on-Thames art
school amongst other things. Like many short me, a tyrant.
Very critical, very sardonic. And if you didn’t punch his
weight, or height, he’d slam you in the guts and leave you
sprawling. But if you did, he was very controllable, I learned,
and he represented a tradition of British etching, what you
might call the tradition of British etching, which can be
traced very directly back to Samuel Palmer, mid nineteenth
century, through just two or three figures really, almost
passing the flaming torch from one to the other. The
torchbearers included at one time and relatively briefly,
Graham Sutherland. And another wonderfully poetic etcher
called Paul Drury, whom I had the pleasure of meeting as a
old man, and they etched English Idyll, a romantic idyll,
heavily laden fruit trees, orchards, rounded hills, suns
setting behind the shore and beech forests and hangers.
Very much an idealised Britain. Again very much a pre-1914
Britain. The quintessence of that great richness that Empire
and country and craftsmanship and hope and idealism, and
men lioke H G Wells and Arnold Bennet and G B Shaw were
all seeing a great future ahead. Well these etchers occupied
a little corner of this great future; they occupied the
romantic gardens of the future. And very accessible and
beautiful places they were too. They would I’m sure look
frankly silly now. But as long ago as 1950 you were probably
still in order to evoke that spirit of landscape and history. So
I got a lot of old man …Wilfred, Wilfred his name…I got a lot
of his knowledge and skill through his son Michael, himself a
very distinguished aquatint artist. Who made a peculiar
mistake in relatively early career of setting his sights too
low. A lot of people fail from aiming too high, I think. But not
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many fail from achieving what they set out to do. And Mike
wanted to be the greatest aquatint artist, capable of
covering miles of cornfield in a square inch of copper plate,
capable of evoking Lincoln cathedral not much bigger than
your thumb-nail, yet all there under a July sun. He could do
these things wonderfully. And very fine they are as well. But
there’s no way forward for that. He’s recently broken out –
made his dash – through painting now. Rather a rougher
approach. He took aquatint – three plate colour aquatint
possibly as far as it can go, devising his own techniques
which bemused fellow Royal Academicians, members of the
Royal Society of Painters, Etchers and Engravers. Didn’t
know how Mike got his so-subtle effects so uniformly. Well,
he fulfilled that ambition and now all right he’s tackling the
next stage. Let’s hope he breaks through that and continues
developing. Good for him that he’s stopped at last, when
people were beginning to say when you’ve seen one dragon
you’ve seen the lot, as the fellow says on the gramophone
record. Then the head of department, amiable bully, Arthur
Hackney….

J. At Farnham?

B At Farnham. I like to refer to him in a char ladyfish sort of

voice as (imitates) Mr ‘ackney. Arthur again, had a good
technique, he was a good etcher. By this time, I should have
said, the etching department had expanded, had aquired a
diploma, the only diploma in the country, and was accepting
full-time print-making students. Which was a big mistake.
Full-time print making students you’d have been spending
60% of their time drawing 30 % of their time living, and the
odd bits and pieces learning how to make aquatints and
open bites and so on. But no, the poor sods were shown –
this is lithography, you’ll be doing that next term and
dragged through the processes, which don’t have a lot in
common other than they are reproductive processes
Lithography prints from the surface, using a basic principle
of a water/oil mutual resistance. Nothing at all to do with
the intaglio, sculptural qualities of copper plate etching, but
put in the same bracket as etching as print-making. As with
serigraph or silk-screen printing which again has got
absolutely fuck-all to do with sculpture or with etching. And
not necessarily a lot to do with drawing either. So a print-
making course is highly questionable. I don’t know whether
it still operates as such. I know the few wretched students I
saw at that time struggling through it years later were
totally confused as well they might be. So Mr Hackney had
latched on in his etchings to the notion that the more marks
you put on a plate the more ink the plate holds the more ink
it holds the darker the image will tend to be. So what shall
 206

