A LIFE OF TANGENTS

On reaching a 100 years old I thought that I might write a short summary of my lifespan, mostly of art, wine, travel, garden - the details of which can be found from my books, articles, my blog (www.webpageroberts.blogspot.com) and the yet-to-be published Autobiography in Words and Pictures. 

After a country upbringing of untutored art, and reaching Wellington College, I was offered a safe wartime retreat as a refugee in the USA - and took it, as my mother, with most of us at that time, feared that Mr Hitler might well take the country and subjugate our people. She wanted one of the family to live. 

From the USA I returned to England in 1942 when old enough to join the RAF as a trainee pilot. Then, in waiting for a training vacancy I worked as a farm labourer and then as a prop-swinger. 

For operational experience during flying training I was posted to several RAF stations. 

One of these was to fly in Coastal Command Warwick aircraft from Davidstow Moor, in Cornwall, over the Bay of Biscay with a lifeboat slung beneath to drop on six parachutes to bailed-out aircrew. 

My job in the second pilot’s seat was to look out for the dangerous German Condor aircraft flying out from Brittany. They could have made mincemeat of us.

At another station I flew in the fully armed-up tail turret of a Lancaster bomber on an engine test from RAF Skellingthorpe, near Lincoln, to Scotland and back - checking the drift and on the lookout for enemy aircraft. 

When waiting at RAF Hornchurch for training in America, I volunteered as a slater - being part of my war effort. Given an hour’s training and a mate to climb the ladder to supply me with rather poor quality Welsh slates, I mended several bombed roofs in Plumstead, south-east London.

I was later awarded my wings after final training in Oklahoma, USA - when the war in Europe had just ended but not in the Pacific. I was not wanted there, so returned to England and grounded. 

I then became a Photographic Intelligent Officer, and then invalided out of the RAF with TB. 

TB returned when I was a medical student. There was no cure at that time. 

Living in two council rooms I bought and rebuilt a bombed-out house in London, went to art school and theatre design school, designed for TV and theatre, painted scenery at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, also painting landscapes for exhibitions and sale. 

To extend my artistic knowledge I bought a clapped-out builder’s flat-back van and converted it into an unusual mobile lodging, and travelled Europe for three months and three days meeting people, viewing landscape, and enjoying art and theatre. I covered 5,227 miles - not without mishap. 

In 1958 I set out on a world tour of a year’s drawing, then exhibiting my work in both London and Japan. With notes and drawings I wrote the book Harbours, Girls and a Slumbering World. 

A tumbledown thatched cottage that I had bought before leaving on this voyage to have roots to return to, I burnt to the ground and designed and help build a one-bedroomed house in its place. 

After selling the house to Francis Bacon in 1965, I bought a Thamesside warehouse in London’s Limehouse and, with the help of a Pole, converted it to two studios.

After marriage and now taking care of my two children, I moved to Cambridgeshire, then Hampshire, creating a garden for BBC2’s Gardeners’ World, sculpted three large dead elm trees into animals and birds that had been connected with the ancient Icknield Way nearby, wrote a weekly newspaper column on wine, followed by some 700 articles for newspapers and magazines and 14 books. Then divorce. 

I returned to London to exhibit paintings, got married to a lovely wife and later worked for six years on my blog, and Autobiography in Words and Pictures, which has now reached to over 150 episodes. 

A culmination of my 100 years was a party we gave at a pub frequented by myself and fellow airmen in the war. There, 150 people from home and abroad, family, friends, acquaintances and neighbours, met and thoroughly enjoyed an evening to celebrate.

A card of congratulations signed by King Charles III and Queen Camilla attracted much attention as few had seen one before. 

And that’s about it - a life of tangents, taken at opportune times, described here without detail, and in the minimum of words.

MY DOCKLAND LIFE

It is 2024 and I am about to write about my life in London’s dockland of the 1960s to 1970.

Recalling the late 50s to early 60s encompassed a world of recovering from war, to bouts of dealing with untreatable TB, embracing among other things a world of creative art and enquiry, of building and re-building houses, of travel to and around Europe, and then the world. 

I now, in the early 60s, found myself getting fat and vegetating in the country, loosening my ties with the world of art. After a world tour of drawing, and losing the facility and motivation to get back into it, it was time to change, re-invigorate, re-motivate and re-enter a more vibrant world. That meant getting back to London.

I would first have to sell the lovely one-bedroom studio home I had designed and built in isolated Berkshire countryside.

The main local housing agent in Andover declined to sell a house with only one bedroom. So I advertised it myself and sold to Francis Bacon, the painter.

I took “digs” in London’s Chelsea district, re-frequented the Limehouse area of busy dockland from which I had sailed several times as a supernumerary, and kept my eyes and ears open - especially thereabouts.

