c?>-m.»--~«v-~»--e-» v-;:-vm. H w William Townsend 1909-1973 William Townsend died suddenly in Canada in the summer of 1973. Besides a considerable body of painting, he left behind him a vast quantity of twiting, most ofwhich had never been seen by anyone but himself. An entry in one of his journals from the early fifties records how, while helping his parents move house, he had discovered boxes and boxes of old papers and notebooks from his childhood. Even he is astonished at their quantity and variety: illustrated descriptions of parish churches, notes on the geology of East Kent, notes on place names, on comparative philology, on Russian Grammar, on bird songs, painting—by—painting reviews of the Royal Academy Summer Show. ‘What a diligent boy I was 5’ he cxclairns. This diligent and omnivorous interest persisted remarkably, for the journal in which the discovery is recorded was part of a daily record that he‘kept with few interruptions from his school days until the end of his life. One can only wonder at the selfidiscipline and the inner pressure which took him to his desk night after night, whatever the exertions of the day, Whether in the studio, or teaching or in a full social life. Some years ago he had realised that this journal was beginning to assume an historic character. He deposited the existing volumes in the Library of University College, London with instructions that it was not to be made generally available until twenty years after his death. At the same time he asked the present writer to be responsible for a first reading and to make recommendations to Charlotte Townsend, his daughter and heir, about publication from it. This was made possible by a generous grant from the Leverhulrne Foundation. In total the journal runs to nearly fifty volumes of manuscript, mostly in hard—covered notebooks of 8 X 5 in. There must be well over two-and-a- half million words. The earliest entries tend to be a combination of boyish accounts of school life and achievement with highly detailed descriptions of things seen. His two passions are nature and architecture and in these he is evidently much encouraged by his father Lewis Townsend, a dentist and a man of letters flldflqllé, a poet and the author of a successful biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes. In much of the early writing one has the sense ofa task undertaken to gratify certain stringent parental demands. Father and eldest son, with or without the rest of the family, were inveterate walkers, birdwatchers, antiquarians, botanists, tireless at the highest reaches of sight-seeing. There were long weekend walks through the countryside. of East Kent in which not a nest goes unidentified nor a cottage undated. There were also meticulously planned holidays in Nor~ [Si Jeff? Lewis W. Townsend, 193 1 rigizz ‘»X~’ill.iam Townsend, c. I933 WILLIAM 'l'0'WNSEND mandy, Wales, Ireland, Brighton, Bath: during which, it seems, every quarter of an hour is accounted for. The first ‘volumes are almost entirely given to descriptions of places seen. The discipline of this kind of writing must have helped to shape his formidable visual memory. It is as though he can play the day over to himself like a film. The painter’s immediacy of apprehension combines with the antiquarianis sense of a layered past. And at his best his descriptive writing is distinguished not only in its clarity and intelligence but by a certain dry vividness from which marvellous images suddenly flash out, as when he recalls his first impression of Milan Cathe— dral as ‘a hillside of dead pines’, or tells himself that provincial England is ‘like a sleepy pear’. He went to the Slade in the autumn of 1926, his time there coinciding with the last years of Professor Tonks’ regime. It was here that he made the essential friendships of his life; with Claude Rogers, William Coldstream, Geoffrey Tibble, Edgar Hubert, Elinor Bellingharn~Srnith, Anthony Devas, Rodrigo Moynihan, Gabriel Lopez and many others. Two experi~ enees occur during this time which were to have a lasting effect on him. One was nearly nine months of travel abroad, first in Egypt where he was the guest of a fellow Slade student called Yousef, and almost immediately afterwards in France, Italy and Tunisia in the company of a retired naval commander who was an amateur painter. His record of these travels stands as a whole and there seemed to be no point in breaking into it in making the present selection. The second crucial experience was the death by suicide of one of his closest friends, the Colombian Gabriel Lopez. Townsend pro~ foundly admired his painting and his poetry, diametrically different from his own. He had been with him a great deal during the last months of his {9} Group at the Slade, Summer 1929. Left to right: Dev-as, Clough, Kitchener, Boxall, Shephard, Lopez, —, Scroggie, —, Hunt, Townsend, - Fancy dress dance at the Yorkshire Grey February I932. Back row: Nancy Sharp: William Coldstream, Rodrigo Moyniham far right; Claude Rogers. From: left side; Edgar Hubert, George Charlton, Caitlin Macnamara, right side; Vivien John, Geoffrey Tibble WILLIAM TOWNSEND life and his death affected him deeply. The diaries come to an abrupt stop a few days after Lopez’s death. When they start again two years later, we find him back in Canterbury, helping his father keep the accounts for his practice. Through literary friends of his father’s, particularly Eleanor Farjeon, Townsend had built up several connections with publishers and he had begun to find work illustrating books and designing jackets. He had hoped left William Townsend, ‘Canterbury’ 1945*? right William Townsend, ‘Hop Alleys’ 195 x—2. Tate Gal'1er_\' WiLLIAM TOWNSEND to be able to survive on this in London but it was never a regular living. His life in Canterbury has the qualities of an exile, broken only by oc~ casional visits to London to chase publishers, see exhibitions and keep up with his friends. These are melancholy years. He sees himself being slowly brought down by provincial life, losing contact with the people that mean most to him, unable to free himself from the demands of his father, on whom he is, in any case, dependent. He develops a passion for the ballet, blowing his savings and paying a balIetomane’s court to Danilova and Toumanova in their prime. And as the decade advances, he becomes in- creasingly drawn into left wing politics, the local Labour Party, the League of Nations Union, the W.E.A., Arms For Spain. Both the Abyssinian conflict and the Spanish Civil War are recorded