‘Joe painted his WW1 comrades so they would live on’
Artist Joseph Gray made remarkable contributions in both world wars, says his descendant Mary Horlock
The brutal nature of the First World War produced timeless, affecting poetry, painting and cinema. However, you won’t find artist Joseph Gray among celebrated names like Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and the Nash brothers. In fact his great granddaughter Mary knew very little about his life and work.
“We had lots of Joe’s paintings, but there were no photographs, so he remained a bit of a mystery,” says Mary. “I would ask my grandmother, his only daughter, but it was difficult because he’d had an affair and left her mother Agnes. So I grew up loving his art, but feeling deeply ambivalent about the man.”
Joe’s whole life seemed shrouded and far from heroic, but Mary reasoned that: “If someone fights in two world wars they can’t be all bad, and maybe what happened in the First World War affected him. A few generations down the line I was able to ask questions and be objective.”
Born in South Shields in 1890, Joe was working as an illustrator on the Dundee Courier when war broke out. Alongside his workmates he joined the 4th Battalion of the Black Watch, and dubbing themselves ‘fighter-writers’ they reported from the Western Front through their letters home.
When his illustrations caught the attention of his commanding officer, Joe was given the role of an observer, identifying enemy positions and marking them on maps. However, he was shot by a sniper and developed trench fever. After the Battle of Loos in autumn 1915, Joe was sent home.
Fortunately, his experiences at the Front enabled him to gain commissions as an official war artist, painting battlefield landscapes for a country coming to terms with how to commemorate this most bloody of conflicts. Next to the surrealist, harsh modernism of John and Paul Nash and the often nightmarish scenes of CRW Nevinson, Joe’s tributes to his fellow soldiers are too near the traditional, authentic recreations of battle scenes to fit into exhibitions. But Mary, an art historian and curator herself, understands her great grandfather’s motivation.
“When I read his correspondence at the Imperial War Museum, I realised that he was determined to depict the men he’d fought with,” she says. “All of his friends had died so he painted them as realistically as he could, because he wanted their memory to live on.”
The skills that Joe learned during the First World War enabled him to play a far more important role during the Second. The time he spent still and alone in No Man’s Land, making detailed sketches of the German lines, gave him a fascination with camouflage. Not only did he spend years writing a book on the subject, but Joe volunteered his knowledge to the War Office, eventually working alongside other creative minds on ideas for camouflaging tanks, ships and buildings.
“Aerial reconnaissance changed warfare dramatically,” Mary explains. “It wasn’t just about covering your body and keeping it hidden in a trench any more. You now had planes overhead spotting positions, and bombing. Joe knew that people living in cities would be the biggest targets, so he set about coming up with ways to use camouflage cover on a large scale.”
Becoming deputy director of his branch of the Royal Engineers and Signals Board, Joe flew all over the country helping to save important targets. His most notable contribution was creating vast covers of steel wool, which when painted green or brown and rolled out onto roofs looked like vegetation from the air. Mary quotes an attendee at a recent lecture she gave about Joe’s work: “In the First World War he painted the men to preserve their memory, but in the Second World War he made camouflage to protect them.”
Another act of concealment in this period was the affair that besmirched Joe’s family legacy. He ended up leaving Agnes, and marrying his new lover. However, the effects of the war on families meant that many people had affairs. Indeed, Mary discovered that Agnes, who vocally denounced her husband’s infidelity, had an extramarital affair before he did.
Mary, who has now written a biography of her great grandfather, quotes Siegfried Sassoon: “Our inconsistencies are often what make us most interesting.” Few family heroes are ever black and white, but in the case of Joseph Gray, the shades constitute a rich and fascinating spectrum. Adam Rees
Joe came up with ways to use camouflage cover on a large scale to protect cities