Ray Harryhausen

Cyclops vs.Dragon - The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad

Ray Harryhausen’s calling came to him young, when his parents took him to see King Kong at Graumann’s Chinese Theatre in LA. He was only 13 at the time, but he knew what it was he wanted to do, and set about achieving it with the spirited energy of the dedicated hobbyist. As he self-deprecatingly observed on many an occasion, he was lucky enough to be able to extend his hobby into a lifetime career. Lucky and, of course, with a natural and abundant talent which soon made itself apparent. Willis O’Brien, the stop motion animator who brought Kong and his dinosaur combatants to such vivid and characterful life, was Harryhausen’s idol, his work the pinnacle to which he aspired to ascend. He plucked up the courage to phone him some years after seeing Kong, by which time he had started to produce his own amateur films featuring dinosaurs. Finally, in 1939, he got to meet him on the MGM lot, where O’Brien was working on one of several never to be realised projects. ‘Obie’, as he soon came to know him, proved friendly and solicitous and gave him much valuable advice. He encouraged him to study anatomy, the better to understand how to make his models look convincing and move in a realistic manner. Harryhausen would always study the movements of the animals most closely resembling his fantastic creatures, whether at the local zoo, the aquarium or simply in the human zoo of the city streets. Appropriate then that he should make a cameo appearance in 20 Million Miles to Earth as a man looking at an elephant in a zoo – a real creature which he will later transmute into rampaging stop-motion form. He even went so far as to take a few fencing lessons to prepare for Sinbad’s sword fight with the skeleton in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad.

Best pals - Ray and Mighty Joe

Such assiduous care and attention to fine detail make his stop-motion animation endlessly enthralling, and the sheer quality of his work have ensured that he has been widely and enduringly revered and imitated by animators over the years. He did get to work with his hero, Obie, on Mighty Joe Young (1949), which effectively became his apprentice work, introducing him to the world of Hollywood studio film-making. He did the bulk of the animation for this rather less than mighty son of Kong, and there was a definite sense of the artistic crown being passed down to the next generation. Harryhausen’s death can thus also be seen as the end of a lineage dating back to what many still regard as the finest fantasy film ever made (an opinion with which I wouldn’t feel inclined to argue). With CGI having effectively consigned the labour intensive art of stop-motion to the film museum, this is a lineage which is sadly now effectively at an end. Harryhausen would always honour Obie’s memory and pay tribute to the formative influence he exerted upon him. He would later make the allosaurus vs. cowboys picture Valley of the Gwangi which O’Brien had been planning when Harryhausen visited him at the RKO studios in the 40s. He used some of his storyboards as a basis for key scenes, such as the lassoing of the dinosaur in the drystone gulch.



O’Brien also taught the young Ray the value of fine draughtsmanship and the ability to produce swift and accurate sketches when detailing setpieces and storyboarding action. He introduced him to the etchings and lithographs of Gustav Doré. With their striking use of light and shade, they had a naturally cinematic appearance. They were to be a strong influence on Harryhausen’s own fine charcoal, pencil and ink pictures. Dynamic compositions such as the skeleton tumbling from the top of the exposed ruin of a winding stair as Sinbad prepares to give its skull a final cleaving blow with his scimitar; or an allosaurus rampaging through the shadowed vaults of a cathedral; or a group of men running through the rubble of a bombed out city as three legged Martian war machines stalk towards them are all executed with great skill and dramatic flair. The scenes they envisaged often created the immediate visual impact needed to sell the picture they were summoning up for studio bigwigs in one enticing image.

Arabic aliens - Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger

The latter image, with the Martian war machines, came from the version of War of the Worlds which Harryhausen tried for many years to make. Unfortunately, it was never to come to fruition. Ray would certainly never have let the strings show on those spaceships, as he later demonstrated in Earth Vs the Flying Saucers. His aliens were a bit more freaky, too – basically beaked amphibious heads on scuttling tentacles. He even got as far as designing two latex rubber demonstration heads. The beaked fish-man appearance was later incorporated into the design of the Kraken sea monster in Clash of the Titans. Harryhausen was never shy of re-using work cast aside in previous years. The homunculi who attack Sinbad and his sleeping compatriots in Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger bear more than a passing resemblance to the Selenites from First Men in the Moon, aliens adrift in an Arabian fantasy (or perhaps it was the Arabian fantasy adrift in a post-Star Wars cinematic landscape). HG Wells was an abiding favourite of his. Another unrealised project was an adaptation of Wells’ Food of the Gods, whose giganticised animals would have been a natural for him to bring to looming and lowering life. He did get to make a light-hearted version of Wells’ rather darkly dystopic First Men In The Moon, however. His insectoid Selenites and grub-like mooncalves captured the feel of Wells’ lunar ant colony, and he also got to make a solidly brass-fitted Edwardian geodesic spaceship. He plotted one of Jules Verne’s fantastic voyages in Mysterious Island, whose oversized fauna (a crab, a bee and a chicken!) gave him the chance to realise some of the big beasties he might have enjoyed creating for Food of the Gods.

Attacking the one-eyed monster - The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms

As his love of Wells indicates, Harryhausen was something of a classicist when it came to SF and fantasy (and he was much more at home with the latter). He shared the essentially conservative tastes of his lifelong friend Ray Bradbury. The two Rays met when they were both young men, artistic success and the acclaim of their peers still ahead of them. It would be Bradbury who, many years later in 1992, would present Harryhausen with his Academy award for a lifetime’s contribution to the technological development of cinema (the Gordon E Sawyer award). They both loved Kong, and vowed that they would sustain their love of dinosaurs into old age, treasuring their youthful relish of the exotic and fantastic. It was a vow that both managed to keep without too much difficulty. Their work tended to remain rooted in the era of the 20s and 30s in which they grew up – the age of colourful pulps, imperial adventures and monster fandom (Forrest Ackerman, founding editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland was another friend). Indeed, as Harryhausen turned to the worlds of Greek myth and Oriental fantasy in the late 50s and 60s, his films became increasingly nostalgic in their very escapism, their isolation from any contemporary currents in popular culture or in society.

Lost Worlds - The Golden Voyage of Sinbad

This disconnection from the usual signifiers of a particular decade gives them a curiously ageless quality, free from any attempts at zeitgeist riding. Even the sets, harking back to Doré and John Martin, the Victorian painter of immense depictions of Biblical apocalypse and Babylonian city states, steered clear of the contemporary designs which manifested themselves in many historical fantasies (and indeed in the 50s lounge furnishings found on the planet Altair IV in Forbidden Planet). Perhaps it’s significant that Clash of the Titans, his farewell to stop-motion animation movies, was released in 1981, at the dawn of the studio blockbuster period, and of the market-driven cinema it represented, with all its attendant crudities and loud sensationalism. Harryhausen’s finely crafted and lovingly made fantasies looked out of place in such a world, their emphasis on individual creative effort out of step with the corporate imperative. Even in the 1970s he was still producing classical and oriental fantasies rooted which tended to involve the discovery of lost worlds in the She or Lost Horizon manner. In Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, the adventurers finally reach an arctic Shangri-La of a distinctly Egyptianate nature with a transforming beam of coloured light at its heart. And in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, he drew designs for a fountain of youth, bubbling up in a vast subterraenean cavern and surrounded by an intact stone henge. The entrance to this sacred chamber is reached via a cave in a cliff face carved with heads derived from Indonesian Buddhist sculpture. Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger meanwhile uses the perfect lost world set – Petra, the city carved into the cliffs in the Jordanian desert.

Kali attacks - The Golden Voyage of Sinbad

Harryhausen always felt free to mix his mythologies. As early as his SF picture 20 Million Miles to Earth, he named his ever-growing Venusian monster the Ymir, after the father of the giants in Norse mythology. He would quite happily import mythical beasts from other tales or even other traditions when making the Greek classical or Sinbad films. Cyclops, centaurs, sirens, Buddhist carvings, Egyptian statuary and the Hindu goddess Kali (looking more like a dancing Shiva, actually) turn up in Sinbad films (he was well travelled, I suppose) and the Kraken sea monster of Norse mythology is co-opted to menace Andromeda in Clash of the Titans. The Hydra, meanwhile, migrates from the legend of Hercules’ labours and becomes the guardian of the golden fleece which Jason and his Argonauts have to do battle with. Harryhausen would point out to picky critics that he was making fantasy films, not academic adaptations of the classical tales. These stories existed in many variant versions, anyway, having always existed within malleable oral traditions before being written down and rendered ‘definitive’. The same goes for the dinosaurs vs. humans films (One Million Years BC in particular). This was a colourful fantasy, not an essay in paleontological reconstruction. However, Harryhausen, ever the perfectionist, would try to make his dinosaurs in accordance with current scientific knowledge as far as practical demands allowed. Given the considerable expertise which many young children have when it comes to dinosaur taxonomy, this was probably wise.

