Putting on Anti-Gas Protective Clothing (1940)

Evelyn Dunbar: Putting on Anti-Gas Protective Clothing 1940 (2' x 3': 61 x 76cm) Imperial War Museum, London

Although probably the second of Evelyn's war painting in terms of conception (the earliest being A Knitting Party), this most unusual composition was the first painting Evelyn submitted to the War Artists' Advisory Committee. After her appointment as an Official War Artist in April 1940, she was advised to put herself in the hands of Lady Reading, who had founded the Women's Voluntary Service two years earlier. As a result she was directed to Bisham Abbey, near Marlow in Buckinghamshire, to observe and record the various forms of civilian training for wartime emergencies that took place there. One of these was for dealing with chemical weapons, particularly poison gas bombing.

At the outbreak of war in September 1939 it was widely expected that poison gases would be used. There was good reason to think so. Mustard and other poison gases had been used in the trenches in World War I, occasionally with the unintended consequence of an unexpected change of wind direction causing as much harm to attacker as to attacked. Despite an ambivalently worded clause in the Geneva Protocol of 1922, the development of poison gases and chemicals as strategic weapons had developed in the inter-war period. The simultaneous development of heavy bombers for the indiscriminate delivery of chemical weapons involved civilian populations in a way never before experienced. People were aware that in 1924 the Spanish had used gas in their colonial wars in Morocco. They believed that Mussolini's armies had used gas more widely in the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. Neither showed much discrimination between civilians and combatants.

Why gas was never used in World War II is a question sometimes asked by military historians. Probably the reason lay in mutual fear of retaliation. However, gas was expected, and precautions were taken. The entire British population was issued with gas masks. Older readers will remember them, close-fitting rubber masks held on the the head by adjustable webbing straps, with a flexible perspex window and a cylindrical snout supposed to filter out noxious substances in the air. People were expected to carry their gas masks everywhere, in a cardboard, or sometimes leather, box with a shoulder strap. There was a special gas-suit for babies. Small children were equipped with gas-masks with a rubber non-return snout for breathing out, which made agreeable farting noises if you exhaled hard, I remember. Special  masks were designed for horses and dogs too.  Here are some regular gas-masks of the period:

 

And by the time the photos below were taken it was clear that the risk of gas attacks had lessened, and that the whole business of gas-masks had become leavened with the British propensity to make light of adversity:

 

 

It isn't recorded, as far as I know, what Sir Kenneth Clark, chairman of the War Artists' Advisory Committee and also director of the National Gallery in London, thought of the extraordinary first painting Evelyn submitted. It was accepted immediately for display at the National Gallery, and later went on tour, eventually reaching the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York in 1941 as part of an exhibition entitled Britain at War, with the purpose of encouraging the United States to join Britain in resisting the Axis forces. This is how it appeared in the MOMA catalogue:

 

 Page 25 of the 1941 New York Museum of Modern Art 'Britain at War' exhibition

It's another of Evelyn's compartmented paintings, invoking the idea of progression in the strip cartoon to show the various stages. The sketch below, discovered in 2020, shows Evelyn's ideas developing: first 9 boxes, numbered so as eventually to reduce them to 6 boxes arranged vertically, and finally the horizontal 6.

      Sketch for Putting on Anti-Gas Protective Clothing 1940 Pencil Photograph © LissLlewellyn

 

 

We don't know who Evelyn's models were. Maybe there weren't any: the faces are very simply drawn. For observers of the gender implications of dress it may be notable that both women are wearing trousers, the dresser as everyday wear and the dressee as part of her work clothing. She is also wearing a tie. By box 3 her chief model is wearing an ordinary British military helmet painted black with a white A on it, showing she's a member of an ambulance crew, maybe the driver. Her mission will be to rescue the suffering from gas-affected areas, most likely London. She's protected against the various forms of chemical weapons that were commonly expected, those that affected respiration or the nervous system and those that left lesions and blisterings on the skin.

But somehow Evelyn has managed to turn something grim and appalling into a triumph. The last box sees her model looking determinedly out of the frame, ready to face whatever mortal danger there is in store for her. In between we can feel the unwieldy stiffness of the cumbrous material, in strong contrast with the leisurely slacks, blouse, cardigan and slippers of her dresser, who has disappeared once the putting-on is finished and her agent of protection equipped. She is safe. And both are women, fully involved in activities that had hitherto been almost exclusively the province of men.

And there's a certain majesty about her principal figure. Except in box 2, her head is held high.  The folds of her protective gear are strongly painted, suggesting confidence and determination. Little is going to daunt this woman. She stands for Britain: at the time Putting on Anti-Gas Protective Clothing was first exhibited, in July 1940, invasion was expected every day, and apart from the Royal Air Force, there was little to resist it. Evelyn's model perfectly represents the quietly defiant mood of a proud nation in great danger.

