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Annette Joy Jemison

‘When Will We Have Sleeping Logicians, Sleeping

Philosophers?: Julian Trevelyan in Pursuit of a
Super-Reality1

The anthropological Surrealist collages, photographs and texts produced by

Julian Trevelyan (1910–88) between 1937 and 1939 fall largely into two broad
groups in terms of subject matter. The first collection presents his
interpretation of the Surrealist aesthetic category of decline, during a period in
which economic decline characterized much of England, and the second
portrays his understanding of the psychological impact of this economic
decline upon those believed by Mass-Observation to be most directly affected:
the population of Northern England’s industrial towns. The latter is achieved
through Trevelyan’s imaging of behavioural patterns during ‘spare time’, in
which it was reasoned the human being was most true to himself.2 This essay
explores Trevelyan’s contribution, over a period of three years, to a
phantasmic social psychology of the crisis that so many experienced.
In July 1937, Trevelyan photographed the reflections of two young females,
gleefully waving within Blackpool’s original 1927 Hall of Mirrors (see Figure 1).
Their bodies are wildly distorted, their necks, arms and fingers elongated in
the extreme and the equally exaggerated figure of the photographer at work
appears alongside them in the frame. The curvilinear lines and biomorphic
forms of the image render it explicit in its acknowledgement of a different kind
of reality, a super-reality, as advocated by the surrealists, which is deeper and
more vibrant than the typical realist expression of the working classes as
oppressed beings engulfed by the grey monotony of industrialism. As the
image is neither geometrized nor fragmentary, however, the super-reality that
its warped appearance suggests also seems to be symptomatic of the fictive,
the duplicitous, the deceptive, possibly even the treacherous.3 This surreal
vision is strengthened by Trevelyan’s documentary impulse, in that the very
essence of the interwar industrial seaside holiday is represented here.
Therefore, this particular photographic amalgamation of surrealist visual
strategies and documentary procedures, with outward subject matter that
immediately awards significance to ‘spare time’, visually encapsulates the two
fundamental vectors of his interwar work.
Trevelyan had also adopted the idea of a super-reality in the vivid surrealist
text ‘DREAMS’, included in the June 1930 edition of Transition, an international
avant-garde publication seeking to combine a primitive, instinctive mythology
with a modern consciousness. Here too references to the oblique mirror-image
are made:

Today artists have identified the aesthetic faculty, still chiefly by analogy, with the
subconscious (where Surréalisme flounders, prematurely corpulent, through treasure-
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102 ‘when will we have sleeping logicians?’

Figure 1. Julian Trevelyan,

Untitled (Hall of Mirrors,
Blackpool), 1937.
Photographic print
20 × 13.5 cm. Private
collection: Mary Fedden.

trove). For as the mind has changed, so too has the definition of meaning: the rhythm of
living has its foundations deeper, and the mind gropes to justify, exemplify itself in the
subconscious. Perhaps it glows with a new phosphorescence, and in the oblique
mirrors that line the corridor from the day-world to the night-world, shines pearl-like
in surrounding blackness.4

Trevelyan’s assertion that ‘the rhythm of living has its foundations deeper’,
even within the subconscious, signals his belief in the significance of the
repressed. Repression, as a Freudian psychoanalytical term, refers to the
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Annette Joy Jemison 103

subconscious rejection of thoughts and impulses that conflict with

conventional standards of conduct. Unwelcome thoughts, emotions and
sensations are therefore ‘repressed’ when they are forced into the
unconscious. This area of enquiry in fact motivated the very formation of
Mass-Observation at a time when ‘Social psychology was groping its way out
of the subconscious shadows of Freud and Jung and surrealism’.5 Indeed, poet
and reporter Charles Madge, soon to become one of the organization’s
founding figures, suggested in a letter to the New Statesman and Nation of 2
January 1937 that a combination of psychoanalysis and anthropology was
needed ‘to deal with elements so repressed that only what is admitted to be a
first-class upheaval brings them to the surface’.6 By coincidence, a poem by
self-taught anthropologist Tom Harrisson about his experiences in Malekula
was printed directly below Madge’s article.7 Recognizing similarities between
his Bolton project and the interests of the Blackheath group, of which painter,
writer and documentary film-maker Humphrey Jennings was also a part,
Harrisson suggested a collaboration and, together with Madge and Jennings,
wrote a further letter, one bearing the hallmarks of a manifesto. By February,
therefore, ‘Mass-Observation’ had emerged. Furthermore, even before the
industrial summer holiday in July, it was recognized that no fewer than three
upheavals and key symbolic events had indeed occurred. The first was the
abdication crisis, the constitutional upheaval that dominated the winter of
1936. The burning of the Crystal Palace happened on the night of 30 November
1936 and, finally, on 12 May 1937 the Coronation of George VI took place. Such
events, argues Ben Highmore:

are seen as moments when ‘mythic’ and ‘ritualistic’ elements of a culture come to the
surface. Thus the marital status of the king and the woman he wants to marry is seen as
providing materials for an anthropology of sexual taboo, mythic rituals of crowning
and uncrowning, superstition and so on. This suggests that the everyday (its social
‘rules’) is seen most vividly at points of crisis, moments when everyday life becomes
public.8

Amid these points of crisis, Mass-Observation set out on an anthropological

survey of British life, or ‘an anthropology of the near’.9 It had become
necessary, according to Madge, Harrisson and Jennings, for the ordinary to be
‘made strange’ through examination with a supposedly impartial eye, because
the British possessed no adequate sense of reflection upon their social selves.
If, however, this were to be addressed and rectified, colossal issues such as the
apparent fragmentation of society and political instability might, potentially,
be resolved. Trevelyan, in his autobiography Indigo Days, recalls Tom
Harrisson’s particular objectives as follows:

The Abdication had just taken place, and Tom had wanted to know how the ordinary
people in England had adjusted themselves to the sudden downfall of their Fairy
Prince … To see England as he had seen Malekula; to ask the same questions: how the
dead are disposed of, how marriages celebrated, how indeed the complex social
structure of England works, this anthropological inquiry grew rapidly into the great
organization that became known as Mass-Observation.10
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104 ‘when will we have sleeping logicians?’

Condemning as arid and lifeless well-known models such as the London and
Liverpool social surveys of the 1930s,11 Harrisson recruited respondents who,
by keeping diaries and completing reports, would scrutinize and log their
own conduct, together with that of the people around them. Observers were
expected to distance themselves from others in order to record those
happenings that might otherwise escape notice as being uninterestingly
ordinary, and the findings were dispatched to a central office where they were
edited to provide material for books describing how British people behaved in
everyday life.12
The organization pursued a number of avenues but the Worktown Project,
with which Trevelyan was involved, remains the most ambitious example of
the Mass-Observation method. From mid-1936, Harrisson had been accepting
casual employment in Bolton so that in his spare time he was able to visit the
town’s pubs and other public places. In February 1937, documentary
photographer Humphrey Spender and realist painters Graham Bell and
William Coldstream joined him, and Trevelyan was soon to follow. In fact, in a
handwritten note to Julian, marked, 85, Davenport Street, Bolton, and
scribbled on paper printed with the heading ‘SOUTH LANCASHIRE
CULTURAL SURVEY 1937: Tom Harrisson, Walter Hood, J. Willcock, A.
Smith’, Harrisson writes:

How would May suit?

Or when? June is ok.
In May the smoke is peculiarly fine and the town’s tree supports gay sparrow laughter.
June in a mill is summer indeed.
After a hectic time I am all settled in, with lots of beds, little bedding, some neighbourly
goodwill; a dictaphone; and a midwife next door.
Drop me a line about above, sometime.
Tom Harrisson13

Writing again, on 7 June 1937, Harrisson rephrases his plea:

We have a … Preacher, a Harpo-Marxist and a coalminer in the house at the moment.

