SOME FAMOUS PEOPLE

I am not one to hob-knob with the famous. The notorious and infamous are the kind of people that I avoid. Yet I have come across people that I admired - some by chance and some blood relations.

With many of these people I was too young or too shy to ask questions for interesting answers.

***

I must have met Kingsford Smith because he came to stay with us in the country, flew my mother around the skies from Farnborough Aerodrome and (he was Australian) delivered the Christmas mail from Sydney to Croydon Aerodrome in the record time (17 days in 1931) with my uncle aboard his Avro 10, Trimotor, Southern Star as flight engineer/navigator.

A postage stamp to commemorate the event and the crowds waiting at Croydon to greet them for press coverage, certainly made it a great event. 

In the days of unreliable engines and aircraft, and when navigation was “by the seat of your pants”, Kingsford Smith spent his life breaking records for distance and difficulty in a most exceptional way and this combined with a great appetite for women and booze.

But famous he really was throughout the blossoming of endeavours in the sky.

I wonder if he even noticed me (aged 7) with my brother Nigel and sister June due to be flown by him above and around London in his aircraft which had just broken its skid at Croydon. Another pilot in a Clemm Bat was given the job to give us a “joyride” instead. 

But I knew him - and famous he was as a highly skilled pilot and brave.

***

My aunt (one of my father’s sisters) married into the Smithers dynasty. They were a Stockbroking family and it was thought that they funded my uncle Walla (Sir Waldron Smithers) to be an MP to keep him out of the family business. His inclinations were more sporting. 

This uncle Walla was an MP in the days when Members of Parliament really did care for the people of all classes who had put them in power. He was much loved by everyone. 

One off from being the “Father of the House” uncle Walla asked more questions than any other MP, and because he passed through legislation for cab drivers to be enclosed as they drove their taxis around London, he never had to pay a fare as he was so popular with them. There’s fame for you. 

I knew him well. He was incredibly strong and loved to fight me (ne of the two “vile jellies” in Macbeth, being my brother and me). Of course he won - that was until I discovered his Achilles Heel, and that was his ears. If I was able to grab an ear and twist it I had the measure of him.

***

I must have known my grandfather. It was said he came from farming stock which lead to him becoming a doctor and surgeon. He married my grandmother, a formidable woman who promoted his career as his eyesight began to fail. Because of this he gave up surgery for anaesthetics, a branch of medicine that was considered to be of minor importance at the time.

But he was a promotor of that profession, writing the five volumes of the bible of anaesthetics “Anaesthetics and their Administration”. 

He was world famous, travelling the globe dispensing his knowledge and skills and making his name. 

King Edward the VII was about to the crowned king, but fell ill and needed surgery - and an anaesthetist.

Treated almost as a servant by the surgeon who most reluctantly allowed grandfather to see the patient before surgery to acquaint himself with the medical situation, he conducted his skills so well that the King bestowed upon him a Knighthood. 

Anaesthetics now became a legitimate and recognised part of medical care. He was the first anaesthetist to be Knighted, establishing its importance.

I call that as being famous, though few outside medicine may have known about it.

***

Having designed and part-built a one bedroomed studio house in the Berkshire Downs, I struggled to get back into the use of paint on canvas after a year-long circumnavigation of the globe drawing whatever interested me. 

My book, “Harbours, Girls and a Slumbering World” about this voyage was to be published later (ISBN 0953017 4 9).

But despite using collages to see things from my mind rather than eye, I vegetated and put on weight. It was time to move on - literally and mentally. 

A local estate agent told me that it was not possible to sell a one bedroom house in that part of the country. He was wrong. 

Replying to my advertisement in the Daily Telegraph, a Francis Bacon telephoned and asked to see the house. 

At that moment I saw my house and its simplicity as background material for a Bacon painting. He bought it immediately he saw it. 

We got on very well together as he also did with my lovely old cottager neighbour where runner beans grew on covered trenches of excrement.

I had built into the house several ideas like a central column that concealed all pipes and drains so that they were invisible, an air duct to control the amount of air needed at the fire place to make the fire work well, and a false chimney built parallel and alongside the real chimney that would take in cold air from the outside and heat it by close proximity, by heat transfer, from the real one. This delivered fresh warmed air to the house’s one bedroom above.

