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The art school remained operational throughout the war, even after being transferred to and then bombed out of its wartime Green Park buildings during the ‘Baedeker’ air raids on Bath. Remarkably, under the circumstances, a fine if less spacious house was made available in Sydney Place. Clifford saw the war in a positive light as an opportunity for sharing ‘a deeper and richer life’ through the dispensation of the arts. When war was declared, Clifford was 32 and unlikely to be called up. But he certainly did his bit. He joined the local Home Guard (and said long afterwards that Dad’s Army got it spot on). He also worked as a camouflage officer and instructor, working out how to make factories look like ordinary rows of terraced houses when seen from the air. Moreover he was invited to contribute to the ‘Recording Britain’ programme instigated by Kenneth Clark. The programme gave official work at home to many artists not commissioned into the services under the auspices of CEMA (Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts). In this context, Clifford made a pictorial record of Bath’s bomb-damaged buildings of architectural importance, as well as of the city’s beautiful iron railings and gates before they were removed, supposedly for turning into tanks and planes. Clifford succeeded in saving some of the best examples, but most of the Georgian, Regency and Victorian railings removed in Bath, having (like those removed from London and other cities) proved useless for military purposes, were later dumped in the North Sea. In addition to running the Art School and his continued active involvement in the Bath Society of Artists, Clifford also founded the Bath Art Club in 1940 where, throughout the war on Monday evenings, he sustained a remarkably wide-ranging and inspired programme of notable guest lecturers, including Kenneth Clark, John Summerson, Nikolaus Pevsner, John Piper, Geoffrey Grigson and Lawrence Binyon.

Rosemary, meanwhile, was pursuing her teaching at the Royal School. However, since its buildings, like so many in Bath, had been requisitioned by the Admiralty for the duration of the war, the School had been evacuated to Longleat House, near Frome. This meant that Rosemary underwent a lengthy daily round trip by bus and bike (she hid her bicycle behind a telephone kiosk near the bus stop). She nonetheless found time to make some delightful pen-and-wash studies of the girls’ incongruous occupation of the magnificent Longleat interiors, and of buildings in and around Bath. And, by the end of the war, she and Clifford had their second daughter, Charlotte, born in 1945.

The art school premises at Sydney Place were cramped, and Clifford worried that, as people returned from the war, they might very well be taken over for housing. It occurred to him that were the Bath School of Art to become a residential art college it did not need to be in the middle of the city, and that a suitable rural location would in many ways be preferable. And, as it happened, Lord Methuen’s country seat at Corsham Court, a fine Elizabethan mansion, altered and enlarged in the eighteenth century, was about to be returned to its owner after being used by the War Department as a convalescent home for injured troops.

Book jacket designed by C&SE and printed in four colours by Collins, published in 1958. John Betjeman liked it.

Jackets designed for Jonathan Cape by C&SE, printed in three colours.

London Transport window bill advertising London Zoo by C&SE, 1939, printed by Dangerfield Printing Co Ltd, London (25.5 x 31.5 cm).

‘It was one of those flukes which doesn’t occur very often,’ recalled Clifford. ‘It was a matter of finding somewhere … with a bit more space than we had got then at Sydney Place … I made a mental note of likely places and Corsham Court was top of the list. I telephoned Lord Methuen and asked him what he was going to do when he got rid of the convalescent hospital and he said he wished he knew, so we arranged to meet the next day, and in those few hours of optimism when the war ended, the whole thing was fixed up in something like a week. It couldn’t have been done earlier and it couldn’t have been done later. So we offered ourselves as a place for students to come the following September, and they came, and we started.’ (from a taped interview with C?, 1981).

To run what became the Bath Academy of Art, Clifford had turned down a proffered Chair of Fine Art at Durham University. In the words of the Prospectus of 1953–4, he ‘hoped that the existing school might contribute “depth” and the new school “breadth”, to an Academy which as a whole might be greater than its parts’. The four-year course, leading to the Ministry’s National Diploma in Design, was based on an unusually liberal and broad-based scheme of teaching, which would include not only the visual arts but music, dancing and drama, as well as various branches of science and technology. In response to the vast national demand for teachers (secondary education having been guaranteed for all under the 1944 Butler Education Act), he was also able to provide a training course for art teachers; by the time the course closed in 1967, some 600 art teachers had passed through the college.

The Academy opened as a residential college in September 1946 with Clifford as its Principal and Rosemary as an active member of staff (her role changed from ‘art education’ in the 1950s to ‘senior year tutor’, ‘senior lecturer’ and ‘chairman of the board of studies’ in the 1960s, specialising in audio-visual studies and visual communication). The Ellises moved into a flat in part of the top floor of the east wing.

Lithograph (with added watercolour) of a pike and arrowhead lilies signed by Clifford Ellis, shown at West Riding Spring in 1973 (77 x 56.5 cm).