Potato Sorting, Berwick (1943)

Evelyn Dunbar Potato Sorting, Berwick 1943 (12" x 2' 6": 300 x 750cm) Manchester City Galleries

Potato Sorting, Berwick, is the third Women's Land Army painting Evelyn completed during her stay in Berwickshire, in southern Scotland, in the spring of 1943. At the time her husband Roger Folley was completing night-fighter navigation training at RAF Charterhall, between the villages of Greenlaw and Duns and not very far away from Evelyn's lodgings. This final training course would qualify him for active service posting the following July to 488 (NZ) Squadron, a night-fighter unit mostly staffed by New Zealand volunteers but with several British members and at least one Dutchman. 

RAF Charterhall closed in 1946, and is now a desolation of ruined huts and unmanaged pinewoods set among the broad upland fields of Berwickshire, one of which is the setting for Potato Sorting, Berwick. Unusually, Evelyn unfolds her narrative from right to left.

It's a bleak scene, at some remove from the sunny and idealised recruiting poster below:

In looking at Potato Sorting, Berwick it doesn't need much of a stretch of the imagination to feel a keen April east wind blowing in from the North Sea: all the Land Girls except one are wearing headscarves and coats, mostly uniform greatcoats. The Land Girl in the centre, however, has found her work warm enough to discard her greatcoat, and nobody is wearing gloves, so it can't be that cold.

If we could hear what is being said, we would probably be struck by the muddle of accents, frequent requests to repeat what has been said, probably some mimicry, especially back at the Women's Land Army hostel after work has finished for the day. The two men on the left will presumably speak with the local Borders accent, in their dialect calling potatoes 'tatties', while the Land Girls, who will have come from all over the United Kingdom, will have their own manner of speech in which 'taters', 'spuds', 'teddies', 'murphies' and of course the English middle-class 'potatoes' all mean the same thing. Maybe we can imply from Evelyn's painting the unity-within-diversity that was such a feature of wartime propaganda films.

And then there's the noise of the machine. Some surviving Land Army accounts of potato sorting describe the stultifyingly boring process of picking through potatoes and sizing them by hand: this farm is lucky enough to have a machine to help things along. All the same, it's not very different in principle from the drawing below, dating from about 1908:

- but it shows some advance. The machine, which appears to be fairly new from the pristine-ish state of its paintwork, is operated by a crank turned by the second Land Girl in from the left, the counterpart of the bowler-hatted and nattily-dressed gent on the left above.

On the extreme right, Land Girls are shovelling main crop potatoes from the clamp they've been stored in since harvest the previous autumn, using tools called graips, forks with more tines than usual and with each tine flattened at the end to prevent damage to the potatoes.

The potatoes run along a riddle which sorts them into sizes, then up a short open elevator, from which damaged or diseased potatoes can be picked by hand. The crop appears to be an especially good one: the relaxed, leaning, cross-legged pose of the left-hand Land Girls - suggests that there isn't much weeding out of below-standard potatoes to be done. The sorted potatoes arrive at the top of the elevator and fall into a sack held by a farm labourer. When full, the sack will be weighed on the scales on the extreme left and the contents adjusted until exactly 1 hundredweight (45kg) is reached. Older readers will perhaps remember that 20 hundredweight (cwt) made 1 ton. By the end of the day several tons of potatoes will have been sacked up, especially if the not inconsiderable spillage is included.

Sub-standard or damaged potatoes, incidentally, were stained with purple dye, marking them as unfit for human consumption, and were used as animal feed, chiefly for pigs.

Potato Sorting, Berwick and its companion pieces Singling Turnips, Land Army Girls going to Bed and Women's Land Army Hostel were exhibited - with other paintings - at the National Gallery in London later in 1943. The critic Jan Gordon, writing in that year's November issue of The Studio, commented:

The pictures are capable and in many ways excellent, but as the collection grows, a conviction becomes equally strong that something is lacking from them, and that lack seems to be a lack of war consciousness...Evelyn Dunbar's set of four 'Land Army' paintings are works of a very respectable talent indeed, but good as they are they are examples of what I mean when I suggest a lack of war-substance.