By Saturday 12th I hope to have cleared some of that debris away … You can have
decent beds and stay as you please. You must paint some Bolton chimneys; they are
like saltmills without the savour … Bolton art awaits you! You will enjoy it, I swear.14

Trevelyan at this point relented. Up to sixty unemployed, largely Southern,

upper-middle-class university-educated figures also became involved in the
Worktown Project, living on subsistence pay as full-time observers in Bolton.
Five were permanently stationed in Blackpool for a full fourteen months, with
additional field-workers from the industrial town visiting for long
weekends.15 Although in a minority, female observers were also recruited,
including Julian’s first wife, Ursula.
Four volumes consolidating the collected materials were planned, but only
The Pub and the People (1943) was published. Much archival material
nevertheless remains and this, according to Jenny Shaw, is best used to
research ‘the ephemeral, the hidden, the paradoxical and the surprising’.16
Nonetheless, as John Walton suggests, Mass-Observation’s assemblage of
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Annette Joy Jemison 105

vivid evidence, ‘valuable and compelling though it is, views Blackpool as if

through one of the distorting mirrors in which so many of the sideshows
specialise’.17 Both opinions therefore confirm the complex state of reality
suggested in visual terms by Trevelyan in his ‘Hall of Mirrors’ photograph.

Dream-state and dream-city

The appeal of Blackpool as a holiday destination for the masses was rooted in
its peculiar blend of reality and dream. Indeed, Gary Cross, in Worktowners at
Blackpool, reports that ‘the Blackpool Corporation weaves the magic and the
dream with the fish and the chip’.18 Trevelyan, however, valued the dream as
an entity in itself, albeit essentially for the impact that he believed it could
make upon reality. Thus, between 1937 and 1939, and even as late as 1947
when he was entirely free of Tom Harrisson’s influence, he produced images
and texts and filled notebooks with explicit references to this subject matter.19
Harrisson, Madge and Jennings, like Trevelyan, recognized the ability of the
image to express significant truths. Tyrus Miller comments in his essay ‘In the
Blitz of Dreams: Mass-Observation and the Historical Uses of Dream Reports’:

An assumption held in common by the three founders of Mass-Observation … was that

the predominant social anxieties and wishes of the age express themselves most readily
in the idiom of ‘images’. The image, as they defined it, has a peculiar two-faced
character, in which ideas are sensualised and sensations given ideational content. The
image is ‘more vivid than an abstract idea’, Madge and Harrisson wrote in the 1937
pamphlet Mass-Observation; yet ‘it is more tangible than a concrete sensation’.20

If the concept of the image, as formulated by Mass-Observation, provided for

epistemological investigation of collectively produced meanings, it follows
that the everyday, or ‘everynight’, process of dreaming should also have
attracted their interest, as dreams did not need to be interpreted as images
because they already were images. The organization compiled scores of
accounts of dreams, as it was supposed that issues and anxieties repressed
within the collective unconscious could, potentially, be seen to re-surface
through the inevitable emergence of dominant images. The lack of war
dreams, for example, noticed later in the forties, suggested that Hitler’s
propaganda was less effective than originally thought.
The secure position maintained by dream interpretation in the development
of psychoanalysis also meant that Mass-Observation could rely upon a
relatively authoritative body of theory that could be ‘extended’ to inform the
wider issues of the social images they desired to probe. The pioneer in this
field was, of course, Freud, for whom analysis of the manifest content of
dreams offered insight into subjective responses to experience.21 Walter
Benjamin was also influential, claiming that dreams have a history and that it
should be possible to write a social history of dreams.22 Most recently,
however, Peter Burke’s ‘L’histoire sociale des rêves’ has advised that dreams
can provide the social historian with information on two levels.23 First, in a
concept allied with Mass-Observation’s idea of the dominant image, Burke
proposes that consideration of the manifest content of dreams, in a specific era,
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106 ‘when will we have sleeping logicians?’

can reveal changes in the ‘psychologically efficacious or pertinent’24 images

and myths of society. The second benefit of dream analysis is then recognized
to lie within the dream’s representation of notions that are forbidden or
repressed within society. There is potential here for dreams, like graffiti, to
serve as testimonies to forces and factors that might otherwise remain hidden
in more official forms of discourse and documentation. Therefore, although
dreams and dreaming constituted but a fraction of Mass-Observation’s area of
enquiry, they were, from a theoretical point of view, crucial.
The Surrealists, of course, also believed that dream analysis could allow
access to the unconscious as, ‘In dream, in free association, in hypnotic states,
in automatism, in ecstasy or delirium, the “pure creations of the mind” were
able to erupt’.25 In La Révolution Surréaliste of December 1924, it was declared:
‘We are all at the mercy of the dream and we owe it to ourselves to submit its
power to the waking state. It is a terrible tyrant garbed in mirrors and flashes
of lightning. What is pen and paper, what is writing, what is poetry before this
giant who holds the muscles of clouds in his own muscles?’26 Trevelyan’s
vividly written script ‘DREAMS’, published six years later, in fact marks one
of the key moments in the artist’s career, in which his acute understanding of
Surrealist precepts is voiced. It is therefore deserving of lengthy quotation:

Stare fixedly at the lamp, its incandescent spherical shade, the white zig-zag of its
filament; with eyes shut the pattern remains printed in purple and blue on the empty
redness of Retina. But once liberated from the meanly world of actuality, the pattern
acquires a new and more dynamic value; the sphere of the shade becomes the symbol
of a finite universe; the incandescent zig-zag, the thought to penetrate the encircling
walls. So in dreams the objects of every-day existence, freed from the tyranny of
consistency, of unilocality, acquire a new meaning. Jung has shown that the
subconscious symbolises, the better to solve, its problems; and we would go further
and suggest that the entire aesthetic activity of the mind is an attempt, often frustrated,
to symbolise a remote disintegrating reality …
In the state of dreaming or of hallucination, the mind loses that selfconsciousness
which in its waking hours it can never quite banish, and begins to move silently
through a timeless, spaceless world, where neither Destiny nor Chance have stepped; it
is created by and at the same time creates its sleep liberated creatures, grows deeper
and broader than the day-world; lines can be drawn in any direction instead of in the
one; the tension which relates mind to matter in the waking hours disappears.27

In 1935, Trevelyan delved yet deeper into the realms of these sleep-liberated
creatures in his painting Hypnosis (Figure 2), presenting the human mind and
imagination as a piece of quirky machinery. A disembodied head here
provides the housing for a carefully constructed mechanical system of wheels,
pulleys, levers and other symbols. The whole scene is also bathed in an indigo-
blue wash, which, considering the title of his autobiography, immediately
confirms the painting as an act of spatial self-reflection. Writing in June 1938 in
the London Bulletin, in relation to similar images appearing within Surrealism
around this time, Humphrey Jennings commented: ‘the point of creating
pseudo-machines was not an exploitation of machinery but as a “profanation
of art” parallel to the engineer’s profanation of the primitive “sacred places” of
the earth’.28 Trevelyan’s painting of the dreaming mind, however, proposes a
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Annette Joy Jemison 107

Figure 2. Julian Trevelyan,

Hypnosis, 1935. Oil on
canvas, 71 × 45 cm. Private
collection: Jeffrey Sherwin.

scenario allowing direct access to the unconscious. Indeed, the part played by
the wheel in this mechanization, with its unavoidable treadmill morphologies,
is especially suggestive of the prevailing notion of interwar Britain as a prison.
Imagery associating life in Britain with a prison existence saturated the 1930s
and lingered well into the 1940s. The poet Kathleen Raine, for example, in a
letter to Trevelyan, mused: ‘But it is a prison here. I could [climb] whole
mountains if it were not for this chain I have to drag’.29 Tom Harrisson too, in
his essay ‘Mass-Opposition and Literature’, had, in Valentine Cunningham’s
view, ‘put the finger right on the ‘30’s oppressed sense of being confined,
enclosed, islanded, behind bars’.30 This imagery resurfaces in Trevelyan’s
photography, and very powerfully in a scene captured by the Surrealist in
AT101 – 05-ch05 - Jemison
Figure 3. Julian Trevelyan,
Untitled (Town Centre,
Whitehaven), 1937–38.
Photographic print,
14.5 × 20.5 cm. Private
collection: Mary Fedden.
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108 ‘when will we have sleeping logicians?’
Whitehaven, a port and coal-mining town on the Cumbrian coast (see Figure 3).
In this particular image, various clusters of male figures linger around a street
corner as if to waste time purposely. One man folds his arms; another two
appear seated with their heads in their hands, and a further three stand with
their hands in their pockets. A lamp post then casts its shadow over a curved
arrangement of bollards, producing the effect of a sundial and establishing a
feeling that time is ticking by. Two interrelated interpretations of this allusion
to time and the wasting of it emerge here. Firstly, and most obviously, is the
reference to mass unemployment.31 There is also secreted within this image,
however, a sense of depressing relentlessness.32 Northern England’s working-
class population is portrayed as imprisoned within an uncontrollable cyclical
process, one potentially comparable to the endless cycle of ruination and
renewal that so fascinated the French surrealists who chose to enter the
Parisian Zone.33
In addition to this notion of imprisonment was the popular idea of escape
through travel. In the 1920s and 1930s, the ‘holiday dream’ was a significant
concept and one that Paul Fussell has equated with the prevalence of foreign
geographical imagery in British literature at this time. Fussell takes as
examples the guide-book obsession in Joyce’s Ulysses and the countless
topographical references in Eliot’s The Waste Land, which is ‘the work of an
imagination stimulated by great presiding motifs of movements between
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Annette Joy Jemison 109

