julian trevelyan

8/7/2019 Julian Trevelyan

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Annette Joy Jemison

‘When Will We Have Sleeping Logicians, SleepingPhilosophers?: Julian Trevelyan in Pursuit of aSuper-Reality1

The anthropological Surrealist collages, photographs and texts produced by

Julian Trevelyan (1910–88) between 1937 and 1939 fall largely into two broad

groups in terms of subject matter. The first collection presents his

interpretation of the Surrealist aesthetic category of decline, during a period in

which economic decline characterized much of England, and the second

portrays his understanding of the psychological impact of this economic

decline upon those believed by Mass-Observation to be most directly affected:the population of Northern England’s industrial towns. The latter is achieved

through Trevelyan’s imaging of behavioural patterns during ‘spare time’, in

which it was reasoned the human being was most true to himself.2 This essay

explores Trevelyan’s contribution, over a period of three years, to a

phantasmic social psychology of the crisis that so many experienced.

In July 1937, Trevelyan photographed the reflections of two young females,

gleefully waving within Blackpool’s original 1927 Hall of Mirrors (see Figure 1).

Their bodies are wildly distorted, their necks, arms and fingers elongated in

the extreme and the equally exaggerated figure of the photographer at work

appears alongside them in the frame. The curvilinear lines and biomorphic

forms of the image render it explicit in its acknowledgement of a different kindof reality, a super-reality, as advocated by the surrealists, which is deeper and

more vibrant than the typical realist expression of the working classes as

oppressed beings engulfed by the grey monotony of industrialism. As the

image is neither geometrized nor fragmentary, however, the super-reality that

its warped appearance suggests also seems to be symptomatic of the fictive,

the duplicitous, the deceptive, possibly even the treacherous.3 This surreal

vision is strengthened by Trevelyan’s documentary impulse, in that the very

essence of the interwar industrial seaside holiday is represented here.

Therefore, this particular photographic amalgamation of surrealist visual

strategies and documentary procedures, with outward subject matter that

immediately awards significance to ‘spare time’, visually encapsulates the two

fundamental vectors of his interwar work.Trevelyan had also adopted the idea of a super-reality in the vivid surrealist

text ‘DREAMS’, included in the June 1930 edition of Transition, an international

avant-garde publication seeking to combine a primitive, instinctive mythology

with a modern consciousness. Here too references to the oblique mirror-image

are made:

Today artists have identified the aesthetic faculty, still chiefly by analogy, with thesubconscious (where Surréalisme flounders, prematurely corpulent, through treasure-

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trove). For as the mind has changed, so too has the definition of meaning: the rhythm of living has its foundations deeper, and the mind gropes to justify, exemplify itself in thesubconscious. Perhaps it glows with a new phosphorescence, and in the obliquemirrors that line the corridor from the day-world to the night-world, shines pearl-likein surrounding blackness.4

Trevelyan’s assertion that ‘the rhythm of living has its foundations deeper’,

even within the subconscious, signals his belief in the significance of the

repressed. Repression, as a Freudian psychoanalytical term, refers to the

102 ‘when will we have sleeping logicians?’

Figure 1. Julian Trevelyan,Untitled (Hall of Mirrors,Blackpool), 1937.Photographic print20 × 13.5

cm. Privatecollection: Mary Fedden.

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subconscious rejection of thoughts and impulses that conflict with

conventional standards of conduct. Unwelcome thoughts, emotions and

sensations are therefore ‘repressed’ when they are forced into the

unconscious. This area of enquiry in fact motivated the very formation of

Mass-Observation at a time when ‘Social psychology was groping its way out

of the subconscious shadows of Freud and Jung and surrealism’.5 Indeed, poet

and reporter Charles Madge, soon to become one of the organization’s

founding figures, suggested in a letter to the New Statesman and Nation of 2

January 1937 that a combination of psychoanalysis and anthropology was

needed ‘to deal with elements so repressed that only what is admitted to be a

first-class upheaval brings them to the surface’.6 By coincidence, a poem by

self-taught anthropologist Tom Harrisson about his experiences in Malekula

was printed directly below Madge’s article.7 Recognizing similarities between

his Bolton project and the interests of the Blackheath group, of which painter,

writer and documentary film-maker Humphrey Jennings was also a part,

Harrisson suggested a collaboration and, together with Madge and Jennings,wrote a further letter, one bearing the hallmarks of a manifesto. By February,

therefore, ‘Mass-Observation’ had emerged. Furthermore, even before the

industrial summer holiday in July, it was recognized that no fewer than three

upheavals and key symbolic events had indeed occurred. The first was the

abdication crisis, the constitutional upheaval that dominated the winter of

1936. The burning of the Crystal Palace happened on the night of 30 November

1936 and, finally, on 12 May 1937 the Coronation of George VI took place. Such

events, argues Ben Highmore:

are seen as moments when ‘mythic’ and ‘ritualistic’ elements of a culture come to thesurface. Thus the marital status of the king and the woman he wants to marry is seen as

providing materials for an anthropology of sexual taboo, mythic rituals of crowningand uncrowning, superstition and so on. This suggests that the everyday (its social‘rules’) is seen most vividly at points of crisis, moments when everyday life becomespublic.8

Amid these points of crisis, Mass-Observation set out on an anthropological

survey of British life, or ‘an anthropology of the near’.9 It had become

necessary, according to Madge, Harrisson and Jennings, for the ordinary to be

‘made strange’ through examination with a supposedly impartial eye, because

the British possessed no adequate sense of reflection upon their social selves.

