BOHEMIANS IN EXILE: THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF ART IN AMBLESIDE.
Students in Ambleside by Sheila Donaldson 1944.
Appearances can be deceptive. Outwardly Ambleside in the early 1940s appeared like any other small rural community, tight knit and essentially conservative. However, its long history of tourism had given it a particular perspective, where transience was the norm. As its own young people had left to join the forces or undertake war work, they had been replaced by child evacuees, wealthy self-evacuees, locally stationed troops and prisoners of war. Nevertheless, what the village had not bargained for was the arrival of 150 art students, exotic creatures who filled the two major hotels and effectively infiltrated and transformed the life of the village, bringing colour to the grey wartime streets.
The students themselves had returned to the Royal College of Art in South Kensington in September 1940, to find it closed, its windows blown out and a note on the door stating that it would reopen ‘in the near future, somewhere in the country’. Three months later they arrived in Ambleside, their numbers depleted by National Service, and many utterly bemused by this alien rural environment. The staff were also fewer and older, many including Paul and John Nash, Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden recruited as official war artists. Despite this, the college was still able to retain the main schools: Painting, Sculpture, Design, Engraving and Architecture, and remained in Ambleside until September 1945.
The first impressions of Senior Drawing Tutor, Percy Horton were glowing, ‘The RCA has chosen a superb spot… fine landscapes & magnificent vistas abound on all sides...’. But, whilst the location might have appeared idyllic, one student, the agoraphobic Arthur Berry admits that he never walked further than to the bar of the Waterhead Hotel. For him the natural world was a malign mystery, he recalls being ‘overwhelmed by the immediate vastness of it... There was no beginning and no end of it, and in summer there were midges and flies and worse still people who looked at what you were doing and asked questions about it.’
Most first year students were lodged in the two main hotels, The Queens and The Salutation. Gilbert Spencer, Professor of Painting, complained bitterly of: ‘60 students sleeping 3 to 5 in a room. No Sick Bay. No fire escapes. No night watchman. No fires in bedrooms…’. Percy Horton was rather more sanguine: ‘I have a decent smallish room here, comfortably fitted up with constant running hot water...Certainly they are doing their best for us’. Les Duxbury, a student from Lancashire, was also much delighted by the plentiful supplies of hot water, particularly welcome in winter when coke and coal supplies were irregular, and Arthur Berry, who had never before been inside an hotel, was much impressed by being addressed as ‘sir’.
In their second-year students moved out into houses, many of which had previously served as private hotels for ‘discerning tourists’. Others had more thrifty ideas. One enterprising group of females converted the upper floor of a barn behind The Golden Rule for both sleeping and working with access by means of an external wooden ladder.
If living arrangements were sometimes difficult, working conditions were invariably a challenge, with materials in short supply, freezing studios in a variety of converted buildings and poor lighting. Etching and engraving were taught in The Salutation and Painting on the second floor of the Queen’s Hotel. A particular hazard was the resident mouse population, which delighted in nibbling paintings which contained egg powder. The Salutation Pavilion was used for architectural studies as well as lettering and calligraphy, although it was often so cold that students worked in overcoats, scarves and woollen mittens making it almost impossible to handle compasses, T-squares and calligraphy pens. The Sculpture School was set up in a large unheated garage and the Textiles Department was based in a converted barn. As the ‘Picture Post’ reported in July 1943, students had converted ‘...a cowshed... old pigeon lofts and garage attics into patched-up, whitewashed studios, isolated above rickety ladders.’
Acceptance of the College as part of village life emerged gradually. A major impact was made by the RCA’s theatre group whose first play ‘Ladies in Retirement’; a thriller based on a real murder that took place in the 1880s, was a roaring success. Their second production, Chekhov’s ‘The Seagull’, also received glowing reviews and was to be followed in 1945 by a yet more ambitious project, a production of ‘A Midsummer’s Night Dream’. Percy Horton was prevailed upon to take part, ‘making a splendid Bottom.’
Musical entertainment included the regular Saturday Night Hop at the Queen’s Pavilion, with jazz and blues, jive, boogie-woogie and be-bop. Student Les Duxbury fondly recalls his friend Fred Brill shuffling about all evening ’on a couple of square yards of floor space … sometimes half hidden in the cloud of smoke from his pipe.’ Rather more energetic were the jitterbuggers and in particular John Thistlethwaite, an engraving student from Barnsley, famous for doing everything with great determination, including dancing, ‘On the floor he jumped, twisted and kicked. He whirled his partner upwards sideways and around, no matter who she was.’
