AUSTIN CLARE COOPER (1890-1964) AND THE CALGARY CHRIST

I have regularly celebrated the poster designs of the artist Austin Cooper in these pages. He was a cousin of my grandmother May Castle and I’m proud to claim him as a relative.

1920s Railway poster for the Scottish east coast town of Montrose, by Austin Cooper, who studied art in nearby Arbroath

His career as a poster artist is framed by the two world wars of the twentieth century, and I am sure he would prefer to be remembered for the fine art which he produced after 1945. At the end of his life he moved away from figurative commercial work altogether and produced a series of emotionally powerful abstract collages.

His career began in the early twentieth century with training at art schools in Cardiff on the south coast of Wales and in Arbroath on the east coast of Scotland. From there he rejoined his emigrated family in British Columbia, with aspirations to be a portrait painter. But at the age of 22 he and a fellow Arbroath graduate (Adam Sherriff-Scott) joined a commercial art studio in Calgary, painting urban landscapes for real estate developers.

Austin Cooper (left) and possibly Adam Sherriff-Scott (right) in the Calgary studio of their employer Gibson Catlett (centre), 1912

The pair caused a scandal in around 1913 with a controversial collaborative painting called Christ in Calgary, which depicted Jesus being ignored by crowds on a busy city street. Was it blasphemous or instructive? Enough people paid the 15c admission charge to judge for themselves for the picture to remain on display for six months. I can’t find a reproduction of it, and I don’t know if it still exists. At the time, the Calgary News-Telegram carried the following description of it:

A crowd of hurrying people is on the street hurrying west on the side and corner near the old Royal hotel, and intermingled with this crowd is the Indian, the squaw with her child in a papoose, the lady stenographer with her beau; the lumberman chatting with his companion on the corner, and, leaning up against the wall of the hotel; the policeman talking to a nurse and taking notes on an accident; the mother and her litte girl; the Negro standing unconcerned, and other characters; but the most prominent character in the picture is a large representative figure of Christ standing on the corner of the pavement, while directly in front of him and looking up into his face with a frightened look is a woman of the street, bearing all the characteristics of such a woman, and dressed in red.

 

The Hotel Royal, Calgary – a promotional postcard from the 1920s

I have found an artist’s impression of Calgary’s Royal hotel – Scott and Cooper were both employed to paint such impressions, and it’s tempting to think that this is the work of one of them. The style fits Cooper’s. But the picture is dated 1920s, by which time the pair had already moved to Montreal to establish Shagpat Studios, their own commercial outlet. So the image may be of a NEW Hotel Royal which replaced the “old Royal hotel” described in the News-Telegram. In any case this building too has gone, demolished in the early 1970s. If the painting too has now been lost, then thank goodness for the News-Telegram’s vivid description of it.

The headlines of another local newspaper, the Calgary Herald, reflect the debate about the painting’s moral message:

MINISTER ASKED TO INSPECT PAINTING

 SUNDAY TEACHER PRAISES IT,

WHILE IDEALIST THINKS IT OVERSTEPS ITS BOUNDS

 THREE WRITERS UNANIMOUS

THAT WORK IS NOT IMMORAL

BUT RATHER AN INFLUENCE FOR GOOD

 The owner of the gallery which exhibited Christ in Calgary declared, “The picture is there to teach a lesson. Only the woman of the street recognizes the Christ. [It shows] the people of Calgary hurrying by with their thoughts bent on worldly gain, pleasure and real estate speculation.”

Austin Cooper as a Regimental Sergeant Major in the Black Watch, March 1919

That dig at real estate rather bit the hand that was feeding both Scott and Cooper at Catlett’s studio. It might explain why the pair both relocated to Montreal soon afterwards. But war in Europe soon overshadowed career; and like so many men of the British Empire both artists enlisted – both to serve in the Black Watch. Both survived, but while Scott returned to Canada, Cooper remained in London, first to court his future wife and then to begin a new phase of his career, as a railway poster artist.

This article is in memory of the artist Timothy Ray, a descendant of Austin Cooper, who curated an exhibition of his ancestor's work in 1993. The essays which he wrote for the exhibition catalogue are by far the best source of this and other stories of Austin Cooper's life.

JOHN COOPER-CHADWICK (1864-1948) AND THE FAMILY OF BOERS

I’ve been rereading the memoir published by my grandmother’s cousin John Cooper-Chadwick, called Three Years With Lobengula, and Experiences In South Africa. It was written in 1892-93, and has a lightness of style which you wouldn’t expect from a late Victorian author.

