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| ISBN-13: | 9781909844308 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Parthian Books |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2015 |
| Sold by: | INDEPENDENT PUB GROUP - EPUB - EBKS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 300 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Brenda Chamberlain
Artist and Writer
By Jill Piercy
Parthian
Copyright © 2013 Jill PiercyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-909844-30-8
CHAPTER 1
The Anchorage 1912-29
On 17 March 1912, Brenda Irene Chamberlain was born in Bangor in the old county of Caernarvonshire (now part of Gwynedd) in north Wales. For centuries, Bangor had been a fairly quiet cathedral city. It remained a comparatively insular community until the end of the eighteenth century, when tours became popular with the English gentry and the wars with France precluded Continental travel. In the nineteenth century Thomas Telford's improved road system along the north Wales coast from London to Holyhead was a major factor in opening up the area. There was a certain amount of industrial growth locally, especially in the commercial quarrying of slate from the hills south of Bangor, and in 1826, the opening of the Menai Suspension Bridge designed by Telford and the subsequent railway link in 1848 from Chester through Bangor to Holyhead allowed much easier access to the region, and much easier communication within it.
Apart from improving the transport of commercial goods to, from and within the area, the railway brought more visitors and tourists to the north Wales coast and the mountains of Snowdonia. Bangor began to gain a reputation as a holiday resort and the richer classes came to spend their summer months by the sea. New hotels were built to encourage them to stay and the newly formed Municipal Borough Council made the decision to construct a pier at Garth Point, sea-water baths and bathing huts, and also to improve the landing facilities at Garth to accommodate the passenger steamers which journeyed along the north Wales coast.
As well as developing its potential as a holiday resort, Bangor was establishing itself as a centre for education as it had been from the Middle Ages onwards. In 1862 Bangor Normal College was set up to train teachers and in 1884 a University College was established. By 1911, specially designed hostels were opened in the Upper Bangor area to house the growing number of students.
Brenda Chamberlain's younger brother, Neville, once described the city of Bangor as 'a snobby place|–|either you were college or you weren't.' The Chamberlains weren't. It was the railway that had brought Brenda and Neville Chamberlain's grandfather, Caesar Corlett Cooil to the area. He was a Permanent Way Inspector on the railways and had moved to Bangor from Liverpool when his daughter, Elsie, was five years old. Elsie was sent to Glanadda School, then on to Cae Top School and Cynffig Davies School in Menai Bridge. She later gained her teaching certificate at the Pupil Teachers' Centre and taught at Vaynol and Cae Top primary schools. Her father became a member of Bangor Borough Council and Elsie began to take a lively interest in his work with the Council. As a teenager, her ambition was to see her father become Mayor of the city. Sadly this was not to be, as he retired from the council after ten years' service in 1919, shortly after his two sons, Captain C.A. Cooil, a graduate of the University College in Bangor, and Jack, who was in the South Wales Borderers, both tragically died in the Great War.
Although her father's involvement in local government ceased, Elsie's interest grew and from the age of sixteen she began to help with various groups in Bangor. One of the greatest encouragements she had was from Mrs Price-White of a prominent family in Bangor, who told her, 'You have the ability to do public work and it is your duty to serve the citizens of Bangor'. Elsie took this advice to heart and began to help with more committees and groups in the town, becoming a Sunday school teacher and a member of the choir at St. David's church.
In 1910 she married Francis Thomas Chamberlain at St. David's Church, Bangor. He had been born at Hill Ridware near Lichfield on 7 June 1877, one of two sons. His father, Thomas, was a native of that area while his mother, Elizabeth, came from Ireland. Both Francis and his older brother, Richard, were proficient carpenters and experts in wood turning. During the early years of his marriage to Elsie Cooil, Francis spent a lot of time travelling abroad|–|to South Africa, the United States and Canada, arranging the import of wood to Britain. By all accounts, Francis Chamberlain was a quiet, intelligent man who enjoyed travelling and a challenging occupation.
