The Dreams of Children

She was younger than me, by about a year or so. Corkscrew hair, funny, sharp and dangerous. We'd all get the bus to and from school, cramming about 400 kids into about 8 buses from outside the school gates. Got to get on the first bus!

The queue was always carnage: Bags, elbows, knees and heads - nothing was off limits. Got to get on the bus first!

Traveling via the Station and things could only get worse. Off one bus onto another. Got to get on the next  bus!

To be honest I can't even remember why I bothered to rush home. Nothing to do or eat when I got there, except play music - loud!

I suspect it was just about getting on the same bus as the girl with the corkscrew hair.

Hiding in plain sight (or ‘You always used to be able to spot a Nazi ‘cos he wore a badge’)

When I was 14 (back in 1976) one of the boys in our year suddenly started bringing in copies of ‘Bulldog’ the National Front’s newspaper. Bulldog, for the uninitiated was a combination of jaundiced articles, vile rants, badly drawn cartoons, recruitment advertising and requests for money to fight the scourge of Bolshevism and anybody else the latest group of British Fascists hated. The National Front, a fundamentally racist entity, had been recruiting at English football grounds from the early 70’s, with quite alarming success. 

The disaffected young white male population gravitated towards the Front with undue haste. Barely a decade after the summer of love/height of the swinging 60’s, the UK had crumbled into a bitterly divided nation. A class war had erupted in the shape of the struggle between the miners and the government. The 3-day week and recession helped incubate resentment. And whilst the wealthy remained untouched, the white unemployed populace looked for someone to blame and the National Front found plenty of scapegoats for their rage… West Indian, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, African and Jewish communities were targeted and violence was never far away. 

Eastbourne, sleepy old Eastbourne, the sun trap of the south and home to the largest collection of white over 65’s in Europe at that time hardly seemed a relevant recruiting ground for the NF. There were less than 20 BAME families in the town at the time and there was hardly anything to suggest that the situation would change. But the NF continued to peddle their ‘truths’and they went on a recruitment drive to turn the rather weedy youth of the town into some kind of elite Freikorps. A rather simple strategy of identifying the intellectually immature but physically intimidating was the way forward. And so, it came to pass that our school got its very own playground brownshirt – NaziBoy!

It began with a badge. Badges being quite high on the teen boys currency list. A little NF badge, if you were none the wiser, might seem like just another band badge – white red & black. The badge provoked interest and provoked a conversation or two. The recruitment process had begun. After the badge, some stickers. They’d start appearing on bus shelters, in the school toilets, on desks and noticeboards. The message was simple “PAKIS GO HOME”. The message was repetitive. The message was of course, repulsive!

The follow up was then the newspaper. ‘Bulldog’ full to the brim with odious, ill-concealed racist rhetoric left the reader in no doubt who was to blame and what should be done. Terrace humour mixed with a mangled manifesto hewn from off cuts of Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech. Battle-lines had been drawn.

Fortunately, to the eternal credit of all but two of my classmates, the message was received, understood and swiftly rejected. Membership of the Anti-Nazi League/Rock against Racism skyrocketed and robust debates were had on every bus home, the untruths were confronted at each and every turn. Admittedly the significant shoeing that was meted out to NaziBoy helped to sway any of the undecided. 

The point of sharing this little snapshot of a political awakening on the South Coast of England is twofold:

1)   Recognition of my schoolmates who swiftly and rigorously rejected the doctrine that NaziBoy had been championed with spreading.

2)   To also recognise that it was easy to confront such an obvious affront to common decency because the tactic of playground recruiting was so route one.

The problem of course now is that, the same enemy has become far more sophisticated in their branding, message and approach. Route one is no longer viable, these tricky fuckers are far more subtle. The use of well-worn tropes is still happening, not least because the rebuttal portals are no longer geared up to respond. The significant leap to the right by media houses has left rigour and context trailing behind all those chasing clicks. The various techniques and approaches to get people on their own (the digital equivalent of getting somebody round the back of the back sheds and threatening them with a right kicking) are so marvellously subtle thanks to targeted EDM’s, FB Posts etc.

What I’m trying to say is that the bastards aren’t wearing badges anymore and it makes it easy for the weak and embittered to join the slipstream of hate… 

It is our duty to call them all out. Every single one of them, every single time. If we don’t before you know it, NaziBoy and his chums will not only run the playground, they’ll own the whole damned country!

