Piffy, Bird & Bing

by Jane Dunn

  On their fraught European holiday together, Ellen had urged Daphne to be a better wife and support to Tommy, especially as he was now Comptroller and Treasurer to the Household of the Princess Elizabeth and had duties that demanded his presence in London and on tour with the Princess. In honour of his own Olympic past, he was also Commandant of the British team in what became known as the Austerity Games, the Olympics of 1948, produced on a shoestring by a bankrupt Britain as host nation.

  Daphne was alarmed and bored by the kind of social life that Tommy enjoyed: weekends at various royal palaces, shooting grouse and stag, sailing with Prince Philip at Cowes, dinner parties and musical shows, and most of all the ballet. She made occasional forays up to London to do her duty but could not wait to return to the embrace of Menabilly. She knew she was not giving him the love and support he so obviously needed but was struggling herself to reconcile all the various parts of a fractured personality that seethed under her surface manner of serene detachment. The drama of her own obsessions, needs and desires did not leave much energy for the outside world.

  In the cold of early February 1952, Daphne was being driven up to London by Angela when they noticed that all the flags they passed were at half-mast. She was on her way to Oxford to see Tessa who was in hospital having had her appendix out. When they stopped for lunch they asked about the lowered flags and were told in hushed tones, ‘the King is dead’. Angela’s eyes immediately filled with tears but Daphne just felt stunned. The King was not yet fifty-seven, only a year older than Tommy himself. Tommy had just flown out to Kenya to be with Princess Elizabeth on tour but had now to fly straight back with the new Queen Elizabeth. She had been dressed in bright summer clothes when the news came through and Tommy had been the only person to think of going straight to her trunk to find the one black coat and hat for her return. When Daphne saw him that night he seemed to have aged ninety-nine years, she thought, but organisation was Tommy’s forte, despite the toll on his nerves.

  During their long drive from Cornwall to London the sisters were amazed to see a country transformed with mourning – shops had removed the gay spring clothes from their windows and replaced them with black, in Hammersmith the buildings were draped with purple ribbons – and Daphne felt incongruous and conspicuous in her red jacket and blue skirt. As Tommy’s wife, Daphne was at the centre of all the subsequent pageantry and was moved by the overwhelming sense that here was history happening and she was included at its heart. When the coffin was brought from Sandringham to Westminster Hall, only the Queen’s Household and the members of the Commons and the Lords, in their magnificent regalia, were there to greet it and the Queen Mother and new Queen walking behind it. Daphne’s age-old longing asserted itself to be not Tommy’s good supportive wife but the chivalric boy, ‘I did not want to be me in a veil and a silly woman, I wanted to have a sword and be wearing armour … That’s the way these things take me.’9

  Tommy’s duties now changed radically too. His new position was Treasurer to Prince Philip and he moved into an office in Buckingham Palace, still with Maureen Luschwitz in attendance as his invaluable personal assistant. Her practicality and kindness extended into buying school clothes for the Browning children and caring for Tommy at weekends too. Daphne could not continue to put off joining her husband on one of his official royal engagements and in the autumn of 1953 she accompanied him to Balmoral for just under a week of stalking and shooting, ‘which seemed like the longest week I have ever spent in my life’. Her letter to Ellen describing the visit was a tour de force of self-deprecating humour and fascinating detail. After dinner the ‘table games’ were canasta ‘or that US import “scrabble” where you have to invent words, and I could only think of rude ones, and Prince P sat next to me and helped me’. Daphne found the Queen Mother extraordinarily warm and charming and even the recently widowed Princess Royal was easier to deal with than the younger generation; the Queen a ‘re-incarnation of Queen Victoria’, and Princess Margaret ‘so See Me and bounces about very pleased with herself’.10 Prince Charles and Princess Anne, who were only toddlers at the time, were allowed in to see the visitors and Daphne thought them lively and delightful.

