Dorset (1946-47)

Evelyn Dunbar Dorset 1947-8 (1' 7" x 1' 11": 48 x 58cm) Photograph Ben Taylor ©The present owner. Private collection

Writing towards the end of his life in his unpublished 2007 pamphlet Evelyn Dunbar: The Husband's Narrative, Evelyn's husband Roger Folley states: 'My sister offered us the use of a vacant cottage adjoining her house at Long Compton. With more pull than push, we leaped at the chance. The Dunbars gave us some furniture, and we moved there, [..] our married life began. Evelyn had her first experience of housekeeping, but her painting was handicapped. The cottage had few rooms, low ceilings and low windows. Nevertheless she made her first portrait and [..] Dorset was sold to a patron.'

The patron was Mary Landale, a student at the Ruskin School of Drawing and of Fine Art in Oxford, where Evelyn taught part-time as a Visitor. In March 1951 Mary Landale's niece, then 15, wrote to her parents from her aunt's house -

Auntie Maydie [the family name for Mary Landale] has bought a picture by a well known artist. It is an allegorical figure of a woman symbolising Dorset (I think it is Dorset) sitting in a background of (presumably) Dorset countryside. It is a lovely picture, very graceful & done in a colour scheme [of] dullish greens.

- which if nothing else suggests that its purchaser bought it for its own sake and not out of any great familiarity with or special fondness for the county of Dorset. Nor is it certain that Evelyn ever went there, apart from one occasion in the mid-1930s when she spent a few days near Wimborne child-minding for some friends. Why did she paint it?

Dorset was lent back by Mary Landale for showing in Evelyn's only solo exhibition, at Wye College, Kent in 1953. I went to this exhibition. Rising 12, I was very much struck by this image, I think falling in love a little with this lovely but slightly troubled woman, unique in Evelyn's work, but apprehensive of raising with her the boyish conundrum that if you asked Dorset to stand up she would be so monstrously tall that the breeze evident in the painting would blow her over. But who was she?

A year or two later, in the course of a conversation about what I was doing at school, I told Evelyn that in English we were reading Thomas Hardy's Far From The Madding Crowd. She was pleased. For her, Hardy was an important writer, the most elemental of English novelists and one she often mentioned. She told me his The Trumpet Major lay behind Dorset. After a teenage failure to persevere with it, I didn't read The Trumpet Major fully until very much later, many years after Evelyn's death in 1960.

 

There was a sudden, eye-blinking epiphany: Evelyn's hint from so many years before was very loaded indeed. She had done the same with Dorset as she had with so many of the Brockley mural spandrels, where the image shifts from mere decoration to something much more lively and meaningful once the viewer penetrates to the underlying narrative, which may be obscure, not to say hermetic. But why The Trumpet Major? Clearly Dorset - the woman - is a personification: if for Evelyn the spirit of Dorset - the county - was best expressed by Hardy, the choice of suitable Hardy heroines on which to base such a personification is not wide. Tess Durbeyfield? Bathsheba Everdene? Susan Henchard? Hardy is not kind to his women. There is one exception: Evelyn's choice of Anne Garland in The Trumpet Major becomes clearer.
 
Towards the end of The Trumpet Major Anne Garland trudges from Weymouth to a high point towards the extremity of Portland Bill, which she reaches at about midday. From here there are wide views over the English Channel. Anne Garland settles herself and gazes out to sea. Presently what she has climbed the hill to see comes into sight to the south-east: HMS Victory, outward bound on the voyage that will culminate in Trafalgar. On board HMS Victory is one of Anne Garland's suitors, Bob Loveday, whom she eventually marries.
 
Hardy is quite specific about the season ('...at this time of mist and level sunlight...') and the weather ('...the wind is to the south-west...'). HMS Victory passes her and begins to disappear, and as the topmost masthead vanishes over the south-western horizon she murmurs to herself a line from Psalm 107: 'They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters…' In a typical Hardy coup de théâtre, someone who has come up behind her unnoticed carries on: 'These see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.' The voice is that of Bob's brother John Loveday, the trumpet major of the title. (In fact, according to the ship's log, HMS Victory passed Portland Bill in the early afternoon of 16th September 1805.) Dorset herself is looking out of the frame, to the south-west, the direction from which a watery sun is shining and from which the wind is blowing her hair back and billowing out her robe like a man-o'-war's sail behind her left shoulder. Resting her forearms on her upraised knees, she is holding her fingertips together in an attitude of deep thought, of prayer, and forming her hands and fingers into a symbolic roof of protection. What is she concentrating her worried gaze on? What is she seeing that we cannot see, and whom is she protecting, framed between her fingers and thumbs, at an angle a little below the horizontal, gradually receding from her view and eventually dipping below the horizon, far out to sea? 

