To return to our timeline, Blake went to a solid local primary school, Lamorbey CE in Sidcup (now Holy Trinity Lamorbey CE Primary) in 1937, and then a respected local secondary, the County School for Boys, Sidcup (which became a grammar school in the wake of the 1944 Education Act). Here an enlightened English teacher, J. H. Walsh, pointed him towards Downing College, Cambridge, where he went as only the third successful Cambridge entrant from his school, as an Exhibitioner in 1951. Downing was at the time known as a college with a focus on Law and Science, but more than anything in this period it was where that giant of English teaching, F. R. Leavis, held court and helped ‘Downing English’ to become a significant experience for all who were exposed to it.
Later, Blake went to the Institute of Education in London to train as an English teacher. Exams were passed, each stage equipping him well for the next one, and Blake benefited from exposure to distinguished teachers and academics. This was a not untypical trajectory for an intelligent middle-class boy growing up after 1944, and Blake is grateful for his secondary education which offered him access to the kind of culture he later realized was lacking in his home environment: ‘Grammar school was practically the only source of cultural input . . . I got more or less everything from there.’ I’m not sure that this is a criticism of the offer at home, in a way it is another comment on self-aware learning, recognizing what you need as a learner away from the home framework, and I would not feel at all certain that he would have become a greater artist if he had grown up in a string-quartet-playing, gallery-going home.
However, much of his cultural input at school did not emerge from the curriculum, nor (with a few exceptions) did it come from most of the teaching he experienced. Instead, discoveries about drawing and the theatre, two subjects that excited the artistically awakening Blake, often took place in different contexts. This was sometimes through people who were not teachers, and perhaps most of all through his own visual curiosity. The theatre may be a good place to start looking for clues about the nature of his learning experiences, since it is something that Blake himself frequently connects with his own art: ‘these drawings are like something happening, there is some sequence of time implied in them: an arm may be as much the description of a gesture as a depiction of anatomy. It’s a sort of little theatre’.2
Learning (teaching) through the theatre
Blake discovered the theatre, as many lucky people do, through performing school plays. At Chislehurst and Sidcup, these were extra-curricular activities, in part the province of the eccentric headmaster, Dr C. R. McGregor Williams, who also performed in them (‘he was good as Toby Belch, not Mark Antony, though,’ says Blake drily). Blake remembers, that ‘We used to do Shakespeare: which was a very good thing . . . organized by McGregor Williams (or Mac as he was known) . . . a bizarre character, very full of himself, but he did think you should do Shakespeare, which was a redeeming feature.’ Blake now sees how useful these performing opportunities were to be to the notion of illustration as a ‘theatre of the page’: ‘when you’re on the stage you really understand what happens’. And this was in spite of not being given significant roles: ‘I don’t think I’d got the presence to do it, or I thought I hadn’t; I did things like Gratiano in The Merchant of Venice.’
Perhaps it was Blake’s reserve that prevented him from getting the star parts, but later, while doing National Service in the Royal Army Educational Corps, he did play one lead role. While preparing to teach English (literacy) to young recruits, Blake was sent on a 12-week training course at Gerrards Cross. Here he encountered Major Archie Wavell (1916–53), the son of Field Marshall Viscount Wavell, a Viceroy of India, and compiler of Other Men’s Flowers, a best-selling anthology of his favourite poems, published in 1944. Wavell fils, a kind, educated and literary man, was an important figure for Blake, (who was clearly affected when only a few years later Wavell was killed in Kenya during the Mau Mau Uprising): ‘He knew how to teach, how to organize that course, he talked about Shakespeare and the army, the Bible and the army, it was interesting . . .’ Wavell encouraged his staff to put on a soldier production of Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (‘that’s what he was like’) and Blake was cast as Subtle, the fake alchemist who is one of the three leads in the play – a demanding role which, he says, he ‘almost’ learned in 12 weeks. It was performed in front of an audience, which on one night included the actor Alec Guinness. In one of Blake’s few stories about his parents, he says that they also attended a performance, but, he continues, they were at first greatly disappointed: it seemed as if their son was not in fact on stage that night – they had failed to recognize him in his bald wig. It is tempting to wonder whether the Blake on stage was also unrecognizable to them because his acting skills allowed him to become a person they had never seen before.
