TEACHING AT NORWICH SCHOOL OF ART

Having been given some teaching at the University of East Anglia by Alastair Grieve, a history of Victorian Illustration in 1970, necessitating detailed hand-outs and long, long booklists, I recognised on the first day that this approach would not do. For the first few weeks I drifted around rather like a Chaplain. In the Life Class, I drew up a Chair to talk to one boy who became incensed because he was drawing it. I found that after 2pm, my services were popular among the students because many members of staff were late back from the Pub, the infamous Red Lion just up the road. I developed a keen sense of my own worth with very little justification other than I was the only man standing.

What signs alerted me to the true nature of art school education, a distinction between Norwich School of Art and a conventional University? I could observe as a Visiting Lecturer without the annoyances of initially attending Academic Boards, and without being drawn into Power Struggles. The longer I taught at Norwich School of Art the more my independent stance was recognised by the students, and the more I found my greatest successes were achieved in the Lecture Room which I found as close as dammit to writing and performing reviews at University.

With a smattering of knowledge of the Law, there were aspects of the conduct of affairs that worried me. If I felt not the slightest impulse to blow whistles or lead a reform movement, but I knew conversion of goods when I saw it, represented by paying students for their contributions to staff freelance work in materials such as Letraset and painting materials. Only when the Authorities suspended the Treasurer was it clear that financial ineptitude was wider than merely dispensing Letraset, but involved major neglect of the usual financial protocols. I was making photocopies at the University and was talking to an operator whose husband was in the local CID and got the whole murky tale.

Vocational Design students came from poor backgrounds, often from agricultural families. Several had to drop out of their studies out of poverty, yet the Hospitality budget at the School would have covered the expenses of several who had returned to field work. My portrait of the place is of course a restricted one, partial and many, many years ago. I have every confidence that many of the abuses once discovered were never repeated.

One event I witnessed and was then given further details of by participants was the School’s attempt to replace A.J.Stevens, the Vice Principal, an affable and distinguished architect, approachable and debonair. A short list of candidates was prepared and a number of applicants with their portfolios invited to attend interviews. One of those invited was my old pal Brian Love who had already been teaching in Design and Illustration. Each candidate gave a presentation and at four p.m. were invited to meet the Staff, several of whom were only just in from the Pub. Brian tells me that the printed timetable broke down early as the meeting spilled out into the vestibule. One of the Governors was showing an unhealthy interest in the voluptuous Head of the Students Union, and a fight broke out as to whether the Vice Principal’s job amounted to more than a bucket of spit anyway. The spirit of Carnival only intensified, much to the passing students’ amusement. There was a clear view of proceedings in the Principal’s Room from the first floor of the Graphic Department opposite. One senior member of staff was scrabbling about under the table nibbling people’s knees, and at nine o’clock the caretaker had lost patience. “Right you lot,” he shouted flashing the light switch  “off home the lot of you.” The festivities by this time resembled Trimalchio’s Banquet, and the celebrants made their way up to the Red Lion, by which time all pretence at appointing a successor to A.J. had been forgotten. The phrase, There was no appointment…” hardly covered the proceedings.

I have been criticised for a tendency to self righteousness. I had seen some merry old pranks in the offices of Messrs Lawrence Messer and Co., but nothing so exuberant, baroque and hilarious as the unfolding of the Day of Appointment. I am not censorious, and tried to discover more of later events. I got a lift in many mornings from Harvey Lane with John Love, the replacement Treasurer directly appointed by City Hall. He lived near me. His discretion and integrity were immense but he would raise his eyes at new abuses and organisational infelicities. When I was about to leave for a job at Brighton, he tried to persuade me to stay but I was looking for experiences beyond the small provincial school of art.

I made the mistake early on in referring to my previous legal experience. Few people realised this was only two years of failed clerkship, but whenever legal problems emerged, as they often did, my opinion was invariably sought.  The Summer Term was a dangerous period as Assessment Procedures throughout the courses were pretty primitive. The School often followed the Itten principle of assessment by hidden urges. It was to be expected that eventually a student (preferably with money) would appeal against rule by diktat and whim. With little notice and few credentials forced to appear as advisor when an enraged student who had worked hard and with integrity was summarily dismissed by a pair of ideologues. His Barrister wiped the floor with the Assessment procedures, which to anybody’s eyes were self-contradictory and in places pure gibberish. By averting my gaze I did prevent the Principal singling me out as their Legal Rejoinder Man.

