Wild New Zealand Blog

In the meantime we had moved out of Aberdeen City to a small bungalow in Malcolm Road, Culter, southwest along the Deeside Road.

We didn’t have a garage for the car out there and the winters were cold. I can remember first thing in the mornings my dad throwing a bucket of hot water over the door handle and grabbing it mighty quick to open it before the water refroze.  We lived a wee way up Malcolm road, opposite what was then a common with a small general store at the side of it. There were cows in the paddock over the fence, and an elderly lady who became a good friend in the little cottage next door.

I can remember doing a lot of art in that house, as well as making balsa aeroplanes - another favourite pastime - I had several hanging from the ceiling of my bedroom.

My most striking memory of Culter itself was at the A93 bridge over the Leuchar Burn as it descended through a rocky gut to join the River Dee.  On the steep rocky cliffs above the burn and below Malcolm Road perched a commemorative statue of  Rob Roy McGregor, his scarlet tartan and green jacket shining like jewels against his backdrop of rocks and foliage. According to legend, the 18th century Scottish folk hero was fleeing from English troops during the Rebellion, and leapt the burn to escape from them. If true, it was a mighty feat, and I’m sure none of the followers was game to try it on.

A wee while after I first came on the net 11 years ago I tried to find pictures of this statue.  There was very little  - one picture only of it draped in shrouds during a refurbishing paint job.  Disappointing, I thought..

A lot has happened since then, above the Leuchar Burn, and it’s now well documented on a great site about Culter. The statue that I knew was the third of four Rob Roy statues, the first being fashioned around an old ship’s figurehead and erected on the site around 1850.  This had to be replaced in 1865 when another figure was commissioned by public subscription.

The third Rob Roy, also funded by public subscription, was unveiled on the site in 1926.  It had been carved out of a log of Quebec Yellow pine and was carefully maintained by R. Geddes a local painter, who kept the paintwork in good condition until his death.  This was the version of the statue that I remember - though I never realised he was larger than lifesize!   The reason the story is now so well documented is that when he was replaced by Rob Roy no 4 in 1999, a home was found for him in the local Gordon Arms Hotel.

Alas, how often items of public heritage turn into private property! How often acts done in good faith for the public benefit go sour when money-grubbers come on the scene!  I won’t go into the full details - you can read them HERE - but the people of Culter and their supporters ended up having to find £8360 to return Rob Roy 3 to ownership of the public, who funded him in the first place, and secure his future in the safety of the St Peter’s Heritage Centre, Howie Lane, Peterculter.

Here in Far North New Zealand, we have just seen a similar rape and pillage of public property, on a much larger scale. My local small town, Kerikeri, had a Memorial Hall - a refurbished packing shed complex with stage and auditorium that was gifted to the Far North District Council many years ago as a Memorial Hall for soldiers lost in the two World Wars.  It was a good venue, and I have fond memories of designing and painting sets for theatre productions there during my holidays from University.  It was the town’s theatre for many years.  It could have been done up and developed for a number of uses (especially relating to youth) suggested by members of the public recently.

HOWEVER! Several years ago, the Far North District Council set up an indpendent trading arm called Far North Holdings.  Notwithstanding the fact that the Hall was originally gifted to the Council as a public memorial, Council saw fit to pass it over lock, stock and barrel to Far North Holdings.

To cut a long story short, Far North Holdings decided to divest itself of the property (quite a valuable piece of land).  It was put on the market, to the horror of many local residents. The pretext was that the building was no longer viable and was surplus to requirements because Kerikeri now has a new (not yet fully completed) Civic Centre.  The return from the sale of the Hall should be used to finish off the Centre, it was argued.

Just as the movement to retain the Hall was gaining momentum, a motion was passed in Council condemning it and demolition began literally overnight. I have quite honestly never been so appalled, and I don’t doubt many people were shocked at this travesty of public process.  A builder who inspected it in the course of demolition commented the building was sound.  That would not surprise me, knowing the timbers used and the construction methods of the era.

And so a public asset has been wantonly destroyed by the actions of a Council voted in by the ratepayers who technically owned that asset from the beginning.  The unfortunate thing for Kerikeri was that the public just could not raise the $1.4 Million required to purchase the land back into real public ownership, as the people of Culter managed to do with Rob Roy 3. As we say in the Antipodes “Good on you, people of Culter!”  And may the actions of the Far North District Council and its puppets come back to haunt them - jointly and severally - a millionfold in the years to come.

