Evelyn Dunbar & Sparsholt College

Dunbar's work is featured heavily in the newly opened Blavatnik Art, Film and Photography Galleries at the Imperial War Museum, London. Dunbar's work is the subject of a talk at the AshmoleanMuseum in Oxford. 

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Evelyn Dunbar 

Intro: Welcome to Hampshire HistBites. Join us as we delve into the past and go on a journey to discover some of the county's best, and occasionally unknown, history. We'll be speaking to experts as well as enthusiasts, asking them to reveal some of our hidden heritage as well as share with you a few fascinating untold stories.

William: Hello, and welcome to today's Hampshire HistBites. In 1940, artist and illustrator Evelyn Dunbar was commissioned by the War Artists Advisory Committee to create paintings of the Land Girls working at Sparsholt College in the Hampshire countryside outside Winchester. Many of these works are now in public collections and are celebrated as a vital and moving depiction of women's working lives during the Second World War. I am William Summerfield, Head of Modern British Art at Rosebys Auctions, and I will be talking today to writer, curator and expert on Evelyn Dunbar's work. Dr Jill Clark. Dr Clark wrote a biography on the artist and co-curated a show of her work at St. Barb's Museum and Art Gallery in Lymington in 2006, the first show devoted to her work in many decades. So, good evening, Jill, thank you so much for having me here and thank you for talking to the Habitual History Bites.I thought I'd start off with just quit an easy question, just a basic one to get us started. Who was Evelyn Dunbar and what was her status as an artist at the beginning of the Second World War?

Jill: Well, firstly, thank you for asking me to come and speak. I'm delighted to talk with you about Evelyn Dunbar. At the start of the Second World War, like other artists in the profession,it was very badly hit. As you can appreciate, with wartime, commissions had virtually dried up. The materials were scarce so, like other artists, she was struggling for work. She had, the previous year before the war started in 1938, actually opened a gallery in Rochester where she was living and had been living since a young child, but with the advent of war that failed. So she was, I suppose if you would like to say, almost unemployed. But before that she had been at the Royal College of Art, she'd won a scholarship there. She'd studied in Kent but that didn't seem to suit her. I think she probably wanted something more and London was where it was at, if you like. So she went to the Royal College of Art around 1929 to about 1933 and her principal, Sir William Rothenstein, saw her as not only a talented artist but someone who had real genius. So we've got that sort of background. I suppose in terms of what she was doing pre-war, perhaps what first brought her to public attention was the work that she did on the Brockley murals, which is in Hillyfield in Lewisham. And these murals, they're still extant and the school is now Prendergast School, so it's possible to see them during London open house or open buildings weeknd, often in September, and these murals she did with her former tutor at the Royal College of Art,Charles Marley, who she later became romantically linked with, and two other senior students from the Royal College of Art. And these murals that Dunbar did were set in the landscape of Kent which was the area that she knew very well having lived there for some 30 odd years.And, as I say, that brought her to public attention, and they were seen as being some of the finest creations of the age. So she'd done in the middle earlyish 30s and I suppose probably on the back of that she illustrated a number of books. So she did a diary for Country Life, a lovely diary called Gardener's Diary and it's a page a day with beautiful little vignettes about people in the garden, tending the garden.As you'd expect, it's a gardening diary, and it was a subject that was very dear to her, something she knew a lot about. The first diary actually had been done by Edward Borden, so she was in good company following him. But, the previous year to Gardner'sDiary, she'd also produced a book with Charles Marnie, to actually, I should say, if any of the listeners have a copy of it, they will know that on the cover of it it says Cyril Marnie. But he was told by fellow artist Barnett Freedman that he couldn't be an artist and called himself Cyril. So actually he is known as, Charles, Charles Marnie, but not on that cover. So they produced this lovely book in 1937, which is all about the plants that they knew and loved. And she used her family as models for these and inside is beautiful -line drawings done of the various plants that they knew, plants that they each grew. And Dunbar's house in Strude near Rochester had a very extensive garden.So these are some of the projects, if you like, that she was involved in pre-war. So I think that gives you a sense that we've got a sort of rising artist here.And then suddenly it's war. But it's also, I think, worth saying, and I'm sure it'll emerge later on when we're talking about her. That she was a very modest person, she wasn't out for advancement at all, she didn't belong to any particular groups and she was very wary of artistic sort of cliques.