Of course this was not restricted to Norwich because every Art School in Britain at that time was devoted to the furtherance of Fine Art with an occasional nod to the vocational possibilities of Graphic Design to persuade anxious parents. Illustration was what you did when your mahl stick broke or you turned out to be colour blind. Nevertheless Funding Bodies, while hesitant to be charged with Philistinism, insisted on businesslike standards of planning, accountability and fairness.

It sounds irresponsible of me to take this so lightly, because I had witnessed similar sharp practice in the City of London, except it was on a larger and more profitable scale. When the CEO of the Association of the Unit Trust Managers skipped with the till, I was drafted in to deal with the Press. The otherwise blameless Secretary to the CEO and I memorised the leaflets and called Press Conferences; it was all mimicry and bluff. It was the same at the Art School where my demure silences at crucial points persuaded people I knew more than I did. . Because people wanted me to be there and help. I inspired confidence and still don’t know why it was so. I didn’t really persuade myself. My powers of literacy were much vaunted. My powers of mind-reading legendary. My memories of past conduct and events were treated as definitive. In the end I brought comfort, and that suited me as I was paid well.

And participate I did as best as I could, not an artist, not an administrator and not a scholar. I was a teacher and relished any further extension to that role. Norwich provided the tools for my lecturing techniques.Whereas my superiors were distanced from me at Messrs Lawrence Messer and Co., and my Lecturers at University mostly regarded teaching as a distraction from academic research, Art Schools provided a wide range of human beings under a wide range of conditions. The Sit Com about Art Education awaits its own Jimmy Perry. Working for Art Schools in a variety of capacities I experienced Narratives that could have easily been adapted for Dad's Army or It Aint Half Hot Mum.

In my first week with the Vocational Designers I had discovered a poster for Social Services with fifteen typographic errors which then had to be pulped. I handed my first completed pay claim to Frank Evans who mimed wiping his arse with it. A student called Laura had thrown a scalpel at a message board eight inches from my left ear, explaining that she had detected secret and amorous messages from another tutor in my Lecture on the Bauhaus.I didn't keep a diary but dined out with such material which was also (with exceptions) recycled into my lectures.

The Vocational Design Students were a delight. They had no need for what I could have taught them, given my academic track record. They needed a sympathetic ear and, in the lecture theatre, the opportunity to respond to the material as it was delivered, not in some artificial corral at the end of the talk when most people were dying to get to the canteen. I used many films and found "Taxi Driver", and "The Hitcher" went down particularly well, along with "The Shining" and Roeg's "Performance". I didn't want to give them kerning or Gestalt Theory, but a better perspective on what turned them on.

My first teaching group all turned out to be motor cycle kids and rampantly Xenophobic. It taught me to make no assumptions as to the responses of my audience, that they were just like me, and to keep a beady open eye open for the drift of interpretation. "Overcrowded island... Piccaninnies ...send 'em back". I hadn't encountered that sort of bile at University.

A later and more sympathetic third year group had been winnowed down to a group of four, Will, Sandra, Malcolm and Howard.On our first encounter they took me to the Red Lion and spiked my Guinness with vodka generating an inspired if slurred lecture on Marcel Duchamp and the Large Glass. Sandra had a boyfriend who worked in a sound studio where "Derek and Clive Live" had just been recorded (1976) . I booked the Large Lecture Theatre and played the tape over the sound system. To cover my Ass, I assembled a carrousel of Jackson Pollock drawings which mechanically turned over to Jayne Mansfield's Lobsters up the Bum, Bo Duddley and Winkie Wanky Woo. At the end of the session I retrieved Sandra's tape, collected the slides and was making my way out of the room as the then Head of Foundation, Peter Kaye, buttonholed me, expressed delight at my experimental ways of making Pollock understandable and gave me a day's teaching a week. So much for the calculated career path shaped by a Doctorate.

This student group used to meet out at Hardingham and occasionally stayed overnight. Malcolm freaked out in the middle of one night. He had never left the glow of the street lamps of Norwich, and waking in the country, believed he had been struck with blindness.