Germany, Russia, Greece, India, Switzerland, Smyrna, Carthage, Phoenicia,

Jerusalem, Egypt, and Austria, as well as by shifts of perceived landscape and
setting – sand, rock, water, mountains, plains, snow, sea, city, river, ship, even
hotels’.34 Humphrey Jennings’ imagination was likewise animated by
fantasies of flight, freedom and Port de Plaisance imagery, prompting him to
complain to Trevelyan in 1930: ‘I am tired of waiting about in this appalling
island and shall come to Paris with about twopence and simply exist for the
summer … I sound miserable but am not really so: only bored by England.
Some painting must be done and one can’t do it here’.35 Likewise, Kathleen
Raine in another letter to Julian remarked: ‘This is no country for poets just
now’.36 Trevelyan’s dreamful mind was also enlivened by the possibility of
escape, as a photograph of a group of his friends, chatting and drinking
around a sun-drenched café table on the Ile de Ré, suggests.37 Also produced
in the summer of 1939 was his series of images featuring this same group of
people relaxing at the water’s edge in Cassis, and larking around with fishing
vessels. In both examples, an almost palpable sense of momentary liberty from
restriction is registered in Trevelyan’s depiction of the human body revelling
in an experience of pleasure and comfort – an immediate pre-war idyll, even
under the ever-encroaching shadow of international hostilities.
By the late 1930s, the holiday had become a major domestic political issue in
Britain, a phenomenon which Gary Cross suggests resulted from the
Depression, which had produced a new interest in the relationship between
work and leisure.38 Harrisson’s observers in 1937 and 1938 found that wage-
earners now defined themselves not as jobholders but as consumers, their
ability to express themselves in funded free time being critical to their self-
esteem. Leisure, therefore, was no longer seen as privately experienced
compensation for the rigours of industrial work. It had evolved into a means
of recovering the lost values of family and community, which were notions
central to interwar political ideals. Spare time, and its organization, had
become contested terrain for both the international right and the left. Harold
Laski and Clement Attlee’s TUC committee to subsidize holidays for the
unemployed proclaimed that the ‘industrial refugees … need to get away
from the misery and drabness of their everyday lives’.39 And this misery and
drabness are suggested in the treadmill imagery of Hypnosis.
In the category of surrealist works known as ‘dream paintings’ an
illusionistic technique predominates, as it does in Hypnosis. In this sense, they
may not necessarily offer direct records of dreams. This is also the case in
many of Yves Tanguy’s paintings, including Surrealist Landscape of 1935,
which presents a dream-like exploration of an interior landscape rather than a
visualization of a particular hallucination. Many surrealist paintings, and even
photographs, therefore retain characteristics of what Freud labelled ‘dream
work’.40 The survival of contrary elements side by side provides one example.
This is a scenario to which Trevelyan alludes in his photograph of Blackpool’s
‘Teapot Café‘ (Figure 4). Here, a queue of holiday-makers is seen to have
formed alongside a quirky mobile tea kiosk, shaped like a giant teapot, and
these weary people wait in complete indifference to its screaming incongruity
upon the sands. The consolidation of two or more objects or images and the
AT101 – 05-ch05 - Jemison
Figure 4. Julian Trevelyan,
Untitled (Teapot Café,
Blackpool), 1937.
Photographic print,
14.5 × 20.5 cm. Bolton
Museum and Art Gallery,
Bolton M.B.C.
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110 ‘when will we have sleeping logicians?’
attention to entities that profess a symbolic value, often masking a sexual
meaning, then supply two further instances. Dream work was even put to
practical use by London’s Maudsley Hospital in 1936, in the experiments it
performed to investigate the curative effect of mescalin, a hallucination-
inducing drug, upon cases of acute schizophrenia. Trevelyan was himself
approached to partake in these trials because artists were believed to be better
equipped to describe their experiences than the common man. His
contribution served also to further his own search into the deeper self, as
traced within his paintings and photographs of this time.41
A significant consequence of Trevelyan’s search was his merging, between
1935 and 1937, of evocations of individual consciousness with representations
of the city. The results of this fusion are not exotic, except in their borrowing
from Klee and Miró. Instead, the referent is Northern industrialism. The
images, including a vision in mixed media of 1936 entitled The City (Figure 5),
do, however, become fantastic in their fetishism, and Trevelyan himself recalls
this exceptionally creative period as follows:
I had invented a sort of mythology of cities, of fragile structures carrying here and there
a few waif-like inhabitants. ‘Dream Scaffold’, ‘The Tenements of Mind’ – such were the
titles of some of the panels on which I was now engaged. I think they owed something
to early Klee, and probably also in their technique and presentation to certain early
works of Ben Nicholson. They expressed a need I felt for something more poetic and
AT101 – 05-ch05 - Jemison
Figure 5. Julian Trevelyan,
The City, c.1936. Mixed
media, oil and crayon on
gesso ground on board,
72 × 115 cm. Private
collection: D. Byner.
2/5/08 3:48 pm Page 111
Annette Joy Jemison 111
mysterious than the brutal hammers of Hélion, and I can well understand Ozenfant’s
comment when he saw them: ‘Ça manque un peu de rosbif’.42
On his arrival in Bolton there was, therefore, a definite shift of emphasis in
Trevelyan’s work, reflecting his increasing desire to acknowledge a sense of
the collective unconscious. The amorphic compositions of 1932–34 had
become linear and architectural, bearing an affinity to Alexander Calder’s
three-dimensional morphologies.43 In The City, for example, the dynamism of
the urban environment, which fascinated Trevelyan throughout his life, is
instilled within the image in the lines of force established by his strategic
positioning of coloured diamonds and whitened stars usually surrounded by
circles. The apparition of five newly created letters, floating alongside these
pictorial symbols, serves also to indicate a playful and animated Klee-like
space, but one equally suggesting the need for a fundamental, even childlike,
re-learning or re-focusing within this microcosmic city. Indeed, Michel Remy
has described the aim of Trevelyan’s dream work as: ‘to recover a pristine
version of creation, through new, spontaneously raised urban symbols. This
means that the new myth is not to be dug up, but found, through renewal of
vision’.44 Trevelyan’s approach to his subject matter in The City may be aligned
with Tim Edensor’s much later assessment of ‘ruined’ space. Edensor’s
comments, although entirely unrelated, illuminate what I perceive to be
Trevelyan’s standpoint insofar as his great interest is in urban and industrial
decay. Indeed, ruins are places of similar limitless possibilities which:
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112 ‘when will we have sleeping logicians?’

