In Memoriam, Berkhamsted and others.....

Burp Hampster

[Before I proceed I should explain that "Burp Hamster" was the name of the place our daughters decided their Grannie and Grandad lived - aka Berkhamsted]

At lunch I am sitting next to someone who is supposed to be dead..... (there is a lot of it about, Ed).  This person has clearly been Mark Twained (The report of my death was an exaggeration).

The curious thing is that I was in Berkhamsted to pay my respects to a dead man - but it wasn't this one. Suffice it to say that my companion was something of a misprint (in The Old Berkhamstedian magazine.....)

The real object of the obsequies actually died last year, and I appended a brief tribute to him on my post Snettisham Today (https://www.richardpgibbs.org/2023/06/snettisham-today.html) but this was a day for a formal memorial to Jonty Driver, former Headmaster of Berkhamsted School, poet, activist, and family friend.

I last saw Jonty at a reading he gave in Wells-next-the-sea, in June 2021 (was it really that long ago already?) but we had kept in touch.

Anyway, with the greatest respect to Jonty, and his family, and to Berkhamsted School, this is not (quite) about them.  

Some might say that I grew up in Berkhamsted (for more on which town, please see: https://www.richardpgibbs.org/2013/05/berkhamsted-herts.html) though to be exact, I was a boy in Berkhamsted (I was a lad in Lancaster, a romantic in Rome, ageing in Ascot, a has-been in Harpenden and now getting senile in Snettisham - but take your pick). 

My father had also been a boy in Berkhamsted, but then returned here as a father and a much admired man, (but that is another story).

So, though I have been back many a time over the years, I found myself thinking about our time here, and sifting the way things change, or not. After the celebrations of Jonty's great life, and the pleasantries of meeting other dead people, I wander down to cross the Bulbourne, the chalk stream that carved this valley through the Chilterns.

It flows, that's still true, but it shows neglect.  I remember walking down the stream bed from Northchurch to Berko in my wellingtons, past the watercress beds and into the town, without worrying about the collection of dog shit.....  Perhaps there weren't as many dogs then?

On the Moor, which is the canal basin hard by the railway station, I meet a charming couple who have taken to live on the waterways.  How nice to travel slow and easy, tranquil in the security that your home will always be with you while the world passes by inconsequentially.  I am taken by the idea, but realise that it takes two to manage the locks, and so shelve that thought.....

I carry on along the canal side, sniffing that pervasive smell of stale water, dead fish and puddled mud, to reach The Rising Sun, where, with a pint of mild, I watch Ireland beat Scotland in a room I first frequented sixty years ago (yes I was under age, but scoring darts improved my mental arithmetic no end!)

When I leave it is already dark.  I don't really want to go, but I know no one and the match is over and my pint is drunk.....

So I meander down the High Street, dodging the motorised prams and people in unisex one-piece tailor-made personalised jogging suits, past my bank (The National Provincial), which was once the school attended by the girl who would become Winston Churchill's wife, and which is now a restaurant (the bank moved across the street behind the bus stop, but even the NatWest is now gone....)

Almost everywhere is now an eatery.  You might think that no one knows how to cook at home these days. Or you might think that the populace is so well off they can all afford to dine out every night (I guess they would once have had servants? Maybe they still do, though I guess even they may have a night off?)  I don't know, but once upon a time the Gas Showroom was a gas showroom (not a restaurant) and the Post Office was a Post Office (not an M & S Foodhall)

But at least some things don't change.  Woods is still a garden centre, and, appropriately for today, Malcolm, Jones and Metcalfe are still dealing with our demises from the same address.  We did business with them when my parents needed their services, but they may not remember that late one Saturday evening over sixty years ago someone rang their front door bell and ran away.  

Joe and I are still ashamed, having run to hide at the bottom of Park View Road.  

I am particularly ashamed that we were caught.....

Just up the next hill, Boxwell Road, I feel a little weird photographing the facade of Number 2, but this is the house where my dad attended Mr and Mrs Popple's infant school almost a hundred years ago, and it is the address we all lived at some forty years later. 

Hey!  Memories.  It is a questionable benefit being able to recall all the crimps and creases of a misspent life.  Time to call time?

At the bottom of the road I step into The Lamb, wishing to wash away the lingering taste of fish and chips that I hungered for earlier.

Here I meet Gordon Lee, a fellow from Hemel Hempstead, a few years older than me.  His card introduces him as an 'All round good guy,' a 'Roving FF Reporter,' and a 'Soldier of Fortune.'  He has been in town today to watch football , but is intending to return to Papua New Guinea where he feels more at home (I understand).

I feel a presence, a drift of energy.  It is as if Jonty Driver is catching my eye.  I sense that I should turn in, and thank my new friend for his offer of another drink.  I could go the distance, but perhaps another day.  I am too full of memories, of unclear thoughts. It seems that perhaps I have done with Berkhamsted.  My mother and father are dust on the hill:

I am becoming bleary, no longer sure of anything:

I enjoyed the company of Ron Hall at lunch, despite the announcement that he had recently passed away.  I enjoyed meeting my friends with their canal boat, though I am so sorry that I cannot recall their names.  I would have spilled much beer with Gordon in The Lamb, but I have to leave the last words to Jonty:

Far gone?  Gone for good?  I abjure

All pre-knowledge, but now I know for sure.

