AN ENCHANTED PLACE


smugglers, Royals and the military. “It brings the people home,


shows what they are and how they thought and lived,” she says. “I was going to just write about the art and the writing, but found during my research that there was so many more interesting people to look at and stories to tell. The thing is you can’t really separate these things out – all of the changes to the town have influenced the people who came here and produced so many amazing things and built the town to what it is today.” you can read it as both an artistic and social story. Within each chapter, the images are mostly contemporary to the period of the text, whether modern or historical. so the stunning book, which uses its large pages to full effect, not only creates a visual story of the area via the art it has inspired, but also tells about the change of art style over the centuries. This idea is used in the new hanging of the galleries at Tate Britain. “Through the artists inspired by


this area, you can see art developing,” she says. “JMW Turner came here - and drew some amazing sketches, but also was inspired by the landscape to create a colour wash which shows just why he was such an influence on the impressionists – he started them off really. During my research, I found a number of sketches he had done of the area which had never been published and I’m delighted that they are in the book. Over a hundred years later, Lucien Pissarro was here, and his paintings showed how the last of the impressionists chose to see the area. so we see it through the first and last artists of an international movement.”


Joslin has travelled far and wide during her research and managed to unearth new, alongside well-known, treasures.


The book features not only the


artists inspired by the Dart and their work, but also the novelists, writers and poets who have worked or written about the town. some surprising names instantly jump off the page: apart from the widely known Agatha Christie and Flora Thompson, there is also Nevil shute and Robert Graves – both of whom wrote some of their most acclaimed work either about Dartmouth or whilst they were staying on the river. “Graves wrote several books while


he stayed in Galmpton,” she says. “This includes The White Goddess,


“It’s about seeing what


you are looking at – I mean really seeing.”


a major work on myth. Nevil shute based much of Most secret here, and it was so accurate it was censored until after the war! Flora Thompson lived here for more than ten years. she found her voice here, writing Lark Rise and starting Over to Candelford; she chose to be buried here, alongside her son, who was killed in the war.”


“I’m especially pleased to have a


chapter on three living poets who write about and come from the area: Alice Oswald, Brian Patten and Kevin Pyne. These poets are very different, but are all inspired by, and involved in, their communities a huge amount. I think the book benefits massively from their presence.”


Joslin has also managed to include


many stories from the Victorian inventors to medieval pirates. “We have harrowing accounts of men being taken as slaves ” she says. “And we also have a picture of Kat Ashley – Governess to Queen elizabeth the first – who was also a Champernowne of Modbury and Dartington. she introduced her relatives Humphrey Gilbert and Walter Raleigh to the Queen and helped them start their glittering careers. They helped our local John Davis, who discovered the Falkland Islands and searched for the north- west passage to the east, sailing there on the first expedition of the Dutch via the south. It took me months to source the right image of this little picture and I’m delighted. This woman helped shape not only her own family’s fortunes, but also the history of the Tudor times!” The book features beautiful photography of the Dartmouth area. Joslin says she was delighted with the way the book looks. “They have done a fantastic job with both the images of the town and the art. Valerie Wills and Nigel evans have provided a lot of the images and the large format of the book allows their work to be shown off magnificently. I’m hopeful the book will be well received.” ‘Dartmouth: An enchanted Place’ is published on August 17th by the Antique Collectors Club in association with Richard Webb and will cost £35. It is available for sale exclusively in Dartmouth prior to national publication from the Dartmouth Community Bookshop (01803 839571) and White sails Gallery (01803 832272).


57


THEDARTMOUTH FIVE


Twenty-five odd years after the Dartmouth Five came here, Dartmouth has many artists. But in the early 1980s, when John Gillo, then Andras Kaldor, Simon Drew, John Donaldson and Paul Riley first arrived, there were very few.


Sir Humphrey Gilbert, oil, c.1584, at Compton Castle. © National Trust Images/ courtesy of Geoffrey Gilbert


Opposite: Queen Elizabeth I, studio of Nicholas Hilliard, at Hardwick Hall. The queen’s clothes were essential to the image she projected of herself and England – confident, opulent and awe-inspiring. The jewels she wore encrusted on her dresses were often presents from her courtiers, who had acquired them from the Spanish and Portuguese treasure ships. She would have them removed and re- sewn onto different garments as she changed them. © National Trust Images/ John Hammond


Humphrey Gilbert – who Thomas Westcote, writing in 1630, called ‘that high attempting spirit’ – was as obsessed as Davis with finding a northern route to China and India, writing A Discourse of a Discoverie for a new Passage to Cathay for Queen Elizabeth in 1566. After a first, disastrous attempt to reach Newfoundland from Dartmouth in 1578, he landed successfully in 1583, claiming the island for England, mapping the coasts and recording details of the climate, products and population. The Europeans who had been fishing there during the summers for at least fifty years must have wondered how his claim would affect them, but the island was not to be settled permanently by the English for another century. As for Gilbert, much of his fleet was lost, with all his records. In the end, two ships set off for home across the Atlantic, Captain Hayes in the Golden Hind and Sir Humphrey in the tiny 10-ton Squirrel, named after the squirrel on his coat of arms. Gilbert never made it, going down in a storm off the Azores.


