Fred Yates: Escape to Cornwallby John Martin

Fred Yates was 46 when he moved to Cornwall in 1968. He crossed the Tamar to be free of his family, free of conventions and free from the hell of a teaching career he had endured for 15 years. He had been working as a full-time art master at Dawlish Secondary Modern School and loathed it. His shyness and gentle manner made it impossible to maintain any discipline in the classroom and the only way he could keep control was to embark on painting demonstrations where he could lose himself in his work and try not to notice the pupils behind him. Even so, it had not been an easy decision. Remaining at his post for three more years would entitle him to a state pension; his cousin Eileen Yates, herself a teacher, urged him to stick at it. But he simply couldn’t work there any longer: he was depressed and needed to escape. On his last day of work he dressed up in his best clothes and put on the fancy silk cravat that his father used to wear. As he walked into school one of the boys came up and said ‘that’s a lovely tie sir, can I have a look’, grabbed it and pulled it tight to throttle

him. Typically, in later life he was grateful: “if they hadn’t been so horrible I might never have become an artist”.

His sanctuary was a house in Fowey bought with his savings, a fisherman’s cottage close to the harbour. He earned some money doing odd jobs and gardening and gradually, with the encouragement of friends, he managed to get a few commissions to paint houses, or create delicate line drawings for headed stationery. He lived in poverty, but it was a state he seemed to relish: the frugal lifestyle in which he lived was something he clung to throughout his life. Harder for him to abandon was the pressure of conformity: teaching at least offered a degree of respectability, and had been the compromise that he made with his father, mother and his formidable Aunt Jessie in order to escape the family business. By 1968, his parents were dead and at forty-six he may well have abandoned any thoughts of marriage or children. He had nothing to lose. He grew his hair long, painted with whatever materials he could find and, always the outsider, turned himself from a shy loner into a single-minded artist who, with the encouragement of a loyal group of supporters, slowly found his extraordinary

voice. The next forty years were devoted to painting. He made room for nothing and nobody else in his life. No

more compromising; he painted incessantly as if making up for the wasted years of teaching.

Fred Yates had been born in Urmstone, a suburb of Manchester in 1922, one of twin, but not identical, brothers. He came from a respectable background. His grandfather had an insurance company and Fred recalled going to the house and reading his collection of illustrated books by Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm. Any business acumen of the old man’s was vested in his daughter Jessie rather than in his son, Charles. Fred’s father had been a physical education instructor during the Great War. Charles was an over-indulged son, whose own father bought him a car, a radio and a house, which succeeded in adding fuel to the growing jealousy and contempt of his sister. Fred described his father as being tall, handsome and a wonderful piano player who true to type, fell in love with a beautiful, but unsuitable girl; a match that met with the total disapproval of the family. Clara

Self-portrait in Cornwall, 1969

Gregory had been born in Liverpool, possibly an illegitimate daughter of a docker, who had been sent to live with her aunts in Manchester. Fred’s Aunt Jessie ensured her story was kept secret from the family, and after her death destroyed all her personal records and letters.

Clara was devoted to the two boys, Frederick and Arthur, but Charles grew apart, hiding in respectability, alcohol and a painful absence of physical affection. The iron grip of respectability and social convention took its hold on the family and Fred was in thrall for the next forty years. "... Our family never showed love, no-one put their arms around me and said ‘I love you Fred'”. Though he was proud of being a Manchester man and spoke fondly of his memories of the city and the people, the evidence of his real feelings lies in later paintings of his childhood. The crowd scenes of Manchester betray the regimented, formal attitudes and the stern, pinched faces that held the society together. You rarely see hands in these paintings; sometimes no arms. They are not forgotten; you simply don’t forget to paint hands. They were hidden away, pressed into the small of the back or hidden deep inside the pockets; to a small child, who did not know physical affection, arms and hands simply did not exist. This was the world he described in a letter as the "tightness, discipline and torture of my childhood".

When Fred left school he took collar-and-tie work at the administration office of a large Manchester foundation school. Looking out of the window one day he saw an artist in corduroy trousers. He knew he wanted to be like him so after work bought a similar pair of corduroys. When he returned home that evening his father said nothing but sent him out of the room. "Mother," he said, " have we got a workman in the house?" For Fred it was the start of a dream that took another twenty-five years to become a reality; had it not have been for the war, it might never have happened.