 

And of course Bob Loveday, unlike his Admiral, survives Trafalgar and eventually comes home safe, and England is saved from the threat of invasion by Napoleon's armies. Whatever echoes of The Trumpet Major there may or may not have been, Dorset stands for protection, emphasised in her figure, in her watchful pose and in the form of her hands.

(Original text © Christopher Campbell-Howes 2019. 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. RRP £30

 

Christmas 1945

Evelyn Dunbar Christmas Card 1945 Pre-publication presentation (?) 1955 © Estate of Evelyn Dunbar: private collection

Evelyn's vignette of her and her husband Roger's first married home featured on their 1945 Christmas card. 'Our first house' is added in Evelyn's handwriting at the foot. Exceptionally, there is no literary contribution from Roger.

This drawing is particularly fascinating for me, because at the time, as a very small child, I lived with my mother at The Old Orchard next door, the slightly higher house to the right of Evelyn's drawing. Although its official address was No. 8, Long Compton, Evelyn and Roger called their thatched cottage Vyner's, after a previous owner. 

Evelyn had a rather unsatisfactory studio in an outbuilding, and, love sheds though she did, I'm sure that she missed her old studio in The Cedars, the Dunbar family home in Rochester. There's a glimpse of this studio in Winter Garden: the house, seen faintly to the right of the painting between the trees, has a modest tower with a pyramidical roof. The upper room of this tower, well provided with windows, gave a generous light, especially the north light so favoured by artists, with which a tumbledown rural Warwickshire shed could hardly compete.

 Evelyn Dunbar Winter Garden ?1928-1937 (1' x 3': 30 x 91cm) Tate Britain

All the same Evelyn completed some major paintings during her 15 months or so in Long Compton. One was Dorset. Another was Mercatora, whose location, ironically for a painting about navigation, is unknown. This painting took its name from Gerardus Mercator (1512-1594), the Flemish map-maker whom everyone knows of, even if unwittingly, because he developed a method of representing a three-dimensional sphere as a two-dimensional rectangle. The rectangular map of the world that we are all familiar with is due to Mercator's Projection. According to Roger, by December 1945 an ex-RAF navigator, Mercatora was an allegorical figure representing aspects of navigation. If this short commentary turned out to be instrumental in finding Mercatora, it would be wonderful.

Equally tantalising is the disappearance of another painting from this period, Cottages at Long Compton, which Evelyn exhibited in Oxford in the winter of 1949 and sold for 20 guineas (£21). Was Evelyn's Christmas card drawing accurate? There's no reason why it shouldn't have been, but it was fascinating to come across, while searching the internet for any clue relating to Evelyn's lost painting Cottages at Long Compton, a startling - and much more recent - photograph of the very thatched cottages in Evelyn's drawing.

 Thatched cottages at Long Compton © Stephen Mole Photography

Many thanks to Stephen Mole, of Stephen Mole Photography, for his help in the preparation of this commentary.

(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

Christmas 1944

Evelyn Dunbar Christmas Card 1944 Pre-publication presentation (?) 1955 © Estate of Evelyn Dunbar: private collection

Evelyn's husband Roger Folley, serving with 488 (N.Z.) Squadron based at Amiens-Glisy in northern France, is the subject of their Christmas card for 1944. Roger managed to obtain a few days' leave at Christmas time, which he spent with Evelyn at The Cedars, the Dunbar family home in Rochester.

Evelyn has drawn Roger in his flying kit, leather helmet with earphones, night-vision goggles, oxygen mask and very non-uniform cravat. She has signed her drawing E.F. on Roger's right shoulder, and beneath she has written 'From a drawing of Roger on leave from France'. 
 

For the first time in their series of Christmas cards Roger has added his own poem:

Wrong was strong for Right to fight-
The struggle's on, it is not won.
Many are freed; they're still in need.
Our counterparts have thankful hearts.
We, their saviours, know what prayer does,
And intercede against self-heed.

