Issue 86

January/February 2006

Contents

news

Flight of the eagles

Unearthing the ancestral rabbit

Counting the treasure

Tools for learning

Round and about in historic Leominster

In Brief

features

700,000 years old found in Suffolk
Full report from the scientists who found the first Northern Europeans.

Easter Island statues explained
Brett Shepardson takes issue with stories of doom - thanks to Edwardian women.

50 years on
Celebrating industrial archaeology, but what is it? Michael Nevell knows.

Evacuees Christmas and other war art
Soldiers who draw: English Heritage report on a new study of old graffiti.

on the web

Recommended websites

letters

Views and responses

CBA News

Headlines from the CBA office.

ISSN 1357-4442

Editor Mike Pitts

features

Art of war

English Heritage has been surveying and recording historic military bases. Wayne Cocroft, Danielle Devlin, John Schofield and Roger JC Thomas found a wealth of art and graffiti to be more informative than you might expect.

People have always decorated their surroundings. Whether on walls in prehistoric caves, Roman villas or medieval churches, paintings are motivated and inspired by forces as diverse as the images. Murals, graffiti and casual doodles connect directly with a moment in time and with past residents, be these ancient Egyptian artists, Roman soldiers or recent service personnel. Some marks are no more than a name and number casually pencilled or scratched out by a bored guard. Naïve sketches might be applied to any available surface to while away an idle moment. Many, however, display considerable artistic accomplishment and clearly took hours or days to apply.

Wall art and graffiti are found throughout the United Kingdom, on buildings that are, or were once, in military use: murals, pencil sketches, stencils, instructional drawings, signage and graffiti can all be seen. There is a considerable history of such marks. Many castles still bear inscriptions made by inhabitants or inmates. Graffiti by 18th or 19th century soldiers are comparatively rare, although there are some notable exceptions from incarcerated French soldiers. In England inscriptions or drawings from the first world war are unusual. It is unclear if this reflects the true situation or whether they have been lost: typically images and graffitied buildings are both ephemeral.

During the inter-war years secular murals by professional artists, such as Rex Whistler and Eric Ravilious, became a fashionable accessory for wealthy private patrons, hotels, shops, restaurants and public institutions. This tradition continued into the second war. At the Bristol Aeroplane Company's factory in the Corsham quarries, Wiltshire, Olga Lehmann, a classically trained artist, was commissioned to brighten up the lives of the subterranean workers. During the cold war this complex was used as a top secret government headquarters, and it is only recently that a remarkable assemblage of around 50 of her murals has come to light. Many of the images depict quintessentially English scenes, optimistic visions of an England that would return with the peace that came in 1945. The inspiration for other paintings, such as the Eskimos feeding one another fish and a missionary being boiled alive by cannibals is totally baffling.

War art comes to the fore during the second world war. Cartoons on the noses of aircraft and the backs of flying jackets are a well-known feature of the United States Army Air Force. Its war personnel were largely conscripted. Less immersed in military traditions than regular troops, they were also a more visually aware generation brought up on moving pictures and the relatively new art of cartoon films. Familiar cartoon characters are common motifs, as are scantily clad women, often copied from the pin-up art of George Petty and Alberto Vargas from magazines such as Esquire and Beauty Parade.

Images on aircraft and other machines of war might be seen as good luck symbols or talismans. Similar images applied to a unit's accommodation were there to brighten up the drab uniformity of standardised military accommodation or requisitioned buildings. Art is usually found in communal areas, such as messes or bar areas, which might double as temporary dance halls.

Just as American and British murals and graffiti were firmly rooted in their respective popular cultures, so too images produced by Italian and German prisoners of war betray their national origins. Relatively few prisoner of war camps survive in England, but most of those that do contain examples of war art. Pictures of women are common, but sentimental landscape paintings were also popular, as - perhaps surprisingly - was Nazi imagery. The wish to brighten the living environment was just as strong in the most adverse circumstances and in Germany at Harzungen, an outer work camp of Dora Mittelwerk factory complex, a painting of the prisoners' roll call was applied to the rear of a window shutter.

With the return to peacetime soldiering, many temporary camps were abandoned; the home forces rediscovered a routine where defacing government property was severely frowned upon. Murals on 1950s American bases are known from photographs, but none has survived. During the 1970s, after the set-backs of the Vietnam war, the United States armed forces were concerned about damaged morale and unit cohesion. The US Air Force attempted to boost esprit de corps with a programme known as Project Warrior. Partly this celebrated air force and unit heritage through the reintroduction of wartimestyle leather flying jackets and aircraft nose art. Individualising aircraft was found to produce a greater personal attachment by ground crews, with a resulting benefit in servicing standards. It did not stop there. In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s there was a great revival of military mural art. This coincided with the Reagan administration's massive increase in cold war spending.

