NATIONAL LIFE STORIES ARTISTS’ LIVES Robert Medley Interviewed by Andrew Lambirth C466/19 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 [email protected] This transcript is accessible via the British Library’s Archival Sound Recordings website. Visit http://sounds.bl.uk for further information about the interview. © The British Library Board http://sounds.bl.uk 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 [email protected] Every effort is made to ensure the accuracy of this transcript, however no transcript is an exact translation of the spoken word, and this document is intended to be a guide to the original recording, not replace it. Should you find any errors please inform the Oral History curators ([email protected]) © The British Library Board http://sounds.bl.uk The British Library National Life Stories Interview Summary Sheet Title Page Ref no: C466/19/01-10 Digitised from cassette originals Collection title: Artists’ Lives Interviewee’s surname: Medley Title: Sir Interviewee’s forename: Robert Sex: male Occupation: Date and place of birth: 1905 Dates of recording: 1994.05.04, 1994.05.12, 1994.05.19, 1994.05.25, 1994.06.07, 1994.06.14, 1994.07.06, 1994.07.13 1994.07.27,1994.08.02, 1994.08.12, 1994.08.17 1994.05.04, 1994.05.12, 1994.05.19, 1994.05.25, 1994.06.07, 1994.06.14, 1994.07.06, 1994.07.13 1994.07.27,1994.08.02, 1994.08.12, 1994.08.17 Location of interview: Charterhouse, London Name of interviewer: Andrew Lambirth Type of recorder: Marantz CP430 Recording format: D60 Cassette F numbers of playback cassettes: F4108-4117 Total no. of digitised tracks: Mono or stereo: Stereo Additional material: Copyright/Clearance: Full clearance. Copyright held by the British Library Board Interviewer’s comments: © The British Library Board http://sounds.bl.uk Robert Medley Page 1 C466/19/01 F4108 Side A F4108 Side A [Robert Medley talking to Andrew Lambirth on the 4th of May 1994.] Robert, to start at the beginning, what sort of background were you brought up to? Was it an artistic one? Well, yes of course it was an artistic one, of course it was, yes. My mother actually was a very good artist indeed, and she really ought to have made more of it out of her life, but unfortunately with six children she couldn't, because, she married my father when she was 22 I think, and my father was I think eight or nine, nine years or so older than she was, and he was a successful lawyer, a young successful lawyer, very successful indeed, with principally literary interests. And his ambition in life really was to have been a classical scholar; he was a very brilliant man in his own way. My grandparents on my father's side had really little money, because he was a non-conformist minister, and my grandmother didn't have much money, though she came from a rather aristocratic, or at any rate county family background much more. She was a Birrell and connected with the Greys, and that's where she was brought up. But my father was brought up a primitive Baptist you see, so, this was rather different. But when he was at Leys School he passed into Cambridge with a scholarship at the age of 16 having done everything, and then of course his parents couldn't afford to send him, and I think he felt this very much all his life I think. Do you think it embittered him? I don't think it embittered him exactly, but what it made him do, he wanted all his children to go to Cambridge and take Classics, because he wanted them all to have double firsts in Classics, and of course he was disappointed in the whole lot of us. Did none of you do that? None of us did, no. My elder brother really should have been an engineer but he had to go into the family business, into the law, and then my younger, Oliver, he went off into the Merchant Navy and then became a farmer in Rhodesia and finally came back here and made a rather successful farmer here. And he was always a problem boy. And then my next brother, Richard, of course, Father said he could have been a very good lawyer, had a good legal mind, but he really wanted to be a statistician, but anyway he died. And the war interrupted him, so that when he went to Cambridge he really wanted, he read mathematics and what he wanted to do was to be a statistician; he had a very accurate mind. Anyway, my father's © The British Library Board http://sounds.bl.uk Robert Medley Page 2 C466/19/01 F4108 Side A uncle, the Right Honourable Augustine Birrell of course was, he wrote belles-lettres as well as being Minister for Ireland for longer than anybody else ever. And he specialised in the law, and was a barrister in copyright, in fact it was really his, my father and my uncle, and my Uncle Austin, they really were engaged in copyright, because there was no copyright. And so my father was an authority in this of course, and through that, and of course because he was immensely well read, he knew all the great authors of the age, and that's why of course he left my father, George Moore left my father the copyright of all his books when he died. I see. And so did Granville Barker, which provided my father with quite a list. When Granville Barker died there was quite a handsome amount of money of course. But with George Moore it's been very useful, George Moore; you didn't make much out of George Moore for a number of years, and every now and again you got nothing at all, and sometimes £12. But recently there's been a slight revival, and so that's all right. They made a film of Esther Waters. But Granville Barker, directly his plays come on, all the remains of the family make quite a lot of money out of this, I'm glad to say; welcome little cheques of five or six hundred even come. So you make money out of them? Oh yes I do, because it's... And George Moore still? Yes. Oh no, George Moore has come to an end, and Granville Barker comes to an end in a year or two's time, so they're both practically at an end you see, it's 50 years. And all this, all the money has to be divided you see between my father's ultimate residuary legatees, which are first of all six children, and now of course I think four isn't it. But to return just briefly to your mother, did she actually go to art