(A footnote to the extended Festival of Remembrance that’s been taking place over the last week or so.)
I’ve recently been reading (or partly re-reading) “VanishedWorld“, the first part of the autobiography of the Northamptonshire author H.E. Bates (b. 1905). I came across this:
“even a child couldn’t escape the eventual insufferable gloom of the holocaust that every morning was reflected in the long columns of the dead, wounded and missing that darkened every newspaper and still more intimately in the little mourning shrines set up in every street with their own lists of agonies and pitiful jam jars of flowers”
and a little later:
“the effect of those long, black, mortifying lists of killed, wounded and missing that filled column after column of every morning newspaper had made a searing impression on me that has never left me; nor can I ever forget the little improvised street shrines decorated, as one still often sees in little Italian cemeteries, with faded photographs of the dead and a few jam jars of fading flowers.”
He provides a sketch of one of these “street shrines”:
We still see these “street shrines” today, of course, (with their “pitiful jam jars of flowers”) when someone – particularly a young person – has died unexpectedly or violently; I think I remember (at about the time of the death of Diana Spencer) a rash of newspaper articles condemning them as somehow cheaply sentimental and un-English. I’ve never shared that sentiment, but would have guessed that they were a recent phenomenon, so I was surprised to find them cropping up in that least Latin of locations, Rushden, during the First World War. I can’t remember, either, them being mentioned in other accounts of the War or pictured in drama, but it’s unlikely they were unique to Northamptonshire.
“Remembrance” is a high-flown word (the “anamnesis” of the Eucharist, Scott Moncrieff’s translation of Proust) and is appropriate to the commemoration of events that no-one living can now remember, but to understand, on a human level, what it was like to lose a child, a school friend, I think we need to imagine, not remember and look to those little “street shrines”. “Remembrance” may look like a sea of ceramic poppies, but raw grief looked and looks like a pitiful jam jar of flowers, a bunch of garage shop roses.
I’m afraid this really is The End, my friends. A week ago the Stump was showing signs of ailing. Dry rot had set in on one side. Someone had hacked lumps off it and strewn them all over the Rec.
The Stump had, however, survived one previous assassination attempt (in January a year ago) and I was hopeful that this latest setback would prove a mere interruption to its continuing story of resurrection and renascence in the face of adversity. However, this was the scene that greeted me this morning:
Well and truly and radically extirpated, I’m afraid, and (as football commentators are prone to saying in less dramatic circumstances) it’ll take a miracle to come back from this.
When I have gathered my thoughts I shall try to compose some suitable epitaph for the Stump. For the moment, though, I suppose it’s a good job I didn’t identify with the Stump too closely.
I very rarely re-post anything I’ve written (in fact I rarely reread anything I’ve written). I see the last time I did it was also at the time of Epiphany, so in a way it’s reassuring that I can put my current low-spiritedness and lack of inspiration down to seasonal fluctuation.
This piece originally appeared in the first week of January 2011, which appears to confirm my theory. Unfortunately, it has a certain gloomy topicality.
Apart from poor CMJ, a few more to add to add to the list would be Alan Ross (died 14th February), Ian Peebles (28th February) and Tony Pawson (12th October last year).
Some of the morbidity of the piece was probably due to the bottle of whiskey that makes an appearance late on. I never normally touch the stuff and this one was a Christmas present. I’ve taken my own advice and steered clear of it ever since.
The first faint intimations of this year’s cricket season have started to appear. The Wisden Cricketer have sent me a calendar, featuring “some of the U.K.’s loveliest cricket grounds” (including a couple – Sidmouth and Bourneville – I’ve visited).
Leicestershire have sent me last year’s annual report and financial statements – “The club has had what can only be described as a disastrous financial year …” – and the agenda for the A.G.M.. The main item is to “increase the age limit of a director from 70 to 80”.
But it is these little signs of life that keep us trudging on hopefully through the winter gloom.
E.V. Lucas put it nicely in his 1909 essay “Winter Solace”:
“During the snowstorm in which I write these lines the unlikelihood of the sun ever shining again on my flannelled limbs is peculiarly emphatic. It is a nightmare that pursues me through every autumn, winter, and early spring. How can there be another season? one asks one’s self; just as years ago, a fortnight before the holidays, one was convinced that the end of the world must intervene. The difference between the child and the middle-aged man merely is that the child expects the end of the world – the man the end of himself.”
This is no exaggeration – the fear of dying in the close season is a well founded one. At the beginning of every season at the county ground there is usually at least one familiar face missing, and, at the end, some of those who wish each other “winter well” know that they will not live to see the Spring.