“Lest We Forget?”   Oh yes……

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At the age of 13 in the Scottish educational system, a pupil has to make the choice of what they want to do. Obviously a very big decision, quite hard to make at a relatively young age: I don’t know if things are the same now.  The options for me were Languages, Science and Art.

I wasn’t in any doubt what I wanted to do and it was called Art, but here’s where one of life’s major disappointments reared its head: my father’s response was a flat, “No! You will never make a living at art. Keep it as a hobby and enjoy it.”  Hobby? Aaargh!  

Looking back, I can understand his reaction at that time, but it sure was hard on me.  What’s more, I was also very good at both languages and science - It wasn’t as if art was my only option. So I didn’t have that leg to stand on.  One doesn’t argue with an RSM.  With a great deal of sadness, I decided to go for languages.

My dad’s comment impacted very heavily on my mind for far too long, and I am only just now beginning to shake it off.  What’s more, I never until very recently fully forgave him for what he’d said because as I grew older, and especially lately, I became so very aware what a strong influence it had on my thinking and choices. 

Though I sold quite a lot of art all through my legal career, I found I had indeed a very deep belief that I’d never make a living at it. How deep that belief was, I only discovered when I quit my job and moved up north here - about which, more later.  It seemed like I would never shake off the stigma (as I saw it) of not having been to Art School. 

That is beginning to change. When I look back now, and take off the wistful, rose-tinted glasses, I have to say that I’m strangely glad I didn’t go the Art School way and end up trapped in an “arty” world.  I’m grateful for where my education led me - not that my career in the law was ever truly, deeply satisfying - but because I hope I’ve ended up a much more rounded person, with more to bring to the art I create. Looking at the academic flavour of art and art galleries today, I’m at last really coming to see that I’d rather be where I am.

This blog is part of the healing process. It’s also a very necessary part of me revisiting, acknowledging and truly valuing what my dad DID give me - and I’m now realising that was considerable.

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Cinemascope had hit the big screen: at some point, my mom and I went to see “The Robe” from 20th Century Fox.

Aside from Disney, of any film I ever saw, this film had by far the widest and most lasting impact on me.  I had already been studying Latin at school from quite a young age (thanks to that great Scottish education), and I found it rather dry. Now for the first time, the Roman world began to come alive. I bought the book, The Robe by LLoyd C Douglas, was fascinated by it, and started taking an interest in the Romans and their culture.

More than that though, I got a crush on the movie’s leading man, Richard Burton.  Ah me - the effect of getting a crush!  -   It was actually a very good thing for my art, believe it or not. Doing the usual teenage girl crush stuff and finding out more about Burton’s career led me into the world of Shakespeare at the Old Vic, Alexander the Great, The Dark Tower, Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, Keats’ Rime of The Ancient Mariner, and some of Christopher Fry’s plays. This new world I stumbled upon had an exciting richness of spirit.   Shakespeare took on new life, and I began to look at literature with different eyes.

All of this impacted more or less on my art - especially Alexander the Great which opened the door on Classical Greek Art and Architecture for me.  That was hugely valuable, because Greek sculpture taught me a lot about anatomy - along with a couple of anatomy books I got for Christmas presents. I spent some enjoyable hours drawing anatomical studies from Greek pieces, and went on to produce a couple of free-standing sculptures inspired by the Classics as well.

Ancient Greece got under my skin well and truly. Rome may have conquered the Greeks, but it never conquered their art - that stands on a pinnacle of its own in the Classical world.  Greek art embodies the living breath of human and artistic endeavour, the vibrant life-force and awareness of those who created it.  Alongside the work of the Greeks, Roman statuary pales.  We are reminded that the Greeks also created the living democracy of the City State, whereas the Romans created an Empire - a very, very different thing.

Greek vase painting is still something I frequently go back to in wonderment, and so is the marvellous, almost unbelievable skill of the artists throughout the Ancient Greek world who carved in metal, in intaglio (in reverse) the dies from which the many city states’ coins were struck - coins that are works of art in their own right.  Can you imagine the skill required to carve perfect works of art of that size - in reverse? In metal? A study of the development of Greek coinage from about 700 to about 150BC opens the door on a whole new world of artistic triumph.

To take a look, go HERE and click on  the Alphabetical Index of Issuing Authorities for Greek coins.  You will find at the top of each issuing authority page a link to pages with thumbnails, which saves a lot of blind delving.

