Companions Review 2022

COMPANIONS

REVIEW

A compendium of writing and images by Companions from 2021

INTO THE WOODS

Ruskin and Nature

GUILD OF ST GEORGE

Contents Letter from the Master RACHEL DICKINSON

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Ruskin: A Time for Change RACHEL DICKINSON

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RUSKIN AND

The Writing’s on the T-shirts p3 PAUL BOARDMAN

INTO THE WOODS

Ruskin and Nature

Three Companions in an online symposium PATRICK CURRY, NICHOLAS FRIEND and PETER DAY

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The slowly sinking ship QUSAI KHRAISHA

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No Wealth But Life JOHN HOLMES and DION DOBRZYNSKI

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Light pollution: a slow-motion disaster DAVID BARRIE

Ruskin Land: John Ruskin’s continuing influence today PETER BURMAN

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In the Post p42 Isle of Man Commemorative stamps

How I came to Ruskin (Land) p8 MARK CLEAVER

Au revoir Louise Pullen NICHOLA JOHNSON and PETER MILLER

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Ruskin Revivalist James Dearden remembered

by CLIVE WILMER

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A Man who was Multitudes Appreciations of Kevin Jackson

by CLIVE WILMER and HOWARD HULL

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Ruskin Land in Winter JENNY ROBBINS

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How Ruskinian Trees Changed My Life MARK FROST

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The Barnstormers ROBERT SOMERVILLE

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Ruskin and the Birds Ruskin Gallery Redisplayed

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True Service Tree saved EWAN ANDERSON

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One Who Could Have Been a Companion Lawrence Ferlinghetti

by KATHLEEN GONZÁLEZ

The Very Spot PETER BURMAN

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Written by Hand TERRY JOHNSON

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(Almost) On Top of the World ARJUN JAIN

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Book Reviews

by CLIVE WILMER, JO NIGHTINGALE and PETER BURMAN

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Afterword SIMON SELIGMAN

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IN THE CITY

Ruskin's Venice

A Report from the Battlefront p28 Planet Earth 2100 Inside back cover PETER BURMAN LINDA ILES

Footnotes DÉIRDRE KELLY

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The End of the Cruiseocene in Venice

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COPYRIGHT OF WORDS AND IMAGES IS HELD BY EACH CONTRIBUTOR. THE COLLECTION IS © 2022 THE GUILD OF ST GEORGE

MICHELLE LOVRIC FRONT AND BACK COVER PICTURES OF THE WYRE FOREST BY JENNY ROBBINS. OTHER PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE RELEVANT CONTRIBUTOR UNLESS OTHERWISE STATED.

COMPANIONS REVIEW The Guild of St George 2022

Letter from The Master WELCOME to the first Companions Review – a gathering of contributions by Companions and friends of the Guild of St George. Many of these items first appeared in online newsletters in 2021 or emerged from on-line Guild events. Almost half of them were unsolicited, and all are offerings from individuals, sharing knowledge, memories, skills and passions. Combined, these pieces tell us much about who we are, and where we are going. We are going into the woods.

concrete examples not just of the relevance but the urgency of Ruskin’s message a century and a half after the Guild was formed. It is very striking how many of the contributions here highlight a need for change at a local and a global level. Ecological crises loom large: light pollution, destructive cruise ships, floods, climate change. So too do the possibilities – and potential pitfalls – of technology.

When Companion Peter Day began to arrange the material for this Review, he noticed that many of the pieces mention nature or trees – and the theme of this collection shone out, organically emerging from intertwined responses. While wilderness and forests can bring fears of unknown dangers and uncertainty, they also represent a place of reflection, freedom, transformation, and renewal – think of Shakespeare’s As You Like It.

This collection also offers models: examples of friends, both living and dead, whose contributions towards a world of Ruskinian ‘wealth’ are praised. Craft, art, design, authorship – skills – are reflected in these pieces and shared. Journeys are traced, including in Ruskin’s footsteps through Scotland, in Ruskin Land and to Venice, as well as a path he never took (but as a lover of mountains would have revelled in) to the Base Camp of Everest. Perhaps ‘pilgrimage’ is more apt than mere ‘journey’. Like the symbolic weight of entering a forest, engaging in pilgrimage extracts us from the everyday hustle and bustle to a state of intention and reflection.

The bicentenary of Ruskin’s birth in 2019 was in many ways a peak for us and we ended that year on a high, elated. We had planned for 2020 to be a period of reflection and reappraisal, and 2021 – the 150th anniversary of the Guild – to be focused inward on Companionship and on setting new goals for the Guild. The arrival of Covid-19 made that planned period of pause and inward focus a requirement. While a difficult period, it has helped us to see next steps.

As a Guild, we often mention the continuing relevance of Ruskin’s ideas, and their appeal today. This collection offers

What is very clear from this patchwork is that the Guild today is active. Our Companions and friends are committed to help bring change for the better: in protecting nature; in developing and sharing skills of art, authorship, craft and design; in being good stewards of what we have been given; in learning from the past as we build the future.

RACHEL DICKINSON

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Ruskin: A Time for Change MORE than 150 years ago, in January 1871, the Victorian art and social critic John Ruskin decided change was needed.

It was period of turmoil. Seeing the effects of the Franco-Prussian war and the rise of nationalism in Europe; increasingly conscious of poverty in Britain; struck by continuing destruction of the environment and places of natural beauty due to industrialisation and urban expansion; conscious of loss of heritage through the neglect or destruction of buildings and of decreasing skills at traditional craftsmanship, disheartened by an education system which stressed limited learning for employment rather than for living – Ruskin reflected on these and more negative patterns he perceived and made a public declaration: “For my own part, I will put up with this state of things passively, not an hour longer […] I will endure it no longer quietly; but henceforward, with any few or many who will help, do my poor best to abate this misery”.

This statement is in the first letter, dated 1st January, 1871, of Fors Clavigera, Ruskin’s public ‘Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain’. With its publication, he founded the Guild of St George as a body of individuals with shared concern about the “state of things”, who actively would work together to make a change, doing what they could to help protect and conserve the precious, and stop the destructive.

As the name suggests, Ruskin consciously chose the medieval Guild system as model and a specific saint as the embodiment of his new organisation.

The image of St George – the nationalist figure George of England but simultaneously the George of other places, nations and traditions who functions as a universal, unifying figure – fighting against evil as embodied in the dragon became a visual representation of the Guild and its members.

Ruskin’s own sepia copy of Carpaccio’s St George and the Dragon from the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni in Venice is the basis of the Guild’s logo.

Ruskin visualised the battle against destructive aspects of the nineteenth century through this image of St George on the side of true ‘Wealth’ fighting against the dragon of ‘Illth’ to save the princess – the representation of what is precious and at risk.

‘Illth’ is a term Ruskin coined, and one that is very useful as we think about what is broken in our world. It expresses the idea of being ill rather than well in economic, social and aesthetic senses. It is the opposite of what Ruskin perceived as true ‘wealth’ as expressed in his famous declaration “There is no wealth but life”. He follows that statement with “Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and 2

An article by the Master of the Guild written for the members newsletter of the York Consortium for Conservation and Craftsmanship, 2021 happy human beings; that man is richest who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others” (Unto this Last). Then, he proceeds to decry “all political economy founded on selfinterest”.

A significant aspect of Ruskin’s aspirations for the Guild – and solution to illth and the destructive pursuit of economic wealth at all cost – is education.

While the Guild schools he dreamed of have never materialised, his proposed curricula for these schools have much to teach our current policy makers. He stressed that practical skills in craftsmanship were a necessary part of education for all, and that local curricula should be nuanced to meet local need. The goal of Ruskinian education is moral development, building real-life skills and learning to live in community; this is very different from the economic goal stressed by education designed to further the ends of rampant capitalism. He opposed competition, whether in the market places of capitalism or in schools, and argued against “the madness of the modern cram and examination system” (Fors letter 95).

Lockdown has shed light on many of the assumptions within our culture, including about our education system, such as the need for competitive, standardised testing. If we were to begin to implement Ruskin’s ideas into our schools, then appreciation for beauty – of architecture, art, and craft as well as the natural environment – would be key lessons, and all students would learn a craft suited to local need and their own innate skills.

Young people would have the opportunity to discover the thrill of actively making, and the dominant economic system would prize conservation and craftmanship much more highly than a plutocracy.

It is striking that, 150 years later, many of the issues which inspired Ruskin to establish the Guild of St George resonate today. Nationalism and isolationism are on the rise, as are economic uncertainty and poverty in the wake of COVID. The environment is still under threat of pollution and climate change and areas of natural beauty are being bulldozed for new buildings, while architectural

conservation and loss of specialist skills.

Today, the Guild of St George has evolved from Ruskin’s original plan. In its 1875 Memorandum, it was “constituted with the object of determining and instituting in practice the wholesome laws of agricultural life and economy and of instructing the agricultural labourer in the science art and literature of good husbandry”. This focus is evident in Ruskin Land, the Guild’s property in the Wyre Forest, Worcestershire, which is once again managed for conservation and education. The Guild owns a

teaching collection Ruskin put together for the education and improvement of Sheffield’s working class, with an aim to have such collections (St George’s Museums) around the country.

Just as important an asset are the Companions, the members of the organisation who work together to implement Ruskin’s ideas, fighting illth as best they can in their local environment and in connection with each other.

RACHEL DICKINSON

The writing’s on the T-shirts THE Guild is very grateful to Sheffield-based designer Paul Boardman, who has designed three T-shirts and tote bags, ethically made, that feature famous sayings of John Ruskin, featuring the Guild's logo. He has generously offered the Guild 100% of the profits on sales of these three designs.

Paul explains the project: One of my first designs for a t-shirt was the simple phrase “citoyen du monde”, meaning “world citizen” in French. This is my design-response to Theresa May’s claim that “If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere”, which although partly a point about what words we use, was also to my mind a

quite sinister point which sought to deny our common humanity.

This made me think about selling some t-shirts where 100% of the profits would go to charities related to the T-shirt designs (for example, all profits from the sale of the “citoyen du monde” design will go to the charity Care4Calais, a volunteerrun charity working with refugees in France and Belgium). It also made me think about other ideas for designs using simple phrases. Last year I was fortunate to design Ruth Nutter's excellent book Paradise is Here, for the Guild. Through this, my growing awareness of the work of the Guild, together with my thoughts about T-shirt designs naturally led me to think about using the words of Ruskin, and in hopefully overcomes the possible particular the phrase "There is no inherent contradiction. I can't wealth but life". imagine Ruskin being a fan of tshirts as items of clothing (even It's a seemingly very simple phrase, but to my mind also one that organic eco-friendly ones), but I states a deep truth about life that is hope he would at least appreciate all too easy to forget in a world full that his words still have relevance – of material distractions. Although it in fact, perhaps more relevance now than ever. may therefore seem almost contradictory to sell a “product” with these words of Ruskin upon it, The full range of T-shirts and tote bags is available from Paul’s project Bold I feel the message is one that deserves to be seen and heard as Face: widely as possible, and this https://boldface.teemill.com/ 3

INTO THE WOODS

Ruskin and Nature

NO WEALTH BUT LIFE The role of the arts and humanities in tackling the climate crisis. By John Holmes and Dion Dobrzynski WHEN politicians and generals talk about winning “hearts and minds”, it is hard not to be cynical. The phrase seems to mask with good intentions a desire to dominate. But in the fight to stop climate change and the degradation of the natural world we need to win over the hearts and minds of the global population if we are to stand a chance of victory. As the survival of ourselves and countless of the other creatures with which we share our planet depends upon our success, this could not be more vital. To be moved to act, whether as a leader or a citizen, you first need to be moved. People need to feel for themselves that they have a stake in the transition to a new and sustainable society; to know what they, personally, will love and lose if we do not make this happen; and to believe that with an act of collective will, we can.

If we are to reach a sustainable future, we first need to be able to imagine it, not merely practically, economically, technologically but as human beings.

Science is essential to this process, but it cannot

First published in September 2021 in ‘Addressing the Climate Challenge’ published by the Forum for Global Challenges at the University of Birmingham. The article is reproduced by kind permission of the authors 4

achieve the transition we need on its own. It will need the help of both the arts and the humanities. Climate science and ecology tell us the risks we are facing but we need art and stories, television and film, music and poetry to help us feel for ourselves the impact of the loss of animals, plants and environments. The arts offer hope and motivate us to act where graphs and diagrams remain remote and impersonal. Scientific data and discourses can be exclusive or obscure, while climate change, pollution and deforestation are all too often invisible. They are happening at a distance for many of us, incrementally, and even as individual disasters mount up and spread, it is hard to get over the cognitive dissonance caused by the wish for this not to be true, combined with the fair-to-moderate weather outside our own windows.

The arts can make climate change vividly present and salient within our everyday lives. They can speak to a broad range of people of all ages and backgrounds in accessible and inclusive ways, and they engage us as communities, not just as individuals. After all, we can only solve the ecological crisis together. As the galvanising effect of music and theatre within the activist group Extinction Rebellion shows, the shared experience of art can help to sustain hope and motivate collective action. If the arts can win over hearts, the humanities can help win over minds.

Technological innovation will surely play a key part in slowing and potentially reversing climate change and in developing new and more sustainable infrastructures, but historical research and literary scholarship are vital too, to recover the voices of the people who saw before the rest of us the impact humanity was having on the natural world. We can still learn today from their observations and solutions.

In February 1872, in the second lecture from his series The Eagle’s Nest, the Victorian prophet and

social critic John Ruskin told an audience in Oxford that “our ingenuity in the vindication, or the denial, of species, will be disregarded in the face of the fact that we destroyed, in civilized Europe, every rare bird and secluded flower”. It is almost one hundred and fifty years to the day since Ruskin alerted us to anthropogenic extinction. Not much more than a decade later, in 1884, he warned of anthropogenic climate change in his lecture The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century.

In tackling these problems, we could do worse than start by adopting the remedy Ruskin himself proposed some years earlier in his trenchant critique of capitalism, Unto this Last, summed up in the phrase “wise consumption”. If Ruskin’s voice speaks to us from the early decades of rampant industrialisation and rapacious extraction, contemporary history comes together with oral tradition and indigenous knowledge in the voices of the Kogi people of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Columbia. Their BBC documentary From the Heart of the World: The Elder Brothers’ Warning, now thirty years old, is a stark reminder of lessons we might have learned then and still need to learn now about how to live in harmony with the rest of the natural world and of the need to consider all human cultures and traditions in looking for solutions to the ecological crisis.

Science is our best guide to understanding the world as it is, but literature has the most to offer us in teaching us what it might be. In their different ways, poetry, myth, science fiction and fantasy all break open our narrow assumptions of what is possible, showing that we can indeed imagine new and different ways of living. For the Romantic poet Percy Shelley, poets were, as he gloriously put it in his Defence of Poetry, “the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present”.

In her acceptance speech for a National Book Award Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2014, Ursula K. Le Guin echoed Shelley when she praised her fellow science-fiction and fantasy authors as “Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality”. Where “so-called realists” risk entrenching the social order of the day, taking its intellectual limitations to be the actual limits of the world, the visionary imagination can throw off the

shackles of prejudice and enable us to conceive of new worlds, including ones in which human beings sustain a less self-centred and self-destructive relationship with nature. If this seems utopian, remember that we live our daily lives inside multiple and demonstrable unrealities – limitless economic growth, endless consumerism, anthropocentrism – fictions which are disguised as fixed natural laws or mere facts of life.

Close attention to literature gives us the critical distance we need from these contingent and transitory modes of being in the world. By reading and studying science fiction and fantasy, not to mention the diverse literatures of other cultures, times and places, we can help ourselves and each other to enter imaginatively into attractive and sustainable alternatives to the social, political and cultural systems we currently live in. Literature, then, no less that science, has a key role in bringing about the ‘futurity’ we need.

Finally, science needs the arts and humanities to show us the importance of values, not just costs. The policies and commitments made and thus far unmet at COP after COP have been predicated upon what is achievable within current models of economic growth, obsessive as they are over GDP. Ruskin’s famous adage “There is No Wealth but Life” should be blazoned on every wall of every meeting room at COP26 as a reminder that wealth as we have been pursuing it since around the time of his birth, 200 ago, has been at the expense of life, and that our very future – indeed the future flourishing of life itself, at least as we know it – depends upon us finding other ways to conceive of value.

The reason we must act now cannot be reduced to economic ends nor the method to economic means, not only because of the moral imperative to respect and care for life at large and unborn generations but also because economics itself should serve the ends of life, not the other way round. The arts, together with humanities disciplines such as history, literature and ethics are as integral to solving the ecological crisis as the sciences. To mobilise them we need to pursue not just dialogue but active collaboration between artists, humanities academics, scientists and civil society.

At Birmingham, we have been developing two projects which point a way for these collaborations.

Working with Mount Allison University in New Brunswick and several museums worldwide, we > 5

NO WEALTH BUT LIFE continued have launched the Symbiosis network to promote and enhance the role of the arts and humanities within natural history museums and collections. Symbiosis has enabled us to think globally. We have devised projects with colleagues in Europe and Canada and shared practice and expertise with museums from Paris and Portugal to Pittsburgh and Brazil through an online conference attended by delegates from over 20 countries across four continents.

Acting more locally, our closest and most farreaching collaboration to date has been with the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

Founded in the 1850s, the museum was designed by the Irish architect Benjamin Woodward, working hand in glove with Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites and the scientists at Oxford University. They aimed to use the arts to celebrate nature and teach science.

Since 2016, we have been working with the museum to revive that legacy under the banner Visions of Nature. Art exhibitions and commissions have drawn new audiences to the museum and helped them to apprehend the impact of environmental changes from the decline of British bees to the melting of the Arctic ice. Poets in residence have brought these changes home and helped visitors to fathom their own sense of loss and their hopes and to express them in poetry themselves.

Following Ruskin’s lead, the Museum has embraced activism alongside public education, opening its doors in September 2019 to Extinction Rebellion for an “Arts/Science Extravaganza” that saw 6000 people attend the museum in a single day.

More recently, literature scholars at Birmingham have begun working with Ruskin Land in the Wyre Forest as part of an interdisciplinary doctoral programme funded by the Leverhulme Trust at the Birmingham Institute of Forest Research.

