Industrial Sheffield at Kelham Island

The city of Sheffield had a great industrial economy based around steel, heavy engineering, cutlery and tool making that declined in the post-war era due to increased competition from Europe and Japan - it all but expired in the 1980s as Thatcher-led deindustrialisation took effect.  Free market fanatics inspired and applauded the project, taking inordinate pride in following up with a policy of having no economic planning of any sort over the following decades. The local authority-run, free admission museum at Kelham Island does an excellent job explaining and illustrating the scale of steel and engineering enterprise in the days when it was known internationally as “Steel City”.

The museum entrance is dramatically marked by the towering presence of the UK's last working Bessemer Converter used by British Steel until 1974. Invented in 1856 by Henry Bessemer for the conversion of iron into steel at a substantially lower price than hitherto. The first working examples were installed at Bessemer’s works in Sheffield in 1858. At the centre of the museum is the imposing River Don Engine - built at the John Brown Atlas Works (Sheffield Brightside) in 1904, a 3-cylinder 12,000hp steam engine designed to power the process  of armour plating by rolling steel backward and forwards in rapid succession. Hence the ability to reverse the driving wheel in an instant, which is demonstrated in a two minute gas-powered firing twice a day. It remained in use into the 1970s at British Steel River Don works before removal to the museum site in 1978. Described as the most powerful steam engine operational in Europe and still an awe-inspiring sound and motion experience! Watch the brief video at the end of the post to get a flavour.

Other moving exhibits include an impressive Crossley Gas Engine built in 1915, once employed in a rolling mill in Penistone - now powered by electricity for demonstration purpose. Crossley Brothers was formed in Manchester in 1867, building pumps and presses. Their most successful development was  building 4 cylinder gas engines. Enemies of the demon drink, they steadfastly refused to do business with breweries. In the upper gallery there’s a display of locally built Sheffield-Simplex cars - this business was active from 1907 to 1920.  Despite a reputation for innovation and experimentation, the company never broke through to the mass market and left little trace apart from these examples.  On the ground floor is a recreation of a Victorian street occupied by the premises of master cutlers at least one of whom is still working. The cutlery trade is represented by period examples of lavish displays of bladed items, cutlery and hand tools.

Stored alongside the museum car park is a 1951 built Diesel Electric 0-4-0 shunting locomotive designed for internal use at the Templeborough Steel Works in Rotherham. Constructed at the Sheffield works of the Yorkshire Engine Co. It has languished here since at least 2005 and obviously deserves a better fate but most local authority museums lack the resources to restore and display items like this. Sheffield native and Reform Party supporter, Mr. Christopher Harborne found £5 million pounds to slip into Nigel Farage's already well stuffed pocket. It will never happen but would be good if he could find some spare cash to help out the museum service in his old home town. It’s impressive that the city museum service still occupies a key position in cultural life in a time when resources have never been under greater pressure.

 

“This is not a museum …

… it’s a conservation and storage facility.” The first words of our guide on a tour of the Hawking Building at the Science and Innovation Park at the former RAF Wroughton airfield. The Hawking Building is a vast purpose-built warehouse box that, along with a number of old aircraft hangars, holds the reserve collection of the Science Museum. Over 300,000 objects, large and small have been moved in from their old home in Earl’s Court, most of which are stored on pallets or open shelving in carefully controlled temperature and humidity settings.  The tour is focused on “the grid”, a large open space on the ground floor mainly occupied by a spectacular display of road vehicles from bicycles and milk floats to trucks and buses.  Collecting policy is not to collect an example of every known vehicle but to look for items that represent a technological step change or have a strong association with an individual of interest or an important historical event.

Conservation is aimed at the preservation of exhibits in the condition when acquired. Making them safe is a priority, removing hazardous materials - where vehicles are concerned this involves extracting batteries, draining oil and petrol, and degreasing components to protect against further deterioration. Restoration is never undertaken, partly because of the frequently inordinate expense, partly because, in many cases, restored examples already exist thanks to individual and group efforts and not least, the problem of finding agreement on the chronological point in the long life of the object to which it should be returned.

In the first image we see the balloon gondola used by Swiss physicist, Auguste Piccard on his altitude record-breaking ascent of 16,201 m (53,153 ft) using a hydrogen balloon becoming the first human to enter the upper atmosphere.  This gondola was presented to the Science Museum in 1935. In a triumph of adaptive re-use, Piccard went on to convert his gondola into a vehicle for deep sea exploration.

There’s a group of vintage cars from the first decade of the last century, an era of experimentation with three forms of motive power - steam, electricity and petrol - battling for supremacy. Steam power was the first to be eliminated despite surviving just into the 1950s for heavy haulage.  Electricity foundered quickly due the weight of the batteries although it clung on in the form of lightweight delivery vehicles where lower speeds were more acceptable. The race was easily won by petrol and diesel, greatly assisted by the predatory instincts of the American oil barons of the period. Lithium battery technology has brought the electric vehicle back into contention although it remains locked in mortal combat with the descendants of the oil baronetcy and their political enablers.