I don't think these four paintings are among Evelyn's best, although it's still possible to pick up from them, as in all her War Artists' Advisory Committee work, her themes of determination and hope. I think they are revealing of something else, of preoccupations not always connected with her work. She was under pressure: in letters from this period to the Secretary of the War Artists' Advisory Committee she asked for more time, for the final date of her contract to be extended. The WAAC was very accommodating and gave her all the leeway she wanted, but it seems clear that her 1943 output had reduced considerably compared with the non-stop outpourings of 1940-42. There's no proof, of course, as so much of her work is unaccounted for, but if the first six months of 1943 accounts only for these three paintings plus the work she produced during her stay in Usk, i.e. six mostly small paintings in total, then a change has come over Evelyn. Few of the early 1943 paintings are highly finished, in the way that Women's Land Army Dairy Training or St Thomas's Hospital in Evacuation Quarters are. What has happened?

Firstly, her private painting was occupying her more, maybe at the expense of her WAAC commissioned work. In 1943 she exhibited, possibly among other non-war paintings, the talismanic Joseph's Dream, at last now complete and highly finished.

Secondly, Evelyn had had on her easel since before her marriage in August 1942 one of her largest wartime canvases, The Queue at the Fish Shop. This painting, which wasn't submitted until 1945, is a celebration of her marriage and a strong statement of what Roger Folley had become for her. Completion may well have eclipsed, for the moment, her interest in the Women's Land Army. Here's a reminder of what is one of her greatest paintings:

 

Evelyn Dunbar The Queue at the Fish Shop 1945 (2' x 6': 62 x 183cm) Imperial War Museum, London

Thirdly, marriage, as it was bound to, altered Evelyn's outlook in many ways. Despite wartime marriages being fraught, it worked. At the most basic level, from now on she could rely on Roger's service pay, particularly as they had no married home: after marriage Evelyn continued to have her home and studio in Rochester, at The Cedars, although she followed Roger's various postings wherever she could. Having nowhere else, Roger considered The Cedars as his home too, but he was only able to spend odd leaves there.

Up until 1943 Roger had seen no active service in the air. Completion of his flying training, which started in 1941, at RAF Charterhall would mean active service to follow. Life expectancy among RAF aircrew was not high. However used RAF personnel were to tragedy at this stage in the war, a cloud hung over RAF Charterhall to which both Roger and Evelyn would have been sensitive: shortly before Roger arrived in Berwickshire, Flight Lieutenant Richard Hillary was killed on a training flight from RAF Charterhall, when his aircraft crashed into a nearby field. Hillary had been a celebrated and successful Battle of Britain pilot who had suffered appalling burns when his Spitfire caught fire. He recounted his Battle of Britain experiences in a then famous book, The Last Enemy. After intensive treatment at the famous East Grinstead, Sussex, burns hospital under Sir Archibald McIndoe, Hillary insisted on returning to flying, meeting the last enemy while re-training.

Roger joined 488 (NZ) Squadron, then based in Ayr, Scotland, in July 1943. The first mention of him in Leslie Hunt's Defence until Dawn: The Story of 488 N.Z. Squadron, reads '...by this time [July 1943] Roger Folley had turned up ahead of his pilot, Flight Lieutenant Ron Watts, of Auckland; Roger hailed from Rochester, Kent, and was a professor in days of peace.'

('Professor' was prophetic: only after the war did he become a university lecturer.)

I think Evelyn was terrified of losing him. With final training at a RAF station haunted by the spectre of the iconic Richard Hillary and with active service looming, she wanted to spend every possible moment with him. It's surprising that her commissioned painting didn't suffer more.

(Text © Christopher Campbell-Howes 2012. All rights reserved)

 

Further reading...

 

EVELYN DUNBAR : A LIFE IN PAINTING 

 

      by Christopher Campbell-Howes
       

        is available to order online from

       customerservice@scriptps.co.uk

 

       448 pages, 300 illustrations. £30

Christmas, 1942

Evelyn Dunbar Christmas Card 1942 Pre-publication presentation (?) 1955 © Estate of Evelyn Dunbar: private collection

Evelyn married Roger Folley in August 1942, and the following Christmas they started what became a tradition over the next 17 years: Christmas greetings designed by Evelyn, with text written (or selected) by Roger. The 1942 card above is the only one of the series without a text from Roger. 

 
In 1955 Evelyn had the notion of assembling all their previous Christmas cards into an album, possibly with a view to publication. This entailed cutting each card in half, mounting each half on card and adding a brief comment. The printer's name (in this case Mackay's of Rochester) is given, I imagine, to help an eventual publisher to locate the original blocks.

