Some Pictures of Submarines

Last week I gave a talk at the National Maritime Museum about 'Ravilious: Submarine', which was illustrated with various pictures borrowed from the Imperial War Museum's online collection. They have the most astonishing array of images, and I'm very grateful that they allow non-commercial use. Anyway, here are some of the photos...

Not fun: a trainee submariner learns how to use Davis Submarine Escape Apparatus at HMS Dolphin, Gosport

New recruits arrive at HMS Dolphin, Gosport

L-class submarines, HMS Dolphin

Control Room, WWII submarine

Submariners worked, ate and slept wherever they could - note hanging teacups

The Ward Room - the officer in the middle is Peter Young, in peacetime Penguin's production manager

Motor room, with engine room beyond

The Commander of HMS Snapper hard at work

Occasionally someone else had a go, in this case the Bishop of Liverpool

Successes were recorded on the Jolly Roger carried by every sub -
That's what happens when you label submariners 'pirates' as Admiral
Arthur Wilson did early in the century...

No. 29 Bus by Eric Ravilious: as featured in Time Out

'No. 29 Bus' by Eric Ravilious (1934)

            Asked in later years for a biographical sketch, Ravilious noted his ‘tendency to paint in sequences (groups of broken down tractors and old cars and buses in fields, the discarded machinery of Essex)’. Here, an antique double-decker faces the sunlit, open countryside, as if about to drive away, yet it is only the shell or skeleton of a bus, standing not on wheels but on four barrels. With its tapering, top-heavy wooden body it could be an eccentric river boat, awaiting a rising tide. The number ‘29’ has been painted on a folded piece of canvas or cardboard and wedged behind the staircase, perhaps as an aid to identification for potential buyers.

This is probably a view looking away from the ‘repair yard for steam engines’ that Tirzah later recalled, where Ravilious also discovered the subjects for ‘Talbot-Darracq’ and ‘Tractor’. Engineer and blacksmith John Thomas Chapman began repairing steam engines and other agricultural machinery in 1870 at a yard on Bell Lane, [in Great Bardfield, Essex] and the business was still going in the 1930s; the bungalows of Durham Close now occupy the site.

Tirzah noted that some of the engines were in working order, ‘Though the bindweed was climbing over them and there was a hen’s nest in one. The door of the shed where they repaired wheels was splashed with a variety of paints and inside were some lovely red wheels.

‘Eric was very excited with the yard,’ she remarked, ‘And set to work drawing the engines and the car, afterwards tinting in watercolour his very careful drawings.’

But why is this bus here, in a country junkyard? It looks like a city vehicle, a double-decker with the distinctive curved stairway of the B-type London buses built by the London General Omnibus Company in Walthamstow before and during World War I. Hundreds of these vehicles were used as ambulances and troop transports on the Western Front, their bodywork painted khaki and windows replaced by wooden panels. After the war some returned to service in the capital, but were quickly replaced by newer models and dispatched to the provinces, until the passage of time caught up with them even in rural districts. Eventually it became quite common to see a B-type bus dismantled in this way, its cab and chassis perhaps put to use in haulage while the body waits to be transformed into a henhouse, shed or, possibly, somebody’s home.

            Following the move to Castle Hedingham Ravilious soon found a new junkyard, where he made the wood engraving of ‘The Hansom Cab and the Pigeons’(1935): ‘An area wholly mud given up to every sort of junk, beds and bicycles and cartwheels with ducks and hens and black-faced enormous sheep to liven the scene…’

‘These brutes,’ he added, ‘Run about the place jumping pans and corrugated iron with a beautiful agility and a great deal of clatter.’

This is an extract from 'Ravilious in Pictures: A Country Life', available to order now from The Mainstone Press. You can see B-type buses in slightly better condition at the Imperial War Museum - look out for Old Bill - and at the London Transport Museum.

Jon Snow: Paul Nash, Jeremy Deller and The Art of War

Paul Nash, We Are Making a New World, 1918 (IWM)

The final instalment of Channel 4's survey of British art gave us Jon Snow's personal survey of the war artist's role from 1914 until the present. Given the seasoned news reporter's experience of war's grim reality, it is perhaps not surprising that the flavour of the hour-long film was anti-war.

Jon Snow

We began with Paul Nash and Richard Nevinson, whose violent, often cynical portrayals of trench warfare remain the visual complement to the poetry of Owen and Sassoon. One or two odd lapses aside - Nash may have become a Surrealist in later life, but could not have been one in 1917 as the movement did not exist - Snow captured perfectly the cultural shift that occurred during the course of the war, as early militarism gave way to horror at the soldiers' suffering. A visit to see Stanley Spencer's work at Sandham Memorial Chapel in Hampshire was especially moving, and the comparison between the controversial Nevinson and Gulf War artist John Keane proved effective.

The treatment of the artists' role in World War II was less good, however, perhaps because characters like Paul Nash did not fit Snow's vision of the artist as messenger of war's horrors. Nash was pictured, sketching wrecked Nazi aircraft, but nothing was said of his attitude to the conflict.

Paul Nash, Totes Meer, 1941 (Tate)

The Paul Nash of 1939 was fiercely in favour of war against Nazism, and his painting 'Totes Meer' - which was based on his sketches of the Cowley aircraft dump - exudes a grim satisfaction in the aerial invaders' fate.

Instead of following the careers of war artists like Edward Bawden and Edward Ardizzone, who travelled to France with the British Expeditionary Force and recorded the evacuation from Dunkirk, Snow focused on the Home Front. In part this was perhaps because his admitted favourites were Stanley Spencer - a pacifist who painted shipbuilders rather than soldiers - and Henry Moore, whose tube station sleepers proved such a memorable response to the terrors of aerial bombardment.

The rolling exhibition of war art shown at the National Gallery from the summer of 1940 did of course contain fine paintings from the Home Front, but it also featured, over the course of the war, thousands of paintings from around the world.

Steve McQueen, Queen & Country, 2007

Kenneth Clark and the War Artists' Advisory Committee commissioned artists to cover every aspect of the war; some gloried in grand battles, while others showed scenes of suffering and devastation. All brought their own attitudes, experience and vision to the vast, complex subject of a global war, leaving us with a huge, startlingly diverse body of work.

The Imperial War Museum website has thousands of images, some of which glorify war, while others more closely resemble the Great War paintings of Nash and Nevinson.

So to the present day, and here the programme found its touch again, with fascinating reports on the work and experiences of modern war artists Steve McQueen and Jeremy Deller. It was fascinating to see how contemporary artists have taken on the subject of war, and equally interesting to follow their progress. Having found life as an embedded war artist unstimulating McQueen had the brilliant idea of printing stamps showing portraits of dead UK servicemen and women, but he has so far failed to persuade the Royal Mail to use his stamps.

Jeremy Deller, Baghdad, 5 March 2007

Deller, meanwhile, had the equally brilliant idea of exhibiting a car smashed by a bomb in Baghdad street - I wonder if he had heard about the exhibition of wrecked cars JG Ballard put on in 1970. Ballard found that reaction to his crashed vehicles was vitriolic and often physically violent, but when Deller toured the United States with his exhibit he found responses more verbally confrontational.

The car is currently on show at the Imperial War Museum in London, among the tanks and planes, under the title 'Baghdad, 5 March 2007'. If you go along, make sure you visit the art gallery upstairs, where you'll find paintings by Nash and Nevinson, and by Eric Ravilious, Stanley Spencer and numerous others.

'The Art of War' is available to watch here. Overall, it is a moving, beautifully composed and thoughtful film by a man who has seen his share of wars.