The Alchemist is of course a comedy. The notion of Blake the comic is highly visible in his art, as we have already seen, but it is also there in a quieter but equally hilarious side to his life and seems to have been so from early on – Blake’s father is said to have had a very dry sense of humour; perhaps it came from there. Certainly two memories from other people who Blake knows well confirm this side to his character. The first is from the Rahtz sisters, Julia and Madeleine, daughters of Roland Rahtz who taught at Blake’s school and lived opposite him. They are several years younger than Blake and Madeleine remembers him as someone who was always ‘clowning’. When they were at primary school, Blake, then a teenager, was known as ‘“the funny man” . . . because he had such an expressive face and if the ball accidentally got kicked over the playground fence, there was always a response’. According to Julia, ‘We always thought of him as somebody who would amuse us . . . he once came on holiday with the family, he was in his late teens and on one occasion he was holding Jean’s (Mrs Rahtz’s) hand and bending down double pretending to be her little boy, for my benefit of course, because I was walking behind!’
The second much later story is told by Jane Stanton, one of Blake’s students from the RCA, and now Head of Design at the University of Derby. Stanton remembers a student trip to Paris when ‘a whole restaurant became helpless with laughter at his impression of a frog trying to get out of a bucket . . . the frog act made me realize that Quentin was exactly like his drawings, the animation that he was acting out’.
Perhaps it was partly because he remembered how much acting can give otherwise reticent young people a sense of self-confidence (it’s always easier to be brave when you are someone else) that Blake used it as a teaching tool during his brief period as part-time English literature teacher at the Lycée Français de Londres in 1964.
Although Blake does now recall the following event, it is not with the enthusiasm of former Lycée student Gilles Dattas, now an artist and part-time security guard at the Musée du Petit Palais in Paris. Over thirty-five years later he recognized Blake, at the time working on an exhibition at the museum, and approached him. I happened to be there and recorded their conversation:
GD: You used to read us stories, no other teachers did that, they were all very set in their ways, [it was] very Cartesian . . . a very French school. And we did a school play . . . it was Julius Caesar.
QB: I was thinking about it the other day, because everyone knew their lines! I was quite worried, because it was a very short version, but even so quite a lot to learn. For the assassination we had three kinds of blood, various different people brought their own versions of home-made blood . . .
GD: And they put it in water pistols! Yes! And they were wearing bed sheets and we all sort of clung together while Julius Caesar was getting stabbed and one of them had this water pistol spraying the bed sheet with red ink.
This chance conversation says a lot about how good teaching works: Dattas’s breathless description was a spontaneous memory – it is fine evidence of the impact that the original event had on his 10-year-old self: the (for him) unusual opportunity to perform in a play, and the drama of a production for which the student-performers were
also creatively involved in dreaming up and making fake blood. And Blake’s surprise that the students had managed to learn their lines at all reminds us how unaware he is (probably, along with most teachers) of what a motivational effect one small intervention can have on students.