The Chamberlains were living in Caernarvon Road, when, after two years of marriage, Brenda was born. Four years later, in 1916, their son Caesar Neville was born. Francis Chamberlain was in the United States when his son was born and on his return he decided to find work which would be based closer to home. He was encouraged by his father-in-law to work for the railways and in fact both Francis and his brother, Richard, became engineers, Richard at Crewe and Francis at Bangor. Although his work was now in Britain, Francis Chamberlain's job still took him away from home a great deal and the dominant force in the children's early life was their mother. As the children grew up they became 'railway children', joining their father on occasional Sundays for examination runs, special journeys and mysterious expeditions to faraway places. But for Brenda, trains were not really necessary; she had found a much easier way to travel|–|in her imagination. Africa was at the bottom of the garden, in a smelly water tank floating with scum. She boasted to her younger brother and
... lied and lied, about the heat, crocodiles, swamps. Alligators turned in strong smooth waters. My brother was sick with envy and admiration.
At an early age, Brenda had discovered how much she enjoyed an audience. Perhaps this trait was inherited from her mother who had become very proficient as a public speaker. As the children grew up, Elsie Chamberlain became more involved with the WVS and was appointed vice-chairman for Wales of the women's section of the British Legion, Secretary of the Citizens Advice Bureau, and also sat on numerous committees. She was developing into a woman of considerable power and energy in Bangor. She was strong and well-built, with a formidable though friendly nature. Although her husband, Francis, was quieter and more reserved, he too was a strong character and had great enthusiasm for his work and his interests in gardening and carpentry. He kept bees in the garden and from the honey Elsie made mead. It was a secure and happy childhood for Brenda and Neville. The stone and brick house in Caernarvon Road where they lived was the end of a terrace and the rear garden backed onto a bracken-covered hillside. As well as bees, they kept rabbits in the garden and they provided endless amusement for the children. Dolls held a transient interest for the young Brenda and soon the rabbits were dressed in the dolls' clothes and taken for walks in the dolls' pram. It was in the garden that Brenda first discovered her enjoyment of drawing. She used fragments of stone and chalk to scratch patterns on the slate fence which enclosed their garden, revelling in the different textures and shapes that she could create. Her mother encouraged her interest as she herself enjoyed drawing and was adept at embroidery and tapestry. Another of the children's favourite occupations was to play with a toy theatre and they looked forward to the summer holidays when they could go and see plays by Shakespeare at the Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. Their mother's sister, Margaret, lived in the town and the children usually spent a few weeks with her in the summer holidays.
Brenda's first school was, she later wrote
kindergarten under the mothering eye of Bangor University College, where there was freedom to think, and try out one's capacities ... From those days, I remember no restraints at all, only encouragement to dress up, dance (it was the time of Rhythmic Movements), paint pictures on a real easel, write essays and poems.
Brenda enjoyed these activities so much so that by the age of six she had decided to be a painter and writer when she grew up.
She was a lively, likeable child with a vivid imagination and loved to dream of faraway lands and people. Even as a child she desperately wanted to be recognised as an individual and she sought attention not by her academic achievements but by her appearance. She took to wearing her long hair with a band around the forehead|–|an unusual style amongst little girls in the early 1920s. When asked by her school friend, Jean Jones, why she wore it that way, Brenda said that she liked to imagine herself to be a Norwegian princess. Out of doors she begged her father to let her wear his old trilby which she pulled down over her ears. She loved dressing up and enjoyed the extra attention she received when she wore something just a little unusual. But in fact it was her size that really distinguished Brenda easily from her friends. She was not growing as fast as her contemporaries and sometimes this had its drawbacks, as she herself recalled:
There was a dangerous see-saw in the garden [at the school]. I was so much smaller and lighter than my friends that it was inevitable that I should be thrown from this. My arm was broken, and my comrades carried me indoors in an interesting faint. With a sense of high drama they did not speak but presented my body to a mistress while black and white spots swam before my eyes on a fading world.
