Some Notes about Arthur Berry and His Work. – Peter Morrell – HOMÉOPATHE INTERNATIONAL

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SOMES
NOTES ABOUT ARTHUR BERRY AND HIS WORK.

Some Notes about Arthur Berry and His Work.

Arthur Berry (February 7, 1925 – July 4, 1994). Born in
Smallthorne, Stoke-on-Trent, England. Playwright, poet, teacher and
artist.

Raised as the son of a publican in an industrial
district during the depths of the Depression, Berry escaped via an
education at the Burslem School of Art from age 14. Despite a rebellious
start there, he came under the care of renowned tutor Gordon Forsyth and
later gained a place at the Royal College of Art, London. After his
education he returned to Burslem to teach at the School of Art, and his
individual creative work became deeply rooted in the culture, people and
landscape of the industrial pottery town of Burslem.

His first play was staged in 1976, followed by others
and a remarkable autobiography, Three and Sevenpence Halfpenny Man. His
1979 work Lament For The Lost Pubs Of Burslem was awarded the Sony/Pye
Award for the best radio monologue of 1979. Until 1985 he held the post of
Lecturer in Painting at North Staffordshire Polytechnic. His paintings are
held in numerous private and public collections, and he is known as ‘the
Lowry of the Potteries’.

There is an annual Arthur Berry Fellowship award for
young artists, administered on behalf of his widow Cynthia Berry. An early
introduction to Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde made a great
impression, as did the many new art movements of the time. He did,
however, pursue his own path, with an individual style and means of
expressing a deep affinity with the working people and the gritty world of
the pit villages where he was born and raised.

[Above from

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Berry
]

Figure 1 Arthur Berry, Portrait

Figure 2 Arthur Berry,
Portrait

Figure 3 Arthur Berry, Man with Walking-stick

Figure 4 Arthur Berry, Autumn

Figure 5 Arthur Berry,
Landscape

Arthur Berry is more than just the ‘Lowry of the
Potteries.’ He was and remains a cultural icon of North Staffordshire
life, still revered and loved by those who knew him or who met him just
walking his dog along the canal tow-path. Even though he was in many
respects an educated intellectual, yet he retained the warmth, the common
touch, humour and manners of the working class people he had grown up
with, and who he loved and mixed with daily. In this respect he remained
truly and deeply loyal to the plebeian culture that had spawned him.

He was a lifelong pub aficionado, a pig breeder and an
agoraphobic, deeply attached to the entrenched patterns of working class
life and resentful of change and ‘progress.’ The Potteries Museum and Art
Gallery admitted to me on a recent visit to the Berry archive how
embarrassed they are that they only possess half a dozen of his works.
Many paintings were sold and just as many were lost. Apart from
obituaries, it is also embarrassing that the Hanley Local Studies Library
does not possess any of his plays or radio talks. Much has been lost.

For example, Berry describes what a load it was off his
mind when he sent several cart-loads of paintings, some large canvases, to
the local tip during the 1950s and 60s. He was a complex man tormented, it
would seem, by his gloomy art and yet deeply attached to the working class
culture of pits, pot-banks and pubs, which he had strived to depict.

Many of the characters in his pictures were common
working people he saw regularly in the pubs of Burslem. His Lament
to the Lost Pubs of Burslem is an absolute gem, a literary
masterpiece very much akin to Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood,
though narrower in scope. It vividly and amusingly depicts not only the
lost pubs of Burslem, but the passing of an entire age of British working
class life. It commemorates such life in the pubs of any northern or
midland town, or indeed of anywhere in Britain in the 50s and 60s. That is
what makes it so great. He was a keen social observer and had an almost
sociological attunement to human quirks and needs and how they play out
into the clannish and amusing behaviour of people. His work always
portrays very warmly the working people he loved very dearly. This simple
affection for place and people shines brightly through all his writings
and pictures.

Berry recalls the artistic inspiration he obtained from
“the streets of my early childhood, the moorland landscape, pit
villages, public houses, chip shops, night town and later avenue life.”
[1; 4] Lamenting change, he bemoans that, “the old wooden mangle
rollers were replaced by rubber wringers, the iron range grate by little
fancy tiled affairs, the elegant, slim paper packets of five Woodbines
disappeared…” [1; 4] He felt he had been born into a tightly
cohesive society, but “the values that had held the working class
together began to slowly be eroded.” [1; 4] He loved a world that
was filled with, “a line of shunted coal waggons…wreaths of
steam and a smell of gas…youths playing cards at the back of the old
knackers yard…old men cough in the betting shops and huge fat women
queue in the Co-op…the chain row and pit-head gear.” [1; 17]
This was a “place of empty chapels and aborted kilns,”
[1; 18] “the window cleaner with wild eyes and a mania for
gambling,” [1; 10] or indeed “an effeminate man who wears
a ginger wig…muttering to himself all day, he pushes an old pram with a
bird cage in it.” [1; 23]Lovingly, he noticed the habits of the
people: “at weekends when you are flush and filled with drink or
the prospect of drink,” [1; 24] and when one might feel “as
dry as a lime-burner’s clog.” [1; 27]