we do about it. I know, let’s do the blossom tree at the

bottom of the garden under a full moon. So you’ve got a
lovely velvety black sky, and the shadows, and the blossoms
looming out of the shadows and the radiance of the moon
through the half-tones. In other words make an etching as a
dark subject and it’s money for old rope really! The skill
comes in evoking a hot day mebbe…then you can’t just large
cross hatch the whole thing with lines…anyway blossom
trees and ponies under moonlit skies were Arthur’s
speciality. And very adequate they were. All these artists of
a high standard…not the highest. And technically
wonderfully informed. And all very, very glad to share on a
one to one basis their knowledge. So didn’t have an etching
teacher; I had four or five. And because I place myself very
much as a beginner – I didn’t try to bluster my way – Oh I’m
a painter and I’m this and that -No …I know nothing about
this and I want to know something – can you help me? And
of course people respond to this. So, a damn good
background I got. And the new medium, etching, allowed me
to take over from the previous medium – pencil, wash, board
–effects. It gave me a greater scope of subject matter. I
don’t know exactly why, but it did. I’ve always been
suspicious of anything achieved by myself rapidly, Now
that’s a mistake; it’s quite wrong. But I’ve always resisted
fluency. And of course you can become very fluent with a
pencil and a paper. Rather as I became very fluent with the
glazing techniques at St Martins, pinched from Fra Angelico
and Co and then slapped myself over the wrists and
sentenced myself to two years house emulsion paint. Which
I could understand but none of the tutors chose to enquire
why, so they couldn’t understand. Maybe they thought it
was a response to the neo-brutalist buildings going up on
the South Bank maybe they thought I was much more
sophisticated than I was pretending to be. So with etching
as a medium I could go out, I could make my on-the-spot
drawings. I could even draw any old stuff. And I could draw
material that at the Royal College of Art a few years
previously you’d have been laughed out into Exhibition
Road! A man drawing a medieval church. Or a man drawing
a farmers forge. Or a drawing a wave breaking over a rock,
or drawing Soapy Cove or Lizard headland. No, sod it, with
the etching you could do anything. You could even, or I
could even, draw naked ladies. Which I could just about
scribble down in pencil. But I could never make, barring two
or three exceptions, I could never make an elaborate
painting or drawing, And I could never present my swift
sketches, by candlelight a a finished work. And that’s where
the mystery of the medium starts to come in. For a start,
armed with the drawings of the grave yard and the church.
What’s the lovely white flower bush that they make the
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champagne..Oh – elderflower. Drawings of elderflower trees

in blossom. Take all these pencil notes back into the
workshop, choose a grounded plate, then your first decision,
d’you want the image to come out as it is optically in life or
is it all right if the image is reversed as it print physically in
fact. Well usually I would choose to draw on the plate as I
draw from life. And not worry about the reversed image. In
fact even welcome the reversed image because on the first
glance of the first print of that reversed image and you
knew you were well away from that actual church, that
actual bush and place. The imagery became to a degree
abstract. To a small degree, but to a degree… And then of
course you were drawing with such strange tools – literally
and frequently with a needle which as you draw through the
wax exposes the copper, the aim never being to mark the
copper, just to expose the copper. Now that copper will then
delimit that quite a strong line, but of course under
magnification we would appreciate that that quite strong
line in fact is a line drawn by a needle, a very fine line
indeed. So we’d have to invite the acid to widen this line, or
if we don’t wish it to be widened we’ll use another type of
acid and ask the acid to deepen this line. And the acid will
go on deepening as long as we allow it. The acid will also
find any weak place in your grounded plate and attack that
as well, so if you’re not keeping a close look on your plate
you might find nasty patterns of exposed metal beginning to
appear. Well, leave those for ten minutes in a normal acid
and it doesn’t matter two hoots, so shallow and so broad is
the mark that you could polish those back to be
accommodated in the final plate. But let is go all night and
you might find you’ve got holes in your copper plate. The
plate might be a tracery, it might be like a piece of lace
almost. So you’ve got to take care of it, but you’ve got also
to learn to let it look after itself. And that’s why etching and
in later years Auchel Staat Bremen became such good
companions. My studio, my workshop was 50 yards from the
pub. And I would go the pub thinking, yes, I will leave that
plate for one hour. And I’d look at the clock, and By Jove an
hour would have passed! And with the arrogance that
alcohol can give, I’d think yes, I’m going to let it run. Give it
another hour. Then I might go back, and the sure enough it
would behave itself, be behaving itself very well – if I’d gone
back an hour earlier I would probably have painted out some
of the lines, lost a bit of confidence, but no the two hour was
more appropriate…So then I could think yes, if I want to stay
to midnight, another two and a half hours I won’t go and
look at it again. All I must remember to do now is to take the
bloody thing out at midnight. So I could roll home in my
cups, take the plate out, rinse it off, not look at it, go to bed;
next morning look at it. Literally, as I say look at the
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damage. And the damage would almost certainly be

