Category: Rupert Toovey’s Articles

Old Cars Draw the Crowds at The Amberley Museum

Rupert Toovey and Bonnie with their 1932 green Riley Gamecock

The Amberley Museum’s themed weekends are always a cause for celebration with trains, cars, traction engines and buses as well as the superb interactive displays which so eloquently speak of the history of our nation’s heritage crafts and industry.

As I drove down that beautiful road between Storrington and Amberley I was met with that majestic open landscape against the backdrop of the Sussex Downs and the blessing of blue skies and scudding clouds. It seemed spring had finally arrived with a warmth on our faces. Wrapped in her tartan travelling rug my terrier, Bonnie, poked her nose out the side of the car and seemed to smile. I was heading to the museum for their annual Vintage and old car day in procession with a group of friends and fellow Riley enthusiasts.

Turning into the Amberley Museum we were met by a scene filled with excitement as the volunteers welcomed us. The Amberley Museum depends on its remarkable community of volunteers.

Amidst all this activity Peter was being steamed up and the vintage Southdowns open top double decker bus prepared for rides. The day drew large crowds who were delighted to be at Amberley in the spring sunshine.

My 1932 Riley Gamecock is a new arrival. I’ve called her Jenny after my favourite childhood Corgi and we’re getting on rather well. At 92 years old she’s a little oily and incontinent but all to be expected. She’s been loved and beautifully maintained over the years and has the most wonderful patina. She and Bonnie drew much attention.

Peter steaming through the Amberley Museum

I love to ride on the railway at Amberley especially when Peter is steaming along. Peter was built in 1919 by W C Bagnall Ltd in Stafford. An 0-4-0 loco, no. 2067, he was originally supplied to the Ministry of Munitions for War and delivered to the Canadian Forestry Corps at Longtown in Cumbria. He was later acquired by the Cliffe Hill Quarry Co in Leicestershire where he worked until 1949. Eventually the Narrow Guage Railway Society (NGRS) took ownership of him. He’s been busy at Amberley since 1983 where he was restored. Amberley were able to buy Peter from the NGRS in 2002, a fitting home for such a delightful engine.

The Amberley Museum offers so much throughout the year a Family Membership really will really will repay you. And it is such a pleasure to belong to this remarkable community of historians, crafts people, volunteers and enthusiasts. To find out more visit amberleymuseum.co.uk.

The History of Our Nation Told Through Objects

Stereoscopic photographs of the famous engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel by Robert Howlett & George Downes, c.1856-1857

My recent visit to SS. Great Britain in Bristol has reminded me of the remarkable love of history seeded in me by Joyce Sleight as a school boy. Joyce taught British Social, Economic and Political History which explored our procession towards the reforming, inclusive, liberal and predominately tolerant society we live in today. It celebrated our industrialists and social reformers whilst tackling head on slavery, child labour and poverty. We were taught to be objective and not to judge history from the perspective of our own times so that the shadow of history could shape our thinking and inspire us to continue in the nation’s centuries long purpose to strive for fairness, to make things better and work for the common good. Education in those days was less about box ticking, process and grades and more about shaping and forming generous, creative, questioning minds. A love of learning for its own sake.

Amongst our greatest engineers was Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Isambard designed and built the Great Western Railway and had the vision and drive to attempt to continue the line to America building three revolutionary steam ships.

The largest of these was the Great Eastern. She left Deptford on the 7th September 1858. Large crowds gathered to witness her steaming down the Thames for her first sea trials. As she passed Hastings on the 9th September tragedy struck. A heater attached to the paddle engine boilers exploded killing six firemen. Isambard’s revolutionary design with water tight compartments and bulkheads saved the ship. Isambard had suffered a stroke on the ship shortly before she set out and many argue that this tragedy hastened his demise. He died on the 15th September 1858.

The Great Eastern ABC, or, Big Ship Alphabet children’s book

Perhaps this explains why the copy of the children’s book The Great Eastern ABC, or, Big Ship Alphabet with its 26 hand-coloured wood-engraved alphabetical vignettes is so rare. It was entered as part of a single owner archive collection by a direct descendent of Isambard’s father Sir Marc Isambard Brunel at Toovey’s and realised £9,000.

You get a real sense of Brunel the man in the photographic stereoscopic slides which sold at Toovey’s for £14,000. The photographs were taken in about 1856-1857 by Robert Howlett and George Downes. They depict Brunel before The Great Eastern.

Objects have such a power to bring history to life and connect us with the story of our processional nation inspiring us to continue to work for the common good.

A Postcard from Bristol’s SS Great Britain

Rupert Toovey and the SS Great Britain at Bristol’s Historic Docks

The 19th century visionary and engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-1859), has been described as the nation’s most important engineer and was a key figure in Britain’s Industrial Revolution. Sussex has some claim to this remarkable figure as Brunel’s early schooling was at Dr Morrell’s boarding school in Hove before being educated in France.

He is famous for building the Great Western Railway (GWR) pioneering the 7ft 1/4 inch Broad Guage and constructing the line with carefully surveyed gradients, new viaducts, bridges and the revolutionary 2 mile box tunnel. He had a gift for thinking on a grand scale and revolutionised modern engineering and transport. There was astonishment when he proposed to continue the GWR to America.

Brunel designed and built the Clifton Suspension Bridge and three transatlantic ships. SS Great Britain was the second of these vessels. An iron-hulled ship with a steam driven propeller it revolutionised naval engineering and is considered to be the world’s first modern ship. She was launched amidst much fanfare by Prince Albert in July 1843 who travelled down from London on a Great Western train which made the journey from London to Bristol in just 2 hours 40 minutes. It took two more years to complete Great Britain and in 1845 she set out from Liverpool for New York and became the first steam driven propeller ship to cross the Atlantic. Measuring 322 feet in length she was the largest ship afloat at the time of her launch.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel

A navigational error caused her to run aground in 1846. She was salvaged and from 1852 carried emigrants to Australia. In 1881 she was converted to all-sail and the engines removed to make way for more cargo. The masts and sails were on an enormous scale. Just three years later she was retired to the Falkland Islands where she was used as a warehouse and coal hulk. This grand old ship was finally scuttled in 1936.