William: Could you describe her artwork a little, just how it looks, the feel for it?

Jill: Yes, I think it's, it's very realistic. She painted what she saw, she painted what she knew, almost without, or certainly in her early work, without embellishment. So it's very sort of figurative art, which is also partly why her work later on fell out of favour, because it wasn't, in terms of perhaps more modern, abstract ways of looking at it. It was very much based in the sort of realism of what she saw, particularly around the land and agriculture. So you've got beautiful sort of colours when you look at her paintings and I think a real sense of understanding. She knew what she was painting, and she was very methodical. And I was fortunate when I was writing the biography of EvelynDunbar back in 2006, but I was able to track down her husband, Roger Folley, and he was in his nineties and even Dunbar had died in 1960. She was born in 1906, so I was fortunate that Roger was still alive and was able to talk to me about Evelyn and her ways of working. And I also spoke to a number of people who knew her, including some Land Girls who were actually at Sparsholt in Winchester during the Second World War. So I got a real sense of what she was like as a person and as an artist.

William: Yes, it's quite rigorous, her painting, and quite methodical. Is that right to say? Would you be able to tell me, how did you first come to, to see her work? What was your first engagement with her work?

Jill: I was actually researching a book on the Women's Land Army. So that was how I came to Evelyn Dunbar's work, because of the paintings that she did of the Women's Land Army during the Second World War. And I was interested in the topic because I've always been interested in people's lives, and particularly women's lives and how those lives are made sense of. And so, my mother had been a Land Girl and what interested me was how she used to talk about the time when she was a Land Girl in Yorkshire. And I thought, if we don't capture those stories, and particularly women's stories, those stories get lost. So hence, I was sort of on a quest if you like, to capture those stories of Second World War Land Girls who were still alive, but also to write about the land arm in the First World War when it started in 1916. And I wanted to tell that story slightly differently. I wanted to tell it through the eyes not only at the Land Girls but also through the artists who painted the Land Girls and that included the First World War,so the book that i did was called The Women's Land Army a Portrait and Evelyn Dunbar featured in that and that was going to be my first book. But then when I tracked down her husband who was by then living in Wye in Kent, it became more important to finish the Dunbar book first whilst Roger was still alive and could be involved in it, and it was a great privilege meeting him, talking with him and finding other people who knew Evelyn Dunbar. And so that took me on a quest, and as a biographer, then I was interested in trying to retrace the steps of Evelyn Dunbar. And hence that took me on a journey all over the country. So our holidays would also be driven by where there might have been Dunbar doing some painting. So that really is how I came to her and it developed from there.

William: Because I imagine that by that time she was really, very unknown. She must have fallen off the sort of art historical narrative.

Jill: She certainly had fallen out of view, there's no doubt about that, that despite the body of work that she produced and she was the only salaried woman war artist, it had just slipped. So that made it all the more important to get her work and her name out into the public domain and to get the attention that it deserved. Because she should be seen alongside her contemporaries like Edward Borden, Ravilious, Stanley Spencer. I'm not saying she's one of the greatest, most important British artists, but what I want to say is that she has a place.Her work should be better known. And I think since the biography and since the exhibition that I curated at St. Barb in Lymington in 2006,with the help of other people of course, her work has definitely become much better known, and rightly so.

William: Absolutely. Well,I think at this point it'd be good to turn to Sparsholt and what brought her to Sparsholt and what her experiences were there.

