One day when Clark was six his mother came to the nursery and caught his German governess scolding him. The governess was sent away the next morning and replaced by a Highland Scots woman, Miss Lamont, thereafter always known as ‘Lam’. Lam was the daughter of a minister from Skye, but was not at all dour; she was a great giggler, with a naughty sense of humour, and above all she was affectionate and full of unsentimental goodness. Clark adored her, and for the first time he encountered uncritical love. ‘The arrival of Lam,’ he wrote, ‘was the first of several pieces of human good fortune which have befallen me in my life.’19 He always claimed that Lam saved him: ‘At last I had someone whom I could love and depend on, and who even seemed to share my interests.’20 Lam became his protector and companion. This remarkable woman spoke four languages, never married, and ended up, thanks to Clark’s recommendation, as the housekeeper at Chequers, where she once remarked on the similarity between Clark senior and Mr Churchill.
At the end of January, when the shooting season was over, the Clark household would move by wagon-lit to the south of France, where one of the pleasure yachts would have sailed from the Clyde to await them in the harbour at Monte Carlo. His father loved the casino, but his mother found Monaco too socially demanding, and preferred the quieter pleasures of nearby Menton. One day a French woman who had joined them for lunch on the Katoomba expressed the wish to own a yacht of such beauty. Clark senior saw his chance, and named an enormous price, which to everyone’s surprise she accepted. The Clarks left their yacht the following day, and with the money Clark senior acquired a parcel of land near Menton on Cap Martin, where he employed the Danish architect Hans-Georg Tersling to build – using Scottish labour – a sturdy wedding cake of a villa in which the family would stay for three months of every year. Clark senior would gamble all day at the tables, where according to his son he had extraordinary luck that would fund extravagant purchases.*1 The Menton casino also put on early-evening shows for children, with conjurors, jugglers, acrobats, comedians and stuntmen, and through these entertainers the young Clark developed a desire to become an actor; he loved showing off his newly learned skills to his rather bored mother and her friends. In France, his mother’s only occupation seems to have been directing the head gardener, who returned during the summer months to his native Pitlochry.
Clark claimed to have had no childhood friends on the Riviera, but Isobel Somerville, the daughter of the English vicar at Menton, remembers playing rounders with him; she also recalls his passion for parsley sandwiches. She was captivated by Lam, with her compassion, her sense of the ridiculous and her exhortations to her charge – ‘Kenneth, don’t be silly.’ She remembers Lam bringing ‘her fabulously rich employers to Menton, each in turn. When she went to the Churchills, because we got no gossip whatever out of her, we changed her name into “Damn-clam-Lam”.’21
Perhaps the first indication of Clark’s remarkable gift for engaging the affection of distinguished friends and mentors is his improbable attachment to the Empress Eugénie, the elderly widow of Napoleon III, a neighbour who would allow him to accompany her as she took her morning walks. Otherwise the rather sedate life of the Riviera was punctuated for the small boy with carnivals and flower festivals which brought colour and a welcome vulgarity.
When his parents left Menton in April for a cure at Carlsbad or Vichy, young Clark would be sent back to Sudbourne – which was a mixed pleasure. With his parents away he found himself looked after by resentful servants, whom he accused in his memoirs of taking out their malice on him by serving him rotten food.*2
But there were also enormous compensations to life at Sudbourne. His favourite room was the library, the heart of the house, still filled with books left by the previous owner. Clark learned to read late, from an illustrated manual called Reading Without Tears in which each letter was represented by a pictogram. He read all the standard Edwardian children’s classics, but claimed that one series of books ‘influenced my character more than anything I have read since’. This was the illustrated adventures of ‘Golliwogg’ by Florence and Bertha Upton.22 Golliwogg, as Clark explained, lives on terms of perfect happiness with five girls. He always treats them with the greatest courtesy, and they share his adventures. Their role is to admire him, and when things go wrong they rescue and console him. ‘He was for me an example of chivalry far more persuasive than the unconvincing Knights of the Arthurian legend,’ wrote Clark, who added the frank admission, ‘I identify myself with him completely and have never quite ceased to do so.’23 Indeed, he was to spend the second half of his life enjoying carefully managed relationships with a number of women at the same time, and their role would be to appreciate and console him in a not dissimilar fashion.
Meanwhile in his nursery the solitary Clark enjoyed constructing elaborate Classical buildings with his bricks, and putting on performances with his circus figures à la Menton. ‘When my parents departed for Cap Martin and Vichy, I was left to my own devices,’ he wrote. ‘I was an only child and should have felt lonely, but in fact I do not remember suffering any inconvenience from solitude. On the contrary, I remember with fear and loathing the rare occasions when some well-wishing grown-up arranged for me to meet companions of my own age.’24 When other children did appear he found that he had little in common with them. Nor did he expect them to share his interests, thus nurturing a personal exceptionalism from an early age. He rejoiced when they left, and ‘returned with relief to my bears, my bricks, or at a later date, my billiard table’.25 All his life he would be pleased when guests had departed, and he believed that his early solitude ‘made me absolutely incapable of any collective activity. I cannot belong to a group.’26 He tended to exaggerate this point: in fact he was to demonstrate an unending capacity for collegiate activity by serving on numerous committees throughout his career, from the war onwards. His solitary childhood did make him shy – except with grown-ups – but it also helped to develop his sensitive perception of works of art.
Perhaps a greater enemy than loneliness to a solitary child might have been boredom. But Clark was at pains to dispel any such notion: ‘my days were all pleasure. Most children suffer from boredom, but I do not remember a dull moment at Sudbourne. I loved the Suffolk country, the heaths and sandpits, the great oaks in Sudbourne wood, the wide river at Iken.’27 Equally, he could write: ‘in family life the enemy of happiness is not oppression, but boredom, and against this the unfortunate parents are almost powerless’.28 All his life Clark was frightened of boredom – an important consideration in his attitude to other people. To most observers he displayed a very low boredom threshold; he was always allergic to bores, and was terrified of becoming one himself in his lectures or television programmes.
The large eighteenth-century Sudbourne Hall was opulent, and its estate well-tended, but down the road was romantic Iken on the Alde estuary, with its isolated thatched Saxon church of St Botolph. Clark would be taken there by horse and cart to go shrimping, and it was to remain a magical spot for him: ‘I found that the delicate music of the Suffolk coast, with its woods straggling into sandy commons, its lonely marshes and estuaries full of small boats, still had more charm for me than the great brass bands of natural scenery, the Alps or the Dolomites.’29 It was here, in a cove on the edge of the River Alde, that Clark was painted by Charles Sims, the first artist he befriended. He had already had his portrait painted by Sir John Lavery in the manner of Velázquez (which he described, using Maurice Bowra’s favourite term of praise, as ‘by no means bad’). Clark thought the Sims portrait lacked freshness, but the choice of setting on the Alde estuary is important. He would return there all his life, and at nearby Aldeburgh on the coast he would write his best books. When in later years he formed a close friendship with Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, he became an early champion of the Aldeburgh Festival and helped establish its reputation.
In London the family had given up the house in Grosvenor Square where young Clark had been born, and rented a flat in Berkeley S
quare. ‘We never stayed in London for long,’ wrote Clark, ‘because my mother thought, and rightly, that my father would get into trouble; but I enjoyed these visits because it meant going to the theatre.’30 He was taken to see all the famous Edwardian actors: Squire Bancroft, Gerald du Maurier, and his favourite, Charles Hawtrey. His mother may have watched her husband like a hawk in London, but he was allowed to take young Kenneth to the music hall; Clark senior kept boxes at the Empire and the Alhambra theatres. As a result the young Clark stored a repertoire of music-hall songs in his head, which would emerge in later life to the surprise of his friends.*3
In 1910 Lam took Clark to see the great exhibition of Japanese art at White City. It was one of the most formative moments of his childhood. There he saw life-sized dioramas representing various scenes and settings of Japan, but it was the screens that made the greatest impression, ‘with paintings of flowers of such ravishing beauty that I was not only struck dumb with delight, I felt that I had entered a new world’.31 He realised that something had happened to him. This aesthetic awakening marked the birth of his ‘freak aptitude’. The following Christmas his grandmother gave him a picture book of the Louvre, which was his first introduction to the Old Masters. The images fascinated him, and he found himself similarly enchanted. However, when he showed her his favourite plate, Titian’s Concert Champêtre (then attributed to Giorgione), her only comment was, ‘Oh dear, it’s very nude’ – which was probably the first time he encountered the word.
