The Unsung Mentors

Encouraged by writer, Giovanna Congdon, who asked me respond to a fairly detailed Q & A about my life at her blog, I’ve been casting my mind back. The full version will be hers to post, but here’s a taster. This about experiences not previously shared, so all credit to Giovanna for prompting me.

Giovanna:

‘Is there a mentor in your past? I am thinking of historical characters that inspire, as well as feet on the ground…’

Clive:

‘Mentors. There have been many and various throughout my life. I’ll confine myself here to those who, on reflection, had the most impact in the early days, though at the time I was too young to understand or value the extent of their kindnesses.

Mel Thomas and Mollie Wanklyn at Monmouthshire Young People’s Theatre. Mel was the Drama Officer for the county, and he took me to MYPT when my parents confided to him that they were worried about me. Mollie was the main tutor and director, and she enthralled me with her ‘actress’s’ voice and her inspiring classes in choral verse speaking, which hit me like revelatory lightning. Myra Silcox, my fearsomely waspish but encouraging ballet teacher, and ‘Bunny’ (Marcia) Griffiths, who cast and choreographed me in the MYPT production of Peter and the Wolf, and showed me how shyness could vanish when I inhabited another character.

Mollie Wanklyn with me and Linda Henderson, backstage during a performance of Maeterlinck’s The Bluebird

Later, in London at vocational school, my headmistress, Miss Brierly, once paid out of her own pocket for a small group of pupils to attend a performance with Gemma Jones as Shaw’s Saint Joan. We sat in a box and it was another revelatory moment. I’ve watched Gemma Jones on stage and in films all my life, most recently in the film God’s Own Country. Boy and man I’ve loved her work, all unknown to her. She is everything I most admire in an actor. Her eyes can tell you all you need to know about her character, her life, her dreams, her joy, her despair. Joan Brierly opened the door to all that for me, with the gift of a ticket to a play in which a gifted actor gave a luminous performance that became a gold standard for me as I felt my way toward a career as a director. In my teens, after I’d left the school, a letter came in which she enquired what the results of my O levels had been. She wrote, joshingly, “You children can be so ungrateful You never think we’d like to know!” And I lived up to that summation, because I didn’t reply. Awkward and unformed as I was, her words then didn’t strike me with the force they do today. Now, I wish, I wish….. but of course it’s too late.’

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Abergavenny Music

 

Twenty seven years ago my friend James opened his music shop in Abergavenny. I designed and painted the lettering on the board above the window and on the hanging sign that led shoppers along the street to it, together with the shop’s logo of two wyverns, their tails entwined with a lyre. The signs have been repainted many times since those early days, but though the livery evolved from gold lettering on a turquoise ground to what you see now, the typography and the wyverns have remained unchanged.

For the several years James had a satellite music shop in Castle Arcade, Cardiff, at his generous invitation I set up my studio in the cellar beneath it, a shared space that was also the shop’s staff and stock room. No windows and bitterly cold in the winter, nevertheless in memory it remains the studio I was happiest in. I painted the entire series of ‘The Temptations of Solitude’ in James’ cellar, and my first Annunciation, with pianist Semra Kurutac, who worked part-time in the shop, modelling for the Virgin in her lunch and coffee breaks.

The Castle Arcade shop closed many years ago, before Peter and I moved from Cardiff to west Wales. Now Abergavenny Music, too, has closed its doors. It’s been on the cards for quite a while, though James’ sudden illness has precipitated what had been planned anyway. Life will not be the same in Abergavenny without my friend’s shop, his wonderful staff and his deep knowledge of music, so generously shared.

Peter has written below about the closure of Abergavenny Music.

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Abergavenny’s specialist classical music shop, Abergavenny Music, will close on 29 July owing to the illness of the owner and founder, James Joseph. For more than quarter of a century it has been a big part of the lives of Abergavenny and a world-wide community of music enthusiasts.

James established Abergavenny Music 27 years ago. As a talented musician who had worked in production across the UK and Europe, James wanted to create his own perfect music shop, characterised by wonderful stock and expert service. He and his wife, the artist Sarah Thwaites, chose Abergavenny as the place where they wanted to settle down and have a family.

