These, however, were definitely not the conversations that were happening on Marine Parade in Sheerness. If Martin Harris, who lived at No. 24 with his wife Susan and their two daughters, represented any tendency within twentieth-century English art, it was the heroic school of offcut artists who have refused to lie down and die when the agents and galleries stop returning their calls.
Susan Harris remembers meeting the man she would eventually marry in 1966 when she was teaching dressmaking at the Nuneaton School of Art in 1959 or 1960. She herself had studied the craft in Birmingham, having severely tested her parents (her father managed part of the Midland Bank) by failing to make the grade in academic subjects. Martin, who also joined the staff, had lived a fetchingly rackety art student life, first at Wimbledon School of Art and then at Hornsey in London, and he had recently been doing quite well with his work. Susan remembers him using a palette knife to distribute large quantities of bright paint, entire tubes of which would be gone in a minute or two. In those days, the paintings were “big colourful things” improvised in a flurry of activity (sometimes while talking with people in a convivial studio), which Martin would then drive to London and sell through Liberty or Heals. He had lived in a houseboat at Hampton Court, as well as in a bursting basement flat in Stoke Newington, and everything about him exuded an attractive freedom of spirit — he was “all syncopation and jazz”, as Susan remembers, and dancing through the night.
Things had gone fine at Nuneaton for a couple of years, partly because they managed to get a couple of friends appointed to work alongside them, but Harris found the teaching onerous and relations with the principal deteriorated once he and Susan became engaged. So they threw in their jobs, packed all Martin’s equipment — “basically old rubbish” as he assured me — into his army truck and hit the road for Sheerness, where he would park in Jewson’s yard and, early the next morning, hire three people from the Labour Exchange — including, as it turned out, a future friend who had studied with David Hockney at the Royal College of Art — to help him carry his stuff into new quarters above the National Westminster Bank. It was June 1963, and the man who would soon be hailed as “Sheppey’s own artist” had landed.
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Why Sheppey? Susan herself would quickly learn to appreciate the island’s separation from the mainland. On the island, as she says, it was possible to live a good life without being rich, or having to claw your way to the very top of the tree, or feeling any the less because you didn’t match up to conventional middle-class expectations. In her account, the island was a place of modest but also varied possibilities: you could “get by” on Sheppey, and gain the freedom to “do things” as you wished.
In driving to Sheerness Harris was, to be sure, placing himself outside mainland understanding of success and failure. He was coming home in a more literal sense too. His father, Dennis A. Harris, had become the manager of the National Westminster Bank on Sheerness High Street, and Martin had spent holidays there while attending boarding school at St Lawrence College near Ramsgate and also during his time as an art student in London. In the summers he had worked as a waiter at Warner’s Holiday Camp, opened in 1955 on a former caravan site next to a disconcertingly smelly council dump at Minster. The place had a rectangular boating lake, tennis courts and a “den” for teenagers. “New Faces — New Friends”, promised Warner’s brochure for 1960 as it touted Sheppey as “the Londoner’s playground”. The impression of popular glamour was enhanced when the owner, Jack Warner, dropped in for lunch in what the Sheerness Times Guardian reckoned must have been the first time anyone arrived on the island in a private helicopter. Harris remembers being paid £4 a week plus perks, and staying with other seasonal workers in little chalets at the back. It was, he recalls, the “first time I had even met girls and what girls do, I didn’t know one end of…. And I learned that there, so this doubled my education”. As time went on he would help his friends from art school get summer jobs at Warner’s, so there would be quite a group of them. “I had a wind-up gramophone and we had a keen interest in early American jazz, King Oliver and people like that”. He would go up to London to buy imported American records from Dobell’s Jazz Record Shop at 77 Charing Cross Road — Bunk Johnson, George Lewis, Sister Lottie Peavey. Youthful summer scenes, then, of “dancing and jiving around”.