In Law I had been used to all employed individuals homogenised to the overall culture of the firm, and its partners' pursuit of profit. Art Schools boasted of many people who could not have worked anywhere else; many people of astonishing livliness and kindness; many people who Jimmy Perry would have relished.So impressed was the Vice Principal with my memories of the place during my time teaching , that, when Margery Althorpe-Guyton was commissioned to write a history of the School of Art, I should write a Secret History in the way that Procopius did for Rome. The only difficulty would be knowing when to stop.

THE ART SCHOOL LIFE FOR ME

My anecdotes of easy disasters and tiny triumphs may lead you to think I disliked the Art School system and its participants. The reverse is true. The system was inconsistent, perverse and needed great ingenuity to explain and defend at parties or family meetings. I seldom chose to seek out official reports or historical reflections on Higher Education for artists. Each prospectus I read was a risible blend of puffery and sheer invention. I have saved a few over the years and marvel at the resources lavished on colour photography, dissimulation and in the case of Andy Vargo's giant brochure for Norwich, ingenious inserts. The students I encountered were uniformly bright and talented in a bewildering range of media and personal obsessions. Leaving education to sell my books, it was heartening how many customers said they would not have known of this artist had they not come to one of my lectures.Constructing this website, The Visual Telling of Stories, several correspondents were able, to spot how I'd changed the material over the years.

In the pursuit of cheap notoriety I delivered the Penis in Art based on the privately printed extra volume to Edward Fuch's Prints of the Era of the Gallant. A few months ago, a visitor to my website claimed I had suppressed the more garish material from the lecture she attended.

TALES FROM THE FRONT  (a small selection) University and Art School

Given the climate of moral outrage that prevails at the time of writing, I insist on anonymity in certain of these stories. Even though some colleagues were as daft as a brush, and even more irresponsible, the prevailing culture of the Art School was liberal, tolerant, inclusive and wholly delightful. It is hardly surprising that certain colleagues took this latitude as far as it would stretch. Their inventive pushing of the envelope, tantamount to origami on a Grand Scale, was, almost without exception delightful and hilarious. I want to spare them embarrassment because I love them just as much.

I had done a small amount of teaching at the University of East Anglia while a post-graduate where the conventions of seminar presentations and academic research were largely unchallenged despite it boasting of being a ‘New University’. Teaching and Learning at Norwich evoked wistfully the patterns of education at Oxbridge. Staff Student ratios did not permit the port soaked tutorial by the stuttering fire place. Seminars were held around large refectory tables where one poor sap read from a hurriedly assembled script with the occasional interjection by the Teacher who had read the text under discussion many years before. Fifteen bored individuals who hadn’t read the text at all,  sat around, rolling cigarettes or writing home. UEA rejoiced in the calibre of its staff, but they were judged not by original thinking but by the ingenuity of the ways they deployed critical terms, and by the sheer weight and obscurity of their footnotes.

At the University, the staff credentials, the terms of lectures and timetables extended from the fixed point of the present to the horizon of the discernible future, providing the convergence of forward planning, like some seventeenth century perspectival exercise.

THE ART SCHOOL PROSPECTUS

What to do with your kids?  At first sight the Art School might perhaps be regarded as a Johnny come lately into Higher Education, an indulgent three years opportunity for your children to make their minds up.  But then you send for the Prospectus.

This glorious colour printed celebration of half truths and downright fibs, promised academic programmes unrivalled throughout the civilised world, comforting propositions supported by portraits of grave scholars, cheerful  artists and close browed administrators, all with unlikely Curriculum Vitae. It was significant that University prospectuses were printed then in black and white, being text heavy to give reassurance of careful use of funds.   Art Schools had every excuse to go in for the full McCoy.

At the half title of the Norwich Prospectus the principal turns to greet us from his desk with a wry smile as if to reassure us that he is glad to see us but wants to get back to his labours. Look – he is holding a pen. No worries though because the walls of his studio are crammed with paintings (perhaps his own).  Now for the unsolicited testimonials. Genial youths with unlikely names attest to the difference made to their drab and unsatisfying lives in Coketown and the Malay Peninsula by their experiences at Norwich.  And is it any wonder their creative tides are in giddy flow looking at the spacious studios with displays of modern technology and boundless resources. Among the easels and enlargers the winsome and determined students solved knotty problems with string and pigment. Any parent would be impressed. This is not the Tony Hart bit they anticipated.