He took premises at 23 Cross Street and made them into a stylish and airy space that became a treasure house of music. The shop sold recordings, videos, sheet music and books, and customers came from far and wide. One of its qualities from the start, set by James’s own quiet and unassuming style, was as a place where people felt welcome to browse for as long as they liked, listening to current recommendations playing through the sound system. The shop felt like a creative space – a focus of chance meetings and a place to make new friendships.

The excellent staff over 27 years have included bright youngsters given their first job opportunities and many professional musicians who were able to supplement their incomes knowing that James would change schedules at short notice if performing opportunities came up. Customers came to expect a service very different from any they would get from HMV or Amazon thanks to the eagerness of James and his colleagues to find answers to obscure questions, research just the right recording or locate scarce scores.

For several years James expanded the operation with a sister shop in Castle Arcade in Cardiff and after that a stand in Ross-on-Wye but the changing landscape of multinational online retailers and downloading has challenged the survival of in-person music retailing everywhere. He kept Abergavenny Music open long after most people would have closed the doors because he loved to be in that calm, music-rich environment and to provide a service.

James has received many messages from people who have been grateful for everything the shop has been over the years. Angela, Kaye, Rosie and Lindsey continue there until the doors close for the last time on 29 July.

Peter Wakelin

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Southampton Solent Graduation Day

 

For the interview, click

HERE

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Catriona on May Day Morning

I remember my friend Ian telling me that he and Catriona had risen in the dark of May Day and driven from their home in Caerleon to Oxford to be present in time to hear the choristers of Magdalen College choir singing Hymnus Eucharisticus from the Great Tower. The adventure would have been a seed sown by Catriona and made into a reality by Ian, her champion, life companion, lover and organiser. The journey would have been carried out in the spirit of delight and celebration for all things green and renewing. But the weather was not great, and Catriona later recounted that far from the rapturous experience she’d imagined, all youthful voices ringing through the crystalline spring air in the city of dreaming spires, instead a desultory crowd huddled against the damp grey morning, straining to hear the distant, muffled and not terribly enthusiastic account of the music given by the sleepy boys, dragged from their beds and herded up the tower to signally fail to sing out glory. All a bit of a damp squib, she mocked, and hardly worth the bother.

This was the Catriona I loved and admired. She was a romantic in spirit but she wouldn’t make a pretence when things failed to measure up. The notion of the Magdalen Tower tradition, she claimed, was so much better than the event. It was this refusal to pretend that made her such entertaining and bracing company. That said, she would delight in small things, gilding the everyday with insight and her ability to appreciate. While the May Morning recollection made her scornful, she could wonderfully describe her memory of taking a nap in the crogloft of our cottage one peerless summer afternoon, drifting in and out of sleep to the distant sound of children playing and dogs barking on the beach, and stirring herself to the noises of preparation in the kitchen below. She said there was no sound sweeter than waking to the low murmur of voices she loved, and the tinkle of china cups and spoons being laid for tea.

In her final year, when the illness that would take her from us had her in retreat and yet she was still well enough for Ian to bring her to join Peter and me at Aberporth, Catriona and I – plus Jack – would sit on the bench in front of the low, whitewashed cottage, and listen to the birds, observe and greet passers by and wax lyrical over the burgeoning garden, so many plants of which she and Ian had brought to us and planted. Intolerant of puff or any form of self aggrandisement in herself or others – and she could be merciless in her lambast when roused – yet she could make you see the transcendent in ordinary things. The old bathtub at the cottage that I’d determined to change because of a dislike of coloured baths, was forever transformed for me when Catriona cast her eye over it for the first time, exclaiming on the beauty of its pale, washed-away blue, ‘Oh how lovely. Taking a bath in here will be like taking a bath in the sky!’ And so it’s there still, and is still as blue as a sky washed after rain.

Catriona died on May Day 2005. She came into my life when I was lost, and held me fast until the moment had passed. She changed the way I see the world. I miss her still, every day.

