NATIONAL LIFE STORIES ARTISTS’ LIVES David Nash Interviewed by Denise Hooker C466/32 This transcript is copyright of the British Library Board. Please refer to the Oral History curators at the British Library prior to any publication or broadcast from this document. Oral History The British Library 96 Euston Road London NW1 2DB 020 7412 7404 IMPORTANT Access to this interview and transcript is for private research only. Please refer to the Oral History curators at the British Library prior to any publication or broadcast from this document. Oral History The British Library 96 Euston Road London NW1 2DB 020 7412 7404 The British Library National Life Stories Interview Summary Sheet Title Page Ref no: C466/32 Digitised from cassette originals Collection title: Artists’ Lives Interviewee’s surname: Nash Title: Interviewee’s forename: David Sex: male Occupation: Sculptor Dates: 1945 Dates of recording: 1995.06.07, 1995.06.08, 1995.06.09 Location of interview: Interviewee’s home Name of interviewer: Denise Hooker Type of recorder: Marantz CP430 Recording format: D60 Cassette F numbers of playback cassettes: F4717 - F4728 Total no. of digitised tracks: Mono or stereo: Stereo Additional material: Copyright/Clearance: Full clearance. © The British Library Interviewer’s comments: © The British Library Board http://sounds.bl.uk David Nash Page 1 C466/32 Tape 1 [F4717] Side A [F4717 Side A] [Interview with David Nash at his home on the 7th of June 1995. Interviewer, Denise Hooker.] David can I start by asking you where and when you were born. I was born in Esher in Surrey on November the 14th 1945. And did you have brothers and sisters? I have an older brother who was born in September of 1939. He was born just before the war and I was born just after the war. And I wondered if we could go right back now to your memories of your grandparents. Were you close to them? We saw a lot of both. My mother's father was from New Zealand, I think he was a tailor, they lived in Walton-on-Thames, he and my grandmother, my mother's mother. Very middle-class family, very correct. And my father's parents had lived most of their lives in Wales, my father was born in Newtown. My father's father I think I knew much better than my mother's father; my mother's father died when I was eight or nine. My father's father, Frederick Nash, was a, he went to Manchester University and was a pharmacist, a chemist, and he was a great entrepreneur, and he did things like buying all the army boots from the British Army after the First World War and selling them to the Turkish Army in one day and made a lot of money. So I think he was in his career, three times he was a millionaire, and he lost it all, so, quite a wild entrepreneur. He had a chemist shop in Montgomery, I remember my father taking me there to show it to me, and also to the chemist in Newtown, and he pointed out the room that he was born in, this was when I was about fifteen. My grandfather, the one in Newtown, bought a lot of, or bought a woollen mill, an abandoned woollen mill and converted it into a toothpaste factory, a powder toothpaste, which I think was sold by post, it was a...he got into this mail order, pharmaceutical mail order. And I believe he...he also had a ginger beer factory, we have a bottle with `Nash's Ginger © The British Library Board http://sounds.bl.uk David Nash Page 2 C466/32 Tape 1 [F4717] Side A Beer' embossed on it. He also invented a cure-all tonic. Very successful businesses, successful enough for him to leave his brother, my great-uncle Oswald, in charge of these various little businesses, and he set up in partnership in Regent Street and started a department store which included a picture gallery which actually had at one time Turners and Constables in it, and he at one point in his life actually owned Turner and Constable paintings. So he had quite a good eye for art. What sort of date are we talking about? Oh well, 1918 for the army boots which he sold to the Turkish Army. He did another coup like that with boots I think, or something, other leather goods, but there was a ship strike somewhere en route and all these leather goods rotted, so that deal was an absolute disaster. I think the department store was 1920s, early 1920s. Uncle Oswald was a ne'er-do-well and totally ruined the businesses up in Wales, and my father suffered a serious nervous breakdown, and with that also consequently he...he was swindled by his partner, and he lost the department store. Did your father take over the department store? No, no my father was, in the Twenties I guess, he went to... He was in and out of local schools and private schools like a sort of yo-yo, depending on my grandfather's income, or wealth. There was one time when he had two Daimlers and two chauffeurs, and then they would be gone you see and my father was out of private