DRAWINGS REMEMBERED

It was in the early 1950s, when drawing a coaster tide up in Barking creek, the captain seeing me at work, suggested that I sail with them as a supernumerary, taking the owner’s cabin. 

Having often been drawing colliers (flatirons) that were delivering Newcastle coal to London power stations, this was my first chance to expand my shipping and docks drawing horizons.

Living in London’s Fulham Road this was the start of my love of and connections with an extremely busy working part of the city’s landscape and inhabitants.  The atmosphere of the place was unique and wonderful, being deserted at night with the noise of mooring chains and bumping barges, with only the odd rat as a sign of life. And then in daylight, when all was noise and bustle, shouting and swearing, with cars and vans clogging the narrow streets, and now with the noise of barges and tugs on the river, often hidden behind warehouses, made up an atmosphere of docks at their busiest. 

The smells of the riverside were pronounced by the movement of spice cargoes and Stockholm tar. These were such that captains of tugs could navigate along the river in thick fog by smells alone. 

More of my trips followed, like when our sailors enjoyed the pleasures of food and girls in Rouen on our way up the Seine to deliver whisky and cigarettes to France’s capital. At night we would tie up, perhaps to a tree, to visit riverside cafés for food and wine.

One time, having drunk rather too much wine in Paris, I climbed the mast of our ship to fix a purloined road lamp for my stepfather, thinking that he would like it for his pleasure boat. He did not. Climbing the mast the next day to retrieve it when sober, was a frightening experience.

In another voyage to Finland, having delivered poor quality French coal to a town in central Sweden by navigating through lakes, I was befriended by a Finish family to join them in their black sauna. It was black because of there being no chimney on the shed, so smoke had blackened the interior. After sweating and the rubbing of twigs, we plunged into the cold Baltic water before returning for another sweat, drinking copious amounts of lemonade to rehydrate our bodies. In deference to me being foreign, we wore bathing suits when they would normally be unclothed. 

Derelict ships lay about as over time in the northern Baltic the seabed had risen and the water was no longer navigable to many laden vessels. They were wonderful to draw. 

Salmon-like fish swam in the crystal-clear water near our ship, but we were told not to catch and eat them because of their noxious mineral contents.

Top heavy with sawn timber we made our way back to Portsmouth. Though the crossing was very stormy I felt safe with so much floatable material in the hold and tied to the deck.

Once we took aboard a cargo of fertiliser in Antwerp for delivery to Cork in Ireland, where the Stuurman (First Mate) had a girlfriend (the wife of a Danish sailor) who locked her in his cabin until the bags of fertiliser had been off-loaded to farmers in their carts.  She was released when we set sail ones more.

These jaunts on small coasters took place as I rebuilt a bombed-out warehouse I had bought in London, went to art school, painted scenery at Covent Garden Opera House, designed for repertory theatre, an ice show, and exhibited my landscape paintings in London galleries and elsewhere.

Having missed out on education because of the war and my service time spent in it, I created and attached a car body of my design to an old builder’s flat-back van, and set out on a Grand Tour of Europe’s art and life, meeting generous and helpful people, especially  when my untrustworthy mobile accommodation needed repair. 

There were few tourists in Europe at that time, so I met many friendly people who treated me as somewhat of a curiosity, especially when I parked for the night.

It is now the late 1950s and although I was working in the theatre, I realised I would never progress to the more prestigious jobs as I was not gay. 

But I was restless and wanted to see the world through drawings. So I sent my favourite drawing paper to various post restantes around the world, sold my London house, and took a train to Birkenhead with a ticket in my pocket for a sea voyage to Japan.

I got as far as Penang in Malaya, skipping the Middle East, and started from where the true Far East began. 

Giving drawings for guidance and accommodation, keeping an eye out for docks and shipping, I sailed from Singapore to Bangkok, moving through Thailand to Cambodia, to HongKong, to Japan, and then through the South Pacific to Australia and then back to England via the USA. It all took a year and cost a £1000.- 

From that round-the-world trip came an exhibition of drawings in Cork Street, London, one in Japan and an illustrated book on my various travel experiences. 

After building a studio house in Hampshire and then selling it to Francis Bacon, I was back in London’s riverside docklands again, building a two studio house, painting happily and getting on well with the native population of dockland workers.

With a Pole, who became a great friend, we worked night and day on this project, building a  two studio triple-glazed house overlooking the river Thames from Limekiln Dock.