To round out this post, here are one or two of my own sculptural tributes to the Greek die-makers, sculpted and cast in epoxy soon after we came to New Zealand.  Mouse-over the images for the details:

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The instruction I got fom my dad went a whole lot further than drawing and painting. Sculpture was his own preferred medium, so naturally he got me involved in that, too.

He was experimenting with moulding and casting processes and it wasn’t long before I was learning the techniques of creating low-relief and three-dimensional sculpture in plasticine and making moulds from them to produce master casts - mostly in plaster of paris.

My dad had his own very strong sculpture style, which he passed on to me. Usually it was full of cutbacks and tricky shapes, so we started off making waste moulds of plaster of paris.  With free-standing sculptures, these moulds had to have more than one part.  I learned how to box in the original and use either shims or gravity to make moulds in several pieces, keyed into each other.  We used vaseline as the parting agent before pouring plaster into plaster.  Scary!   The end job of breaking the mould away from the hardened master inside it with a hammer and chisel was an exciting and tricky business - often fraught with accidents.  There was always patching and sanding to do afterwards.

Making moulds is a lot easier process today, even though the fundamentals are still the same.  True, you could get rubber moulding agents then, but they had to be poured hot - an impossibility with a plasticine original - hence the need to create a plaster master cast to work from.

In London my dad had already made puppet heads for a theatre project and cast them in plastic wood. Now he went on to make low-relief (or in his case high-relief) wall sculptures.  Heads and faces were always a favourite subject of his.  He extended the puppet head concept to a brilliant little “Army Major” head that he created as a decanter stopper, and we had four larger wall-plaque heads of his making, including a teddy-bear head he made for the foot of my bed.

I came away from that early period with several pieces and a wealth of experience.  I still have a spaniel dog and a low-relief tiger head made early on - both in plaster of paris and both still worth developing, plus a couple of jewellery pieces cast in epoxy resin.

I lost a big cantering horse I started because with my school commitments I didn’t complete it fast enough and though I tried to keep it damp, the clay dried and cracked on the armature inside it - lesson learned.

I realise now these early beginnings were a real gift - something else that has never left me. A few years ago, I took up sculpture again and found the moulding and casting fundamentals I’d learned as a youngster were still there. They stood me in good stead working alone, even though the materials had changed (for the better) over the years. It’s now possible to get cold-pouring, two-pot rubber, of course, and after a day of instruction at a bronze foundry I was able to adapt my techniques to make rubber moulds within a supporting plaster jacket very successfully. Thank you, Ken.

More later…

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I had arrived in Scotland with a perfect BBC accent. Aberdonians are very patriotic, egalitarian and up-front. No place to be talking like a London radio announcer, with or without the longstanding Scottish/English feuding factor.  That soon knocked the corners off the accent I didn’t know I had.

My new school was the High School for Girls (now Harlaw Academy) in Aberdeen where I gained the advantage of a great Scottish education. I was there for 8 years in total - my longest term at any school by a long shot.  In spite of our continual house moving though, my parents had always made sure I got the best possible schooling - this settled period at an excellent school occurred at just the right time in my education.

Outside of school, I enjoyed making scrapbooks of pictures I liked - Royal Family was one favorite topic for a girl from the military.  I embellished them with painted artwork and lettering, drawing on ideas from magazines and books. My stamp album got the same treatment.  Our new involvement with a Highland Regiment, pipe bands and all that went with it inspired a pencil study of a Highland dancer, drawn from a photo in the local newspaper - I’m glad I have that.

There was plenty of Art at school, too -  I still have one or two of the many things we created in art classes.  Naturally, we were beset by the usual array of still life subjects. A couple of paintings from those days remain - mainly because I used the backs of them for something else. (It’s called keeping a portfolio LOL!) They’re actually quite tricky subjects involving reflections on glass, and I’m glad to have these. They would have been done in my early teens. 

When we got to the higher classes, we were encouraged to produce black and white ink illustrations for use in the annual school magazine.  My first was of Alice in Wonderland, drinking from the bottle and holding her hand on the top of her head to see if she was growing any taller. No prizes for guessing where that idea came from, but I remember especially the art teacher’s help and encouragement in creating it.  I know it was accepted for the magazine, and so were a couple more in later years. I wish I still had those magazines…

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My art awareness was developing. I was learning to analyse what I saw from a graphics point of view - maybe not with the improved understanding that comes from years of practice, book study and looking, but at least innately.

My dad encouraged me to start a “swipe file” of pictures that appealed to me as a useful reference tool.  Over the years it has grown to huge proportions, but it still contains stuff that dates back to that time

It gradually came about that whenever I looked at books or magazines, I was taking note of the artwork. How was that picture done? What about the composition? What about the colors? What about the angle?  At first I was probably barely conscious of this, except to know that I enjoyed pictures, but through sharing thoughts with my dad, this way of looking at things quickly grew stronger and it has never left me. In fact, it took me a while to realise that not everyone has the same priorities, and that many people simply look at things long enough to identify them.

My parents bought the The Encyclopaedia of Knowledge put out by the Waverley Book Co in London. Plenty of pictures, thank goodness. It became a great resource, not just for knowledge but also for inspiration if I was doing art. Then I entered a coloring competition and got a highly commended. The prize they sent me was - of all things - a book called “Nature’s Playground”, full of information about animals and birds. I’ve still got a copy - not the one I won, which disappeared in one of our moves, but a second-hand copy I picked up somewhere just for the memory. For Christmas and birthdays I was given books on drawing  animals and trees - including several of the great “How To” series by CF Tunnicliffe - painting, and using color.

So what was I doing at this time? The earliest piece I have, done in our first year in Scotland, is a half-finished drawing on a sheet of lined paper ripped from a school exercise book of a tiger attacking a buffalo, copied freehand from an illustration in the book “The Tigers of Terengganu” by Col A Locke.  I remember being fascinated by the illustrations in that book - more quality artwork!

Another very early piece was a Guy Fawkes, developed from a black and white newspaper logo in an advertisement run by a fireworks manufacturer.  Inside the small circle you could just see the face and the tall hat, the armful of fireworks and the side of Guy’s lantern.  Tiny as it was, the quality of the basic design made an arresting image.  It was a challenge to expand it out, bring in color, and still retain the play of light and shadow created by the lantern. I was about 9 when I did that at home.

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Apart from the straight Disney content, there was one other cartoon strip in Mickey Mouse Weekly that I came to rate just as highly  - a cartoon called Strongbow the Mighty, illustrated by another real master of his trade - the London-born designer Ron Embleton. Ron created a huge body of artwork pretty much single-handed, in a really short space of time. 

Ron was in a league of his own, and it shocked me since to find out that at the time he was doing Strongbow, he was only in his early twenties, having started illustrating for comics at the age of 17  - totally, totally amazing.  I still have 37 Strongbow comic pages stashed away and kept over the years because I admired his work so much, and once I get my scanner going again, I’ll put them online, because I notice there doesn’t seem to be anything much out there about this particular comic strip.

Meantime, I’ve set up a page on this blog with one or two Strongbow images, which I’m sure will be relished by those who remember the work - and by anyone with an eye for outstanding graphics. See the link in Pages in the Sidebar.

I loved Strongbow for Ron’s marvellous, crisp black and white images, his detail, his strength of line and composition (again!), the brilliant accuracy of his men and horses, and above all his total mastery when it came to capturing power and movement. My dad and I used to pore over his pages, marvelling at his rendering of horses and men, often frozen in a split second of violent action,  but fluid, powerful and graceful nonetheless. Very, very powerful stuff.  Now I’ve had the chance to see more of Ron’s work, I have a sneaking feeling that the Strongbow era might have been one of his favorites, because the images he created for it are so complete and so satisfying. Ron captured the spirit of that period so vividly, that it’s hard for me to realise that he was also engaged with Biggles (another of my favourites), American Wild West, science fiction and Playboy magazine.  What an artist!

Strongbow, as far as I remember, was only ever a black and white comic strip. I saw some of Ron Embleton’s color work in comics recently when I searched him on the net, but to be honest, I think black and white conveys his mastery of comic strip work far more effectively.

Having said that, he also had brilliant control of tone and color, and produced many individual images that are truly breathtaking. It was a real joy to me recently to find a great body of his work that I previously hadn’t known about, a lot of it done for “Look and Learn“- over 900 images on there alone.

The other thing that drew me to Strongbow was the “Robin Hood” quality of the story. As I’ve said before, Sherwood Forest has some deep resonances in our family history, that I wasn’t even aware of at the time. That will surface later in my story, though. 

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Moving up to Aberdeen when I was eight marked the real beginning of art in my life.  From this point on, my “artistic” output and awareness really started to develop, and recollections come thick and fast. Maybe it was the Hieland air, maybe it was the greater freedom of living out of barracks and relating to a community, maybe it was just my age….

