One of the many unexpected outcomes of the war was the boost it brought to contemporary British artists, for with all the valuable art sent away, galleries and dealers had nothing else to show. The National Gallery led the way: during the war Clark staged thirty-four exhibitions, with a strong accent on war artists and modern art. One group of exhibitions happened as a result of Clark’s chance encounter at Coventry railway station in 1939 with a forceful young contemporary art dealer, Lillian Browse, who wanted to stage loan exhibitions of modern British painting at the National Gallery; the story reveals Clark at his best and worst. He invited Browse to travel with him, and she related that ‘I had to tell him I was travelling “hard”, to which he disarmingly and with feigned apology replied that he was travelling first but that I should not mind for he would pay the difference.’20 Fortified by this encounter, Browse ‘went to see him in his impressive, sombre office at Trafalgar Square. Alas, this was a very different Sir Kenneth to the one I had met in Coventry. Without giving any reason, he summarily dismissed my proposal.’ He was later persuaded to change his mind, and told Browse that she could put on an exhibition at the gallery, adding that he was far too busy to do much himself, which ‘prompted me to ask him what time he got up in the morning. “Eight o’clock.” I suggested he rise an hour earlier. I doubt whether anyone had ever asked him such an impertinent question, but it must have amused him for when Queen Elizabeth came to visit our exhibition I heard him telling her what I had said.’21
Clark was frequently irritated by Browse’s relentless determination; on one occasion she found herself on a crossed telephone line and overheard him describing her as ‘quite intolerable’. However, he recognised the quality of her exhibitions, beginning with ‘British Painting Since Whistler’ (1940), and followed in 1942 by a combined retrospective of William Nicholson and Jack Yeats (the motivation for exhibiting the latter being partly that of strengthening relations with Ireland). Clark himself wrote the Introduction, in which he compared the fastidious work of Nicholson with the essays of Max Beerbohm.
A cryptic diary entry of Clark’s for 5 January 1943 reads: ‘1.30 Connaught, de Gaulle.’ This lunch came about because Clark had organised an exhibition of French art at the National Gallery, and de Gaulle’s Gallic pride had been hurt when he had not been invited to open it: he wrote to complain. Clark had written to Stephen Spender the year before: ‘I do not like the idea of speeches at the opening of exhibitions and I hate making them. The idea of compiling another string of false and facile generalisations about art, the war, Russia, etc., makes me feel sick.’22 His reply to de Gaulle is lost, but it must have been more mollifying, because the General invited him to lunch, at which Clark was surprised to discover an intellectual in the manner of Henri Bergson.23 In spite of his professed aversion to them, Clark made many opening speeches at this time, particularly in connection with a new initiative to use artists to record the disappearing landscape.
Clark was one of the instigators of ‘Recording Britain’, an initiative that brought three more exhibitions to the gallery. Funded by the Pilgrim Trust and set up to employ mostly watercolour artists on the home front, it recorded the sort of scenes and landscapes that were particularly vulnerable to war, and visualised the world that the British were fighting to defend. The scheme resulted in the commissioning of over 1,600 works, many of them elegiac in character, by artists including Russell Flint, John Piper and Barbara Jones; Graham Bell’s painting of Brunswick Square (1940) was a typical example. Even the arch-modernist Herbert Read approved, and wrote: ‘these drawings may serve to remind us of the real fight – the fight against all commercial vandalism and insensitive neglect’.24 By far the most famous paintings exhibited (if not commissioned) under the Recording Britain scheme were Piper’s set of watercolours of Windsor Castle, the story of which is told in Chapter 20.