  Jeanne meanwhile had thrown herself into her life as an artist. She had left Angela largely in charge of their mother at Ferryside while she painted at St Ives. She had rented a small studio called St Peter’s Street Studio, just off St Peter’s Street, on the narrow neck of the peninsula between the harbour and Porthmeor beach. It had once been a sail loft connected to a blacksmith’s shop and became an artist’s studio at the turn of the century. Along with Dod Procter and another of Dod’s artist friends, Alethea Garstin, Jeanne became a member of the St Ives Society of Artists.

  The fishing port of St Ives on the west coast of Cornwall had been attracting visiting artists from the middle of the nineteenth century. Being so westerly it was warmer and milder than the rest of the country and being so far to the south there was more light for painting en plein air. The arrival of the railway and the availability of redundant sail lofts made it practical for artists to live there all the year round. Well-known painters like Whistler and Walter Sickert left London to winter there and soon a cosmopolitan band of artists had congregated in the town. The First World War interrupted the colony’s organic growth but artists returned to St Ives after the Armistice.

  The St Ives Society of Artists was founded in January 1927 to raise the artistic standards of the colony and exhibit work. Part of its great success in subsequent years was due to the decision to organise touring exhibitions which publicised the work of the St Ives group of painters, sculptors and ceramicists. The Second World War saw a further influx of artists and the influence of movements from Europe began to stimulate discussion and experimentation; Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism, all mixed with the tradition of English marine painting to produce a distinct style reflecting the brilliance of the light and the mastery of sea and the sky.

  In 1946, Dod was elected President of the Society but was not automatically re-elected, as had been the form previously, possibly because she was too much of a modernist. The influx of younger artists after the war had begun to challenge the old orthodoxies and the traditionalists were growing increasingly irritated with what they saw as the arrogance and relaxed morality of the younger set. Nor did they appreciate their non-representational art. Stresses between the modernists and traditionalists would rumble on until a break occurred in 1949 when Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson among others, left to set up the Penwith Society of Arts where they could pursue their more experimental ideas. Dod Procter and then Jeanne were invited to join them. Quite soon, however, the rebel members realised that, rather than creating a new democratic union of like-minded artists, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson were largely running the show.

  Jeanne and Dod set off for a working holiday of a lifetime, for it began in Oslo and, after a long and varied journey south, as suggested by Marda, encompassing Basutoland and the mysterious and magnificent Drakensburg (Afrikaans for Dragon Mountains) the highest range in Southern Africa. The lower slopes were blessed with abundant water and the landscape was vivid with wild flowers and birds. The women went on to the Cape and Jeanne was struck by the Dutch colonial farmhouses with their cool dark interiors, lovely refuges from the fierce summer sun.

  While they were in Basutoland they met Noël Welch, the woman poet and writer who was to become Jeanne’s partner for life. Noël remembered that at their first meeting Dod was distressed as her favourite skirt had somehow been blown from a train window. Possibly her extreme reaction caused Noël and Jeanne, newly acquainted, some amusement. Dod’s distress, however, was soon forgotten as she delighted in the landscape around her. Particularly enthralling to her was the way a tree at noon stood in its own deep shadow as if it were on a pedestal. Noël would write one of her great poems, dedicated to the poet Michael Hamburger, called ‘A Shadow to its Tree’, admitting her own love of shadows but also perhaps remembering Dod’s deeply felt r
esponse to the African tree on that distant noonday.

  The meeting with Noël altered the dynamic of Dod and Jeanne’s relationship, with Jeanne writing later to Marda about this time in her home country: ‘Things went wrong with our lives there [in S. Africa], which I never had the chance to tell you of. Eventually there was no leisure to set them right … I don’t suppose even the Kruger [National Game Park] would have redeemed things.’11 Perhaps from this point Dod began to be replaced in Jeanne’s affections by Noël. Family duties also weighed heavily on Jeanne at the time, and even travelling so far away did not allow her to escape from her responsibilities for a mother who relied on her emotionally and a sister resentful of her prolonged absence. Letters from Ferryside would arrive, sometimes three a week, from both Muriel and a desperate Angela, asking whether she had booked her passage home.

