‘Fierce Feathers’, ambulance trains and surrealism
Simon Colbeck writes about his research on the Penrose family
Oxhey Grange, near Watford, was the home of James Doyle Penrose, the artist of two familiar Quaker paintings: The Presence in the Midst and None Shall Make them Afraid (perhaps better known as ‘Fierce Feathers’). His wife Elizabeth Josephine was the daughter of a wealthy Quaker banker, Alexander Peckover of Wisbech, who had been a generous benefactor of Leighton Park School.
The couple’s four sons went to Leighton Park as boarders and the three eldest – Alexander, Lionel and Roland – were all conscientious objectors who served with the Friends Ambulance Unit (FAU) in world war one. Alexander and Lionel were stewards on FAU ambulance trains in France and Roland served in Italy in the final months of the war.
The influence of Quaker values and wartime experience showed in very different ways in Lionel and Roland’s lives. Lionel became a medical geneticist and pioneered research on Down Syndrome in the 1930s. In the 1950s he was a founder and first president of the Medical Association for the Prevention of War and wrote on war as a behavioural and psychological malady. As Galton Professor of Genetics at University College London until his retirement in 1965, he largely succeeded in discrediting the ideological strand of ‘eugenics’ in his field of research. The inaccurate and pejorative term ‘mongolism’ was also superseded by Down Syndrome through his work.
Lionel was an amateur artist throughout his life and also pursued a fascination with puzzles and the creation of impossible three-dimensional objects. The ‘Penrose triangle’ and the never-ending staircase (also independently designed by M C Escher) are the best known examples. He died in 1972 and is buried with his parents at Jordans in Buckinghamshire.
Roland pursued his father’s occupation, but as a surrealist, and was a leading figure in introducing Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, Joan Miró and other avant-garde artists to a British audience. He brought Picasso’s Guernica, the twentieth century’s most celebrated anti-war painting, to be exhibited in Britain in 1939, raising funds for the Spanish Republican cause. He was a founder of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) and an influential trustee of The Tate Gallery, procuring works that could not have been afforded without his direct personal contacts with modern artists.
The work of his second wife Lee Miller, the American model and war photographer, is currently being shown at The Imperial War Museum, while Kate Winslet is set to play her on film. Picasso and other artists were frequent visitors to their farmhouse home near Eastbourne, where their son Antony Penrose still lives and opens the house and its artistic treasures to the public. Roland was knighted in 1966 for his services to visual arts and died in 1984.
Roland had no strong connections with Quakers in his adult life and in world war two he lent his creative talents to the design and teaching of camouflage for army and air force equipment. This involved an implausible commission as a captain in the Royal Engineers, which was no more consistent with his libertarian artist lifestyle than with his family origins. In later life Roland wrote in tones of amused detachment about the sober influences of his Quaker parents and his father’s eldership in Watford Meeting.
Perhaps the idea of Roland reacting against an austere morality is not the whole story. The Quaker emphasis on inner personal revelation as against adherence to scripture, outward liturgy or credal authority, has always been, at least potentially, liberating. The surrealists explored a relationship between artistic expression and natural objects ‘as found’, an ‘opening’ that echoes the Quaker understanding of the sacred as universal rather than consciously defined, either by artistic convention or religious authority.
Simon was one of the producers of Watford’s Quiet Heroes: Resisting the Great War, which can be seen on Youtube. A DVD can be ordered from heroes@watfordquakers.org.uk or the Quaker Bookshop at Friends House.
