Swindon, England 1960s - a burgeoning artist

Taking my wife and toddler to a new home in a new town that we hadn’t seen before and for which we had to head to the council offices to get the keys shows our naiveté, our immaturity and our boundless belief that good things would happen. And they did. Of course, during our six years there, life à la Swindon was not without its fair share of ups and downs.

The estate was on the edge of the town. It was a green-field site and its inhabitants were a motley collection, made up of people from Rotherham (in the North), Swindon (in the West) and Londoners. The Plessey company was merging two factories and Rotherham-based ‘Plugs and Sockets’ workers were asked to move to Swindon and merge with the Wiring division. Rotherham types who declined, left housing for Londoners alongside Swindonians entitled to community housing. So we were a mixture of white collar and blue collar workers from diverse backgrounds.

On my left was Harry Millard, ex London, a marketing manager for Square D, a company associated with Plessey.  On my right was (we’ll call him) Sid from Swindon, who kept down 9 jobs in 13 weeks and who at the sight of us digging over the ground removing cement and odd bricks in order to plant daffodils matched us by going to Fine Fare and buying a handful of plastic ‘daffs’ and salting his plot with them. Job done!

I started out as a technical clerk. ‘Technical’ meant a half guinea (ten shillings and sixpence, 53p new money, $0.70) more per week. Then this Grammar school boy went to night school to earn an electrical engineering certificate. At the same time I moved over to a drawing board (Plessey’s Aircraft wiring division) and in between drawing plugs and electrical diagrams for Concorde, English Electric Lightning  aircraft and other diverse projects, I morphed into the office’s cartoonist. 

They look just like scribbles now but they were the forerunner to later cartoons

On Whit Sunday 1960 I was sitting out in the sunshine, working from a 6” x 3” newspaper cutting and copying the picture below: ‘Wild White Horses’ as a present for my wife.    Harry next door saw it and pointed out that my version omitted the three horses on the horizon.  He had seen the actual picture in a window in ‘Old’ Swindon – the elite part of town. Having to see for myself I had to drive there and note the element I had nearly missed, before I could finish the picture.

The picture in the Daily Express and my (now-weatherbeaten) version

Once completed, Harry said ‘Let’s sell paintings’. He was to make the frames, I paint the pictures. We made our first sample. When I went among the factory workers I got orders for ten pictures the first day and Harry said ‘I can’t spare the time’. So that left me to painting pictures, making the frames, painting the frames and hiding the drying frames from my ‘touchy feely’ baby son.

What was on the showcard’s reverse - my first Chinese horse painting

The picture that started out on the back of the promotional showcard ultimately became the mainstay of my more than 400 pictures which I painted over the next few years.

Of course the pictures didn’t have such an illustrious backing and the buyers would have been surprised if there had been a bathing beauty on the rear side, but they bought them nevertheless. Cats, dogs, kittens, puppies made up the numbers – even pictures of the Beatles.

We eventually bought our first house and moved away; Harry (who became godfather to my future daughter) and his family also moved elsewhere. Where are you Harry? I read that Carl James a later inhabitant of his house was murdered in 2007 by a friend – some friend!

And when I passed through the town many years later it had changed immeasurably. In fact I got lost. The estate had expanded so much that I didn’t recognize it. Even as the town had been growing and aiming for city status, I had got itchy feet, wanting to head back to ‘the smoke’ – London.

I see from a recent birthday present from my son that he and I saw our first football match together in 1966, when he was 8. It was about the time we were to leave the ‘wilds of Wiltshire’.

My son’s reminder to me of our first father and son football outing.

I see from the programme that the February match was against Swansea Town, who like Swindon had been relegated to Division III that year. And when I Googled the website for the result I was amused at the subhead to Swindon Town FC.co.uk which read ‘A history of the 56^th best football team in England’. You could have fooled me. I was sure they were 57^th. Oh the match ended 2-2 by the way and another 3 years before they caused the upset of the year by beating Arsenal 3-1 in the Football League Cup Final. That alone would have upgraded them to being number 1, I would have thought.

But by then my career had taken another turn and painting and soccer-attendance were temporarily on a back burner.

To be continued…

Newspaper Days - the beginnings of a love of Art.

I wasn’t always an artist, nor a cartoonist. But it was as a lowly office clerk that I was introduced to various art styles of legendary painters. Putnam, or ‘Put’ as we called my colleague, was a mentor, without possibly realizing it in those early days at the Sunday Dispatch newspaper.


The Sunday Dispatch was the Sunday edition (with a then-circulation in excess of 2 million) of the London Daily Mail. It was a paper owned by the Rothermere family that continues to this day as an ‘institution’. The Mail’s 1.2 million circulation) has always battled with the Daily Express (now just over 600,000 circulation) which was once owned by the Beaverbrook family.

As circulation clerks our job meant being in attendance alternate Saturday nights ready with brush and paint (printer’s ink) to dash off ‘screamer’ headlines on posters.

There was plenty of time as the evening dragged on, waiting for the ‘call to arms’  to discuss love, life and everything in between. The subject on Put’s mind often was art and during those discussions he pointed out to me that we were copying the Chinese style of painting by taking a loaded brush and creating our works of art as the brush discharged its contents.  

‘Bamboo’ my first attempt at ‘Chinese’

We weren’t required to create illustrations; but we did paint ‘pictures in words.’ Mainly the headline would be simple and brash to tempt the readers to buy the paper. ‘Fire’, ‘Murder’, ‘Scandal’ were often the teaser.  Sometimes the posters were pre-printed when the newspaper wished to promote a serial. In fact the Sunday Dispatch was notable for first serializing Forever Amber – considered ‘very saucy’ for its time. And whenever a flagging circulation needed to be revitalized, the paper would revert to The Royals’. And there was invariably a story to tell. Nothing salacious, it didn’t need to be - the proprietors knew their audience enjoyed reading about the Royal family.

On occasions the posters were pre-printed for an upcoming event and the most ironic of which was The CHURCHILL IS DEAD printing in readiness for the great man’s demise.  Ironic because Winston Churchill’s journalist son Randolph wrote for the Sunday Express – the rival paper – and made detrimental comments including that the Sunday Dispatch didn’t look like the Sunday version of the Daily Mail. The proprietors took umbrage at that and chose to change the format as well as the editor. Unfortunately it didn’t work. While the CHURCHILL IS DEAD posters were stored away for a future occasion after ‘Winnie’ recovered from his illness, the Dispatch finally succumbed to failing circulation and expired in 1961. I had moved to greener pastures – the green belt in fact and would return to London years later as did the paper which eventually resurfaced as The Mail on Sunday in 1982.

But it was in that newspaper environment that I learnt to copy in the style of Chinese paintings with printer’s ink via a felt tip on the end of a piece of wood.

  Miss Great Britain Contest.

I see I experimented using the back of the then current promotion! The Miss Great Britain national beauty contest staged by the Dispatch in conjunction with Morecambe and Heysham Council. The grand first prize for that first heat was the princely sum of 7 guineas ( $12) – and a basket of fruit.

The subject that I painted on the reverse side would resurface later in my new job. Check that out in my next Blog. See you then……to be continued