One project in particular aims to explore the imaginary forests found in fantasy literature to consider how they might enable us to think about woodlands in less 126 anthropocentric and instrumental ways and how we can mobilise them to enrich public engagement with actual forests. Forests 6

are home to most of the Earth’s terrestrial biodiversity and are vital in our fight against climate change. Yet, all around the world – including in Britain – forests continue to face very real threats.

Just 7% of all Britain’s native woodlands are currently in good ecological condition, according to the Woodland Trust’s State of the UK’s Woods and Trees Report (2021).

The popularity of fantasy literature makes it a valuable resource for shaping public opinion. We will be running a series of experiments in Ruskin Land – itself John Ruskin’s historical experiment to revitalise working people’s connection to nature – using fantasy literature by William Morris, J. R. R. Tolkien and Le Guin. Through reading walks and discussions in the Dragon’s Nest, fantasy readers and environmentalists will be brought together and stimulated to reflect on and reimagine our past, present and future relationship with forests. These projects show how the arts and humanities can make a direct contribution to winning over hearts and broadening minds in the struggle to halt climate change and reverse the destruction of the natural world.

In his 1872 lecture, Ruskin told his audience: “We shall be remembered in history as the most cruel, and therefore the most unwise, generation of men that ever yet troubled the earth: – the most cruel in proportion to their sensibility, – the most unwise in proportion to their science. No people, understanding pain, ever inflicted so much: no people, understanding facts, ever acted on them so little.”

If these words don’t resonate with our own moment and our own failings, then we have not heard them clearly enough. There is no doubt left about the facts and we must act on them in full. In the words of Ruskin’s fellow Victorian, Alfred Tennyson, speaking as the Greek hero Ulysses, “ is not too late to seek a newer world”.

If we seek it together, pooling the knowledge of science and the knowhow of technology with the inspiration of the arts and the wisdom of the humanities, then we stand a decent chance of finding it.

Ruskin Land: John Ruskin’s continuing influence today

By Peter Burman, written for the May 2021 Newsletter of the York Consortium for Conservation and Craftsmanship FEW people realise that Ruskin was a passionate gardener and that the wise stewardship of land was one of his key insights into the nature of satisfying work and healthy food. I’d like to show how Ruskin sought to support rural crafts and reposition craftsmanship away from the manufactories back into his vision of an arcadian idyll.

Ruskin’s 1875 Memorandum on establishing the Guild of St George declared it to be “constituted with the object of determining and instituting in practice the wholesome laws of agricultural life and economy and of instructing the agricultural labourer in the science art and literature of good husbandry.”

In 1877 Ruskin purchased St George’s Farm, Totley, near Sheffield comprising an 18th century farmhouse, subsidiary buildings and 13 acres. He appointed Henry Swan, a “cycling vegetarian, Quaker and artist” to help set up the farm as a collective, with nine working-men and their families.

Like Edward Carpenter and his partner George Merrill they proposed to make boots and shoes to boost their income and demonstrate practical craftsmanship. It was one of Britain’s earliest communes, but lasted only two years. Edward Carpenter said of the farming community that “they were mostly great talkers”. Finding the precise balance between “talk” and “do” has always been a challenge to idealistic communities.

Ruskin’s love of landscape was interwoven with his empathy for rural crafts and craftsmanship. Based at Brantwood, overlooking Lake Coniston, he vigorously encouraged local craft traditions – for example, textiles (“Ruskin Lace”); furniture, enriched with carving; pottery (“Ruskin Pottery”); traditional building materials and skills. The Guild today is an education charity focused on arts, crafts and rural economy. This focus is best exemplified at Ruskin

INTO THE WOODS Land, the Guild’s property in Wyre Forest, near Bewdley in Worcestershire.

The original property was given to the Guild by George Baker, Quaker and Mayor of Birmingham.

Ruskin stayed there and wrote in Letter 80 of Fors Clavigera, 16th July 1877, that “he has shown me St George’s land, his gift, in the midst of a sweet space of English hill and dale and orchard, yet unhurt by hand of man.” The original 20 acres were later added to by purchase by the Guild and are surrounded by 6,000 acres of oak forest, orchard, meadow and wildlife habitats.

On my first visit to Ruskin Land, in the summer of 2011, I was bowled over by the beauty of the place – ancient forest land, orchards, meadows, grazing land – and by the demonstrations of rural craftsmanship and sound husbandry. The Guild’s own 40 hectares of woodlands are managed in hand after a long period of being leased to Natural England. Obvious care has been taken in the replanting of the orchards, keeping old local varieties where they still had life in them and did not need to be replaced.

My architectural historian’s eye was caught by the two groups of farmhouses and their outbuildings.

The Guild aspires to manage them with tenderness using traditional skills: as I write, a relationship is being forged with historic buildings architect Robert Kilgour, former SPAB Scholar and Hereford Cathedral architect, who has his office in Bewdley. The Studio at Ruskin Land, now just over a decade old, shows how a barn can be sensitively developed using traditional skills.

On each of my visits I have been struck by the welcoming and friendly atmosphere created by John and Linda Iles, both of them Companions of the Guild, and tenants at Unclly’s Farm. They have worked to transform Ruskin Land, reinterpreting its mission, as expressed by Ruskin in Letter 5 of Fors Clavigera, >

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RUSKIN LAND TODAY continued in May 1871: We will try to take some small piece of English ground, beautiful, peaceful and fruitful. We will have no steamengines on it, and no rail- roads ... we will have plenty of flowers and vegetables in our gardens, plenty of corn and grass in our fields ... We will have some music and poetry; the children shall learn to dance to it and sing it ... We will have some art, moreover; we will at least try if, like the Greeks, we can’t make some pots.’

The other farmhouse on the Guild’s estate is St George’s Farm, occupied by a young couple and their family, enthusiastically working with the “genius of the place” in its forest context. In 2007 John Isles and Jenny Robbins, both Directors of the Guild, were instrumental in setting up the Wyre Community Land Trust (WCLT) to carry out forestry and agricultural work – in particular orchards and meadows – to a high standard of competence.

Community, volunteer and educational work have all been greatly expanded. The WCLT, now led by an enthusiastic team under Margaret Tunstall, offers conservation and sustainable woodland management to other landowners in and around Wyre Forest, clearly meeting a local need. A woodworking shop has been established to make saleable products; a timber drying shed, a sawmill and a sawmill shelter have been provided along with volunteer, educational and office facilities.

Recent highlights have included managing a Guild initiative called Ruskin in Wyre; hosting Studio in the Woods courses for visiting craftspeople; expanding conservation grazing techniques for the Dexter cattle, supported by an annual grant from the Guild; and broadening the horizons of local schoolchildren, some from exceptionally deprived areas in local towns. Four days a week, local volunteers learn traditional rural skills such as hedgelaying.

In May 2021 the Guild’s Board held an online meeting to consider the options for Ruskin Land, which will now be explored through a feasibility study. The meeting highlighted the need for substantial investment in building repair and adaptation, for example to provide much needed accommodation; it affirmed the general direction of 8

travel – working within the natural environment, training volunteers, holding and hosting courses and events of a distinctively Ruskinian creative character; being an exemplar of good rural landscape and forest management, working with other local owners, agencies and organisations. In all these activities the Board recalled Ruskin’s wish that his ideal place should be peaceful as well as beautiful and fruitful.

Finding the right balance through good management will be vital, along with open and skilful communication to the Companions of the Guild and all who support us through partnership and funding.

In the Guild’s 150th year it is good to be able to report so many positives at Ruskin Land.

INTO THE WOODS

How I came to Ruskin (Land)

By Mark Cleaver JOHN Ruskin wasn’t a part of my life until 2008. I will be honest; my education had not introduced me to him, or indeed almost any important thinker or people who have shaped our society, although it is possible that if it had, I may not have noticed; as a schoolboy I was more interested in fishing than studying.

It was fishing that eventually led me to find the natural environment as my calling and fortunate still further to arrive at Ruskin Land in 2008, a year after the inception of the Wyre Community Land Trust set up by the incredible, insightful John Iles to whom I owe a great deal of thanks. Through meeting John

and getting involved in the developments in Ruskin Land, initially as a willing labourer and later as Farm Manager for the Community Land Trust, I was introduced to Ruskin and the Guild and as I learned more, I became a Companion.

his place. My role on the Board is to maintain and further John’s excellent and innovative work in Ruskin Land, and beyond that to turn the commitments the Guild has made in respect to Climate Change into positive action.

What struck me about Ruskin and the Guild was that it was so forward thinking compared with what I had seen in my early career. My first role as a countryside professional was in a country park comprising the remnants of a Victorian estate and private pleasure grounds, now on the edge of a large council estate. The contrast of the past historic exclusion and its present community had quite an impact on my thoughts on social justice and the environment.

In this respect, I will be working with my fellow Directors to understand the Guild’s impact on the environment through its range of activities and partnerships, and seek to add value to those activities through embedding environmental thinking in all aspects of what we do. This is not an easy task; if it were, climate change would not be such an intractable issue. The interconnectedness of society means that our impacts are like ripples in a pond.

A further eight years working on a National Nature Reserve where it seemed almost nothing else mattered than ecology, whilst educating, seemed at odds with my values about environmental and social justice. Despite all the developments in theory and practice since the 1949 National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act, our modern approach to caring for nature still had so much to learn from ideas developed some 150 years ago.

It is also worth noting at this point that Ruskin wrote “there was more education in that [chalk] stream with its minnows than you could get out of a thousand pounds spent yearly in the parish schools” (119. Lecture IV: The relation of Art to Use. Lectures on Art). As a boy who grew up paddling and fishing in the chalk streams and rivers of the south downs, I find myself agreeing with him on some of his ideas on education too.

I worked for the Trust in and around Ruskin Land for four years, attended and supported Guild events and continued to attend AGMs after leaving in 2012 for pastures new. During this time, I slowly developed an understanding of the importance and impact of Ruskin, if not the deep knowledge of the many Companions I have met along the way.

In the seven years of my career after leaving Ruskin Land, I worked to engage with people and promote the value of nature, and my narrative was improved through the influence of Ruskin and the Guild. Last year, John Iles gave notice of his intention to stand down from the Guild’s Board of Directors and I applied and was duly elected to take

Simple decisions such as in the things we buy or the transport we take, to the more complex choices such as the way we choose to manage our assets, all have to some greater or lesser extent a carbon footprint and we need to get a better understanding of how this works. Key to enabling this good decisionmaking is being carbon literate. I will be organising training for the Directors and for Simon and Martin, and I will be working with everyone to create ways of testing our decision-making against sustainability principles.

We are not standing still while we learn more about our impact. Important steps have already been taken; the Guild has already reviewed its financial investments to put them on a good footing with social and environmental policies in place to ensure that the Guild’s funds are not just doing well, but doing good.

The ongoing work in the Ruskin Land in partnership with the Wyre Community Land Trust continues to improve the ecological value of the Forest and enhance the ecosystem services it delivers. I have also reviewed our Tree Safety Policy and updated the tree safety audit to ensure the continued well-being of all who live and visit our beautiful, peaceful and fruitful forest.

Looking ahead more broadly, with the support of my fellow Directors I intend to engage with the Companionship in active participation on climate and other sustainability issues. I will be encouraging you all to take a thoughtfully Ruskinian approach to making a difference wherever you may be and in whatever capacity you are able, and to share your stories and support us and others in the Companionship in our endeavours to make positive change.

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Ruskin Land in Winter

By Jenny Robbins

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INTO THE WOODS

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FOREST WALKING FOR those of us for whom normal life was suspended in lockdown 2021 there was an opportunity to walk in the winter landscape with a lack of time constraints or places to be. Walking with only one other person, as regulations dictated, was an enriching experience. In walking, we shared life histories, discussed how we were coping with the bizarre new covid world and discovered new routes right on the doorstep.

Historians will reflect on the way the Covid19 pandemic was dealt with, whether the draconian restrictions on freedoms were justified, assessing the damage on the population in terms of lost education, home schooling, loneliness, missed life events and mental health. A light in the uncertainty may be our reconnection with the natural world. Looking back one year on from the second lockdown it is clear it forced us to look more closely at our immediate surroundings, both inside our own four walls, and for those with the good fortune to have unlimited access the countryside, discovering places close by we had not noticed before. Never has living in a beautiful place been more wonderful, walking in the woodlands observing the beauty of our surroundings.

Ruskin Land set in the heart of the Wyre Forest in Worcestershire, is a half hour brisk walk uphill from home. Here the January frosts were hard, creating natural art for those with time to do some good looking. With time to be in the forest Ruskin’s words came to mind. "Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty if only we have the eyes to see them."

Capturing our surroundings has been a task for the ages. Ruskin was one of the first to capture photographic images using daguerreotypes, an early form of photography. Fast forward a century and we are benefitted by always having a smart phone camera in our pocket. What future do all the millions of digital images taken everyday have? Stored as they are on the virtual cloud. How will future generations access them?. It is our responsibility to ensure the same preservation to the way by which we capture the beauty of our natural world.

Jenny Robbins 12

INTO THE WOODS

How Ruskinian Trees Changed My Life

By Mark Frost A VERY long time ago, back in the 1990s, I was a directionless graduate, shy yet opinionated, an idealist possessed of no plan whatsoever in life and no obvious means to provide myself with purpose, energy, or direction or a way of engaging meaningfully with a world that seemed to make no sense whatsoever.

At some point, after having claimed the dole for quite some time, the benefits office informed me that I was officially “long-term unemployed” and that I would therefore be required to undertake some form of training in order to better equip myself for the challenges of life, and to hopefully get me off the government’s books at some point.

I cannot recall the various options held out to me on that gladsome day in Coventry’s salubrious dole office because one opportunity stood out like a shining beacon. Having loved trees from early childhood, I immediately signed up for a one-year City and Guilds National Certificate in Countryside Management (Trees and Woodlands). Little did I know as I first boarded the early morning coach on the way to Warwickshire College of Agriculture, Moreton Morrell, that a new path had genuinely opened up for me..

The joys of the course were many and varied – learning practical skills, with chain saws, winches, and hand tools; gaining knowledge of how woodlands work and how they can be managed in different ways; and, most of all, deepening my love and understanding of what remain for me the most remarkable organisms on earth.

From tree identification to conservation management to tipping rams to the role of deer in woodlands to tree climbing to goodness knows what next – each week was a rollercoaster of intense enjoyment, but also an important era in my life. > 13

How Ruskin’s Trees Changed My Life continued Immediately after finishing the course I worked for a period for a sociopathic and flatulent tree surgeon, parting from his company after learning that he had turned up in the middle of the night outside a major supermarket to cut down a row of oaks with preservation orders. Shortly after, I moved back to Lancaster (where I had done my first degree) and continued a pattern of unemployment now punctuated by a series of short-lived and genuinely awful jobs (I challenge anyone in a Terrible Employment competition).

Somehow, I then managed to persuade Lancaster Castle to take me on as a tour guide, a veritable step up for me, and a formative experience in terms of overcoming shyness – one has no option when faced with a party of Barnsley pensioners or a roomful of schoolkids who expect entertainment – and in terms of setting me on a road I had no inkling of at the time.

It was at this point that Ruskin intervened in a moment of “Fors”. Lawrence Woof, the father of some kids who knew my kids approached me one day, saying that he had heard I knew some things about trees. He was running a project at Lancaster University to produce a hypertext version of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters I (I had read one piece by Ruskin at university and had quite liked it).

The edition, which was cutting edge back at the time, was to include annotations by scholars, but while they had most things covered – the art, the architecture, Turner, Switzerland, etc etc – no-one knew anything about trees, and this was a problem given that there was a long chapter, Of Truth of Vegetation, in need of annotations. Would I consider contributing? This was the first but by no means the last time in academia that I heard the words, “We can’t pay you, but..”

The “but”, however, proved interesting in this case. Once I had been completely bowled over by Of Truth of Vegetation and Modern Painters, and had fallen in love with Ruskin because he was in love with trees and could teach me things about them that no-one else had ever tried to teach – at that point I considered what Lawrence had tentatively suggested 14

– “..but you might think about doing a Masters on Ruskin”.

I was lucky enough to start my MRes during a major period of growth and excitement at the Ruskin Programme at Lancaster – when Professors Michael Wheeler and Robert Hewison headed a team that brought Jim Dearden’s Whitehouse Collection to the university, when the Ruskin Seminar series was at its zenith, and when I had the pleasure to work alongside such luminaries as Rachel Dickinson, Stuart Eagles, Gill Chitty, and Alette Berlusconi in their own postgraduate careers. I graduated in 2000, moved on to a Phd at Southampton and the rest, as they say, is history.

It was a very odd route back into academia, and impossible without the twin help of Ruskin and trees.

INTO THE WOODS

The Barnstormers Robert Somerville introduces his book Barn Club I HAVE always been struck by how the old barns of the British countryside are so beautiful. These buildings are so unlike the modern versions. They are unassuming, functional buildings made by un-named village carpenters, yet powerfully expressive and delicately detailed. No architects were required. Just the knowledge, the hand tools and the arms and efforts of a local community. Each county has their own traditions, reflecting not just the farming traditions and technical abilities of their makers, but the changing geology and landscapes across our country.

So when I moved to Hertfordshire nearly twenty years ago, it came as no surprise that there would be a unique approach in this region. I found among the encircling steel and concrete sheds of modern arable

agri-business, the derelict timber barns of a bygone age of wheat and barley harvest storage. Even more interestingly, around the Eastern midlands and into East Anglia are numerous elm-built barns. They have a beauty and structural form of their own, resulting from the particular biological properties of elm wood and lovely creamed-honey glow of the timbers.

I decided to build a barn for myself on our family small-holding. Since I had the freedom to work as I pleased, I wanted to run a sort of Craft Experiment. I decided to do it in the way it was done in the past. I wanted to see what was involved in this process of making and raising that had fallen into disuse over a hundred and fifty years ago, perhaps even before the birth of the likes of William Morris. Elm trees would be needed, sharp hand tools and a very close look >

Laying up and cutting the barn timbers

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All together: Raising the back wall of the barn

> at the exact detailing of the 18th century barns nearby. Probably, most people do not get to see large elms any more. But curiously, not necessarily because these trees no longer exist.

