A Knitting Party 1940 Oil on canvas (18¾ x 19¾ in: 45.7 x 50.8 cm) Imperial War Museum, London
A Knitting Party is arguably the first of Evelyn's war paintings.
On April 17th 1940, four months after her application to the War Artist's Advisory Committee, Evelyn was gazetted as an official war artist. It was a particularly important event for her, perhaps the defining moment in her career; for over a year previously she had been working in some desperation behind the counter of the children's wear shop run by her older sisters Jessie and Marjorie in Rochester High Street. Evelyn and her fellow artists Dorothy Coke and Ethel Gabain were the first women to be appointed. For Evelyn her appointment heralded the end of what she called her 'crisis' years, 1938-40, years of sterility, lack of purpose, family bickering and personal poverty.
Although in her application Evelyn had requested to be assigned to agricultural or horticultural subjects, she was initially asked to record women's activities on the home front, particularly those of the Women's Voluntary Service. In her acceptance letter to Edward Dickey, secretary of the War Artists' Advisory Committee, Evelyn wrote that she had no money and was therefore unable to travel anywhere, nor to buy materials, adding a little later that '...there are certain subjects which may be available at home'. She contracted to produce 6 WVS-based pictures for a fee of £50, some £4,000 at today's values. In the event only 3 were produced as Evelyn's initial contract was amended to include wider subject areas. In due course Dickey produced travel warrants and arrangements for her to indent for artist's materials.
One of the subjects 'which may be available at home' was A Knitting Party. It was planned, sketched and started in the earliest days of Evelyn's contract. It is best interpreted and understood in the context of the momentous events, of the war overseas and the politics at home which shook Britain violently in the spring and early summer of 1940. Its gravity might be best expressed in the form of a timetable:
April 17th, 1940: Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, is heavily involved in the war in Norway, which is not going well despite some local successes. The Nazi Norwegian campaign, fought to secure supplies of iron ore, is marked by both tactical and terror bombing. British and allied troops are finally evacuated by June 9th.
May 7th-9th, 1940: Failure to expel the Germans from Norway leads to the Norway Debate in parliament. The Conservative Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, resigns amid calls for a National Government.
May 10th, 1940: Nazi forces overrun Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg within 24 hours. Invasion of France follows soon after. Churchill becomes Prime Minister.
May 13th, 1940: In his first parliamentary speech as Prime Minister, Churchill says he can promise nothing more than 'blood, toil, tears and sweat'. British, French and allied troops retreat in disorder before the German onslaught, abandoning large amounts of matériel, culminating in the evacuation of remaining troops from the beaches at Dunkirk from 26th May to June 4th, 1940.
* * *
Enter Lady Stella Reading, one of several largely unsung heroines of 20th century Britain. An extraordinarily astute and energetic woman, she was among those few Britons who recognised that the clouds of war with Hitler's Germany were fast gathering on the horizon, and that such a war would feature urban and civilian bombing in an unprecedentedly horrific way, as exemplified by the Nazi Condor Legion, fighting on General Franco's behalf in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), and in the barbarity of Mussolini's East African colonial wars (1935-37). Lady Reading had the ear of Sir Samuel Hoare, the British Home Secretary; she proposed the creation of a civilian women's service, to be called the Women's Voluntary Service for Air Raid Precaution Service, in the event abbreviated to WVS. The WVS was to provide hands-on back-up to the emergency services, particularly as regarded evacuation from cities liable to bombing. It was to have no ranks, apart from local organisers. Between its inauguration in 1938 and the creation of A Knitting Party in April 1940, thousands of women had joined the organisation and its scope had widened very considerably.
The extent of this widening of WVS activities can be judged from a unique wall poster created by a Mrs Pennyfeather, local organiser in Walton and Weybridge, in Surrey, who designed and created a 'Spider's Web' to show all the activities of her WVS branch. (Time has faded the text and colours, but it's mostly decipherable with patience.)