almost daily, as are the Munich Crisis and the events leading to September 1939. He watches his friends somewhat at a distance, recording with intense feeling each visit and each nuance of aesthetic and political opinion. He is a witness from the wings of their first successes: Devas’ rise as a fashionable portrait painter, the short—lived and daring experiments in informal abstraction of Tibble and Moynihan, the founding of the Euston Road School by Rogers and Coldstream and their swift recldme along with Pasmore and Graham Bell in {II} William Townsend, ‘Hedley Mountain’ 1963 Hazel Strouzs WILLIAM TOWNSEND the years immediately before the war. He joins the army in 1941 and is demobilised five years later, having become a staff captain with the Army School of Education. This period is not recorded in the journals. When he picks up civilian life and returns to writing, he is married, Charlotte is born and he is a teacher at (Zamberwell School of Art, where William Johnstone was reassembling the people who had been connected with the Euston Road School before the war. From this point on his life is centred on art schools, at Camberwell and then at the Slade where he goes with Coldstream in the autumn of 1949. From 1951 onwards he makes regular visits to Canada where he also teaches. Read as a whole the journals yield an extraordinary picture of a life in both its private and its public dimensions. It is not possible yet to do com- plete justice to this picture in publication, for to do this would mean to observe a balance between the inner and the outer chronicle. Scores of people are mentioned in these pages and although I do not think that he would have minded the publication of his professional acidities, I know that he would not have wanted confidences abused nor feelings needlessly hurt. So any selection now can only give a partial impression of the scope of the journals and of their final importance - that importance stemming, as I have suggested, from their inclusiveness. The document as a whole is many things: a profoundly honest confession; an acute and sophisticated account of a professional career, with all the gossip and inside talk that implies; it is a succession of passionately detailed and feeling accounts of places and above all buildings seen; it is the critique of an intelligent and [I2] WILLIAM TOWNSEND humane man upon his times. In selecting these extracts, which amount to the merest tip of an iceberg, I have concentrated on three periods which seem to me to be of the greatest historical interest: his student years, the late thirties and the first year of the war, and the years 1946 to 195:. I have not included anything after these for a variety of reasons. Later entries tend increasingly to be about day—to—day matters at the Slade —— conversations with students, college politics, the somewhat repetitive appointments of academic life. All this is fascinating to anyone involved in this world but of limited general interest. These are also the years of his Canadian visits. He was first invited there to teach at the summer session of the Banfi" School of Fine Art. It was the first time that he had crossed the Atlantic and all his skills an observer are brought out to the full. He is learning a new landscape with its own fauna and flora, all of which have to be worked up and recorded. He is learning a new culture, new kinds of cities, new styles of reference. And of course, he is meeting scores of new people and looking at a lot of unfamiliar art. As visit follows visit he begins to under- stand Canadian life in greater depth and finally even to become a part of it. All his life he had been fascinated by the special problems posed by the relationship of English art to the Continent. Now in Canada he was to en- counter similar problems in new terms. He became something of a spokes- man for Canadian art and culture and as the journals go on from the first visit to the end, a remarkably rounded ‘picture emerges of a crucial period. But the effect stands as a whole. There seemed to be no point in extracting sections whose real interest lies in their contribution to an organic account, separate to a large extent, from his preoccupations at home. Finally, during the last few years there is a change in the nature of the entries themselves. The style becomes more elliptical, less reflective, and private and public matters are more sharply intercut. When the time is right for more inclusive publication, such changes of style will fall meaning- fully into place. I cannot see that they would here. One strand which is never dropped in the entire text is his commentary upon his own painting. Whatever else he was involved in, however rnulti— furious his interests, the central concern was always his studio. And. yet, like so many artists in this country, there is something tentative in his relationship to it. Perhaps in the end, too much time was spent thinking about it at a distance from a productive nziliezz, his time broken by insecurity, war, too much reaching, his hold on it xveakened by lack of recognition. He had committed himself early to a quiet position. Any form of extremism was foreign to his judicious observer’s temperament, and he was not an innovator. However, the best of his painting reflects those qualities of balance, sensitivity, and acute economical observation which were essential to him, and in some of the Kentish hop garden series and the cityscapes of Edmonton, these qualities are refined to a pitch which approaches perfection. lI3l THE WAR me that Roland is the only one of us who has joined up —— anti aircraft. Camouflage he says is hopeless. He himself is finding it very difiicult to do nothing and impossible to paint . . . Then I rang up Stephen Bone. He confirmed my general idea of the chances of artists at the moment. He also is in the know about the M. of Information and gave me the address; but that scheme is still only in embryo. 9 September 1939 Most of the morning went in tracking down the Ministry of Information; from one government building I was sent to another, no one was sure where it was, or even knew sometimes that there was such a Ministry. However I did find it, after calling at the Home Office and learning that its location had changed overnight. It is now at the Senate House of the University, but they were no longer giving out posts, nor even considering appli- cations. . . Down to Canterbury in the afternoon. The train crowded, and the plat- forms at Tonbridge and other stations packed with hop—picl