Peter Drinkwater
my obituary of this eccentric genius should really be in the odds-n-ends section; it was written in 2014 for the Bulletin of the Scientific Instrument Society, whose members knew of Drinkwater as an authority on the geometrical construction of sundials and doubtless realised (from his publications) that he was a bit eccentric, but I imagine had little idea just how
Peter Drinkwater – Learnèd in Esoteric Subjects and with a Long Forked Beard
Peter Drinkwater, who died suddenly on July 25, 2013 aged 65, was someone unashamedly out of tune with his times, studiedly unconventional and unhurried, and very fond of rabbits. He was also a great authority on the geometrical construction of sundials and related instruments. A lifelong resident of the small English town of Shipston-on-Stour, latitude 52° 42′, he was known there as a ‘much-loved eccentric who took a rabbit with him everywhere’ – including to church, his rabbits being devout Catholics,
He started as a Methodist, becoming an odd combination of English ‘Liberal Puritan’ and medieval monkish polymath. In spite of his high intelligence he worked in a factory as an unskilled assembly-line worker until he was made redundant, after which he set himself up as a small publisher. He also did gardening for neighbours, played the church organ (and composed music for it), and went for long walks with a shepherd’s crook (and a rabbit).
Locals were well aware that he had hidden intellectual depths – if you stopped for a chat it might as easily embrace Proust or Comenius as local history or the weather – but they can hardly have suspected that his name was esteemed in sundial circles throughout the world, and that his book The Art of Sundial Construction was admired less for its quaintness than for its wealth of accurate geometrical and constructional detail. First published in 1985, privately of course by Drinkwater himself, it went through four editions in little more than a decade. He attributed the ‘enormous sales’ to the fact that it was championed by Charles Aked and Chris Daniel, and with a different sort of modesty wrote in a preface to the third edition ‘it is a disgrace that this little book is still called for’. What he meant was not so much that more or better books were needed, but rather that the principles on which the design of sundials is based should be taught in school, as they were in the eighteenth century.
Largely self-taught himself (in all his skills – including calligraphy and book design), he thought school geometry (in his day anyway) was ‘either so inconsequential as to be a waste of time; or it is treated as a mere jumping-off point for Mathematical Abstractions which have no practical application’. One practical application of course is instruments – but the value of instruments is how they embody real ‘understanding’ of the astronomical and geometrical concepts. He believed ‘a Child of 8 to 10 should easily be able to cope with’ the basics – perhaps a little generous, but the approach allowed him to attempt to construct ‘a sure Foundation upon which a genuine understanding of the Art [of Dialling] can be developed’. The regard in which his book is held by the sundial and instrument community speaks for itself.
After a lifelong fascination with sundials, he plunged into purer historical research around 1980, reading original 16th- and 17th-century dialling books in the Oxford libraries and museums, usually on Saturday mornings as he still worked full-time. The Art of Sundial Construction is not a history book, but one of its unique qualities is that it is infused with authentic period detail and antiquarian sympathy – it is in the true tradition of Foster, Stirrup, and Fale (though he disliked Leybourne!). His other publications include an interesting pamphlet about Kratzer’s dials, and versions of Oronce Fine’s ‘Solar Horology’, while to the fourth edition of The Art he added a fascinating interpretation of Dürer’s Melancholia.
Peter Innocentius Drinkwater (1947-2013) described his personal status as ‘a chaste Bachelor’, though he had ‘beloved Female Friends’ and included feminism among his interests, along with theology, astronomy and astrology (his own italics), and mediaeval (he refused to spell it medieval) philosophy and scholarship. In his autobiographical introduction to the Kratzer pamphlet (1993) he wrote: ‘As a child my double ambition was to be learnèd in esoteric subjects and to have a long forked beard: both of these I have achieved and in that I am content’. A small number of his designs and models, including a beautiful wooden astrolabe made in 1982, will be preserved in the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford. His shepherd’s crook was buried with him.