This dock would fill with flotsam and jetsam in a westerly wind and then be empty of rubbish with an easterly wind. These winds were indicated on the ceiling of the top studio with an arrow connected to a weathervane on the roof. A map of the river was painted on the ceiling.

Material for building often came when helpful dockers would tip some timber overboard ia westerly wind, where Max and I could collect it when the tide went out. 

At a nearby pub, frequented by crooks and police, building materials could be arranged - like bricks that for a modest sum would appear at our doorstep in the early morning.

Having over the years since student days been interested in wines and vineyards (I had two by now), I imported red wine in casks to bottle at home. 

With one barrel of wonderful Rioja I needed 350 bottles, Bordeaux-lenght corks and capsules.

The bottle suppliers wanted a shilling a bottle. But from them I learned that they had contracts with large hotels and restaurants to collect all their empty bottles at dead of night, then discard those unwanted, like spirit bottles, and then clean and sell the desired ones (English heavyweight) back to wine merchants. So I did much the same at 4 o’clock each morning from smaller businesses. And it did not take long to collect the desired claret-shaped bottles that stack so well.

The corks were hand-selected as the cork merchant liked me and my ideas of bottling my own. (In those days wine merchants bottled their own wine from imported casks.)

My bottling was a family affair and great fun. That particular wine got better over the years, but tailed off toward the 10 year mark.

With my Port of London Authority pass I was able to roam the docks at will. 

Much wine then came into London Dock to be stored and distributed at the Crescent Wine Vaults, built, it was said, by Napoleonic prisoners of war. This massive facility was lit and  temperature-controlled by just a few bare-flame gas lamps. Edible fungus grew from its brickwork.

I was friends with the Head Cooper whose wife was Italian and would not eat lunch and supper without wine.

His job was to care for the stored wine which meant quite a lot of extracting it from casks with a flogger and valinch, and sipping it from thick glass goblets with their broken stems set into large corks.

Should we find a wine that was “off” in any way, Mr Arjun was called for to right it. He had the extraordinary skill to do this and yet never tasted a drop - except, one day as I left the docks and passed his office I looked in to say goodnight. “Come in and have a glass”, he said. And from what I learned later he rather took to it. 

It was the 1960s and I was back in my dockland element, almost part of the community, and drinking at the pub where information was exchanged and sources of almost anything divulged - and not always legitimately. 

Those days are long gone. I was so lucky to have been part of a vibrant dockland life in the days before containers took over. 

100 YEARS

 

Is not everyone who has lived for over a 100 years, so I am in a position to tell you what it is like.

For one’s body you have to remember that all organs and joints have been going for a long time and wear out. So one has to decide what needs attention medically or just acceptance that bodies do not last for ever. So I like to think that most aches and pains are just the result of use over the years.

I’m often asked (sometimes even by people with medical knowledge) what are my secrets. For the sake of brevity I just reply that much laughter with one’s partner in life is the number one reason for a happy and long existence. Next comes garlic, for a reason without foundation, but I have a feeling about it and use it as often as I can when it is my week to cook. Then comes red wine. I wrote on this subject for newspapers,  journals and in books for many years.  Being a member of the prestigious Circle of Wine Writers, I must have consumed at least a bottle of red wine each day as part of my job (doctors please note).

 And lastly I recommend  a good sex life. I never add more to this last item as somehow it creates much laughter and thought. 

There is another strange thing about being a centenarian. It is that people, when they know my age, want to shake my hand. Just why, I have no idea - though someone suggested that it was for good luck. The King and Queen may have thought the same as they sent me a birthday card. 

As I am very active and do not look my age, I have pleasure in astounding people, doctors especially, as they believe alcohol to be harmful, when, in my view it is a lubricant of life. Of course tolerance to alcohol varies from one person to another. So one has to know one’s limits and be careful not to overstep them. 

Then there is longevity tolerance, lack of expectation if you like. All your bits and pieces including the brain have been active for a very long time and, because of it, must be rather worn out. Memory loss, I think, is just good brain cells, trying to get out past dead brain cells. 

But to one’s aid comes the wonderful National Health Service. I thank this great organisation for its countless pills and its doctors, nurses and staff for everything they have done for me over the years.

That’s life - and the length of it. 

PS: I’m 101 in the meantime and still going strong. 

A Butler

In my Autobiography in Words and Pictures I have written fairly extensively about my early life at our house in Silchester. And I may have noted that we were rather poor at that time, especially during the Great Depression when my father’s chicken farm was ruined by fowl pest and the importation of cheap eggs from Poland. 

