It seemed fitting that our group from Oxford Unitarians (http://www.ukunitarians.org.uk/oxford/) should have our summer outing today,
the 71st anniversary of the destruction of Hiroshima, when 150,000
civilians died, either instantly or subsequently from radiation
sickness, at Sandham Memorial Chapel (https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/sandham-memorial-chapel), which is dedicated to the fallen on both sides in the First World War. In addition Jonathon Jones will be reading First World War poetry.
It is a lovely day and the gardens are at their best.
Sandham is a twentieth century gem based on a Italian Renaissance style within a Hampshire village.
It was designed specifically to house the paintings and is a monument to those who served in The Great War and to the genius who created it. The personality of the artist, Sir Stanley Spencer dominates the work. Stanley was a positive, optimistic, glass half full type of a person. Eccentric too, and at times misunderstood. He would say ‘ I love life’ and words to the effect of ‘each day is full of activity, namely morning noon and night’. He saw religion, at least his version of it in the everyday and the mundane.
The chapel speaks more about coping through great adversity than about suffering, and in this respect is very unusual for war related art.
The murals detail everyday war time experience. As Stanley himself described it, this is a 'symphony in rashers and bacon' with a 'tea making obligato'.
The art is inspired by the writing of Saint Augustine, who helped Stanley endure his trauma.
Stanley Spencer was born in Cookham, Berkshire in 1891 and lived there most of his life.
This idyllic village is structurally very similar nowadays to how it was in Stanley’s time although of course the shops have all changed into boutiques or tea rooms. The blacksmiths is a restaurant and the Methodist chapel is the Stanley Spencer Gallery, which is also well worth a visit.
Stanley was the second youngest of eleven children. A set of twins died in infancy, nine survived to adulthood. All became artists or musicians. Their father was a music teacher and church organist. They were not a rich family but they were artistic and cultured.
Home was special to Stanley. It was cosy and safe; where he could be with people with the same values.He had a charmed childhood and adored Cookham; it was hugely important to him and figured in much of his work. He was a short boy who was quiet but not shy. He showed an early arty tendency and was encouraged all along the way. His
early sketch books feature in the current exhibition at the Hepworth, Wakefield. (http://www.hepworthwakefield.org/stanley-spencer/)
Stanley’s father wished for the children to be home educated, and constructed a shed in the back garden for this purpose. First of all, the children were taught by a couple of sisters from the village and later the elder children educated the younger. This was an education rich in the arts and theology but lacking in some basics such as arithmetic. The 3Rs. Stanley enjoyed reading the bible and loved it’s stories.However, he found formal subjects such as maths and english difficult and remained clueless about finances and letter writing throughout his life. But he excelled at drawing and his father, though bemused by this was keen to allow him to develop along which ever lines he wished. The family attended both the Anglican and the Methodist churches, and in the army training camp later, he preferred the Catholic services. Later in life he studied Eastern religions, with his first wife, Hilda. Maybe he would have been a good Unitarian.
From school, Stanley went to Maidenhead Technical College then the Slade, where he studied draughtsmanship between 1908 and 1912. Oil painting was a secondary persuit, which he didn’t discover until later. He had some eminent contempories, in the form of a group known as the Primitives. Dora Carrington and Henry Tonks were members.
Stanley also developed a strong indiviual style, influence by early Italian tradition
As a student, he travelled into London daily by train, desperate to be home for tea. He was nick named Cookham, and perhaps teased or bullied even.
He was pedantic and rigid in his thinking , always taking the same route. He did not take kindly to being made to visit other places. With my GP hat on I wonder if he had Asperger's Syndrome.
At the Slade Stanley’s talents were quickly recognised. He was an outstanding student.
The Spencers delayed the entrance of the younger two brothers to the war as long as they could. The elder brothers Sydney and Percy had already gone and this seemed more than enough. However, Stanley was keen to do his duty and joined the medical core as a compromise.