From its bulging stacks, the Library clearly rivals that of Alexandria, and most desks enjoy the presence of students, very few of them asleep. Under community interaction,  you find the Annual Lecture, “Norfolk in World Culture”, with not an empty seat,  a heady mixture of town and gown, with a strong resemblance to a speech by Kin Il Sung. A printed insert encourages any doubting parent that, if this piffle doesn’t persuade you, then you should bring your offspring to an Open Day.

OPEN DAY.

I was rarely asked to contribute to these events at Norwich. Despite undoubted abilities as a public speaker, my capacity to undermine the corporate line with unscripted asides, made organisers suspicious. Believing that Thurrock was somewhere north of Glasgow I sympathised with their long and tiring journey, and made several cultural references to Scotland. It seemed to make no difference to my audience that they had been driven over the border from Essex. I seldom end a gig with a request for questions. My briefing however made clear that this was a vital part of their visit. “Have you had the cuts?” asked one girl from Thurrock. “No.” I said with a nod to Eric Morecombe, “I always walk this way.” Quick as a Flash.

When I arrived at Brighton Art School (then masquerading as a Polytechnic) I was persuaded in my innocence to host a stall at the Post Graduate Open Day representing the Department of Communication. Never again. Not only did I know nothing of the subject but most of my audience over the day were jeering vagrants or friends who called in to check my morale. It was enough to remind me that the public face of most institutions was a tissue of fantasy, how a Manager might have concocted an entity in his/her tired brain after a few glasses of sherry.

HIGH JINKS. In reality the Art School, everything observed was in a state of flux. On a daily basis, roles and reputations were challenged, projects came and went with no identifiable consistency. Time dissolved in the heat of making things and images, while managers sought to seduce visitors and funding bodies with persuasive scenery for the tableaux.  

I arrived as a teacher with a University patina,  expecting sensible debate and an underlying culture based on the values of the Guardian, In fact it was much more a reflection of the Daily Telegraph and Tit-Bits, with an occasional helping of Reynolds News.

This was clear in my first week teaching in Vocational Design, when a casual reference to the befits of multi-culturalism was met with a growl of contempt from the first year cohort who were, to a man and woman, well disposed towards the National Front. Some indeed had joined and took to prowling country lanes on motor bikes abusing anybody with a darker skin.

Early on I remember the Senior Librarian being a Member of a Far Right Political Party, infiltrating its pernicious propaganda on to the Library Information trolley. Among the “Teach Yourself Watercolour” Pamphlets were crude leaflets explaining that a town the size of Peterborough landed every six months in England. Harold would often ask me, on the strength of my surname, when I intended to go back to the Emerald Isle. He knew people who would pay my expenses.  He was succeeded by Tim, a consummate professional with a love of books whose support made my last years at Norwich supportable (see beneath).

The spirit of Joyful Absurdity reigned throughout the infrastructure at Norwich from the Switchboard Operator who had a medical condition that didn’t allow her to go near telephones,  to the Porter (well before my arrival) who moved his family into the basement. Their washing was strung out between the Boilers on a Monday down the darkened corridor to the Paper Store.

The Art School at Norwich had once housed an ambitious course in the making of Boot and Shoes. My late pal David Moore had even taught their students English seventeenth century history, a necessary part of their Intellectual Portfolio, it was claimed. A secret compartment at the back of the Vocational Design studio in the monastery, well above eye level, contained a dozen large industrial sewing machines for leather sandals, glimpsed through frosted glass, a last remnant of this long defunct course.  I still have an unused reel of pink edging for Riviera sandals as a souvenir. Down one corridor in Fine Art there was a row of infrared X Ray machines that, at some danger to the flesh, indicated whether your feet suited your choice of footwear.

The Photographic Technician,  Mr. T we shall call him, recorded every Jimmy Young show for eight years, lovingly shelved in sequence around his work room. Often I would take a pile of books into this space for slide making, only to discover from the news on his speakers that revolutionary students in Tehran had seized American diplomats. Not again, I thought. I couldn’t go through that hysteria again. But no, it was the  Jimmy Young show from 1979. substantiated by the characteristic music of Russ Conway and Frank Ifield. Mr.T was big locally in Citizen’s Band Radio where he purported to be a bearded castaway from the safety of his Kitchen table in a village outside Norwich.

