A Private view
Last Christmas, instead of sending us a collage made from his own drawing and a list of contents from a Fortnum and Mason's Christmas hamper, Arthur posted a recycled traditional Christmas card with its old greeting cut off and a laconic “all the best Arthur” in its place. It was a bad sign. I’d written him my usual note at Christmas, so when, in February, I found an envelope addressed in his hand lying on our doormat I was delighted. I’d heard — and guessed — that his health was failing and had feared the worst in December. Instead, here was a note from the old reprobate to prove my fears groundless. Not so. Inside was a narrow strip of paper. It was his last joke and also written in his own hand: “Regret to inform you of the death of Arthur Moyse”. It made me laugh. Sadness — of a sort — came later but his final and characteristic wheeze had drawn the sting from sorrow so to speak and I’ve smiled everytime I’ve thought of him since.
Together with Arthur’s note, there was a letter from his cousin, Graham, inviting attendance at Mortlake Crematorium. It had been Graham’s task to post Arthur’s notices of his own death and — whether by Arthur’s instruction I know not — to arrange for his more orthodox departure. I went up by train from Stroud but Dennis Gould ( Stroud’s anarchist pacifist poet printer publisher) was ill and I went alone. When I arrived at the crematorium there was a small crowd of darkly dressed middle aged to-elderly Mafiosi grouped outside. One very large gangster in dark glasses detached himself and made purposefully toward me. He turned out to be the revered anarchist illustrator/publisher Clifford Harper. The gangster funeral I assumed I was about to witness was actually for Arthur and the Mafiosi, mere anarchists come to show respect for one of their own.
Among them was Brian Mo Mosely, who visited Arthur regularly during the last two hermitic years of his life. There was also an unfamiliar modish woman of a certain age who proved to be Angela Flowers, the director of a London art gallery of the same name. Our Lady Of The Flowers was a patron and admirer of Arthur who — as Freedom’s art critic — reviewed her exhibitions for many years. Of course, none of this prevented him from regarding her as largely in league with his class enemies.
Arthur’s other patron, friend and admirer, George Melly, was conspicuously absent. I’d expected him to be there — looking like a Max Miller version of Al Capone — but physically, it seems, he wasn’t up for it and so there was a large colourless space where he ought, and perhaps would have liked, to have been. In the late 60s I remember a Sunday paper colour supplement— it could only have been The Observer couldn’t it?— doing a feature on Arthur which I’m sure was written by George Melly. It was illustrated by Arthur’s seething and phantasmagoric drawings, as I recall, and I was astounded to see them in such a straight publication. I’d previously seen them only in Freedom, where they generally accompanied his regular Around The Galleries column, and in the Dave Cunliffe and Tina Morris journal, Poetmeat, which was the predecessor of the publication you’re now reading.
Poetmeat was part of what was then known as the “underground” and when I started my own little duplicated mag, Poetsdoos, in St Albans in 1966 I was much inspired by it — and Jeff Nuttall’s My Own Mag. Poetsdoos (a Dutch word stencilled on our shoe polish box), however, was determinedly local in content and intent, for it was dedicated to making “Snorbens” —as the locals called it— “the centre of the known universe.” Emboldened by the example of Poetmeat, I wrote to Arthur and asked him if he’d contribute a drawing and/or a poem to Poetsdoos and was overjoyed when he did. I loved his cartoons and his inimitably ornate prose — his column in Freedom was the first thing I read in each issue —and felt that his presence in Poetsdoos gave it a metropolitan gloss for which, perhaps, I secretly yearned. Anyway, that was the start of our friendship.
It was principally a friendship of letters though —in Arthur’s case often written on the back of an invitation to some incredibly prestigious gallery — for we rarely met. When he sent me some drawings for Poetsdoos in 1968 they included — as was his custom with any magazine to which he contributed — one of its editor. At that time we’d never met, yet he managed an extraordinary likeness by osmosis or divination or some such. (It now occurs to me he might have bummed a photo off someone but I prefer to think not.) Even so, he clearly saw me as a limp wristed middle class poetaster.
My dad — a communist sheet metal worker and rank and file activist in the National Union of Sheet Metal Workers Coppersmiths and Braziers — knew Arthur independently of me. They were the same age and somehow their paths had crossed within the trades union movement. He liked Arthur personally and much admired his angry campaign against one man operation on London’s buses. In the years I knew Arthur he was a bus conductor until his retirement and an old fashioned class warrior for all time. On his retirement he wrote a splenetic attack in Freedom on what he saw as his own union’s sell out on the issue of one man operation and, in many respects, I suspect he had more in common with my dad than he had with the largely middle class anarchist movement. Certainly he didn’t seem to share its disdain for Labour and its absolute hatred of communism. He was a fiercely individualist anarchist, no mistake, but I’m convinced class solidarity meant as much to him as political purity. In the early 70s, he cornered me at a Freedom Press party in Angel Alley and told me that, despite them being thieving lying bastards, of course he’d vote Labour “What else can you fuckin’ do Jeff?
Dad was tickled by Arthur being an art critic and he’d borrow Freedom from me just to read his reviews. Arthur loathed almost every exhibition he visited — whether Old Master or Latest Sensation — and in my memory, the only consistently good reviews he wrote were for the annual exhibitions of pictures by inmates of HM prisons. This distinction may have had a class basis too. In the enforced absence of Freedom editor, David Peers — he wrote Arthur’s Guardian obit — Francis Wright valiantly spoke at the crematorium instead. He called Arthur a “loveable rogue” but stressed that his suspicion of middle class values made him a difficult and combative presence in London anarchist circles.
I agree, but Francis might also have mentioned what a Londoner he was and that was something else he had in common with dad; they thought and spoke the same language. Well nearly. My dad, though hot tempered, hardly ever swore. If Arthur had gone to Oxford he would have got a Blue for swearing; he swore fluently, naturally and unaffectedly. He could have sworn for Britain in the Swearing Olympics. And like many, if not most anarchists of my acquaintance, he could nurture a feud for years. The last time I met him was at the Anarchist Book Fair around four years ago. I found him holding court in his favourite habitat, a pub. His face was as red as the scarlet banner high and his language as blue as Margaret Thatcher’s suit. His dog Mick — after Patch (who appeared in his drawings) died, his successors were all called Mick — lay at his feet while he told his courtiers what he would do to that unspeakable fornicator, Sansom, if he got hold of him.
Philip Sansom was one of the Freedom editors sent to prison after WW2 for inciting troops to disaffect. He was a talented artist and cartoonist himself but what he’d done to upset Arthur I didn’t know then and don’t know now. Maybe he was just too middle class but, until his cremation address by Francis, I knew little of Arthur’s background. And not much more after. It turned out he was born of a working class family in Ireland and brought up a Catholic. His seven or eight family mourners — cousins and second cousins presumably — were understandably proud of him but what did they make of the anarchist contingent?
To our surprise a cleric — Papist or Prod who knows? — spoke about Arthur too. There were prayers and hymns, much embarrassment among the heathen and — on my part at least — considerable relief when Arthur’s coffin finally disappeared from view. Afterwards, his family went home and his friends went to a charmless barn of a pub to drink to his memory and recall his exploits. Our language was moderate and our manners impeccably middle class.
Page(s) 30-33
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