There's nothing traditionally Christmassy about any of them. Their individuality and the compactness of Roger's texts, which will become apparent as the series unfolds, became notorious in the family for their un-Christmassy-ness. Evelyn's Christian Science, however - with which Roger complied to some extent - did not celebrate Christmas as a religious festival. Evelyn's comment, in her own handwriting, reads:

Our first Christmas card. At that time R. was in the R.A.F. and E. an official war artist, so the symbolism is obvious. The distant peaks, one imagines, are meant to suggest the brief "leave" periods in the Lakes or the Yorkshire fells.

Evelyn's and Roger's short war-time honeymoon was spent in the Yorkshire fells. This, and the star Evelyn has placed on the 'distant peaks' in her cameo, might serve as the last word about the infrequency of mountains in Evelyn's work. The sharp-eyed will note that, exceptionally, Evelyn has signed herself 'E.F.' (Evelyn Folley), instead of her usual 'ED', 'E.Dunbar' or 'Evelyn Dunbar'.

(Original text © Christopher Campbell-Howes 2012. All rights reserved.)

 

Further reading...

 

         EVELYN DUNBAR : A LIFE IN PAINTING

 

               by Christopher Campbell-Howes
 

                is available to order online from 

               customerservices@scriptps.co.uk 

                448 pages, 300 illustrations. £30

Baling Hay (1943)

Evelyn Dunbar Baling Hay 1943 (1' 6" x 2': 45.8 x 61cm) National Museum of Wales, Cardiff

 

Baling Hay is the third, and maybe the most remarkable, of the three Women's Land Army paintings which had their genesis in Evelyn's stay at the Institute of Agriculture, Usk (now Coleg Gwent) in January, 1943.  It's such a bold, confident and compelling composition that I find myself wishing Evelyn had executed it on a larger canvas than on the modest 18" x 24" she gave it.

The baling machine previously seen in Threshing and Baling, Monmouthshire has been moved to the haystacks of another farm in the area. Or maybe it's another part of the same farm; I don't know where it is, but readers who know Monmouthshire may recognise the location. Tarpaulins will have been removed from the stacks of hay mown the previous May or June, and the Land Girls, who may form part of a team assigned to the baling machine contractor, are pitchforking what some used to call 'birds' nests' of hay into a hopper, in which the hay is compressed.

A guillotine, suspended above the hopper, drops down to slice the compressed hay into the required length; a belt-driven rack - you can see the drive-belt on the extreme right - inches the bales forwards to where two Land Girls seated either side of the rack are ready to tie the familiar rectangular bales with prepared wires, using pliers to twist the wire securely and to remove excess. The Land Girl in the right foreground, clad in winter greatcoat (with the WLA shoulder title, a red crown on a green background) is bringing forward a bundle of pre-looped wires, and judging from the amount of hay to be baled they will all have been used by the day's end. One of the very few figures in the entire canon of Evelyn's work to be shown looking out of the frame, she is looking up at the sky, perhaps wondering when the rain will start again.

Wire ties have long since been replaced by automatically-tied baler twine, or by plastic netting enveloping much larger drum bales. Baling machines like the one Evelyn has meticulously painted are only found in farming museums. Although this can't have been her intention at the time, Baling Hay has become a historical document, a valuable record of past agricultural practices.

Evelyn claimed that during her extraordinarily rain-sodden stay of several weeks at Usk that January, there were only three fine days. (Indeed, the word 'Usk' is a Celtic word for water.) Baling Hay must show one of them. It will have been important to ensure that the hay stayed dry: wet hay will become mouldy and unfit for animal feed the next winter. Once again we have the Dunbar message of promise and confidence in the future.

There are certain clues as to how the various tasks are divided up to make the most of a fine day. Speed is essential. There are nice contrasts between the disparity of uniform and different layers of clothing. It's cold: the Land Girl in the centre foreground, who has commandeered a bale to sit on, has a full, if unorthodox, uniform of boots, overalls, whipcord or corduroy breeches, plus a non-uniform plaid lumberman's jacket or fleece and a sack to cover her lap and knees. Maybe she's also wearing the familiar WLA green jersey underneath. She's sitting on another sack. She finds she can work more deftly without gloves, and you can imagine her having to warm her hands every now and then, maybe by placing them inside her jacket. For the Land Girls on the haystacks, however, the work is so physical and warm that they've stripped down to their breeches and green jerseys. The one in the centre, feeding the hopper, has even got her sleeves rolled up. As always, Evelyn is observing very accurately.

