Memoir & Diary extracts for Mar to June 1926

Memoir • 1926:

I must confess that I played truant a good deal during my second year but I do not regret it as I was employing the time mostly at the British Museum.

I was also going to those wonderful institutions, lunch time organ recitals. The organ works of Bach were being played in their entirety at Christchurch, Westminster, now destroyed.

There was also Shakespeare at the Old Vic where Edith Evans and other now famous actors and actresses were appearing. To see “Anthony and Cleopatra” for a few pence from the gallery was good value indeed.  

. . . There was the young man in the bow tie who in the interval carried about ten cups of tea stacked one above the other to his adoring girlfriends.

The audience was a motley crowd but they had one thing in common and that was that they had come to see Shakespeare.

Memoir • [unknown date]:

He attended concerts and went to exhibitions with his friend Bickerdike, learning a lot about early sculpture and its influence on artists like Mestrovic.

John Bickerdike, the sculptor, and his wife had both come to London before me and, as it was possible to be very lonely in such a large city, their company and greater experience were of untold value to me.

Photo: John and Doris Bickerdike, musicians and puppeteers

1926:

During the Summer I painted at home in Ilkley, and produced what I considered to be my best work to date, but none of the London Exhibitions would take them. They were exhibited in Bradford where they attracted some notice in the press.