Part of the pleasure of moving to Hertfordshire was the discovery of many large elm trees in the landscape, and even whole woods of them. As a carpenter, I could see that there were enough recently dead trees (some just of old age) to provide sufficient timber for a full structural frame. I spent a year researching, visiting the Chiltern Open Air Museum to look at their elm barns, tracing the owners of elm woodlands, getting the planning permissions and seeing if anyone else had any idea how to raise a barn by hand!

The decision to make the barn using hand tools, not power tools, came early on and I didn’t realise at the time just how important this decision was to be.

These days carpenters live and breathe power tools, and site machinery is an unquestioned and universal starting point for any carpentry project. I became ever more fascinated by the prospect of following in the footsteps of our forebears, and inspired by the prospect of getting a new perspective on my love of trees and making things from wood.

I bought about 25 tons of elm tree trunks, delivered to my yard. I found about 1500 old bricks under a decades-old bramble patch in a neighbour’s garden. I rolled my sleeves up and started digging the footings..though just to remove the earth as this barn was to have no concrete foundations. At that 16

moment, two friends turned up out of the blue and asked if they could help. Barn Club was born.

Since that day two whole barns have been made and raised by hand with a third structure underway. And I have come to realise that there is nothing better than working out-doors together with people from your community, listening to birdsong, chatting and enjoying the shared labour of the day. Then finally the satisfaction that comes when the barn is finally raised and we can see in front of us the fruits of our labour.

The raising day is an extraordinary event, not to be missed if ever you have the chance. With the structure towering overhead and glowing in the setting sun, the trestles set out along its length with tablecloths and flowers adding to the occasion, the raising feast is one you never forget.

We learnt that most things could be done quite easily when enough people are involved, when the old ways of doing things effortlessly are employed, and most significantly, when little or no machinery is brought to the task. It opened the doors to everyone, not just burly blokes! It never failed to impress the physically smaller volunteers when they moved a half -ton log using levers, for example, that it was way easier than they had thought.

When we decide to put our power tools aside, we also open up all sorts of new possibilities. You don’t need personal protective equipment. You don’t need to be constantly wary of losing a fingertip in the blades of a circular saw. Instead, we talk to each other, or ask for help to lift something. We can pause between the strokes of a handsaw to listen to the song thrush in the tree above or watch a robin, sitting on the other end of a beam.

I am also constantly impressed how quickly almost anyone can acquire the skills of using a plumb -bob, scratch awl and dividers to mark out a mortice

and tenon joint. No laser levels and measuring tapes are needed. The techniques that the old carpenters used and that we were following are very threedimensional and not numerical, if that makes sense.

People have said how they can almost feel a different part of their brain waking up. I think it is true. So, I have found that this type and most significantly, when little or no machinery is brought to the task. It opened the doors to everyone, not just burly blokes!

I am also constantly impressed how quickly almost anyone can acquire the skills of using a plumbbob, scratch awl and dividers to mark out a mortice and tenon joint. No laser levels and measuring tapes are needed. The techniques that the old carpenters used and that we were following are very threedimensional and not numerical, if that makes sense.

People have said how they can almost feel a different part of their brain waking up. I think it is true. So, I have found that this type of hand tool-carpentry is very accessible, highly contagious, and quickly absorbed attainable knowledge. It is almost like an innate human capability.

Another thing about the timber used in barns that seems in tune with our sense of soulfulness, is that the trees are still very visible in the completed frame. A tie beam is often a single tree with the sides roughly sawn away but with the wayne and gentle curves of the stems still very much visible. It’s both lovely to see and also to handle as you make the numerous carpentry joints along its length. The same is true for a jowl post that supports the ends of a tie beam.

They are usually an inverted tree stem that utilizes the natural flare at the base of a tree to provide the widening of the jowl post where the teazle tenon rises up past the inside of the top plate.

That the same trees were viewed in a wood prior to felling by barn club members makes this quality even more poignant.

Another realisation appeared during this carpentry experiment. When milling elm rather than oak, the wood is usable right up to the bark. The sapwood and the heartwood together. This means that the more of each tree is used and fewer trees are needed for each structure. In fact it is intriguing that when the variety of sizes of timber needed for the frame and cladding are sawn from a mixed bag of elm trees, very little is wasted. This is in contrast with my experience of milling to a contemporary list of timber sizes resulting in a big pile of of-cuts and side slabs.

Can this approach work as a sound business

Hand-made: an internal view of the finished barn

Hand-made: an interior view of a finished barn

proposition? I believe it can. The second of the elm barns was a commercial project, while fully involving Barn Club volunteers and several timber-frame carpentry courses.

The spirit of satisfaction and wellbeing that Barn Club generates continued. In fact an even larger crowd of volunteers arrived to help assemble, knock the oak pegs into place and raise the structure into the air.

But why barns? Why Barn Club and not House Club? The answer to that question can be found in the book that was written to share our experience of actually making one. Hopefully it will inspire people about the possibilities of working with elm wood, outdoors, with hand tools and in the company of other people. At the very least it is a feel-good read in these truly difficult times.

Barn Club was published by Chelsea Green in 2021. It is available from Bookshop.org and at good local bookshops.

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THE RUSKIN COLLECTION GALLERY

Ruskin and the birds IN the Autumn of 2021, Sheffield Museums Trust unveiled a re-ordered and re-displayed Ruskin Collection Gallery. Led by their new Ruskin Curator, Ashley Gallant, the project includes a completely new welcome area, with a comprehensive introduction to Ruskin, his ideas and his motivation for amassing and donating the collection to the working people of Sheffield. The newly refreshed gallery looks at how Ruskin established his collection in Sheffield to help people find inspiration in art and nature, and explores the relevance of his ideas today. Highlights of the new displays include over 50 colourful ornithological illustrations featuring birds from around the globe. It is anticipated that the themed elements of the display will be refreshed once a year.

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PICTURES © SHEFFIELD MUSEUMS TRUST, USED WITH KIND PERMISSION

PICTURES © SHEFFIELD MUSEUMS TRUST, USED WITH KIND PERMISSION

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All together: Raising the back wall of the barn

INTO THE WOODS True Service Tree saved

by Ewan Anderson A PARTICULAR delight in the National Gallery of Art in Washington is the study of a Birch tree

by John Ruskin. It is an example, as he recognised in his Inaugural Lecture at Oxford (February 1870), of the creation of new beauty. He concludes that, to be worthy, a national inheritance should be made more lovely not only by arts but also by acts. Such action is being currently demonstrated in the Museum Gardens in York.

Among the many fine trees in the Gardens is one which is outstanding aesthetically but also because of its history and rarity. It is a heritage tree, defined as a large, individual tree with unique value which is considered irreplaceable. In the lower area of the Gardens, near the boundary with the River Ouse, is a True Service Tree (Sorbus domestica). It was planted in the early part of the last century when a few descendants of the original, discovered in the Forest of Wyre in 1678, were available either directly or through the Oxford University Botanic Garden.

On the strength of this one tree, the True Service Tree was considered to be a British native. Any doubt was removed in 1983 and over the following decade when very small populations of the tree were discovered at various inaccessible locations, most notably on the coast of South Glamorgan and along a short stretch of the River Avon near Bristol. The latter, on account of the tree, has been designated an SSSI. Since the tree in York was planted over a century ago, there has been a marked increase in the discharge of the Ouse and, last year, it decided to increase the height of the flood bank on which the tree sits. Initially this involved plans to clear all the trees and shrubs from the immediate area. However, following discussions with the Environment Agency, agreement was reached that, despite the costs, including design changes to the flood bank, because of its beauty and rarity, the tree would be preserved.

The True Service Tree, protected by masonry and an enhanced food bank, now the dominates the landscape and creates new beauty in the Gardens.

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INTO THE WOODS

JOHN RUSKIN, 1853-4, BY JOHN EVERETT MILLAIS, © ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM, OCFORD

The Very Spot

John Ruskin, the village of Brig o’Turk, The Trossachs, and the beauties of Glen Finglas.

Peter Burman visits the site RIGHT where, in the summer of 1853, John Ruskin stood to be sketched and painted by his protégé John Everett Millais for the portrait ABOVE now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

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PETER BURMAN

Peter Burman tells the story of a quest to find the site of a famous Ruskin painting.

ON Saturday 18 July 2021, on a golden summer’s day, Ross Burgess and I decided to do something we had been proposing for some time but had up to then been prevented by the Covid situation and bad weather. We wanted to see the site where in the high summer of 1853 Ruskin had stood to be sketched and painted by his protégé John Everett Millais (18291896). Ruskin was ten years older than Millais and in mid-1853 the fame which had come to him through the multi-volume Modern Painters had been consolidated by the publication of volumes two and three of Stones of Venice. Millais became the leading figure of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, of which Ruskin had become the articulate advocate and defender.

The Trossachs is an extensive area of wooded glens, braes and lochs in central Scotland, lying to the north of Stirling, within easy reach of Glasgow and to a lesser extent of Edinburgh. We set out from our home in the middle of Fife, at Falkland, the journey itself worth the effort. Whenever we have occasion to go in that direction we relish the drive through beautiful Glen Eagles, taking us into south and west Perthshire and to such favourite places as the 17th century Library at Innerpeffray and the ravishing formal gardens of Drummond Castle and its woodlands beyond. A short stretch along the fastflowing A9 in the direction of Stirling brought us past Dunblane, also of Ruskin-related interest as he had vehemently opposed the restoration of the cathedral under the supremely competent architect Arts & Crafts architect Robert Rowand Anderson (1834-1921).

From Dunblane we turned north towards first Doune and then Callander, historically in Perthshire but now in the local government area of Stirling. At Doune I was keen to show Ross something of Doune Castle, currently the subject of a major restoration and therefore not open to visitors. However, the staff on duty warmly invited us to take the circumambulatory path which provides spectacular views of the outside of the castle and for a stretch runs along the bank of the river Teith, a classic Scottish river, broad, sparkling and shallow and probably ideal territory for salmon.

Suitably refreshed, we went on to Callander, also on the river Teith, a historic town of just over 3,000 inhabitants notable for being one long street with few outliers. We noticed a promising-looking secondhand bookshop but parking was then impossible.

Later on, however, and past 5.30 p.m. we noticed that 24

the bookshop was still open, parking was then possible, and we achieved some notable purchases.

We also noticed a hotel with an intriguing appellation, Roman Camp Hotel, which must hint at a story.

Beyond Callander we headed west in the direction of Loch Katrine until we came to our goal, the village of Brig o’ Turk. Just before Brig o’ Turk we noticed a sign with the name of the Woodland Trust on it and later learned that the Glen Finglas Estate had been acquired by the Woodland Trust in 1996; the Trust is doing great work in promoting responsible forestry, encouraging visitors to learn more about trees, and providing modest but appreciated visitor facilities so that no-one able to read their interpretation panels can be unaware of the connexions with John Ruskin and John Everett Millais, with the Glasgow Boys (a group of around twenty-five artists who were from or who had studied at Glasgow) or with Sir Walter Scott and his great poem The Lady of the Lake first published in 1810 and one of the great publishing success stories of the early 19th century. We recalled that Ruskin was also a passionate admirer of the novels of Scott.

Since taking over the Glen Finglas Estate the Woodland Trust has been re-establishing native woodland species. Around nearby Loch Katrine, Scottish Water and Forestry Commission Scotland are also encouraging native woodlands. Between them the three organisations aim to create a woodland corridor from Loch Venachar to Loch Lomond that will further boost the area’s rich biodiversity of animals, including birds, and plants In Glen Finglas Ruskin’s wife Euphemia (‘Effie’) Grey and Millais had fallen in love with one another.

This led to the Ruskins’ marriage being dissolved on the grounds of non-consummation. In 1855 Effie and Millais were married; they had a long and happy marriage and produced eight children.

It was curious to be in that steep-sided glen and to think of all the emotions and events which had been stirred there by the presence of Ruskin, Effie and Millais. No doubt similar passions were aroused in the 1890s and onwards when members of the Glasgow Boys, not all of whom were boys, came here for holidays, to socialise and to paint.

On the main road we noticed on arriving in the village a house larger than the 19th century cottages in the upper part of the village and the name “Burnt Inn” on its gate. The house appeared early Victorian, charming, and will probably have been the New Trossachs Hotel where Millais and his younger brother, William stayed, while the Ruskins stayed at the schoolteacher’s cottage. Afterwards Millais moved into the cottage, while William stayed on at the inn and continued his fishing. Later we found

another cottage, formerly a cowbyre, and now the Byre Inn – the sort of simple cottage that there would probably have been more of in the mid-1850s, and all of them no doubt with thatched roofs of one kind or another.

What drew Ruskin, his wife and Pre-Raphaelite friends to spend the months from July to September here in 1853? First and foremost it was the dramatic surrounding landscapes, a quiet and beautiful place where Ruskin could carry on drafting his Edinburgh lectures, to be given in November, where Millais could paint and where Effie could – do what, precisely? Enjoy a quiet rural existence as a break from the hectic lives she and Ruskin had been leading in Venice and then London.

Surely it was also the associations with Scottish literary history, especially Sir Walter Scott, with Rob Roy and other local heroes of the past that brought them here. In addition, Ruskin wished to continue to encourage Millais’s career as an artist and the idea evolved that that he would paint a very special kind of portrait of Ruskin showing him in intimate relationship with the spectacular cascading torrents of the river which flows down the steep valley of Glen Finglas. Ruskin wrote to his father: “Millais has fixed on his place – a lovely piece of worn rock, with foaming water, and weeds, and moss, and a noble overhanging bank of dark crag – and I am to be standing looking quietly down the stream – just the sort of thing I used to do for hours together – he is very happy at the idea of doing it and I think you will be proud of the picture – and we shall have the two most wonderful torrents in the world, Turner’s St Gothard – and Millais’s Glenfinglas. He is going to take the utmost possible pains with it – and says he can paint rocks and water better than anything else – I am sure the foam of the torrent will be something quite new in art.” John Ruskin, Works, Vol 12, p.xxiv.

Today the painting hangs in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, where we have both seen it on many occasions. It is one of the greatest of the PreRaphaelite portraits and a jewel of the collection.

Arriving at the centre of the small scattered village of Brig o’ Turk we noticed a smart new village hall, the kind of facility which rural communities dream of. Opposite it was something that we were dreaming of on that hot summer’s day, housed in what had probably been the predecessor to the village hall, a tea room. This charming building of just over a hundred years old (used as a location in several films) has been taken in hand, superbly restored and

refitted, by a delightful, enthusiastic and welcoming couple, James and Kay Hill.

They proved to be knowledgeable and enthusiastic about the Ruskin connexion and produced for us a light but delicious late lunch. We were able to eat outside, but so much enjoyed their successful revival of the wood-panelled interior, which will make a visit pleasurable at any time of year.

After that necessary refreshment we made our way up the steep village street, off the main road, passing several attractive vernacular cottages and pleased to see interpretive panels at various stages in our journey.

We passed the Trossachs School and School House with a richly planted “cottage garden”, the date of “1875” prominently carved on the front of the School House. It is thought to occupy the site of the school-teacher’s cottage where Ruskin and his wife had stayed in 1853. It is no longer used for its original purpose, which seems a great pity, but no doubt there is good reason for it. It is clearly cherished as someone’s home.

Eventually we came to the Woodland Trust’s Forest Gateway and from that point walked the final steep haul to a small parking area at one side of which the river flowed at the bottom of a precipitous wooded slope. All that then captured our attention was sheer enchantment. Along the way of our upward ascent we had been delighted by the numerous ferns – Ruskin loved ferns – and foxgloves, a delightful combination.

Now we looked down into the gully and saw rock pools, cascading torrents and – yes – looking towards the right we could see the distinctive rock formation where Ruskin had stood for the initial studies for the portrait. There is a central rock dividing the tumbling waters to go either left or right. The sound of the waters crashing on the rocks reminded me of the deep pedal notes of a mighty organ, such as the one we had heard in York Minster only a month before.

At last, we had seen with our own eyes the place – the very place – associated with that superbly confident portrait of John Ruskin about which so much has been written. It was a moment to cherish, difficult to draw ourselves away from, and we came away exhilarated, full of delight and empathy with the landscape, and glad that such a remote part of the Scottish Highlands carries such powerful messages and that the pressures of twenty-first century tourism have dealt with it lightly. It is available to everyone who has but the energy to walk up the steep path to a scene and sound of such timeless beauty.

Every convinced disciple of John Ruskin should make such a visit in a spirit of pilgrimage at least once in their lifetime.

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(Almost) On Top of the World As a contribution to the Guild's idea for a Festival of Walking in 2021, Companion Arjun Jain kindly shared his recollections of a walk in Nepal.

FROM 21st November to 6th December in 2017, I was in Nepal, walking from and back to ‘the most dangerous airport in the world’ – having been, on the 28th, the highest I’ve ever, some 100 or so metres above 5365m, Mt Everest’s base camp.

I was travelling with a Sherpa and two friends, from Mexico and Spain. To be honest, the trek wasn’t at all ‘technical’ – it was what is called a ‘teahouse trek’, the primary difficulty being that of the lack of oxygen, it going gradually down to 50%, at Base Camp, of that at sea level. To be clearer still, this primary difficulty was not ignorable however.

Both of my friends could not accompany me to the top, or the journey back home, requiring to be helicoptered back down to Kathamandu, and treated in a hospital for altitude sickness.

“Prone to certain poetic disillusionments” was what I started out feeling of myself. My friends, making other friends along the way, were much freer spirits than me, I felt. I had brecentlyeen reading Carlyle’s Heroes , and what views I was witnessing, I was re-witnessing of myself. The case – of where I was, how I was – astounded me. This was, of course, on the first day of the trip, from Lukla to Phakding, from which point onwards, as we made our way to the much talked about Namche Bazār on the second, we all began feeling the effects of the height.

I gave in to buying insurance, feeling scared, frightfully sick, and entirely sleepless; whatever rest I could get, consisted only of the most terrible, and, frankly, strangest of dreams. I did, however, acclimatise myself, and sufficiently soon was able to take pleasure again, in the rosebud cheeks of the Nepali children, and the evident absence of any of the “trickery” I was so used to from the city. The mountains, really, had begun taking over. Every time I should close my eyes, I could only but muster a landscape. There were scenes that I’d seen, that had, as though, been etched beneath my eyelids. Amongst the rhododendron that seemed to be everywhere, my 26

INTO THE HILLS thoughts were rambling about. In very brief, I was quite ‘self-destructive’, and, extremely happy about everything, simultaneously. I think it was at Tengboche, at about 3880m, that first I realised the relativity of distance. I was “nothing” before what was about me. And yet, everything that was about me – my personal history – seemed indescribably magnificent. The frozen-up grass had started sparkling. The dreams only got vivider. Suffice it to say: the heavens appeared haunted. Now and again, I should, indeed, stumble upon mountainfolk sullied from what from tourism I myself was part of, but all in all, who were unable to disturb me.

