All men have secrets and here is mine, so let it be known.
Although Sir Frank Brangwyn (12 May 1867 – 11 June 1956) was born in Belgium he is generally thought of as a true native son of his adoptive country; the country in which I am writing this description. One of the translations of his surname into English is “fair raven”. Wikipedia states that in his lifetime he created over 12,000 works. I am not sure if this sketch qualifies as one of them as it seems to be so quickly dashed off. But that is one of the reasons I find it appealing – its frantic energy. I can imagine him standing on the Cannon Street station platform hurriedly trying to get an impression down because he senses that the station guard is getting ready to blow his whistle to signal that it is time for the train to depart. That the drawing is executed on squared paper indicates to me that Brangwyn was going to take the sketch back to his studio and work his magic on it by scaling it up and transforming it into one of his large-scale canvases or colossal wall panels. One of the other things I like about this sketch is that it must have had some significance to the previous owner to have had it professionally framed with conservation materials.
I have gotten to the stage of life where I unconsciously slip into thinking about all my past regrets. Pretty much all of these are too personal and embarrassing to relate but I can list what is my biggest cultural regret which is much worse than not stretching to get a page of original comic art when it was although pricey at the time was then just a tiny fraction of what it is worth now. I might not be able to get that one page I missed out on but with enough money I might be able to get a reasonably acceptable substitute. However, the event I passed up on cannot be replicated and some gazillionaire music promoters have tried by throwing silly money at Johnny Marr (no relation) but he resolutely refuses to re-form what remains of the band. I would like to think that if I were in his shoes then I would act the same but I know that I would cave when the offer got to seven figures, let alone the nine figures that Marr has reportedly turned down. Yes, nine figures meaning at least 100,000,000. So much for Money changes everything.
Back in the mid-1980s when I was doing my first stint of [state-funded] higher education I was not big into music – I am still not – so when a number of up-and-coming bands such as Explorers and Dr & the Medics played the Students Union on one of the upper floors of College House I have no remorse about not going to see them. There is one exception but I had seen the group perform on Top of the Pops, a British television chart show programme, and I had taken against the singer because he flamboyantly wore his shirt slashed to the navel. That’s all it took, but I suppose it is comparable to what drummer Mike Joyce wrote in his recent autobiography when he said that he and his fellow bandmates had mentally rejected someone just because he had his hair in a ponytail, but who otherwise would have been a good fit to cover for the regular bass player, Andy Rourke, who was then in rehab. It was Joyce’s band that played the college that February evening all those years ago, their first gig after the release of their self-named debut album – the atmosphere that evening must have been electric. I can picture myself leaving the library that evening and cutting through College House and thinking what a racket was coming from upstairs before I exited through the side door and within sixty seconds I was back in my on-campus student accommodation where I was going to settle in for the night with a comic, and think about my teenage crush, who was not a comic character, and yes, I was a teenager as well then.
[continued in the following post.]
