In spite of his lack of interest in physical activity (apart from cycling and sex – see 'Gainsborough'), Wood wholeheartedly joined the First World War in late 1914, becoming one of the Third Seaforth Highlanders. It was an action of which he was obviously proud and he had a series of photographs taken of himself in uniform, complete with kilt. One of these was taken at a studio in Derby Road.
Wood returned to Nottingham during and after the war, but hardly spent any time there. He had enjoyed staying in the city though, particularly taking an interest in its local history. Of note is a copy of a 19th century painting of the windmills which stood on Forest-side (now Forest Road).
3 He later included a large number of other things in the scrapbook, including visiting cards. The book was completed in Gainsborough, being filled out with paintings cut from magazines.
A postcard of HMS Bulwark, blown up in Sheerness harbour on 26 November 1914, was posted to Nellie in February1915 from nearby Fort Grain where he was based, and along with showing the pride he felt as a lance-corporal in the army, gives some insight into his life at the time:
'Am here on a 24 hour guard facing the sea. Feel a lot better: thank you for letter – full report shortly. I like the view muchly. Wish you could see me lying on the floor of my tent writing my diary, and in charge of 3 men. Have just written out an order for their supper – Bread, cheese & coffee. All are the most kind to me here and luckily I've got the cleanest room in the fort.
'Kindest Regards K.'
Another card was written in equally casual vein:
'Am at present and for the next 24 hrs on the ‘Electric Guard’ watching the sea. Thanks for all things and letters of this week. Have put in a pass for Tuesday – 48 hrs only. Of course we want you to come to Nottm & stay the night. Thought of showing you round our warehouse if you’d care to go? The seagulls are screaming around and the sun is just setting. '
Wood also got some time off to visit orchestral performances at Sheerness, although he used to complain about the work a lance-corporal had to do and later in the year wrote, ‘Signs of chevron number two coming along.’ He was correct in his prediction.
In France, Wood sustained a shrapnel wound to his right ankle, which was to give him a slight limp for the rest of his life, and for which he later received a small pension. At the end of 1915 a form from the Convalescent Hospital in Dartford stated that 1649 Corporal Wood was allowed to walk out of the hospital without wearing his puttees. The wounds periodically caused him pain for a very long time afterwards and he was sometimes treated for months continuously.
The last mention of Corporal Wood is on 26 October 1916, when he was given permission by the major and adjutant at Dartford to ‘use the pianoforte at anytime found convenient’. This is the first indication of Wood's musical leanings: he had a great talent for playing the piano and taught music privately in Gainsborough. For reasons unknown, Wood was demoted not long after: a card addressed:
'Pte. K.S.Wood S/23196
Hut 57 ‘F’ Coy.
3rd Seaforth Highlanders
Cromarty'
This was written in morse code in August 1917, and composer William Baines’s biographer Roger Carpenter writes of the entrance of Private Wood into Baines’s life in 1919 (see David and Jonathan). Wood appears never to have mentioned it and it must have struck a great blow to his ego.
The demotion need not necessarily have been due to a particularly serious offence, and Wood remained proud of his war years, to the point where anyone doubting his record would be asked to retract their statement: when in the 1940s someone writing under the pseudonym of Peter van Emmichoven did so in the Gainsborough Evening News, Wood threatened to take him to court over the issue if he did not write the following announcement:
'I, Peter van Emmichoven, regret writing the latter part of a letter...The paragraph referred to, I now see and understand, has done some damage to Mr. K. S. Wood's reputation, and I retract it and assure Mr. Wood that his war-time record is not what I was led to believe it was, and that some person or persons have led me to regret. I sign this document trusting that Mr. K. S. Wood will be able to restore his character thereby.'
Wood is next heard of in York, where he was convalescing at Nunthorpe Hall Voluntary Aid Detachment Hospital.
DAVID AND JONATHAN (1919–22)
William Baines was a very weak 19-year-old: out of a total of 17 weeks military service, he spent 15 of them in hospital (Blandford and York). He lived with his family at 91 Albemarle Road, The Mount, York, barely ever showed any interest in girls during his brief life and felt ill at ease in social situations. His overriding passion was music and he delighted in playing the piano and writing musical works. He was unknown as a composer before he met Wood.
Demobilization Day – January 24 1919 – brought a large number of celebrations and although Baines would have preferred to stay at home, he was persuaded to go to a party held by Edith Milner, an elderly woman who had previously enjoyed entertaining thousands of soldiers at her home near York.
According to Roger Carpenter, it was on retiring to a deserted room where Baines began playing the piano that Private Karl Wood walked in, thus starting up a friendship which was to continue until Baines died in 1922. Baines had not then had any of his music published, but Wood was to be instrumental in his brief professional future.
The relationship which was to develop was a reciprocal appreciation society strongly resembling love, but which was never expressed physically, as Wood appears to have viewed love as a sacred–profane dichotomy, with Baines undoubtedly occupying the sacred pole.
Consequently, the language they used about each other was highly complimentary; Baines of course was very young and extremely impressionable, but to write in his diary ‘A genius perhaps’ of Wood after their first meeting is something of a hyperbole, and possibly even the subject of his admiration, although an obvious egotist, would not have agreed with this first impression.
Wood acted as a great fillip to Baines’s intelligence, although the former, being 11 years older, stretched his display of knowledge to the utmost in order to make a favourable impact. Baines was certainly an inspiration to him and Wood’s writing during this period was very different from later occasions.