school? She went to a private studio, which was of course what girls did in those days. I can't remember the man, the name of the man who taught her unfortunately. He was a foreigner as far as I remember, and he was a very good teacher obviously, and one of the young people who used to go and teach there in the studios, which as far as I remember, my mother was saying, it was in that block of studios where Sandra Blow is now, you know, off, what's it called? © The British Library Board http://sounds.bl.uk Robert Medley Page 3 C466/19/01 F4108 Side A King's Road? The Fulham Road. It's off the Fulham Road, that's right. And, you can see they're nice handsome studios, and he ran a class there, and one of the two teachers, young, was Augustus John, and my mother, she had a life drawing of hers in charcoal with a charcoal detail, or a pencil drawing, by Augustus John on the corner of it. Great. Anyway this teacher gave my mother a little oil painting of a model dressed as a monk, which was the kind of thing people did in those days for quick poses. It was really a very good painting, absolutely direct. And my mother had a very good true eye, and she had a very good instinct, she had a very good instinct as to what was a good painting and what was not. She knew exactly if one was telling a lie, or gingering things up or not; she had a beautiful eye, very good. Did she give you encouragement or any kind of instruction? She very sensibly didn't, but I was encouraged of course in a general kind of way. I mean for instance, I mean we all, all the children had a little paint, we all had little paint-boxes, and I had little...we had...I had a sketch-book. Oh yes she always provided me with a sketch-book and a few water-colours and a pencil. And of course at home, we had quite nice pictures at home, they bought C.J. Holmes and... Who? C.J. Holmes, Charles Holmes; he was Director of the National Gallery, and he was a very good water-colourist actually, sort of New English Art Club. And then they bought small pictures of a kind. And then of course there were Arundel prints. What were they? Arundel prints. It's a well-known...prints, sort of hand-done prints. They were, of Old Masters, even frescos and things like that. You'll have to look it up to decide what Arundel prints actually are, but they were very well-known, and they're unlike the kind of prints that you get nowadays. © The British Library Board http://sounds.bl.uk Robert Medley Page 4 C466/19/01 F4108 Side A They're copies, are they? Yes, they're sort of hand-done copies really. And also she had drawings, my mother had drawings of Old Masters and things like that. I always remember we had a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci and a drawing by Raphael, portrait heads in both cases, hanging in the lavatory. And when I got to about the age of about 16 of course I had begun to understand what things were about, and it was very informative to sit on the loo with these two drawings in front of one, and one saw how much more natural in a way of course the Raphael drawing was and how much more extremely artificial and structured in a certain sense the Leonardo was. It's very curious, much more stylish somehow; there was a kind of frank acceptance in a way about the Raphael, which of course doesn't show in his great big paintings but, it's a well- known sort of, little portrait drawing they had of Raphael's. I can't remember off-hand who it's of. In chalk or something? Yes, in chalk, I think it was in chalk. But, very very...so that was interesting enough. And of course, what happened really was that, we went, we were taken to the museums but not all that amount to the National Gallery, that I really can't remember going, but I do remember when I was about 12 or 13 when I had my bicycle first I used to go off to the National Gallery by myself, and this was encouraged, do you see, this was not...you know, it was quite natural in a certain sense that I should do so. And my mother never told me what pictures, thank goodness neither of them told me what pictures I should look at. So the idea was that you made your own mind up. I made my own mind up. And of course naturally enough at that age, what I liked most were the primitives, and we took it from there. So who would you have been looking at? Oh, well, I remember all the little Duccios and things like that, and Botticelli and Verrocchio, and what primitives they had in those days, the National Gallery. They had quite a number, but of course not as many as they have now. I can't remember in detail. And the other thing about the National Gallery in those days was, it was a very different kettle of fish from what it is now. Perhaps I should enlarge on that a bit. Well the walls, this would be, when would it be, probably during the First World War I should think, when I was...yes, it was...that would be the time when I first had a bike. And of course the National Gallery wasn't redecorated © The British Library Board http://sounds.bl.uk Robert Medley Page 5 C466/19/01 F4108 Side A until after the war, which I can tell you about too. It was very dark, that's the first thing about it as a whole, because all the walls were covered with Lincrusta. What's that? Well Lincrusta was a slightly embossed facsimile paper, it's an embossed paper, and they were most...and it was embossed in of course high Renaissance brocade patterns, I mean such as we use still of course. But they were painted as a whole rather dark brown, and then touched up with bits of gold leaf a little bit, gold paint, you know. That was my memory of it, and most of the rooms were more or less the same colour. And there were numbers of pictures which were in the gallery; they had some of the Wertheim pictures were there, and there was a portrait of a man called Sir Henry Thomson who was a vague relation of the Medleys, one of the Medleys having married Sir Henry Thompson, into Sir Henry Thompson's family, who was a famous surgeon who operated on various people including King Leopold of the Belgians for stone. And he was the person who pioneered through the Houses of Parliament cremation. It took him years to get this through, to get people to accept that idea, and they did, and so there's a little bust of him when you go to Golders Green. I shan't be able to see it I hope next time I go to Golders Green! (laughs) Unless I get myself burnt up somewhere else. And there was a portrait of him by, oh what's his name, Sir Frank Holls was it, Sir Frank...I'll remember sooner or later. OK. Perhaps I ought just to have a.....