Table Of ContentNATIONAL LIFE STORIES
ARTISTS’ LIVES
Ken Campbell
Interviewed by Cathy Courtney
C466/35
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The British Library National Life Stories
Interview Summary Sheet Title Page
Ref no: C466/35/01-08 Digitised from cassette originals
Collection title: Artists’ Lives
Interviewee’s surname: Campbell Title:
Interviewee’s forename: Ken Sex: male
Occupation: Dates: 1939
Dates of recording: 1995.1.17, 1995.5.3, 1995.5.24, 1995.5.31, 1995.9.21, 1995.6.7, 1995.6.14,
1995.9.21
Location of interview: Interviewee’s home, St Ives, Cornwall
Name of interviewer: Cathy Courtney
Type of recorder: Marantz CP430 and two lapel mics
Recording format: TDK C60 Cassettes
F numbers of playback cassettes: F4805-F4822
Total no. of digitised tracks: 35 Mono or stereo: Stereo
Additional material at the British Library: Summary, transcript, ‘The World Returned’ catalogue
1999, ‘Broken Rules and Double Crosses’ catalogue/poster 1994
Copyright/Clearance: Full clearance. © The British Library
Interviewer’s comments:
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F4805 Side A
[Interview with Ken Campbell, January the 17th 1995 at his London studio.]
.....me where and when you were born?
I was born in November 1939. Where is a slight mystery to me. You will find that any
stories from my family change violently all the time. I believe I was born in Edgware,
Middlesex.
They change depending on who you talk to, or they change depending on what mood you're
in?
Both, but most exclusively who I was talking to, because it's usually my mother, and she is
now dead.
[BREAK IN RECORDING]
.....an adenoidal but never mind.
You are referring to yourself rather than your mother.
Well I certainly wasn't referring to you. To me.
And, why might you not have been born in Edgware, where else might you have been born?
Well, because my mother did...on my mother's side there were story-tellers, and they enjoyed
telling stories and they enjoyed their language, despite their lack of education, and the
enjoyment I think came well in front of anything we call in your middle classes fact. So my
mother moved it around for her own purposes. She told me that I was conceived in Epping
Forest, which if you work it out must have been achieved on a very desperate February
morning or February day, and I think I was, I think I was born in Edgware, Middlesex,
because we were...when were discussing such things it was discussing the Blitz, the moving
around, my father going away, my mother moving from one burning house to another, and
where she was at different times is not at all clear to me. I think I was born, I was actually
born in Edgware.
Do you think you were born in a hospital?
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I think I was born in a hospital, in Edgware.
And did you know your mother's parents? How far back can you go?
I knew my mother's father, who was a huge, in personality a huge and roguish man. I didn't
know her mother very much, because she left him when my mother was about 12, because he
mistreated her, the story goes, and set up with another woman - no she set up with another
man called Brookman; interestingly not a common name but a name you will find on, I think
you will find on either St. George's in the East, the Hawksmoor Church, or, the one in
Spitalfields, I can't remember. There were a lot of, Brookman sounds like a German
translation, a name that's moved from the German, and there are a lot of Germans, a big
German community in the East End; they rapidly changed their names at the First World
War, but they were in baking and bricklaying and things like that, or brick-making. And I
think on my grandfather's side there was some German blood, also Flemish weavers,
Huguenots. But the mother I can remember very very very vaguely, the grandmother, but
interestingly enough they were apart for forty or fifty years and they died within about ten
days of each other; when one died the other one hurt and the other one passed on.
What was your mother's maiden name?
York. I suspect that was an acquired name, because if they were Huguenots they may well
have gone to York first to pick the name up, but in this area and this street my grandfather
was born in, or the one just there.
Can we just say for the tape which street we're in?
It's in Gibraltar Walk, London E2 7LH. There are other Yorks around here, again not a
common name, so they might be part of the same tribe.
And do you know anything about your maternal grandfather or grandmother's growing up, do
you know what their life had been?
Well, part of the...my family being East End had a very kind of Dickensian imagination, I
mean they actually read a lot of Dickens; my grandfather, my mother's father read a great
deal. As she put it, he would read himself sober every morning after a night's drinking, that's
in his eighties, he would actually, he lay in bed in the suburbs reading Dickens and Trollope,
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and then go off to the library, i.e. the library in the pub, the following morning. So, what was
the question? I've forgotten it.
Whether you know anything about his background and upbringing and...
