Stanley Spencer (Text Only)

When some years later the Tate Gallery showed the painting, they mistitled it Christ Bearing His Cross, which for Stanley implied ‘a sense of suffering which was not my intention. I particularly wished to convey the relationship between the carpenters behind him carrying the ladders and Christ in front carrying the cross, each doing their job of work and doing it just like workmen. … Christ was not doing a job or his job, but the job.’8

The comment is again significant in interpreting not only this painting but much of Stanley’s visionary art. He is warning us away from seeing the painting in terms of pure emotion. However sad his feelings and of those around him on that day, the painting is not ultimately about those feelings, and he is not imputing them to Christ. Christ is simply doing the job he has to do, as Stanley, off to the war, is doing what he has to do. The job, the fact, the event exists in its dispassionate reality. Stanley’s struggle to use recalled emotion in the creation of visionary allegory meant that he had to detach the emotion from whatever event aroused it for him. Throughout his life, the struggle, both in behaviour and in art, will continue, making his actions seem detached at times. When, for example, in his letters or writings he reveals strong feelings about an event, they are seldom concerned specifically with the event itself or with the cause of the event, but with his own or others’ ability – or more usually inability – to appreciate the implications, the transcendence, he finds in it.

Such detachment however does not imply that he was anaesthetized to the emotions he was recalling. Twice in his comments on the painting Stanley refers to the three onlookers – himself in recollection – as ‘louts’, a strongly condemnatory epithet in his vocabulary.9 The most likely reason is that the dilemma he is recollecting in the incident is so strong that he finds it necessary angrily to belittle it. He transfers the pain of his self-searching to painted representations of himself watching his more visionary self dredging from his memory-feeling the painful visual elements so necessary to composition. Like someone half in and half out of a bad dream he introduces a defensive technique to limit his pain. He turns himself into a doppel-Stanley. Indeed in this case the procedure armours him sufficiently to be able to tell a later friend with some good humour that he is aware that his depiction of Fernlea-Belmont ‘looks rather like a diseased potato’.10 But there speaks the everyday Stanley. The visionary Stanley knows that the imagery, strange though he finds it, is exact to his purpose. It is, he says, ‘wonderful’.

In this painting, Christ Carrying the Cross, Christ the Son of God is preparing for the final agony which will redeem his creation. Stanley too is entering an agony with the same inevitability. He will endure whatever befalls him in the implicit trust that he too must find redemption in his own purpose and creativity. In the top right of the painting Stanley inserts, out of its true position, one of the cowls of Cookham’s malthouses. His grandfather is said to have had the building of them. The eye of God is upon him.11

Stanley has given the painting flat tones and an unfamiliar, abstract quality, almost a floating sensation. Looking back, he doubted whether it conveyed the transcendence he sought: ‘The Cross, as far as its position in the picture is concerned is right enough. But I still feel it is a pity that I failed to arrive at the notion I had hoped.’12 The Cross and its transfiguration of the material into the spiritual is the theme of the painting. When Stanley’s dealer subsequently asked him if he should catalogue it as Christ Carrying His Cross, Stanley again furiously corrected him. Its title, he said, was Christ Carrying the Cross.13 The Cross is universal. It represented for Stanley, as he assumed it represented for all, a necessary submission to the perpetual confusions and frustrations of existence from which it is our purpose to seek redemptive meaning. All Stanley’s powers of spiritual awareness would be needed if he was to find the true meaning of the agony of the next four years.

PART TWO

The Confusions of War

1915–1918

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Burghclere Chapel: The Beaufort panels

‘An ideal place for a sick man. No wonder they so rapidly recover.’