Talos descends - Jason and the Argonauts

Harryhausen’s stop-motion animation technique involved moving his models in each of the 24 frames which went up to make a second of 35mm sound film. This was hugely labourious and time consuming, and required intense concentration, a minute sense of continuity and a fine attention to every nuance of gesture and movement. Duchamp’s 1912 painting Nude Descending A Staircase No.2, with its blurred yet analytical depiction of movement over time, provides a good visual analogy to the kind of stretched out and slowed down perception of time Harryhausen had to cultivate. His moving monsters were always evidently models – they never achieved a convincing semblance of real life. But those who carped that they lacked realism fundamentally failed to appreciate their true appeal. It was the very fact that they did look like models stirred into miraculous motion, golems raised from inert, moulded clay by some cabbalistic enchantment, which lent them their magic aura. Harryhausen seemed to be well aware of this, which is why there are so many statues, lifeless figureheads or limply hanging skeletons which are brought to life in his films – the witches or sorcerers (invariably wicked) who achieve this acting as surrogate animators. There is the six-armed Kali in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, which also has a wooden figurehead which comes to life; the bronze colossus Talos in Jason and the Argonauts; and the golden bull christened the Minaton (a kind of robotic minotaur) in Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, which acts as a labour saving mechanised galley crew. He had also planned to adapt Karl Capek’s play R.U.R (standing for Rossum’s Universal Robots – the first use of the term), bringing the Czech writer’s mechanical men to life.

Talos Awakes - Jason and the Argonauts

The Talos sequence in Jason and the Argonauts is probably my favourite Harryhausen scene. The moment when the monumental statue, kneeling on its plinth with sword at the ready, turns its cumbersome head with rusty creak of ages to look at the two fools making away with its titanic treasures, is electrifying. And when it effortfully pulls itself up and climbs down from the plinth, to the accompaniment of the low rumbling brass of Bernard Herrmann’s score (his standard lumbering monster music), I still find myself catching my breath. Harryhausen animates the stiff-limbed gait of the verdigrised giant perfectly, creating an awkward, naturally pixillated movement suggestive of joints which haven’t seen exercise in aeons. It was entirely appropriate that Harryhausen turned to casting his own bronze statues in later life. He created casts of both his Talos and Shiva models, giving them a more permanent form than the fragile and perishable latex rubber of the originals.

With Trog on your side - Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger

The care which Harryhausen took over his creations, and the evident love he put into giving life naturally led to them often taking on a sympathetic air. His monsters were frequently imbued with a certain noble savagery. This was another legacy of Kong, the imperious master of its kingdom, whose wild environment is invaded, and whose untamed nature brought low by contact with human civilisation. There’s always a part of me that’s rooting for the giant roaring beasts as they’re poked, prodded and pierced by spears, swords and arrows, and a feeling of sadness when they slam lifelessly to the ground with a final bellow or drawn out screech. The prehistoric saurian in The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms disturbed from its ocean bed slumber by the noisome rumblings of the atomic age; the alien Ymir in 20 Million Miles to Earth, which is brought to our planet from Venus and is treated as a freakish beast by all who come into contact with it; and the great ape of Mighty Joe Young, subjected to all manner of circus indignities – all invite audience sympathy. In Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, Harryhausen goes the whole way and finally makes one of his stop-motion figures, the prehistoric giant Trog, a dumbly loyal friend to our intrepid adventurers. He lends his brute strength like a humanoid Kong, a beast once more tamed by Beauty. Perhaps significantly, the Harryhausen family dog when Ray was a boy was named Kong.

T Rex vs.Triceratops - One Million Years BC

Harryhausen created a wide variety of creatures over the course of five decades, to each of which he imparted a living movement drawn from his careful study of analogous species. He modelled real animals such as baboons, elephants and walruses. He also recreated extinct ones, bringing dinosaurs, carnivorous and herbivore, back to life for The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, One Million Years BC and the Valley of Gwangi. There were molluscs, crustaceans, marine reptiles and cephalopods – the giant octopus from It Came From Beneath the Sea, the giant crab and nautiloid from Mysterious Island and a giant turtle for One Million Years BC; and insects (all giant, of course) – scorpions in Clash of the Titans, bees in Mysterious Island and a wasp in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad.

Pterodactyl with mini Raquel - One Million Years BC

Creating the illusion of flight in its different forms was one of many challenges he relished setting for himself in each film. The flickering wings of an insect in flight was a very different proposition from animating the flapping, spike-beaked scrap of a pterodactyl, the top-heavy bulk and wide wingspan of a roc or the mid-air gallop of the winged horse Pegasus. Making a skeleton stalk and stab entailed building a particularly fine armature, the jointed metallic frame at the core of all his cast latex rubber models, to provide the bones within the bones. He often had his monsters an magical creatures fight on different planes, climbing up stairs and jumping off and onto plinths and platforms, all of which allowed for an increased range of postures and gestural movements.

Death's head grin - Jason and the Argonauts

His Dynamation photographic process involved the matching of actors with model action (the integration of mannequins human and manufactured), and that combined action against model, studio and location sets. This entailed managing the delicate task of matching colour, tone and scale, blending the real and the imaginary in as realistic a marriage as possible. Such a blend had demonstrably not been the case in some of his earlier studio pictures such as 20 Million Miles to Earth, where the back projections of Rome were obtrusively ill-matched with the animation. The celebrated summit of his achievement with Dynamation was the skeleton fight in Jason and the Argonauts, which he choreographed to the last detail in his charcoal storyboards. The skeletons he fashioned for The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts (the singular creation from the former piecing itself together to rise from the earth with its bony brethren in the latter) area a marvellous design. The beetling, drawn in brow ridge and leering death grin lends them a jack-o-lantern appearance of gleefully psychotic ferocity. They look like they relish the prospect of reducing their opponents to the lifeless and fleshless state from which they’ve temporarily been resurrected.

Ymir and model farmer - 20 Million Miles to Earth

For all the technical mastery of the Dynamation scenes, it was also always fun seeing a jerkily writhing of a human being picked up in the jaws of a dinosaur, screaming horribly before being chomped (the bloodcurdling cries another element taken from Kong), or lifted bodily in the claws of a Roc to be deposited in a mountain nest as food for the chicks. There’s a brief but rather impressive scene in 20 Million Miles to Earth in which the reptilian Ymir wrestles with a farmer in a barn, understandably enraged by the fact that its just had a pitchfork stuck into its back. Harryhausen animates the man quite convincingly as he tries to fight off his attacker, his blows growing more desperate as the creature sinks its teeth into his shoulder. Most famously, a tiny model of Raquel Welch was carted off in the clutches of a pterodactyl in One Million Years BC, feebly gesticulating as it disappeared into the distance, spears thrown in the flapping and cawing beast’s wake all falling pitifully short.

Monumental lumber - Earth vs.the Flying Saucers

The Jason skeleton fight demonstrated the complex action Dynamation could co-ordinate between actors and models. But Harryhausen also enjoyed having his creatures interact with miniature sets, which usually involved their utter destruction. There are many wonderful scenes of oversized monsters chewing on masonry and twisting iron girders as if they were plasticene, reducing all to decorous rubble. He drew upon his friend Ray Bradbury’s short story The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms for the poetic scene in which the subaquatic saurian rears up to confront an isolated lighthouse. It hears its foghorn as an aggressively challenging bellow, its reflecting beacon a blinking eye, and tears wounds in the brickwork with its claws. Later, it goes stomping through Manhattan in the classic style, snacking on foolhardy NYPD officers who stand their ground in the face of the overwhelming evidence that their guns are having no effect whatsoever. The giant octopus which Came From Beneath the Sea wrestles the span of the Golden Gate Bridge into new plastic forms, like a post-war sculptor. The Venusian Ymir in 20 Million Miles to Earth climbs to the top of the Colosseum in Rome in an attempt to evade the US army. They blast away in their usual dunderheaded manner with bazookas and howitzers. Between enraged monster and aimless artillery, they manage to destroy a fair amount of antique Roman architecture before the inevitable end. The spectre of Kong looms large again as the rather pitiable beast plummets to the roads ringing the old Roman circus. It even gets to wave a defiant Kong-style fist at its tormentors below before taking its dying fall. Most enjoyably (and in a stylistic departure for Harryhausen) the sharp-edged discuses of the alien ships in the self-explanatorily titled Earth vs. the Flying Saucers fell the Washington Monument like so much dead lumber (crushing fleeing citizens in its timbering shadow), strim the classical columns guarding the Lincoln Memorial, and crack the dome of the Capitol like a hollow eggshell. It was a scene memorably parodied by Tim Burton in Mars Attacks, with the Martians rather more adeptly manoeuvring their saucers to toy with the toppling monument, tipping one way and t’other and making the panicked tourists run thither and thither before crushing them with much gleeful cackling.

Enter Medusa - Clash of the Titans

Harryhausen also delighted in sinuous, elastic motion, whether it be in the winding tentacles of the giant octopus in It Came From Beneath the Sea, the seven heads of the Hydra in Jason and the Argonauts, or more simply in the trumpeting trunk of the elephant in 20 Million Miles to Earth. More balletically, he also animated a serpentine bellydance in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, an enchanted snake growing four limbs which undulated with hypnotically swaying gesticulations before the tail reverted to boa instincts and tried to throttle its new-grown head. This delight reached its apogee in the snaking hair of the Medusa in Clash of the Titans, in which the multiple coils of the gorgon’s tangled barnet writhe in hissing and chaotically contrary motion. The Medusa’s slithering approach is all lit by a light mimicking flickering torchlight in a subterranean lair, an effect which had to be sustained in all the 1/24th of a second frames. Ray Bradbury called it ‘the finest piece of work he ever did’.

