a great gaunt creature before whom Queen Mary looked quite a crumpled little thing, came down the ward with a veritable sheaf of dailies under her arm determined to track down this great unknown. Even she looked a little less grim and gaunt. These notices were very welcome to me. I had been terribly crushed. They gave rise to such teasing remarks from the Sisters as, ‘When are you going to get that commission, orderly?’ having scented I was a bit different, or thought I was.15
It was not only the hospital staff who found the event of interest. In the residential suburb of Clifton, a tall elegant young man of twenty also read the notices and recalled Stanley as a celebrated predecessor at the Slade. He had studied there with Gilbert, but had not met Stanley. His name was Desmond Macready Chute – the ‘chu’ pronounced as in ‘chew’ – and he was a collateral descendant of the great Victorian tragedian Macready. His actor-manager grandfather had run the Theatres Royal in Bristol and Bath and introduced as ingénues stars of the calibre of Ellen Terry. Although Desmond had innumerable aunts, uncles and cousins, his own branch of the family had been scythed by consumption. His father had died in 1912, and now only he and his mother Abigail remained to carry on the family theatrical business, centred by then on the considerable Prince’s Theatre in Bristol. Tall, good-looking, highly intelligent, literary in bent, deeply read, a capable organizer – he had been Head of School at Downside – a dedicated musician, sensitive pianist and competent artist, his artistic and religious aspirations soared beyond the limitations of the family theatre. He was, however, withdrawn by nature and showed a tendency to ‘nervous prostration’. His indifferent health precluded thought of military service.
The ties between the Prince’s Theatre and the Beaufort were particularly close – visiting artistes freely gave their time to military hospital entertainment – and it cannot have been long before talk of Stanley reached Chute. The result was another surprise for Stanley:
It was about this time when I was wondering how to get the mental energy to make the work bearable … that I had a visit from a young intellectual of sixteen who, like Christ visiting Hell, came one day walking to me along a stone passage with glass-coloured windows all down one side and a highly patterned tile floor. … I had a sack tied round my waist and a bucket of dirty water in my hand. I was amazed to note that this youth in a beautiful civilian suit was walking towards me as if he meant to speak to me; the usual visitors to the hospital passed us orderlies by as they would pass a row of bedpans. The nearer he came, the more deferential his deportment, until at last he stood and asked me with the utmost respect whether I was Stanley Spencer.
This account of their meeting is repeated several times in Stanley’s later reminiscences and misled biographers about Desmond’s age. In fact it is somewhat dramatized. Writing to the Raverats at the time, Stanley is more factual: ‘Desmond Chute is a youth of 20. … When I first met him … I was on my way to the Stores. …’16
All his life, Stanley would show a tendency to overcolour some experiences. Invariably they are experiences in which he suffered some ‘spiritual’ hurt. The tendency was part of his make-up, part of the process by which he transcended the hurt in precisely the way he used his art. At all other times his accounts of experiences are accurate. In this case the spiritual hurt lay some years ahead. At the time Chute’s arrival was salvation:
If I were able to express how much this hospital life and atmosphere was cut off and out of the power of any other power than itself, I could make it clear what I felt at the moment of meeting. Compared with the crushed feeling the place gave me, the army and the war took upon themselves something of the feeling of freedom that one felt about civilian life in peacetime. The appearance of this young man was a godsend. He was terribly good and kind to me and appreciated the mental suffering I was going through.
During the first months of their friendship Desmond was fit, and they were able during Stanley’s time off-duty to explore Clifton together. Engrossed in conversation, they must have made an odd-looking pair, Desmond well over six feet tall, slim and languid, with reddish hair and the beginning of a beard, and Stanley a slight, dark-haired and brisk figure beside him. They contrasted too in personality, Desmond intellectually reserved, Stanley the eager terrier zigzagging after ideas which would set his imagination alight. There were visits to Desmond’s home, sometimes with Budden, to meet his mother and his aunts. There were visits to the bookshops of Bristol where fine secondhand bargains were to be found. There were ‘at homes’ at Desmond’s friends and with the Clifton hostesses of the day:
I go down to Mrs Daniell’s to hear some singing on my half-days. Mrs Daniell has a fine voice and so has her daughter. I felt quite ‘crackey’ with delight to hear some duets out of Figaro and they sang them well. They sing heaps of early French things. A young Slade student named Desmond Chute does the arranging for these visits and he plays the piano. I shall always feel grateful to Mrs Daniell.17
Desmond for his part found Stanley an ideal pupil. For although he was four years younger than Stanley and lacked Stanley’s intuitive genius, his love of literature and music matched Stanley’s instincts.
When I [Stanley] used to visit him, he used to translate so much [of the Odyssey] and then read it in the original. Mind you, if he was to read about two pages he could go through to order, whether he had the book or not. Sometimes when we have been out for a walk – wonderful walks – I would begin to ask him about some particular novelist and he would go through the whole novel quoting pages and pages, quite unconsciously.18
In the spring of 1916 Desmond suffered one of his attacks of nervous prostration, and their meetings had to take place in Chute’s bedroom:
When I think of the wonderful quiet evenings I have spent in Chute’s bedroom with the sunlight filling the room and Desmond surrounded by the wildflowers which he loved [in later life Chute became a knowledgeable gardener]. I used to sit looking out of the wide-open window and listen to him translate Homer and Odyssey, Iliad and Cyclops and the men escaping under the sheep, oh my goodness, it really did frighten me.19
It is noteworthy that Stanley is affected as much by the drama of this forefather of all adventure stories as by its verse.
I have looked at different translations of Homer, but nothing to approach Desmond’s. … Our evenings were so satisfying. He read me Midsummer Night’s Dream one night and on another night he read me As You Like It. I think it is a wonderful play. The colour of Chute’s hair is a brilliant rust-gold. It glistened as the sunlight fell on it as he sat up in bed reading. … He reminded me in character of John the Baptist. Of course, having studied at Downside, Desmond has a natural grace that makes it satisfying to be with him. [Chute was a devout Roman Catholic]. I mean he has a mind so quickened by God that you can do nothing but live when you are with him.
It was Desmond’s patient coaxing which at last gave Stanley a glimpse of the spiritual meaning to be found in his military life. Desmond was reading aloud from St Augustine, and there Stanley found a quotation, a notion, which seemed to provide the key to the redemption he so desperately sought: ‘St Augustine says about God “fetching and carrying”. I am always thinking of those words. It makes me want to do pictures. The bas-reliefs in the Giotto Campanile give me the same feeling.’ The quotation is a paraphrase of a passage from St Augustine’s Confessions: ‘ever busy yet ever at rest, gathering yet never needing, bearing, filling, guarding, creating, nourishing, perfecting’.20 Other passages in St Augustine could have similarly inspired him:
Therefore He who is the true Mediator – inasmuch as by taking the form of a servant he became the Mediator between God and Man, the man Jesus Christ – in the form of God accepts sacrifice along with the Father, together with whom he is one God. Yet in the form of a servant he chose for himself to be sacrificed rather than to receive it. … In this way he is at the same time the priest, since it is he who offers the sacrifice, and he is the offering as well.21
The dedication of Stanley’s whole existence, the sacrifice of himself to the spiritual sources of his art, destined his art to be a ‘mediator between God and Man’, a perpetual theme in his writings. If he had not enlisted but stayed at home painting, he would have continued to ‘accept’ or ‘receive’