Ken Pople - Stanley Spencer (Text Only)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To Wood, Stanley wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Burghclere Chapel: The left-wall frieze

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

Stanley Spencer to Desmond Chute 1

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

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

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