Centaur vs.Griffin - Golden Voyage of Sinbad

Again, for all the technical achievements of the Dynamation action, the climactic setpieces of Harryhausen’s films, the Jason and Sinbad ones in particular, tended to feature monster on monster gladiatorial combat. This put the real stars of the movie centre stage, with the humans pushed to the periphery. They occasionally prodded the antagonist of their favoured creature with puny pinprick spears, which produced an irritant sting at best, but generally they took the opportunity to slink away to safety. As far back as 20 Million Miles to Earth, he set his amphibious Venusian giant against an escaped circus elephant (the same one whose real incarnation he himself had been seen feeding a few moments earlier in his small screen cameo). In the later films of his mature period he pitted curved claw against razor-toothed claw, clacking scimitar beak against boulder-like fist. There was the classic fight between T.Rex and triceratops in One Million Years BC, with the mighty carnivore leaping onto the bony plated herbivore’s back, trying to avoid the jabbing thrusts of its goring head lances. Surprisingly, the triceratops comes out the victor in that one. An ogrish Cyclops lashed out at an unleashed dragon in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, and the friendly troglodyte tried to pummel the defrosted sabre-tooth tiger in Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger. Both anthropoid bruisers were outclassed, however, and the outcome seemed something of a foregone conclusion. Griffin vs. Centaur in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad was a rather more even match – club and hoof against beak and claw, brutish grunt met with screeching squawk. Harryhausen creatures never reached a linguistic level, but their panoply of howls, roars, snarls and piteous dying screams were articulate in themselves. Lets finish with the image of this mighty bout, played out in front of the henge fencing the fountain of eternal youth. Place your bets now, and watch The Golden Voyage of Sinbad to find out who wins. My money’s on the griffin. It’s a wickedly clawed southpaw with good beak action, and the centaur’s vulnerable in its undefended flanks.

Comrades and Pre-Cinema at the Bill Douglas Centre

The lanternist and the moon - Comrades

I had a good look around the Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture up at the University of Exeter last weekend, on one of a select few Saturdays on which it is currently opening. Located on the periphery of the campus in the Old Library, where unloved books go to gather dust, yellow and slowly fall apart in a warren of strip-lit underground levels, it’s not exactly prominent or conspicuously inviting. But it is worth seeking out and investigating, piled high as it is with a rich variety of memorabilia spanning the history of cinema and its antecedents. The collection is the fruit of several decades of assiduous antique and junk shop combing by the Scottish film-maker Bill Douglas and his lifelong soulmate, emotional support and companion in creative exploration Peter Jewell. Their collection began in a fairly modest way in 1961, shelves gradually filling with books on the cinema, and the silent period in particular. Other objects associated with the movies and their marketing soon formed a further, rapidly accreting layer above this scholarly bedrock. It was not long before every space in the flat which the two shared in Soho from the mid-60s onwards was taken over by their impressive personal museum, as can be seen in the 1978 interview conducted there, which is included as an extra on the BFI Comrades dvd. Jewell estimates that they eventually amassed some 50,000 items, a testament to the mutual passion for the moving image which had brought them together in the first place. Jewell, whose family home in Barnstaple was a regular residence for Douglas, a welcome retreat from the unsupportive and wearying hustle of the London-based film industry, donated the collection to Exeter University following Douglas’ death from cancer in 1991, at the terribly premature age of 54.

Bill sets up the praxinoscope

Making your way downstairs, past the posters for gaudily coloured science fiction b-movies, silent films starring half-forgotten screen sirens and lengthy variety bills with cinematographic spectacles just one more novelty act, you discover what was, for Douglas, the heart of the collection, and the core of his own private obsession. The bunker-like conditions are appropriate here, since this really is a hidden hoard of magical delights. The hushed atmosphere and sense of being hermetically sealed off from the daylit world, together with the fact that I’ve never encountered another living soul down here, make you feel as if you are trespassing into some sacred, forbidden chamber. This is the room in which Douglas’ pre-cinematic devices and toys are displayed – early means of projecting images, creating the impression of movement or depth, or producing illusionistic effects which play upon visual perception. Here you’ll find phenakistoscopes, kaleidoscopes, filoscopes, stereoscopes and a large green mutoscope, better known as a What the Butler Saw machine (and yes, you can crank the handle and have a leering look at the casting couch scene flickering by within). Douglas was particularly fond of the praxinoscope, an ingenious and beautiful moving image toy invented by the Frenchman Emile Reynaud in 1876. This consisted of a revolving barrel with a strip of successive images fitted around the inner rim. These would be reflected on the mirrored facets of the central hub, illuminated by a shaded candle, which gave a convincing impression of movement to whatever figure or object was depicted. Douglas’ excitement at taking out his own praxinoscope from its wooden box in the 1978 interview is charmingly evident. Too polite to foist his toy on his interlocutor, he is nevertheless delighted when asked to demonstrate its workings, and goes about its construction and operation with the proprietorial pleasure and educative zeal of someone showing off their pride and joy, revealing their hidden passion. As he points out, this was an experience which could be enjoyed communally, everyone gathering around to gaze into the mirror, anticipating the shared dreams of the cinema. Indeed, Reynaud invented a theatrical elaboration of the praxinoscope, the Theatre Optique, which he unveiled to a Parisian audience in October 1892. This allowed for his figures to be projected via a system of reflective mirrors onto the rear of a screen, their movements played out against a magic lantern slide backdrop. Douglas also demonstrates how the different speeds at which the barrel could be revolved, or the way in which it slowed down led to a contemplation of nature of motion, and the manner in which it is observed.

The 'lanternist' demonstrates a thaumatrope disc in Comrades

Also in the collection are thaumatrope discs, with images on either side which merge when the attached strings are wound and then released to rapidly spin around. It’s an example of the persistence of vision which is key to the experience of cinema. The best known example, with the bird on one side becoming incarcerated in the cage on the other, is used in Comrades as a visual representation of the fates of the Tolpuddle martyrs who are the subject of the film. One of Eadweard Muybridge’s multi-camera motion picture studies of movement from the 1880s is included, a succession of photographic images which have proved amenable to later cinematic animation. One of the unrealised scripts which Douglas worked on towards the end of his life, Flying Horse, was based on Muybridge’s experiments and the tragic events of his life. There’s a hand-cranked Lumiere camera prominently placed in the centre of the space which effectively marks the beginning of cinema, and to a large extent the eclipse of the entertainments which surround it. Also prominent is a selection of magic lanterns and the delicate, hand-painted glass slides which threw luminous, candlit scenes onto screens or living room walls. A travelling lanternist, his appearance drawn from the 19th century prints and engravings, played a central part in Comrades, and the magic lantern prop made for the film takes its place amongst original models.

The lanternist in the rain - arriving in Tolpuddle in Comrades

Douglas and Jewell dedicated a great deal of time and effort into expanding their collection, particularly during the lengthy periods when Douglas found work hard to come by. His semi-autobiographical trilogy comprising My Childhood, My Ain Folk and My Way Home, funded by the BFI’s production board set up in the 1970s, won him awards and critical plaudits (some of these awards on display here), but didn’t lead to offers of funding for further films. It would be almost a decade before he got to make his intimate historical epic about the Tolpuddle martyrs, Comrades, years during which he became a respected and well-loved teacher of direction at the National Film and Television School. After several delays, partly caused by a serious falling out with the initial producer, Ismail Merchant (there was never any way that Douglas was going to make a decorous Merchant-Ivory production), he finally started shooting his film in September 1985, having finished his script in 1980. His fascination with pre-cinematic optical entertainments found a significant place within the script, and provided a series of formal devices which reflected on the way we perceive the world, and the manner in which images are used to tell particular stories. Douglas and Jewell were both huge fans of silent cinema, and had read widely on the subject, in addition to seeing screenings of as many films from the era as they were able. Douglas’ choice of modern classical composer Hans Werner Henze to write the music for Comrades was made on the basis of having heard his score for Erich von Stroheim’s silent masterpiece Greed. There’s a letter written to Henze in the corner of the museum dedicated to Douglas which attests to this. The influence of silent cinema on Comrades can be felt in the way that the images are left to tell as much of the story as possible. The contemplative concentration on expressive faces and gestures shows an affinity with Carl Dreyer, as well as with his spiritual descendants Robert Bresson and Ingmar Bergman.

George Loveless' lantern slide portrait from Comrades

Comrades bears the subtitle A Lanternist’s Account of the Tolpuddle Martyrs and What Became of Them, which appears separately on the screen to give it particular emphasis. It’s the kind of wordily descriptive title which might indeed have appeared painted on the side of a travelling showman’s hoarding or bill poster. The lanternist appears as a witness in the opening scene, looking on from a distance as machine breakers disguised as women are cut down in cold blood by redcoated cavalry who sweep down on them from the hillsides. Lugging his magic lantern equipment on his back, he becomes a news vendor, travelling from village to village. As he cries out as he enters the village of Tolpuddle, he charges a penny for the entertainment, but ‘all the news is free’. The first image we see in the film is a blazing white solar disc, which is slowly eclipsed by a dark circle. It could be seen as a lens cap being placed over the projector, a blocking off of light which also symbolises stories left untold, histories unrecorded. The rest of the film, with its variety of visual storytelling devices embedded within the frame of the cinema screen which will be the ultimate development of their illusions and shadowplay, can be seen as a progression towards the full revelation of those hitherto untold or ignored stories. And the delight which the toys or entertainments bring shows that those lives are filled with magic, joy and love as well as toil, misfortune and exploitation. Douglas’ use of pre-cinematic devices goes against the realist grain, introducing a deliberate element of non-naturalistic imagery which makes it clear to us that we are being told a story. He also departs from British social realism by insisting upon hope, rather than having his characters ground down by the depredations of the world in which they live. He makes the Methodist preacher George Loveless the central character of his tale, and views him as a man of uncomplicated goodness and quiet determination. He is aided in this by a beautifully measured performance of great warmth from Robin Soans. Douglas saw Loveless (a wholly inappropriate name for the generous and universally liked character presented here) as a saintly man, commenting in a talk he gave at the Bridport Film Society in October 1987 that he ‘couldn’t see any evidence of anything he did against any form of human life…he only gave to human kind’; As good a definition as any. He is not interested in exposing some dark side to his character. In this too – allowing for a character to be merely and simply good and kind – he went against the grain of British film-making at the time.

