Retrospective celebrates the idyllic final Dorset years of sculptor Elisabeth Frink

The late sculptor Dame Elisabeth Frink in her beloved Dorset landscape

By Jeremy Miles

Dorset wasn’t just home to the late celebrated sculptor Dame Elisabeth Frink, it was a place of refuge and inspiration, providing the perfect environment for both work and play. She spent the final 16 years of her life in the county creating powerful, groundbreaking art and entertaining visiting friends at her beautiful country estate, Woolland House near Blandford Forum.

After many years living in France and London, the increasingly famous and successful Frink and her third husband Alex Csáky, discovered Woolland in the mid-1970s and instantly knew that they had found a country base in a wonderful location that offered all that they required. 

Nestling beneath Bulbarrow Hill on the edge of the Blackmore Vale and in an area of outstanding natural beauty, the house and its grounds were a haven of tranquillity surrounded by spectacular views across the ancient Dorset landscape. It provided an inspirational location for Frink’s studio that wasn’t too remote from the London art world or the foundries that cast her often giant bronze sculptures.

Photograph by Hattie Miles … Elisabeth Frink “A View From Within” exhibition at Dorset Museum, Dorchester. View of the exhibition. left, Gogglehead 1969 courtesy of The Ingram Collection of Modern Art, centre Seated Man courtesy of Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield.

Frink had trained at Chelsea School of Art in the 1950s and found early fame with her massive male figures and naturalistic sculptures of horses and dogs. She would go on to become one of the towering figures of British art driven by a sense of compassion and known for an unwavering interest in the nature of man and the laws of the natural world. She was elected as a Royal Academician in 1977 and appointed a Dame of the British Empire in 1982.

Today she is best known for her public sculptures which can be seen in a diverse array of locations nationally and internationally including Salisbury, Coventry and Liverpool cathedrals and of course much closer to home, like her Dorset Martyrs Memorial at South Walks, Dorchester, which stands on the site of the gallows where Catholic martyrs were hanged in the 16th and 17th centuries.

But there were many smaller studio works too, including both sculptures and prints and by the time she moved to Dorset there were increasing demands on her time and she needed space and a creative environment to continue developing her art.

Two of the Frink exhibits at Dorchester

Woolland soon became the focus of not only Frink’s intense and disciplined work schedule but also a joyous place for her and Alex to invite their wide circle of friends for fun weekends and long happy meals. Above all it felt like home and in a way it always had been. For although Elisabeth Frink was born in Suffolk in 1930, she had first found Dorset during the Second World War when her Army officer father was posted to the county and her family temporarily moved to the Purbeck village of Kingston. 

She was just 11 years old but memories of discovering the area and places like Kimmeridge, Dancing Ledge and Corfe Castle remained with her, helping to establish her singular artistic style.  Moving to Woolland allowed her to find the place that she felt was her true spiritual home. Her life there with Alex was intensely happy and productive but sadly cut short when they were both stricken by illness and died within weeks of each other in 2003. 

Frink was just 63 years old when she died but her artistic legacy lives on. She had long let it be known that she wanted the county to be the permanent home of her considerable archive. 

Dame Elisabeth Frink at work in the studio

Thanks to her estate many of her works are held by the Dorset County Museum in Dorchester and now, 30 years after her death, it is staging the first-ever exhibition dedicated to her time living and working at Woolland.

Elisabeth Frink: A View from Within runs until April and showcases more than 80 of her sculptures, drawings and prints including working plasters that informed her final bronze sculptures that have never been on public display before.

The show examines her working processes, recreating part of her Dorset studio with a collection of her tools and the plasters that formed the basis of some of her best-known bronze sculptures. It displays many quintessential Frink works like Seated Man, Goggle Heads, Walking Madonna, The Dorset Martyrs and there’s even her wonderful maquette for Risen Christ, the piece that turned out to be her final commission. 

The inclusion of the work in the show underlines the fact that despite suffering from the cancer that would kill her, this determined and brilliant woman worked right up until the end of the end of her life. The completed work which today towers over the western doors of Liverpool Cathedral was unveiled just days before her death.

As well as revealing something of both Frink’s artistic practices and her joy of life, this is a fascinating exhibition that gives visitors the chance to explore the importance of her years in Dorset through both her art and a selection of personal possessions, including letters and photographs. 

Dame Elisabeth Frink with her third husband Alex Csaky c1976. Frink archive Courtesy of Dorset History Centre.

Although relatively compact, this is an important show that has been beautifully designed by its co-curators Annette Ratuszniak and Lucy Johnston. With carefully selected lighting that particularly highlights the unique carving of Frink’s bronzes, it has a thematic layout that takes the visitor through sections dedicated to Family and Social Life, Printmaking, Spirituality and Humanism, Interdependence of Species, Human Rights and New Beginnings.

One intriguing addition to the exhibition is Small Warrior – the 12-inch tall bronze sculpture bought for £90 at a car-boot sale in Essex. The piece was recently the subject of BBC1’s Fake or Fortune? Was it the real deal or just a relatively worthless hunk of metal? For a while the jury was out but after exhaustive scientific tests and expert analysis it was declared to be a genuine rediscovery of a lost Frink original from the 1950s which could be worth £60,000.

*Elisabeth Frink: A View From Within runs at the Dorset Museum and Art Gallery in High West Street, Dorchester DT1 1XA until 21st April 2024. Further information at http://www.dorsetmuseum.org

*This piece was originally published in the January 2024 edition of Dorset magazine.

TV drama that woke world to the conviction and sacking of innocent sub postmasters

Toby Jones leading the cast of ITV drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office. Picture: ITV Publcity

Like so many others I spent my evenings last week gripped and appalled in equal measure by the superb ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office. 

As we all now know it told the shocking true-life story of how The Post Office spent years hounding, persecuting and accusing thousands of perfectly innocent sub-postmasters of theft or false accounting to cover up the inadequacies of Horizon its not-fit-for-purpose computer accounting system. 

Many loyal and honest employees lost their jobs, their homes, their life savings and their reputations. Hundreds were prosecuted and even jailed for crimes they had never committed. Sadly some, broken by the experience, took their own lives.

It was a story that has been told countless times over the past 20 years by victims of this dreadful moral failure and catastrophic miscarriage of justice but for some reason no one was really listening. It has taken a television drama, admittedly a very good one, to bring it to widespread public attention.

People have been terribly shocked by the brutal, callous and completely unfair treatment of these blameless workers by the Post Office and suddenly after years of paying scant attention to the scandal journalists and politicians are demanding answers and action. 

Mr Bates vs The Post Office has provided a unbelievably effective wake-up call by highlighting this horrifying example of the kind of corporate tunnel vision that can drive institutions like The Post office to crush anyone who stands in their way threatens their reputation.

Within days of the broadcast members of the Cabinet including the Prime Minister were condemning the entire chapter of events that lead so many innocent people losing their good names, their jobs, their homes and in some cases even their lives. There were calls for the Post Office to be blocked from its role as prosecutor, for all the outstanding convictions to be quashed and for former Post Office CEO Paula Vennells to be stripped of her CBE

The docudrama style play had focussed on the dogged determination of one of the wrongly accused sub-postmasters, Alan Bates, who simply refused to be bullied and the two long decades he had soentbsupporting the victims and leading them in the seemingly impossible battle that would eventually clear their names.

With the peerless Toby Jones as Bates it brought the terrible behaviour of the Post Office to a massive audience. Perhaps it caught the zeitgeist, arriving at a time when people are uniquely fed up with broken Britain, appalled by corporate bully boys and ineffectual politicians and desperate for those prepared to hold truth to power.

The unfeeling actions of the Post Office and those who drove its savage face-saving campaign horrified them and it took a dramatised version of this log and shameful episode to make clear just how awful it really was.

NOTE: Earlier today (9th January 2024) Paula Vennells confirmed that she is handing back her CBE.

Aladdin: Buckle up for a real magic carpet ride for the whole family in pantoland

It’s that time of year again. Deck the halls and all that and check out the local pantomimes. It’s not always easy to find a show that will appeal as much to granny as it will to your eight year old but I am delighted to say that we happen to be particularly fortunate in this neck of wood as we have one the best – a sparkling new production of that perennial favourite Aladdin.

Chris Jarvis (centre) as Wisshee Washee. Picture: Jayne Jackso Ph0tography

 It has just opened for a three-week run at the Lighthouse Centre for the Arts in Poole and really is perfect entertainment for all the family.

Lighthouse has long punched well above its weight in the panto stakes and once again it has enlisted the talents of writer, director and performer Chris Jarvis to work alongside its creative team to deliver a pantomime that really ticks all the right boxes.

 Alim Jadavji as Genie of the Lamp (left) and Andrew Pollard as Professor Pocus .
Picture: Jayne Jackso Ph0tography

Chris knows his stuff. The CBeebies favourite is positively steeped in panto lore. He’s starred in, written and directed festive shows for years and learnt his craft from some of the biggest and best names in the business. It really shows. Chris is a good actor, an excellent writer and a brilliant communicator and above all he understands the psychology of performing for all ages.

This Aladdin, in which he stars as Widow Twankey, is smart, witty and full of festive fun, laughter and music. It offers a clever contemporary take on the time-honoured story without losing any of its traditional appeal and wisely avoids any awkward racial stereotyping and misguided innuendo.

Here’s Hattie Miles’ review

Aladdin at Lighthouse, Poole
Aladdin runs at Lighthouse in Poole until 31st December

From the moment the curtain rises, Aladdin at Lighthouse is a winner. A brilliant cast make this modern take on the traditional story full of vitality, hilarity and slapstick fun. Written and directed by CBeebies favourite Chris Jarvis, who also stars as a wonderfully funny Widow Twankey, the show romps along and engages the audience right from the very beginning. Twankey’s array of costumes are fabulous – they include nods to King Charles, Dame Shirley Bassey and the RNLI.

Genie of the lamp (Alim Jadavji), is obsessed with game shows, and makes the quest to find the lamp, hidden deep in a cave on the Jurassic Coast, real fun and Professor Pocus (Andrew Pollard) makes a magnificent and amusing baddy – the packed audience loved booing him. There’s fine performances too from Aladdin (Benjamin Armstrong), Wishee Washee (Josh Haberfield), Princess Jasmin (Ionica Adriana), the Spirit of the Ring (Stephanie Walker) and the Queen (Jo Michaels Barrington). 

There is so much in this show including great music from live musicians led by musical director Adam Tuffrey. It would have been worth going to just to see the rendition of The Twelve Days of Christmas that had Widow Twankey, Princess Jasmine and Wishee Washee racing around the stage and interacting with an uproarious audience. There were also marvelous special effects. A proper flying carpet of course, and a clever virtual flight from the Lighthouse stage to the hidden cave on the Dorset coast. The audience joined in and had the most wonderful time right through this excellent pantomime.  Highly recommended. – Hattie Miles

Aladdin runs at Lighthouse until New Year’s Eve (Sunday 31st December)

Invading a medieval castle in hot pursuit of a secret Macca and Wings recording session

The announcement yesterday of the sad death of Moody Blues and Wings guitarist Denny Laine at the age of 79 stirred memories for me of an encounter with him 45 years ago.