There was also an under-heated kitchen floor and an under-heated studio floor paved with discarded marble washstand tops from people ridding themselves of washstands in favour of real plumbing through pipes which was becoming popular after the war.

Francis, now in residence, wanted to know more about these ideas, so invited me to come back a couple of times and even invited me to stay as a friend. But I did not feel like staying with Francis and his boyfriend George, who reclined on the soft surfaces I had designed where he combed his greasy hair. 

Francis and I had much to talk about including the aforesaid ideas and of the value of chance in painting and that homosexuals were certainly not living in a twilight world.

When Francis sold up when George died, he returned to his Reece Mews home in London

There, and on the street should we meet, he would always cross the road to talk with me.

But I was not one of his drinking coterie and our friendship must have been refreshing to him as I sought nothing from our relationship.

World famous as he was, he was also just a very nice person. Others, I am sure, must have seen him quite differently. 

***

Back in about early 2000 a man moved into a place in our street and was outside when we fell into conversation. 

He turned out to be a journalist with a column in a motoring magazine. His name was James May, known, presumably, only by the readers of that magazine. No great fame there.  But times have changed. Over the ensuing 25 odd years he and his partner, Sarah, have been our friends and we regularly exchange 6 o’clock drinks in our homes. 

You might think that with international fame from Top Gear and Grand Tour to diverse programmes on such as history and mechanics that we locals might be plagued by crowds of  screaming fans or bespeckled professors of history. But no, James, happily, is still the same man as that journalist who moved in just up the road all those years ago.

May he continue to be both famous, modest and our friend.

MEDICAL PROGRESS IN BRIEF

 

I don’t think we needed much medical attention as a family when I was young, but I may not remember many incidents.

All right, Nigel and I were circumcised, which was not uncommon at the time. The reason for it being done was, we boys thought, because our father, who fought in Mesopotamia (Iraq)  in the First World War, was disturbed by sand up his foreskin when fighting in sandy desert conditions. I wonder now if there was any truth in that.

My father running over my foot in the car I do remember, but the family diagnosis was that no bones had be broken. Were there any X-ray at that time? 

I was exactly 0 years old when doctor Daley delivered me on the 5th February 1925 at our house, Sawyers Lands,  Silchester.

Doctor Daley made his medicines in his garden shed. He never charged my family for his services as when he was at Cambridge with my grandfather he got into some kind of trouble (we don’t know what) and grandfather had helped him out. 

Iodine was put on to all cuts and grazes and stung like mad. Dock leaves were rubbed on to nettle rashes and butter applied to burns - something we do today with magical effect, but you have to be quick. 

School came and went. The war came and went. 

It was during that war (probably in 1944) that I crashed an aeroplane (a Cornell) and knocked two instruments out of the control panel in front of me with my head. I asked the ambulance driver who drove me to the airfield hospital just what had happened. He had no idea that I wanted to know what country I was in and had I possibly been run over by a bus. 

But I came around with no medicine needed and was soon flying again, having demonstrated my “bravery” to the Commanding Officer.

Than, the war over, I was about to be demobbed and wanted an X-ray as my girlfriend at the time told me that she had coughed up some blood.  So I told the medic that I, too, had coughed up blood. In front of a row of RAF officers (I had become one too) I was solemnly told that the minuscule X-ray taken had indicated that I did, in fact, have TB of the lung. 

The girlfriend was clear of it.

As there was no cure for the disease then.  I was invalided out of the RAF, given a 20% pension and spent time in a famous country clinic and told to rest.

I had not had much schooling, but was accepted as a medical student at St Thomas’s Hospital if I passed certain exams. So I spent some of my  post war time in the RAF as a Photographic Intelligence Officer studying at the same for the exam, and passing into medical school at St Thomas’s. 

But having missed out on education generally because of my service in the war I had to work long into the nights on medical matters, not resting enough, and so started to spit blood once again. As doctors were forbidden to practise should they have TB, I had to abandon a career in medicine. 

The nearest the medical world had as a rest cure was an artificial pneumothorax. This consisted of a hollow needle pushed between the ribs allowing atmospheric pressure air to fill a created space between lung and ribs, thus resting the lung. 

Because of absorption, this gap had to be topped up with air, initially weekly and latterly  fortnightly for 7 years. 

This was inconvenient if travelling abroad when it was often difficult to find a doctor who knew about it and had the right equipment at hand. 