[BREAK IN RECORDING] I don't know why the pictures were there. And there was also Sargents, as well as the Wertheims there was, Sargent's Lord Ribblesdale was there, and I think a lot of those pictures got there because they were probably sent temporarily housed during the war there. And so it was roughly the primitives and up to Botticelli that I first liked. And then, as I say, I wasn't told but I was always, my mother always encouraged me to draw; she knew instinctively, she knew perfectly well that I was not going to be cut out to be a classical scholar, though curiously enough I think I might have been quite good at it. Well you've always been interested in history, haven't you. Yes. And always interested in history. Of course I get that largely through my father as well. Did he read...? © The British Library Board http://sounds.bl.uk Robert Medley Page 6 C466/19/01 F4108 Side A He read everything. Literature and everything that...? Oh yes, yes, everything. My cousin Francis Birrell, who ran a bookshop with Bunny Garnett said of course my father was the best-read man he had ever known, and if you wanted to know about an obscure English novel you only had to ask my father to find that he had read it, not only read it but remembered it as well. And he had a large library, and we weren't sort of hampered in this kind of way at all. But he also read history. Yes, well he gave me, when I was run over at the age of 14½ he gave me Trevelyan's `History of the Italian Risorgimento' to read, a nice two or three volume book. And of course he judged me quite right, because I read it with total fascination. And you have devoured history ever since. Yes, well I've always liked history, and he used to take us round City churches and things like that on Sundays, so I got to know architecturally quite a bit. And as I say, my mother was really a very good painter, and my mother's family of course were much more well-off people than my father's side of the family, then they went bankrupt. Could you describe them? That's the Owens isn't it? That's the Owens, yes. Well, my grandmother was, my grandfather I really know very little about, because he died when I was...oh, about three or four years after he went bankrupt, so I don't really remember him very well, but he was a nice gentle man. I think the force of character was ultimately of course my grandmother. They lived in Holland Park, next-door, rather next-door to where Dufferin and Ava live now, in one of those nice double-fronted Victorian Regency houses, big house they lived in down there. And my mother when she was a girl she used to go round, because there was a big artistic colony there as you know, and opposite there lived one of the Ionides girls who was married to a man called Praise[ph], and so, on my father's and on my mother's side there was a considerable number of people, like the Ionides, you know, who is a great collector, Victorian collector; the Emmanuels, the Armadies[ph] and these rich Greek merchants, who played a very important part in the cultural lifetime there. And my mother used to go, she told me that she used to go on Sundays sometimes to Watts' studio in Holland Park of course, and she was very funny about © The British Library Board http://sounds.bl.uk Robert Medley Page 7 C466/19/01 F4108 Side A this, it was typical of my mother, she said, `You know, it was really rather awful, because,' she said, `he always dressed up to look like Titian, and he was always surrounded by large numbers of other females,' and my mother as a whole didn't get along very well with other women, as a whole, she preferred...she always wanted boys instead of daughters in the family I think really. I'll tell you about that later, because it's funny. And she said, `You know, the awful thing you see, I felt it was all a complete fraud.' (laughs) You know, she was absolutely right. And so... As I say she painted the little picture there, that's up there, you know, it's a nice, very modest little picture that people do notice. Can you describe it for the tape, because they can't see it. Well it's a rather dark picture of the dining room in the house in which I was born, which was number 11 Edith Grove, Chelsea, and, it's quite impossible for anyone to live there now of course, on account of the traffic, but of course a number of people have lived in Edith Grove. What sort of style is the picture painted in? Oh, what style is the picture? Very difficult to say. It's a kind of monochrome impressionism, to put it that way. It's practically a monochrome picture, but very very truthful in tone, she had a wonderful sense of value. And it's nothing but a table with a little, one little sort of flower on it, and a bit of the sideboard which we always had, and curtain, and a small view out of the dining room window on to the back garden in Edith Grove, which was not exactly a really inspiring sight in any case, but it's a very nice picture. Well structured? Very well, yes. And of course she did this other drawing which I've also got, which is a wonderful drawing I think, a really good drawing, of a ruined old pier at Walberswick, which doesn't exist any more, because it's crumbled into the mud. And it really, it's a drawing which somebody like Jongkind could well have been proud of. She was enormously conscientious, she could handle these things with great delicacy, and it's a very beautiful drawing, very attentive. Wasn't that where Steer used to go? Steer used to go there. I think that's partly why my grandmother and my grandfather, when he went bankrupt, why they went there. And then, they were one of the first people I think, or only about the second or third people, who actually built themselves little houses down there, © The British Library Board http://sounds.bl.uk