Just a few pics from a recent trip. Here’s just one painting from the excellent exhibit at The Imperial War Museum Beauty and Destruction: Wartime London in Art
It’s by Ethel Léontine Gabain, who was commissioned by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee, WAAC, in 1940.
In spite of poor health, she travelled all over the UK to document women’s war work, capturing subjects ranging from lumberjills to factory workers.
Her work featured her interest in medical innovations, including depicting Sir Alexander Fleming working in his laboratory and in A Child Bomb-Victim Receiving Penicillin Treatment, a girl being treated with the drug.
In this painting – A Bunyan-Stannard First-Aid Envelope for Protection against Infection in Burns, as issued to the RAF – she records airmen and pioneering burn treatments.
This preserved ghost sign at a London station advertising a cup of tea for 2d must date from that era too.
Wallflowers are not native to the UK and probably arrived with the Normans. But they can be found growing wild across the country and often in coastal areas. There are few things that smell as glorious. These were in the coastguard cottage hedge on the cliffs in Norfolk
Just along the coastal path – a WW2 gun emplacement bunker that looks that it maybe on the beach sometime soon. In the distance – at the horizon – you can just see the wind farm.
And here are the ladies lavs behind the Sheringham seafront in the early evening. Look at those windows!
Beautifully executed art 🙂
Great photo’s, I went to the IWM exhibition as well, thanks for the reminder!
Thanks Jane. I thought it was a great exhibit.
great photos
It is unimaginable what those air crews went through and what everyone else did, for that matter. I was looking at some other pictures just this morning. If that was to happen now, I’m not sure people have the strength for it. I have never been sure I would have. Brilliant windows.
It’s something I wonder about too. I think that the existence of an existential threat made a difference. The threat was real. And combined with a very different cultural ethos and relentless and effective propaganda that stressed community effort – we are all in this together – made a difference. Ordinary people rising to do extraordinary things. And at far I can tell there was a kind of patriotism that Orwell writes about. Not flag-waving jingoistic nationalism but just a sense of belonging to somewhere that – for all its shortcomings – was worth preserving.
Ms. Gabain’a paintings certainly bring the dangers of war to life — and also the need to improvise when injured (if I am understanding the first aid envelopes correctly…) On another topic, it never occurred to me that there might be an actual wallflower. I just thought it was a descriptive term for a shy person at a dance/social event. Hurrah that you saw and smelled some. And what an elegant lavatory! Glad to see it has been well maintained (and not vandalized/graffitied either).
What struck me about the painting was that the airmen were still on duty in spite of still recovering from severe burns.
Wallflowers are a very common garden flower in the UK. It’s generally thought that they were brought over by Norman stonemasons or returning Crusaders in the medieval period. The first official record of them growing in the wild dates back to 1548. They have the most wonderful smell. And such glorious rich colors of gold and bronze and maroon. They thrive in limestone soils, so were often found where lime mortar crumbled and leeched from medieval walls. Hence the name.