Blossom and Decay - the book and print seller's window in Comrades

The lanternist is played by Alex Norton, who brings a great stillness and alert presence to a character who is essentially an observer, an outsider who gradually becomes involved with the lives of those he encounters. He makes periodic appearances throughout the first half of the film. He provides us with an introduction to the socially and economically segregated world of Tolpuddle, linking the elegant grandeur of the country house, with its gentile manners and conspicuous display of wealth, and the village, with its spare cottages and muddy paths, which appears even more starkly bare as he enters it during a filthy downpour. The contrasting reception he receives in each environment marks a clear moral division between the two. We are initially denied access to the country house, viewing his approach to the local lord from the darkness outside, his pitch for a performance seen in the form of a shadow puppet play, figures rising and circling around one another in silhouetted outlines thrown onto the backlit curtain. This shadow show, symbolic of social exclusion, is repeated in variant form later on in the film, when the wives of the arrested men are only able to see their trial through an obscuring pane of frosted glass (another device designed to eclipse the story), turning everything into a vague blur of movement. Other illusionistic pictures or toys are associated with exclusive or elitist environments in which George Loveless and the other villagers meet with deceit or dismissal. The book and print shop in Dorchester has a print in its window called Blossom and Decay, which can be found in the Bill Douglas Centre, in which two young children full of blooming health, pose with a cornucopia fruits, glasses of milk, bouquets of flowers and huge loaves. Viewed from a distance, however, these details form the image of a skull, a grim memento mori pointing to their, and the observer’s inevitable end. In the Tolpuddle mansion, meanwhile, there is a picture of a sailing ship which, when viewed from another angle, turns into a portrait of an unsmiling cavalier (the two being painted on obverse sides of pyramidally raised rills). He looks down on the viewer with a disdainfully appraising air, as if he doesn’t really approve of the person gazing up at him from their disadvantaged position. One of the Tolpuddle villagers gives him an appropriate arm gesture in response, which we can almost imagine being accompanied by a Carry On ‘up yours’ raspberry.

Children's pictures - attic lantern show

Cutting away from the illuminated window and its shadow play, a baying of hounds gives a shorthand aural indication of the rude rebuff of the lanternist and his proffered entertainments and his unceremonious subsequent ejection from the premises. We momentarily see the him outlined in profile against the huge bright disc of the full moon, as if he were framed in the glare of his own projecting light. It gives him a noble, almost heroic appearance, far from the mangy cur he’s just been treated as, a subhuman creature fit only to set the dogs on. In the village he pauses by the window of George Loveless’ cottage, suffused with the low radiance of his humble hearthfire. In this dim but homely interior, he makes hand shadow puppets by the light of the moon against the interior wall for the Loveless’ children. It’s a direct inversion of the scene at the big house – shadows created from the outside, through an open window, rather than cast from within a veiled interior. His welcome here is warm and open, quite the reverse of his treatment at the big house. The fact that we often see his magic, made from shadows and light, from a child’s eye perspective indicates that Comrades is in a sense a children’s version of the Tolpuddle martyrs’ story. It views things with clarity and simplicity, and draws clear divisions between right and wrong, and has no place for shades of moral ambiguity. It asks us to view the world from a fresh and innocent perspective, to cleanse our minds of world-weary cynicism. Entertainments and stories for children are also capable of conveying harsh truths which are often elided in the ‘adult’ version. The lanternist shows a slide of ‘three little soldier boys’ who go to war to a wide-eyed gathering in the gloom of the village hall loft. With a sharp rap of his tambourine to conjure a cannonade, he abrubtly jerks one of the slides to the side, making their startled heads fly off – a shocking piece of subversive anti-militarism for impressionable young minds.

Meetings in ancient landscapes - Maiden Castle

Later on, the lanternist frightens the children on a foggy night by capering wildly behind the village hall, his shadow looming large on the stony screen of the windowless sidewall as he bangs and rattles his tambourine, striking it against himself and into the ground. In the ghostly light glowing through the billows of mist, he takes on an almost demonic cast. This mercurial, sprite-like side, full of playful capriciousness, gives him an air of otherness, and prepares us for the transformations he undergoes throughout the film. He is like a figure from a folk tale, a wanderer who arrives at a village from the wide world beyond and may not be entirely what he seems. The folk-tale aspect of the story (which is allied with its children’s storybook qualities) is also reflected in the evocation of the spirit of place, of the particular setting within which the tale is told. This being a story of agricultural labourers, the land plays a centrally important part. Douglas frames the Dorset landscape beautifully, making painterly compositions of ploughed soil, autumn wheatfields, rolling pasture, glinting sea and chalky Purbeck cliff and winding, flinty trackways. Ancient earthworks and chalk figures also figure, with Douglas’ camera looking down on the Cerne Abbas giant and up at the ramparts of Maiden Castle (shot in what he referred to as ‘God’s light’). This furthers the sense of the film as folk tale, with the characters rooted in a landscape which is steeped in accreted legend and history, sculpted by age-old human habitation. It places Douglas within the neo-romantic lineage of painters like Paul Nash and Eric Ravilious. It also suggests a natural affinity between man and landscape, a connection with the contours of local geology and geography which can be followed down the generations, and which is now being eroded away.

The lantern show of spectacle - Doubtfire’s Famous Diorama

We encounter different incarnations of the lanternist as the story unfolds, all played by Alex Norton and in all but one case peddlers of optical entertainments or diversions. The form is mutable but some essence remains the same. His recurrent presence as an onlooker and impish commentator gives the film its own internal persistence of vision, as well as the self-reflexive sense of a story being both recounted and recorded. When the actual lanternist takes his leave of Tolpuddle, and has a few parting words with George Loveless, he tells him that because of him he is ‘a changed man’. The warmth of his reception in the village, where a ragged and penniless itinerant such as himself has found such generous hospitality, has led him to feel a direct involvement in the labourer’s cause. No longer will he be a passive observer. His political awakening comes about all through human contact and kindness, with all the fellow feeling that it engenders. Responding to the sincerity of his feelings, Loveless tells him ‘go then, and make a union of lanternists’. It’s an idealistic vision of a unionised future which allows for creativity to be freely realised and adequately rewarded, and is to an extent no doubt a rueful reflection on Douglas’ part of his own struggles within the modern ‘lanternist’ industry.

Sergeant Bell's Raree Show

...and what lies inside

The lanternists’ departure makes way for successive incarnations (some of which have already appeared before he heads off into the world to spread the news). He is the stout, union-jack waistcoated proprietor of ‘Doubtfire’s Famous Diorama’, whose extravagant and noisy theatrical spectactle, akin to the grotesqueries of the French Fantasmagorie (an impressive mock-up of which I remember from the Museum of the Moving Image on the South Bank), employs sophisticated moving lanterns alongside frantically busy stagehands, and offers ‘a journey to the Antipodes’ – a presentiment of the curiously onlooking Loveless’ fate. At the village fair, the gaily if grubbily uniformed Sergeant Bell brings along his Royal Raree Show – a fold out stand bearing a wooden box with two round peepholes opening on to a diorama of the garden of Eden, in which an African Eve is transformed, et in Arcadia ego-style, into a bony death. This raree show was based on an 1839 print which the film’s prop, together with Alex Norton’s ‘sergeant’, brought to life. It can now be found amidst the authentic period pieces in the Bill Douglas Centre, as can the Edenic diorama. When George Loveless is driven through the streets of Dorchester after his arrest, on his way to his cell, the lanternist turns up in the guise of a destitute vagabond, huddling in a recessed stairwell. Reduced to passive observer once more at this bleak point in the story, the camera focuses on his eye, which looks through the straight iron railings at the curved spokes of a passing carriage wheel. This contrast of static and still, straight and curved lines creates a strobing op-art effect, a bedazzling impression of contrary motion such as that which can sometimes be seen in early cinema. Once sentence has been passed and the men have gone from the village, the lanternist turns up as a mysterious visitor looking out from the interior of a coach. He beckons the children over and shows them a thaumatrope disc, the toy which contains a single image on each side of a disc which are combined when it is rapidly twirled on the attached strings. His is the old bird and cage favourite. He points out the bird and the cage on their reverse faces before spinning it around and incarcerating the one in the other. But his underlining of their initially separate states offers hope that the men will once more be free, and will return home. It turns out that he is bringing money gathered by sympathisers for the support of the wives and their families.

Journey's end - the panorama runs out

The long voyage to Australia, as foretold in Doubtfire’s Diorama, is recreated in the form of a painted panorama, the camera gliding steadily over it to give the impression of movement. When we’ve passed Africa, India and Van Dieman’s Land to drop anchor in Botany Bay, we see the lanternist as ship’s captain, selling the moving panorama we’ve just seen to one of the overseers rowing over to transport the convicts to their harsh new world (‘for just one penny you can put the world in your pocket’). This panorama can be found stretched out on the wall in the Bill Douglas Centre, the eye reproducing the film’s interlude as it scans its elongated transglobal span. The behemoths and trident bearing Neptunes which populate the pictorial representation of the sea journey suggest that we are now entering the land of myth, a part of the story which is more sparsely documented, and therefore reliant on imaginative expansion. The narrative also fragments at this point, the comrades disunited and becoming the centre of their own separate stories. The lanternist turns up in the shelter of a wooden cubicle in the scorching midday sun of the outback desert, his spyhole turning his overseer’s hut into a camera obscura. His failure to see the inverted image of the chained convict labourers projected on the wall as they approach his box, pick axes raised, means that it will become his splintered coffin.

