Jenny Uglow - Sybil & Cyril - Cutting Through Time

xi

All are linocuts unless otherwise stated.

On the evening of Thursday 4 July 1929, women in cloche hats and chiffon dresses, men in chalk-striped suits, or blazers and cravats, clattered up the steps to the Redfern Gallery in Old Bond Street. Inside they found a glowing array of prints, ochre and scarlet, sky blue and sea green, wild geometric patterns alongside boldly cut scenes of buses and escalators, horses and machines the first exhibition of British linocuts. Some people laughed, others were entranced. This was a democratic art, claimed the organiser Claude Flight, and everyone could try it. Lino was cheap, he said, the best cutting tool was an old umbrella spoke and the easiest way to get a good impression was to rub the paper with the back of a toothbrush. Was this a joke, a childs art class posing in a London gallery? Or was it, as Flight proposed, a new form, perfect for the modern world? It seemed that he was right. Linocuts, a small yet significant corner of avant-garde art between the wars, became a craze, their clear lines and bright colours shining out against the darkness of the Depression. Over the coming decade, the Redferns artists would see their work shown around the world, in exhibitions across Britain and Europe, in the USA and China, Canada and Australia.

Linocuts were cheap, two or three guineas, good for presents and that is how my own interest began. As a student, my father rowed in the college boat, the eight. When he married my mother, his best man, who had rowed in the same boat, gave him two linocuts on tissue paper. These were The Eight by Cyril Power and Bringing In the Boat by Sybil Andrews. I have known them all my life in my fathers study, then my mothers hall, blasted by sunshine, and finally on the stairs in my own home, and though I loved them I walked past them without a thought for years, hardly even reading the signatures. Recently, however, I began to wonder about the artists and their lives. When I found out more, I wanted to tell their story and look more closely at their work.

In 1922, when Cyril was nearly fifty, he abandoned his twenty-year career as an architect, left his wife and four children, and set off to London to join Sybil, a twenty-four-year-old art student. At the end of her long life, far away in Canada, Sybil roundly denied that they were lovers and who can deny her the right to possess the facts of her own life? There are many kinds of couples. If this story is, in the end, a love story, it may not be the kind we expect. To their friends they were certainly a unit, Cyril and Sybil. For twenty years they worked together until they went their own ways in 1943. At that point, or later, a great clearing-out occurred: all the letters that they wrote to each other over the years have disappeared, burnt, destroyed, lost. I have a vision of smoke rising from braziers in back gardens, scorched pages fluttering and curling, handwriting vanishing into air.

They left scraps and fragments, Power scores of sketchbooks, Andrews scribbled appointment diaries and scrapbooks stuffed with cuttings and photos, music and cards a ragged collage of two lives. We can, however, follow their journey as artists, from oddly matched watercolourists in a country town to innovatory print-makers at the heart of the London scene, from Sybil and Cyril to Andrews and Power. Their prints summed up the dizzying mood and unease of the late 1920s and early 1930s, while at the same time they looked back, to a dream of a pre-industrial life. These contradictions, too, were part of their world. Their work, in all its variety, is the heart of the story, the core of this book.

Cyril Power, The Runners, 1930

When Sybil Andrews came home to Bury St Edmunds in late 1918 the town was not quite the same. But then neither was she. Bury felt small after Bristol, where she had been welding aircraft parts. The smell of malt and hops still wafted over the streets from the Greene King brewery. She could still look up at the ironmongers, Andrews and Plumpton, in Guildhall Street, and see the window of the room where she was born, walk down to 117 Northgate Street where she had lived since she was seven and past the cathedral and the abbey ruins, to the rivers Linnet and Lark, meeting and flowing on to join the Ouse, running through the wetlands to the Wash and the grey North Sea. Yet though much was familiar, Bury had been marked by the war.

The Suffolk Regiment served in all major battles on the Western Front, and in Macedonia and at Gallipoli. Sybils elder brother Geoffrey, a twenty-year-old engineer in 1914, fought in France and Belgium until a hunt for men with experience of motors led to a transfer to the Royal Flying Corps in 1916. He came home, wounded, after the Armistice, swathed in bandages and causing a stir in St Marys Church. (Le Jour Divin) with its poignant ending:

Quand le crpuscule touche sa fin,

Et lami rend son dernier baiser!

War had always seemed near, yet unreal. At two Sybil had seen her uncle Henry Gardener Andrews in his Suffolk Yeomanry uniform with its bright yellow frogging, when he came to say goodbye to her mother before setting off to fight in the Boer War. (Henry stayed in South Africa, married and had children.) At six,

That was entertainment. Real war was not. Yet it felt exciting, in the baking summer of 1914. Boys Sybil knew were billeted in tents among the lakes and ponds, oaks and beeches of Hardwick on the edge of the town. They came to the Andrews house for meals or a bath and it amazed her that here were all these men with aeroplanes and the latest equipment practicing manoeuvres on the Buttes, the place where they practiced with bows and arrows in earliest times.

Townsfolk grew used to soldiers in the streets, coming in from nearby training camps: hands in the pockets of her starched skirt, her narrow waist cinched by a belt, hair tucked beneath cap, watch pinned to chest.

On the night of 29 April 1915, a Zeppelin crossed the East Anglian coast, pounding Yarmouth and Ipswich before heading for Bury. First a looming shadow appeared against bright moonlight, then booms and thuds, the clatter of roof tiles and roar of flames. All the street lights were on, despite the Lighting Act, and more light flooded out as people opened windows to see what was happening. One incendiary narrowly missed the Andrews