If, however, this were to be addressed and rectified, colossal issues such as the

apparent fragmentation of society and political instability might, potentially,

be resolved. Trevelyan, in his autobiography Indigo Days, recalls TomHarrisson’s particular objectives as follows:

The Abdication had just taken place, and Tom had wanted to know how the ordinarypeople in England had adjusted themselves to the sudden downfall of their FairyPrince … To see England as he had seen Malekula; to ask the same questions: how thedead are disposed of, how marriages celebrated, how indeed the complex socialstructure of England works, this anthropological inquiry grew rapidly into the greatorganization that became known as Mass-Observation.10

Annette Joy Jemison 103




Condemning as arid and lifeless well-known models such as the London and

Liverpool social surveys of the 1930s,11 Harrisson recruited respondents who,

by keeping diaries and completing reports, would scrutinize and log their

own conduct, together with that of the people around them. Observers were

expected to distance themselves from others in order to record those

happenings that might otherwise escape notice as being uninterestingly

ordinary, and the findings were dispatched to a central office where they were

edited to provide material for books describing how British people behaved in

everyday life.12

The organization pursued a number of avenues but the Worktown Project,

with which Trevelyan was involved, remains the most ambitious example of

the Mass-Observation method. From mid-1936, Harrisson had been accepting

casual employment in Bolton so that in his spare time he was able to visit the

town’s pubs and other public places. In February 1937, documentary

photographer Humphrey Spender and realist painters Graham Bell and

William Coldstream joined him, and Trevelyan was soon to follow. In fact, in ahandwritten note to Julian, marked, 85, Davenport Street, Bolton, and

scribbled on paper printed with the heading ‘SOUTH LANCASHIRE

CULTURAL SURVEY 1937: Tom Harrisson, Walter Hood, J. Willcock, A.

Smith’, Harrisson writes:

How would May suit?Or when? June is ok.In May the smoke is peculiarly fine and the town’s tree supports gay sparrow laughter.June in a mill is summer indeed.After a hectic time I am all settled in, with lots of beds, little bedding, some neighbourlygoodwill; a dictaphone; and a midwife next door.Drop me a line about above, sometime.

Tom Harrisson13

Writing again, on 7 June 1937, Harrisson rephrases his plea:

We have a … Preacher, a Harpo-Marxist and a coalminer in the house at the moment.By Saturday 12th I hope to have cleared some of that debris away … You can havedecent beds and stay as you please. You must paint some Bolton chimneys; they arelike saltmills without the savour … Bolton art awaits you! You will enjoy it, I swear.14

Trevelyan at this point relented. Up to sixty unemployed, largely Southern,

upper-middle-class university-educated figures also became involved in the

Worktown Project, living on subsistence pay as full-time observers in Bolton.

Five were permanently stationed in Blackpool for a full fourteen months, withadditional field-workers from the industrial town visiting for long

weekends.15 Although in a minority, female observers were also recruited,

including Julian’s first wife, Ursula.

Four volumes consolidating the collected materials were planned, but only

The Pub and the People (1943) was published. Much archival material

nevertheless remains and this, according to Jenny Shaw, is best used to

research ‘the ephemeral, the hidden, the paradoxical and the surprising’. 16

Nonetheless, as John Walton suggests, Mass-Observation’s assemblage of





can reveal changes in the ‘psychologically efficacious or pertinent’24 images

and myths of society. The second benefit of dream analysis is then recognized

to lie within the dream’s representation of notions that are forbidden or

repressed within society. There is potential here for dreams, like graffiti, toserve as testimonies to forces and factors that might otherwise remain hidden

in more official forms of discourse and documentation. Therefore, although

dreams and dreaming constituted but a fraction of Mass-Observation’s area of

enquiry, they were, from a theoretical point of view, crucial.

The Surrealists, of course, also believed that dream analysis could allow

access to the unconscious as, ‘In dream, in free association, in hypnotic states,

in automatism, in ecstasy or delirium, the “pure creations of the mind” were

able to erupt’.25 In La Révolution Surréaliste of December 1924, it was declared:

‘We are all at the mercy of the dream and we owe it to ourselves to submit its

power to the waking state. It is a terrible tyrant garbed in mirrors and flashes

of lightning. What is pen and paper, what is writing, what is poetry before this

giant who holds the muscles of clouds in his own muscles?’26 Trevelyan’svividly written script ‘DREAMS’, published six years later, in fact marks one

of the key moments in the artist’s career, in which his acute understanding of

Surrealist precepts is voiced. It is therefore deserving of lengthy quotation:

Stare fixedly at the lamp, its incandescent spherical shade, the white zig-zag of itsfilament; with eyes shut the pattern remains printed in purple and blue on the emptyredness of Retina. But once liberated from the meanly world of actuality, the patternacquires a new and more dynamic value; the sphere of the shade becomes the symbolof a finite universe; the incandescent zig-zag, the thought to penetrate the encirclingwalls. So in dreams the objects of every-day existence, freed from the tyranny of consistency, of unilocality, acquire a new meaning. Jung has shown that thesubconscious symbolises, the better to solve, its problems; and we would go further

and suggest that the entire aesthetic activity of the mind is an attempt, often frustrated,to symbolise a remote disintegrating reality …

In the state of dreaming or of hallucination, the mind loses that selfconsciousnesswhich in its waking hours it can never quite banish, and begins to move silentlythrough a timeless, spaceless world, where neither Destiny nor Chance have stepped; itis created by and at the same time creates its sleep liberated creatures, grows deeperand broader than the day-world; lines can be drawn in any direction instead of in theone; the tension which relates mind to matter in the waking hours disappears.27

In 1935, Trevelyan delved yet deeper into the realms of these sleep-liberated

creatures in his painting Hypnosis (Figure 2), presenting the human mind and

imagination as a piece of quirky machinery. A disembodied head here

provides the housing for a carefully constructed mechanical system of wheels,

pulleys, levers and other symbols. The whole scene is also bathed in an indigo-

blue wash, which, considering the title of his autobiography, immediately

confirms the painting as an act of spatial self-reflection. Writing in June 1938 in

the London Bulletin, in relation to similar images appearing within Surrealism

around this time, Humphrey Jennings commented: ‘the point of creating

pseudo-machines was not an exploitation of machinery but as a “profanation

of art” parallel to the engineer’s profanation of the primitive “sacred places” of

the earth’.28 Trevelyan’s painting of the dreaming mind, however, proposes a





scenario allowing direct access to the unconscious. Indeed, the part played by

the wheel in this mechanization, with its unavoidable treadmill morphologies,

is especially suggestive of the prevailing notion of interwar Britain as a prison.Imagery associating life in Britain with a prison existence saturated the 1930s

and lingered well into the 1940s. The poet Kathleen Raine, for example, in a

letter to Trevelyan, mused: ‘But it is a prison here. I could [climb] whole

mountains if it were not for this chain I have to drag’.29 Tom Harrisson too, in

his essay ‘Mass-Opposition and Literature’, had, in Valentine Cunningham’s

view, ‘put the finger right on the ‘30’s oppressed sense of being confined,

enclosed, islanded, behind bars’.30 This imagery resurfaces in Trevelyan’s

photography, and very powerfully in a scene captured by the Surrealist in


Figure 2. Julian Trevelyan,Hypnosis, 1935. Oil oncanvas, 71 × 45 cm. Privatecollection: Jeffrey Sherwin.




Whitehaven, a port and coal-mining town on the Cumbrian coast (see Figure 3).

In this particular image, various clusters of male figures linger around a street

corner as if to waste time purposely. One man folds his arms; another two

appear seated with their heads in their hands, and a further three stand with

their hands in their pockets. A lamp post then casts its shadow over a curved

arrangement of bollards, producing the effect of a sundial and establishing a

feeling that time is ticking by. Two interrelated interpretations of this allusion

to time and the wasting of it emerge here. Firstly, and most obviously, is the

reference to mass unemployment.31 There is also secreted within this image,

however, a sense of depressing relentlessness.32 Northern England’s working-

class population is portrayed as imprisoned within an uncontrollable cyclical

process, one potentially comparable to the endless cycle of ruination and

renewal that so fascinated the French surrealists who chose to enter the

Parisian Zone.33

In addition to this notion of imprisonment was the popular idea of escape

through travel. In the 1920s and 1930s, the ‘holiday dream’ was a significantconcept and one that Paul Fussell has equated with the prevalence of foreign

geographical imagery in British literature at this time. Fussell takes as

examples the guide-book obsession in Joyce’s Ulysses and the countless

topographical references in Eliot’s The Waste Land, which is ‘the work of an

imagination stimulated by great presiding motifs of movements between


Figure 3. Julian Trevelyan,Untitled (Town Centre,Whitehaven), 1937–38.Photographic print,14.5 × 20.5 cm. Privatecollection: Mary Fedden.




Germany, Russia, Greece, India, Switzerland, Smyrna, Carthage, Phoenicia,

Jerusalem, Egypt, and Austria, as well as by shifts of perceived landscape and

setting – sand, rock, water, mountains, plains, snow, sea, city, river, ship, even

hotels’.34 Humphrey Jennings’ imagination was likewise animated by

fantasies of flight, freedom and Port de Plaisance imagery, prompting him to

complain to Trevelyan in 1930: ‘I am tired of waiting about in this appalling

island and shall come to Paris with about twopence and simply exist for the

summer … I sound miserable but am not really so: only bored by England.

Some painting must be done and one can’t do it here’.35 Likewise, Kathleen

Raine in another letter to Julian remarked: ‘This is no country for poets just

now’.36 Trevelyan’s dreamful mind was also enlivened by the possibility of

escape, as a photograph of a group of his friends, chatting and drinking

around a sun-drenched café table on the Ile de Ré, suggests.37 Also produced

in the summer of 1939 was his series of images featuring this same group of

people relaxing at the water’s edge in Cassis, and larking around with fishing

vessels. In both examples, an almost palpable sense of momentary liberty fromrestriction is registered in Trevelyan’s depiction of the human body revelling

in an experience of pleasure and comfort – an immediate pre-war idyll, even

under the ever-encroaching shadow of international hostilities.

