GORDON'S FINE ART

We know that Gordon was primarily an artist and a trained artist at that. He attended the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, and he exhibited twice at least in the Royal Hibernian Academy.

His first exhibition was in 1916 where he had two pieces on show. It was an unfortunate start as that was the year when the Academy itself burned to the ground during the annual exhibition.

The Easter Rising was in full swing and the Helga was shelling the GPO from its dock at the Custom House. Unfortunately the Academy was in the line of fire and got hit. Everything in the building was lost: all of the pieces on exhibition and all of the Academy's own art collection. The only thing saved was the Academy's own constitution.

Undaunted, Gordon had another piece in the following year's exhibition, The Dead Rebel, a portrait of a dead rebel which he had seen in St. Stephen's Green during the Rising. This piece subsequently hung above the fireplace in his home in Sutton until his death some thirty years later.

I don't know what of his fine art might be in the possession of individuals. I haven't been able to trace any sales. But as far as any pieces in the public realm are concerned, I only managed to find the one, the peasant woman's head at the top of this post. I must thank Dr. Margarita Cappock for finding this, buried deep in the Hugh Lane (formerly the Municipal) gallery in Parnell Square, next to where I went to school.

There seems to have been a considerable amount of Gordon's fine art in his house in Sutton when he died, including nudes from his Metropolitan School days, but these were destroyed by his estrnged wife Biddy in a bonfire in the back garden before she left to return to England, taking the children, Dolores and Richard, and their inheritance, with her.

The end result of all of this is that Gordon is now known exclusively for his cartoons, insofar as he is known at all.

This is less upsetting than it might have been as the cartoons are beautifully rendered and the artist shows through in virtually all of them.

COVERED AT LAST

I had the idea to do a book on Gordon and his cartoons after I had seen them in the National Library and after I had done my talk on him in the Library. The furthest I had got at that time was to think of a cover for the book.

My first consideration was that I would use the cartoon above on the cover as it depicts Gordon in the role of a poor artist dependent on philanthropy to finance his art. Not strictly true in his case but, given the destruction of his fine art after his death, it seemed an appropriate cartoon for the occasion.

I then toyed around a little with some text.

And there the matter rested for the next number of years.

Meanwhile, about two years ago, I got involved in Leentje Folens book about her father. And while some might consider this a distraction, it did introduce me to MS Word including layout and graphics which proved invaluable when I did finally get round to my own book.

Leentje wanted the above photo of Albert and Juliette on the cover so we went from the same starting point as where I had stalled on the Brewster book.

Leentje's daughter Juliette had produced some handwritten titles, but unfortunately they didn't translate well to the book cover.

No matter how they were arranged.

So we went for a more conventional approach on the lines of the above.

And I then adapted that for the cover for my book.

THAT WAS ENGLAND, THAT WAS !

Nowadays we, at least most of us, are fairly careful in our use of terminology when referring to "these islands". It's England for that country, Britain for the Island, and UK for the state.

But it was not always so. In my day England was shorthand for all of the above. For example, the Queen was "Queen of England". I never heard the expression Queen of the UK in my life, yet that is what she was. And more besides, as testified to by her father's title on the above 1942 thrupenny bit from my mother's wedding day.

Of course, the other bits were slowly slipping away, some of them inspired by the example of Irish independence. And today the British monarchy is down to the UK itself, a few British Commonwealth countries and a few tax-dodging overseas territories.

For me the Queen will always be Queen of England and her son King of Same.

There was also another usage in operation in Gordon Brewster's time and right through to mine. This was the Roman Catholic view of "Pagan England" the source of all of Ireland's woes.

Once the British had left after Irish independence, nationalists, or at least a significant proportion of them, assumed that they would take their dirty ways with them and Ireland would be distilled into a pure and holy nation state.

However, Brewster's cartoons give lie to that misplaced expectation as he ruthlessly pillories the flow of dirty literature from pagan England.

Just a brief personal story. It was my referring to England, when I was actually in Wales, that led to me getting my first Welsh lesson from the Welsh attendant on the Irish Mail as we sped towards London.

And while I'm into terminology I should point out that "pagan" is a misnomer. We have had the decency to label Communism "Atheistic Communism" yet we give the English credit for a belief in a clatter of Gods they have never heard of nor could name in a fit.

