SUBUD WRITERS CLUB MEMBERS
Marcus Bolt
And That’s When I Knew …
I was seventeen and two terms into the Lower Sixth year, studying A-level Art, French and English. Literature with a vague idea of perhaps going to Uni; but, having become obsessed with motorbikes, decided to leave school, get a job and buy one.
After a couple of years working in factories and on building sites, through my girlfriend’s father, who was a Governor at the local Secondary School, I got a post as an unqualified teacher. While there, I was taken under the wing of the art master – who convinced me I had talent and told me I definitely should go to art school. But to get a grant and a place on a Foundation Course, I needed A-level Art, which I managed to pass thanks to the local Further Education College’s night classes. I applied for and secured a full grant and then a place at St Albans Art School (now part of the University of Herts).
Walking into the college building on that first day felt like a homecoming. I loved the cultural kudos of being at art school and the sense of freedom being a student gave me after three years of mundane employment. I revelled in the work, both practical and theoretical, as well as the interaction with fellow students and our lecturers. This Foundation Year was exceptionally well run, and I shall never forget the trips to the Reading Room at the British Museum where we students were allowed to actually handle and study drawings by the greats. I remember holding in my hands such sublime things as a silver point drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, through to a shopping list written by Reynolds, the latter making me realise people from the past were just like us – a revelation in those hungry-for-knowledge days.
I also enjoyed the friends I made and, because of a new-found talent for organising dances and entertainments, felt valued and popular. I went to lots of parties and got drunk often. The lifestyle fitted me like a wetsuit and, in common with the Charles Ryder character in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, I too was ‘drowning in honey’.
It was all such fun, but at the same time, hard work and a steep learning curve for me. One time, after a college trip to the Victoria and Albert Museum, we were tasked with writing an essay on the differences between Michelangelo’s and Donatello’s ‘David’.
At the V&A, there are a full size plaster casts of both the Michelangelo version – the original carved from a block of Carrera marble, and the Donatello ‘David’, originally modelled in clay, then cast in bronze. The originals of both sculptures are housed in Florence.
Michelangelo’s piece presents an athletic young man in a kind of he-man pose, naked with a slingshot over his left shoulder, and is 5.17 metres tall (approx. 17 feet). Donatello’s shows a young, willowy shepherd boy clothed in a tunic and holding a sword in his right hand with his left foot on the severed head of the giant Goliath; this full size plaster cast is 1.265 metres in height (approx. 4 feet).
So, off I went and wrote an essay based on the theme of my preference for Michelangelo’s version, because, I wrote, he was obviously a well-muscled strongman, and you’d have to be a very confident, very macho tough guy to defeat a giant warrior and so on. And, by contrast, asked how could Donatello’s twelve-year old, somewhat puny boy pull off such a feat?
A week later, during a one-to-one tutorial on my essay, my tutor, Anthony Harris, the college principal, quietly said to me, “Yes, but what about divine intervention? And doesn’t a youthful, weak body pitted against a giant mercenary reinforce the concept of a miraculous event? And that the underlying message in the David and Goliath story is, perhaps, that faith overcomes the ‘giants’ of fear, depression and other problems in our life?”
His gentle, questioning statements were, to my mind, like the floodlights at a football stadium switching on section by section, slowly revealing the pitch…
And that’s when I knew… I wasn’t as clever as I thought. I hadn’t got it; I’d completely missed the point – and that intellectually, culturally, historically I had a lot to learn… then further shocked to realise that even geniuses like Michelangelo can get it so wrong – probably due to his penchant for athletic male bodies.
It was, in many ways, an epiphany, which set me off on a lifelong quest to try to really understand the underlying meaning and symbolism concealed in cultural artefacts – paintings, sculptures, films, books, poetry and music.
