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CHAPTER ONE

The Coming of the Wise Men

I am actually old enough to remember the Victorian Age; and it was almost a complete contrast to all that is now connoted by that word. It had all the vices that are now called virtues; religious doubt, intellectual unrest, a hungry credulity about new things, a complete lack of equilibrium. It also had all the virtues that are now called vices; a rich sense of romance, a passionate desire to make the love of man and woman once more what it was in Eden, a strong sense of the absolute necessity of some significance in human life.

G. K. Chesterton: Autobiography¹

COOKHAM VILLAGE lies some thirty miles from London along the favoured stretch of the Thames from Henley, past Marlow and Cliveden, to Boulter’s Lock and Maidenhead Bridge. It rests on the slightest of rises at a point where the eastward-flowing river makes an abrupt right-angle bend south against the bluffs of Cliveden Woods. Lying within the elbow of the bend, the village is in effect an island, for the river may once have made its course on the other side of the rise, isolating it today by its low-lying remnants – Marsh Meadows to the north, Cookham Moor to the west, Widbrook Common to the south, and Odney Common to the east. These water-meadows often flooded in Stanley’s boyhood, and the winter rising of the river was anxiously watched, as Stanley’s brother Sydney notes in his diary for January 1912: ‘I went up the river and saw the heron high in the air flying towards Hedsor, dim in the rain. A peewit and a seagull met, exchanged compliments by numerous tumblings, then went their several ways. Cattle were taken off the Moor this morning and pigs from Randall’s styes this evening.’² For this reason extension of the village has not been possible and under protective preservation it remains virtually as Stanley knew it in his boyhood.

A few cosmetic alterations have occurred. The malthouses whose cowls once dominated the village have gone, the blacksmith’s forge is now a restaurant, the village shops have become boutiques or tea rooms, Ovey’s Farm in the High Street is now a residence, its barns a garage and filling station, and the former Methodist Chapel is now the Stanley Spencer Gallery. But in its structural appearance the village remains much as it was in the early decades of the nineteenth century when Stanley’s paternal grandfather arrived from Hertfordshire to help build the superior residences locked inside their high red-brick walls which Victorian genteel wealth and the new commuter railway system from London were imposing on the neighbourhood. A builder by profession but a musician by inclination – he inaugurated a village choir – Grandpa Julius prospered sufficiently to produce two families by two marriages, thus giving Stanley a profusion of ‘cousins’ in the village. His Spencers were the product of Grandpa Julius’ second marriage.

For the two sons of the marriage, Grandpa Julius demolished a row of small cottages in the High Street and replaced them with a pair of semi-detached villas. The elder son, Julius, occupied Belmont, the left-hand villa facing from the road. He had a family of daughters – Stanley’s ‘girl-cousins’ – and was managing clerk to a firm of London solicitors. The younger son, William – ‘Pa’ to Stanley – occupied the right-hand villa, Fernlea, and was a dedicated musician. The piano and violin being Victorian social accomplishments much in demand, he set up as the local music ‘professor’, cycling to teach the children of the grand middle-class houses – Rosamond Lehmann remembers a ‘gentle old man with a white beard’ – and welcoming the humbler in his home.³ The succession of little girls sitting in the hall awaiting their piano lesson was a long-standing Stanley memory, and he did much of his early painting to the accompaniment of their halting efforts.

Pa supplemented his income by acting as church organist, mainly at St Nicholas, Hedsor, in the advowson of Lord and Lady Boston. Lord Boston had been one of his piano pupils, and in those days of discreet patronage the Bostons did much to help their church organist. They allowed him, for example, to enjoy the study of the stars in their private observatory and on one occasion met his expenses on a cycling holiday along the south coast while his wife, Annie, relaxed at Eastbourne. From his Pa, Stanley asserted, he took his ‘sense of wonder’, and from Ma his small frame and his sense of the dramatic. Ma was an excellent mimic, a gift which Stanley inherited and could use to social effect.⁴

