Stanley Spencer (Text Only)

When thus thwarted, Stanley could give way to anger at those who were apparently baffling him by their obtuseness. There were the other orderlies: ‘It is the utterly selfish spirit of these orderlies that makes me wild. … being here is wasting time to no purpose. …9 There were the ward Sisters: ‘Ill-natured, cattish, conceited Sisters who are also incompetent; they make the nurses and orderlies their servants.’ And there was the place itself: ‘There is something so damnably smug and settled-down about this place. … If I can, I am going to transfer into something else. I would give anything to belong to the Royal Berks.’

His frustrations were not improved when in September Gilbert was posted away to the main RAMC depot at Tweseldown in Hampshire; Stanley and Budden took him to Carmen at the Bristol Hippodrome on the eve of his departure. Then a fellow-orderly named Tomlin whom Stanley and Gilbert liked took sick and died unexpectedly. Finally, one of the lunatics went berserk and, although Stanley was not shocked in the medical sense, his feeling for the inhumanity of the man’s suffering made the event one of horror for him:

I always get the feeling of a man possessed by devils when I see a man in a mad fit. I remember one man, he was perfectly all right, and then suddenly he was cast down and it took about ten men to hold him. He was put into a room, a padded cell at first, but that was not big enough to hold him, so they spread about 12 mattresses on the floor of a room and put him in there. There he raved a day and a night and spat at everybody, especially when he was being fed. The Sister used to hold his food to his mouth while two or three men held his arms down. His face gave me the feeling that he wanted to pray that the devil would come out of him. He was taken away, but is now all right – in his right mind. Nothing like this is shocking, but to know a man and like him and to know that man is going mad is awful.10

So when during October or November of 1915 a notice was pinned on the hospital notice-board asking for volunteers for RAMC service overseas, Stanley thought about it for some days. His parents were the main obstacle. Henry Lamb had written to say that he was about to undertake a crash course at Guy’s Hospital in London to complete his interrupted training as a doctor. He would be commissioned in August 1916 and wanted Stanley to wait and become his batman. But, Stanley decided, he was ‘too impatient’. When he eventually signed the notice, his was only the second name. But gradually thirty-eight more were added, including that of Lionel Budden. Stanley did not immediately tell Ma or Pa and asked his friends not to do so. In those still early months of the war, even though more than a year had passed, medical standards remained high. Of the forty volunteers, only fourteen were passed. Stanley was youthfully gratified to find himself among them and to learn that Budden too would be going with him. However, army bureaucracy took its time. Some of the volunteers did go, but those like Stanley and Budden in the main batch were kept kicking their heels. In the meantime, several surprising things were to happen to Stanley.

The first was that he was scrubbing the floor of the Dispensary one day when a one-legged Dardanelles patient came in, thrust a newspaper under his nose, and demanded to know, ‘Is this you, you little devil?”11 Flabbergasted, Stanley read an account of a New English Art Club exhibition in November in which his painting The Centurion’s Servant was highly praised. It transpired that Henry Tonks, having used his surgeon’s training to advise on the establishment in France of the many private hospitals and convalescent homes which British patriotism was endowing, had returned to London and, among other activities, set up an autumn exhibition of the New English Art Club of which he, Steer and Brown were the virtual founders. Not knowing where Stanley was, he had written to Pa to ask if paintings were available and, without telling Stanley, Pa had sent The Centurion’s Servant and another work.* Stanley’s reaction was one of fury at Pa’s action and of horror at what the press might make of his picture. Mercifully, however, no reviewer put any untoward interpretation on it, and all praised it for a variety of qualities, most of which Stanley had not intended.