King George V to Lieutenant-Colonel R. Blachford, Superintendent of the Beaufort War Hospital, September, 19151

IN LATER LIFE Stanley was to assert that after 1919 he resolutely ‘turned his back’ upon the Great War. In the sense that he did not use his experiences in the way that many of the war poets and artists used theirs, his assertion is valid enough. But to interpret his statement as discounting all war influence in his art is patently absurd. War memories can be traced in many later paintings, and without some knowledge on our part of their origin in his war service, the force of these paintings is diminished. For Stanley, as for countless young men of his generation, the shock of war was to prove ineradicable. Only time, or in Stanley’s case an attempted sublimation offered comfort, and the greatest of the redemptions he undertook was the Sandham Memorial Chapel at Burghclere painted between 1927 and 1932. Of the sixteen side-wall panels in that masterwork, ten re-create the Beaufort War Hospital.2

The hospital, Stanley’s ‘roaring great hospital’ – it had 1600 beds – had been hastily converted three months earlier from the Bristol Lunatic Asylum. Most of the thousand or so inmates, men and women, were moved to rural asylums, about eighty being retained for domestic duties. Assigned to the patronage of the Duke of Beaufort, the ad hoc hospital was a typical 1860s institutional building comprising a central administrative and service block from which ward wings extended right and left. Across these, at intervals, other wards ran transversely, enclosing small courts. The right half, facing the building, had been the male half, the left the female. The male hospital staff had been ‘volunteered’ into the Royal Army Medical Corps with rank appropriate to their status; the superintendent and medical staff as officers, the administrative and supervisory staff as sergeants and corporals. The female staff, having no surgical nursing qualifications, became auxiliary nurses, augmented by Red Cross nursing volunteers and supervised by an intake of army nursing sisters from Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service who, as most old soldiers will confirm and as Stanley was to discover, were formidable authoritarians. There Stanley joined a number of young volunteer orderlies like himself. Because they were known only by surname, and Gilbert, having arrived first and being bigger in build, was mistaken as the elder, Stanley was invariably referred to as ‘young Spencer’.

The first panel on the left wall in the Burghclere Chapel, showing a Convoy of Wounded Soldiers Arriving at Beaufort Hospital Gates, hints at Stanley’s impressions on arrival. The wounded were shipped to Southampton from France or to Avonmouth from the Dardanelles and were entrained in ‘convoys’ to Temple Meads Station in Bristol. From there they were ferried to the hospital in a motley collection of vehicles or, as in the case of the ‘walking wounded’ in the painting, in requisitioned omnibuses. At this still excited state of the war, they were cheered through the streets of Bristol by passers-by. A convoy could consist of several hundred patients and the duty staff had to work frantically to register, examine, bath and install them with their kit – the Sorting and Moving Kitbags panel.

The orderlies, normally two to a ward, came under the jurisdiction of the Ward Sister. Their duties combined those of a modern hospital porter with those of a ward auxiliary. They had to make beds – Bedmaking; do dressings, as in scraping the dead skin from a patient’s foot in Patient Suffering from Frostbite; and scrub and polish everything in sight – Ablutions, Scrubbing the Floor and Washing Lockers:

I have done nothing else but scrub since I have been here. I think it has done me good. I think with pleasure of the number of men I have bathed every Wednesday morning. I have to bath patients at 6.00 a.m.; I do it in an hour and a half. When I am seeking the Kingdom of Heaven I shall tell God to take into consideration the number of men I have cleaned and the number of floors I have scrubbed, as well as the excellence of my pictures, so as to let me in.3

Stanley found himself fetching and carrying from the Stores and Kitchens – Filling Tea Urns; preparing tea – Tea in the Ward; and sorting and fetching the ward linen and laundry – Sorting Laundry – together with other activities he records in his memoirs but did not illustrate. Later we shall need to ask ourselves why he chose these specific events for painting.

In addition to ward duties, the orderlies were required to attend military parades and to join in physical training: ‘I remember being rather glad the sergeant who took us on our morning’s route march and double had a girl at one of the cottages en route, so we were allowed a long halt outside this cottage and sometimes she came out and reviewed us pawing the ground and champing at the bit.’4 It was a long day. Reveille was at 5.00 a.m.; on duty from 6.00 a.m. to 6.00 p.m. or even 8.00 p.m., with breaks for parades and meals. Off duty, the orderlies could on occasions get a leave pass into Bristol until 10.00 p.m.; they would be inspected for their turn-out by the gate sergeant, Sam Vickery. Otherwise they could relax in their quarters or play cards, chess or billiards.