Baines makes no comment on the following piece, but the fact that he copied it into his diary would seem to indicate that he felt it was important. Here Wood is expressing his feelings about the many soldiers who lost their lives at the battles of Ypres:
'MORNING AT YPRES
I gazed around
The purpled amethystine sky
Hung tremulous, as if a veil
Still held aloft by dusky sky
Had Day’s fair arms about its folds
Majestic in its ruins yet
The Place was swathed in silent snow
(A winding sheet it must have been
With fading stars for candle light)
Soft curling mist, like frankincense
Paused slow and dim before mine eyes
So like a dream, forgotten, lost
It seemed to me as I stood there
And then the pillars and the walls
Arose in peerless beauty round
Methought and gazed at Milan’s gown
Embowered in the rosebud dawn.'
William’s mother Mary thought that Wood was an artist ‘of no mean ability’ and said that the two had come together because ‘like attracts like’. There is no suggestion that she realised he was a homosexual, and appears to have welcomed his presence, as Wood was continually at their home during his stay in York. Baines used to wheel him to his home in Albemarle Road, where he played to Wood, who on one occasion responded by drawing a sketch reproduced on the sleeve of Lyrita SRCS 60 a few years later, which Wood interpreted in this way:
'Your spirit is making music; to get within its mystic influence (circle) one must expect a rough progress (brambles) and to make sacrifices (candles). Here one finds beauty (flowers) and passion (vines). You have enchanted the Fates, who listen to you enraptured; and even souls from purgatory come to hear. Your musical pride, which I adore in you, is portrayed by the outspread peacock’s tail.4 And your wonderful chord [incorporated in the illustration] is a fitting finale to the dreams your music brings (moon, stars and poppies). '
Baines and Wood spent a lot of time with Sister Mary Bernard of St Mary’s Convent in Nunnery Lane; Baines was a Methodist, but the religious differences were of no importance. Baines would often play to just the two of them, and wrote his ecstatic reaction in his diary:
'What hours of joy with Sister Bernard and he and I which the world knows not. What a union of thought when the great sun’s rays pour through the window into the beautiful old room, which has stood for hundreds of years and was once the old chapel, as the last chords die away and we feel quite apart from the rest of the world.'
Baines had described Wood as a ‘sketch artist and pen painter’, and Wood often used to present him with sketches to Baines’s compositions. Miss Milner called them ‘David and Jonathan’.
An entry in Baines’s diary reads:
'Karl – who is getting really dear to me – has been with me nearly all day. Only he has to be back to hospital by 7. He has compiled some analytical notes for my Horbury recital for me. Tears stood in his eyes when I played Paradise Gardens (as I am going to call it) tonight, and I love him all the more.'
Wood in turn was later to lapse into a rather pretentious eulogy: ‘In a blue night your red song of passion flew to me and stung me with its fiery joy.’ In a letter to Roger Carpenter, Wood described his protégé’s ‘long supple fingers’ in his inimitable style:
'The only thing I’ve any chance of expressing what they were really like was in a book called The Sacramentary of St Etienne at Limoges, in which, on a page giving a full sized picture of our Lord or our Lady, two angels were adoring the main figure, and their hands were those of William.'
He continued:
'His voice was not strong enough though far from weak, capable of great expression and possessing the qualities of confidence and sympathy – especially confidence (real Yorkshire of course). He had the Yorkshire speech, though as time went on and his experience grew he could add the tones of culture and charm with anyone. He had a great fund of humour and mostly saw the funny or odd side of things before anyone else.'
It is quite apparent from the wide-eyed innocence of Baines that this love remained platonic, and although it has been previously noted that he hardly showed any interest in the opposite sex, he went for the occasional cycle ride with a Miss Gribbon (but never addressed her by her Christian name), and his diary is marked ‘Alas!’ on her emigrating to Canada.
Wood ensured that the weak, timid youth was not surrounded by admirers. Seven people at a private recital was the maximum, although the number at later public performances was a different issue, and Wood was to be responsible for the organisation of these. He unofficially set himself up as Baines’s business manager, but his suggestion that he should arrange Baines’s affairs on a more professional basis was greeted with a rather self-effacing scepticism.
Wood, a far more extroverted individual than Baines, settled into the atmosphere of Yorkshire very well: after a stay with his relatives at his birthplace at Horbury near Wakefield, Baines noted that Wood enjoyed it ‘great’, explaining ‘Yorkshire dialect and good heartedness seems [sic] to suit him.’
In Wakefield Wood bought a baby grand piano for £5: ‘It was not too good, but for the time we live in worth the money,’ commented Baines. Soon afterwards, it was sent to Albemarle Road before finally being moved to Gainsborough where Wood had found work. Baines missed playing on it.
Wood’s gifts to his friend were often books, such as Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, the sketches already mentioned, photographs of himself or boxes of flowers. Another present – a bundle of joss-sticks – inspired Baines to write a poem called 'Ode to a Burning Joss-stick', which became a musical composition and posthumously a financial bone of contention between Mary Baines and her son's publishers.
Baines had access to Wood’s diaries, and noted a passage full of apparent existential torment:
'The road leading from ... to ... is very trying for me when it is dark. It is to me the loneliest road I have ever come across, and as each landmark on it passes, I breathe a sigh of relief. It strikes me that a murder has once been committed on it, and the air of tragedy will not depart from it. A babbling brook causes weird noises to come across the night air and there is a peculiar echo as one walks down a little slope the road traverses. No light can be seen from any point ... the whole countryside – of which one can obtain an extensive view – seems desolate.'
Nunthorpe Hall closed in March 1919, and Wood was moved to Fulwood Military Hospital in York. He had two projects in mind for his protégé: to get him to give concerts, and to ensure that his music was published.
On 8 May, Baines performed at the Tempest Anderson Hall to favourable reactions both from the audience and the Yorkshire Post: the next step was publication. Wood had sent some of Baines’s manuscripts to Elkin’s in London, who invited Baines down to play the pieces to them. After making Baines pay for the first 300 copies, Elkin's agreed to publish Paradise Gardens and seven preludes, the former of which was dedicated to Wood; Baines later received excellent national press coverage. It was to be the beginning of a successful if very short-lived career.