Reading clockwise from the top, we have firstly - as is fitting for this essay - Knitting; Infants' Canteen; Billeting; Evacuee Welfare; Creche; 1st Aid Posts; Hospital Domestic; Savings; Walton British Restaurants*; Mending Party; ? Centre Library; Clothing Depot Hospital Supply; Emergency Clerical; V.C.P. Ambulance; School Children's Lunch; Rest Centre; Clothing Exchange; Hersham Restaurant.
* 'British Restaurant' was a term happily invented by Winston Churchill to replace 'Community Feeding Centres'.
* * *
The Dunbars were a close family, especially after the death of Evelyn's father William Dunbar in 1932. 'They lived within themselves', Evelyn's husband Roger Folley said of them later. In 1940 they all lived at The Cedars, a large house in Strood, the left bank suburb of Rochester, Kent, with the exception of Alec Dunbar, fourth of the five siblings, who had married and lived nearby. Alec was serving with the Royal Navy; within a few weeks of his sister starting A Knitting Party he would be present at Dunkirk helping evacuate British and French troops in a Royal Navy minesweeper, a vessel converted from a trawler.
The Dunbars were not particularly sociable. Alec and Evelyn were by far the most outgoing. Further, the Dunbars were practising Christian Scientists, and felt themselves a little removed from the general populace; not in any way superior, just different. The two older daughters, Jessie and Marjorie, had disfigurements - Jessie with a wall eye, Marjorie with a lupus which gradually spread down her face and neck - which turned them to each other for support and discouraged them from appearing in public. The Cedars was not a house which welcomed many visitors.
A probable scenario for A Knitting Party is that Florence Dunbar, the siblings' mother, received a request from a Mrs King, the Rochester WVS centre organiser and a local bank manager's wife, to make The Cedars available for groups of knitters. It's possible that the knitters, not always the same women, had been coming to The Cedars on several occasions before April 17th, 1940, the date of Evelyn's appointment. Evelyn, no doubt as a further spur to her enthusiasm to get started, discovered that here was a subject ready-made for her brush, requiring no more travel than to leave her studio in the tower of The Cedars and run downstairs, drawn mainly by the click and clack of knitting needles because, apparently, no one is talking in the sitting room below. (As of 2024 The Cedars is still there, with its pyramid-roofed tower, although closely surrounded, indeed crowded, by other more recent housing.)
That Evelyn had a problem with her mise en scène is suggested by the quantity and variety of pencil sketches that survive. Several appeared in 2013, having spent the 53 years since her death in 1960 tucked away in portfolios in the attic of Hammer Mill Oast, near Biddenden in mid-Kent. More, including the sketches below, followed with the additional recovery of some 20 sketchbooks from Hammer Mill sheds and outhouses in the Covid years. The Hammer Mill discoveries, together totalling some 1000 drawings, sketches, studies and finished canvases caused ripples of astonished delight in the art world. In fact - the story is well established - after Evelyn's death her husband Roger Folley assembled all the residual work in her studio and consigned it to Alec Dunbar, the only sibling with room to accommodate it. The oast house sketches were in remarkably good condition, testament to the incidental suitability of oast houses, with their continuous updraughts, for the preservation of art works; those from nearby sheds required extensive restoration work. In due course the sketchbooks were acquired by the Special Collections facility of Oxford Brookes University devoted to Evelyn's work.
The figures in the sketches below are too heterogeneous for them to be portraits; none of them, apart from the two women facing the artist in the bay window, is identifiable, for reasons suggested below. The Cedars sitting room was too small to accommodate in a portrayable fashion these fifteen knitters and a child, or at least a very small person, almost hidden behind the pile of blankets on the tripod table in the middle of the room. How to make the room appear larger, how to distribute the knitters about the room, while making their distribution an integral feature of the design? How should she concentrate attention on the most distant person, the seated woman in the window bay? In a sense A Knitting Party is about this person: she is Florence Dunbar, of whom more in a moment.
We can gauge Evelyn's problem by looking at three of her preliminary sketches.
A Knitting Party 1940 Preliminary sketch 1 Pencil Oxford Brookes University, Special Collections.