It was Mr.T’s regular task to take the formal photographs of all new students. He would choose slightly flirtatious poses, and, it was rumoured suggested ‘a little more shoulder’. But he allowed one minx to waylay him and got him to photograph her nude on a sofa behind the locked door of his Darkroom. I remember her name to this day, as well as her endearing slur of speech. The revelations were hardly seismic and the scandal ended with a warning as mutual embarrassment shuffled the narrative under a carpet.

According to M. T’s lapel badge he belonged to the Casualties Union and officiated at Football Matches. My pal with whom I often went to the Canaries’ Home Fixtures at Carrow Road said it would just be his luck to pass out on the terraces and come to his senses gazing up at this beaming but faintly sinister face. He also was Official Photographer to the Norwich Anglo-Saxon Society where plump middle aged men with winged helmets stood over prone damsels dressed in very little.

The prospectus of course detailed disciplinary options and the protocol of assessments throughout the School, but failed to specify any of the juicier case studies. A Senior member of Staff spent more time than he should have running a business from a city many miles away. Like colleagues he got the late train in, refusing to compound the congestion of other travellers during the peak period, he claimed. Needless to say, his Managers called him in front of an ad hoc disciplinary panel to account for his attendance (and other matters). The panel was held in the late morning but still several members were themselves late or still at the bacon sandwiches in the canteen. Ten minutes into the solemn proceedings, a high pitched siren sounded from inside his trousers, revealing his amateurish attempts to record the proceedings. He didn’t realise that the tape had to be turned over.

I should add I was a Visiting Lecturer for many years, avoiding the tedium of academic meetings and general administration, so my perspective is a narrow and clouded one. Many anecdotes reached me at third, even fourth hand, yet the gist rings true. The stories I pass on are undoubtedly apocryphal and exaggerated. Please regard them as fables of Good and Evil, the Tragic and the Hilarious. A naïve and even-handed observer would suspect that students had a raw deal. Despite the rich mix of incompetence and folly in British Art Schools, most students burst forth in remarkable and unexpected ways. Jaundiced observers from outside questioned the cost of this happenstance.

Just as telling were those meetings where student successes were recorded, and read out to a meeting as if a Parish notice. We sat nodding sagely as this talent we had so astutely identified at an early stage, and nurtured so sensitively over the years finally reached the pages of the Creative Magazines. Past students, now celebrities, we were told, would just adore to come back to their alma mater for mutual glorification. In reality it was, in my judgment, amazing that students received anything like a proper education for the money, let alone, forge a career from the nonsense they learnt.

I remember attending a meeting at Brighton where some glib, statistically orientated manager claimed that the University’s success at recruitment and retention were almost entirely down to the flexibility and integrity of its Modular structure of courses. My snort of derision came out too loud for comfort.  I suggested that the nightlife, the clubs, the proximity of London and the gay friendly atmosphere ran the Modules close.  I was immediately cast as a Vulgarian but was proved right in the end. It was further revealed that very few students had the faintest idea what a Modular Course was.

If the end product (as students came to be known) was a creative energy, a fresh way of seeing the world, a delight in collaboration and a suppression of the corrosive effects of the Bohemian, many of those teachers to whom they were exposed shone out as beacons of learning, playfulness, probity and understanding.

PROUD TO HAVE KNOWN , Fred Ward, Frank Evans and Maurice Read

Fred was the utterly professional Head Printing Technician with a large and mobile toupee. He told me he had once organised a Christmas Party for Less Able Children and some tiny Chilean refugees, booking the Art School premises for the purpose. The Principal cancelled his booking and superimposed the Staff Party where celebrants were to come in Nazi Uniforms. Fred's Charity Party was hurriedly reinstated when the Local Press got wind of the affair, but the Nazi party did go ahead because I saw photographs of some Secretarial Staff from the General Office in Gestapo jackets and fish net tights.

The then Principal of the Art School, Bill English had organised a selection of poetry and art by several of his friends. It was Fred that suggested the collection was collated in loose leaf style, and inserted into a Bin Shaped Outer Binder.

etching by David Davies

Frank was an East End boy gravitating from the Funeral Trade through Shop Fitting to teaching Design. He learnt early on how to unscrew the brass coffin handles at the crematorium after the curtain closed. He claimed to have been offered a job at Norwich on the strength of a misprint, the course being closed down a week after he was appointed. For much of the seventies he lived in a semi-detached cottage on the Hackford Road near us .He had been separated from the mother of his two sons Gilly and Julian, before meeting and marrying the lovely, the effervescent Theresa. You could spot his settlement immediately, a beautifully restored Bentley parked in the front garden, and through his front window his uncanny full scale copies of Mondrian (Boogie-Woogie) and Picasso (The Three Dancers). He was a secretary of the Norwich Labour Club and a keen amateur brewer of beer. His kitchen was like a scale model of Fylingdales with rows from floor to ceiling of Beer Spheres, seldom left to mature. Many happy evenings were spent at Frank's, a ten minute walk across the flat dark Norfolk landscape from 19, Nordelph Corner.