Sir Walter Raleigh, the untiring supporter of the Dart explorers, was born in 1552 at Hayes Barton near East Budleigh. A soldier and explorer, he was an accomplished writer and poet, a courtier and an intellectual and by 1583 Raleigh had made his fortune soldiering in Europe and


Dartmouth was different then – very quiet, they say. Kaldor remembers Foss Street, where Drew found a place to live and work, as a back alley. On the South Embankment there was a coal merchant and a petrol station with a great crane supporting the fuel pipe. But it always had a solid group of people involved with sailing and/or the navy, and had supported a good bookshop for some thirty years. Bruce and Nicolette Coward, who owned the


Harbour Bookshop from 1981, remember hosting the first Gillo-Kaldor exhibition after Andras had come in to chat carrying a big pot of paint. When he dropped it, the lid came off, and the floor was covered in paint.


He was so mortified that he returned with a bottle of wine, and the friendship began. This exhibition, says Gillo, sowed the seeds for the group.


Two Ferries, acrylic on board, by John Gillo, 2012.


The Dartmouth Five, c.1985. Clockwise, from top right: John Donaldson, Andras Kaldor, John Gillo, Simon Drew and Paul Riley.


Jeff Waddington 42 43


They promoted their art through joint publicity and exhibitions. Stunts were never far behind. During an exhibition at the Lymington Gallery in Hampshire, celebrated in a restaurant afterwards, Donaldson played a piano suspended from the ceiling – hoisted up on the chair. They painted a mural at Café Alf Resco’s on Lower Street. It’s partially hidden by an extension, but you can still see it from the other side of the street. They exhibited jointly in Henley, Newmarket, Cowes, and the Country Living Fair in Islington. They did Christmas shows for their children – synchronised swimming behind a blue cloth, wearing bathing hats, trunks and clothes pegs on their noses, and a nativity in which Kaldor, the Virgin Mary, had to carry Riley (the smallest) as Jesus to a manger under the supervision of Drew as the Archangel – but Riley was still dropped into it. At the dress rehearsal for the swimming, Donaldson


Courtesy John Gillo


remembers that they were standing on a dais in the exhibition room, mostly in underpants with noseclips, practising receiving their gold medals, when in walked a family to look at the paintings. They froze. Very slowly, the family went from painting to painting, until they came to the unmoving tableau, considered it, and moved on. They had created their first piece of installation art, a true Gilbert and George.


Wives were always an integral part of it, critics of the art, managers of the business, organisers and morale boosters. They remember lots of dinners, particularly at Sally’s Bistro at the Kaldors’ place and regular eating at the Gillos’, Drews’ and Rileys’. They went on holidays together, to the vineyards of Bordeaux (this spawned an art exhibition in the restaurants of Dartmouth with a food-and-wine theme), and elsewhere in the south of France.


Dartmouth Happy Families, organised by Elizabeth Cooper for the Dartmouth swimming pool fund. Dartmouth has an extraordinary number of families with names that describe their occupations – Cutmore the butcher, Swindell the banker and Pillar the builder, plus these. Simon Drew painted the Nashes, John Gillo the Legges, Andras Kaldor the Carrs, and John Donaldson the Sleeps.


What held them together? They all say Dartmouth, they all say friendship and they all say food. Was it the art? Gillo says ‘the group meant a huge amount to me for both inspiration and support. They have all been true friends over the last thirty years or so. It has been great to watch our work develop with shared inspiration and ideas. We all work in our own way, but we


257


NDKINGS er


estiny; with both hands, its medieval men setting out on the religious and ational importance. From here, men els on the second, and an assembly the port. They went on pilgrimages y laden with pilgrims’ in 1190. And oss of Normandy some fifty years nd the storms of the Bay of Biscay pin the town’s prosperity for 300 k more wine than corn.


ly visited in 1190 when he crusade in Exeter, Totnes and King John dated a document from 18-22 June, going on to me, having spent Christmas recognising Dartmouth’s


s in Wales; and Thomas e again eight years later, y en route to Brittany.


Saviour’s church carries of the Normans, across 99, used two on his first d; and a century later pards on the charter ch near the port. The


Embroidery with Leopards – Broderie aux léopards réalisée pour Edouard III d’Angleterre. Fragment of English embroidery on red velvet, c.1330-40, from the abbey of Altenberg an der Lahn. Silk, partially gilt silver thread, pearls and glass cabochons. This fragment is believed to be one of the finest surviving examples of opus anglicanum, highly skilful English embroidery work prized across Europe that died out after the first devastating episode of the Black Death in the mid-14th century.


Musée de Cluny has the remnant of an embroidery that was probably the trapping of a royal horse belonging to Edward III in about 1330 showing three glorious and very similar leopards, but, unlike our more peaceful two, royally aggressive, with tongues and claws protruding. Though the similarity between the two works that are dated and the church door does not date the door, it establishes the meaning of its symbols and associates it with medieval work.


© RMN-GP/Franck Raux/Paris, Musée de Cluny


February 1286 giving ect their own church on Scribe, 1970. Valerie Wills/St Saviour


South Porch, St Saviour’s church, Dartmouth, litho- graph, c.1845. The ancient door carries across a tree of life the stretch leopards/ lions that were royal Norman symbols. The date, 1631, is thought to record restoration and the door and ironwork to be medieval. The similarity with a fragment of a royal horse trapping now in the Cluny Museum in Paris (shown above) is striking.


We


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