A Limehouse pub, frequented by both police and criminals, was a centre for information. And, true enough, I learned there of a warehouse shortly up for sale at auction. I bid for it and bought it. At least I now owned a large commercial studio to work in, but still nowhere in which to live.  

I had bought a shell of a warehouse right on the river bank at the head of a small creek of dockland Thames. The potential to create something special there was considerable.

I drew up rough plans to convert the place into two studios overlooking the river, using a prestigious west-end firm of architects to draw up my plans for a conversion from industrial to domestic use. This was in a dockland when no-one had ventured to do this before. Planning permission was given. 

Now I needed someone with general building skills to help me.

The chief of police at my “information” pub had used a first class heating engineer for a job. I met his man and we gelled. He was a Polish builder with artistic imagination. We would build the place together and then, when the project had been completed, he would return to central heating. And so it was. 

There were a few old waterside houses nearby where some rich and famous resided, but  my place was quite different in concept and environment. The dockers saw us as working people and absorbed us. Being rather oddities and friendly, and they being often “on the make”, made obtaining the wherewithall for building a rather underhand but locally normal way of going about things. So costs were low.

When finished, it was unique, with my one-roomed living/studio above, with a glass walled bathroom from which I could see through the studio to the river, and with an outside weathervane that transmitted wind direction directly beneath to the ceiling below.

All windows in the studio above, and the one to rent out beneath, had triple glazing. Moreover, there was a garage for a small car and bottling area for wine from casks, and all this, hidden behind an exterior that blended in so well with other adjoining walls that it was difficult to see what was what. 

I could now, at last, settle down to paint and be artistically creative with dockland shapes as my theme. These paintings now sell to private collectors but which were never exhibited.

Now the end of the 1960s arrived and all changed.

In fairly quick succession came marriage, a baby, sale of the studio house to some Lord or other and a Laker Airways flight to Yale where my then wife had a post-doctoral fellowship. Another phase in my life was about to start and, as usual, it involved many changes and much good luck.

Actually it was not the end of my connection with that dockland studio home. A later owner found several of my paintings in the loft space, contacted me, and although he technically owned them we decided to share the spoils between us.

Although the wife of that owner wanted to keep the place in the 1960s style in which it was conceived and built, her husband wanted to develop it - which he did. 

So it is now flats, and the newly-minted coins that we incorporated in the structure will have vanished with its demolition rubble. 

 

A TYCOON

 

Having been invalided out of the RAF as a pilot with TB, I started studies to become a doctor, and suffered TB again. I decided that as I had always shone as an artist I should learn my basic trade at art school. So I enrolled at the Central School of Art in Holborn, London.

As well as fine art I also enrolled in their theatre design department, thinking that theatre set design would eventually provide me with money as well as allow me to flourish as an artist.

There were three art school departments of interest to me, they being fine art in the drawing class, painting under the gaze of Bernard Meninsky, and theatre set design and theatre costume design, both in Jeanetta Cochrane’s department.

To work with Bernard Meninsky I had to submit to him a painting or two and some drawings. He didn’t think much of my paintings but liked the drawings so much that I was accepted.

From the theatre department there was much to learn about set design, costume design and sewing, with excellent guidance on the use of colour and brushwork in the presentation of ideas to producers.

As many of my fellow students were recently out of school, I was, as an ex-war student, given extra attention, possibly in a more adult laguage.

Although I eventually bought a Bernard Meninsky at Christie’s, I never really liked his work. But we made friends and would seek out living and defunct music halls in London.

In the drawing class, a callow youth, just out of school, often sat near to me as we made drawings of the nudes. 

I asked one of the nudes if she might pose for me. Her reply was yes, but only when I was famous. As my mantra for happiness in life is to avoid being either rich or famous, the chances were slim.  Had she known that a sniff of fame came my way when I once sold a painting at Christie’s for £33,600, and had I re-contacted her at that time, she would not have been the curvacious creature of art school days, but an old woman.

My fellow student in that drawing class really was to become both rich and famous. He was Terrence Conran, of Habitat and much else, but his drawings were dreadful.

TRAINING YOUR ROBIN

Most British gardens must have a resident robin that hangs around to pick up small worms when earth is dug.

I think that we all love these friendly little birds. The American robin is a much larger bird, as befits its nationality.

We have a small walled garden in London that is mostly paved with flagstones with nearly all its trees, bushes and floral displays growing in pots. These we move around as peer season and the vigour of the plants.

Growing next to the garden’s south-facing wall are alternating tomatoes and runner beans. On its north-facing wall is a small pear tree and apple tree, both in pots, apparently springing from a abacanthus that waves its long leaves in the wind. I grow mistletoe in the apple tree. 

 

All this is in the land, owned by its resident robin, who, this year, chose to nest and bring up a family with a mate high on the house wall in a box made for, but never used, by swifts.