The Land Girl on the right of the bale rack is curiously under-dressed compared with her opposite number: she has probably just come off haystack duty in a muck sweat, grateful to be able to hand over her pitchfork to the previous occupant of her bale-seat, sit down and do a bit of wiring until the next change-round. In a few minutes will she too be looking for extra layers to put on? She has already pulled up the shoulder-straps of her overalls.


(Text © Christopher Campbell-Howes 2012. All rights reserved.)

 

Further reading...

 

       EVELYN DUNBAR : A LIFE IN PAINTING

 

               by Christopher Campbell-Howes
       

 

               is available to order online from

 

        

             customerservices@scriptps.co.uk
       

 

              448 pages, 301 illustrations. £30

Threshing and Baling, Monmouthshire (1943)

Evelyn Dunbar Threshing and Baling, Monmouthshire 1943 (1' 4" x 1'8": 40.8 x 51cm) National Museum of Wales, Cardiff

This is the second of the three Women's Land Army paintings initiated by Evelyn during a particularly cold and rain-sodden January, 1943. She spent several weeks at the Institute of Agriculture at Usk (now Coleg Gwent), in Monmouthshire, housed in a WLA caravan. Despite the comparative nearness of her husband, Roger Folley, then undergoing navigation training at RAF Colerne, it's not hard to imagine her relief at abandoning her caravan with its cussedly nonconformist paraffin stove, and making for the comfort of her studio in Rochester to work up her sketches, probably far greater in number than eventually appeared as finished paintings.

Maybe this scene features one of the few fine days in that very wet January. There's an east wind blowing (the right-hand barn door is jammed open with a plank to prevent the wind catching it), not usually a rain-bearing wind in South Wales. We can orientate the scene by the shadow of the hay-rake, propped correctly with tines uppermost, cast against the left-hand wall by a pale sun, low in the post-midwinter sky.

The barn is old, built of local sandstone and roofed with Welsh slates, patched with mosses and lichens. An unusual feature, although not uncommon in the area, is the vertical ventilation slits on either side of the doors, maybe an indication that the barn was originally built to overwinter cattle in. At any rate the previous summer's wheat harvest has been stored here in the dry, and the time has arrived for a threshing machine, of the same travelling contractor's type that we saw in Evelyn's Threshing, Kent (1941), to be installed in the through passage of the barn. Connected to it is the baling machine, packing the straw into rectangular bales which will be stacked for use mainly as cattle litter and thereafter as manure. The noise must be indescribable, the chaff and dust everywhere, and the scarved and maybe masked Land Girls inside, stripped of their heavy coats, must be as grateful for a through-draught as those outside are grumbling about the sharp edge of the wind.

The design of Threshing and Baling, Monmouthshire is strong, assured and confident, as almost always with Evelyn's work, and I think much may be read into certain features of it. I wouldn't like to suggest that a detailed history of World War 2 can be extrapolated from her War Artists' Advisory Committee commissions, but a glance through the major headlines of January 1943 includes:

Germans Surrender in Stalingrad
Conference of Allied Powers in Casablanca
Berlin Hit by First Daytime Bombing
Allies Take Tripoli as Germans Retreat

 

(I've taken these from Chronicle of the 20th Century, ed. Derrik Mercer, Longmans, London 1988)

Slowly, gradually, the outlook is becoming more positive. (But then Evelyn's outlook is never negative.) There's room for hope. The tide of war is turning the Allies' way, and the age-old principles for which Britain stands are being vindicated. I expect it's much too fanciful to imagine this barn as a metaphor for Britain, as This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, as Shakespeare makes John of Gaunt say about England in Richard II, but do the ventilation slits remind us of arrow slits in mediaeval military architecture? And it may be equally illusory to note that the barn itself is built of Devonian or Silurian sandstone, among the oldest rocks not just in Wales but in the entire planet, and do these roots to a remote past suggest the time-tested durability of the ideals for which this war is being fought?

(What? As I re-read this I'm a little ashamed of the sentimentality of this analysis, something that later Marxist and postmodernist historians and critics would give me maybe 2 out of 10 for, if that: but then I remember that the historian Sir Arthur Bryant, with similar flights of often utopian-agrarian fancy, was enormously popular during the war, and that it's a poor historian who visits the preoccupations of his or her own times on the past. But I stray from Evelyn, one of the least sentimental artists I know.)

