Clark’s preparations for World War II began long before Sassoon’s death. It was obvious that if hostilities did break out they would almost certainly involve bombing raids, and the National Gallery would be very vulnerable. Following the example of the Spanish Civil War, most people in Britain imagined that aerial bombardment would cause instant obliteration, and H.G. Wells’s book turned into a film, The Shape of Things to Come, encouraged this notion. ‘Air raid precautions’ first appear in the gallery minutes in May 1937, and the gallery began by adapting all the frames so that both the glass and the pictures could be taken out from the front at a moment’s notice, leaving the frame hanging on the wall. Clark gave a BBC Empire Broadcast on the story of the evacuation in which he told his audience that ‘although I grumbled a good deal about the cost and trouble at the time, I am now very thankful because some altarpieces which it used to take a whole day to get out of their frames can now be got down in five or six minutes’.3 An unexpected benefit of such planning occurred one day while Clark was rummaging around in the basement of the gallery, looking for safe places to store pictures, and came across twenty rolls of grimy canvas. Curious as to what they might be, he called for a brush, soap and water, and got on his knees to scrub the darkened surface, only stopping when he realised they were thirty-four previously unseen late Turners. They went on show at the Tate in February 1939, and became, as Clark later wrote, ‘among the most admired Turners in the Tate gallery’.4
The question of finding storage space for the National Gallery in the event of war proved more difficult than expected: country houses had big enough rooms, but seldom had big enough doors, not to mention the question of fire protection and warders. Martin Davies made a tour of potential houses and compiled a characteristically acerbic report, a typical entry reading: ‘Owner is nice, ruled by his wife, a tartar, anxious to have NG pictures instead of refugees or worse.’5 Clark had the inestimable luck of having on his staff Ian Rawlins, who as well as being a meticulous scientific adviser was a railway enthusiast who knew his Bradshaw. Clark would often later be introduced as the man who saved the nation’s pictures in wartime, but as he pointed out, that honour really belonged to Rawlins, aided by Martin Davies. They settled on a number of Welsh locations, which included University Hall in Bangor, Penrhyn Castle and the National Library at Aberystwyth. The prolonged to-ing and fro-ing of Neville Chamberlain’s diplomacy gave the gallery a chance to practise the evacuation, so that when war was imminent all the pictures were removed in ten days. Some 1,800 pictures, all those designated for evacuation, had left London the day before war was declared. They were conveyed in special containers by a dedicated train travelling at twenty miles per hour, and thence by lorry. Many people, including Clark’s mother, wondered whether it was all worth it, but he told her: ‘And is all this evacuation necessary?…On the whole I think it is. After his Russian Pact Hitler must have a complete victory or he is done for…I think the Russian alliance will turn out to be a great mistake.’6
Clark actually rather enjoyed the move, seeing ‘pictures in all kind of unexpected lights and surroundings…Many pictures which I have known for years have only come to life for me for the first time during these last days when I have seen them being wheeled in and out of shafts of sunlight, and finally buried in the darkness of a railway container.’7 The gallery would make the most of its removal to Wales: the time would be usefully spent in cataloguing and cleaning pictures under almost perfect conditions, not possible in peacetime. As Lord Balniel told Clark: ‘One of the advantages of the war appears to be that we will get a lot of pictures put in order for very little money.’8 Holder and Ruhemann were established in Wales with a studio and paid £5 per week, although the latter had not yet received his naturalisation papers, and so could not technically be employed by the government. Clark’s former antagonist Martin Davies was perfectly suited to the scholarly quiet of Bangor, as Clark told Jane: ‘Davies is in very good form reading the Italian classics and working indefatigably…there are a good many decisions for me to take…so my time is well spent. And as before I must confess I am enjoying Bangor…the surrounding country is sublime. I usually profess indifference to hills, but at the moment I feel like the Psalmist.’9
It soon became clear, however, that the pictures were no safer in their new homes than in London. German bombers could easily reach Wales, and in the case of Penrhyn Castle, Martin Davies reported that ‘the owner is celebrating the war by being fairly constantly drunk’. The trustees considered sending all the pictures to Canada (Lord Lee advocated this), and this was followed by an offer from the American government to give sanctuary to the collection. This proposal troubled Clark, as he confided to Balniel: ‘Jane is passionately opposed to it. I don’t know why she and Mary should be right but I must confess there is a good deal to be said against it, not only the risk, but also that…the Americans would always claim that they had saved the National Gallery for us.’10 When pressure was put on Clark to export the pictures, he went above his trustees directly to Winston Churchill, who scribbled on the memorandum in red ink the famous words at the head of this chapter.*1 Rawlins, as usual, came up with the answer; an abandoned slate quarry with a series of enormous chambers known as the Manod Caves in a remote valley near Blaenau Ffestiniog, in north Wales. The Office of Works was able to build the necessary dry, well-lit and air-conditioned storerooms, in which the National Gallery’s paintings would be remarkably stable and well looked after for the duration. All this was achieved in six months.