By the late 1930s, the holiday had become a major domestic political issue in

Britain, a phenomenon which Gary Cross suggests resulted from the

Depression, which had produced a new interest in the relationship between

work and leisure.38 Harrisson’s observers in 1937 and 1938 found that wage-

earners now defined themselves not as jobholders but as consumers, their

ability to express themselves in funded free time being critical to their self-

esteem. Leisure, therefore, was no longer seen as privately experienced

compensation for the rigours of industrial work. It had evolved into a means

of recovering the lost values of family and community, which were notions

central to interwar political ideals. Spare time, and its organization, had

become contested terrain for both the international right and the left. Harold

Laski and Clement Attlee’s TUC committee to subsidize holidays for the

unemployed proclaimed that the ‘industrial refugees … need to get away

from the misery and drabness of their everyday lives’.39 And this misery and

drabness are suggested in the treadmill imagery of Hypnosis.In the category of surrealist works known as ‘dream paintings’ an

illusionistic technique predominates, as it does in Hypnosis. In this sense, they

may not necessarily offer direct records of dreams. This is also the case in

many of Yves Tanguy’s paintings, including Surrealist Landscape of 1935,

which presents a dream-like exploration of an interior landscape rather than avisualization of a particular hallucination. Many surrealist paintings, and even

photographs, therefore retain characteristics of what Freud labelled ‘dream

work’.40 The survival of contrary elements side by side provides one example.

This is a scenario to which Trevelyan alludes in his photograph of Blackpool’s

‘Teapot Café‘ (Figure 4). Here, a queue of holiday-makers is seen to have

formed alongside a quirky mobile tea kiosk, shaped like a giant teapot, and

these weary people wait in complete indifference to its screaming incongruity

upon the sands. The consolidation of two or more objects or images and the





attention to entities that profess a symbolic value, often masking a sexualmeaning, then supply two further instances. Dream work was even put to

practical use by London’s Maudsley Hospital in 1936, in the experiments it

performed to investigate the curative effect of mescalin, a hallucination-

inducing drug, upon cases of acute schizophrenia. Trevelyan was himself

approached to partake in these trials because artists were believed to be better

equipped to describe their experiences than the common man. His

contribution served also to further his own search into the deeper self, as

traced within his paintings and photographs of this time.41

A significant consequence of Trevelyan’s search was his merging, between

1935 and 1937, of evocations of individual consciousness with representations

of the city. The results of this fusion are not exotic, except in their borrowing

from Klee and Miró. Instead, the referent is Northern industrialism. Theimages, including a vision in mixed media of 1936 entitled The City (Figure 5),

do, however, become fantastic in their fetishism, and Trevelyan himself recalls

this exceptionally creative period as follows:

I had invented a sort of mythology of cities, of fragile structures carrying here and therea few waif-like inhabitants. ‘Dream Scaffold’, ‘The Tenements of Mind’ – such were thetitles of some of the panels on which I was now engaged. I think they owed somethingto early Klee, and probably also in their technique and presentation to certain earlyworks of Ben Nicholson. They expressed a need I felt for something more poetic and


Figure 4. Julian Trevelyan,Untitled (Teapot Café,Blackpool), 1937.Photographic print,14.5 × 20.5 cm. BoltonMuseum and Art Gallery,Bolton M.B.C.




mysterious than the brutal hammers of Hélion, and I can well understand Ozenfant’scomment when he saw them: ‘Ça manque un peu de rosbif’.42

On his arrival in Bolton there was, therefore, a definite shift of emphasis in

Trevelyan’s work, reflecting his increasing desire to acknowledge a sense of

the collective unconscious. The amorphic compositions of 1932–34 had

become linear and architectural, bearing an affinity to Alexander Calder’s

three-dimensional morphologies.43 In The City, for example, the dynamism of

the urban environment, which fascinated Trevelyan throughout his life, is

instilled within the image in the lines of force established by his strategic

positioning of coloured diamonds and whitened stars usually surrounded by

circles. The apparition of five newly created letters, floating alongside these

pictorial symbols, serves also to indicate a playful and animated Klee-like

space, but one equally suggesting the need for a fundamental, even childlike,

re-learning or re-focusing within this microcosmic city. Indeed, Michel Remyhas described the aim of Trevelyan’s dream work as: ‘to recover a pristine

version of creation, through new, spontaneously raised urban symbols. This

means that the new myth is not to be dug up, but found, through renewal of

vision’.44 Trevelyan’s approach to his subject matter in The City may be aligned

with Tim Edensor’s much later assessment of ‘ruined’ space. Edensor’s

comments, although entirely unrelated, illuminate what I perceive to be

Trevelyan’s standpoint insofar as his great interest is in urban and industrial

decay. Indeed, ruins are places of similar limitless possibilities which:


Figure 5. Julian Trevelyan,The City, c.1936. Mixedmedia, oil and crayon on

gesso ground on board,72 × 115 cm. Privatecollection: D. Byner.