And in the cinema
But perhaps Blake’s most important theatre-related experience took place not on a stage but in the cinema. He was taken on a sixth-form outing to see Marcel Carné’s 1945 film Les enfants du paradis, then in its first London showing at the Academy Cinema. Les enfants would probably feature on many aficionados’ list: it was voted best film ever in a 1995 poll of French film critics and cultural professionals. But for Blake it was not only the epic romance, played out over the three hours, between the mime Baptiste (played by the famous actor-director Jean-Louis Barrault) and Arletty’s mysteriously beautiful courtesan Garance. It was more a sense of the theatrical and how theatre related to the kind of drawing he was already doing that most filled his head on his return to Sidcup. In the film, itself a tale about popular theatre in nineteenth-century Paris, there is a little sequence which imprinted itself deeply on Blake’s consciousness:
That scene where he [Baptiste] is sitting on a barrel outside the Théâtre des Funambules in clown’s costume, with his arms and legs hanging down as though he were a puppet, until the moment when he is able to come to life, as it were, and act the story of the little pick-pocketing incident which has taken place in front of him. That moment, with all its accompanying atmosphere . . . represents for me that mime element which is an important part of illustration.3
This is also a good story about learning: as the contemporary composer John Woolrich has observed: ‘You don’t choose your influences; tastes aren’t arbitrary – they point to something in your own creative personality’.4
In the end it was not acting on the stage or the screen that became the vehicle for Blake’s creative personality, but he did take from theatre an understanding of the elements it has in common with illustration, and which make illustration such a compelling art: character, costume, the right props, timing, knowing how to keep the reader in suspense, and he knew that when you understand all those, you can play all the parts and be the director, which in his own works he absolutely is.
Blake’s youth and early professional life were dotted with theatrical situations from which he could learn: from plays as literary texts and vehicles for the enjoyable and self-defining activity that acting can be, to the notion of mime as a narrative medium, to the role of the director who must compellingly conjure the vision of the text. The fruits of this learning are there in the teacher he became, the quiet but inspirational classroom performer, and they are there in the way that he learned to incorporate theatre into drawing.
Learning drawing
As far as his own early experiences go, Blake feels sure about the first one: he remembers becoming aware of what good drawing was almost before picking up a pencil. For his fourth birthday in December 1936, his parents had given him the Chicks’ Own Annual 1937. Chicks’ Own was a weekly children’s comic with strip cartoons as well as simple written stories, and he remembers one strip that beckoned to him in a particular way:
The hero was Rupert, a little yellow chick. He had a red beak; his friend was to the same design but black with a yellow beak. There was a curious convention about the beaks: normal beaks seen in profile, they became a nose and a mouth seen head-on. The chicks were child-sized, and went to a school where their friends were other animals such as Teeth-y Croc-o-dile and Stri-pey Ti-ger, who were not much bigger than they were.
The interesting thing to me, in retrospect, is that I am sure that I was aware already that some of the drawings were better than others. Many were flat and anaemic, but those for the Rupert stories had satisfyingly substantial forms; the wheels on Rupert’s train really looked as though they would go round, and the bowl of pudding they found in the pirates’ cave really looked worth eating.
Blake believes that the artist who signed the Rupert stories, A. White, may well have been influenced by the French illustrator, Benjamin Rabier (1864–1939), probably best known in this country for his image of a red cow’s head which chortles out from boxes of La vache qui rit processed cheese. With this memory and the later reflection on it Blake validates his own critical judgement, by suggesting that the artist whose works he picked out at such an early age was someone with a good artistic (and, even better, a French) pedigree.
We will never know whether this precocious critical faculty fed into Blake’s own early efforts at drawing, but it is clear that he did draw well, and from a young age. He remembers drawing at primary school, where he recalls making what must have seemed very sophisticated scenes of people looking in on other scenes (at the time considering these works ‘proper drawings’). He would probably disagree, but this is an astonishing early appreciation of what artists themselves do.
