Binman scours the art market
In the morning, James Innes-mulraine cleans Brighton’s streets. In the afternoon, he tracks down lost Gainsboroughs and Van Dycks
My two jobs move to the same rhythm in tandem. My research for the Jordaens Van Dyck Panel Paintings Project, and my street-cleaning for Brighton Council are both quickening with spring.
The Project studies oil paintings on oak panels by Jordaens (1593-1678) and Van Dyck (1599-1641). It is now concentrating on the Royal Hospital Chelsea’s portrait of King Charles I and his family. The picture was thought to be a copy, but we discovered that Van Dyck gave it the finishing touches. (Building on this work, the Project is also keen to hear from any private owners with Van Dyck panels).
Work on cleaning up the streets is hotting up, too. No frost, and the grass starts poking through the kerbs in February. We’ve already started hoeing. Weeds explode in April. When I was on a barrow-route, my husband asked me why I couldn’t sleep. ‘Weeds,’ I said.
I started working with Brighton Council in 2012. The art business was slow, and great dealers like my old boss Philip Mould (of Fake or Fortune? fame) scoured the sales. Little slipped down to my end of the trade. A lost Gainsborough (pictured) I discovered with my dad, now published in Hugh Belsey’s catalogue raisonné, was a glorious exception. I needed another job, and I’d enjoyed early starts when I was working on a farm.
The comedian Bob Mortimer loved being a dustman because of the exercise and free afternoons. I’m done by 2.30pm, and at the London art archives by 4pm.
The manager trained us on dustcarts, hooking the wheelie bin on the hoist at the back, then pressing the button that tipped it in the back. He showed us how to avoid being hit as the bin swung up. ‘Along one and up two,’ he said to us, then turning to me, ‘like a knight’s move in chess.’ I wasn’t nervous after that.
I was given a uniform, and joined the 5am line-up at the Yard, often back in bed
before my husband Zak got up for work. My diary covers some shifts in August: ‘Back on the trucks! – Slightly grim morning on the small recycling truck – Good day on the trucks.’
The small truck was barely taller than the arc of the bin-hoist, and the mechanism was surprisingly powerful. I shot cans and plastic right over the truck, and it took several goes to get it right.
The other days were brilliant – it was so hot one time that we all dunked our heads in the ornamental fountain on someone’s drive. I remember riding back through Brighton with my feet braced on the dashboard. Nothing beats it.
There was the time we parked on a break under some trees I didn’t recognise. They were elms, and the driver showed me how to tell the leaves. Brighton’s elms survived Dutch elm disease, and there are 17,000 of them. My route these days in west Hove has a mile-long avenue of Victorian elms. I get to drive the whole length of the avenue before 7am in the summer, with the light through the leaves and an empty road. It’s an unbelievable perk of the job. ‘Isn’t this incredible?’ I say to a colleague, nicknamed ‘the Wisest Man’, as I take him to his barrow-point. He’s unimpressed. He’s from Brighton. The elms have always been here. And they’re responsible for Leafing Season.
Leafing Season, the roadsweeper’s equivalent of haymaking, is relentless. On a heavy day, the four of us lifted and bagged more than a ton of leaves off the streets, with Dave on the mechanical sweeper taking twice as much again. A day’s leafing has the frenetic excitement of a 20-phase attack on the tryline. I love it. Henryk, my co-pilot, has vast experience and patience. After the Polish Army, he drove a Brinks armoured van – and carried a gun, I remind myself if my recent promotion from barrowboy to driver ever goes to my head. Another colleague, Balàzs, is a Hungarian archaeology graduate. He dreams of diving for shipwrecks, and listens to my instructions before gently modifying them with the words, ‘You don’t have to, but wouldn’t it be better to…?’ And very often it is.
One time we were joined by a colleague, a human dynamo who’s parachuted in for emergencies. He had a black hat over his ears and turned up at the front. Henryk couldn’t stop laughing: ‘Your hat!’ he howled, ‘Martin Luther!’
My colleagues are remarkable men and women. Pierre Halé the storeman will be known as a portraitist. He’s a genuine talent. One grew a beard and lived in a forest for six months after reading War and Peace. Another explained why Baltic oak is better for making panels to paint on. The cooler climate produces more even growth rings, and stronger wood. Thanks to him, I had this fact to hand when someone asked me before our lecture for the Project.
The last word goes to a mathematician colleague on the Brighton streets. My ambition went as far as keeping the local residents happy. His was: ‘First we clean the streets; then we clean the oceans.’
I wish him luck. He made it sound doable.