Ken Pople - Stanley Spencer (Text Only)

Ma – Anna Caroline Slack, but Annie always – had been a soprano in old Julius’ choir when Pa married her in 1873. Their eldest son, William – ‘Will’ – was invited at the age of seven to play Beethoven before the Duke of Westminster and his guest the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) at the nearby mansion of Cliveden. The Prince was so impressed that he presented Will with a piano. At fourteen Will gave a public concert at the prestigious Queen’s Hall in London, and under the Duke’s patronage studied and graduated at the Royal College of Music. There he was followed by his brother Harold, a violinist. Today the elder of their two sisters, Anna – Annie always – would have followed them, but the custom of the day decreed that she act as helpmeet to her mother and as a not altogether willing nursemaid to the two youngest sons, Stanley and Gilbert. There were eleven children in all. Florence (Flongy) was the younger sister. The other sons were Horace, who delighted in conjuring and did so professionally; Percy, a keen cellist; and Sydney (Hengy). Stanley was ‘Tongly’ and Gilbert ‘Gibbertry’, presumably as derivations of childish attempts at pronouncing their names. A pair of twins died in infancy.

Will was about to be offered a teaching post in Bristol when he suffered a nervous breakdown. 5In Ma’s view it was brought on by Pa’s relentless pressure towards the highest professional standards, a characteristic which all the siblings inherited in their various careers. The collapse necessitated expensive medical treatment at Virginia Water and impoverished the previously thriving household so much that Percy had to give up the prospect of articles with his uncle Julius’ law firm and take a job at a neighbouring sawmill; half his meagre pay went to the family. In the crisis Florence took a post as governess, and Sydney, who intended to go into the church, had to restrict his studies to night schools and crammers, later supported by Will. For, having recovered, Will had obtained a post as piano master at Cologne Conservatoire and had there met and wed Johanna, daughter of a prosperous Berlin family. *

In few families can there have been such close identity of interests and passions. There was the devoted and scholarly respect for music which the children shared all their lives. Pianos, violins, violas and cellos were part of their upbringing. So were books, for in all the siblings lay the fierce intent to expand their knowledge and imagination through literature. Will and Sydney kept detailed diaries, lovingly preserved by Florence, who herself had her family recollections typed and bound. Pa’s idealistic venture at promoting a village library failed from sheer high-mindedness in the choice of books. All the family were inveterate talkers, for Pa encouraged discussion, especially at mealtimes, on any topic from politics – they were Liberals – to poetry, philosophy, psychology or religion. He worshipped Ruskin. The family were soaked in the language of the King James Bible, for Pa adopted the prevailing custom of family Bible-reading, a habit Stanley was to continue all his life.

The family possessed astonishingly retentive memories both auditory and visual. Will could memorize a page of music or a restaurant menu at one reading, and Stanley could instantly replay a once-heard piano piece which interested him. The acuity of Stanley’s visual memory was a cornerstone of much of his painting. Images from a multitude of sources – places, people, gestures, happenings, books, newspapers, paintings, exhibitions – flooded his mind and could be recalled when needed, even years later, with photographic accuracy.

As a family they were encyclopaedic acquirers of information and catholic in their interests. All were immersed in a countryman’s instinctive and unsentimental solicitude for nature. Percy, in his role of big brother to Sydney, Stanley and Gilbert, took them birdwatching. Sydney’s diaries are full of rhapsodies: ‘Went up Barley Hill in the dark and gathered poppies and a little corn. I love to see the poppies looking jet-black against the corn. Saw three glow-worms. …’ 6Pa’s sense of wonder never palled: ‘I crossed London Bridge on Tuesday and could have stood for hours watching the flight of the seagulls – surely the acme of graceful motion. And yet the people passed by without a glance. …’ 7Will, translating Heine: ‘I discovered that we have no word which quite gives the feeling of Wehmut. “Full of sadness” means more than “sadly” but not quite the same as “sorrowful”. This brought to my mind a word I had not thought of for years – “tristful”. I think the goddess of poetry herself must have helped me to think of it. It more nearly gives the meaning of Wehmut than any word we have.’ 8And Stanley: ‘The marsh meadows full of flowers left me with an aching longing, and in my art that longing was among the first I sought to satisfy …’ 9but, as we shall see, not always in the manner we might conventionally expect.

With these characteristics went an inbuilt instinct for mastery in whatever they undertook. Will, for example, who had been speaking German fluently for years, one day made a slight mistake for which Johanna corrected him. 10Appalled, he promptly devoted an hour and a half every day to the complete memorization of every detail of German grammar. A similar search for perfection could make Stanley an exhausting companion. As a family they loved charades and games, and were determined solvers of puzzles and problems. Occupied by an erudite question of musical interpretation, Will could divert time to finding the highest score possible at dominoes. Percy’s essential function at the substantial London building firm of Holloway and Greenwood, to which he had ascended from his sawmill, was, according to Stanley, ‘getting the aforesaid gentlemen out of scrapes’. 11Gilbert became a considerable bridge player whose skill was in demand at Bloomsbury parties. Horace’s aptitude in conjuring was not an unforeseen eccentricity but a deeply rooted family characteristic. Above all they shared a continual search for comprehension and validity in experience.

‘Home’ had a special meaning for Stanley. His childhood memories would recur time and again in his paintings. Home was where he was ‘cosy’, tucked up in the safe embrace of those who loved him and shared his values. *At home he was shielded from the incomprehensible threats which lurked in the world outside; threats quite specific from some of the village boys who were contemptuous of his slight build and tried to bully him – he was to find a defence in the sharpness of his tongue – or from those villagers who had “no means of understanding his exaltations and thought him ‘funny’. Home was where he first experienced the impact of those feelings he came to know as ‘happiness’. His happiest feelings, as he frequently emphasized, were those of a baby safe in the known confines of its pram, gazing in wide-eyed wonder at the larger world it saw beyond; except that in Stanley’s analogy the larger world was not only physical but, more significantly, metaphysical – what he called ‘spiritual’. Home meant handholding, the sanctuary he found as a child when walking with Pa or Annie lest the sensed terror of becoming lost befall him. It represented that peace of mind in which his and mankind’s spirit is free to soar untrammelled by emotional bewilderment. All his life Stanley’s deepest commitments were to be to those who, like his family in childhood, were willing and able to handhold, to set fire to his imagination and help solve the deep mysteries which beset him.

Stanley’s schooling took place at his sisters’ dame school, a corrugated iron hut in the next-door garden; Pa was disdainful of the new state product, the village National School. A born educator, Pa had started the school with the help of two local ladies, the Misses George. When they emigrated, his daughters took over. At school, even though taught by his sisters, Stanley became convinced that he was not bright in the scholastic sense. Indeed there were times when he felt himself a ‘dunce’, for he had no facility in the linear logic so necessary in mathematics or in narrative writing. Composing formal or business letters was a penance to him: ‘I have written a letter and hated it, it is so young. I do not mind being young, but it comes out in such an objectionable manner in my letter.’ 13But in school drawing lessons he came into his inheritance and found that he could ‘become a boy like any other’. For then his mind functioned as he needed.