Ma – Anna Caroline Slack, but Annie always – had been a soprano in old Julius’ choir when Pa married her in 1873. Their eldest son, William – ‘Will’ – was invited at the age of seven to play Beethoven before the Duke of Westminster and his guest the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) at the nearby mansion of Cliveden. The Prince was so impressed that he presented Will with a piano. At fourteen Will gave a public concert at the prestigious Queen’s Hall in London, and under the Duke’s patronage studied and graduated at the Royal College of Music. There he was followed by his brother Harold, a violinist. Today the elder of their two sisters, Anna – Annie always – would have followed them, but the custom of the day decreed that she act as helpmeet to her mother and as a not altogether willing nursemaid to the two youngest sons, Stanley and Gilbert. There were eleven children in all. Florence (Flongy) was the younger sister. The other sons were Horace, who delighted in conjuring and did so professionally; Percy, a keen cellist; and Sydney (Hengy). Stanley was ‘Tongly’ and Gilbert ‘Gibbertry’, presumably as derivations of childish attempts at pronouncing their names. A pair of twins died in infancy.

Will was about to be offered a teaching post in Bristol when he suffered a nervous breakdown.⁵ In Ma’s view it was brought on by Pa’s relentless pressure towards the highest professional standards, a characteristic which all the siblings inherited in their various careers. The collapse necessitated expensive medical treatment at Virginia Water and impoverished the previously thriving household so much that Percy had to give up the prospect of articles with his uncle Julius’ law firm and take a job at a neighbouring sawmill; half his meagre pay went to the family. In the crisis Florence took a post as governess, and Sydney, who intended to go into the church, had to restrict his studies to night schools and crammers, later supported by Will. For, having recovered, Will had obtained a post as piano master at Cologne Conservatoire and had there met and wed Johanna, daughter of a prosperous Berlin family.*

In few families can there have been such close identity of interests and passions. There was the devoted and scholarly respect for music which the children shared all their lives. Pianos, violins, violas and cellos were part of their upbringing. So were books, for in all the siblings lay the fierce intent to expand their knowledge and imagination through literature. Will and Sydney kept detailed diaries, lovingly preserved by Florence, who herself had her family recollections typed and bound. Pa’s idealistic venture at promoting a village library failed from sheer high-mindedness in the choice of books. All the family were inveterate talkers, for Pa encouraged discussion, especially at mealtimes, on any topic from politics – they were Liberals – to poetry, philosophy, psychology or religion. He worshipped Ruskin. The family were soaked in the language of the King James Bible, for Pa adopted the prevailing custom of family Bible-reading, a habit Stanley was to continue all his life.

The family possessed astonishingly retentive memories both auditory and visual. Will could memorize a page of music or a restaurant menu at one reading, and Stanley could instantly replay a once-heard piano piece which interested him. The acuity of Stanley’s visual memory was a cornerstone of much of his painting. Images from a multitude of sources – places, people, gestures, happenings, books, newspapers, paintings, exhibitions – flooded his mind and could be recalled when needed, even years later, with photographic accuracy.

As a family they were encyclopaedic acquirers of information and catholic in their interests. All were immersed in a countryman’s instinctive and unsentimental solicitude for nature. Percy, in his role of big brother to Sydney, Stanley and Gilbert, took them birdwatching. Sydney’s diaries are full of rhapsodies: ‘Went up Barley Hill in the dark and gathered poppies and a little corn. I love to see the poppies looking jet-black against the corn. Saw three glow-worms. …’⁶ Pa’s sense of wonder never palled: ‘I crossed London Bridge on Tuesday and could have stood for hours watching the flight of the seagulls – surely the acme of graceful motion. And yet the people passed by without a glance. …’⁷ Will, translating Heine: ‘I discovered that we have no word which quite gives the feeling of Wehmut. “Full of sadness” means more than “sadly” but not quite the same as “sorrowful”. This brought to my mind a word I had not thought of for years – “tristful”. I think the goddess of poetry herself must have helped me to think of it. It more nearly gives the meaning of Wehmut than any word we have.’⁸ And Stanley: ‘The marsh meadows full of flowers left me with an aching longing, and in my art that longing was among the first I sought to satisfy …’⁹ but, as we shall see, not always in the manner we might conventionally expect.

With these characteristics went an inbuilt instinct for mastery in whatever they undertook. Will, for example, who had been speaking German fluently for years, one day made a slight mistake for which Johanna corrected him.¹⁰ Appalled, he promptly devoted an hour and a half every day to the complete memorization of every detail of German grammar. A similar search for perfection could make Stanley an exhausting companion. As a family they loved charades and games, and were determined solvers of puzzles and problems. Occupied by an erudite question of musical interpretation, Will could divert time to finding the highest score possible at dominoes. Percy’s essential function at the substantial London building firm of Holloway and Greenwood, to which he had ascended from his sawmill, was, according to Stanley, ‘getting the aforesaid gentlemen out of scrapes’.¹¹ Gilbert became a considerable bridge player whose skill was in demand at Bloomsbury parties. Horace’s aptitude in conjuring was not an unforeseen eccentricity but a deeply rooted family characteristic. Above all they shared a continual search for comprehension and validity in experience.

