Memoir extracts for March 1914 to April 1918
Memoir • 1914:
There remains in my mind a picture of a Rugger match which ended an epoch . . . The drama was in the surroundings as the sky was glowing with stormy light . . . The light deteriorated until all we could see were the silhouettes of the players against a brilliant band of light low down in the sky . . . Rain stung our faces and a loud roll of thunder and flashes of lightning gave the scene a look of the Last Judgement.
The match took place at the end of the spring term in 1914. Many of the boys who played in it disappeared off to to WWI never to be seen again. Richard alludes to the event in his mid WWII painting 'A Rugger Match' (1943).
Memoir • [unknown date]:
I found there was one way in which I could make my fellows forget their antagonisms. It was generally acknowledged that I could draw so I entertained the uncritical rabble with extravagant battle pictures, often of a murderous nature, and in their appreciation of these works they lost sight of my German antecedents.
Memoir • [unknown date]:
An artist came from the village to teach drawing. No real help so Richard told him he would give up coming to ‘Drawing Class’.
He looked at me very hard from behind his spectacles and beard and then asked “Ever heard of Turner?” I could not say that I had. “Would you like me to show you how to paint with oil paints?” he continued. I said “Yes, very much” and then he asked permission for me to go outside the school grounds to his home and there asked his wife for his sketching box, which I carried most proudly back to the school as though it was my own. He then proceeded to demonstrate, with one of the girls sitting as model, how to mix white pigment with the other colours to vary their tone. “Put your paint on and LEAVE IT!” he said and that was the first of the only two painting lessons I ever received. My second one was about two years later in Bradford.
Memoir • [unknown date]:
Father had bought me a small box of oil paints after I had told him of my initiation into the mysteries of painting on that last day of boarding school. So it was quite natural that my first efforts in the new medium were centred on portraits of our pets.
Memoir • [unknown date]:
Richard started to have organ lessons.
Father had enquired whether Charles Stott, the celebrated organist, would give me organ lessons. I had admired Mr Stott at a distance many a time. He was city organist and accompanist. Even Father, who rather despised organists as a race, conceded that his delicate piano playing and accompanying was masterly.
Alas, my self-taught piano playing was not nearly good enough but I was keen and my teacher became highly entertained at my unorthodox fingering and, while I was struggling with some passage, he would draw funny men on my music pages. These lessons were a very great joy to me and I seriously thought I might have become an organ builder and organist. But Mr. Stott was suddenly called up and the bottom of things seemed to have been knocked out of things for me.