Art joke

This week as a respite from the demoralising effects of imminent redundancies at work, I treated myself to lunch in the cafeteria of the Whitechapel Gallery, which, if anything, is even more expensive than before the refurb', but a civilised retreat from the Front, where I've fielded nothing but complaints all week.

Along one wall is a mirror inscribed with a joke about Stephen Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick. I can't quote it verbatim, but it goes something like this:

Stephen Spielberg died and at the Pearly Gates was asked by Saint Peter if there was anything he wanted. Spielberg said he wanted to meet Stanley Kubrick, but St Peter demurred, explaining that it was impossible, Kubrick was a very busy man and never saw visitors. Then Spielberg noticed an old white-bearded man riding by on a bicycle and asked, "Isn't that Kubrick? Can't I speak to him?". "No", replied St Peter, "That's not Stanley Kubrick. That's God. He only thinks he's Stanley Kubrick."

Ought To Be Bought art auction

Final year BA students at The Cass held another very successful and profitable auction of donated artworks on Friday evening to finance their degree show in July.

Top bid, but at the bargain price of £480, was the mixed media painting The Fairytail of NYC (pictured below) by Bob & Roberta Smith, whose work normally sells for thousands (shortlisted for the Fourth Plinth project, creator of Tate Britain's 2008 Christmas tree, with work in the Tate collection). Other artwork for sale included a gold and diamond ring and a signed first edition of Gilbert and George's The Complete Pictures, dedicated "Love you always in all ways", as well as work by many of the artists who teach in the department.

Like last year the gavel was wielded by the flamboyant and stylish Lord Shoreditch, alter-ego of Steve Edge of Steve Edge Design, decribed variously as "designer, jockey, model-maker, honorary Eagle Dancer of a North American Indian tribe, prophet, madman, wanderer and self-styled Lord Shoreditch".

http://www.steve-edge.com/

I made telephone bids on behalf of a mystery buyer for the small untitled painting (pictured above) by Ian Robertson, Head of Fine Art, and successfully secured the piece at £110 for my anonymous 'client' after a serious bidding war, but this year resisted the temptation to outbid anyone for the two pieces I was interested in myself, which went for £130 and over. It is a recession after all!

HMS Clio again

The day following my last post I discovered more fascinating details about the Clio's history, as well as two forgotten photographs of great-grandfather Edward James Bray, tucked away in an old Welsh Regiment wallet of my grandfather's (as unofficial family archivist, many documents and pictures have been entrusted to me in a haphazard fashion). The three buttons are from his captain's uniform jacket and bear the name of the ship. Both photographs must have been taken around the same period and, from the women's and girls' fashions in the picture of the garden party, it must have been near the beginning of the century, certainly before the 1914-18 War. Captain Bray stands to one side holding a cup of tea rather awkwardly, like a butler waiting on the party, which I at first mistook him for, rather than master of the officers gathered round the table with their wives and children. A short man, like my grandfather, and not particularly proposessing apart from the immaculate whiskers. I wonder if my great-grandmother is there? I know nothing of her at all and assume she died long before her husband.

Researching online, I found confirmation of the harsh conditions on board the Clio from Anglesey Quarter Sessions records of the convictions of two boys in 1885. William Henry Smith, "detainee on the training ship Clio", was ordered to be imprisoned at HMP Carnarvon for one month and "thereafter to be detained at a Reformatory for four years". His crime? Leaving mass before grace was sung. The other was Charles Underwood, aged 14 years, also a detainee on the Clio, who was found guilty of unspecified disobedience and imprisoned in the same gaol for 14 days' hard labour, then, like his shipmate, sent to a Reformatory for four years. I also found that there exists a PhD dissertation on 'The Clio', lodged at University College Bangor Library, plus other records at the Denbighshire and Anglesey Records Offices, The Welcome Trust and the National Archives, Kew. I plan to visit some of these archives in August if I can.

HMS Clio and old fires

My maternal great-grandfather, Edward James Bray, was born in 1853 in North Wales. I knew him only from this photograph, taken in the backyard of Elba Cottage, Gowerton, in 1926; from family accounts of how he came to live with his middle son, Manny, in South Wales when he retired; and from the crow's nest he built as a lookout over the Great Western Railway that bordered the house, which we loved to clamber onto a quarter of a century later. He had been master of what we were always told was a "correction ship" moored near Bangor in the Menai Straits and continued to sport his captain's hat at the requisite jaunty angle in retirement. Predictably, in view of his white hair and beard, he was nicknamed Father Christmas by local children, but he may not have always been regarded with such affection by youngsters in his care, though my mother certainly adored him.

Last night for the first time I found on the internet a little more about The Clio and two photographs of the vessel - the first I've ever seen. Built in Sheerness in 1858 when my great grandfather was just a toddler, HMS Clio served as a training ship from 1877 until she was scrapped in 1920, which was probably around the time that Edward Bray retired. Although popularly known as a reformatory or prison boat for young offenders, a kind of floating Feltham of its day, officially the Clio was designated under the Industrial Schools Act of 1866 as an industrial training ship where homeless and destitute boys from North Wales, Chester and the border counties were prepared for a career at sea in the mercantile marine service. The Prosiect Menai website suggests that many were compelled to do so, however, and were in effect prisoners on the ship, that discipline was harsh and beatings and bullying rife - so much so that local parents continued to threaten the ship as punishment long after its demise. This punitive regime is hard to marry against the avuncular figure in the sepia photograph, who would have been instrumental to the ethos on board his vessel. I will research further when I get a chance to find out more about life on these reform boats.

This photo of HMS Clio is from http://www.prosiectmenai.co.uk/hmsclio.php

It was a beautiful wooden sailing ship, a Corvette or small warship with 22 guns and 200 feet long.

Today I received an email from Mark Finn whose grandfather, Cornelius Philip Finn, a distinguished chemist and amateur photographer, photographed the Clio in 1903 moored opposite Bangor pier. My great-grandfather might even have been on board at the time. The second photo shows the Clio moored in the foreground on the Anglesey side of the Straits with Bangor Pier behind. An archive of Finn's photographs are published on his commemorative website:

http://www.cpfinn.com/

http://www.cpfinn.com/image_display.php?image_no=4&image_size=800

This image recreates where I think the mooring must have been using a Google satellite view.

There's also a snippet about the Clio on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Clio_(1858)

My illustration, from an oral history of the Elba steelworks, which I collated some years ago as part of a site specific series of artwork called Old Fires, exhibited at Congress House, the TUC headquarters in Central London, montages the backyard photo with one of me taken at almost the same spot, the chimneystacks of the Elba steelworks between which and the railway Elba Cottage was sandwiched, a group of anonymous foundry men and lines from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets.

Easter Sunday funfair, Finsbury Park

Signs of spring

... and an upturn in the housing market?