recompensed by the results of the bravery shown in staying
in the pub. I suppose at Jollytown I would walk down to
Soapy Cove, gather another load of driftwood or a sackload
of kindling wood a job I did two or three times a day. It took
about 40 minutes a round trip, gathering the wood and
taking a rest coming back. So etching was, with its primitive
methods and needs very appropriate. As I said I didn’t have
running water, but then I’m sure Rembrandt didn’t. He
probably had a bucket, as I had a bucket. If I had a bigger
plate I had a running stream a hundred yards away. If I
wanted a very good ground put on my plate I might still take
it up to Surrey, or I might take it to a neighbour who had a
larger hotplate than mine. But slowly I became quite well
equipped with everything - hotplate… so I could take off a
ground, take a proof, put on the new ground, do the whole
process myself. And as I say, important to me, allowing
subject matter, observation, reportage of direct visual
experience. Which had become absent in, for example, the
large Rome pictures. Important too in the etching process is
the fact that the more one allowed the acid to eat the metal
away, the more literally tactile the plate and the ensuing
print becomes. And it is that tactile sense and that sense of
object and physical reality as opposed to illusion of physical
reality that I have always sought as the main component in
my art work since I began to understand it. Since leaving my
landscape Pre-Raphaelite manner -that was simply an
excursion up the wrong gravel path. Worthwhile but…My
God, if I’d followed that path I’d be a millionaire! Times over.

J: You think so?

B: Oh yes, probably be president of the Royal Academy. It all

goes together. I would have been like the painter in, -I’ve
not read it for years, - but the painter in Brideshead
Revisited, Charles Ryder. Was not his job a portrait painter
of country houses? So I’d have got on to that circuit and I’d
have been invited to do Castle Howard and so on…. And had
a rich clientele. To please my clientele I’d have shown
regularly at the Royal Academy. They would have been
thrilled to have such realistic and prestigious subjects in
their Gallery 3….they would have discovered I had a taste
for rhetoric {chuckling} I would have been a made man! I
would been wearing fine tweed suits at the age of forty. And
assuming all manner of alarming eccentricities by the age of
fifty five! But unfortunately I had too much intelligence, or
common sense, or ambition, or whatever we call it, to follow
that path. Oh yes that would have been easy, easy easy.
Easy as anything…
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J: Easy at one level.

B: Yes, Like my pal Fairclough I’d have been pitching my

sights very low, and not having a taste for the life of the
socialite all ¬break in tape.¬¬ Just to finsh that topic, it’s
not, as many a listener might believe. Anybody in the Blue
Anchor would listen with jaw agape. It’s not delusions of
grandeur there, but a simple knowledge of..
J: Of the market?

B: Of the market, of the workings, the social workings, of

mankind or of our society. But all what would have seemed
to be the perks, the high life and fine houses and the
handsome women. If one doesn’t aspire to a handsome but
possibly shallow woman one jolly well doesn’t wany
anything to do with them! One doesn’t have a gap in one’s
heart for the Tiggy Legge-Bourkes of the world – She may be
a charming girl, I don’t know that particular one. But the
girls that go with country houses and dukes are not really
my taste! As company.

J: Well, you’ve managed to squeeze in a few handsome ones,

one way or another..

B: Oh certainly yes, certainly. But for example every time I

came down from Scotland, much as I enjoyed my stays
there, every minute, my first pleasures in coming back
would be to go on gentle pub crawls up and down Brick Lane
and Spitalfields talking to the dossers around their camp
fire, and to the mad African deposed kings, like African
Johnny. {imitates} I bring you hashish, Man! Big as bars of
soap! It was an unfulfilled promise. And mixing in that
really, again, not my milieu. But I enjoy it. As much as…

J: Stob Hall…

B: Another extreme. And I suppose it’s the one in the middle

that one enjoys least of all. Like the lovely Hillaire Belloc
poem – do you know?

“The rich arrived in pairs/ and also in Rolls Royces/They

talked of their affairs/ in loud and strident voices/ The
husbands and the wives/ of this select society/lead
independent lives/ of infinite variety/ The poor arrived in
Fords/ whose features they resembled/they laughed to see
so many lords/ and ladies all assembled/ The people in
between/ looked underdone and harassed/ and out of place
and mean/ and horribly embarrassed.
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So it’s the people in between who’ve never really given us a

lot of fun! And one’s experience of the upper echelons is
limited, very limited, but limited in such a way to know that
one doesn’t lust for any more. One’s had enough tasting of
that. So friends and colleagues to tend to come back
ultimately to a small circle of people who are neither one
thing nor the other. Life, experiences, the education of life
has drawn us into degrees of mutual sympathy at the ages
of thirty, forty, fifty, sixty years old. Now I’ve lost my thread
there ¬break in tape ¬

B: Yes, we went from imagining what sort of a painter one

might have turned out to be had one stuck to one of the
many options that were available. Not a painter of society
women, but a painter of society architecture… which I was,
very fond of, painting architecture. With what I call my Pre-
Raphaelite techniques I could do a lot, I could do almost
anything, or I certainly would have been able to with
another few years at it. To paint a box hedge, a carved
topiary work garden, dew-sprinkled lawns…. Elm trees….
beautiful, beautiful things. They would have been good, not
junk. But not…not this other weird sort of art. Are we
deluding ourselves – would that have been the right way? I
don’t… I don’t, I never think so; I never regret it. But we do
tend to assume that what we’ve done is right. It could be
that it’s all some massive big mistake…I’ve certainly fought
against my talents all my life. I’ve never let them help me.
And I think that that is one’s boiler house, that is one’s
strength and that of any truly fine artist.[long pause, gulls
crying} The great difference between the media is that they
direct us to different solutions, to different results; so if we
use pencil on paper we achieve one quality of expression, if
we use this ink intaglio line on soft hand-made paper we
achieve an altogether different expression of what could
originally have been the same idea. And so in exploring the
large surfaces of for want of a better expression I will refer
to as the Rome reliefs but I don’t mean that with capital
letters – people to tend to do that quite a lot you know, to
set themselves up historically – Chapter Three big letters –
The Rome Reliefs – and we’ve all got to be very serious….no.
The bloody…the things I did in Rome I could never or I
thought I could never achieve by standing in Ruan Minor
churchyard with great big board and a drill and a
screwdriver and tubes of glue and bottles of stain and paint.
No, It wouldn’t work. They were studio paintings, and the
etchings allow a quality of expression achievable only
through that medium. So as a musician can write a tune for
piano and later he can set it for two pianos and then think it
might be better to have a violin a bass and a viola, and drop
one piano, and then reorchestrate it including a clarinet – all
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of this can happen and it can obviously produce very

different flavoured work. But the original impetus came
from the piano maks, or in this case the etched marks. So
I’ve always found it a very worthwhile medium, a good
friend of a medium. To be sure, as a friend it can make a fool
of you, and it can expose your inadequacies, so that you’ve
got to admit to them. Occasionally it can give you a bit of
encouragement and help you. But it’s a totally honest
medium at it’s true level – not at the student level I
mentioned earlier “if you can’t draw you’d better do
etching”…that’s using etching as a disguise, but that’s
nothing to do with etching or heart or anything. That’s to do
with extremely reprehensible teaching attitude. So etching
is a very, very honest and a handsome medium I think, a
medium with style, with flair, a medium that can
accommodate itself to all manner of uses. It can mix. With
all people, with all artists, they can make it their own in very
distinctive fashions. It’s subtle. And it’s always a hard task
master. So there you’ve got a trusty thing upon which to
lean. And I leant on my etchings for many, many years.
Exclusively. And retrospectively I can see, going up so many
less than major branches from the main stem. The English
School of Etching Palmer through to Wilfred Fairclough, fine
in it’s own way, but a dead end. A dead end in Mr Hackney’s
white blossom beneath the silvery moon, nowhere to go.
Other than cliché and sentimentality. Well, I followed similar
paths. Some of my most popular ones – that was the largest
ones, are the ones mostly in the wrong direction, like the big
garden pieces of Kynance. Which I would never dismiss –
none of them. But they are…they have missed the main
direction. I had to come back from those rather than
advance through them.