When Brenda moved on to what she referred to as Miss Mason's School for girls (the local grammar school for girls), she found the discipline much firmer and her idiosyncratic taste in hairstyle and dress was not tolerated.
I suffered as a madchen [sic] in uniform: drill, prayers, 'shirts must be buttoned to the neck on all occasions', prayers, drill. I hated my shiny gym slip, the seat rubbed mirror-smooth from impatient shuffling. I suffered the indignity of being the most unteachable pupil in mathematics the school had ever known. Latin was an agony, since I longed in vain to be able to read Virgil with ease. Eventually the headmistress capitulated, allowing me to have my own timetable for the last year, English Literature, Art, French, English Language, Latin. The rest of my time was spent in the school library, where I was at peace with books, a thick carpet, and silence.
Despite her application to her work and the help and coaching of her three schoolgirl friends, Jean Jones, Joy Witton Davies and Mary Grierson, Brenda passed only two subjects, Art and English, in the School Leaving Certificate exams.
These four girls were drawn together initially by their interest in fell-walking and they explored the local mountains on Saturdays and in the school holidays. When she was fifteen, Brenda was invited to join Jean, Joy and Mary in their magazine venture Triod, which they had begun eight months earlier in April 1927. Jean Jones was the initiator of the magazine. She used to help her father, E.H. Jones, file contributions for The Welsh Outlook which he edited, and was inspired to try her own hand as editor of a schoolgirl magazine. The entries were handwritten in covered exercise books and each girl took a turn to edit the magazine and copy out the articles in a neat hand. Amongst the fashion notes, gardening and household hints, puzzle pages, 'Personals', 'Funny paragraphs' and 'Etiquette' there was scope for a serial called 'The Modern Girl', for poems, short stories and drawings. In the third number of Triod (Christmas, 1927) the editorial announced:
The Trefoyle has decided to admit another member into its magazine, by name, Brenda Chamberlain. This has of course upset the name of our magazine which is now called The Tetralogue. The contributions to this number of the old Triod, are most of them very good, and next number we hope to have more illustrations than ever, and we are much obliged to our new member for her excellent drawings.
In a later section of this issue Brenda was described as 'a budding Royal Academist'. She contributed to the regular features, wrote poems and short stories and illustrated the magazines with coloured line drawings. The authors chose to be identified not by names but by initials: Jean was known as R.H.J.K., Joy as R.L.D., Mary as F.A. and Brenda as A.S.M.J. which stood for Anglo-Saxon-Mary-Jane, for no particular reason except that she liked the way it ran off the tongue.
In Tetralogue 3, Brenda wrote a poem called 'The Old Witch in the Woods' and an illustrated story called 'The Feast of Wolves'. Her illustrations were well drawn and coloured with fine detail while her writing showed a youthful interest in myths and fairy stories, and although she was three years older than her fellow contributors, there was no obvious difference in maturity in her work at this stage. Brenda was editor of the fourth number of Tetralogue, written early in 1928, and again she contributed a poem and some prose. 'The Birth of Song' was a short story about a maiden singing in response to seeing the Sun-god, and her poem, 'The Spirit of Shakespeare' reflected on his presence in the town of Stratford 'where', wrote Brenda, 'I love to read his plays/In the faint atmosphere of other days'.
The holidays which Brenda and her brother spent in Stratford-upon-Avon with their aunt and uncle were always very special and, as they grew up, they both developed a love of Shakespeare's work. In a later notebook Brenda recalled one of their visits:
Idyllic afternoons in the backwaters among angry swans and inept punters on the Avon. My aunt walked up and down the punt fore-deck, in a cool lime-green silk and shady straw hat and pipe-clayed plimsoles [sic]. She dropped her pole in at exactly the right angle so as not to get water down her sleeve, so as not to over-run the pole: while we children sat paddling the turgid river, lost half in a haze of Midsummer Night's Dream, half in anticipation of the picnic hamper to be opened on the bank beside a quiet pool of bulrushes and water hens. Home-made scones with home-made butter, cucumber sandwiches, the mouldy smell of the cushions. Brown, thin, damp triangular sandwiches. Anticipation of tennis in the evening on the side of the lawn, the humpy paddock, turkeys, over-emotional dogs.