In 1941 he joined the Grenadier Guards. He later said that the army and the war didn’t change him, though he never talked much about the war itself. He once mentioned being selected for the cross-country team simply because he had the biggest feet and another recollection: when on duty in Windsor Castle, the young Princess Margaret made him repeatedly present arms by walking backwards and forwards in front of him. The light, self-mocking anecdotes were his way of protecting himself from talking about the horrific events he experienced during the relief of Arnhem and in particular the loss of his brother.

By the time of the Normandy Landings, his brother Arthur had joined the Parachute Regiment and was part of the 1st Airborne Division that landed in Arnhem in September 1944. The plan was then for the Division to be joined by the XXX Armoured Division that included the Grenadier Guards in which Fred served and which was meant to sweep in from the west to support them. The plan went disastrously wrong, with the paratroopers quickly overwhelmed by massive German forces. Even if Arthur survived the first few days of the battle, the twin brothers like their respective divisions, were separated from each other by impossible numbers. When, too late, they finally reached the River Waal, The Grenadiers themselves encountered massive German resistance and suffered enormous losses. Fred never reached his brother.. Arthur was reported as missing in action.

Manchester Street Party, 2008

Fred and his family were devastated by the loss. His father Charles,by this stage an alcoholic, died soon afterwards in 1947. Clara, the devoted Mother, continued to search for news of Arthur’s death and in 1955 Fred went with her to Geneva hoping to find some news of his death or his remains through the United Nations. A cousin and his wife Janine lived there and offered to help, in what proved to be a futile quest. It was Janine’s first meeting with Fred and the start of a long friendship. Recalling her first encounter with Fred she described him as “desperately sad – desperate in every way: he looked ghastly and terribly thin, but he was sweet and very gentle”.

Fred always said that the loss of his twin brother meant he could “only ever live half a life”. The loss was profound, but except for closest friends he rarely spoke of it. “When you are a twin, you are never frightened,” Fred once said, and for those that knew, the loss of Arthur was the cause of Fred’s solitude, his shyness, his gentle nature and his art. Janine Yates was soon to notice the two little boys that played together in the background of every one of his paintings, from the beaches of Cornwall to the Riviera – they disappeared only in his last paintings.

In 1945 he returned to Manchester. He had no interest in resuming a career in insurance. He wanted to be an artist, to be the man in corduroy trousers. His family tempered his ambition with practical financial advice. So, rather than joining Manchester Art School he enrolled at Bournemouth Teacher Training College. Fred was happy enough with the solution. A formal art training seemed too serious, too posh and too precious. The accelerated course offered to ex-servicemen meant he could qualify as an art teacher within three years, a career that combined respectability with security; besides, with few commercial galleries in the country, very few artists could survive by their work alone.

At first he gravitated towards graphic arts, specialising in wood-block and lino printing but soon the head of the fine art department John Spencer, who got on particularly well with the ex-serviceman, became determined he should stick to painting. Although Spencer’ painting course was “pedantic in the extreme”, the atmosphere was a relaxed and very happy. Fred fitted in with a crowd of clever, talented artists including Margaret Matthews, Warwick and Jean Metcalfe, Michael Spencer and the tragic, but brilliantly gifted, painter, Cynthia Pell. His charm and kindness impressed everyone. They played tennis and went to dances. Maggie described him as an exceptional student, and was unsurprised he was awarded a travelling scholarship to Rome by the Principal of the college, Frederick Courtney. However, she added, “Fred was quite unsuited to teaching … he would have been ripped to pieces”.

After graduation a first teaching job took him to Windsor in the early 1950s, working in secondary schools and adult education colleges. He bought a house and had a girlfriend. In 1950 came his first real breakthrough when he won first prize in a competition for a painting of an industrial scene. His painting showed a furnace in a foundry; it was bought by the owner of the factory and illustrated on the front cover of Ingot magazine. Though criticized for being too graphic, he was gaining confidence as a painter and in 1953 entered a competition on the subject of ‘Football and Art’ organized by the Football Association to celebrate London’s hosting the European Team Championship that year. Fred knew nothing about the game and later confessed that he based his painting on a table football game

Saturday Afternoon,1950. Brighton Museum and Art Gallery.