J: But I don’t think that merit should simply be seen as

whether it fits into the pattern of progress. I think that
things like merit stand on their own…

B: Well, I think that’s probably a very good point, Joss.

J: They may have been in a sense irritations for you because

you went down – as everybody else does – a number of culs-
de-sac. And had to come back to hit the main trottoir, but,
you know…. I don’t think one should knock them for that.

B: Well, I don’t think I’m knocking them. Possibly I’m

regretting the many years I’ve spent doing things which
have not ultimately been of use towards my direction and
purpose. And yes there is the argument that by going
through many of these…along many of these false boughs,
one has enriched one’s vocabulary, if only minimally, but
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positively enriched it. That is one reason why the best of my

later etchings are strong. And Inimitable, because nobody
ahs gone up and down those various pathways. Because
most people have chosen to stick to just one bloody pathway
for Heaven’s sake! Not the pathways of construction,
collage, oil painting, drawing, etching, lithograph, and of
their various component paths. I’ve been up and down a hell
of a lot of pathways. And this is all very, very fine. And I’ve
said before, if one had another lifetime, another sixty years
to work, one would certainly do startling work. But it’s taken
all of that time just to arrive at the beginning. I feel that
about my etching, I feel that about my painting, and to a
lesser extent about my sculpture. Well that’s an
apprenticeship, and a good apprenticeship. But should an
apprenticeship last 45 years?

J: I’m sure you’re not the first person to feel that and not
the last. And I’m not sure that anyone would regard you as
an apprentice as far as your etching and painting are
concerned!

B: But I do, because I know. I know! I know, I know I can just

about envisage what I might be doing next year, and in five
years and in ten years. As I’ve said before I’m not lamenting
a few lost years now, because in the scale in which I’m
thinking those few years are as one year, nothing much to
lamented over. And it does happen that by pure chance that
the work on my various fronts is on pause at the moment if
not full stop at fortuitous stages, of the sculpture of the
etching and of the painting. I feel I’ve made breakthroughs
very recently in all three of those. So it’s not a bad time if
the curtain has to come down. It’s not a bad time for it to
happen. {long pause} the real breakthrough as far as I am
concerned in my own etchings was via a student at the
Summer school, I think I mentioned him the other week, a
man called Albert Herbert who is probably ten years older
than myself. Very interesting painter. He was a painting
tutor at the St Martins College, when I met him at my
summer school at Falmouth. So he came as a student,
because he too had got lost in painting, funnily enough. So
we had quite lot intuitively in common, both being well
experienced painters, but not painting. And he broke every –
I never lay down rules per se – but he broke every would-be
rule that I might lay down Albert would turn it on its head
within 36 hours and I’d see that he’d got a point there….and
he used one simple technical device, which to put it at its
simplest was etching surfaces rather than lines and this like
a good artist he acknowledged he had lifted from the
technical repertoire of a German artist called Michael
Harmsdorf, who had made a bit of a stir in London I think in
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the late 1970s. So Albert had picked this up from Harmsdorf