school again and back into the local school. But then he went to Brighton College on the south coast. Your grandfather? My father. He was the eldest of five sons, so there was my father Charles, then there was Norman who never forgave my father for being older than him, and there was Ronnie and Geoff and John. I've got a little lost now. Were you close to your grandfather, that grandfather? © The British Library Board http://sounds.bl.uk David Nash Page 3 C466/32 Tape 1 [F4717] Side A He was an extraordinary character, and he was always very warm towards us but not in a really...I'm trying to think of, you know, this sort of grandfather image of the sort of embracing, and, he always gave us these bear hugs I remember when we arrived, but he was such an eccentric character it was...I suppose I didn't really fully relate to him. My elder brother, six years older, was always making fun of him, so... What was he like? He was round, he had white hair. This was in north Wales when I knew him. My grandfather bought a big old house here in the Ffestiniog Valley in 1948 for very little money, which included 44 acres of land, very beautiful land, it's got the Cynfal River running through it. There were some semi-detached cottages which were part of this estate and my father bought a pair of them as an evacuee house, this is 1948, because my mother, while my father was in the Army and in the war, moved 19 times during the Second World War and my father was very convinced apparently that we would have a war with the Soviet Union, and I think one of his strategies was to buy this house as an evacuee house for us. He also helped my grandfather financially, because they were very impoverished then. But they had always lived in big houses and they had all this big furniture, and I remember it all being very threadbare, and these silk curtains were very thin and quite raggedy, and he no longer had Turners but he had sort of third rate sort of Turner-like paintings. It was a very, extraordinary, mysterious...it was an enormous house with staircases and passages and rooms, and it just seemed like one was in a dream there, so it was a great place to be fooling around and playing when one was a kid. And all our holidays were spent up in this little cottage, and then every day when it was wet we would go down, if it was wet we would go down to this big house and play there or... Can you describe it? Big black and white house, it's called Pen-y-Mount, big bay windows. I remember there was this hall-way with a grand staircase going up, and dividing to the left and to the right. It just seemed to be endless rooms, but very dilapidated. It had a sense of grandeur but the implied wealth was not really there. © The British Library Board http://sounds.bl.uk David Nash Page 4 C466/32 Tape 1 [F4717] Side A Do you have any particular memories of it, any objects or...? Well yes, there was a First World War revolver that my brother and I were always very keen on playing with. There were swords hanging up on the walls. As I said, these threadbare curtains. There was an amazing billiard room which didn't have any billiard tables in it, but it had a lot of old furniture stored in there and we used to make dens in there and tunnels. There were lots of old mattresses and trunks and books. I remember a lot of `Giles' cartoon annuals from the Second World War there, we used to always enjoy them. What kind of pictures did your grandfather have then? They were sort of Dutch interiors, academy sort of landscapes, sort of late 19th century. Some quite nice pieces which have stayed in the family. Do you remember any in particular? My brother's got some of them now. I remember there was a ship. Oh yes of course, the great one was `The Afterglow at Accra', which was a picture of the desert, and it was all sort of, an amazingly red painting with this camel in it with this great gilt frame. And when my grandfather died my Uncle Norman was determined that all these paintings were worth a great deal of money, and there was one dreadful painting of a woman, a melancholic, a very dramatic gesture, he was determined that it was a Goya, and my father would have them valued and then they were told that these were very insignificant paintings and Norman was always saying, `These people are idiots, they don't know what they're doing,' and he would take them off to be valued somewhere else. And `Afterglow at Accra' was taken to auction and the only bid was on the frame. [laughs] [BREAK IN RECORDING] Your grandfather must have been very interested in art to have opened a gallery. Yes, I think very much in the commercial sense, he was an entrepreneur. But he had © The British Library Board http://sounds.bl.uk David Nash Page 5 C466/32 Tape 1 [F4717] Side A great pretensions to be a very cultured man I think, and perhaps he was but it was