The problem was to get the large pictures from the railway up the six miles of steep, narrow mountain road to Manod. Clark was there to supervise. Entrances had been enlarged, roads hollowed out under bridges and every detail considered, but the case containing the two largest pictures, van Dyck’s Charles I on Horseback and Sebastiano del Piombo’s Raising of Lazarus, became jammed under a bridge – Rawlins had miscalculated by half an inch. ‘We all stood silent,’ said Clark, who with his mind stored with historical references ‘was reminded of the moment in Ranke’s History of the Popes, when the ropes lifting the obelisk in St. Peter’s Square began to fray. The crowd had been sworn to silence, but one sailor from Bordighera could not restrain himself, “Aqua alle tende”*2 he shouted. Silence was broken. “Let the air out of the tyres” we all said in chorus. It was done and grinding under, scraping over, the huge packing case passed through.’11 While the Manod Caves were being prepared and the pictures moved there, Clark, with an eye on history, had a film record made by Paramount of this unusual operation, a process repeated at the end of the war with their return to Trafalgar Square.
Clark thought the experience of visiting Manod was Wagnerian: the romantic isolation, the long tunnels, the buried treasure and the two talismanic rocks, known as ‘the dragons’, that guarded the caves.12 It was one thing for the men left to look after the pictures to be at Bangor, but Clark was concerned about morale at the isolated caves, as he told the gallery keeper, William Gibson: ‘we must envisage a time when the men will be snowed up, sometimes for several days on end, and provide them with such simple comforts as a wireless set, a library of cheap books, first-aid sets etc’.13 In fact the arrangements were to be remarkably successful; the guardians were not insensible of the advantages of spending the war in Wales. Holder worked ‘uncomplainingly throughout the war’ restoring pictures, and Martin Davies, who was in charge of the installation, toiled away at his catalogues, which as Clark acknowledged, ‘by their thoroughness, no less than their austerity, raised the standard of cataloguing in every country’.14 Clark enjoyed going to north Wales – less to inspect the pictures, which he found difficult to enjoy in these surroundings, than to escape the war and enjoy the breathtaking scenery: in old age he found that he still dreamed about those Welsh valleys. Sometimes he took Jane with him, and they stayed either at Portmeirion, Clough Williams-Ellis’s picturesque recreation of a north Italian port, or with Christabel Aberconway at Bodnant, which Jane thought the ugliest house she
had ever seen.
It was not just the National Gallery that needed packing up. The Clarks decided that they had to give up both Bellevue and Portland Place. Apart from the loss of Philip Sassoon, Bellevue was far too close to any likely invasion spot, and would be in the front line of aerial warfare. ‘Uncle Arthur’ Lee persuaded the Clarks to move to Gloucestershire to be close to him at Old Quarries, his Regency house near Avening. They found a pretty artisan Baroque country house to rent, called Upton, close to Tetbury. It was here that Jane and the children would spend most of the war. The house was in very poor condition, but it had a striking double-height salon with pilasters, and a library.
