Joseph Gray's Camouflage

by Mary Horlock

  13 The Graphic, 20 February 1915

  14 Oliver P. Bernard, Cock Sparrow – A True Chronicle, Jonathan Cape, London, 1936, p. 197

  15 Philip Warner, Kitchener: The Man Behind the Legend, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1985, p. 4

  16 Solomon J. Solomon, Strategic Camouflage, John Murray, London, 1920, p. 54

  17 Somech Phillips, Solomon J. Solomon, p. 139

  18 Diary extract quoted in Somech Phillips, Solomon J. Solomon, p. 143

  19 Bernard, Cock Sparrow, p. 197

  20 Ibid., p. 274

  21 Solomon, Strategic Camouflage, p. 51

  22 ‘Camouflage. Col. Solomon’s “Fantastic Ideas”’, The Morning Post, 28 May 1920, p. 3

  23 ‘Strategic Camouflage’, Times Literary Supplement, 6 May 1920, p. 279

  is for Camera. try to confuse The enemy’s reading of aerial views

  They stood or sat in two simple rows. Most were in uniform, polished medals pinned onto their tunics, clattering against each other as they straightened their shoulders, striking a pose. The survivors of Neuve Chapelle. Joe sat front and centre, but he wasn’t in khaki. Instead, he wore a new dark suit and silk cravat, resting his felt fedora casually on his knee. His handsome face seemed fuller, and his thick hair sprang up rebelliously. He stared straight ahead, keeping his dark eyes fixed on the camera. The artist was composing himself.

  Then came a blinding flash and it was over. The photograph would appear in the paper that evening, with the headline ‘“DUNDEE’S OWN” – Famous Battle Picture Presented to City’ and an accommpanying article had the same flourish:

  Men like those, we can say of them: ‘To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die’. Ages and ages ago – or so it now seems to those who were ‘there’ – on a dull desolate morning in March, the Battle of Neuve Chapelle was fought; and though kindly time has enveloped naked memories in as soft a mist as screened the dreariness of the landscape that fateful evening, Mr. Joseph Gray’s picture of the 4th Black Watch bivouac on the night of the battle recalls the stark brutality of half-forgotten scenes and incidents with a vivid truthfulness which makes the picture a masterpiece of reality.1

  ‘It shall take its place among the great battle pictures in the country.’

  Sir Alexander Spence was peering at the painting through his round, thin-rimmed spectacles. Joe, in turn, was admiring the polish of his provost’s necklace. He turned to survey the crowd in the gallery. It was full to bursting with every type of person: men in their battledress, war widows, young men and women, children. The atmosphere was heavy with emotion as everyone swarmed towards the painting, craning necks to catch a glimpse of it. Would they marvel at the detail? Would they recognise the men they knew?

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen. May I have your attention?’

  Spence cleared his throat and a gentle hush fell across the room.

  ‘I am aware this ceremony may open wounds only partially healed,’ Spence began. ‘No picture is needed to remind people of the huge loss, the scale of human sacrifice.’2

  Joe was no longer listening. He turned and studied the men of his old battalion – not the men who’d just sat for the photographer, but the soldiers he’d spent so many hours painting – Walker, Tosh, Boase, Weinberg – all of them dead. Seven years had passed, yet it felt like yesterday. And it looked like yesterday.

  There were more speeches. Much was made of Mr Gray’s remarkable ability to combine so many likenesses within a single picture, of his meticulous attention to detail. The architect Charles Soutar hailed him a genius, praising the painting’s truth to reality. The fact that it represented a moment after battle caught something of the ‘everyday dreariness’3 and exhaustion of the battlefield, which was often more testing than an actual attack. Such uncanny realism, he declared, could only have been achieved by an artist who had been there. Yes, Joseph Gray had been there, and now all he did was go back there, returning men to the midst of the action, making sure they were seen.

  He would say it time and again: that he would only depict the war as it was. It wasn’t glittering and glamorous – it was ruinous and wearisome, and the waste was appalling – but he wouldn’t make it pointless. There was heroism in the perseverance. He wouldn’t forget that, any more than he’d forget the friends he had lost, and really he was lucky: while some veterans struggled with their memories of the war, Joe was turning his into something as coherent as a picture within a frame.