When the Foundation year ended, I left St Albans Art School and started a degree course at Maidstone College of Art (now part of the University of Kent). The modules on the three-year course included graphic design, photography, typography and the history of art. I found the latter the most challenging, because it made me think deeper, study harder and, ever since, to always strive to go beyond the obvious, to go deeper. And for that, I am grateful to my laid back St Albans tutor.
By Marcus Bolt
For Once In My Life …
Oxford Street, August 1869… a noisy, bustling formicary of fashionable shoppers, hawkers, tradesmen, messengers, sandwich boarders, nannies with children in prams, horse drawn cabs and coaches – and pickpockets, prostitutes, grifters and handbill distributors, all going about their business.
One of the latter, a Mr. Timothy Leonard, is being tailed by a plain-clothes member of the recently formed Metropolitan Police. Having accepted and read one of his proffered handbills, the detective, Sergeant Martin, has decided they are indecent. He follows Leonard and observes him enter the premises of Dr. Gilbert Du Brange in Gilbert Street, off Oxford Street, London West One.
Later, after further investigation, Du Brange is arrested and charged with ‘paying for the distribution of handbills of a character not sanctioned by the Commissioner of Police’ and ‘fraudently advertising himself as a member of The Royal College of Surgeons’. He is then summoned to appear before Marlborough Magistrates Court in October 1869.
From The Times, October 1869:
Sergeant Martin told the court that the indecent bills in question were adverts for medicines claimed to cure the pox, other sexual diseases, impotence and abortion remedies for women. He also told the court that on entering Du Brange’s premises, he observed it had the appearance of a doctor’s shop. A diploma in the name of Dr. Gilbert Du Brange was displayed in the window and ‘Dr. Du Brange’ was written on a sign on the door. He witnessed Du Brange making up medicines and selling them. He also saw what he called ‘several disgusting medical representations’ pinned to the shop walls.
When questioned by the magistrate, Du Brange said he was well known and highly respected and that he had been selling pills in the open air for about two or three years until about nine months ago when his business had increased so that he now had to stay in his shop and employ handbill distributors. When he sold a box of pills, he said, he wrapped them in a handbill to advertise his products. When he sold them to a woman, he wrapped them in plain paper. He told the court that he sold about three or four gross of pills every day and that they were very popular and highly efficacious.
He then stated that in order for him to be convicted of the offences, the court must prove he was an annoyance to those seeking medical assistance and the public in general.
The magistrate replied that nothing of the sort was required. Du Brange then, turning in the dock, repeated directly back to him that it was indeed most necessary. The magistrate replied that Du Brange’s manner was in the highest degree offensive and ungentlemanly, and that he had better conduct himself properly.
Du Brange continued to argue his case, stating his pills were ‘effective and necessary’ until being forcibly removed from the courtroom on the magistrate’s order.
Du Brange, born as Gilbert Tiffin, may have continued to sell his pills, but changed his name yet again, this time to Greenwood (adopting the name of his wife) and may have moved to Derbyshire. There is no further record of him except on the marriage certificate of one of his sons (dated 1891), where his name is registered as ‘Gilbert Tiffin Greenwood’, and his occupation is recorded as ‘Herblist’.
His son, Gilbert William Tiffin Greenwood, a blacksmith’s assistant (or striker), living in Derbyshire, had a daughter called Gertrude. She later met and married a Canadian immigrant called William Cousins (originally Cozenz, but changed during the First World War for fear of being thought a German). The couple had two sons, Gilbert and William, and two daughters, Alice and Florence. Alice married Frederick Bolt in 1940, and they had two sons, Brian and Phillip. Brian changed his forename to Marcus in 1970.
Yep! Dr. Du Brange is, in fact, my great-great-grandfather.
NB: This story is 98% true, but in docudrama style I have conflated several Du Brange court cases and Times reports to simplify the legal complexities, but have retained the essence. It is reported that Du Brange said, “This will break me!”, but to include the prompt line, I have ‘put words in Du Brange’s mouth’. Please forgive the contrivance.
By Marcus Bolt