Revolutionary silhouettist - decapitating the portrait

He turns up again in a colonial governor’s house as a prim and powdered silhouette portraitist, dextrously cutting the outline of James Fox’s aristocratic profile with his scissors, finishing it off with a snipped decapitation which sends it tumbling to the tabletop. By a tropical shore, adjacent to the surreally twisted forms of a petrified forest, he appears in the eccentric guise of Gaviotti, his caravan proclaiming his ‘Celebrated Steam Heliotypes and Solar Mezzotints’. With his steampunk proto-camera, he takes pictures of the Aborigines, recording another untold layer of history. In his developing shed, his glass plates hang like delicate windchimes, clinking together with a gentle clinking susurration. The Aborigine, standing posed within his own sacred landscape, forms a direct link with the convicts and the land from which they have been wrenched. His image is reproduced on the plates which hang in the shed alongside that of one of the Tolpuddle transportees, a picture which brings them back together again when another of their number sees it. These images fade before our eyes, however. The Aborigine, who is left obediently posing by a tree, is left to fade from his own story. The transportees meet beneath another tree, and also fade from the land, leaving little trace of their temporary presence, returning home to resume their own interrupted stories.

Lost pioneer - Gaviotti's steampunk camera

Our final view of the lanternist returns him to his original guise. The men are free, and receive a ceremonial welcome home in a grand hall which looks a little bit like a cinema. They line up on the stage as if to give us their curtain call bows. And there in the wings stands the lanternist, now smartly dressed and in possession of a three lensed triunal lantern. A technological progression in the art of magic lantern projection allowing for added layers of movement and more impressive special effects within the backdrop slide, it means that the tale can now be told more fully and with even greater visual impact. Douglas had originally intended to create a similar effect of cinematic progression by filming the Dorset scenes in black and white with a compressed ratio before expanding into widescreen colour for the scenes set in the vast open vistas of the Australian landscape. The lanternist takes a bow as he is given credit for telling the story ‘through the power of optics and magical transformations’. When Michael Hordern’s progressive reformer and campaigner for the martyrs’ freedom notes that ‘it was almost as though he’d been present throughout’, Alex Norton’s lanternist gives a knowing straight to camera look, all but tipping the audience a wink. The final shot is of a bright white disc, wiping out the eclipse with which we began. The lens cap is now off and the story has been recounted in full. We end with magic lantern slide portraits of the Tolpuddle martyrs, footnotes alerting us to their subsequent lives in true Hollywood biopic style. The slides are there to be used again (and you can see them in the Bill Douglas Centre), the story retold until it is transformed into exemplary myth, the village becoming as much a part of the legendary landscape as the Cerne Abbas Giant or Maiden Castle.

His final bow - the lanternist with his 'Triunal' projector

Broadcast in Shindig Magazine

The cover of the latest edition of the music magazine Shindig, whose tastes generally tend towards 60s psychedelia, is this month graced by a photo of Trish and James from Broadcast, circa Tender Buttons, looking appraisingly down at the camera eye, a painted wall of words forming a cryptically semi-legible backdrop. It’s the first step in locating the band within a broader history, allying them with a continuing stream of adventurous music which seeks to marry pop melodicism with avant garde and experimental sounds and techniques and poetic lyrics. Psychedelia, if you will, although the retro connotations of the term ill suits the music which Broadcast made, which, whilst drawing on many influences from the past, was always resolutely forward looking. Small side pieces folded into the main article pinpoint some of the music which fed into Broadcast’s evolving sound – The United States of America above all. There’s also a short article on the 1969 White Noise LP An Electric Storm, a collaborative effort bringing together Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson from the Radiophonic Workshop with the young American musician David Vorhaus. Another big inspiration for Trish and James, it was, as she observed in Broadcast’s Invisible Jukebox article in the September 2005 edition of Wire magazine, slightly marred by the intrusion of ‘orgy vocals’. There’s an obvious element of sadness in the implication inherent in appearing in a magazine devoted to the glories of bygone days that the band are now a part of the history upon which they drew. Trish’s death at the beginning 2011 effectively brought the ever-evolving musical adventures she and James had shared, together with their fellow travellers, to an end. But in the interview which is the centrepiece of the issue, James reiterates the promise of material recorded for the album intended as a follow up to Tender Buttons (a full-force Broadcast album as opposed to the fruitful collaboration with Julian House’s Focus Group on the Witch Cults of the Radio Age LP) being forthcoming at some future date, when he is entirely satisfied that it has reached a suitably finely tuned state to stand as the fitting tribute which it will inevitably partly be viewed as. The article is titled The Children of Alice, which also points to a continuation of the lineage: James has been recording and will be performing under that fitting name in a trio which includes longtime friend Julian House, alias The Focus Group, and Roj Stevens, a former Broadcast compadre who has more recently recorded an excellent album on the Ghost Box label (its percussive and slightly abrasive electronic palette sounding like it wouldn’t have been out of place on Tender Buttons, or indeed on the faux library music of the Microtronics mini-cds). The choice of name references Trish’s love of Lewis Carroll and Jonathan Miller’s 1966 version of Alice in Wonderland, and its suggestion of continuation, rather than a new start with a new individual perspective, is hugely heartening. If Trish is the girl who left Chelmsley Wood to go down the rabbit hole, then it seems that the spirit of her brave explorations into the hidden continents of the imagination is to be honoured, and further expeditions mounted. The Children of Alice will release their first recordings as part of the Devon Folklore Tapes series on June 1st, and will be performing at the Deerhunter/Atlas Sound ATP festival in Camber Sands in June (and you can see a clip of Trish singing with Bradford Cox during an American tour over here).



In one of several capsule side pieces bracketing the main article, Dan Abbott offers a ten best of Broadcast list. James and Trish’s methodical approach to recording and perfectionist attention to detail means that any such list is bound to be highly subjective. The time and care taken to craft each song on each album means that their records were few and far between but uniformly strong. There could be any number of top ten combinations. Abbott chooses a representative selection, reflecting the different phases of the band’s development, and the various aspects of their sound and songwriting. Clearly a committed fan with a broad and deep knowledge of their oeuvre, his choices tend to direct us away from the obvious, but always with a colourful and frequently poetic description which imagistically summarises why he considers it essential. How can you not immediately want to hear a piece whose ‘notes hang suspended like stars glimpsed through gaps in a magic fog as it slowly engulfs an unsuspecting night-time city’. Wonderful stuff, and entirely apt for the track in question (and I’m not going to tell you which one it is, either – you’ll have to guess, or buy the magazine). I’m happy that he’s chosen Arc of a Journey, one of my favourites from the Tender Buttons LP. It’s one of Trish’s most evocatively allusive lyrics, summing up science fiction landscapes with a few carefully chosen phrases, the simple, yearning melody backed by atmospheric and refreshingly non-generic electronic sounds which suggest they’ve learned something from their collaboration with the BEAST (the Birmingham Electro Acoustic Sound Theatre) on the Pendulum EP.



Lists by their very nature invite response and suggested additions, however. So, if you insist: Book Lovers was my introduction to the band, and its shifting minor key arpeggio, suggestive of the 60s harpsichord sound which managed both to have a flavour of the antique and to inhabit the kinetic bustle of the present, drives it on irresistibly. The lyrics, full of bibliophile sensuality and excitement at book learning, are a statement of intent, with an unapologetic ‘it’s not for everyone’ pointing to their determination to pursue their own winding and idiosyncratic path. The melancholic instrumental addendum is gorgeous, a long drawn out sigh, both satisfied and a little sad, marking the closing of the storybook. Echo’s Answer follows the literary trail, with lyrics quoting Tennyson’s Echo’s Answer, as used in Benjamin Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings. Its languorous pace is typical of a number of Trish’s daydream songs. Illumination from the Extended Play Two EP has a quietly ecstatic feel, with a rich mix of electronic sound textures over propulsive bass (which has an echoing concrete shadow throughout) and a gently rolling swell of drums giving it an epic, orchestral sound. It’s the baroque frame supporting a beautiful folkish melody, with visionary lyrics of great power (‘wait, the growing stem of time/waits poisonous outside’ is a striking opening couplet) expressing the autonomy of inner worlds, and a chorus of soaring wordless vocals. Poem of Dead Song, also from the Extended Play Two EP (both are collected on the Future Crayon compilation of EPs) has another lusciously melancholic opening section, beginning this time with wordless vocals. With the soft, bell-chords of the synths sounding behind her, the strike of the initial chime burnished away to leave only glinting resonance, it sounds like Trish singing to herself whilst walking back home along silent night streets. An abrupt shift in tempo and key takes us into what is not so much a chorus as a different plane of the song, refracting against the initial passage at a subtly off-kilter angle. Words come to the fore, although the muffled vocalisations continue with a crooning harmonisation in the distance. A solemn invocation calls on transformative powers, offering a hopeful vision of a clear path ahead.