 

At the Imperial War Museum

These are some highlights from a recent visit to the upper decks of the Imperial War Museum to see the recently opened Blavatnik Galleries.  This has enabled the museum to display a more complete survey of their visual arts collection to include film and photography alongside paintings.  A decent selection of the museum’s major paintings was supported by a large group of lesser known pictures from the hidden depths of what is a vast collection of works.  It’s always fascinating to see what emerges from a museum store after a deep curatorial dive and many unjustly neglected paintings (often by female artists) have been rescued from oblivion.

Percy Wyndham Lewis,   A Battery Shelled  (1919)

Lewis had a remarkably inventive visual imagination - his Cubist-inspired bio-mechanical figures were the perfect combatants in a war that was increasingly an inhumane  technological struggle for supremacy.  On the left a stylised trio of officers, two seem lost in thought, only one observes the incoming fire and the frantic efforts of the troops in a shattered landscape on the ground.  Crates of unused shells look terrifyingly vulnerable to enemy fire.

Paul Nash,   The Menin Road  (1919)

Nash served as an officer in this part of the Western Front in early 1917, later that year he returned as a War Artist and made the sketches and studies that would form the basis of this painting completed in London in 1919.  His experiences were condensed into this tormented landscape, blown apart by the exchange of explosive forces.  For an artist whose sensibility was largely formed by a reverence for the natural world, this sight was the ultimate affront. Displaced concrete defences and curls of corrugated iron are scattered on the cratered woodland floor, to which a handful of splintered tree stumps remain anchored.  All under a turbulent sky pierced by searchlight beams, illuminating the scene in a sickly, unnatural glare.

Anna Airy,   Shell Forge, Hackney Marshes  (1918)

With so many male artists overseas, female painters landed some major commissions recording the Home Front.  Anna Airy, an established Slade-trained realist painter in her mid-thirties spent a year travelling the country painting the spectacle of heavy industry in the service of the war effort - manufacturing munitions, assembling aircraft and extracting domestic gas from coking coal.  Her command of perspective and ability to build a coherent composition in challenging environments were every bit as effective as similar works by the much more celebrated Terence Cuneo.

Douglas Fox-Pitt,   Indian Army Injured in Hospital in Dome, Brighton  (1918)

Fox-Pitt was a son of the founder of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, blessed with competent drawing skills he drifted into the fringes of London’s art world, linking with the painters of the Camden Town Group. In this painting he records a curious wartime episode when the dome of the Brighton Pavilion was commandeered as a hospital for the treatment of Indian and Asian troops injured on the Western Front. It’s a boldly coloured and attractively naive composition - an elevated viewpoint enhances the artist’s pattern making impulse.

John Wood,   ARP in Jamaica  (1941)

Five female nurses of the Order of St John in training in Jamaica. Commissioned as part of the scheme for "War Pictures by Native-born Colonial artists", 1941

Ethel Gabain,   Bunyan-Stannard First Aid Envelope for Burns Victims  (1943)

Sequential four part image showing different aircrew at work with protective silk envelopes shielding their injured hands.  A varied selection of her portraiture (mostly theatrical subjects) and workplace studies from the war can be seen here.

John Singer Sargent,  Gassed (1919)

Sargent’s monumental picture of the victims of mustard gas dominates the space.  Blindfolded and carrying their weapons they process across the picture plain with hands resting on the shoulder of the man in front. Another line of injured men sprawl in the foreground.  In August 1918 Sargent was witness to just such a scene on a day when hundreds of injured men were led from the trenches for treatment behind the lines.  The epic scale and the cinematic presentation make a powerful statement about the random cruelties of armed conflict.

 

The Fabric of Democracy: Propaganda Textiles

An intriguing exhibition at the Fashion and Textile Museum in Bermondsey provides a snapshot of the role of the visual arts in time of conflict.  When national survival is at stake everything must make a contribution to the war effort. Collective values come into play as even the most socially exclusive artists and designers strive to make a difference - nobody wants to be accused of lacking in patriotism.  There’s a change of tone from hauteur to something more demotic - extravagance is no longer acceptable while raising public morale is a new priority.  Working under this new set of constraints the fashion industry falls back upon formal simplicity, classic elegance and a colour palette that’s light, bright and uplifting. Textile designers responded with fabric prints devised around patriotic messages and texts displayed in jaunty settings.  Other nations were involved including a strong collection of kimono prints from Japan - more bellicose in their imagery but more refined in their visual language.

 

Paintings from Penlee House Museum, Penzance

We begin with a flatly painted image of a pint of beer in a straight glass resting on an otherwise empty table in the grip of a sturdy hand - it’s a factual exercise and nothing more.  Attached to the hand is Robert Morson Hughes, a fellow artist and associate of the painter Harold Knight - the year is 1915, the First World War is in progress and Knight, a conscientious objector, is about to be put to work as a farm labourer.  The subject, Hughes, was a Lamorna based painter of mainly topographical subjects. Here he has the air of a country landowner in a slightly oversized suit, from beneath the downturned brim of his hat he stares with suspicion out of the painting. Knight has conveyed strength of character and a sense of presence in a stolid, unemphatic manner.

