The Sea View Has Me Again

by Patrick Wright

  With Trier’s permission, Johnson had named his acquisition Blackboard. Like its predecessors, it was an abstract work, painted in 1961 by this famously “ambidextrous” artist whose interest in speed and acceleration encouraged him to paint simultaneously with both hands, moving outwards from a central axis to produce shapes that gestured towards a unifying symmetry while also remaining divided and in some respects irreconcilable from one side to the other. As Johnson had explained to Trier in a letter written on the occasion of his sixty-fourth birthday earlier that year, “the maelstrom there does in fact throw off, like some kind of kinetics problem, spirals of blue and gray symbols that arrange themselves on either side, in lines and groups of types: only in this case one was free to attempt a solution or not”. In this, Blackboard was analogous to Johnson’s incomplete Anniversaries project: “That fit my own situation, since what I was busy doing in front of your picture was attempting to get to the bottom of the similarly encoded, equally integrated sign-system of an invented biography”. In Johnson’s case, however, a “solution” — at least to the problem of completing Anniversaries — really did have to be attempted.

  So it was that, one morning not long after receiving Trier’s request, Johnson set off along Alexandra Road with the painting that had become so closely associated with his own compositional struggles tied up in black plastic and catching the “stiff northeaster” that made a sail of the object under his arm. Trier had anticipated that fulfilling his request in Sheerness “won’t be easy”, but that was to underestimate the man who ran a photography shop at the southern end of the High Street: an establishment, so Johnson informed Trier with a dry smile, that its proprietor — “let’s call him Barrie” — “calls a ‘studio’ followed by his surely accidental house number. Quite the world-traveller!”

  Having carried his painting into “Studio 137”, the writer, who was by this time well-versed in the townspeople’s use of small talk, ventures an “appropriate” opening remark about the wind: strong enough, after all, to “blow the high water into a flood”. Barrie agrees: “Quite a bit of weather we are having!” After this exchange of cod English pleasantries, Johnson busies himself untying Trier’s painting, only catching sight of Barrie’s expression after he “had his surprised look behind him”, having replaced it with “a hard-mouthed face” of the islanders’ it’s-always-best-to-look-life-straight-in-the-eye variety.

  “What might that be?” Barrie can’t help exclaiming, as he scrutinises Trier’s “maelstrom”. Perhaps he made the mistake of looking for resemblances in the turbulence, as if the abstract shapes might resolve, with a bit of blinking, into waves or a tree in a forgotten landscape, or the division of Germany, or the wide-spread wings of Walter Benjamin’s ever more dishevelled angel of history blown all into nothing by a Sheppey storm. Soon, however, it became clear that Barrie had at least “accepted the thing as a painting” since he “refrained from further enquiries” once Johnson had fended off his first disconcerted question by explaining that the work was “untitled”. The sight of Barrie’s buttoned lip causes a “small shift in the attitude of the school-leavers who spend their days at Barrie’s under the pretext that they were learning the art of photography”. Having pulled themselves together, Barrie and his team get down to work.

  Hann Trier, Blackboard (1961). Photo: Studio 137, Sheerness, 1979.

  The next quarter of an hour is spent clearing the cluttered table so that the picture can at least be laid out flat. During this preparatory stage, Johnson stands back at a distance of four or five feet, but he can’t help moving closer as Barrie prepares to take the photograph. This entails clambering up onto “a swaying swivel chair, complaining all the way (it is hardly a long climb, rather quite a short one)”, in order to align the painting with a large camera mounted high up on “a kind of gallows”. One slip, so Johnson notes, “and he would fall with both knees through the canvas”. Having survived this perilous ascent, Barrie reaches up as high as he can and, “with fingers stretched to their utmost length”, just manages to reach the button of the camera’s remote control. After numerous attempts, he realises that the gadget is “not working”. Descending from his perch, “he stares at the broken black thing so suspiciously and comprehensively that I was tempted to ask him if he was familiar with its German nickname: ear drill”. Barrie, who may well have been as mystified as the rest of us by this explanation, then “places the busted device on the edge of a counter (can’t throw anything away!), from which one of the next customers will knock it onto the floor. Then he starts tearing open the packaging of various accessories set out for sale, since he suspects there might be a remote control inside”. On the third try, he finds one, and the crew regroup for a second attempt:

  Let another half hour go by and you would find this view before my eyes: the gangly figure of Barrie’s workmate swaying like a reed in the wind on the squeaking, increasingly shaky chair that keeps trying to swivel around; to his left, another helper is trying to hold a flash at a 45 degree angle to the painting, while Barrie, on the other side, flash bulb in his hand as well, keeps correcting him. You have to have a feel for it! (Meanwhile, dangling in the camera’s field of view are the cords that are meant to synchronize the flash with the shutter. Or would have been meant to if this system had ever worked for Barrie.) Everyone is talking over each other, counting, giving orders, the springs of the chair are groaning, all under the watchful eye of an experienced shop cat who learned from her Grandma long ago that human beings are all a little cracked.

  After an hour or so, Barrie and his various apprentices have produced two negatives and, this being an ordinary day in the life of Sheerness’s photographer, Barrie has moved on to apply his “artistic ambitions” to “new clientele”. “An implausibly young couple have come in with a baby as tiny as a two-pound loaf of bread, probably still living in its mother’s belly as of the previous evening. They now requested, in very quiet voices, a picture of their baby. No, just the baby. Their quiet, absolutely inflexible stubbornness suggested a fear that their request might be refused, and so I straightaway invented a will — ‘If there is no documentary evidence of an heir by January 1979, the inheritance will pass to …’ — or perhaps a letter to Australia, with photograph enclosed, saying: ‘You can see from Baby that we have to follow our heart…’ Baby, however, does not want to lie alone in the cold under the white but unfamiliar silk umbrella that Barrie has set up for portrait photographs; it resists Barrie’s attempts to console it; and so now Barrie is struggling with the challenging assignment of photographing Baby in the young mother’s lap in such a way that it looks like Baby is sitting on a park bench”.

  Barrie, Johnson continues, “doesn’t have it easy”. He proves as much by asking to be paid in advance, in cash. When Johnson questions this departure from normal practice, Barrie starts selecting examples from his box of photographs that have neither been collected nor paid for: “He shows me scenes from the intimate life of people I don’t know, who do like to take photographs but then leave Barrie stuck with the pictures on his hands; a particular favourite of his is a horse, fairy-tale white, on a textbook green meadow: Whoever took that one, Barrie cries, may have a deep connection to this horse! but as for me, this white horse with the crooked croup, I don’t give a damn! I don’t care tuppence! No offence intended! he appends to our goodbyes”.

  An adequate black-and-white photograph did eventually emerge from Studio 137 to take its place alongside Johnson’s account of its creation in the catalogue to Trier’s retrospective at the Kölnischer Kunstverein. It took a while, to be sure. Asked to “give us four days”, Johnson registers Barrie’s “roguish slippery smile” and goes back after ten, only to find the “studio” closed with no visible explanation — “it is known, though, that Barrie occasionally takes aerial photographs, or earns money with news photos for the Sheerness Times Guardian”. When Johnson returns again after two weeks, Barrie can only regret that the copying machine has broken, and that the only ma
n able to fix it is down with a cold. Eventually, though, the job is done. Johnson picks up the print and two negatives from a man at the counter and, as he leaves, hears Barrie shouts “good luck” from the back of the building, using “a tone intended to encourage a young colleague or guild-brother”. Only then does it dawn on Johnson that Barrie believes that he, Johnson, must have painted the picture himself. It was a forgivable error:

  Sheerness is a small town, you see, and two buildings down from my address lives a bearded man who produces landscapes and abstractions for the summer tourists. With neighbours like that … with Barrie’s memory, in which you can count on a mass of mistakes … it would be ridiculous if he didn’t think it”.

