Some letters to Charles Mahoney (1933-37)

 Letter to Charles Mahoney, summer 1935. Original in Tate Britain, ©Estate of Evelyn Dunbar. Unless otherwise stated, all illustrations are from the same source

Trellis? Trellis? What can Eve(lyn) mean? Certainly, there are trellises here, blown hither and thither by this mighty creature from the heavens: houses look on in astonishment, a small Mahoney-like figure raises his arms in consternation (or surrender?), chimneys are blown away, the text is littered with flying bits of trellis. Whatever is going on?

* * *

Charles Mahoney (1904-1968) lectured at the Royal College of Art from 1928 until after World War 2. His given name was Cyril, but he found himself nicknamed 'Charlie' by his RCA colleague Barnett Freedman, probably for the rhythm and euphony of 'Charlie Mahoney' and the agreeable if impertinent rhymes that might be got from it. Evelyn knew him mostly as 'Chas'.

They met in 1932, while Evelyn was pursuing a postgraduate year at the Royal College of Art. Mural painting, taught by Mahoney, was a principal element in her course. A year earlier the RCA Principal, William Rothenstein (later Sir William) urged, via the BBC, the nation's public authorities to encourage and enable mural painting in public buildings, partly to provide employment for young artists struck by the Depression. Mahoney could hardly avoid implication. The outcome was a commission to decorate the school hall at Brockley County School for Boys, now Prendergast - Hilly Fields School, in SE London. He tried to put a team of recent RCA graduates together, but only one answered the call: Evelyn Dunbar. (Later two other recent graduates signed on: Violet Martin and Mildred 'Elsi' Eldridge.)

From the spring of 1933 Mahoney and Evelyn worked at Brockley, sometimes together but often apart. They fell in love, and so began a correspondence as remarkable for an emotional intensity often expressed more in drawing than in words, for its frequency (Evelyn wrote several times a week), for its almost total absence of dates, and especially for its one-sidedness: none of Mahoney's letters survives. However to start with all went merry as a marriage bell. Here is Evelyn in impish, 1934 mood:

 

Evelyn enjoyed quite complex pictogram puzzles from time to time. Writing from her aunt Clara Cowling's house in Ticehurst, East Sussex, she appears to be saying 'The truly gorgeous [gourds + 'geous'?] epistle delighted my heart ! Glad you are feeling fighting fit again' Then there are little cameos of a girl saying HOORAY and skipping with delight, and finally, complete with apple and grinning snake, Evelyn as Eve the temptress, whose figleaf appears to have fallen off. Aha.

 

Like all lovers they concocted their code-words. 'Trellis' was one. Which of the two first likened the rows of Xs that trellis consists of to kisses - XXXX - no amount of latter-day playing gooseberry will reveal. So the letter above is a whirlwind, an elemental hurricane of kisses.

 

However only one kiss, and only one mini-zephyr, in this letter from the summer of 1935, in the same blue-ink and fountain-pen style as the whirlwind letter above. As usual, no date, but the address - 95 Ermine Rd, Brockley - is of the lodgings Evelyn took while working on the murals at nearby Brockley school. Or 'Broiley', as she calls it, mirroring 'Stew-dio' where Mahoney was also working in the heat of a summer's day. This shared studio was the one Evelyn rented for £13 a quarter from Noël Carrington - the Noël mentioned in the text - in Hampstead. Incidentally, 95 Ermine Road no longer exists, according to my informant Nicholas Sack, the eminent urban photographer. Where it stood there are now council flats.

More trellis on this letter, and it would be interesting to know what Mahoney had written to evoke such enthusiastic thanks from Evelyn, if only to discover what the 'boardlet' was. We can stab a guess at 'J & G': were they Joan and Geoff Rhoades, artist friends of Mahoney? And even if we're right, their cushion remains a mystery despite Evelyn's little drawing of it and the accompanying workbox. Happy days.

 

 

Dating Evelyn's letters needs a panoply of little strategies. In this hearts-and-flowers letter there's very little to go on. Ladywell is an area of Brockley, so it can be assumed she was working on the murals and writing from her lodgings at 95 Ermine Road; Jessie was Evelyn's sister, who would hardly have written to Evelyn if she had been at home in Strood. Spring flowers are in evidence, perhaps a pointer to April or May. Evelyn used blue ink fairly consistently throughout 1935. The tone is of someone happily in love. Put all this together and we arrive at a Wednesday, probably in May 1935. But does it matter all that much when it was written?

