Before I started work on Thames to Dunkirk I read a lot of material, including first-hand accounts and contemporary photographs in the Imperial War Museum archive, and every book I could find on the subject. I regard all this accumulation of material as part of the design process; its filtering and reduction becomes the essential transformation from concept to working first draft. My primary concern was that the form and scale of the work should reflect the surreal scale of the event, so I was thinking really big. I found the largest possible sheets of handmade khadi paper at Shepherds Falkiners shop on Southampton Row in London, and ordered 25 of them (allowing a spare, which became the endpapers). This stack of sheets (100cm x 140cm) just fitted into our car in three huge rolls and then took over our dining table for the next three months.
I realised that I would certainly not be following my usual practice of construction first, then decoration, which is second-nature to a studio potter. These vast pages had to be folded in half and then worked on one at a time on my adapted work-bench, and then when done, dried overnight and stored in a stack back on the dining table. I’m used to working in series so that I never have to wait for anything to dry (anathema), so I had to adjust my usual practice to work out a system for working on only one page at a time and completing the whole page in a day.
I started first thing every day with incising the river line and painting it in watercolour, mapping the Thames from source to sea. (The ‘shifting north’ I was obliged to use to accommodate the line onto the pages reflects the many volunteered small ships that didn’t even have a compass to guide their Channel crossing.) I carefully measured the page edges to ensure the continuity of the line from page to page. This took all morning, so I had lunch while it dried. Next I lettered the small ships in ink on the river, then the ‘type’ text by brush upside-down at the top, and then the flowing Virginia Woolf text on the lower part of the page, with pens carved from Thames driftwood. Then I left the page to dry overnight.
For 12 days I worked on the first side (Thames side), completing a page a day. Once I’d reached the sea, I set off on the second side (Dunkirk side), first incising the river line backwards (as if it were incised through the page), which set the composition for each page, and determined the shapes of the smoke plumes and the lines of men in the sea. Then I drew and painted the grisaille watercolours of the coast, bombed town, landmarks and skyline, the views from 1940’s photos taken from RAF planes – measuring each page again to ensure continuity. Then I painted the sand and sea. Then lunch while it dried. Then the ‘type’ text above (upside-down again), then the waiting men on the beach and their names queuing into the sea were marked with a peg-pen, and then I did the driftwood lettering in the sea. After all the pages were done, and safely in the stack on the dining table, I painted the front title cover page, and the back page, which links the Thames estuary with the Dunkirk beaches via a most unhelpful Admiralty Instruction directing the small ships across the channel (‘by any… route with which you are familiar… proceed direct to Dunkirk roads’). This was lettered by brush in a font based on one of the original typed scraps of paper handed to the skippers, now in the IWM archive.
This sequence of work took 25 days (including 1 day off) – and I loved every second of it. I was on a roll, didn’t answer the phone, wash up or think about anything else. My partner looked after me throughout – she was only writing a book at the time. We had a wonderful time. Next time I’ll talk about the book construction, and I’ll add another post later today about the progress of my online installation.