he saw in Brighton, arranging the players and fans from an imaginary bird’s eye view of the pitch. The painting had a bold simplicity in its composition and a naïve charm that clearly betrayed the influence of Lowry on his work at the time. Lowry, the great Manchester hero; the no-nonsense artist of honest, urban toil: he was the artist that Fred must have had the greatest sympathy with and first turned to when developing his own style after his initial academic training. Yates was often referred to as the ‘happy Lowry’, a tag that he was happy enough to use himself. In 1953, the competition brought the two together, Fred’s painting (now in the Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton) a brave runner up to Lowry’s seminal work Going to the Match (40 years and £1.5million later, the painting finally ended up in the collection of the Football Association). For the celebratory dinner at the Café Royal Fred, wearing a new suit for the occasion, was seated between his hero, Lowry and the art critic of The Times, Ulric Van den Bogaerde, the father of Dirk Bogarde. It was one of the proudest points in his early career, and an event that he would often recall in conversation.

Competitions and open submission exhibitions were one of the few ways struggling artists could show their work in public. There was little public provision for contemporary art, and commercial galleries specializing in modern art were rare. He made one attempt to show his work to Lowry’s main gallery, Lefevre, but the only interest they showed was in Yates’s novel way of separating wet paintings with drawing pins. The technique excited the entire gallery staff but even so they had no interest in taking him on. He soon realized that the prospect of making a living solely as an artist could only be a remote dream. Teaching was his only option. At least the holidays gave him some respite – he began travelling to France to stay with Janine and husband or staying ‘en famille’ as a paying guest in the Riviera. He often talked about the glamour of Nice and Antibes, of painting

close to David Niven’s house and basking in the glow of the celebrity life there.

It was a striking contrast to his life in England, in his loathsome teaching post and demonstrating at evening classes for various adult education centres or mental hospitals. During the 1960s he spent more and more time with Aunt Jessie and his mother’s sister, Auntie May, both now living near him in Brighton. With no other family, Fred evidently felt a deep obligation of care for his two ageing aunts and in his will at the time he made them joint beneficiaries in the event of his death. Fred was enormously fond of his Auntie May; his relationship with the domineering Jessie was more complex. By the mid-Sixties, he was lodging with her in Worthing. He never explained the reasons for this but spoke bitterly of what can only be described as a Pinteresque existence. He

The Heaven Boat, c.1980. Painted after the death of Fred’s Aunt May. Private Collection

remembered the stifling, oppressive heat of the front room as she insisted he sat with her to watch ‘Coronation Street’ in the evening, providing her with cups of tea and plates of biscuits. She would scold him as a failure, taking full advantage of his lack of self-confidence and painful shyness in front of her friends. For two hours he could escape while she had a nap, going to the sea front to paint watercolours; he said they were the most beautiful paintings he ever did, simply because everything was beautiful away from that house. Later in life, Fred was far more open about this oppressive, tortuous life with his aunt. He never fully explained why it took so long to break free, but there is some indication that Jessie controlled whatever family money existed, and Fred may have held on to the hope of some future benefit and therefore a lifeline out of teaching. Whatever the reasons, it clearly marked a moment of deep crisis in his life. In his mid-forties he was unmarried and had little social life outside the circle of his aunts and their friends. The spark of success in public competition had fizzled out, and he could see no promise of recognition as a painter if he continued teaching. Any hope of making a name as an artist depended on painting full time. This was the tipping point that brought him to Cornwall.

His paintings at the time betray nothing of his insecurities and shyness; on the contrary, they seemed to be an essential channel to express his emotions. Paintings like Mad Bessie or the series of Fowey River tramp ships were painted in a robust kitchen-sink style: thin slabs of paint, delineated by a long seam of oil paint around the edges of each object. There was a striking simplicity in his arrangements of figures or boats, and the painting itself was sophisticated, strong and direct, a style that he returned to in his later landscapes in France twenty years later. Many of the paintings in the early 1970s were done on off-cuts of hardboard and often painted in household paints or tones of the cheapest available blue and brown oil paints.

Whilst he concentrated on developing his painting and maintaining the discipline of being a full-time artist, he was conscious of the need to sell his work. A few smaller galleries in Cornwall took him on and it was at one of these in Polperro in 1973 that Pam Walker, who was to be a huge supporter of Fred’s, first encountered his work, buying the two paintings that were on display in the shop. As Fred had not signed either painting, the gallery owner suggested that she popped in to see Fred in Fowey on her way back home and he could sign them. Fred gave Pam a warm welcome on her arrival, offering cheese and cups of tea served on his well scrubbed wooden table. She remembered the stairs that were carpeted in random carpet samples he had found, and in his spare room the huge sheets of brown paper on which he was planning a commission for an office in Liverpool.

