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.

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

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