We started off living in a semi-detached Army villa in the pretty suburb of Seafield. At the bottom of our street was a small park called Johnstone Gardens built around a rocky landscaped stream, surrounded by paths, shrubberies and rock gardens, with tall trees as a backdrop. I was given my first little camera and took many photos - now lost - in that park.

I also got my first and only serial comic, and, yes, you guessed - it was Odham’s “Mickey Mouse Weekly”.  No doubt my folks enjoyed it too, but I also know my dad would have been looking for artistic quality in what he chose to expose me to, and I’m really grateful for what he selected. I looked forward to that comic, and devoured its contents voraciously.  It wasn’t all Walt Disney cartoon content of course - many of the other cartoons and illustrations were of a different quality and appealed to me less.  I found myself gradually getting a preference for the Disney style of artwork.

Two characteristics of Disney’s style stand out, and I’d like to think they influenced me favorably.  Firstly, clarity of line.  Disney’s line is stylish in its simplicity - there’s nothing tentative or weak about it - no exploratory hatching, no prevarication. Eye and hand are co-ordinated to produce a highly polished, clean result.  This was reflected in my dad’s attitude to what I produced, which harked back to the good old basics of looking hard at one’s subject-matter and capturing it accurately.

I know this ethic has been hugely eroded in the present day, but I have to say to me it’s fundamental.    If you can’t REALLY LOOK at something so you can undertand, analyze and record it accurately, you haven’t a leg to stand on when you want to play fast and loose for the sake of creating an effect. That’s my view anyway, and I’m eternally grateful that though I never ended up going to art school, I got a pretty rigorous training in making what I created look like the reality I was trying to capture. I came to value the clean, clear line, especially when it expresses 3 dimensional mass economically.  

The second valuable lesson from Disney was strength of composition, plus purity of color and tonal control.  Cartooning, especially comic cartooning, requires tight control of composition and, as always, some cartoonists are better at it than others. To me, Disney was and always will be a master. No matter that in those days, this kind of appreciation was beyond me - I just soaked the stuff up unwittingly like a sponge.

At some point, Mickey Mouse Weekly began serialising Disney’s “Alice in Wonderland” cartoon film on its back page. I fell in love with that, of course.  It’s interesting that of all Disney’s works available at the time, “Alice in Wonderland” was richest in landscape, as well as characters.  And what a landscape it was!  Lush parks, deep forest, the Walrus and the Carpenter’s moonlit beach, the White Rabbit’s house and garden, the Mad Hatter’s tea party garden, the Queen’s maze and croquet lawn - what richness of imagery and color Disney unleashed on the world in that movie! 

Movies and cartooning have come a long way - and the standards set by Disney have played a huge part in that development.   Today, children can see so much on TV and DVD that the impact is essentially lost, and that’s a pity. It’s probably hard for any young person now to estimate the impact that “Alice in Wonderland” had on me then.

On top of my second PC sits a little stuffed Disney Cheshire Cat toy that I found lying in the street shortly after our local McDonald’s opened its doors for the first time. Sadly, some child was the poorer for my gain - but I’d like to think he was put into my hands because in the long run, he carries a whole lot more meaning for me than he could for any child in today’s world of ever-changing toy fads…

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Before I take this story from London to Scotland there are a couple of important connections I need to make, because I recognise now they are the start of another thread that runs through my life and my art.

The very earliest thing I can recall about doing art - and this must have been VERY early - was drawing a kiddy house as a square with a pointed roof, four windows and a door.  The usual standard tot’s drawing, probably done in Derby or Caterham.  And I can clearly remember my father when I drew the pathway as two straight parallel lines going upwards from the bottom of the page to the door, showing me how to draw a winding path in perspective, wider at the bottom than the top and with a couple of sinuous bends on the way - looking like it was lying on the ground and not sticking up in the air. What a revelation, at that young age LOL!

That was the beginning of a long “collaboration” on art between us, and though there were times when I was irked by his input into my endeavours, I know I owe my dad an enormous debt for what he passed on to me over the years.

When we lived in Kennington, London, I attended the girls’ side of the boys’ prep school for Dulwich College for a short time.  It’s a great pity that in those days kids were not encouraged to keep  their artwork.  I hope things are different at schools today - it’s important to start building your portfolio as young as possible - ;-).  Anyway, the one piece of art that sticks in my memory from that school was a shaded pencil drawing of a goose that was sent off somewhere to an exhibition to be critiqued by the mysterious “powers that be”.  I can recall being told that it was awarded some kind of distinction, but I don’t think it ever came back to me, which was a pity. I wish I had it now.