In 1970 the British industrialist and philanthropist Sir Jack Arnold Haywood, OBE paid for Great Britain to be refloated and brought back to the dry dock in Bristol where she had been built some 127 years earlier.

Today the scale of this grand old ship still impresses and the historic dockyard and museum eloquently give voice to her story. Going aboard the ship the experience is immersive and you feel you have travelled back in time as you walk past the engines, the grand first class dining hall and below decks promenade, to the more cramped conditions of the steerage class.

Easter – A Pilgrimage from Tragedy to Hope

The St Mary Magdalene Chapel, Chichester Cathedral, with Graham Sutherland’s ‘Noli me tangere’

Easter in the Christian tradition marks a pilgrimage from tragedy towards hope. These themes are given powerful voice in Graham Sutherland’s paintings of the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ.

Sutherland’s 1947 version of the ‘Crucifixion’ from the Hussey Bequest is displayed at Pallant House Gallery. It illustrates the artist’s obsession with thorns as metaphors for human cruelty; their jagged lines are reflected throughout the composition. Sutherland acknowledged the influence of photographs taken by the American military in the Nazi concentration camps at Belsen, Auschwitz and Buchenwald on his Crucifixions remarking “many of the tortured bodies looked like figures deposed from crosses”. His 1947 Crucifixion depicts Jesus’ body hanging lifeless on the cross. The shocking red of Christ’s blood is accentuated by the fertile green. There is agony in the body’s posture, the weight clearly visible in the angular shoulders, chest and distorted stomach. This is a God who understands and shares in human suffering. Graham Sutherland, a Roman Catholic, was sustained by his Christian faith all his life.

Graham Sutherland’s ‘Crucifixion’ 1947 at Pallant House Gallery

Sutherland gave voice to a common story. His Crucifixions reflected people’s experience of evil in the world and yet spoke loudly of the triumph of hope in response to the tragedy of violence and war. They sadly resonate with our own times.

Graham Sutherland’s vibrant oil on canvas ‘Noli me tangere’ of 1961 was commissioned by Walter Hussey for the St Mary Magdalene Chapel in Chichester Cathedral.

The painting depicts the moment on that first Easter morning when Mary Magdalene becomes aware that she is in the presence of her risen Lord who has just spoken her name. As she reaches out to touch him his gesture stops her. The angular composition of the figures, plants and staircase allude to the Passion narratives which lead up to and include Jesus’ crucifixion. At the centre of the painting is Jesus Christ dressed in white symbolising his holiness and purity. Christ’s finger points towards God the Father symbolising His presence. Graham Sutherland invites us into the narrative at this liminal moment so that we, like Mary, might acknowledge Jesus, our teacher and friend, as advocate and redeemer of the whole world.

Here in the story of Jesus we witness the triumph of hope and love over evil and hatred.

There are a series of services at Chichester Cathedral in the coming days to mark Holy Week and Easter. For more information and times go to www.chichestercathedral.org.uk. To find out more about Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, visit to www.pallant.org.uk.

Eduardo Paolozzi – An Artistic Bridge Between Post War Britain and America

Eduardo Paolozzi – ‘The British Library, Newton after Blake’, plaster relief, signed, titled and dated 1995 in pencil verso

The British artist Eduardo Paolozzi claimed to have embraced “…the iconography of the New World. The American magazine represented a catalogue of an exotic society, bountiful and generous, where the event of selling tinned pears was transformed in multi-coloured dreams…” This fascination with American culture is clearly expressed in in his art. In the late 1940s and early 1950s a cold-war generation of artists in Britain began to turn towards New York for inspiration rather than Paris. Paolozzi had a foot firmly in both camps. He emerges as an artistic bridge between post-war Britain and the US.

One of Paolozzi’s most celebrated sculptures is ‘Newton after Blake’ made for the forecourt of the British Library. It was commissioned by the British Library’s architect the late Colin St John Wilson, who was also responsible for the Pallant House Gallery extension in Chichester. The plaster bas relief titled ‘The British Library, Newton after Blake’ sees the theme repeated. It sold at Toovey’s for £460. Eduardo Paolozzi was fascinated by the artist William Blake’s image of Sir Isaac Newton from 1795. In Blake’s depiction the scientist appears oblivious to all around him, consumed by the need to redact the universe to mathematical proportion. Paolozzi explained of his own sculpture that “…Newton sits on nature, using it as a base for his work. His back is bent in work, not submission, and his figure echoes the shape of rock and coral. He is part of nature.”

Eduardo Paolozzi – Bash, screenprint on wove paper, signed, dated 1971, and editioned 164/2000 in pencil

Alongside Paolozzi’s cultural icons and totems the resilience and fragility of the human person and the influence of humankind’s relationship with technology is expressed through the culture of science fiction, and robots also recur as a theme in his work. The complicated array of influences are often collaged into a single work as can be seen in the screenprint Bash which realised £340 at Toovey’s despite being from an unimaginably large edition of 2000. The geometric qualities of his art speaks of the machine in our age, and the influence of boogie woogie. A rich collage which, for him, described modernism.

Paolozzi’s prints and plaster reliefs give voice to the idea of relationship between collage and image making. The prints with their often vibrant colour allowed the artist to explore visual comparisons between music and drawing. They are also connected with Paolozzi’s sculptural reliefs.