Pam suggested Fred take part in the first Guiting Power Festival of Music and Arts of which she was one of the co-founders. The festival was to be an important annual event for Fred, who took part in it for the next six years, staying with the Walkers and painting every day while he was there. It was also an important source of income for Fred who could be assured of selling not only every painting he

Mad Bessie, c.1968. Private Collection

brought along for the exhibition, but also many of the paintings he completed in his daily excursions. In a week he might sell over thirty pictures at between £15 and £25 each.

Staying with the Walkers, Fred would set off early each morning with his paints, not returning till the early evening before the first of the concerts. He became a well-known and popular figure in the small village where Pam lived and would often sell those paintings he completed during the day to passers-by or concert-goers, the new owners collecting them later from Pam’s house Weeonce the paintings were dry. She remembered one evening returning home to find ten people in the garden all chatting to Fred as he painted there. Finally he agreed to take a painting class for a week. He surprised many with his formal, academic approach, but his charm and good-humour made a huge impression on students who would take it in turns to take Fred home for lunch.

After twenty years of tedious painting demonstrations in the classroom, Fred was now something of a virtuoso in front of a holiday crowd in Cornwall or any location he chose to start painting. The street became his subject as well as his principal exhibition space. He loved the attention and played to the audience. Sitting on the harbour wall or beside the beach, he was happy to paint for the growing audience.. When it was finished he would sell the painting or invite the curious back to his cottage to see other work. One couple recalled buying him a pair of shoes in exchange for a painting and his friend, Nancy Hall saw him scrubbing down larger paintings with a yard broom and hose in preparation for one collector’s visit. He was delightfully down-to-earth about painting. It was simply a morning’s work and he charged accordingly. One of his few dislikes throughout his life was the fuss that the label ‘artist' invariably attracted; he felt his was a job like any other and deserving of no more attention than the blacksmith's or the plumber's. He once sent me a cutting of a quote by the French painter, Jean Dubuffet summing up one of the few ambitions that Fred probably ever had:

... It is the man in the street that I'm after, whom I feel closest to, with whom I want to make friends and enter into confidence and connivance, and he is the one I want to please and enchant by means of my work

In 1976 Fred was offered his first one-man show at the Reynolds Gallery in Plymouth. One of the directors was the educationalist and principal of Dartington College, Dr Royston Lambert. At the time the subjects of most of Fred’s work were landscapes and buildings peopled with the stock

characters of Fred’s imagination. Lambert was convinced that Fred could make a name for himself as a more gritty genre painter, following in the footsteps of Plymouth’s favourite celebrity painter, Beryl Cook. Fred recalled a bizarre night as he was introduced to the city’s red light district: strippers, gay clubs, transvestites, in the hope that the painfully shy artist would be inspired. Whether he was bewildered or not, the strategy worked and led to his first ‘naughty’ painting, The Sailors’ Night Out. Fred was so unsure about it that when he delivered his paintings to the gallery for the exhibition, he left this one in the back of the car until it was spotted by Dr Lambert. It proved the star of the show and sold to Nancy Hall, who was to become an early supporter of the painter.

The Madam Wee-Wee, c.1975. Private Collection

Fred could describe the painting in minute detail thirty years later: the setting was the romantic boudoir of a Plymouth landlady, with a Bible and a Barbara Cartland novel on the bedside table, and her prim clothes neatly folded on the bed. She is asleep as her sailor boy arrives, leaving his parrot on the floor and enthusiastically jumping into bed still wearing his socks. It was the first, and possibly one of the best, of ‘Fred’s naughties’ as he called them in which he ransacked every sexual cliché in a repertoire that often involved MPs in bondage, seaside landladies, bowler hats and drag queens. Nonetheless, it was a liberating moment for Fred, whose love of music hall songs and slapstick now found a place in his paintings. Making serious art out of light comedy seemed to solve his fear of the dry, high-ideals of academic and modernist art. It was a way he could connect with ordinary people and be less of an ‘artist’.

