The Death Sheds of Colney Rise: A D H Laven article

Part One

From whence does art spring? The sources are manifold; too many to count. And it stands to reason that not all - in fact, very few – of these sources are what we might call ‘pure’. Great art is not fresh water; it does not have to be caressed by a specific set of minerals, gently pushed through certain porous stones, collected in sharply defined glass bottles and set to rest on white dusted windowsills. It can instead burst from a centre of unalloyed grossness; rising like a gaseous rainbow-domed bubble to the surface of the most stench-ridden swamp. As the song goes (I forget which song exactly): “from an impure heart/pumps the blood of good art”.

    But just you try telling this to the people of Ferrendale in Yorkshire. Like tortoises retreating into their armoured shells, they withdraw in the face of their finest creations. They treat my eulogies as accusations. ‘You were at the centre of one of the most fascinating art happenings of the last century’ I am fond, maybe overly so, of telling them. ‘’Twas nought but a load of old sheds,’ they reply, with disdainful (oh so disdainful) shrugs. For the fact is: they have no time for Colney Rise. They care not. For them, the street bares the scars of two decades of animosity and jealousy and that is what counts; no matter the art that grew, like a frail but beautiful weed, from the heart of all this chaos. The blemishes left by bitter battles: this is all they know. And, as they try to forget this sorry episode in their town’s otherwise unexceptional past, it seems that the last thing they want is an Australian art historian (or indeed any art historian) poking his nicely-tanned nose into the whole affair. Fortunately I am not absolutely alone – which is not to say that I couldn’t cope on my own, but that I am nonetheless grateful to have had the support of Mr Arnold Simper, who has (most importantly) provided me with access to two of the properties concerned (in one of which, No. 21, he now lives). Thanks to Simper, my fascination for the monuments of Colney Rise – or ‘Death Sheds’ as others would have it – has been fully satisfied. Not that I would ever have let the trail go cold – when one is studying forgotten art, one gets used to never giving up on anything – but I might have struggled to share with you, my honoured readers, quite as much as I shall endeavour to share right now.

    Let us not dither any longer. Talk a walk with me. We’ve arrived at Ferrendale station, situated at the southern end of the high street, once famous for having more butcher’s shops than any other high street in Yorkshire - until the York ‘Pork Rush’ of 1978 knocked it off its pedestal, since when it has been notable for no more than its reassuring blandness. Note the stationers shop on the corner: it sells fifteen different grades of tracing paper, but no biros. Come along now. As we walk north along this comfortably boring boulevard, you may notice that we are going uphill; not obviously, but discernibly. This is because the town Ferrendale clings, like a mussel on a damp rock, to the side of a small hill, from the summit of which it seems to have slipped, like a hat on a baby’s head.

    The word ‘damp’ was not used without forethought. Much about this town is damp. The pavements are near soggy. Garden gnomes search for mermaids in waterlogged lawns. The drystone walls live in a perpetual state of irony. The very air is damp. But not the people. Be assured: strange though it may seem, the people are most definitely not damp. Amongst all this dampness, they have remained as dry as the desert sand. And the deeper you go, the drier you get (digging a well here would do little good).

    In short, they are a fierce lot. Not unfriendly, per se, but reticent, yes. They don’t care much for searching questions and if they appear to open up on some subjects, on others they will evermore stay shut. And the so-called death sheds of Colney Rise seems to be one of these subjects. However hard I try, I can not get them to talk about this; either those who were around at the time or those who came later. The people of Ferrendale are united, collectively pretending that they aren’t ignoring something so much as giving nothing the scant attention it deserves. What of Colney Rise? They won’t budge. ‘A nasty business’ one man called it, in what was a typically cryptic quote. ‘But it produced some great art’, I pointed out. His look was a wrecking ball; my ideals the flimsy wall it crashed through. ‘It produced some sheds’ he said, ‘and they’re gone now – thank god’.

    He was wrong. They aren’t all gone. And it was always more than ‘some sheds’. It extended beyond the sheds, as we will see; into the gardens, with their sculptures, water features and finely cut lawns. In wood, in stone, in flowers and in streams. In general and in detail. Above and below the ground.

    All gone? No. Some of it can still be seen. Other bits are being uncovered. Only a few elements of these ambitious designs are gone for good; though with the help from those other houses (fat chance, but you’ve got to try) there is yet hope that a good proportion might be recovered. For posterity. For Ferrendale. For the sake of forgotten art.

 

    We have reached our destination. Colney Rise. A simple street, twenty six houses long. Semi-detached, with sizeable gardens. Lower upper middle class, or thereabouts. A row of semi-fragrant cherry trees. High hedges concealing tight driveways. On our right, numbers 2, 4, 6… The odd houses are on the left. We walk on for a while. We’re at the wrong end of the street. It’s not until we pass No.15 that the stories begin. But it’s at No. 21 that I shall start.