Although Clark believed that paintings achieved a dimension that was beyond photography, with the coming of the Blitz it was obvious that something urgent had to be done to make an objective record of vulnerable buildings, both for historical purposes and in case reconstruction became necessary; he gave a speech at the Royal Institute of British Architects to this end in November 1940. This was the catalyst in bringing into being the National Buildings Record, the aim of which was that all buildings of national value that were at risk of destruction by enemy action should be photographed and measured. Clark was immediately put on the management committee; through his position at the Ministry of Information (discussed in the next chapter) he could issue the necessary permits. He had told the RIBA audience that ‘Police and Military will respect a permit, the public will not and local people will stone or knock down people taking photographs.’ A fraction of the resulting photographs were exhibited at the National Gallery in 1944, and were received by Londoners as poignant reminders of what had already gone. As Harold Nicolson wrote in the Spectator, ‘a visit to the National Gallery…will convince anyone of the true value of the work being done’ by this scheme, ‘namely an illustrated catalogue of all our national treasures’.25 And after the war it did indeed prove to be instrumental in the reconstruction of damaged historic buildings.
When the gallery was not exhibiting young British artists, Clark was keen that it should champion designs for the rebuilding and planning of Britain after the war. In February 1943 Alan Lascelles wrote in his diary: ‘I went to the National Gallery to hear [the economist and social reformer] Sir W. Beveridge open an exhibition of designs for post-war housing, organised by the Royal Institution of British Architects…Kenneth Clark wound up with a neat speech in which he said that the architecture of the Middle Ages had been inspired by man’s faith in God, that of the Renaissance by their faith in the majesty of the human intellect, while that of the coming age would necessarily have a more utilitarian motive, and we must therefore be prepared for some sacrifice of aesthetic considerations.’26
In 1944 Jill Craigie directed Out of Chaos, a documentary that centred on the National Gallery and featured Clark as one of its leading presenters. Her film welded the appreciation of modern art with the story of the gallery at war, and mixed interviews with artists and vox pop. It was an innovative approach that set a new pattern for presenting art programmes. It also showed exhibitions of amateur art all over the country, and captured the Home Secretary Herbert Morrison saying, ‘I hope that this bond between the artist and the man in the street will outlast the war.’ Out of Chaos was a pioneering venture as an art documentary, and Clark had made his selection of British painters and used the opportunity to support a female director, unusual then and thereafter.
—
The gallery was hit nine times during the war, and particularly badly on 12 October 1940, when Hampton’s furniture store next door (where the Sainsbury Wing is today) was completely destroyed; the concerts had to be moved. There were some lucky escapes, but when an unexploded bomb fell on the gallery in October 1940 a full-scale row developed between Clark and Major General Taylor of the Bomb Disposal Unit, whom Clark thought behaved inefficiently and dangerously. The Unit had inspected the bomb, shown it to the gallery staff (which was against all regulations), then gone off for lunch – whereupon it exploded, destroying two galleries. The keeper Willie Gibson complained to Taylor, and told Clark and Courtauld that he had never received ‘a more insolent and scandalous reply to legitimate criticism’.27 Clark was never in sympathy with the rigid military mind, and angrily told Gibson, ‘General Taylor’s letter is typical of what one would suffer under a military dictatorship.’28 With gaping holes all over the building, Clark and Gibson increased the number of night warders from two to three, and in addition arranged for two day staff to sleep overnight at the gallery.
Perhaps more serious was a call that Clark received from the supervisor of the Manod caves: ‘It’s a crisis, it’s a crisis. Come at once.’ Air conditioning and a change in temperature had caused large pieces of slate to collapse, and the spectre presented itself of the gallery’s pictures
being buried under an avalanche. Steel scaffolding solved that particular problem, and there were no further falls.
One of Clark’s perennial concerns at the gallery was his benefactor Calouste Gulbenkian. At the outbreak of war Gulbenkian had stayed in Paris, attaching himself to the Iranian Embassy, which gave him diplomatic status. This meant that his treasures were not carted off to Berlin, but by remaining in Vichy France he had technically rendered himself an ‘enemy alien’ of Britain. His many enemies used this as an excuse to cut off his famous 5 per cent revenues from the Iraq oilfields. Clark did his best to intercede with the British Treasury, but he could do nothing about the loss of revenue that had resulted. After many vicissitudes Gulbenkian went to live at the Hotel Aviz in Lisbon, where one day he was even arrested while rivals attempted to find evidence to incriminate him. He survived all these machinations but nurtured a growing grudge against Britain, and there was little Clark could do but unsuccessfully speak up on his behalf to Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and Maynard Keynes.
