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On Tour With The Pitmen Painters


The scenario could have come straight from Calendar Girls or The Full Monty. One day Robert Lyon, an enthusiastic master of paintings at King’s College, is invited to teach an art appreciation class to a group of Workers Education Association (WEA) participants in Ashington, 16 miles north of Newcastle in Northumberland.

It is the early 1930s and Northumberland is coal mining country.

Not surprisingly, the 13 men who assemble in the room to hear Lyon’s lectures consist largely of pitmen; ordinary hard-working men. And as much as they try to understand why and how artists paint, it soon becomes apparent that the group cannot quite grasp the message Robert Lyon is trying to convey.

So, after a couple of weeks of lantern slides and lectures on the old Masters, Lyon changes tack. One day he brings in an armful of art materials and instructs the group to start painting. From now on, he announces, the class will focus on the paintings they themselves have produced at home during the week; on what they discover about the ‘method and process’ of painting, through entering the mind of an artist.

Fast forward a few years and The Ashington Group, as they have become known, have produced hundreds of ‘homeworks’. Many have also been recycled or destroyed – they have served their purpose – but Lyon recognises the pitmen’s progress and puts on a show of their most significant works in the fine art department at King’s College. Remarkably, this leads to an introduction to collector and heiress Helen Sutherland, who ensures the pitmen are welcomed into the British Museum and the Tate. Eventually the paintings even go on tour.

And thus, by the late 1930s, these men with their ‘unprofessional’ paintings of the mines, allotments, kitchens and social clubs, have become minor celebrities.

Fast forward yet again to a winter’s night in 1971 when artist and art critic William Feaver travels over to Ashington to meet a small group of 5 or 6 elderly men; all who are left of the Ashington Group.

‘I had met them at the opening of an exhibition of works made by Helen Sutherland, who had patronized the group in the 1930s,’ William explains. ‘I was writing a book about art in Newcastle at the time, and although I knew their story, I had never met them.’

Once in the old army hut in which the group had stored their work, William admits to being ‘completely overwhelmed by the quality and intensity of their work’. To start with, he recalls, the paintings were stored away. ‘So, they came out, one by one, and it was like Christmas morning for a child. There were these extraordinary, detailed paintings. As an art critic I am always asked to go and see people’s work and usually it’s a terrible disappointment. You just have to be very tactful. The work just doesn’t spark.’

In the case of the Ashington Group’s work, however, ‘it was just unpretentious, honest, inventive; and it was very varied, from straight naïve and charming, to sophisticated.’

The men were all talking at the same time, William remembers, ‘and I was equally impressed by their incredible camaraderie and humour and intensity, and by their grasp of not just what they’d been doing but of other art as well. It was a very good feeling, to see that these people didn’t feel inhibited at all; didn’t feel they were the ‘amateurs’ or ‘dabblers’, but that they were just as serious as everybody else. They were just different from other artists as a result of their circumstances.’

William went on to write a book about the pitmen’s tale – Pitmen Painters – and helped to form a trust to ensure the paintings were properly preserved. They are now permanently housed in the Woodhorn Colliery Museum in Ashington.

Some years later, long after William’s book had gone out of print, playwright Lee Hall picked up a copy of Pitmen Painters from a secondhand bookshop on Charing Cross Road. Celebrated for his musical Billy Elliott, Lee Hall instantly saw the potential for a stage play inspired by the pitmen’s story and in late 2007 his play The Pitmen Painters opened in Newcastle’s Live Theatre before transferring to London’s National Theatre.

‘It’s a funny, intelligent play,’ William Feaver says. ‘It’s the only play I know of that deals with art in a real way. The reason why people love the play so much is because here, at last, is a play that doesn’t treat people like idiots or as people to be teased with intellectual conceits. It’s a very straight play. You should go and see it.’

The Pitmen Painters showed at the Theatre Royal in Norwich, Norfolk, in November. It is next showing in Theatre Royal Bath (www.theatreroyal.org.uk) from 17 - 21 November, and Theatre Royal Plymouth (theatreroyal.com) from 24 - 28 November.