This early sketch shows Evelyn feeling her way. A simple oval doing duty for the central tripod table has squiggles on it marked 'wool'. Later versions - see below - have this central table laden with folded blankets, to be understood perhaps for the moment as the group's output. An ingenious but ultimately pointless touch is to augment the number of knitters by showing some of them reflected in the mantelpiece mirror. It doesn't really work; what it shows us is Evelyn's readiness to manipulate the spacing of the group, and in doing so to present the viewer with a fiction, an as-it-might-have-been rather than an as-it-was. We might note in passing that the mantelpiece clock has no hands.
A Knitting Party 1940 Preliminary sketch 2 Pencil Oxford Brookes University, Special Collections
In sketch 2 Evelyn has managed to squeeze ten people in, reasonably distributed round the room and in the window bay. The tripod table, with its heap of blankets, is central to the composition, but to pile them higher would obscure Florence Dunbar, the person sitting in the middle of the window bay. Without her the picture will have very little meaning. (We are also allowed a glimpse of a very necessary period piece: the sock-knitter's hat pin, lower right.)
Now we're on the way. We have our group of knitters, including the very small person half-hidden by the pile of blankets, but Florence is missing. In her finished version Evelyn makes room for her mother by turning the entire scene clockwise by several degrees.
In the event, she has simply invented some space on the right of the finished picture. The wall with the fireplace is like a stage flat, with nothing behind it. This has enabled her to open out the window bay, allowing extra light in with the added perspective depth, complemented by the pattern in the carpet, drawing attention to the two most distant figures. Both these are hatless, Florence, sitting in the captain's chair, because she is in her own home, and the standing figure next to her because she is family: she is Vera Swain, Florence's niece, Evelyn's cousin. This is very curious, because at the time Evelyn was painting A Knitting Party, in April and May 1940, Vera Swain was in Sri Lanka, then called Ceylon, with her husband Val.
What the women are knitting is uncertain. Socks, scarves, balaclavas? Maybe events in Norway aren't far away. There are piles of completed work on the floor. The central table is piled with blankets, or possibly comforters, so high as to obscure, for an unfathomable reason, the child or very small person behind them. It may be that Evelyn has added them as a reference to their destination: the colours are deliberate, navy blue, khaki for the army, light blue for the Royal Air Force. The military colours are echoed by the décor, the upholstery and to some extent by the knitters' clothes in an unspoken solidarity with the armed services.
* * *
But what about this?
A Knitting Party 1940 Preliminary sketch 4 Oxford Brookes University: Special Collections
Almost invariably in Evelyn's war paintings - and elsewhere, of course - there is some tiny detail that is the key to an alternative, and more important, agenda to the scene. The sketch suggests that Florence's posture and activity is absolutely deliberate, even exaggerated to make the point: she has taken her eyes off the ball of wool she is winding from the hank of navy blue wool (for her son Alec, at sea?) which she is holding between her knees in order to look at her watch. It's this kind of detail that can transform an otherwise fairly banal account of something at first view not terribly extraordinary into something with another agenda, another layer of meaning.
In A Knitting Party context is all. However chattery, lively and laughter-loving the knitters may have been before the crisis of mid-April 1940, the dire threats from across the Channel have given them much to think about. Never had Britain been so threatened; the sense of imminent danger is palpable. Later they might relax, joke, evoke the spirit of undaunted Britishness, a few weeks later to be eternised as the Dunkirk spirit. Later they might sing We'll meet again or There'll be blue birds over The white cliffs of Dover or Run, Adolf, run, Adolf, run, run, run, but just now, at this moment, things are grim indeed. I suggest that one of Evelyn's problems is how to express this without, however subconsciously, calling to mind the Fates of classical literature, or - a little nearer home - Madame Defarge and her circle of knitters beside the tumbling blade of the French Revolutionary guillotine from Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, which she undoubtedly knew.
Examining A Knitting Party the eminent social historian Emeritus Professor James Hinton (e.g. Women, Social Leadership, and the Second World War: OUP 2002) raised an eyebrow as to the value of Evelyn's painting as a record of women's contribution to the war effort, to the maintaining of morale and to the promotion of women's social and economic standing.