 

Occasionally Evelyn allowed herself - and Mahoney - the luxury of some water-colour:

 

 

* * *

Beneath this idyllic surface they were an ill-matched pair: Evelyn something of an artistic cuckoo in the nest of a Christian Scientist family of Rochester shopkeepers, comfortable without being wealthy, bourgeois and centrist in their political outlook; Mahoney, of part-Irish descent, a Londoner, one of four surviving brothers. As a child he had lost an eye in a hardly fraternal struggle for possession of a pair of scissors, which may later have affected his ability to judge depth in his paintings. He was a complex man, strongly drawn to the political left and the utopia Stalin's Russia was then thought to be, uneasy with opposition and not without some streaks of rancour.

In some senses plants and gardening were the only unifying factor in their relationship. In their entourage of friends, mostly Mahoney's, and which included several of the Great Bardfield group of artists, they were nicknamed 'Adam and Eve'. Here is a typical plant letter, written from Evelyn's home address:

 

This is probably from 1935, when Evelyn was working on a commission from her earlier Hampstead neighbours Catherine and Donald Carswell to provide incidental drawings for a book they had edited, The Scots Week-End and Caledonian Vade Mecum for Host, Guest and Wayfarer. Does the frontispiece below owe something to Evelyn's letter, or vice versa? A unifying factor is Paul, the Dunbar's Aberdeen terrier, perched high in the branches/flowers.

 

 Frontispiece, The Scots Week-End and Caledonian Vade Mecum for Host, Guest and Wayfarer eds. Carswell D and C, Routledge, London 1936

 

Behind this commission, which brought Evelyn about £1800 at today's values, lay the Carswells' neighbour and Evelyn's recent landlord, the editor and publisher Noël Carrington, a man Mahoney disliked. This put Evelyn in a quandary: throwing in her lot with Mahoney meant distancing herself from her Hampstead friends. The Brockley murals were completed by Evelyn in February 1936: Mahoney had left the project the previous May at a particularly difficult point, the painting of a ceiling. Even so, months later Evelyn sent him her notion of what it might have been like if Mahoney had contrived to stay on:

 

 

Evelyn continued to mask her disappointment, and even designed a tie for Mahoney to wear for the inauguration of the Brockley murals the following February:

 

Despite her disappointment over Mahoney's abandonment of the Brockley project, Evelyn saw her future linked privately and professionally with him: what joint projects could they undertake?

Through the Carswells and The Scots Week-End Evelyn now had a presence at the publishers, Routledge, via their commissioning editor, a man called Ragg. Evelyn suggested a book about gardening, a joint production between her and Mahoney. After some badgering Mahoney agreed. The writing and illustration of Gardeners' Choice  kept them together, perhaps somewhat artificially, until the late summer of 1937, when they separated. Gardeners' Choice, which Evelyn hoped would stand as a metaphor for all that had been good in their relationship, appeared in good time for Christmas 1937.

* * *

The writing on the wall had been evident for some time, perhaps since Mahoney's departure from Brockley. Evelyn's letters continued, ever hopeful of a permanent arrangement, expressed through joint commissions, or a shared garden or home together, or finally through children together.

 

 

Trellis again, surrounding a flowery nook in which to spend quality time with Mahoney. 'Eves' - see the text - has to be a play on words on Evelyn's name and the evenings they spent together.

    

February 1936. Evelyn has taken her post, in this case a letter from Mahoney, outside beside the summer house in The Cedars garden for a bit of privacy. But who is the figure lurking behind the wall? There's no obvious answer.

 

The 'R's and all their social biz' refers to William Rothenstein, the RCA principal. Mahoney was at odds with the direction the RCA was beginning to take, advocating a more commercial approach to art. Not easy for Evelyn, who got on very well with Rothenstein and enjoyed his 'social biz', something she had to abandon in her support of Mahoney. 

 

Evelyn occasionally addressed Mahoney by affectionately insulting names. 'Dearest Pig' is typical of this habit. We don't know how Mahoney responded. The figure writhing in agony, pinned to the ground by Imperturbability (as prescribed by Evelyn), is none other than Rothenstein.

 

Suggestions for activities to keep them together begin to feature heavily in this correspondence.

Here they are gardening together (above), and here (below) is Evelyn describing a house she has seen which might suit them both, but without actually saying as much:
 

 

By 1936 'opportunity' had become a theme-word covering the various projects which Evelyn thought she and Mahoney might envisage together. Apart from Gardeners' Choice they came to nothing. She made various attempts to personify Opportunity, some of which are examined in an earlier post, and in her final outpourings in this vein she refers to the children they might have between them -

 

 - not that she necessarily intended to have eight children, as in the drawing above, where half of them are scrumping the fruit from Opportunity's hat. In any case Mahoney wasn't interested, and said so: children would stunt his and Evelyn's careers. In the late summer of 1937 Evelyn miscarried, Mahoney had bought a house without consulting her, and the relationship collapsed.