Clark had always known that Portland Place and all it represented was a luxury that they could not afford. He had been preparing Jane for some time – two years earlier he had warned her: ‘under normal conditions our way of life, quite apart from picture buying, is a little beyond our income’.15 The tax year 1939–40 is one of the very few for which there is a surviving record of the family finances. Before tax, Clark had a large income of £13,324, of which £10,400 was from stocks and shares, and £950 from property rental (including Old Palace Place). His net income of £6,600 was over £1,000 down on the previous year, owing to higher taxation.16
Disposing of Portland Place was never going to be easy with war imminent, and an improbable saga developed. Herbert Read, Clark’s antagonist in the Listener controversy, had a surprising habit of consulting Clark,17 and in 1939 he decided to leave his post at the Burlington Magazine in order to help Peggy Guggenheim set up a museum of modern art in London to rival New York’s MoMA. Read wrote to Clark asking about a suitable location and to discuss the general policy of the museum.18 In May 1939 he wrote again to say that Mrs Guggenheim and himself would like Clark to be a trustee (the other was to be Roland Penrose). He also mentioned that he had not found a home for the museum yet, and was looking for a floor in a modern building.19
Peggy Guggenheim takes up the story in her memoirs: ‘One day Mr Read phoned me to say that he had been offered the ideal spot for the museum. It was Sir Kenneth Clark’s house in Portland Place…Lady Clark showed me all over her beautiful house. It really was the perfect place…even though it was not modern. Lady Clark, who had been a gym teacher,*3 was particularly pleased with the air raid shelter she had made in the basement…We actually took the house, but as the lawyers were away on holiday I never signed the lease, and when war was declared, I had no legal obligation toward Sir Kenneth Clark. He, however, thought I had a moral one, and…he suggested that I give the indemnity to a committee he had formed for artists in distress, to which he had by then sacrificed his house. Mr Read considered Sir Kenneth Clark was richer than I.’20
Read had alerted Clark to the probability that with the declaration of war Peggy Guggenheim would not take his house, but offered him a very different view of the situation from that he reported to her: ‘I agree that you have a case for compensation and I will urge this view as strongly as possible.’21 Clark was extremely put out, believing that this might be his only chance in the present circumstances of selling the thirty years left on the house’s lease. He rarely became angry, except when he felt he had in some way been cheated. Nor did his sense of injustice end at that: ‘The landlords, in order to swindle us, pretended that the house could not be let to anything but a private person; we eventually sold the house for about £6000 and they immediately let it to Lawleys the glass manufacturers.’22 Clark later admitted that Portland Place ‘would in fact have been totally unsuitable’ for the London Guggenheim museum, and in the event the pictures went to New York before finally coming triumphantly to rest in Venice.23 The war lost London the chance to have both the Gulbenkian and the Guggenheim collections.
