The End and the Beginning

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• Dear Josie,
  The actor Benedict Cumberbatch plays Jimmy Langley.

  The Racing Correspondent, Roger Mortimer took part in the same rear guard action and was captured, after being knocked-out. Later in life his letters to his wayward son, Charlie in the 1960s and 70s were publish by Nick Robinson of Constable Robinson. Wonderfully Humourous, the book "Dear Lupin" became a best seller and the source of a West End play.

• Dear Josie,
  The 3 part BBC docudrama (2004) covers the rear guard action in its third episode (deliverance). We see the action taking place through the eyes of Jimmy Langley. Whose hand written notes and order of battle he sent to my grandmother.

  • Now I'm wondering if that's available somewhere.
    Thanks for the info Nicholas.

• Dear Josie,
  As well as being an artist I have, for thirty years or so supplied many an author with historical data. Much to do with the Second World War, and indeed stretching across huge tracks of the Medieval. Dunkirk I know is one of your subjects. I was once at a dinner party where all four of us husbands discovered that we had grandfathers who were killed in action whilst fighting the rear guard action - and so keeping the Germans away from the embarkations all along the coast around Dunkirk. In my paternal grandfathers case all five officers killed in the battalion were related. Their bodies were not given a burial for a year. Slowly DNA has allowed their names to be added to their headstones instead of just their rank and regiment.

  • That must have been quite the dinner party! The story of that rear guard action is so often lost in the telling of the "miracle".

• Dear Josie,
  The topped hatted boys in the photograph are wearing Eton Jackets. At Harrow, Eton Jackets were worn only by the most junior of boys or those under 5ft 4in. At Harrow such jackets were called in our jargon "bumfreezers". These were worn on Sundays and Special occasions such as Speech Day. The other boys at the school wore tails for such days. The rest of the time we wore bluers and greyers. We wore a black tie in mourning for Queen Victoria. Our hats were boaters whilst Etonians wore top hats. Only Harrow monitors had top hats with tails, and they did not wear "bumfreezers".

  Cecil Beaton photographed in the Western Desert. He lived,towards the end of his life at Broad Chalke in Wiltshire, where indeed he is buried. It is the same village where the diarist, John Aubrey had lived, and where now, each year a well attended Literary Festival is held.

  • I defer to you on the school outfit front. I'm surprised though that someone has not pointed this out to all the stock photo and newspaper folks who use it so often and misidentify the name of the school.

    And you are a wonderful mine of fascinating items from history. Thanks.

• Dear Josie,
  I wonder if your are missing an opportuity here. The photographer Ceil Beaton photographed the destruction of war. He was an Old Harrovian like your "Mr Chips" Mervyn Comrie - as was the artist, Claude Francis Barry (The Park) who crops up in another one of your articles. I lived with a "Barry" on my walls for a period of time some forty years ago. His family called his paintings "room dividers" since they were painted to a large scale. Indeed it was Barrys influence that broght me to my present stage of painting with the juxtaposition of bright colours. Barrys son, Rupert, captured at Dunkirk, was one of the first British officers to be imprisioned in Colditz. Indeed there is a well known group photograph of them. Rupert, in the photograph sports a stashe and wears a cricket jersey. In fact he escaped. In your article of Mervyn Comrie there is a photograph of a pair of top hatted boys. They are Etonians. It was optional to vanish the boaters yourself. However the wind did have a habit of blowing them off the head and under the wheels of of a passing car ( Inspite of the hat band at the back of the head - which was seldom utilised).

  • Interesting stuff, as usual Nicholas. Thanks. All the credits for that Lord's photo say that the boys are from Harrow, not Eton. If that's wrong then it's a perfect example of - once a mistake is made it multiplies.

    I'm familiar with Beaton's war work but other than Tower Bridge, London: A War-Time Nocturne I am unfamiliar with Barry's art. I shall have to go explore. Love the idea of "room dividers" as a term of fine art appreciation!

    Ben Macintyre's book about Colditz is on my reading list. (I loved the BBC TV series back in the 1970s. )

• Dear Josie,
  There are a few examples of my work dotted around, but not very many. It really depends on what combination of words you use in the search engine. My one man shows are self organised - usually in London, where I throw myself at the mercy of media friends to generate a presence. Indeed I have shown at Private venues in New York and New England where also I have painted a mural or two. Some examples of my old style of painting and photographs are registered with the Brigeman Art Library. There has been much evolution in the last twenty years or so. I still paint ruins - but the juxtaposition of colour choice has come into its own with Fauvist undertones. I have no Website.

  I was once asked to put together the outline for a television documentary devoted to British War Artists. Two of those on my list had fought in the Second World War. Over the years, I had met and got to know, as friends many of those who had fought behind enemy lines during the war. One of those artists was David Cobb whose main job was to run, on dark nights, special agents with his MTB into the coast of France. The second artist I met only twice, was Brian Stonehouse, when an old school friend of mine gave him an exhibition. Stonehouse had operated behind enemy lines in France. He had been captured and survived Dachau by drawing his captors and fellow S.O.E prisoners (most of whom would be subsequently shot). Stoneshouses work is in the Imperial War Museum.

  • Thanks Nicholas - you've provided some great leads here. I shall follow-up. Thank-you.