Their duties were regulated from the office of the Hospital Sergeant-Major, William Kench. He was one of the few men Stanley met who utterly terrified him. Even the ‘most martenesh’ of the Sisters avoided him if they could. He was, says Stanley, ‘a gigantic man, whose eyes paralysed me. … He was quite terrifying enough even when he did not wear puttees. But if you came anywhere near him when he did wear puttees’ – that is, when he was in formal parade dress – ‘God help you!’5 Stanley remembered in particular his huge hands, and the way he walked with them stuck into his tunic pockets so that only his ‘fat thumbs’ protruded. Then aged fifty-three, Kench had served when younger in the Royal Marines and had joined the Asylum staff as Head Male Nurse about 1906. He lived with his wife and family in a hospital house and had the habit of exercising his large Airedale dog in the hospital grounds. Only one orderly, according to Stanley, ever had the temerity to try and make friends with the dog. Stanley himself, in passing it, ‘felt all apologetic, sort of, saying to myself, well that’s all right. … I would imagine the expression on my face would be stern but hopeful and guarded. Not a bit of it – terrified and furtive more likely!’

Kench’s office was off the corridor system which runs transversely through the administrative block, windowed and tile-floored at the reception end but darker and stone-flagged where it entered the main service area at the rear. A clerk did the paperwork and one of the male ‘loonies’, known as ‘Deborah’, acted as Kench’s orderly or runner: ‘His face was long and egg-shaped with a short scrubby white beard and bald head. I felt he could claim some mystical discipleship with the Sergeant-Major. If the Sergeant-Major was God, Deborah was St Peter. He slunk about with short shuffling steps and never looked up. If he did, it was only when he thought no one was looking.’ Whatever Stanley’s strictures on him, Kench was evidently an NCO of the old type doing his best to knock into shape a clutter of intelligent, hard-working, responsible, but largely unmilitary volunteers and, more urgently, to keep control of a rumbustious horde of lively young convalescents delighted to be in Blighty for a while and out to make the best of their luck.

Stanley found himself assigned to a group of wards towards the end of the male wing which surrounded one of the newly built operating theatres.* His reactions in his memoirs and his letters offer a valuable glimpse of the unique way his mind worked. Except for occasional comments, he was not interested in recording his activities. He is silent too on highlight events at the hospital which excited the other orderlies – a royal visit by King George V and Queen Mary,* hospital billiards and chess matches, sports competitions, stage shows and entertainments, the daily gossip of any closed institution. He was not supercilious or forgetful about them, indeed they amused him as greatly as they did the other orderlies, but they had no bearing on his need to analyse and explain to himself his art and vision. It was to the service of his vision that all else had to be subordinated, and he saw the hospital and his life there only in the light of its contribution or damage to his creative life. Thus his writings on the hospital – indeed his war writings generally – give a picture of life which does not intend to be descriptive, but explains only those spiritual or visionary aspects of the total experience which held meaning for him.

With this in mind, we can begin to define more precisely how Stanley saw the individual aspects of his hospital experience. Although disorientated at first, physically and emotionally, it did not take him long to adjust physically. His essentially cheerful nature, his sense of responsibility in his duties, his meticulousness and honesty of purpose, together with his prodigious energy, made him a likeable and respected comrade. Unlike Gilbert, he felt no resentment: ‘Please send me my St John’s Ambulance Certificate as soon as you can, as they want it. It is quite all right down here. You get your food all right but you have to push for it. But you get plenty, at least for me. They seem to be quite reasonable, I mean the sergeants etc.’6 But his emotional disorientation was more alarming, because that same sensitivity which so elevated his creative instincts made him fearful of failure in a situation which all his instincts told him he should honour, but to the everyday reality of which he knew his values could never fully subscribe.

Stanley could only let impressions flow into him. There was no possibility of any counterflow outwards in imaginative creativity. The disciplined routine of the hospital not only did nothing to encourage creativity, but by the rigidity of its system damped down the least spark of it. Leaves – thirty-six hours every month – were too short for Stanley to do more than turn over his abandoned paintings at Fernlea in nostalgic recollection. As far as the hospital was concerned, 100066 Pte Spencer S. was merely a cipher; two legs and a pair of working hands. Individuality was to be suppressed in conformity with military and medical demands.