 

* * *

It says something maybe unexpected about their relationship that Mahoney kept Evelyn's letters, in their entirety and not simply the drawings, which a lesser man might have done. In due course the package, numbering some 80 letters - it's possibly that one or two might have been suppressed - passed to Mahoney's daughter, Elizabeth Bulkeley. Mrs Bulkeley nobly presented them to the Tate Archive, where they are open for anyone to inspect...

 

...even Evelyn's biographers: in 2016 Josephine and I spent several hours in the Tate Archive photographing this extraordinary collection, only a fraction of which is shown here. One of the saddest was written by Evelyn in blunt pencil on a much-folded piece of paper; it had evidently passed much time in Mahoney's pocket. I could just make out '...why can't you even be bothered to say hello when I pass?' I couldn't bring myself to photograph this desperately sad witness to an ill-judged relationship that had gone horribly wrong.

 

Text ©Christopher Campbell-Howes 2022

 

Further reading...

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

  

The Garden (c.1926)

 

The Garden Oil on millboard c.1926 21 x 32.6 cm Museums Sheffield

It's uncertain when The Garden was painted, nor can we be sure this was the title Evelyn originally gave it. It's one of a pair. Let's start with the pair; it's the same house, but the façade instead of the side. Both measure approximately the same.

Several years ago, during researches in preparation for Evelyn Dunbar: A Life in Painting, I was invited to East Sussex to look at a small collection of Evelyn's work, as fascinating as it was unassuming; a wonderful privilege for the biographer. Among the various paintings and drawings, mostly from Evelyn's late teens and early 20s, was this:

'Gadshill House' c.1926 Oil on canvas 20.5 x 30.5 Photograph © LissLlewellyn

The Dunbar family provenance was impeccable. There could be no doubt that Evelyn had painted it. But when? And where? And why, because she rarely painted buildings? Our return route - my and my wife Josephine's - took us from East Sussex to Kent. Armed with photographs, we decided to drive via Ticehurst, the village where Evelyn's uncle and aunt Stead and Clara Cowling had lived during the inter-war years, in a large house called Steellands. Could the painting possibly be of Steellands? Evelyn and Aunt Clara had been very close.

We stopped in the centre of Ticehurst. We showed our photo to shopkeepers and people in the Post Office: no one recognised it. Yes, they said, there had once been a house called Steellands, but it was now called Apsley Court, a red brick building, nothing like the picture. Oh yes, and there was a road called Steellands Rise on the village outskirts. So at least the name lived on. Meagre pickings. We retreated into Kent, mystery unsolved. We'd drawn a blank. Back to square 1.

* * *

In 1924 the Dunbars left a rather cramped house opposite the old station forecourt in Rochester and moved west across the river Medway to Strood, where Evelyn's father William had bought The Cedars, a much larger house with a 2½ acre garden, fully wandered through here. The Cedars lay about a half-mile up London Road from the centre of Strood. (It's still there, its pyramidical tower - once Evelyn's studio - overlooking the press of newer housing.) A mile or two up the hill was - and is - the settlement of Gadshill. Charles Dickens lived at Gadshill Place for the last 15 years of his life, 1855-70, and not far away is Gads Hill House. (Both forms, Gadshill and Gads Hill, appear to be acceptable.)

We don't know who lived at Gads Hill House a century ago, but fully conscious of the shifting sands and slippery slopes of conjecture, perhaps we can posit that Evelyn, the most outgoing of the Dunbars, got to know them, maybe through a Rochester Girls' Grammar School friend, of whom we have an unwitting but distant image, because the mystery house is surely none other than Gads Hill House -

Gads Hill House, c.2002. Estate agent's photograph

- and the figure in The Garden, standing on the verandah and reaching up to tend a plant, is perhaps none other than Evelyn's friend. The match between Gads Hill House and Evelyn's mystery painting was made, after a Twitter appeal, by Chris Lee, a specialist in such matches whose Twitter address is https://www.twitter.com/CLeeEsq

So Evelyn painted her pictures of Gads Hill House, possibly while she was still at school, stored them in the tower studio at The Cedars and there they remained with other juvenilia for several years.