  The public unveiling of After Neuve Chapelle (10 March 1915) was, he felt, a huge success. People pressed forward and reached out to shake his hand, congratulating him on his achievement. So many years had passed, but the war was still on everyone’s minds. Joe had sketched and etched it, written and painted it. He weaved his way through the crowds, smiling and nodding. He couldn’t hear half of the compliments but he knew every face and name. This was Joe at his best; charismatic, vivacious, a real life force.

  And his wife was the same: fluttering around him, luminous in his reflected glory. Within five months of returning from France they had married – perhaps that was a little hasty, but they loved each other deeply. Agnes was the third daughter of John Dye, a bank clerk and church elder, a respected pillar of the community. Having such a strait-laced father gave her plenty to rebel against, and she liked to do so in style.

  Although working as a stenographer, Agnes spent all her evenings on stage, indulging a passion for amateur dramatics. The minute Joe had seen her under the floodlights he was caught. Agnes had more energy than anybody he’d ever met. She was dazzling, feisty (in fact, rather fierce). She could dance and sing and ski and ride (but never side-saddle, as a lady should), and she saw things in simple, direct terms. Having never really liked the name Agnes, it seemed right that Joe christen her Nancy. Nancy Gray, the artist’s wife, was a thrilling new role to play.

  They’d settled in a home close to her parents in Broughty Ferry, ‘a very modern and cultivated circle’,4 and Joe had converted one room of their house into a studio. There was still space for a live-in maid, who became devoted to Nancy, who gave up work and soon produced a daughter. They named her Alice Maureen, though people only ever called her Maureen.

  Born the same month as the Treaty of Versailles, Maureen represented a bright new beginning and was cherished all the more for it. There is a wonderfully informal photograph of Joe and a very young Maureen with her grandfather, John Dye. Dye is smiling indulgently as he holds up the little girl, and she affectionately wraps one arm over his shoulder, using her other arm to point at the camera. She is ecstatic, her little face screwed up in excitement, and Joe shares her joy, grinning broadly, dark eyes sparkling.

  Joe still believed in love and romance, and this was going to be part of his problem. The signs were already there if he looked for them: ex-soldiers begging on street corners, shops and factories failing. It was soon going to be hard to make a living at all, let alone make a living as an artist.

  A few months after the unveiling of his Neuve Chapelle picture, Joe travelled down to London. He’d been offered the chance to show some of his war works at a Bond Street gallery, a prospect that created much excitement. He felt he needed to spread his wings and reach a wider audience. Perhaps this would be his moment. And London seemed to offer all that he hoped and the fast pace of life appealed. He wrote to Nancy telling her that he’d had many visitors to the gallery and that his dealer was confident of sales and success. On paper everything looked good. the Scotsman reported that Queen Mary visited and had showed ‘much interest’ in his work’.5 Joe wrote excitedly to his friend, the photographer Andrew Paterson, offering edited highlights from choice reviews: ‘vigorous and clever – enveloped in atmosphere’, ‘Mr. Gray has done wonders.’6

  But Mr Gray could never shake off that feeling that he didn’t quite fit in. By London standards he was rough around the edges, quite without advantages. He had trained at South Shields School of Art, not the Slade. He was nuts and bolts, without wealthy patrons or private income. He’d ev
en had to pay for his own advertisements, hiding the cost from his wife.

  ‘I wonder what will be the result of the exhibition,’ Joe told Paterson. ‘I am full of beans and have every hope, as I shall be in a serious position if nothing comes of it . . . All the right folk come in and after all we only need one or two people seriously interested to do the trick.’7

  Joe hovered in the gallery and courted his audience. Men who’d been in the trenches came and said he’d got it just right, that there was nothing to match it, but this swell of good feeling didn’t translate into the sales and money he so needed. He was beginning to feel the rub. ‘I will not do anything unreal or false,’ he said. ‘My experience is that people want straight stuff. The problem of course is a difficult one, to combine artistic expression with the expression of historic and topographical truth.’8

  It was a problem indeed. This was 1922 and there were now so many versions of the war in circulation. It was as if reality had splintered into fragments. Joe saw it with his own eyes, in every other gallery on Bond Street and beyond. The fractured and twisted forms of Modernism apparently made sense after the carnage of the battlefield. All the critics said so. A brutal, mechanised war required a sharp-edged language of expression, something that was neither literal nor subjective. Wyndham Lewis, Paul Nash, Christopher Nevinson: these were the artists who stole the headlines and caused such excitement.