Frank was generous, open-minded and thoughtful. Like other people working on non-degree courses, he was tolerated rather than valued. He had a passion for Colour and Colour Theory, advocating the use of the Luscher Colour Test to reveal health. frailties, and basic dispositions. You selected a sequence of six coloured cards and then consulted the manual for a diagnosis. It was too Gypsy Petrulangulo for me, but it fascinated students. His obsession was such that he would be carried away by his own Lectures, and I was present when the first half of the Luscher special took over an hour and re-covening after a coffee break, he repeated the lecture afresh. His students enjoyed him so much they didn't have the heart to spoil his fun.

Maurice was a delight. He was a skilled and sensitive watercolour artist devoted to the depiction of the English countryside. Yet he was employed within Graphic Design, not his first language, so to speak. Despite his skills as a teacher of the Visual Ways of Mammon, e.g. kerning, corporate identity, logos, pictograms and such like, he seemed always under pressure from those teachers who purported to bring their cosmopolitan attitudes and fashionable ways down the railway track to provincial Norwich.  One Head of Department was curious why I counted Maurice as a friend. The prevailing attitude among opinion and shape formers was that he was not at the cutting edge. Well, damn right. His popularity among students, his expressive facial reactions (no deadpan he) and sense of humour were not to be audited in the attempt to make the Art School appear itself at the Cutting Edge.

It was indicative of Maurice’s self-esteem that when I admired a brief glimpse of one of his poppy field paintings in his office, he  turned up one afternoon at Hardingham with a carful of them, bouncing down the track to number 19 Nordelph Corner. Yet his caution was such that Oriole and I admired his work through the car windows with the doors locked. And superb they were in the best and truthful spirit of the English Landscape artist. 

Like the best of us, Maurice could laugh at himself. He had popped out one lunchtime for a sandwich and had been side tracked into a newsagent where he saw a central circular magazine rack. Picking up a copy of Razzle Dazzle in a spirit of inquiry and bemusement, he was not to know a student returning to the Studios with a camera, recorded the spectacle and had a photograph of Maurice with Saucy Magazine pinned up on the Studio door for his return.

Maurice’s car itself was legendary. As the floor rusted and peeled away, Maurice added more and more thin layers of cement until the vehicle had the mass of a Sherman Tank. Far from being nervous travelling with him, I was always confident that if we collided with a mechanical harvester or Dump Truck, I knew who would come off worst.

THE LIBRARY. Wherever I have taught, the Library was my first port of call, where I felt most at ease. I tiptoed uneasily round any studio, wary of equipment and imagery I had never seen before. People’s offices were seldom welcoming as they were clearly arranged to disprove rumours of inertia with displays of paperwork and spread sheets.
   
Much more attractive was the Norwich School of Art Library, particularly under the supervision of Tim Giles, with Enid and Anne, and later the delightful Kitty. I could cheerfully have moved in there and be seen cleaning my teeth at the microfiche viewer in the early morning. Gill Doel presided over the Slide Library and its Technician. This is not the place for to get sentimental over my love of them all, and how sympathetic I was to their efforts. I still have dreams about finding books that I have to return instantly to the Library, knowing that this is a mere excuse to see what has happened to my pals over the years.  Significantly I dream of climbing the main stairs to the Library but being ushered to a waiting room with no access to the book stacks.

Lacking an office, I would go into the Slide Library and gossip with Gill. She also taught in the Norwich Prison and to her credit, with Mental Patients. She organised a show of work in the Art School Gallery by her students at the Hospital. One drawing in particular in crayon stays in my memory, the repetition of the line “ship  ahoy, ship ahoy, with presents” over a large sheet of paper. Every now and then I find myself chanting the line, at bus stops in the rain.