During Roger's Christmas leave his pilot, Wing Commander Ron Watts, Commanding Officer of the squadron, had rostered himself for duty and had invited another navigator to take the seat beside him in his De Havilland Mosquito night-fighter. This team brought down a Luftwaffe Junkers 188 in the early hours of Christmas Eve, and I have sometimes wondered what Roger felt about having missed out on what his colleagues would have called a 'kill'.

Roger Folley would have been 100 on the day this was first posted, 6th December 2012.

(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

A 1944 Pastoral: Land Girls Pruning at East Malling (1944)

  A 1944 Pastoral: Land Girls Pruning at East Malling 1944 (3' x 4': 91 x 121cm) Manchester City Art Gallery

A 1944 Pastoral: Land Girls Pruning at East Malling is almost the last of Evelyn's Women's Land Army paintings, and among the last of her wartime canvases. The preliminary sketches were made at East Malling Research Station, not far from Maidstone, in December 1944. At the time her husband Roger Folley was serving with his RAF unit, 488 (N.Z.) Squadron based in Amiens, in northern France, supporting the Allies' advance towards Germany. Home leave was rare, dependent on spare seats on returning transport aircraft, but Roger managed to spend a short Christmas leave with Evelyn at the Dunbar family home in Rochester. Heartened and encouraged by Roger's presence, for this painting Evelyn returned, I suspect with great pleasure, to her beloved Kent landscape.

The East Malling Research Station of the Kent Incorporated Society for Promoting Experiments in Horticulture, to give it its full original title, was founded in the 1920s. Evelyn spent some time there in the winter of 1944/5, when one of the principal activities was pruning of fruit trees, particularly of apple trees. Until more disease-resistant rootstocks were introduced from the United States and latterly from Poland, the influence of East Malling Research Station on the British commercial apple industry was vast. Most commercial apple orchards used, and often still use, Malling series rootstocks, identifiable from the letter M in their reference numbers.

Evelyn's entrée to East Malling Research Station may have owed something to the horticultural economist Glynn Burton, a good friend of Roger since their student days together at Leeds University. We may have met him before: he was one of the four 'mice' featured in An Episode in the History of the Lake District. Glynn Burton had strong associations with East Malling, where he later made his name as an authority on potato cultivation.

Evelyn was excited by this painting, and I think her excitement shows in the size of the canvas, the originality of the design, the care taken in its execution, the exceptionally sensitive colouring, in the inferences she draws and - I think - the little final joke she leaves the viewer with. It's a magnificent canvas that deserves close study.

Technically, we could consider it as an unusual historical document, because the thrust of some areas of research undertaken by East Malling was to develop cultivars for heavy-fruiting apple trees with limited upward growth, thus making them easier and cheaper to harvest. The trees in Evelyn's painting are much taller than commercial apple trees today. These aren't any old apple trees, as one might say: they are some of the highest quality trees in contemporary Britain, the result of painstaking research, expertise and practical husbandry in selection, grafting and nurture.

Evelyn's squad of Land Girls, a mix of volunteers and conscripts possibly a dozen strong and maybe more disappearing into the far distance, are well wrapped against the cold of a Kentish December. A line of low hills - in fact the North Downs - defines the horizon. The sky is overcast and wintry. Once again - disregarding the frame for the moment - we're led into the picture from the left, partly by the angle of the stepladder legs, and I wonder if Evelyn is deliberately drawing our attention to the extraordinary risks these young women are taking with such confidence.

The extreme right-hand figure, in apple-yellow coat, is standing very near the top of her step-ladder - you can see the white top platform to her lower left - and two others are pruning the upper branches of the nearest right-hand tree. Their acrobatics are nothing compared to another figure, to which - surely deliberately- various geometrical lines lead our eyes, in the third or fourth tree on the right: she's teetering precariously on the stepladder platform, at full stretch to reach the topmost branches. I can feel a slight vertigo just looking at her.

Maybe the Land Girl on the extreme left has no head for heights and has been excused climbing the stepladders, even though the rungs are covered with a non-slip material, or possibly wound round with rope. As evidence of the cold, she has her left hand in her coat pocket. The two aproned Land Girls beyond her, collecting pruned branches and twigs in a tarpaulin, may be looking forward to some extra warmth before so very long, maybe after nightfall, because the short midwinter hours of daylight must be put to good purpose: you can't prune in the dark, but you can make a bonfire of your prunings. In due course the wood ash, rich in potassium and trace elements, will be mixed with other nutrients and dug as required into the 360 acres of the East Malling Research Station. All very good husbandry. Waste not, want not, especially in wartime.

