Flashback

Dr Richard Westcott remembers the photographer James Ravilious

Dr Richard Westcott remembers the photographer James Ravilious

WE CAN OFTEN FEEL threatened when somebody takes our photograph. The camera trained squarely on us; the silent figure watching through their lens; the feeling of being judged. Yet when that figure was my late friend James Ravilious – who took this photograph of me checking over a patient in the 1980s – there was never any kind of discomfort.

Instead, James would just set everybody around him at ease, then dwindle to one side, getting on with his work as you got on with yours. It was almost as if he could minimise his ego and render himself entirely unobtrusive whenever he wanted. And the results were remarkable.

He and I met a few years before this was taken, after I saw his work depicting farmers toiling in the English countryside. I was a rural doctor in a traditional market town in north Devon, where old practices were on the cusp of dying out. Computers were coming and times were changing.

I thought James might like to come down and document our way of life before that modernisation by seeing me at work on my rounds, so I contacted him. He was very enthusiastic about the idea, and we hit it off straight away.

The project wasn’t without its risks. This was the ’80s, before reality television and smartphones, so cameras didn’t often go into ordinary people’s personal spaces. As a doctor I instantly trusted him in joining me, though, and so did the patients.

On this day I was out on my regular run – that’s what I called it, when I’d travel about seeing patients on house calls – and stopped to see an old chap, Bill Brown, who had a heart murmur.

We are in Bill’s shed, where he worked, and James was very keen that we took the photograph there: he liked to capture people where they spent most of their time. There’s me, with my stethoscope, and there’s Bill, obligingly holding his waistcoat open for me.

James, meanwhile, never gave instruction or butted in on things. He had an enviable bedside

James had an enviable bedside manner, quietly there, freezing moments in time

manner: the ability to put people at ease in an instant. He was just quietly there, freezing moments in time.

Serene with a camera in hand, James could also be the complete opposite. On his subsequent trips he became a firm friend of the family, endlessly amusing my four children with cat’s cradles, and making my wife and me laugh with jokes, impressions and his wicked sense of humour. He was quite the character, but became a tabula rasa when it came to his work.

The products of James’s career are some of the finest portrayals of country life England ever produced. They show life as it was, and as it remained for so long in the country. It’s no surprise Alan Bennett called him ‘one of the great unknowns of British photography’, since he never sought fame. What mattered to him were people, experiences and listening.

I have long since retired and James is sadly no longer with us, but I remain in Devon and keep all his books at home, while the family portrait he did of us remains one of our most prized possessions. In the meantime, this gentle, lovely photograph has become somewhat iconic. I think James would have rather liked that.

Dr Richard Westcott tends to heart-murmur patient Bill Brown in South Molton, October 1984