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Catriona Urquhart was the author of The Mare’s Tale, a series of poems that she wrote about my father, Trevor, who she knew and loved in his later life. At the core of the series is Trevor’s childhood encounter with an apparition that terrified and thereafter haunted him intermittently for a lifetime. The book was published in a numbered edition by the Old Stile Press in 2001, designed and printed by Nicolas McDowall and with illustrations by me. It was the only book of poems by the writer published in her lifetime. Copies are still available from the Old Stile Press, signed by us both in pencil on the colophon page. You may find it:

HERE

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Catriona Urquhart, 1953 -2005.

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The Boy Who Made a Map in his Head

Davenport’s Magic Shop, back in the days when it was in Gt Russell Street.

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When I was a kid attending a theatre school in London that didn’t board, I lived with my aunt and her husband in Dulwich Village. Amy and J.L. were busy people who travelled a lot. The upshot was that on many weekends I was left to my own devices, usually alone in the house. But with so much to explore on the doorstep, I never felt at a loss with what to do with my time. I’d catch a train to central London. Once there I walked everywhere, criss-crossing the city to visit my favourite museums and places of historic interest.

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In the process I discovered shops that were survivors of another age. Benjamin Pollock’s in Scala Street, with its museum of toy theatres housed up a rickety stairs that for me was like climbing to heaven, and Cornellisen the ‘artists’ colourmen’ in Gt Russell Street, where the darkly varnished interior was lined in glass jars displaying powdered pigments as rainbow hued as a tropical sea. Davenport’s in Gt Russell Street was conveniently situated opposite the British Museum, and I would save my magic-trick purchasing for a post-museum treat. Hours spent blissfully drawing in the Egyptian galleries followed by an hour at Davenport’s, was for me, Saturday afternoon perfection.

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The Theatre Zoo by John Griffiths for Motif magazine, September 1959

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The Theatre Zoo was another of my haunts, where masks crowded the shelves and sticks of hard, waxy Leichner greasepaint, a stage make-up even then almost obsolete in the West End theatres all around, were displayed under the glass-topped counters. (I had a well-stocked Leichner make-up box and was much in demand for transforming friends for a lark, using mortician’s wax, crepe hair and Leichner sticks to create the monsters of old Universal Pictures horror films!) I collected a hit list of eccentric shops in the maze of narrow streets behind Covent Garden, the ones with interiors more like museums. I made a circuit, marked on the A to Z of ‘special places’ stored in my head, that on weekends I would delight in navigating, taking in my favourites. Long before I became a painter I was purchasing French varnishes, mahl-sticks and gilding-papers that I had no use for beyond the fact that I loved the shops I found them in. I relished the sense of ancient crafts, the language of forgotten skills, the scents of resins and rabbit-skin glue and scenic-fireproofing, the graphic loveliness of the packaging of vintage stock. I wandered, a boy in a trance in love with I knew not what.

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I took a weekend job in Berman & Nathan’s theatrical outfitters. I’d sit cross-legged on a counter sewing buttons on Pearly King and Queen costumes, or re-stitching worn eyelets that held the laces of corsets worn by ‘doxies’ in musicals. (Ever noticed how many corseted loose women appear in operas, ballets and musicals? Those corsets take a lot of maintenance, and for about a year, I was the boy who spent his Saturdays repairing most of them!) With my pay I’d purchase cheap tickets in the ‘gods’ to see some of the productions I’d earlier delivered costumes to after repairs at the B & N workshops.

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Click here to see archive footage of The Theatre Zoo

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There was a shop that sold pens of all types, from mapping-pens to fat and satisfying-to-hold fountain pens. I wish I could remember its name. Concerned with the shop’s slowly diminishing stock of products, I took to saving my pocket money to make purchases. No weekend was complete without carrying off a paper bag of some treasure that had caught my eye because of the old-fashioned graphics on its battered packaging. I was addicted to the old stock of French perfumed inks lining one shelf, produced by the venerable Paris manufacturer, J Herbin. The labels on the the bottles were as tantalising as those on fireworks (I recall a stunner called ‘Lotus Bleu’), and I took to writing my letters home in inks that gave up the unmistakeable scent of flowers. One had the powdery scent of violet cachous, and I can’t imagine what my parents must have thought when envelopes started arriving addressed in the scratchy/spidery scented penmanship of mapping nibs dipped in perfume! My letters must have smelled like the insides of old ladies handbags!