The same appears to be true of more celebrated lovers of the game. The following all handed in their dinner pails in the dead of winter:
John Arlott – 4th December
Brian Johnston – 5th January
E.W. Swanton – 22nd January
Neville Cardus – 28th February
On a brighter note, E.H.D. Sewell dedicated his last book “Well hit! Sir” (1946) to “Professor de Wesselow and all the doctors and … Sisters and Nursing Staff of St Thomas’ Hospital who had charge of my case, without whom …” and, in it, said “if I am destined to see Donnelly scoring almost at will for Middlesex in 1947 I shall drink in the savour with as keen a relish as anybody”. He was not destined to see Donnelly, who did not play for Middlesex in 1947, but he did live to see the classic and glorious season of Compton and Edrich. He expired – presumably a happy man – on the 20th of September, three days after seeing Middlesex, as Champion County, defeat a Rest XI by an innings, with a century from Edrich and a double from Compton.
On a much darker one, R.C. Robertson-Glasgow cut his throat in a snowstorm on the 4th of March (if only he could have held out for another month …).
And then there’s Alan Gibson. Gibson died on the 10th of April 1997, the first day of that season (if you count University matches). But it’s doubtful how much interest he was taking by that stage.
But he too had once found the thought of a new season an incentive to pull himself out of a deep Slough of Despond. In 1985 he had, according his son Anthony* drunk himself into the Bristol Royal Infirmary (at the rate of at least a bottle of whiskey a day) and from there to “a hospital at Ham Green, which specialised in treating alcoholics on their last legs, as Alan was presumed to be.” He perked up enough to write a piece, unpublished at the time, which begins –
“Christmas in hospital (this was my fourth) is always a bit of a struggle … The most relaxed of my four Christmases was in a mental home: a case, I suppose, of sancta simplicitas.”
but moves on to regret that he had not received a game of OWZTHAT in his Christmas stocking and ends –
“For I am confident of being at the Bristol ground next summer and probably even more at Taunton and an assortment of other places as well. When I came into hospital, I was quite unable to walk, even to rise from a chair. But you should have seen me, after a week or two, dashing down the ward on my trusty zimmer. On Christmas Eve I graduated to a stick; muttering proudly to myself, OWZTHAT?”
The moral being, I suppose, don’t lose interest in cricket and go easy on the whiskey.
A bottle of Whiskey, this afternoon
* Quotations from “Of Didcot and the Demon”, a collection of Gibson’s writings with reminiscences from Anthony Gibson, published last year by Fairfield Books (available here).
The sad news of Mark Boucher’s injury-forced retirement prompted me to think about how rare it is these days (or so it seems to me) for a player to be seriously injured during a match.
I’ve had plenty of time this season to catch up with my reading and I’ve managed – at various county grounds – to pick up a selection of back copies of The Cricketer from – as it were – my formative years – the period when my interest in cricket was at its freshest and least jaundiced or jaded – which was the early ‘seventies.
I suppose many of us are inclined – if uncorrected – to think of the period when we first became interested in cricket as a Golden Age against which all subsequent cricket must be compared. It’s always useful to be reminded of how things were at the time (or how they appeared to others, or were reported), as opposed to how we remember them.
One thing I’m inclined to rail against about the modern game is the way that the dice are loaded against the bowlers, and, in particular, the fast men. Take away his helmet (I’m inclined to say when watching some of our more flamboyant galacticos) and his supercharged bat and his body armour and stick him up against Thommo or Holding on a dodgy track with unlimited bouncers allowed and we’d soon see what he was really made of …
But, reading through these Cricketers, it was salutary to be reminded of quite what a violent game it was in those days (for fieldsmen almost as much as batsmen) – and these are from a fairly random selection of issues.
In the 1971 Winter Annual, under the heading ‘A tragic accident’, A.R. Lewis writes –
‘A tragic accident happened on the field of play this week … I was crouched in the gully as Malcolm Nash bowled to Neil Abberley … Off the meat of the bat … the ball sped almost invisibly to crack Roger Davis a lightning blow above and behind the left ear … Violent grotesque convulsions and a sudden change of facial colouring warned us all that there was immediate need for professional medical attention … Two doctors ran on, one of whom thankfully revived Roger with mouth to mouth resuscitation, after his pulse had stopped.’
