ELVA BLACKER (1908-84)
The Control Tower at Biggin Hill Elva Blacker was one of the most remarkable women artists of the Second World War, producing a record of life in a wartime fighter station that the RAF Museum website describes as ‘without equal’. At the outset of war, 31 year old Blacker already had considerable life experience, having run her father’s photographic studio in her early 20s, between graduating from the Regent Street Polytechnic (where she studied photography) and studying at the Slade. In 1939, she drove vehicles for the Blood Transfusion Service, but was later called up for service and joined the WAAF. During her time in the WAAF, she produced a record of life at the Fighter Station at Biggin Hill that is remarkable both in terms of its comprehensiveness and quality. Much of the work survives in the collection of the RAF Museum, so works in the private domain have a particular rarity value. Blacker’s oils have a thick impasto and impressionistic use of colour that make them instantly recognisable; they manage to be both accurate records of person and place, but also lively and vivid. In this picture of a relatively relaxed control tower in the latter stages of the war, a mixed group of RAF personnel, including ground crew (in leather working jerkin) survey a fleet of Dakotas, probably belong to 168 Squadron R.C.A.F (Royal Canadian Air Force). The extraordinary level of detail recorded: every minutiae, right down to the layout of the maps of the runways, and the individual portraits of the servicemen, make this a uniquely precious – and affectionate - piece of social record. 26