Jill: It's perhaps worth just going back even to how she became a war artist, because there had been a radio broadcast at the end of December, December 1939, by Kenneth Clark who was chairing the War Artists Advisory Committee which appointed artists and the broadcast was made as an appeal to artists to come forward who might want to be considered to record the war in all its aspects on the home front and overseas and although Dunbar didn't hear the broadcast, she wrote to one of her tutors who contacted the committee and she got a letter very swiftly afterwards inviting her to, to become a war artist because of the work that she previously done on The Brockley Murals. And so she had something of a reputation. And what she said was that she was interested in doing work that would be involving work on the land and agriculture because that was something she understood. So she was appointed to record women's work on the Home Front. And so around the summer of 1940, she went to Sparsholt because Sparsholt Farm Institute, as it was then, was training land girls.So it was an ideal place for her to go and so that was the first work that actually she produced on the Women's Land Army and it was a very happy time for her. We were talking earlier about how I got to know more about her. The Imperial War Museum holds the archives of the correspondence between the artists and the committee. So I was able to read Dunbar's letters to the secretary of that committee and in it she talks about Sparsholt and how much she enjoyed her time there, and being with the Land Girls and with the common room there, that she had a very happy time there. So I suppose she might have stayed a week or so and she would be out in all weathers, drawing, sketching and she got on very well with the land girls. And from that a number of things came out. One of her early paintings wasWomen's Land Army -Dairy Training. I think it's also worth saying that these Land Girls were fortunate because not all land girls got training, most had to learn on the job. So those at Sparsholt were, if you like in a way, ahead of the game and the milking practice with artificial udders, it's such a fun painting because you can see the Land Girls there in their regulation sort of overalls and things, but they're sitting at these wooden frames with like a large plastic bag hanging down with udders on it and there they are squeezing these artificial udders, so that was one of the first ones that she produced there. And she also did around the same sort of time, Women's Land Army dairy training and this is one of the units where they cleaned all the churns, they cleaned all the various equipment. But while she was also at Sparsholt, she would amuse the Land Girls by, in the library, she would draw on the board that was there, lots of pictures and things to amuse them.But, she got to know one of the instructors there, Michael Greenhill, and together they produced a book to help Land Girls because Michael Greenhill who was teaching the Land Girls who were there, was very concerned about the Land Girls, many of whom were city girls had never been in the countryside before, 

really hadn't seen animals, had no idea about what they should be doing, and he felt that a book, a primer, would help them so that they would be less of a danger to themselves and or the animals. So they produced this book called The Book of Armcraft and within it again are pencil drawings, little vignettes, basically of what is right and what was wrong in terms of whether it was tying up a sack, carrying a sack, but one of my favourite ones in the book was actually done in the library at Sparsholt. And it's four images of how to use a pitchfork and the model for this was one of the senior Land Girls at Sparsholt who I was able to meet, Anne Hall. And Anne Hall was asked basically to sort of pick up some books and then put them on the top of one of the cupboards in the, in the library, so that Dunbar could get a sense of the movement of doing that and if you look through the book, you can see how, these are places that were at Sparsholt, and in getting ready for our talk, I was looking, there was one where there is a picture in the book of dairy training,and it is sparsely the same place, and I hadn't really recognised it as such because one of her other paintings that I like is this Women's Land Army Dairy Training, and if you compare the images, it's the same.But one thing that's interesting in some of these images is, Dunbar found it very hard to draw people's faces,so you often won't see the faces. So if listeners later on go on to the Art UK website and look at some of these pictures, if they haven't seen them, then they'll see that some of the faces are actually turned away from the viewer.

William: But she does that quite cleverly. So the focus is always on the action and the doing rather than the individual people. So it's quite a clever device. It's something she couldn't do.

Jill: I think you've really picked that up well, that she was a skilful artist. And I think what is also very good about her work is, she's not taking fun of them, she's not pillorying them, whereas when land girls started, particularly in the First World War,and again early on in the Second World War, they were often the butt of jokes for “women can't do these things”, but actually they did and they proved they could do it as well and better than men in some instances. So I like the way that it's not like St Trinian's.

William: But nor is it particularly saintly either. It's very actual.

Jill: No It's very, yes, it is. It is. I interviewed the woman in the foreground of Women's Land Army Dairy Training, Josie Loosemore, who lives in East Sussex, and she can recognize herself there. That is here, so there's an element that she's able to sort of pull out and capture that is really, effective. 

William: How did you track all these people down? It's quite remarkable that you found so many people.Jill: Thank you, it was a challenge. And, I suppose I've been fortunate in the sense that my sort of working life before I was able to pursue some of my interests in art, were very much around research methods. And so my last academic post was at Southampton University and I used to teach research methods, so I guess you begin to develop those skills, but I did feel very much like you're a private detective that you're tracking leads trying to put them together and sometimes there's just a bit of luck you have a conversation with somebody and then that puts you in touch with someone else but the archives were helpful at the Imperial War Museum in London that was quite useful with some leads but not all went somewhere.

William: Of course, what was the committee’s and Kenneth Clark's response to the works? Were they pleased with the work she made?

Jill: They were, but what Dunbar found challenging was she didn't want to work to order in the sense of work was censored so it had to be passed by the committee, and they wanted that work done fairly quickly and she didn't like that because she was so meticulous about what she did, and rigorous. It took her, her time, so they were pleased with the work but she would sometimes be chivvied too. Is that nearly ready? 