In Dingboche, which in fact was like a cloud, some cottage’s chimney caught fire. I went about to see if I could do anything. was, of course, noting all this: the particular configurations certain “stalactites” were assuming, hanging from the roof of my brain.

At one of the lodges along the way, I thought I fell in love with one of the waitresses.

Such views, along the way, absolutely terrified me, having quite burned themselves into my eyes! At 5000m, at Loboche, my legs started feeling strange as well, swollen, apparently, to each about a tonne.

As for Byron, for me, gradually, the high mountains did indeed become a feeling. In a barren leading up to a massif, I saw reflected ‘exactly’ what was within me at the time. Gorak Shep onwards, “Almost there!

Almost there!,” people were continually heard encouraging each other, amidst promises, also, of “never coming back again!”.

A woman of another party fell dangerously ill; the percentage of oxygen in her blood dropping down to 45. She was probably administered cylinders and flown back to the city, though how I don’t know in fact, since it was pitch black then outside, with no satellite phones at hand. My own friends, vomiting, also left the next morning. Their departure was confusing and sad. Needless to say, I wasn’t well myself, and was only but pushing my own health, to till wherever I could. But I was indeed there, at Base Camp – the highest point on Earth seemed just down

An entire mountain, a life-changing experience

the road – beyond which, as aforementioned, I could only climb a bit farther.

I’d never felt like it before: every step a kilometer, my clothes strangling me. I had, of course begun hallucinating, which indeed was when, with a heavy heart, I had at last to accept defeat, and with the help of the Sherpa, retrace my steps. The journey back was lonely. A chance encounter with a mountaineer induced us to remap our route.

From Dzongla to Pangboche, and Pangboche to Phortse – a village where summitting Everest seemed to have been a rite of passage, for every man in every family! – we returned to Namche Bazar, the second time round, where it felt like Christmas! At Phakding, before returning to Lukla, and reflecting upon the whole thing – upon which people I’d met along the way, and which people I’d left behind, whose acquaintance I now felt precious– I played awhile with the kids, at the guest house by the river. Somewhere around Dzongle or Phortse. I was standing on one of two parallel precipices. As I

walked as far as I could, safely, I witnessed an 'entire' mountain for the very first, and only time in my life.

If a scene that I've seen could claim to have been lifechanging, it was this.

It wasn’t all brilliant in the mountains… I was saddened to see cement and steel hauled regularly up by labourers; and big, ugly blots of “development”, where nothing of the sort ought to have happened: “status” and “competition” seemed, unfortunately, not also to suffer from a lack of oxygen. The common Nepalese appeared only most interested in “marriage” and “money” most of the time. They were once commonly visitors to India. Nowadays, I learnt, the British paid more. It is their “army”, and “their” army, not their own, that the mountains’ sons now dream of joining.

Amazing, isn’t it, how Ruskin wrote not only of the glory of the mountains, but also their gloom? Our best thoughts, without doubt, have all come walking.

Text and picture © Arjun Jain

27

A Report from the Battlefront Guild Director Peter Burman on an important new book about a city still in peril EVERY Companion of the Guild of St George whose life has been touched by Ruskin and especially by his Stones of Venice should read Venice Rising – aqua granda, pandemic, rebirth, edited by Kathleen Ann Gonzalez, Ca’ Specchio, San Jose, 2020. It reads like a report from the battlefront. Venice, have no doubt about it, is in real peril at this moment and the main issue is the impact of the rising water levels in the Lagoon and the dramatic increase in the power and levels of flooding that afflict the city through the Acqua Alta. Aqua Granda is the Venetian term for specific and devastating historic floods like those of 1966 and 2019. Its use in the subtitle of Venice Rising is because much of the book is about the consequences and sheer terror of the flood of November 2019.

Then there is the impact of over-tourism, shared with many other cities and historic towns, Barcelona being another major sufferer, but nowhere so serious and so overwhelming as Venice, to which most visitors come for a few hours and then retreat like the Aqua Granda leaving much detritus behind; there is a serious problem also with people of high personal wealth buying into the architectural heritage of Venice but using their palatial apartments for a few weeks, even only for a few days, but otherwise leaving them empty as one of the several pressure points leading to the dramatic depopulation of Venice; then the ultimate symbol of the ‘wrong kind of tourism’ is the invasion of the city – astonishing that it should ever have been permitted – by the Grandi Navi, the embarrassingly luxurious and overbearing cruise ships to whose passengers (2,000 to 3,000 at a time) Venice is but a glamorous ‘toytown’ backdrop not respected as a living, breathing organism home to a community of creative and enterprising citizens. Finally, there is the near coup de grace given by the Coronavirus pandemic.

There are three campaigning organisations which are doing their best to protect Venice’s cultural, ecological and sustainable economic future: We Are Here Venice, No Grandi Navi, and Venice 28

IN THE CITY Ruskin's Venice Calls. All three deserve the urgent support of Companions of the Guild of St George. Moreover, in conversations between Guild Directors, we have been considering what we can do to call attention to the multi-faceted plight of Venice. Ruskin would have expected no less of us.

I have already read straight through the book twice and re-read some of the 31 contributions numbers of times. It’s a book I want to live with, to be inspired by and to ponder, and above all to be stirred to action by it. There are stories, some in Italian but mostly in English, or both, there are poems, there are memories, there are howls of anguish at the disasters which routinely fall on Venice, there are brilliant suggestions as to how matters could be improved or mitigated. The editor has made a shrewd choice of Venetians from many walks of life including craftspeople, artists and one or two representatives of Venice’s noblest ancient families.

I want to try and give some flavour of the book but above all to encourage Companions to buy it, read it, and tell their friends what they have learned.

As the editor says in her introductory essay, after all the disasters many of the contributors have nevertheless felt able to raise their eyes and express hope: “Hope for a fresh look at the tourism industry.

Hope for gathering with friends once again. Hope for new ways to live together and support the arts and envision a Venice that could thrive anew. Some wrote of an almost mystical love or ethereal philosophy evoked by the dramatic events they have lived through. And all wrote with determination and new dreams.”

An attractive feature of the book is that every contribution is followed by a pen portrait and photograph of the author. The first essay is by Elena Almansi, a female rower, who has been a rowing instructor for over ten years at Row Venice, an association that promotes Venetian rowing in Venice and throughout the world, teaching it to tourists and

PHOTOGRAPH BY MARIE NARDIN

residents. Let us listen to Elena’s voice: “After two months of deliveries of shopping and medicines to those who could not leave their homes, we can take stock of what we have achieved. We realize that not only have we helped individuals and businesses, but we have also come up with an idea for sustainable transport in Venice – respectful of the environment and the Lagoon – and we have shown its feasibility.”

During the night of 12th November 2019 Venice experienced an Aqua Granda that was well-nigh as traumatic as the notorious one of 4th November 1966 which drew the sympathy of the whole civilised world and was the beginning of countless targeted conservation initiatives. Alessandro Santini is a fourth generation gondolier and he tells us “The gondolas of our mates in front of the Danieli Hotel were on the Riva, mashed at an angle. Two gondolas were inside the hotel, in the reception area. I couldn’t believe it.

Close to these gondole there was a vaporetto on the fondamenta, leaning on one side. A water bus – on the street?”

One of the innumerable Venetians whose businesses were severely damaged by the 2019 Aqua Granda was Paolo Olbi, whose bookbinding business was also savaged in 1966. It is almost unbearable to read the conclusion of his essay: “Six months after the

Aqua Granda, we still live in the absolute lack of possibilities for our work and in the uncertainty of the future. I also advised my students to find a safer job than self-employment..which is too much subject to the various economic crises that are periodically repeated and to the silence of the authorities who see self-employment, very often, as a source of undeclared work. As for me, after 60 years of work, I find myself forced to surrender: my dream of a Venice has come to an end, once alive with young artisans who with their activities and their skill could contrast with the big names and the junk that invades the city.”

Another author is Vera Brunello, a teacher of gymnastics with a deep love of Venice who says sensibly “Perhaps we should start with the simplest things, like digging the bottom of the canals, which over the centuries have filled up a lot. Venice must be treated with great care and delicacy. Big ships must no longer endanger the city. Tourists must arrive with reservations, so there are not too many of them all together, but all must be able to enjoy the magic of the city.”

During the relaxations of August and October my partner and I dared to visit such major tourist > 29

> attractions in England as Stonehenge, Chatsworth House and the cathedrals of Salisbury and Wells. We found that having to book ahead was not only sensible for us – we were committed to the visit, we prepared for it by reading and reflection, as Ruskin would have done – but also good for the places we visited. They seemed calmer than in the past, it was obvious that visitors were behaving respectfully, both towards one another and towards the very special places we were visiting. We thought of Portmeirion, that delectably picturesque village in North Wales, where the charges are gradually raised when visitor numbers are rising to what might become uncomfortable levels. Tourism has to be an invisible contract between those visiting and those being visited in such a way that all will feel that the visit has been a success.

One major reason why this book is so important is that it has a resonance far beyond Venice. Just like SAVE Britain’s Heritage, the three organisations to which I have drawn attention are piloting innovative and enterprising ways of running their campaigns.

As we noticed on our visit in February-March 2020, We Are Here Venice ingeniously made use of the City of Venice’s bill posting service to install a host of posters with very serious and pertinent messages.

One which I recorded read: “As a cruise passenger your energy consumption and waste production are several times higher than those of a resident.” This is a very neat way to bring home to the individual cruise-ship visitor the likely consequences of their generally too-superficial visit.

Themes have gone from the specific environmental consequences of the cruise ships to more general topics like air quality and safeguarding the Lagoon, 30

The rower: Elena Almansi

the arguments always evidence-based. As Jane Da Mosto, who runs We Are Here Venice, says in her contribution: “More than 50 unique posters have emerged, each made by hand. Participants range from acclaimed artists to toddlers, while suggestions include putting Venice forward as the capital of smart working and increasing traditional rowing transportation.”

Whenever we are in Venice, I find myself longing to see more of the historic gardens of palaces and monasteries which hide behind their tall brick walls. They need to have a very specific range of trees and plants which can cope with regular inundations of salty water at the times of the Aqua Granda. So, it was with a very specific anticipation that I approached the contribution of Iris Loredana, an authority on Slow Food and author of La Venessiana – The Fragrant World of Venice, who with her grandmother Lina runs La Venessiana, a slow travel, garden and food guide to “show visitors the hidden Venice, never told in guidebooks, her forgotten stories, gardens and recipes”. I suspect that what they have so abundantly to share will be immensely sympathetic to many Companions of the Guild of St George!

First, though, I read of the terrible damage to the garden of their palazzo, the oldest garden in Venice. Imagine their distress at the following: “The oleander falling off the terrace hit the ancient silverpurple rose that Lina had received as a gift from the monks of the Lagoon monastery on San Lazzaro

The bookbinder: Paolo Olbi degli Armeni. For more than 40 years, she had been using its petals to make fragrant jam, tea and syrup.”

Then I read of how the ever-increasing visitor numbers have impacted on one particular family: “During the past four summers, my family and our neighbours in Venice had become accustomed to avoiding crowds during the day. We only leave the house in the morning for a short cappuccino break and to buy groceries. During the day, we stay inside, on the terrace and in the garden.”

Finally, towards the end of Iris Loredana’s essay, she explains how during the lockdown, by April 2020, “the city looked like one huge workshop, with residents discussing ideas for the future and ready to get started. It felt as though the “Age of Responsible Living” had already dawned.

“But (and this is a huge ‘but’ for all of us), for these initiatives and ideas to become true, the government, associations and residents MUST finally find a way to work together.” How easy it is to say those words, “work together”, and how difficult it is to bring it about.

Iris Loredana’s conclusion from the time of the

Covid-19 lockdown is that “none of the extremes is good for Venice and her residents: the overcrowded city makes us feel alienated and sick, and the city wasn’t built to be empty.

We need to negotiate a balance between those extremes, and we need to accept that solutions won’t come overnight, but slowly and gradually. There are always signs of hope and encouragement if you know where to look for them.”

I plead with all readers of this article, and especially Companions of the Guild of St George, to do whatever they can to raise awareness of the quite frightening challenges faced by Venice at the present time.

The actions of the three campaigning organizations deserve our support, financial but also moral and practical, and they need to know that we understand what they are attempting to do, not only through our words.

Finally, as Catherine Kovesi, a historian at the University of Melbourne, Australia, with a great knowledge and love of Venice, says: “If we cannot save Venice, what can we save?”

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FOOTNOTES

series of map drawings from memory, thus ’Footnotes’.

Déirdre Kelly

I am drawn to the intrinsic beauty of the map of Venice; the familiar signs, symbols and the nature of details which relate to the human condition. Its unique psychogeography; a limited territory of small islands in which one is confined, (118 insulae, connected by some 400 bridges), while at the same time being linked by water onto a borderless dimension with the rest of the world, gives a renewed awareness and understanding of how Venice has come to symbolise the vulnerability and beauty which represents the fragility of this time.

A selection of images from Footnotes, a notebook dedicated to John Ruskin in celebration of my becoming a Companion of the Guild of St George.

IT was indeed the period of lockdown and reflection this year that drew me to the Guild of St. George. I was transported back to the vision which first brought me to Venice as a student in the 1980s, that which resonates from John Ruskin, Walter Sickert, John Piper and the many other artists’ familiar views of the city.

Living in Venice during the ongoing pandemic crisis, afforded the privilege of walking the ‘calli' and bridges without the enormous numbers of tourists, offering a sharpened vision of the arches, shadows and ever renewing reflections of the historic city.

Observations from reading and walking resulted in a

Rio Marin 32

The lived experience of Venice is one of constant reflection, or rather reflections, as the writer Erica Jong relates: “It is the city of mirrors, the city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone.” An ongoing dialogue, which for me is all part of the process of “becoming” Venetian.

Footnotes, a tracery dedicated to John Ruskin September 2021 is part of The Sketchbook Project held at the Brooklyn Art Library, New York. A short video of the sketchbook can be seen at: www.deirdrekelly.net

Santa Maria dei Miracoli

Calle Larga

Towards Miracoli

Fondamenta Misericordia 33

The End of the Cruiseocene in Venice a work in progress I Only now we wonder – why did we let them stay, let them stay so long?

I think they hypnotized us. We watched as if this island were a flickering screen on Saturday night when horror is at home.

The monster slays the dewiest girl, the one everyone wants to make love to.

And we watched, even through spreadeagled fingers, we couldn’t stop watching when steel creatures slew the grace of this city, this city still dewy after a thousand yearning years, this city everyone wants to make love in.

Do we want the monster to take her because we know that she’s too good for us?

Did the clever keepers of the carnivore-fleets grasp this masochismo mondiale – our weakness for watching beauty done away with – and sink their maws in it? This city, made so perfectly to the measure of a woman that a woman may walk as if upon water and the cruise ships made so frightfully to the measure of a monster to defile her.

II This is what grows, if it grows without reverence, tenderness or irony: a brute bucket you christen the Poesia, the Deliziosa, the Melody, or the Rhapsody of the Seas – and grows and grows, for Carnival, Celebrity, Caribbean & Costa sent ships-of-prey Into Venice’s soft waters, with their great white snouts and seeping bowels of chemical darkness, let them salt-sicken her bricks and spike her air with poison plumes, tremble her foundations, churn up the slattern shame of industry in her sediment.

The keepers of these gruesome zoos denied their Serena, Luminosa and Splendida could plant tumults in the lungs of Venetians or defects in their embryos.

MSC, Disney, Norwegian, P&O & Co & Co & Co made ships of grosser tonnage, greater grotesqueries of luxury and more mellifluous names – fatuous sonnets of ships: the Fantasia, the Preziosa – morbid anatomies of bloat, both boats and boaters, the Fascinosa, the Symphony, the Grandiosa and the Enchanted Princess gobbling more & more horizon until the only unspoiled vista was the one their passengers paid for.

High above San Marco, the new cash crusaders – garish mayflies to Venetian eyes on shore – cowered from this sick city’s beauty, not quite safe from it. The beauty was so strong they made contact not with the naked eyeball but sheltered and shuttered by lenses.

Snap, own-brand, post, Venice, done.

‘

III This, if you’re a city, is how it feels to be Me-too-ed and maltrattata.

Not even Napoleon showed Venice such dry contempt as the Liberty, Anthem and Ovation.

This is how it feels to be stripped, stared down and shamed until your corpus, dispossessed of all its private places, grows outlandish, unfriendly even to itself.

Everyone wanted a piece: as if this city were here only to be pretty for passing behemoths.

The keepers of the Divina, the Bellissima, the Virtuosa – they deployed the usual defence: She wanted it, oh she was begging for the money, and she took it, lying down.’

IV The cruise ships died slowly, decreto by sanzione. It took a pandemic to render them extinct on planet Venice. And yet. And yet they never died, the dinosaurs: they lizard on in birds.

Watch the robin hop. See his armoured toe. He could open the blood of your eye with it.

Don’t forget the cruise ships hovering on the edge of the lagoon – lustful, hungry, just one corrupt blind eye, one deft hand, one deep pocket, one mayor away from prey.

NOTE

The cruise ship situation continues to evolve in Venice – as will this poem, in response.

MICHELLE LOVRIC

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RUSKIN AND An online symposium Three Companions made these contributions to an online exchange of views in the summer of 2021.

Ruskin and the New Technologies Patrick Curry THIS little essay addresses social media and the internet in relation to Ruskin. My initial focus is on reading, but to some extent those technologies are a representative stand-in for wider and more pervasive new technology, and reading (a kind of living, after all) for a fully human life.

Ruskin set the bar high for reading, especially great authors of the past: Into [it] you may enter always…by your aristocracy of companionship there, your own inherent aristocracy will be assuredly tested..because, observe, this court of the past differs from all living aristocracy in this: - it is open to labour and to merit, but to nothing else..

