Oppy Wood 1917, Evening.

John Nash (lifelong friend of Claughton Pellew)

Claughton Pellew:

Canada & the Great War

1914 Army recruiting poster St Francis of Assisi

 Claughton Pellew: Canada & the Great War
The environment in which Claughton was brought up went to make him the vulnerable but talented
man he was, a reflection of the interesting dichotomy that existed between his two parents

Young William Harvey with his wife, Elizabeth Hichens, and new-born son Claughton had to leave
the Cornish mines where William and his ancestors had worked for untold generations. Cornwall’s
copper and tin mines had become uncompetitive on the world market and most mines had already
closed. So it was that, in 1891, this very young family found themselves translated to a high valley,
overlooked by Canada’s Rocky Mountain range on British Columbia’s border with the State of
Alberta. Their new home was ‘a shack’ in an expanded Canadian logging camp (McMillian’s
Camp). It had been newly established a few years before when the Canadian Pacific Railway at
last found a linking pass there through the Rockies. The ‘camp’ gave access to the development
of local mines and became the town of Golden (today it advertises itself as “the Adventure capital
of the Rockies”). The Golden name was a misnomer; the metal was never found there, only lead,
zinc, coal and gypsum were mined.

McMillian’s Camp only got its first doctor and a shack to put him in (described as ‘a hospital’) in
1895. This was shortly before Elizabeth, 5-year-old Claughton and his new-born 2-year-old sister
Dorothy left Golden for Vancouver (some 450 miles away). They left with relief, after four years
isolation there, which had been anything but “golden”. In Vancouver, Elizabeth provided Claughton
with two more sisters. They included Helen, who sadly was incapacitated for life, both mentally
and physically, by lack of oxygen at birth. She of course added hugely to her mother’s burden.

MacMillian's Logging Camp in winter c.1894 (Golden Museum)

Meanwhile Claughton’s father, a mining assayer required to develop new countrywide systems,
was frequently absent from home for long periods. Then, as work progressed, he was having to
visit mines as far away as Ontario, Nova Scotia, and even northward into the ice and gold-laden
Yukon. Once he attended a World Trade Fair; using late 19th century travel through wild country,
he was away for months. Over the ten years they spent in Canada, William had, perforce, little
time to devote to his family. However, all his hard work and travel led to a huge business success.
This was the establishment of the first ‘Dominion’ Assay Office, in Vancouver covering the whole
of Canada. For this in 1901 he was given a gold watch (now lost). He probably hardly noticed the
effect of his absence on his young un-schooled son, on whom his sophisticated but rather
unpractical wife had increasingly to rely while she cared for Helen. In this environment Claughton
appears to have developed a very shy and reclusive nature which, to a degree, persisted into his
later life. When he became an artist, he continued to avoid self-exposure, such that the whole
commercial process became anathema to him. He was even, on occasion, reluctant to show his
pictures; he once cancelled a lucrative contract with LNER (East Anglian railways) when he saw
his landscapes displayed as advertising on a train.
 William Pellew-Harvey 1864-1954 when he became President of the
Institution of Mining and Metallurgy in 1931. Described as always
immaculately dressed generally with spats, professional, precise
and very punctual.
Elizabeth Hichens 1863-1954 artist and painter in water-colours,
beautifully dressed often with diamonds. She had a wonderful sense
of humour, very amusing, easy-going, liberal and often late.

Returning with the family to London in 1901, the 11-year-old Claughton was ‘sent away’ to a
boarding Prep School in Wolverhampton on the grounds that his mother was overburdened and
the headmaster was her Cornish cousin. Claughton survived for only a few months in this ‘lion’s
den’, in which the boys had all joined at age 8 or 9. Returning to his mother at Blackheath in London
with his confidence shattered, Claughton went to Merchant Taylors’ School, then at Clerkenwell,
to repair the damage. This is where his artistic and other talents were first recognised.

Claughton aged 8 in Vancouver 1898, with Dorothy 5 and Helen 1.

