Traffic LP 'Mr Fantasy', 1967

The reason for the inclusion of this item is that when Steve Winwood left the Spencer Davis Group in 1967 to form a new band Traffic he, along with his three fellow musicians, lived in a secluded cottage at Aston Tirrold in south Oxfordshire (formerly Berkshire) to write and rehearse their new material. The result was this LP, a blend of pyschedelic pop influenced and inspired, amongst other things, by the ageless mystery of the surrounding Berkshire Downs. Jim Capaldi, one of the band members, later recalled the place as exerting a Very Strong Presence.

The cover photo and other sleeve images were taken in and around the cottage.


Over a two year period, other prominent musicians of the day, including Eric Clapton, Steven Stills and Pete Townshend spent time with Winwood at the cottage to drink in the atmosphere.


This recent photo of the cottage is from a Winwood website.

Norman Neasom watercolour, 1954

A Fordson Major and seed drill chug their way across the red West Midlands soil in the shadow of Bredon Hill. The date is April 1954, the title is Woollas Hall, seen in the centre of the picture, and the artist was Norman Neasom (1915-2010).

Neasom drew much of his artistic inspiration from the farming landscape of his native Worcestershire. Into adulthood, and in spite of a formal training at Birmingham College of Art, he continued to live and work on Birchensale Farm just outside Redditch where he had been born. His working life after World War II was spent as an art college teacher, first in Birmigham and then Redditch. Hence the innate authenticity in Neasom's farming pictures.

Much of Birchensale Farm has since been swallowed up by outward expansion of the Redditch suburbs. The farmhouse now serves as a community centre. In his latter years, Neasom produced a number of works recalling the farm of his boyhood years.


These were put together in 2004 into a book, Birchensale. Farm Memories in Pictures.

Chapel chair by Alan Peters, 1977

Alan Peters (1933-2009) was commissioned to make the furniture and Peter Tysoe - the Devon-based glass sculptor - the coloured glass window for the small chapel in the new Swiss Catholic Mission in Westminster. The work in wood comprised an altar table, reading stand, candle holder, statue support, and life-size cross, together with 35 chairs, all made from English ash. Our chair is a spare that remained at Peters' workshop and which we were able to acquire from his widow, Laura.


The accompanying paperwork shows that a total of 1123 hours were spent on the project by Alan Peters and the four members of his team between July 1976 and completion in February 1977. Of these, 188 were put in by Peters himself, who charged for his time at £3 an hour. The full labour bill was £2,281 on a final invoice price of £2631.25. There is a letter in appreciation of the work from Father Paul Bossard, chaplain to the Mission.


Alan Peters, one of the foremost English furniture makers of the second half of the twentieth century, had a direct connection to the spirit of the Arts and Crafts Movement in that he served his apprenticeship with Edward Barnsley (1900-87) at Froxfield in Hampshire. After some time spent at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London, in 1962 he set up his own furniture workshop at Hindhead in Surrey. Love of craftsmanship and of the countryside were parallel threads in his life, taking him through moves to Devon and then Somerset and through study tours of Japan and Korea. His influential book Cabinetmaking - the professional approach came out in 1985.

Ladderback chair by Edward Gardiner, 1950

Made of ash and with a rush seat, this is a chair with important connections that place it firmly within a continuing tradition of English country furniture. It was made by Edward Gardiner (1880-1958) and was one of a number originally supplied in the early 1950s to the Craggs sisters' famous tearooms in the Suffolk coastal town of Aldeburgh. Here, for the rest of the century they did service to tourists, Festival goers and locals alike. (Photo below by Charles Christian)


Along with the chair, we purchased some bills and correspondence relating to Gardiner's dealings with the Craggs over some years.


The Gardiner connections span the entire twentieth century, and indeed tip beyond it at either end. He learned his chairmaking from Ernest Gimson (1864-1919) and was a partner in Gimson's business based at Sapperton in Gloucestershire from 1904-13. Gimson had many talents and moved in the inner circles of the Arts and Crafts movement. His furniture style was much influenced by the guidance of Phillip Clisset in Herefordshire in the 1890s and refined further by contact with the brothers Ernest and Sidney Barnsley, with whom he moved to Gloucestershire in 1893 for the purpose of putting the countryside at the heart of their respective businesses.


After the First World War, Gardiner set up on his own at a workshop near Rugby in Warwickshire, where our chair was subsequently made, essentially to a Gimson design. In 1939, Gardiner took on a pupil, Neville Neal, who, after Gardiner's death in 1958, continued in business from a workshop in nearby Stockton. Today, Neville's son Lawrence continues the tradition of chairmaking there, and will happily supply a new chair very similar to ours (the Bedales No.1) for around £315. (See www.lawrencenealchairs.co.uk)

Plant pot by Quentin Bell, 1951

Here's something from another equally well-connected twentieth century potter. Quentin Bell (1910-1996), product of the unconventional marriage between Clive and Vanessa Bell, grew up amongst members of the artistic and literary Bloomsbury set who were frequent visitors to Charleston, the farmhouse near Firle set idyllically into the Sussex downland, that his mother occupied from 1916 through to her death in 1961. It's outwardly an eighteenth century building with a sixteenth century inner core but, from the unique interior decoration applied by Vanessa Bell and her friends, is best remembered now as perhaps the clearest physical expression of the twentieth century connection between art and the countryside.