  *

  So what is the actual basis for this story of everyday life in Sheerness? “Studio 137” was indeed based at 137 High Street, opposite a much rebuilt pub named the Old House at Home. The “gangly workmate” who perches perilously on Barrie’s swivelling chair for the second attempt to capture Blackboard was almost certainly Tim Oxley. Now living at Harty, at the eastern end of the island, he is still an enthusiastic photographer although just as familiar on the island as the council’s dog warden. He had started learning about photography while at the Technical School for Boys on the Broadway where the maths teacher, Colin Penny, had set up a small darkroom. After the technical school closed in 1970, he continued his education in the superior facilities at the new comprehensive school at Minster. He worked at Studio 137 from the mid-Seventies until 1985, and remains grateful to “Barrie”, who trained him to run the studio and also showed him how to do industrial and commercial photography. Oxley has no memory of photographing Blackboard but he does remember Johnson as one of the firm’s less regular customers — “quite tall, balding, with an accent”, as he puts it. Beyond that, “we didn’t know anything about him”.

  As for “Barrie”, who presided over Sheerness’s only photographic establishment, he was actually George Poule, who opened Studio 137 in January 1973. Sitting below a colourful and definitely not abstract painting of a lighthouse in his home in Queenborough Road, Poule explains that he is French, although now perhaps only half so, having lived on the island for more than forty years. He was born within sight of the Pyrenees in 1942, and grew up in Pau — a town that he remembers for its famous view of the mountains rather than for the flight demonstrations once given here by the Wright Brothers or for the grand English villas still lauded in the tourism guides. He learned photography at the Polytechnic of Central London, but left after six months, when he realised he already knew enough to start making his way. Early in his career he worked with “Edmond’s Studio”, a photographic concession on the top floor of Harrods, and also as a spotlighter at the London Palladium, where he lit and sometimes also photographed popular stars such as Jimmy Tarbuck and Engelbert Humperdinck. He was indeed a “world traveller” of sorts, having come into his own as a ship’s photographer, sometimes doubling as an x-ray technician, on P&O cruise ships. He worked on voyages to New York and Australia (“in those days they paid them £50 to go”), and on luxurious liners gliding through the Canary Islands, the Caribbean, or the Panama Canal. If his press cuttings are to be believed, Poule cut quite a sharp profile on those “dream boats”. Suave, chivalrous and seductively French, he confesses to having had a darkroom full of portraits of bikini-clad girls and a charming way of asking whether a selected young lady might like to step out for a glass or two of Dom Pérignon at the next exotic destination.

  Janet and George Poule at Studio 137, with an Asahi Pentax 6 x 7 roll film camera.

  Poule remembers loving the work but the cruises tended to happen in the autumn and winter, which left the summers open. One day in the late Sixties, Warners advertised a seasonal photographic concession at their large holiday camp to the east of Sheerness at Minster-on-Sea. Poule took it on, acquiring an empty studio in a camp that was then still attracting over one thousand visitors a week. His talents now extended to both ends of the social hierarchy. In the winter, he would smile his way through five-star cruises, with elaborate menus, silver service and all the trimmings, but the summer months now found him in a “cockney” paradise full of banter and egg and chips, selling portraits at four shillings and sixpence each. He remembers the dance hall and the beer (“ha! ha!”) and the wardens who used to say that you’d know you were drunk when you could no longer distinguish the glitter ball’s lights as they shimmied across the dance floor. Setting himself the target of selling at least one photograph to every visitor, he filled his studio at the camp with colour technology, using Agfa-Gevaert paper that had to be imported from New York — an expensive decision, but one that added definite glamour to his Sheppey offering, and also brought him printing jobs from less well-equipped photographers working the camps and chalet parks at Leysdown-on-Sea.

  Poule enjoyed five good years at Warner’s, but everything seemed to slump in the early Seventies: the cruise jobs weren’t getting any easier to find and numbers at Warner’s were dwindling (the Minster camp would eventually go out of business at short notice in 19803). Poule had thought of moving to London but the scene there was dominated by influential agencies, and, as he asks, “How could I have told David Bailey that he was now my competitor?” Friends, meanwhile, pointed out that there was “no proper photographic studio on the Isle of Sheppey”, and he decided, like a true islander, that “To think small and be successful” must be better than “trying to be big and failing”. By May 1973, when he married his wife Janet, whom he had met and wooed on a Fred Olsen cruise from Millwall docks, Poule had bought out a tobacconist selling “Woodbines, lollipops and sherbet fountains” and reopened the premises as “Studio 137”.