Valerie, from the HaHa Sound LP, is essential, a perfect setting of Lubos Fiser’s main theme from Jaromil Jires’ 1970 Czech surrealist fairy tale film Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. The film became intensely personal to Trish, as she reveals in her sleeve note to the soundtrack album, released a few years back on the Finders Keepers label, and now happily repressed on vinyl with the original green poster design replacing the bloodstained daisy on the cover. It was a work of art to which she immediately felt instinctively attuned. It suffused her psyche so comprehensively (‘I became Valerie’, she notes of the experience of listening repeatedly to Fiser’s music) that such an appropriation seems entirely natural, the melody and lyrics a deeply affecting reflection of her inner life, as expressed by her sense of connection with the images on the screen. Hawk, which ends the album, flies along on a steady, ratcheting wooden pulse, two notes tic-toccing along at a nimble pace. Sparse synth arabesques are plucked out in reverberant harpsichord tones at regular intervals. Trish sings in a low register, the melody restrained in its emotional range. The words, intoned as much as sung, are imbued with a mythic feel. There’s the sense of a steady flight through the upper air, looking down on an ancient tundral landscape, progress measured out in the rushing beat of a strong and wide wingspan. The song sounds like a precursor to the ‘what you want is not what you need’ one chord Mongolian lute kosmische freak out with which Broadcast would end their concerts in the post-Tender Buttons period.



Tender Buttons, the title track of the LP which James and Trish made as a duo, draws on the linguistic play of Gertrude Stein, and finds Trish delighting in alliterative connection and the assonant qualities of words, creating striking contrasts or surprising associations through semi-random conjunctions of sound and meaning. The slithering, fast-picked guitar spattered over the firm supporting frame of the looping bassline sounds like Lou Reed in the early Velvet Underground days, or a stuttering passage in a Sonny Sharrock solo, a preface to the eruption. Black Cat, always a concert favourite, returns us to Alice’s subterranean or beyond-the-mirror dreamworlds. The repeated refrain ‘curiouser and curiouser’ is given its own distinctive inflection, the emphasis laid on the last two syllables. The electronic backing has a fizzing, roughly burred edge, which makes it sound as if it’s going to combust into smoking flame at any moment. This provides an added sense of tension, contrasting effectively with the measured vocals. The Focus Group collaboration Witch Cults of the Radio Age is a collage of song and sound fragments, which makes individual tracks harder to isolate and highlight. I See, So I See So, with its incantatory worlds and vocals, always stuck in my mind, though. The ‘solar on the rise’ lyric reminds me of Kenneth Anger’s films (as did the short films which accompanied the album), with Trish as a dark-haired incarnation of Marianne Faithfull in Lucifer Rising. It seems designed to sung on the rounded crest of an iron age burial mound or hill fort to mark some significant winter conjunction (in ‘magic January’). Finally, In Here the World Begins, from the Mother Is the Milky Way tour cd, is another low-key Pagan hymn, with lyrics of meditative self-reflexivity (‘a dream within a dream’) which fold in upon themselves before expanding outwards once more. The synths here sound like some plucked zither reverberating in a watery cavern. It was punctuated on stage by the most luminous synth lines from James, glowing with summery solar warmth. Trish would step lightly up and down the stage in front of a spotlit and back-projected screen, her shadowed form growing huge and then diminishing again as she did so. It’s a blissful and utterly entrancing lullaby, with all the acceptance of paradox and mystery often found in children’s songs (as in ‘life is but a dream’, cheerfully chorused in nurseries and libraries across the land as the concluding sentiment of Row, Row, Row Your Boat). Well, those are some of my favourites. Others will assemble a completely different set. All are equally valid.



Julian House is an abiding presence throughout the magazine. In his guise as a graphic designer with a distinctive, instantly recognisable style, he has produced to double page title spreads: One for the Broadcast article, featuring collaged fragments of Trish’s publicity and cover photo portraits, some outline cut-outs, some cropped and squared off; the other for an article on the dubious pleasures of 70s Italian giallo films, an imaginary poster in the period style of the one he designed for Peter Strickland’s recent film Berberian Sound Studio (and there’s an article on Broadcast’s soundtrack for this, too). Getting into the profundo rosso spirit of things, its steeped in shades of deep red. House is also interviewed in his role as joint chairman of the Ghost Box parish council, along with Jim Jupp (aka Belbury Poly, or the vicar of Belbury). Once more, he voices his indifference to the cultural pontifications filed under the unwieldy theoretical heading of hauntology. The Focus Group’s forthcoming LP, The Electrick Karousel, is previewed, apparently offering us numerous nuggets of ‘baroque psych’. It also features the magic trio of House, Roj and James on several tracks. The children of Alice are coming out into the world in many different guises.



As if all this weren’t enough, there’s also an article by Trembling Bells’ head Alex Nielson (a regular contributor of accessible and insightful reviews to the Wire), who shines a light on the post-Incredible String Band LPs of Mike Heron. I remember his Smiling Me With Bad Reputations album with vague fondness (sadly, it fell victim to one of my periodic Record and Tape Exchange purges many moons ago). My teen self particularly enjoyed the track with Pete Townshend and Keith Moon, glorying under the Beefheartian title Warm Heart Pastry. It seemed a surprising change of direction, before you recalled the move towards a heavier rock sound on the latter and little-loved Incredible String Band LPs. A news item at the beginning of the magazine has alerted me to the fact that Trembling Bells are returning to the Exeter Phoenix on 20th July. After their previous visit with Bonnie Prince Billy, they are teaming up on this occasion with the aforementioned Mr Heron, together with his daughter Georgia Seddon.

Night Ferry (1976)

Another article surveys the modest pleasures afforded by the Children’s Film Foundation from the 50s through to the 70s, which have grown in charm with the passing of time (I can’t say I ever saw one while I was actually a child). They now offer an insight into a more innocent world, which seems separated by a gulf greater than the few intervening decades would suggest. Watch the London Tales collection released by the bfi (it’s in the Devon library system if you’re from these parts), and in particular the widely roaming attempts of three schoolchildren to set up their own rag and bone round in The Salvage Gang, and you’ll see a city which simply no longer exists (and you’ll find yourself straining to pick up background detail passing by during the children’s trip on the top deck of a routemaster – a modern variant on the turn of the century ‘phantom rides’). Night Ferry (1976) is also fascinating, with its young punk protagonists in unglamorous back street settings in south west London reflecting their time and place with an unforced realism rather undermined by the preposterous (but fun) Egyptian mummy heist plot. The opening scene, in which one tyke tries to evade apprehension having trespassed into a busy railway marshalling yard to retrieve his toy glider, is particularly hair-raising. It has all the cringing tension of a public information film, with a shockingly violent accident just waiting to happen. The boy is seen hopping out of the way of oncoming trucks, and running in the narrow space between a stationary line of wagons and another approaching train. It’s inconceivable that such scenes would be filmed today, even if marshalling yards still existed. More treats for trainspotters (sorry, rail enthusiasts) come in the form of extensive footage, both in platform and onboard, of the night sleeper service from Victoria to (via Sealink) Paris and Brussells, just a short while before it was scrapped. I look forward to the release of the Weird Adventures CFF collection forthcoming from the bfi, which includes Powell and Pressburger’s 1972 swansong, The Boy Who Turned Yellow.

All in all, this edition of Shindig seems to be especially constructed to meet the needs of the average Broadcast fan, and thus can be considered essential.

Samuel Palmer, Simeon Solomon and the Camden Town Group at RAMM, Exeter

Samuel Palmer - Self Portrait

The new selection from the Royal Albert Memorial Museum’s art collection on display in the downstairs gallery includes some paintings which will be familiar to Exeter citizens who have visited regularly over the years. But there are also some new acquisitions which are being displayed for the first time. Chief amongst these is Samuel Palmer’s After the Storm, a late watercolour from 1861. This was painted on the North Devon coast, with a perspective looking out from Lee Bay. The mountainous outcropping of Castle Rock rises above the sheer cliff face in the middle distance, like a shattered tower keep at the foot of the Valley of Rocks, which leads up to the clifftop town of Lynton. The jutting headland of Foreland Point protrudes in the distance, a more solid echo of the clouds hanging above. These provide an element of Romantic sublimity, a touch of Alpine awe found closer to home. Palmer uses magic hour tones to lend his seascape a stained glass luminosity, the deep blue of the sea contrasting with peaches and saffron yellows of the after sunset horizon with which it is edged. This colour saturated seascape has a melodramatic narrative imposed upon it, as if Palmer were trying to bring his work into accord with Victorian pictorial conventions. A ship has foundered on the rocks, and a lifeboat is being heaved across the shore towards the sea, its crew preparing to row out and rescue any survivors still clinging to the wreckage. One of the lifeboatmen is embracing his young son as he is called by another young man whose hand is raised, summoning him to join the vessel as it is launched into the breaking waves. His wife stands to the side, body tensed with anxious anticipation, hands nervously wrung or firmly clasped in fervent, supplicatory prayer.

1861 was a terrible year for Palmer. His 19 year old son Thomas, to whom he had devoted all of his attention after the death of his daughter at the age of three, and in the face of his own stagnant artistic career, died after a short period of consumptive illness. It’s difficult not to see this tragedy reflected in the emotional parting of father and son which is the dramatic focus of After the Storm. The magic hour sunset light was typical of Palmer’s work, along with atmospheric moonlit night settings. There is, indeed, another late watercolour from 1865 with the title The Golden Hour. After the Storm, in common with the rest of his watercolour work from his middle and late periods, lacks the visionary intensity and sense of numinous presence characteristic of the paintings he produced whilst living in the North Kent village of Shoreham in the seven years between 1827-34. The Darent Valley, or the ‘valley of vision’ as he called it, provided him with the perfect stage backdrop for the realisation of his ideal spiritual landscapes. From it, he projected an Arcadia protectively bounded by the soft, feminine curves of sheltering hills and the rounded, piled up ranges of cumulus clouds, and lit by the silver sickle of a harvest moon, the copper disc of a lowering sun or the warm evening glow emanating from welcoming cottages and churches. These Edenic settings are peopled by figures languorously working in the fields, sheaving and bringing home the golden harvest or lounging about beneath bountifully burdened apple trees. It was a dream, of course, but a glorious one, a landscape suffused with what Palmer saw as a divine spirit. Unfortunately, his non-naturalistic, visionary paintings found no more favour with the public, patrons or the art establishment than had the work of his friend and inspiration William Blake (who came down to visit him in his Shoreham house towards the end of his life).

Scenes from the valley of vision - The Magic Apple Tree

Palmer saw his rural idyll as a retreat from the industrial expansion of the London on the outskirts of which he’d grown up. His solution was to look back to an idealised past, as it would be for the Pre-Raphaelites some years later. It was a past which included a reverence for old masters like Durer, Fra Angelico and Leonardo, soundtracked by Elizabethan English composers like Purcell, Tallis and Gibbons, and with Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress as its key literary work. But the ideal world which he constructed in his imagination and superimposed on his magical valley clashed badly with the distinctly unromantic realities of the rural labourer’s life in the early nineteenth century, which was a matter of grinding poverty and backbreaking toil rather than mystical communion with the cyclical progress of the seasons. The Captain Swing riots of 1830, a spontaneous reaction across Southern England to a failed harvest, depressed wages and the threat of widespread unemployment posed by new agricultural machinery, punctured Palmer’s dreamworld. Its radiance was already waning as the economic reality of his own commercial failure led to increasingly desperate poverty. An inheritance, which had sustained him for some time, had eventually dwindled away. Frustrated that visionary imagination, intensely personal artistic activity and spiritual idealism were turning out to be forces insufficient to transform his life and the indifferent world about him, he grew increasingly reactionary, retreating into narrow religious conservatism and judgemental hellfire condemnation. The 1832 Reform Act, which took tentative steps towards widening the voting franchise in the country beyond the landowning class, raised his ire and led to him proselytising for the Tories in apocalyptic ‘death of England’ fulminations which were dismissed, if they were noticed at all, as the ravings of a crank.

A Letter from India (1859)

He calmed down once he got married in 1837 to Hannah Linnell, by which time he had left the valley of vision and returned to London, having reluctantly relinquished his Darent dreaming. Hannah was the daughter of John Linnell, a successful and wealthy painter who was also a friend and patron of William Blake. Palmer had got to know Linnell in 1822, when he was still a teenager, and the older, well-established artist had guided him towards forming his own individual style and tastes. He was to prove something of an ogre as a father-in-law, however, loudly voicing his strongly held views and never forgetting to remind his son-in-law of his failure as an artist, both commercially and, in his opinion, aesthetically. Palmer remained humiliatingly beholden to him financially, and it was Linnell who funded a journey to Italy in the wake of the marriage. He steeped himself in the art of the area, consciously adapting his landscape painting to a more classical style, shorn of visionary stylisation, in an attempt to gain wider acceptance, and to hopefully earn a living with which he could support his family and gain some degree of independence. His watercolours from this point onward still have a vivid eye for the numinous qualities of landscape, but they are of a different, more prosaically Romantic tenor to those of the Sharpham period. In later years, he would look back with nostalgic yearning to his days in the magic valley of vision. His regular travels to Devon and the West Country, which began in 1833, suggest that here more than anywhere he managed to recapture something of the enchanted spirit which had illuminated those fast receding days. Paintings such as Mountain Landscape at Sunset (1859), The Good Farmer (1865) and The Dip of the Sun (1857) set the shadowed contours of Dartmoor landscapes before rubescent sunset sky backdrops. The Brother Home From the Sea (1863) and Robinson Crusoe Guiding His Raft Into the Creek (1850) locate their dramas of arrival or return in front of the limestone cliff arch of Durdle Door in Dorset, the jutting spar marking the furthest westward cusp of the curve of Lulworth Cove beyond. A Letter from India (1859), meanwhile, places another narrative within a North Devon landscape. Castle Rock and the Valley of Rocks are viewed from the opposite direction this time, and from an inland perspective. The sun sets below the ocean’s rim, setting the clouds on fire, and the crags of Lundy Island protrude above the watery horizon like the phantom city of Ys risen from the depths.

Simeon Solomon - Night (1890)

Another new painting on display is Simeon Solomon’s Night, a small watercolour painting from 1890. Solomon was born in 1840 in Bishopsgate in East London, on the edge of the Spitalfields area which was home to a large Jewish immigrant population in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Solomon was the youngest of 8 children born to orthodox Jewish parents. He clearly grew up in an environment which encouraged artistic expression, since his brother Abraham and sister Rebecca also had successful careers as painters. Night features a dreamy face in profile, eyes gazing outwards but lost in inner absorption. It is garlanded with light blue poppies, and a bird’s wing of the same colour sweeps back above the ear in a streamlined suggestion of flight. Liquid, light-blue swirls seemingly exhaled from nostrils or mouth, or inhaled from the intoxicating incense curling from the poppy’s dark stamen, are like the vapour trails of dream, and the contours of the billowing grey cloak the expanding shadow of night which this mythic figure trails in its wake. Solomon signs his picture with his characteristic serpentine double S transfixed with a straight line topped by a downward curve. Short strokes rising from this curve are suggestive of radiant flames or beams of light, as if this is some sort of ceremonial torch. It’s a signature symbol which looks like a tattoo. Night bears a definite resemblance to the work of Burne-Jones and Rossetti, both in the androgynous appearance of the dreamer, and in the poppy motif. This recalls Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix, his memorial portrait of his dead wife Elizabeth Siddal as Dante’s muse, in which the poppies carried down by a bird alludes to her opium addiction. This is no incidental similarity, and certainly not a case of stylistic copying. Solomon had met Rossetti back in 1857, and through him got to know Burne-Jones and the poet Algernon Swinburne. All four were very close and in the early 60s were pioneers of the Aesthetic style, both in their art and in their lifestyles. The flow of influence and ideas between them was mutual and benefited all in finding their own individual style and thematic preoccupations. Burne-Jones may have partly derived the pallid, androgynous subjects of his later work from Solomon’s sensual dream figures. Of these figures, the poet and art critic Arthur Symons commented that ‘these faces are without sex’ and that ‘they have brooded among ghosts of passions till they have become the ghosts themselves’.

Solomon photographed by David Wilkie Wynfield

Solomon was particularly close to Swinburne, and illustrated two of his most controversial works, which remained unpublished until after his death: Lesbia Brandon, his erotic novel and The Flogging Block, his mock epic poetical paean to flagellation. Swinburne in turn wrote two more restrained poems inspired by Solomon: Erotion and At A Month’s End. It was Swinburne’s work in particular which was the object of a swingeing and hugely destructive attack on Rossetti’s circle by the critic Robert Buchanan in 1871, in which he decried what he described as ‘the fleshly school of poetry’ for its moral turpitude. The ruling powers, both cultural and political, were determined to clamp down on such liberal expressions of desire. The Paris Commune was enjoying its chaotic and brief anarchist ascendancy over the channel, and the Victorian establishment was not about to tolerate the assertion of individual liberties beyond those which were endorsed by the state, which might in turn expand into demands for greater political liberty. Burne-Jones had already experienced censorious ire over his painting Phyllis and Demophoön, which had been exhibited at the Old Watercolour Society and attacked for indecency. The dreamy homoeroticism of much of Solomon’s work, and the suggestive androgyny of his subjects (sometimes dressed in priestly robes) made them another target for the repressive forces of conservatism. His alliance with the flamboyant Swinburne, who was recklessly liable to flaunt his transgressions, increased his vulnerability to attack. In 1873, he was arrested for soliciting in a toilet near Oxford Street, found guilty of illegal homosexual acts, and sentenced to 18 months hard labour. Fortunately, an acquaintance managed to use his influence to suspend the sentence, and he got away with a period of police supervision. The man who he’d been having sex with, a 60 year old stablemaster, was not so lucky. He had to serve out his 18 month sentence, as well as facing the ruinous social repercussions.

Simeon Solomon - Self Portrait (1860)

The echoes of Oscar Wilde’s martyrdom in his 1895 trial are inescapable. Wilde espoused an aesthetic brand of utopian socialism in which the transformation of society would free people from the strictures of time and narrow convention and allow them to express themselves in whatever artistic manner suited them. The wide reporting of the details of the trial, and the repugnance which was stirred up destroyed his public persona as the spokesperson for Aestheticism, and left the movement, with its potentially radical worldview in ruins. Wilde served out his sentence, at least partly involving hard labour to which he was utterly unsuited, and it broke him physically and spiritually. Solomon may have evaded imprisonment and labour, but he still had to face the social opprobrium, verging on hatred, with which any gay man, designated a sexual criminal, was burdened at the time. He fled to France, but was arrested again for having sex with another man, and on this occasion did serve out a three month prison sentence. The year of 1873 opened an unbridgeable fissure in his life, and effectively ruined him. Galleries and patrons were no longer interested in his work, and his friends, the fickle and self-interested Swinburne included, turned their backs on him. Only Burne-Jones, outwardly less of a flamboyant rebel than Rossetti and Swinburne, stood by him. He turned more and more to alcohol, and fell into destitution, until finally he was obliged, in 1884, to take up residence in the St Giles Workhouse in Bloomsbury. At he lowest ebb, he was reduced to begging on the streets. But despite such desperate circumstances, he continued to work, producing small scale visionary paintings, and chalk sketches and pen and ink drawings of angelic heads. Night is one such. The artistic spirit simply refused to be crushed. A lot of the works from the 90s have a melancholy air of escaping into interior dreamworlds. Dreaming sleep is a recurring theme, retreating from harsh reality into blissful imaginative reverie. This is reflected in titles such as The Moon and Sleep, the Healing Night and Wounded Love, and Night Looking Upon Sleep her Beloved Child.

