Did YOU know Stanley Spencer?

One of the strands in Absent Voices which is gathering momentum is Walking in the Footsteps of Spencer & Eardley.

Both Sir Stanley Spencer and Joan Eardley painted in Port Glasgow.

Stanley Spencer came to Inverclyde as an official war artist in the early 1940s. His brief was to record working life in the shipyards in as much detail as possible and he left a phenomenal record for posterity based on the lives of the workers in Clydeside shipyards and the great ships they built, in a series of paintings called 'Shipbuilding on the Clyde'.

Our Absent Voices historian, Rod Miller (pictured here after an interview with David Faller at internet-based radio station, Inverclyde Radio, today) has been on the trail of Spencer in Port Glasgow.

During the interview today, he made an appeal for anyone with information about Stanley Spencer in Inverclyde to get in touch.

We know that Spencer stayed in various places, including the Star Hotel in Port Glasgow and the Glencairn boarding house.

According to an article we found from The Glasgow Herald archives in 1975, he wrote about Port Glasgow in a letter: "I like it here, being lost in a jungle of human beings, a rabbit in a vast rabbit warren."

Spencer was billeted at The Glencairn boarding house which was run by a lady who also helped to lay out the dead. Back in his native Cookham in Berkshire, Spencer had helped his mother lay out corpses as a boy. He felt at home here and helped his landlady with this task which others might have found repulsive.

These experiences seeped into his paintings, especially his vast Port Glasgow Resurrection Series, a suite of 16 paintings - seven completed on Clydeside and the others painted back home in Cookham working from sketches he made in Port Glasgow.

Apparently, he had an 'epiphany', one night at Port Glasgow Cemetery. He had fled there to escape the noise of a jazz band. Above the hedge he saw stone bibles and large winged angels.

You can read more in the Glasgow Herald story by Hugh Cochrane HERE

Here is the link to the BBC's Your Paintings website, which shows Spencer's Shipbuilding on Clyde series, including The Template.
Stanley Spencer at Your Paintings (Imperial War Museum)

According to Rod, the woman with the baby in The Template (pictured) was the maid in The Star Hotel in Port Glasgow. How wonderful would it be to find the baby - who would be around 70 now?

Rod says that Spencer also had links to families called Shannon and Buchanan in Port Glasgow. He was in the habit of handing out sketches to people so who knows what is lurking on walls and lofts in Inverclyde?

Please email rod@absentvoices.com or me jan@absentvoices.com if you have any information at all. We'd be delighted to hear from you.

Blip by Jan Patience