All this, Susan confirms, was in accordance with the line of “theatrical Bohemianism” in Martin’s mother’s family tradition. Harris loved the example of his uncle, Henry Pettit, who had owned a considerable tract of Canvey Island, upriver and across the estuary on the Essex shore, when it was “nothing but a bog”. Pettit had lived in an old bus, but his operational HQ was a gimcrack palace named “Bohemia Hall”, in which he ran Canvey’s first cinema, showing silent films to piano accompaniment. Martin’s maternal grandfather, John Harwood, who had lived with the family in Kent during the Second World War, had produced musicals in London and on New York’s version of Broadway in the Twenties. He was a close friend of P.G. Wodehouse, who remained one of Martin’s favourite writers. He had also, as Susan points out sharply, been all too successful in frustrating his own daughter’s desire for a life on the stage.
As part of his job, Harris’s father had disposal of the three residential floors above the bank on Sheerness High Street. So the young artist had the top floor cheap and also took over responsibility for the bank’s unreliable alarm system, rigged up out of a whole series of twelve-volt car batteries and far beyond the ken of the elderly police constable who used to turn up for tea on the many occasions when the thing decided to go off. His father was well-known and generally also well-liked on the island, and Martin, who had returned to Sheppey aged twenty-five, had quickly established himself as something of a “happening” on legs. He became known for his distinctive vehicles: the Second World War army truck which he had converted into a travelling home and studio; a butcher’s bike he named “Mr Bones” and had cycled around London and Paris as well as Sheerness; an old Ford Customline, an American monster car from the mid-Fifties, which he had further “customised” with the help of a local welder, adding a kitchen of sorts and, so he claimed, accommodation for some six or so people — a shack-like English anticipation, perhaps, of the “paleo-futurist” vehicles imagined in the illustrator Bruce McCall’s fine book of visions The Last Dream-O-Rama: The Cars Detroit Forgot to Build 1950–1960.3 There would also be a string of E-Type Jaguars, including a sleek silver-grey example, remembered more vividly than some of its successors because Harris proceeded to paint it mustard yellow.
The activities of the island’s recently returned artist were soon being followed by the local paper. In February 1964, when he opened an exhibition of fifty works in his studio above the bank, the Sheerness Times Guardian described him as a twenty-six-year-old art teacher who was now “more of an artist than a teacher”.4 He had, so the impressed reporter noted, travelled widely in his customised army lorry — visiting many places in Britain, but also Paris, Venice, Pisa, and various “beauty spots” in Switzerland too. He was said to have “wide experience in every field of art — posters, book covers, theatre sets, costumes and programmes, and also interior decoration”. His exhibition in the Bank House included works in various media — watercolours, drawings and collages and a single sculpture entitled The Crucifixion. The latter was an arresting piece: the Sheerness Times Guardian’s photographer revealed it to be a moulded and partly abstract construction in which imaginative viewers might detect the figure of Christ hanging between two common thieves, while a grieving woman reached up from beneath each twisted and drooping figure. As for the paintings, “one of the most interesting and unusual” examples showed “a Yorkshire terrier, which he painted on a piece of newspaper while cleaning his paint brushes”.
Martin Aynscomb-Harris
Harris had quickly developed a local reputation and his paintings and, more recently, giclée prints found their way into many Sheppey homes. I’ve seen Thames barges, trawlers and rural cottag
es, vintage cars and Concorde taking flight, Westminster Abbey and London Bridge as well as Sheppey views and panoramas of coastal cities and estuarial towns around the country. A large and, as some drinkers speculate, perhaps not entirely finished example showing the town clock tower on Edward Banks’ Crescent has a prominent place on the wall of the Belle and Lion, a pub created by Wetherspoon, which spent the unprecedented sum of £1.2 million converting the old Brittain and Hobbs TV and Electricals shop into a large, popular, Brexit-promoting establishment named after the first pub to open in Sheerness.