Tony Simcock
Museum of the History of Science
Oxford OX1 3AZ
[from Bulletin of the Scientific Instrument Society, 2014]
A Dodo in the Ark
this unconventional biography of Robert T. Gunther, the founding curator of the Museum of the History of Science, explores the origins of the Museum – not the tedious business of its immediate foundation but its deeper roots, which are to be discovered in the details of Gunther’s earlier life down to about 1920; it was written to accompany a previously unpublished history of the Old Ashmolean by Gunther himself (edited, cobbled together, and annotated by me) which started with Noah's Ark and ended with an account of the founding of his Museum in 1922-25, and they were published together as Robert T. Gunther and the Old Ashmolean in 1985; it was also in some measure a sequel to my tercentenary history of the scientific aspects of the Old Ashmolean, The Ashmolean Museum and Oxford Science 1683-1983 (1984)
to read my biography of Gunther please click the button
Alchemy and the World of Science
my biography of the prolific science writer, historian of science, and one-time Director of the Science Museum, London, Frank Sherwood Taylor, was published in 1987 in the 50th-anniversary volume of Ambix, the journal of the history of alchemy and chemistry of which he was founding editor; it explores his career and intellectual life from school chemistry teacher to top museum curator, from author of some of the most successful popular science books and textbooks of the 20th century to historian of science who wrote what is perhaps the most level-headed and reliable history of the mysterious science of alchemy, from sceptical agnostic who championed freedom of thought against religious and political dogma to deeply spiritual Catholic who believed passionately that science and religion could be reconciled
to read my biography of Sherwood Taylor please click the button
Francis Maddison
this is an unpublished obituary which I set about writing partly because I’d written and published biographical accounts of all previous heads of the Museum – Robert T. Gunther, Frank Sherwood Taylor, C. H. Josten (obituary in The Times, 1994) – and partly, more immediately, because it seemed likely I’d be asked to do one; obituaries duly appeared – several, if I remember correctly, written by Anthony Turner – but since obits spawn obits (bandwagon effect) I still expected somebody would end up asking me, even if they were barrel-scraping; the call never came, and it remained unpublished; the advantage is, I didn’t have to rein it in, neither for length nor for diplomacy, so you get the warts-and-all version
Francis Maddison obituary
Francis Romeril Maddison, who died in France on July 12, 2006 aged 78, was a historian and museum curator whose formidable expertise on Islamic astrolabes (the paragon of early scientific instruments) arose not from intense specialisation but from an unusually broad concept of historical and linguistic scholarship that rejoiced in what Renaissance scholars called ‘particulars’, whether they were linguistic, cultural, technical, bibliographic, folkloric, musical, or even to do with the meal he was eating or the car he was driving.
Born in Hounslow on July 27, 1927, he was educated at the independent grammar school there and at Exeter College, Oxford, where he changed from French to modern history, but was most actively interested in archaeology. He graduated in 1949. He worked on some archaeological digs, and then as an archivist (1950-53), before becoming assistant curator of the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford, where he remained for the rest of his working career (41 years). In 1964 he became curator of the museum (the post is now called director), and he retired in 1994.
He was a fellow of Linacre College, Oxford; of the Society of Antiquaries; of the International Academy of the History of Science; honorary member of the Société Internationale de l’Astrolabe; sometime chairman of the British National Committee for the History of Science; and president of the Society for the History of Medieval Technology and Science.
He was twice married: firstly to Audrey Kent, with whom he had a daughter and a son (the marriage was dissolved; she died in 2004); and to Patricia Brown, who survives him, and with whom he had a son.
He was the elder son of Dr R. E. W. Maddison (1901-1993), the distinguished historian of science and biographer of Robert Boyle, who was an industrial research chemist by profession, and also a musician, linguist, book collector, and librarian. His mother Adelaide Romeril Verdier was of French extraction, the daughter of Revd Louis Verdier, a Huguenot minister in London. Much of Francis Maddison’s intellectual breadth and cosmopolitanism derived from these sources, and his earliest paper on history of science was co-authored with his father (in 1956). His love of antiquarian scientific books and his relish for languages (his father knew at least six and taught Russian at one time) had the same origin. An effect of this was that he became a historian who was entirely comfortable with science, at a time when interest in history of science was largely confined to those trained as scientists.
Even so, his entering the history of science as a profession came about by chance. In 1953, working at Warwick record office, he had the simultaneous opportunity of returning to Oxford to work either for the University Press, which was setting up a museum and archive of printing history, or at the Museum of the History of Science. The curator of the latter, Dr C. H. Josten, earnestly head-hunted him as successor to his able assistant curator Kathleen Higgins.
Within a couple of years Maddison the archivist had supplied one of the museum’s most pressing needs by doing the first catalogue of its interesting collection of scientific manuscripts; Maddison the curator/archaeologist had introduced a professional accession-numbering procedure to the museum; and Maddison the scholar/linguist had tackled the most challenging component of the museum’s collection, the astrolabes engraved in Arabic script, learning Arabic for the purpose of studying and re-cataloguing them.
He also took over the cataloguing of the private collection of J. A. Billmeir from Josten, who had rather tersely catalogued the original collection. The over-modestly entitled Supplement to the Billmeir catalogue of 1957 was a highly erudite catalogue raisonné which, as has often been remarked, set new standards for the serious description and contextualisation of early scientific instruments. In the wake of Maddison’s Supplement Billmeir presented his collection to Oxford.
About this time L. A. Mayer’s Islamic Astrolabists and their Works was published, and Maddison became acquainted with Mayer and began to collaborate with him on a revision and extension of his book. Mayer’s death shortly afterwards (in 1959) was a great blow; and a more ambitiously conceived continuation of his work was a driving passion of Maddison’s ever after, becoming the Répertoire of Islamic astrolabists’ works compiled jointly with his friend Alain Brieux, the Parisian scholar-bookseller.
Maddison was seconded for a time to the National Maritime Museum, where he assisted and learned from Commander D. W. Waters, the historian of navigation. Navigation and its instruments were another abiding interest, and one of his most valuable publications is his substantial Coimbra monograph on the development of navigational instruments in the great era of exploration (1969).
He also became involved in Josten’s long-term project on the life of Elias Ashmole (the Museum of the History of Science being situated in the historic seventeenth-century Old Ashmolean). In fact Maddison’s degree of involvement in Josten’s work, a piece of grand antiquarian scholarship of the old sort (five volumes, three of which print the source materials for Ashmole’s life in extenso), has not been sufficiently appreciated. The book was so complex that it took six years from its completion in 1960 to its publication, during which time Josten (for personal or family reasons) resigned as curator and returned to Germany, leaving Maddison (the obvious choice as his successor) to nurse the book through the press in Oxford. Much of the vast amount of minute and difficult proof-correcting is in Maddison’s hand.
Even before this stage, as a by-product of Josten’s Elias Ashmole, Maddison had researched the entire history of the Ashmolean Museum from original archival sources, compiling a detailed chronological record-card file, and also painstakingly reconstructing a list with biographical details of all staff of the museum since its foundation. At this time there were no general histories of the Ashmolean Museum, and Maddison’s pioneering researches have been drawn upon by Josten, R. F. Ovenell, myself, and several other writers, and are still in use.
One of the triumphs of Maddison’s curatorial career was his identification in 1962 of an object shown him by one of the auction houses, as a spherical astrolabe, an instrument known from medieval literature but no extant example of which had been seen in modern times. He then, of course, had to acquire it for the museum, which meant raising outside funding as the museum had virtually no purchasing power of its own at that period. It remains the only complete example known, and Maddison’s paper on it the classic study.
In the 1950s and 1960s he was much involved in the international community of history of science. In particular he presided for a time over the world inventory of historic scientific instruments promoted by the International Union for the History and Philosophy of Science. He was always keen to encourage and help colleagues in eastern Europe at a time when they laboured under great disadvantages. He gave much support to the Polish inventory, and distributed it (on microfilm) from Oxford.
He was also busy with various teaching and educational activities. A diploma in the history of science with a strong instrument component taught in the museum seems (in retrospect) to have been very successful and influential, its alumni including Anthony Turner and David Bryden; though it was short-lived. He did a stint as examiner for the science and technology option of the Museums Association diploma. He also wrote material for a number of teaching courses and for popular encyclopaedias.
In the 1970s he was involved in the detection, and as an expert witness in the prosecution, of a notorious case of forgery of antique scientific instruments. After this experience, and aware that older fakes (made in Victorian times) have long since entered our museum collections and perhaps been misinterpreted, he became increasingly concerned about this problem, and inclined to err on the sceptical side. His controversial refusal to accept the Regiomontanus astrolabe, which came on to the market in 1989, at least encouraged other scholars to study it further and defend its authenticity robustly.
His friend and pupil Anthony Turner has characterised Francis Maddison in Thomas Hardy’s line, ‘a man who used to notice such things’, someone perpetually delighting in a myriad of details, not only in his professional work but in ordinary life. His favourite variety of rose, an elegantly designed telephone, the right kind of pen (he wrote in a beautiful calligraphic hand) were extolled and pursued, or lamented if the philistinism of the market-place deprived one of them. He designed his own house near Oxford (at a time when such a thing could be done economically), and it combined modesty with a tasteful, sensible elegance. He loved all things French, from cars to the beret he always wore. To seek his advice, whether about publication or plumbing, guaranteed a sweeping lesson in history and taste, as well as exasperating delays while he sought to find you the perfect typeface or a particular design of tap.
His linguistic aptitude and knowledge of historical philology gave him a scholarly edge in studies that were perforce cosmopolitan. But he wore it lightly, and tended to convey more the sheer enjoyment of language and its quirks. He became especially interested in minority languages, such as Catalan and Georgian, and attended classes in Armenian.
Maddison was the exponent and embodiment of a style of scholarship that, while quietly admired and envied, sits ill with the modern world’s targets and projects and performance monitoring, and the strangle-hold of dumbing down. The activities of his museum only a decade after his retirement are almost unrecognisable. It changed rapidly, as for quite a while before he retired Maddison was holding back the floodgates of change, for which some admired him and some did not. Privately, on his retirement, he said ‘Après moi le déluge’ and meant it. Publicly, welcoming his successor (Dr Jim Bennett) in his retirement speech, he translated this with his usual charm, self-effacement, and realism into what was taken as an endorsement of the need for change. And perhaps it was.
But a museum curator in a time of rapidly changing priorities is a difficult beast to commend to posterity. For the core achievements of his career may already have been swept away, his core values already made to seem old-fashioned. Maddison designed bespoke display cases in the 1970s that solved the problem of displaying astrolabes so that both sides of the instrument could be viewed. They are gone. With Anthony Turner he created a new horological gallery and reconciled within it the two somewhat incongruous focuses of the museum’s clock collection, scientific horology and locally-made Oxfordshire clocks. It no longer exists.
For several decades Maddison ran the museum, which is a department of Oxford University but also open to the public free of charge, with its sights firmly fixed on the pursuit of post-graduate level scholarship and advanced research, himself as the academic figurehead. That is what his employers the university expected of him. Even before he retired the university itself was openly criticising the limitations and lack of relevance it now perceived in the museum’s role, and Maddison’s reputation has unfairly suffered from this volatility in his employer’s priorities.
I think he increasingly saw the world around him, including his own academic and professional milieux, as hyperactive, shallow, and evolving in ill-advised directions. He came to feel that, in university museums for instance, education and popularisation, elements of a museum’s role that he had once embraced, had become a threat to sound academic scholarship and not the happy concomitant they once seemed. Funding and the criteria for funding have of course been important factors in these changes. Maddison was never very comfortable with fund-raising activities; but the primitive nature of the university museums’ funding structure, and more often than not the complete lack of funds in his day, conspired to exaggerate the inertia that he was criticised for.
One of the highly applauded achievements of his successor at the museum has been to build useful and architecturally discreet extensions at the rear and underneath the front of the museum’s sensitive historic building (the Old Ashmolean is the oldest purpose-built museum in the world). In fact Maddison (and also an earlier head of the museum in the 1940s, Frank Sherwood Taylor) tried several times to interest the university in such a development, and the answer was always that it was impractical and prohibitively expensive.
The other negative thing about Francis Maddison’s career that might be mentioned is his reluctance to publish. He was prolific in his early research; and he was always brimming with topics he wanted to look into and articles he thought of writing, or commended to others to write. Sometimes they materialised after many years of gestation; more often they did not. He found the business of getting things finished and published ‘tedious’, and enjoyed the minutiae of scholarly detail too much ever to be entirely satisfied – there was always a linguistic nicety, a recondite bibliographical reference, a finely-tuned footnote that he thought should be added. He once told me he was lazy, but it was not intellectual laziness but a growing impatience with the irritations and compromises attendant upon academic publishing.
This exasperation increased as he grew older, but was characteristic of him all along. His work on the staff of the Ashmolean Museum was accepted for publication in Annals of Science in 1964, requiring only minor typographical adjustment; he seems never to have bothered. A paper on John Greaves and his 1630s journey to the Levant, combining science, instruments, linguistics, and oriental culture, never lost its fascination for him, but was nonetheless never published (though he wrote the excellent entry for Greaves for the new Dictionary of National Biography, perhaps his last publication). A study of Islamic astrolabes drafted as early as 1955, and several subsequent generations of the ever-lengthening descriptions displayed with the museum’s astrolabes, never achieved published form, in spite of frequently-expressed demand.
Better known among his unpublished works and unfinished projects, because they have been used and cited so often by other scholars, are the substantial catalogue he wrote with Anthony Turner in connection with the Festival of Islam (1976), and his long-cherished and very ambitious Répertoire of all known works of Islamic astrolabe makers, which he was still putting finishing touches to during his retirement.
Francis Maddison was an affable and charming person, rather formal but entirely approachable, and generously helpful to enquirers, students, and colleagues who sought his advice or shared his interests. His influence by that means alone, especially in the fields of astrolabe and scientific instrument studies and history of Arabic science, has been important in bringing history of science and technology to maturity as a discipline, encouraging its focus on instrument studies and on linguistic epigraphy, and at the same time broadening its cultural and scholarly terms of reference.
Such personal influence, and the tolerance, intellectual breadth, and scholarly rigour he infused into the daily life of the museum for over 40 years, are real enough but intangible. The importance of a number of his publications will endure more obviously, and presumably (as in his lifetime) some of his unpublished material will continue to be used by specialised scholars. And hopefully, however much fashions in the practice of scholarship and the priorities of museums keep changing, much of what Maddison did for the collections, documentation, and intellectual spirit of the Museum of the History of Science, and of historic scientific instrument studies generally, will quietly endure.
TS 2006
Jack Simcock
this short biography of the artist Jack Simcock was originally drafted as an obituary in 2012; the original core of it was written for The Times, by arrangement, duly submitted, and then weeks went by and nothing was heard from the bastards; when I enquired they said they’d printed one by their in-house art critic – which, when we found it, turned out to be crap; meanwhile the result of them sitting on mine was that it missed the opportunity of being offered elsewhere; I improved and expanded it somewhat, and have also thrown in some quotations from the horse's mouth; a version of it was published on my sister’s ‘jacksimcock.com’ web site
Jack Simcock obituary
The artist Jack Simcock died on Sunday May 13, 2012 at the age of 82, on the eve of the opening of an exibition of previously unseen work in uncharacteristically colourful abstract style.
He had always done abstracts, some of which were stylised versions of his more typical ‘landscape and head’ theme. And some of them, and his heads and nudes, were colourful. But Simcock was and will remain best known for dark moorland landscapes, farms, and villages, with buildings that seem to grow out of the earth, and sometimes a foreground figure or head. Or is it a boulder? They are realistic, yet as exaggerated in their sombre grittiness as Wuthering Heights.
The trees are always bare and the roofs are always wet. He actually waited for the combination of rain and a certain kind of light before he would venture out sketching. More famously, he only sketched or painted at all in winter. The resulting gloomy landcapes under light skies give a monochrome effect, but Simcock hated people referring to them as ‘black and white’. There was much subtle use of dark browns and dark reds and dark blues and dark greens. He painted in oils on hardboard, mainly using a palette knife, which itself imparted a characteristic rugged texture.
Cottage landscape with wet roof and bouldery wall, probably at Rock Side, Mow Cop, 1971 (Trent Art)
The typical Simcock painting was often thought to merge his coal mining origins and the adjacent moorland landscape, a combination of environment so typical of much of northern England (or the Welsh valleys). He was in fact born in a coal mining valley, at Biddulph in North Staffordshire, just north of the Potteries, in 1929. His parents both hailed from Biddulph Moor, once famous for the surly individuality of its inhabitants. Father and grandfather were coal miners, who nevertheless retained a strong sense of their roots among moorland farmers and stone masons. The grandfather Joseph Simcock was killed at Chatterley Whitfield Colliery when Simcock was 12.
So the presumption of the two strands coming together in these paintings has some foundation. ‘I have never consciously thought about coal in connection with my art’, Simcock wrote. ‘But so many people have seen and felt the allusion to coal ... that I can now see it myself unmistakably.’ The Simcocks were also Primitive Methodists, the working-class sect that originated locally and had more in common with old-time Quakerism. Coal aside, both Puritan and Primitive are words that have to enter any discussion of Jack Simcock’s work, though he himself denied them both.
He was by no means a primitive painter, it was rather his subject-matter that was primitive. He could not escape the word anyway, as from 1958 to his death he lived at Primitive Street, Mow Cop, immediately adjacent to the spot where Primitive Methodism began in the 1800s. It was only a matter of time, as his career took off, before a newspaper headed a review of one of his exhibitions ‘Art on Primitive Street’ (The Guardian, 1961).
Village landscape with greenhouse, Mow Cop or Biddulph Moor, 1956 (Potteries Auctions)
Puritanical however Simcock certainly was, in his painting and in his personality. A convinced atheist, he lived it and advocated it with a grim commitment worthy of the most Quakerish of his ancestors. He liked to engage in religious debate, but debating with him was pointless. He considered himself a great ‘conversationalist’, but his partners in these marathons needed to be very good listeners. He was an armchair expert on many things, including medicine, music, philosophy, and roofing; and his egotism filled in where his knowledge fell short.
At the time when everyone was talking about the ‘three tenors’ and selecting their favourite, he held forth at length on the superiority of Carreras. When the person with whom he was having this conversation thought it was his turn and began to say his own favourite was Pavarotti, he was stopped with a dismissive hand gesture, as Simcock leant forward and said emphatically ‘Ah, but that’s just your opinion’.
He was active until shortly before his death, which was from heart failure related to cancer of the bowel. But he had always enjoyed illness, and had been predicting his imminent demise from at least his thirties. The Reader’s Digest medical encyclopaedia was always by his chair. More than once he had to change doctors because his self-diagnosis conflicted with their ‘opinions’.
Misty landscape, about 1969, also showing the black and silver frame designed by the artist
He had been diagnosed at quite an early age with what used to be called ‘nerves’, and was consequently a lifelong addict of the pills that it was once fashionable to prescribe for that imaginary ailment. He called himself, as if with pride, ‘a black-and-green-and-little-red-man’. It was hard to tell whether it was he or the pills that were manic depressives. Much that was selfish and aloof or irascible in his personality might possibly be laid at that door, co-existing as it did with humour, compassion, and his almost mystical attachment to the landscape that inspired his art.
These deeper emotions expressed themselves in his ceaseless creativity. Having painted in his studio for many hours his relaxation would consist of writing (often during the night – his book of poems is entitled Midnight Till Three) or composing music, or occasional forays into sculpture, pottery, wood carving, or the invention of nutty gadgets. He wrote compulsively – clipboard and pen typified him more than brush and palette – much of it by his own admission just ‘my way of meditating’. Hence little came of it, except for the poems and an idiosyncratic autobiographical work, entitled Simcock Mow Cop (the words he used in answering the telephone), both published in 1975.
Another sideline or hobby, photography, eventually supplanted sketching as the basis for his landscape paintings, arguably making them more documentary in style. It certainly coincided with a series of paintings of identifiable houses, such as 23 Rock Side, which was shortly afterwards demolished (the buildings in his landscapes hitherto being more often anonymous or generic). Not surprisingly he had a good photographer’s eye, but creatively he preferred portrait photography.
Exceptionally realistic view (painted from a photograph) of part of Mow Cop village, including car and modern houses, about 1980
His father never wanted him to be a coal miner. He attended Burslem Technical School, where his aptitude for technical drawing led to work in the drawing office of an engineering firm (as ‘blueprint boy’) and then in an architect’s office, followed by full-time studies, at his father’s expense, for a career as an architect’s draughtsman. Interrupted by conscription into the army and posted to the Royal Army Medical Corps, he graduated from the ‘shit squad’ to the task of designing instructional posters on hygiene (he loathed flies for the rest of his life). More importantly he started painting seriously, and decided he wanted to go to art school.
He returned to Civvy Street in 1949 as ‘Smicko’, an aspiring commercial artist with a business card. Within months he moved from watercolour to oils, and took up outdoor sketching. His father bought him an easel and oil-painting outfit (he used the metal palette for the rest of his life), and helped him through Burslem Art School, an excellent training ground in fine and decorative arts, being at the heart of the ceramic industry. Later for a brief period he taught there. The first painting he ever exhibited, in his first term as a student, was purchased by the City of Stoke-on-Trent Art Gallery for £3.
From a Back Lane, 1949 (City of Stoke-on-Trent) Preliminary version of From a Back Lane, 1949 (TS Collection)
He admired and was influenced by Van Gogh (giving Vincent as a middle name to his son), Munch (Simcock’s heads do not scream, but they are the unmistakeable cousins-once-removed of Munch’s), and Bonnard, who remained his favourite non-contemporary painter. His mentor at Art School and for a time after, and the only contemporary whose influence he acknowledged, was Arthur Berry, a greatly under-rated North Staffordshire painter. In contrast he also liked the abstract styles of Klee and Mondrian, but kept their influence in check until late in his career.
In 1953 after four years of study he was astonished to learn that he had failed the diploma examination in painting. He took it twice more and failed it twice more. In spite of which, both his sense of ‘emergence’ as an artist and his seemingly charmed life flourished during the 1950s, in tandem with marriage, having children, and making a home of his own. His cousin fixed him up with a girlfriend, who became his wife (and for the first year of marriage the main breadwinner). His father gave him a house. He got more or less the first job he applied for, as art and craft master at Lawton Hall School, a private school not far away in Cheshire.
And when he set off to London in 1956 to perform the hopeless task of dragging six paintings round the off-Bond Street private dealers’ galleries, the first gallery he walked into (on the recommendation of no less an adviser than John Berger) brought him face to face with Godfrey Pilkington, an astute gallery owner and genial spotter of new talent. Pilkington was his agent for more than 25 years. Annual one-man shows at Pilkington’s Piccadilly Gallery, and at various provincial venues, well reviewed and often selling-out, with occasional sales to celebrities and well-known art collectors, established a reputation which was at its height during the 1960s and 70s.
1956 was the year he found the signature style on which that reputation was built, in a series of sombre village scenes of Biddulph Moor, Brown Edge, and Mow Cop. It seems to have happened suddenly, but quite what prompted it is unclear. ‘The turning point had occurred when I first of all accepted, and then became fascinated by, my own environment’, he later wrote. Turning away from the industrial Potteries to sketch in these moorland villages may also have suggested the darker palette. He recognised the breakthrough instantly – these paintings were ‘Simcocks’, and they were the ones he took to London that same year.