  Joe mistrusted Modernism: how it distorted and disguised reality. He considered it a craze, a worthless fad. The war, what he’d been through, the friends that he’d lost, had to be properly represented. ‘A picture may be really fine from the point of view of abstract aesthetic expression and of no value as a war record.’9 But he was always defending his position, which was a sure enough sign that it was under threat.

  The dazzling future so hoped for, and so hard fought for, didn’t look how anyone thought it would. When Joe returned to Broughty Ferry he was deeply unsettled by the picture before him, but he put on a good face for the sake of his family. And it wasn’t all bad. There were still some commissions trickling in, and he turned some of his paintings into etchings to make more regular money. Prints were cheaper and easier to sell, and etching itself was enjoying quite a revival.

  Etching had a particular appeal, of that there was no doubt. In etching, the artist draws with a needle onto a metal plate that is covered with a waxy ground. The plate is then immersed in acid, and the bare metal, exposed by the lines of the drawing, is eroded. The depth of the etch is controlled by the amount of time the acid is allowed to bite the metal. The longer in acid, the deeper the line and the darker the print, but each impression can vary greatly, and the effects are a wonderfully rich, painterly chiaroscuro of tone.

  Joe loved the etching process, the focus on line and tone, and he looked for inspiration outside, taking sketching trips along the Tay and hiking far into the Highlands in all kinds of weather. The war had given him his best subjects, but just recently the war had kept him indoors. It did his lungs good to get out in the open, and although he walked with a stick, it was more from habit than necessity. It was time to find fresh drama and Joe hoped to find it in the landscapes of his home: wild Highland views, serene and empty lochs, craggy ancient coasts.

  Nancy wondered where her husband disappeared to. He was often gone from dawn until dusk, looking for both an answer and escape. He returned with endless sketches that formed the basis of new plates. By looking down on the world, Joe Gray felt he might still control it. Certainly, he could etch it. He was back in the landscape, the observer hard at work.

  Nothing changed quickly. There was no lightning bolt or earthquake, no watershed moment. Joe was obstinate and blinkered, as artists often are. He reassured himself that his work was still popular: his etchings sold well, allowing him to buy his own printing press, and his battle paintings remained a focal point in local galleries. Ernest Blaikley, the curator of the Imperial War Museum, assured him A Ration Party was still one of the ‘most appreciated in the collection’.10

  Yes. Ernest Blaikley. The connections are there to be made. The man who had once trained snipers under Hesketh-Prichard was now a well-regarded member of the London art establishment. Joe had corresponded with Blaikley for some time, spurred on by a desire for accuracy in his war work. What started as an innocent request (‘Mr. Blaikley, may I ask please if it would be possible for me to borrow a few details of German equipment?’11) became a protracted correspondence. (‘Do you have such objects as field cooking kitchens and field guns in the museum? . . . Do you think . . . that it would be possible to borrow for a month or two a set of leather infantry equipment, such as was worn by the Scottish Divisions at Loos? . . . I would not ask for anything else, and I would not say where I got it.’12) Blaikley deflected Joe’s enquiries with humour and tact, making arrangements instead for him to sketch the items in the museum store. It was how they first met, and would continue to meet.

  The two men had plenty in common. Blaikley was himself an etcher, a devotee of drawing and direct observation, and a founding member of the Society of Graphic Art. A stickler for accuracy, Blaikley’s time teaching map-reading to snipers served him well, since his first task on joining the Imperial War Museum had been to catalogue all the trench maps and intelligence summaries collected from the Western Front. His second had been to index the thousands of aerial photographs taken by British servicemen of that exact same area. Solomon J. Solomon had said it took the eyes of an artist to understand aerial photography, and Blaikley bore that theory out. He created an unparalleled resource, a precise record of one war that would ultimately be used in another.