Towards the end of April 1922, when Wood had already been living in Gainsborough for over two years, he went on holiday to Rome for three weeks, possibly to develop his painting skills. Miss Milner died while he was there, although he arrived in York three days later, on 19 May, to attend her funeral. He had picked a flower spray from the Colosseum to give Baines, and had bought him a large marble cameo of Dante which Baines described as ‘a little treasure’.
Wood had persuaded Baines to give a recital in Gainsborough just seven months before Baines died, and this was his last appearance before the public, on 28 March:
'In spite of an appalling piano my recital tonight was a great success - but it was rather hard graft for me. The soft pedal was broken, out of action entirely, and the sustaining pedal five times out of ten did not act properly – and dozens of notes were squinting out of tune! One dear old lady clapped so much that a bird dropped out of her hat! After I had played Le Rossignol I think.'
Baines stayed in a small room in ‘Grannie’ Fletcher's house where Wood was living at the time, and one evening they went to see Dr Johnson; the composer was rather surprised that there was no form of transport to take to return to Wood’s ‘digs’ – not even a wheelbarrow, he noted!
Although Baines’s early death (from consumption of the bowel) came on 6 November 1922, Wood was still talking about having ‘put Baines on the map’ in the late 1940s. Wood was one of the very small select group of individuals allowed at Baines’s bedside at his parental home. His comment on Baines’s death – ‘Paradise Attained’ – was inscribed on the gravestone.
A 90-minute BBC radio programme entitled Goodnight to Flamboro’ after one of Baines’s compositions is a generally faithful account of his life, although the authenticity of Wood’s role (played by Philip Sully) is spoiled by the use of Received Pronunciation: Wood had a Derbyshire accent.
Wood’s time in Gainsborough was by far the longest he ever spent in one place, being where he developed as a professional artist, gained a certain fame, but where he was forced to leave in disgrace. He arrived at the end of 1919 as pageboy to Father Richmond: the priest had work to do at St Thomas’s in Cross Street, and Wood had some stained glass commissions. In this town Wood’s name was to become synonymous with windmills.
Wood had inherited £250, presumably from his maternal grandmother Mary Ann Wood, who died at the end of 1917. It is some of this money which financed his journey to Italy.
Before setting up his studio, Wood stayed for a few years at the home of ‘Grannie Fletcher’, who had two daughters and was a devout Catholic. When William Baines briefly stayed there, he remarked, ‘... the halos and popes scattered plentifully around the walls are rather alarming.'
Wood was considered eccentric by the majority of people, and his dress was very much an external manifestation of this eccentricity: a trilby was usual, and a bow tie, possibly pink with green dots, with a green shirt and plum-coloured waistcoat, and perhaps a dark yellow jacket and green corduroy trousers. He was accepted in spite of the flamboyance, and appears to have been respected by everyone.
As an indication of his appearance in middle-age, he is said to have had a superficial physical resemblance to ‘Tink’ (played by Dudley Sutton) in the television programme Lovejoy.
The Studio
This was originally at 22 Market Place, which was a spacious ground floor flat with a bathroom, living room, studio and kitchen. Here Wood gave lessons in music and art, and had a sewing machine on which he made fancy dress costumes to hire out.
He was less satisfied with his move to 27a Market Place in the early 1930s, because he did not have as much room there. The baby grand piano is remembered by a large number of people, along with the fact that, unlike traditional Bohemian artists, he kept his flat clean and tidy.
The smells were also noticed: at the beginning of World War Two Wood used to make etchings on copper plate, and his flat reeked of nitric acid fumes. Later, he begged cheese boxes from a nearby shop to use as tinder, and pupils have a vivid recollection of the smell of the cheese from the boxes piled up the stairs.
Towards the end of the war Wood moved to 23a and 25a Market Place – bigger accommodation. His first floor bay window announced ‘K.S.WOOD STVDIO’ [sic] and the second floor housed a small printing press on which he and, perhaps more often, his work partner Laurence John Wormell, produced Christmas, birthday, Easter and general greetings cards with linocuts; business was brisk in the 1940s.
Wood’s paintings were almost always of architecture and sometimes he put them on display at his studio; at other times his old regimental uniform lined the walls: at the beginning of his stay in Gainsborough he took advantage of any special occasion to wear his kilt, giving many people the impression that he had Scottish ancestry.
Occasionally, actors mistook his address for a film studio and would arrive on his doorstep looking for work.
The Church
The Catholic Church was a central part of Wood’s life and he devoted a great deal of time and energy to it. Quickly establishing himself as choirmaster and organist at St Thomas’s, he would take members of the choir en masse for singing practice and lessons in Latin at his studio. He liked to cut a very dogmatic figure and once installed himself in the choir loft, refusing to move when Father John Keogh told him to, which resulted in a strong verbal battle which continued as the congregation was filing in to Mass.
He took great pride in the mural, with a peacock as its centrepiece, which he had painted at the back of the lady altar, probably as a tribute to William Baines, and which he showed Baines on his visit to Gainsborough in 1922. In an advertisement in a 1920s trade directory, Wood claimed that the mural had been described as ‘a page from The Book of Kells’, although he omitted to say who had given the description.4 It was later painted over because Father Keogh considered it too garish.
Wood also painted the aisle, decorating the wainscotting and the window arches gold, green and blue.
The choirboys saw Wood as a paper tiger and used to play games on him, such as tapping on the door knockers, although he took it in good humour: when the boys were a nuisance, he did not normally mete out punishments.