By January 1975, we’re on to England’s tour of Australia and some comments from John Woodcock –
‘The day began to some unedifying remarks by Lillee on television last night. The idea of the bouncer, as he uses it, is to hit the batsman ‘somewhere between the rib cage and the stomach.’ That is what he said, and he has written it previously in a book. Thomson is already on record as saying that he enjoys felling a batsman with a bouncer. This is the talk of the underworld, not of Test cricketers.’
By the Spring Annual of 1975 we’ve moved on to the aftermath of the tour and the brief series against New Zealand. Under the headline ‘A nightmare ending’ there is a description of Peter Lever almost killing Ewen Chatfield –
‘The first test at Auckland had a dramatic and unpalatable ending when Chatfield … collapsed at the wicket and his breathing stopped for a few moments after being struck by a ball from Lever. It was ten minutes before Chatfield was carried from the field on a stretcher and during that time several England players thought that the blow … onto his temple had proved fatal. Fortunately … the England physiotherapist was able to apply cardiac massage and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, which undoubtedly saved Chatfield’s life … later a distressed Lever spoke to Chatfield as he recovered consciousness in hospital and his first comment to me afterwards was ‘I feel like retiring here and now’.’
By May 1975 under the heading ‘A martial, medical match’ Riaz Ahmed Mansuri reported on the second Test between Pakistan and West Indies in Karachi –
‘Sadiq Mohammad’s long air trip … was not in vain … he pulled Pakistan out of trouble … and this after a full-blooded hit from Julien struck him under the left ear as he fielded in close. He was carried off … with Wasim Raja, with his injured right ankle in plaster and virtually out of the match, Pakistan’s plight was extremely serious … a total of 150 minutes’ play was lost, the running battle between police and crowd ending only under a cloud of teargas … When the ninth wicket fell the match was safe, Sadiq was in the nineties (seemingly recovered from his concussion), and the spectators rose to their feet cheering lustily as Wasim Raja, with a plastered foot, entered …’
On to June 1975, and ‘The Battle of Kingston’, as reported by Tony Cozier …
‘Bedi [the Indian captain] declared with only six wickets down ‘in disgust’ … Later Bedi denied that he had declared, saying that there was no-one fit enough to bat. Vishwanath received a fracture on the middle finger of the right hand when struck by Holding; Gaekwad was hit on the left ear, also by Holding, and was still groggy after spending two days in hospital. Patel, who had three stitches inserted in a cut in his mouth caused by a ball from Holder, could possibly have batted, but … only if necessary. This left only Bedi and Chandra and … both had painful hand injuries that made it impossible for them to hold the bat …’
Meanwhile, back in England, David Lloyd was being knocked unconscious by Bob Cottam of Northants, as reported by David Frith …
‘I listened to the shell-shocked recollections of those awful moments by members of the fielding side: ‘His eyes rolled up, and all you could see was the whites.’ ‘Blood was coming from his nose.’ ‘After a while his legs started twitching. It was terrible.’ ‘I couldn’t go over to him,’ said another player, who happened himself to be a batsman. ‘It wasn’t my scene.’ [According to Cricket Archive, Lloyd was out ‘hit wicket b. Cottam 2’ and was absent hurt in the second innings. I wonder which Northants batsman would have said ‘It’s not my scene’? Perhaps not Roy Virgin or David Steele.]
In July, in ‘News of the Month’ we find that ‘G. Boycott was put out of cricket for several weeks after sustaining a broken bone in his right hand at Old Trafford in mid-May‘, ‘A.P.E. Knott missed a fortnight’s cricket … owing to a chipped right index finger, the result of a rising ball from … W.W. Daniel’, ‘A.J. Borrington, keeping wicket for Derbyshire, was taken to hospital after being struck on the head by one of Oxford University’s tail-end batsmen.’ and ‘B. Dudleston had his right thumb dislocated and fractured by a ball from S.J. Rouse … and was forced to miss a fortnight’s cricket.‘
In the same month’s issue John Woodcock reports from MCC v the West Indies …
‘It was horrible to watch. Amiss was helped off, his shirt stained with blood … it was a reminder to the umpires that the first-class game … will soon have a death on its hands’ and (from the Daily Mail) ‘Roope was ducking and weaving to escape physical punishment. His cap was knocked off … and four leg-byes flew off the back of his shoulder …’
Just to finish the year off, in October’s News of the Month, David Frith notes
‘B. Hassan suffered a broken hand during Notts’ match against Essex at Trent Bridge … Asif Iqbal was hospitalised after being hit on the head during Kent’s match against Somerset at Taunton … J. Simmons, of Lancashire, had 16 stitches after being hit in the face by a ball from Somerset fast bowler H.R. Mosley.”
