Cookham - A Village in Heaven
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A Village Made in Heaven,
The Cookham War Memorial
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We motored across the Chilterns,
my father piloting our black Vauxhall, registration FOW 34, an L series Wyvern
I think. Down through Bourne End and
across the meadows to the 1867 iron bridge at Cookham.
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The Thames at Cookham
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At Turk’s boatyard, famous for swan-upping, we
hired a small motor boat and puttered upstream to the railway bridge, the river
gently swirling past the reedy banks. Or
perhaps we splashed about in a skiff? It
was one of those sunny days in my childhood that lingers, somehow caught in the
eddies of memory, occasionally surfacing in the light of dreams, my affections
for family confused with images of Ratty and Mole.
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The railway bridge
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I wasn’t to know, but at the time
Lord Astor, of nearby Cliveden (and later Mandy Rice-Davies) fame was making
arrangements for a sixty-eight year old artist to return to his birthplace at
Fernlea in Cookham High Street. Stanley
Spencer had earlier been diagnosed with cancer and had undergone an operation
at the Canadian War Memorial
Hospital which was then
on the nearby Cliveden Estate. He went
to convalesce with friends in Dewsbury, but returned to Cookham, and then died,
at Cliveden, on December 14th, 1959.
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Odney Common, and just visible, top right, the clock tower of Cliveden
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It was years later, when living
at Ascot, that I returned to walk in the meadows alongside the Thames here. The
boatyard by the bridge, memorialised in Spencer’s painting, had gone,
destroyed, I believe, by fire, and the far bank of the river seemed to have
sprouted houses where once cattle grazed, but much of the village and the
surrounding scenery was still recognisable.
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Stanley Spencer Gallery
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Just recently, I passed by again,
to see an exhibition of The Creative Genius of Stanley Spencer
at the Stanley Spencer
Gallery, which incorporates loans from
the Stanley Spencer collections of Aberdeen
and Leeds Art galleries. A former Wesleyan Chapel, built in 1846 in Cookham
High Street, is the home of the gallery.
Spencer himself used to attend services here, and his uncle was one of
the preachers. The chapel closed in
1910, but was for many years used as a reading room, and then became the studio
of another local artist. In 1962 it
opened as The Stanley Spencer Gallery with the largest single display of his
work, although Tate Britain,
following its acquisition of archives in 1973, holds the greatest collection of
his paintings, drawings and writings. Thanks to a grant of £800,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the
Gallery was refurbished in 2006/7.
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Fernlea, built by Spencer's grandfather
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The gallery is a delightful
memorial to this artist, described by Dr James Fox, Art Historian, as one of
the most original artists of the twentieth century. His paintings are
beautiful, inimitable and irresistibly uplifting. To look at his 1935/6
paintings of Domestic Scenes,
such as Neighbours in which
one of Spencer’s sisters passes a bunch or red tulips to her cousin over the
high hedge at Fernlea, the house where the family lived in the High Street, or At the Chest of Drawers where he
is seen helping his first wife, Hilda, rummage in their bedroom chest, is to
see into a very intimate world of everyday life.
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A copy of Spencer's The Last Supper
Commissioned from Sharon Brindle
Hanging in Holy Trinity Church, Cookham
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On the other hand, to see Patricia
at Cockmarsh Hill, 1935 is to see the awkwardness of his second
marriage set in the landscape he loved.
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Cockmarsh, beside the Thames
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And then there is the vast canvas (over two by five metres) of the
unfinished Christ Preaching at
Cookham Regatta, 1952-9 in which he links Cookham with religion, as he
did throughout his artistic life.
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Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta, 1952-9
Photo by kind permission of the Stanley Spencer Gallery |
In
this picture Christ, wearing a black straw hat, preaches to the villagers from
a wicker chair set in the horse ferry barge, by the Ferry Hotel near the
bridge.
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The Ferry Hotel, where Christ preached at the Regatta
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Unfortunately Spencer died
before he could complete this work, but others in the current exhibition, such
as The Betrayal, 1919 and Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, 1921,
and others at the Tate, such as The Resurrection, Cookham, 1924 -26 and
St Francis and the Birds, 1935
show very clearly how his imagination
brought religious subjects and his home village together in an extraordinary
way. Cookham was indeed to him an
earthly paradise.
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Sandham Memorial Chapel, Burghclere
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Some years ago I stood, alone, in
the Sandham Memorial Chapel, Burghclere. The chapel was built to Spencer’s
specifications, funded by the generous patronage of Louis and Mary Behrend, as
a memorial to Mary’s brother, Lieutenant Henry Sandham, who had been killed in
the war. The walls, covered with Stanley Spencer’s paintings of scenes from his
own experience with the Royal Army Medical Corps and then as an infantryman
with the Berkshire Regiment in Macedonia,
reminded me of my grandfathers, my direct lines to the extraordinary sufferings
of the First World War and its aftermaths.
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For the Fallen: Sandham Memorial Chapel, Burghclere
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Stanley Spencer’s elder brother,
Sydney, died in action, in 1918, and his name is one of the many listed on the
village war memorial at edge of Cookham Moor.
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Sydney Spencer's name on the Cookham War Memorial
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Stanley Spencer came from a
remarkable family. He was the eighth
child to survive, and the second youngest. His father, Pa William, was a
music teacher, and the family produced a knight, two professors, a concert
violinist, a professional stage conjurer, the Director of the National Building
Institute in London, an Oxford graduate (Sydney, who was killed in the war), the
wife of a Cambridge don and two professional artists, as the youngest, Gilbert,
was also a successful painter. Father
read to his children from literature and the bible; they were surrounded by
music and books, and all of them learned to play instruments.
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Fernlea, Spencer's birthplace
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Stanley was initially home-schooled by two of
his sisters, but later attended Maidenhead Technical Institute and then the
Slade School of Fine Art. Before the War
he had already begun to win prizes and gain attention, and then in 1919 he was
commissioned by the British War Memorials Committee to create a painting for a
never completed hall of remembrance. The
work, entitled Travoys Arriving with
Wounded at a Dressing Station at Smol, Macedonia, September 1916, is now in the Imperial War Museum, along
with a number of Spencer’s other paintings.
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Cookham High Street
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For a high proportion of the rest of his life, Spencer resided and
worked in, or near, Cookham, though memorably he visited Port Glasgow
many times during World War Two when commissioned to produce a series of
paintings of shipbuilders on the Clyde.
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The Thames by Cockmarsh
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His first marriage, to Hilda Carline, ended in divorce in 1937, and his
second marriage, to Patricia Preece, was solemnised a week after the divorce
came through, but was never consummated. He had two daughters, one of which, Unity, born in 1930, recently published her
autobiography, Lucky to be an Artist.
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The Maltings, part of the School Lane Brewery
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During his last years he was a familiar figure in Cookham, wheeling an
old pram (now preserved in the Gallery) in which he carried his paints and
brushes and an umbrella. He was a
slight, scruffy figure who rarely washed and who sometimes wore his pyjamas
under his suit if it was chilly.
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With kind permission of The Stanley Spencer Gallery
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For
twelve years up to his death he was looked after by Mrs Emily Price, his daily
help, who said she had to bully him to get his hair cut and to let her wash his
clothes. The people of Cookham loved
this kind and generous, eccentric genius, and children often clustered around
his easel as he worked.
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Holy Trinity Church
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Stanley Spencer’s cremated remains were buried near the path to Bellrope
Meadow in Holy Trinity churchyard. A
memorial stone is inscribed:
To the
memory of Stanley
Spencer Kt. CBE RA, 1891–1959, and his wife Hilda, buried in Cookham cemetery
1950. Everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God: He that loveth not
knoweth not God, for God is love.
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Heavens Above
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The village
of Cookham may, perhaps,
not be everyone’s idea of heaven, but it was Stanley Spencer’s, and that is
where he now is. In a village. In heaven.
LINES WRITTEN ON THE DEATH OF SIR STANLEY SPENCER CBE, RA
Here, in the beauty of this River Village,
God gave a man some vision of His Light,
He saw the Glory, and, within his Parish,
Sought to interpret it for our delight.
In simple faith, this fortunate Immortal
Nurtured his talent, exercised his art,
Touching the cold grey canvasses with beauty,
Borne on his brush the pictures in his heart.
See with your own small eyes, his world around you,
Walk through his lanes and sit beneath his trees.
Can you see Christ, as he did, in a boater?
Can you hear God, as he did, in the breeze?
Paints them in dearest detail on his walls,
Shows us the mire and misery of battle,
Echoes the empty brag of bugle calls.
Thousands have seen and walked the humble gardens,
The leafy lanes, and river paths he trod.
The places in which everyone sees beauty,
Are where he painted Mary, and saw God.
We must be glad that he has seen things for us,
Revealed his memories, and portrayed his mind.
Those whom he knew rejoice because they knew him,
And mourn all anonymous mankind.
Anon
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Stanley Spencer
by his friend Reca McGibbon
1915-2007
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