The avenue of apple trees stretches away to a vanishing point. Again, as in Singling Turnips and Men Stooking and Girls Learning to Stook, there are no limits to this plantation, and by extension no limits to the earth's abundance, if properly looked after. We return yet again to Evelyn's firm belief in the Covenant, the contract between the Creator and mankind: in return for love and care of his creation, the Creator promises it eternally and abundantly. It's unlikely that Evelyn's Land Girls had this thesis very much in mind at the time.

It's possible to think of A 1944 Pastoral as an allegory not just of Evelyn's Covenant but of the progress of World War 2 in the winter of 1944/5. The downfall of Hitler and the defeat of Germany seems assured, but maybe some distance away yet. Clearly it's not hard to attribute this or that allusion or reference after the event, but it does seem to me that there are similar prognostications in A 1944 Pastoral as in Sprout Picking, Monmouthshire from almost exactly a year earlier. Green, the colour of growth, and - if you take the idea a bit further - belief and trust in that growth, features strongly in both. As gardeners know, and as the old saying has it, growth follows the knife. The people involved in ensuring that growth are devoting themselves to it with determination and energy. I don't expect Evelyn intended deliberately to balance the calculated risk taken by the acrobatic Land Girl high in the apple tree with the risks taken by men on active service, but I don't think she would have dismissed the idea out of hand.

And then there's the border. The central picture is arresting enough in itself, the addition of the complementary border, at one or two points actually obtruding into the main scene, is a stroke of genius. We see the two types of saw, used for pruning the stouter branches, bright, clean and well maintained. Seven leather gloves with rolled cuffs (why?) hold seven secateurs, exquisitely drawn, none of them scissored but all, curiously, of the anvil type, in every conceivable pose, almost a kind of ballet.

Then there are the apples. We can admire Evelyn's subtlety in matching, on the white background of her plates and bowl, the colours of her apples with the colours in the pruning scene: the green Bramley, the red-patched Cox's Orange Pippin, the yellowish James Grieve or St Edmund's Pippin. These apples, of course, are the previous year's, so they're hardly yet the fruits of the victory that would be declared the following May 2nd, the first VE Day, but in Evelyn's mind they do represent the guarantee that the Covenant promise will be kept, and with hindsight we can applaud the confidence and optimism this painting expresses.

One apple is missing, from the lower right hand corner of the border. Why is it missing? Where has it gone? Has somebody anticipated the fruits of victory? I'm not certain, but in pondering this little conundrum, one of Evelyn's favourite quotes - in this case from Mark Twain - comes back to me, remembered from childhood: 'There ain't-a-going to be no core'. It was something she used occasionally as an all-purpose expression of finality, of closure, of the end of something, perhaps even a war:

There's plenty of boys that will come hankering and gruvvelling around when you've got an apple, and beg the core off you; but when they've got one, and you beg for the core and remind them how you give them a core one time, they make a mouth at you and say thank you 'most to death, but there ain't-a-going to be no core. (Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer Abroad)

(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. RRP £30

 

Section Officer Austen, Women's Auxiliary Air Force Meteorologist (1944)

Section Officer Austen, Women's Auxiliary Air Force Meteorologist 1944 (1' 8" x 2' 6": 50.2 x 76.2cm) RAF Museum, Hendon

There's such a palpable change evident in this quite haunting and beautifully light and balanced painting, compared with Evelyn's two previous Women's Auxiliary Air Force studies (Women's Auxiliary Air Force Store and Portrait of an Air Woman), that I think it's legitimate to suggest that something positive happened in Evelyn's private life to account for it. At the time, the second half of 1944, she was also working on two major canvases, both with Women's Land Army subjects: A 1944 Pastoral: Land Girls Pruning at East Malling and A Land Girl and the Bail Bull, two of her most finished wartime canvases.

While Evelyn was working on the WAAF commission from her employers, the War Artists' Advisory Committee, her husband Roger Folley was serving with 488 (N.Z.) Squadron. This squadron, manned largely by New Zealanders but with a few other nationalities as well - hence Roger's inclusion - flew De Havilland Mosquito night-fighters. Roger's year-long training was not only in navigation but in in-flight radar operation as well. Mosquitoes had 2-man crews, pilot and navigator. Roger's pilot was Squadron Leader Ron Watts, a remarkable New Zealander who was eventually promoted to Wing Commander and took command of the squadron.