Yes. So they tended to spin stories, and they had this...there are certain models in 19th
century story-telling or novels that keep coming up. One is `lost and found' of course, the
other is the poor child born of rich parents. Then there's the bastard son and all of that. Now,
my grandfather on my mother's side was supposed to have been, first of all he was a rogue,
secondly he was.....[BREAK IN RECORDING] .....someone in Waring & Gillow, but this is
the story, this is the story. And so there was money, he once had money, you know, with a
capital M, which could have been anything, you know, it could have been £400, but he once
had money and drank it away. If you see all these capital letters, you know, at the top of a
Dickens period chapter, it was all spelt out in those ways. It's interesting if you listen to
music-hall songs and, in many ways the working class of course are more conservative than
anybody and they do hang on to their folk roots if you like, or they hang on to the models that
are passed down to them, and you can hear this coming through in the stories that my mother
used to tell. So, maybe life's sorted itself out that way, I don't know. Before him came, his
father was supposed to be somebody called `the Butcher of Aldgate' with a huge red beard,
this is where it gets into fantasy, a huge red beard, and he had three daughters, one of whom
was my great-aunt, and grandmother, and they all had flaming red hair, wouldn't they just?
And coal heavers were known to sweep the streets, the pavements, the coal away from their
dresses so that they could pass, and he is supposed to have put up, put the three girls up on a
bar in one of the darkest pubs in the docks where people were, sailors would go in, `indulge
themselves' my mother would say with her rolling eye, and they would come out of the top
into the river with their throats cut, you know, after their money. [LAUGHS] So my mother,
these three daughters were put on the counter and it's rumoured that my father would say,
`Nobody fucking swears while my daughters are in the pub'. And it's rumoured
[INAUDIBLE] even peed himself rather than move while my father... You know, it was all
cowboy stuff.
While your grandfather...
While my grandfather was in the pub, right. And he, now Dad[??]... It was either he or
somebody else, went to America and was deported from New York in about 1902, which I
think you've got to be going some to be deported from America for misbehaviour, came back
to England and mysteriously, again it falls into these kind of novella stories, went to the
country, you know, capital C, went to the country to look at the fine air, met a vicar's
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daughter, and seduced her and brought her back to England, right? So it's that kind of, those
kind of stories. No way of checking up any of this, none at all, fortunately.
And as far back as the stories go they are Londoners?
Yes, but they, my mother said that they were called Yorkshire Yellowbellies, which is a
strange term but it's supposed to mean that they had slightly Latin skin, as indeed I have were
I to show you my belly, it's kind of dark. But I don't know what that means, Yorkshire
Yellowbellies, and with the name York, who knows. They're supposed to go back to
Huguenot weavers, but a lot of people in the East End claimed that, but in fact perhaps that's
true too, because a great many people, there were a great many Huguenot weavers here.
And, what was he like as a grandfather as far as you were concerned?
I think he was wonderful. He smelt, he smelt of old man, and he smelt of tobacco, and he
cackled and wheezed, and he had a stick, and he had a twinkly eye. Ruth, my wife, does not
like the sound of him at all, she thinks I'm going to grow up into him, or grow down into him,
or grow sideways into him, but he had, at 84 he had a 48-inch chest and he was called over at
82 to the doctor because he wasn't feeling well and the doctor saw my mother and said,
`Well, I'm afraid Mr York will have to from now on, if he wishes to survive six months, live
on steamed fish, milk liquids, and not touch alcohol.' And my mother said, `You're
completely wasting your time, I will never be able to persuade him of this.' And he lived on
for another two, three, four years after that. I remember him because he used to twinkle a
great deal. He used to prod the dog, Billie, with his stick, and he used to walk along between
one place, from our house to the house he was living, which was a few doors up, in the
suburbs in Sidcup with my uncle, and there would be a train of kids walking behind him, and
Billie the dog running backwards and forwards sort of shepherding the whole team. He used
to leave great holes in privet hedges all round Sidcup because he would go off in the
morning, ostensibly to the library, and I think he went to the library and then he would go to
the pub, and then he would sit out his relaxment through the afternoon in various holes he
had established in the privet hedges on the walls[??], and people were furious with him but
they wouldn't face him out, which I quite admired him for.
And when did you spend time with him?
Oh really in my very early teens in Sidcup when he moved out of the East End to join us in
Sidcup where we were bombed out of the East End in the war, and my mother, we were
blown up in two separate houses which I'm sure we'll talk about later on. And at some point
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he found life non-viable in the East End and moved out to my uncle who was living a few
doors from me.
This is your mother's sister - I mean brother?
Yes. Again supposed to be a bastard, but we don't talk about it.
What was he like as a figure [INAUDIBLE]?
Well he was...he was the man in the family who fought in the desert with Montgomery and
all of that and drove a lorry, and because he had been abroad, been away, he was regarded as
the man with brains and life experience, so he was set loose on me somewhat to argue with
me, because I was an exceptionally disputatious small boy, and I would argue about anything;
as somebody once said I would argue about how to cut your toe-nails but I forget who said
that. And I found myself facing out Uncle Bert, because he had a fairly swift mind, I would
say that I could win but we would argue to a standstill, and I suppose my trouble with him
was that he...it wasn't just kind of male competition or preposterone or protesterone or
whatever the substance is that produces these effects; it was that what he was there for as far
as I could see was to argue me round to becoming what the family wanted me to become, and
I was not in that business, and so this produced...this was a symptom of a very very difficult
time where I had very ambivalent feelings about my family; I would look as though I was
ashamed of them sometimes...and this was a desperate... This is one of the awful things
about being working class which doesn't really get accounted for. But at the same time you
knew that if you got in line you were mentally doomed in some ways, and this became a
really terrible struggle and a schism between me and my mother. But her brother was really
kind of, turned into the person who was supposed to get me in line. So, you know, Ruth for
instance, my wife, really thinks he's a rather nice man, but my memory of him was, you
know, it's like...it's like finding that you've got a great big cuddly pet to play with and you
realise it's a tiger but no one else actually realises it's a tiger.