One of the best collections of murals from this period survives at former raf Upper Heyford, Oxfordshire, then one of the USAF's most important UK bases. The airfield landscape was transformed with dull-brown concrete structures to protect it and its nuclear-armed f111 aircraft against a pre-emptive Warsaw Pact attack. Images are found in buildings across the site, but are particularly concentrated in the accommodation and communal areas, offering an insight into the personnel who operated and serviced the f111s. As with many wartime murals contemporary popular culture provided inspiration: there are cartoon characters from AD2000 magazine, Garfield and the Simpsons, while other images recall 1970s record covers. Cartoon renditions of the f111 are also widespread as are caricatures of ravens, a reference to the nickname of the electronic warfare version of the f111. To outsiders the military may look homogeneous, but murals reveal customs of the different armed forces and reflect the cultures of individual bases and units within them. Murals at Upper Heyford clearly link it with the f111. On bases where A10 aircraft (nicknamed the "warthog") were deployed, cartoon warthogs are common. At Greenham Common, Berkshire, home to cruise missiles during the 1980s, death heads were a favourite theme for unit emblems. Spanish mottoes may point to the growing number of Hispanic recruits to the US forces.

Wall art can contribute a great deal to the understanding of the occupation and uses of military sites. It can be seen establishing group pride, but also illustrating boundaries and rivalries. Even within a military base some areas will be restricted to a very small group of people, leaving them relatively free to decorate their spaces with motifs and in-jokes. By contrast, in semipublic areas images are usually restricted to unit emblems and examples of the unit's equipment.

In the Soviet Union, agitatsiia and propaganda, or agit-prop, had a long history dating back to therevolutionary period; murals were a common feature of life for her troops. In former East Germany many striking murals survive in abandoned Soviet bases, extolling the Red Army's proud heritage and the progressive nature of socialist society. One of the few people investigating this legacy is photographer and filmmaker Angus Boulton: we are fortunate to be able to include some of his work in our book (see end) to illustrate how the cold war was also fought through art. The Soviet army was a vast imperial organisation where Russian was not always a recruit's first language. Murals thus had an important role to play in military training, showing rifle stripping and the correct way to don a chemical warfare suit. Most murals on Soviet bases are found in the communal areas, gyms, canteens and cultural centres and all appear to have been painted by professional artists or skilled amateurs. Less well executed murals are found in some barracks, but they still tend to follow the theme of the unit's military equipment.

Spur-of-the-moment graffiti are a further valuable source of information. Some provide dates, names and numbers of soldiers stationed at a particular location. One remarkable survival is a collection of first world war pencil graffiti left by conscientious objectors held in Richmond Castle, North Yorkshire. Hastily scribbled tallies of, for example, shells issued from stores can give an insight to the types of ammunition housed in a building.

Spontaneous graffiti are also effective at communicating a message of protest or subverting a hated structure. During the cold war, the Berlin Wall, an active and deadly military edifice, became a canvas for people to scrawl their names or obscenities about the communist system, as well as for more accomplished mural-style paintings. Today the barrier being built to separate Israel from the Palestinian Territories is assuming a similar role: British graffiti artist Banksy recently applied a series of stencil designs. In 1980s London, protest was officially sanctioned when a wall-sized mural was applied to a building in Dalston Lane, Hackney, celebrating a peace carnival and local community life. During Northern Ireland's troubles, and especially from the 1980s, mural art formed an important method of communication and denoting territory; less well known are the murals by British soldiers within their bases and by prisoners in Long Kesh/Maze.

In some situations there might be no convenient wall. During the 1980s and early 1990s peace protesters outside the Nevada Test Site commonly used rocks to create intricate designs on the desert surface. Even in this remote location a highway underpass between the peace camp and test site boundary provided a surface on which to write. The examples of war art illustrated here and in our book represent only a very small sample of this vulnerable historical resource, which is being yearly diminished by nature and demolition. Conversely military murals and graffiti constitute a thriving folk art tradition: in Iraq there are reports of graffiti defacing ancient monuments and murals being used to brighten camps formed of tents and transport containers. Murals and graffiti are an important part of the historic record of military sites. They can tell us of the cultures at the bases, the functions of spaces within them, about individuality and about reuse. Only a few of these images will survive for posterity. All are worthy of record and study.

The authors all work for English Heritage. Their book, War Art: Murals & Graffiti - Military Life, Power & Subversion (ISBN 1902771567 £14.95) will be published by the Council for British Archaeology in January

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