I had a particularly close relationship with WP and received many kindnesses from him during my time at the school, which is why I have been so reticent about my role in their re-emergence. We had in common the fact that we were both to some extent misfits in the grammar school environment. Prior to KES, although academically bright, I had been expelled at the age of twelve from Solihull School for refusing to play rugby or join the CCF and had been sent to a school for maladjusted boys in Henley-in-Arden because of my general rebellion against authority at school and at home. Then KES headmaster Lesley Watkins had thrown me a lifeline by the offer of a place at the grammar school which I was to attend in the daytime while going back to the maladjusted school at night. Despite the goodwill and understanding KES showed me, nothing could really normalise this situation while it lasted and I always felt odd compared with boys going back to normal homes.
WP in his turn – a meticulous and scholarly man, but whose background was Birmingham School of Art rather than a university - never felt completely at ease as the non-academic master at the grammar school. I remember that he told my mother that he always felt hurt that he was the only one not entitled to wear a gown on speech days. Whereas other masters lived in Stratford and were part of a Stratford scene he was, again, somewhat distanced by living in Hall Green on the outskirts of Birmingham, travelling to and fro by train, and we frequently travelled together.
His rediscovery of the paintings in 1955 and the scholarship involved was a triumph and vindication of his time at the school, raising him immediately from the status of art-master with no gown to the academic level of the other staff, or beyond. And socially it projected him overnight to a place among the town’s intelligentsia. So I do hesitate to make even this small claim to having a role in their re-emergence under his hand in the 1950s; and if any of his friends are still alive - he ended up having many in Stratford – they may well see this as trying to steal some of my old art-teacher’s thunder. However, I do remember feeling disgruntled aged fifteen-and-a-half, that in all the publicity about the frescoes I got no mention because as I saw it, a schoolboy and a penknife had kick-started the whole thing.
Gradually any pique I felt was forgotten as the pressure of school and preparing for GCSEs took over. Nor did I see the paintings as particularly important. I had been introduced by WP’s art-history lessons to what I thought of as ‘proper’ fresco done on wet plaster by great artists like Giotto, Cimabue and Fra Angelico, so I was a bit of an art snob where the Stratford efforts were concerned, done – as I saw it - naively a secco onto dry plaster by a journeyman provincial artist, and I wasn’t surprised they had peeled off.
Even if I had felt like putting the record straight, I wouldn’t have done so then or later because WP’s kindnesses to me continued after I had left the school and found myself friendless and out of work in Stratford. If Lesley Watkins had thrown me a lifeline at thirteen, WP threw me one at eighteen by setting up job interviews and introducing me to his now wide circle of friends. He gave me the impetus to go to art school myself and to teach, and the push he gave from the past led eventually to my own career as an art lecturer at a university. As far as I was concerned he did all the spadework and was welcome to all the kudos.
So now why, fifty years later, do I want to butt into the history of the Chapel and get in on the act? And isn’t it cheek on my part to say I was the catalyst that started the process - a process that became the life-work, and the life-justification of this tenacious, kindly, self-effacing man. And are the paintings anyway worth all this finicking about who discovered what and when in view of the fact that they have been re-hidden behind wooden panels, even though some of these are hinged so the public can see them.
I do now think the paintings are worth it, and if I did have any role in their seeing the light of day again, it will do no harm at this distance from the 1950s, to put the record straight. And, anyway, WP’s scholarship was so profound and the rediscovery, restoration and re-recording of the frescoes is so much his that it can’t be diminished by what many will dismiss as a schoolboy yarn.
The medieval 'Dance of Death' wall painting, Guild Chapel, Stratford-upon-Avon as reconstructed by Wilfrid Puddephat 1958
So what do I remember? What do I base my case on? School at KES began each morning with prayers in the Chapel which although owned by Stratford Corporation stood cheek by jowl with the school buildings and was used by the school. I always sat in the same position in the gallery, on the right hand side viewed from the altar, and up against the side wall. Below me but invisible from the balcony was the expanse of the north wall where WP was to uncover what was left of the Dance of Death – a feat that meant trying to see with X-Ray eyes through a ruinous palimpsest of paint layers consisting of two architectural friezes painted at different periods over the Dance itself.
The Guild Chapel, Stratford-upon-Avon, looking west towards the gallery prior to the 1955 remodelling
I need to stress – and my brothers confirm this – that apart from the Doom over the chancel arch which had been exposed in 1928 and rather heavily restored by E.W Tristram, the other chapel walls were bare, insofar as there was no discernible imagery on them. I’m not claiming they were a uniform white giving no clue at all. The whitewash and underlying paint had flaked off and combined with damp creating a patchy effect which a sharp-eyed art-master or imaginative schoolboy might see things in if he tried, on a ‘Rorschach blot’ principle, but the overall impression was that there was no imagery left.