On 14 June 1939 there was one last great event at Portland Place, when a dinner was given for the American journalist Walter Lippmann, whom Clark described as ‘the greatest listener of the age’. The other guests were Winston Churchill, Lady Colefax, Harold Nicolson and Mr and Mrs Julian Huxley. There can be little doubt that the motivation for the dinner was political, for Lippmann to hear Churchill speak about the dangers faced by Europe, and to challenge American isolationism, a subject about which Clark felt strongly. Clark, although left-leaning, had no political affiliations, and as so often in his life ‘the leading figures on both sides talked to us…assuming that we must be on their side’. In fact, Clark at this time was ‘unequivocally on the side of Mr Churchill’, having seen at first hand during his lonely Dresden days the destructive direction being taken by Germany. He had read Mein Kampf, and although he liked Neville Chamberlain, observed ‘a disastrous fond of naivety’ in his character. Clark believed that only Churchill, with his sweep of historical imagination, could see the future as it might be presented in 1939. Many years later, in a BBC interview (about Berenson), Clark admitted, ‘I have never been frightened of anyone except Churchill.’ When the interviewer challenged this and questioned whether Churchill was an intellectual, Clark forcibly responded, ‘Don’t be taken in, he was a man of a wonderful and very powerful mind.’24
During the dinner Lippmann raised the notorious statement recently made by the American Ambassador to London, Joseph Kennedy, that Britain would be ‘licked’ in the forthcoming war. Harold Nicolson left a florid account of what happened next: ‘Winston is stirred by this defeatism into a magnificent oration. He sits hunched there, waving his whisky and soda to mark his periods, stubbing his cigar with the other hand…describing the trials ahead and concluding “Yet these trials and disasters, I ask you to believe, Mr Lippmann, will but serve to steel the resolution of the British people and to enhance our will for victory. No, the Ambassador should not have spoken so, Mr Lippmann, he should not have said that dreadful word…Nor should I die happy in the great struggle which I see before me, were I not convinced that if we in this dear, dear island succumb to the ferocity and might of our enemies, over there in your distant and immune continent the torch of liberty will burn untarnished and (I should trust and hope) undismayed.” We then change the subject and speak about the Giant Panda.’25
Clark in his memoirs complains that Nicolson ‘could not resist shampooing’ his account of the dinner.26 In fact there are four accounts of it: Nicolson’s, that in Clark’s memoirs, Jane’s diary, and one by Lippmann (who made extensive notes which form a memo he wrote later that evening27) – and they all agree with Clark that the evening witnessed ‘the most brilliant display of Mr Churchill’s conversational powers’.28 The final touching moment of the evening came as Churchill was leaving at around 1.30 a.m.: ‘He went out into a deserted Portland Place, the pavement glistening with heavy rain…and told his chauffeur to take him to Westerham [Chartwell]. “Good heavens” said Jane “you’re not going all that way?” “Yes my dear, I only come to London to sock the Government or to dine with you.” ’*4
—
Once they had moved out of Portland Place, Clark wrote to his mother, who was living in Cheltenham: ‘I have been a very neglectful son, but these last few days have been in some ways more exhausting than the actual evacuation. All the stimulating bustle is over and instead there is the dreary routine…I am staying at Garland’s Hotel in Suffolk St. It is very shabby and the only bath is on the half landing; but I find it good enough, and preferable to a Grand Babylon. I can dress and be at the Gallery in 5 minutes, so that you needn’t worry about air raids…London is looking very strange and rather beautiful at night. It really is dark so that one bumps into pedestrians.’29
It was in a café in the Charing Cross Road that Clark heard Chamberlain’s ‘tired old voice announcing the declaration of war’. He walked aimlessly through the West End, and melancholy thoughts were stirred at the bottom of Waterloo Place, gazing at the dull office buildings of Edwardian London, which ‘took on a grandeur and fatefulness that I had never felt before’, while even the vulgar illuminations of Piccadilly Circus ‘achieved a kind of pathos’. Melancholy gave way to mutability as ‘the banal
thought passed through my mind that even if they were not destroyed by bombs that night they would before long be deserted and crumble to the ground. It gave me a curious feeling of elation. The social system of which these featureless blocks were an emanation was a worn-out monster founded on exploitation, bewildered by a bad conscience. It would be better to start afresh.’30 He was jolted out of these reflections by the appearance of an air-raid warden.
After the last painting left the National Gallery, there was a deep silence in the large empty spaces. They looked strange and unreal with all the vacated picture frames, and it seemed as if they would remain like that for the duration. At the end of August 1939 the National Gallery was handed over to the Office of Works, and was expected shortly to be taken over by the government. As it happened, the government had no plan or idea what to do with the building, and Clark was surprised and grateful to be left his office. The first months of the war he later described as a sort of penitential rite, with emergency orders requiring that all the pleasures of civilised life were closed down – no art, no concerts, no theatre and no cinema – and he began to feel what he called a hunger of the spirit. It was three weeks into this void that Myra Hess appeared in Clark’s office with a proposal that would transform the wartime position of the National Gallery.
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