The threat of invasion and violation has passed, the doors are open to their fullest extent, and what has been temporarily housed and sheltered inside, grain, maybe for re-sowing in spring in several weeks' time, and straw, with its own promise of enrichment for the future, is being processed and disseminated. And by women. 'Let them get on with it' is maybe what the man is thinking, head bowed as he leaves the scene.

(Text © Christopher Campbell-Howes 2012. All rights reserved.)

 

Further reading...

EVELYN DUNBAR : A LIFE IN PAINTING

 

         by Christopher Campbell-Howes
 

          is available to order online from

 
          customerservices@scriptps.co.uk
 

          448 pages, 301 illustrations. £30

Sprout Picking, Monmouthshire (1943)

Evelyn Dunbar Sprout Picking, Monmouthshire 1943 (15" x 15": 40 x 40cm) Manchester City Art Galleries

After her marriage in August 1942 to Roger Folley, Evelyn's tempo changed. Historians might consider that the tempo of the war had changed, too. Britain was no longer alone: the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941 had brought the United States increasingly into the war on the Allied side. Hitler's attention was more drawn towards his armies invading Russia than towards attempting to crush Britain. The Battle of the Atlantic and the mortal threat of Hitler's U-boats, although far from won, was just beginning to go Britain's way, and after the Battle of El Alamein there appeared to be room for a very cautious optimism for British arms in North Africa. Despite appalling setbacks against the Japanese in the Far East, Churchill could feel justified in claiming that while the end of the war was hardly in sight, at least 1942 marked the end of the beginning.

Against this background of a world in turmoil and the great nations in arms it may seem difficult to assign much significance to a small painting of some women picking brussels sprouts in a field in Monmouthshire. However, I think there are significances, and evidence that points to changing attitudes, in this and the other paintings of the trio that resulted from the January weeks Evelyn spent in a Women's Land Army caravan at the Institute of Agriculture (now part of Coleg Gwent) at Usk in 1943. It surely wasn't coincidental that at that time Roger, by now Flying Officer Folley, was stationed at RAF Colerne, not impossibly far away across the Severn estuary. Wittingly or unwittingly, he may well have influenced Evelyn's changing outlook and tempo.

Sir Kenneth Clark, Director of the National Gallery and chairman of the War Artists' Advisory Committee, is quoted in Meirion and Susie Harries' The War Artists (Michael Joseph, London, 1983) as saying 'the trouble about war pictures of agriculture is that they are rather hard to distinguish from peace pictures'. He wasn't necessarily referring to Sprout Picking, Monmouthshire, but I wonder...

Leaving aside for a moment their outstanding artistic qualities, Evelyn's war paintings so far have been remarkable for showing women undertaking tasks, especially on the land, that were ordinarily the province of men. One or two commenters on these essays have enjoyed Evelyn's evocation of the farming techniques from seventy years and more ago, but I don't think Evelyn ever intended her paintings to be records of agricultural history.

All the same, I think there's a lot to be inferred from this little painting. In the early years of her appointment as an Official War Artist, 1940-41, Evelyn makes her women tell us about their - and I hope it's fair to say hers also - attitudes to the war and the danger Britain was in. Their activities, their expressions, the set of their bodies, express hope, determination, a quiet and unassuming confidence. Their morale, and by extension the morale of the nation, is positive, at least steady.

We know about Evelyn's own credo, her trust in a Nature that would always provide in return for Man's looking after it, and as it happened her beliefs dovetailed very neatly with the work the War Artists' Advisory Committee asked her to undertake. Sprout Picking, Monmouthshire, is yet another statement of her beliefs: there is the same husbandry at work, the same tidy and disciplined rows of plantation, the same prepared soil with its elements of promise on either side of the vegetables, the same carefully pruned fruit trees in the background, the same Covenant in operation that we've seen continuously in Evelyn's husbandry paintings since Winter Garden of 1928-37.

Many of Evelyn's extraordinary output of paintings from 1940-41 deal with summer or autumn subjects. The winters of 1940-42 were taken up with interiors like the nursing paintings, or completion of canvases in her studio in Rochester. Her subjects at Usk were her first winter outdoor paintings. Sprouts are best harvested after frost has touched them, and while there's no frost in Sprout Picking, Monmouthshire (the Land Girls aren't wearing gloves) the scene is wintry, with the sort of lowering sky that betokens snow later, there are no leaves on the trees and the women don't appear to be evincing much pleasure in, let alone taking moral strength from, being bent double working the rows of brussels sprout stalks, surely wondering if it's all worth it for £1 19s 6d per week (£114 at 2024 values). You can imagine impatient queues of dressing-gowned Land Girls waiting for a hot bath back at the hostel when the day's work is done.