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allow wide scope for imaginative interpretation, unencumbered by the assumptionswhich weigh heavily on highly encoded, regulated space … Ruins offer spaces inwhich the interpretation and practice of the city becomes liberated from the everydayconstraints which determine what should be done and where, and which encode the

city with meanings. Accordingly, they offer opportunities for challenging anddeconstructing the imprint of power on the city.45

Trevelyan wished to challenge and deconstruct this imprint, launching

himself into charting the archetypal city of his childhood through a sustained

portrayal of urban fantasy that he explored and explained himself in his

second published dream-text, ‘Mythos’, which appeared in 1937 in ThePainter’s Object:

To-day there is the same city to paint; but it has become a world city, more inclusive yetless precise in its geographical construction. Mingling in its streets and among itslabyrinthine galleries are the mass desires and individual experiences of itsinnumerable inhabitants … the analogy suggests itself to a single nervous system, to asingle human being. The line of demarcation between the city and its inhabitants,between house and people, sometimes almost vanishes. The ‘nerves’ and ‘arteries’ of agreat town form the ‘cells’ and ‘canals’ of our own body.

… the city is in fact a compound of metaphor and symbol, a new kind of myth. I havestressed it because I believe that such myths in fact form the subject-matter of muchcontemporary painting. Society in the past provided a continually changing mythologyfor the artist. To William Blake such a ready-made mythology was already lacking, andhe had to create his own. To-day the need for new myths has become far more urgent.The cinema has evolved the Wild West and the paradise of Harpo Marx; but the painteris left high and dry and has to rely on his own imagination.46

The painting Palace of Dreams, also completed in 1937, offers a remarkably

direct visual representation of the themes engaged in ‘Mythos’, the analogy

between mind and machine, first suggested in 1935 in Hypnosis, now extended

to that of a machine-city.47 Trevelyan also registered these convictions in an

oblique sense in the collages he produced during 1937 and 1938 which, being

assembled from carefully selected portions of newsprint, in themselves

present symbols of community relationships and forms of communication.

‘Mythos’ is in fact illustrated by a collage in The Painter’s Object. Pictured is a

range of skyscrapers around which many comparatively tiny black-and-white

protrusions from the ground appear. These dome-shaped features, present

elsewhere in Trevelyan’s dream-state and dream-city paintings, actually

‘mingle’ in the city’s streets and among its ‘labyrinthine galleries’, thus

embodying ‘the mass desires and individual experiences of its innumerable

inhabitants’. In a letter to Trevelyan, which refers in all probability to hisseparation from Ursula in 1948,48 Tanya Wickham makes explicit reference to

this curious symbol, thus demonstrating its prominence within the artist’s

visual vocabulary over a number of years:

Please dear Julian, don’t look so unhappy and live with your imagination and let itmake the people around you look like this: [one dome-shaped symbol drawn and in-filled with red pen]. If you can stay where you are for the duration … then you can gohome every night and even have parties with lots of [five identical dome-shapedsymbols] and think of them instead of letting things get at you.49





Trevelyan’s collages do indeed permit the ‘cuts and sutures’ of the research

process to remain visible, with potential for the re-arrangement of their

diverse elements and, in turn, encouraging a re-articulation of their possible

meanings. Given their marriage of typically incompatible realities, these

distinctive works are particularly effective portrayals of everyday life as a

scenario in which conflicting elements forever collide (see Figure 6).

This amalgamation of the mind and the city is also encountered in

Trevelyan’s 1937 collage portraying a group of wrecked buildings, formed

from a range of mental-health-related newspaper cuttings (Figure 6). In this

scene, which like many of his images of Lancashire’s wastelands, is

reminiscent of a war zone, jaggedly torn sections of newsprint represent

tonnes of mortar that have been dislodged from buildings and have tumbled

to the ground.55 An inverted newspaper extract, indicating a section of fallen

masonry, explains the scene: ‘a young French airman crashed in view of his

friends … after hitting an overhead electric cable. One man was killed’. Given

Trevelyan’s interest in deeper realities, we might assume, however, that thisdilapidated scene carries wider implications, suggesting a painful conclusion

to the state of national decline that he, throughout 1937, acknowledges with

mounting urgency. The impact upon the Worktown collages of issues


Figure 6. Julian Trevelyan,

Untitled (DevastatedBuildings), 1937. Collage,pen, ink and watercolouron paper, 25.5 × 36.7 cm.Location unknown.




of Dunne accentuated an interest in dreams and prevision which pervades his

fiction and creates distinctive thematic and textural effects’.61 J. W. Dunne’s

geometric diagrams in An Experiment with Time (1927) could also be said to

offer a non-Klee-based precedent for Trevelyan’s similar scaffoldings.62

Therefore, although the attention paid by Trevelyan to dreams and

dreaming was vividly surrealist in character, it was at the same time very

obviously and firmly entrenched in British social reality. His Lancashire

rubbish-dump collages, epitomes of the nation’s urban and industrial decay,

likewise provide effective visualizations of the artist’s dream theories in their

acknowledgement of his belief in the ‘urgent’ need for ‘new myths’. 63 This

Trevelyan achieved by means of his appropriation, and desecration, of the

Coronation covers of the Weekly Illustrated and of Picture Post. Both collages, as

a result, register an objection to this ceremony, which was so endowed with

mythical quality yet so indifferent to the people’s real needs. The ‘myth’, in the

turbulent period between 1937 and 1939, needed to be replaced by a

philosophy that was far more securely anchored in the realities of ordinaryeveryday life.