There is but brief question: ‘Do you deserve to enter?

Pass. Do you ask to be the companion of nobles? Make yourself noble, and you shall be. Do you long for the conversation of the wise? Learn to understand it, and you shall hear it. But on other terms? – no. If you will not rise to us, we cannot stoop to you.’ ..You must, in a word, love these people. No ambition is of any use.

Now contrast this deep reading for its own sake, for the love of it and its authors, with what reading has now become for so many millions on Google, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, TikTok, Instagram, Tumblr, WhatsAp, Snapchat and all the other “platforms”, along with innumerable short, linkstrewn articles on the internet: a restless, nervy, jumpy skittering about on the surface, at the mercy of a myriad of short-term fears, desires, addiction and conditional neurophysiological rewards all of which are themselves deliberately stoked by the owners of what remain, for the most part, advertising companies. (They are corporate businesses, and the source of their income is overwhelmingly

advertisers.) Anyone who can’t see a problem here – a big one – isn’t really looking.

There is now a substantial body of empirical and experimental research – easily available, so I won’t trace it here – which confirms the unsurprisingly damaging effects of the new social media on reading in almost all its aspects: immersive capacity, comprehension, retention and so on.

There have also been thoughtful critiques by various observers, including Jonathan Franzen (“Distraction pours through every portal”), Will Self (“the tyranny of the virtual”), Rebecca Solnit (see her eloquent lament in the London Review of Books in August 2013) and Nicholas Carr in The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.

I am not arguing that we must – assuming we could! – throw this new technology away and return to some prior state. Nor do I deny its usefulness in various ways. What I am saying is, first, that it cannot act as – and therefore must not be considered as – in any way an adequate alternative to embodied social, cultural or intellectual human life. Supplement, yes; substitute, absolutely not. Secondly, and relatedly, it is urgently necessary to maintain and defend offline life and offline culture (to borrow a term from the flagship journal The Analog Sea Review) – not least reading books.

Thirdly, no plausible advocacy for the new media can be mounted, in this context, on the basis of its usefulness or convenience. Even though it is those things (but at what price?), that would be to connive with a characteristically modern Faustian bargain; for once usefulness is accepted as chief arbiter, what crimes could not be thereby justified, and are, every day, against the relatively powerless, both human and natural?

And it is to turn Ruskin into J.S. Mill or, worse, Bentham: a grotesque inversion, when utilitarianism was almost everything that Ruskin rightly understood himself to be opposing.

Ruskin and Technology: Living with hypocrisy Nicholas Friend I WILL explore some contradictions in Ruskin’s attitudes to technology, and suggest one or two ways in which the internet and social media may benefit both us and Ruskin studies, while asking how Ruskin’s ideas and approaches may help us to > 35

> modify the more damaging effects of modern communications.

If we are to take Ruskin seriously, then it seems to me we must see him, not as a guru merely, with all the superhuman attributes that might imply, but as a human being, a man not to worship but to learn from and love for his foibles. Among those foibles was a certain hypocrisy, particularly with regard to the uses of technology.

RUSKIN AND

According to Ray Haslam, the word “technology” appears nowhere in the Library edition of Ruskin's works, and as we know, he inveighed against the technology of his time, deploring the advent of steam trains and the factories that brought a new kind of storm-cloud over the Old Man of Coniston. But he could not have lived his life without these technologies: he travelled by up-to-date coach with improved springing over its 18th century counterpart, on tarmaced roads.

Of course there is more to it than hypocrisy.

Ruskin was interested in technology. At the age of 16, to aid in seeing the skies of the Alps he made himself a cyanometer to measure blueness. He accepted the possible usefulness of the telegraph, questioning not the technology itself but the use to which it was put. He was astonished by the engineering skill that went into a locomotive, even if he thought it would not make us “one whit stronger, happier, or wiser.” The main reason he didn’t like trains is that they went too fast for him to see anything. How horrified he would be by Las Vegas, whose signs have been designed to be seen from a car travelling at 30 miles an hour.

He travelled by train, taking advantage of the very shortness of time it takes that he deplored in a late lecture, moaning that people could travel from Bakewell to Buxton in half an hour. He used limelight in his lectures. He was fascinated by printing presses, using Gutenberg’s printer’s ink containing graphite, copper, lead, titanium and sulfur in an oil medium, and by photography, whose iodide was industrially produced. He made watercolours using Winsor and Newton’s industrially produced paints.

His attitude to those who travel by train or who use the telegraph is that these technologies do not benefit those who use them. He seems to ignore all questions of those users needing to earn a living, in a world that has adapted itself to such new modes of transport, and the benefits of such technology to expanding populations, let alone to those who did not share Ruskin’s good physical health. In this, he is patronising. It is easier to be critical of others’ behaviours when you have capital which now would amount to £24 million, and good eyesight.

He was contradictory in knowing that the Lakes Landscape was one of industry (viz. his support for the Coniston copper workers) and had been for hundreds of years: that landscape was far more smoke-covered in his time than it is now, yet his writing suggests there is a kind of purity in it. He admired lichens, but may not have acknowledged that some lichens, and certainly algae, could draw sustenance from polluted air. He used and indeed depended on numerous technologies that preceded the Industrial Revolution: of course, paper, pens, ink, pottery and porcelain, cutlery, pots and pans, coal fires, glass.

Ruskin was an imperialist, believing that all dirty factory work should be done abroad. He thought the dirty business of manufacturing should be delegated “to less fortunate and more covetous races” and in The Future of England 1869 he demands a programme of relocating factories etc to the imperial territories.

He believed in freeing the factory worker from the meaninglessness of her labour, but was a passionate believer in the virtues of colonisation (1870 Slade Lecture on manifest destiny). This is a side of Ruskin we have to accept but I suggest should never emulate. It is relevant to our present concerns with technology, which has done much to undermine elitism.

If we are to win over the sceptics, we have to accept the hypocrisies, not only of Ruskin, but of us all. We are all guilty. But we can make amends, if we act now, taking Ruskin’s Injunctions not only to heart, but to mind and action.

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Nevertheless there is much that is vital and valuable in Ruskin’s inveighing against technologies, be they a train or a microscope, which tend to encourage excess of focus or speed, and thus a lack of appreciation of context,. It is this question of lack of perception of context and interconnectedness, >

enhanced by modern speed and specialisation, from which we do indeed suffer now. Lockdown, lack of travelling, has helped us to see more, perhaps to understand more of Ruskin’s concept of the importance of seeing properly.

But it seems to me important that we Ruskinians do not get lost in dreams, as his follower William Morris feared he might in the Prologue to his Earthly Paradise. Ruskin was not a dreamer: he was a passionate realist, even or especially when he waxed most lyrical and poetic. His belief in ecology was not expressed from a mystical belief in Gaia, but from a passionate belief in improving the lives of people through understanding the value of interconnectedness. That means improving their working lives, but also their mental and spiritual lives: the latter with no help from organised religion, from which he had unconverted himself in 1858.

Does this mean he thinks we should return to a pre-lapsarian, or at any rate pre-Industrial Revolution, world? In Praeterita Ruskin asks, thinking of the Guild of St George, whether we should wish for St George’s Old England or the Devil’s New England. This is Ruskin at his most simplistic and his least effective. It is a view comparable to that in The Stones of Venice that Ruskin thought medieval Venetian carvings expressed the freedom of the medieval craftsman, overstating the case.

St George needed the technology of a finelytempered lance to slay the dragon. Could the present Guild demonstrate ways in which technology could consistently be used for Ruskin’s concept of wealth, and not for illth? I have a most wonderful new app on my iPhone. It is called Picture This. You point your phone at a grass or a plant or a flower and it tells you what it is. I cannot tell you how much this has contributed to my ability to see. Now I look at a simple meadow and delight in the beauty of Yorkshire fog, Autumn Hawkbit, Hedge woundwort, false oatgrass and cow vetch. It encourages me to love the meadows and determine to preserve them all the more. Could I have learned this from a book? Yes, but I wouldn’t have. Apart from the difficulty of identifying from a picture in a book, I would have had to pick the grass to take it home to my bookshelf. The book would have encouraged me to destroy the grass.

The new technology let it live.

Would Ruskin have denied us the use of the internet, by whose agency we are meeting now? To

deny people the internet is elitist, and pays no heed to those who have difficulty of accessing books. There is a real sense in which Ruskin is in danger of removing the role of industry in ecology. Man is an industrial and inventive being. That inventiveness led to the horrors of smoke and grime of the industrial revolution. But now it will lead to astonishing innovations in the face of climate crisis. These innovations will all depend on technology. To deny technology its role is to deny, not just the possibilities of a purer world, but the possibility of a purer people.

As Ruskin recommended in Unto This Last, we need government, co-operation, regulation. This is how we should respond to the more damaging effects of modern technology. We need to exploit the internet as a force for good, and through regulation allow its power to overcome the evil purposes to which it is often put. We do not have time to waste: eight years to overturn the effects of the Industrial Revolution, according to the International Committee on Climate Change. There is no time for meaningless reaction against the use of technologies, and for a plea for a return to earlier ways of living. Our future will be just that: a future way of living, based on future technologies.

Look at the contribution of heat technologies of the past to civilisations: the messages imparted for the vassals of Persia and China by exquisite metalwork of the Bronze Age, the passionate expressions of Jomon pottery of five thousand years ago. We need of course to look again at the effects of that heat technology on our present climate crisis. But we need, not to abandon technology, but to embrace new technological discoveries that may come about through examining the constituents of life: the structure of water, such that we may power our houses or our vehicles by hydrogen, the value there may be in lichens, and mushrooms which eat plastic, the glorious power of wind and tide. There is no time for dreaming, only for action, inspired by Ruskin’s beautiful words. Fond though he was of Wordsworth, he was an activist. Ruskin was Shelley’s kind of poet: an as yet-unacknowledged legislator of the world.

A Great Re-shaping Peter Day I SPENT much of my working life making programmes about business for BBC Radio. I didn’t have to report from the financial markets, with share prices whizzing along the bottom of the screen. > 37

> Instead, I could concentrate on the enormous changes that have been taking place in the world of work and business over the past 30 or 40 years. We made programmes that I don’t think anyone else was making anywhere in the world at the time. It was a tremendous privilege.

So I come to John Ruskin with that perspective.

In a nutshell, I think that our world – to a certain extent it is recognisable as John Ruskin’s world – is now undergoing a fundamental reshaping. It is caused by the rise of the digital dimension, the vast growth of computer power, and the interconnected, networked global society. These things are doing much more than merely amend the analogue world that we (and John Ruskin) grew up in.

This is much larger than just influencing business or entertainment or communications. It is as profound as was the coming of printing from moveable type in the 15th century. The consequences are still being worked out. TS Eliot wrote of the Metaphysical poet John Donne: “A thought was to him an experience; it modified his sensibility”.

The rise of the digital world is also modifying our sensibilities in a potent way. The Metaphysical experience was an interior one..in the mind of the scientifically-aware individual. Ours is an external transformation, through great leaps of connectivity into the whole world outside ourselves.

We may not realise how big the change is because – in the words of the Canadian philosopher the late Marshall MacLuhan – “We observe the future through the rear-view mirror of the past”, even when the future is happening to us here and now.

It is of course a very different world from the one that John Ruskin grew up in, and also from the one which in many ways he looked back to as a great touchstone, if not a utopia. My observations are rather impressionistic, and not very organised. Their starting point was the short series of online seminars about one of Ruskin’s key texts which the Master led in the spring of 2021. They were, unfortunately, sparsely attended. But they were very potent, and well worth taking a look at, if they are still available.

It is now very clear that the coming of the digital interconnected world ought to cause the Guild of St George to ask questions about what Ruskin wrote and said about work and society and the economy..particularly as he laid it out in his Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain, Fors Clavegera. (Would that his clarion call to action 38

RUSKIN AND An online symposium had not been entitled so puzzlingly, but that is how we have it.)

The 150th anniversary of John Ruskin’s founding of what became – some seven years later – the Guild of St George, is a unique opportunity to plan for the next 150 years. The Guild has already outlived most organisations. Even so, it has not grown in the way that Ruskin envisaged when he set out the Guild’s principles and priorities in Fors Clavegera.

Many Companions will say that we do not need to refit anything; that Ruskin’s principles and ideas are as valid as they were when enunciated between 1871 and 1884. But in the past 200 years – since Ruskin was born – the world has changed in many ways.

Though John Ruskin’s thoughts and words contain many great universal ideas, they may need refitting to retain their relevance and their appeal to a general public in the digital age.

This does not necessarily mean that they need modernising. As was pointed out by many during the Ruskin bicentenary events in 2019, so many of the prophetic concerns of Ruskin have now advanced to the forefront of debate about society, capitalism, the environment, and the working world. They are just as relevant now as when they were first articulated 150 years ago.

Ruskin had experienced the rise of factory capitalism (and the railways) in his lifetime, and found their impact on work and people disquieting.

To correct this, he hearkened back to the craftsmanship of the Middle Ages, and inaugurated the St George’s Company to put his ideas into action.

Although he was against the idea of a created utopia, his ambitions for the Company, later Guild, have a utopian flavour to them which increases the difficulty of extracting 21st century principles (or principles that may be relevant in the 21st century) from Ruskin’s best-laid plans.

But it would be useful if some concentrated work by groups of Companions could produce a restated list of Ruskinian ideas which to illuminate and inspire the Guild over the next century or so: a new and modified Fors. This list – a brochure for Companions, perhaps – would have to acknowledge the changes

that have taken place in society, politics and the economy since Fors was written. Grasping which of these self-evident changes are relevant to restating Fors will be a process fraught with difficulties and controversy. But it needs to be done if Fors and the Guild itself are to retain their force and relevance for 150 years more.

For example, we've had factory capitalism replaced by hollow financial capitalism in the last quarter of the 20th century, and now we are in the middle of another seeming revolution: the so-called fourth industrial revolution based on information and communications..plus the rise of the robot, or artificial intelligence.

This new revolution, and artificial intelligence (if it ever becomes intelligent rather than just superior pattern recognition), are going to have a profound impact on work and society..and on leisure, if much work is deemed no longer necessary.

But these things are also in the process of restating the place of humankind in our own world, and humankind’s relationship to it. (The printed book did something similar in the centuries after the Guttenberg, but at a much slower pace. That was why the Metaphysicals had new scientific thoughts to modify their sensibilities with.)

Will we need a basic income so that the things made by the machines still have a market even though fewer people are required to work? Or will new forms of work replace what we do now..including the brainwork which has mostly evaded substitution by machines up to now, but will not for much longer?

Any refurbishing of Fors for the next 150 years might have this as a key consideration, and a very timely one. If work is so central to human happiness, what sort of work is the Guild talking about? And where does craftspersonship fit in? When most things are made by machines from start to finish, the crafted object may become much more valued than it has been in recent decades. Unless machines learn to do craft too, and they may.

In Fors, John Ruskin built a vision of society founded on land and what is grown on it, particularly food. In the past 200 years, the significance of agricultural land and food in the total economy has shrunk enormously, but our awareness of the vulnerability of the earth we live on has expanded hugely. Ruskin, of course, embraced both ideas. The Guild needs to think about how they can be rebalanced for the future.

As well as the impact of artificial intelligence and robots on work on humanity, here are a few other topics deriving from Fors which might be individually considered, perhaps by small groups of Companions meeting to draw up a new version of Fors in time for the anniversary of the naming of the Guild in 2028: Coping with Capitalism Money (the rise of crypto currencies) The Guild’s land and property Spirituality/religion Education Art and in particular, museums Craft The university settlements inspired by the Hinksey road-building project: are there new potential versions of those now?

Does the Guild need a theoretical journal in which Ruskinite responses to the changing modern world might be tried out?

And of course, there are the very current new topics of race and gender, both of them magnified and confused by the potency of the social networking effects I have already mentioned.

Technology has already reconfigured many of these things, and it will go on doing so. It may be more productive for the Guild to seek to engage with these radical changes rather than let them be and go on asserting without modification the principles we were founded upon.

This sort of engagement with today’s world has already been taking place, of course: in Sheffield in particular, and nationally and then internationally with what became the Big Draw campaign. But the Guild may need to find new ways of reaching outsiders in the rest of the 21st century.

As the retiring Master Clive Wilmer pointed out in his AGM Lecture in 2020, Ruskin’s title for his Letters is a combination of Force, Fortitude and Fortune. Fors: the skill of humans to choose the correct moment to strike forcefully in order to enact social change.

And (as we saw from the enthusiastic response to the Power of Seeing exhibition in 2019) it is indeed timely to re-enunciate Ruskin’s core ideas for the 21st century. But because the context in which that will happen is in the process of such huge change, it will take quite a lot of work.

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The slowly sinking ship

By Qusai Khraisha A FEW months before COVID-19 began to spread in mainland China, a historic UN Human Rights Committee’s meeting was held at the Palais des Nations in Geneva. In it, the Committee discussed a case of a person displaced in the context of climate change. After fleeing Kiribati, a remote and low-lying nation in the Pacific Ocean, Mr Ioane Teitiota applied for asylum in New Zealand claiming that the island was virtually uninhabitable due to environmental degradation and saltwater contamination. However, the Immigration and Protection Court of New Zealand saw nothing about his testimony nor the available facts in Kiribati that indicated an imminent threat. A decision was made as a consequence to reject Mr Teitiota’s claim and he was deported from New Zealand to Kiribati in September 2015.

A few years later, the Committee argued that the Court of New Zealand failed to account for the other indirect long-term consequences of climate change, which could result in Mr Teitiota’s facing “irreparable harm or a threat to his life”. As a result, Mr Teitiota was granted permission to stay in New Zealand under other legal instruments. Although this judgment meant that Mr Teitiota was no longer at a threat of being deported, it also meant that he cannot be considered eligible for refugee status.

that Mr Teitiota would not be able to continue living his life in a meaningful way.

Neither the UN Human Rights Committee or the Court of New Zealand considered that climate change has instigated a spike in interpersonal violence in Kiribati because the island inhabitants saw a sharp decrease in the amount of land and resource available, which consequently gave rise to resource disputes.