  Marda Vanne was fifteen years older than Jeanne and her worldly-wise frankness both attracted and unsettled the younger woman. Having arrived back in the spring from her fateful holiday in South Africa and returned short-term to Ferryside to sort out her thoughts, Jeanne was struggling with her mother’s and Angela’s needs as well as the turmoil in her own personal life. ‘I cannot get to sleep,’ she wrote to Marda, ‘Tuffet [her Pekinese] was snoring, and you are rather mercilessly sitting around in my mind, dear Marda. I should like to write you an intimate letter, but I cannot guess even how well, or little, you would care for that.’

  There were obvious stresses in the household at Ferryside that she hoped would improve with time, and stresses too in her relationship with Dod:

  I have been exceedingly unhappy at times lately, because finding people impossible so that you want to shake them, & apparently being bloody myself, does not, perhaps luckily seemed to have happened before with me. I have felt quite leaden with sadness & dismay, but I believe that fundamentally it cannot matter as I cannot imagine NOT wanting Dod to be the most important person [crossed out in the original] closest person to me. At least I can imagine it, because alas what a lot of love does go wrong.12

  Although she was already hinting at the rift that had once seemed unthinkable, Jeanne was hoping to set off again with Dod for Madeira, sending a heartfelt plea to Marda to meet them there. She explained she had fallen for the island within four hours of coming ashore and decided that she would one day retire there, if she could.

  Back in Ferryside and full of melancholy, Jeanne could not bear to play on the piano the London Fantasia, a popular piece of music recently composed by Clive Richardson as the British answer to the Warsaw Concerto, evoking the bombing of London during the Blitz. It was something she had played when Marda was at Ferryside and she wrote that it filled her with sadness over Marda and also stirred up her feelings for Catholicism. Her sense of the sacred was perhaps already well developed. When Marda had written to her about her conflicted feelings for Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, and had suggested suicide as an alternative to the difficulties of life, Jeanne was appalled. She could not even bring herself to write the word but urged her: ‘Don’t for God’s sake say or think about it ever again.’13

  Daphne had been rather dismissive of both Angela and Jeanne, who had complained to her that they could not both work and look after Muriel. When Muriel came for a short visit to Menabilly to give Angela a break, Daphne was quick to point out that she had enjoyed one of her most productive periods – their complaints were ‘plain silly. Or is it just that I am cleverer than they are?!’14 In fact Jeanne had been working towards her first exhibition in London, at the Beaux Arts Gallery, a prominent exhibition space known for its promotion of avant-garde painting. Until it closed in the sixties, the gallery was run by the painter Helen Lessore and it was here that Barbara Hepworth had one of her earliest exhibitions.

  It was Tommy who organised the exhibition at this prestigious gallery for Jeanne and it was probably his influence too that meant Queen Elizabeth paid a visit. Tommy was much liked by both Jeanne and Noël, but Jeanne was dismayed that Daphne did not make the effort to attend. In fact, it seemed that her family’s lack of appreciation of her work became a lasting hurt. Both Angela and Daphne had been used to accepting without question their father’s view of modern art and Tod, herself a talented watercolourist with conventional tastes, was naturally opinionated and continued his censure of the kind of expressionist work in which Jeanne and her colleagues were engaged. The sisters hung Dod’s attractive but unchallenging paintings on their walls while eschewing their sister’s.

  Alongside her burgeoning career as an artist, Jeanne was struggling with her emotional life and the fact that she and Noël Welch were beginning to be drawn to each other. At some point Noël rented the next door studio to Jeanne in St Ives. A clever and beautiful young woman nearly ten years younger than Jeanne, Noël had graduated with an honours degree in English from St Hilda’s College Oxford in 1943 and brought her cool fastidious intellect to everything she did.