The Watts/Folley team flew 116 night-fighting sorties from various RAF stations, among them RAF Colerne in Wiltshire. It was at RAF South Cerney, conveniently near Colerne, that Evelyn completed her preliminary sketches for Women's Auxiliary Air Force Store and Portrait of an Air Woman.

In October 1944 Roger and his squadron were transferred to Amiens, in northern France, in the wake of the advancing Allies, and in the spring of 1945 to Gilze Rijen in Holland, where the squadron was disbanded a few days before the war ended. Roger had served continually since July, 1943. During these six months Evelyn and Roger saw very little of each other. Unable to follow him abroad, Evelyn lived at home at The Cedars in Rochester and looked for subjects nearby.

The preliminary sketches for Section Officer Austen, Women's Auxiliary Air Force Meteorologist were made at RAF Gravesend, almost within walking distance of Strood, the trans-Medway area of Rochester in which Evelyn lived. What was once RAF Gravesend is now a housing estate and leisure centre, so nothing remains of the wooden huts or brick offices, hastily built in the great UK airfield expansion of 1938-39, which once housed the meteorological department where Section Officer Austen worked.

Section Officer Austen, who looks about 25, is a study in concentration as she leans forward over a large map. We can't tell what the map shows, but it's likely to be the Western Approaches, maybe stretching as far south as the Azores, so often the origin of the weather systems which would affect aircraft movement in support of advancing Allied troops in northern France and the Low Countries. The rolls of paper around her suggest tracings, maybe reports from weather patrols far out in the Atlantic, which Austen is adding to the overall weather map. At last Evelyn, or the censoring authorities through whom she worked, is allowing us to see a member of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force actually engaged on work of tactical importance. We know nothing about her other than her surname.

A blonde colleague, equally concentrated, is sitting beyond Austen, within reach of a telephone typical of the 40s, then - and later - popularly known as 'the blower'. Another colleague, with a hairdo so splendid that it might be mistaken for a hat, is sitting in an office through the doorway.

Roger Folley, who died in 2008, was a quiet and unassuming man, not alone among ex-RAF aircrew in being almost pathologically reticent about his wartime experiences. However, in an uncharacteristic opening-up that was never repeated, he did once show me a home-made decoration his squadron colleagues had given him. I must have been about 10 at the time. I asked him, crudely, how many German planes he'd shot down. As so often in matters he  didn't want to talk about he ducked the question (in fact the answer was 1). It wasn't really for that, he said. The 'decoration', a plywood cross painted black and white like the wing markings of Luftwaffe aircraft, was attached to a large collar of crêpe paper and was inscribed 'Fritz Frier Folley', 'Fritz' being a generic term for Germans. His colleagues had presented it to him in recognition of the various tweakings and improvements he'd made to their in-flight radar sets, making identification of targets easier and more accurate.

Roger's contribution is recognised in a rather end-of-term-reportish understatement in Leslie Hunt's book Defence Until Dawn: The Story of 488 N.Z. Squadron, published privately in 1949: 'Roger had gone about his duties quietly but with a great sense of humour and as the Nav/Radio Leader had done some sterling work for the squadron.' In fact, as a result of his radar improvement work he was seconded to other RAF units, under a scheme called Navigator Lease, to train other navigators in its use.

It's no more than conjecture: something positive and reassuring had happened to Evelyn at the time Section Officer Austen was painted. I wonder if that something was her relief on hearing that Roger had been taken off flying duties?

Thanks to Graham Corner for help in the preparation of this commentary.

(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

An Army Tailor and an ATS Tailoress (1943)

  An Army Tailor and an ATS Tailoress 1943 (2' x 1'6": 60.9 x 45.7cm)
 Imperial War Museum, London

Maybe as a result of a continual flow of Women's Land Army paintings, and of pundits downward from Sir Kenneth Clark, Director of the National Gallery and Chairman of the War Artists' Advisory Committee, remarking on their apparent lack of war content, it was suggested to Evelyn that she should record the activities of the various women's branches of the armed services.

This rather unusual painting has a question mark over it because I can't accurately assign a chronology to it. There appears to be no account of Evelyn visiting an army depot to record the scene above. I have a problem with the title, too: certainly there's an army tailor at the upper right of Evelyn's painting, but there are four ATS women in it, so maybe the title should be An Army Tailor and ATS Tailoresses, a title echoing in its categorisation of the sexes her earlier painting Men Stooking and Girls Learning to Stook. At any rate, that's how I should like to refer to it hereafter. With some reserve: there never was a designated army tailoring service. The manufacture and supply of uniforms was put out to civilian contract. The people in Evelyn's painting are doing individual alterations and sewing on badges.