In fact, paintings surrounded the young Clark at Sudbourne. His father was a voracious buyer of pictures of the Highland cattle variety, although occasionally he bought something more interesting, such as Millais’ Murthley Moss, a Corot or a Barbizon School landscape. In general, however, he enjoyed the high polish and sentimentality of Jozef Israëls’ Pancake Day, Rosa Bonheur’s Highland Cattle and William Orchardson’s Story of a Life. This was what his son called ‘a coarse diet for a growing aesthete’, but he came to believe that those who had grown up with too much good taste were less capable in later life of a catholic response to works of art. ‘It is no accident,’ he wrote about Ruskin, ‘that the three or four Englishmen whose appreciation of art has been strong enough and perceptive enough to penetrate the normal callosity of their countrymen – Hazlitt, Ruskin, Roger Fry – have all come from philistine, puritanical homes. To be brought up in an atmosphere of good taste is to have the hunger for art satisfied at too early an age, and to think of it as a pleasant amenity rather than an urgent need.’32
Clark senior enjoyed the company of artists. No doubt they appealed to him as living outside the conventions of the day, and he befriended several, including Sims and Orchardson. He encouraged his son’s interest in them, and the boy’s ambitions did indeed change from acting to painting. His father even allowed him to rehang the smaller pictures at Sudbourne on a regular basis, developing a skill that would one day help to make the National Gallery in London one of the most carefully hung picture galleries in the world. And on young Clark’s twelfth birthday his father, presumably remembering his son’s rapturous tales of his visit with Lam to White City, gave Kenneth a scrapbook, put together around 1830 by a Japanese collector, containing drawings and prints from the circle of Hokusai; a wonderful treasure which he still owned at the end of his life, and one that fed young Clark’s growing passion.
Each summer the family would make the long train journey to Ross-shire for the fishing. They would spend a night at the North British Hotel in Edinburgh, where his father would invariably get very drunk and have to be fetched by his son from a sofa in the main lounge and helped upstairs muttering, ‘It’s a hard road for an old dog.’ Young Clark hated the holidays in the Scottish Highlands, and his heart sank at the thought of the threadbare comforts the house there offered. He described the country around Loch Ewe as ‘endless bogs, not an acre of cultivated land, persistent rain, followed by swarms of midges’.33
—
The British habit of sending their offspring away to boarding school at the age of seven or eight, which Clark abhorred (but repeated with his own children), was, he believed, ‘maintained solely in order that parents could get their children out of the house’.34 His parents’ choice of preparatory school was Wixenford, a fashionable school in Hampshire. Like most schools of its type, Wixenford was faintly ridiculous, and Clark probably made the place sound even more ridiculous than it actually was, with shades of Llanabba Castle, the school from Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall. Wixenford was a feeder for Eton, and in Clark’s description expended more effort on entertaining parents than educating children. It was housed in mock-Tudor buildings and had a very pretty garden, ‘leading to an avenue of pleached limes, under which, it was alleged, school meals were served in the summer term’.35 Lord Curzon was an alumnus, and the pupils were the children of the upper classes and of American and South African millionaires.
