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 Rees Davies (Mullen Collection)

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.

 

BOOKS AND SLIDES - 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.