Tom Sunderland very kindly gave me this splendid photo postcard, which is of a choir outing to Cleethorpes in 1923. From the left are: Margaret Dowman, Sukie Fletcher, Frank Robinson, Evelyn Sunderland, Charlie Barrable, William Dewick, Gladys Olivant, Karl Wood, Doreen Hinsley, Charles Dallingwater, Patsy Rainsforth, Dennis Riley, and Kittie Naylor.
4 The Book of Kells was produced in the eighth century in the town of Meath in the county of the same name in what is now the Republic of Ireland, and was an illuminated manuscript of the Gospels which greatly influenced Wood's religious paintings.
The Hospital
Wood worked part-time at John Coupland Hospital in Ropery Road, being secretary there from 1933, and continuing into the 1940s. He may have worked there from his arrival in Gainsborough, but very little is known of his hospital work: a few notes, written at the back of his windmill diaries – of which these, from 1937, are a good example – are virtually all the information there is:
'Hospital & company meeting... There’s a new sister. Matron & I go round to see if there’s a rosemary bush...'
'To hospital after going to Lea Road to see Flo Fletcher convalesce. Give a bottle of 4711. Make out her salary cheque. After tea tackle patients’ accounts.'
'Hospital & sparsely attended meeting in the afternoon. Long. After we have tea Mrs Cruickshank joins us. On my asking how her mother was she said she was in the car. So we get her in and have a 20 minute chat. The old girl was much delighted with my descriptive word ‘midgery’ – she was suffering from midge bites. After they’d gone I left.'
The Teaching
Wood gave private lessons from his studio throughout his stay in Gainsborough: in the 1920s he advertised, ‘Lessons given in Voice Production, Pianoforte, Water Colour and Oil Painting, Black and White Work, Designing, etc., at reasonable terms.’ Then, a lesson was 1/6d (7½p) per hour, at a time when the average weekly wage was between £2 10/- (£2.50) and £3 – expensive, but considered good value because he was a good teacher, although he had little patience with dullards.
This business was very successful and a number of pupils went on to make a career out of their artistic skills. One such former pupil was artist and sign writer Tom Harrison, who used to share lessons with Michael Colley and Brian Hastings on Tuesday evenings in 1945–1947.
Wood sometimes put up a copy of his own work for them to draw, or set up a still life composition on the table; his favourite saying, after they had gone so far with the painting, was ‘That’s now ready for an ochre wash’, which signalled that the colours were getting too bright and that the painting needed toning down a bit: one of the features of Wood’s watercolours was a thin ochre wash over the whole picture.
Calligraphy was also taught: ‘Make your own Christmas cards for your mum and dad.’ He would occasionally say, ‘Right, boys, no lessons next week, I’m away: going out sketching’, and he used to return the following week, showing the boys his numerous sketches: ‘Now then, boys, what do you think of this lot?’
Tom Harrison adds:
'I remember we got to a certain stage in our lessons, and he sent a little note to my grandmother [who was paying] saying he was going to have to put my lessons up a few coppers because we were now going to do illuminated dresswork, and it involved a lot of gold leaf, which was quite expensive. But since the amount of gold leaf we used was negligible, I think it was just an excuse to put his lessons up – it was only the scrapings off a leaf of gold that we used.'
Games were also played on the teacher when he was out of the room – a boy would perhaps play on his piano, causing him to dash out to find the culprit. On one such occasion, he emerged from the kitchen licking a spoonful of home-made lemon curd, dribbling it onto his waistcoat.
During the 1930s and the 1940s, Wood sometimes taught at Queen Elizabeth Grammar School in Morton Road – a boys’ school. Art was not considered an academic discipline then, and did not form part of the School Certificate.5 Almost anyone with a smattering of art could teach the subject, as did a former school secretary during World War Two. Not surprisingly, Karl Wood picked up the sobriquet ‘Windmill Wood’.
In the 1930s, he visibly stood apart from the other teachers by his lack of a lounge suit. Ex-pupil Alan Clapham says that he looked as if he had got out of bed and thrown on any clothes that had come to hand: dress seemed to be a matter of small importance to him, although he never appeared unkempt. He used to cycle to the school, and often wore an artist’s smock in class.
In the mid-1930s, he used to wield a sharp stick which was about a foot long and just over half an inch thick, and would sharply rap pupils with it if they started playing such games as walking round the room, or hanging their wet paintings over the desk to make the paint drip onto the floor.
As for the actual lessons, he sometimes pinned up a series of diagrams, such as heraldic shields, of which the class drew the outline in pencil and painted them in in accordance with the illustrations on the blackboard. Heraldry was one of his passions, and he delighted in telling the stories behind the shields. As Alan Clapham describes it:
'There was one which had vertical stripes on it – one yellow and the other a sort of blue–grey. The story he told the class was of a knight who went to battle with his squire; the knight was fatally wounded, and as he was dying he said he would bequeath his shield to the squire, then dipped his finger in his own blood and drew diagonally across the shield. When the squire became a knight, the shield he carried just had a red stripe across it.'
Imaginary landscapes would be painted, and for still life compositions props like apples and pears were used.
Reading Wood’s diaries, one is given the impression that no matter how good a teacherhe may have been, teaching was just incidental to his life – another means of making money, but ultimately tedious:
'Tues 21st Sep [1937] Up at seven. 9.15 is schooltime. Chestnuts yellow and falling leaves. The first period is absolute chaos because of some boys having been taken to a higher class, etc.'
In a later lesson, he was checking the boys’ names, and after ‘Laird’ asked:
‘Scottish, I presume?’ ‘Yes, sir,’ answered the delighted youth.
‘Whereabouts in Scotland do you come from?’
‘Newcastle, sir’.