By the standards of the time Wixenford was an easy-going and benign establishment, whose staff Clark characterised as a ‘pathetic group of misfits and boozy cynics’. The only master with whom he had any kind of rapport was the art master, G.L. Thompson – known as ‘Tompy’ – who introduced him to the drawing methods of the Paris art schools of the 1850s. Wixenford encouraged the boys to put on theatrical productions and write for the school magazines, and Clark did both. He staged a revue incorporating all his favourite music-hall songs. Harold Acton, the future leader of the Oxford aesthetes, was a contemporary at Wixenford. He edited a magazine, and it was probably for him that Clark produced his first literary effort, an article entitled ‘Milk and Biscuits’ (which referred to those breaks added to the school’s curriculum, so Clark argued, in order to please the parents). Acton in his memoirs remembered Clark as a mature prodigy, ‘walking with benign assurance in our midst, an embryo archbishop or Cabinet Minister’, and mischievously added, ‘Since those days he seems to have grown much younger.’36 Wixenford provided one revelation for Clark. The ‘school dance was the first time I had met girls and I was enchanted beyond words, not by anything tangible, but the aura of femininity. Incipit vita nova.’*4 37 For good and ill, this enchantment would remain with him for the rest of his life. He enjoyed his days at Wixenford, and was described in his leaving report as ‘a jolly boy’ – a description that would be beaten out of him at Winchester.
When Clark looked back on his childhood world of Edwardian England he described it as a vulgar, disgraceful, overfed, godless social order, but admitted that he had enjoyed it. He also allowed that the period was a golden age of creativity: ‘Well it always seems to me that there was a great deal to be said for living between 1900 and 1914, because it wasn’t simply the age of the Edwardian plutocrat; it was also the age of the Fabians, of extremely intelligent people like Shaw and Wells. It was the age of the Russian Ballet. It was the age of Proust. It was the age of Picasso, Braque and Matisse. In fact almost everything I enjoy in what is called modern civilisation was in fact evolved before 1916. I do think the 1914 war was the great turning point in European civilisation.’38 When he came to tell the story of Civilisation on television he ended his account in 1914.
* * *
*1 Clark senior bought the Imperial Hotel in Menton with his winnings. On another occasion he acquired a golf course at Sospel and built a large, ugly hotel on it, also designed by Tersling, which he later gave to his son. Curiously, the art historian R. Langton Douglas and Sotheby’s chairman Geoffrey Hobson were partners in the golf course. (Information from the late Anthony Hobson.)
*2 His friend Joan Drogheda wrote to complain about this passage in his memoirs, stating that most servants did not treat children in the way he claimed, nor were they resentful of their employers, and that he had ‘struck the wrong note’. Letter from Lady Drogheda, 19 February 1972 (Tate 8812/1/4/36).
*3 It would also provide a mutual interest with Val Parnell and Lew Grade when Clark was chairman of ITV. Their background was in music hall and variety.
*4 ‘Thus begi
ns a new life.’
3
Winchester
Winchester helped to open for me the doors of perception.
KENNETH CLARK, Another Part of the Wood1
Winchester was a curious choice of public school for Clark’s parents, and is perhaps best understood in negative terms: it was not Eton or Harrow. Clark senior had a horror of the nobility, who – as he liked to point out – only ever wrote to ask him for something. He did not want his boy turning into a snob, and he and Alice would no doubt have felt uncomfortable at speech days – had they ever bothered to attend. The idea of sending Kenneth to Winchester almost certainly came from Wixenford. Even in an establishment so academically lax, it was recognised that the boy was exceptionally promising. His sponsor in the entry book at Winchester is given as P.H. Morton, Wixenford’s headmaster. Kenneth was the only boy in his year to go to Winchester.
Winchester is one of the great schools of England, with a distinctive and cerebral reputation. Founded in 1382 by William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester, as a school for poor scholars, it maintained a standard of academic excellence that was daunting to all but the cleverest boys. Clark painted a miserable picture of the school in his early years there, but pointed out that ‘All intellectuals complain about their schooldays. This is ridiculous.’2 He believed that they tended ‘to regard bullying and injustice as a personal attack on themselves, instead of the invariable condition of growing up in any society’.3 Ridiculous or not, Clark certainly took bullying personally. An additional privation was the effect of arriving at the school in the middle of World War I, which meant little heat and very poor food. Clark, who all his life was mildly epicurean, suffered accordingly. He also missed the soothing feminine influences of Lam.
Kenneth Clark Page 3