These disputes were not random. Inadequate access to clean water, a problem for all inhabiting Kiribati, particularly impacted less influential families. Theft and land disputes disproportionally affected more prosperous individuals, who own more land. Aggression was more targeted at men, whereas women experienced higher household burdens. Granted that climate change as a process is indiscriminate, its effects will not impact everyone equally; the sinking of ship of Kiribati has holes that are distributed unequally. All of these vulnerabilities will invariably limit access to the resources available on the island in discriminatory ways and consequently create imminent threats. Mr Teitiota was not only escaping climate change but was also fleeing the increasing hostility of other residents because of aspects pertaining to his socio-economic and family status, as well as his gender. Any of which should trigger article 1 of the 1951 Refugee Convention.

Mr Teitiota’s case and its subsequent decisions alongside the general discussion on climate disasters This happened because the Committee reasoned that should matter to all of us. No one can predict precisely climate change’s threat is not imminent nor does it how climate change will unfold, who will be particularly discriminate against people; meanwhile, a refugee is someone escaping an imminent and discriminate threat. vulnerable to its direct and indirect effects, and how that vulnerability will expose individuals to threats of Yet, because a refugee status is associated with being granted rights to work and live, not having it could mean persecution. Although the jury is still out on how exactly COVID-19 is impacting different individuals, the REFERENCES 1. UN Human Rights. Historic UN Human Rights case opens door to climate change asylum claims [Internet]. [cited 2020 Nov 25].

Available from: https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/ Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=25482

The Economist [Internet]. 2021 Jan 2 [cited 2021 Jan 4]; Available from: https://www.economist.com/middle-east-andafrica/2021/01/02/after-34-years-ugandas-president-has-nointention-of-retiring

2. AF (Kiribati) [2013] NZIPT 800413 [Internet]. 2013 [cited 2020 Dec 5]. Available from: / cases,NZ_IPT,5dad6b754.html

5. Covid-19 will help unscrupulous incumbents in African elections.

The Economist [Internet]. 2020 Nov 17 [cited 2021 Jan 4]; Available from: https://www.economist.com/the-worldahead/2020/11/17/covid-19-will-help-unscrupulousincumbents-in-african-elections

3. Bobi Wine, the pop star who would be president of Uganda. The Economist [Internet]. 2020 Nov 5 [cited 2021 Jan 4]; Available from: https://www.economist.com/middle-east-andafrica/2020/11/05/bobi-wine-the-pop-star-who-would-bepresident-of-uganda 4. After 34 years, Uganda’s president has no intention of retiring.

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6. Democracy under Lockdown - The Impact of COVID-19 on Global Freedom [Internet]. Freedom House; 2020 Oct [cited 2021 Jan 4]. Available from: https://freedomhouse.org/article/newreport-democracy-under-lockdown-impact-covid-19-globalfreedom

pandemic represents yet another illustration of how the indirect consequences of natural disasters could result in persecution. In fragile democracies, autocratic leaders have used COVID-19 to limit the opposition. In Uganda, for example, the pandemic has made it easier for its president, Yoweri Museveni, to block opposition and dissent. Museveni, who has been in power for almost 35 years, detained the opposition leader, and arrested and killed protesters on the basis that they are flouting COVID-19 restriction.

The politicisation of COVID-19 is not just happening in Uganda. According to the think tank Freedom House, since the pandemic started, democracy and human rights have deteriorated in 80 countries. Across the globe, 91 countries have

experienced new or increased restrictions on news media as a result of the pandemic. There are currently no laws that could allow people to seek refuge for reasons relating to climate change disasters. But laws exist to protect people from persecution.

The reality is that people who are vulnerable and threated are being turned away on the basis that there are no legal grounds for their claim––when in fact a majority of these individuals who may be escaping natural disasters could also be running away from persecution arising from the extreme conditions associated with such disasters.

Adapted from Quasai’s contribution to the online discussion “Refugee Journeys: Will they ever end?” held in June 2021.

a slow-motion disaster

By David Barrie ONE night, some years ago, an earthquake completely cut off the power supplies to Los Angeles. Suddenly darkness – real darkness – descended on the city.

Then the emergency services began to receive calls from people who had seen something strange in the sky above them. Was it an alien invasion, they asked anxiously? No, but it was something they had never seen before: the Milky Way. I don’t think Ruskin ever mentioned the problem of light pollution, though I’m sure it would be high on his list of polemical targets, were he alive today. He was lucky enough to live before the spread of electric light had begun, slowly but inexorably, to cut us off from the night sky. Today, when most people live in brilliantly illuminated cities, a truly dark night sky is unknown to more than half the human race. Where I live in London, it is rarely possible to see more than a few dozen of the brightest stars.

As a sailor I’ve had the good fortune to observe the night sky untouched by the pervasive glow of light that envelops us on land. It is quite simply the most sublime spectacle that nature has to offer, and it is tragic that the profligate and often pointless use of artificial light denies most people the chance to witness it. The spread of light pollution has been so gradual that most people have no idea what they have lost. There is still a strong tendency to believe that more light is always better – that it invariably makes life easier, safer and more agreeable. After all, fear of the dark is one of our primal instincts, and the night has long been associated both with danger and with evil. But satellite images show that artificial light is

rapidly extending its grip over the planet; its scale massively exceeds our reasonable needs. What is more, we now know that exposure to excessive light at night is seriously bad for us – both physically and psychologically. We, however, are not the only victims of light pollution. Its effects on our fellow creatures are far, far worse.

Brilliantly-lit buildings cost the lives of billions of migratory birds and insects every year. Electric light also disrupts the internal clocks that govern many critical biological processes in both animals and plants. I could go on, but if you want more information, visit the website of the excellent International Dark Sky Association: www.darksky.org Last year I helped the charity, Buglife (https:// www.buglife.org.uk/campaigns/light-pollution/), in their efforts to persuade the British Government to include a reduction in light pollution as one of the binding targets in the Environment Act. Although there was a helpful discussion in the House of Lords, I’m afraid the proposed amendment failed.

Reducing light pollution will not only make life better for all of us, but it will also save an enormous amount of money and – better still – massively reduce the amount of energy we waste. Unlike so many of the environmental problems we face, this one is really easy to solve. However, we have a long way still to go in persuading our fellow citizens and our political leaders that action is needed.

Surely this is a campaign to which the Guild might usefully lend its weight? I think our founder would approve.

In the post

IN April 2021 the Isle of Man Post Office issued a new commemorative set of six Ruskin stamps, to mark both the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Guild and the 140th anniversary of the opening of the Laxey Woollen Mill on the island. The stamps were created in close partnership with the Guild and the Ashmolean Museum.

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FROM TOP LEFT First

class stamp: Laxey Mill, its owner and friend of Ruskin, Egbert Rydings, and the Guild symbol of St George; EU postage: Social justice, the slogan at Walkley in Sheffield; Large post: Ruskin the artist; FROM LOWER LEFT RoW: St Mark’s Venice by the Manx artist JM Nicholson, who travelled to Venice on the advice of John Ruskin; £1.82: Ruskin the art critic and champion of JMW Turner, whose view of Calais Pier is shown on the stamp; £2.17: Ruskin Land

THIS is the story of the stamps, as told by the Isle of Man Post Office.

John Ruskin is one of Victorian Britain’s most influential figures, John Ruskin. The Guild of St. George, set-up by Ruskin 150 years ago, played a pivotal role in the history of the Laxey Woollen Mills ÷ a Manx institution that continues to practice traditional crafting methods to this day. John Ruskin was a writer, artist and philanthropist, and a fierce critic of prevailing social and political norms. He wrote about nature, art and architecture, craftsmanship, geology, botany, Greek myth and education – a dizzying variety of subjects.

Driven by his deep faith in social justice, his concern for the impact of industrial society on people and their environment, and his passionate advocacy of a sustainable relationship between people, craft and nature, he established the Guild of St George in 1871 to right some of the social wrongs of the day and make England a happier and more beautiful place in which to

live and work. With the assistance of the Ashmolean Museum and the Guild of St. George, local designer Emma Cooke of EJC Design was able to create six compelling stamps narrating the story of John Ruskin’s life and the impact his actions and initiatives have had on countless lives and continue to do so to this day.

Declan McCarthy, Head of Publishing and Licensing at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Oxford said: ”The Ashmolean Museum is thrilled to be partnered with Guild of St George to celebrate the genius of John Ruskin in this beautiful set of stamps from the Isle of Man Post Office. Ruskin was a true polymath and genius of his time, and it is warming to know that he continues to be celebrated more than 120 years after his passing.”

“This set of stamps marks the culmination of a number of months of collaboration with both the Isle of Man Post Office and the > 43

On the first day of issue, Guild directors Jenny Robbins and John Iles were photographed with the first set of the stamps, standing by the oak welcome board at Ruskin Land, the Guild's landholding in the Wyre Forest, which itself features on one of the stamps. With them was the former Guild director and secretary Cedric Quayle, whose family come originally from the Isle of Man.

> Guild. As Ruskin said: ‘Quality is never an accident: it is always the result of intelligent effort.’”

John Ruskin. One hundred and forty years later Laxey Woollen Mills is still here, continuing to stand by Ruskin principles, producing quality hand-woven cloth Dr. Rachel Dickinson, Master of the Guild of St. and garments on traditional pedal looms using locally George, said “On behalf of Ruskin’s Guild and our grown Manx Loaghtan and other Manx wools. We 320+ Companions around the world, can I express our think he would approve.” delight and appreciation for this beautiful acknowledgement of John Ruskin’s founding of the Maxine Cannon, general manager Isle of Man Guild 150 years ago.

Stamps and Coins, said: 'We would like to thank the staff of the Ashmolean Museum for their assistance in She added “In his lifetime, Ruskin’s ideas, values the research and production of this issue, as well as and his writing across a dazzling range of subjects had expressing gratitude to the Guild of St George for a colossal influence on public debate and thought in the their contribution.”

19th century. As an educational charity committed to making lives better through the lens of art, craft and “But our journey started much closer to home, the the rural economy, we are delighted to celebrate the day we received he book A Weaver's Take: the Life and continued importance of Ruskin’s ideas in the 21st Times of the Laxey Woollen Industry 1860-2010 by local century.” author Sue King. We are indebted to her for the wealth of research material within her book, and Manx John Wood, the managing director of Laxey Woollen Mills, said: “John Ruskin, along with Egbert National Heritage for the supply of images."

Rydings and the Guild of of St George was Details of how to buy the stamps are on the IoM Post instrumental in setting up Laxey Woollen Mills in Office website: 1881, so we are absolutely delighted and honoured to https://www.iompost.com/ be featured in this fabulous issue, celebrating the life of 44

Louise Pullen: au revoir, but not adieu A tribute by Nichola Johnson and Peter Miller THE Guild’s Ruskin Collection has, over the years, come to mean many things to many people. To the casual visitor walking through Sheffield’s Millennium Galleries who may be entirely unaware of its historic, if sometimes chequered, links to the city and its people it may well be simply another museum display inviting their attention and exploration. To the committed and increasingly international band of Ruskin scholars and enthusiasts, however, it has come to represent an invaluable treasure trove of primary source material and, for many, a route to a greater emotional connection with Ruskin and his multifaceted engagement with the world.

A collection of objects alone, though, has little to say without some kind of mediated interpretation of its context and contents. This might be from detailed catalogues, explanatory object labels, supporting publications and, increasingly, multi-media access points. But there can surely be little doubt that for most people the most transformative museological encounters are with curatorial experts who really know and love the collections for which they’re responsible and, even more importantly, can communicate and share that knowledge and love with professional and personal skill and generosity.

In Louise Pullen, the Guild and, of course, Sheffield Museums have been privileged since 2009 to have had access to just such a person. Her difficult – but entirely understandable – decision in 2021 to take a temporary break from her career to devote more time to her young family will be a source of considerable sadness to those who have come to know her personally and to benefit from her ever-increasing expertise. It’s a great comfort to have Louise’s assurance that she doesn’t intend to step away from Ruskin entirely and will informally be sharing her understanding of the Collection with her successor, Ashley Gallant, as he builds on her wonderful legacy and develops his own Ruskinian expertise.

Louise trained as an art historian at the University of York and then the Courtauld Institute. She subsequently developed an interest in the social history of material things and went on to work at the V&A and Historic Royal Palaces before arriving at Sheffield Museums in 2004 to take up a Paul Mellon Research Curatorship and going on to work under the then Keeper of Decorative Art Dorian Church until she left, when she formally became Curator of the Ruskin Gallery and Collection. She was particularly valued by the museum for the insight and careful research which she brought to the presentation of the collections in the gallery and to her talks and publications, and she was consistently commended by the public for her immensely

engaging ‘stores tours’. Less immediately visible to the general public was Louise’s capacity to accommodate courteously, professionally and generously the numerous requests for information, object loans and images which arrived on her desk – requests which were occasionally made at alarmingly short notice and with little real appreciation of the demands and responsibilities of professional curatorship!

The recollections and tributes of our two most recent Masters perhaps sum up so much of what Louise’s enthusiasm and expertise has come to mean to the Guild and its supporters. Rachel Dickinson, the current Master, has fond recollections of recording on-site a Radio 4 programme on John Ruskin’s Utopia. She and Louise , wearing 21st century interpretations of ‘artistic dress’ (including hand-made items) were wondering how the producer and presenter would recognise them. “We needn’t have worried. The Radio 4 people said we couldn’t have been anything but Ruskinians!” And the former Master Clive Wilmer “couldn’t imagine the Ruskin Collection having a better curator than Louise. I would meet her for lunch to talk over business matters and then we would go down into the cages, where she would already have laid out the things I wanted to see – and oftentimes things she thought I’d be pleased to discover. I learned a lot.“ It’s fitting that Louise’s final major project was the outstanding 2019 celebration of Ruskin’s bicentenary. The Power of Seeing exhibition at Two Temple Place was the most successful hosted at the venue to date and, together with accompanying events and publications, it introduced thousands of people new to Ruskin’s world and impressed both the press and dedicated Ruskinians with the depth and range of its underpinning scholarship. Together with the subsequent Sheffield exhibition, Art and Wonder it surely offers a fitting and hugely admired and respected tribute to Louise’s curatorial expertise, scholarship and, above all, love and enthusiasm for Ruskin. Thank you, Louise!

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PICTURE BY RACHEL DICKINSON

Ruskin Revivalist

James S Dearden OBE 1931-2021 An appreciation by Clive Wilmer COMPANIONS of the Guild and Ruskin enthusiasts everywhere were sad to hear of the death on 23th October 2021 of James Dearden, Master of the Guild from 2004 to 2009. He was 90. As Curator of the Whitehouse collection at Bembridge School, as convenor of the historic As Curator of the Whitehouse

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collection at Bembridge School, as convenor of the historic Brantwood Conference widely thought to have launched the Ruskin revival, as a Guild Director for 35 years, as author of many books and advisor to three generations of Ruskin scholars, as bibliographer and book collector, Jim made a uniquely rich contribution to the recovery and enthusiastic pursuit of all things Ruskinian. It helped that he was a modest, unselfish

man, friendly, convivial and an engaging raconteur.

There can be no Ruskinians who are not, directly or indirectly, in his debt.

Born in the Lake District in 1931, he attended Bembridge School on the Isle of Wight from 1945 to 1949. The school had been founded on experimentally Ruskinian lines by the philanthropist and Liberal politician J. Howard Whitehouse, who went on to purchase Ruskin’s house on Coniston Water and was building up a comprehensive collection of Ruskin’s books, manuscripts, drawings and memorabilia, which were held at the school.

In 1957, as a young bibliophile looking for a job, Jim returned to the school to teach there. In particular he taught printing, a key part of the school’s Ruskinian emphasis on craft. As a boy, hearing of Ruskin day by day, he had taken no more than a passing interest in the great man, but before long, he was invited by Whitehouse’s heir Gerran Lloyd to care for the collection. It was then that the enthusiasm began and he stayed on as curator till 1996, when the collection was moved to Lancaster University.

Ruskin’s reputation in the 1950s was at a low ebb – few people had even heard of him – but during the next decade it began to recover and did so on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1969, in response to the revival, Jim set up a conference at Brantwood, which brought together Ruskin experts and enthusiasts from several parts of the world. As a result, a Ruskin Association was founded with Jim at the helm. In 1979, because of the contacts he had been steadily gathering, he was invited to join the Guild of St George as Companion and Director. As a result, he was actively involved in the first period of Guild expansion, when the Verrocchio Madonna was sold (against Jim’s judgement, as it happens) and the Guild’s Ruskin Collection – what had been St George’s Museum – brought back to Sheffield after a long period in storage.

In 2004, at a time of crisis in the Guild, Jim agreed to become Master, a role in which he gently pushed the Guild forward, making a second major expansion possible. After standing down as Master in 2009, he remained on the Board as Director for Ruskin Affairs till 2014. As his immediate successor, proposed by him for the Mastership, I couldn’t have done without his help, support and legacy of trust.

In the course of a long life, Jim built up a number of book collections, of which the most wide-reaching

was of Ruskin. Along with the major publications, it included a good deal of stray materials and ephemera – articles, advertisements, memorabilia and so on. His first large-scale collection – of Lake District books – is now in the Wordsworth Museum in Grasmere, labelled the Dearden Collection.

Jim wrote a great deal – more than I can record here, but I will name the most notable things. His own story is related in a light, off-the-cuff manner in Rambling Reminiscences (2014). He collected his many articles in three volumes: Facets of Ruskin (1970), Further Facets of Ruskin (2009) and A John Ruskin Collection (2017). He wrote a history of the Whitehouse Collection, Ruskin, Bembridge and Brantwood (1994). He edited a number of important volumes – an edition of Ruskin’s boyhood poem Iteriad, or Three Weeks among the Lakes (1969), for instance, and The Professor: Arthur Severn’s Memoir of John Ruskin (1967). For the centenary of Ruskin’s death in 2000, he edited with meticulous scholarship John Ruskin: A Life in Pictures (1999), which brings together every image of Ruskin then known – paintings, drawings, engravings, caricatures, sculptures and photographs.

But important as that book is, Jim’s most momentous and perhaps most durable publication was The Library of John Ruskin (2013), which is that rare thing, a readable bibliography. It sought to name and describe every book that Ruskin had owned at some time in his life. Its splendid introduction was surely the finest thing that Jim ever wrote. As this great volume shows, Jim combined the skills of a great detective with a memory like a filing system.