  Step in close to see the details, and then pull back and patterns start to emerge. A landscape seen in monochrome might seem so very simple, yet the grainy lines, the minuscule variations of light or shade, a particular tone or texture, contains any number of possibilities.

  ‘The worker in black and white, although working in an art which is simpler, is allowed the freest range.’ So spoke Sir John Findlay, the owner of the Scotsman, as he welcomed the crowds to another exhibition at the Victoria Gallery, this time a group show of the Dundee Art Society. To the agreement of all present, Findlay expressed the view that the graphic arts still had a direct and wide appeal.

  ‘Although it might be heresy to say it, there is a definite need on the part of modern artists to consider the public a little more than many do. There is still room in the world for a good deal of descriptive art.’13

  Joe stood at the front and applauded that sentiment. He wore the same dark suit and cravat that he’d worn for his last opening, but his hair was now dishevelled, his eyes a little tired, and his fingers stained with ink. Still, he was excited to be exhibiting his new etchings. There was a strong market for his expressive Highland views, heather-covered banks and wild and lonely lochs. He etched a world untouched by war and barely touched by man, landscapes borne out of deep contemplation. A return to something simple, personal, hand-crafted.

  If anybody asked, he eagerly explained how he carried out his own experiments and prepared each plate personally. Much as he loved the fluidity of the hand-drawn line, he built up tone not just through fine and dense strokes, but by repeatedly inking and wiping the plate, thereby creating wonderfully different atmospheric effects. He would spend hours moderating shadows, balancing every nuance of light and shade, making his subject more or less visible.

  Joseph Gray didn’t want to be a war artist any more; he wanted instead to be an etcher of landscapes. He hadn’t yet seen how the two might come together.

  Notes

  CAB = Cabinet Papers

  CD, TC, CDTC = Camouglage Development and Training Centre

  HO= Home Office

  IWM = Imperial War Museum

  PREM = Prime Minister’s Office Records

  TNA = The National Archives

  WO = War Office

  Jack Sayer, ‘The Camouflage Game’, refers to his unpublished, hand-written memoir, courtesy of G
illian Ward.

  To avoid repetition, the majority of quotes from Joseph’s letters to Mary are not noted. Unless stated otherwise, they form part of the Barclay family archive. Similarly, images reproduced form part of this archive, except where credited otherwise.

  1 As reported in The Dundee Advertiser, 1 April 1922, p. 2

  2 Ibid.

  3 Ibid.

  4 Mabel Boase, I Stir the Poppy Dust, J. & G. Innes Ltd, Cupar, 1936, p. 21

  5 The Scotsman, 7 June 1922, p. 8

  6 ‘London Press’, June 1922, quoted by J. Gray to A. Paterson in a letter, 22 June 1922, from the Paterson Family Archives, courtesy Andrew Paterson Collection

  7 Undated letter to A. Paterson (assumed June 1922), from the Paterson Family Archives, courtesy Andrew Paterson Collection

  8 J. Gray in a letter to Ernest Blaikley, 28 September 1932. IWM First World War Art Archive, ART/WA1/386

  9 Ibid.

  10 E. Blaikley in two letters to J. Gray, 9 and 16 February 1929 respectively, First World War Art Archive, ART/WA1/386

  11 J. Gray in a letter to E. Blaikley, 27 January 1919, IWM First World War Art Archive, ART/WA1/125

  12 J. Gray in a letter to E. Blaikley, 21 April 1930, IWM First World War Art Archive, ART/WA1/386

  13 As reported in The Scotsman, 18 November 1922, p. 8

  is Deception, which plainly implies You’ve got to tell Jerry some credible lies

  The colours aren’t what I expected – the pale green sinking into sulphurous yellow – and I’m disappointed to find that it is smaller than all the other canvases crowded on the rack. I lean further forward, focusing entirely on this painting, on the ghostly, ragged outlines and the murky ground they’re sunk in.

  ‘It’s nothing like the photographs,’ I say, turning to the curator who has brought me here to see it.