John Warner
Helped to rescue the Chelsea Arts Club from financial ruin
JOHN WARNER, who has died a week before his 90th birthday, was an artist and teacher who, as Chairman of the Chelsea Arts Club in the late 1970s, played a key role in saving the then destitute club from closure.
The son of a talented carpenter with natural artistic inclinations, John Warner – known to most as Jack – was born on January 15 1931, one of seven children. After education in north London, he won a scholarship to Willesden School of Art, now the College of North West London, where he studied graphic design.
After graduating, Warner was called up to do his National Service in the Royal Army Educational Corps and spent some time in Hong Kong.
On his return to civilian life, he secured a teaching post in the graphic design department at the London College of Printing in Elephant and Castle, where he worked throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
There he met the American Steve Dwoskin (1939-2012), a fellow graphic designer, well-known as an experimental filmmaker: the two collaborated on a number of projects. Warner became increasingly interested in film, and particularly in computer animation, and took early retirement from teaching to concentrate on filmmaking and on his painting.
He spent time in Japan and his paintings of aspects of the culture of the country, especially of sumo wrestlers, were robust and vivid. He was a popular, unfailingly patient tutor and made many friends among his students, whom he continued to see long after they left college.
Warner introduced many, too, to his beloved Chelsea Arts Club. “There’s this place that I think you might like…,” he would say, before leading the way to Old Church Street.
As treasurer of the club in the late 1970s Warner discovered that the finances were in a parlous state. The bar staff were conveying wine and spirits out of the door almost as fast as they were being delivered, and the barman was cleaning out the till on a regular basis.
The chef, meanwhile, was doubling all his food orders and selling the surplus at a profit to local restaurants; and it was not uncommon for certain members to wander up to Curnick’s, an expensive butcher’s shop in the Fulham Road, and order sirloins of beef for the weekend, asking for them to be put on the Chelsea Arts Club account.
As chairman of the club in 1977, and later as vicechairman to Barry Fantoni, Warner eventually brought order to this unsustainable chaos: the bankrupt club recovered and thrived, and owes much of its current rude health to his time at the helm. It took time: a succession of management companies proved ever more disastrous until Dudley Winterbottom and Morris & Verdin’s Chelart took on the job.
That contract was to last until 2013 and was followed by the establishment of the club’s own trading company – but all of this subsequent success sprang, ultimately, from Warner and Fantoni’s interventions.
Warner cultivated an abrupt manner, but beneath the surface lay a wry, kindly, generous and witty man, who was always among the first to see the absurdities of life, which he approached with an irrepressible twinkle in his eye. Sadly, it was the failure of his sight in recent years that forced him to give up his artistic practice.
A marriage early in life ended in divorce; there were no children. Warner’s nieces hoped to see him remarry, but none of a succession of attachments ended in lasting commitment.
Jack Warner combined worldly wisdom with a degree of intellectual detachment. Once, when introduced at the bar of the club to a fellow member, Bill Wyman, Warner asked what he did.
“I’m a musician,” replied the Rolling Stone.
“Really,” said Warner, “how nice. Anything I might have heard?”
John “Jack” Warner, born January 15 1931, died January 6 2021