ATS, for the record, stands for Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women's branch of the army. The ATS was founded a few days after the outbreak of war in September, 1939, and volunteers served as clerks, orderlies and telephonists among other fairly lowly occupations. In December 1941 unmarried women between 20 and 30 were conscripted into the various women's services, including the chief subject of Evelyn's brush, the Women's Land Army. For some reason the ATS was the least popular of the women's services, acceptance into the somewhat exclusive Women's Royal Naval Service being the most sought after, closely followed by the Women's Auxiliary Air Force. Despite expanding its scope to include more prestigious paramilitary activities like radar operation, decyphering and encrypting codes, gunlaying and ammunition inspection, the ATS remained the Cinderella of the women's services. However ATS members (known popularly as 'Ats', like 'Wrens' and 'Waafs') felt their image had received a welcome and necessary boost when in February 1945, and apparently of her own free will, the 18-year-old heir to the throne Princess Elizabeth (later Queen Elizabeth II) volunteered to serve in its ranks as a driver.

An Army Tailor and ATS Tailoresses shares with several other contemporary mid-wartime paintings, for example Land Army Girls going to Bed and Women's Auxiliary Air Force Store, a top-down viewpoint that makes me wonder if one of Evelyn's first requests on arriving at a venue was the loan of a stepladder.

The high viewpoint, while creating problems of foreshortening, does give us a panoramic view of what's going on, if panorama is the right word to describe five people variously arranged round a long table. It's clearly a warm room, probably in the depot stores: three of the women have taken off their tunics. We can't see exactly what the woman in the foreground is doing, but we can imagine that she's sewing on red arm strips. There's a box of such strips in the lower foreground. Beside the box are the tools of their trade: reels of white or khaki cotton, scissors, a steel sleeve slide, to prevent accidents like the inadvertent sewing of both sides of a sleeve together.

It's possible that the two women in the foreground are working on the same garment, a winter greatcoat. The left-hand woman appears to be sewing an embroidered crown on to one of the shoulders, indicating that the coat belongs to a major. It may be the major's cap that's seen upside-down in the right foreground, awaiting the addition of a corps or regimental cap badge. The addition of one or more red strips to his sleeve would show firstly that he belonged to an infantry regiment and secondly to which brigade his regiment had been assigned. Tentative and conjectural though this suggestion is, it would tally both with the organisational changes in the British army that followed the series of defeats in the earlier years of the war, and with preparations for the Normandy landings. Dating this painting to September or October, 1943, can't be far out.

The second woman on the left is sitting on the table in the traditional cross-legged pose of tailors, or as cross-legged as skirt-worn modesty allows. Unlike her colleagues, she has abandoned her services issue stickback chair. The underside of the seat would have a crown, or possibly the letters WD (War Department) branded into it: the rear edge of the seat would have had GVIR die-stamped on it, i.e. Georgius VI (6) Rex, to mark it as Ministry of Defence property. (Thousands of these chairs were issued. I owned four of them once, bought long after the war at an auction of ex-MOD furniture. They served as our family dining chairs for many years.)

At the far end of the table another ATS is operating a sewing machine. Completed battledress tunics, trousers and greatcoats cover the rest of the table, and the nearer floor spaces show that scissors have been well used.

On the right is the tailor of the title, a simple private, no Goliath, no warrior by all appearances. He's ironing something on a sleeve board, warming his flat-iron on a little trivet probably heated by short stubby candles like night-lights. When I contemplate this diminutive figure, I begin to wonder if Evelyn, maybe not entirely enamoured of this commission and wishing she was out of doors, isn't making an elaborate and sophisticated joke. She would be perfectly capable of it. So, how many people do you see in the picture?

While Evelyn was no feminist, as we understand the term today, she was proud of her sex and proud too of the very small, as she saw it, contribution she had made in the cause of the emancipation of women. She was too modest to give much value to her own personal contribution, but her wartime work in no way detracted from a general re-evaluation of the place of women in a largely male-dominated society. Exploring the social consequences of war, especially World War 2, was practically an academic cottage industry in the 1970s and 80s. One of the ideas suggested, one particularly associated with the now somewhat old-fashioned sociologist Stanislav Andreski and rather grandly entitled Military Participation Ratio, was that the more any section of society (e.g. women, Blacks, scientists) contributes to a war, the greater the levelling of social inequality in that section's favour afterwards. I'd like to explore this idea further in the context of Evelyn's last, and greatest, Women's Land Army painting, A Land Girl and the Bail Bull, elsewhere in this series.