Also completed in 1937, and similarly heralding the need for urgent change,

was Bolton: 1,000,000 Volts (Figure 7). This collage once again reveals

Trevelyan’s surrealist vision of Northern England as a degraded, decaying

urban technical milieu. However, this particular wasteland is rendered

sinister to an exceptionally alarming degree because Trevelyan shifts the


Figure 7. Julian Trevelyan,Bolton: 1,000,000 Volts,1937. Collage, pen and inkon paper, 25.5 × 36.7 cm.Location Unknown.




death-inducing electric currents, acknowledged in a number of his Bolton

photographs by their distant chains of pylons, into the foreground of his

image where a sign also forewarns: ‘DANGER TO LIFE: 1,000,000 VOLTS’.

The use of collage to represent this scene, a medium which in itself generates

an ‘electric’ charge in its presentation of a totality of fragments, actually

augments the sense of shock that reverberates.

Also secreted within this particular scene is surely a reference to Blackpool’s

Illuminations. Humphrey Spender photographed these famous lights

directly, both in close-up and as part of the wider seafront scene. Trevelyan,

however, chose to elicit a deeper issue provoked by the display in his

portrayal of the electricity with which the Illuminations were powered. This

approach is recurrent within Trevelyan’s working practices between 1937 and

1939, underlining subsidiary or supplementary occurrences so as to question

the typically unquestioned, and to accentuate the presence and impact of more

profound forms of reality. Instead of confirming the positive impact of

electricity upon modern life, as in the case of Blackpool’s almost fanaticalattention to its lights, Trevelyan focuses upon the potential dangers in a move

offering much scope for metaphorical suggestion. Electrical energy is

portrayed here in such a way to concur, perhaps, with European surrealist

interpretations of the wasteland as an indeterminate and hybrid site. It is more

likely, however, that Trevelyan is reiterating in visual terms his opinion

expressed in Indigo Days that Blackpool, a self-promoted health-giving and

escape-providing holiday destination for Lancashire’s workers, was in reality

nothing more than ‘a gigantic parody of factory life, a mad industrial Hell’,

and one which ‘left them slightly hysterical’.64

Julian Trevelyan’s orchestration of social elements marking a contemporary

crisis stands, therefore, to represent a period in history during which the

population of Britain was visibly affected by the convulsive, shape-shifting

forces at work within society. This is a situation encapsulated in the

photograph of the warped reflections of two women enclosed within

Blackpool’s Hall of Mirrors (see Figure 1). In his focused consideration of the

typically neglected scenarios stimulated by the decay of the nation’s urban

and industrial environments and, indeed, in his scrutiny of their inhabitants’

‘spare time’, Trevelyan captured an episode in British history during which

almost all things were seen to be dissolving, a moment ‘when the world we

knew seemed to be falling to pieces’.65 With a surrealist eye, he perceived and

even re-focused that central element of 1930s culture: entropy, the dissolution

of form. His photographs, collages and texts provide counterparts, therefore,

to the not entirely negative observation made by one anonymous Worktownmale: ‘It is only possible to be sure that I am alive. Little else seems as certain as

that in 1938’.66 This observation, in all its ambivalence, in fact strikes the

existentialist note that characterizes Julian Trevelyan’s work during these

three short years.

I am most appreciative of the recollections and recommendations offered to me byJulian’s widow, Mary Fedden RA. I am grateful for the access that Mary so kindlypermitted me to Durham Wharf in Chiswick, Julian’s home and studio, to his





‘Worktown’ suitcase and to his boxes of photographs, which had been forgotten by allbut his own family. I also wish to express my gratitude to Ursula Mommens, Julian’sfirst wife, for so willingly sharing her memories of his contributions to both Mass-Observation and surrealism. My communications with Philip Trevelyan, Julian andUrsula’s only son, have also proved to be revealing. Finally, it is fitting to acknowledgethe late Humphrey Spender, who died in March 2005. Having secured the fullcooperation of Mr Spender back in 2002, I had the pleasure of interviewing him at hishome and studio, and of speaking and corresponding with him on a number of occasions until April 2004.

The distinguished research community and archival resources of the University of Sussex have likewise played a vital part in the development of my research. Theinstitution’s archive of Mass-Observation has made its prints of Spender’s photo-graphs readily available as comparative examples. The primary sources held by BoltonMuseum and Art Gallery have been equally invaluable, especially the 56 photographstaken by Trevelyan in Bolton and Blackpool during 1937 and 1938. I am also

appreciative of the resources offered by the Wren Library of Trinity College,Cambridge: the 66 boxes of papers accumulated by Trevelyan throughout his life,incorporating correspondence, diaries, juvenile sketchbooks and revised drafts of theartist-turned-camoufleur’s wartime reports.