    ‘Never has one street contained so much supremely bad taste’ one man once said. He may have been right. The art and architecture which I am dealing here is in many ways tasteless. Good taste, bad taste: the line is finer than the lissom belly of a wispy ballerina. There are even distinctions to be made within the terms themselves. Within ‘bad taste’, for instance, there is good old ‘bad taste’ (pink porcelain cockatoos) and, hold the giggles for a second, ‘in bad taste’ (The Royal Family bathing in a trough of elephant dung). To say that the death sheds of Colney Rise (and all that they encompass) fit either one of these models would not be entirely accurate. At times, they court both. On the whole, however, they seem far too friendly with the latter concept. Not because they attack an institution with as much nobility as the Royal family, no. It's because they deal (with spurious or perversely exaggerated effect) with a subject that has little nobility, but is nonetheless treated with extreme care and kindliness. A subject which has, you might say, emotional resonances. A subject which is, perhaps, no laughing matter. I talk, of course, of Death.

    Death/death sheds: I never expected the connection to be beyond the reasoning of a detective, so thumbs up to all those who were, so to speak, ‘ahead of the game’. Meanwhile, it is time, I think, for a few more details. So let us enter No. 41, Colney Rise, presently residence of Mr Arnold Simper, former abode of a French family, headed in the 1950s by a Mr Jacques Voiles, designer of ‘cheap quality goods’ for a well-known clothing firm. The Voiles family moved to Ferrendale from Bordeaux in the late 1940s, and were, at first, accepted into the community with refreshingly open arms. There was no antagonism; no unfriendliness. What matter that they were French? Colney Rise had always welcomed foreigners. The O’Connell family at No. 19 were Irish, after all, and there had always been a rumour that Mrs. Parker of No. 4 had a drop of Jamaican blood. Come one, come all: no problems at all.

    At least, not until death reared its less-than-well-coiffured head. For in 1956, tragically, the second son of Jacque Voiles passed away (and then, shortly after that, died). ‘Emile! Emile!’ they all cried, which was odd, for the boy’s name was Eugene, but then death does funny things to people. ‘Emile! Emile!’. It was tragic, it was sad; it was enough to bring tears to the eyes of every member of this otherwise dry-hearted town. Put all those tears together, however, and you would not even come close to having the amount that fell, incessantly, from the eyes of Jacques Voiles – and his wife, Claudette. They wept, they wept and they wept. And then one day they stopped weeping. And they started building.

    The normal practice, après la mort, is to have a body buried, or cremated, and placed in a public graveyard, or crematorium. It is family pets, on the whole, who find themselves flung into shallow graves at the bottom of the garden. But then, some people do things differently; whether coerced by extreme grief, or provoked their own personal traditions. Which of these led the Voiles family I cannot say; rest assured, they seemed to have a clear idea of what it was they were trying to do – and they made no attempt to compromise their vision, twisted as it was.

    Tombs, of course, have long been a mainstay of art history. The Romans and the Egyptians, and many more besides, were fond of honouring the illustrious dead with elaborate tombs, the iconography of which still puzzles us today. Yes, there is nothing new in tombs, except that – for the average person – things have of late rarely progressed beyond a certain point. People will do vaguely radical things: I have known of some who will leave a room as a dead person had left it, as a touching monument to their memory; or of others who will plant a tree, or have a picture painted: maybe even a small statue erected somewhere in the garden. When my great aunt died, my great-uncle climbed fourteen mountains, and left a lollipop at the summit of each, in her memory (I forget why exactly). No, it’s not as if the spirit of remembering and honouring the dead in eccentric ways has in any ways died in the last century or two. It’s simply that few people have made the effort that Jacques Voiles did; the 'death-honouring' effort that came to be a salient feature of more than one of the gardens of Colney Rise, as time went by.

    How to explain the Tomb of Eugene Voiles? The word ‘rococo’ comes to mind. As does ‘grotto’, ‘frond’, ‘meringue’, ‘tendril’, ‘fungoid’ and the phrase ‘flamboyance of a freakish nature’. Using an unholy mixture of marble, sandstone, bronze and Della-Robbiaesque glazed pottery, the Voiles designed a monument of hitherto unknown ‘splendour’. You might not like it, you may detest it, you might be physically repulsed by it, but there will never be a person who would not be amazed by it. Prefiguring the psychedelic movement by several years, the Voiles family fashioned a work of such embarrassing madness, of such wondrously repulsive loopiness, that it is hard to see how the people of Ferrendale have been able to ignore it these last few decades.