Funny world.

HOWTH TALK

In 2016 I gave my Brewster talk in Howth at a mere 230 metres from The Gem where Gordon died seventy years earlier.

I had taken the initiative in suggesting the talk to the local history society. I was an unknown, but I persuaded the Secretary that it would be a good idea. I gathered later that he did not always have his own way and that the Committee took some persuading.

The night went well and I treasure the Secretary's subsequent remark. He commented that had they known in advance how good the talk was, it would have avoided all the effort in persuading the Committee to take the risk with me.

Compliments come in different forms. The thing is to be alert to them.

BLISS

Sheer bliss

I know the feeling. Been there. Done that.

Coláiste Mhuire was a good school. We had an orchestra, periodically examined by an extern. But then we had the Pit Orchestra. A loose assembly of serious musicians and messers, all out to enjoy themselves accompanying whatever action was going on onstage. The sheer joy and enthusiasm of it is hard to convey. The formal stuff was onstage. The formal orchestra doing a piece by Beethoven or whoever. The quartet with its Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and endless restarts in which I played second fiddle.

But the Pit Orchestra, accompanying the onstage gymnastics, was a bit like jazz. A collection of individuals, each expressing themselves to their heart's content but producing the miracle of coherent sound, never to be repeated.

I just loved it.

So I think I can claim to empathise with Gordon Brewster and his liberated first violinist.

Gordon gets it so right.

And that is just a tiny detail in one of his political cartoons.

Get the book (forthcoming)

WHERE DID GORDON DIE?

Gordon's Death Cert
Click on image for a larger version

Wikipedia, when I looked it up, assured me that Gordon had died in Sutton. This was most likely because the writer knew that Gordon lived in Sutton, so presumably he had died there. As I know only too well from my research into family and local history, it is unwise to make assumptions and peddle them without corroboration.

As it happened, I knew only too well where Gordon had died. On the fatal day, he had left his house in Sutton and gone to Howth to buy sweets for his children. As he was purchasing the sweets in the sweetshop he collapsed and died.

Died? Or was he suddenly taken ill, was carted off to hospital only to be pronounced DOA?

Well, there was one way to find out, and that was to check out his death certificate, which is what I did

So I can now confidently state that the artist Gordon Brewster died in The Gem on Bloomsday 1946.

The Gem was a sweetshop in Howth, run by my mother between 1942 and 1949. So Gordon died in the Mammy's shop and that is why I was sort of curious about him down the years. In truth, I knew next to nothing about him except

"Gordon Brewster, the artist, died in the Mammy's shop"

Non-existent plaque

The Gem in more modern times

WHEN I MET DOLORES

It was a strange feeling, being nervous about meeting someone for the first time.

In response to my asking about the Brewster family, Honora Faul, the lady then in charge of the NLI collection of Gordon's cartoons, told me they would be over from England at the weekend and would love to meet me. Apparently they came over every so often to visit Gordon's grave in Kilbarrack.

I jumped at the opportunity and that's how I found myself sitting in my car, outside the Marine Hotel in Sutton on 23th March 2013, feeling nervous.

But why nervous? That puzzled me. I don't normally have any difficulty meeting new people. So what was going on here?

I think I finally worked it out. Gordon Brewster had been a sort of ghostly presence in the family over the years. I knew his name, that he was an artist, and that he had died in the Mammy's shop. But who was he really? What was he doing in the shop? Had he known my parents? And if so, what was the connection.

There was so much about him that I didn't know. I had fleshed him out a little bit when I went through his cartoons in the National Library, but now I was to meet the family. I desperately hoped that this meeting would lead to me getting to know Gordon better. After all, I had come to like him from being through the cartoons. What if his family didn't like me? Or me them? What then? Was that the end of the line? I figured that was what was bugging me.

In the end, I needn't have worried. Four generations of Brewsters turned up that night: Dolores, Gordon's daughter then in her eighties; Lynne, Dolores' daughter; Katrina, Lynne's daughter; and Lottie, Katrina's daughter. And we all got on like a house on fire.

Dolores was really something and she and I chatted into the night. I was to meet her again a few times over the few years until she died in 2016 and we got on so well that she was still passing on information to me virtually from her death bed; she was gone within a week of our last communication.

RIP

Flowers by Dolores