In a closed community like the hospital, the news that young Spencer was a ‘name’ spread quickly. The effect was, said Stanley,

extraordinary. The matron, a great gaunt creature before whom Queen Mary looked quite a crumpled little thing, came down the ward with a veritable sheaf of dailies under her arm determined to track down this great unknown. Even she looked a little less grim and gaunt. These notices were very welcome to me. I had been terribly crushed. They gave rise to such teasing remarks from the Sisters as, ‘When are you going to get that commission, orderly?’ having scented I was a bit different, or thought I was.15

It was not only the hospital staff who found the event of interest. In the residential suburb of Clifton, a tall elegant young man of twenty also read the notices and recalled Stanley as a celebrated predecessor at the Slade. He had studied there with Gilbert, but had not met Stanley. His name was Desmond Macready Chute – the ‘chu’ pronounced as in ‘chew’ – and he was a collateral descendant of the great Victorian tragedian Macready. His actor-manager grandfather had run the Theatres Royal in Bristol and Bath and introduced as ingénues stars of the calibre of Ellen Terry. Although Desmond had innumerable aunts, uncles and cousins, his own branch of the family had been scythed by consumption. His father had died in 1912, and now only he and his mother Abigail remained to carry on the family theatrical business, centred by then on the considerable Prince’s Theatre in Bristol. Tall, good-looking, highly intelligent, literary in bent, deeply read, a capable organizer – he had been Head of School at Downside – a dedicated musician, sensitive pianist and competent artist, his artistic and religious aspirations soared beyond the limitations of the family theatre. He was, however, withdrawn by nature and showed a tendency to ‘nervous prostration’. His indifferent health precluded thought of military service.

The ties between the Prince’s Theatre and the Beaufort were particularly close – visiting artistes freely gave their time to military hospital entertainment – and it cannot have been long before talk of Stanley reached Chute. The result was another surprise for Stanley:

It was about this time when I was wondering how to get the mental energy to make the work bearable … that I had a visit from a young intellectual of sixteen who, like Christ visiting Hell, came one day walking to me along a stone passage with glass-coloured windows all down one side and a highly patterned tile floor. … I had a sack tied round my waist and a bucket of dirty water in my hand. I was amazed to note that this youth in a beautiful civilian suit was walking towards me as if he meant to speak to me; the usual visitors to the hospital passed us orderlies by as they would pass a row of bedpans. The nearer he came, the more deferential his deportment, until at last he stood and asked me with the utmost respect whether I was Stanley Spencer.

This account of their meeting is repeated several times in Stanley’s later reminiscences and misled biographers about Desmond’s age. In fact it is somewhat dramatized. Writing to the Raverats at the time, Stanley is more factual: ‘Desmond Chute is a youth of 20. … When I first met him … I was on my way to the Stores. …’16

All his life, Stanley would show a tendency to overcolour some experiences. Invariably they are experiences in which he suffered some ‘spiritual’ hurt. The tendency was part of his make-up, part of the process by which he transcended the hurt in precisely the way he used his art. At all other times his accounts of experiences are accurate. In this case the spiritual hurt lay some years ahead. At the time Chute’s arrival was salvation:

If I were able to express how much this hospital life and atmosphere was cut off and out of the power of any other power than itself, I could make it clear what I felt at the moment of meeting. Compared with the crushed feeling the place gave me, the army and the war took upon themselves something of the feeling of freedom that one felt about civilian life in peacetime. The appearance of this young man was a godsend. He was terribly good and kind to me and appreciated the mental suffering I was going through.

During the first months of their friendship Desmond was fit, and they were able during Stanley’s time off-duty to explore Clifton together. Engrossed in conversation, they must have made an odd-looking pair, Desmond well over six feet tall, slim and languid, with reddish hair and the beginning of a beard, and Stanley a slight, dark-haired and brisk figure beside him. They contrasted too in personality, Desmond intellectually reserved, Stanley the eager terrier zigzagging after ideas which would set his imagination alight. There were visits to Desmond’s home, sometimes with Budden, to meet his mother and his aunts. There were visits to the bookshops of Bristol where fine secondhand bargains were to be found. There were ‘at homes’ at Desmond’s friends and with the Clifton hostesses of the day:

I go down to Mrs Daniell’s to hear some singing on my half-days. Mrs Daniell has a fine voice and so has her daughter. I felt quite ‘crackey’ with delight to hear some duets out of Figaro and they sang them well. They sing heaps of early French things. A young Slade student named Desmond Chute does the arranging for these visits and he plays the piano. I shall always feel grateful to Mrs Daniell.17

Desmond for his part found Stanley an ideal pupil. For although he was four years younger than Stanley and lacked Stanley’s intuitive genius, his love of literature and music matched Stanley’s instincts.

