Ken Pople - Stanley Spencer (Text Only)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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