I had very little to do with animals at that time - living the nomadic army life doesn’t lend itself to relationships with pets - or long-term friends either, for that matter. I’ve certainly made up for it since (see my Cartoon Country Blog for more), and animals are now one of my favourite subjects, as well as my  best friends - but it’s strange how that goose picture was the one piece that sticks in my memory!

Another major influence came from the movies.  Just off Piccadilly Circus in those days there was a small picture theatre that ran continuous Walt Disney cartoon movies. Whether it still exists, I really don’t know. At any time of the day you could buy a ticket and wander in there and stay as long as you liked watching Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse.  I know we went there quite often and I can still  vividly recall watching Donald Duck especially - oh man that attitude and that voice!  It wasn’t until I got real live ducks of my own only a few years ago that I fully realised what a great duck characterisation Donald really does.

At the time, these cartoons were just movies to me. At six or seven years of age, I hadn’t yet developed a critical appreciation of what I was looking at - the colorful antics on screen were just something to laugh at and enjoy.   What I didn’t know was that this first brush with Walt Disney was going to develop into a relationship that would impact on skills I didn’t even fully realise I had.

About which, more next time!

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Not only that - I was a granddaughter of it, too.  Ken’s father, William Ernest Howitt, was RSM of the 1st Battalion Scots Guards before him, and he too had artistic talent.  When my dad ran away to join the Guards, he tried to escape the influence of his father’s name on his own career by enlisting in the Coldstreams.  Short-lived dream: the enrolling officers in the Coldstreams knew the name Howitt all too well and shunted him off to the Scots Guards real fast.  It was a tradition that sons should follow in their father’s regiment.

Now my grandfather’s mother, Georgiana Howitt (nee Hewitt), ran a cab yard at the top of Normanton Road, Derby, England, where I was born.  She took it over from her father, so horses ran deep in the family.  To keep her only son out of trouble - and probably to give herself time to run her business - she packed him off at an early age to live with relatives in Heanor, and in that rural environment he labored, found time to paint and sharpened his skills with horses.  As a result I believe he became senior riding instructor at Sandhurst for awhile. He was also an outstanding soldier.

My grandfather fought as an NCO of the Scots Guards in the trenches in France in World War l and was badly gassed.  His batman saved his life, and he returned home, to be invalided out of the Guards and into the Sherwood Foresters.  Sherwood Forest - now THERE’S a name that rings through family history down the generations - of which, more to follow later.  Click HERE though, for a great piece of writing about the Sherwood Foresters and their mascot, “Private Derby” the ram.

My grandfather died when I was very young indeed.  I can remember that he used to call me “Poppy”, and I remember his woodworking shed and aviaries at the bottom of his garden. I dearly wish I had got to know him.  His love was finches, budgies and canaries. As a sideline, I now breed rare breeds poultry.  That kinda came upon me and I didn’t think of the connection when I first got started in birds … 

When my aunt, Ena May Howitt (my father’s twin), died in Boston in 1983, my mother and I went over to clear up her estate.  I hoped above all that I might find some of grandpa’s paintings from the Heanor days.  I had heard about them - in particular one of a water mill at Heanor - and I clung to the dream that they might have been with my aunt’s posessions in the States.

Well, I came home with heaps of family stuff, including many great photos - but no paintings.  They probably fell victim to a brush with borer in nana’s house, blamed on the cane furniture factory owned by Georgiana’s husband, John Howitt.  In-laws trouble rears its head.  Apparently, my grandmother ruthlessly threw out everything that could have possibly harbored borer.  My father pleaded in vain to keep the metal workings of a grandfather clock - but out they had to go.  Looks like her husband’s paintings with their wooden frames went, too.

The only artwork I have of his are a pair of beautifully painted Scots Guards crests - one for each of his twins, with their names hand-lettered underneath.  They are very dear to me.

Among my aunt’s belongings I found my grandfather’s Regular Army Certificate of Service - another of those slim red books, which came home with me to join my father’s. 

Once again, history repeats itself …   The Final Assessment of grandpa’s Conduct & Character, completed personally in the handwriting of his CO, Major A A Sims, was : “Exemplary”.

See Links Under Pages in sidebar for more about the Regiments.
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