When I [Stanley] used to visit him, he used to translate so much [of the Odyssey] and then read it in the original. Mind you, if he was to read about two pages he could go through to order, whether he had the book or not. Sometimes when we have been out for a walk – wonderful walks – I would begin to ask him about some particular novelist and he would go through the whole novel quoting pages and pages, quite unconsciously.18

In the spring of 1916 Desmond suffered one of his attacks of nervous prostration, and their meetings had to take place in Chute’s bedroom:

When I think of the wonderful quiet evenings I have spent in Chute’s bedroom with the sunlight filling the room and Desmond surrounded by the wildflowers which he loved [in later life Chute became a knowledgeable gardener]. I used to sit looking out of the wide-open window and listen to him translate Homer and Odyssey, Iliad and Cyclops and the men escaping under the sheep, oh my goodness, it really did frighten me.19

It is noteworthy that Stanley is affected as much by the drama of this forefather of all adventure stories as by its verse.

I have looked at different translations of Homer, but nothing to approach Desmond’s. … Our evenings were so satisfying. He read me Midsummer Night’s Dream one night and on another night he read me As You Like It. I think it is a wonderful play. The colour of Chute’s hair is a brilliant rust-gold. It glistened as the sunlight fell on it as he sat up in bed reading. … He reminded me in character of John the Baptist. Of course, having studied at Downside, Desmond has a natural grace that makes it satisfying to be with him. [Chute was a devout Roman Catholic]. I mean he has a mind so quickened by God that you can do nothing but live when you are with him.

It was Desmond’s patient coaxing which at last gave Stanley a glimpse of the spiritual meaning to be found in his military life. Desmond was reading aloud from St Augustine, and there Stanley found a quotation, a notion, which seemed to provide the key to the redemption he so desperately sought: ‘St Augustine says about God “fetching and carrying”. I am always thinking of those words. It makes me want to do pictures. The bas-reliefs in the Giotto Campanile give me the same feeling.’ The quotation is a paraphrase of a passage from St Augustine’s Confessions: ‘ever busy yet ever at rest, gathering yet never needing, bearing, filling, guarding, creating, nourishing, perfecting’.20 Other passages in St Augustine could have similarly inspired him:

Therefore He who is the true Mediator – inasmuch as by taking the form of a servant he became the Mediator between God and Man, the man Jesus Christ – in the form of God accepts sacrifice along with the Father, together with whom he is one God. Yet in the form of a servant he chose for himself to be sacrificed rather than to receive it. … In this way he is at the same time the priest, since it is he who offers the sacrifice, and he is the offering as well.21

The dedication of Stanley’s whole existence, the sacrifice of himself to the spiritual sources of his art, destined his art to be a ‘mediator between God and Man’, a perpetual theme in his writings. If he had not enlisted but stayed at home painting, he would have continued to ‘accept’ or ‘receive’ the sacrifice of himself to his art. But by volunteering into the army, he had yielded the nobility of sacrifice demanded by his art to lesser commitments which had no relevance. He had reduced himself to the role and status of a ‘servant’. The function of a servant is to ‘fetch and carry’, to ‘do things to men’. By offering to deny his spiritual destiny as artist, he had deliberately ‘chosen to be sacrificed’. The fact that such sacrifice might mean not only artistic but physical death was inconsequential. Sacrifice was a sacrament and Stanley was both priest at this particular sacrifice and the sacrifice itself.

Some such metaphysical revelation – the theme of Christ Carrying the Cross – must have come to Stanley as an ‘emergence’, an exaltation. The meaning to his presence at the Beaufort, ungraspable till now, could at last be visualized. Its impact was joyous. He worshipped and even, in his fashion, loved Chute, who already understood it and had shown it to him. For, at last, with understanding came the urge to compose, to draw, to capture his comprehension:

The sunlight is blazing into the corridor just near the Sergeant-Major’s office and I say inwardly, ‘Oh, how I could paint this feeling I have in me if only there were no war – the feeling of that corridor, of the blazing light, and the Sergeant-Major and his dog – anything, so long as it gave me the feeling the corridor and the circumstance gave me!’ If I was Deborah, the lunatic who doesn’t know there is a war, I could do it. His sullen face and shifty eyes – I envied him the agony of being cut off completely from my soul. I thought in agony how marvellously I could paint this moment in this corridor now. And if at any time this war ends, I will paint it now, that is with all the conviction I feel now; but it can only be done if I feel assured that I am not suddenly going to be knocked off my perch. No! Not quite like that, because that can easily happen. No! Not that! But it was a belief in peace as being the essential need for creative work, not a peace that is merely the accidental lapse between wars, but a peace that, whether war is on or not, is the imperturbable and right state of the human soul; and that is only to be found in the peace of Christ.22

The crucial sentence in the passage must be the curious, ‘I envied him the agony of being cut off completely from my soul.’ It seems to predicate a notion that in our instinct to find a place in which we cannot be ‘knocked off our perch’ – a state of being ‘home’, at ‘peace’ – we seek those miraculous moments which lift us beyond the physical where we are isolated into our separate existence into a spiritual world in which we are not only at one with each other but with the form and meaning of creation itself. Our lives are Odysseys to reach those joyous states. Only in achieving them can Stanley’s desire to paint have meaning. Deborah, however mysteriously, was permanently in such a world, and even if his state was not one Stanley sought for himself, he felt it ‘agony’ that he could offer only sympathy in comprehension, not the empathy of truly spiritual identification.

If the recording of such visionary ecstasy was still impossible at the Beaufort, Stanley at least found the motivation to start drawing again. With his growing reputation came requests for portraits from staff and patients. In later lists he remembered a dozen or so. He was out of practice and the earliest ones dissatisfied him. But later ones ‘showed a great improvement’.23 He invariably gave them to the sitters. Only one seems to have survived, that of ‘a tall chap in the cookhouse’. Stanley does not give the sitter’s name, but it was Jack Witchell. Having been a grocer in civilian life he had been detailed not to the ‘cookhouse’ as such, but to the stores. The head was drawn in Jack’s small autograph album, and Stanley had to run the top of the head across the fold in the leaves. ‘You would smile, dear, to observe young Spencer sketching me,’ wrote Jack to his girl. But the event was more of an ordeal than Jack had anticipated, involving two sessions of two hours each. During the second session Jack played chess with Lionel Budden, ‘so that I look half-asleep’.24 Even so, Stanley did not finish Jack’s ear, an omission which is artistically comprehensible, but which irritated Jack’s precise storeman’s mind. He pressed Stanley to finish it, but ‘he would not’. However, Jack found the drawing ‘very pleasing and quite like me’.

At last Stanley was becoming reconciled. Work went on in the same routine, but even the most fearsome of the dreaded Sisters now treated him with consideration. Being on draft, Stanley was given his overseas injections and was invited to attend lectures and even to watch an operation on an elderly patient named Hawthorn; he was fascinated by the proceedings. But it must have been with relief that his draft of ten men learned that their departure was imminent. It was now well into May 1916: ‘I think it will be Salonika. The Sergeant-Major says so, anyway.’25

Suddenly, at short notice, they were off. Jack Witchell, writing to his girl on 12 May, saw them go:

Budden and nine others have just gone. They had only twenty-four hours’ notice and we gave them a jolly good send-off. Am sorry to lose Budden, he is one of the best men I have ever met and I trust we have not seen the last of one another in this world. Spencer was also with them. I should have been with them. I was able to get their autographs just before they left.

There are only nine signatures in Jack’s album. Budden’s is there, but the missing name is Stanley’s. Probably he had permission to spend his last evening with Desmond Chute and so missed the ‘jolly good send-off’. Desmond had only just managed to make a pencil sketch of him in time (now in the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham).

Their departure left a gap: ‘They will feel us being gone,’26 declared Stanley, and indeed they did, in more ways than one. To his letter Jack Witchell adds a sad little coda: ‘Am feeling a bit down today.’

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Burghclere Chapel: Tweseldown

Drinkwater used to work in a place where the clouds touched the hills where he worked.

Stanley Spencer to Desmond Chute1

STANLEY’S group of volunteers was destined for the RAMC Training Depot at Tweseldown, near Fleet in Hampshire. But because the Beaufort was administratively responsible to Devonport Military Hospital the party had, by the exigencies of military logic, to proceed to Hampshire by way of Plymouth. Arrived there he immediately wrote to Desmond: ‘We left the Beaufort yesterday Friday morning. I swept the ward out yesterday morning with George [one of the inmates whom the orderlies used to tip to clean their boots]. I felt a bit sad, poor old George was so upset. Have brought my Shakespeare with me. Remember me to your mother and aunt.’2

The draft, being in transit, had little to do at Devonport apart from attending morning parades, persuading the mess orderlies they were entitled to meals, and working out which among the unfamiliar naval uniforms in the town they were supposed to salute. Stanley was able to catch up on his correspondence. Gilbert was in Salonika as an orderly in a Field Hospital. Harold and Natalie, their orchestral work disrupted, were filling in time as cinema pianists at Maidenhead, but aiming to move to London where Natalie, who had fluent Spanish, hoped to work in Intelligence. Horace, back in England, had in March married Marjorie, ‘the youngest of the Hunt girls’;* ‘she is a nice girl and we are all fond of her’ wrote Pa to Will. Transferred to the Royal Engineers, Horace was then posted to France, but by October was to be back in England in hospital after two bouts of malaria. Percy too was in France, in a Field Headquarters, and had been mentioned in despatches. Sydney was an officer instructor in the Home Training Battalion of the Norfolk Regiment. Henry Lamb was at Guy’s Hospital completing his training as a doctor. Edward Marsh, frantically busy, nevertheless found time to propose a small Civil List grant for a struggling writer called James Joyce, then in Zürich. To Switzerland too, Will had departed, to be reunited there with Johanna as two among thousands of international refugees – Lenin also among them – who then crowded that neutral if bureaucratic haven. Will was doing little work and Johanna, barred from returning to Germany, was dependent on infrequent money sent from Berlin; Will had to reduce his monthly allotment to Pa from £8 to £6. Johanna’s brother, Max, was reported missing, and Will was anxiously trying to discover from the War Office if he was listed among the Germans taken prisoner.4 There had been floods at Cookham and fierce gales had uprooted hundreds of trees there.

Stanley was not sorry to leave for Tweseldown after a few days. The hutted camp was on the open slope below the racecourse on the down. He was delighted to be able to see the sweep of the sky again: ‘Training is all out in the open, and this is what I like.’5 It was, however, strict. The Kit Inspection panel at Burghclere records Stanley’s dislike of the mindless regimentation of depot life. The purpose of the training was to fit him for active service in a Field Ambulance. The function of a Field Ambulance is essentially to collect the sick and wounded from front-line fighting units and to convey them back to Field Hospitals, giving them on the way such emergency aid as could be provided in the Advanced Dressing Stations which the Field Ambulance would set up. Stretcher drill, practical scouting – searching for stray wounded during a battle – the recovery of wounded from the difficult confines of trenches and dugouts, the handling of mules and wagons – normally done in action by Army Service Corps drivers – operation of the vital watercarts with the testing and purification of water sources, and, of course, first-aid and medical procedures, all these topics had to be learned and practised. At the time Stanley thought that the training, though interesting, would not apply to him, as he was convinced that only the strongest and most resourceful orderlies would be assigned to Field Ambulances; he assumed that he would be detailed to hospital work overseas.

Desmond Chute wrote every day, pouring out the stream of encouragement begun at the Beaufort. Stanley wrote to the Raverats: ‘Chute has sent me a translation of Odyssey Book 6, the coming of Odysseus to the Phaiacians [it was a personal, hand-written translation, not a copy of another’s] and as I was hut orderly today I was able to go through it this afternoon. It is all so nimbly written … that you feel you have the original wonderful rhythms with you.’6 To Chute himself he wrote:

It is grand to take your translation out of my haversack and read it during intervals of drill … I should like a photo of you. Now that I am here I look back on the time I spent with you and it appears so beautiful to me. It clears my head which gets muddled at times.7

The illumination provided by St Augustine’s ‘fetching and carrying’ continued to enthuse his imagination: