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CHAPTER TWELVE

The Burghclere Chapel: Tweseldown

Drinkwater used to work in a place where the clouds touched the hills where he worked.

Stanley Spencer to Desmond Chute¹

STANLEY’S group of volunteers was destined for the RAMC Training Depot at Tweseldown, near Fleet in Hampshire. But because the Beaufort was administratively responsible to Devonport Military Hospital the party had, by the exigencies of military logic, to proceed to Hampshire by way of Plymouth. Arrived there he immediately wrote to Desmond: ‘We left the Beaufort yesterday Friday morning. I swept the ward out yesterday morning with George [one of the inmates whom the orderlies used to tip to clean their boots]. I felt a bit sad, poor old George was so upset. Have brought my Shakespeare with me. Remember me to your mother and aunt.’²

The draft, being in transit, had little to do at Devonport apart from attending morning parades, persuading the mess orderlies they were entitled to meals, and working out which among the unfamiliar naval uniforms in the town they were supposed to salute. Stanley was able to catch up on his correspondence. Gilbert was in Salonika as an orderly in a Field Hospital. Harold and Natalie, their orchestral work disrupted, were filling in time as cinema pianists at Maidenhead, but aiming to move to London where Natalie, who had fluent Spanish, hoped to work in Intelligence. Horace, back in England, had in March married Marjorie, ‘the youngest of the Hunt girls’;* ‘she is a nice girl and we are all fond of her’ wrote Pa to Will. Transferred to the Royal Engineers, Horace was then posted to France, but by October was to be back in England in hospital after two bouts of malaria. Percy too was in France, in a Field Headquarters, and had been mentioned in despatches. Sydney was an officer instructor in the Home Training Battalion of the Norfolk Regiment. Henry Lamb was at Guy’s Hospital completing his training as a doctor. Edward Marsh, frantically busy, nevertheless found time to propose a small Civil List grant for a struggling writer called James Joyce, then in Zürich. To Switzerland too, Will had departed, to be reunited there with Johanna as two among thousands of international refugees – Lenin also among them – who then crowded that neutral if bureaucratic haven. Will was doing little work and Johanna, barred from returning to Germany, was dependent on infrequent money sent from Berlin; Will had to reduce his monthly allotment to Pa from £8 to £6. Johanna’s brother, Max, was reported missing, and Will was anxiously trying to discover from the War Office if he was listed among the Germans taken prisoner.⁴ There had been floods at Cookham and fierce gales had uprooted hundreds of trees there.

Stanley was not sorry to leave for Tweseldown after a few days. The hutted camp was on the open slope below the racecourse on the down. He was delighted to be able to see the sweep of the sky again: ‘Training is all out in the open, and this is what I like.’⁵ It was, however, strict. The Kit Inspection panel at Burghclere records Stanley’s dislike of the mindless regimentation of depot life. The purpose of the training was to fit him for active service in a Field Ambulance. The function of a Field Ambulance is essentially to collect the sick and wounded from front-line fighting units and to convey them back to Field Hospitals, giving them on the way such emergency aid as could be provided in the Advanced Dressing Stations which the Field Ambulance would set up. Stretcher drill, practical scouting – searching for stray wounded during a battle – the recovery of wounded from the difficult confines of trenches and dugouts, the handling of mules and wagons – normally done in action by Army Service Corps drivers – operation of the vital watercarts with the testing and purification of water sources, and, of course, first-aid and medical procedures, all these topics had to be learned and practised. At the time Stanley thought that the training, though interesting, would not apply to him, as he was convinced that only the strongest and most resourceful orderlies would be assigned to Field Ambulances; he assumed that he would be detailed to hospital work overseas.

Desmond Chute wrote every day, pouring out the stream of encouragement begun at the Beaufort. Stanley wrote to the Raverats: ‘Chute has sent me a translation of Odyssey Book 6, the coming of Odysseus to the Phaiacians [it was a personal, hand-written translation, not a copy of another’s] and as I was hut orderly today I was able to go through it this afternoon. It is all so nimbly written … that you feel you have the original wonderful rhythms with you.’⁶ To Chute himself he wrote:

It is grand to take your translation out of my haversack and read it during intervals of drill … I should like a photo of you. Now that I am here I look back on the time I spent with you and it appears so beautiful to me. It clears my head which gets muddled at times.⁷

The illumination provided by St Augustine’s ‘fetching and carrying’ continued to enthuse his imagination:

When I used to have a full day at the Beaufort, full of every kind of job you could think of, I felt very deeply the stimulating effect ‘doing’ had upon me. … ‘Doing things’ is just the thing to make you paint. I have washed up the dinner things at the Beaufort a hundred times. How much more wonderfully could a man washing plates be painted by me now than before the war. … Every necessary act is like anointing oil poured forth. … I am looking back on Beaufort days and now that I am away from it I must do some pictures of it – frescoes. I should love to fill all the hundred square spaces in this [wooden frame] hut with hospital work [paintings] but I have a lot to get over, especially my bed picture propensity. …⁸

A curious thing was unsettling Stanley. He was discovering that as his experience and understanding broadened he was seeing his earlier work with fresh eyes. He had just been home on leave and found that his pictures there, although good, were perhaps not as successful in conveying the deeper substance of his vision as he had thought when he painted them. It was a problem which was to engage him all his life. He could only paint from the personal association of a specific time. What was to happen when subsequent associations became more apt?

I really feel at times doubtful if what inspires me will really reach out and achieve all the qualities and perfections that a work of art should contain. I have always gone on the basis that pure inspiration contains within itself all the necessary apparatus, practical and spiritual, for carrying it out. If I have found that in carrying out a picture the carrying out was not doing this or not giving me any great pleasure, then I have concluded that the initial inspiration was somehow wrong or else had to go arm-in-arm with some notion to which it was not perfectly related. But I have not put it down to lack of knowledge; knowledge, that is, as separate from inspiration; something I ought to know and study quite apart from what I want to express.⁹

So in letters home we find Stanley pestering, pleading with, cajoling whoever will listen – Florence, Henry Lamb, Desmond Chute – for books and reading-matter.

An unexpected piece of news which pleased him was that two friends wanted to buy his ‘Kowl’ painting – Mending Cowls, Cookham. One was Henry Lamb, the other James (‘Jas’) Wood. Stanley had met Wood before enlisting. He was a young man of independent means and outlook who had studied painting in Paris and Germany, and had reluctantly – he saw no point in taking up arms against his old Bavarian friends – joined the Royal Field Artillery. As both were known to Stanley, he wanted both of them to have it, but tactfully he left them to sort it out between them. Lamb won.

As a recruit stationed at Trowbridge in Wiltshire, Jas Wood was miserable for many of the same reasons as Stanley had been during his early days at the Beaufort. Since Trowbridge is not far from Bristol, Stanley thought it might help Wood to meet Chute:

Am going to write to a man named Wood and ask him to come and see you. His military life is getting on his nerves and in fact he has had little chance at any time of doing what he would have done. He has just sent me a book of Donatello, and the other day he sent me a book on the life of Gaudier-Brzeska which you mentioned as having seen in George’s [a Bristol bookshop]. I hated Gaudier when I knew him but I agree with you that he is extraordinarily true and certain in his drawing.’*¹⁰

To Wood, Stanley wrote:

I rather envy you being in the RFA [Royal Field Artillery] and for the draft. Chute has been sending me [pictures of] a series of corbels in Exeter Cathedral. … This life quickens the soul. I am laying in a goodly store [of ideas]. I am still thinking about the Beaufort War Hospital which the more I think about it, the more it inspires me. … I am determined that when I get the chance I am going to do some wonderful things, a whole lot of big frescoes. Of the square pictures there will be The Convoy (I have that) and The Operation (and that). … I think there is something wonderful in hospital life … the act of ‘doing things’ to men is wonderful.¹²

Stanley’s training was nearly over. By August 1916 he was telling Henry Lamb, by then commissioned as a doctor in the RAMC, ‘It is true that we are just going. We are even now ready, down to writing our wills. If you have your clothes [uniform] come in them as you will have less trouble getting into the camp.’¹³ It must have been a brief visit, but it cheered Stanley: ‘It seemed almost too good to be true when I saw you coming down the street. I felt these times were over. It seemed uncanny.’

Pa came over to Tweseldown to see him, because during Stanley’s embarkation leave at Fernlea, he had by chance been away visiting Florence in Cambridge. To Desmond Stanley outlined the reading he was taking:

I have sent home my large volume of Shakespeare. Impossible to carry it. Much better to have a play sent [individually] as desired. I am able to take the Canterbury Tales, as it is more pocketable. Also the little blue book you sent me [perhaps a Missal]. Some Gowan and Gray art books and, if possible, Crime and Punishment. The Garden of the Soul. …¹⁴

News came that he was to leave with Lionel Budden and some 350 others on 23 August. They had been issued with tropical kit. So by train to Paddington and thence to London Docks (‘much sound of steel and repairing of ships’) and aboard the hospital ship Llandovery Castle, ‘the wedge widening as we moved away from the quayside, the throwing of letters to be posted by the be-ostriched-feathered Cockney women come to say goodbye.’¹⁵