I was a young newspaper reporter and having heard rumours that Paul McCartney and Wings were recording a new album at Lympne Castle on the Kent coast, I decided to go and have a look for myself.

Denny Laine on stage in 1976

It wasn’t hard to find out if the band really were in situ at the spectacular 1,000-year-old castle. Lympne is a small village and I just went to the local pub and asked. The barman nodded in the direction of the bar billiards table. An earnest game was in progress and the players not only looked unmistakably like roadies but they were all wearing Wings T-shirts. Before I’d even had a chance to strike up a conversation one of them was called to the phone. He returned, saying: “They want us at the Castle,” and with that, they all trooped out and walked the short distance to the stately pile nearby. I followed and just as we reached the entrance a car pulled up and Denny Laine got out.

I grabbed my opportunity. ‘Denny mate, good to see you, I said. ‘How’s the album going?’ Denny, who I’d never met in my life before, looked momentarily confused but then smiled and said things were just fine. I simply kept chatting and walked with him straight through the impressive castle doors and into the Great Hall where Wings had set up their recording equipment.

Moments later I was standing right beside Paul and Linda who were talking to a recording engineer. So now what? I took a chance and told the former Beatle I was a music writer (Well I did have a weekly entertainment page) and asked if he would be prepared to talk about his latest project.

Lympne Castle as it once was

He studiously ignored the question but, gesturing towards me, had a few words with the engineer and then wandered off. I was worried now. I thought I might be frogmarched out of the building.

Instead, the engineer simply said: ‘Right, you can’t stay but before you go you can help us move some of the gear around. So it was that I found myself, manoeuvering Linda McCartney’s piano across the Great Hall of this spectacular medieval pile before being firmly but politely told: ‘You can go now’. Which when you think about it is almost a Denny Laine lyric.

I wish I had played a small part in a truly iconic Macca recording but those recording sessions which eventually emerged on the 1979 album Back to the Egg were neither his nor Wings finest hour.

It was by general consensus a fairly unfathomable and uncohesive piece of work featuring a haphazard mishmash of seemingly unrelated songs. It was also the last album Wings recorded before the band broke up.

Back to the Egg album cover

Paul McCartney later revealed that he chose to record at Lympne Castle because he knew the owners, Harry and Deidre Margary, liked the atmosphere and it was quite close to his home in East Sussex. He has since admitted that some of the Back to the Egg songs were a little oddball and didn’t make a great deal of sense and he also suspects that he was smoking “a little too much wacky baccy at the time.”

It may be a pretty poor album but to me Back to the Egg is simply a reminder of a decidedly unusual evening a long tine ago when the ever-genial Denny Laine unwittingly helped me to get into a Wings recording session in a fortress. He was definitely one of the good guys. RIP

How Barbara Hepworth’s magical St Ives sculpture garden was inspired by music

Writer Jeremy Miles photographed in Barbara Hepworth’s garden in St Ives. Picture: Hattie Miles

Walking through Barbara Hepworth’s strange and wonderful sub-tropical garden in St Ives it’s hard to imagine that it was once little more than a working space where the sculptor created some of the most radical works of the 20th century.

The lush exotic plants and swaying palms that provide such a magical setting for her powerful and instantly recognisable sculptures seem to have been there for ever. They delight the tens of thousands of visitors who each year seek out Trewyn Studio, her old home, long preserved as The Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden.

It’s easy to assume that it was this garden as much as the discreet facility offered by the studio’s town-centre location that drew Hepworth here in 1949. After all she’s inextricably linked with the place. She lived, worked and eventually died at Trewyn. Her death at the age of 72 was caused by a fire believed to have been started by a dropped cigarette. It sealed her association with this house. To this day her studio remains frozen in time exactly as she left it. The date of her death – May 20th, 1975 – is still on the wall calendar.  

In fact her initial interest in Trewyn was purely in finding a suitable space to work. She had just separated from her second husband the painter Ben Nicholson and had been invited to produce two major commissions for the forthcoming Festival of Britain. Trewyn was the perfect answer.

Hepworth’s Studio at Trewyn. Photo: Hattie Miles

Hepworth had enjoyed a growing reputation among the artistic elite in London but the birth of triplets – Simon, Rachel and Sarah – and the outbreak of World War II had temporarily derailed a glittering career.

As German bombs threatened to rain down on the capital she and Nicholson decided to move their family to the relative safety of Cornwall.

Living in Carbis Bay they soon became central to what would become St Ives’ golden era as an artist’s colony. It wasn’t always easy. Nicholson could be autocratic and controlling and Hepworth, not the easiest person herself, was forced to put domestic chores before art.

The breakdown of the marriage and the move to Trewyn gave her the freedom to fight her way back into the public eye. With international success came the opportunity to re-model her working environment and in the mid-1950s Hepworth set about transforming the blank canvas that was the Trewyn garden. Over the next few years it slowly turned into what author Miranda Phillips, an authority on the garden,  describes as  “almost a showroom for potential buyers and people who might commission her.”

To achieve this Hepworth took advice from her good friend the modernist composer Priaulx Ranier and also Will Arnold-Forster who had established a marvellous garden at  Eagles Nest, the house high above Zennor that would later become the home of the artist Patrick Heron. Arnold-Forster was a well-travelled retired Colonel who had written the influential 1948 book Shrubs for Milder Counties. Ranier meanwhile possessed an encyclopaedic knowledge of plants both from her native South Africa and across the New World. Hepworth could count on extraordinarily informed advice to help plant a garden that would perfectly combine the beauty of natural forms with the strange power of her stone and bronze sculptures.

Hepworth’s garden. Photo: Hattie Miles

A wonderful mixture of the traditional and exotic gradually took form as the garden was landscaped and planted with fan palms, bamboo, honeysuckle  magnolia, eucalyptus, Japanese anemones and roses. Rockeries were built, paths laid and an old pond rescued and given new life. The result combined with Hepworth’s sculptures was a mesmerising display of colour and form that continues to evolve to this day.

Miranda Phillips worked with the Tate and Hepworth Museum for many years.  She is the author of Barbara Hepworth Sculpture Garden (Tate Publishing). Written with former Tate curator Chris Stephenson, the book was developed from a popular guide she had put together after being constantly quizzed about the plants in the garden by visitors to the museum.

It follows the plants at Trewyn through the seasons, examining their relationship with Hepworth’s sculptures. “People are constantly fascinated by the garden,” she told me. “Hepworth certainly used it to impress potential buyers but the sculptures she sited here were very much her own favourites. Phillips believes that Hepworth used the garden – “with its spiky primeval forms and the ancient nature of some of her sculptures” – as a source of inspiration. “Placing her works in this setting with the interplay of light,shadow and movement allowed her to see how different sorts of light and even dry and wet conditions would work on the sculptures. I’m sure it influenced her art.”

On a bigger scale the rugged and ancient Cornish landscape was her inspiration too. Hepworth had originally fallen in love with large sweeping vistas as a child in Yorkshire. In Cornwall she was able to rediscover the feel for weathered rock, lichen and windswept heathland that had been hardwired into her infant soul. Trees twisted by the wind and storm lashed beaches provided a wealth of material.

Despite her great achievements –  internationally feted as an artist and made a Dame of the British Empire in 1965 – Hepworth did not have an easy life. Her work was physically tough and she also endured two divorces, the death of an adult child ( her eldest son Paul died in an air crash in Singapore in 1954) and terrible health problems. By the end of her life she had received treatment for throat cancer, was almost crippled by a fractured hip and her hands were full of arthritis. She was also heavily dependent on pain killers and drinking heavily.

“I think she ran on nervous energy, drove herself terribly hard and wasn’t particularly interested in physical comfort,” says Phillips. “Beyond her work she didn’t have much time left for living.”

 The general assumption is that the fire that caused her death was an inferno, the final ghastly chapter in an increasingly miserable existence. Phillips sees it slightly differently. “There was actually very little fire. It caught some plastic.” She believes Hepworth was probably already asleep and succumbed to fumes.  “To be honest life wasn’t getting any more pleasant. She was already in great pain and she wasn’t going to get better. In those circumstances, to die in the place that you love surrounded by the things that you love is no bad thing.”

 *Visit the Barbara Hepworth Museum & Sculpture Garden at Barnoon Hill, St Ives, Cornwall TR26 1AD www.tate.org.uk/stives The book Barbara Hepworth Sculpture Garden by Miranda Phillips & Chris Stephens was first published in 2002 and reprinted last year.

Lucy Kemp-Welch: a brilliant artist who was sidelined by gender, war and modernism

`Burnt Out Fires by Lucy Kemp-Welch ©David Messum Fire Art

By Jeremy Miles

A rare combination of prodigious talent, intuitive understanding and carefully honed skill made equestrian artist Lucy Kemp-Welch one of the finest painters of her generation.

Sadly, although her star did indeed shine brightly for many years, history was not on her side. Born into a well-to-do Bournemouth family in 1869, she lived through an era marked by war and burgeoning modernity. It was a world dominated by men. Making an impact as a female artist was far from easy. Socially and politically the cards were stacked against her.

She found fame while still in her 20s and exhibited her first painting, Gypsy Horse Drovers, at the prestigious Royal Academy in London when she was just 26 years old. But it was two years later when her huge painting Colt Hunting in the New Forest was exhibited at the RA’s 1897 Summer Exhibition that the name Lucy Kemp-Welch really started to get noticed by the art establishment,. Stunned by its size, power and detail, critics predicted great things for this extraordinary young woman.

Kemp-Welch would hang many more notable paintings at the RA over the coming decades and also enjoyed a certain level of celebrity as the illustrator of the 1915 edition of Anna Sewell’s best-selling novel Black Beauty.

One of Lucy’s Black Beauty illustrations

However, suggestions that she was on course to become the first woman since the mid-18th century to be officially admitted as a Royal Academician never came to fruition and by the time of her death in the late 1950s the name of Lucy Kemp-Welch was being sidelined.

Thankfully much has been done in recent years to restore her reputation as one of the towering if largely forgotten artistic talents of the 20th century and now a major retrospective is being staged at the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum in Bournemouth.

It could not be a more appropriate location because it not only brings the work of Kemp-Welch back to the town of her birth but also the one-time home of art collector and philanthropist Merton Russell-Cotes who was one of her early supporters.

This wide-ranging and impressive exhibition, In Her Own Voice: The Art of Lucy Kemp-Welch (1869–1958)  will be in Bournemouth until mid-October and then moves to the National Horse Racing Museum in Newmarket until January 2024. It is curated by art historian, David Boyd Haycock and focuses on key works and moments in Kemp-Welch’s long and illustrious career.

It explores the early influence of her life on the south coast and childhood trips to the New Forest, her unstinting commitment to her art and the teaching of the eccentric but brilliant German-born Hubert von Herkomer whose art school she attended in Bushey, Hertfordshire. She admired the school so much that when Herkomer retired in 1906 she took it over becoming the first woman to run a British art school for both male and female students.

Herkomer had believed that for Kemp-Welch to capture the real essence of the horses she painted she should spend weeks studying the animals close-up in the woods and fields of the English countryside. She responded with great enthusiasm establishing the lifelong work practices that would produce some truly stunning paintings. Among them was location painting where she would capture scenes of timber hauling or hunting using massive mobile canvases in weather-proof boxes.

Lucy Kemp-Welch working en plein air

As the name of this exhibition suggests, it is the paintings that really do the talking. The sheer power and majesty of works like Burnt Out Fires, showing three working horses returning home across stubble-burnt fields or the struggle and urgency captured in The Call with horses straining to drag a lifeboat into a furious foaming sea are breathtaking.

Throughout the show, Kemp-Welch’s mastery of colour, light and energy and her deep understanding of everything equine from sinew and muscle to the behavioural quirks of the horses she paunted is displayed again and again.

There were many intriguing twists and turns in her life and career. For several years she would spend each summer following the famous Sanger’s circus around the country and painting their horses. Solidly respectable and widely admired she was nonetheless distinctly unconventional.

Though she was, as David Boyd Haycock has noted, neither a suffragette nor a feminist, Kemp-Welch was clearly not prepared to be restricted by her gender. During the First World War she volunteered to go to the front as an official war artist but had to be satisfied with painting the British Army’s training exercises on Salisbury Plain instead.

The war work, including some recruitment posters, is a minor diversion and of scant importance besides the quality of her major paintings. Viewed from a contemporary perspective, it seems rather distasteful, drumming up cannon fodder for the carnage of the First World War although at the time  Kemp-Welch would have simply seen it as doing her bit for King and country. It also helps put her life and career into some kind of historical context that goes at least some way to explaining why she faded from the public eye.

Britain in the 20th century was oppressively patriarchal. Battered by two world wars and a major recession, it was an age driven by the need to rebuild. Engineering and industry were prime and even the working beasts of Kemp-Welch’s world were being rapidly replaced by a variety of horseless carriages.

By the time she reached her final years, her work was simply out of step with the times. Perhaps that point is driven home by the fact that the landmark event on the London art scene in the year that she died was a big Jackson Pollock show. Thankfully we now have an art world where the modernist and traditional can be studied, admired and enjoyed with equal intellectual rigour.

There is much to think about at this Lucy Kemp-Welch exhibition. I guess you will leave the show not only impressed by her astounding paintings but also newly aware of what an extraordinary individual she was.

Foam Horses by Lucy Kemp-Welch

*In Her Own Voice: The Art of Lucy Kemp-Welch (1869–1958) ran at the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum in Bournemouth earlier this year and is currently at the National Horse Racing Museum in Newmarket until 25th February 2024

Saving the threatened words that keep our children in touch with the wonders of nature

Otters © Jackie Morris

By Jeremy Miles

Anyone of a certain age who grew up in the countryside, particular in a beautiful county like Dorset will have memories of playing among fields and trees surrounded by the wonder of plants and wildlife.

When the Oxford Junior Dictionary decided to drop a series of ‘nature words’ from its pages arguing that they were no longer relevant to childhood there was not surprisingly an outcry.

In a bid to get the dictionary to reconsider its position, a campaign was launched by writers including such literary giants as Margaret Atwood and Andrew Motion.

Consigned to the lexicographical dustbin were words like acorn, adder, bluebell, dandelion, and catkin. There were many others. In came broadband, blog, chat-room, celebrity and voicemail. It seemed like an attack on the very tradition of healthy outdoor play. Some felt it was actively encouraging solitary indoor childhoods. 

No one was more appalled than the writer, poet and academic Robert Macfarlane. A life-long nature lover and activist, he teamed up with artist and illustrator Jackie Morris to produce The Lost Words, a celebration of the names of plants, birds and animals that were deemed no longer worthy of inclusion in the Junior Dictionary.

When it was first published in 2017 the book became a near-instant bestseller and has now been translated into several languages, and adapted for film, drama, dance, radio, classical music and folk song.

Raven ©Jackie Morris

It even inspired a grassroots movement to put a copy in every primary school in England, Wales and Scotland with Dorset campaigners at the forefront of local funding and distribution.

A touring Lost Words exhibition organised by Compton Verney, with Hamish Hamilton and Penguin Books visited venues nationwide including the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum here in Bournemouth.

Suitable for all ages, it featured 20 acrostic “spell-poems” alongside the 50 watercolour and gold-leaf paintings that were used to create the original book. It combined Robert Macfarlane’s poetic words and Jackie Morris’s artwork in a show that harnessed the power of nature and love of language. It celebrated the magic of the natural world and reclaimed those words that, at the stroke of an editor’s pen, were ditched as irrelevancies.

Robert Macfarlane

I took the opportunity to talk to the authors about their passionate campaign to save these vital connections to the natural world. This is what I wrote. It originally appeared in an article published in Dorset magazine last year.

It seems the protests to the Oxford Junior Dictionary fell on deaf ears. “I’m afraid the dictionary’s response was ‘It’s none of your business. It’s our editorial decision,’ says Jackie. “We thought we can make a book that will reverse this.”

They hadn’t realised that no sooner had the book been published than the project would begin to take on a life of its own. “Not in my wildest dreams could I have foreseen what the book would become, admits Robert. “It’s as though Jackie and I just planted an acorn and up rushed a wild-wood.  It has become a movement that has been taken on by other people and institutions. It’s not really ours anymore. It’s been used in schools all over the British Isles and even featured in a prom concert at the Albert Hall. None of it could have been foreseen.”

He stresses that he doesn’t regard the loss of so many evocative words as the fault of the dictionary. “It is culture or society’s fault. This separation of our lives and our imaginations from everyday nature has become very pronounced.”

It is, he believes, a symptom of the “ecological chaos and precarity” we are living through. “If we are going to get out of this we need to begin at the beginning. We have to grow our way out of it by learning the names of the creatures and plants we share our everyday lives with and then teach them to the children.”

Robert and Jackie both speak with delight about the effect their stories, images, spells and poems, can have on young hearts and minds.

“Kids hunger for the utterly beautiful stuff that is right on the doorstep,” says Jackie. “They love getting muddy and watching insects and birds. We  are giving them a tool with which they can re-wild their parents.”

She argues that children are naturally visually literate and understand the words and pictures in The Lost Words in an intuitive way.

“Adults can take five, six or seven readings to realise what is going on. Kids get it right away. They understand the value of natural beauty before they learn about money but then everything goes belly up.”

Jackie describes herself as “an anarchist and anti-capitalist”. I venture that it must be a little awkward when the cheques roll in. Jackie laughs:  “You know what? It’s lovely being able to give it away. It’s a question of knowing when you’ve got enough and when to share rather than hoard.”

Jackie Morris

She’s 61 and feels lucky to have found success relatively late in life. She says that 40 years of working as a freelance artist and illustrator has given her valuable life experience.  

“It has equipped me with the nous to stand my ground and not be pigeon-holed by anyone. I raised two kids as a single mother using only my brush and pen. I always had to worry about how to pay the bills until The Lost Words. Now it looks after me, bless it.”

Robert comes from a rather different background. He is a 47-year-old multi-award-winning writer, a Fellow of Emmanuel Colledge, Cambridge, and widely known for his books on nature and landscape.

The Wall Street Journal has described him as “the great nature writer and nature poet of this generation” and in 2018 he co-edited, with Chris Packham and Patrick Barkham, A People’s Manifesto For Wildlife, arguing for urgent and large-scale change in Britain’s relationship with nature. Ten thousand people marched on Whitehall to deliver it to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

“Access to nature is a political issue. It’s an economic issue and that is why the book has become associated in many cases with activism and protest,” he says.

“We want to bring childhood and the natural world back together again. Children are naturals with nature. They are wondernauts. They make up their own names and make up their own stories. Every day we receive photographs and videos of children working with the book in their schools or home education settings and it is lovely to see the creativity that has been drummed out of much of schooling by successive governments sneaking back in.”

Victorian travel photographer John Thomson’s travels in Siam and Cambodia

Siamese Boatman: Photograph from 1865/66 negative by John Thomson.Wellcome Collection, London.

By Jeremy Miles

It is wonderful to see the remarkable work of pioneering Victorian photojournalist and travel photographer John Thomson back on the walls at Bournemouth’s Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum.

A new exhibition Siam: Through the Lens of John Thomson (1865-1866) openedat the clifftop museum last week and will run until April next year. It features a powerful and insightful collection of images captured in Siam and Cambodia nearly 160 years ago.

In a series of extraordinary photographs curated from the renowned archive of glass negatives at the Wellcome Collection in London, the exhibition offers a unique glimpse of life in 19th-century Southeast Asia.  The images are of particular interest partly because they reveal a glimpse of living history but also because of their sheer quality produced at a time when such achievements must have seemed close to impossible.

Gallery-goers first saw Thomson’s groundbreaking work at the Russell-Cotes five years ago when the museum staged an exhibition of photographs he had taken in China during his mid 19th century travels.

Both shows are the result of this resourceful and talented Scotsman’s grasp of the possibilities offered by the practice of photography at a time when it was still in its infancy. Thomson had quickly become a master of the art and with finely honed technical, creative and social skills he managed to gain entry to what to the British public at the time was an unseen world.

Angkor Wat: Photograph by John Thomson from 1865/66 negative.Wellcome Collection, London

His eagle-eyed attention to detail produced exquisite studies of the people, their costumes, architecture, customs, rituals and traditions. He even received special permission to visit Cambodia’s Angkor Wat (then under Siam’s control), becoming the first person to photograph its famous ruins. Ironically his Siamese hosts are said to have considered him quite mad to want to photograph a bunch of broken old temples.

His photographs reveal never before recorded details of far-off societies captured in images of extraordinary detail and breathtaking definition. They contain a wealth of anthropological and historical information. 

To get his pictures Thomson had to make long, arduous journeys involving weeks of planning and negotiations and the transportation of heavy and cumbersome cameras, tanks of toxic chemicals and a huge portable darkroom.

Looking at the prints on show at the Russell-Cotes it is clear that his charismatic and engaging personality helped open the door to some very special areas of Siamese society, even the Royal Household of the legendary monarch Rama V – King Mongkut. Yup that was him immortalised in the musical The King and I, though it’s probably best you don’t mention this in polite Thai society.

The country’s authorities took great exception to what they felt was a less than respectful portrayal of their ruler by the actor Yul Brynner in the 1956 film and it was promptly banned in Thailand, remaining officially blacklisted to this day.

 Of course, present-day Thailand ( it changed its name from Siam in the 1930s) is a long-time favourite destination on the British tourist trail and as such the subject of literally millions of point-and-shoot smartphone shots.

Scrolling through your Instagram feed, it is worth remembering that to achieve so much more, Thomson travelled more than 5,000 miles loaded up with his massive camera and bulky glass-plates that then had to be coated with wet collodion emulsion before an exposure – often of several seconds or more  – could be made. It was a far from simple process. 

King Mongkut. Photograph by John Thomson from 1865/66 negative.Wellcome Collection, London.

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about these photographs though is the simple fact that they survived. In old age and suffering from frail health, Thomson was desperate to find a home for his archive. He contacted the pharmaceutical tycoon Sir Henry Wellcome and offered to sell him his collection of 700 or so plates. Negotiations were still underway when in 1921 at the age of 84 Thomson died of a heart attack.  Fortunately the Wellcome Library still took possession of the collection which was contained in three crates and, probably more by luck than judgement, stored them in conditions that just happened to suit the fragile negatives. 

In 1980 the crates were re-opened and test prints were made. After 60 years they were a little battered and scratched but essentially in surprisingly good condition. When finally digitised and printed as large, high-quality images for exhibition many of the scratches, marks and scuffs were left untouched. The effect is both atmospheric and strangely enhancing giving Thomson’s photographs a unique sense of time and place and an undeniable stamp of authenticity.

*Siam: Through the Lens of John Thomson (1865-1866) is at Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum in Bournemouth until April 2024. More information at www.russellcotes.com

All Photographs from 1865-1866 negatives by John Thomson. Wellcome Collection, London. 

How Tina dumped abusive husband Ike and eventually found fame at a whole new level

Tina Turner on stage during a 50th anniversary concert

I was so sorry to hear of the death of the incredible Tina Turner. At the age of 83 she was a wealthy woman and global megastar, a uniquely talented singer and performer whose life had taken her from a childhood of near poverty in rural Tennessee to one of luxury in Switzerland. In between there were years trapped in a singing career and abusive marriage controlled by her first husband. Her ultimate success was not only well-deserved but a testament to her talent, courage and determination. As the tributes flowed in I found myself reflecting on an interview I once did with singer and one-time member of The Ikettes, PP Arnold, who was herself an abused wife and worked with Tina during the toughest of times.

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I was a callow 15-year-old schoolboy when the then 26-year-old Tina first roared into my life as part of the support package on the Rolling Stones 1966 UK tour.

To be honest I hadn’t been expecting much. As far as I was concerned I was simply excited to be going to a Stones concert, particularly one with The Yardbirds (featuring both Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck in their line-up) as a support act. 

The fact that the Ike and Tina Turner Soul Revue was also on the tour had only been of passing interest to me. Then they hit the stage. Wow! The band and their three girl backing singers, The Ikettes, roared into action, a glorious wall of sound with sexy, sassy Tina strutting her stuff and delivering soaring vocals that dominated a performance fuelled by frenetic energy and shaped by carefully choreographed precision. I’d never seen anything like it.

Of course, at the time I had no idea of the personal tragedy that lay behind that amazing outfit. I didn’t know that Svengali-like bandleader Ike Turner was a controlling and violent man and that Tina was trapped in an abusive marriage that would last 10 more miserable years.

With hindsight it is possible to view that Stones tour and the events that led up to it as the first step that Tina took to free herself from Ike’s control. It had been their transatlantic hit with the Phil Spector-produced River Deep Mountain High that,  just a few months earlier, paved the way for the invitation to join the Stones on tour. It had also perhaps offered an early taste of what Tina could achieve as a solo artist. 

Although the single had been credited for contractual reasons to Ike and Tina Turner, it was LA’s famous session team the Wrecking Crew who played on the recording. Ike wasn’t even in the studio. The writing was on the wall.

Among those who observed what was happening was singer P P Arnold who  appeared on the 1966 tour as one of The Ikettes. Years later she told me how Tina became her friend and mentor and saved her from her own troubled marriage.

Los Angeles born Arnold was just 18 years-old and already the mother of two young children when she auditioned as a backing singer with Ike and Tina Turner’s soul revue back in 1965. A year later she was a fully-fledged member of The Ikettes and enjoying life in the road with the Rolling Stones.

But behind the glamour that would soon see her launch her own successful pop career was a bleak tale that had seen the girl from the wrong side of the tracks break away from a vicious circle of drudgery and violence  Arnold, who was born Patricia Cole in Los Angeles’ notorious South Central, in 1946, had been facing a dead-end life. As the sound and fury of the Watts race-riots and gangland clashes echoed around her once peaceful neighbourhood, Cole found herself struggling to survive.

Pregnant at 15 she had been railroaded into a shotgun marriage by her controlling father. She was forced to work as an office clerk by day and a factory worker by night just to get by. Her young husband felt trapped and resentful. A few miles across town soul revue stars Ike and Tina Turner seemed to have it all but as Pat would soon discover their relationship too was marred by troubles.

PP Arnold

A curious chapter of accidents would bring PP Arnold into their life and offer the young singer a path to freedom. Amazingly the fortuitous audition happened entirely by chance. “I never dreamed of being in show-business,” she told me. “ I was married, I had two kids, I worked two jobs. My life was hard. But one day Maxine Smith, an ex girlfriend of my brother, called me up. She and another girl, Gloria Scott, were due to audition for Ike and Tina and a third singer who had been meant to go with them hadn’t shown. Maxine called me out of desperation to make up the trio.”

Ike and Tina were impressed by the girls and to Arnold’s astonishment they were offered the job on the spot. She admits she was terrified. “At first I said ‘No, I can’t possibly go out on the road. I’m married. I’ve got two kids and I have to get home now!  My husband doesn’t know where I am and I’m going to be in trouble when I get back,’ “Tina just said:  ‘Well if you’re going to be in trouble for nothing why don’t you come to Fresno with us and see our show tonight and then make up your mind?’ 

“It was just one of those moments when you suddenly think ‘Yeah, well why not? I might as well go with them.’  Fresno was a 300 mile drive from Los Angeles. Arnold had never been so far from home. “Man, I’d never even been to Hollywood. It was a long way away,” she chuckles at the thought of her naivety and inexperience.

Ike and Tina in the early days

She loved the show but still wasn’t sure about joining the band…until, that is, she finally got home. “I got back about six o’clock the next morning and the door opened. He was furious.. Something in my head clicked. I was thinking: ‘I prayed to God yesterday morning to show me a way out and 24 hours later I’ve got an alternative.’  The Lord certainly works in mysterious ways.”

Arnold, who went on to score British chart hits like The First Cut Is The Deepest and Angel Of The Morning, says that that fateful day marked the beginning of her liberation. But first she would witness Tina Turner suffering an all too familiar fate at the hands of husband Ike. 

Being on the road as an Ikette brought Arnold into close contact with the Turners’. dysfunctional and violent marriage. She soon realised that their disastrous relationship was far from obvious to outsiders  Every night on stage the band drove fans to a frenzy as Tina strutted her stuff looking totally in control. Few noticed glowering guitarist Ike directing the show in the background. He was an inspirational musician but also a controlling often angry figure whose spiralling drug use would over he years lead to increasingly violent behaviour.

Arnold, fresh from her own domestic problems witnessed the growing abuse. “Of course I saw  it happening,” she said.  “We travelled together. We were family. We went on the road on 90 day tours and we were working real close together for 87 of those days. I genuinely felt for Tina. I felt what she was going through so deeply. It was very frightening.” 

Ike Turner died in 2007 from a cocaine overdose. He was 76-years-old. The marriage to Tina ended in divorce in 1976.

Back to the days of the anti-heptagonists?

An illustration in a guide to retailers issued during the 1971 switch to decimalised coinage

By Jeremy Miles

So when he wasn’t being distracted by cheese, dancing to Abba, yelling at the dog or attending hard-drinking work meetings, our hopeless Prime Minister was trying to dream up a wizard scheme to nail the nostalgia vote.

That of course was before he was booed at the Jubilee Celebrations, persuaded his wife – not seen in public for weeks – to join him at the Royal bash and discovered that 148 of his MPs and Ministers want him gone.

Tough times for BoJo but at least he didn’t have to worry about Cliff Richard performing at the Jubilee knees-up. Cliffy was kept well away from the stage possibly amid fears that he might have burst into an impromptu rendering of his 1989 hit Carrie (doesn’t live here anymore). 

But hey, back to the nostalgia thing. It had been such a good idea. ‘I know’, Boris had told himself as he wandered into the Downing Street larder and sliced another piece of stilton.  ‘I’ll pretend we are reintroducing imperial measures’. Yaroo! What better way to impress the Little Englanders during the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Celebrations?

Er perhaps not. The idea bears the classic Boris Johnson hallmarks of being ill-thought through and a piece of pointless populism that actually isn’t very popular at all.

Hardly anyone under the age of 50 understands or has any use for pounds and ounces, feet and inches and most of them couldn’t give a flying firkin if their beer glass has an imperial pint crown on it. 

None of these things impact too much on the over 50s either. We already live in a society that is largely comfortable with a mix of measures. Many of us switch happily between pounds and kilos, pints and litres, miles and kilometres, while clothing is often sized in both inches and centimetres. It’s not a big deal. Almost everyone thought it a bit stupid.  There was one exception.

As I listened to people discussing the matter last week, a woman in her eighties earnestly joined a discussion in my local butcher’s shop. “Oh yes”, she said gleefully. “They’re bringing back pounds, shillings and pence.” There was instant silence. Everyone looked at her and gently explained that that wasn’t going to happen.

Distressingly, I am old enough to remember the official arrival of the decimalisation of our currency back in February 1971. I had just got a job as a junior reporter on my local newspaper so it wasn’t surprising that for several weeks I was regularly despatched to cover meetings and arguments about the imminent switchover to decimal coinage. 

The decision to ditch the nation’s familiar pounds, shillings and pence and replace them with decimal coins had caused a furore. It may have looked like a no brainer to divide the pound into 100 new pence but there were howls of protest from those to whom the then-current pound with its 240 pennies seemed so much more logical…and British.

 To them, decimalisation smacked of bowing to foreign ways. They liked their farthings, halfpennies, threepenny bits, florins and half-crowns too. There were conventions, old and relatively new, that relied on LSD as it was often known. Given the distorted logic of the protestors, it seemed an apt label. I met one man who said that he knew that an old Haig Dimple whisky bottle would hold exactly £40 in sixpences. How was he to save £40 now? 

Shops held training sessions, bank managers gave familiarisation talks, and a booklet was issued with pictures of the new coins. One pensioners’ group I was sent to talk to argued that the Bank of England should wait until ‘all us old uns are dead’ before bringing in the new coinage. 

There was even panic buying. One afternoon I was sent with a photographer to a house that had effectively been turned into an emergency store depot by its elderly owner. He had been buying canned and dried food for weeks, convinced that he would never be able to work out how to pay for anything ever again.

It was clear that messing with a fiscal system that had origins dating back nearly a thousand years was not without its perils. Steps had been taken to integrate the new coins. Several, like the 5p and 10p, had already been introduced alongside existing coinage. 

These were identical in size and shape to the old shilling and florin or two bob bit as it was known. Their presence in people’s change didn’t cause too much of a stir. The nation’s traditionalists weren’t so calm in the Autumn of 1969 when the new 50p coin was introduced to replace the old ten-shilling note. There was an outcry. 

The press called it ‘a monstrous piece of metal’ and, despite it having seven sides, people complained that it was too easily confused with the old Half-Crown. The unfamiliar shape of the new 50p coin annoyed one retired army officer so much that he launched an official protest group, the Anti-Heptagonist Society. 

Even though the new coin featured a portrait of the Queen with Britannia on the reverse, a furious Colonel Essex Moorcroft told reporters: “I have founded the society because I believe our Queen is insulted by this heptagonal monstrosity.” The Queen remained dutifully silent on the issue and by the time Decimalisation Day finally arrived, on 15th February 1971, the furore that had raged so fiercely in the tabloid press seemed already destined to be eclipsed by history.

And that’s why it’ll take a whole lot more than resurrecting the use of a few ancient weights and measures for Boris Johnson to find favour with anyone beyond a certain lunatic fringe. Were he still with us, I’m not even sure that Essex Moorcroft would be on Johnson’s side.

The woman who shot Warhol’s Marilyns

Shot Sage Blue Marilyn soldfor a record breaking $295 million

By Jeremy Miles

When, one day in the autumn of 1964, New York oddball, trickster and sometime photographer Dorothy Podber turned up at The Factory, Andy Warhol’s studio in midtown Manhattan, no one seemed very surprised.

After all 32-year-old Podber, a friend of Warhol’s house photographer Billy Name, seemed to fit right in with the Factory crowd. 

She was certainly weird enough. She hung out with the ‘mole people’, the homeless activists who lived in the disused subway tunnels and sewers beneath the city. Of course, that didn’t faze Andy Warhol. Crazy creatives were good for business. The more the merrier.

What happened next however changed the course of art history and is still having repercussions nearly 60 years later. Podber, dressed to the nines and accompanied by her dog, Carmen Miranda, spotted a stack of recently completed Marilyn Monroe paintings of varying colours leaning against the studio wall.

 Indicating her camera, she politely asked Warhol if she could shoot them. He agreed and, carefully putting on a pair of gloves, she reached into her bag, pulled out a small revolver and fired straight into the stack hitting Marilyn bang between the eyes.

A horrified Warhol watched as she walked out of studio and inspected the damage. He quickly let it be known that Podber woud not be welcome at The Factory again. Four of his five Marilyns had been in that pile. One red, one orange and two blue. They would become known as The Shot Marilyns and, with their bizarre provenance, gradually spiralled in price.

So it was that earlier this month Shot Sage Blue Marilyn was auctioned by Christie’s in New York and sold for $195 million, the highest price ever paid at auction for a work by an American artist. The purchaser was international art dealer Larry Gagosian, thought to have been buying on behalf of an as yet unnamed purchaser.

At the time of Podber’s impromptu attack, which she later claimed was a Happening, a work of performance art, Warhol’s star was beginning to the rise – his Campbells Soup cans had already brought him major publicity – but his Marilyn Monroe paintings had yet to acquire their iconic status. He had decided to produce them after the shock of Monroe’s apparent suicide in 1962 provided him with a one-stop cocktail of his favourite subjects – scandal, death and glamour. He based the image on a publicity shot of the actress used for the  1953 film Niagara. 

Had he sold them at the time they would have fetched no more than a few hundred dollars. He may even have given them away. Three years later, in 1967, prices were rising and the soon to become famous and very rich art collector Peter Brandt paid $5,000 dollars for the other Shot Blue Marilyn. He was just 20-years-old at the time and it was the start of a multi-million dollar collection of art.

Warhol’s reputation was on the up and prices were rising at astonishing speed. Although he was undoubtedly a shrewd operator, quite how much Andy Warhol managed to manipulate his own artistic destiny is unclear. There has been inevitable speculation that he knew that Podber was going to shoot the paintings and perhaps even paid her to do so. I think not. No one could have predicted the eventual outcome and if Warhol had merely wanted to generate publicity, a bullet through just one painting would have done the trick. 

I think the biggest mistake people make when hearing that a painting has sold for nearly $200 million is to imagine that it really must be of unsurpassed quality. ‘A Mona Lisa for the 21st Century’ screamed one headline. 

Sadly at this level, art sales have more to do with the prestige of a small circle of obscenely wealthy dealers and collectors who almost certainly care more about the saleability of work than its actual quality.

At times of stock market volatility, the top-end of the art world provides a lucrative refuge for a certain type of investor by keeping the prices ludicrously high. It’s got little to do with art though.










	


	





	

		
		
Memories of Sven and Julia Berlin
	


	
	
	

		


Sven and Julia Berlin , a pair of bohemians from anothert age.




By Jeremy Miles





A sad letter arrived the other day telling us that Julia Berlin, the lovely widow of my old friend the artist and writer Sven Berlin, died last summer. It came from a firm of solicitors in Penzance who had found our last Christmas card to her while preparing to wrap up the Berlin estate. 





I felt guilty and shocked that we had no idea that Julia was no longer with us but I suppose that was the nature of our relationship. Since Sven’s death in 1999 we exchanged annual Christmas cards with her and occasionally visited the little cottage outside Wimborne that they had shared but we would often go months without making contact. 





Lockdown and the covid restrictions made things more difficult and when there was no card from Julia last Christmas it seemed like just one of those things. We now of course know that there will be no more fascinating and fun chats over tea but we will always treasure memories of their friendship.





Sven and Julia really were an extraordinary couple, a pair of bohemians from another age. She was his third wife and 33 years his junior. They turned heads with their unconventional lifestyle, colourful clothes and free-living attitudes.





By the time they arrived in Wimborne in the mid-1970s, Sven was already both famous and controversial as a writer, painter and sculptor. A leading and sometimes mercurial figure in the immediate pre and post-war art world of St Ives in Cornwall, he made many friends but also rather too many enemies, There were clashes with some big egos, not least those artistic king-pins of the era, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson.






Sven Berlin 




Years later he would speak with enormous fondness of his time in St Ives and his friendship with painters like Bryan Wynter and John Wells. But he also expressed sadness and anger about his clashes with small-town busy-bodies and the powerful and controlling presence of Nicholson and Hepworth. 





These irritants and Sven’s uncompromising and stubborn nature would eventually lead to a devastating fall from grace when he decided to vent his spleen in a book. The Dark Monarch was a barely fictionalised account of the reasons why, after establishing himself as one of the town’s leading lights back in the 1940s, he was finally driven away by those he viewed as small-minded and mean-spirited. It reinvented St Ives as ‘Cuckoo Town’ where no one could live without “being gutted like a herring and spread out in the sun…for all to see.”  





Originally published in 1962, The Dark Monarch was withdrawn from circulation within weeks of publication amid a hail of writs. Little had been done to disguise the identity of the characters. For instance, the poet Arthur Caddick was presented as Eldred Haddock.  Several of those involved were so outraged by their portrayal that they took legal action. Sven refused to make even minor changes. It cost him a small fortune. He was left, in his own inimitable words: “bleeding from every pocket”.  





Ironically The Dark Monarch would, with the passage of time, also be the focus of the major exhibition at  Tate St Ives in 2010 that finally, a decade after his death, showed that Sven Berlin would always be regarded as a key figure in the history of the famous Cornish art colony. 





With all the main litigants dead and special permission from Julia, they even republished the book complete with Sven’s original secret key to exactly who was who.

	


	





	

		
		
Boris Johnson and the  scandal of the care system he claims to have fixed
	


	
	
	

		

They’d never have believed that care home fees would cost them £155,000-a-year





By Jeremy Miles





Watching Prime Minister Boris Johnson trying to squirm his way out of trouble last week was a thoroughly unedifying sight. Abandoned by increasing numbers of Tory MPs in the wake of relentless and continuing Partygate revelations and of course that fixed penalty fine from the Metropolitan Police, he has proved a pathetic and desperate sight.





Having been given a right going over during Wednesday’s Prime Minister’s Questions, a battered and unbelieved Johnson legged it to India on the pretext of doing post-Brexit trade deals. 





This smokescreen didn’t impress the UK journalists who were far more interested in demanding answers about Partygate and pressing Johnson on whether his number is finally up.   





Boris looked haunted and, as he frantically tried to justify his position, he blurted out the usual list of non-achievements designed to make him look good: “I’m absolutely determined to get on and deliver on the pledges we made to the people of this country in 2019…” he burbled.  A list swiftly followed “…building 40 more hospitals, putting 20,000 more police on the street, 50,000 more nurses.…  and getting on with our agenda of fixing social care, as we did.” 





Good Lord, what twisting of the truth. What empty promises. The fact is there won’t be 40 more hospitals and there is little chance of the other targets being reached either. But the claim that sticks in my craw is the boast of “fixing social care, as we did” No you didn’t, Johnson, you lying oaf.





Ask my parents, both in their nineties and living in a care home. Joyce and Ken are old, frail and suffering from multiple health issues. Their decline was relatively swift. They didn’t see it coming. Now  Ken is suffering from advancing Alzheimer’s and  Joyce cannot walk, has compromised eyesight, very poor hearing and severe arthritis in both hands. 





They cannot look after themselves. The only answer is residential care and that costs, boy does it cost. I had no idea what was in store when the Powers of Attorney forms I signed many years ago suddenly needed to be activated and, as their only blood relative in this country, I committed to managing their affairs.






The way they were: Joyce and Ken, young and in love. Photo c.1950




I watched in disbelief as the fees poured in. My mum and dad’s bill, which has just gone up by nine per cent, costs them well over £6,000-a-month EACH. There are additional charges too for hairdressing, chiropody, the dentist, optician, transport for hospital visits and additional clothing. It amounts to around £155,000-a-year and they are not eligible for any grants or benefits except for a monthly payment from the Department of Work and Pensions of £240 each in Attendance Allowance.





Each month I look on helplessly as huge sums are transferred from their account. My parents are, or perhaps I should say were, comfortably off but were not multi-millionaires and this level of expense is neither sustainable nor fair. I should stress that none of this is the fault of the care home which does a wonderful job in the face of its own spiralling bills. It is the fault of the system.





But here is the rub. In 2019 as he entered Downing Street, Boris Johnson promised that no one would have to sell their home to fund their care home fees. Guess what? That’s exactly what I had to do to ensure that my parents would be able to afford long-term care. 





There is supposed to be a cap being introduced in 2023 that will limit the care bills that have to be paid. But promises are routinely broken by this government and after Brexit, the pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the cost of living crisis I can’t help feeling that, come 2023, Boris Johnson or more likely his successor, will kick that particular can even further down the road. Not that the cap is going to help my parents much. By mid-2023 they will already have spent around £500,000 of their own money on care home fees.





Putting the lovely house they had lived in for the past  27 years on the market was heartbreaking.  Clearing treasured possessions with so many memories was truly hurtful. Ironically my dad is protected from the anguish of realising that life as he knew it is over by the cruelty of the very disease that is destroying his mind. The tragic fact is that he really doesn’t know anything anymore. This lovely, gentle, intelligent man who once travelled widely, had a rich and interesting life and loved art, books and the theatre has no memory of the world he once enjoyed so much. I miss our conversations so very much.. 





 My mum is not so ‘lucky’. She is very aware of everything that has happened to her and fully understands what has been lost and why. Fortunately, I have her blessing as well as the support of my wider family for the steps I have had to take. She has been extraordinarily understanding, wise and loving and often tells me how guilty she feels to have caused me so much extra work . Yet I know that the  experiences of the past two or three years have been devastating for her. 





Initially, being taken from her home and separated from her husband after 71 years of devoted marriage pitched her into a state of extreme shock. She was terribly ill for several weeks. But she’s a survivor and being a strong and determined woman, she rallied and is now setting her sights on her 100th birthday. “I’ve only got four and a bit years to do,” she told me recently. “It’s not a prison sentence, mum,” I replied. But on reflection I realise that it probably feels very much like that to her. 





The sad fact is that my mum and dad now have such drastically different needs that they cannot even share a room. They live a floor apart. Dad is in a specialist dementia unit while mum needs nursing care. They do get together on most days for tea but dad can often become agitated and sometimes he simply demands to go back to his room. Mum knows that this uncharacteristic and unpredictable behaviour is caused by his illness but it doesn’t make it any easier. She is 95 years old and has lost everything.





Covid hasn’t helped. Until last week my wife and I  hadn’t seen either of my parents without being required to wear a mass of PPE – a mask, gloves and plastic apron. For the first time, on Good Friday, we managed to dispose of the masks, gloves and apron by having tea with them in an outdoor area. We still had to make an appointment and present a negative covid test before being allowed in.  I’m not complaining. I want my parents and their fellow residents to be safe but it is an indication of how complicated a simple family visit can be.





I suspect this is not something that Boris Johnson could even begin to understand. As we all now know he makes the rules and if they don’t suit, he simply breaks them without a second thought. At the time of the controversial Downing Street and Whitehall parties, my poor mum and dad – sick, frightened and in failing health – were facing the final few months in their own home, under strict lockdown. In June 2020 they celebrated, if that is the word, their 70th wedding anniversary with their live-in carer. A big tea party had been planned but government covid regulations meant that invitations had to be cancelled and we, their son and daughter-in-law, weren’t even allowed in their house. We had to toast them through the patio window and even then had risked being pulled over by the police for travelling 65 miles to their home.





This brings me yet again to the shameful incompetent wretch that is our Prime Minister Boris Johnson. The fact is that he imposed rules on the entire population, enforced them with a proverbial rod of iron and yet when he broke those rules himself he not only tried to deny it but he lied and lied and lied about it. That is completely indefensible. He’s not fit to be Prime Minister. He has to go





We shouldn’t be surprised of course. Even when he was at Eton College his housemaster and classics teacher Martin Hammond wrote: “Boris really has adopted a disgracefully cavalier attitude to his classical studies . . . Boris sometimes seems affronted when criticised for what amounts to a gross failure of responsibility (and surprised at the same time that he was not appointed Captain of the School for next half): I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else.”





This widely leaked comment, taken from a 1982 school report and sent to Johnson’s father, should have been a warning for, sure enough, once he entered the world of work, Boris Johnson soon lived up to his reputation. 





He lied as a journalist and he lied as a politician. He was fired twice for lying even before he became Prime Minister. Back in the 80s, he was sacked from The Times and in 2004 the then Tory Party leader Michael Howard dismissed him as shadow arts minister and party vice-chairman after he lied about an extramarital affair.





Another warning came from journalist and military historian Sir Max Hastings who employed Johnson as his Brussels correspondent when he was editing the Daily Telegraph back in the 1980s.





Writing in 2019 Hastings was horrified and scathing about Johnson becoming Prime Minister. He described him as a cavorting charlatan who was unfit for office and “cared for no interest save his own fame and gratification.” 





Three years later it looks as though Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson has finally run out of runway. I do hope so because I despise everything he represents. There should be no place in modern politics for greedy, self-serving politicians whose sense of privilege, wealth and entitlement is such that it eclipses decency, empathy and concern for anyone but themselves. 

	


	





	

		
		
Brothers in covid quarantine: It’s 50 years since we spent this much time together.
	


	
	
	

		

The Covid Twins – Jeremy and Simon in Bournemouth … 11.01.22





My wife Hattie and I had two visitors this New Year. One, my brother Simon, was very welcome indeed. The other, his exotic friend, Omicron Variant, was not. 





Simon flew in from Los Angeles on the 30th December, eventually arriving via a gruelling six hour transit stop in Dallas that involved, much to his horror, mingling with a massive crowd of hundreds of New Year’s travellers.





Though he, like us, is double vaxxed, boosted and tested negative multiple times both before and after his flight to the UK, by January 4th the almost inevitable had happened. He and I were both positive and effectively under voluntary house arrest. 





Happily our symptoms were relatively mild – not much more than a bit of a cough and cold – but it meant that what for Simon was supposed to be a five day flying visit planned between TV lighting jobs in California, became a two week stay durng which we couldn’t go anywhere or see anyone.





 It definiteky wasn’t what we had planned. We read, we wrote, we watched TV  and caught up on years of conversation. We also gazed longingly at the world beyond our windows while working our way through a couple of boxes of lateral flow tests and waited to be officially declared contagion free. 





Simon finally managed to fly back to California with a clean bill of health on January 12th, arriving just in time to supervise the start of the new series of the US version of The Masked Singer for which he is lighting designer.






Simon, mum and Jeremy more than 50 years ago in Macua




We later worked out that it was the first time for more than 50 years that Simon and I had spent so long in each other’s company. Ths last time was during the school and college holidays in 1970 when we spent a long and lazy summer with our parents in Hong Kong and Macau.











	


	





	

		
		
Desmond Tutu: Remembering a lifelong champion of peace, love and understanding
	


	
	
	

		










He preached peace, love and understanding and campaigned tirelessly for truth and social justice. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel prize winning peace laureate who has died aged 90, was a truly remarkable man. 





Not only did he help end the scourge of Apartheid in South Africa – an extraordinary feat in itself – but he battled on to achieve reconciliation between opposing factions. His intellect, tenacity and humour were crucial elements in the ongoing fight for what is right.For almost 10 years I had the privilege to work regularly with the Tutu Foundation UK and learnt a lot about Desmond Tutu or Arch as he was invariably known. 





This curious encounter between me –  a confirmed atheist – and the world of this man of God occurred like so many other things in my life through a curious chapter of happy accidents. I’m so glad I did. It didn’t make me a believer but it enabled me to witness at relatively close quarters, a charismatic man who was kind, compassionate and caring but certainly no pushover. 





Arch could be tough and fearless when required and was always prepared to speak his mind but he aso had an innate ability to weigh up an argument. He could deliver a devastating criticism often skilfully levened by his wonderful wit. 





By nature Arch was excitable and emotional but his really was the voice of reason. Desmond Tutu made a very real difference to our world..











	


	





	

		
		
Home grown panto at Poole’s Lighthouse proves such a beautiful beast of a show
	


	
	
	

		

Chris Jarvis as Dame Betty Bonbon and Michelle Collins as the wicked Nightshade





Beauty and the Beast, Lighthouse, Poole





Magnifique! Fantastique! Ooh la la! Panto has returned to Lighthouse in Poole. This magical version of Beauty and the Beast has a decidedly Gallic flavour, is the first Lighthouse panto produced entirely in-house and it works like a dream.





Under the assured direction of its writer and star – Cbeebies legend Chris Jarvis – we find the time-honoured fairytale shuttling gloriously between Paris and Dorset.





With music and dance that starts with the La Marseillaise-tinged All You Need is Love and ends with a joyous can can, it is a marvellously family friendly production whic tells  of beautiful Belle (Alice Rose Fletcher) and the handsome Prince Valentin (Wade Lewin).  Brought together by Cupid (an excellent Tom Mann) they are cursed by evil enchantress Nightshade played with relish amid a hail of boos and hisses by soap star Michelle Collins.





With the couple banished to a haunted castle and Valentin turned into a hideous beast, it is down to Belle’s father, Marzipan (Ross Ericson), her sister Souffle (Georgia Grant-Anderson) and Chris Jarvis’s wonderful Dame, Betty Bonbons, to rescue them.





Their mission finds them battling with adversity, coping with cheerful chaos and, with  assistance from Cupid, helping true love finally  battle over evil. With the Prince and Belle freed from Nightshade’s curse, Betty Bonbon getting together with Marzipan and the sulphurously horrible Nightshade suddenly turned into a goody two shoes, there is nothing not to love.





It’s a great pantomime with a very strong cast and full of traditional slapstick and sass, including a riotous prop-laden 12 days of Christmas. There’s a contemporary twist or two and loads of topical humour and music. It’s a covid safe theatre too with state of the art air-con and strict protocols in place.





Chris Jarvis has been playing panto for nearly 30 years and it shows. He is a master of the craft and a brilliant children’s entertainer. Better still, after decades of playing Buttons, Simple Simon or Jack, with a variety of beanstalks, he is now in his 50s and has decided the time has finally come to play the Dame. Believe me the flamboyant Betty Bonbon  has been worth waiting for.





Beauty and the Beast runs at Lighthouse, Poole,  until New Year’s Eve. Do yourself a favour and snap up  tickets for your family.





Jeremy Miles






	


	





	

		
		
Huge new gallery marks  GIANT leap for art in the ‘cultural desert’ that is Bournemouth
	


	
	
	

		


Just one part of GIANT – the  new 15,000 square foot gallery in the centre of  Bournemouth




It is no coincidence that the opening exhibition at Bournemouth’s huge new contemporary art gallery is called Big Medicine. The town centre is ailing and badly needs a shot in its metaphorical arm.





The 15,000 square foot privately-funded gallery, called appropriately enough GIANT, covers the entirety of the second floor of the old Debenham’s building in The Square. It  is part of a much needed plan to inject some life, creativity and culture back into the badly run-down shopping centre. 





Big Medicine, which opened last night, does the job admirably. Curated by Bournemouth artist Stuart Semple, the exhibition and the GIANT gallery space is part of the first phase of a project that will see the old building reborn as Bobby’s which was for many years a much-loved and historic retail landmark in the town






One of Jake and Dinos Chapman’s suicide vests




The free show features the work of major international artists like Jake and Dinos Chapman, Jim Lambie, Gavin Turk, Gary Card, Nicky Carvell, Paola Ciarska, Eva Cremers, Chad Person, Anthony Rodinone and Paul Trefry. 





Not only are the works truly thought-provoking, like the Chapman brothers suicide vests cast in bronze and sometimes loaded with art materials but the whole exhibition is world-class. How wonderful that it has been brought to Bournemouth a town that has so much going for it but in recent years has been branded “a cultural desert”.





 Meanwhile the GIANT gallery also has a dedicated Project Space which is featuring Why We Shout – the Art of Protest.  Curated by Lee Cavaliere, director of VOMA, the world’s first virtual museum in association with Greenpeace, it examines ways in which contemporary artists respond and contribute to protest and activism. 





With works by Banksy, US feminist Martha Rosler, Turner-Prize winner Jeremy Deller, Hong Kong activist-artist Kacey Wong, trans photographer Bex Wade and others it covers climate change, environmental struggles, the illegal rave scene of the 90s, LGBTQ + issues and much more. 











	


	





	

		
		
Talented young Dorset actor Jamie hits Brighton’s mods and rockers battlefield
	


	
	
	

		

It’s good to hear that two years after shooting and then being left on the covid shelf as release dates came and went, the  film Brighton finally gets a digital release tomorrow.





Based on a Steven Berkoff play, it stars Phil Davis and Larry Lamb as a pair of ageing and decidedly non-PC East London rockers returning to Brighton – the battleground of their clashes with sixties mods – for the first time in 40 years.





Jamie Bacon Brighton
Jamie as a young rocker in Brighton





It also features  flashbacks to their youth with up and coming Dorset film and TV actor Jamie Bacon playing the young version of the Larry Lamb character.





 “It was so enjoyable,” he told me. “Being able to watch really experienced actors like Larry and Phil at work was such a privilege. You can learn a huge amount from people like that.” 





Sounds like a great movie. Can’t wait! 





For Jamie’s full story  go to my January 2020 interview with him on these pages.

	


	





	

		
		
London Repertory Players take summer thriller Ira Levin’s Deathtrap to Wimborne
	


	
	
	

		

I am so sorry to see that the wonderful Shelley Theatre in Boscombe has decided not to reopen this summer. Fans of the excellent London Repertory Players will be particularly concerned. The pandemic robbed them of the 2020 season but it was hoped that those plays would be back at the Shelley this summer. Sadly it wasn’t to be.





But fear not. All is not lost. The Players and their ever resourceful director Vernon Thompson have been approached by the Tivoli Theatre in Wimborne. The result is that one of the company’s productions – Ira Levin’s Deathtrap -will be staged at The Tivoli this summer with performances from Wednesday 28th to Saturday 31st July. 





Ira Levin’s Deathtrap marks London Repertory Players debut at The Tivoli Theatre in Wimborne





It will play at  7.30pm each evening plus two 2.30pm matinees on Thursday and Saturday. Featuring LRP favourites including Victoria Porter, Al Wadlan and Claire Fisher, the production already looks like a sure-fire success.





Deathtrap is perfect London Rep’ material. Originally written in the 1970s by Rosemary’s Baby author Ira Levin.  It focuses on a washed playwright desperate to rediscover his talent and repeat his past success. When a student brings him a  brilliant self-penned play he hatches a murderous plot to claim it as his own.





Deathtrap held the record for the longest running comedy thriller on Broadway and is considered a classic of the genre. It was also adapted as a 1980s film with Christopher Reeve, Michael Caine, Dyan Cannon and Sidney Bruhl.





This summer’s London Repertory Players’ production is going to be a must-see. Book tickets at the Tivoli Theatre  on 01202 885566.

	


	





	

		
		
The art deco gem where Harold Pinter swapped stage for page to be reborn
	


	
	
	

		

What wonderful news! Bournemouths Palace Court Theatre is poised to become a town centre performance venue again. For the past 35 years the striking art deco building has served as a Christian centre but long before that it was arguably Bournemouth’s favourite theatre.Now it has been bought by the town’s Arts University and there are multi-million pound plans to restore it as teaching, performance and rehearsal space.





Artists impression of The Palace Court before its 1931 opening





I’ve had a peep inside and can tell you that not only is the original architecture stunning but the building still contains a near perfect 1930s theatre just waiting to be revitalised. In its hey day the venue, which opened in Hinton Road in 1931 was the place to see and be seen.  





As The Palace Court Theatre and The Playhouse, it featured many well known performers.  By the 1950s and 60s it was home to a vibrant repertory company whose members included Sheila Hancock, Vivien Merchant and Merchant’s then new husband, Harold Pinter who at the time performed under the stage name of David Baron. 





The year was 1956 and Pinter’s transition from actor to influential playwright was developing fast. Indeed those who knew him at the time say that during the rep season he spent he was  experimenting and writing new material. His first plays were performed to critical acclaim in the next two years.

	


	





	

		
		
Remembering Cumberland Clark doyen of doggerel who went from bard to verse
	


	
	
	

		






Cumberland Clark: erudite scholar and the doyen of doggerel





I wonder how many people remember Cumberland Clark – writer, critic, Shakespearian scholar and, inexplicably, one of the worst poets to ever wreak havoc on the English language?





Almost exactly 80 years ago the extraordinary literary crimes that he so gleefully committed were finally brought to an end when a wartime enemy  air raid scored a direct hit on his Bournemouth flat. Both Clark and his loyal housekeeper Miss Kathleen Donnelly were killed.





Though London born and well-travelled, Bournemouth was Cumberland Clark’s adopted home. He loved the town and in the final decades of his life he eulogised it endlessly, churning out ghastly doggerel that made a mockery of his classical education and previous serious literary endeavours.





The Bournemouth Songbook, which he first privately published in 1929, contained more than 150 ‘songs’ in verse so plodding that you have to marvel at his endless determination to find a rhyme, however awful it might be.





How about such dubious gems as:-





For many years I’ve held a brief





For Bournemouth’s Golden Sands





Indeed A1 in my belief





Are Bournemouth’s Golden Sands





You lie on your back from ten till one,





And get well baked by the genial sun;





And then turn over when you’re done





On Bournemouth’s Golden Sands.





or





The bathing at Bournemouth is good





Which appeals to the holiday creature





Among seaside joys this has stood





As by far the most popular features





There’s nothing the sport to supplant





It’s joy for each person who swims





And gives to those people who can’t 





A chance to exhibit their limbs





or





When in Bournemouth if you’ve got





A notion that you would like a yacht





And your cash is quite a lot





Go and buy one on the spot





Folks will point and say ‘Big Pot’





Simply tons of money, what?





A millionaire he is. Great Scot!





And all that kind of tommy rot





Why he penned these outrageously constructed ‘songs’ which also often extolled the virtues of neighbouring towns and villages, remains a mystery.





Cumberland Clark was essentially an erudite and well read man who for reasons best known to himself delighted in reinventing himself as Bournemouth’s very own answer to William McGonagall. Maybe he was just having fun. Whatever the reason, he was a splendid eccentric, immaculately dressed and, I am told, prone to standing on street corners and striking impressive poses.





Self-aware and opinionated he was particularly fond of encouraging the attention of young women. He would acknowledge them with a cheeky wink and a twirl of his snow-white moustache. 





His intentions seem to have been quite innocent and it is said that waitresses would fight to serve at his table because by lavishing a little extra attention on him they would be guaranteed a generous tip.





Poor Cumberland Clark he was eternally optimistic and at the outbreak of World War II, by then in his late 70s, he produced a patriotic and morale-boosting collection called War Songs of the Allies. It included the following verse:





Let the bombs bounce round about us





And the shells go whizzing by





Down in our air raid shelter





We’ll be cosy, you and I





Sadly when the bombs and shells did fall on Cumberland Clark’s flat in St Stephens Road in Central Bournemouth in April 1941, he was not protected by the safety of an air-raid shelter but fast asleep in bed.





At least there is striking memorial to his memory. He made sure of that. Not only did he design an impressively over-the-top monument complete with guardian angle but he had it in place in the Bournemouth East Cemetery a full six years before his death. “So that there will be no bother or anxiety to fall back on relatives or friends”  he told the local press.





He had it inscribed too with the words ‘Sacred to the memory of Cumberland Clark, poet, historian, dramatist … The longer I live the more do I turn to Christianity as the one hope of salvation, the one faith for the soul of man, the one comfort in distress, and the one and only power that can save the world.’ 










Nothing if not thorough, Cumberland Clark left £500 to the NSPCC on the condition that they maintained his grave. He also told the minister at his local church that he didn’t care if everything else he had written was lost but he wanted his self-penned epitaph to remain.





So far it does and seems well kept even though the words are becoming a little worn by age and gradually harder to decipher.





How long will his legacy endure? There used to be a Cumberland Clark Memorial Society that held an annual dinner in his honour but that seems to have petered out around a decade ago. Unless of course you know better.

	


	





	

		
		
The day Colonel John Blashford Snell blew up a village fish pond hunting killer ‘Jaws’
	


	
	
	

		

They don’t make ‘em like Colonel John Blashford Snell anymore. This larger than life soldier and explorer has done it all. He made the first descent of the Blue Nile, crossed the Darién Gap,drove from Alaska to Cape Horn and pioneered the navigation of the Congo River.





Oh yes and he also blew up a village fish pond in Kent in a bid to destroy a monster which had been munching its way through thousands of valuable goldfish.





I know because I was there.  Forty four years ago to this very day I was a young reporter on the Kentish Gazette in Canterbury. I had been despatched to the nearby village of Ickham after the newsdesk heard that the British Army was rolling into the Garden of England in pursuit of a rogue fish that had been causing havoc in a local goldfish breeder’s pond. There were even rumours that the aquatic killer – instantly nicknamed Jaws – had been deliberately  bred by the Russians.










To be honest I didn’t believe a word of it but, if nothing else, it was a morning out and had the makings of a cracking little tale. Imagine my astonishment when I arrived in Ickham to find a large pond in the grounds of a posh country-manor care home surrounded by a team of Army frogmen and explosives experts. The Colonel – known universally as Blashers –  was directing operations. They really did pull out all the stops. An armoured car, complete with machine gun, sat incongruously on the adjacent ‘Darling Buds of May’ lawn. 





The owner of both the care home and pond, a former trawler skipper turned goldfish breeder called Alf Leggett, was making it clear to anyone who would listen that blowing up his pond was fine by him. There had been 3,000 goldfish in its murky waters just a few weeks ago but now so few were left that their death by friendly fire was a small price to pay for the demise of the dreaded Jaws.





The Army press office, sensing some positive publicity plus the opportunity for an exercise, had put the word around and gradually the UK media – always game for a quirky yarn – started arriving in the village. By the time Blashers gave the order to detonate the charges half of Fleet Street and a couple of TV crews were preparing to witness the demise of Jaws. The resulting explosion sent a plume of water, pondweed, fish, frogs and heaven knows what else at least 50 feet in the air and swamped the assembled press. Someone made a joke about a ‘newt-tron bomb’ and Alf Legget looked on in delight. 





Had Jaws been exterminated? No one knew. And gradually it dawned on us that Mr Leggett wasn’t particularly concerned. He had a 30 or 40 strong press pack in his back garden and as Blashers and his men started to pack up their kit, he invited the reporters into the care home for Champagne and a good look around. Before long brochures were being handed out and details of the perceived delights of the care facility were being bandied around,.





Viewed from the perspective of 2021 this story offers a curious snapshot of an era. A time when the British Army was still big enough to enjoy a bit of fun, when newspapers could afford to send multiple reporters and photographers  on jobs that took them away for days at a time and business people believed that no effort was too great in the pursuit of publicity.





But what of the killer fish? Well, a couple of days later two men from the Southern Water Board clambered into a rowing boat and set out across the pond clutching a fishing net and an electric prod. They eventually found a large perch which was stunned, slightly damaged and possibly rather hungry. It was removed and released into nearby reservoir but not before having it’s photograph taken. The caption simply read ‘Jaws’.










	


	





	

		
		
The strange world of sculptor and self-styled ‘rebellious old sod’ Geoffrey Dashwood
	


	
	
	

		






Two huge Harris Hawks outside sculptor Geoffrey Dashwood’s Hampshire home





Here’s another one I did earlier. Well several years back actually. Probably around 2012. It was written for the now long-gone Compass Magazine and offered an intriguing insight into the curious world of New Forest sculptor Geoffrey Dashwood. Thought it was worth revisiting.





*********





By Jeremy Miles





Internationally renowned wildlife sculptor Geoffrey Dashwood is an anomaly in an art world full of pretensions and psycho-babble. His works – stunning sculptures of birds – sell across the world, often for tens of thousands of pounds, yet he would rather have teeth pulled than have to play the gallery game. He prefers to work remotely at his home deep in the Hampshire countryside outside Ringwood. Perched on the edge of an escarpment with views for 30 miles across Hampshire and Dorset, it’s an otherworldly place.





Surrounded by monumental bronze sculptures – a one-and-half ton,12 foot tall Peregrine falcon dominates the entrance – the Dashwood home is a marvel to behold.  As you walk across the lawn there are are two huge Harris hawks, a barn owl, a tern, a great crested grebe and a frog. A massive Mandarin drake sits on a plinth in the middle of a pond: “We built the pond for the sculpture rather than the other way around,” says the 66-year-old artist matter-of-factly.





Nestling amidst ancient forest, the natural setting of this house is astonishing too. He points to a huge gnarled old oak which is believed to be 700 years old. “Incredible to think that that was an acorn in about 1300,” he says. 





The site is even believed to have been used for beacons warning of the approach of the Spanish Armada.  Dashwood has lived there with his wife Val and three sons Leo, Max and James for 17 years. He says he really can’t imagine being anywhere else.





Despite his international reputation  and prices that range from £2,000 to £250,000, he eschews most private views and even tries to avoid discussing works with potential buyers. “I’m a rebellious old sod,”he told me as we looked around the huge studio and home gallery that he has built in a barn just yards from his front door. Sucking on a liquorice paper roll-up and swearing like a proverbial trooper, he warmed to his theme. “I don’t do commissions because to be honest I am too awkward and bloody-minded. They all too often end in tears because the person commissioning the piece and the artist have a different idea about the end result. So it’s very, very simple. I just do exactly what I want to do and then offer the work for sale.”





Chippy and uncompromising he may be but Geoffrey Dashwood’s prickly exterior clearly masks a sensitive soul who deeply cares that his work is an honest response to the natural world that he loves. Hampshire born and bred, he has a rare affinity with the New Forest and in his youth worked there as a keeper.  Although he won a scholarship to art school in Southampton when he was just 15-years-old, he dropped out within weeks. “I hated it,” he says. The Forestry Commission provided the only job he could hang onto. “Basically I‘m absolutely unemployable,” he explains. 





Doing artwork for forestry brochures provided some personal satisfaction. He seized the moment and left to go freelance. Amazingly Dashwood didn’t turn to sculpture until he was in his mid 30s. He modelled a tiny English partridge and loved the whole process. With a £5,000 loan from the kind of bank manager that doesn’t exist anymore he made a series of bronze castings and touted his work around upmarket outlets in London – Harrods, Aspreys, Garrards and the galleries of Cork Street. 





Thinking about it now he says he’s amazed that he had the nerve to walk into such elitist emporiums and demand to see the bronze buyer. Somehow it paid off. He was on his way. Initially he concentrated on miniatures but then moved on to life-size and monumental sculptures. The one-man shows and international reputation soon followed.





He has successfully experimented with abstracting the fine detail of the birds down to studies of pure sculptural form. He has also explored the effects that can be achieved with multi-coloured patinas. He recalls eyebrows being raised when he asked at the foundry that he used what would happen if he splattered a mixture of all three commonly used chemicals –  liver sulphate, ferric nitrate and cupric nitrate – on his bronzes.





“They were horrified. They said ‘You can’t do that’ and I just said ‘Oh yeah, and where’s the book that says I can’t?’ We went ahead and it was brilliant. It’s incredible that no one had ever done that before, but that’s the conservatism of the art world for you.”





He knows he’s been lucky, gaining a rare reputation and enjoying success despite a stubborn refusal to bend to the whims of either clients or art professionals. 





“I’ve had a very self-indulgent life,” says Dashwood. “The extraordinary thing is that logically choosing to do this kind of sculpture should have involved a compromise between what I want to do and what the market price demands. I discovered that the more self-indulgent I became the more the market would rise to it.”






	


	





	

		
		
Memories of  best-selling fantasy novelist David A. Gemmell and death on the page
	


	
	
	

		

Fantasy author  David A. Gemmell at work in his final days as a newspaper man in 1986










I FIRST met the best-selling fantasy author David A.Gemmell nearly 40 years ago. He was standing on my doorstep pretending to be John Wayne.  He was also about to become the editor of the newspaper I worked for and had decided that a face-to-face meeting on home turf would be the perfect way to introduce himself to his new senior staff.





Whether this was a good idea or not, I don’t know. I found the idea of a  new boss I’d never met before hammering on my front door and demanding a get-to-know-you  session a little unsettling.  Dave –  never David in those days – was, I quickly worked out, far more scared by the encounter than I was. 





He talked nineteen to the dozen about his great passions, the songs of Bob Dylan, the films of John Ford and his great hero Wayne.  He would later have a framed picture of the movie star on his office wall. I don’t think he mentioned newspapers once. He certainly didn’t ask anything about me. He finally departed, moseying in classic style down my front path with the words “Walks off slowly into the sunset.” The fact that it was 10 O’clock at night and pitch dark didn’t appear to register. 





A man with a rampantly overactive imagination and sense of romance,  he was horrifyingly ill-equipped to deal with the day to day reality of editing a newspaper. If there was a meeting he didn’t want to attend he just wouldn’t turn up . I believe there was even a summons to court once that he conveniently mislaid. 





When I worked with him in the early 1980s Gemmell spent a lot of time shut in his office endlessly reworking  the manuscript of what would become his breakthrough novel Legend. As a journalist he was always an inspired writer. However he suffered the fate that so often awaits high-flyers in the newspaper business, promotion to a job that frankly he was never cut out to do. Gemmell seemed singularly unsuited to the editor’s chair and the management was clearly alarmed at his lack of interest in actually editing the paper. 





He was on borrowed time but it didn’t matter. Legend was a huge success and a string of best sellers followed. When he eventually got his marching orders, Gemmell was already a publishing sensation. Today, 15 years after his untimely death from heart disease, there are still websites devoted to his work and a great many fans for whom he will always be regarded as a towering talent among authors.





I can’t say that his work actually had any significant literary merit but it was certainly commercially successful. My memory of Dave Gemmell will be of a maverick newspaperman who worked out how to use his talents as a tabloid hack to become a hard-hitting and successful novelist. It can’t have been easy. It was a path that many had tried and failed to follow before.





As a colleague and a boss he was talented, fun and fascinatingly unpredictable. He was also a little crazy and, behind the wheel of a car, positively dangerous. For the best part of a year or so he would drive me weekly across southern England to stone-sub the paper. I’m still not sure how we survived.





Happily we did and I have good memories of the times we spent together. Dave even paid me the dubious compliment of having me killed on page 255 of his 1986 novel Waylander. In interviews he has said that he based his characters on real people. He even claimed that he was eventually sacked from the newspaper for using thinly disguised versions of company staff as characters in his book. I hope not because  I am immortalised as a young soldier called Milis. In the space of a page and a half Gemmell has me swapping tall stories about the local whores before I get three arrows in my back and have my throat cut by a marauding invader. It must have been something I said? 

	


	





	

		
		
The day town crier Chris banned Bob Dylan from his own Glastonbury dressing room
	


	
	
	

		

 Wimborne Militia and the town’s then Mayor watch Bob Geldof plant a rosemary bush in 2002. Photo: Hattie Miles





Oh the perils of being misunderstood on social media! It’s happened to all of us and  usually it’s a minor matter and easily resolved.





But a couple of weeks back the harmless and well-meaning folk of the Wimborne Militia had their Facebook pages deleted after being inexplicably mistaken by an over-zealous algorithm for a bunch of alt-right thugs.





Nothing could be further from the truth of course. The Militia are a group of historic re-enactors who dress in 17th century military costume and are familiar sight at fetes, parades and festivals in the ancient Dorset market town.





It seems they became unwittingly caught up in Facebook’s creditable bid to root out far right extremists and conspiracy theorists operating militia groups mainly in America. Thankfully Facebook realised its error and the accounts were quickly reinstated. 





Militia leader, gently eccentric Wimborne Town Crier Chris Brown told the BBC:  “I wouldn’t want us to be associated with some of those violent people over there carrying round guns and talking about open rebellion – we talk about peace and community understanding.”





Indeed he always has. I remember Chris once telling me that back in the early 1970s he was far too much of a hippy to become a serious biker even though his Norton Dominator 650 SS was the envy of the local motorcycle gangs.





  “They loved looking at my bike but I used to wear crushed velvet jackets and I don’t think they could really deal with that. Anyway, I could never have been a Hells Angel or whatever. I hate aggression and I’m vegetarian so biting the head off a live chicken would be out of the question.” 





Peacenik Chris has also done his bit at a variety of very non aggressive music festivals appearing on stage with Texan psychedelic visionaries The Polyphonic Spree at Glastonbury, Leeds and Reading.





He also worked as a volunteer backstage marshal at Glastonbury for a number of years and has the dubious distinction of once trying to ban Bob Dylan from his own dressing room.





 “I was told that no one but Dylan was allowed in so when this strange looking bloke turned up and knocked on the door I told him to go away. He fixed me with this really weird stare and just said: ‘Do you know who I am?’





“ I said; ‘I haven’t got a clue mate but no one but Bob Dylan comes in here.’ “Then he just stared at me and I realised that he had an eight foot security man with him. I thought ‘Oh yeah, I know who you are.’ 





Dylan, he says, was rather distant and aloof.





Closer to home Chris has had a number of other rock ’n’ roll encounters. Not least the day when Bob Geldof, in town for a gig at the Tivoli Theatre, was ‘volunteered’ to conduct a planting ceremony at the then brand new Wimborne physic garden. As he planted a rosemary bush, Chris and the Militia fired a celebratory round of musket fire.