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From an apprentice at the Midland Railway Loco Works to leading avant-garde artist. The life of Graham Sutherland is revealed by Vivienne Smith.

FIFTY years ago, Graham Sutherland was a leading figure in the world of modern art. Among the most celebrated of his works was the design of the huge tapestry, Christ in Glory, for the new Coventry Cathedral in 1962.

Yet, his development as an artist owed more than a little to early experiences as a railway apprentice in Derby.

London may have been his birthplace, but Graham had local blood in his veins. His father was a Derby man born and bred.

Vivian Sutherland was raised at the family home on Arboretum Square, together with brother, Frank, and sister, Beatrice.

Their father, George (Graham’s grandfather), was the headmaster of St Andrew’s School, in Litchurch, until 1898, when he became organising secretary of the new Municipal Technical College in Green Lane.

Their mother, Catherine, was the daughter of Charles Humphreys, a local builder who constructed Derby Market Hall as well as Arboretum Square itself.

Vivian Sutherland qualified as a barrister and settled in London where son, Graham, was born on August 24, 1903.

The future artist showed no special aptitude at school. So, when he came to leave Epsom College at 16, his parents faced the dilemma of what to do with him.

In the end, the decision was made to send the teenager to Derby as an engineering apprentice at the Midland Railway Works.

As Graham Sutherland himself remarked years later: “If you had been through the Locomotive Works at Derby you could get a job pretty well in any engineering works in the country in those days.”

His father’s brother, Frank, known to the teenager as Uncle Budge, was a top draughtsman in the design department with the company.

He still lived in the family home by the Arboretum with his unmarried sister, Beatrice.

However, the pair did not invite their nephew to stay with them when he arrived in Derby a couple of months or so before his 17th birthday.

Instead, Graham found lodgings at Melbourne House, on Osmaston Road. Being within easy walking distance of the works, the place was popular with apprentices. Unhappy there, he soon acquired new digs at the home of a fellow trainee who also became a good friend.

Taken on as a privileged apprentice, Graham received training as an all-round engineer rather than a traditional craftsman.

As part of his apprenticeship, he had to spend two mornings and three evenings a week studying at the Municipal Technical College which had once been his grandfather’s domain.

The rest of the time, he was mainly employed in the boiler-making department and, later, the boiler repair shop.

The teenager did not find the work tedious or particularly difficult, but the hours were long.

What he saw in the vast railway workshops certainly left an impression. As the artist later recalled: “I was at once amazed at the transformation of block and sheets of metal into the modern steam locomotive.”

Even so, Graham realised right from the start the job was not for him. The main problem was his lack of ability in maths, a subject vital to any aspiring designer.

He began to skip lectures at college and, back at his lodgings at the end of the working day, he much preferred drawing sketches to concentrating on his studies.

A traumatic incident in the boiler repair shop finally helped convince him to abandon engineering altogether. The boilers of steam engines suffered from corrosion and were fixed by riveting patches over the appropriate sections.

In order to assess the damage, someone had to squeeze inside the boiler to mark up the cracks with chalk.

At the time, the repair shop was fortunate in having one particular member of staff who was small and very skinny. He had no difficulty in carrying out the inspections.

Unfortunately, one day the man was off sick and young Graham had to do the job in his place.

The slim 17-year-old had no problems getting inside the boiler of the shunting engine. But then, to his horror, he found himself unable to get out.

Years later, the artist reminisced: “I cannot remember how long I was shut in, but it seemed an awful long time and I know they had to remove part of the boiler to get me out.”

Not surprisingly, this terrifying episode led him to suffer from claustrophobia.

Just a year into the apprenticeship, Graham decided he had had enough. However, his parents were somewhat concerned that he wanted to pursue a career in art instead, as this was no way to make a living.

The young man went to discuss the matter with his superior, Sir Henry Fowler, chief mechanical engineer of the Midland Railway. He proved to be most understanding.

Graham was told that, with the best will in the world, he would never make it as an engineer because of his poor grasp of mathematics.

The engineer wrote to his father to that effect and suggested the teenager’s own choice of art would be more appropriate.

Fowler’s letter helped to do the trick.

This, together with a little pressure from his wife, Elsie, persuaded Vivian Sutherland to let his son have his own way.

Graham went on to win a place at Goldsmiths College School of Art, in London, in 1921.

Yet, he never regretted the year spent at Derby. In later life, the artist commented of his time as an apprentice: “The experience, without doubt, gave me a feeling for great machines which I have never lost.”

After five years’ study, he initially specialised in etching. His father had suggested that there would be a better chance of making a living from book illustration.

So, Graham was 30 before he first took up painting. Yet, by 1940, he had been appointed an official war artist.

The range of assignments now facing him were unlike any he had ever tackled before.

The war artists were commissioned to create pictorial records of all kinds of wartime activity. For Graham, this included producing illustrations of the devastation caused by air-raids in places such as Swansea and London’s East End.

He also made studies of Cornish tin mines, iron foundries and quarries.

His experiences at the railway workshops in Derby proved invaluable to the task, as they had awakened in him a fascination for machinery.

The pictures he produced are considered some of his most memorable works and are an evocative record of the times.

They also brought him back to Derbyshire. In the spring of 1943, Graham’s search for a new subject for his war work led him to the Peak.

He spent six weeks at the various premises of ICI, including their dye works in Manchester. But, most of the time, he worked at the company’s limestone quarries at Hindlow, just outside Buxton.

One of the pictures Graham completed here shows a quarryman working on the stepped face of the quarry.

Executed in pen, chalk and watercolour, it is titled simply Limestone Quarry – Loosening Stone.

While in the area, the artist stayed at a hotel in Buxton where, it seems, fellow guests were difficult to please.

As Graham wrote in a letter to a friend that May: “Buxton was full of the aged and infirm, loudly complaining (in a perfectly excellent hotel) that salmon was boiled and not grilled, and so on.”

Around the same time, a film was being made about the work of Britain’s war artists under the title Out of Chaos. Graham was invited to take part, alongside such famous names as Henry Moore and Stanley Spencer.

Although it had been intended to shoot some scenes with him in Cornwall, the tin mines proved too difficult to light.

So, instead, the film crew descended on the quarries at Hindlow where footage was shot of the artist sketching.

Out of Chaos was released in cinemas in 1945 as a supporting feature.

After the war, Graham tackled his first portrait, producing a striking study of Somerset Maugham in 1949.

But his most famous commission was the portrait of Sir Winston Churchill, in celebration of the statesman’s 80th birthday in 1954.

Unfortunately, his sitter hated the end product, claiming it made him look half-witted and old. It later came to light that Lady Churchill had the picture secretly destroyed not long after it was completed.

Other post-war work produced by the painter was more surrealist, one of his obsessions being the correspondence “between machines and organic forms”.

Memories of the cogs and wheels of the Midland Railway’s workshops often found expression in this abstract art.

Long before his death in 1980, Graham Sutherland was recognised as a leader of the avant-garde in Britain.

Yet, for all that, he freely admitted he would not have missed his time as a railway apprentice in Derby for the world.

As the man himself once said: “I must confess it was a very formative thing in my life.”

• Leading artist was Loco Works apprentice

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County:  Derbyshire
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This article is from the Derby Evening Telegraph and is reproduced online here.