    It is less hard to see why it caused a fuss in the first place. The British are renowned, so they say, for their ‘stiff upper lip’; for their obsessive restraint. This is to some extent a stereotype: this is not a nation incapable of crying, as we have seen; rather one who would prefer not to cry, if you don’t mind. A few days of ‘Emile! Emile!’ they can bear. All’s fair in love and war. Have your little cry – you don’t half deserve it. On the other hand, there’s a time and place for fanatical acts of emotion, and you can’t go on weeping forever. Ferrendale is damp enough as it is.

    As for designing and creating ostentatious tombs in one’s garden to commemorate a lost son, well now, this is simply beyond the pale. It’s enough to make people murmur for miles around. Not criminal exactly, but very definitely testing the limits of people’s patience. Oh yes indeed.

    It wasn’t so much the single Tomb of Eugene Voiles that caused the mass resentment, however, as all that it provoked. On its own, I imagined it would have raised eyebrows for several weeks or so, before being forgotten. A bit of frippery, that’s all. Unfortunately, it was not allowed to be on its own. The effect it had on some (we must remember, after all, that though it was in the Voiles back garden, it was visible from every garden on this side of the street and, partially, to anyone passing the front of the house) was too strong. And when I say some I refer, at first, to one particular house, the Voiles left-hand neighbours, the aforementioned O’Connell family who lived at No. 19. They were not pleased, no, they were not pleased at all. First and foremost, the tomb blocked out the evening sun that usually filtered into Mr O’Connell’s study downstairs. Secondly, it was ugly. Lastly, it was in-your-face and inappropriate. Padraig O’Connell was of the classical school and this rococo mess simply wasn’t on; it was petty bourgeoisie, decadent: thoughtless nonsense. The structure and composition was impossibly weak. Oh dear me he didn’t like it at all. He’d read his Alberti; he knew his Greek temples, his Roman coliseums and his American wannabe temple-coliseums. And he knew that what Mr Voiles thought was an adequate memorial to his son was no more than a frothy mess.

    But how to put him right? It was O’Connell’s wife who came up with the answer. Nearly a year after the tragic demise of Eugene Voiles, Margaret O’Connell went into the other room (and then died). It was poignant, it was dreadful, it was… not wholly unexpected (she was eighty nine, after all, having married a man thirty years her younger). Nevertheless, there was mourning to be done. And, after (or maybe even before that) the question of how to commemorate the body.

    I won’t say that professional jealously didn’t come into it. According to papers owned by Arnold Simper, O’Connell and Voiles had clashed before, once having a rather vociferous argument during a meeting of local preservation society, at which O’Connell was proposed the widening of the Colney Rise road by four inches, to be taken from the pavement, an idea with which Voiles agreed, but thought it not to be under the remit of that particular committee. They are also said to have ‘exchanged dark glances’ (or was it ‘dark glasses’?) at a village fete in the mid-50s. On top of this, the similarity of their jobs (O’Connell’s exact job title remains hazy, but it had something to do with sewing machines) may have put them in direct competition in the professional sphere. More reason, then, to get back at each other at home; to show off who was the better man; who had the best taste; to prove, once and for all, who could build the most impressive tomb for a close family member.

    It is evidently from the Mrs O’Connell tomb (knocked down, alas, in the early 1970s) that the phrase ‘death shed’ came about – for the finished monument not only took the place of the garden shed, but seems (from extant photographs) to have taken the same proportions – and even fulfilled some of the same uses (O’Connell’s wife was a keen gardener, it is said, and may have appreciated her tomb doubling up as storage space for flower pots and rakes). The façade of the shed/tomb, however, belied its humble nature. For it was here that O’Connell really fought his war against Voiles: in this bold, firmly classical frontage, complete with five small Ionic columns and a carefully rendered pediment, featuring scenes from Margaret’s life, including her much feted cameo in the 1920’s film Daisy and the Donkey. Where Voiles had gone for details, for curves and twirls, twists and drips, O’Connell opted for stately grace; the rigour of the steady, vaguely democratic Greeks. And in his merry way, it seems that he was perfectly successful. The comparison was made - and it was made well. The war, you could say, had begun.

    We will get back to Voiles and O’Connell in due course, for they are undoubtedly the main players in this macabre little play. They acted everything out on a grand scale; throwing more time, effort and money into the cause than anyone might think was possible. The grand squabble was, for the most part, theirs and theirs alone. On the other hand, I don’t think that Colney Rise would be Colney Rise were it for the work of some of its other residents, work done on a much smaller scale, but nevertheless an integral part of the whole project.

    Let’s cross the street and go back to No. 15....

Part Two