  Noël was a poet and for a time worked as reader for the talented young printer Guido Morris who had moved his Latin Press to St Ives just after the war. Good looking, creative and charming, Guido Morris had suffered a breakdown during his war service and a subsequent divorce from his wife. His passion was for print, design and typefaces and his time in St Ives was a happy and settled period in his life, printing material for the local community and embarking on the Crescendo Poetry Series. Between 1951 and the summer of 1952, he published eight pamphlets of poems by young poets, John Heath-Stubbs, himself and Noël Welch among them. Morris’s print run was only in the middle hundreds and Noël’s pamphlet, ‘Ten Poems’, published in 1952, is by far the rarest of all eight collections now. At the centre was a series of extended poems to Saint Joan, seen through her companion’s piercing gaze as both armoured soldier and precocious child: ‘Oh ambiguous maid/You touched most poignantly my ambiguity.’ Joan of Arc had resonance in the self-image of both Daphne and Jeanne, both unconventional and ambiguous spirits in disguise.

  Jeanne wrote a second confessional letter to Marda, suggesting that an answer to the complexity of her life would be to run away to live with her in South Africa, ‘how exciting it would be, & what a shambles of incompatibility would be the result, to turn my back on everyone I’m caught up with, & come & live with you’. She knew it was impossible but was keen to have Marda’s clarity shone on the mess she was making at home:

  to use a vulgar expression I have come to the conclusion that I have too much on my plate. I’m drawn into, and influence, too many lives. You are not on the plate at all, since you are unacquainted with any of the people … I think about you a lot. I love writing to you. I hope to God you realise there’s no-one else I write to in this strain.15

  Marda was well acquainted with Jeanne’s family, so the demanding issues on Jeanne’s plate at the time could only be her relationship with Dod, and the advent in her life of Noël too.

  Jeanne realised, however, that work was the answer to most of her romantic problems. When she had been in South Africa the emotional strains had meant she was unable to paint, ‘& the more continuously I’m painting the better I feel’.16 She was working a great deal and exhibiting regularly. Before the break with the St Ives Society of Artists she had a painting, Spanish Vermouth, included in a touring exhibition at the end of 1947, exhibiting in Cardiff and Swindon, amongst other towns in the west. Jeanne exhibited Flowers in a Spanish Bowl at the Swindon Arts Centre in the three weeks from the end of January to the middle of February in 1949; the picture’s price of £50 showed just how highly she was regarded at the time.

  When she had two paintings Green Apples and Mimosa with Ferns accepted for the inaugural exhibition of the Penwith Society in the summer of 1949, her prices once again were almost on a par with the already celebrated Dod Procter and Peter Lanyon. Only Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth could command significantly more than the other members. Interestingly Bernard Leach was selling a large stoneware jar for half the price of Jeanne’s paintings and a celadon porcelain tea set for even le
ss. It suggests that her talent was recognised early and had she had a little more of Dod’s ambition and luck, her paintings might have been much more prized and in far greater evidence than they are today.

  Despite having been suffering with health problems for some time, Angela was suddenly highly productive and wrote and published three books in the first three years of the 1950s. The two novels she produced were interesting biographically as they explored the kind of life Angela felt she could have lived if she had had more encouragement and perseverance. She had reached her middle years and recognised that this was the life she had made for herself, but it did not stop her thinking of the paths she might have taken.

  She had loved the theatre all her life, had tried to be an actress but given up before she had really begun, she loved music and singing and had a good voice but was put off any more training by a tough teacher in Paris. She had also been drawn to politics, both in her youth through a love affair with a committed socialist and then as a staunch Conservative in middle age. But all these careers remained just dreams. ‘I never ventured further than the Never-Never-Land.’17 She protested that she did not mind that she had led ‘a full (if useless) life, who met daily people of interest, who travelled often, whose time was taken up flitting butterfly-wise an hour here, an hour there’.18 In fact she believed she could have been a contender, if only she had had more courage and resilience.