So he found himself at Beaufort War Hospital, Bristol, which had been an asylum in peace time, and was now by all accounts a miserable place, containing the original inmates as well as 5,000 wounded soldiers. Stanley Spencer was overwhelmed.
His duties were lowly, consisting of scrubbing and scouring, which he found gruelling. In addition adapting to discipline was very hard. He could not take self criticism, often felt threatened. So the first weeks were very diffilcult. In addition, he felt the weight of gullt for not being in active service and about his inability to continue to feel patriotic in terms of the conflict. His attitude was transformed by someone he met at the hospital; meeting another square peg in a round hole helped him adapt.
Desmond Chute, who was to become a life long friend, was described by Stanley as 'Christ visiting Hell'. Desmond introduced him to an artisitic circle and, crucially to St Augustine's confession, which taught him to find solace in everyday tasks and routine. This sounds to me like mindfulness and Buddhism.
Stanley's immersion in daily living was his redemption and as I said earlier, inspired his paintings in the chapel. He finally left Bristol in May 1916 for training and eventual mobilisation.
Stanley was pleased to hear he was to be deployed as a medical orderly in Salonika in Macedonia ( now Thessaloniki in Greece). This was a harsh enviroment with bitter winters and malarial summers
The Salonika front was the forgotten campaign of the war. Read more at http://www.1914-1918.net/salonika.htm
Stanely loved the sea voyage to the area and felt inspired by Homer's Odyssey.
On arrival he was captivated by the landscapes and way of life but reality soon struck home. He was fascinated by army life without enjoying it. He did not see the purpose of this campaign. Stanley had no problem with the 'enemy', that is the Bulgarian people. On the contrary, he felt a bond of 'universal brotherhood'. None the less, he was not afraid to be on the front line in a medical capacity. While recovering from malaria in Salonika, he wrote to his sister that on his return he would learn fresco painting and paint a church or 'Holy Box'.
Thus the seeds for Sandham Memorial Chapel and the Burghclere paintings were sown.
Stanley had been interested in religious frescoes for some time. Giotto's Arena Chapel in Padua was an inspiration for his own 'holy box'.
In early 1917 Stanley was transferred to the infantry, the Berkshire Regiment. Soon after this the Bulgarian regime withdrew. But he struggled to come to terms with the war.
Sadly, Stanley’s kit bag and sketch books did not get back from the front and the loss of his older brother, Sydney, towards the end of the war, left him devastated. On returning, he felt unable to paint. Nonetheless, when he was appointed as a war artist he produced his amazing work 'Travoys with Wounded Soldiers arriving at a Dressing Station at Smol 1919 , Macedonia' which is now in the Imperial War Museum. Like the Burghclere paintings, it shows 'scenes of redemption not horror'.
After the war, Stanley did not start on the Burghclere sketches for a long time. His focus was to finish 'The Resurrection at Cookham’ (1927) which is in Tate Britain.
After this was completed he began sketching from memory, in preparation for his Holy Box. He felt it might never happen but eventually struck gold.
Sandham owes it's existence to the benefactors, John and Mary Behrend. This couple, who were amzingly good patrons of the art world, had made their money in the Egyptian cotton trade but were not fabulously wealthy, merely comfortable. They were friends of Henry Lamb. Harry was a contemporary and friend of Stanley’s who painted his 1928 portrait which is in the National Portrait Gallery. One weekend Stanley was visiting Harry at his house in Poole, the Behrand’s turned up. When they saw the sketches, they agreed to sponsor the project. The chapel was a huge and risky project for them. Their art works were gradually sold off during the process. They developed a close friendship with Stanley, which was also, at times,fraught. The Behrends insisted on certain conditions, which doesn’t seem unreasonable. Stanley wished for the chapel to be in his native Cookham but the Behrends were insistent that it be built in their own village of Burghclere. They lived in Grey House which sadly burnt down in the 60s. Stanley wished to call the chapel 'The Oratory of All Souls ‘. However, the Behrends wanted a broader purpose or meaning for the chapel.
