An image from a historian

The following passage, which I read many years ago, has stuck in my memory; or rather, that image of the estuary has. I always thought it was from Jacquetta Hawkes’s A Land but couldn’t find it there, and a reference in Oliver Rackham’s Woodlands made me think I'd perhaps read it in W.G. Hoskins’s The making of the English landscape. I had, and here it is:

W 0 R D S W O R T H in his Guide through the District of the Lakes - one of the best guide-books ever written, for poets make
the best topographers - opens his description of the scenery
of the Lakes with a View of' the Country as formed by
Nature. He then passes, in his second section, to the Aspect
of the Country, as affected by its Inhabitants, and this he
begins by asking the reader to envisage what the landscape,
finished by the great impersonal forces of Nature and awaiting its first human inhabitants, looked like in its primeval
freshness.

He will form to himself an image of the tides visiting and re-visiting the friths, the main sea dashing against the bolder shore,
the rivers pursuing their course to be lost in the mighty mass of
waters. He may see or hear in fancy the winds sweeping over the
lakes, or piping with a loud voice among the mountain peaks and,
lastly, may think of the primaeval woods shedding and renewing
their leaves with no human eye to notice, or human heart to regret
or welcome the change.

How often one has tried to form these images in various
parts of England, seated beside a wide, flooding estuary as
the light thickens on a winter evening, dissolving all the
irrelevant human details of the scene, leaving nothing but
the shining water, the sky, and the darkening hills, and
the immemorial sound of curlews whistling over the mud
and fading river-beaches. This, we feel, is exactly as the
first men saw it when they reached the shingled margin of
the river a hundred generations ago. Nothing has changed.
We are seeing the natural world through the eyes of men who died three or four thousand years ago, and for a moment or two we succeed in entering into the minds of the
dead. Or on some desolate English moorland it is even easier
to feel this identity with the dead of the Bronze Age who lie
near by under a piled-up cairn or under the heathery blanket of a burial-mound. It is easy, too, to feel this kinship
while watching the summer morning waves falling with a
meditative indifference on a beach still untrodden by the
human race. (17-18)

W.G. Hoskins, The making of the English landscape, London, Hodder & Stoughton, second edition 1977

Images like that seem to have been very powerful in my peculiar sensibility. This one could only relate to Britain, I think. There must be a British artist who’s done justice to such a scene, but who? It might be John Piper or Eric Ravilious or Gwen Raverat but I don’t know any work by them that meets the specifications. Or what about a photographer? Fay Godwin?

Art schools, as was

The climate I was trying to create with my scruffy disaffected 4th and 5th year mixed-ability Humanities groups in 1975-7 (that’s years 10 and 11 for those of you under 85, and humanities was English plus history/ geography/ sociology) was that of an art school of the time.

Art school (old style) was what many of them needed -- not to learn art (lots of art students never did that) but to be in an institution that was geared to their age group, that didn’t force a curriculum on them (no timetable, no absolutely obligatory assignments) and in which interests could emerge and be pursued. Often the art students’ interests were in music: a huge proportion of British pop and rock bands came out of art school. I didn’t particularly want my students to become musicians, but I did want them at 14-15 to choose to learn or, failing that, to live in a civilised environment free of teachers’ shouting and nagging and appeals to duty (to do homework, to pass exams); to talk a lot and have interesting stuff around.

I'm not saying I was right in wanting all that, just that the art schools stood for teachers like me with kids like mine as a symbol of a regime that ran on quite different lines and actually had a chance of getting education to happen -- which the standard curriculum and exams had no hope of achieving with many.

Jarvis Cocker recently had a good radio series about the art schools and pop music. Much of it was about the art schools regardless of music and lots of well-informed commentators featured. Angela McRobbie, a terrific sociologist of, amongst other things, youth culture, described how British art schools came into existence in the mid-19th century largely as a result of the tireless efforts of one campaigner, whose name I forget. The result was a system of art schools (strictly, colleges of art, for students older than the statutory school leaving age) more widespread than in any other European country: every respectable town had its own. You could get in without any academic qualifications right up until, I think, the late 1970s or even 80s -- and they were autonomous institutions and not, as later, departments of polytechnics and then universities with all the deadening academic accountabilities to which undergraduate teaching is subject.

The one constraint on the art schools from the beginning was that they shouldn’t presume to trespass on the Fine Art territory of the posh Schools of Art like St Martin’s, the Slade and the Central School of Art; hence they emphasised design and the craft skills -- printing, pottery, illustration etc. Under that cover plenty of real art went on.

Do you know Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden? Terrific artists.


(Those are all Ravilious : see especially this collection)

Well, Eastbourne College of Art, both of them. Eastbourne! Off the top of my head I can’t reel off many other names -- there are plenty -- but here’s one more, David Hockney: Bradford Art College -- sooty, smoky Bradford, headscarves and flat caps -- and Hockney stalking the Swan Arcade in gold lamee jacket.

Jonathan Gould (Can't buy me love: the Beatles, Britain and America -- see previous entry) has a nice bit about provincial art schools in John Lennon’s time: