‘Who am I in the first place?’
Augustus John, Finishing Touches
A regiment of women, monstrously feathered and furred, waited at Tenby railway station. The train that pulled in one autumn day in the year 1877 carried among its passengers a young solicitor and his wife, Edwin and Augusta John. With his upright figure, commanding nose, his ginger whiskers, he had more the bearing of a soldier than lawyer. She was a pale woman of twenty-nine, with small features, rather fragile-looking, her hair in ringlets. She was expecting their third child.
The landladies of Tenby fell upon the new arrivals. But the Johns stood aloof. By prior arrangement the most regal of these beldames escorted them to her carriage and drove them up the Esplanade along the ‘fine houses of coherent design’ fronting the sea to a building on the edge of South Cliffs: No. 50 Rope Walk Field.1 From their windows they looked over to Caldy Island and to a smaller island, St Margarets, later a bird sanctuary, that at low tide seemed to attach it to the mainland of Wales.
Augusta’s other children were born in Haverfordwest in Pembrokeshire. But she and Edwin had decided that, for safety, she should give birth to their third child in Tenby, Haverfordwest having recently been hit by an epidemic of scarlet fever. Soon after the New Year her labour pains began, and at five-thirty on the morning of 4 January 1878 the new baby was born. It was a boy, and they named him after both of them: Augustus Edwin John.
*
Victoria Place, Haverfordwest, had been built in 1839 to commemorate the opening of the new toll bridge. The houses were narrow, and all had small square windows with wooden frames that sloped inwards, and window-sills a child could sit on.
The John family lived at No. 7.2 Almost immediately behind the front door ascended a steep staircase. Small alcoves had been cut into the wall. From the second floor it was possible to see into Castle Square opposite, one side of which was formed by the Castle Inn, with its ramparts and its archway through which coaches drove to the stables behind. Above the inn rose the ruined Norman castle, its stone windows gaping at the sky. All around stretched the uneven slate roofs of the houses, now high, now low, undulating away to the perimeter of the town. And beyond the town lay green hills that on summer evenings grew blue and hazy, and in winter, when there was frost, stood out hard.
In the eleven years of their marriage Edwin and Augusta John had two boys and two girls. Thornton was nearly three years older than Augustus: Gwen eighteen months older; and Winifred was born almost two years later.3
For all of them, Haverfordwest was an exciting town in which to grow up. On market days the streets and square heaved with a pandemonium of people and animals – women from Llangwm in short skirts, bright shawls and billycock hats carrying baskets of oysters on their backs; philosophical-looking tramps wandering through with an air of detachment and no obvious purpose; and gypsies, mysterious and aloof, shooting down sardonic glances as they rode by in ragged finery on their horse-drawn carts. From this continuous perambulation rose a cacophony of barking dogs, playing children, the perpetual lowing of cattle, screaming of pigs and the loud vociferation of the Welsh drovers.
Papa warned all his children against walking abroad on market days in case they should be kidnapped by the gypsies and spirited away in their caravans, no one knew where.4 The lure of danger made it a warning Augustus never forgot.
At weekends, Edwin John would lead out his children on well conducted expeditions in the outskirts of the town. Augustus loved these walks. One of his favourites was along a path known as ‘the frolic’ which ran southeast, parallel to the River Cleddau, where barges were pulled in over the marshy ground to dilapidated wharves. Beyond the tidal flats, in the middle distance, a railway train would sometimes seem to issue from the ruins of an ancient priory and rumble on under its white banner till, with a despairing wail, it hurled itself into the hillside: and vanished.
Another popular walk was along a right-of-way called ‘the scotchwells’. Under a colonnade of trees this path followed the millstream past the booming flour mill from which the terrifying figure of its miller, white from head to toe, might emerge. Sometimes, too, Papa would take them high above the Cleddau valley and perilously close to the cottage of a known witch.
On all these walks Edwin John marched in front, preserving a moderate speed – the pace of a gentleman – only halting, in primrose time, to pick a few of his favourite flowers and make a nosegay against the frightful exhalations of the tannery, or, when on the seashore, to gather shells for his collection. Behind him, heard but not seen, the children crocodiled out in an untidy line, darting here and there in a series of guerrilla raids.
On Sundays there was church. Augustus preferred being sent with the servants to their Nonconformist chapels, bethels, zions and bethesdas. He loved the sonorous unintelligible language, the fervour of the singing, the obstinacy of prayer, the surging and resurging crescendos of the orator as he worked himself towards that divine afflatus with which good Welsh sermons terminated.
The religious atmosphere of Victoria Place was for several years fortified by two aunts, Rosina and Leah Smith – Aunts ‘Rose’ and ‘Lily’. They were younger sisters of Augusta, both in their twenties, and both ablaze for God. They had come to Haverfordwest from Brighton when Augusta’s health began to fail. After the birth of Winifred, Augusta seldom seemed well. She suffered from chronic rheumatism which the damp climate of Haverfordwest was thought to aggravate, and she travelled much in search of a cure.
In her absence Rosina and Leah took charge of the children’s upbringing. One of the aunts’ first demands was for the dismissal of the nurse, on the grounds that she had permitted the children to grow abnormally fond of her. They had gone to her cottage on the lonely moors above the Prescelly Mountains north of Haverfordwest, where they would sit wide-eyed over their bowls of cawl, staring at the dark-bearded woodmen with their clogs, thin-pointed and capped with brass, and then argue on the way home whether their feet were the same shape. Few of these men knew a word of English. Old pagan festivals still flourished, and on certain dates the children were given sprigs of box plant and mugs of water, and told to run along the stone flags of the streets asperging any stranger they met. These were habits of which the aunts could not approve.
The new regime under aunts was a bewildering change. Both were Salvationists and held rank in General Booth’s army. Aunt Leah, a lady of ruthless cheerfulness and an alarming eloquence, had once ‘tried the spirits’ but found them wanting. Also found wanting was a young man who had had the temerity to propose marriage to her. But she had been seduced by the Princess Adelaide’s Circle, of which she soon became a prominent member.
Aunt Rosina – ‘a little whirlwind’, Winifred remembered her, ‘battering everyone to death’5 – had a curious ferret-like face which, the children speculated, might cause her to get shot one day by mistake. Her choice of religion seemed to depend on her digestion, which was erratic. ‘At one time it might be “The Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion”, with raw beef and hot water, at another Joanna Southcote and grapes, or again, The Society of Friends plus charcoal biscuits washed down with Rowntree’s Electric Cocoa.’6
The two aunts toured the neighbourhood of Haverfordwest in a wicker pony-trap known locally as ‘the Hallelujah Chariot’, bringing souls to Jesus. Strong men, it was said, pickled in sin, fell prostrate to the ground before them, weeping miserably. Their presence dominated Victoria Place. Each day began with morning prayers, and continued with the aid of improving tracts, Jessica’s First Prayer and The Lamplighter.
Although the theatre was out of bounds, the children were permitted to attend an entertainment called ‘Poole’s Diorama’. This was a precursor of the cinema – a vast historical picture, or series of pictures which, to music and other sound effects, was gradually unrolled on an apparently endless canvas across the stage. At one corner a man with a wand pointed to features of interest and shouted out his explanations to the audience. But when ‘The Bombardment of Alexandria’ was depicted the aunts judged matters had gone far enough and bustled the children outside.
Even more exciting, though viewed with some family misgivings, was the children’s first visit to the circus. Though later in life Augustus used to object to ‘that cruel and stupid convention of strapping the horses’ noses down to their chests’, this circus, he claimed, corrupted him for life. It wasn’t simply a question of the animals, but the dazzling appearance of a beautiful woman in tights, and of other superb creatures, got up in full hunting kit and singing ‘His Moustache was Down to Heah, Tiddy-foll-ol’ and ‘I’ve a Penny in my Pocket, La-de-dah’.
In summer the family used to go off to Broad Haven, twelve miles away, where Edwin had a one-storey house specially built for him out of the local stone.7 And the aunts came too. But here the regime was less strict and the children happier. Their house on St Bride’s Bay had a large lawn and faced the sea, in which the children spent much of their time. Yet even in the waves they were not beyond religious practices which extended offshore with dangerous ceremonies of Baptism by Total Immersion.
The Johns at this time were an isolated family. The uncompromising reputation of the aunts, the formidable respectability of Edwin, and their rather lowly origins, limited the number of their friends while failing to win them entry into the upper reaches of Haverfordwest society. The children were at ease only in the sea or roaming the wilds at Broad Haven. ‘Our invincible shyness,’ Augustus later recorded, ‘comparable only to that of the dwarf inhabitants of Equatorial Africa, resisted every advance on the part of strangers.’ Their grandfather, William John, used to exhort them: ‘Talk! If you can’t think of anything to say tell a lie!’ And: ‘If you make a mistake, make it with authority!’ But the children were speechless.
The only adults with whom Augustus appears to have formed any friendly contact were the servants. At Victoria Place the one room where he felt at home was the kitchen. He passed many hours sitting on a ‘skew’ by the kitchen fire, listening to the quick chatter and watching the comings and goings. Sometimes an intoxicated groom would stagger in, and the women would dance and sing to him till his eyes filled with remorse. It was natural theatre, full of melodrama and comedy, and the fascination of half-understood stories.
The children needed the influence of their mother, but she was absent more and more. One day, in the second week of August 1884, the servants were lined up in the hall of Victoria Place, and Edwin John informed the household that his wife had died. The servants stood in their line, some of them crying quietly; but the children ran from room to room, chanting with senseless excitement: ‘Mama’s dead! Mama’s dead!’
‘Have I any claim to the throne? My father kept everything dark, but I had an uncle descended from Owen Glyndwr.’
Augustus John to Caspar John (16 February 1951)
‘We come from a long line of professional people,’ Edwin John would tell Augustus when questioned about their antecedents. Since he was seeking to enter fashionable Pembrokeshire society, he had his reasons for not being more explicit. Augustus, who had little sense of belonging to his parents’ families, did not probe further. They couldn’t all have been middle-class lawyers, he thought; then he would glance at his father again and reflect that perhaps it was better to remain in the dark. At least he would be different.
Both his paternal grandfathers, William John8 and David Davies, had been Welsh labourers living in Haverfordwest; while on his mother’s side he came from a long line of Sussex plumbers, all unhelpfully bearing the name Thomas Smith. William John’s son, who was named after him, was born in 1818. At the age of twenty-two he married a local seamstress, Mary Davies, the same age as himself. On the marriage certificate he described himself as a ‘writer’, which probably meant attorney’s clerk (the occupation he gave on his children’s birth certificates). That he had cultural interests, however, is certain. By the end of his life he had collected a fair library including leather-bound volumes of Dickens, Scott, Smollett and an edition of Dante’s Inferno with terrifying illustrations by Gustave Doré; and he had done something rather unusual for a man of his class in the mid-nineteenth century: he had travelled through Italy, bringing back with him a fund of Italian stories and a counterfeit Vandyke to hang in his dining-room.
William and Mary John had begun their married life in a workman’s cottage in Chapel Street, then moved to Prendergast Hill and in 1850 were living at 5 Gloster Terrace. Each move, though only a few hundred yards, denoted a rise in the world, and the climax was reached when, in 1855, they transferred to Victoria Place. The basis of their fortune was an investment in a new bank which had turned out well. In 1854 William was admitted a solicitor and shortly afterwards started his own legal firm in Quay Street. He served for several years as town clerk of Haverfordwest, bought a number of properties and, on his death, left a capital sum of nearly eight thousand pounds (equivalent to £300,000 in 1996). In politics he was a Liberal, had acted as Lord Kensington’s agent in all his contests up to the late 1870s and was well known for his speeches in Welsh at the Quarter Sessions. But although, in the various directories of the time, he is listed among the attorneys, he is not among the gentry.9
Between 1840 and 1856 William and Mary had six children who survived, three sons and three daughters. Edwin William John, the fourth child and second son, was born on 18 April 1847. No. 5 Gloster Terrace, where his earliest years were spent, was a tall thin house into which were crammed five children,10 their parents and a maternal aunt, Martha Davies, who helped to look after her nephews and nieces. There was also another Martha Davies of about the same age, who acted as a general servant.
In later years Edwin John let it be known that he was an old Cheltonian. In fact he was at Cheltenham College for only three terms and, according to his younger sister Clara, this year produced a devastating effect upon him. His disposition, tolerable before he attended public school, was ‘impossible’ ever afterwards. He fell victim to the cult of appearances, forgetting all he knew of the Welsh language and becoming obsessed by his social reputation.
Edwin’s main education had been conducted locally in Haverfordwest. He knew Lloyd George’s father, William George, a Unitarian schoolmaster at a private school in Upper Market Street where Edwin went for several years. William George ‘was a severe disciplinarian’, he recalled, ‘ – rather passionate, sometimes having recourse to the old-fashioned punishment of caning.’
It was the eldest son Alfred, not Edwin, who had originally been intended for the law.11 Alfred married a Swansea girl and had three children in three years, but after a period working in his father’s law office his spirit suddenly revolted. While still in his twenties he ran away to London – and eventually to Paris – to play the flute, first in an orchestra, later in bed.12 The burden of family responsibility then passed to Edwin who, leaving Cheltenham at the age of sixteen, was immediately articled to his father and, in the Easter term of 1870, became a solicitor. On his twenty-fifth birthday, William John made him a partner, and the practice became known as William John and Son. When the father retired seven years later, the son took it over entirely. He had done all that could have been expected of him.
He had even married with his father’s ‘lawful consent’. The legal atmosphere was so pervasive that, on the marriage certificate, his wife accidentally gave her own profession as that of solicitor.13 Her father Thomas Smith’s profession she described as ‘Lead Merchant’.
*
Thomas and Zadock Smith had been born at Chiddingly in Sussex, the sons of Thomas Smith, a village plumber. The elder son, who inherited his father’s business, moved to Brighton and in 1831, at the age of twenty-two, married Augusta Phillips. They lived in Union Street, and between 1832 and 1840, Augusta gave birth to three children, Sarah Ann, Emily and Thomas, who was later to inherit the Smith plumbing business. Early in 1843, she was again pregnant and her condition must have been serious. She was given an abortion, but afterwards was attacked by violent fevers. On 25 May, at the age of thirty-two, she died.
A year later Thomas Smith married again. His second wife was a twenty-six-year-old girl, Mary Thornton, the daughter of William Vincent Thornton, a cupper from Cheltenham. Before her marriage she was living in Ship Street, Brighton, and it was here that Thomas Smith and his three children now moved. In the next fourteen years they had at least ten children, but the mortality rate among the boys was high, four of them dying before their twelfth birthday.14 Thomas Smith was ‘a person of full habit of body’ and outlived nine of his seventeen children.
In its way Thomas Smith’s career was comparable to that of William John. From humble beginnings he became a successful and respected local figure. By the age of fifty he was a Master Plumber, glazier and painter, employing ten men and three boys in the painter’s shop he had bought next door in Ship Street, and in the home a cook, housemaid and nursemaid. His will might have drawn a nod of approval from the Town Clerk of Haverfordwest. In one respect at least it is superior to William John’s: he left a sum of almost fourteen thousand pounds (equivalent in 1996 to approximately £522,000).
Mary Smith’s third child, born on 22 September 1848, was named Augusta after her father’s first wife. From a comparatively early age she appears to have shown a talent for art. She was sent to ‘Mrs Leleux’s Establishment’ at Eltham House in Foxley Road, North Brixton, and here, in December 1862, she was presented with a book, Wayside Flowers, as a ‘Reward for Improvement in Drawing’.
She continued drawing and painting up to the time of her marriage, and to some extent afterwards. The few examples of her work that survive show her subjects to have been mostly pastoral scenes. A study of Grasmere church, seen across a tree-lined river and executed in soft cool colours, is signed ‘Augusta Smith’ and dated 1865;15 a picture of cattle with friendly faces, painted three years later when she was nineteen, is signed ‘Gussie’. But a charming ‘Landscape with Cows’ painted after marriage and simply signed ‘A. John’ is part of the Dalton Collection in Charlotte, North Carolina, where, attributed to her son, it hangs happily in company with Constables, Rembrandts, Sickerts and Turners.
For Augusta, painting was only a pastime. Her father’s taste for biblical Christian names, and the fact that almost none of his daughters married before his death, suggests an Old Testament view of women’s place in the scheme of things to which, while he lived, Augusta was obedient. But on the night of Thursday, 20 February 1873, Thomas Smith suffered a stroke. For five days he lay paralysed on his bed, gradually sinking until, at four o’clock on the following Thursday afternoon, he died.
His relatives filled three mourning coaches at the cemetery. Such was his reputation as an honest tradesman that, despite appalling weather, a great concourse of people gathered at the grave, while in Brighton itself nearly every shop in his part of the town had one or two shutters up. ‘In fact,’ the Brighton Evening News (4 March 1873) commented, ‘so general a display of shutters is seldom to be seen on the occasion of a funeral of a tradesman, only but honourably distinguished by his strict and uniform integrity during a long business career.’
Four months later, on 3 July, Augusta married Edwin John at St Peter’s Church in Brighton. It was said to be a love match. One of the tastes they held in common was music: she would play Chopin on the piano, while he preferred religious music and in later life wrote a number of ‘chaste and tuneful compositions’ for the organ, including a setting for the Te Deum and a berceuse. The three eldest children, who were unmusical, were all encouraged to draw and, to amuse them, Augusta ‘painted all round the walls of their nursery’.16
But the strongest reaction Augusta produced on all her children was through her absence. She died, apparently among strangers, at Ferney Bottom, Hartington, in Derbyshire. The cause of her death was given as rheumatic gout and exhaustion. She was thirty-five years old;17 her daughter Gwen was eight and Augustus was six-and-a-half.
‘The bubble of a life-time of respectability burst without trace. There seemed no answer to it but ridicule. That was your answer and I approve of it – that or silence.’
Thornton John to Augustus John (25 June 1959)
The year 1884 was for Edwin John a particularly unhappy one. His marriage, ruined latterly by his wife’s ill-health, was at an end; and his father, who had been suffering from what the locals called ‘water on the brain’, had died in the previous month.18 He had four children, two fanatical sisters-in-law, few friends.
That autumn Edwin made a great decision. He gave up his legal practice in Victoria Place, sold his house at Broad Haven and, taking with him two Welsh servants from Haverfordwest, moved to Tenby where, for a short spell, he had enjoyed some happiness with Augusta. Leah and Rosina left too, transferring their proselytizing zeal to the wider horizons of the New World,19 and leaving Edwin to lapse back into the bosom of the orthodox church.20
But there may have been another reason why Edwin wanted to get away from Haverfordwest. He had inherited almost all his father’s fortune of some eight thousand pounds. His two brothers, Alfred and Frederick, were each left only a small annual income provided that, at the time of William John’s death, neither was ‘an uncertified bankrupt or through his own act or default or by operation or process of law or otherwise disentitled personally to receive or enjoy the same during his life or until he shall become bankrupt’.21 It seems that in their father’s opinion Alfred, who had gone to Paris, was a ne’er-do-well; Frederick, who served time in prison (and was to die in 1896 aged thirty-nine), was a criminal; and Edwin was his good son. Two of their sisters, Joanna and Emma, were already dead, but another sister, Clara, was alive. She did not go to her father’s funeral, and neither did Alfred or Frederick, for there was bad feeling between them and Edwin. Clara never enlarged ‘upon the rift which separated them’, Thornton wrote to Augustus, ‘ – hatred perhaps would be a better word. I suspected money.’22
Clara felt she had a moral claim on her brother, but Edwin knew she had no legal claim. He was now a comparatively wealthy man, having also inherited his wife Augusta’s money (partly held in trust for their children). He was thirty-seven years of age – not too late to start another life in a new place.
Victoria House, 32 Victoria Street, into which he and his young family now moved was an ordinary mid-nineteenth-century terrace house, with three main floors, a basement for servants and an attic for children.
Augustus disliked his new home almost from the beginning. Dark and cube-like, with a peeling façade, it was like a cage and he a bird caught within it. Set in a dreary little street off the Esplanade, from where you could hear but not see the waters of Carmarthen Bay, it was furnished without taste or imagination, its dull mahogany tables and chairs, its heavy shelves of law tomes and devotional works, its conglomeration of inauthentic Italian pottery, pseudo-ivory elephants and fake Old Masters – all tourist souvenirs from William John’s European wanderings – reinforcing the atmosphere of mediocrity and gloom. In the twelve years he lived here, Augustus came to feel that this was not a proper home nor was Edwin John a real father. ‘I felt at last that I was living in a kind of mortuary where everything was dead,’ he records, ‘like the stuffed doves in their glass dome in the drawing-room, and fleshless as the abominable “skeleton-clock” on the mantelpiece: this museum of rubbish, changing only in the imperceptible process of its decay, reflected the frozen immobility of its curator’s mind.’23
Edwin John was afflicted by a form of acute anxiety from which he protected himself with a straitjacket of respectability. For what he had lost with the death of his wife, for all he had seemed prevented from attaining by his terrible reserve, he found solace in the contemplation of a stubbornly unspent bank balance.
The regime at Victoria House was an expression of this financial and emotional stringency. Sometimes, at night, the children were so cold that they would pile up furniture on their beds. Though timid in public, Edwin was something of an authoritarian at home and demanded of his children an unquestioning obedience. He was determined to do the right thing – and the right thing so often combined unpleasantness with parsimony. Gwen, who abhorred rice pudding, was required to swallow it to the last mouthful; Winifred, who was rather fragile when young, was specially fed on a diet of bread-and-butter pudding full of raisins which she was convinced were dead flies. More awful than anything else were the silences. Whether because of his shyness or of some wall of melancholia, Edwin seemed shut off from his children, unable to mix or communicate with them. Breakfast, lunch and eventually dinner were sometimes eaten without a word spoken. Once, when Winifred hazarded some whispered remark, Edwin turned on her and asked with facile sarcasm: ‘Oh, so you’ve found it at last, have you?’
‘Found what?’
‘Your tongue.’
It was after this that Gwen and Winifred invented a language based on touch and facial expressions, but they were forbidden to use it in the house since it made them look so hideous. So they would go upstairs before each meal and try to decide what each would say.
‘I’m going to say...’
‘No. I want to say that.’
‘I thought of it first.’
‘Well, I’m the eldest.’
Augustus’s silence was more complicated. He had seen a boy of about his own age fall off a roundabout at a fairground and be led away bleeding at the mouth. This scene had so impressed him that he later transferred it to himself. When called upon to answer some question he would struggle gallantly with his partly amputated tongue but utter only a few grunts. This handicap left him at last when he became a self-elected son of the Antelope Comanche Indians, and was required to cry ‘Ugh! Ugh!’
Birthdays were times of unbearable excitement. Though excessively formal, Edwin John was not an unkind man. At night, the children would tell him what to play on the piano, and the sound of his scrupulous rendering would float up to their icy bedrooms. He also read to them in the evenings from Jane Eyre, and Mme Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled, from bowdlerized versions of The Arabian Nights and, more haltingly, from the complete works of a Flemish writer, Hendrik Conscience, translated into French – a language in which Edwin was being tutored by Monsieur de Berensburg, a Belgian exile in Tenby. Gwen and Winifred were for a time taught by a French governess who was delighted by their progress and told their father it must be due to some French ancestry. This intended compliment dismayed Edwin who discontinued the lessons and substituted instruction in German grammar.
As at Haverfordwest, it was the servants who enjoyed themselves most and they were much envied by other servants in Tenby. Shrieks of laughter were often to be heard rising from the basement and invading the stillness of Edwin John’s rooms. Occasionally relatives called, and the children would be dragged out from behind furniture and under beds to deliver their cold kisses.
But it was not an unhappy life. Their emotions were chiefly directed to their animals, the sea, to wild stretches of the country and the occasional best friend. Gwen had a cat, Mudge, who was a famous fighter. Out walking, Edwin would meet him on the town wall looking so disreputable that he refused to recognize the animal, quickening his pace to shake him off. But when Winifred lost her spaniel Floss, Edwin arranged for the town crier to walk through Tenby ringing his bell and shouting out the news. Once Floss was found, he hurried round to her school, accompanied by a maid, interrupting her lessons to tell her the good news.
Thornton grew into a small quiet boy, more at home in the sea than on land. Rather slow and precise in his speech, he would provoke Augustus into all sorts of exasperating tricks to discover the limits of his endurance. Destined by his father to be an engineer, he cherished a romantic ambition to live the life of a gold prospector, and before the age of twenty left, luggageless, for Canada, sprouted a moustache and spent many years unsuccessfully digging.*1
The two girls, Winnie with long fair hair down her back, and Gwen who was dark, used to walk about Tenby alone, which was regarded as very peculiar. Both were intensely shy. As they grew older they were allowed to go for bicycle rides together along the green Pembrokeshire lanes, climbing on to the stone walls whenever they met a flock of sheep. Once they encountered a company of soldiers, whose officer gave a word of command as they approached so that the columns of men separated, allowing them to ride down the centre at full speed, blushing furiously.
Winifred, who was to become an accomplished violinist in the United States,*2 and who also loved dancing, shared her sister’s affinity for the sea and passion for flowers. But Gwen’s need for sea and flowers, nurtured in greater solitude, was obsessive. She used to dream of flowers and if she could not pick them, she would spend her pocket-money buying them.
Out of sight of her father and the well-dressed persons of Tenby, Gwen would strip off her clothes and run along the empty beaches. In this wildness, and the quick switchback of her emotions, she resembled Augustus more closely than Winifred or Thornton who were both softer personalities. But as children Gwen and Winifred paired off together while Thornton and Augustus, wearing their dark-blue schoolboy caps at the very backs of their heads, trailed groups of girls across the sandhills. At home Gwen and Gus would stage elaborate arguments as to who was really the elder, neither of them appealing for judgement to Papa because they would then have to find something else to argue over.
Much of Augustus’s life at this time passed in fantasy. He would ransack his father’s library for books and, poring over them, would seem to hover on the threshold of other worlds. When he read the story of Gerda and Little Kay, he was overcome by ungovernable tears, and had to shut himself away in his room. His favourite author was Gustave Aimard, whose tales of ‘Red Indians’ so absorbed him that he took to studying his father’s features in the hope of discovering in them some trace of Antelope blood.
But it was outside Victoria House that Gus came fully alive. Striding through the streets of Tenby on the tallest stilts, diving off rocks and swimming far out into the cold bay, gathering wild strawberries that overhung the cliff tops, gazing fearfully down disused coal pits or up through the terrifying blow-holes that bellowed out volumes of yellow sea-spume over the fields, wandering across the salt-marshes to the rock-pools in the hills where the snow outlasted the winter – Augustus was in his element.
At home he appeared to shrink; outdoors he seemed fearless. One day, coming across an untethered horse, without a word he jumped on its back. As it started to gallop, he slowly began sliding off until he was eventually hanging under its neck. So this odd pair hurtled towards the horizon. But in the end, when the horse finally came to a halt, Augustus was still clasped there. He was always climbing. He would descend the dizzy rock-cliffs between Giltar and Lydstep to wet shingle beaches and, like Gwen, fling off his clothes and throw himself in and out of the water while the tide advanced, giving him that special thrill which comes from not being quite sure of getting back.
In particular, he loved the harbour at Tenby with its fleet of luggers and fishing-smacks, and the russet sails of the trawlers; and the long expanse of Tenby beaches, their sand spongy like cake – a golden playground two miles long. Here, while still very young, Gus would play all day with his brother and sisters, catching shrimps in the tidal pools where the sea-urchins delicately flowered, paddling through the waves that seethed and criss-crossed the shore, and elaborately hauling buckets of sand up the blue slate-coloured cliffs. Where the sea had worn these cliffs away, devious caves had been hollowed out, as if gnawed by giant sea-mice – dark, dangerous and exciting. Slabs of slate rock lay bundled at the entrances, covered with barnacles and emerald seaweed.
The beach was a fashionable meeting place for all Tenby. Under the cliffs a band played patriotic airs and ‘nigger minstrels’ sang and danced; donkeys, led by donkey-boys and ridden by well-dressed infants, trotted obediently to and fro; gentlemen in boaters or top hats, and ladies in long skirts with wasp waists, balancing parasols, promenaded the sands. Bathing – a complicated procedure in voluminous blue serge costumes or long combinations – was permitted between special hours. Horse-drawn bathing machines, strewn along the sands, were used – bathing from boats was not lawful within two hundred yards of the shore. These bathing machines were upright carriages on wheels, advertising the benefits of Beecham’s Pills and Pears Soap. They were looked after by a large uncorseted woman and a company of boys, celebrated for their vulgarity, who shocked Augustus by whispering unheard-of obscenities in his ears. A frantic man, summoned by the shouts of these boys, would canter up and down the sands harnessing horses to the vehicles which were then pulled out into the deep water. The occupants could thus enter the water with the least possible hazard to modesty. Once they had completed their swimming, they would re-enter their horse-drawn dressing-room, regain their clothes, then raise a flag as a signal that they were ready to be towed back.
As he grew older, Augustus began to avoid this beach, roaming beyond North Cliff Point where he and his companions could bathe from the rocks and lie naked in the sun. He longed for a wider world than that enclosed by the walls of Tenby and was happiest when he and his brother and sisters were invited to stay at Begelly, in a house overlooking an infertile common populated by geese, cattle and the caravans of romantic-looking gypsies. Here, and with the Mackenzie family at Manorbier, the rules and repressions of Tenby were forgotten, Papa was left behind, and the strangely brooding children of Victoria Street were transformed into a turbulent tribe of Johns.
One of Gus’s best friends at this time was a boy, eighteen months younger than he, called Arthur Morley. With their butterfly nets, the two boys spent much of their time playing along the dunes. ‘We used to go for walks together, sometimes to a place known as Hoyle’s Mouth, a cave in a limestone cliff about 1½ miles from the town near a marsh where flew many orange-tip butterflies,’ Morley recalled. ‘On the floor of the cave we used to dig pre-historic animals… We found that leading out of this cave there was a second which we could reach by crawling along a very small passage with a lighted candle.’24
His greatest friend was Robert Prust, whose family occupied, with their parrot, a fine house on the south cliff. Robert Prust was keen on ‘Red Indians’, and for a long time Augustus hero-worshipped him. The two of them would lead a pack of braves along the rough grass tracks, across the sand dunes known as ‘the Burrows’ to advance upon the army encampment at Penally. No one took his Indian life more seriously than Augustus. ‘Under the discipline of the Red Man’s Code,’ he wrote, ‘I practised severe austerities, steeled myself against pain and danger, was careful not to betray any emotion and wasted few words.’25 Such a regime was too much for his companions who, one by one, abandoned the warpath to chase the paleface Tenby girls. At last, only the two of them were left. The final betrayal came when, having helped Augustus set fire to a wood, Robert Prust revealed a most un-Indian lack of stoicism. Thereafter Augustus was left to roam the Burrows with only a phantom tribe of Comanches.
The cult of the ‘Red Indian’ gave Augustus an alternative world to Tenby. Yet everywhere there were encroachments. His hunting ground, the Burrows, was converted into a golf-links; the ‘nigger minstrels’ under the cliffs were replaced by a refined troupe of pierrots who could be invited with impunity to tea; flower shows took over the ice-rink and the annual fair, with its blaring roundabouts spinning away late into the night, was removed from under the old town walls.
Tenby, in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, was becoming a town patronized by relatives of the county landowners of Pembrokeshire, by retired field officers and elderly sea-dogs. It was also a holiday resort for the upper-middle classes, who arrived each summer to play their golf, badminton and high-lobbing lawn tennis, to shoot sea-birds and hunt foxes. There were regattas, picnics and water-parties, much blowing of marine music, balls with polkas and galops at the Royal Assembly Rooms and, in the evening, the twilight ritual of promenades along the cliffs.
Everywhere strict rules of etiquette were observed. One of the first things Edwin John did was to throw away his professional brass plate – though he continued to practise law from his home as if it were merely a gentleman’s whim or hobby, like his shell collecting. He volunteered as assistant organist at St Mary’s, and every Sunday morning lined up his children, like small soldiers, in the hall, to be inspected before taking them off for the service. He himself, in a top hat and frock coat, led the way, and drew many curious glances. He did more: he took up photography; he played the harmonium; he had cold baths in the early morning; above all he did – and was conspicuously seen to do – absolutely nothing whatsoever. His manner was unapproachable: and no one approached him. It was very odd. He redoubled his efforts. His hair grew white, his cheeks turned pink, his collection of cowries multiplied, his solitary walks towards Giltar or along the road to Gumfreston became longer, his collars, always of the stiffest, stiffened further: throughout the district his gentility and rectitude were freely acknowledged. But with the élite of Tenby – the Prusts and Swinburnes, the Morleys and Massays and Hannays and de Burghs, whose children were his children’s companions – Edwin was never on visiting terms. For although his propriety was unexampled, curious rumours persisted of some scandal back at Haverfordwest – rumours fanned into life by Gus and Gwen, Thornton and Winifred.
So Edwin John, who hated eccentricity, took his place among the town’s most bizarre characters: with the gentleman who tied a rope to his topmost window and, shunning stairs, swarmed up and down it; and with another who wore socks on his hands; with the lady who struggled to keep an airless house, stuffing paper into every crevice of window and door; with Cadwalladyr, the speechless shrimper, massive and hairy and never less than up to his waist in water; and with Mr Prydderch, bank manager and Captain of the Fire, who, ‘swaggering fantastically, his buttocks strangely protuberant’, paraded the town to the music of a brass band until confined in Carmarthen Asylum.
Edwin John made sure that his children were seen to be educated. Nothing excessive was required; in particular the girls’ education was so reticent as to be almost invisible. As soon as the family had settled into their house at Tenby, Gwen and Winifred were sent to what was referred to as a ‘private school’ a few yards down Victoria Street. It consisted of three pupils, the mother of the third one, a German lady married to a philosopher named Mackenzie, acting as teacher. This arrangement combined for Edwin the advantages of cheapness with those of social prestige in claiming for his daughters a foreign ‘governess’, optimistically described as ‘Swiss’. Mrs Mackenzie was a kind and homely woman who, to a limited extent and more especially with Winifred, took the place of a mother. Her daughter Irene became a particular friend of Winifred’s – the two of them laughed so much together that if one caught sight of the other even on the horizon she would be convulsed with giggles. Gwen, at this time, suffered from back trouble that gave Mrs Mackenzie’s lessons a drastic appearance as she lay, on doctor’s advice, stretched out on the schoolroom floor where Irene and Winifred insisted on joining her.
When they were older the two sisters attended Miss Wilson’s Academy,26 a school that placed more emphasis on deportment than scholarship. Miss Wilson herself was a stern-looking woman of unguessable age, who later committed suicide in the sea.
Gus’s education was also unusual. Late in 1884 he went to an infant school in Victoria Street, and at the age of ten was sent to join his brother at Greenhill, a rambling building set on a plateau on the slopes of lower Tenby.27 This school catered for the sons both of tradesmen and of the middle classes, and its pupils, faithfully mimicking the ways of their parents, segregated themselves into two classes: ‘gentlemen’ and ‘cads’. It was run by Mr Goward, a tiny man with a large spectacled face topped by a flame of hair, dressed in mock-clerical neckwear and curiously short turned-down trousers. An ardent Liberal and Congregationalist, he began each day with a Gladstonian homily, followed, according to his mood, by hymns or a rendering of ‘Scots, Wha Hae’.
Gussie, as everyone called him, was a mutinous pupil, often in trouble for breaking school rules, caricaturing the masters and retaliating when corrected. With the other boys he seems to have been popular. It was here that he won his first serious stand-up fight, collapsing into uncontrollable tears after his victory as if in sympathy with the loser.
It was here, too, that he received from the drill master a smashing blow on his ear that, for the rest of his life, made him partially deaf.
Regularly, each term, his misdeeds were reported to his father who meticulously committed them to paper. Then, one day, something shocking happened: Augustus struck the second master – instead of the other way about – and Edwin felt he could ignore these delinquencies no longer. Having entered this last enormity in his ledger, he summoned Augustus to his study, read out the full catalogue of his crimes over the years and with a cry of ‘Now, sir!’ had, in his own words, ‘recourse to the old-fashioned punishment of caning’.
Shortly after this incident, Mr Goward left Greenhill for British Columbia, and both Thornton and Augustus were sent to boarding school at Clifton College, near Bristol. The new school took a number of pupils from Pembrokeshire and was well thought of in Tenby, from where it was seen as a minor Eton College turning out middle-class stalwarts who played the game and administered the Empire.
Augustus never fitted into this school. The top hat, Eton jacket and collar made him feel uncomfortable and faintly ridiculous. At football, which he liked, he achieved some success. But cricket seemed elaborately unspontaneous: he could never bowl, the long drudgery of fielding bored him, and at batting, which appeared more promising, he was always being given out. It was while day-dreaming on the cricket field that a ball struck him on his ear and did for that one what the drill instructor’s baton had done for the other at Greenhill.
Though strong for his age, Augustus seldom entered into the games of the other boys and he made no lasting friendships. The only boy for whom he cared at all was, like himself, an outcast in this foreign atmosphere of an English preparatory school, being a ‘half-wit’, but so sweet-natured that Augustus befriended him.
Everything that appealed to him at this time seemed to lead him away from Clifton: the River Avon flowing westwards under wooded cliffs towards the Golden Valley and the sea; the docks of Bristol where, for a few pence, it was possible to watch a platoon of rats being mauled to death by a dog or ferret; and, in the dark autumn evenings, while he was dreaming over his homework, the distant wail of an itinerant street vendor, which stirred in him a painful longing.
‘Gloom, boredom and anguish of mind’28 were his predominant moods at Clifton, but they did not last long. Early in 1891 he left to continue his schooling back at Tenby which, for all its disadvantages, was still the only home he knew.
St Catherine’s, where he passed the next two-and-a-half years, had recently opened on the north-east corner of Victoria Street.29 There was one classroom and seven pupils – though this number doubled later on – and the atmosphere, far happier than at Clifton, was like that of a family party.
‘A lonely adolescent’ was how Augustus later described himself in his early teens. Sometimes he was rebellious, sometimes quiet, at all times conspicuous. He liked to claim that he was a descendant of Owen Glendower, the fourteenth-century Welsh ‘prince’. When one boy expressed scepticism, Augustus marched up to him glaring terrifically and waving his fists before his nose, and the doubter was convinced.
The school was so small it could not raise a full team for any game, and they devised all sorts of miniature variations – hockey on roller skates; four-a-side football; golf along the sand dunes with one club; and a game with wooden sticks with which you endeavoured, without being hit yourself, to hit your opponent’s elbow. Augustus enjoyed these sports without going out of his way to excel in them. But there was one game at which he did excel. ‘We each had to make a shield of some sort and were given six tennis balls,’ Arthur Morley remembered.
‘We were then divided into two sides… The idea was to attack the other side with the tennis balls. Anyone who was hit was out. Gussie naturally was captain of one side, but instead of trying to take his enemies by surprise he stood on the highest dune challenging them all loudly – he had, I think, been studying The Lady of the Lake. He was a striking figure.’30
With such small numbers and a wide span of ages, little teaching in class was practical, and the boys worked on individual lines under the headmaster’s supervision. Augustus was largely innumerate, maintaining his place in arithmetic at the bottom of the school. But his reading and writing improved greatly. He devoured almost every book he could lay his hands on, especially any volume of poetry, and his stories and essays were so vividly written that the headmaster, who thought he might become a novelist, used to read them to the class.
It was not long before Augustus established himself as a star pupil. With the headmaster, Allen Evans, a clever Welshman who had passed his written examination for the Indian Civil Service but failed to pass the medical, he was an obvious favourite. On one occasion Evans delivered to the class a triumphal address in which he expatiated on the boldness and idealism of Augustus’s aspirations, picturing him with one foot on Giltar Point and the other on Caldy Island, and in effect comparing him to the Colossus of Rhodes.
To these encomiums, which might have embarrassed another boy, Augustus responded like a bud in the sun. He had longed for encouragement from his father, but Edwin’s lack of interest had closed him up. The hero-worship he had wanted to fix upon his father he now transferred to Allen Evans. Their special friendship lasted more than a year, but eventually ended painfully. ‘One day when we were at work in the classroom the headmaster and Gussie stood together in a quiet but very bitter argument,’ Arthur Morley remembered.
‘I think that the former was accusing the latter of some offence which Gussie was vehemently denying. In the end the headmaster no doubt feeling that the argument had gone beyond the bounds of reason turned towards me and said: “Morley, did you hear what we were saying?” This was embarrassing, but I said: “I could not help hearing, sir.” He then turned to Gussie and said: “There is a boy who talks the truth.”’
For Augustus, the effect of this scene was devastating. He had been accused of dishonesty and his plea of absent-mindedness over a new school regulation was brushed aside as a lie. Charged publicly with deceit by the man whom he idolized, he was unable to find words to defend himself and broke down before the school.
This incident appears to have had a lasting effect on him. Episodes in later life would press upon this bruise and unaccountably cause him pain, giving rise to blasts of anger, grating sarcasm. Fifty years later, when writing the first draft of an autobiography, he cursed this ‘amateur pedagogue’, his former hero long since dead, for his ‘appalling meanness of soul’.
At the age of sixteen, he left school, and a little later, while he was away from Tenby, heard that Allen Evans had committed suicide. Half-seriously, he began to wonder whether he possessed the evil eye. In his fragmentary autobiography, Chiaroscuro, he alludes briefly to the headmaster’s ‘unhappy end’.31 But there is also a sentence, not eventually included in the book, that expresses his sense of retribution: ‘Not long did my master (whom I had loved) enjoy his satisfacton and when he had punctiliously cut his throat, I grieved no more.’
‘We don’t go to Heaven in families now – but one by one.’
Gwen John to Ursula Tyrwhitt
‘I am visiting my father,’ Augustus John wrote to William Rothenstein during a stay in Tenby over thirty years later, ‘and suffering again from the same condition of frantic boredom and revolt from which I escaped so long ago. My antecedents are really terrifying.’
Yet he loved Pembrokeshire, the exultant strangeness of the place, its exuberance of shadow and light; and since he was never cruelly treated some other factor must have accounted for this extremity of ‘boredom and revolt’.
It was the indoorness of late Victorian life, the conformity and constraint of his oddly patriarchal background that affected him. For almost forty years, from the death of the Prince Consort in 1861, Britain had been in mourning. Despite the heavy new buildings, the heavy industry, everything seemed at a standstill – everything except for military developments across the Empire. This atmosphere of stagnation was eccentrically reproduced at Victoria House after the death of Augusta John. The widower did something of what Queen Victoria had done. There were no exaggerated manifestations of feeling. The iron will within Edwin John held firm. But though he was calm, he filled the house with darkness – out of which Augustus would burst rather like Edward VII escaping from the formalities of Windsor Castle into the new century.
‘Too shy to be sociable, he made few friends; and these few he often found an embarrassment. Walking at his side through the town, I would be surprised by a sudden quickening of pace on his part, while at the same time he would be observed to consult his watch anxiously as if late for an important appointment: after a few minutes’ spurt he would slow down and allow me to catch up with him. This manoeuvre pointed to the presence of a friend in the vicinity… he was delighted when a bemused soldier from Penally Barracks, mistaking him for a retired officer of high rank, saluted him. In reality he lacked every martial quality, except, of course, honour. Excessively squeamish, he would never have been able to accustom himself to the licence of the camp; even the grossness of popular speech shocked him...’32
To what extent is this picture of his father accurate? Winifred, who was probably Edwin’s favourite but who saw less of him than the others, told her daughters she felt Augustus had been rather unfair. But Thornton approved, and Gwen’s attitude to their father exceeded Gus’s. ‘I think the Family has had its day,’ she wrote.
Edwin had two ambitions. The first was the revival of an old daydream: to enter the church. All his life he entertained an admiration for churchmen, and had once considered preparing himself for the priesthood. In his fifties, he became organist at Gumfreston, a tiny inaccessible church two miles from Tenby. Every Sunday morning, wet or fine, he would make his way there, play the hymns and the psalms loud and slow; then walk back along the fields. He persisted with these duties until he was almost ninety.
His other ambition was to remarry. For a short time he seems to have become engaged to Alice Jones-Lloyd, and on another occasion was said to have proposed marriage to Teresa George. Both women were considerably younger than himself, handsome and of good family. These matrimonial skirmishes were always discreet, but news of them eventually leaked out bringing down on him the combined rage of Gwen and Winifred. ‘I was furious at this heartless and extravagant outburst, and took his part,’ Augustus records, ‘but my overheated intervention only earned me the disapproval of all three.’33
The ordinary people of Tenby quite liked Edwin. They liked the look of him. ‘I am not clever,’ he boasted, ‘but I am independent, and I believe in a good appearance all the time. With a good appearance I can accomplish much.’ His chief accomplishment was to convert this good appearance into the appearance of goodness. His stamina for church-going, his cast-iron empty routine, above all his unrelenting loneliness and longevity excited a respect uncomplicated by envy. He was no trouble and he seemed a kindly man. He offered to pay for the education of his housekeeper’s son; he taught a number of local children to play the organ; and when he wished to try out some new air he would call on a young chorister and present him afterwards with a shilling. Another of his pupils in the neighbourhood, John Leach, remembers that:
‘my own father in spring and summer often took my sister and me to evensong… and usually we walked home with Edwin John through the woods and lanes. It came about through these walks that he asked my sister and me to go with him to the cinema, of which he appeared to be very fond. These were the days of the early Chaplins, the Keystone cops and the serial with its weekly threat to the life or virtue of the heroine. Perhaps Edwin John was fortified by the presence of children on these occasions… Besides being generous, one recalls [him] as a quiet, gentle, soft-voiced courteous man, who talked to children without condescension.’
But his own children he could not love. He was faced with the obstacle of their existence: an obstacle to remarriage, to the church and to almost any ambition he may have had. ‘He became an object only,’ commented Thornton. ‘Is it any wonder we felt the effects of this?’34
‘What damned ancestral strain is at work?’35 Augustus later demanded. All of them were afflicted by melancholia. Winifred was probably the most successful at shedding what Augustus called this ‘gloom by day and horror by night’.36 She was to bring up a conventional American family and nourish a belief in the rigorous simplicities of psychic religion. Though she developed ‘strong nerves’37 to combat her timidity, she shared with Gwen, so she felt, a lifetime’s devotion to privacy and the wish ‘to be forgotten’38 after death. But Gwen, who thought ‘aloneness’ rather than family life ‘is nearer God’,39 believed in the value of her work after death. Gwen’s self-neglect worried Gus and he worried her about it. ‘Leave everybody and let them leave you,’ she exhorted herself. ‘Then only will you be without fear.’40 Thornton, too, came to agree ‘about solitude being a good thing. I didn’t always think so.’41 He would pass much of his own life ‘alone but I am not at all lonely’42 or fishing from his sailing boat.
Winifred, after escaping to the United States in her twenties, was obliged, like all the children, to keep up a regular correspondence with her father so as to receive the quarterly allowance from her mother’s estate. ‘Papa worries me to go home,’ she wrote to Gwen in 1910. ‘I don’t want to’43 – and she didn’t. But Thornton, who left for Canada at the same time as Winifred, did return to Tenby at the end of the First World War. For Edwin still wanted his sons and daughters round him, even if he could not show them affection. He took the opportunity to remind Thornton that he was an executor of his will and, despite there being no work for his son in Tenby, advanced this as a proper reason for his staying there. ‘I said I could return in the event of his death,’ remembered Thornton who, on getting back to Canada, realized that he would never return. ‘Do you think I should write to tell him so?’44 he questioned Gwen.
Gwen, who went to live in France, could not avoid seeing her father occasionally. ‘My father is here,’ she wrote from Paris to her friend Ursula Tyrwhitt, ‘ – not because he has wished to see me or I to see him, but because other relations and people he knows think better of him if he has been to see me. And for that I have to be tired out and unable to paint for days. And he never helps me to live materially – or cares how I live.’45 Gwen hardly ever referred to her childhood and her few references to Wales – ‘the mild climate of Tenby means that one has little energy there’46 – are polite metaphors. For ten years, in the optimistic belief that their father was dying, Gus would try to arrange a farewell meeting between the three of them. But he failed, and when eventually the old man died in 1938 Gwen did not go over for his funeral. He had been no more than an ‘unwanted interruption to her work’.47
‘I hold no grudge against him,’ Thornton wrote of Edwin after his death. Nor did Winifred. But Gwen, who spent more precious energy in escaping from him, and Gus, who never really escaped and sometimes felt ‘I ought to have stopped’ in ‘my native town’,48 did hold a grudge.
Augustus had needed a hero, and the hope that his father might somehow reveal himself as this hero had died a slow death. He described his father to the painter Darsie Japp as ‘a revolting personage’49 and was anxious to erase signs of involuntary attachment. ‘I wanted to be my own unadulterated self, and no one else. And so, taking my father as a model, I watched him carefully, imitating his tricks as closely as I could, but in reverse. By this method I sought to protect myself from the intrusions of the uninvited dead.’50
His actions represented not simply a wish to be different from his father, but to be someone other than his father’s son. His claim to be a descendant of Owen Glendower; his vivid fantasy life, nourished by books, which developed into the cult of the ‘Red Indian’: these were symptoms of his identification with non-John people. The kinship he felt for gypsies, too, and which later became so close that many people believed him to have gypsy blood, arose not just from the fact that Edwin John disapproved of them but from his having warned his son they might capture him and bring him up as one of their own. He longed to be kidnapped. At home he felt an outcast, and at school it was with the outcast he grew most sympathetic – the ‘half-wit’ at Clifton, even the boy he beat in a fight at Greenhill.
This drive to be someone else grew more complicated in adult life. To know Augustus John was to know not a single man, but a crowd of people, none of them quite convincing. His reaction against the paternal environment of his early years was in perpetual conflict with the melancholy characteristics he inherited from his father. Between the two opposing forces in this civil war stretched a no man’s land where Augustus pitched his tent. But this battling against himself produced a state of crisis. In later years everyone else would recognize readily enough the manly and melodramatic form of Augustus John – but he himself did not know who he was. His lack of stylistic conviction as a painter, the frequent changes of handwriting and signature in his letters, his surprising passivity and lack of initiative in everyday matters, the abrupt changes of mood, the sense of strain and vacancy, the theatricality: all these suggested a lack of self-knowledge. ‘When I am in Ireland I’m an Irishman,’ he told Reginald Pound, and it was partly true. He was a chameleon. He had half turned his back on Wales and, while continuing to make sentimental visits, chose to live fifty years of his life amid the lushness of Hampshire and Dorset – a green-tree country he seldom painted and to whose beauty he was not particularly responsive. Like his brother and sisters, he too dreamed of exiling himself far off from the land of their father. But having ‘got stuck’51 in England, he later resented the parental contamination of his homeland. ‘I wish to the Devil I were in Wales again instead of this blighted country,’52 he wrote from Hampshire to his friend John Sampson in 1913. In such moods of disgruntled nostalgia his thoughts veered wistfully to the Prescelly Mountains and the west coast – and he would suddenly ‘make a dash’ there (‘a pony trap and a spell of irresponsibility’53). But when in 1929 Sylvia Townsend Warner advised him to ‘go back to Wales’ permanently, he replied that this was ‘impossible’ because his father was there and he ‘was still afraid of him’.54 Yet, had it been possible, it would have been ‘better to try and make the best of one’s own country’,55 he acknowledged. Indeed, he sometimes felt it would have been really best of all if he had never left Wales.
Over the years Augustus became more imaginative at changing his past. He claimed not to know the date of his birthday, and declared that he never celebrated it. In 1946 he told a Time magazine interviewer, Alfred Wright, that his mother’s name was Augusta Petulengro; and six years later (14 May 1952) he wrote to John Rothenstein: ‘As for Gypsies, I have not encountered a sounder “Gypsy” than myself. My mother’s name was Petulengro, remember, and we descend from Tubal-Cain via Paracelsus.’ What he did not tell Alfred Wright or John Rothenstein (saving the inverted commas) was that Petulengro was the Romany version of Smith.56 It was deliberate teasing, a fantasy that was irresistible to him but in which he did not actually believe. His real state of mind concerning who he was seems to have been a genuine bewilderment. ‘I am in a curious state,’ he confessed to Lady Cynthia Asquith in 1918, ‘ – wondering who I am. I watch myself closely without yet being able to classify myself. I evade definition – and that must mean I have no character. Do you understand yours?’
This void seems to have been created through the rejection of all Augustus knew of his background. He could not remember his mother; he knew nothing of his origins; he disliked his father. Victoria House appeared to enclose him in darkness. His shyness and anxiety cut him off from other people, cut them all off from everyone except themselves. Gwen was to make solitude part of her way of life. Edwin had done much the same but, probably in reaction to him, Augustus could not come to terms with this legacy of melancholia, endeavouring by force of energy to hurl it from him, or to outpace it, like a boy running against his shadow which at evening lengthens and overtakes him. To many who, like William Rothenstein, believed that Augustus had been born ‘with a whole series of silver spoons between his gums’,57 this stampeding through life seemed a thoughtless squandering of his natural gifts. But Augustus took a more sombre view of himself: ‘I am not so perverse as unfortunate,’ he wrote (15 September 1899). All the children had been unfortunate in losing their mother and in having to contend with the family’s isolation. But Augustus seemed particularly unfortunate in having been afflicted while at school by partial deafness that raised another invisible barrier between him and the world.
‘If our mother had lived it would have been different,’ Thornton wrote to Augustus over seventy years after her death (3 February 1959). She had encouraged them to draw and paint and, surrounded by her pictures, Gwen and Gus continued drawing and painting, using the attic at Victoria House as their studio. ‘Wherever they went their sketch-books went with them,’ their father liked to recall.
‘In their walks along the beach… on excursions into the country, wherever they went the sketch-books went too, and were used. They sketched everything they saw – little scenes, people, animals… I can remember when they were a little older, and I sometimes used to take them to the theatre in London, how, even here, the inevitable sketch-books turned up as well. Then in the few minutes interval between the acts they worked feverishly to draw some person who had interested them.’58
Although he conceded ‘it was possible that I was a less keen observer of the boy’s work than his mother would have been’, Edwin took pride in having failed to put a stop to all this sketching. He had left his children’s talent ‘to develop freely and naturally’. But one day on Tenby beach, Gwen, who ‘was always picking up beautiful children to draw and adore’,59 came across Jimmy, a twelve-year-old boy with a pale haunting face and corkscrew curls down to his shoulders, dressed in a costume of old green velvet. Having made friends with him, she invited him back to her attic, and, in the hope of some payment for these sessions, his mother came too – rather to Gwen’s disgust. But Edwin disapproved of strollers, and the sight of this woman wandering into his house was open to misinterpretation. He therefore decided to put his foot down and forbid Gwen inviting ‘models’ home. But already it was too late. He objected; Gwen insisted; and he gave way. It was the pattern of things to come.
In their adolescence the children began to pair off differently, Thornton and Winifred, both small and quiet, spending more time together, and Gwen growing more involved with Gus. They needed someone to replace their mother and displace their father, someone to love and from whom to learn. Gwen appears to have hoped that Augustus might be this person, but his needs were similar to hers and he responded fretfully to Gwen’s attentions, undermining her confidence by making her feel ignorant. She was older, but he was bigger. ‘I suffered a long time because of him,’ she wrote in her early thirties, ‘it’s like certain illnesses which recur in time… I revolted against him at the beginning of each holiday, but he won by telling me horrible things and when I threw myself on him to fight him and pull his hair… he always won, for of course he was the stronger.’60 Gwen was often in tears over this period, and Gus in angry despair.
Like Gwen, Gus saw life in terms of pictures. ‘Once when we were walking together over the sand dunes and saw a piece of hard perpendicular sand,’ Arthur Morley recalled, ‘Gussie pulled out his penknife and very rapidly carved out an attractive hand and face. On another occasion when he was sitting on my right in class he seized my Latin Grammar book and on the first empty page drew in ink with amazing speed two comic faces very different from each other, face to face.’61
At Greenhill there had been art classes in which the pupils, armed with coloured chalks, copied lithographs of Swiss scenery. But Augustus also practised drawing from life, discovering from among the masters some challenging models. At Clifton he had been given no encouragement and no instruction. ‘Philosophy was eschewed,’ he afterwards wrote, ‘Art apologized for, and Science summarized in a series of smelly parlour tricks.’62
Back at Tenby, while studying at St Catherine’s, he endured a course of ‘stumping’ under the tuition of a Miss O’Sullivan. ‘Stumping’ was a substitute for drawing prescribed by the State Art Education Authorities. The stumps were spiral cones of paper, and the stumping powder a box of pulverized chalk. With these materials, some charcoal, an indiarubber and a sheet of cartridge paper, students would reproduce the objects placed before them by means of a prolonged smudging, rubbing and stippling that gave him a method of representing form without risking the use of line. At first he copied simple cones, pyramids and cylinders, then gradually advanced, via casts of fruit and flowers, to Greco-Roman statuary until he finally arrived at the Life Room, where he spent several months studying a fully clothed model almost as bored as himself. At this stage his work was submitted to the Central Authority, since each successful student received a certificate qualifying him to indoctrinate others in the Theory and Practice of Stumping, while the school received a grant from the Exchequer. Augustus was awarded his certificate and, at the age of sixteen, became a Master Stumper, Third Class.
He was more than ever anxious to leave Tenby. But what was he to do? He no longer thought of becoming a trapper on the Red River, or of leading a revolt of the Araucanian Indians, but dreamed of exploring the exotic possibilities of China. He would join the Civil Service perhaps, if that would carry him to such enchanted lands: he would do anything to get far enough away from this stagnant little backwater. He still loved parts of Tenby, the wooded valleys inland and the wild sea coast and rocky country along it, but the meanness of his life at home constricted him unbearably, and his hunger for a larger world grew every day more acute. His father, who would have preferred to launch him on a barrister’s career, had to acknowledge that he was unfitted by nature to such a profession, and for a short time it was agreed between them that he should join the army. Augustus began his army training locally, and in the evenings the respective merits of the officer-training establishments at Sandhurst and Woolwich were weighed.
Then he changed his mind. He had decided, he said, not to join the army, but to study art. Edwin had never, he later admitted, ‘taken their drawing seriously’. But for some months Augustus had been going to an art school in Tenby run by Edward J. Head, a Royal Academician, who reported very favourably on his progress. Edwin was impressed by these reports. He was an annual visitor to the Royal Academy and had read in The Times accounts of various sales and successes in the art world. Pastoral painting and conversation pieces in particular recommended themselves to him as gentlemanly pursuits. These days, it seemed, the artist’s profession might be tolerably respectable, provided it was practised with financial success. Mr Head himself, if not exactly a gentleman, managed to live comfortably. When a number of his pictures had first been hung at the Academy, Edwin’s civic pride vibrated. Here was an example his son might strive to emulate. Naturally he would have preferred Augustus to go for a soldier, but he was such a temperamental fellow, so moody and mutinous and with no head for serious business: art might be just the job for him. One thing still bothered Edwin: had he been sufficiently unenthusiastic? Certainly he had failed to encourage his son, but was that by itself enough? He had no wish to appear irresponsible in the way of putting up difficulties. In his own account of this time, Edwin explained his position by means of paradox:
‘Obstacles put in his [Augustus’s] way would only have strengthened his determination to become an artist… He suggested being allowed to attend the Slade School in London. The earnestness he put into this request made me first think he might after all make an artist… he could display plenty of determination when necessary, and his whole childhood had proved that he could give untiring application to either drawing or painting. This, combined with his obvious eagerness, made me give my consent quite willingly.’63
It was Mr Head who had recommended the Slade. The fees, Edwin discovered, were pretty stiff, but the legacy of forty pounds from Augusta would see to his son’s upkeep – and there was always the possibility of a scholarship. Besides, it would put an end to the rows that were now breaking out between them. On the whole, things could have turned out worse.
*1 Either he would discover a good partner and no gold, or some gold and a partner who ran off with it. But, except for a brief period when he dreamed of starting a tobacco factory in Ireland, he seemed to have found what he really loved – mountains, prairies, horses and empty spaces. Among the trappers, cowboys and prospectors he earned the title of ‘the rider from away back’, and, in company with a band of them, crossed Canada on horseback, fording rivers and bathing in hot springs till his skin turned dark orange. Above all he relished solitude and for some years before 1914 went to live beside an Indian encampment, whose inhabitants would appear outside his tent, sit for hours smoking their long pipes, then vanish. He also travelled through Montana ‘and always on horseback’; he wrote: ‘I used to make my bed on the ground without a tent, and the dawn was the most important part of the day.’ He married late in life a woman who had had two previous husbands and whom he discovered after her death to have been twenty years older than he thought. He had no children, but one foster daughter. He died in British Columbia on 19 March 1968, aged ninety-two.
*2 From Paris, Winifred crossed the Atlantic while still in her early twenties. By the summer of 1905 she had reached Montana, living some months with Thornton surrounded by Indians, ‘rattlesnakes and all sorts of wild animals’. The two of them planned to travel to Mexico by boat along the Mississippi. ‘The idea of orange groves and sunlight is enchanting,’ Augustus wrote to her, ‘– but too remote from my experience to be anything but a lovely dream. But depend on it, you have only to perjure yourselves to its reality to bring this family at any rate helter skelter on your tracks… I can see you and Thornton installed on the top of some crumbling teocalli with the breath of the Pacific in your nostrils.’ Eventually this plan was abandoned, and Winifred journeyed instead to Vancouver where ‘the weather was perfect: it rained every day’, and to San Francisco, ‘a beastly town’. For a number of years she gave violin lessons in California, and on 30 January 1915 married one of her pupils, Victor Lauder Shute, a failed painter who had turned engineer and worked mostly for the railroads. They had three children, Dale, Betty and Muriel, a fourth child being still-born in 1924. Although she claimed to have developed ‘such strong nerves I have played to a room full of people and forgot everybody’, she remained shy.
She never returned to Wales or England, but died in Martinez (California) on 12 April 1967, aged eighty-seven.