The College’s annual exhibition of 1941 attracted 1,000 visitors, far more than at its pre-war London showings; the number doubled in 1942. Mural paintings appeared in a number of local buildings, including one in an Ambleside school by Bill Kempster and Barrymore Evans of coal miners at work; and another in the Parish Church by Gordon Ransom of the Ambleside Rushbearing.
Inevitably the students spent much time in the local hostelries. The White Lion, across the road from The Queen’s Hotel, was much favoured after Sunday dinner. The atmosphere was decorous, and the landlady tolerated the students in small doses. Livelier was The Unicorn where the piano was pounded on by both students and locals indulging in impromptu sing-songs. However, most popular was The Golden Rule on Smithy Brow, under long serving hosts Albert and Minnie Faulkner. As Les Duxbury explains, ’Sometimes groups of students congregated there for the sole intention of talking about art… a fact which, we suspected, the staff never appreciated... The discovery had been made that discussion was best conducted in a pub, especially in the Golden Rule’. Friday night gatherings around the coal fire included discussions and sing-songs, drawing in the local clientele including poacher Lanty Langhorn with his spirited rendition of ‘The Mard’le Hunt’.
In the summer the students walked, cycled and bathed in the lakes. During the winter months skating was a popular activity, so much so the Principal, Professor Jowett issued a veto against skating during working hours. However students continued at night by moonlight, as Wordsworth had done a century before. Student George Jardine described the scene at Rydal as ‘like a Bruegel painting’, and though few of the students were proficient, most could at least ‘keep on their feet long enough to get their circulation going and end up out of breath.’
Attitudes to the College altered significantly with the arrival of students wounded and traumatised from the war. Arthur Berry recalls that ‘One man had is leg off … another had returned with his nerves shattered to such an extent that he wore bicycle clips around his trouser legs to stop rats running up them.’ Several students suffered from malnutrition and depression was not uncommon. The grimmest episode occurred in June 1943 with the death of Richard Seadon, aged just 18. The Westmorland Gazette reported that Seadon was found in his room at the Queens Hotel, his Home Guard Lee Enfield rifle, a relic of the First World War, by his side. Various accounts describe Seadon as ‘depressed’ and ‘temperamental’. The coroner gave a verdict of death from a gunshot wound, self-inflicted, whilst of unsound mind.
Participation in the Home Guard brought together men of all ages and social positions. Two sergeants in the Ambleside Battalion, Jock Connelly a local painter and decorator and Fred Brill student in the Painting School became great allies in debates, united by their socialist sympathies. Brill’s painting of Ambleside Home Guard members drew strongly on this sense of friendship and community.
The Home Guard defended key positions like the water works and the gas works and each company of twenty men took it in turns to guard the village by night. Gilbert Spencer describes his pride at being able to ‘crawl a hundred yards without my behind showing above the skyline. I stormed the heights of Nabscar, helped restore the defences of Windermere when knocked down by the sheep … and by a mistaken choice of parades found myself shying live hand grenades at the side of Loughrigg.’ He went on to produce a series of twelve satirical but affectionate drawings of the life and times of the Home Guard, much in the tradition of the 18th and early 19th century caricaturists. Spencer sent them to a publisher only to have them returned, torn to ribbons. This, he admits frightened him. Thirty years later in his autobiography he remarked that the popular television programme ‘Dad’s Army’, ‘had it appeared in wartime, might not have been thought so funny.’
The Home Guard was stood down in late 1944, and on May 8th 1945 the official end of the war in Europe was proclaimed with a national holiday. In Ambleside Market Place flags and bunting were hung and the church bells rang. The College celebrated with a lunch at the Salutation. Licensing hours were relaxed, the pubs were open all day and much revelry ensued. The long day ended with a glorious sing-song in ‘The Rule’.
The legacy of the Ambleside years is complex. For the RCA it was all about survival and despite the hardships many students emerged from these years to become successful professional artists and designers or influential teachers. For the local community it was a different challenge, one of understanding and acceptance. Student Donald Pavey described his contact with local people as ‘so memorable as to colour the quality of the rest of my life… full of kindness and loving concern for our aspirations.’
The RCA had painted its way into Lakeland folklore, and would be remembered with a wry smile, for many years to come.
Football match between The Golden Rule and The Royal Oak by John Thistlethwaite, 1945. Courtesy of the Faulkner family, Ambleside.
First published in ‘Cumbria and Lakeland Walker’ April 2024.