Solomon's grave in Willesden Jewish cemetary

Solomon’s art fitted in perfectly with the Decadent phase of the Aesthetic Movement, the fin-de-siecle 90s of the Yellow Book and the Savoy, the Picture of Dorian Gray and Salome. Solomon anticipated the spirit of this age, with his dreaming androgynes and blurring of the rigid parameters of sexuality. His influence can be seen not only in the palled figures of Burne-Jones, but in the limpid and dandyish fops and angels of Charles Ricketts and Aubrey Beardsley. Solomon was something of a cult figure to this new generation of aesthetes. He was collected by one of the chief intellectual forces behind Aestheticism, Walter Pater, and by its public figurehead, Oscar Wilde. Wilde was particularly upset to lose his Solomons in the sale of his belongings made necessary by the personal and cultural disaster of his trial. Solomon may have fallen on hard times, but his work retained a devoted coterie of admirers. There were tow major retrospectives in the immediate wake of his death: an exhibition at the Baillie Gallery in London in 1906; and a book, Simeon Solomon: an Appreciation by Julia Ellison Ford, published in New York in 1908. It’s clear, therefore, that the value of his work was recognised at the time, even if it would subsequently fall into obscurity once more, eclipsed by his better known contemporaries, whose scandalous activities provided more colourfully and acceptably entertaining versions of the wild bohemian life. Obviously, such appreciation would have been of immeasurably greater use to Solomon had it been forthcoming whilst he was alive. But the lingering taint of scandal, together with his slow plummet into the netherworld of underclass destitution, meant that people were reluctant to be publicly associated with him, particularly after the Wilde trial. He died in 1905, still in the workhouse, five years after Wilde’s passing. It’s strange to think that his last works were produced whilst the first stirrings of twentieth century modernism were making themselves felt on the continent, currents which would first be recognised and drawn upon in nearby Bloomsbury and Fitzroy Street. Although Solomon had long since moved away from the Judaism which had formed the subject of many of his early paintings, he was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Willesden, where you can seek out and lay a poppy or sunflower upon his grave.

Walter Bayes - Victoria Station, London, Troops Leaving for the Front

Another new picture here is Walter Bayes’ large scale 1915 painting Victoria Station, London, Troops Leaving for the Front. Bayes was a founder member of the Camden Town Group, which formed around Walter Sickert, its presiding elder. It replaced the Fitzroy Street Group, which had met and exhibited in the house and studio space of 19 Fitzroy Street in Fitzrovia, the area of narrow Georgian streets north of Soho. Bayes was the intellectual of the group, writing art criticism for the Athenaeum magazine and supporting himself by teaching at the Westminster School of Art. He was less in thrall to the colourful stylisation and formalism of the continental post-impressionists than the other Camden Town Group members, and painted in a more conservative academic style. He did follow his friend Sickert’s example in choosing unusual and sometimes counterintuitive perspectives for his subjects, however. But his Victoria Station might as well be in a different world form that portrayed by Camden Town fellow Charles Ginner in his 1913 painting Sunlit Square, Victoria Station (this produced in the same year as his Clayhidon, also on display in the RAMM gallery). Bayes’ palette is muted, in keeping with Sickert’s dark, smoke-stained non-primary colours from his dimly lit music hall and Mornington Crescent interiors. The stone arch beneath which the soldiers pass forms a foreground frame within a frame. It’s brooding mass, topped with an ornamental keystone, has the heaviness of ceremonial architecture, and there is a fateful sense that these men are filing through a gateway of doleful significance, a presentiment of memorial monuments later to be erected in their collective name. The drab olive khaki of their uniforms makes of them a largely unindividuated mass. Only the red coat of a woman walking arm in arm with her man and the small red circle of a cap which hangs on the barrel of an erect rifle stand out, adding defiant touches of distinctiveness, reminders of the world beyond military uniformity. The cap on the barrel is a poignant variant on the traditional nursery rhyme image of the knotted pack on the end of a stick thrust over the shoulder of the innocent traveller heading out into the world for the first time. The interior of the station into which the men are trooping in their haphazard group is dark and wreathed with ragged palls of locomotive steam. A suspended bulb provides an angular cone of dim illumination, which fails to penetrate beyond a narrow radius. Although perhaps viewing with the benefit of historical hindsight, there seems to be a highly symbolic dimension to the painting. These men are entering the baleful shadows of a netherworld which will carry them with regimented and timetabled efficiency beyond the land of the living.

Charles Ginner - Clayhidon

Two more familiar works from the museum’s collection on display are from fellow members of the Camden Town Group, the aforementioned Charles Ginner and Robert Bevan. Both are connected with Clayhidon Farm on the Blackdown Hills in Devon, near the Somerset border. Both stayed there in the years before the war, sketching and painting the farm buildings and routines and the surrounding landscape. These paintings are displayed in their centenary year, both having been created during a 1913 visit. Charles Ginner’s Clayhidon exhibits his carefully measured and meticulously built up technique and style. Fields, trees and the roofs, walls and chimneys of the farm buildings are marked out with thickly layered lines of paint, the whole composition divided into strongly distinct ‘pieces’; it’s like a stained glass window or a surface of ornamental marquetry. The oil paint is applied with careful evenness, and the overall impression is of static order, a gelid atmosphere, as if the scene were filtered through the heavy, humid air of a long summer afternoon. With such solid and firmly girdered construction, it’s not surprising to learn that Ginner trained and for a while practised as an architect, before devoting himself to his art. He was born in France, growing up in Cannes, and was educated in Paris, so he could claim a close connection to the source of the post-impressionism which the Camden Town Group aimed to translate into an English idiom. Quite the opposite of the stereotype of the wild bohemian artist, he was a quiet, self-contained and rather conventional batchelor, who kept regular working hours throughout his life. He was very close to his fellow Camden Town Group members Harold Gilman and Spencer Gore, and was deeply affected by their early deaths. He nursed Gilman through a bout of influenza, which proved such a killer after the war, but both subsequently caught pneumonia in the early winter months of 1919. Ginner survived, Gilman didn’t. Ginner lived alone from then until his death, in his house in Pimlico, in 1952, a man increasingly out of his time. He never stopped working, however (and received a commission as a war artist in the second world war). Indeed, his life seemed to have been his work.

Robert Bevan - Devonshire Valley No.1

Robert Bevan’s Devonshire Valley No.1 similarly divides the landscape into discrete blocks of colour, although they are not so firmly delineated here. The characteristic Camden Town colours of muted mauves and magentas and light and dark olive greens are prominently used. Bevan is more free and expressive with his brushstrokes than Ginner, particularly in the wavering lines of the foliage to the left of the frame. His composition is a lot less rigidly controlled, edges allowed to blur into that which they outline. The impression is less of a heavy summer’s day than a hazy spring one. If Ginner’s work shows the influence of Van Gogh, then Bevan’s is more in tune with late Monet (who was still painting at the time, of course) and Cezanne. Bevan had also studied in Paris, and had stayed for a while in the artists’ colony at Pont Aven in Brittanny in the 1890s. This was a hugely fulfilling time for him, during which he met and got to know Gauguin, producing several sketched portraits of him in his books. Unlike Ginner, who was principally an urban artist, Bevan preferred the rural life and the depiction of rural subjects. He painted on Exmoor between 1895-7, and after marrying a Polish woman, Stanislawa de Karlowska, in 1897, made a number of trips to her home country in the early twentieth century. Here, he sketched and painted rural life in and around the villages in which he immediately felt at home. He was quite mature in years by the time he hooked up with Sickert and his circle. Sickert invited him to join his Fitzroy Street group after seeing some of his pictures exhibited in the first Allied Artists Exhibition in 1908. It was the first time he’d received significant recognition for his art. An inward man lacking in self-confidence and belief, he’d frequently doubted his talents and the worth of his endeavours. His wife, Stanislawa, was firm and constant in her encouragement, however, and it was largely due to her support that he persisted in his artistic career. He was a founder member of the Camden Town Group, and his subjects whilst in London generally centred around cabs and omnibuses, and horses and the world of the stables on the periphery of the city. This was a world in its twilight years, the era of horse drawn transportation already increasingly supplanted by the spread of electricity and the insidious invention of the internal combustion engine. Bevan’s choice of the stables as a subject for his urban art suggested that his heart lay beyond the boundaries of the city. He felt particularly drawn to the farm at Clayhidon, and returned on numerous occasions throughout the 1910s. Eventually, he bought his own cottage nearby – Lychetts in Bolham Valley in the Blackdown Hills. Devon was his own version of Palmer’s magic valley. And it was in Devon that he passed away in 1925. The paintings he produced in the area which he made his home remain amongst his most personal, and his best.

There's an excellent archive site providing extensive information on Simeon Solomon, with plentiful illustrations, over here, as well as a good general article (with pics) at the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer culture site over here.