‘Home’ had a special meaning for Stanley. His childhood memories would recur time and again in his paintings. Home was where he was ‘cosy’, tucked up in the safe embrace of those who loved him and shared his values.* At home he was shielded from the incomprehensible threats which lurked in the world outside; threats quite specific from some of the village boys who were contemptuous of his slight build and tried to bully him – he was to find a defence in the sharpness of his tongue – or from those villagers who had “no means of understanding his exaltations and thought him ‘funny’. Home was where he first experienced the impact of those feelings he came to know as ‘happiness’. His happiest feelings, as he frequently emphasized, were those of a baby safe in the known confines of its pram, gazing in wide-eyed wonder at the larger world it saw beyond; except that in Stanley’s analogy the larger world was not only physical but, more significantly, metaphysical – what he called ‘spiritual’. Home meant handholding, the sanctuary he found as a child when walking with Pa or Annie lest the sensed terror of becoming lost befall him. It represented that peace of mind in which his and mankind’s spirit is free to soar untrammelled by emotional bewilderment. All his life Stanley’s deepest commitments were to be to those who, like his family in childhood, were willing and able to handhold, to set fire to his imagination and help solve the deep mysteries which beset him.

Stanley’s schooling took place at his sisters’ dame school, a corrugated iron hut in the next-door garden; Pa was disdainful of the new state product, the village National School. A born educator, Pa had started the school with the help of two local ladies, the Misses George. When they emigrated, his daughters took over. At school, even though taught by his sisters, Stanley became convinced that he was not bright in the scholastic sense. Indeed there were times when he felt himself a ‘dunce’, for he had no facility in the linear logic so necessary in mathematics or in narrative writing. Composing formal or business letters was a penance to him: ‘I have written a letter and hated it, it is so young. I do not mind being young, but it comes out in such an objectionable manner in my letter.’¹³ But in school drawing lessons he came into his inheritance and found that he could ‘become a boy like any other’. For then his mind functioned as he needed.

Stanley’s compulsion to take up art bemused his musical father.* But typically Pa devoted his persistent energy – which Stanley inherited – to winning for his son the best possible training. It began in 1906 – 7 with lessons from Dorothy Bailey, a young local woman who had some leanings as an artist.¹⁵ This was followed by a year at Maidenhead Technical College, mainly drawing plaster casts. Then, initially under the financial patronage of Lady Boston, who had herself studied at the Slade, Stanley was accepted there. He travelled each day by train. For the first few days Pa escorted him. When Stanley felt confident to go by himself, he refused to diverge from the known route unless he were given detailed information beforehand. This unadventurousness was due not so much to timidity as to an innate characteristic which insisted, both in his everyday life and in his art, that he should always know exactly where he was, what he had to do and why, and to a reluctance to take guidance on trust.

To cosmopolitan London thinking, such precision was misinterpreted as parochialism. In the summer of 1911 Henry Tonks, the formidable drawing master at the Slade, decided that Stanley needed his experience of the world widened and arranged for him to stay with a farmer friend at Clayhiden, near Taunton. He might as profitably have sent Stanley to the moon. Sydney, the brother who perhaps most clearly understood Stanley, saw the pointlessness of the exercise: ‘I beseeched him by all the love he had for me not to go. But he went.’¹⁶

Stanley tolerated the event on an everyday level, but the drawings he managed were purely formal. The place meant nothing to him compared with Cookham and its associations. Tonks realized he had made a mistake and did not repeat the error. But in a letter to Florence, Stanley chanced to describe a farmworker he had seen there: ‘the old man that I drew, a labourer, was most pathetic. He had knocked off work owing to the heat and looked very ill. His face was beaten and cut with the sword of age. You could divide his face up like a [jigsaw] puzzle.’¹⁷ Yet this vivid comment came from the ‘dunce’ who at the time could not for the life of him compose a business letter. The quality of Stanley’s mind is becoming apparent.