When Brian Edlington was taught by Wood in 1940, he seemed to be an erratic teacher who was normal one day, and the next mentally elsewhere, apparently in another world: he would give out punishments, such as 100 lines, but when questioned as to the reason for the punishment, would have forgotten.
By the 1940s the stick was no longer used, but was still present as a deterrent. For one of his lessons, Wood wheeled in his bicycle, propped it up in the centre of the classroom, and told his pupils to make a painting of it; this kind of zaniness was a hallmark of his character.
After the summer of 1948 Wood ceased to teach at the grammar school because he was so busy with the work at his studio. He is remembered as an eccentric, but also as a good and kindly teacher who often talked to his pupils as if he were their friend.
5 The School Certificate was the equivalent of the later O level, and was taken in England and Wales from 1917–51.
THE MÜHLENDÄMMERUNGS
The Mühlendämmerungs – or windmill painting tours – were at the core of Wood’s work; without them, he would never have attained the level of interest he has, because they are the symbol of his enthusiasm, his eccentricity and his self-interest. The name was a stroke of brilliance arrived at by what John Wormell describes as ‘a marriage of interests’. Wood was a great admirer of the music of Wagner – particularly The Ring of the Nibelung, which he often sang on his journeys – and consequently he fused Götterdämmerung (Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods) with the German for ‘windmills’ to form Mühlendämmerung, and this word translated into English – 'The Twilight of the Mills' – was to be the title of the book which Wood was planning to write. 'The Twilight of the Mills' was intended as a summary of the Mühlendämmerungs themselves – a book containing Wood’s paintings with an account of all the windmills and windmill remains in Great Britain, of which there were about 1,650 if Wood’s estimate was correct. The proposed book gained local and even national publicity and Wood spoke excitedly of it to everyone, sending out subscription letters to the mill owners. He boasted:
'Every known windmill in Britain, from Land’s End to John o’Groats, Holyhead to Lowestoft, will have its place within its covers, and at least a description will be written about it... Mr. Rex Wailes, M.I. Mech.Eng., the greatest living authority on windmills and their craft, has promised to write a valuable Foreword, whilst Sir Frank Brangwyn, R.A., has written a lively introduction to the work.'6
He continued:
'Twenty years have gone into the making of the contents of this book and only just in time to catch many that have been since swept away.'
He was aware of the importance of his work – recording a particular aspect of industrial archaeology at its twilight – but the vision was unfortunately never realised, perhaps because of lack of outside interest, or because his court case of 1951 intervened to drive a fatal blow to the enterprise.
Wood painted his first known windmill, 'Roving Molly', in 1928, but it was not until the early 1930s that his work began in earnest.7 In December 1932 Arthur Mee’s Children’s Newspaper contained an article on his mission,complete with a full page of some of his paintings, revealing:
'It was in June, 1931, through casually reading an advertisement for pictures of windmills that Mr. Wood started on his quest. Since then he has toured the country in all his spare time...'
The Retford, Worksop, Isle of Axholme and Gainsborough News of 6 January 1933 reprinted the article, adding that he had cycled 28,000 miles and painted 450 windmills.
The medium by which the paintings were made possible – the famous bicycle – was an old boneshaker with no gears and a basket at the front and a box at the rear to hold his painting equipment; to reach further destinations he would load his vehicle in the guard’s van of a train. He methodically recorded the number of miles his bicycle took him, and although he carried a puncture repair outfit, due to his unpractical nature – these of course being the days before the DIY industry – he found it more comfortable to have his punctures mended at a garage.8 Wood even included the bicycle in one of his windmill paintings: Morton Mill near Gainsborough.
It is important to note that Wood’s windmill paintings are solely that: unlike the paintings of, say, Ruisdael, Gainsborough or David Cox, they are not adjuncts to a landscape, or even an important part of the canvas – they are the canvas, and many attract the attention with the impact of a wide-angle camera lens close up to its subject. Wood had a great respect for detail and the painting of, for example, Grassthorpe Mill, Nottinghamshire, does not employ artistic licence in depicting the sails as top-heavy: they really were top-heavy.
A Mühlendämmerung, which may have lasted a few hours or a large number of days, was planned meticulously: cloth-backed Ordnance Survey maps of the day were thoroughly scoured for windmill sites, and places to be passed through were all noted down.
The routes were typed out rather amateurishly in hand made diaries entitled 'Mühlendämmerung No...', with the principal towns or counties on the cover, which often consisted of cardboard covered with brown paper or wallpaper. The pages of the diaries were thin typing paper, held together by two thick brass staples.
Sometimes, small maps cut from books were stuck onto the typing paper and simple comments such as ‘Pretty village church, used as a school 1854, rich ex. and interior’ would be pencilled in at the side. On the inside cover he usually wrote ‘Property of K.S.Wood, F.R.S.A., The Studio, Gainsborough,’ with a note such as ‘Reward if this being lost is returned to the above address’.
Wood went alone, with a lover or with friends, typically singing his beloved Wagner or quoting Carlyle or Rabelais. He was a prolific painter: in A Check List of Windmill Paintings by Karl Wood, Catherine Wilson points out that he painted 15 mills in Suffolk and Norfolk on 24 August 1936 and 13 on Anglesey on 8 September 1934. These were unusually active days which nevertheless conceal the fact that he probably painted other architectural features on the way.
Sometimes a work would be executed in between 10 and 20 minutes and this haste is unfortunately very often reflected in the sketchiness of the paintings, which were in reality only preliminary sketches which he would name and give a reference number to. If he was later asked for a particular mill from his sales list, he would do a worked-up copy. He never sold his original copies and was surprisingly not really interested in windmills at all: he knew nothing of their internal structure, simply wanting to boast that he had painted all the windmills in the country. As John Wormell comments, ‘He was a collector rather than a molinologist’.9
'No short cuts were taken, though – Wood never used a camera and probably did not even know how to use one: ‘No button-pushing or switch-clicking about it,’ he bragged in his subscription letter.'
