Ken Pople - Stanley Spencer (Text Only)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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