and I picked it up from Albert and spent that summer
applying this principle to a littler suite of etchings which
were called Souvenir of Falmouth. I wonder whether you
ever saw them, I don’t think I showed them as such. They
were about so big and had raggedy edges and asymetrical
formats, and I would start with an asymetrical format the
draw within that to achieve a state of motion or balance or
equilibrium whatever I was after and then etch the things
very vigorously……..that’s Katy there …….scrape out a lot,
polish a lot – a lot of elbow grease goes into etching. A lot of
vigorous polishing. To achieve plates that were very
beautiful in their own right, plates which carry very few
lines but were shapes, areas, dots and so forth. Carrying on
developing, taking farther, some of the small revolutionary
techniques that Anthony Gross had opened up in the 1950s
as an etcher. Very innovative Anthony Gross, very fine
artist. His best work was terrific I think; but he produced a
lot of not very good work, and I think made the mistake of
allowing too much of it through. Although he did die very
suddenly. He was working the day before he died. So he’s
not had the grace and favour which I’ve been given to try
and put such things in order. I’ve got have session or two
with an assistant in the next month or two, first of all
getting together as many copper plates as we can find.
Cataloguing the lost ones with great regret, and then
weeding out the borderline ones and saying no, let’s throw
those away. Let’s cancel those. I’d rather be represented by
thirty, forty good etchings than by 120 including some poor
ones. So maybe Anthony Gross would have done much the
same. Anyway, using Albert Herberts’s technique I made
what I thought was a definite breakthrough. I even wrote a
little catalogue introduction to a show at the Penwith which
I expressed very very lucidly, and I’ve lost that lucid
expression, and the curator there says Oh it would take me
a long time to find, Bryan. I said you must have an archive,
Cathy for God’s sake! Yes. Well, please find it for me. Well
that was about two years ago, I must start using my
telephone and pestering her. Because that says very, very
much what I feel etching might be as opposed to the
reproducible line drawing done on copper. And then of
course there’s room for overlapping the more traditional
techniques of Samuel Palmer with one’s own discoveries.
And leaving plenty of room for Anthony Gross’s inventions.
Or for aspects of Picasso’s wonderful graphic oeuvre. Which
99 out of 100 times you can’t get near to that because one
isn’t the genius of a draftsman that Picasso was. So some of
his plates might break every rule – after what I’ve been
saying about simple drawn lines on copper Picasso does just
that and because they are so exquisitely right lines it
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knocks my ball out of court completely. But then there is

only one Picasso. And I think there are very very few
notable etchers. There is a not very well known Frenchman
called Dunoyer de Segonzac, (Andre 1884-1974) whose
genius was with the still life. The picnic. The landscape of
Provence. Villages like le Lavandou in 1930

J: When they were still villages…

B: When they were real lived-in places. And he captures the

flavour of that like nobody else. And the other great etcher, I
would always claim,- Giorgio Morandi, the Bologna eccentric.
{1890-1964}

J: What subjects did he produce?

B: He lived with his two sisters.

J: Now dead?

B: Now dead, maybe 1970 at a guess. Deeply, profoundly

modest man. Would not court publicity or fame. Would have
visitors, even as his work was gaining international
recognition, would have a visitor from for example the New
York Museum of Modern Art, the curator of prints would
come over and say what a lovely painting or what a lovely
etching, Mr Morandi, I would like to buy it. At which point
Signor Morandi would be very embarrassed and mumble the
equivalent in lira of “Would £40 be all right?” Now this was
an already great artist. Still a minor name because the old
tune still remains that if you don’t bang your own drum and
play your own trumpet it takes the world a long time to
cotton on. Anthony Gross is not a household word…you
could drop his name in an art school today, they wouldn’t
know who you were talking about. Likewise Segonzac.
Likewise probably Morandi. And yet there are many
infinitely tenth rate artists who for brief periods are well
known. Well you know this doesn’t count, it’s not important.
They more or less are the etchers I see as being, in their
minor ways often, but great. Not second division. Great,
though minor. I think there is such a category. There was
somebody I was reading about the other day..God I can’t
remember who it was….I think an artist – no, I know – a
writer who placed himself in the front seats of the second
raters. But at the very front seat. And that was Somerset
Maugham. And that’s a fairly shrewd self-assessment.

J: Somerset Maugham? Who knows? You’d have a job to find

a short story writer of a greater talent.
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B: Talent, yeah. Yup. Story teller, yes. But not, quite, great
literature.

J: Well, I suppose the argument being that for literature to

be great it has to be a novel, but I’m not sure about that….

B: He’s well loved for his novels. I mean there are a number
of long stories that are considered novels. Cakes and Ale,
that’s one I’ve never read…

J: No I haven’t either.

B: It’s such a fine title. Said to be a portrait of Thomas

Hardy I believe.

J: I think…no it’s his short stories which are …they’re not

second rate. Of short story writers I’d put him as the doyen.

B: Well, second division, is that the same as second rate?

J: I dunno.

B: I think that second division still belongs to first-rate……

¬end of tape¬¬

J: 3,4,5,6,7,8,9 10…right it records…..

B: Good evening {pause, stage voice,} This is Bryan Ingham

recording Part 1 of his memoirs {both laugh} This will take
us up to the age of three! {chuckles}.
That is the end of my introduction, thank you very much,
one and all…Good night.

Note: Bryan lived about three weeks after the end of this,
his last tape.