* * *

In 1929 Evelyn started studying at the Royal College of Art, to which she had won an exhibition. The complement of the full fees was paid by her father William and her uncle Stead Cowling. Initially she travelled daily to Kensington from Strood by train, but tiring of this a few months into her course, she looked for lodgings. She found them in Hampstead, firstly in the ambit of Allan Gwynne-Jones, one of her RCA tutors, and then with Noël Carrington, publisher and book designer, in South End Road, from whom a little later she rented a studio. A near neighbour was the not-yet-knighted William Rothenstein, the RCA principal, who presided over a salon frequented by the great and good of English art, while his nephew Oliver Simon's table at Downshire Hill welcomed artists, especially of the younger generation. This Hampstead coterie, which occasionally rubbed shoulders with Bloomsbury, formed what the art historian and critic Herbert Read called 'a nest of gentle artists'. In the years 1930-32 Evelyn fitted into this world of good company and creative cross-fertilisation very comfortably indeed. A young woman gifted in the arts of friendship, she made lifelong friends in Hampstead. It might be wondered how this student contrived to sit at the high table, as it were. Perhaps it should be remembered that in a sense Evelyn was a mature student, four years older than most of the school leavers of her intake year, and much the same age as some of the young bloods like Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden, whom Rothenstein had appointed to the RCA to ginger his staff up a little.

Evelyn's position in this nest of gentle artists was disturbed by the beginning of her association with Charles Mahoney, her mural tutor in her fourth and post-graduate year. (His birthname was Cyril, but he became almost universally known as Charles or Charley after his RCA colleague Barnett Freedman re-christened him, probably for the rhythm and euphony of 'Charlie Mahoney' and the agreeable rhymes that could be conjured out if it.)

With Rothenstein's enthusiastic backing Evelyn volunteered to join a team of recent graduates, led by Mahoney, to implement a mural decoration scheme at Brockley County School for Boys, in south-east London. Almost from the beginning of this project Evelyn and Mahoney fell in love. Predictably, her devotion both to her work and to Mahoney reduced her Hampstead presence. Besides having a reputation for being touchy and difficult, although a competent tutor, politically Mahoney leaned far to the left, not a marked characteristic of the nest of gentle artists.

The Brockley scheme lasted three years, 1933-36, during which both her father and her uncle Stead Cowling died, and with them their subsidies. Brockley imprisoned Evelyn to a large extent: during this period she painted very little else. The Brockley remuneration was uncertain and irregular. Part way through Mahoney left - after all, he had his own RCA job to do - and Evelyn was to some extent trapped in a scheme which she herself had greatly enlarged from its original dimensions. She and Mahoney separated in the late summer of 1937. She had no money, no prospects, and she felt excluded from Mahoney's circle of friends. So began what she later called her 'crisis' years.

* * *  

Hampstead and the gentle nest came to the rescue. Perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, in 1936 Rothenstein arranged for the purchase of Girl and a Birdcage (c.1924) and some of Evelyn's Brockley sketches by the Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery, Carlisle, recommending Evelyn as an artist of 'real genius'. Noël Carrington, once Evelyn's Hampstead landlord, arranged several commissions for book illustration, which led subsequently in 1937 to Gardeners' Choice, written and illustrated jointly by Evelyn and Mahoney, in which, curiously, this drawing appears as a vignette:

Gadshill House? Vignette in Gardeners' Choice (Routledge, London 1937) written and illustrated by Evelyn Dunbar and Cyril Mahoney

 John Rothenstein, William's son, director of the Sheffield City art gallery, asked Evelyn to select a painting from her studio for his gallery to purchase. This maybe put her in a tight spot: the previous years had been spent up ladders and on trestles at Brockley; she had painted very little lately in the way of formal canvases. I can imagine her leafing through the canvases piled in her studio at The Cedars, almost all from her pre-student days. We come full circle: what she chose was The Garden, which now hangs in Sheffield, a witness maybe less to Evelyn's talent as to the kindness - indeed, to the rescue operation - of her Hampstead friends. Was there collusion? We shall never know.

This benevolence was in evidence a little later. In 1939 Evelyn's first year RCA tutor, Allan Gwynne-Jones, persuaded the Tate to buy two of her canvases via the Knapping Fund, a fund for the purchase of work by living or recently dead artists. Again they come from early days, Sketch for Decoration: Flight and the very fine Winter Garden, which heads this blog. Although it exists elsewhere, there is no evidence of Mahoney in any of these works. 

Finally, in late 1939, Sir William Rothenstein (by now knighted) suggested to Evelyn that she should apply to the War Artists' Advisory Committee for consideration as a war artist. She did so, and a few months later was appointed. She never looked back. At the time of Rothenstein's suggestion, Evelyn had been at her lowest ebb, working behind the counter in her sisters' Rochester haberdashery shop. Her 'crisis' years were over. She was back in The Garden, the agricultural garden of wartime Britain.

 

Text ©Christopher Campbell-Howes 2022.

Further reading...

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