Harold Knight (1873-1953), Portrait of Robert Morson Hughes (c 1915)

Robert Morson Hughes (1873-1953), Carn Boscawen (1928?)

Visits to local museums are always a pleasure and Penlee House Museum is a fine example that has the dual function of providing a lively overview of local history with a comprehensive collection of interesting paintings by locally based artists with historically national reputations.  The core of the collection is made up of painters active in the 19th. and early 20th. century, working in the Penzance - Newlyn region of Cornwall.  Aesthetically conservative, averse to experimentation and inheritors of a tradition of realism that goes back to Courbet (as diluted by Bastien-Lepage), these painters built up an impressive visual archive of the minutiae of Victorian and Edwardian daily life in West Cornwall alongside a comprehensive record of the abundant varied landscape and coastal scenery in the county. Many had worked in the art colonies of Brittany and become committed to painting en plein-air but Impressionism remained a step too far.

Laura Knight (1877-1970),  My Lady of the Rocks  ND

Although this body of work has come to be regarded as an essential component of the Cornish cultural identity it’s notable that many aspects of that identity were, for the most part, studiously ignored.  While the fishing industry was much celebrated for its pictorial values, the world of mining, heavy engineering and new technologies got little or no attention - the only exceptions being quarrying, a reliably popular landscape subject and the railways that became a regular source of income for Stanhope Forbes.  All this despite Cornwall having a strong claim to being the global birthplace of steam power. The Celtic heritage that separated Cornwall from the Anglo-Saxon territory east of the Tamar likewise went unremarked along with the great Neolithic assemblages of menhirs and stone circles, at least until the 1940s when Ithell Colquhoun turned up in Lamorna.  Most of these painters were drawn to Cornwall from elsewhere in the country and many formed strong personal links with the indigenous community, their interests didn’t encompass the profound sense of Cornish exceptionalism held by the local intelligentsia. 

Stanhope Forbes (1857-1947), Abbey Slip (1921)

Laura Knight  (1877-1970), Spring (1916)

This is not to undervalue the contribution that these artists have made to the popular image of Cornwall as a special place.  Their brushes may have been preoccupied with surface values but by virtue of sheer representational brilliance their work acquired lasting value.  Laura Knight and Stanhope Forbes stand apart in the quality and consistency of their work though Knight’s paintings have a bravura and vitality that often make Forbes look pedestrian by comparison. By the time Laura and Harold Knight moved to Newlyn in 1907, Forbes was well established as the leader of the Newlyn painters where he’d been active since 1884.  The Knights settled in Lamorna but were soon accepted into Forbes’s circle.  While Harold’s taciturn nature caused him to hold back, Laura played a full and active part in the social life of the artistic community.  For his part, Forbes was especially impressed by Laura’s paintings.  Most Newlyn painters stayed loyal to their locality a few shuttled back and forth to St. Ives where new ideas were more readily accepted.  Forbes reacted with disproportionate hostility when Whistler and Sickert spent time in St. Ives. This went both ways - Sickert especially loathed the paintings of Newlyn’s Frank Bramley whose A Hopeless Dawn was rapturously received by an audience hungry for pathos at the Royal Academy (RA) in 1888.

Norman Garstin  (1847-1926),  The Rain it Raineth Every Day (1889) 

Most of the Newlyners were reluctant to stray far from their patch - an exception was Irish born Norman Garstin whose global wanderings set him apart. His travels took him to Africa, North America and all over Europe and inspired him to lead groups of students on sketching trips to continental art centres.  In 1889 his major painting of a rainswept Penzance seafront (The Rain It Raineth Every Day), was rejected by the RA for being ‘too French’ with its subtle tonal observations.  Further humiliation lay in wait - when Garstin later presented the painting to Penzance Town Council it was hidden away for fear it would deter visitors.  Garstin’s vindication may have been a long time coming but today’s visitors have voted it their favourite painting in the museum.  A future post will look at how  local history is served in the museum 

Samuel ‘Lamorna’ Birch  (1869-1955),  The Quiet of our Valley (1940)

Samuel ‘Lamorna’ Birch  (1869-1955),  trio of landscapes, Lamorna Valley in Summer (right)

Frank Gascoigne Heath  (1873-1938),  A Game of Cut-throat Euchre  (1909)

Frank Gascoigne Heath  (1873-1938),  The Little Maid (1923)

Charles Simpson  (1885-1971),  Dying Light, Carn Barges  ND

Stanley Gardiner (1888-1952),  The Old Quay, Lamorna (Upper), Samuel ‘Lamorna’ Birch (1869-1955), Lamorna Cove (Lower)

Harold Harvey (1874-1941), Laura and Paul Jewill Hill  (1915)

Frank Bramley (1857-1915),  Eyes and No Eyes (1887)