NOTES
There are no notes for this chapter yet. Some of the notes on other pages are based on info YOU send me. |
I've called this chapter 'The Settled Era' because I think of the move to Hammersmith in 1989 as the beginning of the settled, 'respectable' and at times relatively prosperous life of the past 24 years.
! completed my three years at Heythrop College in the Summer of 1992, graduating in Philosophy & Theology after three years of what I now remember only as a jumble of lectures of variable quality, much essay writing in the beautiful maze of a library, and very much wine. Heythrop is (or was - it has since moved) a very small college housed in an 18-century building which, apart from the library, was all staircases, narrow corridors, little seminar rooms and cupboards. Most of these cupboards seemed to be used for storing bottles of wine - wine which flowed freely at any possible excuse, and many excuses were possible. These excuses tended to be called 'receptions', though I was never quite sure who or what was being received, apart from wine. I, of course, was perfectly happy with this generosity, without ever finding out who was responsible for it. Whenever the wine wasn't flowing, there was always the George, a favourite watering-hole of BBC radio stars in the past, next door to Broadcasting House and a stone's throw from the College, which was in Cavendish Square. |
| While at Heythrop, I decided it would be a good idea to supplement my student grant by returning to a career that had begun, but soon stalled, twice previously - that of life model (see chapters 75 & 80). Angela had now returned to it (between attending a variety of academic courses in various subjects and in various institutions) and had re-established contact after many years with Miss Vanek. You can read about Miss Vanek and her domination of the London life modelling scene in her obituary on the website of the Register of Artists' Models. Suffice it to say that once you were on her books and provided you stayed in her good books, work came fast enough to fill all the time you had available. I quickly built up a reputation, comparable to Angela's, as a very good life model, able to hold difficult poses for long periods, or to do very athletic ('dynamic') short poses. Gone were the inhibitions that had troubled me in the earlier attempts to get into the business (Chapter 80 again). I began to make a science of posing, as well as an art, and tried to familiarize myself as much as possible with art history. With a demanding tutor (and they jolly well should be demanding) life modelling is hard physical work, and I found it a great antidote to the endless airy-fairy agonizing over whether tables exist (why is it only tables whose existence falls under suspicion in philosophy seminars?) or whether there is any meaning in the concept of right and wrong. |
| When I finally escaped from the vinous abstraction of Heythrop, damaged to the extent that, to this day, all I know is that nothing is known or knowable (except that nothing is known or knowable (except that ...)) I found myself modelling full-time. Well, rather more than full-time, actually. By the mid-nineties, I was putting in up to 60 hours a week of actual posing in term-time, mainly for schools, colleges of further and adult education and art clubs, but rarely for the major schools of art - they had long since given up life drawing, in the main. Added to the hours of posing were the many hours spent whizzing all over London on the Tube, the Overground and buses (or walking when there was no more than a couple of miles to be done) to the various assignments. I learned far more about the geography of London than I had ever known before. |
| These were boom times for artists' models, because there was an idea in the educational establishment that life drawing should come into just about everything, an idea encouraged by Prince Charles as much as anybody. As well as for art students, I posed for students of bookbinding, media studies, jewellery-making, leather-work, furniture-making, drama - almost anything with a creative content. In addition, many firms arranged life drawing sessions for their employees - Sony, Tussaud's and the people who make those '2's for BBC2 among them. The media interest in life drawing was as keen as ever, with the result that I sometimes posed on television, was interviewed on radio and featured in newspaper and magazine articles. |
| However, there was a dark side. Pay and working conditions were atrocious - an absolute scandal. Then there was our public image, which was very poor. The job was often a subject for humour in sitcoms and you were always reading or hearing that it was the easiest job in the world, because you got paid good money for doing absolutely nothing. Well, it wasn't good money and it certainly wasn't for doing nothing. It was - and remains - a job that very few people have the stamina to do properly, all day, day after day, but it was the media treatment of us that coloured the thinking of those in charge of providing life classes - we were only worth peanuts. There was also the problem of Miss Vanek, who had the hiring and firing of models on behalf of the employers in London and the Home Counties pretty much sewn up and wasn't interested in demanding better pay and conditions. This led to a circular problem. It meant that many of the people coming into the job were totally unsuitable - incompetent, unreliable and often with attitude problems. Miss Vanek did no auditioning or vetting of any kind, and most employers in London were afraid of upsetting her, so rarely complained about models. In fact, life models were often people such as illegal immigrants, desperate for the pittance on offer. This in turn dragged down our reputation still further, which meant even less chance of fair treatment. So the quality, image and treatment problems were chasing each other round and round. |
| I got very hot under the collar about all this and decided to do a number of things about it. My first act was to alert Inland Revenue to the practice of paying models cash-in-hand. I kept quiet about this 'betrayal' for many years, as the widespread and revolutionary clamp-down that followed my contact with the Revenue caused shock and horror, even among the good and reliable models. But the fact that models now had to provide a National Insurance Number and be employed on a PAYE basis, getting paid for a session several weeks after they'd done it, meant that it would be pretty hard in future for anyone without a fairly settled way of life and also for those just wanting to supplement their Income Support illegally, to break into the business. |