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This was the London of the ‘Swinging Sixties’. But I was a tad young for all that, and my heart lay not so much in the trendy emporiums of Carnaby Street, as in the wonderful survivals of a past fast vanishing, though I didn’t know that at the time.

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A few weeks ago I had a meeting in London that required an overnight stay with my sister-in-law in Blackheath, and I reserved the following day for a visit to the Pollock’s Museum, still in a corner property on Scala Street. Alas, although I’d checked the business hours, when I arrived mid morning the door marked with an ‘open’ sign was locked, and remained so for the hour I hung around hoping that someone would turn up. After that disappointment I traced the old map, still in my head, of the shops I’d once loved. None of them save Cornellisen and Pollock’s have survived, or at least not in the places they had once been. (I know that Davenport’s Magic Shop is still in the hands of the family, though re-located somewhere close to Trafalgar Square.) The walk felt like I was straddling two realities, the bright and vibrant one in my head, and the lacklustre reality of what the West End and Bloomsbury have become. There’s no room left for the eccentricities and unlikely post-war survivals that I had witnessed the tail-end of. The economics have changed in ways that the old communities could never have envisaged. The dusty shops with ancient stock and courteous proprietors are now only in my memories. I guess that’s where everything ends, eventually, in the realm of ‘once upon a time’.

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Palaces of the Imagination: Part 1. The Globe

The Penylan was a cinema in Albany Road, Cardiff, that opened in 1914 showing silent films. On conversion to ‘Talkies’ in 1931, its name was changed to the Globe.  It was demolished in 1985.

The building though small – it sat 500 – was presented in a pretty, neo-classical style. It was surmounted by a dome that could be opened on fine evenings to let out the patrons’ smoke. By the time I went there in the 1960s, it showed mainly art-house films, and was the cinema of choice for Cardiff’s student population. I remember the elegance of the narrow auditorium, the slender, gravity-defying balcony and the loveliness of the gilt plasterwork. It was faded and peeling, but it had all the allure of a building that though built-to-purpose as a cinema, had its roots in the traditions of the old theatres and music-halls.

At some point in my early teens I was taken to the Globe by a young man I’d met at drama club. Gareth was about six years older than me and had a car, and it was exciting to be picked up by him from my home in Newport and whisked away to Cardiff for an adventure. There was a heady whiff of romance in the air, though I wasn’t quite sure what that might entail. He had written poetry for me, which was unexpected and head-spinning, and to this day I have an art book that he brought to me as a gift, with an inscription and his name on the title page.

We saw a double Jean Cocteau programme. Orphée (1950) and La Belle et la Bête ( 1946). The experience was revelatory. Everything on the screen left me weak at the knees. This was the single defining moment of what I would later reach toward creatively, though of course I didn’t know that at the time. I don’t mean by this that I came away from the experience yearning to be a film director. At that point I was still unclear about what I’d be, in all senses. But the seed was planted, the desire to build worlds of my own that had the power to hold and enrapture, as I had been held and enraptured by the experience of the films. Watching Cocteau’s masterpieces shimmering in the darkness of that palace of the imagination, left me yearning to be a maker.

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Beneath the Greasepaint

Back in the London of the 1960s when I was a pupil at the Italia Conti Stage School, I used to haunt the shop called Theatre Zoo in the West End. I was drawn to the papier mâché ‘Big-Heads’ ranged on high shelves around the showroom, and fascinated by the theatrical animal suits for hire, the front-and-back pantomime horses and cows that required two actors to fill them.