I remember that at the American Hospital in Paris lying on an operating table surrounded by white-coated medics as this simple procedure was put into effect.

And not long after, I found a doctor Xalabadar at a house in a Barcelona back street who did have the equipment. This was a long thick needle with a dial fixed to one end that looked like a dial from my car’s instrument panel. Having ascertained that I had flown in the RAF during the war he refused to take payment. 

Later, it was discovered that I had prostate cancer. As treatment I chose radiotherapy which was pretty gruesome and horrid for Margreet. 

Part of the treatment was to pass urine through a tube to a bag strapped to my leg. When this became full and heavy I had to more or less undress and turn on a tap to empty it. So I had a zip fastener sewn in to my trouser leg, so that when I needed to discharge liquid in public I could unzip, turn on the tap and, next to a rose bed perhaps, admire the blossoms as the liquid took its course into the surrounding earth.

Now I have a pacemaker for heart failure and a host of pills for God knows what. 

Reminiscing about the advancement of medicine now, as I can just see what I am doing adequately, hear what’s going on, just walk a mile or so a day, do some shopping, execute my bi-weekly cooking, and still enjoy life as I down countless pills and drink plenty of red  wine, all in the company of my lovely wife Margreet, who possibly takes even more pills than I do. 

The world of medicine has advanced immeasurably since I was born. And I am deeply grateful for it having done so. 

SCULPTURE

Making sculpture has always been an important aspect of my life. Just when it became so I cannot recall, but it was of importance to me as an adjunct to my painting - to make my points stronger in another medium than in paint. To satisfy my natural feelings for creating three dimensional shapes became yet another artistic outlet. 

One of my earliest sculptures was when villa-sitting in the South of France, I came by a large piece of olive wood. Because of the knotty way an old olive tree grows, it is hard to find a piece for a sculpture of any size.

Anyhow, I turned this lump into a sort of angel within a shell. I have it to this day, mainly because no-one has bought it but also to enjoy its lovely warm golden colour.

Another odd piece came about when my ex-wife returned from Russia with one of those tourist’s bears. I took an instant dislike to it (it was rather Black Foresty) and without much forethought, turned it into a figure that turned out to be half polar bear and half penguin. Now, pale in wood with no grain, it awaits a future - probably the fireplace. 

In the late 1960s I depicted my father’s First World War part in it as a Hampshire Regiment Officer taking part in the skirmishes and battles against the Turks in Mesopotamia (Iraq) in an effort to relieve our encircled army at a place called Kut on the Tigris river.

My sculptural part in depicting that siege was to put myself in the minds of the beleaguered soldiers with their feelings of isolation, loneliness, home-sickness and despair.

To while away the time in extreme weather conditions I imagined them recovering pieces of wood from the Tigris river water and, with bayonets and penknives whittling them into shapes relating to their military position.

There were 9 pieces that I exhibited in a one-man show of paintings and sculpture at the Qantas Gallery, Bond Street, London, as “The Nine Logs from the Tigris”.  Several were sold, one to a well known art critic.

Just before, or after, I cast in lead a metamorphosis of the human lot. These started as shapeless folds to represent female organs and eventually developing from male shapes into animal/dinosaur figures. I must have exhibited them (or some of them), as I recall a psychiatrist buying one to put on his desk as a starting point for mental diagnosis. 

The lead for these castings (from a lined wooden mould) came from local dockland sources (possibly church roofs) with the lead capsules then used to cover the necks of wine bottles to prevent drinking glasses from being chipped when wine was poured into them.

Several of the castings decorate our house and garden, one so large and heavy that I say to people that if they are able to lift one of them with one hand, they can have it as a gift. No-one could, or would be able to. 

A little after this time I found myself in the Cambridgeshire countryside with three mighty elm trees in the garden that had died from Dutch elm disease. 

These I marked off with white paint into potential sculptural pieces.

When the trees were felled the pieces chosen were put beneath a row of Scott’s pine trees to season. 

The finished pieces represent the people and animals who in ancient times walked the Icknield Way (nearby). Some have been sold individually over the years, others adorn our drawing room.

Two entwined fighting dogs are in The Netherlands, a pig is at Yale in America, others in households, like Sidney pig, which has ears like Sidney Opera House.

We retain 4 pieces, the most popular being a horse almost 6 foot long upon which children love to ride when not used as a perch for us or guests. It is much sought after but Margreet won’t sell it - and I agree.