The base of the pot is inscribed GH from QB 1951 and we know from the provenance that this was a present, Christmas or birthday one imagines, from Quentin Bell to Grace Higgens, who worked at Charleston as variously maid, nurse, cook and housekeeper for fifty years from the age of 16 in 1920. An indispensable part of Charleston life, she was close to the leading players and her own extensive archive of diaries and correspondence is now in the Briitsh Library.

Quentin Bell continued his potting but was also part of the academic world, as a professor of fine art in the 1960s and 70s, and also wrote an acclaimed biography of his aunt, Virginia Woolf, which was published in 1972.

Stoneware bowl by Ursula Mommens, c.1995

I thought the project should include a piece by Ursula Mommens (1908-2010) who spent most of her long adult life - she died earlier this year aged 101 - as a potter. Her metropolitan cultural and artistic connections were impeccable but yet from a rural setting she dedicated herself to producing spirited but practical household wares. She was the great granddaughter of Charles Darwin and great great granddaughter of Josiah Wedgwood; her father, Bernard Darwin (1876-1961) was for fifty years golfing correspondent of The Times and Country Life; she studied at the Royal College of Art and, after setting up a studio near the Darwin home at Down in Kent, by the mid-1930s was active in the London avant garde art scene along with her first husband, the surrealist Julian Trevelyan. A spell working with the great slipware potter Michael Cardew set her on a new course of unpretentious and useful country ware and in 1951 she established a pottery with her second husband, the sculptor Norman Mommens, at South Heighton near Newhaven in Sussex where she remained for the rest of her life. After working initially in earthenware, stoneware became her principal medium from the 1960s, for sensitively decorated, soundly functional tableware.

Stanley Anderson line engraving, 1934

We have taken the opportunity to add to our collection of engravings by Stanley Anderson (1884-1966). This one is entitled Sheep Dipping and is signed in pencil at the bottom. It had been framed with a pristine copy of the Daily Telegraph for January 1934 to provide padding and has the remains of a label on the back for The Birmingham Exhibition 1936 with a price tag of £4 10s (framed).


It is one in a series of precisely-observed rural studies that Anderson produced over a 20 year period from 1933 when he went to live in a cottage in the heart of the Oxfordshire countryside at Towersey (now home, incidentally, of the Towersey Village Festival which began in 1965 and is still going strong).

It would be difficult to think of any other twentieth century artist who managed to capture the ordinary business of farming in such clear and accurate detail, so attractively without tipping over into excessive sentimentality. This one, entitled Three Good Friends, shows a ploughman and his team taking a rest:


The Bristol-born Anderson was apprenticed to his father in heraldic engraving initially but subsequently studied at the Royal College of Art and Goldsmith's College, where in 1925 he was taken on as engraving instructor. He was a frequent exhibitor at the Royal Academy and became a Fellow in 1941. These engravings were produced in 40 print editions and sold through the Royal Academy and other exhibitions. This last example from our collection has the title Good Companions and shows an early morning farmyard scene as a horse is led from the stable ready to be harnessed to the Buckinghamshire type wagon in the background.

The Battle for Middle Oak, 1996

In complete contrast, and thirty years after that bright optimism of The Open Road (see previous post), Middle Oak is testament to the deep divisions evident by the 1990s in the now souring relationship between motor vehicle and the countryside. Middle Oak, as it came to be called, stands at an intersection of the Newbury bypass just immediately to the west of the town of Newbury itself.

/>In the early months of 1996, Middle Oak was one of the focal points for protest against the building of the bypass. This nine mile stretch of new dual carriageway required the felling of 10,000 trees and cut through three Sites of Special Scientific Interest, an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, a nature reserve and a Civil War battlefield. As with other grandiose and controversial road schemes of the time, such as the Twyford Down extension of the M3 in 1994, the Newbury project aroused a storm of direct action environmental protest. From the summer of 1995, impromptu camps sprang up along the proposed route with tents and benders on the ground and makeshift but elaborately connected and protected structures up in the trees themselves. A guerilla war of attrition with the authorities grew in intensity as the winter progressed and pressure mounted to clear the area.


The number of protestors at times ran well into the thousands, but one of the smaller band involved throughout was Jim Hindle. In the later stages, he was particularly associated with the defence of Middle Oak and we have acquired some items of clothing that he wore whilst living up in its branches. There was insufficient headroom in the treehouse for standing, hence the heavy wear at the knees of the trousers.



Jim subsequently went on to write a book about his experiences, Nine Miles. Two winters of anti-road protest (2006), which is a remarkable insight into the extremes of cold, stress, deprivation and danger that these (mostly) young protestors subjected themselves to for the cause, often to the detriment of their own physical and mental health.


