During her second year at the Royal College of Art (1930-31) Evelyn abandoned her daily train journey to London from the Dunbar family home in Rochester, Kent, and installed herself much more conveniently in lodgings in Hampstead, north London, instead. For several months she lodged with Mrs Evelyn Gwynne-Jones, the mother of the artist Allan Gwynne-Jones, Evelyn's (Dunbar's) first year tutor. Among the Gwynne-Jones' neighbours were Noel and Catherine Carrington, living at 95 South End Road, to whom Evelyn was introduced and whom she found congenial. Carrington, brother of the Bloomsbury-ish Dora Carrington (who committed suicide in 1931), worked for the Kynoch Press, a private publishing house, before moving on to work for the magazine Country Life and eventually to found Puffin Books. Proximity to the Carringtons led Evelyn in late 1933 to rent a newly converted top-floor studio, designated 99 South End Road, from Noel Carrington, paying a quarterly rent of £13 (£1077 at 2024 values), a rental which she was able to finance probably through the legacy of her father William Dunbar, who died in March 1932.
In Hampstead Evelyn found herself thoroughly at home in the beau monde of artists and creative spirits, a society which the poet, writer and literary critic Herbert Read described as a 'gentle nest of artists'. Gentle nestlings included the Principal of the Royal College of Art, William (later Sir William) Rothenstein, to whose salon Evelyn, one of Rothenstein's star graduates, was frequently invited.
On
the edges of the gentle nest were a couple of exiles from Glasgow,
Donald and Catherine Carswell. The Carswells appear to have left Glasgow
under a cloud: Mrs Carswell, whose celebration and acclaim as a
proto-feminist is surely long overdue, had recently published a
controversial biography of Robert Burns, in which she posited that far
from being a silver-tongued son of the plough and visionary patriot he
was little more than a drunken womaniser. For this and other
inconvenient attitudes - she was a friend of D.H.Lawrence - she was
denounced from the pulpit of Glasgow Cathedral. Clearly Hampstead was a
safer environment than Glasgow Green, and some months after the time of
Evelyn's uptake of her new studio the Carswells were completing a
dip-into Scottish bedside miscellany entitled The Scots Weekend and Caledonian Vade Mecum for Host, Guest and Wayfarer, of which it might uncharitably observed that the reader was liable to nod off before reaching the end of the title.
[...] can you tell me why it is that whenever I get going on these blooming Scotch illustrations with vigour and spontaneity all my spontaneous and lively feelings completely desert me, and I am left clutching an unwilling, unwieldy pen, scratching at laborious and second-rate expressions of stereotyped and 5th rate (so it seems to me) ideas? I'm trying my best and I mean to get over it, but jobs of that kind seem to mesmerise me into a kind of stupidity and inability. Write me a few comforting and inspiring lines [...]
In the light of this maybe it's not surprising that there's such a mixture of styles in Evelyn's drawings. As might be expected, she did her homework, although against much adversity. The frontispiece, at the start of this essay, features a giant thistle, emblem of Scotland, growing out of a ruined castle set among mountains. Its branches are adorned with people and animals undergoing various activities - fishing, hill-walking, dancing, barking - associated with Scotland.
The top left-hand drawing above is the vignette introducing The Holiday Friend, which unexpectedly turns out to be a rather coy and pawky - and decidedly un-feminist - manual of flirtation, even seduction, in Scotland. In several cases Evelyn was not given the text she was supposed to be crystallising, and had to guess.
So The Holiday Friend vignette shows a couple standing on a symbolic heart-shaped pincushion. In Victorian times and a little later such pincushions, with the two pins Evelyn has stuck in them, were tokens of love to be exchanged on or after parting, the pins symbolising the pain of separation. Evelyn's couple are straight out of, appropriately, a Robert Burns poem, O wert thou in the cauld blast:
[Résumé: If you were out in the cold in that field, I'd protect you from the wind with my tartan cloak]
Travelling is in a different style altogether, with Evelyn commenting on the Scottish weather as experienced by two caped cyclists heads down against the rain on a moorland road that has no visible end.
Centre right, Outdoor Games, shows a gentleman in 18th century town dress, complete with Tam o' Shanter bonnet with ribbons flying, playing peever, a Scottish version of hopscotch.
Lower left, to head the chapter entitled Rights and Wrongs (for which Evelyn complained that she did not have the text) shows a Scottish High Court judge in full fig.
Lower right, for a chapter called Non-human Natives, we have a brace of grouse, a Scottish or Aberdeen terrier, and a splendid heraldic beast, possibly from the arms of clan MacDonald of Sleat, although I'm not aware of any particular significance in this.
The model for Mirth and Dancing is Evelyn's sister Marjorie, whom we will glimpse again in Gardeners' Choice, the book that followed The Scots Week-End.
Bottle and Wallet is an enjoyably cartoon-like rendering of two ultra-stereotypical Scotsmen of the type that Evelyn was familiar with from the pages of Punch, the satirical magazine founded in 1841. Several leather-bound volumes of 19th century back numbers of Punch, originally from The Cedars, the Dunbar family home in Rochester, eventually found their way to Roger's and Evelyn's bookshelves.
Evelyn's father, William Dunbar, who died in 1932, was a Scot originating from Cromdale, a village and a range of hills on Speyside to the north-east of Grantown on Spey, now in Highland Region. Evelyn was thus half Scottish, but rarely made anything of it. To the best of my knowledge she went to Scotland only twice: once in 1943 to paint Potato Sorting, Berwick and once, during one of Roger's RAF leaves, to climb in the Cairngorms. (On this occasion Evelyn took the opportunity to visit her father's native village.)
Evelyn had a fund of stories which she loved telling. I think the following tale may have come from her father. We can assign it with neither authorisation nor shame to one (or both) of the Scotsmen in Evelyn's drawing:
An ageing and solitary widower, Great Uncle Sandy, had developed certain eccentric culinary habits, characteristic of which was his practice with porridge, to which he referred in the plural as 'them'.
To save himself the trouble of daily preparation, he would make enough in one batch to last him a fortnight.
One morning towards the end of the second week the residual crusts and scrapings looked so unappetising that not even Uncle Sandy could face 'them'. But at length he hit upon the notion of placing the one luxury he allowed himself, viz. a dram of malt whisky, in front of his porringer, promising himself this treat once 'they' were finished.
Slowly and painfully he forced himself to consume 'them' until at last his porringer was empty, whereupon, with that truly Scottish tendency to defer gratification, he lifted the glass, observed 'Weel, Sandy, my man, ye're gey [gey = very] easily fooled!' - and poured the whisky back into the bottle.
Evelyn's final drawing introduces the last chapter of The Scots Week-End, entitled To the stranger within our gates. Her admonitory finger warns all who tease the Scots. H'm...
(Original text © Christopher Campbell-Howes 2024. All rights reserved.)
by Christopher Campbell-Howes
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