Despite these frustrations, Gulbenkian went on believing in their project at the National Gallery. Throughout the war – communicating with Clark via a diplomatic bag – he made enquiries about paintings for sale: ‘I shall be very grateful if you find time to let me know when there are any extremely fine pictures which you would like to add to our “family”.’29 Clark had no luck – he went on hoping for the Cook Rembrandt, Titus, and mentioned the possibility of pictures from the Crawford collection; he even suggested that Lord Spencer might sell some of his incomparable collection of portraits by Reynolds. At one point he was all set to buy Constable’s White Horse at auction, but the National Gallery of Scotland stepped in and the painting was withdrawn. In the meantime William Adams Delano, the architect of the proposed Gulbenkian wing, could not get his fee, and told Clark in 1942, ‘You must be a confirmed optimist if you still have faith that your benefactor will come true.’30 The following year, however, Gulbenkian wrote Clark a long, reassuring letter, saying that their plan was still on track, and even that he intended to lend more items after the war.31
But there were alarming rumours going around. James Lees-Milne recorded in his diary an encounter at the Travellers’ Club with the British Consul in Lisbon: ‘He told me that Gulbenkian, now living in Lisbon was being slighted by the British Embassy and society because although a British subject, he was evading income tax. Consequently Gulbenkian had hinted to the Consul that he might after all not leave his pictures and collections, now in England to this country. Did I know Kenneth Clark? And would I do something?’32 The matter was still at this stage rescuable; the dénouement was not to come until the war was over.
* * *
* Poussin painted two series of the Seven Sacraments, in 1637–40 and 1644–48. The latter was owned by the Duke of Sutherland.
19
The Ministry of Information
It was a perfectly useless body, and the war would have been in no way affected if it had been dissolved and only the censorship retained.
KENNETH CLARK, quoted in Ian McLaine, Ministry of Morale1
Once the National Gallery pictures were safely despatched, like most men of his age Clark wondered what he should do for the war effort. ‘For anyone with my background,’ he wrote, ‘there was an obvious source of employment, the so-called Ministry of Information’2 – the British equivalent of a propaganda ministry. This cobbled-together institution was housed in the monolithic 1930s Senate House of London University, and was from the beginning an uneasy mixture of clever amateurs and (occasionally resentful) civil servants whom other ministries were prepared to release. Harold Nicolson’s first impression was that ‘all the lunatics flock to the MoI like bees around ale’. Clark’s time at the ministry was quite short – about eighteen months – and he later liked to denigrate his efforts there. During its early days the MoI was indeed ineffective through a mixture of poor leadership, inappropriate personnel and confusion of purpose, but Clark’s verdict that it was a useless body is unduly harsh. It was always going to be harder running such a ministry at a time when all the news was bad.3
Clark’s first attempt at getting a job was almost a caricature of wartime recruitment – a chance meeting in a gentlemen’s club which he described to Jane: ‘This is to say that I met at the Beefsteak a nice anthropologist called Lord Raglan who is in the M of I as deputy chief censor, and he has arranged for me to go round there this evening…I have just been to the M of I but without much success. A pleasant man took the line of “you’re far too big a man to get a job through the ordinary channels, you should write to Perth etc.” ’4 He dutifully wrote to Lord Perth, who held high office at the ministry, but as he told Jane: ‘I hastened to the Gallery, but alas no word of a job not even an acknowledgement of my letters. I begin to learn what it must feel like to be unemployed. There is only the usual pile of letters from artists all assuming I can get them jobs.’
