Meanwhile
Each of James Ravilious’s natural, unsentimental black and white photographs of a small Devon community is a work of art
In 1970, I wandered around an unfamiliar part of West Devon. Down a grassy lane I came across a farmyard in which stood three circular hay stacks, each beautifully thatched. It resembled a picture by the 18th-century painter George Morland. There was nobody about and the yard had a haunted air. In a pub a few miles away, I discovered that the settlement was called Riddlecombe.
Two years later James Ravilious started work for the Beaford Centre, recording the society of this inaccessible and largely unchanged part of Devon. Seventeen years and 75,000 photographs later the project was closed. Ravilious’s pictures now form the major part of the archive, a unique record of the everyday life of the area. Nothing is missed: farming; schools; church and chapel; vicarage teas; hunting; tramps; weather, especially snow; doctors visiting — in fact everything that gave life, and to a degree still does, to this small rural enclave.
James Ravilious was born in August 1939 to the artist Eric Ravilious and his wife Tirzah, herself an accomplished artist, to be followed by John and Anne. In this biography Robin Ravilious, James’s widow and daughter of Laurence Whistler, the glass engraver, tells the story of James’s early life and their subsequent life together simply, directly and affectionately. A more intense and lyrical approach comes when she writes of the West Devon countryside that is part of her being.
Eric Ravilious waved to his son as he left the family’s Essex home as a war artist. James’s only memory of him was of waving back. Eric was lost in a plane near Iceland. There followed a childhood disrupted by his father’s death, by war and lack of money. It improved after his mother remarried the kindly Henry Swanzy, but that too came to an end with Tirzah’s death from cancer in 1951. Swanzy’s brother and sister-in-law, a kindly and reasonably prosperous Warwickshire couple, became the children’s guardians. Materially the children were secure, but were sent to a variety of schools, so that they were frequently on the move. Everyone was kind, but it was not an ideal childhood.
With an assortment of ‘O’ levels, Ravilious was put into an accountant’s office, but with the encouragement of old friends of his parents he applied to St Martin’s School of Art, using an assumed name so as not to be recognised as Eric’s son. The ruse did not work. Like so many children of famous parents, he found it hard to escape from his father’s shadow. Photography was to give him that independence, while St Martin’s gave him a reverence for the great masters of the past.
Following a solitary year in a cottage on Barra, he returned to London, undertaking part-time teaching, and in 1969 met Robin Whistler. Her mother’s family owned the Halsdon estate in West Devon, where she spent much of her childhood. That year was momentous for James in other ways: he visited the London exhibition of the work of Cartier-Bresson, where he was overwhelmed