'Mühlendämmerung' as an actual name does not appear until the first really active year – 1932 – when on the inside cover of a diary these surreal words are seen: ‘Lorry full of signposts, dumb cat, & a deaf mother.’ The year before, a diary contains a list of items required for a Mühlendämmerung:
'Maps, itinerary, pump, cycle repair outfit, visiting cards & RNLI badge, shorts, beret, mac, paints, brushes, paper,etc., stool, gloves, thermos, towel, missal, comb, shaving brush, razor strap, soap powder, soap box, sponge, nail brush, tooth brush and paste, toilet bag, shoe polish and brush in bag, 10 hanks, 3 prs stockings, manicure, needle, cotton, thimble, string in housewife’s bag, trews, 4 shirts, fruit knife, paper and envelopes, fountain pen, address book, windmill record book.'
A typical expenditure list recorded:
'25/5/31
£0 0 2 Methylated spirits
£0 0 6 bananas
£0 0 9 choc
£0 2 3 tea
£0 0 4 milk
£0 0 2 observer10
26/5/31
£0 0 9½ eats (Wisbech)
£0 4 4 '' ''
—————————————
£0 9 3½ ' [46p]
A similar list contains the entry ‘£3 0s 0d books’, as if to confirm that Wood’s nourishment had a more intellectual than alimentary bias.
Wood sometimes camped, but a lot depended on the weather, his temperament, and unforeseen circumstances; sometimes he offered to paint a person’s house or dog in return for a bed, sometimes he slept in barns and at other times he stayed at inns: ‘B & B Sunbury 4/3d’ (21p); ‘B & B Swaffham 3/6d’ (17½p); ‘B & B Boston 3/11d’ (19½p). In 1937, after spending the night at The Royal, Attleborough, Wood made an agreement with the landlord to exchange the painting in his bedroom for one of his own.
A postcard from CLR Steadman of Porterhouse, Cambridge University – dated 29/5/33 – reads:
'Monday – Have got a room for you in College for the night of Friday the 2nd. I shall be in at 8.30 in the evening and after. So come and ask for me at the Lodge, they will direct you. In thick of exams.'
Always a gregarious person, Wood delighted in attracting a crowd and once did so in the middle of a traffic roundabout in the centre of Newcastle upon Tyne, his paintbrush flicking away in representation of some architectural subject.
But the brush did not always slap the canvas merrily, as a lot depended on personal whim or meteorological conditions: his painterly skill was controlled by how tired he was, if it was raining, or if a nearby bull looked aggressive, although the weather exclusively was lambasted in his printed subscription letter:
'Blinding snow, howling wind, pitiless sun, deluges of rain, icy frosts, the yellowest of fogs, all have contrived their arts to prevent the work being accomplished...'
Never one to pass the time idly, Wood wrote in one diary in 1937, ‘Missed express for Doncaster by about ten minutes. Did two sketches and had a meal while waiting for the next train.’
There are no diaries between April 1940 and 1942, perhaps because of the complexities of the war, and in the war years Wood was evidently anxious to be a law-abiding citizen, sometimes writing to the police for permission to sketch in an area. In his Mühlendämmerung diary of 1945 – ‘Berwick-on-Tweed’ – there appears a letter dated 2 April from the County Chief Constable’s Office, Durham:
'Dear Sir,
With reference to your letter of 30th March 1945, I have no objection to your sketching in Durham County, providing that nothing of military or national importance is included in your sketches,
Yours Faithfully,
J.R.Johnson,
Detective Superintendent for the Assistant Chief Constable.'
There is surprisingly little mention of the war in the personal notes which Wood often wrote at the back of his diaries, usually only oblique references such as, ‘Called for his ration and then we went to Bampton Lodge’, or ‘Breakfast porridge, excellent bacon, some sort of eggs scrambled & marmalade’.11 But on Wednesday 14 August 1945 ‘We were awakened today by a man shouting, "The war is over"... we went in to lunch at 1.15, hearing part of the king’s speech on the radio.
A little after this Wood wrote a postcard to his cousin Nellie (then Mrs Harrison), revealing that his ‘holiday’ had earned him so many commissions that it had paid for itself three times over.
In Mühle 89, dated 28 October 1946, the ‘Wood & Wormell’ stamp first appears. Laurence John Wormell had been a pupil of Wood’s from 1942–44 and later went into partnership with him until 1948. With the linocuts selling very well and numerous commissions coming in, the business was becoming increasingly successful. John Wormell often accompanied Wood on his later Mühlendämmerungs, but at the studio strict office hours were adhered to.
As a measure of Wood's perseverance, he once travelled to South Havra off the west coast of the Shetlands to paint a single windmill. The island had been uninhabited for 20 years in 1949. Wood went by train to Aberdeen, where he took the ship to Lerwick and stayed at Bridgend on Burra Island, where he had arranged for islanders to take him to his destination by cob-boat.
Wood never succeeded in his ambition to paint all of the windmills in the country, but at about 1,400 he was only a few hundred from his goal. More than a quarter of the windmill paintings were made in 1932, 11% of the total in July (73) and August (75); less than 170 were painted in the 1940s and only a few in the 1950s.
6 Sir Frank Brangwyn painted The British Empire Panels for the House of Lords in 1925, but his style of painting was by then unfashionable and the murals were moved to Swansea Guildhall. Wood became acquainted with him after writing to him as a fellow windmill painter, and tried to interest him in his Twilight of the Mills project. Brangwyn had by this time become a virtual recluse at his home in Ditchling, East Sussex. He died in 1956.