Jim was also entertainingly knowledgeable about the places he had known and lived in, especially the Lake District, where he was born, and the Isle of Wight where he spent most of his life. He was very much involved in activities local to the island. He was, for example, a member of both the Bembridge Sailing Club and the Isle of Wight Foot Beagles, of which he was at different times Master, Chairman and President. His work for the Whitehouse Collection led him to distant and sometimes unlikely places, accompanying loans – to remote parts of the US, for instance, to Japan and to Italy. After his retirement he began to garner awards and distinctions.

In 1998, he was made Honorary Doctor of Letters (D Litt) at Lancaster University and, in 2018, he was appointed MBE for “services to culture”.

Earlier this year, at an online ceremony, he > 47

> received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the newly- founded Ruskin Society of North America in celebration of his 90th birthday. He was delighted and sometimes visibly moved by such recognition. He had no self-importance and so was always surprised when honours came, though he must have known he deserved them. I well remember his retirement as a Guild Director when a tribute paid to him at the AGM brought tears to his eyes.

He was in some ways an improbable Ruskinian.

He always said that he was not much interested in Ruskin’s ideas and I noticed that he didn’t always agree with them. What mattered to him were Ruskin’s life and connections, the bibliography and the drawings. It was his good fortune that others needed advice on these matters and he was always ready to give it, expecting to gain no advantage

thereby but a sharing of his fascination and the many friendships that came of it.

Many Ruskin scholars have told how, working at Bembridge and pursuing some elusive fact or quotation, a word from Jim led them to their goal, at the same time opening up some new line of enquiry. It goes without saying that he will be very greatly missed.

He was married in 1958 to Jill Cheverton, whom he’d met when both of them were working at the school. Jill nearly always accompanied him on his travels and endured his commitment to Ruskin with the placidity of a saint. She was a popular figure at Ruskin gatherings until a painful illness made travel impossible. She died in 2015. Jim leaves a daughter Sarah Washington and her daughters, Caroline, Harriet and Elizabeth, all three of whom are Companions of the Guild.

A man who was multitudes Appreciations of Kevin Jackson

by Clive Wilmer and Howard Hull KEVIN JACKSON (Companion, 2001) died suddenly and unexpectedly on May 10. He was 66.

To his friends – and he had a genius for friendship – Kevin was always The Moose. The nickname went back to his student days and it was easy to see why it had stuck. He was a big man, expansive and genial, with large capacities – for friendship and talk, food and drink, books and films. It sometimes seemed as if, possessing vast resources of knowledge and uncanny powers of recall, he could talk or write about anything.

He made his name as an arts journalist and broadcaster, working for The Independent in its early idealistic days as well as for radio and television – Kaleidoscope, The Saturday Review, Night Waves, Front Row – but by the mid-nineties he had tired of the superficiality that goes with turning out copy and attracting an audience, and so, for not much less than thirty years, he earned a meagre living writing books he never expected would sell in high numbers.

The range of his subject matter is stunning: the language of cinema, great voyages, Lawrence of Arabia, vampires, Egyptian archaeology and, of course, the natural and cultural history of the moose. Among those that have meant most to me I’d like to name two: Humphrey Jennings (2004), the biography of another polymath, best-known as the visionary maker of docu 48

mentary films about London during the war, and Constellation of Genius (2012), an alphabetical survey of 1922, the year in which Modernism took off.

And of course, there was another polymath he wrote about. The Worlds of John Ruskin (2009) is that improbable thing, a brief account of our first Master’s complex life and achievement. Increasingly, this is the book one recommends to new readers of Ruskin. It is not only short, but lively, lucid and readable. It is also, thanks to collaboration with Stephen Wildman, then Director of the Ruskin Library at Lancaster, wonderfully well illustrated.

The Worlds of John Ruskin was not Kevin’s only approach to the arch-polymath. Quite as important were the Ruskin comics, collected together as Bloke’s Progress (2018), to which Howard Hull pays tribute on page XX, and it is also worth reminding Companions of another A-Z – this one for your coat pocket – A Ruskin Alphabet (2000), which will tell you about everything from Art to Zoology, to say nothing of Etymology and Pubic hair.

I have tried to sum up a man who included multitudes.

He has, as I should have known, eluded me. I already miss him more than I could have imagined. I also feel that, of course, he must be somewhere here among us still. As someone said on hearing of his death: “He was a life force.’”

PICTURE BY PETER CARPENTER

Kevin Jackson 1955 - 2021 Clive Wilmer also wrote Kevin's obituary for The Times, which was shortened when it appeared. This is the full version.

KEVIN Jackson’s short book Moose (2009) is about a species and its significance for human culture and society. Full of insight, wit and out-of-the-way learning, it is also beneath the surface oddly personal. For Moose was Jackson’s nickname, which, earned early in life, stayed with him to the end. He was a big man, handsome and verbally fluent, with a mighty laugh and huge capacities, slightly out of scale with his surroundings, like a friendly beast that has wandered

into the room or the conversation. It went with the energy and generosity that many of his friends have remarked upon since his death: “I thought he was indestructible,” said one. “He was an Ode to Joy,” wrote another.

Not many people have been members of both the Guild of St George (the earnest charity founded by John Ruskin) and the London Institute of ‘Pataphysics (a zany society of latter-day French surrealists), but the Moose was. In much the same way, the variety of the topics he wrote about seemed infinite. He consumed books voraciously, ingested quantities of learning >

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> and language at great speed and went from one project to another with unfailing energy. It was always delightful to be with him when he held forth.

His learning was lightly worn, his tastes were wide and generous, and he was blessed with a vivid sense of humour.

Kevin Jackson, as he often reminded you in the local accent, was “transpontine” – a South Londoner.

He was born in Tooting in 1955. Alec Jackson, his adored father, was a Colonel in the Life Guards and Riding Master of the Household Cavalry. His mother was Alma Dorothy Louise Jackson (née Rolfe). He studied at Emanuel School in Wandsworth (1966-73) and Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he took a First in English in 1977. He then embarked on an abortive PhD and ended up at Vanderbilt University, Tennessee, where he taught and studied from 1980 to 1982. The thesis was to have been about the annus mirabilis of Modernist literature, 1922, a subject which was to provide, much later on, an outstanding book, Constellation of Genius (2012). He did eventually earn a Cambridge PhD in recognition of his publications.

Returning from Nashville, Jackson trained as a producer for the BBC and soon began producing arts programmes, first for Radio 4, then BBC 2. In 1987 he joined the staff of The Independent, then the great hope of quality journalism, where he soon became Associate Arts Editor. Jackson was a wonderful journalist, discovering new voices and championing neglected gems. but in 1993 this ceased to be the main source of income. Instead, he dedicated his life to writing books; occasionally potboilers but, more often than not, vehicles for his grand passions.

At a dinner party in Oxford in 1990, he met and fell in love with the American literary scholar Claire Preston, who soon afterwards became a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where the pair married in 2004. They moved into a house they christened “Moosebank” in the village of Linton near the source of the Cam. Within the range of Jackson’s work, it is probably his books on cinema that are best known.

His knowledge of the medium was vast. There is an A-Z called The Language of Cinema (1998). There is Schrader on Schrader (1990), his book-length interview with the director and screenwriter who wrote Taxi Driver. There are three British Film Institute monographs on films that were points of reference in his conversation: Lawrence of Arabia 50

(2007), Withnail and I (2008) and Nosferatu (2013).

Above all, there is Humphrey Jennings (2004), his luminous biography of the maker of such great wartime documentaries as Diary for Timothy. This is a major work of cultural history.

Jennings – poet, painter, social analyst and surrealist innovator as well as director – was one of Jackson’s tutelary heroes. Others include Coleridge, Ruskin, André Breton, Anthony Burgess and Iain Sinclair – all intensely productive, polymathic enthusiasts spurred on by some vision of a better world. Jackson never seems to have quite believed he belonged in their company – though in Sinclair’s London Orbital (2004), a voyage of discovery around the M25, he emerges as a hero in his own right.

Jackson was a humanist of the old school, though one enamoured of David Bowie and the pop trio ‘I, Ludicrous’. His best books offer what the student or general reader needs, but few nowadays provide.

Many Victorianists, for instance, will tell you that The Worlds of John Ruskin (2009) is the best short introduction there is to its subject’s complex life. It is typical of Jackson that he also wrote the text for a series of comics by the graphic artist Hunt Emerson, in which a latter-day everyman, Darren Bloke, encounters the spirit of Ruskin and is stunned to find how relevant he is. The comics are collected in Bloke’s Progress (2019).

Some of Jackson’s most recent work features on audiobooks – a series on famous voyages, for example – and he made a series of films out of his life-long obsession with the occult and the lore of vampires.

The audiobook Legion is his study of the most complex of his heroes, T.E. Lawrence, a man of action with the soul of a poet. He was not the only fascinating figure to haunt Jackson’s capacious imagination. For Jackson was multitudes: poet, translator, voyager, bon viveur, scholar, true companion, moose lookalike. We shall miss all of him.

Howard Hull writes: Kevin Jackson was a force of nature, a man with a huge heart, full of joy in life and kindness to others.

He was deep thinking, endlessly inquisitive and laughed with the power of an army of souls. It made complete sense that when I talked to him about translating Ruskin's ideas into something like an adventure in a series of cartoons he immediately seized the idea and invented the concept of a Ruskin

comic book, 'Bloke's Progress'. Kevin knew exactly how an impasse in tackling a particular idea he would turn to bring Ruskin into the present by partnering him with full circle and come at it from a completely different a modern-day everyman, Darren Bloke. He also knew direction, always better. the comic genius we needed on board, Hunt Emerson.

Throughout, Kevin gave of his time and affection And so an amazing partnership was born. for us and for what we were trying to do, freely. He was Kevin and Hunt, powering through Ruskin's ideas, a good friend who lit up the times we worked together far from dumbing them down, made glorious sunshine and whenever he re-appeared, red wine and new project out of them. Kevin was a joy to work with for as long as in hand. The Ruskin world owes him a tremendous my liver could stand the pace. For him working with debt. Pick up a copy of Bloke's Progress and share in his others was always something to celebrate. He never energy, humour and humanity. once balked at having an idea questioned. If we reached

One Who Could Have been a Companion Lawrence Ferlinghetti 1920-2021

to be a painter, but he instead co-founded City Lights bookstore, which popularized inexpensive paperback

by Kathleen González books for all. Probably best-known for his poetry book A Coney Island of the Mind (1958), which has never been out “Be committed to something outside yourself.” of print, he was also put on trial for publishing Allen Lawrence Ferlinghetti Ginsberg’s Howl, winning a verdict that secured freedom ON February 22, 2021, the world lost the pacifistof speech for publishers. Ferlinghetti later became San activist poet, just a few weeks shy of his 102nd birthday.

Francisco’s first poet laureate, serving from 1998-2000.

Ferlinghetti, who wrote his Masters thesis on John RusFerlinghetti earned his Masters degree at Columbia kin, could have been a Companion, as many of his interUniversity in 1947, composing his thesis titled Ruskin’s ests and activities intersect with the Guild of St. Turner: Child of Light. In it, Ferlinghetti outlines the George’s beliefs. many references Ruskin makes to light in his writings In Poetry as Insurgent Art, (1975) Ferlinghetti wrote: about J.M.W. Turner’s paintings. The thesis is replete “Have wide-angle vision, each look a world glance. Exwith quotes from Ruskin’s Modern Painters as well as press the vast clarity of the outside world, the sun that sees us lines of poetry from Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and all, the moon that sees us all, the moon that strews its shadows other Romantic poets whose writing he compares to on us, quiet garden ponds, willows where the hidden thrush Turner’s painting. Ferlinghetti shows convincingly that sings, dusk falling along the riverrun, and the great spaces that Ruskin so highly prized Turner’s use of color and light, open out upon the sea .high tide and the heron’s call .. And the and that these two elements bring out the Divine in nature, that Ruskin placed Turner at the apogee of the panpeople, the people, yes, all around the earth, speaking Babel theon of modern painters; however, that opinion was tongues. Give voice to them all.” somewhat tempered in Ruskin’s later years when his obThe reverence for natural spaces, the valuing of all session with light had diminished somewhat. In numercreatures, the desire to let all of them speak for themous places Ferlinghetti also comments on Ruskin’s highselves echo from these words. Just as Ruskin wrote ly embellished writing style, even offering that, in the about Venice, “I would endeavor to trace the line of this hands of the right publisher, Ruskin’s prose could be arimage before it be for ever lost”, Ferlinghetti’s poetry ranged to read like poetry (especially interesting because likewise urges readers to pay attention before it’s too Ferlinghetti favored prose poetry himself). late, as in his repetition of the “rebirth of wonder” seen in Ferlinghetti went on to earn a doctorate at the Sorhis poem I Am Waiting. bonne with the paper The City as Symbol in Modern Poetry.

Though Ferlinghetti had served on a WWII Navy His friend, the poet Gary Snyder said of Ferlinghetti in submarine chaser and was present at D-Day, he later 2009: “His particular brand of highly reasoned, highly eschewed war. After visiting Nagasaki, Japan, in the afintelligent but witty political activism ..he has carried termath of the atomic bomb, Ferlinghetti said, “It made that in his life and in his poetry effectively but lightly me into a lifelong pacifist.” He moved to San Francisco through his whole career.”

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Written by Hand: the Guild Calligrapher Companion Terry Johnson, who inscribes the names of new Companions into the Guild's Roll, explains the origins of his passion for architecture and calligraphy.

LOUTH is where it really all began but even before that, as a pupil at Clee Grammar School, Cleethorpes, I had been cursorily introduced to Calligraphy as part of the O level art course. I’d always had a neat hand at school and it clicked with me. The art master, Tom Robinson, allowed us to use his own personal art library where I came across a fairly rudimentary History of Architecture and I recall being quite enthralled by the classical “Orders” of Architecture. And so were born the two loves of my life (notwithstanding my wife, I hasten to

add).

On leaving school, I started work in an architectural practice in Louth, as I simultaneously pursued my architectural career via a course of external study through the RIBA (not an easy route).

Some of the first exercises required were free-hand sketches and the drawing of St. James’ Church, Louth, was one of these, together with a pen drawing 52

of one of the Apostles carved on the pulpit. My history of the church in verse form came later and was calligraphed to accompany the drawing.

In fact, a close friend, who recently ended his captaincy of a local golf club, asked me to put the two together as a “thank-you” gift to the club’s steward, who later opened a high-class restaurant in the former public library building of Louth and took the gift with him. Not wanting to disturb the interiors of this Grade 2* Listed Building, my piece now hangs above a splendid “throne” – the first time I have exhibited in a Gents toilet (if you know what I mean) and so, to a limited audience. Some years later, and having given up the day job to do so, I graduated from Leeds School of Architecture as a qualified architect with my final year Design project for ‘New

Civic Assembly Rooms for Cleethorpes’, sited on the sea front, strongly linking to my roots.

In the early days of my career, I was technically an architectural assistant and it is said that architects’ drawings are a means to an end, and so they are, but I vowed to produce the best drawings that I could. I did just that and had a good reputation for doing so. Of course, these were pre-CAD days and

architecture.

so all drawing and annotation was done by hand but I never did go down the computer route and continued with my hand drawing – consolidating my reputation and obtaining commissions because of that. I just thoroughly enjoyed the whole process.

Even after retirement, the drawing continues, frequently and prominently featuring Lettering as part of my ARTchitecture brand. I am also a keen supporter of the world wide Urban Sketchers fraternity.

The drawing of Lincoln Cathedral’s west face came about many years later via a visit to some friends in Barnetby-le-Wold and a trip to Lincoln with a walk around the castle ramparts.

This too was nostalgic as I had attended Lincoln Art School to facilitate my architectural studies and sketches were done around that area as well as preparing some “measured drawings” of the façade of the Wren Library and a bay of the Cathedral cloisters (all as part of these early studies).

I have often thought, that had I not been an architect, I might have been a stone mason (but maybe not a ‘Jude the Obscure’) and thus, had a different life altogether. The calligraphy continues too with work both for my own pleasure and with many varied commissions, a number of which have come about via the wonderful area in which I have lived for five decades, on the edge of the Lake District. The scenery and local history have initiated many pieces of work, the Shepherds’ Counting (Yan, Tyan, Tethera, etc) being a firm favourite over the last 25 years and copies of which are now all over the world.

My right hand has received its Warhol “15 minutes of fame” by being filmed writing with a quill as a standin for an actor playing the part of David Hume as part of a BBC programme on the Enlightenment. A most intriguing experience.

Here, up north, it all continues to this day – NULLA DIES SINE LINEA (no day without a line) – but the call of Lincolnshire still echoes around.

Accompanying the cathedral drawing are the words of a song – The Angels of Lincoln – penned by John Conolly, a founder member of the original Grimsby Folk Song Club, who willingly gave his permission to use them.

His words have a genuine and moving affinity with the

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BOOK REVIEWS DRAWING LESSONS

An Instinct to Draw: John Ruskin’s Drawings in the Ashmolean Museum

by Stephen Wildman Ashmolean Museum, Oxford £20 IN 1870 – a year before launching what was to become the Guild of St George – Ruskin took up his appointment as the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford. The importance of this new role cannot be exaggerated. Art had never before been a subject for study at an English university and what Ruskin was to do with the role cannot have been obvious. All he was required to do was lecture, but what were the lectures to deal with and was anything to follow from them? I imagine he was expected to deal with the history of art, and he certainly fulfilled that expectation, but he was unwilling – even unable – to separate art from its subject matter in the world, or the history of art from the practice of it.

His experience as a teacher was mainly as a drawing master and, consistent with the views expressed in his writings, he thought the first duty of art teachers was to help their pupils to see. Seeing meant primarily seeing nature, which Ruskin understood as seeing particular things, not through the lenses of custom and convention, but as they really are. There was nothing to be gained in teaching someone to draw if they could not see the object to be drawn; once their eyes were opened, 54

however, the task of drawing would then help them to see that object better. This was not, moreover, a purely practical matter. Ruskin valued what he called “admiration”: the sense of wonder in the face of what is beautiful. “I would rather teach drawing that my pupils may learn to love Nature,” he wrote, “than teach the looking at Nature that they may learn to draw.” It followed that you could not truly appreciate the great masters – the Turners and Tintorettos – without recognition of their truthfulness and their feeling for what they saw.

