Lives of the First World War

Passport photo of subject

Claughton Pellew at Blackheath, London, in 1911 on graduation from the Slade School of Art, while staying with the Tennent family whose daughter he married in 1919 after WW1

Claughton Pellew is on the left holding the head of the prisoner who they are pretending to force feed (a hazard that many of them will have endured). Most of them will have been in prison or confined in Home Office Work Centres since the introduction of conscription in 1916. Far left is Hermon Ould, dramatist, poet and critic, who later became Secretary General of PEN International (‘Poets, Essayists, Novelists’).

The prison could be Dorchester, Winchester, Strangeways, Wakefield or Dartmoor, in all of which Claughton was held between 1916-18. He notes that "the netting is to prevent prisoners from throwing themselves over the balconies"!

Kechie (with her cat) was an artist in her own right having also trained at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Her family were neighbours of the Pellew-Harveys at Blackheath. She supported Claughton throughout his two years in prisons; he finished as a cook in Dartmoor. She married Claughton in 1919 after the war when they both withdrew to live and paint in North Norfolk for the rest of their lives, apart from occasional long holidays spent with Bohemian friends in Bavaria.

Claughton, a gifted artist, designed this house built on a remote rural site to which he & Kechie moved in 1927. There he found the obscurity for which he seemed to have been searching since his imprisonment of the war. They lived the simple life with oil lamps, only bicycles for transport, and a flock of geese for security. Yet from there his paintings and wood engravings continued to flow, illustrating the old traditional world of rural peace, helping to eclipse the memories of bloody conflict. They lived there for the rest of their lives.

Claughton in British Columbia, Canada, circa 1898, where his father, William Pellew-Harvey, a mining engineer, had moved in 1891 when Claughton was a baby in Cornwall. Ten years later in 1901 the family returned to England (London) where William opened what became a highly successful mining consultancy. Therefrom sprung the conflict between the often absent materialistic father William and his effete artist son.

The two mounds side by side are the unmarked graves of Claughton & Kechie, buried in 1966 & 1968 respectively. They lie in the churchyard of All Saints, Gimingham, Norfolk, their favourite spot by the mill stream which figures among Claughton’s pictures.

Ground floor of the prison in which Claughton was being held. The photo is annotated by him to show his cell doorway (long arrow)

A favourite subject, this picture is owned by the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. It is a watercolour with pen and ink, a medium Claughton often used. He occasionally painted in oil, but a large body of his work are wood engravings. See http://www.scribd.com/doc/117326171/

Claughton Pellew aged 21 on graduation from the Slade School of Art. In the next three years he had what proved to be the transcendent experience of visiting Italy, France and Austria. In particular he saw the Florentine art of the 14th century and lived in Assisi where its historical and religious associations overwhelmed this sensitive young artist. On his return he wholeheartedly embraced religious symbolism in his work and, encouraged by his neighbour Edda Watkin, converted to Catholicism. The year was 1914 when the Great War began

A hearing for exemption from military service held in Darlington. Claughton attended his MST at Greenwich in London. He was then held in prisons at Dorchester, Winchester and Strangeways in Manchester before being sent to Dyce Camp (Work Centre) at Aberdeen in August 1916 where he spent a year. On 28th August 1917 he was sent to Dartmoor prison in Devon until his release after the war

A group at the Dyce Work Centre near Aberdeen. Claughton arrived there at the end of that month and spent a year there after which he was sent to Dartmoor prison on 28th August 1917 for the rest of the war. Britain had some 16,000 conscienscious objectors to deal with during WW1

The artist, Claughton Pellew, student of the 'The Slade' in London, completed this woodengraving in 1930 for the cover of the Christmas edition of the Radio Times. It depicts the north Norfolk village of Trunch, near the artist's home and is typical of much of his work done in the aftermath of WW1, reminders of the world people then yearned for - peaceful, slow moving, traditional and unindustrialised.

This small isolated camp on the British Columbian border with Alberta in Canada is where Claughton and his parents arrived in 1891 after his father's mine in Cornwall had had to close. It became the mining town of Golden (which supplied the photo). The family lived her in comparative isolation 1891-95, when they moved to Vancouver, and then to London in 1901