7 The aptly-named 'Roving Molly' began her (windmills are almost invariably female) life in Upton, Nottinghamshire, moved to Forest-side (now Forest Road) in Nottingham, then to Blidworth near Mansfield, and finally to Hemswell in Lincolnshire.
8 It is not generally known that Wood had a car, although he bought a Morris 8, c. 1939, registration number RH1468, from Albert Farmery in the late 1940s. Although it was in good working order, he did not use it much as he disliked having to work the starting handle, so simply preferred to mount his bicycle.
9 This magpie behaviour extended to music: Wood had all the wrorks of Wagner, Beethoven and Chopin, for example.
10 Wood never took a daily newspaper, preferring to listen to the radio, but for a person with such right-wing views (see 'Writings'), this seems an odd choice of Sunday paper.
11 Wood is referring to the dried eggs of World War Two.
OTHER ARTISTIC WORK
Although Wood once claimed to be a direct artistic descendant of 19th century watercolourist David Cox, it is probable that he was more influenced by Peter de Wint, and it has been suggested that he had some lessons from an ex-pupil of his.
Whatever the influences, and it is indisputable that there were many, a fact open to no question at all is that one of the most startling things about Karl Wood's paintings, taken as a whole, is the lack of people; the paintings featuring (invariably indistinct) human figures are the exception rather than the rule, memorable because of their rarity: the silhouettes lined up at the side of Blidworth Mill; the Christmas present of the ruined monastery teasingly sent to cousin Maud Parker (née Wood), with a man in the background urinating against the wall; and the shadowy road sweepers in Lord Street, Gainsborough. One could spend a long time debating the psychological causes of this curious underpopulation, but a glimpse at the odd portrait sketch in his Mühlendämmerung diaries or scrapbook soon reveals the prosaic truth: he was artistically incapable of depicting people.
Wood is best known for his windmill paintings, but he painted many more architectural features: churches, castles, houses, pubs, shops, bridges, watermills, streets, gateways, dovecotes, etc. These were often painted during a Mühlendämmerung, and as many of these buildings have since disappeared from the landscape, they offer a great insight into a place’s architectural past.
Also painted were inn signs, altar frontals, banners, missals, bookplates, rolls of honour, heraldic devices and many other things.
Wood painted two murals at Cleveland House, the first of which was done in the Thirties and depicts the riverside at Gainsborough, and the other, showing the Old Hall, is dated 1945.12 The figures in the second mural were painted by John Wormell.
A list of vicars survives at the Trinity Arts Centre, dating from 1950, when it was Holy Trinity Church; it is elaborately decorated.13 It shows SS. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John at the corners.
Probably the most famous lost work is the mural of the Pilgrim Fathers at the John Robinson Memorial Church, now renamed the United Reformed Church. An article in the Gainsborough News of 18 September 1948 tells us that it was 39ft by 11ft and had been ‘carried out by Mr. K. S. Wood, F. R. S. A., the well-known Gainsborough artist, and his partner, Mr. L. J.Wormell, F.R.S.A.' It was intended s a ‘perpetual memorial’ to the Church Jubilee the year before, and the newspaper enthused:
'Gainsborough has... by the creation of this mural, set on record for all time a historical fact which has great significance to the rest of the world – the founding of the Americas.'
The article continued:
'Here, on Sunday morning, a pictorial record, believed to be the first in any Congregational Church, will be dedicated and unveiled by the Rev. Leslie Hall, who is regarded with affection by the Gainsborough congregation, and he will be assisted by the Rev. Haydn Morgan, the present minister, who has taken a prominent part in the project, though he suffers from blindness. Mr Morgan has indeed carried out a substantial part of the arrangements and has co-operated closely with the two artists in creating this unique pictorial record.'
The work was in two parts: one side showed the imminent departure of the Pilgrim Fathers for the New World, and the other the pilgrims’ pastor John Robinson preaching to them in Leiden, Holland.
Many people objected to the mural on the grounds that they found the characters a little ‘rough and Wood’s prison sentence in 1951 provided them with the perfect pretext to paint over the ‘perpetual memorial’.
On Wood’s letterheaded notepaper there was a list of businesses and churches for which they did commissions, but hardly any of these works are still in existence.
At Christmas Wood sold cards from a stall in the Butter Market: an ordinary sketch cost 5/- (25p), and one with an illuminated script 10/- (50p).
Before the days of plastic golf tees, a tee box containing sand for teeing-off was used and what amused Wood was that the redundant boxes were now being used as general litter bins; he presented George Playford, the competitions secretary of the local golf club, with an illuminated drawing of a box put to this alternative use.
Although Wood’s artistic interests were wide, he was much more conservative in this field than he was in music: he was a great admirer of Shostakovitch and Sibelius, and of course Baines, but the only 20th century painter for him was the outmoded Sir Frank Brangwyn.
12 Cleveland House was originally the home of the Marshall family, who owned the Britannia engineering works in Beaumont Street, and who had previously commissioned Wood to do some work on the boardroom. It became a hotle where Wood is said to have stayed once, and is now a medical practice.
13 The ''77 group' was active in Gainborough until 1986, working to muster enough support to turn the derelict church into a cultural centre.
WORDS, WORDS, WORDS
Mercifully, Wood is not generally known as a writer, but he nevertheless did an amount of writing in his Gainsborough years which strongly reveals his character.
Despite being emphatically Conservative, Wood was not particularly concerned with party politics, having the scepticism of the academic. He was, however, a friend of the long-standing Conservative MP for Gainsborough, Captain ‘We’ve been left for too long – time to turn to the right’ Harry Frederick Comfort Crookshank, fellow hater of socialist Herbert Morrison, whom Wood detested for ordering the dismantling of the sinking Waterloo Bridge.