My idea of a sewing (or knitting) circle comes from *Nella Last’s account of the WVS centre in Barrow', Hinton writes in a private e-mail: 'It is a place where women get together not just to knit comforts for the troops, but to comfort each other. It is warm, close. They gossip, laugh, ‘keep smiling through’, fighting off the loneliness and the anxiety about the absent husbands and sons, and, when the dreaded telegram arrives, they are there for each other.
Evelyn’s knitting circle could not be more different. Nobody talks. Nobody even looks at anyone else. The nearest we get to human intimacy - the (presumably) mother and daughter [the 'very small person' referred to above] on the sofa – is hidden from view. It is a picture not of community but of the gaps between people (the missing men?). It is not a ‘circle’, but an atomised collection of isolated people.
*Nella Last was a housewife from Barrow in Furness, a member of the WVS, who kept a diary throughout the war years for the Mass Observation project. Her wartime diary entries are frequently upbeat, positive and entertaining.
Had Evelyn painted A Knitting Party two years later Hinton's remarks would surely be justified. Although the immediate danger, the 'blood, toil, tears and sweat' of Churchill's inaugural prime ministerial speech, had largely receded, the threat of invasion, with Rochester in Kent in the direct path of invading forces, was uppermost in the minds of those assembled in Florence Dunbar's sitting room. We don't know, of course, and Florence may well have been wondering when this sombre crew of knitters would go home, but there are other possibilities. Was she checking the time for the next BBC Home Service news bulletin, read by the instantly recognisable Alvar Liddell, with perhaps yet more dire news? Was she wondering, symbolically, when all this dreadful experience would be over? Or has Evelyn charged her with wondering, figuratively, how long it would be before the social and economic credits even then being earned with each knit and purl by these women, individually unidentified because collectively they represent their entire sex, would come to pass?
Florence Dunbar would not be able to see the mantelpiece clock from where she is
sitting, but in fact Evelyn has left the dial indistinct, with no suggestion of hands or of time being expressed. Is this
deliberate? Curiously, the apparently insignificant detail mentioned earlier, the pointer to other, maybe deeper levels of meaning in certain of Evelyn's paintings, is found tucked well away from the main action, in this case towards the top right hand corner. (There's another example of it in Singling Turnips (1943), where a labour squad of Italian prisoners of war is hoeing.)
I advance the following theory with great trepidation. Evelyn's Christian Science led her to a deep knowledge of and trust in certain books of the Bible, notably the first and last, Genesis and Revelation, with the Psalms, Job and the Gospels coming in between. A continuing trope throughout her mature work concerns concepts of time, in my end is my beginning (St John 20-21, although very obscurely) and especially there shall be time no longer (Revelation 10:6). This is usually taken to mean, basically, that the duration of present evil is limited; Evelyn's meaning, surely shared with her mother, who is looking to see if the hour has come, is that the dreadful happenings of April-May 1940 will not go on for ever.
* * *
A footnote, read into it what you will: Val Swain, Vera's husband, had business interests in the Far East, specifically Sri Lanka, then known as Ceylon. The Swains came back to Britain on leave in the summer of 1940. Evelyn's and Vera's aunt, Clara Cowling, who lived at Ticehurst, near Tunbridge Wells, in a large house called Steellands, now renamed Apsley Court, kept a diary throughout the war years. (These diaries, covering 1940-46 (1942 is missing), are now housed at The Garden Museum, Lambeth Palace Rd, London.)
The Swains stayed with Clara Cowling for some three weeks in July and August, 1940. On Wednesday, 7th August Clara Cowling wrote:
Went to Strood quarter to 10. Had a nice day with them all at home. Looked at Eves pictures & Florries all very nice. Home about 7-15. We are all so glad we met.
The Swains left Steellands shortly afterwards and returned to Sri Lanka while civilian sailings were still possible. Val Swain, at least, did not return until the end of the war in the Far East.
by Christopher Campbell-Howes
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