I was flattered to be asked once to accompany Tim to a meeting with the Head of Graphics, in an unparalleled act of consultation. It recognised my contribution to choosing books, and allowed the Head of Department to flaunt his literacy. But no. Curtly dismissing us, the Head of Mammon made it clear that this was Tim’s job as Librarian, while he had more important things on his mind. I suspect this was to keep open the opportunity for him to make snide comments in the future to Tim on the provision of Graphic Design books. Neither of us was crushed, just the wiser for the event.

FINE ART, Mel and Nigel

As a tutor in Vocational Design, Graphic Design and then the Foundation School, I had little contact with Ed Middleditch’s Fine Art Department. Rather I would drop in where I felt most confident of a cheery welcome, and where the occupants wouldn’t be suffering from a hangover. Mel Clark was the sort of Art School teacher who inspired by his skill, his industry and by his evident love of the challenge of helping everybody who asked (and there were many). We meet to this day although I am loathe to luxuriate too much in the nonsense of much we both experienced. He lives just down the road from Derrick Greaves who also bears witness to the passage of time and events. Mel is married to Linda who I met first in 1965 in the School of Fine Arts and Music at UEA where she was a secretary in the new department under Peter Lasko and Andrew Martindale. The stories she and I could tell! The stories Mel and I could tell!

My most reverberative meeting was with Nigel Henderson, and an old pal of Ed’s. I knew from the start that any conversation with Mel Clarke, Gill Doel, Tim Giles or John Love was going to be fun, to start something new. With Nigel a simple chat about cricket in the canteen started a long association I have described elsewhere. Malcom Marshall was bowling to the hapless English batsmen at Lord’s, and working up quite a sweat in the process. We had both noticed that a sweatshirt under his top shirt had a cryptic message across his chest that became increasingly clear as he sweated more. We recognised in each other a kindred spirit and he recommended me to write the introduction to the catalogue of his big show at Norwich in 1982, his subsequent show at the Serpentine, taking in a TV film for Cologne TV. I even appeared at his funeral as emcee.

NIGEL HENDERSON

I am nearly at the exact age Nigel was when in 1983 we stood in the Serpentine Gallery in front of his Headlands work. He was not happy despite the efforts taken by the Gallery with his work. One of his best friends had died at the age of 65 and he suspected he was similarly doomed. In fact he was to get an extra three years.

I had just conducted an Artist meets the Public event with him at the Serpentine. Oriole Mullen was there in support. My sister-in-law Emma Kirkby had heard I was in town and sweetly swelled the audience with several members of the Consorte of Music. Nigel had been at his most benevolent and reflective in the first ten minutes. I asked about his association of green and dead flesh in the Single Heads. He talked about working on a Baroque portrait with the chief restorer Helmut Ruheman at the National Gallery London in 1939, to find the underpainting for the flesh tones was realised in green pigment, its complementary colour. The audience hummed with interest. I found it odd this fascinating aside had been concealed until long after I could have used it in the catalogue.

Then the saloon doors swung open. Eduardo Paolozzi appeared at the back of the room, completely throwing Nigel. After years of collaboration, fascination and mutual delight, their relationship had fractured and soured for reasons now pointless to probe. Nigel glared at his old friend who had unfurled a large Tube map in the back row and was pointedly scrutinising it in the company of a young man with wire framed glasses. Nigel now refused to string words into sentences and I was left blathering as sweat slowly rolled down my flanks. Paolozzi left before the end of the event so I didn't get to discover what I had got myself into.

What the fuck was that? I asked Nigel.

The Cunt, he said through gritted teeth.

The Serpentine show Headlands, with its emphasis on Landscape offered him the opportunity to strut his stuff in the Metropolis, and its critical failure deeply wounded him. Only now, re-reading texts and subsequent critical response do I see how much his heart was broken. He was a hard man and the disappointment had to be managed carefully.

How had this all started? Nigel had agreed to a major show at the Norwich School of Art to be held in 1983. He had been Head of Photography twice there, seemingly drifting in and out of administrative duties. I was a visiting lecturer in what was called Complementary Studies, known for my florid and persistent lecturing. I had dropped in from time to time on studio lunches with Derrick Greaves and Nigel when fine wines and food sustained visitors during most of the afternoon. I loved the campy patois of sudden cries of "Dommage..." and "Quelle Elan.." Terribly Rive Gauche I thought. Nigel's studio was less attractive being in the basement, next to the Boiler Room and giving the impression of being underwater, the River Wensum lapping at his sill.