Because her final painting that she submitted to the War Artists Advisory Committee was the Land Girl and the Bale Bull, which was done at Sparsholt and that defied completion. She writes about that. It took her a considerable amount of time. In fact, I don't think it was finished until about September 1945, but the committee were absolutely enthralled by it and that painting is now at the Tate. It isn't always on public display, but it has been. But I will just go back to your point about the, the committee and the reaction to them in that, Kenneth Clarke in commenting on the work, he wrote a piece in one of the magazines that was still going, The Studio, and he was quite critical of Dunbar's pictures and some of the other women artists describing them, as just these were sort of peacetime pictures and how was that really any different to what would have been going on if there hadn't been a war on? Well, I tried to argue in the book that, of course there wasn't the same degree of threat as there might have been if you were Raviliouswho lost his life, or Thomas Hennell, where you're in Iceland or you're in, in Java, the far greater threat, and of course in France and, and other countries, but it was another theatre of war. It was truly the People's War, and so I think there's still something very important about her work in terms of it being a documentary record, and that's what Kenneth Clarke was wanting from the artists who were employed and hence why some artists who might have painted in a different way, their work would not have been acceptable to them.But the other point I think that's relevant as well is that some Land Girls did lose their lives. We don't know the numbers. But those who were working in Bomb Alley in Kent were actually issued with sort of hard hats so that when the German bombers came over and they were out in the fields, there wasn't cover for them, so there were reports of some losing their lives, but of course it was not the same degree as those who were serving overseas.

William: And what was the impact of the, the farming guide to the Michael Greenhalgh book that she made?

Jill: It sold 41,000 copies, it was very popular. It was well reviewed, it was bought by, it wasn't only Land Girls, but also conscientious objectors were working on the land. Young children were helping particularly with like the potato harvest or picking berries in Scotland. And there were farming camps, holiday camps, people were encouraged to lend a hand. So, if you weren't working or even for some of the troops home on leave, they might go and work on the land. So, it was hugely popular, and it came out in both, hardback and softback.The softback was two and sixpence, and if you had five shillings you could get a hardback copy and I'm very lucky to have both. One of which is signed by Michael Greenhill, the instructor at Sparsholt, because I was able to track him down and interview him and he actually signed my copy so that's very special to me. But you can pick it up. I got another copy in an Oxfam bookshop so they are still there. It's worth looking out for.

William: I think I read in your book that, I think it was a letter by Dunbar talking about seeing her book in the shop front of WHSmiths on Winchester High Street which is quite funny because obviously that Winchester still has WHSmiths on the high street!

Jill: Yes, no it, it, it does. So, no, she would have known that area pretty well because of the time that she, she spent there.

William: How long was she in the area for?

Jill: Well, she, she was there, I think, I've tried to work out how many times she must have been there. So, perhaps four or five times. It's difficult to tell, but I think one of the most memorable visits that she had back to Winchester to Sparsholt was, in preparation for the Land Girl and the Bale Bull, and she came from her home with her husband in, Strood in, in Kent, and he was on leave. She'd actually met him at Sparsholt, he was an agricultural economist. Dunbar wanted to paint the Land Girl and the Bale Bull early in the morning. So they left home about four o'clock in the morning because she wanted to get there early as the sort of dawn is, is breaking. And they were stopped in Guildford by the police to ask, was their journey necessary? Where were they going? Anyway, fortunately they were able to explain so they carried on and she made this wonderful painting of this heroic Land Girl about to tether this bull. And in the background is the, the bale bull, which is the movable milking shed. She loved the landscape. She wrote about that. She liked the simplicity. It probably was a place where she had great happiness.

William: Well, I grew up in Sparsholt, so I can understand that, so!

Jill: And I visited it too, because again it was part of my journey to try to retrace where she'd been. So I went to one of the open days that they had there and walked around the sort of campus and things just to get a feel for it. But it's also worth saying that she was going all over the country to do her work. She wasn't only at Sparsholt. So she did record Land Girls in Monmouth, in Berwick. So, yeah, she was busy doing other things but it was an important part of her time at Sparsholt, undoubtedly.

William: And do you think it had an impact on her later life and work?