Two of the elm sculptures have returned to nature. One of which was two lovers in our London garden which became the home of mice before rotting away and was discarded in bits. 

The other, a huge mule that a country gallery left on a concrete plinth in a field, before being   moved to woodland were it was enjoyed by insects and woodpeckers and crumbled to dust. 

When I moved from the country to London I had to leave behind an unfinished 7 foot mother and child and a very large and beautiful iron-age boat, formed mostly with an adze, that was more sculptural than practical. There was something mystical and magical about it. 

Since when I have produced no sculptures, no longer having the strength or the tools to do it. 

AGEING EYES

In some ways this blog is rather a sad one. Put simply and directly my eyesight is in poor state. So I am less able to control shapes and colours, but I am still able to write blogs, 457 so far (webpageroberts.blogspot.co.uk).

And I completed my Autobiography in Words and Pictures (155 of them) almost exactly on my 100th birthday. It took 8 years to do. 

I certainly don’t complain, as all my faculties have so far lasted my 101 years rather well.

I am still very active, collecting the newspaper each morning from the supermarket, giving Margreet breakfast in bed (I’m an early riser), keeping the house in order, cooking on alternate weeks, shopping, helping to entertain and gardening - producing flowers and some vegetables from our small walled garden.

Eyesight is interesting, as after having had brilliant eyesight as a pilot in the RAF, at one time I saw a grey area in the centre of my vision and did not give it much attention. I should have, as I had wet macular degeneration in one eye, which was by then too late to save.  In the other eye a series of injections has maintained its vision. This has been successful and interesting as it is helped slightly by the bad eye’s peripheral vision. 

I march around and travel alone on bus and underground in London impressing everyone as soon as my age becomes known. Then people want to learn the secrets from me and, for some reason, shake my hand. 

I make it a point to help old people cross the street or steady them if I think it necessary.

Margreet, who is younger, thought that when we married she would end up looking after me, but has found exactly the reverse. 

We don’t travel and don’t miss it, have no car and don’t miss that, but we eat and drink well and thoroughly enjoy life.

My gosh how lucky we are to be living in this age with a wonderful National Health Service and, for us, an excellent public transport system - to get us to and from hospitals.,

SOUP

Soups are a daily dish in our household and for them we use a pressure cooker (for economy and speed) and a handheld electric blender that has a vicious spinning blade at its tip. This gadget will turn a soup made of bits and peaces into a creamy purée soup.

Nearly all our soups start off by being a leek and potato one, or onion and potato if no leeks are available.

For this basic affair, simply cut up onion or leek or both into small pieces with potato. Cook the pieces in the open pressure cooker with oil or butter, or both, until the leeks/onion bits are transparent.

Now add water and stock cubes of your choice before pressure cooking for about 15 minutes.

When the pressure has subsided, test the result for salt content and it is ready to eat.

I sometimes add mace at the start. (my neighbour in the country, Bernard Venables, the great illustrator and author of Mister Crabtree Goes Fishing, ate this mace-favoured soup every day of his adult life). You will want to evolve this soup from there.

Quantities of ingredients will depend on the size of your pots and pans, and more importantly, experience.

Aim to start eating soup in its state of small chunks of this and that vegetable, then later, using the handheld electric blender, turn this into a creamy purée soup.

The initial mix of chopped onion made transparent in hot oil or butter (or both) and then adding the flesh of peeled pumpkin or butternut squash and carrots - all cut into bitesize pieces, will be a good start. This mix can become a tomato soup, then or later, with a good dollop of concentrated tomato purée.

When using tomato purée you may need a little bit of sugar - unless using carrots which will do the same job.

As for the ever - useful tomato purée, buy a large tin of it, then bag and freeze it in small quantities. Then it can be used soon after its frozen state by leaving the bagged lumps in water to unfreeze just enough to extract the purée in its thawing state to go straight into the initial soup mix.

Any stock cubes will do, but I use beef mostly - remembering that stock cubes are often heavy on salt.

Leftovers of dishes of all sorts can be added to your soups and spun in with the blender.

Pearl barley is a nice addition at the initial stage, as are dumplings later (just flour, minced fat like Atora, water and salt). Self-raising flour will make the dumplings lighter. Add the dumping balls giving them 20 minutes or so before the soup is wanted. 

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.