So Lynda Morris curated, Bruce Brown designed the catalogue, Bill English wrote the standard introduction. Derrick contributed a gem of descriptive prose on Nigel's disfiguring the printed pages of his books. After a few weeks of guarded interchange, Nigel decided he would enter into the spirit of the exhibition and answer questionnaires I sent to him. This was the breakthrough. He was at his best in this considered and rounded response. I went over to his studio on several occasions, once with Oriole. Then on one occasion when I was promised access to the tea chest of unshown work in the studio. I had a hangover of huge proportions and went for a walk instead when I threw up on the Dyke and not in the tea chest. Janet Henderson was a source of constant delight in our meetings , with an amusing glare as Nigel's claims of ownership of the garden and its contents became increasingly inflated.

I thought I had done the decent with the exhibition texts for Norwich, our outings to the various points of call of the exhibition through provincial art galleries (being what he called the Prisoner's Friend at Southampton, Colchester as well as the Serpentine) and the film for Cologne TV. We had got on famously, and he trusted me to be part of his options when the call from posterity came calling . Only he (and probably Paolozzi) knew how much he had accomplished, how much he had guided and inspired others particularly a slightly younger generation than his in the post-war period of austerity and cultural conservatism.

By the very nature of his working practices during the later years he was isolated and in many ways believed the work was good enough to make its own way without his active interventions. By the time he realised that he was being just too fastidious it was too late, He knew he was going to be relegated to the Lower Divisions of the Hierarchy in Brit Art. What a fate.

The next time I worked with Nigel was a reprise of the role of the Prisoner's friend. Tim Rayner was a film director operating out of Norwich doing a series of English language films for Cologne TV. By clever editing it appeared Nigel was a Norwich lad with a studio round the corner from the Art School whereas he was two hours away by train on the Essex Marshes. Nigel and I were seen in solemn conclave in the Norwich Art School Gallery in front of Duchamp's Dust Breeding which had been such a key influence on the young Henderson. I remember Nigel's cut-off line about his attitudes to art, "No scholar I." Such timing. Such economy of effort.

Another day's shooting has been arranged at Nigel's studio. Neither of us could work out how we were to be paid. At the end of the shoot the Sound Man opened his wallet and did the decent. Nigel was superb. He was articulate and measured in appraising his own work. He talked to camera but his eyeline directed to me out of shot. How far his performance was an aid to the teaching of English as a Foreign language I cannot say. He certainly taught me a lot that day - at home- surrounded by his works, the talismans and tearsheets of his obsessions. He teased sections of Satie's Gymnopedies out of an old piano. He perched on a high stool in the milky studio light. They filmed him striding out with dogs in the landscape. I was shocked he'd even allowed himself to be filmed without his top set of dentures, gurning into the camera. More informatively he'd even hacked up a photograph of a section through a red cabbage, cutting into a large photographic self portrait to allow a glimpse into his collage techniques.

We did another Box and Cox for Robert Short and the Norfolk and Norwich Contemporary Art Society on its acquisition of Willy Call Up.

But I didn't seem to see Nigel much after the Serpentine show. Who rang ? I can't remember but I was told that Nigel had come down to breakfast at Landemere Quay, prepared a full English breakfast and dropped dead. What seemed like weeks later I was in a car heading for the Ipswich Crem with Lynda Morris, Derrick Greaves and Mel Clark. How I found myself hosting the funeral is already here at . The success of my schtick can be judged by repeat performances at the funerals of Grahame White and David Watkin. I became what Phil Beard called the Jack Dee of the Funerary Experience.

There is no point making claims for Nigel and his art. No revival of interest flared after his death, or after Victoria Walsh's book and exhibition in 2001. I make available here for the first time his questionnaire responses from which you will gauge for yourself the fizz and originality of the Man. Ultimately it means little that the art world underestimated him. I delighted in his company. He enjoyed the interchange of collaboration, despite his hermetic leanings. His ear for language and calculation with words was unique and I treasure memories of him.

He would thrust an image across the table. "What do you make of that?" His pleasure was that, no matter what association or narrative I discovered, he always claimed it was nothing he hadn't already pondered. And I believed him.
 

CLICK for my HENDERSON ARCHIVE

Many thanks to Dr.Vera Sheridan who encouraged me to write more