Through direct commissions but also acquisition of works offered to them, the WAAC accumulated a significant collection which covers an incredible range of wartime subjects at home and abroad. Gregory, Committee Secretary from 1942, Percy Jowett, artist member and Principal of the. One night he and a couple of other firemen were trapped by multiple fires when they saw a light in the basement of a building that wasn’t on fire. The first set of four, entitled Army, Blitz, R.A.F and War at Sea, sold some 24,000 copies and led to a second set, Air Raids, Production, Soldiers and Women, being published in 1943. Although the next work is located in the outskirts of London, it is an iconic image showing the work of the control room in Uxbridge which had responsibility for analysing all the input from spotters and radar to track enemy aircraft and the coordination the resources needed to attack the enemy. Considering the film was shot in 1957 they weren’t falling over themselves to rebuild the area. Whilst not formally employed by the WAAC, a number of his works were purchased and he was commissioned for a number of specific projects. Gabain was one of the first artists commissioned by the WAAC in early 1940 and she worked across the country, mainly focusing on detailed portraits of people. I’d encourage you to seek out William Sansom’s short story “The Wall” which was inspired by this incident, and was in a sense a coming to terms with the traumatic event, by subverting the reality of what happened. Your email address will not be published. I am old enough to remember the very many bombsites-there were so many where I lived in Bermondsey. His works from this period are very dramatic views of the devastation he found. After his work in the Auxiliary Fire Service, the WAAC commissioned Hailstone to travel with elements of the Merchant Navy Service and he toured the world working on this subject until the end of the war. Wartime rationing restricted good quality paper for printmaking and materials for sculpture so such works were under-represented in the WAAC collection. Thanks for another well researched post and this art treasure trove.. My mother [who trained at the Slade] had a permit to paint bomb damage, but all her sketches were lost when my parents’ car was stolen. (Art.IWM ART LD 2864), Cassell’s Tower and the Spire of St Bride’s, Fleet Street, London, EC4 (Art.IWM ART LD 3782), St Michael Paternoster Royal, College Hill, London, EC4 (Art.IWM ART LD 3785), Ruins in Cripplegate, London, EC1 (Art.IWM ART LD 5305), A Flying-bomb over Tower Bridge (Art.IWM ART LD 4719), The Haberdashers’ Hall, 8th May 1945 (Art.IWM ART LD 5311), Sandbag Filling, Islington Borough Council (Art.IWM ART LD 1443), The Evacuation of Children from Southend, Sunday 2nd June 1940, https://shop.royalacademy.org.uk/hardback-leonard-rosoman.html, Millbank Estate and Millbank Penitentiary, Jubilee Gardens and the World’s Longest Safety Poster, Fire, Blitz and Route 11 – How Two Historic City Walls Have Survived The Centuries, Pubs of the City of London, July 2020 – Part 3, Where the Victoria Line breaks through an Islington Square, A Roman Wall in a Car Park and a Pottery Kiln in Kensington, Two Bombed Churches – St Alban and St Mary, Pubs of the City of London, July 2020 – Part 2, St Mary Woolnoth – The Church with the Underground in the Crypt, The View from Greenwich Park – Watching the City Evolve. Two women, Mary Kessell and Laura Knight, were also, towards the end of the war, given overseas commissions. During this period, he would spend occasional nights in the City, including sleeping in the deck chairs arranged around the Gallery of the Dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral. The reconstruction of this area only effectively begun in the middle 60s, and for a 16 year-old, going there from the suburbs for the first time, this was a complete and quite shocking revelation. During the war, the WAAC employed a number of artists on a salaried basis, commissioned artists to provide works on a specific subject, and purchased the work of artists presented to the committee. I have chosen a sample of works held by the Imperial War Museum to illustrate the work commissioned by the WAAC across London. Which is all to the good. Thanks for an excellent and most interesting post. The following painting is titled “NFS Relief Crews Arriving at Millbank, London, May 1941 (Art.IWM ART LD 1359)” The location is at what is now the roundabout at the end of Lambeth Bridge, looking along Millbank to the Victoria Tower of the Palace of Westminster.

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