It would be crass to suggest that any such notion as 1 woman = 2 men ever fell from Evelyn's lips, but I wonder if in sketching An Army Tailor and ATS Tailoresses from the top of her stepladder the fleeting thought crossed her mind that if each woman represented two men, and if you added in the army tailor, you would begin to endorse the old saying that 'nine tailors make a man'. She would certainly have enjoyed the story of Queen Elizabeth I welcoming a deputation of 18 tailors by saying 'Good morning, gentlemen both'.

There are two other features I'd like to single out. The first is the hairdressing, and the contrast between the elegantly-coiffed ATS and some of the nondescript hair-dos of Evelyn's Land Girls. Perfectly natural: the Women's Land Army worked long hours out of doors in all weathers, while these ATS are sedentary, their perms not subject to sudden downpours or sweat-soaked, chaff-ridden scalps. But then the WLA had no ranks, all were theoretically equal, while the ATS had its full hierarchy of officers. Hairdressing and military punctilio have often marched together. 

The second is the floor, which - unexpectedly - is extraordinarily beautiful in its balance of abstract shapes and subtle colours, complementing but in no way drawing attention away from the activities round the table. I hope Evelyn enjoyed painting it.

(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. RRP £30

 

Christmas, 1943

Evelyn Dunbar Christmas Card 1943 Pre-publication presentation (?) 1955 © Estate of Evelyn Dunbar: private collection

The second of Evelyn's and Roger's Christmas cards shows two hands, one reaching down and the other reaching up, on a rock climb in Yorkshire. This is Almscliffe Crag, not far from Harrogate, and a pitch well-known to rock climbers called The Flake. Roger knew it well from his student days, 1932-36, at Leeds University, and had introduced Evelyn to it at some time during his RAF leaves. I can imagine that he found in rock-climbing not only a freedom and release from the mortal pressure and claustrophobia of constant sorties as a navigator with 488 (N.Z.) Squadron, but also a deep delight in discovering that Evelyn could share his passion for rock- climbing as well.

Roger chose the text, an extract from The Pilgrim's Progress:

This Hill, though high, I covet to ascend;
The difficulty will not offend;
For I perceive the way to life lies here;
Come, pluck up, Heart; let's neither faint nor fear:
Better, tho' difficult; th' right way to go,
Than wrong, though easy, where the end is wo.

(In this section of The Pilgrim's Progress, the hero Christian arrives at the foot of a hill called Difficulty. At the foot of the hill his two companions, Formalist and Hypocrisy, duck out of climbing the steep path up the hill and take the easy paths left and right round the foot, not knowing that one path leads to Danger and the other to Destruction. Christian is later described as changing 'from running to going [i.e. walking], and from going to clambering on his hands and knees, because of the steepness of the place'. So Roger's quotation and Evelyn's drawing are particularly apt.)

There are several paths to follow from all this, not necessarily leading to Danger and Destruction, but maybe not to anywhere else in particular either. Certainly, the two hands suggest mutual assistance, support and encouragement in difficult times between husband and wife, but I think Evelyn's later comment, in her own handwriting, 'The War continues: courage and patience are tried' reaches outwards to the wider world.

By Christmas 1943 the presence of American troops in Britain, in preparation for the Normandy landings the following year, was universally felt. 'Hands across the sea' wasn't only the name of an 1899 Sousa military march given radio airing occasionally alongside Bing Crosby's I'm dreaming of a white Christmas or Glenn Miller's Moonlight Serenade on the popular American Forces Network: it was a metaphor for the assistance, support and encouragement given by the USA to the British and other allied forces. (It was borrowed for the title of a 1980s TV series about the relations, not always trouble-free, between US troops stationed in England and the natives.)

So much for any allusions in Evelyn's drawing, historical now but very present then. And the sharp-eyed will notice - the drawing should enlarge if you click on it - that wittingly or unwittingly she has been unable to escape, in the lower right-hand side where far below a river flows, a suggestion of fields neatly enclosed by drystone walls. Agriculture is never far away.

(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  

 

  orders@scriptps.co.uk

448 pages, 300 illustrations. £30