For a time, as Susan Harris remembers, Martin (who claimed, when I talked to him shortly after the 2016 referendum, to have voted Remain in order not to offend his wife and daughters) also achieved some wider profile as “a very flamboyant artist” exhibiting in London, making works for corporate foyers and restaurants and, in the early stages, becoming modestly successful. Harris had agents in his prime, some better than others. His wife Susan also notes, in the light of their later separation, that male artists who manage to co-operate with their wives tend to do better than those who don’t. Determined to help her husband turn his art into a living, she would load a portfolio of his work into her aged Citroen 2CV (quite incapable, as she recalls, of functioning in reverse), and set off in search of buyers. When she arrived somewhere — Leamington Spa, Leicester, Sheffield, south Wales — she would park and seek out galleries in the area, guided by the recommendations of a traffic warden if one happened to be at hand. She found it advantageous to call on twenty or more galleries in a day — and would pack several days into a trip. She had some success in the north of England but remembers East Anglia and Buckinghamshire as cold and unrewarding.
In the last years of his life, Martin was still speaking out in defence of his art. After one of my visits, he came to the front door and continued explaining himself from the top of the steps. I had committed the error of asking him, perhaps a little insensitively, what he made of the extraordinary expansion of London’s Tate Gallery under Nicholas Serota and, more particularly, of the “contemporary” currents now dominating the London art world. Bristling, he declared himself a proud representative of “the 98% of artists who make pictures for people to have in their homes”. He had sold thousands in his time, so he insisted as the cars swept by, and he’d done so in defiance of the curators and galleries, the fashion-following collectors and, of course, the complicit, bum-licking art journalists and critics (“what’s your name?”) who made their living by pandering to that world. He was happy to make an exception for Richard Hamilton, who had later painted one of the Harris’s daughters, but he drew the line at the clutch of YBAs who eventually emerged from Michael Craig Martin’s incubator at Goldsmith’s College. Take Tracey Emin, he says. Over the years, Harris had accommodated and tried to help many school-failed youths like Margate’s famous daughter, and he knew how to recognise the type. She is, he said in a tone of calm, unblaming, let’s-face-it island realism, “a guttersnipe”. Perhaps, as I failed then to suggest, a prolonged period like that is necessary to the proper formation of what Emin’s former partner in Medway chaos, Billy Childish, would recognise as a true “backwater visionary”.5
Sold under the signature of “Aynscomb”, Harris’s own work never formed the slightest obstacle to the fast-rising stream of megabucks art. Susan remembers one of Martin’s agents encouraging him to realise that he had to attend to the market if he wanted his work to sell. Martin, however, went his own way — unwilling or perhaps psychologically unable to sustain professional relationships of the kind necessary to the pursuit of a successful artistic career. As Johnson himself knew well, a household has to live and though the Isle of Sheppey had no universities or art colleges to provide part-time teaching, it was by no means without opportunities for the cognitively diverse artist who is prepared to exchange his brushes for larger ones of the house-painting variety. Martin became a man of many projects, joining the informal economy in which he would often employ others to work with him, or enter partnerships with people who would not necessarily treat him well or even honestly. Some of his schemes involved the conversion and customisation of vehicles: Susan sometimes felt he had unfinished cars and caravans all over the island. He also went into business designing and making market stalls of fibreglass: she remembers going to the opening of a market in the Midlands, and meeting Ken Dodd, who had been hired for the opening performance, and who turned out to be “a very nice man”. For a while he had a picture-framing business, run from a three-decker barge moored at Queenborough, a riotous setting as former habitués recall, on which Martin made the metal frames used by some of the more upmarket London galleries. Every week he would drive one or other of his cars to London, where he would sell his artwork and carry out other chores for local people, some of whom, as Susan repeated, were plainly taking advantage of his good will.
