Bradford Grammar School

After the years of misery at boarding school it was decided that Richard should go to Bradford Grammar School.

School still proved to be a desert except that he developed an appreciation of Shakespeare. Eventually however, his pictures came to the notice of Mr Pearson the gym master who was an amateur artist who gave him his second lesson echoing the words of his other teacher: “Put the paint on and leave it.”

Richard was invited to join the Pearson family holiday that summer (1919) at Sandsend near Whitby to paint every day. 'The glimpse of the sea…. was the climax of the feeling that the chains of the war and school had been thrown off.’ He painted about seventy pictures which he later destroyed, but the whole experience of the daily proximity of his great love, the sea, and the concentration of learning, encouraged by Mr Pearson, became a lasting and significant legacy.

Early next year, Richard went to see Mr Sichel, director of Bradford Art College and it was decided that he should go to Art School. His father agreed to give him a year’s trial. He was granted a scholarship where he was asked to draw a plaster cast of a lion’s head. He was much pleased to be leaving school.

That summer together with his father and elder sister Margaret he went to Zittau in East Germany to visit family whom he had last seen in 1913 before the War. 

Richard also visited his English cousins in Weymouth where he spent hours sailing with them or on his own watching the sea crashing on Chesil beach and trying to catch the action of the waves in his sketches.