William’s success in Canada enabled him, with the help of his Harvey cousins who were mining in
Portugal, to open an international mining consultancy in London. With his Midas touch, that
eventually boomed, and before long William was away for a year visiting Australian mines. By then
the long-suffering Elizabeth, showed her feelings by marking each absence abroad by selling their
home and buying and completely refurnishing another house elsewhere at great expense - and
sometimes forgetting to tell her husband where!
By the time Claughton entered the Slade school of art in 1907, he had regained his poise. There
he began to make a few firm friends, some of them, like Paul Nash very much admired the work
he was doing. Paul’s brother, John Nash became a lifelong friend (his photos are further below).
Nevertheless Claughton remained a social oddball, extremely shy, with a high-pitched voice and
nervous giggle. A sensitive and vulnerable man, he was uncomfortable with strangers, who he
tried to ignore. Nevertheless, he strongly affirmed his independence from his father by removing
his “Harvey” surname, so he could write “Pellew” on his pictures. His father responded by
hyphenating both names.

Claughton age 21 at home at Blackheath, Emma-Mary (‘Kechie’) Tennent c. 1915. A Slade

London, 1911. The Tennent family were graduate 1912-14. She married Claughton when
neighbours. he was released from Dartmoor in 1919.

After the Slade, at which his attendance was described as irregular, Claughton left London to bury
himself in the north-east corner of the Norfolk country and seaside. He took lodgings there, and
that area remained his “home” for the rest of his life, as it was for Kechie Tennent, who was also a
Slade artist and became his wife in 1919. It was in 1912 that Claughton, in his self-imposed
isolation, first met two neighbours in the Norfolk village of Sheringham. One was the local Catholic
priest and the other a well-known Oxford academic of Claughton’s age. They became close friends
and in the following year, 1913, with their encouragement and funded by his father,
Claughton travelled in Europe to France, Germany, Austria and especially to Italy where he had
the transcendent experience of visiting Assisi. There, like so many, he fell under the spell of St
Francis. In early 1914 he returned home, and under the tutelage of his friendly priest became a
Catholic. Then the war began, and two years later he was called up for military service.

Claughton’s drawing of the Rocca Maggiore at Assisi John Nash 1893-1977. Life-long friend, met in 1912
 The search for St Francis, Assisi. Kechie Upper Sheringham 5 miles west of Cromer. Claughton

As a professional artist he was a natural pacifist like most of his class at the Slade. So he had no
qualms in ignoring his father’s and his family’s disapproval, as well as his fiancé’s brothers, all of
them in uniform. But Claughton was then by choice isolated from his Slade contemporaries, many
of whom were busy facing the same dilemma over Conscription. So why was he, almost alone
among them, imprisoned for the rest of the war? The obvious distinction is that Claughton’s pacifist
stance was based primarily on his new-found Catholic convictions. In facing the Draft, supported
by both Squirrell and Watkin, he adopted the most extreme path of non-cooperation with all aspects
of the war effort, then described as “Absolutist”. He refused to consider the alternative offered him
of taking a non-combatant role, such as war artist or medical orderly, as many other artist friends
had done. Such strong religious convictions naturally attracted a reaction in wartime when the
survival of the state and the lives of its servicemen were at issue. In his case it was an
uncomfortable detention, with protective custody possibly being essential at first.

Dr Edward Ingram Watkin 1888-1981 Father Harold Shelley Squirrell 1872-1960

Oxford philosopher and polyglot, Catholic priest of Sheringham & Cromer 1910-34
Catholic convert 1908, founder of “PAX” 1936, Educated in Germany, “Guild of Pope’s Peace”,
Author “The Crime of Conscription” 1939 lived with Claughton for six months

The friendship that Claughton developed with these two Sheringham locals had developed over
the previous four years. During it, Father Harold Shelley Squirrell, 20 years older than Claughton,
invited him to stay for six months at his Presbytery in Cromer. There we know he especially enjoyed
his host’s professional knowledge of German art, literature, music and language, much of which
he subsequently pursued with enthusiasm. He was also introduced to Squirrell’s interesting
Bavarian friends in Tutzing, the Leonardi family of Bohemian/German origin. Claughton and his
wife made several working visits of 6 or 7 months to them in the 1920s and early 30s; the Nazi
Party were forming in Munich just down the road.