Unlike the more restless Gilbert, Stanley, in so far as his duties were concerned, was not at all rebellious. He understood and acquiesced in the need for the suppression of individuality, ‘not to be in the least degree out of my slot.’ The trouble was not that he was unwilling to adapt, but that he found it difficult to do so, and felt depressed and inadequate when he failed. ‘Tickings off’ from sergeants and Sisters which washed over the majority of the orderlies haunted the sensitive Stanley, not in a nervous sense, but because he could not integrate them into his more questioning view of life. Whatever he sensed as natural and instinctive – and therefore joyous – was incomprehensibly forbidden. Even to whistle a few bars of Chopin while passing a ward where a gramophone played was sufficient to earn him a ticking off from a Sister, so that he began to feel that if the sky were blue or the sun shone or the Sergeant-Major remarked in his hearing to the Colonel that it was a glorious day, none of this related to him. The blue sky and the sunshine became equated in his mind with the hospital itself; all including the ‘luscious girls’ who visited belonged solely to the Sergeant-Major. Private Spencer was of no more significance in that world than the stripes on the Sergeant-Major’s shirt, on which every stripe had to match exactly every other in willing deference to their owner: ‘Why should I have been so sensitive to these things, I wonder? Because I had always been easily crushed and because I was sociable and loved human contact when it was harmonious and [was] horrified at the sign of hatred in anyone of myself.’ Stanley’s use of language remained idiosyncratic throughout his life. It is impossible that anyone in the hospital ‘hated’ him; quite the reverse. But by Stanley’s etymology anyone who continually ticked him off or criticized him was not being ‘friendly’, and as the opposite of friendliness can be interpreted as ‘hatred’, so they were, in a deeply argued sense, giving ‘sign of hatred’. By the same reasoning, anyone who kept insisting he do things their way, especially when he was having difficulty in doing it at all, was being ‘bullying’. Hatred and bullying combined to produce an ‘alien atmosphere’ in which he felt his spirit ‘crushed’ in the sense that he was denied the spiritual ‘harmony’ in which his free-ranging mind had the comfort to wander at will.

It is of some importance to reiterate that these sentiments pertained mainly to Stanley’s inner self. They were feelings that he found difficult to explain easily to most of his comrades. One who understood was Lionel Budden, a young lawyer from Dorset, for he and Stanley had discovered that they shared a common interest in music – Budden was a skilled violinist who often organized hospital concerts – and the pair enjoyed long discussions together in walks around the hospital grounds and into Bristol. To the rest of his fellows Stanley was a friendly, hardworking comrade, as amused as they by the incomprehensibilities of military logic and the antics of authority. Perhaps with his ‘obsession for art’ as one orderly there described it in letters to his girl,7 he was rather more than they an unmilitary square peg in a military round hole; but, for all that, none found him a dreamy incompetent who could easily be put down or trifled with. His sensitivity may have inwardly torn him apart at times, but he was never a wilting flower in the exterior sense. He had no hesitation in proclaiming his dogmatically puritanical views on such matters as drink, betting and casual sex, but he had the tact not to force his convictions on others. In any case, most of the orderlies were young men of similar background and held comparable views. Nor would Stanley tolerate any mockery of himself or his opinions; he could defend himself with waspish quick-wittedness, as surprising to the recipient as it was wounding.

In the middle of the corridor which connected MC Ward with Ward 5 were three steps which were the unwritten dividing line between the two wards. It is intriguing to find Stanley pondering the significance of these steps in the way he remembered his garden walls at Fernlea. Like the party wall between Fernlea and Belmont, the steps became for him subtle symbols of the division, so apparent in his early paintings, between different ‘atmospheres’. Like his garden at Fernlea, Ward 5 as ‘his’ ward was part of his emotional ‘cosiness’. But when in his scrubbing he reached the three steps he was in a quandary. If he went on and scrubbed the steps, was he trespassing on another ‘atmosphere’, another Sister’s empire and another orderly’s preserve? On the other hand, if he failed to scrub the steps and was thereby ticked off by his own Sister, had he in fact failed to define his proper world? He was perfectly willing to agree to either course of action, but the precise clock-like characteristic in his thinking which made his drawing so accurate in line compelled him to seek mental assurance and to ‘know’ which alternative was correct: ‘I never attempted to dodge any of the inevitable duties. My “dodging” consisted of meeting squarely all the innumerable but analysable shocks which continually beset me.’