And this account, of course, only touches on the best-known instances of assault and battery of the era – Lillee and Thomson’s bowling against England on the ’74-’75 tour and the Holding’s battering of Dad’s Army in 1976. So here are a couple of reminders of what that was like –
Ouch.
So there’s the evidence. Were those really the good old days? Would I really want to go back to that? Questions for another day…
A couple more snaps from my canalside ramble the other day.
About a mile out from Harborough I came across this, on the towpath –
and then, a few hundred yards further along, this –
************
`Such a rumpus everywhere!’ continued the Otter. `All the world seems out on the river to-day. I came up this backwater to try and get a moment’s peace, and then stumble upon you fellows!
There was a rustle behind them, proceeding from a hedge wherein last year’s leaves still clung thick, and a stripy head, with high shoulders behind it, peered forth on them.
`Come on, old Badger!’ shouted the Rat.
The Badger trotted forward a pace or two; then grunted, `H’m! Company,’ and turned his back and disappeared from view.
`That’s just the sort of fellow he is!’ observed the disappointed Rat. `Simply hates Society! Now we shan’t see any more of him to-day” *
************
Badgers have stopped digging up human bones in a graveyard – after a mystery phone caller told the vicar the problem had been solved by the “Big Society”.
As the Leicester Mercury reported in October, the badgers were believed to be responsible for disturbing at least four graves at St Remigius’ Church in Long Clawson, near Melton.
The badgers had dug up and taken skulls, leg and arm bones, which were found in a ditch on the edge of the churchyard. One child even took a human leg bone home, thinking it was a stick.
However, environmental advisory group Natural England blocked a bid to solve the problem which involved putting up a gate to stop the animals returning to their sett in the graveyard. Since then, village vicar the Rev Simon Shouler has received a mysterious call to say the problem had been “solved by the Big Society”.
There has been no sign of the badgers since.
Mr Shouler said: “I got a call late one night from someone saying we wouldn’t have any further problems from the badgers. He said the problem had been solved by the ‘Big Society’.
“Since I received the call there has been no sign of any badgers. It’s probable that the law has been broken, but someone has decided enough is enough.”**
************
“ I see you don’t understand, and I must explain it to you. Well, very long ago, on the spot where the Wild Wood waves now, before ever it had planted itself and grown up to what it now is, there was a city — a city of people, you know. Here, where we are standing, they lived, and walked, and talked, and slept, and carried on their business. Here they stabled their horses and feasted, from here they rode out to fight or drove out to trade. They were a powerful people, and rich, and great builders. They built to last, for they thought their city would last for ever.’
`But what has become of them all?’ asked the Mole.
`Who can tell?’ said the Badger. ‘People come — they stay for a while, they flourish, they build — and they go. It is their way. But we remain. There were badgers here, I’ve been told, long before that same city ever came to be. And now there are badgers here again. We are an enduring lot, and we may move out for a time, but we wait, and are patient, and back we come. And so it will ever be.’
`Well, and when they went at last, those people?’ said the Mole.
`When they went,’ continued the Badger, `the strong winds and persistent rains took the matter in hand, patiently, ceaselessly, year after year. Perhaps we badgers too, in our small way, helped a little — who knows? It was all down, down, down, gradually — ruin and levelling and disappearance. Then it was all up, up, up, gradually, as seeds grew to saplings, and saplings to forest trees, and bramble and fern came creeping in to help. Leaf-mould rose and obliterated, streams in their winter freshets brought sand and soil to clog and to cover, and in course of time our home was ready for us again, and we moved in.”***
Reading through The Observer’s miscellaneous list of Britain’s 300 “leading public intellectuals” on Sunday (an improvement, I suppose, on the wretched, if instructive, Rich List), I was pleased and surprised to see the name of Brigid Brophy.
Surprised, because I had a suspicion that her idiosyncratic, Firbankian novels were largely forgotten (they’re certainly out of print), and that she was now remembered, if at all, for her campaigning work to establish the Public Lending Right for authors. Pleased because I thought she was dead.
Unfortunately – looking into it a little further – I find that she did, indeed, die of multiple sclerosis in 1995. (Here is an obituary as proof).
I suppose this supports the general thesis implied by the title of the article – “Why don’t we love our intellectuals?”. We don’t even love them enough to notice that they’ve been dead for sixteen years.