Bored by school prayers one morning in the January of the Spring Term 1955, I scratched a hole with my penknife in the whitewash next to me in the gallery and, after chipping away several layers (certainly more than the two whitewashes of 1563 and 1804) I uncovered a patch of green paint. I widened the hole to about two inches in diameter and thought I also saw pictorial detail. I was astonished. It was a bright green compared with the washed-out look of all the other walls and suggested that a painting had survived and others might survive on other walls as well. The obvious thing was to go to WP and tell him, but I hesitated. I didn’t want to be accused of vandalism and I’d been lucky anyway to escape the eagle eye of Lesley Watkins in the pulpit. I showed one of my brothers the hole and he thought he saw part of a skeleton (mistakenly as it turned out, probably under the ghoulish influence of The Doom). But I couldn’t keep it to myself and later that day I told WP. I thought it would be a eureka! moment – ‘Sir, there’s still something under the whitewash!’ But he reacted coolly as if he hadn’t heard. Nor did he suggest the obvious – that we went and looked at the hole. In fact it was never mentioned again, which surprised me.
With the subsequent removal of the gallery in 1955 what I had uncovered was revealed to be the upper right corner of a wall painting of St George and the Dragon, showing a small castle on the summit of a green hill.
St George and the Dragon wall painting, Guild Chapel, Stratford-upon-Avon showing the line of panelling at rear of gallery prior to the 1955 remodelling.
As art-master at the grammar school he was obviously aware of the drama of Shakespeare’s father obliterating the paintings and of Thomas Fisher’s drawings of them when they were uncovered at the 1804 restoration. But Fisher had described how fast he had had to work because, although brightly detailed when first uncovered, they had deteriorated rapidly. And if there had been anything worth saving, why had the 1804 restorers whitewashed them again? Fisher’s account creates a poignant image of the walls being peeled back to their original technicolour glory, then crumbling like fairy gold exposed to daylight. But this isn’t the whole story; although paintings were discovered everywhere else, nothing was actually found on the nave walls. And the 1928 Doom restorer E.W.Tristram had concluded that everything else on the walls apart from the Doom was ‘indecipherable’. To cap this, eyewitness accounts of the original whitewashing suggested some paintings had been mutilated (scraped) as well as being whitewashed (the 1804 restorers were themselves iconoclasts and they stripped the plaster in the chancel permanently destroying all paintings there after Fisher had drawn them). So the consensus over the years was that they were either lost for good, or so far-gone as to un-recoverable – and WP seems to have shared this view.
Up to that point I don’t remember that he had shown any particular interest in the Chapel or its frescoes. In our frequent chats about art on the train home he never mentioned the Chapel, nor did he mention the frescoes to favoured pupils in his art class who would be the obvious people to tell. He admitted in a lecture to the Birmingham Archaeological society to having had a ‘dormant interest’ but nothing stronger and in his lecture notes he went on to say that he’d only come alive to the fact that he should investigate them because an impending 1950s restoration was going to panel them over - certainly not because a KES boy had gone and told him about a crucial bit of green paint. I told him about the paint in January 1955 and he went straight to work in the chapel in the February which gives the impression of a man acting fast before the walls are panelled but could equally well have been - and I believe it was - in direct response to my tip. In fact, as a member of the Friends of the Guild Chapel committee, he must have known there was no rush because the Friends had to raise funds bit by bit for each phase of the work and the panelling wasn’t put up until March 1957.
This is further confirmed by notes of the AGMs of the Friends dated 29th Jan. 1954 – 11th Mar. 1955. These give details of different sorts of decay inside and outside the chapel and the steps needed to restore it, but make no mention of frescoes or any need to save them. Conserving them would surely have been a key item on the agenda. I admit I have only seen shortened versions of the AGM notes in the Stratford Herald, but if paintings had been on anybody’s radar they would surely not have been left out of précis of the meetings.
So the question is – When I went to him, was I just a schoolboy telling him what he already knew? Or did it come as a complete surprise and was I – through a bit of serendipitous vandalism – the frescoes’ schoolboy discoverer? I’m relying on a sixty-year old memory and the memory of two only slightly less ancient KES boys and this is how we remember it. At the very least it will add a footnote and a question mark to the history of the Chapel and tie a KES boy next door into that history.
Wilfrid Puddephat’s archive of his research - notes, photographs, slides, paintings and a manuscript for an unpublished book - are held by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Stratford-upon-Avon.
David Morgan
October 2016