The Reynolds show was a turning point in his growing self-confidence as a painter and his desire to paint pictures for ordinary people. He began to submit paintings to the Newlyn and Penwith art societies; their open summer and Christmas exhibitions of Cornish painters providing a welcome routine and the chance of some sales. Rarely did he mix with Cornwall’s many artists and was always something of an outsider in the art scene there. However, he was fond of Brian Pearce’s work and remembered a conversation with Pearce’s mother that perhaps sums up the difference between their personalities. “She told me: ‘You must be a very happy man’. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m very lonely that’s why I put all those people in the pictures -- they’re my family’. I remember she replied, ‘Brian is just the opposite: he never puts any figures in his paintings so I suppose he must be very content’.”

In spite of this anecdote, there is little indication that Fred was anything but happy in his life as an artist. His solitary life allowed him to paint all day, every day, without compromise or distractions. In many ways the wide circle of friends he established in Cornwall seemed to be there solely to function within his life as a painter – as collectors, as fans, as gallery owners, as picture dealers. Many were treated to long and regular letters, but often these letters were simply a statement about his past and about his art; they rarely seemed to pay any particular notice to the recipient other than for a few practical needs. He was conscious of posterity and one often sensed that these letters played an important role as a manifesto of his work. His warm personality, eccentricities and gentle manner attracted people to him, but above all it was his accessibility as a painter that made him so fascinating to people, residents as well as tourists, all of whom felt they had ‘discovered’ Fred. This in turn put pressure on his need for privacy; he would feel smothered and hemmed in. There were too many friends making demands on his time and he would tire of the subjects he needed for his painting. It was time to move on. This became a constant pattern throughout the rest of his life as the need for friendship battled with his need for privacy. He moved deeper into Cornwall, to St Just, then Newlyn, then Lostwithiel, each location bringing changes to his paintings and his subjects as well as new challenges to his very limited skills in home improvement.

His deepest feelings were held for his family. Even living in Cape Cornwall, he would regularly drive to visit Jessie and May, who was now living in a residential home. When she died in 1987 he painted the Heaven Boat, a magnificent tribute to her; a painting he described as his most important. “She was very poor and when she died I wanted to do something in recognition of my love for Auntie May.

The Sailor’s Night Out, 1975. Private Collection

I was looking at the fishing trawlers in Cornwall and I decided to have one of them sprouting great big eagle wings and it would be taking all the people to heaven. And there was a band in the sky around it playing a Gracie Fields song, ‘Sing as we go and Let the world go by’. The boat was crowded with people, with all the MPs in black in one part of the boat and all the nice happy workers somewhere else, and May was there on the side pulling up a cage with the cats in.’ The boat travelled up ‘like an American Shuttle’ towards a bed-and-breakfast house in the sky with an angel holding a banner proclaiming, ‘Come to me bed, breakfast and cup of tea’.

In the late 1980s Fred bought a small mill-house near Beaume de Venice in Provence and though he kept his home in Cornwall for a few more years, he returned less often. The frequency of his house moves became more regular in France, interspersed with spells in Brighton and Frome, Lostwithiel and Marazion. In all he probably lived in over a dozen houses in the last fifteen years of his life both in France as well as England. Whilst each move marked a fresh change in his painting, the conditions in which he lived noticeably deteriorated. As house prices went up, Fred bought ever cheaper and more basic houses, further away from public transport, further adding to his isolation. The solitude and discipline of his daily routine as a painter were by this stage so deeply ingrained in his life that he was numb to the lack of modern comforts.

The memory of Cornwall, the subjects and the people, remained with Fred right through his life. In his last years, unable to travel from France due to his failure to renew his passport, he painted a lovely series of paintings of Cornwall, of fishing boats and harbours all from his imagination. Then in 2008 he wrote to say he had decided to move back to England, he renewed his passport and returned in June for his exhibition ‘Muck and Brass’, then rushed onwards to Somerset to buy a house ‘for his retirement’. The high temperatures and excitement were too much for him and he suffered a heart attack at St Pancras Station from which he died a week later. With no will and no instructions, written or remembered, we buried him, by general consent, in Marazion overlooking St Michael’s Mount. Two weeks later I went to his house in La Motte with Janine Yates to go through his paperwork. As we walked up the street, we noticed that his front curtains were drawn and

hanging there was a painting left by Fred before he returned to England. It was a view of St Michael’s Mount.

John Martin. 2011