Something has changed. So many of her earlier paintings are clad in the drab colours of wartime, as though her paintings were camouflaging themselves. At last green is paramount in Sprout Picking, Monmouthshire. The cabbage-like heads of the sprout plants are little symphonies of green. Spring is round the corner, the year has turned, we're past midwinter, we're into 1943. Better days lie ahead, the darkest days are past. Better days won't come of their own accord, they will have to be worked hard for. The focus has widened: no longer is the Women's Land Army clutching at temporary expedient contraptions like in Milking Practice with Artificial Udders or undergoing basic training in Men Stooking and Girls Learning to Stook. In Sprout Picking, Monmouthshire, the Womens' Land Army is trained and is in full production. The work may be laborious, repetitive, uncomfortable and dull, but the outlook is brighter. On a personal level, Evelyn's outlook was brighter still: her husband of a few months wasn't far away, close enough to visit her as regularly as his RAF leaves allowed. Even among the brussels sprouts, hope is springing eternal. It takes a remarkable artist to express this.

(Text © Christopher Campbell-Howes 2024. All rights reserved.)

 

Further reading...

 

    EVELYN DUNBAR : A LIFE IN PAINTING

 

          by Christopher Campbell-Howes
 

           is available to order online from
 

            customerservices@scriptps.co.uk
 

            448 pages, 301 illustrations. £30

Lake District interlude, 1941

 

"No one can know what induced her to glance a second time at the quiet young fellow in airman's uniform she met while working at Sparsholt Farm Institute. A former member of staff, he was there on a 48-hour pass and had nowhere else to go. Or whether it was entirely by chance that they found themselves alone in the Common Room after the others had retired. They did not stay up late, just long enough for mutual interest and latent friendship to develop. Subsequently there was no courtship - how  could there be? - only occasional rendezvous as circumstances permitted. Two years later, in 1942, after a short engagement, they were married."

The writer - writing of himself in the third person - is my uncle Roger Folley, then a very junior Royal Air Force Voluntary Reserve officer stationed at Titchfield, a village between Portsmouth and Southampton, about 20 miles from Sparsholt. Before the war he had been Costings Officer at Sparsholt, living in on the premises. Roger's home was in Colne, a small town in Lancashire, so distant that 48-hour pass would be mostly spent getting there and back.

So Roger tended to spend his shorter leaves at Sparsholt, and some of these coincided with Evelyn's visits to observe and sketch the various Women's Land Army training activities going on there, and also to collaborate with Michael Greenhill, the Sparsholt Instructor of Agriculture, on A Book of Farmcraft, the farming primer written by Greenhill and illustrated by Evelyn.

By the spring of 1941 Roger and Evelyn had got to know each other well enough for him to invite her to spend an April week rock-climbing in the Lake District. Roger was a devoted fell-walker, rock-climber and cragsman with a deep and abiding love of the Cumbrian hills and Yorkshire fells. Some time before 1941 he had written an account of a previous Lake District expedition with his former Leeds University student friend Glynn Burton entitled Diary I: An Episode in the History of the Lake District.

One result of the April 1941 expedition was Diary II: An Episode in the History of the Lake District (unpublished, private collection). This time the party consisted of Roger and Evelyn, together with Glynn Burton and, as female companion for Evelyn and maybe to act as a sort of chaperone, Evelyn's former Royal College of Art student friend Margaret Goodwin.

Coincidentally, the Royal College of Art had been evacuated from blitz-stricken London, to Ambleside, the small Lake District town a short distance from Middlefell, in Langdale, where the party was staying. Charles Mahoney, Evelyn's former Royal College of Art tutor, colleague and lover, was installed as warden of the students' hostel in the Queen's Hotel. Roger's tactfully expressed account reads: 'A visit to the Royal College of Art in its new habitat ought to have been included, but with the understanding compliance of all the members of the party, was set aside.'

Roger's text is written, for reasons best known to himself, in the orotund style of William Cobbett, the 19th century Radical with strong views on agriculture. The account was delectably illustrated in pen and ink by Evelyn, with the various characters depicted as mice.