allow wide scope for imaginative interpretation, unencumbered by the assumptions

which weigh heavily on highly encoded, regulated space … Ruins offer spaces in
which the interpretation and practice of the city becomes liberated from the everyday
constraints which determine what should be done and where, and which encode the
city with meanings. Accordingly, they offer opportunities for challenging and
deconstructing the imprint of power on the city.45

Trevelyan wished to challenge and deconstruct this imprint, launching

himself into charting the archetypal city of his childhood through a sustained
portrayal of urban fantasy that he explored and explained himself in his
second published dream-text, ‘Mythos’, which appeared in 1937 in The
Painter’s Object:

To-day there is the same city to paint; but it has become a world city, more inclusive yet
less precise in its geographical construction. Mingling in its streets and among its
labyrinthine galleries are the mass desires and individual experiences of its
innumerable inhabitants … the analogy suggests itself to a single nervous system, to a
single human being. The line of demarcation between the city and its inhabitants,
between house and people, sometimes almost vanishes. The ‘nerves’ and ‘arteries’ of a
great town form the ‘cells’ and ‘canals’ of our own body.
… the city is in fact a compound of metaphor and symbol, a new kind of myth. I have
stressed it because I believe that such myths in fact form the subject-matter of much
contemporary painting. Society in the past provided a continually changing mythology
for the artist. To William Blake such a ready-made mythology was already lacking, and
he had to create his own. To-day the need for new myths has become far more urgent.
The cinema has evolved the Wild West and the paradise of Harpo Marx; but the painter
is left high and dry and has to rely on his own imagination.46