Wood was perhaps at his most comical when launching into an attack on the left-wing, and the bristling self-importance is almost tangible in one of his signatures to a painting: ‘K.S.Wood, Hammer of the left-wing’. In his subscription letter he said, ‘... Neither was there any (scorned!) State-aided gratuity’, and dedicated his book to ‘Sir Frank Brangwyn, R.A., and the Spirit of Freedom, Individual Liberty and Private Enterprise.’
There is probably no truth in the tale Wood told his pupils – that he had lost all his money in the Russian Revolution14 – but he wrote in his fifth sales list (1933) ‘A framed selection of pictures from this list may be loaned free, in aid of any object that is anti-Bolshevik or anti-communist.’15 John Wormell laughingly commented that this was ‘typical of the nutty artist writing that to get his name in the paper.’ But Wood’s remark – ‘There are Bolshies’ – written about some of the people at one of the inns he stayed at during a Mühlendämmerung, echoed a fear which existed in many people. Mühlendämmerung diary ‘1937 E Suffolk’ is subtitled ‘Coronation 1937’ as if in reassurance.
It was not, however, only contemporary politics which Wood detested, because in Brian Edlington’s autograph book, signed 24 November 1940, at the side of the drawing of a windmill (‘One of the 1,200 mills’), he tilted his pen at several more recent windmills:
'If progress means aeroplanes, microphones, plus-fours, crooners, dictators and women in men's clothes (complete with dog) I'm a barbarian retrogressive.'
The pride he took in his work and the publicity he gave it are remarkable: his sales lists boasted:
'Exhibitions of these pictures have been held in the Municipal Art Galleries at Rotheram, Doncaster, Wakefield, Gainsborough (One-man shows), also at Nottingham Castle, Usher Art Gallery, Lincoln, Derby Corporation Art Gallery, and elsewhere... Every item in this list has been visited solely on a bicycle and sketched on the spot.'
And in 'The Twilight of the Mills' subscription letter, the adrenaline of self-aggrandizement led to incoherence:
'Without doubt, this is the largest and most comprehensive work of its kind in English; the writer has seen more windmills than any man alive, and on that account alone is allowed to express his views – not irresponsibly, irrepressively – and, at times, quite impossibly, as sometimes has been done in the past by writers who should have known better. Nor is it an account of a glorified holiday spent in what is termed ‘Windmill-land’ – wherever that may be.'
Reading this, it is perhaps hardly surprising that his intended book did not meet with the eager anticipation for which he had hoped.
In 1936 and 1937 Wood wrote a series of articles on local windmills for The Lincolnshire Magazine and his style was pedantic and idiosyncratic: he insisted that windmills have ‘sweeps’ rather than ‘sails’, although the former word is generally restricted to southern England; he began a paragraph in conversational fashion – ‘Well now, in Lincolnshire... ’; and said in another, ‘Before I leave this paragraph, I would like to point out...’. The pride burned: ‘... as a result of my unique experiences in connection with mills...’ Apart from that the articles, which restricted themselves to external descriptions of existing mills and the uses to which they were put, are mainly of specialist interest only.
Through the pride and self-advertising the self-consciousness of the missionary is seen : ‘At times, a mere strict sense of duty impelled the writer to get his work done’, although the sheer euphoria of the undertaking usually gained the upper hand: ‘... but there were more occasions when it was a rhapsodic or ecstatic mood of creativeness that was the urge.’
The price of The Twilight of the Mills was to be between 15/- (75p) and one guinea (£1.05), ‘... and the more promises I get the cheaper it will be.’
Wood’s personal notes were usually pencilled in at the back of the Mühlendämmerung diaries, and although most of them are extremely tedious and often scarcely legible, they reward the patient reader with an occasional insight into his character. Here, Wood was himself, not writing for the public, and the style is prosaic, full of the minutiae of everyday life, the phrases staccato:
'Suffolk, typical English county. Lunch at Hadleigh. Pig & Whistle. Lunch dear to eat. Magpies and swallows. Thursday up at 7.45. Good breakfast but long way for milk' [1937].
It is evident that Wood was very much a social animal as the diary notes abound with the names of people he visited or people who visited him: ‘Called at the Newcombes and inspected their new house’; ‘Willie calls’; ‘Mr Foster comes in during tea’, etc.
Cooking was a great passion of Wood’s and he frequently noted what food he was given or what he made to eat: ‘Mutton, white sauce, mint sauce, kidney beans, cauliflower, boiled and baked potatoes’; ‘Stew some of the plums Miss Eyre has sent me’. Jam- and ginger beer-making were common activities. He hated smoking and drinking but occasionally indulged in a glass of shandy.
The literary Wood is also present in the diary notes, for he was very well read in European literature and art. On 19 September 1937 he ‘Started life of Millet’ and it seems that with a great sigh of relief he ‘FINISHED MILLET’ ten days later; the following year, he noted that he had read The Eclogues of Vergil. Occasionally, an isolated poetic line of his own was written down: ‘Men who live by organisation sell to others their own damnation’; ‘How sadly the English enjoy themselves’. By 1938 spectacles were included in the Mühlendämmerung list.
14 There is no evidence that Wood had much money to lose, with the exception of what may have been left of his late maternal grandmother's money.
15 This offer is absent from later lists, not to stem the flood of anti-Bolsheviks queuing up to borrow his windmill paintings, but becaue in the light of Britain's alliance with Russia, such an offer would have been impolitic.
Composer William Baines, friend of Karl Wood
An early house conversion: a postmill roundhouse at Farndon, Nottinghamshire
Pen and ink drawing of Pan, 1919
Fishing baskets, 1947
Fireplace in pen and ink, 1947
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