I remember the shop’s displays of Leichner stage-greasepaint, the hard, obliterating sticks of colour that were fast becoming obsolete as theatre modernised and actors presented themselves more naturally. Greasepaint had been formulated for an age when theatrical lighting required that the actors’ faces be much emphasised with heavy make-up. (Just look at Moira Shearer in her ‘ballet make-up’ for The Red Shoes. Densely whitened skin, eyes startlingly lined in black punctuated with red dots in the inner corners, her face a mask applied for the stage.) Because I’d belonged to a young people’s drama group in Wales, by the time I arrived in London I already had a well-stocked enamel make-up box, and though contemporary electric lighting in theatres no longer required the grease-based make-ups of the past, my Leichner kit stayed with me through my teens and early twenties, not least because I gravitated to the transformative roles that required a lot of disguising. (I LOVED being cast as assorted villains and Demon Kings in pantomime. And then there were the animals. I played, many, many animals! The old stage-arts have always beguiled me! I was born out of my time, really.) I learned my make-up skills from the Leichner charts, old even by the time I acquired them, and by watching black and white Lon Chaney films!

Not my make-up box, though it looked a lot like this, only with more stuff!

The Leichner charts in the photo at the top of this page are not mine either – those have long vanished – but are from an old e-bay auction. However they, and many more from the series, were the ones that initially guided me into the world of greasepaint and flim-flam!

I remember too, Harlequinade, the long-since-departed London puppet shop that specialised in vintage Pelham marionettes, and of course the old Pollock’s Toy Theatre Shop in Scala Street, with the sales counter on the ground-floor and the museum above accessed up narrow flights of rickety-stairs.  There, when I was a schoolboy, I purchased stacks of penny-plain toy theatre sheets and plays that were old-stock even then.

They were such eccentricities, these creaky survivals whose owners made losses to keep the doors open. But for me, a boy entranced by the archaic worlds of old-time theatrical magic, they were repositories of wonders.

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The Things That Made Me: part 3

Part 3, and I think the last of my posts on the films, TV programmes, books, comics and toys that had profound effects on me when I was a boy. I’ve left the stills without captions, so as not to spoil the fun of you figuring out which films they come from.

Click on these links for parts 1 and 2.

I’ve avoided descriptions as I want the images to speak for themselves, though I will say of the model of Boadicea that until I came upon the online image of it while searching for something else, I’d completely forgotten I’d ever had one exactly like it. The sight of it brought the memories and the pleasure flooding back, including how much I loved racing the chariot on the crazy-paving path that ran between the flowerbed and lawn of our back-garden, and the feel of the chariot’s relief decoration under my fingers.

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The Things That Made Me: part 2

Here’s my second list. All the things on it have been significant to my development. They were the accompaniments to my finding myself.

The castle and farmyard are not ones I own, but are the doubles of those I had as a child. I remember the flimsiness of the castle, and my anxiety that the thin plastic might break as I snapped the pieces together. But the farm,… oh that farm… was my pride and joy. One day it was gone. My parents quickly got rid of things they thought I’d grown out of. But I hadn’t grown out of the farm, and haven’t still. The one pictured was sold on e-bay before I spotted it. It’s listed as having been ‘Made in Sweden’. I didn’t know that, though as an adult I’d figured it was unlikely to have been British, on account of the windmill.

Just in case anyone was wondering, my big sister used to get me into X-rated films. I wore my dad’s flat-cap and car-coat, but I doubt the disguise fooled anyone!

No more words or explanations. Just the pictures. I leave it to you to put titles to the films represented by photographs.

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The Things That Made Me: part 1

Here’s my list. It may appear random, but all the things on it have been significant to me. They were the accompaniments to my finding myself, the books, films, TV programmes and objects that had profound effects on me when I was a child. (And in some cases, the allure of what I yearned for but never got, like a Topstone latex rubber mask!) Some of what’s here you might expect to see, and much of it, probably not. It’s also my ‘coming out’ list, inasmuch as there are items here that my parents didn’t approve of. The horror magazines and the Mars Attacks collector-cards were frowned on by my mother, and I quickly learned to put them away where she wouldn’t see them. This made me uncomfortable. Conflicted. They were pleasures tarnished with guilt.

I’ve been conflicted most of my life about the things I’ve loved that might be considered lowbrow. Next month I’ll be six-five. A nicely rounded figure, though inconceivably high. It’s time I got over being troubled about what made me who I am. There’s nothing wrong with any of the things that thrilled me in those formative years. Time to celebrate them. Time to own up!

No words and no explanations. Just the pictures. I leave it to you to put titles to the films represented by photographs.

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