Eric Ravilious

Eric William Ravilious (22 July 1903 – 2 September 1942) was an English painter, designer, book illustrator and wood engraver. He grew up in Sussex, and is particularly known for his watercolours of the South Downs. He served as a war artist, and died when the aircraft he was on was lost off Iceland.

Ravilious was born on 22 July 1903 in Churchfield Road, Acton, London. While he was still a small child the family moved to Eastbourne in Sussex, where his parents ran an antique shop.

He was educated at Eastbourne Grammar school (weren't we all?). In 1919 he won a scholarship to Eastbourne School of Art and in 1922 another to study at the Design School at the Royal College of Art. There he became close friends with Edward Bawden and, from 1924, studied under Paul Nash. Nash, an enthusiast for wood engraving, encouraged him in the technique, and was impressed enough by his work to propose him for membership of the Society of Wood Engravers in 1925, and helped him to get commissions.

In 1925 he received a travelling scholarship to Italy and visitied Florence, Siena, and the hill towns of Tuscany. Following this he began teaching part-time at the Eastbourne School of Art, and from 1930 taught (also part-time) at the Royal College of Art. In the same year he married Eileen Lucy "Tirzah" Garwood (1908-1951) also a noted artist and engraver. Between 1930 and 1932 the couple lived in Hammersmith, London, where there is a blue plaque on the wall of their house at the corner of Upper Mall and Weltje Road. In 1932 they moved to rural Essex where they initially lodged with Edward Bawden at Great Bardfield. In 1934 they purchased Bank House at Castle Hedingham, and a blue plaque now commemorates this. They had three children: John Ravilious; the photographer James Ravilious; and Anne Ullmann, editor of books on her parents and their work.

In 1928 Ravilious and Bawden painted a mural at Morley College in South London on which they worked for a whole year. Their work was described by J. M. Richards as "sharp in detail, clean in colour, with an odd humour in their marionette-like figures" and "a striking departure from the conventions of mural painting at that time". It was destroyed by bombing in 1941. In 1933 Ravilious and his wife painted murals at the Midland Hotel in Morecambe. Ravilious engraved more than four hundred illustrations and drew over forty lithographic designs for books and publications during his lifetime. His first commission, in 1926, was to illustrate a novel for Jonathan Cape. He went on to produce work both for large companies such as the Lanston Corporation and smaller, less commercial publishers, such as the Golden Cockerel Press (for whom he illustrated an edition of Twelfth Night), the Curwen Press and the Cresset Press.

His woodcut of two Victorian gentlemen playing cricket has appeared on the front cover of every edition of Wisden Cricketers' Almanack since 1938. Hiis style of wood-engraving was greatly influenced by that of Thomas Bewick. In the mid-1930s he took up lithography, making a print of Newhaven Harbour for the "Contemporary Lithographs" scheme, and a set of full-page lithographs for a book called High Street, with text by J. M. Richards. In 1936 Ravilious was invited by Wedgwood to make designs for ceramics. His work for them included a commemorative mug to mark the coronation of Edward VIII, the "Boat Race" bowl and the "Garden" series of plates, in which each size of plate showed a different plant. Production of Ravilious' designs continued into the 1950s, with the coronation mug design being posthumously reworked for the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953. Apart from a brief experimentation with oils in 1930 – inspired by the works of Johan Zoffany – Ravilious painted almost entirely in watercolour.

He was especially inspired by the landscape of the South Downs around Beddingham. He frequently returned to Furlongs, the cottage of Peggy Angus. He considered that his time at Furlongs "...altered my whole outlook and way of painting, I think because the colour of the landscape was so lovely and the design so beautifully obvious ... that I simply had to abandon my tinted drawings". Some of his most famous works, such as Tea at Furlongs, were painted there.

Writer Geraldine Bedell: - "his painting was influenced by his design. His elegant watercolours, with their stipples, hatching and drastically simplified shapes, are instantly recognisable. And he maintained his artistic identity when he became a war artist. - His work is light of touch, elegant, and hugely pleasurable."

Ravilious was appointed an official war artist in 1940, with the rank of Honorary Captain in the Royal Marines. During that year he painted at the Royal Naval Barracks at Chatham and Sheerness; sailed to Norway and the Arctic on board HMS Highlander, which was carrying out escort duties, and painted submarines at Gosport and coastal defences at Newlyn. In 1941 he spent six months with the navy at Dover, then transferred to Scotland in October. He spent much of 1942 at various R.A.F. bases, before being posted to Iceland in August.

He was killed on 2 September 1942 while accompanying a Royal Air Force air sea rescue mission off Iceland that failed to return to its base.