Notes

1 The title to this article derives from: ‘A quand les logicians, les philosophes dormants? Je voudraisdormir, pour pouvoir me livrer aux dormeurs’; André Breton’s ‘Manifeste du Surréalisme’ (1924), inBreton, Manifestes du Surréalisme, ed. Jean-Jacques Pauvert, Paris: Pauvert, 1962, p.24.

2 My use of the term ‘spare time’ corresponds with Humphrey Jennings’ adoption of it in his eighteen-minute film Spare Time (G.P.O. Film Unit, 1939). Jennings, as a poet-reporter in this work of surrealistdocumentary, explores the ways in which British citizens, in towns – Sheffield, Manchester, SouthWales and Bolton – that were dominated by steel, cotton or coal, passed their non-working hours. Thefilm is brimming with Mass-Observation iconography. The fairground and the male-voice choirappear, along with activities including comic-reading, darts-playing, smoking, dog-walking andpigeon-keeping.

3 Graham Greene, in his equally socially sensitive novel of 1934, It’s a Battlefield, builds comparabledepths into his text, which are seen to surface periodically through characterization, as here in hisdescription of Conder: ‘For while they knew nothing of the captain of industry and laughed at therevolutionary and smiled in private at the intimate of Scotland Yard, they had accepted for ten yearsthe family man, although he too was only one among the many impersonations of Conder’s sad andunsatisfied brain. But it never occurred to him as strange that they should arbitrarily choose torecognise this as reality among all his unrealities, even during the few minutes of the day when he wasthe genuine Conder, an unmarried man with a collection of foreign coins, who lived in a bed-sitting-room in Little Compton Street. … Conder walked away along a passage which flashed with distortingmirrors.’ (Graham Greene, It’s a Battlefield, London: William Heinemann and Bodley Head, 1970, p.22).

4 Julian Trevelyan, ‘DREAMS’, Transition: An International Quarterly for Creative Experiment, Nos 19–20,New York: Kraus Reprint Corporation, June 1930, p.121.

5 Tom Harrisson, Britain in the 30s, London: The Lion and Unicorn Press, 1975, p.1.

6 Charles Madge, ‘Anthropology at Home’, New Statesman and Nation, 2 January 1937, p.12. These

circumstances are explored in further detail by Ben Highmore in ‘Mass-Observation: a Science of Everyday Life’, in Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: an Introduction, London: Routledge, 2002, pp.75–6.Highmore reports here that Madge, on behalf of Humphrey Jennings, Kathleen Raine, DavidGascoyne, Stuart Legg and various other Blackheath friends, posted this letter in the newspapercalling for voluntary observers to cooperate in their project seeking to collect ‘mass observations’.

7 Tom Harrisson, ‘Coconut Moon: a Philosophy of Cannibalism, in the New Hebrides’, New Statesmanand Nation, 2 January 1937, p.12.

8 Highmore, ‘Mass-Observation: a Science of Everyday Life’, p.85.

9 See Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Super-Modernity, London: Verso, 1995,p.7.

10 Julian Trevelyan, Indigo Days: the Art and Memoirs of Julian Trevelyan, London: MacGibbon and Kee,1957; reprinted Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996, p.81.





same thing will perhaps not appeal to everyone as a source of uncanny feeling. From what I haveobserved, this phenomenon does undoubtedly, subject to certain conditions and combined withcertain circumstances, arouse an uncanny feeling, which, furthermore, recalls the sense of helplessnessexperienced in some dream-states’; Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ (1919), in The Penguin Freud Library: Art andLiterature, vol. XIV, ed. James Strachey, London: Penguin, 1985, pp.358–9.

33 Ian Walker has made a careful investigation of the European surrealist appropriation of theindeterminate and hybrid areas of interwar Paris, and two of these locations, the banlieue and the Zone,are of particular relevance to Trevelyan’s documentation of Bolton’s wastelands. See Ian Walker, CityGorged with Dreams: Surrealism and Documentary Photography in Interwar Paris, Manchester: ManchesterUniversity Press, 2002, pp.117–22.

34 Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Travelling between the Wars, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980,p.52.

35 Humphrey Jennings to Julian Trevelyan, 68a, Saint Andrew’s Street, Cambridge, 5 May 1930, J. O. T.Papers, Box 2, Item 23, fo. 1.

36 Kathleen Raine to Julian Trevelyan, Cockley Moor, Dockray, Penrith, undated, J. O. T. Papers, Box 13,Item 8, fo.2.

37 The seven figures present include Michael and Tanya Wickham, Arpoid Szesser, Viera da Silva, KayGranville and Ursula Trevelyan.

38 Cross, Worktowners at Blackpool, pp.8–9.

39 Ibid, p.9. Cross is citing ‘The National Committee to Provide Holidays for Unemployed Workers in

Distressed Areas’, London: Trades Union Congress Archive (Ref: HD5106), 1938. Henri Cartier-Bresson’s glimpse of a utopian future, as presented in his 1938 photograph ‘Picnic on the Marne’, alsoprovides visual evidence of the political sanctioning of the industrial holiday.

