Colquhoun and MacBryde’s stint as boho babysitters

WHEN Christopher Barker was seven years old, his mother – Canadian writer Elizabeth Smart, the author of the cult novel By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept – took on a new “nanny-housekeeper” to care for him and his siblings at their home, a rented, ramshackle farmhouse in the Essex countryside.

Still Life by MacBryde (1947). Picture: Contributed

“Well, there were two ‘nannies,’ actually,” says 71-year-old Barker, second of Smart’s four children with the poet George Barker. In loco parentis at Tilty Mill House in 1950, while Smart worked in London and George Barker was in America, were “the two Roberts,” the Scottish artists and bibulous bohemians, Colquhoun and MacBryde, who had blazed like comets across the post-war art firmament before spectacularly crashing and burning.

Once known as the “Golden Boys of Bond Street”, this brilliant but doomed pair of lovers and lifelong partners were sliding into obscurity and penury amid a fog of alcohol. Yet somehow they still managed to carry on painting – MacBryde still lifes and Colquhoun mainly figurative.

Now, their work is being celebrated in two Edinburgh exhibitions marking Colquhoun’s centenary year – one at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, the other at the Scottish Gallery – while John Byrne’s play, Colquhoun & MacBryde, has just ended a run at the Tron in Glasgow.

So, given their rackety lives, what was Barker’s mother thinking, handing over the care of four small children to the roistering Roberts, erstwhile denizens of every drinking dive in Soho and Fitzrovia?

“Yes, maybe it was risky, but my mother liked them. They were actually marvellous characters and looked after us really well. They were great practical jokers – particularly MacBryde, who was very dapper, a small, dark, mercurial figure, always playing tricks,” says Barker, speaking from his home in Norfolk.

“He also played mother, dispensing domesticity and irony in equal measure – it’s hard to imagine MacBryde ever being absent from the kitchen Rayburn to take time to paint in the studio. Colquhoun was handsome, a sort of Gary Cooper. He would emerge from the studio, often beaten back by the weight of his hangover. He was, however, always sweet and charming to us, playing wild games of cowboys and indians. Until he had a drink. We never saw either of them drunk during the week. My mother would come home every Friday and the Roberts would head off immediately to the local pub.

“I was terrified of Colquhoun when he was drunk, although he was never physically violent, he would bellow and roar and was verbally very violent. Scary. Now I realise it was an awe-inspiring way to be brought up,” says Barker, a writer and photographer, who has penned a lovely unpublished memoir about his childhood. “I was overtaken by Roger Bristow’s 2010 biography of the Roberts, The Last Bohemians, which is very good,” he says.

In one chapter, Barker writes: “The Roberts’ homosexuality was never stressed or even mentioned in our household and as children we had no idea this was their sexual orientation and would have been totally bewildered had it been explained to us.”

Originally, the children weren’t even aware that the two men were artists, let alone homosexuals (then illegal, and complicated by the bisexual Colquhoun’s attractiveness to women). And yet, says Patrick Elliott, curator at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, the four years they spent at Tilty Mill were highly fruitful for Colquhoun, less so for MacBryde, apart from his collaboration with Colquhoun on costume and set design for a Scottish ballet, Donald Of The Burthens, for Sadler’s Wells Ballet Company. Colquhoun also created the set and costumes for King Lear, starring Michael Redgrave at Stratford-upon-Avon, designs that so awed the young Judi Dench that she decided to give up her plan to become a designer and act instead.

Tilty Mill was a rich source of inspiration for Colquhoun, because “the rural setting was reminiscent of his formative years in Ayrshire,” says Elliott, who has written a superb catalogue to accompany the Two Roberts exhibition. He gained unique access to a cache of letters written to their next-door neighbour in Notting Hill. This was Colin Anderson, then head of P&O and a major patron and supporter, who looked after them when they were almost down-and-out. So Elliott very much hopes the exhibition will banish many myths surrounding the pair, who met as students at Glasgow School of Art.

Colquhoun was the son of a fitter from Kilmarnock; MacBryde the son of a Maybole tanner. They moved to London together in 1941 and almost every memoir of Soho in the louche 1940s mentions them, their charisma, their air of danger, their friends – Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Dylan Thomas and, of course, George Barker, another prodigious drinker. Christopher Barker acknowledges that the Roberts’ lives have created a flurry of Chinese whispers, but insists the story is true that, on being introduced to his father, MacBryde crushed the shards of a broken bottle into George’s outstretched hand.

“They had so many demons,” says Robin Muir, sighing. The Edinburgh-born photographic historian and contributing editor to Vogue began collecting the Roberts’ work “for pennies” some years ago. “I could still afford it then – it’s now becoming much sought-after since Colquhoun is finally recognised as a master. But they were both such good painters.

“One of the most fascinating things about them – as you can see from the Scottish Gallery show – is that they were superstars, endlessly photographed by Vogue, Picture Post, Harper’s Bazaar, literary magazines… They were everywhere, like rock stars today. They were clearly exotic and interesting people. We regard celebrity as a new phenomenon, but actually the Roberts were the Grayson Perrys, the Tracey Emins of their era. You see them rise in the 1940s when they were young, talented and good-looking, then you see their disintegration in 1950s photographs, particularly those of John Deakin.

“It’s terribly sad that they became such forgotten figures, tragic. I’ve never quite worked out what went wrong.”

Meanwhile, Patrick Elliott believes their lives are so compelling that it’s surprising a film has never been made about them. “We will have, however, playing on a loop during the exhibition, the first film Ken Russell ever made for the BBC’s Monitor series in 1959. It lasts for 11 minutes and opens with a scene that is almost medieval: the two Roberts being pulled along by a horse-drawn cart before taking their paintings into a timbered cottage in the Suffolk countryside. We’re told they will continue working there ‘until they find a studio for even less than a pound’. They stayed until 1961.”

A year later Colquhoun died of a heart attack, aged 47, in MacBryde’s arms. MacBryde went to Malaga – it was rumoured that Francis Bacon funded him – where he drank copiously. Back in London, Elizabeth Smart offered him the spare room in her house in Westbourne Terrace. Here he drank alone, rarely leaving the room, Barker remembers. “He never slept. I would hear him wailing and sobbing all night, every night,” he says. “It was desperately sad – they had known such glory; then it all went so wrong. Heart-breaking.”

MacBryde was run over and killed by a car on the night of 5 May, 1966, as he danced outside a Dublin pub which had just closed. n

Golden Years: Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, until 26 November. The Two Roberts: Colquhoun & MacBryde, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Friday until 24 May