There was, however, one aspect of Squirrell’s role in the Catholic church that, in the context of the
time, was decidedly sinister. He was an active member of “the Guild of the Pope’s Peace”, and so
in effect an unabashed crusading Catholic pacifist. Furthermore, he was educated in Germany
over a period of eight years at Leipzig and Munich, where his sister lived throughout the war. His
mutual friend at Sheringham was Dr Edward Ingram Watkin, known as ‘Edda’, an Oxford educated
philosopher, prolific writer and polyglot (German, French, Italian and Spanish). Watkin had also
been born a Protestant and became a Roman Catholic in 1908, six years before Claughton.
 Claughton Pellew The pond at ‘the Pightle’ with Kechie (right) and friend
At the start of Conscription in 1916, Watkin the Catholic philosopher, publicly and ferociously
opposed the Draft – to which he himself was not subject. Later, in 1936, he further confirmed his
credentials as a campaigning pacifist when he became the co-founder of the Catholic pacifist
movement “Pax”. Then, at the beginning of WW2, he again upheld the same extreme position in
his 1939 pamphlet “the Crime of Conscription”. But in 1916 not only Watkin but especially Squirrell,
Claughton’s priest and close friend, were on hand, when he was faced with the Draft and decided
to adopt the extreme “Absolutist” position, for which he was imprisoned.

In fairness, Watkin was meticulous in providing the support and continuous reassurance that poor
Claughton, ill-equipped to cope with such treatment, craved while he was moved from Prison to
Work Camp, and eventually to Dartmoor (where he worked as a cook). Throughout Claughton’s
two-year incarceration, he wrote frequently to Watkin from prison, looking continually for
reassurance; here is one of many examples at the end of a letter addressed to both Watkin and
wife: -
“As I lie here at night on these boards there are always three guards on duty. Their conversation is
terribly coarse and I feel happier and happier that I am defying this life. Never will we give in. I take
Keats and the handkerchief to bed!!! with me every night. I sleep ever so well, for I escape from here
and come to you both. God bless you, I send you my love. 'Pellewski’…”
All these letters, which form a large section of James Methuen-Campbell’s book “Ploughshare &
Hayrick” (see endpaper), leave the reader in no doubt that Claughton saw Watkin in the role of his
sponsor in a grand pacifist demonstration for which he was proud to be suffering.

It is said that, in the immediate aftermath of the Great War, Claughton's images of rural peace in
wood and paint helped eclipse the memories of bloody conflict. But that phase was over with the
arrival of the depression; demand dropped and he retired again to isolation, almost artistic oblivion,
and to penury (apart from money from Kechie, his wife’s family, to fund "The Pightle” in 1926. Later
they had to let the house to survive in 1939-41). Then during WW2, poor Claughton had the final
indignity of being arrested briefly as a spy - for receiving letters in German! Nevertheless, he and
Kechie’s search for solace in a savage world led to some saintly images of a land now forgotten
but well worth remembering. They lie now in the beautiful graveyard of the Norfolk hamlet of
Gimingham near their home, just two unmarked mounds (below).
 Claughton visited Königssee near Berchtesgaden, the origin of several of his wood engravings, like this one

It was some 20 years after Claughton's 1966 death that he was “rediscovered” by the late Anne
Stevens, and was given an exhibition at the Ashmolean, Oxford in 1987. Encouraged by his family
and other admirers, a number of subsequent exhibitions followed in London and the south of
England; the latest was at the Castle in Norwich which ended in 2018. Meanwhile the family had
rescued the small stock of his unsold pictures and wood work from a damp deserted house in
London. These items are now safely stored in Devon with a few choice items kept by Anne
Tennent, Claughton’s niece in Sussex who owns the copyright. There now remains a small group
of admirers of his work. His art figures in 13 museums and galleries in UK to our knowledge, and
some abroad. It is hoped that the lavishly illustrated 2019 publication below will draw the attention
of art professionals to this artist of the aftermath of a war, whose ghosts still haunt us all.

“Ploughshare & Hayrick: CLAUGHTON PELLEW”

by James Methuen-Campbell

A limited edition compendium of the artist’s life and work –

180 quality illustrations, 288 pages (nearly square: 286x300 mm), Price £245

Simon Lawrence at: Tel: 01226-792200; E-mail: http://www.fleecepress.com/

 Pellew’s website at https://www.scribd.com/doc/117326171

“Norfolk landscape” by Claughton Pellew

Kechie’s website at https://www.scribd.com/document/193108438

“Spring” view of the garden at the Pightle, by Kechie Tennent. 1950s. Watercolour 57 x 78 cms