Reynolds Stone: A Memoir,
KATE HUBBARD
Reynolds Stone: A Memoir By Humphrey Stone Dovecote Press £35
Even if Reynolds Stone is not a name you’re familiar with, you might well recognise his hand: the coat of arms on a British passport; the London Library bookplate; the masthead on the Economist.
These are just some examples of the vast body of work produced by Reynolds, a wood-engraver, designer, letter-cutter and watercolourist. This most modest of men left his mark in many corners, and now Humphrey Stone, his son, a typographer and designer himself, has written a memoir. As you might expect, this is a beautiful book, packed with illustrations of Reynolds’s work, as well as photographs taken by his wife, Janet.
The Stones were friends and neighbours of my parents in west Dorset and their house, the Old Rectory in Litton Cheney, with its attics, drawers full of treasures and woodland garden, was a place of enchantment for a child. Janet, in full Edwardian dress complete with parasol, was the more vivid presence, but Reynolds was always there in the background – handsome, slightly stooped, gentle, murmuring in his low, distinctive voice (‘like bees in a lime tree’, said Sylvia Townsend Warner) and never too busy to produce a birthday card.
He was born in 1909, but considered himself a Victorian and indeed belonged more to the 19th than to the 20th century. His father, like his grandfather, was a classics master and his mother an artist of some talent. Mother and son would sit side by side painting watercolours during holidays in Dorset where the family had a home. Reynolds saw his life as a ‘series of lucky dips’, though his mother’s death, when he was 16, brought a rare stroke of bad luck.
He was lucky in his headmaster at his prep school, Durnford, in Purbeck (the boys stripped naked and swam in the sea every day at dawn, fostering Reynolds’s lifelong love of sea bathing), who saw the point of him – ‘His goods are not in the shop window … there is depth in his nature.’
From an early age, he observed the natural world with the closest attention; later he would pay equal attention to the work of such as Samuel Palmer, Gwen Raverat and Thomas Bewick. He was lucky, after leaving Cambridge, to be the first candidate to take up a printing apprenticeship at the Cambridge University Press, and lucky too that a chance encounter with Eric Gill, on a train, led to a fortnight at Gill’s community in Buckinghamshire, where Gill gave him his one and only lesson in wood engraving.
In 1938, after some dithering, Reynolds married Janet Woods, a bishop’s daughter. The Stones began married life in Berkshire, but Reynolds hankered after Dorset and in 1953 they moved into the Old Rectory. Here Janet perfected the art of hospitality. Friends such as John and Myfanwy Piper, Kenneth Clark, John Betjeman, Cecil Day-lewis, Iris Murdoch, John Bayley, Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears and Kathleen Raine enjoyed bedroom fires, breakfast trays, hand-churned butter from Janet’s cow, picnics and swimming expeditions.
But if Janet was the ringmaster, the organiser of treats and entertainment, Reynolds provided intellectual ballast and a still, calm centre. He would work, at one end of the sitting room, serenely oblivious to the people and chat swirling around him (just as he remained unperturbed by Janet’s liaison of over 40 years with Kenneth Clark). And his output was prodigious: memorials, headstones, bookplates, engravings, book illustrations, watercolours, postage stamps, banknotes, typefaces, the masthead for the Times and the logo for Dolcis shoes.
Reynolds was a listener, not a talker, unassuming and unworldly, and generally equable though prone to bouts of gloom, often brought on by enforced trips away from home, or the felling of one of his beloved trees.
The following story, related by V S Pritchett’s son Oliver, gives something of his flavour. Finding himself in Litton Cheney on a school trip, Oliver ran to the rectory where, through an open window, he spied Reynolds working and announced himself with ‘Hello, I’m your godson.’ Reynolds looked up and without a word handed him an apple from a bowl on his desk, whereupon Oliver ran back to the bus.
Reynolds died aged 70, in 1979. As Humphrey Stone writes, there was ‘a wonderful symmetry and wholeness to his life … his character, the life he led and his work were one’ (enviably lucky). ‘I can’t write about a saint,’ said James Lees-milne, when asked to write a biography of Reynolds. We should be grateful since his reluctance left the field clear for this beguiling memoir.