 

Many thanks to Paul Liss for his contribution.

(Text © Christopher Campbell-Howes 2021. All rights reserved) 

 

Further reading...

EVELYN DUNBAR : A LIFE IN PAINTING
by Christopher Campbell-Howes

is available to order online from:

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448 pages, 301 illustrations. RRP £30

Opportunity (1936)

Opportunity 1936 Oil on canvas 61 x 61cm (24 x 24in), diameter 53.3cm (21in)

 Photograph: ©Bonhams, by kind permission. Private collection

 

 In late 1932 Evelyn, then a postgraduate student at the Royal College of Art, was invited by her mural tutor Charles Mahoney to join him and other recent graduates to paint a series of murals at Brockley County School for Boys (now Prendergast-Hilly Fields School) in Lewisham. Evelyn jumped at the opportunity of such a commission at the start of her career. Although the question of remuneration was suspiciously vague, it would mean working on extensive surfaces, a challenge she found very exciting. It would also mean working alongside Mahoney, three years her senior and a man she had grown to like and admire. (To avoid any confusion, perhaps I should point out that Mahoney's given name was Cyril, but that his RCA colleague Barnett Freedman re-christened him Charles or Charlie, probably because of the rhythmic euphony of 'Charlie Mahoney' and the possibility of engaging rhymes that this might give rise to.)

 

Work started in the summer of 1933. Only two other team members could be found, Violet Martin and Mildred 'Elsi' Eldridge, who worked for a few weeks in early 1934. Otherwise Evelyn and Mahoney worked alone, quickly forming a close relationship, professional and personal. The project was initially restricted to the school hall, but on Evelyn's cheerful initiative it grew to include the adjoining arcade and its ceiling. We can imagine that in due course Mahoney, whose project it was, felt sidelined; compromised, too, by Evelyn's demands for a closer union, often expressed in illustrated letters. Some examples are given below. Mahoney abandoned the project in May 1935. His final contribution, after two hall panels and some lesser work, was the grisaille decoration surrounding the ceiling roundels Evelyn was due to complete. 

 

The Brockley Murals, 1935: the central ceiling panel of the arcade in progress. Mahoney has completed the grisaille, including some complex patterns round the central circular light fitting, Evelyn has completed two of the roundels, Genius, Virtue and Reputation (L) and Minerva and the Olive Tree (R). Image: Tate Archive, ref.TGA200921 Personal papers of Charles Mahoney.
 

Evelyn worked on alone, her sequence of 22 smaller arcade panels, ostensibly illustrating fables, wise saws and modern instances but also veiling hints of an increasingly fractured relationship. She did her best to maintain her convictions, repeatedly suggesting to Mahoney what professional and personal opportunities lay before them if they worked and lived as a couple. The first hint of the theme of 'opportunity' comes in a letter to Mahoney written in October, 1935:

 

Extract from a letter to Mahoney, October 3rd 1935. Tate Archive ©Estate of Evelyn Dunbar

 

Despite Mahoney having left the Brockley mural project 4 months earlier, which is not to say that he took no further interest in it, Evelyn is still exploring the idea that they might continue to work together. 

 

The notion that opportunity could be personified, made into a figure with some resemblance to herself and accoutred with symbolic ladders, comes the following year. A climbing plant has grown to the top of the left-hand ladder, implying she has been holding it up for some time:

 

  Extract from a letter to Mahoney, 6th April 1936. Tate Archive ©Estate of Evelyn Dunbar

No children - yet. They make their first appearance the following September in another letter to Mahoney, perhaps in greater number than Evelyn envisaged as a practical or indeed physical possibility. 'I think I could do a better one', she writes in the letter reproduced above, and indeed the draughtsmanship in the letter below is superb:

 

Extract from a letter to Mahoney, September 1936. Tate Archive ©Estate of Evelyn Dunbar

 

How tempted Mahoney may have been to cave in to Evelyn's urgings we don't know, however enjoyable he found the nimbus of putti scrumping the fruit from Opportunity's hat.  Mahoney was not to be beguiled, and said so: children would stunt their individual careers. Opportunity, given a greater permanence in oils, as reproduced at the top of this essay, was Evelyn's final version. It would have been on her easel as the September letter above was being written. Evelyn's campaign came to nothing. After a miscarriage she and Mahoney separated in 1937. Apart from the Brockley murals, the only offspring from their collaboration was the jointly written and illustrated Gardeners' Choice, a fairly revolutionary gardening book for its time, which appeared in late 1937, shortly after the authors' separation.