All his life, Stanley’s greatest dread was disturbance to the equanimity, the ‘spiritual harmony’ which he continually and painstakingly evolved for himself in any situation. The state of equanimity was built up by ‘analysing’ the puzzles which had beset him in that situation; it was as though he were mentally and emotionally standing outside the situation and formulating his role in it in the way he showed himself contemplating himself in The Centurion’s Servant or was to portray in Christ Carrying the Cross. The possibility of something happening to disturb that equanimity was to him ‘fear of attack’, and he was to attribute much of humanity’s irrational behaviour – sin, evil – to defence against the possibility. He himself loathed being put into a position of such defencelessness.

Says Sister S., ‘Tell Mrs D. [Miss Dunn, the former Asylum Matron] that for the last meal there was barely enough for twenty-two patients, let alone thirty.’ So I am called upon to deliver a slap to this formidable lady. I have to say something, as I know I shall be questioned by Sister S. on my return. I was continually having to be a buffer between two opposing parties.

Such orders, which involved competitiveness or the possibility of failure or the humiliation of a disclosure of personal inadequacy, were ‘shocks’. Under normal circumstances, Stanley could cope with them, find his way through them. But ‘everything at the hospital was so quick’. Shock followed shock too quickly for meaningful adjustment.

There were a few quiet backwaters where Stanley could for a time find calm. He could occasionally slip into the laundry cupboard by the Sister’s office in Ward 4B, always leaving the door open, to refresh himself by thumbing through his precious Gowan and Gray art books. These small inexpensive handbooks were a source of mental comfort and several were among his effects when he died. He found congenial too those sections of the hospital wherein the Sergeant-Major’s writ did not run – the hospital laundry, even though under Miss Dunn, or the Stores, under the Quartermaster-Sergeant, ‘Mr’ King, whom he later described as the Pope to Kench’s Mussolini. These were havens where he could momentarily recapture something of his Cookham life. For similar opportunities of contemplation, Stanley welcomed being sent on routine journeys to other parts of the hospital such as the X-ray department or the pathology laboratory which were in the original female wing. The mirror-image sensation which had captured his imagination in the Fernlea-Belmont neighbourliness at home continued to fascinate him at the Beaufort. In the former female wing everything was repeated but the other way round, and on each journey he had the sensation of entering a looking-glass world.

None of the daily shocks, the reprimands, the agonies of being made responsible for actions not in his power to accomplish, the long hours of tedious physical work and the barren intellectual atmosphere which gave so little opportunity for the contemplation so vital to his nature – none of these would have mattered if only he could have assimilated them into a revelation of some deeper meaning: ‘I did not despise any job I was set to do, and did not mind doing anything so long as I could recognize in it some sort of integral connection with the spiritual meaning that demanded to be clarified.’ The problem at the Beaufort was that the ‘integral connections’ would not materialize in his mind, leaving him confused and frustrated. One of the ‘shocks’ was the frequency with which the ‘atmosphere’ of his ward kept changing:

Every bit of change, no matter how slight or often, would be felt [by Stanley] and the arrival of a convoy – two hundred or more would arrive in the middle of the night – was the most disturbing change in this respect. One had just got used to the patients one had, had mentally and imaginatively visualized them. One’s imagination, once it had taken hold of the whole of an affair, cannot conceive of anything in that affair being altered or different or in any way being added to or detracted from.8

But now, at the Beaufort where ‘everything was so quick’, although the essential significance of the ward remained inviolable – ‘unchangeable’ – the visualization Stanley needed to express it would, like a will-o’-the-wisp, disintegrate before he had the time to establish it: ‘What will the world be like tomorrow? What about Courtney and Hines when the beds between them are filled? The significance will remain as an eternal factor, but another God-creation takes place in the night, and I will find it in the morning.’ In his repeated attempts at image-forming Stanley found himself like a puppy chasing its tail, going pointlessly round and round: ‘At Bristol there was no essential change, but on the contrary anything that occurred there was clearly intended to ensure the continuity of its unchangeableness.’ Creatively, the hospital was a ‘nothing-happening’ place.