Those who knew Ruskin cannot have been surprised that he interpreted his duties in this way.

But I doubt if anyone anticipated that he would then go on – as he did in that first year – to found, at his own expense, a drawing school with a salaried Master, so that students of Classics or Mathematics could at no further cost to themselves learn to draw.

The Ruskin School of Drawing is now exactly what he did not want it to be – the Ruskin School of Art, where art students study the things they study in art schools across the country – and the extraordinary collection of examples Ruskin assembled for the students, pedagogically organised into four series, is safely lodged in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, where it can be seen on application but, as far as I know, is never used for teaching.

Companion Stephen Wildman estimates that the examples I refer to amount to roughly 1,000 items, of which about 300 are drawings by Ruskin himself. It is worth reflecting on this simple fact. This is one of the two large collections of Ruskin drawings in the UK, the other being the Ruskin Whitehouse Collection at Lancaster University, which was until recently in Wildman’s care. It is, however, the only one planned, catalogued and designed by Ruskin himself, and many if not most of the drawings in it were made for inclusion in it. The collection therefore suggests a pleasing paradox. It is itself a work of art of some complexity, though the pictures in it were never meant to be art works, but a set of examples for use in day-to-day teaching.

In 1988 the Ashmolean published an excellent little book called Ruskin’s Drawings in the Ashmolean Museum by the distinguished art historian Nicholas Penny. It includes reproductions of some 30 drawings, most of them much more famous now than they were when the book was published. The Museum has now replaced this with something more like an exhibition catalogue compiled by Wildman.

An Instinct to Draw: John Ruskin’s Drawings in the

Ashmolean Museum, though modest in appearance, is for your desk or your coffee-table rather than your pocket.

Eighty-five drawings are reproduced, a little less than a third of the collection and almost all of them of the highest quality. The spectacular Kingfisher with dominant Reference to Colour – on Penny’s front cover – is on the back cover of this and most of the pictures which Penny selected are also included in it. There are one or two surprises, however. Not everyone will know the extraordinary abstract pattern Ruskin reveals in his Enlarged Drawing of the Extremity of a Kingfisher’s Wing Feather, which seems to have preceded his study of the bird as a whole and not, as one might have expected, Portrait of Mary Constance Hillard, 1872.

Pencil 57.5cm x40cm, Ashmolean Museum single out perhaps the Study of a Piece of Brick, to show Cleavage in Burnt Clay and An Exercise on the Colour of a Common Snail-Shell. Such concentrated attention seems to partake of the mystical, like Blake seeing a world in a grain of sand.

Enlarged Drawing of the Extremity of a Kingfisher’s Wing Feather, c 1870-72. Pencil, watercolour and bodycolour 34cm x 44.7cm. Ashmolean Museum grown out of it. There are also more conventional things of a kind one does not normally associate with Ruskin – the beautiful pencil portrait of Connie Hilliard, for instance, and a finished Swiss landscape Evening in Autumn under the Castle of Habsburg.

The selection of drawings is hardly to be flawed. As Wildman indicates in his introduction, every type of Ruskin drawing is represented. As well as the nature studies I have already mentioned, there are the expected flower drawings, a generous gathering of Alpine views and a set of wild creatures from the London Zoo and the Natural History Museum; there are architectural drawings, copies after favourite masters and three fine examples of letter-cutting.

Some drawings are simple records of circumstance; others are rich with symbolic significance – though, indeed, almost anything that Ruskin touches seems to tremble on the edge of some larger meaning. There are Like a number of other Swiss views by Ruskin – rapid watercolours, capturing cloud formations or the none of them in this book – this picture has a historical changing colours of dawn, and there are slow and labour and cultural dimension important in his thinking but not -intensive long-term studies, such as the copy after in many of his drawings. Ruskin is rarely a landscape Bernardino Luini, which Ruskin worked on over a period painter in the way that his hero Turner is. His views are of seven weeks. not populated and the accidental collisions of nature with Each drawing is accompanied by a description. society are mostly avoided. He praises Turner for These are without exception vivid and absorbing. accepting the litter in his streets and rivers but mostly Ruskin’s life and work are exceptionally welleschews it himself. Instead, his forte is for the nature documented and Wildman, probably the most learned study, which may be elaborate (as in the kingfisher or scholar of his drawings now alive, uses our wide various studies of mountains) but, increasingly when working for the Drawing School, is intensely particular knowledge to good effect. But he never writes to deter the ordinary layman, and every description is buttressed and without context, often concerned only with tiny with anecdotes and quotations that make this book – details – leaves, twigs, shells, stones and so on. Such already a delight to the eye – a delight to read. drawings are abundant here and one would want to CLIVE WILMER 55

BOOK REVIEWS SUNSET SONG

Sunset Over Herne Hill Ruskin and South London Jon Newman and Laurence Marsh published by the Herne Hill Society and Backwater Books £14.50 MANY Companions will have enjoyed the updated edition of the late Dr Jim Dearden’s John Ruskin’s Camberwell, in 2020. Having had a small involvement with its publication (taking the contemporary photos, and publicising the book in the Camberwell area), I was intrigued when the local Herne Hill Society told me it would be producing its own book on Ruskin’s South London connections.

This has been published remarkably quickly as Sunset Over Herne Hill, and is largely written by Lambeth archivist Jon Newman, who curated a local exhibition and led Ruskin-themed walks during the Ruskin200 commemorations in 2019. A final chapter, on Herne and Denmark Hills as Ruskin would have known them (1823 to around 1890), has been contributed by the Society’s Vice Chair, Laurence Marsh.

Having lived on the edge of Herne Hill for the last three years, I was curious to see this new take on the relationship between Ruskin and the place we’ve both called home. With the polymath’s final house – Brantwood, near Coniston in the Lake District – open to visitors, while his family’s South London properties have long been demolished, awareness of Ruskin’s connections to the area where he spent most of his life has arguably diminished, and as a former scholar of the Gothic I’ve been interested in moves to address this since I moved here.

Some of the book’s themes are familiar to me from the exhibition and other reading but are expanded on compellingly here: the enrichment 56

Ruskin gained from the home, garden and mainly rural surroundings of his young days, and his responses to the building of the Crystal Palace, South London’s many railway lines, and commuter houses like (or much better than) the one I live in. Newman paints a lively and well-rounded picture of the passions and prejudices of Ruskin’s day-to-day life, and the diverse ways in which they impacted his work.

Even at the start of his residency, as a small child in 1823, Herne Hill and its continuation, Denmark Hill, were becoming a country enclave for prosperous businessmen moving their families out of bustling central London. When the Ruskins joined the exodus, both roads were lined with substantial detached piles, occupied by families the writer later mocked as showy nouveau riche (despite his own father’s occupation as a successful sherry dealer).

This context, and Ruskin’s engagement with its natural and increasingly man-made elements, is likely to absorb anyone interested in Ruskin’s biography or the foundations of his thought.

The book’s last chapter, which documents the now wholly altered suburb as it would have been in Ruskin’s day, is perhaps more fascinating to those of us who know it, but its inclusion is fully justified in an area-specific book published largely for a local audience. The writing throughout is accessible and engaging and the manageable chapters form a useful, relatable primer for Ruskin more generally; I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it as a companion to Jim Dearden’s more personal biographical volume.

JO NIGHTINGALE

IN HARMONY The Ins and Outs of Public Lettering, Kindersley Inscriptions in the Open Marcus Waithe, Lida Lopes Cardozo Kindersley & Thomas Sherwood Cardozo Kindersley £15 WHY do I think that everyone who cares about the beauty and interest of our villages, towns and cities should read this book? Good lettering matters, first in order to provide clear communication in a public context and secondly because good lettering – in this instance letter-cutting – has the capacity to provide an immediate sense of harmony and well-being across a wide spectrum of contexts ranging from the name of a street to a poignant memorial whether of an individual or a whole community of individuals

sample of Ministry of Transport lettering – equally badly spaced.” David Kindersley, with his sharp “seeing eye”, surely influenced by John Ruskin, had the insight to realise that it was not only the letters but the spaces between them that were important. The whole story is told in another Cardozo Kindersley publication, Optical Letter Spacing, 2001, but suffice it to say here that because of David Kindersley’s insight and passion for lettering the city of Cambridge has what is most likely the clearest and most satisfying street signs in the world, though undoubtedly it has had a widespread influence elsewhere. Mercifully also, and thanks to David’s such as the war memorial on the west wall of the chapel advocacy, many of the distinguished cast-iron street of Trinity College, Cambridge, illustrated on pages 104signs survived. Birmingham also has very fine and 105. This memorial was carried out in 1951 by David distinctive cast-iron street signs and they are always at Kindersley and his assistants, it was cut in situ in risk of being replaced by inferior ones.

Portland stone, and it comprises 4050 letters. Literally a “master piece”, but then the same could be said of many David’s influence on lettering has been profound, of the examples given in this masterly little book. not only through what has come through the Workshop but also because of the apprentices who have learned Who was David Kindersley who died in 1995? He their skills from him and then Lida. One of David’s was a prodigiously gifted sculptor and letter-cutter, apprentices was his son Richard Kindersley, who set up apprenticed to Eric Gill in 1934, setting up on his own his own workshop in London, and whose work may be after two years. Following the second World War he seen in and around St Paul’s Cathedral and many other established a new Workshop in 1946, in Barton, sites. Richard has also run, year after year, a summer Cambridgeshire, later re-establishing the present school in stone carving at Cromarty on the Black Isle Workshop in a former infants’ school on the edge of where is one of his finest works, the Emigrants’ Stone.

Cambridge. His widow, Lida Lopes Cardozo Kindersley, now the consummate master cutter, continues to run At this point I would like to pay tribute to the that Workshop, and to train apprentices, aiming always design of the book which makes it very easy and pleasant for the highest standards in design and execution. to follow the points which Marcus Waithe, a Companion Supporting her role is her husband Graham Beck, who of the Guild of St George, is making in his text. Pages 17 has run the administrative side of the Workshop for a and 18 are a good example of that. The text is explaining good while, and is a Companion of the Guild of St how many and how varied are the notable institutions George. for which Cardozo Kindersley have provided the lettering. On the opposite side there is a fine image of I had the great joy of visiting them in the mid-1970s Lida with the architect Sir Colin St John Wilson, during the twenty-two years I worked for the Council designer of The British Library (close to St Pancras for the Care of Churches and the Cathedrals Fabric Station), with the gateway to the Library behind them: Commission for England. During the whole of that time, on the sandstone arch the first letter “T” is two metres I nurtured our Register of Artists of Craftsmen and high. Within the sandstone archway the metal gate has organised an annual conference which we called The “British Library” in letters which have wide spaces Creative Artist and the Church. David, then, and Lida, between them at the top and then become progressively now, continue to inspire me to grasp whatever narrower as they descend, tier by tier, with the words opportunities come our way to encourage the survival, “British” and “Library” alternating. Looking back to the revival and active flowering of craftsmanship today. text page there are two tiny precious archive images of The ‘Ins and Outs’ of the title refer to entrances and the letter-cutting in progress, on scaffolding high up on departures, and ‘Out’ perhaps also refers to the fact that the structure. the examples are mostly but not entirely in outdoor There is great emphasis on the Workshop’s practice public places. The most public of all lies in the names of in cutting letters in situ. This must entail an element of the streets of Cambridge. One morning in 1947 David risk, not least from the British weather, but must also Kindersley “woke to find the unique and characterful cast promote a deep engagement with the project on the part -iron street names being replaced by a particularly bad of every member of the Workshop team. On p.47 > 57

> Marcus Waithe memorably refers to ‘the kinds of exposure – including the bracing effects of wind on a chisel grip – to which public letters and letterers are subject.’

To give the flavour of Marcus Waithe’s insightful and harmonious style of writing it is essential to provide an example and since I want to promote the use of fine lettering in public places, I have chosen the following observation inspired by the frieze of a handsome Memorial Hall in Pickering, Yorkshire: Inscriptions that fulfil public functions need to be concise, direct, legible, and in several ways incisive. But letters in the open do more than convey information; or, at least, they communicate across a broader spectrum than the literal meaning of a text. This comes down to an expanded idea of what reading actually is. The best inscriptions give us permission to slow down. Our eyes are detained by qualities of material, by the varied depth of cut, by a sense of delight or surprise in the setting. They resist the usual informational tug propelling us toward the end of a sentence. Reading in the open becomes, in this way, an act of contemplation.

The same applies at the level of the making, so that cutting letters in stone becomes a kind of meditative practice.. (pp.25-29).

A work well known to me is the circular commemorative stone (actually a sea-green slate from Kirkstone) towards the west end of Orford church where Benjamin Britten’s Noyes Fludde and four ‘church operas’ were first performed. It was cut

by David and Lida in 1982 and is a great masterpiece in its own right, though easily susceptible to damage.

David used to say that “the floor is a great unexplored area”. Therefore, in villagescapes and townscapes, it represents something of an opportunity whereas in churches and cathedrals we are already used to seeing ledger-stones set in the floor, often with superb lettering and carved heraldry. My all-time favourite from the Workshop is the immense ledger-stone commemorating the medieval abbots of St Albans Abbey in the Choir of what is now the Cathedral & Abbey Church of St Alban.

There are references to John Ruskin here and there, as one might expect from a Companion. The Workshop furnished the external inscription on the former Ruskin Gallery, Norfolk Street, Sheffield, with letters of marine plywood stating: “Founded 1875 The Ruskin Gallery Reopened 1985”. Inside, now in the Millennium Gallery, in Sheffield, was an 58

inscription on green slate of stupendous magnificence with the words “The Ruskin Gallery” interwoven with a floriated pattern worthy of a medieval manuscript, which was one of Ruskin’s great interests as a collector, and from which he considered – rightly – that we could still draw rich inspiration.

Colour and gilding are conspicuous in the work of the Cardozo Kindersley Workshop, as they have been since Greek and Roman antiquity. The Ruskin Gallery stone is an example of the lavish use of gilding which prompts Marcus Waithe to observe that it hints “at an overbrimming joy in learning.

Entering in this way becomes a mode of re-thinking, redolent of the Delphic admonition”.

Examples are also chosen to show how letter-

David Kindersley at work at the British Library KINDLY SUPPLIED BY THE CARDOZO KINDERSLEY WORKSHOP

cutting can transform the humblest of buildings such as the long lintel stone over the doors of a barn on the Isle of Colonsay, Argyll, and a relief carving for Aldrich’s Brush Factory, in Diss, Norfolk.

restrained, a unifying feature is the complete absence of morbidity. Good design is essential, but so too is a willingness to gesture towards character, to register what the deceased cared about.”

I constantly observe how an inscription can tell us in a few words the historical significance of a place; and we are given the example of the enclosing wall of the Memorial Court of Clare College, Cambridge which tells (what had been almost entirely forgotten) that “Here in the first Eastern General Hospital 70,000 casualties were treated between 1914 & 1919.” An element of beauty, interest and significance has been added in 2016 in a way that relates to the centenary years around 1916. The letters were cut into the existing wall – which should often be possible – and painted dark red, with gilded marks between each word.

A wonderful example is the ledger over the recently established burial place of the poet William Blake in Bunhill Fields, executed in 2018 in Portland stone, a stone much used in the City of London.

Marcus Waithe concludes his essay by saying that “when the contract between patron and maker exceeds its usual bounds” it produces “a kind of radiant wealth”, clearly a conscious echo of Ruskin’s “No wealth but life”.

I can only urge anyone who reads these words to buy this book, to give it as a present, and to mention it with affection and enthusiasm wherever you go. Others in the series published by Cardozo Kindersley, focusing The last major topic raised is that of the Workshop’s on carving and especially letter-cutting, have also given memorial work. I have long been a patron of an me immense pleasure over the years. Favourites of mine organisation originally called Memorials by Artists and include Sundials – Cutting Time (the art and science of 27 one of the inspiring ideas behind it is the dialogue Kindersley dials), Cutting Through Nature and, of between the bereaved and the artist, sculptor or letterextraordinary resonance and relevance at the present cutter, so that what is executed is a grave marker which time, Remembered Lives. But this soaring marriage of is individual to that person commemorated, of a material words and images in Public Lettering makes it one of the appropriate to that location, and, as Marcus Waithe puts very best. it, “letters that respect valuable materials by harnessing PETER BURMAN the qualities of stone to the full. Whether exuberant or 59

Afterword WE hope very much that you have enjoyed reading this anthology of writing and imagery created by Guild Companions and friends during 2021.

After the disruption in our lives, and in the life and activity of the Guild, over the last two years, we decided that we would take a new approach to creating a magazine, digital in this instance, by pulling together articles and images that were offered by Companions over the course of the 2021 calendar year, either for newsletters, the website, online discussion events or in response to a call out for new contributions.

As a result, this Review does not seek to be a comprehensive summary of the Guild’s year, or to cover all topics and territories in which the Guild was involved in 2021. It is entirely Companion -led in content, rather than being planned and commissioned by an Editor.

That said, Companion Peter Day has volunteered to do something equally as important, which is to bring order and logic to the layout and design of the magazine, which he has done with his customary combination of rigour and a light touch, and we are immensely grateful to Peter for this.

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As you reflect on what you’ve read, if there are topics and themes that you would like to have seen in here, matters that are important to you and that you think other Companions could or should engage with, then please consider writing about them yourself for our next edition, likely to cover 2022.

All voices are welcome – personal and professional, eloquent and sparing, scholarly and practical, expert and amateur. Please don’t ever underestimate the value of sharing your passions and concerns with other Companions, whether via our regular e-newsletter, our website and social media channels or in physical gatherings; what we might each take for granted in our own life and work can often be a revelation to others, sparking a dialogue or an action that makes new things possible.

Thank you to everyone who took the time and trouble to submit something that you now see reproduced here. Any constructive thoughts for the future are always welcome, via email at: communications@guildofstgeorge.org.uk.

Simon Seligman Membership & Communications June 2022

Planet Earth 2100

by Linda Iles

Earth 2100 is as beautiful as ever, but where are the Arctic and Greenland ice caps? Low-lying lands have been flooded – goodbye Holland and Bangladesh.

New, destructive weather systems move across the globe.

Planet Earth is fine but will humanity survive mass migrations and conflicts over diminishing resources?

GUILD OF ST GEORGE