At breeding time we do see and feed two robins but only one seems to belong. 

There have been robin-less years and the garden has seemed bare without one.

The only food we use to train a resident robin is Cheddar cheese, grated very finely. They love it, fresh or dry. 

To train a robin we place a little “bait” near to the house at one end of the garden, the other end housing our summerhouse, or shed as we call it. 

It is within this shed, where we spend much time and where we aim to entice a robin for company.

The first move is bait left on the ground well away from the shed where we humans have drink, music, food and conversation. Then, when the robin has acquired the taste for grated Cheddar, we lay bait nearer and nearer to the shed.

We keep as still as possible during this training period.

The first real excitement is when the robin takes bait from the sill of the opened shed door.

All this time the bird will have noticed, with its eagle eye, grated cheese in the feeder designed for it.

This object is of wood and roughly described as one open shallow box, upside down and sliding over another open shallow box. This can be adjusted to offer a small or large amount of grated cheese.

Bird-landing edges are of rounded dowel rod - fit for birds’ feet. 

Finally, our robin will enter our shed in short stages or even fly directly in, eventually to eat from my knee, which happens generally to be next to the feeding box. 

Friendly wood pigeons also raid the robin box and are deterred from tipping the feeder over to get to the cheese by a lead weight (a sculpture) resting on top of it.

Friendly birdlife has become quite a feature of our garden and amazes guests. 

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A BONANZA RECALLED ONCE MORE

 

In 1953 I was rebuilding my first house in London’s Fulham Road from one that had been bombed in the war.  At the same time I was at art school and teaching myself to paint and 

selling landscapes. 

As the house was right next to Chelsea Football Grounds, a pet subject was the ground itself, and in particular what is known by Chelsea supporters as “The Shed End”.

I would set up my easel on a spectator’s gravel bank and paint away. 

I painted on canvas stuck to board, mariflayed previously by me using tailors’ canvas, hardboard, animal glue and very hot water. The size that  I favoured was 2 foot by 4 foot.

One of the finished canvasses was entitled “Neighbours on Saturdays” as Chelsea then only played on their home ground on Saturdays.

Those football days were a bit on the rough side, hemming me in and sometimes with my garden used as a urinal. But no-one seemed to mind an artist in their midst. 

“Neighbours on Saturdays” was exhibited at the Daily Express Young Artists Exhibition and failed to sell. Still framed, it was stacked away and forgotten. 

Years later, Margreet’s niece  became engaged to be married and, although the groom was an Arsenal supporter, we decided to give the painting to them as a wedding present. The engagement was broken off and the painting hung on the studio wall in Hammersmith.

It so happened that a man from Christie’s auction rooms came to look at my work and asked if he could sell “Neighbours on Saturdays”.  I agreed.

We decided that the title should be changed to “The Shed End”, that being more readily in the minds of supporters.  And we agreed on a reserve of £1500.  He took it away.

I went along to Christie’s Brompton Road salesroom on a viewing day to see where it had been hung. I can’t say that I was ecstatic as it was placed on a wall rather low down. I would rather have seen it at eye level.

I was then contacted by a potential buyer who told me that he was pretty sure to obtain it as he was willing to go up to £5,000.  He wanted to make prints of it and, for a fee, would I be prepared to sign them. We left it at that. 

Somehow I heard that there was other interest in the painting and that it might even fetch a good price.

On the day of the sale I took a plush seat toward the back of a good crowd of art buyers. The auctioneer was a lady who was quite obviously very professional.

When it came to my turn, she said that this work was by Jim Page-Roberts and that there was considerable interest in it. My heart beat increased. 

“I will start at a thousand”.  Up went quite a few hands.

In no time bidding had reached £5,000, then £10,000.  Bidders started to drop out. 

Bidding continued until some £20,000 was offered. Soon only two bidders remained in contention. One, we heard later was the Chelsea owner’s agent and the other a lady who wanted to give it to her Chelsea-supporting husband as a Christmas present.

Bidding continued as the lady kept her hand aloft. 

Finally Abramowitz’s agent realised he would never obtain it and dropped out at £27,000. There was applause.

Christie’s quote hammer prices combined with their buyer’s premium. So the “Shed End” had sold for £33,600, the “Top Lot”.

At that time, fellow RAF pilots who trained to fly with me in Oklahoma, USA, got together with wives and children once a year. At one such meeting word had reached them about my auction success.

“What will you do with the money” ? I was asked. 

Without much aforethought I replied that I would now buy large potatoes as they were more expensive than smaller ones, but much easier to peel. They thought it was hilarious. 

I buy potatoes nowadays and find that the smaller ones are easier to peel. 

As for the fellow pilots (several of whom went to America on a freebee as “Heroes”), I imagine that they have now all flown high into the blue and are no longer interested in potatoes large or small.