myself in Lettering. They might as well have put me in sky-diving for the use I was at lettering.’ (Once again, he sold himself short: the private sketchbooks containing his cartoons, nonsense poems and stories were always lettered immaculately.)
‘I think he felt frustrated, though he would never admit it,’ recalled one of his first tutors, Arthur Ballard. ‘There he was, surrounded by people who had some talent with art, and I think he felt in a bit over his head. He would act in a daft manner to distract people and probably take away the fact that he wasn’t as good an artist as they were. He would act the fool, but underneath all that I could see he actually was a thinker.’
John liked Arthur Ballard, a friendly, red-whiskered bear of a man who had once been the army’s middleweight boxing champion. But in Ballard’s classes, he initially shone no brighter than in any others. Every Friday the members of his 12-person Intermediate group were expected to display a painting or drawing in progress for assessment by Ballard and general discussion and criticism. John’s offerings were always far below the standard of the others’; on many occasions, he seemed too embarrassed to show anything at all.
In an attempt to stimulate John’s enthusiasm, Ballard would sometimes take him to a club called the Basement in Mount Pleasant, run as a sideline by the painter Yankel Feather. ‘Ballard used to come in with this very serious-looking young lad, and talk to him for hours at a time,’ Feather remembers. ‘Even in those days, I used to think he looked sort of half-Japanese. I remember the look he always used to give me, as if he wanted to tangle with me and see what I was made of.
‘At the back of this old wine-cellar we used to have a grand piano with half its keys missing. John would get on that sometimes, and do Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven”. One time when he was bashing away, I told him “If you don’t stop that fucking noise, I’ll throw you out!” In the vestibule of the club, I’d hung this big semi-abstract painting that I’d done; and as John walked past it on this day, he got a key or something out of his pocket and ripped the canvas along its whole length. “Cheerio, boss,” was all he said.’
Ballard was beginning to despair of conjuring any worthwhile work from John when, in an empty lecture room one day, he happened on a notebook full of caricatures of college professors and students, poems and satirical commentaries, which he thought ‘the wittiest thing I’d ever seen in my life’. The book contained no clue as to its author; Ballard had to do some detective work before discovering it was John’s. He didn’t let on that he’d found it until the next time his class were pinning up their work for discussion. ‘I brought out [his] notebook and we discussed the work in it,’ Ballard remembered. ‘John had never expected anyone to look at it, let alone find it funny and brilliant. “When I talk about interpretation, boy, this is the kind of thing I mean as well,” I told him. “This is the kind of thing I want you to be doing.”’
Yet he had abilities that went far beyond cartooning, even if he chose to reveal them only in flashes, and almost never on demand. He certainly was not the poor relation in his set when they were sent out of college to sketch from life in the cathedral precincts or the Williamson Square livestock market. The accepted method was to work in small dabs and stabs, with painstaking shading and crosshatching. John, however, could capture a face or object in a single bold, unwavering line, much as one of his earliest artist heroes, Henri Matisse, was wont to do. He was also capable of impressing his painting tutor, an energetic Welshman named Charlie Burton. ‘I thought he had the potential to be very good,’ Burton says. ‘But he didn’t really have the right temperament for a painter, which means spending a lot of time on your own. John always had to have a crowd around him—and he had to be in control of them. One day, I told his group what I wanted them to do, and went out of the room for a few minutes. When I came back, John had them all rolling around in fits of laughter. Then he gave them a look as if to say “What a load of absolute idiots you lot are.” Chilled them to the bone, he did.’
Just as he and his fellow Woolton onanists had fantasised, his course did include life drawing of a nude female, to which Intermediate students eventually graduated from Grecian busts and the college skeleton. Not only that: June Furlong, the model who usually sat for John’s group, was a gorgeous 27-year-old with the kind of voluptuous severity as a rule seen in shadowy ‘art’ photographs. A forthright Scouser despite her exotic looks, she had modelled at most of London’s premier art schools and was on friendly terms with many famous painters, among them Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach.
June ran the life class more strictly than any tutor, quelling the smallest hint of unrest among its male members with a ferocious eye, creating the rigidly practical atmosphere of—in her own phrase—‘a clinic’. She had received advance warning of John’s fractiousness, and prepared herself for the worst when she saw him perched with dangling legs on the wooden shelf above the sink where students washed their brushes and palettes. (The shelf’s being just too high to sit on with comfort made it irresistible to John.)
‘But I never had the slightest bit of trouble with him,’ June remembers. ‘And never had a bad word from him. When he came in for a class, he’d pull his chair right up close to me and we’d talk, talk, talk for the whole time—about art, about the colleges where I’d worked in London and all the artists I’d met. And there was something about him you couldn’t help but take notice of, even though no one seemed to think his work was much good. I remember thinking “You, mate…you’ll either end up at the bottom or you’re going to the very top.”’
Clinical though June made the ambience, fascinating though her anecdotes about Augustus John and the Slade Art School, she was still the sexiest woman John had encountered outside Brigitte Bardot films or the pages of Razzle magazine. He once made an attempt to proposition her, as hundreds must have done before him, but was rebuffed without serious damage to his amour propre. ‘I said to him “How much money have you got, John? I’m not sitting over a half of bitter at Ye Cracke, you know. I go to the Adelphi.”’
He needed an accomplice at college no less than at school, and Russell Jeffrey Mohammed soon stepped into the role of Ginger to his William, Lotton to his Shennon. Jeff Mohammed lived in Didsbury, Manchester, but boasted a complex pedigree—a father who was an Indian silk merchant and an Italian mother born within the sacred precincts of Vatican City in Rome. Aged 27, ten years older than John, he epitomised the college’s open-door policy; before deciding to study art, he had experimented with a variety of jobs and done National Service as a military policeman in Malaya.
Jeff was tall and handsome, with the bearing of a prince and a voice that still bore traces of the public school to which his polyglot parents had sent him. He played jazz clarinet and was a passionate trad enthusiast who treated the latter encroachments of modern jazz as a personal insult. When the great Humphrey Lyttelton temporarily forsook the Dixieland style to make records with a more modern feel, Jeff waited until Lyttelton played a gig in Manchester, then confronted him, denounced him as a traitor, and ended by punching him in the nose.
By the time he met John, his eccentricities were already a byword among his fellow students. When he received his grant money, he would change it all into half-crown coins, turn the light off in his bedroom, then fling them far and wide, so that in later weeks when he became hard up, there was always hope of finding a stray halfcrown under his bed or on top of his wardrobe. One of his favourite tricks was to select a pub or workmen’s ‘caff’ where every face was uncompromisingly white and fling open its door with a ringingly authoritative cry of ‘Right! All foreigners out of here!’
Despite their age difference, the pairing of John and Jeff Mohammed had something inevitable about it. They belonged to different work groups and so spent most of each day apart, but wherever their paths crossed, John’s manic laughter instantly redoubled. Although Jeff’s greater worldliness and experience were part of the attraction for him, they always treated each other as equals. They had the same fondness for books, poetry and language, the same interest in mildly occult things like Ouija boards and palmistry, the same unerring eye for human oddity, the same inexhaustible compulsion to make fun. Even their mutually inimical musical tastes, trad versus rock, caused no serious disagreement. Jeff never managed to turn John on to Satchmo Armstrong or Kid Ory, just as he himself remained impervious