You (the reader) don't; or do you?

I wrote this before I knew.

Endpiece

C J (Jonty) Driver

Thank you, everyone,

For everything,

Richard

Brian Bennett

A SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP

From Coombe Hill

Brian Bennett is an Old Master. At least, he is one of my old masters. For thirty years from 1957 he was Art Master (Director of Art) at Berkhamsted School, throughout which time, and beyond, he was also a great friend of my parents. Now at 88 he surely qualifies for the epithet old, but with all the veneration Old Masters deserve. 

Ivinghoe Hills, Winter 

Brian read History at Magdalen College, Oxford, but the inspiration of his English teacher at school, Peter Greenham R.A., led him to become a painter.  I paint in oils with a knife, he explains, mostly landscapes of the Chilterns, where I live, concentrating on wild flowers that grow on the chalk and on the wide panoramic views from the escarpment.  In 2001 he published A Painter's Year: 12 months in the Chilterns, which contains over 80 reproductions of his work.  He is also the author of Oil Painting with a Knife, published by Search Press, as he paints, almost exclusively with a painting knife (not a palette knife) which I modify to my own requirements….. Large and more studied work may require pencil sketches to confirm the composition, but generally I brush a few compositional marks with very dilute paint on the canvas before I begin, in earnest, with my knife.

Sowthistle and Knapweed

This knife work is clearly evident on close examination, but the overall effect is one of bright detail, sharp definition and living contrast.  His foregrounds often show the umbels of wild carrot or beaked parsley, the heads of bristly ox-tongue or knapweed, or the delicate spikes of wild orchids.  May blossom, silver birches and young beech leaves enlighten his landscapes, and distant views of church towers or farm buildings create perspective and add touches of red or white angularity. 

Ivinghoe Hills, Winter - (Detail)

The Chilterns and the Vale of Aylesbury are where he concentrates today, but his work is not limited by locality.  He has travelled throughout Europe and the British Isles, and one of my personal favourites was painted on the beach at Charmouth in 1962, showing Golden Cap.  The deft knife work captures the day, from the children paddling to the flash of gold gleaming on the peak.  A photograph could have brought home the scene, but it would have been a record of a moment, not the impression of an afternoon, with individual choice in each tiny fleck of colour and selection of detail.  

I know; I was there.  And I am still there whenever I review the picture.

Golden Cap, 62 – Private Collection

Brian has had a distinguished career as a painter.  He was elected as a Member of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters in 1973, was their President from 1987 – 1995, and was subsequently elected as a Fellow.  He was a Governor of the Federation of British Artists from 1990 – 1996 and has exhibited at The Royal Academy, the Royal Society of British Artists, the Royal Society of Marine Painters, the New English Art Club, and the National Society as well as at the Annual Exhibition of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters at the Mall Galleries in London.  In addition he held solo exhibitions for many years in Berkhamsted and now for twenty-one years he has been associated with the Hawker Gallery in Old Amersham, where his current show is on display.

Cymbelline's Mount

In 2011, Brian’s exhibition at the Hawker Gallery was inspired by the proposed High Speed 2 rail link (HS2) between London and Birmingham, which will, if it goes ahead, destroy a great swathe of the Chiltern scenery as it shaves some fifteen minutes off the journey time between the cities.  Since the government’s appalling miscalculations over the West Coast Mainline franchise it is impossible to trust their judgement over this project.  Yes, it would create jobs in construction; but that brings to mind the only thing my economics teacher ever impressed on me, which was that it would make sense to build a battleship and then immediately sink it.  Sinking a battleship in deep water, however, would not quite leave the same mark on the landscape as brutalising an entire countryside.  Yes, it might shave a few minutes off getting from outer London to outer Birmingham, but it would also shave 15 million years off our heritage.

Chiltern Landscape

Anyway, Brian’s paintings are there to celebrate and preserve the scenery in case the madness prevails, but they also demonstrate to all comers just what we would lose.  

Ashridge, Autumn

And this year’s exhibition is not, in essence, different.  Its focus is on slightly different tracts of land, but it covers the same principle, and illustrates the changing beauty of the Chilterns.  If we do not look after what we have, his paintings will become Old Masters, windows on a lost world, like Hobbema’s Avenue, or Constable’s Haywain, and if one thing is for certain, as W H Auden said, About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters…..  Brian’s paintings are a joy to behold, now, but one day they may be reminders of a certain suffering.

 Wild flowers - detail from Private Collection

As Brian explains in the brochure to his current exhibition: My underlying ambition is to paint a landscape that will convey not only my love of the Chilterns but also to create something really meaningful for the viewer.  I strongly recommend a visit so that you can see for yourselves.....

The exhibition is running until November 14th (2015) at:

The Hawker Gallery, 

The Maltings, off School Lane, 

Amersham, 

Bucks, 

HP7 0ET, 

tel: 01494 724850 

And this year is a celebration of the special relationship Brian has had for twenty-one years with Michael and Michele Hawker, who share his ideas and commitment to the local landscape.....

www.thehawkergallery.co.uk

http://www.theroi.co.uk/artist_brian_bennett.php

Brian and Margrit Bennett
Another Special Relationship

All pictures copyright; reproductions by kind permission of the Artist