difficult for me to tell at that age, he died when I was 13. Did he talk to you about art and encourage you? Yes he did, he sent me an easel for a birthday present when I was about 9 or 10, and he sent me a dead jay in the post, again when I was about ten. A dead jay? A dead jay, because of its colours. How did you feel about receiving that? Well I was absolutely fascinated. My mother was furious with him, because she never liked him, she thought he was a pompous old fart I think, and this was just a typical example of his impulsiveness I think. He was very impulsive I think, as you will have understood from these various descriptions of his business activities. Yes, I haven't really got a sense of what he was like I don't think, to you. Oh well he was my...he was this funny old man who lived in this big house that we went to for our holidays, and... What did you do with him? Well we sort of moved around him really, I mean he never entered into... I remember him, he was very angry with my grandmother about something and he was weeding in the vegetable garden, he was swearing. That was a fascinating experience. [laughs] No I'm sorry, I'm not being...I would need to think more and prepare to give you a picture of it. Do you know much about his background? Where for instance did he come from? © The British Library Board http://sounds.bl.uk David Nash Page 6 C466/32 Tape 1 [F4717] Side A From the borders of, between, sort of Herefordshire area, Hereford, Shrewsbury. I think his father was a hotelier. And did he have brothers and sisters? Yes, something we will probably meet later on in this talk is that, I felt very rejected by the family, or, they would say I rejected myself from the family, and so I haven't had a very great interest, whereas my brother is fascinated with family history, and he knows a lot of the names and he has gone to trace our ancestry and where the name comes from. Do you know anything about how he was brought up? No. He went to university in Manchester, and, you know, and became a chemist, so, that gives some indications I guess. Do you know how he met your grandmother? No. And what about her family, do you know where she came from? I know absolutely nothing about her family at all. Or what she was doing? I mean I could find out, I could research it to find out, but it's not a...you know...no, what's interesting is that I don't, and I've never been, I've just never been drawn to be that interested I think. Because there's such a preoccupation with the family by other members of the family, I've always felt it rather unhealthy and I prefer to look away from the family. Do you know what your grandmother did before she married? © The British Library Board http://sounds.bl.uk David Nash Page 7 C466/32 Tape 1 [F4717] Side A No. Neither of them. And what about her, what was she like? Very small, diminutive. Nancy. My father has stories of her tying all five sons to a rope when they went swimming so they couldn't be swept away, because one of the houses that they lived in was on the Severn which ran past the bottom of the garden, and they used to go swimming there. I remember her, my grandfather was mending the roof of this big old house and the ladder slipped away so he couldn't get off the roof, and I can remember somebody calling, calling out, because, you know, this big house was about 500 yards from where this cottage was, and I said to my father, `What's that, somebody's calling'. He said, `Oh it's just a shepherd rounding up his sheep.' And this poor old chap was up there all afternoon, and my grandmother must have heard him but she just left him up there, you know, it was a way of getting a little bit of revenge I think. (laughing) Did she play much of a part in your childhood? Very little. She was...I remember her filling up these old china water bottles to air the beds when we arrived, whenever we used to stay there instead of at the cottage sometimes, because the cottage used to be rented out so there were some times when we couldn't stay there so we used to stay in the big house. And she was always cooking, and I remember her peeling a raw carrot for me to eat. And then when my grandfather died I remember her being very lost, and my father and uncle sort of working out how they were going to look after her, and she went quite senile and bedridden, and she had a nurse looking after her for about the last five years of her life, and she died in that big old house. I remember coming up to the funeral, I remember seeing her dead, my father was... How did you feel about that? Oh this was the first time I had ever encountered a dead body. I remember how the eyes seemed to have sunk; they were shut but they were closed[??] away. And I remember this great nose, extraordinary. She was tiny, she had shrunk. I remember © The British Library Board http://sounds.bl.uk