• Dear Josie,
  My maternal grandfather was a Battery commander at Alamein and subseqently at Monte Cassino. Ted Todhunter, his contempory had already been captured and ended up in Campo 12, the prison camp for Commonwealth Generals. However there, in Italy my grandfather came across the artist Edward Seago. When I was a child, in my grandparents library, there was a copy of an illustrated book detailing Seagos time in Italy with the Allied armies. In my twenties I specialised in painting historical ruins. This book, which is now in my library, was the inspiration to go one step further and become a painter of war ruins. (I have gone several steps further since then). I belonged, and indeed still belong to a very lose set of war artists. None of us are of the same school but all are independent war artists where life is certainly more hectic. (no minders) The CNN War Correspndent Jack Laurence (read his book "The Cat from Hue," it is superbe) asked me once at a book launch why I risked my life to paint on the front line. I threw the question back at him as far as his Vietnam days were concern. Neither of us could come up with a credible answer.

  • Quite the family history! I remember hearing parts of it in your interview with the IWM. (My brother has a compass with a radioactive luminous dial that our father swapped for something with an Italian prisoner of war somewhere in the Western Desert.)

    How interesting to know someone who met Edward Seago. I am familiar with some of his landscapes of the east coast and have always admired his work.

    Interesting exchange with Jack Laurence - there is no accounting for what drives us to do what we do when it seems to be counter to common sense and for no good reason. I shall have to look for that book.

    In terms of your own work - are there any other examples available to see online? (I couldn't locate any.)

• Dear Josie,
  I have a particular penchant for the juxtaposition. I am reminded of an R.F.C pilot I once met. He described to me how they would attack the German lines with bombs dropped by hand over the side of the biplane. Their aiming device was a small apperture in the floor of the aeroplane over which was stretched a crosswire. When these pilots got a weekend leave, they would fly back to to England and within a matter of hours would be a guest at a formal dinner party, white tie and tails, in London. They would be back in France over the German trenches again by Monday morning. Another person I met told me that during the Second World War she was at a tennis party where at the same time, they could see and hear the Stuka dive bombers attacking Portsmouth harbour for two hours. When I was in Zagreb one particular Friday I was at a dinner party given by a Croatian friend. The entire meal was perforated by gunfite and tracer bullets slanting up into the sky. This was not an attack but a ritual performance, celebrating Friday night. The following week I was sitting in a street cafe again on a Friday night when a soldier calmly stepped out into the street, drew his pistol, held it aloft with both hands and fired a whole magazine into the air. He shouted something then returned to his drink at his table. Nobody batted an eyelid.

  • It's always interesting when you allow your mind to wander a little and start making connections and associations. Your anecdotes reminded me of my father who grew up in a farmhouse right on the Sussex cliffs and spoke of how they could hear the guns across the channel when there was a big push on the Western Front. And my grandmother's story of giving birth in Croyden during a Zeppelin raid. I have no such dramatic stories to tell from direct experience although we are all surrounded by the oddities of our collective lives - the coincidences, the random happenings, the "just missed a metaphorical bullet" moments.

• AVENGING ANGELS
  They say, come the hours of dark,
  The angels visit to mark
  The next man to die.
  And lovely corpses lie
  With a look on their faces
  which, some say, bare the traces
  of the angels touch;
  And there's nothing so much
  As the dead mans stare,
  In the moonlight where
  The soldiers talk to the dead;
  And the angels, it is said,
  Are but shadows passing by.
  But they mark the men to make them die.
  Copyright 2023 Nicholas.R.A.Gibbs

  • This is very effective - and affecting - Nicholas. Works really well when read out loud too.

• On the day I painted "Ruins of war" I had managed to persuade the Croat checkpoint to allow me through into the battlezone. As I walked down the road towards the devastated town of Petrinja some 6 kms away, a patrol car took pity on me and offered me a lift. Considerable refugee traffic was streaming in the opposite direction. I was dropped at the edge of town with the warning that I should not venture off the road as everywhere was mined (or booby trapped). I seemed to be the only cilivian in the town (which was seething with military activity). In a surreal twist, three hours later on my walk back towards the checkpoint the refugee traffic quite literally dried up. The long and strait road, both ways became totally deserted. Then in the distance, from where I had just come, I noticed with apprehension, two soldiers, at least a kilometre away coming towards me (shades of the Well scene in the film Lawrence of Arabia). I waited and by chance beside a request bus stop. As the soldiers came within three or four hundred yards of me a bus appeared as if from nowhere in the distance. The soldiers hailed it and all three of us boarded a former tourist bus without a word being said.

  • Dear Josie,
    There indeed a footnote to that day. I had taken a train from Zagreb to Sisak. No taxis around. Why should there be in a war zone - so I opted to walk to the checkpoint and the battle zone. I had been walking for about half an hour when a beat up Trebant? car drew up beside me and kept pace with my steps. The window was wound down and hail-farmer-well-met said something to me in Serbo-Coat. I replied in English that I did not understand. Then in very broken Enlish he offered me a lift to the checkpoint. I got in and off we set through trails of refugee columns. However I noticed that his driving tended to sway from one side of our lane to the next - getting, at times perilously close to the on-coming refugee traffic. Although we were only doing about 20 miles an hour my hand hovered near the steering wheel just in case. When we reached the checkpoint we both got out of the car and my drive friend rather unsteadily swayed towards a group of checkpoint Police. After a short period time one of the police approached me, and in perfect English asked me from where the farmer had given me a lift. Then he added "The man who brought you here is completely drunk".

    • Your accounts of your adventures - keep them coming!
      Thank you.
      And are there any other examples of your art available to see online?
      All the best - Josie.

  • Nicholas - Am only now discovering your comment. (Clearly I was not been paying attention.) What a wonderful description of that day. Thank you.

    I am now listening to the tapes of your interview with Lyn Smith on the IWM website. Fascinating.
    https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/80028533

    I've also been looking for other examples of your work and coming up empty.