Here is Jim Hindle signing a copy of his book for me recently.


In the event, Middle Oak was given a last minute reprieve and the bypass was constructed around it. It was hardly a victory, but a more positive legacy of the protest and the publicity it drew was much greater public awareness and questioning of the lasting damage to the countryside caused by such schemes compared to their perhaps relatively modest transport benefits.

The Open Road, 1962

The same team of Lampitt and Deverson that produced The Map that came to Life in 1948 came up with The Open Road fourteen years later. It's John and Joanna again but this time Uncle George takes them in his Hillman Minx on a journey from his farm in the country to the seaside.


The countryside has lost none of its allure but it's a different countryside now, one that has become colonised by, and is completely dependent upon, the motor vehicle and all its needs, from road signs to petrol stations and AA motor cycle patrols. 'There are nearly nine million motor vehicles of all kinds on the road', Uncle George proudly tells John.


There is no negative tone to this: traffic and countryside are in harmony.


The car provides a means of exploring the countryside.


John and Joanna enjoy looking round the inside of a Bedford Dormobile camper van.


When they encounter a motorway (the first stretch of the M1 opened in 1959), 'John and Joanna were thrilled at their first sight of the broad, spacious carriageways with their three traffic lanes on each side of the central grass strip'. It too was at one with the rural landscape and the love affair with the motor car was complete.

The Map that came to Life, 1948

This is a children's book that captures the essence of what the countryside meant to post-War England. Ours has a hand-written dedication on the inside page:

It tells the story of John and Joanna who are spending the summer holidays at their Uncle George's Two Tree Farm. The children decide to walk the 'few miles' to Dumbleford ( a striking measure of the change in attitudes to child supervision between the middle and the end of the century), where there is to be a country fair, taking with them an Ordnance Survey map for guidance and Rover the dog for company. Along the way, they have some adventures and encounter different aspects of the country scene.

The sub-plot to the story is the lesson in map-reading and how maps help in the interpreation and understanding of the landscape.

The book was first published by Oxford University Press in 1948 and was the work of Harry Deverson (1908-1972), a picture editor well-known in the magazine and newspaper world, who produced the text and his brother-in-law Ronald Lampitt (1906-1988) who was responsible for the illustrations. Lampitt's work spanned a wide range of popular commercial art from posters for the Great Western Railway in the 1930s to magazines and books, including Ladybird books, over the following decades. In respect to this book, his time spent in RAF intelligence during World War II producing drawings from maps for bomber crews seems to have been a decisive influence. Here we have a countryside as seen from the air with all the features indicated on the map carefully picked out on the ground.


For someone who lived through the War and who spent most of his adult life in Sidcup, on the outer fringes of the London suburbs, it is also an idealised countryside of the mind. In clear melodious colour, past and present, Man and Nature are in perfect harmony with not a storm cloud on the horizon.

Hawkhurst Railway Ticket, 1907

The Hawkhurst branch line was a classic example of a rural railway which belonged to a different time - it was opened in 1893 - but was never really viable and closed in 1961. It was single track, only 11 miles long and linked Hawkhurst with its neighbouring Kent villages of Cranbrook, Goudhurst, Horsmonden and Paddock Wood, where there was a mainline connection.
The ticket here is dated July 4th 1907, and one can't help speculating on the cause for that particular journey from Hawkhurst to Goudhurst. Was it work or pleasure? One reason for the light traffic on the line, apart from its very rural nature, was that the stations were inconveniently placed. Hawkhurst station, for example, was over a mile from the centre of the village and technically not in Hawkhurst at all. At hop and fruit picking time the line was busier, but by the 1950s competition from road transport was rising fast. Annual operating losses nationally in the early 1960s necessitated a pruning of the rail system, hence the Hawkhurst closure in 1961. When Richard Beeching, chairman of British Railways, produced his report The Reshaping of British Railways two years later it recommended the closure of a further 6,000 miles of primarily rural lines.

The postcard image below shows the station in use in March 1961, shortly before it closed.


I had hoped here to include a further acquisition in the form of an enamel nameplate from one of the Hawkhurst station benches.


But it has just been sold at auction for £2,700! These days railwayana occupies a price zone all of its own.

I have a personal connection with Hawkhurst station because my grandparents lived nearby and whilst on a visit I remember exploring the station one day with my cousin. It must have been not long after the closure so I would have been 10 or 11 and my cousin 16 or so. The place was completely deserted and abandoned. My cousin had a bright red quite large transistor radio which he carried with him (that was the cool thing to do then). He set it down whilst we poked round the signal box and the adjacent water tower. I have a vivid childhood memory of him pulling a handle which was followed after a pause by an ominous rumbling noise up above, and then water cascaded down through a great rubber trunk, used for filling the steam engine tenders, and drowned the precious radio. We left quickly afterwards.

(The abandoned signal box and water tower - Photo by Nick Catford)

The station site is now home to some light industrial units, including a firm that makes garden furniture, and only really the signal box survives.



Rural railways left their mark on the landscape and on the folklore of the twentieth century countryside.