40 The dream-works of British Surrealist Reuben Mednikoff (1906–76), such as ‘The Anatomy ofSpace’ of 1936, offer examples of diagnostic Surrealist visual productions. Mednikoff was heavily influenced bythe work of his partner, Freudian psychoanalyst Dr Grace Pailthorpe. Living together in Port Isaac inCornwall, they conducted experiments in psychoanalysis, delving into the far reaches of thesubconscious. Mednikoff also exhibited at the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936.

41 For further details concerning these medical trials, see Trevelyan, Indigo Days, pp.74–6.

42 Trevelyan, ibid, p.66. Trevelyan is referring to French painter Amédée Ozenfant (1886–1966). Thismanipulation of linear constructions is also manifested in Trevelyan’s photographing, in 1939, of thefolkloric memorial sculptures placed in Cassis upon French graves. This study, comprising tenphotographs documenting intricate wire constructions and colourful beaded wreaths and crosses,presents a series of surrealist images which blend the ethereal realm of funeral memory with arevisiting of the everyday gardening world of Bolton’s allotments. It also anticipates the impendingwar. Trevelyan and his surrealist colleagues were fascinated by these found objects to such an extentthat they even collected together and removed the items that had been discarded from the graves,Trevelyan later displaying one of these sculptures upon an indigo-blue door at his beloved Thames-side home, Durham Wharf.

43 Trevelyan was also personally acquainted with Calder, having encountered him in Paris in 1931; SeeIndigo Days, pp.29–30.

44 Michel Remy, Surrealism in Britain, Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999, p.137.

45 Tim Edensor, Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality, Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005,pp.3–4.

46 Julian Trevelyan, ‘Mythos’, in The Painter’s Object, ed. Myfanwy Evans, London: Gerald Howe, 1937,pp.59–60. A similarly expressive surrealist urbanism is explored in the London-inspired antecedentpoetry of Arthur Rimbaud (1854–91), and in his ‘Villes’ poems in Les Illuminations in particular: ‘Theseare towns! This is a people for whom these Alleghenies and Lebanons of dream have ascended!Cottages of crystal and wood that move on invisible rails and pulleys. Ancient craters girded withcolossi and copper palm trees roar melodiously amid fires’; Arthur Rimbaud, ‘Villes’, in TheAutobiography of Surrealism, ed. Marcel Jean, New York: Viking Press, 1980, pp.16–17. Trevelyan wouldhave known of these filigree poetic images and scaffoldings, as Rimbaud was a key figure insurrealism. See also Rimbaud, Illuminations, ed. Albert Py, Genève: Librairie Droz, 1967.

47 Also notable is the title of this painting, which suggests a reference to the extraordinary proto-surrealist structure the Palais Idéal which was built at Hauterives by the untutored artist, the FacteurCheval, between 1879 and 1912. The Palais Idéal was a site much loved by the surrealists for its dream-like qualities, and by Trevelyan who visited it more than once during the 1930s, and again in the 1950s.

48 Julian and Ursula divorced in 1950.

49 Tanya Wickham (wife of Mass-Observation artist Michael Wickham) to Julian Trevelyan, France,undated; J. O .T. Papers, Box 18, Item 17.

50 Trevelyan, Indigo Days, p.84.

51 Piper was personally acquainted with Trevelyan and the remains of their 1938 correspondence areheld by the Wren Library of Trinity College, Cambridge. J. O. T. Papers, Box 23, Item 71.





52 Highmore, ‘Mass-Observation: a Science of Everyday Life’, p.94.

53 David Trotter, Cooking with Mud: The Idea of Mess in Nineteenth-Century Art and Fiction, Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2000, p.326.

54 James Clifford, ‘On Ethnographic Surrealism’, in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-CenturyEthnography, Literature, and Art, Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1994, p.146.

55 This collage is prescient of the series of photographs taken by Humphrey Spender in 1984documenting the demolition of Davenport Street, Bolton, which included Mass-Observation’sheadquarters.

56 Julian Trevelyan, ‘Dreams’ (unpublished diary), 28 November 1945; J. O. T. Papers, Box 59, Item 1, fo.6.

57 Ibid., 3 January 1946, Ibid, p.8.

58 Ibid., 15 January 1946, Ibid, p.10.

59 Trevelyan, ‘DREAMS’, p.122. Trevelyan is referring to Sir William Joynson-Hicks (1865–1932), amember of the Conservative Party. In October 1922, Andrew Bonar Law appointed Joynson-Hicks ashis Postmaster-General. Following the 1924 General Election, Stanley Baldwin promoted him to thepost of Home Secretary. During the General Strike, he worked closely with Baldwin, Arthur Steel-Maitland (Minister of Labour) and Winston Churchill (Chancellor of the Exchequer) to defeat theminers. Joynson-Hicks retired from the House of Commons before the 1929 General Election.

60 Cedric Watts, A Preface to Greene, London and New York: Longman, 1997, p.133. Watts is quoting fromGraham Greene’s Ways of Escape, London: The Bodley Head, 1980, pp.274–5.

61 Watts, A Preface to Greene, p.134.62 J. W. Dunne, An Experiment with Time, London: Faber and Faber, 1934.

63 Trevelyan, ‘Mythos’, p.60.

64 Trevelyan, Indigo Days, p.100.

65 Ibid, p.115.

66 Cross, Worktowners at Blackpool, p.25.



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