He loved “the sunken bricks of his garden path.”
[1; 26] and even a visit to the gents could become an inspiring
revelation: “as I stand piddling in the crazed urinal stall I can
see the red and green tail lights of some night plane moving across this
area of infinite velvet over the darkened hoop of the world.” [1;
79] His love of North Staffordshire was deep and permanent; he indulged an
incurable addiction to the place. He “had an inexplicable
attraction to the place and…was attached to the area by “an
invisible umbilical cord,” which could never be cut.” [2] He
said of his childhood “every house seemed to have an old woman, a
drunken man, a gang of kids and a snarling dog.” [2] Certainly
then he was, “a thinker of the working class who developed a love
of middle class pursuits.” [2] He said he had “always
worked out of one world, the working class world of which I am part,”
[2] while declaring, “I am a man of habit and pattern.”
[2] He “became a cult figure following many television appearances
in the Midlands.” [2]

His attachment to the place was a legend. For example, “when
he obtained work as a teacher in Chelsea [College of Art] he commuted
every day and night from Biddulph Moor.” [3] And indeed “propping
up the bar at his local public house…is where he felt most comfortable.”
[4] Yet it was during the 1950s that the, “crushing black
agoraphobia descended on him, virtually imprisoning him in North
Staffordshire for the rest of his life.” [5] But as a man,
artist, playwright and artist he came into his own. Cheeseman recalls the
many animated conversations he had with him and “the swift gestures
of his good left arm, banging at the elbow of his useless right…and the
rich talk that pours out of him.” [5] He was “eloquent in
every way…a vigorous and expressive poet…a writer of stories, a
dramatist…grotesquely hilarious…[and] an inspiring teacher of art,
loved and admired by his students.” [5] He was “a large,
ungainly and glum man, tall and remote, cloth cap sitting permanently over
his expressionless face.” [5]

He seemed to have something of a love-hate relationship
with his art, for “he once sent a groaning van-load off to Stoke
tip: a great weight lifted off me.” [5] He was really “a
painter and poet of the cluttered and dying landscape of pits and
ironworks…he writes of that world with unexpected imagery and a great
roaring sense of humour, sometimes wry, often grotesque.” [5] As
a painter, he strained “to paint a world he loved passionately for
its vigour and its energy and its richness before the bulldozer scraped it
away.” [5] He felt his paintings to be “the most eloquent
utterances, portraits of a world seen from the bottom of my rut.”
[5] This was indeed “a world filled with images of people and
landscape that have been twisted and worn into strange shapes by hard work
and poverty. My Parthenon is an allotment hut knocked together out of bits
of rubbish. It is the richness of poor things that I am drawn to.”
[5] As he told Cheeseman, “everything I have ever drawn, every
house, every man, every face has its roots in those few streets [of
Smallthorne] All the things I have written, or hope to write, I am sure
will have the same roots.” [5]

The rare and wonderfully warm observations Berry made
of working people are perhaps the most enduring: “old women, who
sat night after night, squat as frogs, drinking, watching, eating and
taking all in,” [6, 853] “and the publican had got a
clean collar and tie on, and all the world was ship-shape–this was
happiness.” [6; 853] “I once saw a pot-woman dance an
impromptu fertility dance…the woman sitting with him had knees the size
of hams, and drank a case of bottled beer as she sat there.” [6;
854] And “then there are the princes of drink, men high in the
hierarchy of booze, popes of the tap-room…they manage to live and live
with style; to smoke and drink and back horses without ever seeming to
concern themselves about money…savour the full richness of the working
class who can live without work…I have known such men rear big families
on the dole, and strut up the street with a rose in their buttonhole.”
[6; 854]

Then there are the “ordinary men who cannot
make ends meet and are under the rule of women…lesser men, who are
pestered by women and children, whooping cough and rashes of one sort or
another…troubles that reduce an honest man to a worrying machine…all
the bellyaching and mither and half-pint scrimping that bogs most men
down…the poverty, and the poverty of just being able to make ends
meet…[for it is] bosses and women and children [who] pull men down from
their dignity.” [6; 854] Words and sentiments from what is now a
bygone age.