Absent Friends

David Hockney, "Myself and My Heroes", 1961

Etching & aquatint, 257 x 502mm

I was watching an episode of Fake or Fortune – the BBC TV programme that looks for potential "sleepers" (lost or unrecognised artworks of substantial value) that have been submitted by viewers, and presented and researched by some of the most annoyingly smug people to be found in the annoyingly smug fine-art world – when it emerged that one of the elusive edition of ten Elisabeth Frink statuettes under consideration had been bought in the 1960s by the JCR (junior common room) art fund of Nuffield College in Oxford. Both presenters pretended to be aghast: do these colleges really give money to students to buy works of art to put in their rooms? No wonder some are now "lost"...

Well, indeed they do, or did. And I myself was once in charge of such a fund, and the distribution of its purchases. So how did that happen?

Back in my university days, 1973-76, student politics was very much a tribal affair, in which competing "slates" of candidates for all the available posts would be offered up by broad alliances of smaller, politically-adjacent tribes, who would have temporarily buried the hatchet (hammer and sickle? ice pick?) in order to seize or maintain power within the Students' Union or, on a smaller scale in the collegiate universities, the college JCR. The whole business was surprisingly ruthless, given how low the stakes really were, and dirty tricks were – ahem – not unknown. Unsurprising, really, as a lot of those standing for election had their sights set on political careers in the Real World, of course.

Not me, needless to say, although as a notoriously arty bloke I was persuaded to stand for election on a Left-leaning slate for the august position of "Mister Picture Fund" within our college's JCR Committee. That year our slate won, therefore I won. I suppose you might say I was one of those who had greatness thrust upon him. The next year, as it turned out, our slate lost, so I lost, and greatness was summarily withdrawn. Which was a shame, as I had enjoyed distributing artwork from the collection around the college, and had developed good relations with some talented young women in the Ruskin School of Fine Art.

The fund itself had shrunk quite a lot since the days when the likes of Grey Gowrie had held the position in the previous decade, so my purchases were restricted to buying a few items from an exhibition of Ruskin School students' work I had organised in the JCR. The existing Picture Fund collection did contain some real gems, though: early prints by David Hockney and Patrick Caulfield and caricatures and illustrations by Gerald Scarfe and Ralph Steadman, for example, all bought by previous Mister Picture Funds in the days when the fund was a lot bigger and those artists' prices a lot smaller. In my own room I had Hockney's etching "Myself and My Heroes" and the original of one of Steadman's pen and ink illustrations to Alice in Wonderland. I learned a lot just by having them around to examine closely in idle minutes (of which I had a more than adequate supply).

In my official capacity as Mister Picture Fund I also arranged some life drawing classes, for which two of those talented young women agreed to pose as models (Ah, Trebbe and Sophie, where are you now, I wonder?). Obviously, these were not so much "classes" as opportunities to draw: no instruction was on offer, and my role was merely to make suggestions, observations, and to time the poses. It was "invitation only"; the gas fire was on, the curtains shut, and the door was locked. If my memory is correct, these sessions were held in the large room below mine, occupied by a friend named Steve Temple.

Two of my own efforts, from those long-ago days when drawing,

not photography, was my Thing

From his voice and fastidious manner, I had always assumed that Steve was privately-educated, but later discovered that, like me, he was a grammar-school boy (although you might argue that William Ellis School, Highgate, was in a very different league to your bog-standard small-town state grammar). I was surprised he hadn't adopted a greater degree of protective colouration, accent-wise – being "well-spoken" is not usually much of a defence against the levelling thuggery of the school playground – but I suppose it did evidence a certain strength of character.

Even more surprising was that his family were Communist Party aristocracy, if we can call it that: his father was the director of Progressive Tours (the CP's travel agency), and his sister Nina was to become the very last Secretary of the Party in Great Britain, before it packed up shop in 1991. His older brother Julien found notoriety as a film-maker and chronicler of punk rock (yes, that Julien Temple). Of course, in those days of student radicalism the CP was thought of as very staid – reactionary, even. At demos and occupations we did a lot of shouting and pushing and shoving, and Steve was not the shouty pushy type.

I never did get to know him as well as I had expected to; I had him pencilled-in, so to speak, as a long-term friend. I enjoyed his company, but he was not fond of the late-night smoke- and music-filled rooms that were then my natural habitat, so he would usually make his excuses and leave before the evening got going. Scientists, after all, do have work to do. But I found him intellectually curious and open-minded in a fun kind of way, and he was not dismissive of my art-making inclinations or New-Agey obsessions.

Indeed, we constructed and carried out together a practical test of the power of pyramids. I had read somewhere, in one of the wacky books I was fond of reading then, that a blunt razor blade would become sharp again, if placed inside a pyramid made to the strict proportions of the Great Pyramid of Cheops, on a platform exactly one third of the pyramid's height and aligned north-south. In an anticipation of MythBusters, we carefully constructed just such a device out of cardboard and tested it, complete with control setups which pointed in the wrong direction, were the wrong height, and so on. I know... But it was fun in that absorbing way that serious-minded ten-year-olds have fun. And I can report that, no, of course it didn't work!

Steve's own Grand Project of that year, carried out meticulously in that room beneath mine, was a hot air balloon constructed out of large glued sheets of red and yellow tissue paper. It was a thing of wonder: when filled with hot air from candles, it swelled impressively and rose to the full height of his room – about eight or more feet tall. One evening, I made this dreadfully out-of-focus but evocative snap of it with my Kodak Pocket Instamatic:

Later in that summer of 1975 he took it outdoors, fired it up, and simply released it into the wild. All those hours of painstaking work rose into the air and vanished over the chimney pots and crocketed gothic finials of Oxford: a beautiful, zen-like act, I thought. Although something of a hazard downwind, in retrospect. AFAIK there were no reports of houses or college buildings burning down, or of UFOs sighted over Oxfordshire.

Steve admired and actually bought one of the pictures from that Ruskin School exhibition I had arranged in the college JCR, an etching of a chrysanthemum which the artist – I forget her name – later gave to me to pass on to him after the summer vacation. But tragedy intervened: during that vacation he was suddenly taken ill, struck down by a rare and untreatable cancer, and died in a matter of weeks.

Not knowing what to do with it, I held on to that print for years: it's probably still in a box somewhere upstairs. I wonder, might it some day turn out to be a "sleeper", an early work by a prominent artist, perhaps a lucky find to be investigated on some future version of Fake or Fortune, with this very blog post as evidence of "provenance"? I doubt it very much. Few artistic careers are destined to end as even a minor succès d'estime, never mind finding fame and fortune, even when a life is long and lived to the full, and not cut short by accident or disease. 

I always felt, though, that someone who could let go so easily of the investment of time and effort represented by that balloon might also have been able to let go of life with uncommon grace, too. I will never know that, of course; it's just one of those consolatory fictions one makes up, and a blessing I would wish on any friend, pace Dylan Thomas.

So Steve became one of the early entries on my personal "lost list": that is, the tally of friends and acquaintances who moved away, changed, lost touch, lost interest, became boring, fell out with you, died, or became mad, bad and dangerous to know. Those are the names we have in mind whenever we raise a glass to "absent friends", names and memories eventually polished smooth by the passage of time, like a well-shaped, often-told anecdote, or a stone kept in a pocket for half a century or more.