 

Like much of Evelyn's work, Opportunity is a strongly coded personal statement. The roundel form echoes the latest image on which Evelyn and Mahoney worked together at Brockley. The sunflower in Opportunity's splendid hat refers to Mahoney's obsession with sunflowers, and thus targets him directly. Ladders occasionally feature elsewhere in Evelyn's work. Almost invariably the top is somewhere undefined, outside the frame. Not so here: uniquely, we are allowed - just - to see the top, and maybe Evelyn has realised, with a heavy heart, that the opportunities she envisaged were not limitless.

 

Opportunity was shown at the New English Art Club 1936 winter exhibition, where it sold for 15 guineas. It was bought by Harold Jeppe, a remarkable South African Olympian athlete, businessman and art patron, who later became a director of the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg.

 

* * *

 

There was a curious aftermath. Evelyn's career was seriously blighted by her separation from Mahoney. It would surely have come, sooner or later: they were poles apart in their beliefs and outlook, Mahoney, like so many artists of his day, leaned well to the left, while Evelyn was a committed Christian Scientist from a merchant family, not without its bourgeois and conservative elements. Apart from her personal distress, she was alienated from the circle of his fellow-artist friends, like his Royal College of Art colleagues and the Great Bardfield group of artists (they sometimes overlapped) with whom she had enjoyed warm friendships in Mahoney's company for several years. She withdrew into the bosom of her family to spend what she called her 'crisis' years, 1938-40. At her lowest ebb, she spent the best part of a year, until her appointment as a war artist, serving behind the counter in her sisters' haberdashery shop on Rochester High Street and painting very little.

 

Her sisters, Jessie and Marjorie, dealt in the usual range of haberdashery including embroidery wools. Evelyn was asked, or volunteered, to provide the equivalent of a painting-by-numbers canvas background for needlepeople to buy wools for and to work on. To promote sales a finished picture was made for the shop window. Here it is, not a thing of great loveliness, but no doubt it offered opportunities for contented winter evenings with needle and coloured wools by the fireside.

 

 

A needlework version of Opportunity, discovered in 2013 and reworked and repaired through the good offices of Paul Liss. Photograph ©LissLlewellyn

Text ©Christopher Campbell-Howes 2021

 

 

Would you like to read more?

EVELYN DUNBAR : A LIFE IN PAINTING
by Christopher Campbell-Howes

is available to order online from:

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448 pages, 301 illustrations. RRP £30

Men Stooking and Girls Learning to Stook (1940)

       Men Stooking and Girls Learning to Stook 1940 Oil on canvas 29½ x 19 in. (75 x 49cm)   Photograph: Richard Valencia ©Christopher Campbell-Howes. Private collection

 In September 1940, in a letter accompanying a portfolio of new paintings to Ted Dickey, secretary of the War Artists' Advisory Committee, Evelyn wrote:

'...if there are very many more [paintings] than the number I agreed to let you have, as there will be in any case, shall I send them to you to see if you would want any for record purposes?'*

Throughout the war years Evelyn's contract with the War Artists' Advisory Committee (WAAC) was subject to frequent and unexpected change. Her initial contract, dating from her appointment in April 1940, was for 6 pictures of civilian women's organisations contributing to the war effort. She completed one (Putting on Anti-Gas Protective Clothing) and was working on another (A Knitting Party) when Dickey re-deployed her to recording the Women's Land Army in training. For this she was posted to Sparsholt Agricultural Institute, near Winchester, one of the regional training centres for Land Girls. Her contract was upped to include 10 paintings.

Although Evelyn had the freedom to depict whatever she felt was appropriate, it took some time for her to assess what the WAAC was looking for, hence her question to Dickey. The WAAC retained the right to refusal, which they seem to have exercised fairly frequently. Unquestioning acceptance of Evelyn's work was never the case. Among those canvases returned to her, and now mostly lost, were Introduction to the Tractor, Land Girl in Full Dress, Women Drivers Cleaning Party Cars (i.e. cars in the Sparsholt staff car pool), Carting Muck and our subject, Men Stooking and Girls Learning to Stook.

In a further letter to Dickey, dated 26 November 1940, Evelyn refers to it as the 'sketch of girls learning to stook', the implication being that the canvas was unfinished, but that she would complete it if the WAAC approved the sketch. They clearly did not, as it was returned to Evelyn, not to be seen again in public until 2011. Here it is again for reference:

 

This is the wheat harvest of 1940, in August or early September. At the time of painting (like its fully completed quasi-companion piece Threshing, Kent) Evelyn had finished her first stint at Sparsholt and was working up her sketches in her studio at home in north Kent. The setting isn't specified. It could be anywhere in Britain where the fields are as broad as the skies. The scene has no connection with Sparsholt: by harvest time Evelyn had left Hampshire. As a piece of wartime reportage, it might be said to fall short of the sort of accuracy that the occasion, and the War Artists' Advisory Committee (WAAC), demanded. There's no suggestion that the Battle of Britain might be raging overhead: the sky is reduced to a minimum, a blue-grey emptiness, no more than a foil to allow the wheatfield to have no apparent limits, an illustration of Evelyn's frequent referral to Nature's boundless generosity. Her war artist colleague Paul Nash saw the 1940 summer skies dramatically differently: 