  Sheerness’s photographer explains that he “did his homework”, and knew from the start that “it was not enough to do pictures of babies”. He wanted to bring real quality to Sheppey, so he bought everything necessary to do full colour and canvas printing too. His babies would look special, as would their mums and dads and, for that matter, the dogs and cats that also featured in his studio’s portraiture. His eye, though, was also on larger possibilities connected to the industrial enterprises on the island. The stevedores used to come in from Sheerness port: men whose industrial muscle was already shrinking (although Poule had learned to respect it, having once nearly delayed the departure of a cruise ship by inadvertently breaking the rules by himself carrying a small photographic drying machine up the gangplank). He did work for Abbott Pharmaceuticals and Sheerness Steel, which commissioned him to take photographs demonstrating that they really had cleaned their furnaces as the regulations demanded. When I showed him three aerial photographs from Johnson’s own collection — one of Marine Parade and two of the town and port, with the Isle of Grain beyond — he remembered taking them on the order of Messrs Dickson and Howard of the Medway Port Authority, using a Hasselblad SuperWide C camera and a helicopter from Rochester, which had conveniently picked him up on open land just beyond his back garden.

  Poule counted artists among his friends and customers too. He is, for example, full of admiration for the works of Margaret Loxton, who lived on the island when her husband, Jerry, was Head of Education at the prison at Eastchurch. The Loxtons used to visit Studio 137, but Jerry, who once employed Poule to teach French to his prisoners, left the island to run a garlic farm in the Dordogne. Poule had watched as Margaret found her own direction while raising the children — an Open University degree, part-time work teaching art and English in borstals and prisons, and writing grainy but still morally improving stories for teenage readers in which young male school-leavers find their aspirations frustrated and their sense of manhood challenged as they step out into a cold world of joblessness and early marriage in towns that may also be hemmed in by a sea that, having whispered of mobility and far-flung opportunities to earlier generations, has since become a barrier reflecting only closure, dereliction and despair. The Job (1977) tells of a young man named Lennie who is unable to find work even though
he reluctantly stayed on at school for his CSE exams: exposed to temptation by his love of fast cars, he becomes driver to a company of ruthless and intimidating gangsters, and only starts to lift himself out of disaster when his loyal girlfriend, Julie, who has failed to get him to emigrate to Australia, persuades him at least to tell the truth to the police.4 Inside and Out (1979) is about a young man who slides into thievery in the hope of escaping the dismal life of his father, but only graduates from borstal to detention centre, and then to the regular prison, where he develops a more sensible ambition thanks, once again, to the loyalty of his girlfriend, Anne.5 The Dark Shadow (1981) is about an unexpectedly well-off tramp — harried by local kids as “Old Billy Beer-Bottle” and eventually found “mugged” or murdered on a Sheerness-like High Street — who embodies the temptations that eighteen-year-old Jimmy must resist as he finds a path through joblessness, terrible housing, drink and emigration to Australia, before finding employment as a hospital gardener and accepting his responsibilities to his good young wife and child.6

  Loxton took up painting too. Unlike Hann Trier, she produced recognisable pastoral views of Sheppey in which sheep and well-rounded farmers go about their traditional business while the Elmley marshes join the Swale in stretching out scenically behind them, and all seems to be as conventional expectation says it should be in the world. After herself leaving the island for France, she applied her Sheppey-trained eye to the wine regions and her paintings, sold as “English to the core yet inspired by France”, have travelled far. Her cheering renditions of local life in Provence have illustrated the words of Peter Mayle and her bicycle-assisted Travels in Burgundy have been introduced by Alan Coren. Like her contented peasants, her skating and skiing nuns have adorned posters, pillow-cases and shower curtains around the world.