John Cooper-Chadwick (1864-1948), pictured in 1885 when he was serving in South Africa with Methuen’s Company of Horse

It was written, John notes in the preface, “only to amuse my father during his latter years of declining health.” This explains the breezy narrative voice which he used to describe an often dangerous or harrowing set of adventures in southern Africa. The voice is all the more remarkable given the physical circumstances under which it was written.

John Cooper-Chadwick was shot by his dog. It wasn’t deliberate. In May 1891 John had cocked his rifle to shoot an antelope, but the antelope ran off. Forgetting to uncock his weapon John upended it and leant on it with his hands resting one on top of the other over the business end. His dog Minnie leapt up handwards hoping to be petted, then slithered back down the slippery barrel. She caught a paw on the trigger. John sustained injuries to his chest and face, but both hands were damaged beyond salvation. He wrote his book, as one biography casually states, “with a pen tied to his elbow joints.”

John was in South Africa between wars, as it were. The First Boer War had ended in 1881 with a moral victory for the Boers, the Dutch settlers in the Transvaal, with whom Britain wisely negotiated a truce. In 1895 an ill-considered British attack on the Transvaal, known to historians as the Jameson Raid, shattered the peace and led eventually to the Second Boer War. John was in Africa from 1885 to 1891 and had spells as a policeman, a gold prospector and a hostage to fortune placed in the camp of Matabele leader Lobengula by Cecil Rhodes.

 Lobengula, king of the Matabele; and Cecil Rhodes, founder of Rhodesia. Rhodes sent John Cooper-Chadwick to be his eyes and ears in Lobengula’s royal compound

The book is a good read. It reflects the imperial British attitudes of the day, but does so with a good humour and humanity couched in rich descriptions of the lives and customs of those around him, of all nationalities and cultures. Here for example is his encounter with a Dutch family as he travels from Bechuanaland to Johannesburg in 1887.

“The first place we came to was Malmani, a little mining town on the Transvaal border. We passed through several small Dutch farms along the road; at some of these we bought milk, butter and eggs, and the people were generally civil.

“On entering a house, it was necessary to shake hands all round with the whole family. This is a long, tedious operation, always performed gravely and silently. Their hands are large, clammy and dirty, and held out as if they did not belong to the owners. Then the usual questions were asked: ‘Where are you going and coming from?’ ‘What is your name?’ ‘Your father’s?’ and so on. When all these questions have been answered coffee is produced, and drunk out of little china bowls. Coffee is drunk all day long, and when the real article is scarce they make it out of roasted Indian corn [maize].

A Boer family photographed in 1886 (picture from Wikipedia)

 “No Boer house is complete without a concertina, and generally one of the young men will keep on playing the same tune for hours for the benefit of his admiring family circle. Their furniture is not very elaborate: a few chairs, benches, and table is about all; overhead, along the rafters, are strings of onions, dried peaches, apples and biltong [dried beef].

“Any stranger passing is welcome to put up, if on horseback; but they look with suspicion on those on foot, and give them the cold shoulder.

“When a young man goes courting, he sits up opposite the girl on certain nights with a candle between them, scarcely speaking all the time; when the candle is burnt out, the young man must go, and it is according as the girl likes him how much candle she leaves to burn.”

For all I know all these customs still persist today, but John Cooper-Chadwick certainly draws a vivid sketch of Boer family life 125 years ago.

Small Boer farmsteads like this were set on fire as part of Britain’s punitive scorched earth policy when hostilities broke out again in 1899

JOHN COOPER-CHADWICK (1864-1948) AND THE DISPLAY ADVERTISEMENTS (Part 2)

The publication of John Cooper-Chadwick’s memoir of adventures in southern Africa, Three Years With Lobengula, was funded in part by the inclusion of six display advertisements. I wrote about some of those ads directly connected with South African shipping and with Cooper-Chadwick himself in an earlier post.

There is also an advertisement for the South Africa weekly newspaper, “the South African’s Vade Mecum at home and abroad,” with a testimonial from that hero of British imperial colonialism Cecil Rhodes: “South Africa is the only paper of its kind that deals properly with South African Events and Questions.” Rhodes’ mineral rights treaty with Lobengula, king of the Ndebele people, in 1888 was one of the steps towards the creation of the country named after him, Rhodesia. South Africa was launched by Edward Peter Mathers in 1889, while John Cooper-Chadwick was being held in Lobengula’s camp. The Mathers newspaper legacy extended beyond his South Africa title: using the pen name Torquemada in The Observer newspaper, Mathers’ son Edward Powys Mathers is credited with popularising the cryptic crossword clue in the 1920s.