Although we were poor, no-one minded as we had several Knights in the family. My grandfather was one, my uncle also an MP another, a cousin yet one more and a Great Uncle Dean of Salisbury. So we were accepted as gentry, which meant giving dances on our sprung floor, tennis parties on our immaculate grass court and many bridge parties where I was dragged around and given marrons glacé to keep me quiet. 

Should my parents loose at bridge, one of the table would volunteer to cover their losses. It was just considered unfortunate that we did not have a lot of money. We had a maid, but certainly not a butler.

Because of our position in society we children were given the run of many a grand house and invited to lots of balls and parties - ones where the contents of crackers might be mechanical wind-up toys, for instance. 

It was, however, our dealings with butlers that I recall as being of interest.

For some reason or other we were staying with the Firths at their previous house to the one near us. 

They were great family friends and, because of Harry Firth’s family being part of Firth Stainless Steel, very wealthy.

The Firths were keen on playing bridge. Harry shot rooks for some reason, certainly not to eat, though game pies at that time did contain quite a mix of animals.

I was a friend of their hair-lipped gardener, and visited the servant’s side of the house to have our wet batteries for the wireless changed with their battery of batteries that lit their house from a huge and lovely, single cylinder generating machine.

One day the Firth’s cook ordered from us two chickens to roast for a dinner party. My sister June was given the task of delivering these two fine oven-ready birds to the house and, naturally, took them to the front door where Sherrard, the butler, told her to take them around to the servant’s entrance. This upset June so much that she never forgot it.

I suppose it was Sherrard who was their butler when we stayed with them at Calcot. This was a grand house which, small as I was, remember it having separate lavatories for men and women (with stalls like public ones for men).

When we left for home I knew that one should tip the butler. I gave him sixpence. It was a cause for family hilarity but may have been much of my pocket money. 

The other butler story I have certainly told elsewhere that also involved the Firth’s and their butler Sherrard.

Harry Firth seldom visited his well-stocked wine cellar, but one day did so. There he found Sherrard drinking his favourite port from a teacup. Harry could, perhaps, have forgiven Sherrard had he been drinking the port from a proper glass. But from a teacup was just too much to bear for Harry, who sacked the long-standing Sherrard on the spot. 

Sherrard, I believe, emigrated to Australia. 

A LIFE OF TANGENTS

On reaching a 100 years old I thought that I might write a short summary of my lifespan, mostly of art, wine, travel, garden - the details of which can be found from my books, articles, my blog (www.webpageroberts.blogspot.com) and the yet-to-be published Autobiography in Words and Pictures. 

After a country upbringing of untutored art, and reaching Wellington College, I was offered a safe wartime retreat as a refugee in the USA - and took it, as my mother, with most of us at that time, feared that Mr Hitler might well take the country and subjugate our people. She wanted one of the family to live. 

From the USA I returned to England in 1942 when old enough to join the RAF as a trainee pilot. Then, in waiting for a training vacancy I worked as a farm labourer and then as a prop-swinger. 

For operational experience during flying training I was posted to several RAF stations. 

One of these was to fly in Coastal Command Warwick aircraft from Davidstow Moor, in Cornwall, over the Bay of Biscay with a lifeboat slung beneath to drop on six parachutes to bailed-out aircrew. 

My job in the second pilot’s seat was to look out for the dangerous German Condor aircraft flying out from Brittany. They could have made mincemeat of us.

At another station I flew in the fully armed-up tail turret of a Lancaster bomber on an engine test from RAF Skellingthorpe, near Lincoln, to Scotland and back - checking the drift and on the lookout for enemy aircraft. 

When waiting at RAF Hornchurch for training in America, I volunteered as a slater - being part of my war effort. Given an hour’s training and a mate to climb the ladder to supply me with rather poor quality Welsh slates, I mended several bombed roofs in Plumstead, south-east London.

I was later awarded my wings after final training in Oklahoma, USA - when the war in Europe had just ended but not in the Pacific. I was not wanted there, so returned to England and grounded. 

I then became a Photographic Intelligent Officer, and then invalided out of the RAF with TB. 

TB returned when I was a medical student. There was no cure at that time. 

Living in two council rooms I bought and rebuilt a bombed-out house in London, went to art school and theatre design school, designed for TV and theatre, painted scenery at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, also painting landscapes for exhibitions and sale. 

