Ken Pople - Stanley Spencer (Text Only)

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Burghclere Chapel: Tweseldown

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

Stanley Spencer to Desmond Chute 1

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

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

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

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

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