 

Advertisement in Three Years With Lobengula from the South Africa newspaper, "dealing propoerly with South African Questions"

S.W. Silver & Co, who also advertised in John’s book, had been supplying overseas outfits to members of the Army and the Colonial Service from their Cornhill premises in London since the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century they developed the techniques and materials which Mr Charles Macintosh had first introduced in his rubberised Macintosh raincoats. By the end of the century they were involved in the very modern world of insulated wire and submarine cables. But as a testimonial in their display in Three Years With Lobengula shows, they had not forgotten their clients throughout the British Empire.

 Advertisement in Three Years With Lobengula from S.W.Silver & Co., “equippers” for explorers and travellers

 “This firm has supplied travellers, including myself, with their outfit, and know exactly what is needed for every part of the Globe. As they retain lists of all articles supplied to various expeditions, anyone, by reference to these lists – as, for instance, the outfit of my Kilimanjaro expedition – will be sufficiently guided in their choice.” Thus Silver & Co quote Harry Johnston, polymath explorer, novelist, naturalist and soldier who played a large role, working with Cecil Rhodes, in colonising vast swathes of Africa for Britain at the same time that Rhodes had placed Cooper-Chadwick as his eyes and ears in Lobengula’s camp. His expedition to Kilimanjaro was in 1884, a year after he had met Henry Morton Stanley in the Congo. Johnston published his own African memoirs in 1920 as The Backwards Peoples And Our Relations With Them. (In fact he favoured a much more cooperative attitude to working with native Africans than Rhodes’ aggressive military approach, and the two men fell out.)

Harry Johnston (1858-1927) and Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902), who both wrote testimonials for advertisements in Three Years With Lobengula (photos from Wikipedia)

John, like Johnston, reflected the values and attitudes of his day; but he retained a compassion for all the men he met on his adventures which is reflected in the humanity of his simple story-telling. Three Years With Lobengula is available again in a facsimile edition, and I heartily recommend it both for John’s memoirs and for the fascinating display advertisements which helped pay for its publication.

JOHN COOPER-CHADWICK (1864-1948) AND THE DISPLAY ADVERTISEMENTS (Part 1)

Among the many delights of my ancestral cousin John Cooper-Chadwick’s book Three Years With Lobengula are the six pages of advertising within it which presumably helped to fund its publication.

Louis Velveteen – “Ladies Should Reject All Subsitutes”

(advertisement from Three Years With Lobengula)

The book describes John’s adventures in southern Africa, and naturally there are advertisements from the shipping companies which served that region. He sailed out to Cape Town in 1885 aboard the Pembroke Castle, a ship of the Donald Currie Line; and the book concludes with the sentence, “The Dunottar Castle was due to sail in a few days, and brought us safely home.”

Above, the Pembroke Castle; below the Dunottar Castle

Donald Currie founded his shipping company in 1862, and the original Pembroke Castle was one of four ships built by Robert Napier of Govan on the Clyde to create Currie's Castle Line fleet in 1863. The second Pembroke Castle, on which Cooper-Chadwick sailed, was the only ship of the line not built on Clydeside – she was launched at Barrow-in-Furness in 1883 only two years before John joined her, and her maiden cruise had attracted the Russian Tzar and European royalty on board.

The Castle Line sailed mainly to Calcutta, until the Suez Canal opened in 1869 and Currie switched his attention to South Africa. On that route the Union Line, established in 1853, was already dominant. In 1876 both lines were appointed to provide the mail service to the colony, to avoid giving either one a monopoly. In 1900 however, the South African government decided to award the contract to only one company. To avoid either of them losing the valuable business, the two lines merged to become the Union-Castle Mail Steamship Co Limited. Currie and his Union Line counterpart Sir Francis Evans signed the deal aboard the Dunottar Castle, built in 1890 only a year before Cooper-Chadwick’s home voyage on her.

The Castle and Union advertisements from Three Years With Lobengula, both boasting the presence of surgeons and stewardesses on board

The promotion of Louis Velveteen through the pages of Cooper-Chadwick’s South African adventures is a less obvious marketing strategy. So too is the decision to advertise Langdale’s Manures there, until one reads in the ad’s copy that John Cooper-Chadwick is Langdale's local agent in Tipperary. John returned on the Dunottar Castle with horrific injuries sustained in a rifle accident while escaping from Lobengula. Despite the loss of both hands he took on the running of the family estate in Ireland, attracted a wife, raised two sons AND handled the agency for the Newcastle-on-Tyne fertiliser firm. Perhaps he was also an agent for Louis Velveteen.

As his book illustrates, he took a no-self-pity, get-on-with-it approach to life even when faced with the tribulations of his African adventures and their consequences. I have the greatest admiration for him.

John Cooper-Chadwick’s advertisement for Langdale’s Manures in his book Three Years With Lobengula – “To agriculturalists who do not use them, a trial is respectfully suggested.”

More advertisements from John Cooper-Chadwick’s book here.