To extend my artistic knowledge I bought a clapped-out builder’s flat-back van and converted it into an unusual mobile lodging, and travelled Europe for three months and three days meeting people, viewing landscape, and enjoying art and theatre. I covered 5,227 miles - not without mishap. 

In 1958 I set out on a world tour of a year’s drawing, then exhibiting my work in both London and Japan. With notes and drawings I wrote the book Harbours, Girls and a Slumbering World. 

A tumbledown thatched cottage that I had bought before leaving on this voyage to have roots to return to, I burnt to the ground and designed and help build a one-bedroomed house in its place. 

After selling the house to Francis Bacon in 1965, I bought a Thamesside warehouse in London’s Limehouse and, with the help of a Pole, converted it to two studios.

After marriage and now taking care of my two children, I moved to Cambridgeshire, then Hampshire, creating a garden for BBC2’s Gardeners’ World, sculpted three large dead elm trees into animals and birds that had been connected with the ancient Icknield Way nearby, wrote a weekly newspaper column on wine, followed by some 700 articles for newspapers and magazines and 14 books. Then divorce. 

I returned to London to exhibit paintings, got married to a lovely wife and later worked for six years on my blog, and Autobiography in Words and Pictures, which has now reached to over 150 episodes. 

A culmination of my 100 years was a party we gave at a pub frequented by myself and fellow airmen in the war. There, 150 people from home and abroad, family, friends, acquaintances and neighbours, met and thoroughly enjoyed an evening to celebrate.

A card of congratulations signed by King Charles III and Queen Camilla attracted much attention as few had seen one before. 

And that’s about it - a life of tangents, taken at opportune times, described here without detail, and in the minimum of words.

MY DOCKLAND LIFE

It is 2024 and I am about to write about my life in London’s dockland of the 1960s to 1970.

Recalling the late 50s to early 60s encompassed a world of recovering from war, to bouts of dealing with untreatable TB, embracing among other things a world of creative art and enquiry, of building and re-building houses, of travel to and around Europe, and then the world. 

I now, in the early 60s, found myself getting fat and vegetating in the country, loosening my ties with the world of art. After a world tour of drawing, and losing the facility and motivation to get back into it, it was time to change, re-invigorate, re-motivate and re-enter a more vibrant world. That meant getting back to London.

I would first have to sell the lovely one-bedroom studio home I had designed and built in isolated Berkshire countryside.

The main local housing agent in Andover declined to sell a house with only one bedroom. So I advertised it myself and sold to Francis Bacon, the painter.

I took “digs” in London’s Chelsea district, re-frequented the Limehouse area of busy dockland from which I had sailed several times as a supernumerary, and kept my eyes and ears open - especially thereabouts.

A Limehouse pub, frequented by both police and criminals, was a centre for information. And, true enough, I learned there of a warehouse shortly up for sale at auction. I bid for it and bought it. At least I now owned a large commercial studio to work in, but still nowhere in which to live.  

I had bought a shell of a warehouse right on the river bank at the head of a small creek of dockland Thames. The potential to create something special there was considerable.

I drew up rough plans to convert the place into two studios overlooking the river, using a prestigious west-end firm of architects to draw up my plans for a conversion from industrial to domestic use. This was in a dockland when no-one had ventured to do this before. Planning permission was given. 

Now I needed someone with general building skills to help me.

The chief of police at my “information” pub had used a first class heating engineer for a job. I met his man and we gelled. He was a Polish builder with artistic imagination. We would build the place together and then, when the project had been completed, he would return to central heating. And so it was. 

There were a few old waterside houses nearby where some rich and famous resided, but  my place was quite different in concept and environment. The dockers saw us as working people and absorbed us. Being rather oddities and friendly, and they being often “on the make”, made obtaining the wherewithall for building a rather underhand but locally normal way of going about things. So costs were low.

When finished, it was unique, with my one-roomed living/studio above, with a glass walled bathroom from which I could see through the studio to the river, and with an outside weathervane that transmitted wind direction directly beneath to the ceiling below.

All windows in the studio above, and the one to rent out beneath, had triple glazing. Moreover, there was a garage for a small car and bottling area for wine from casks, and all this, hidden behind an exterior that blended in so well with other adjoining walls that it was difficult to see what was what. 

I could now, at last, settle down to paint and be artistically creative with dockland shapes as my theme. These paintings now sell to private collectors but which were never exhibited.

Now the end of the 1960s arrived and all changed.

In fairly quick succession came marriage, a baby, sale of the studio house to some Lord or other and a Laker Airways flight to Yale where my then wife had a post-doctoral fellowship. Another phase in my life was about to start and, as usual, it involved many changes and much good luck.

Actually it was not the end of my connection with that dockland studio home. A later owner found several of my paintings in the loft space, contacted me, and although he technically owned them we decided to share the spoils between us.

Although the wife of that owner wanted to keep the place in the 1960s style in which it was conceived and built, her husband wanted to develop it - which he did. 

So it is now flats, and the newly-minted coins that we incorporated in the structure will have vanished with its demolition rubble. 

 

A TYCOON

 

Having been invalided out of the RAF as a pilot with TB, I started studies to become a doctor, and suffered TB again. I decided that as I had always shone as an artist I should learn my basic trade at art school. So I enrolled at the Central School of Art in Holborn, London.

As well as fine art I also enrolled in their theatre design department, thinking that theatre set design would eventually provide me with money as well as allow me to flourish as an artist.

There were three art school departments of interest to me, they being fine art in the drawing class, painting under the gaze of Bernard Meninsky, and theatre set design and theatre costume design, both in Jeanetta Cochrane’s department.

To work with Bernard Meninsky I had to submit to him a painting or two and some drawings. He didn’t think much of my paintings but liked the drawings so much that I was accepted.

From the theatre department there was much to learn about set design, costume design and sewing, with excellent guidance on the use of colour and brushwork in the presentation of ideas to producers.

As many of my fellow students were recently out of school, I was, as an ex-war student, given extra attention, possibly in a more adult laguage.

Although I eventually bought a Bernard Meninsky at Christie’s, I never really liked his work. But we made friends and would seek out living and defunct music halls in London.

In the drawing class, a callow youth, just out of school, often sat near to me as we made drawings of the nudes. 

I asked one of the nudes if she might pose for me. Her reply was yes, but only when I was famous. As my mantra for happiness in life is to avoid being either rich or famous, the chances were slim.  Had she known that a sniff of fame came my way when I once sold a painting at Christie’s for £33,600, and had I re-contacted her at that time, she would not have been the curvacious creature of art school days, but an old woman.

My fellow student in that drawing class really was to become both rich and famous. He was Terrence Conran, of Habitat and much else, but his drawings were dreadful.

TRAINING YOUR ROBIN

Most British gardens must have a resident robin that hangs around to pick up small worms when earth is dug.

I think that we all love these friendly little birds. The American robin is a much larger bird, as befits its nationality.

We have a small walled garden in London that is mostly paved with flagstones with nearly all its trees, bushes and floral displays growing in pots. These we move around as peer season and the vigour of the plants.

Growing next to the garden’s south-facing wall are alternating tomatoes and runner beans. On its north-facing wall is a small pear tree and apple tree, both in pots, apparently springing from a abacanthus that waves its long leaves in the wind. I grow mistletoe in the apple tree. 

 

All this is in the land, owned by its resident robin, who, this year, chose to nest and bring up a family with a mate high on the house wall in a box made for, but never used, by swifts.

At breeding time we do see and feed two robins but only one seems to belong. 

There have been robin-less years and the garden has seemed bare without one.

The only food we use to train a resident robin is Cheddar cheese, grated very finely. They love it, fresh or dry. 

To train a robin we place a little “bait” near to the house at one end of the garden, the other end housing our summerhouse, or shed as we call it. 

It is within this shed, where we spend much time and where we aim to entice a robin for company.

The first move is bait left on the ground well away from the shed where we humans have drink, music, food and conversation. Then, when the robin has acquired the taste for grated Cheddar, we lay bait nearer and nearer to the shed.

We keep as still as possible during this training period.

The first real excitement is when the robin takes bait from the sill of the opened shed door.

All this time the bird will have noticed, with its eagle eye, grated cheese in the feeder designed for it.

This object is of wood and roughly described as one open shallow box, upside down and sliding over another open shallow box. This can be adjusted to offer a small or large amount of grated cheese.

Bird-landing edges are of rounded dowel rod - fit for birds’ feet. 

Finally, our robin will enter our shed in short stages or even fly directly in, eventually to eat from my knee, which happens generally to be next to the feeding box. 

Friendly wood pigeons also raid the robin box and are deterred from tipping the feeder over to get to the cheese by a lead weight (a sculpture) resting on top of it.

Friendly birdlife has become quite a feature of our garden and amazes guests. 

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