And how did he get on with your grandfather?
I don't know. Bert, my uncle, is a very equable man, and I think he got on with him quite...
Well he married a kind of very ditsy woman called Aunt Mim, who talks like this, you know,
[HIGH PITCHED]. And I remember her coming up to somebody and saying, `Have you
been saved? Are you under the flag?' Because she was in the Salvation Army, you know,
she was... But a sweet woman, but, you know, operating within a narrow torch-beam.
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So how did she get on with your grandfather?
I've no idea. I would think she would put up with anything. If my uncle said so she would
put up with it. They were a very equable couple.
What was her house like?
Her house? Dreadful. Fairly scruffy, producing two bizarre sons, my cousins, one who was
hopelessly spoilt. You know, it's like two chicks in a nest, you can just see it happening, one
gets all big and has things thrust down its big gaping throat and the other one is neglected and
turns into a bizarre little thing if it doesn't die at all, and that's how the two turned out. But, I
mean I just remember things that my mother pointed out. I mean to her the great shame of
my Aunt Mim's place was that she made toast on the gas ring, just by putting the bread on the
gas ring, you know, this was regarded as absolutely shameful.
Can you remember the house in terms of its decoration and furnishing?
This is...are you talking about my uncle's house or my...?
Yes, your Aunt Mim's house.
Well, everything moved...I think what's got to be remembered, it's just after the war, people
were, or at least our people were extremely poor. My family was constantly hit by the
dockers, my father was a docker, docker strikes, you remember the bloody dockers that the
`Express' fulminated against, who were a good anarchic band who knew how to look after
each other because nobody else would, and I could talk about that later, the structure of the
way...the way people as far as I can understand it worked in the docks, something that people
don't understand, never really got to. So life was very hard. My mother had to work at least
one job, sometimes two; my father worked when he could, and when he couldn't work he
would do other things, I found out later, I didn't know that. So the decor of the house...
We're in Aunt Mim's house, yes?
We're in Aunt Mim's house. But I'm trying to say that both of us, both families were
extremely hard up. I think the decor of the house for a period in the...for the Fifties, perhaps
the parts of the Sixties, was not a matter of choice; you used for instance what I call builders'
brown, that mysterious colour that appeared all over the suburbs just after, during and just
after the war, where I think they mixed every little bit of colour, you mix everything together
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and you don't quite get black, you get this kind of dark Plasteciney, purpley brown, and I call
it builders' brown because I think that's what they did, and they made up a general colour. So
everything got painted builders' brown, both outside and sometimes in. When they got a little
bit of money in the Sixties they started to put up wallpaper by choice, but before that the
wallpapers were very very Victorian, and I would say that, forget the money thing, I would
say actually the great leap was from entirely Victorian interiors, straight into the Fifties and,
you've never had it so good kind of, kind watered-down, what was that dreadful Cliff Richard
thing, expresso bongo or café bongo, or cafe expresso, kind of stuff you know.
And would it have been a house with lots of sort of knick-knacks and objects, or not?
Not in those two houses, no, they didn't have much, but there would be treasured things.
There would be a biscuit tin from Queen Victoria's Jubilee, there would be a clock. In the
people's houses before, the grandparents' houses, I can remember one in the East End that I
used to be taken to, there would be an actual, one of those glass, tall glass domes with dank
things going on inside, you know; you hoped you would see something move, you know, and
you would be rather frightened if you did. But damp and mossy and dark colours, feathered
hats, polished wood. The polishing of things was a desperate business.
So although Aunt Mim made her toast on the gas ring she would have been quite house-
proud?
She was ish, but she was kind of criticised by the rest of the family a bit for not being so.
There's a big thing in the East End about being house-proud I notice which is, this is a
supposition of mine, but in the East End a lot of people, a lot of women went to prostitution
in the, well, almost traditionally but certainly during the Depression in the Thirties, and I
noticed that the women used to polish the outside of their houses and their grates and their
steps, and the ironworks and the foot scrapers, you know, outside the house, with absolute
terrifying vim, as, my mother's word was `vim', and the grates inside the house. And I think
what it was a lot of the time, people were trying to, the women had to register that they were
proper, and proper really meant something quite different in the East End because it was the
line between being on the game, or in deep destitution or on the game, or holding your head
above water, and that was I think a far more desperate thing than elsewhere.
So it was a psychological thing as well as a...?
Oh yes absolutely, absolutely. Respectable I suppose is the word, but really, you know, that
word meant something very much stronger in the East End than it...
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