So it was to be with houses. When they got married in 1966, the Harrises had moved into Holm Place Farm, along Halfway Road, where they took over a derelict labourer’s cottage on favourable terms from the owner. While living there, they bought 24 Marine Parade for £3,800, a comparatively modest price that Susan nevertheless remembered as “crippling”. The idea was for Martin to get the house ready so that Susan and he could move in to raise their coming children there. Susan, however, was content at Holm Place, once Martin had finally got round to making the cottage habitable, so he rented the new house to some tenants, who turned out “troublesome” to say the least. Susan remembers them as a “rough lot”, who left the front door wide open day and night, threw condoms and other rubbish into the front garden, and were highly intimidating all round. Martin admitted that he had handed the house over to “a bunch of yobbos” who used the banister rails as firewood and, indeed, completely wrecked the place. He couldn’t bring himself to chuck them out completely, but he did eventually ease them into the upper floors of the house, so that he and Susan could have the basement and ground floor. Just as he employed lots of people on his projects, and infuriated his wife by loaning “friends” money out of his own overdraft, he would also accommodate many in his property over the years — an irregular kind of landlord, who put his children through private school but was reluctant to do anything when his tenants ripped him off, bullied him, or otherwise exploited his goodwill. Susan, who was trying to raise their two daughters in a property that Martin was also running as a chaotic boarding house, remembers that there was almost no behaviour that he would not try to excuse by saying that the tenant in question “hadn’t had our advantages”.
Meanwhile, No. 24 remained a permanent building site. Susan remembers making a “rockery” in the garden by reconceptualising a mountain of uncleared building debris, but that was just the beginning. “I will never stop”, Martin told me in 2015, as he reviewed more than half a century’s worth of adjustments to the house that had become his largest work: “It’s my version of the Forth Bridge”. And, as Uwe Johnson was to find out, No. 24 was not his only property on the street. Martin denied that he had been the rival bidder for No. 26, who once, as Johnson told Max Frisch, “planned to turn a building like this one into a chest of drawers with mini-apartments”.6 Over the years, however, he would buy the houses on either side of his home — Nos. 23 and 25, and also another next to the much-windowed “Glass House”, originally the Victoria pub, facing the sea from two sides at a junction a little further to the east along Marine Parade. The lack of separation between family and tenants, friends and scroungers would eventually encourage Susan to acquire her own residence in Queenborough and move out when her situation changed in 1991, but for Martin the refurbishment was like the event described by Pete Brown and Piblokto! in one of the best LP titles of 1970, “Things May Come And Things May Go, But The Art School Dance Goes On Forever”.
By the time of my last visit, No. 24 did indeed seem a battered, multiple-occupied mess, which Harris, who by then had serious lung problems, was setting out to convert once again: this time into a “dust-free
zone”. Johnson, however, had known it at a time when Harris’s disorderly visions of improvement and a more creative way of life still had time on their side. He kept a copy of the Sheerness Times Guardian from 21 February 1975, in which the Harris’s property was praised as the Bohemian lair of the island’s most creative householder. “Artists try fresh approach to urban living”, was the heading under which Sheppey’s feature writer, Bel Norris, told the story of the refurbishment. She kept quiet about the crazy belvedere, a fibreglass viewing platform for watching the sunset over an evening drink, that Martin had perhaps not yet mounted on the plinth he made of a chimney stack that “collapsed” during one of his refurbishments. She did, however, describe an interior that was “alive with colour” where “imagination has been given full rein to achieve individual, unconventional, and entirely practical modern living for this couple and their two daughters”. After buying the house, the Harrises had secured improvement grants from the council and, perhaps more difficult, persuaded its sceptical officers that they really could do the work themselves. They had started by ripping out the basement bay window, strengthening the gap with a rolled steel joist and then digging out a drive to create the garage workshop in which Martin would continue to repair and customise his vehicles — including the thing that he called his “Jaguar Caravan”. His other innovations included a raised stage made of railway sleepers so that his young daughters might see over the sea wall, a sunken bath, two kitchens, a huge split-level lounge and a first floor “studio” where he produced “pictures which find a ready market in London”. Forty years later, Bel Austin, as she has since become, can still add to the list of remembered features — including, somewhere high up in the house, an upright piano that Harris had managed to sink into a pit so that one had to sit on the edge of the floor to play it. Overall, so she wrote at the time, “the ideas are as fresh as tomorrow”. We can be sure that Uwe Johnson read her piece — not least because he, or someone in his household, has marked the name of “Mr. Jim Religious”, a retired carpenter said to have assisted Harris in some of the more challenging joinery.
The Sea View Has Me Again Page 35