Evelyn's Farmers Weekly quiz (1954)

 

Farmers Weekly puzzle chart quiz: March 1954

 

In 1954 Evelyn was commissioned by the magazine Farmers Weekly to contribute to a regular feature called The Farming Year: Farmers Weekly Puzzle Chart. Perhaps they came out every month: Evelyn's is dated March 1954.

 

Competitors were asked to identify each of the activities shown and to indicate at which time of year - Winter, Spring, early Summer, late Summer, Autumn - each might take place. A further five activities, not among those illustrated, were to be suggested by the competitor, one for each of the specified times of year.  Answers on a postcard, etc. It wasn't stated what the prize(s) might be.

 

Shown is Evelyn's proof copy of what must have been a double page spread, as found recently among her residual papers stored in a Kentish oasthouse since her death in 1960. If you have the means to enlarge it, well and good. If not, I'm sorry to be unable to reproduce a more legible image. But even in its unredeemed state - one might almost say un-ironed - the pen-and-ink draughtsmanship is exquisite, a culmination of so many of her agricultural images since her time as a war artist closely involved with the Women's Land Army. Indeed, one of her images comes straight from her war years: No. 7 harks back to Singling Turnips, recorded on a Berwickshire farm in the spring of 1943:

Singling Turnips 1943 Oil on canvas Photograph ©England & Co. Private collection

 

These pen-and-ink drawings are the last in a short series of farming images. The most extensive was A Book of Farmcraft (Longmans, London, 1942) written by Michael Greenhill, senior instructor at Sparsholt Agricultural Institute, Hampshire, where Evelyn was posted in 1940 to record Land Girls in training. We see the same very careful draughtmanship in some of her illustrations for A Book of Farmcraft, which sold over 40,000 copies.

 

Illustrations from A Book of Farmcraft. (But might one of the questions in the Farmers Weekly quiz feature a certain right/wrong anomaly?)

 

 A Book of Farmcraft was followed several years later by A Farm Dictionary (Evans Brothers, London, 1953). Derek Chapman, a senior instructor at the College of Estate Management in Reading, wanted to compile an entry-level dictionary of farming terms. Chapman knew both Roger Folley, Evelyn's husband, and her A Book of Farmcraft; the circle was squared; Evelyn apparently was very happy to contribute to a sympathetic project emanating from the town in which she had been born. Accordingly she produced almost 100 small drawings, some done with the same concentration as those in the Farmers Weekly quiz above (see Oast-house in the selection below), others in which her lightness of touch is the foil to some little witticism or joke, as in Lean-to or Smoker below.

 

Copies of A Farm Dictionary, which was the last book Evelyn illustrated, are extremely rare. Occasionally Evelyn's studies for individual drawings, survivors from some 60 years of storage in far from ideal conditions, come up for sale. 

Text ©Christopher Campbell-Howes 2022. All rights reserved.

 

 

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