| Next, I thought up the idea of running my own weekly life drawing sessions, with Angela and myself posing in them, and with occasional carefully selected 'guest' models working on a profit-sharing basis. The idea was that the remuneration from these sessions would be far higher for all of us than the usual pay. I'm happy to report that the first such weekly workshop I started is still running very successfully, although it's over a decade since I had anything to do with it. The idea of models running their own life-drawing workshops seems an obvious one, and quite a lot of models now do it, but I'm pretty sure I was the first to think of it. |
| Financially, the workshops were never quite as rewarding as we'd hoped, but they turned out to be very important for the next stage of my plan to improve the lot of the life model. In 1996 Angela and I, with two other models of great experience and high reputation, met in the Lord Moon of the Mall in Whitehall and the Register of Artists' Models was born. We began publishing a simple newsletter containing, among items of news from the life modelling scene, a list of London models we personally knew to be hard-working and reliable. Soon, many models we hadn't seen working began to apply to join, so we instituted auditioning in our own workshops. |
| By the end of the century RAM had hundreds of members all over Britain, having auditioned in regional workshops run by our regional representatives. There were also hundreds of employers - colleges, schools, art clubs and individual artists - vetted and licensed to contact our members. The comprehensive RAM Guidelines for models and employers had become recognized as the 'Bible' of the life modelling business. We had also more than doubled the average pay for life models in London, and nearly doubled it in most other parts of the UK. There was only one snag: I was now so busy as Chairman of RAM that I no longer had time to do any modelling myself. That would have been fine, had I been able to extract any salary from RAM. As it was, I was still sinking quite a lot of my own money into it, while busily campaigning for more pay for other models! This was made possible by the fact that Angela and I now had an income from other sources, due to a number of small investments that all turned out to be remarkably wise (well, just extremely lucky, actually, as we hadn't a clue what we were doing when we put our money into things). However, I eventually decided that enough was enough, especially as all my charitable efforts seemed to be drawing far more criticism than praise from our members. RAM, I decided, was going to be run as a business in future. Legally speaking, it already was, however the ethos had not been profit, but some weird combination of trade unionism and charity. By more than doubling the annual membership fee in one go and easing back on the non-profitable campaigning for better pay and conditions, I succeeded in turning it into a profitable concern - and began to attract less criticism as a perverse result. In 2007, having reached retirement age, I handed over the reins to someone else, in whose very capable hands RAM continues to grow. |
| It was not all modelling and building RAM in the '90s. For many years, we had an allotment in Barnes, on which we grew a very wide variety of vegetables and herbs. We also did quite a lot of travelling. A trip to Barcelona in 1992 was my first trip outside of Britain since the Swiss adventure of '69 (see chapters 65 & 66). After that it was Paris, Florence, Rome, Amsterdam, Moscow, St Petersberg, Budapest and a Nile cruise, taking in Aswan, Luxor and Abu Simbel. |
| My mother died, after a short illness, in 2000, at the age of 90. She had lived in High Barnet for 60 years, and over that time had been known to a large number of people in the town and made many friends. She had also been part of a very large family, through marriage. So at the funeral, which was attended by just myself, Angela, Walter and a couple of residents of the sheltered housing where she had latterly lived, I had the same bleak sensation of pathetic anticlimax as at my grandmother's funeral 26 years earlier. |
| In 2003 we made the decision (another one which turned out to be very wise) to move to Wales, where we were able to buy a fairly substantial house very cheaply. That may have been the only motive right at the start, but we very soon began to feel that we had 'come home' in some strange way. We almost immediately began to learn Welsh and after attending many classes, weekend schools and Summer schools, eventually became fluent. Wales is a country with a strong national identity and I sometimes feel that I have become something of a Welsh nationalist, as well as being passionate about promoting the language. |
| Nigel Palmer (see Chapter 10) and I resumed our friendship after a gap of 40 years, after he chanced upon this website in 2003. |
| Walter Wonfor, my earliest friend (see Chapter 5), who remained a fairly constant factor throughout my life, died in 2008, at the age of 64. There are many references to him throughout the site, but I will be writing a separate special tribute before long. |
| A few months after February 2010 when, as mentioned in the first paragraph, I thought I was at last drawing this long rambling account to a close, came the undoubted highlight of life in Wales up to that point. Two years earlier it had been decided that the National Eisteddfod was to be held in our town of Ebbw Vale for the first time in over 50 years. Angela and I decided to become involved in the visual arts pavilion, so we joined the visual arts sub-committee. Each sub-committee is responsible for planning, over a two-year period, a particular part of one Eisteddfod and is made up of people from the area in which that Eisteddfod is to be held. Normally, it's expected that the proceedings of all the sub-committees should be conducted in Welsh, but that presented a big problem in our area, where very few people who can speak the language. In fact, Angela and I were the only Welsh speakers on that sub-committee. As a result, I was dragooned into being the chairman. Although we were of course obliged to conduct our meeting in English, it was necessary for the chairman to be able speak Welsh in order to present progress reports to the Executive Committee, to write the foreward to the art show catalogue and to make a speech formally opening the art show itself. |
| The visual arts project for Ebbw Vale was particularly exciting, as we were allowed the use of one of the underground bunkers of the former steelworks, on the site of which the Eisteddfod was held. After the two years of planning and all the reports, the great day arrived when I had to make the opening speech and announce the prizewinners in the various categories. It was a thrill afterwards to be congratulated on the speech by none other than the Chief Bard of Wales, although watching my perfomance on video later, I suspected he was just being kind! |