PROUD TO HAVE WORKED WITH ...... DAVID JOLLEY

Norwich was great city in which to work as an artist, as an art historian and as a Gallery Curator. My first written piece at University  was an essay on the cultural efforts of the L’Estrange family of Hunstanton. At the University, John Gage was interested in the conversaziones and art institutions of the early nineteenth century.  Mike Pidgley, our friend, was researching John Sell Cotman , having open access to the Castle Museum and its archives. Mike knew Marjorie Allthorpe-Guyton and Miklos Rajnai of the Castle Museum. Marj was later to write the seminal history of the Norwich Art School itself.  

With Photo technician David Whitworth’s help, I did two extensive wall displays of photographs at the Art School based on holdings in the Norfolk Record Office, Early Nineteenth Century Printing, broadsides, fliers and the like, and my favourite, Tradesmen’s Cards. On August 1st 1994 the Library was destroyed by fire. My photographs are all that remains of the three huge volumes of the cards.

The Norwich School of Art, like the University of Brighton, enjoys an ambitious gallery space on the street front as a shop window for student work and as an opportunity to initiate and curate ambitious exhibitions. The first incumbent in Norwich was the mercurial figure of David Jolley. Although enjoying also a role within Complementary Studies, he was the consummate professional Curator, with a determined nature as a perfectionist.

David's Northern roots were evident in a clear Lancastrian accent (born in Blackburn). I had lost my Liverpudlian accent having had it beaten out of me at Watford Grammar School in the days before the Beatles.

He started studying Science at Leeds and realising his huge mistake, (Vera's term), he switched to the study of art, undertaking a PhD on the French painter, Jacques Emile Blanche with Quentin Bell as lead supervisor. He had spent many years working at the Whitworth in Manchester with its unrivalled collection of British art (see The Burlington Magazine September 1967 on Henry Moore's Two Piece sculpture, 1966).

In 1973 he was appointed as the first Curator in the new NSA gallery within the footprint of Gunton’s, St.George Street,Norwich (once a wholesale ironmonger’s, see above). The attraction of the job must have been to achieve a greater degree of independence, setting the Gallery's direction for the future.

Two years later David brought together the G.J.Skipper exhibition with its authoritatative catalogue of the architect's works including many familiar local buildings. David approved that I had found an article in The Artist identifying the decorative designer employed for the Norwich Arcade by Skipper, as W.J.Neatby.  David’s show with Ian Starsmore, celebrating Fairground Art was a huge success. Ian had married into the Norfolk Fairground family of the Buggs.

l to r, Gill Doel, Vera, Ann Maw, David Maw, Chris Mullen, at Fairground Art

David came with the highest recommendation from those who knew him, and his record as a contributor to the understanding of the City we lived in was considerable.  We must have come to the School around the same time but he gave the impression of being an old hand.  My difficulty was that I had been employed outside the structure of Complementary Studies and in spite of its Head, John Rayner (and later his successor, Ian Starsmore).

I never felt part of the CS group but was tolerated. David operated at a similar distance but was much better integrated.  When staff were required to apply for their own jobs in 1989, I was off to Brighton rather than comply, condemned to play a more dynamic role in Norwich’s Complementary Studies department. Life as a Studio Tutor was so much more stimulating.

I was struck by David’s highly tuned nature, genial but sharply aware of the slightest nuance in others. As someone with limited facial hair I was astonished by his positively Nixonian Five O’clock shadow at all times of the day, flourishing without constraint in an uneasy balance with his beard. He wore his trousers impossibly tight for someone shinning up ladders but my experience of these matters was limited (see photo above). One morning we were in the canteen and he introduced for the first time me to his companion, Vera Timar, whose name I noted was an anagram of “Rave Ramit”, an observation of which he thoroughly approved. I felt initial twinges of guilt at my frivolity and recurring need to show off with words. But she has forgiven me.

Vera came to the UK as a refugee from Hungary and grew up in Brighton where she was to work in the Reference Library with its overtones of a Cabinet of Curiosities. Her first degree was at the University of East Anglia (my own alma mater) and she came to teach part-time in the Complementary Studies department at the Art School. They were a most loving and quick-witted couple with a rich sense of the absurd, formally married before David's tragic early death.

Reports circulating of David’s ill health came as a shock. His GP discounted that anything was wrong physically,  implying he was a malingerer. He was working on an imaginative show called The Art of the Invisible , later completed, with excellent catalogue, by our colleague John Cameron. I remember being inspired by the wealth of Theosophical imagery on show. Within a few months David Jolley was dead. In 1980 Linda Morris was appointed his successor with a very different programme of events.

David and I collaborated on an exhibition of the Advertising Art of J. and J. Colman, entitled “Yellow, White and Blue”, mustard, starch and washing blue. I had met the archivist Honor Godfrey and had visited the comprehensive company archive held at the factory. The show would advance awareness of the role Graphic Design played in Society, and would explore the role of the Company in the City. David and I divided the work between us, alternating the nine chapters in the  84 page catalogue. Whereas I was attracted to generalities and broadbrush analysis of, say, the Mustard Club, he was punctilious in his cataloguing of the minutiae of packaging and labels and the colour codes of weights and prices.I remember a trip with David to the Victoria and Albert Museum to select a range of Colman's posters from the racks available.

Reg Butcher and Honor had found a pile of old acetate films in an air raid shelter, including a simulation of a meeting of the Mustard Club (c1923) as experienced in the tortured dream of someone oblivious of the product. We watched the films in the garage of the University photographer Cliff Middleton, on a projector he had borrowed. We should all have been blown up by untreated nitrate stock, but the risk was worth it for the Giant Cheese sandwich affirming an Oath on the Bible.

What we both relished was the absurdity in advertising a product which was virtually a monopoly. How do you induce customers to eat more mustard without damage to their digestive systems? David would weep with laughter at our discovery of Bath Mustard that eased the bones but gave the appearance of submersion in urine. We loved the use of the offer of five pound notes to Head Waiters who ensured their minions mixed mustard fresh everyday. And didn’t we fall about at Poultry Mustard intended to increase the size of eggs with no anatomic damage to the fowl?

With every visit, we would leave with a souvenir jar of one of Colman's products, usually Lemon Curd, ever a slow seller locally. OK Sauce brewed in giant vats at the river end of the factory site, was so much more desireable.

The experience of working at Norwich, a small provincial art school,  from 1973 to 1989 was largely a happy one. Vera found my accounts of the consequent eccentricities and turbulences entertaining, and encouraged me to write more. She has supplied photographs of David in characteristic mode, hair barely under control, holding the centre ground with visiting dignitaries.   I had to watch my step, but the Dance was a joyous one.

David explains to visiting dignitaries (?Pauline) while the

Principal, Bill English peers over their shoulder.

Private view glasses of wine identify the event.

I would like to thank Dr.Vera Sheridan of Dublin City University for her supplementing my limited knowledge of David Jolley. And indeed her encouragement to write more about NSA.