Margaret Goodwin, who later married under the name of Iliffe, was not attracted to rock climbing and spent her time sketching and painting. As a fellow-student some ten years before Evelyn had rendered her thus:

 Evelyn Dunbar Margaret Goodwin at her Easel 1929-1933 Pen, ink and wash: courtesy of, and many thanks to, Paul Liss of Liss Fine Art

 - but as a non-climbing mouse in An Episode in the History of the Lake District she appears like this:

Evelyn acquitted herself very well, conquering such notorious climbs as Napes Needle, among others:

 And the other drawings speak for themselves:

 

 At one point Roger's (and my, incidentally) cousin Moira Rayner, staying nearby, cycled over to spend a day with the party:

The week ended with a Commemorative Song, chiefly commemorating, it seems, the poor fare on offer at the farm at which they stayed:

Mice sometimes appear in Evelyn's lesser work, friezes for children's bedrooms, letters (which she loved to illustrate), decorated gift tags, home-made birthday cards and elsewhere.

As Roger's and Evelyn's attachment deepened, a change came over Evelyn's work. Where possible she followed his various RAF postings, and consequently she was able to record mostly, but not exclusively, Women's Land Army activities further afield than Kent and Hampshire. They married in August 1942, but had no home of their own until after the war had ended. Evelyn's practice was still to do the preliminary work on site, and complete her canvases either at home in The Cedars, the Dunbar family home in Strood, or - and increasingly as the work advanced - in the large room above her sisters' haberdashery shop at 168, High Street, Rochester.

Roger and Evelyn Folley: Wedding day, 17th August, 1942: Photo in possession of the author

However after their marriage Evelyn's focus changes. She seems less concerned to cram in as many different women's home-front activities as possible. The frantic output of 1940-41 reduces. Instead she concentrates on fewer canvases, more highly finished. The change is gradual, the great wartime paintings are yet to come.

Evelyn Dunbar in fell-walking mode in Langdale, Cumbria, July 1955. Photograph: the author

(Evelyn Dunbar's pen-and-ink drawings: © The artist's estate
Original text © Christopher Campbell-Howes 2012. All rights reserved.)

 

Further reading...

 

EVELYN DUNBAR : A LIFE IN PAINTING

 

      by Christopher Campbell-Howes

       is available to order online from

 

      customerservices@scriptps.co.uk 

       448 pages, 301 illustrations. £30

St Thomas' Hospital in Evacuation Quarters (1942)

Evelyn Dunbar St Thomas' Hospital in Evacuation Quarters 1942 (3' x 5': 91 x 152cm) Imperial War Museum, London

 8th September, 1940:

I did my night rounds, and watched the bombs dropping for a bit, then wandered about having tea here, and ovaltine somewhere else, as nearly everybody else was also doing, and then about 2 am went to bed in my basement and got to sleep. The next thing was I found myself sitting up in bed – chaps were rushing here and there. St Thomas’s has been hit by a bomb.
I donned my dressing gown and slippers and went out into the corridor and was met by a pall of dust. I asked a few questions and found that the wing opposite Westminster Bridge – the nurses’ home – had been hit. I went along and joined a party which was hunting for people who were trapped. Then from 2.30 to 3.30 am we climbed about in the ruins calling out and searching for people. The nurses’ home had been demolished – was just a heap of ruins.
Everybody who was near when the bomb exploded was absolutely covered in black dust – was quite unrecognisable. We found five nurses who were trapped and let them out by shifting some enormous piece of furniture and thus allowing a piece of wall to fall down. They seemed quite cheery.
All the while the bombs were falling round about – but we did not take much notice of them then. The amazing thing was that only five nurses were killed, and a lot of them had cuts and bruises but nothing serious. One was pinned under the ruins for hours before she died.
In the morning what a spectacle! I can’t describe it but it must have been a high explosive bomb to do all that damage. Then last night the whole hospital, doctors, nurses, maids, pundits and pinkies all slept together in the basement! A most incredible sight – one could hardly move without stumbling over a sleeping form. We all slept very well, partly because we were so tired and partly because we were now getting used to bombs…."

This is an extract from a letter written on September 10th, 1940, by one of the St Thomas Hospital housemen, Dr Frank Crockett, to his family in Australia.

8th September, 1940: St Thomas Hospital, Lambeth, bombed. Houses of Parliament in the background. Photo credit: unknown.