Clark believed that of the two of them, Jane was more employable: ‘I have only luxury talents.’5 He wrote half in despair to Lord Lloyd at the British Council: ‘I can get together a panel of the best advertising experts in England. It seems that the Ministry of Information are not interested in persuading people through their eyes.’6 At this point ‘Uncle Arthur’ Lee sprang into action and wrote directly to the Minister of Information, Lord Macmillan (who had been at school with Clark’s father at Greenock). Lee described Clark as ‘one of the ablest young men of my acquaintance…he is a man of great and natural administrative and business ability…[whose] ardent spirit will simply lure him into one of the fighting services’.7 As a civil servant Clark had been exempted from the armed forces, and although he dreaded the idea of ‘going back to school’ he did contemplate the Royal Naval Voluntary Reserve, as Jane recorded, ‘if he could get a commission, failing that a minesweeper, which gives one lots of time for reading’.8 In the event, the Ministry of Information accepted Clark, and he began work there on 27 December 1939. He was thirty-six years of age.
Founded on the day war broke out, the MoI was originally given five functions: the release of official news; censorship of the press, films and radio; maintaining morale; creating publicity campaigns for other government departments; and propaganda in connection with both enemies and allies. Harold Nicolson, who was the junior minister at the ministry, kept a diary of the period which opens a window into Clark’s life there. Nicolson thought the MoI was ‘too decent, educated and intellectual to follow Goebbels’.9 Unlike existing ministries, which had evolved over many years, the MoI’s structure had to be invented, and it was from the start over-complicated and subject to continuous change, which is as confusing to the historian as it was to the public at the time, not to mention those who worked there. A great deal of energy was expended in the early days on purpose, definition, function and procedure. Clark’s surviving MoI memos show how exercised he was by the competing claims of different branches of the ministry, and the problem of whether individual committees were ‘deliberative’, ‘executive’, ‘coordinating’ or ‘informative’.10 He served under three ministers, none of whom was very successful in the post: Lord Macmillan, who had recruited him; Sir John Reith,11 appointed in January 1940 (with whom Clark got on well); and from May 1940 Duff Cooper,12 a Tory with whose views Clark was rarely in sympathy. This succession of ministers prompted the ditty:
Hush, hush, chuckle who dares,
Another new Minister’s fallen downstairs.
The ministry puzzled people, appearing as it did to be overstaffed, very expensive to run and bringing few discernible benefits. It was determined not to become a Ministry of Entertainment, but it certainly became the butt of many jokes – ‘the Ministry of Aggravation’, or ‘Minnie’, as John Betjeman and others who worked there referred to it. Despite his later denigration, Clark took his time there very seriously; as he wrote in the month of his appointment, ‘this war is not a war of man-power, but to a great extent a war of morale’.13 He held positions of consider
able influence, mostly chairing committees which changed name and purpose with bewildering speed, reflecting the uncomfortable character of that period.
To Clark’s surprise, and everybody else’s, he was put in charge of the Film Division. The canard put about by Clark himself that this was because of a confusion over his being an expert in ‘pictures’ is very unlikely, although in keeping with the amateur reputation of the ministry. It seems far more probable that his administrative ability, his perceived understanding of ‘creative types’ and his left-of-centre political views were the real reasons. His predecessor, Sir Joseph Ball, had been a political appointment from the Conservative Party; there was a feeling of inertia about Ball, and the film world had received him with hostility. Clark was seen by contrast as effective, young and dynamic.
Sir John Reith, the father of the BBC, arrived very shortly after Clark, and the combination was initially thought to be positive. Reith, referred to by Churchill, who loathed him, as ‘that Wuthering Height’, immediately interrogated Clark about his religious beliefs (Clark must have stretched casuistry to its limits), and concluded with, ‘You have an independent income…that’s bad.’ Clark responded by pointing out that so did William Morris, Ruskin and the fathers of British socialism, to which Reith retorted, ‘It’s all right for you but it’s no good for me. I can’t get you to obey me so easily.’14 Reith, like so many older men, took to Clark at once, and was determined to promote him, which Clark managed to resist at first.
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