Jill: I think she looked back on it very fondly. I think it did impact in that she'd moved to Wye with her husband, she did illustrate a farm dictionary with, again, some lovely little vignettes in that. But her work, I suppose, in some ways it changed a little bit. She perhaps did it more freely. She did some work that was perhaps more allegorical. She did do a couple more murals down at Bletchley Park when it became a training college. They were on panels, they were detachable. They're now in Oxford Brookes University, you can still see those panels. Those I think hint at some of her earlier work, but she died quite suddenly in 1960. So, would she have gone onto do more great things? We, we, we don't know. But I think to go back to what I was saying earlier, she really was very modest about what she was doing. She had a small exhibition in Wye in one of the colleges at Wye there, of her work. I think this was around about 1954 or something like that, but, um, she wasn't a great one for exhibiting her work or selling her work.

William: You organised an exhibition in Hampshire on Evelyn Dunbar's work. How did this come about?

Jill: It was quite fortuitous, really. I was doing a talk in Milford-on-Sea. I'd grown up around that area in Barton-on-Sea, I knew the area well. And I was giving a talk to the local history group on the Women's Land Army. And one of the trustees from St. Barb Museum and Art Gallery was there and heard my talk and the slides that I showed and said something about, you know, you must come and talk to the curator, the then director at St. Barb, which was Steve Marshall. So I went to talk to Steve about it and put in a proposal then about Evelyn Dunbar and the committee were enthusiastic. So I worked with Steve on the exhibition which was the first one, the first retrospective exhibition of her work. So we were fortunate that we were able to borrow work from the National Collections and bring them to Lymington for the first time.So we had The Land Girl and The Bale Bull, we had Dairy Training, we had a wonderful array. During the course of the exhibition, we ran a number of events for Land Girls to come and enjoy the paintings. And perhaps one of the most special things for me was that Roger Folly, her husband, was able to come. And his family were there as well, and he opened the exhibition. And my mother was there as well in her 80s as a former Land Girl, and it was just a very special moment. And to have it in Hampshire and in Lymington which of course is so close to Sparsholt, was I think very significant to have those paintings that were done in the locality. 

William: Absolutely. And probably it was the first time for, for many decades, that some of those paintings had been seen.

Jill: That's right, because I hadn't seen many of these paintings myself, I'd had to go to the Imperial War Museum, I remember going up to London with Steve Marshall and we went in the, where they store the paintings at the Imperial War Museum, and they were pulling out these racks with all these wonderful paintings on, as well as Evelyn Dunbar, so it was terrific because there was something like five or six thousand paintings produced over the course of the Second World War. And whilst they were distributed around the country, the Imperial War Museum holds the bulk of them. So it was the first time I'd seen some of these and then when you see them hanging you get the significance of them. The Land Girl and The Bale Bull, it's a big painting. She did enjoy the sort of wide, long sort of canvas. That was one of her favourite things to paint that in that sort of size.

William: Where did she learn to, to  paint on such a large scale? 

Jill: I think she must have learnt at the Royal College of Art and she was well taught there by Charles Marnie was there, Alan Gwyn Jones, and what William Rothenstein did at the Royal College of Art was for the first time to bring in practising artists. So she would have been taught by artists who were well known at the time who would come into the college. Even Dunbar also did some teaching herself post Second World War. For a while, her husband was teaching in Oxford and she taught at the Ruskin. So again, she was working alongside other artists. So I think that says something about her skill as an artist, that she was teaching at the Ruskin where they had quite eminent visiting artists come to teach the students there.

William: As a sort of final question, what would you say is Dunbar's legacy? How would you sum up her work?

Jill: I think it is the, the records particularly that she made during the Second World War. The way she recorded with great sensitivity and understanding the work particularly of the Women's Land Army.

William: Yes, she sums up very accurately a sort of noble profession and showing a different side of the wall, showing a different, the different ways that people contributed to that war effort, I think.

Jill: Yes, yes, that would very much be, I think, my feeling in terms of, of what she did. But clearly, a very skilled, talented artist who was at home whether it was illustrating a number of books or with the murals that she did. But I think her work, it will stand the test of time.

Outro: We hope you enjoyed listening to today's episode. If you would like to find out a little bit more about what we've been talking about, then please visit the website, www.winchesterheritagopendays.org. Click on Hampshire Histbites, and there you'll find today show notes as well as some links to more information. Thank you.