Continuing with this cheery seasonal theme, here is the Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead. This painting was originally commissioned by a young widow who “wanted something to dream by“. It enjoyed an enormous vogue in reproduction, becoming, I suppose, the late nineteenth-century German equivalent of Tretchikoff’s Green Girl or Athena’s Tennis Girl. The playwright Max Halbe commented “Between 1885 and 1900 no good middle-class household could be without reproductions of Bocklin’s paintings” and later the phenomenon was also noted by characters in novels by Nabokov set in Germany between the wars.
The painting attracted celebrity admirers too (from all shades of the political spectrum) – both Freud and Lenin had reproductions on their walls and the original of this version (the third of five) was purloined by Adolf Hitler for his personal contemplation.
Isle of the Dead : Arnold Boklin
Whatever you think of this painting, I do find that, once seen, it does somehow worm its way into one’s head in the way that a song (however irritating) or a poem sometimes does. I begin to imagine a resemblance to it in the most unlikely places, for instance, the disused lavatories at Grace Road –
Grace Road lavatories
or even the approach to this house at the end of my street –
As I think I’ve mentioned before on a couple of occasions (in my Pollyannaish way), this is the time of year when thoughts begin to turn to the Spring, to the return of life to the bounteous earth and so on. In a recent post the poet Francis Meynell was musing thus – “I keep this time, even before the flowers/ sacred to all the young and the unborn /to all the miles of unsprung wheat“. It’s time we saw a lamb or two : the birds are in song in the early morning and are eyeing up suitable locations for their nests (e.g. my roof). Tomorrow is St. Valentine’s Day and the young uns have got a bit of a glint in their eyes. You get the picture.
It does seem, though, that some people’s thoughts are turning in quite a different direction.
A couple of weeks ago, for instance, I read the following alarming piece of writing on the blog Stumbling and Mumbling – A modest proposal. It’s too complex a piece to paraphrase accurately (and, as always, frighteningly brainy) but it asks why, if we accept three commonly accepted beliefs (that the population needs to be reduced, that public spending needs to be cut and that there is a self-perpetuating criminal underclass) we should not be in favour of the compulsory sterilisation of those who are likely to produce feral children. As the title of the piece implies, the author isn’t actually advocating mass sterilisation, and, indeed, states explicitly that he is against it (though he doesn’t exactly seem to be motivated by savage indignation about the idea either). But I do find it alarming (and baffling) that the thought came into his head in the first place, and equally so the calm and rational way in which the debate proceeds in the comments.
There are any number of rational arguments against this proposal, but I don’t think I can get past what I think the author means by ” The Urgh Factor“. Imagine what it would feel like to be a woman with few other prospects who had set her heart on having children, only to be informed (presumably by some government functionary) that she was to be carted off to hospital and sterilised instead. At which point the mind of anyone with an ounce of sensibility would indeed revolt and go “Urgh – what a disgusting idea”. And that would be an end to it.
I might have forgotten this, if, a couple of days later, the comedian Ricky Gervais hadn’t come out with the following, in an interview with The Times –
“Should we impose a limitation [on having children], then? “Yes, based on … stupid, fat faces,” he snarls. “If there’s a woman in leggings, eating chips with a fag in her mouth, sterilise her.” (Why leggings, incidentally?)
I do realise that Gervais – as a comedian (that new clerisy) – is only joking, but it’s still worth noting how many people seem to agree with him – though perhaps they too are only joking. The most highly rated comment on the Mail Online, for instance, is “you know how the saying goes…’many a true word said in jest’! I’m with him on this one 100%” and there is a frankly flabbergasting discussion on the official Richard Dawkins fansite – http://forum.richarddawkins.net/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=108274.
I might also mention in this connection the enthusiasm expressed in a couple of comments on this (excellent) post – This article is not witty– for the idea that castration is the way forward in dealing with those who are likely to perpetuate a cycle of abuse. The slight difference of emphasis here (castration rather than sterilisation) is, I think, down to the commentators being women rather than – as in the case of S&M and the Mail – mainly men.
And then again, at a slight tangent, we have Master Amis’s latest amusing thought experiment – that we should set up euthanasia booths for the elderly to prevent “a population of demented very old people, like an invasion of terrible immigrants, stinking out the restaurants and cafes and shops.”
Now of course S&M is really saying something about the nature of managerialism. Gervais is only joking and Amis is being satirical, but I do find it shocking quite how many people there seem to be going around with this stuff swilling around their heads – this fear, this disgust, this contempt for the poor, the feckless, the old even and quite how little permission they seem to need, once the unsayable has been said, to indulge in these weird fantasies of mucking about with other people’s reproductive systems. Slowly the poison the whole bloodstream fills …
Mind you, I do quite like the idea of “The Urgh Factor” and think it could work as TV programme. The aim would be for a succession of controversialist bloggers – contrarians, sweary libertarians, what-iffers and general loons – to see who could make the panel of judges – all bleeding heart liberals – the most angry and upset. Bonus points would be awarded for the superficial plausibility of the argument, but making the panel physically sick would ensure instant victory.
Following on from the last post … what does Death the Bride make me think of ? I think it’s this (though the lyric is, to be pedantic, “Death my bride”).
This is Tim Buckley, singing Song to the Siren, on the Monkees show from 1967. The song eventually emerged on record later in his career on the album Starsailor, by which time he’d ditched Larry Beckett, who wrote the words on his first two albums and also this song, and headed off in a less folky and more experimental direction. By the time it appeared on Starsailor, the lyric had changed slightly (he is no longer as puzzled as an oyster, but a new-born child, for instance), the key (I think) had changed and the over all impression was less tremulously romantic and more narcotically woozy, but it still sounded a little out of place.
It also looks as though he’s so lost in romantic reverie that he’s forgotten to wear any trousers. But I think that’s an optical illusion.
What, someone might be asking, has happened to the Poppies this season? (Poppies are Kettering Town F.C., the football club I support – they appeared in a couple of posts earlier in the year).
On the field, things are going well, thank you – we are third in the table and are through to the second round of the F.A. Cup, with a high profile tie tomorrow at home against Leeds United. I have obtained my tickets (at ruinous expense) and may report back if I get time (and I get back in one piece – though I don’t suppose it’ll be like that).
Off the field, however, things are looking bleak. I won’t go into the whole sorry imbroglio in any depth here – for the latest developments, according to the Kettering Evening Telegraph, try this, but the basic facts are these. During a previous financial crisis, in the late seventies, the club had to sell the freehold of their ground (which they’ve occupied since the beginning of the 20th century). The new freeholder (a Mr. Pickering) allowed the club to continue using the ground on a thirty year lease. The lease is now coming to an end and Mr. Pickering wants his land back to build houses on.
Poppies go-ahead millionaire Chairman Imraan Ladak managed to broker some kind of deal with Asda to build a combined football ground and supermarket complex on the outskirts of town. Kettering Borough Council, however, have refused planning permission, so the club (for the umpteenth time in my memory) are on the verge of extinction (or – worse – a merger with Corby).
The local MP, the noted expenses miser Philip Hollobone, having undistinguished himself a few days ago by asking the following question in Parliament
“Rugby has Twickenham, football has Wembley, and now volleyball has Kettering. Would the Minister like to congratulate the English Volleyball Association on choosing Kettering for its national training and competition centre, which opened at the weekend?”
(Volleyball?) has now attempted to redeem himself by asking another question in the House about the Poppies’ new ground, and inviting the Minster for Sport to attend the Leeds Match (So that was the shady-looking individual queuing up for tickets last Saturday).
Obviously I have views on several of the ishoos raised by this matter, but I won’t bore you with those at this point.
This situation has prompted the folks who run the club’s fan forum to replace the usual bit-at-the-top (whatever the technical term is for that) with this –
(The KBC on the Reaper’s scythe refers to Kettering Borough Council).
This isn’t the first time that a Kettering artist has made a connection between a personification of death and Poppies. One of the most striking paintings on display (usually) in Kettering’s Alfred East Art Gallery is this, by local artist T.C. Gotch (it’s called Death the Bride) –
Death the Bride
Wikipedia provides a decent summary of Gotch’s career T.C. Gotch.
The Alfred East Gallery is well worth a visit, if you happen to find yourself in Kettering for any reason (though, apart from the football and Wicksteed Park, I’m struggling to think of many reasons why you might do so). It has only two smallish rooms, one of which is used for temporary exhibitions, usually by local artists, so not much of the permanent collection is on display at any one time. They do, though, have forty-odd works by Gotch, a similar number by Kettering’s other best-known artist, the eponymous Alfred East, and bits and pieces by the likes of Lowry, Hoyland, D.J. Watkins-Pitchford (the author “BB”), Wyndham Lewis, Charles Ricketts and a crayon drawing by Toulouse-Lautrec.
It also has a substantial collection of works by George Harrison (the “Kettering hairdresser-poet”). “Wet evening in the Ouse Valley” is a picture of his I particularly look forward to seeing on a future visit.
The Crimson Rambler 