In her schoolgirl poem in Tetralogue 4, Brenda had tried to recapture this dreamlike feeling as she wrote about Shakespeare:
He haunts the shady lanes of Warwickshire
For that is where his spirit is most clear.
He loved these shady paths and stately trees
Waving their leafy branches in the breeze.
In Tetralogue 6 she wrote a poem, 'Day's End' and a lively essay, 'Modern Art and its Reception' which advocated a fresh approach and an open mind when viewing Modern Art:
When we study a picture of the Modern School we must not only look at the object which the artist has painted, but also attempt to understand what he wishes to express.
It is a well-presented argument which is much more mature and sophisticated than any of her earlier contributions to the magazine. She concludes the article with the statement:
I suppose the Modern Artists will continue to be persecuted until many people with old-fashioned ideas cease to consider that everything old is good and everything new is bad.
This sixth and last of the Tetralogue magazines was completed in the summer holidays of 1928. There is no further written account of the girls' activities until January 1930 when Mary Grierson decided to keep a record of their walks and explorations. Joy, Jean, Mary and Brenda still spent a lot of their time together at weekends and, in the holidays, exploring the local beauty spots. Brenda had still not grown very much and remained much smaller than her younger friends. As Jean Jones (later Jean Ware) recalled,
In our teens, I fear we all patronised her somewhat and teased her quite a lot, though as one would tease a little sister. She always seemed younger than us although she was the oldest of the group that went mountain climbing. Her nickname was 'Piglet', as to us she resembled that character in Winnie the Pooh. She had very short legs in relation to her long torso and had almost to run to keep up with the rest of us when walking as we were long-legged, but she was a splendid climber.
Mary entitled her notebook 'The Diary of Tramps', and her first entry, on Friday, 10 January 1930 briefly described a short bicycle ride that Mary had taken with her friend, Marie Rowlands. On Saturday, 1 February, the first long walk was recorded, when Jean, Joy, Brenda and Mary went up the Nant Ffrancon Pass. The diary describes twenty walks undertaken between January and July of that year. The walks took the girls deep into Snowdonia and north onto the island of Anglesey. Sometimes choosing a combination of walking and travelling by bus or bicycle, they would travel up to thirty miles a day. Their treks were ambitious, often climbing up to the mountain peaks, and always seemed to incorporate the treat of a picnic lunch. Rain, ice or windy weather did not seem to deter them and Mary's diary gives a delightful account of the girls' love for Snowdonia.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Brenda Chamberlain by Jill Piercy. Copyright © 2013 Jill Piercy. Excerpted by permission of Parthian.
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Table of Contents
Contents
1. Title Page,2. Preface,
3. Introduction,
4. 1. The Anchorage 1912-29,
5. 2. Art and Art 1930-34,
6. The House on the Mountain, T?'r Mynydd 1935-38,
7. 4. The Caseg Press 1939-44,
8. 5. Across Deep Water 1944-47,
9. 6. The Prolific Years 1947-52,
10. 7. The German Waves and the Green Heart 1952-58,
11. 8. The Eye of the Sea 1959-62,
12. 9. The Sound of the Ocean Follows Me 1963-64,
13. 10. This Island Burns Me 1964-65,
14. 11. Love in a Private Garden 1965-67,
15. 12. The Tide Turns 1967-68,
16. 13. Alone she faces darkness 1968-69,
17. 14. Waiting for the Wingbeat 1970-71,
18. Select Bibliography,
19. Acknowledgements,
20. Illustrations,
21. Copyright,