                            Paul Nash Battle of Britain 1941 Imperial War Museum, London

No, Evelyn has something else to say. By harvest time of 1940 Britain had been at war for twelve months. Almost all men aged between 18 and 41 had been drafted into the armed services. The five men in Men Stooking and Girls Learning to Stook (tractor driver, reaper and binder operator, two stookers and and a distant figure with a shotgun, supplementing meat rations with rabbits breaking cover as the wheat is cut) - the five men must be assumed to be either over 41 or unfit for military service, or simply that their call-up papers have not yet arrived. Whatever the case, the stookers' task is being taken over by women. Evelyn has turned stooking into a military undertaking, as though it was an operation to be conducted according to the drill book or King's Regulations, with appropriate bawled commands and stiff, mechanical movements. The two men on the right are mirror-images of each other, one left-handed, the other right-handed, at least for the purposes of this exercise; as they work forward they leave behind neat lines of stooks, eight sheaves to a stook, stretching out of the picture to infinity. They've started well; now it's up to the women to carry on. The task, like the field itself, also stretches into infinity. It may take some time.

 

The Land Girl on the extreme left, stiff and unbending (although in a tiny, almost unnoticed act of her usual playful subversion Evelyn had made her tuck her left arm behind her back, pinning her fingers inside her right elbow) is playing the part of a sort of NCO, despite there being no ranks in the Women's Land Army, giving commands that anyone who has ever gone through the rituals of square-bashing could make up to suit the occasion. A second, more distant trio of women, with one Land Girl in regulation green jumper - maybe a commentary on the contemporary shortage of Land Army uniform - is about to start the same operation. One of Evelyn's messages is to assert the capacity of women to undertake tasks previously the province of men, to share with them and maybe surpass the same quasi-military work procedures. And not just the capacity, but the physique too: these are fine figures of women, maybe in contrast to the men. More, the male stookers are bowed, almost in a parody of deep bows of respect and obeisance. The viewer has to decide whether Evelyn has done this deliberately...

 

...and of course she has. Men Stooking and Girls Learning to Stook is the first example of what one might term Evelyn's wider war work, looking with confidence to a better postwar world from the background of WW2; a world in which the improved social and economic position of women reflected the contribution they had made. As the war progressed this agenda became more marked, more subtly insistent. Many of her war paintings can be, and need to be, interpreted with this in mind. However, it's unlikely that the elderly men of the WAAC returned Men Stooking and Girls Learning to Stook to Evelyn for this reason. She may have been relieved at not being required to work further on what is essentially a finished canvas, although in a somewhat more economic style than her other war paintings.

 

Men Stooking and Girls Learning to Stook ended up, together with several other pieces, in the possession of Margaret Iliffe (née Goodwin), Evelyn's close friend from Royal College of Art student days, who became an art teacher after graduation. If Evelyn did not give it to her earlier, it's probable that after his wife's death in 1960 Roger Folley selected several works from her residual studio and gave them to Margaret Iliffe in recognition of 30 years of friendship. Margaret Iliffe died childless in 1990, and it would seem that a member of her wider circle inherited Men Stooking and Girls Learning to Stook and its companion Dunbars. In 2011 they were consigned to TW Gaze, auctioneers in Diss, Norfolk. 

 

Present at this auction was Kentish fine art specialist Andrew Sim, whose acuity and acumen led him to recognise a previously unknown Dunbar, having penetrated the auctioneer's somewhat misleading and indeed curiously suggestive title Chris learning to stalk and men stalking. Was this due to bad handwriting, or a mis-hearing? We will probably never know, but all credit to Andrew Sim for deciphering this to read Girls Learning to Stook and Men Stooking and for bringing it before the public. Nor will we probably ever know whether this or the inverse is strictly correct. In her correspondence with Dickey, Evelyn refers to it once as simply 'Men Stooking'. This is why I favour the title used throughout this essay. Please feel free to take your pick.

  *Correspondence between Evelyn and the War Artists' Advisory Committee is held in the Imperial War Museum, London, under the reference GP/55/44 Evelyn Dunbar 1940-1949

 Text ©Christopher Campbell-Howes 2021. All rights reserved.

Would you like to read more?

 

EVELYN DUNBAR : A LIFE IN PAINTING
by Christopher Campbell-Howes

is available to order online from:

Casemate Publishing | Amazon UK | Amazon US

448 pages, 301 illustrations. RRP £30