St Thomas Hospital, on the south bank of the Thames, almost opposite the Houses of Parliament, was hit by bombs a dozen times in World War 2. In 1941 the hospital was evacuated partly to Hydestile and partly to Pyrford, both villages in Surrey. In Pyrford various departments of St Thomas moved into the premises of St Nicholas' Orthopaedic Hospital, a Victorian children's foundation later known as Rowley Bristow. 

St Nicholas' Orthopaedic Hospital (Rowley Bristow), Pyrford, Surrey, to which St Thomas' Hospital evacuated in 1941

In March 1942 Evelyn spent several weeks at Pyrford recording hospital activities, which in due course she transformed into the greatest and most finished of her four nursing paintings. She felt the best way of presenting the many different facets of hospital life was to incorporate them in the multi-compartmental form she had made particularly her own. We've seen it already in the 6-box Putting on Anti-Gas Protective Clothing and, before her appointment as Official War Artist, An English Calendar and to a lesser extent in the Joseph's Dream diptych. In St Thomas' Hospital in Evacuation Quarters Evelyn uses it in a yet more imaginative way. There are no margins or borders or separators, and the overall impression of this large, and beautiful, canvas is one of wide and varied hospital activity, but a controlled, unified, orderly and calm busy-ness, indeed evoking the same devotion and detachment that Dr Crockett's letter shows. Hitler's bombs may have caused some material damage, but they've barely brushed the spirit, determination and professional pride of these nurses.

More than a year after its completion, Evelyn wrote a few notes about the painting of it for a programme for a touring exhibition entitled War Pictures by British Artists, in which St Thomas' Hospital in Evacuation Quarters was to be included. Her notes arrived too late for inclusion, but all the same it's very good to be in a position to let Evelyn speak for herself, as quoted in Dr Gill Clarke's Evelyn Dunbar: War and Country:
 

It arose from the vivid impressions I received on first going into & going about in a big hospital. My original idea before I went there, was to do a record of the different Nurses in their various uniforms, but their activity transmuted this...

The hospital is St Thomas's, or a part of St Tho evacuated to Pyrford, in Surrey, & I stayed there for some weeks, with freedom to wonder [sic] about as I chose. The staff consisted of Pyrford nurses and sisters, and the various wartime auxiliaries - Red Cross, Nursing Auxiliary (N.A.) Civil Nursing Reserve (C.N.R.) and, of course, the Matron of St Tho. It was chiefly orthopaedic, and not entirely military. That is, they had a good many service men, but civilians as well, including a great many blitz cases. It used to be a children's hospital before the war.

I think, if people look at the picture, it's pretty simple (They usually send out a cloud of prejudicial steam and say they can't make head or tail of it...) - the nurse in the left upper corner is sterilising, the one next, filling hot water bottles, - the two in the ward bed making, the next one doing a dressing - The one on the left in the next tier is taking a temperature (I think). The little one in the spotted frock is a Sister in her office (their work is chiefly office work) & the back view red x nurse is going in to g [illegible] keys. Then comes the matron, interviewing a Pyrford sister. The next one - in her spotted lace cap  - is measuring pdrysic [sic: physic?], the next two are doing a dressing.

Down below on the left are the pink-clad domestic staff with their big mob caps. Then there comes a night nurse with torch and keys (she is a charge nurse.) Next is a sluice, with an N.A. at the sink. Then there is the linen cupboard (in constant use) with the little N.A. at work in it. Last the plaster room, where a group of workers - from Pro: to sister, & a masseuse, are putting a patient into a plaster cast. (What a strange procedure this is.....)

The whole is a scene of everyday hospital tasks, a flat chequered background, with its wreath of crisply white aproned figures moving deftly and swiftly over it. Browns, greens, blue scarlet and white with a few sharp spottings of delicate pink - so it seemed to me.

Wish I could do it again - I'd do something a lot better.

The agreed fee, before submission, for St Thomas Hospital in Evacuation Quarters was 35 guineas, £36.75. On reception the War Artists' Advisory Committee was sufficiently impressed by its quality to double Evelyn's fee.

(Original text © Christopher Campbell-Howes. All rights reserved.)

 

Further reading...

 

EVELYN DUNBAR : A LIFE IN PAINTING

 by Christopher Campbell-Howes

is available to order online from 

customerservices@scriptps.co.uk

448 pages, 301 illustrations. £30