Society at that time would not have understood or approved of a chapel built solely for artistic and spiritual purposes. It was therefore dedicated to Mary's brother, Harry Sandham, who died some months after The Great War, probably as a result of an illness, maybe malaria, contracted during the war. His death certificate says he died of a ruptured spleen, which is indeed a complication of malaria. There was also a suggestion that Mary had given him too much brandy which had contributed to the death. Harry is referenced by a baroque plaque in the chapel which Stanley detested. This was a source of some conflict with his benefactors.
The fabric of the chapel was completed in 1927 on land donated by the Earl of Caernavon. Stanley sacked the first architect and Lionel Pearson was then employed.
His design is an example of the cheery utilitarianism applied to any number of suburban British buildings from the inter-war period. It could be a cinema, a tube station, a town hall, even. It is simple and unconventional. To me it looks like Manchester Crematorium.
The Behrends insisted on the addition of two alms houses for practical and philanthropic purposes. It was felt that a care taker and boiler stoker could live in one of them.
I am glad we have them as they provide office and reception space and it would be nice if we could have a café
The chapel was consecrated in 1927 by the Bishop of Guildford and services are held here till this day.
Stanley spent the next five years producing the Burghclere paintings. As he painted, he listened to Bach on a gramaphone, his two young daughters never far from his side. The family lived in a nearby rented house. Stanley had married Hilda Carline (a Christian Scientist) in 1925 and had their daughters, Shirin and Unity. Both are still alive and don’t appear to have a bad word to say about their father despite being estranged at times, as a result of the Stanley’s disastrous personal life. Hilda and Stanley remained close throughout their lives despite being divorced in 1937 when Stanley become infatuated with the artist Patricia Preece,who he promptly married. The marriage was never consumated. Patricia had taken over his finances, very much to her own advantage. She was in fact gay and continued to live with her partner, Dorothy Hepworth, an artist, who she also controlled financially.
When Stanley's bizarre relationship with Patricia finally fell apart,( though she would never grant him a divorce), he would visit Hilda, an arrangement that continued throughout the latter's subsequent mental breakdown. Hilda did however refuse to remarry. She died from breast cancer in November 1950.
The painful intricacies of this three-way relationship became the subject in 1996 of a play, Stanley, by the feminist playwright Pam Gems.
Stanley Spencer was made an associate of The Royal Academy in 1932, the year the chapel was finished. He toyed with the idea of a sequel, the Church of Me, which would feature both sacred and erotic art. This never came to fruition. The Ship Building on the Clyde series, which Stanley produced as a second world war artist, became the actual sequel which is quite fitting though these paintings are dispersed between various galleries, and do not have their own holy place.
In 1947 the Behrends could no longer afford the upkeep of the chapel and it was gifted to the National Trust.
In 1959 Stanley was knighted, but sadly, he died of cancer the same year.
Moving on to the paintings, these consist of eight canvases on each side of the chapel with two wall paintings above them. The lateral paintings depict every day scenes both on the war front, the training ground and in the Beaufort Hospital in Bristol. Totally life like but with a strange perspective, they are captivating.
The culmination is the 'The Resurrection of the Soldiers' above the altar which dominates the chapel and other scenes.
Our group was bowled over by the paintings. Over lunch at The Carpenter's Arms we talked about them.
Joan mentioned that the crouching figure between the two bath tubs, believed to be Stanley is typical of autistic behaviour.
Peter felt calling Cookham a 'holy suburb of heaven' was quite something. We were all perhaps most moved by the handshales of the resurrected soldiers from both sides of the conflict.
Oxford Unitarians welcome members of the public and the university, of all faiths and
denominations or none. Our religious faith does not require adherence to
a fixed creed. We believe that religion is wider than any one sect and
deeper than any one set of opinions. We find a basis for unity in our
shared search for truth, our reverence for life, and a mutual respect
for sincerely held beliefs.
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acknowledgments
bbc.com
nationaltrust.org
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