?(((holding image pending 1956 robin hill (+ind’l scene on back) AWAITING PHOTOS
A prize at the John Moores Liverpool Exhibition in 1959, a one-man show in Los Angeles in 1960, and a documentary feature on the BBC’s flagship ‘Tonight’ programme in 1961 signalled how quickly his career had blossomed. Chris Brasher’s ‘Tonight’ film presented him as a Stanley Spencer-like character, a lifelong resident of Mow Cop (to which in fact he had moved just three years before) who painted only his native village. This was rather unfair on his favourite sketching territory, his ancestral Biddulph Moor. But it was his own invention, and ‘the Mow Cop artist’ remained the image he liked to promote as he attempted to sustain these early successes.
His career total was over fifty solo exhibitions. Highlights included an open-house exhibition at his home on Mow Cop in 1966, a major exhibition (his largest ever, containing 100 works) at Salford City Art Gallery in 1968, and an exhibition combining paintings and photographs at the Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne, in 1979. The Potteries Museum and Art Gallery held a retrospective in 2001. Works were acquired for a number of public collections, including the Tate Gallery and various municipal art galleries and universities.
After giving up teaching in 1967 his boast (whether correct or not) was that he was the only contemporary British artist able to support a wife and young children exclusively on the income from selling his paintings. One of the things that made it work was his knack of persuading local tradesmen (plumbers, builders, hi-fi dealers, even a hairdresser) to accept paintings in lieu of payment. But the most surprising thing about it was that he had long since turned his back on anything commercial, and usually refused commissions: he was an ‘artist’ and he painted only ‘Simcocks’.
In the 1980s he changed his style – not for the first time, though the pale ‘misty’ landscapes had proved popular and seemed a natural progression. But the new, more shockingly colourful paintings, which were in some degree an evolution from the misty landscapes, and later from his stylised heads, alienated his long-suffering dealer as well as his established public. He continued painting but only rarely exhibited.
Coloured abstract, using separated segments reminiscent of Klee or Mondrian, 1997 (Artist’s Estate)
In spite of considering himself a ‘working-class lad’ and in spite of being a good art teacher, he had a haughtily purist notion of ‘art’ and held recreational painting in disdain. Though in fact he disliked most fellow artists too, particularly those with whom he found himself compared, such as Lowry, as well as his own arch-imitator Maurice Wade. Yet paradoxically he was almost alone in championing the work of the elderly primitive painter C. W. Brown, who has only achieved recognition long after his death in 1961.
Something in Simcock’s personality, even while he was enjoying success himself, identified with Brown’s outsider status, as it did with his primitivism. In 1958 he resigned from the Society of Staffordshire Artists, one of a number of acts and attitudes by which he ostracised himself from the artistic community that had nurtured him. He had little truck with the social side of the art world, and was reluctant even to attend his own private views. On and off he was a semi-recluse; while his egocentricity often stood in the way of sustaining friendships.
The one spurned friend he regretted and the fellow artist he most admired was Arthur Berry (who died in 1994). Their philosophy was the same: they thought sheds on an allotment or a dry stone wall, pigeon cotes or a moorland cottage, were deeply moving expressions of the predicament and spirit of working-class human beings in a godless universe. The point of painting was not to depict this but to participate in it. ‘The paint accumulated on his canvases as naturally as the muck on his shoes’, Simcock wrote of his mentor: ‘... patch up a pig-sty with them, and they would immediately merge, an unobtrusive part of the place.’ It was genuinely meant as a compliment.
Pigeon huts, with sky and foreground vegetation in the manner of Arthur Berry, 1960 (TS Collection)
He was pleased in his last days to be involved, with the encouragement of his daughter and two granddaughters, in arrangements for an exhibition at Keele University where (unthinkable to him at one time) he shared the stage with Arthur Berry and another painter with whom he had been friends, Enos Lovatt. It was an opportunity to show the colourful abstracts of his last ‘period’, which he doggedly persisted in painting and in believing were the true development of his otherwise inexpressible creative passions and artistic integrity. He died the day before the exhibition opened.
Jack Simcock (he was actually christened Jack) was born in Biddulph, Staffordshire, on June 6, 1929, the only child of George Simcock and Lily Beatrice Beech, and died at his home at Mow Cop, Cheshire, on May 13, 2012. In 1952 he married Beryl Shallcross, who died in 1997. They had a son and a daughter.
TS 2012
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