He also draws at home and famously, a visiting relative said, ‘You’ll find he doesn’t say much but he does draw a lot’. Of course most small children, offered suitable materials and encouragement, will happily draw a lot, as Blake understands very well. He sometimes describes children’s drawing as one of ‘unidentical twins’, the other being words. In an interview with Joann Sfar he says:
the verbal and the visual, they’re growing up together and when you reach a certain age, the visual one become worthless and is pushed to one side and the verbal one becomes important . . . that’s the one that teaches you to get a job . . . how to fill in forms, but what’s important is to get those in balance.5
How did Blake, then, manage to keep the two in balance? It is worth asking how and why he looked after the visual twin despite his academically (verbally) oriented school education: a creatively unadventurous primary curriculum and a secondary school where in order to do art at A-level you might have to give up chemistry, something which exasperated the teachers of boys such as Blake, who had good academic prospects. But Blake had the fortune to connect with someone through the school, though one who was not actually a teacher, the painter and cartoonist Alfred Jackson. He was married to Blake’s Latin teacher, who had shown her husband some of Blake’s drawings, and Alf had been impressed. As a result the 13-year-old Blake was invited to spend time with the Jackson family. ‘Alf’, he says,
would play the violin. He was a small, very sort of bright-eyed man, smoking a pipe, and the ash would drop on your drawings . . . I realise now that it was a tutorial actually. He would go through your drawings . . . he would talk about Michelangelo or about who was in Punch that week, or about Modigliani, or someone like that. He took it all perfectly seriously, on the same level, and it was he who said to me, ‘Do you ever have any ideas?’ I thought, ideas? And what ideas meant was joke ideas . . . Because . . . that was the strange thing, that drawing was also mixed up with funny things . . . as well. When I went to that school, I was friends with two boys and we were a sort of society and I think it was called the ‘III’, Idiotic Inventions Incorporated. And we had a book that we drew things in, you know, how to make blancmange fingers . . . stick your hand in a basin full of blancmange . . . I thought I’d better have some of these joke ideas . . .6
Jackson suggested that Blake should send some of the joke ideas he did manage to come up with to Punch. It was also Jackson who knew that when the drawings Blake sent in were repeatedly returned to him with the art-editor’s comment ‘sorry, not quite’, this was actually a positive response. Such encouragement eventually persuaded the 16-year-old Blake to request a meeting with this person, at the time Russell Brocklebank, which was granted. Brocklebank agreed to publish his work and congratulated Blake ‘on being the youngest-ever contributor’. As we have seen, Blake doesn’t claim many memories from this period of his life so it is significant that he mentions place (strong emotional memories are so often physically located) when he describes reading the words of the acceptance letter: ‘I was standing at the bottom of the stairs at home . . . th
ey paid me seven guineas. I didn’t have a bank account so when they paid me I didn’t know what to do with the cheque.’ Blake carried on contributing to Punch for years and he recognizes that his time there was an important stage in the development of his style – he remembers that a later Punch art-editor Kenneth Bird once told him that his rough drawings were better than his finished ones: after that, Blake says, in paradoxical spirit, he worked very hard to get spontaneity into his final drawings.
Stanley Simmonds was a teacher at Blake’s school. He taught him art during his last two years, but, significantly for Blake, was also an artist, ‘a real proper painter’. He had studied at the Royal College of Art and recognized Blake’s talents, giving him the kind of technical support, advice and familiarity with the work of fine artists that he needed at the time (‘The art-room was really a kind of cultural centre,’ remembers Blake). Blake, as we have seen, chose Cambridge rather than art school, and this may have been disappointing to his art teacher: according to the school’s biographer, Charles Wells, Simmonds fought hard against one headmaster’s ‘relentless drive for academic laurels’,7 arguing that art was the most academic subject of all if properly understood. It would not be surprising if Blake also absorbed this thinking at some level, even if he did consider his own cartoon drawings flippant and unserious.
In any case, Blake had found his own answer to his Higher Education quandary:
I had this dilemma which was: did I go to an art school or did I go and read English at university, and I thought, I can sort of remember the logic of it, I thought, if I go to an art school I might stop reading . . . but if I go to Cambridge I shan’t stop drawing, which is effectively what happened.
Was this the sole logic of his decision to apply to study English at Cambridge? In the early 1950s, an English degree would have led very naturally to a schoolteaching career and perhaps Blake (and his parents) would have preferred a course with a guaranteed job at the end. But it is also true to say that the choice of a literature degree was to provide Blake with a major supporting column for his art: his natural feel for and understanding of text were enriched by the intense and close study of it that his Cambridge degree offered him. This engagement provided him with his acute perspective on how to illustrate text, which moment to illustrate, which moment not to, because the words can do it better.
Quentin Blake: In the Theatre of the Imagination Page 6