The painting Palace of Dreams, also completed in 1937, offers a remarkably

direct visual representation of the themes engaged in ‘Mythos’, the analogy
between mind and machine, first suggested in 1935 in Hypnosis, now extended
to that of a machine-city.47 Trevelyan also registered these convictions in an
oblique sense in the collages he produced during 1937 and 1938 which, being
assembled from carefully selected portions of newsprint, in themselves
present symbols of community relationships and forms of communication.
‘Mythos’ is in fact illustrated by a collage in The Painter’s Object. Pictured is a
range of skyscrapers around which many comparatively tiny black-and-white
protrusions from the ground appear. These dome-shaped features, present
elsewhere in Trevelyan’s dream-state and dream-city paintings, actually
‘mingle’ in the city’s streets and among its ‘labyrinthine galleries’, thus
embodying ‘the mass desires and individual experiences of its innumerable
inhabitants’. In a letter to Trevelyan, which refers in all probability to his
separation from Ursula in 1948,48 Tanya Wickham makes explicit reference to
this curious symbol, thus demonstrating its prominence within the artist’s
visual vocabulary over a number of years:

Please dear Julian, don’t look so unhappy and live with your imagination and let it
make the people around you look like this: [one dome-shaped symbol drawn and in-
filled with red pen]. If you can stay where you are for the duration … then you can go
home every night and even have parties with lots of [five identical dome-shaped
symbols] and think of them instead of letting things get at you.49
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Annette Joy Jemison 113

Trevelyan worked to orchestrate much of the material he gathered in Bolton

through collage, a medium particularly apt for the expression of more
profound forms of reality. His ‘Worktown’ suitcase, recently rediscovered,
remains to this day packed full of scraps of cardboard, coloured papers, tissue
papers, fabrics, doilies and used envelopes. Fragments of publications are also
inside – a copy of The Daily Worker dated 1 June 1937, for example, as well as
issues of Paris Match and Harpers Bazaar. In Indigo Days, the artist recalls of this
faithful object:

At this time I was making collages; I carried a large suit-case full of newspapers, copies
of Picture Post, seed catalogues, old bills, coloured papers and other scraps, together
with a pair of scissors, a pot of gum, and a bottle of indian ink. I was applying the collage
techniques I had learnt from the Surrealists to the thing seen, and I now tore up pictures
of the Coronation crowds to make the cobblestones in Bolton. It was awkward,
sometimes, in a wind, when my little pieces would fly about, and I was shy at being
watched at it; but it was a legitimate way, I think, of inviting the god of Chance to lend a
hand in painting my picture.50

The results of Trevelyan’s invitation to the ‘god of Chance’ are collages which
blend portions of newsprint, objets trouvés and textual puns in the creation of
multi-layered images, finished with ink, gouache or watercolour, brimming
with life and vigour. These works, almost certainly influenced by the collages
of John Piper, are also surprisingly acute in their rendering of time and place,
and in their feeling for popular culture.51 Trevelyan’s collages are assembled
from a considerable number of diverse yet interconnected elements, as
emphasized by the varied angles of their portions of newsprint. It could be
argued, therefore, that the completion of such a complex ‘jigsaw’ presents a
picture of unity that finds its metaphorical outworking in the obvious
implication for the society of which it speaks. Ben Highmore comments that
the medium of collage offers ‘a space that allows for unexpected contacts to be
made, and unanticipated coincidences to be found’.52 Nonetheless, even in the
most elegant of collages, such as those by John Piper, a certain messiness – a
residue of texture and fragmentation – inevitably survives the integration into
a resolved and satisfying whole. Trevelyan’s collages therefore resist narrative
resolution. In a literal sense, it is always impossible to read any of his
incorporated newspaper columns in their entirety. David Trotter even goes so
far as to argue that collage provides one of the points at which mess-theory
might gain some purchase on twentieth-century painting,53 and James
Clifford, in recognition of these properties of collage as tools for the
ethnographer, also remarks that:

Collage brings to the work (here the ethnographic text) elements that continually
proclaim their foreignness to the context of presentation. These elements – like a
newspaper clipping or a feather – are marked as real, as collected rather than invented
by the artist-writer. The procedures of (a) cutting out and (b) assemblage are of course
basic to any semiotic message; here they are the message. The cuts and sutures of the
research process are left visible; there is no smoothing over or blending of the work’s
raw data into a homogenous representation. To write ethnographies on the model of
collage would be to avoid the portrayal of cultures as organic wholes or as unified,
realistic worlds subject to a conscious explanatory discourse.54
AT101 – 05-ch05 - Jemison
Figure 6. Julian Trevelyan,
Untitled (Devastated
Buildings), 1937. Collage,
pen, ink and watercolour
on paper, 25.5 × 36.7 cm.
Location unknown.
2/5/08 3:48 pm Page 114
114 ‘when will we have sleeping logicians?’
Trevelyan’s collages do indeed permit the ‘cuts and sutures’ of the research
process to remain visible, with potential for the re-arrangement of their
diverse elements and, in turn, encouraging a re-articulation of their possible
meanings. Given their marriage of typically incompatible realities, these
distinctive works are particularly effective portrayals of everyday life as a
scenario in which conflicting elements forever collide (see Figure 6).
This amalgamation of the mind and the city is also encountered in
Trevelyan’s 1937 collage portraying a group of wrecked buildings, formed
from a range of mental-health-related newspaper cuttings (Figure 6). In this
scene, which like many of his images of Lancashire’s wastelands, is
reminiscent of a war zone, jaggedly torn sections of newsprint represent
tonnes of mortar that have been dislodged from buildings and have tumbled
to the ground.55 An inverted newspaper extract, indicating a section of fallen
masonry, explains the scene: ‘a young French airman crashed in view of his
friends … after hitting an overhead electric cable. One man was killed’. Given
Trevelyan’s interest in deeper realities, we might assume, however, that this
dilapidated scene carries wider implications, suggesting a painful conclusion
to the state of national decline that he, throughout 1937, acknowledges with
mounting urgency. The impact upon the Worktown collages of issues
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Annette Joy Jemison 115

repressed within the artist’s own unconscious mind is also suggested. In an

unpublished diary, full of Julian’s handwritten jottings presenting an almost
daily record of his own dreaming moments, there appears the following
phrase: ‘Nightmare of flying an aeroplane which … finally flies under trees
and bridges and crashes amongst telegraph wires’.56 Trevelyan’s creative
output therefore expounds a mythology that is both collective and personal.
This diary, doodled with ink-drawn lines, dots, stars and spirals like those
in the dream-city paintings, includes a number of references to motifs
recurring within Trevelyan’s art and photography between 1937 and 1939.
Another entry, for example, dated 3 January 1946, refers back to the abdication
crisis, which is handled by Trevelyan both photographically and through
collage, underlining its sustained impression even upon British postwar
society. Trevelyan remembers the behaviour of an unnamed female from this
dream as follows: ‘She announces that the Duke and Duchess of Windsor are
coming to stay with her and I speculate on how I shall behave. Duke and
Duchess are the Royal lovers … I myself in my creativity’.57 The entry for 15
January 1946, however, returns to the prevailing anxieties amongst Britain’s
working-class population surrounding issues of ill-health. It also incorporates
Blackpool’s popular ‘grotto’ or ‘cave’ motif with which the artist-turned-
flâneur would inevitably have been confronted:

I am travelling in parts of the world that I haven’t even seen on a map before. In one
place I am sleeping on a camp bed in a sort of grotto and there are other people who
come to stay there and tell me that I must undergo an operation. They also say that
when I come to, will be just about the time that another disease will reach its maximum
and that I could be inoculated against it.58

Trevelyan’s own analysis of each of these symbolic occurrences, also jotted in

the notebook, almost always concludes that at their root lies his ‘creativity’. It
is in his published text ‘DREAMS’, however, that he is most explicit about this
connection:

A cord stretched through the subconscious round which may crystallise the impersonal
dream-fantasies, this affords so strange an analogy to the process of artistic creation
that we felt justified in whispering, a little hastily, to dream is to create. Since then the
years have shifted, Mr Joyce has waxed and waned, Sir Joynson Hicks has been
banished to his shelf in the peerage, Mr Eliot has turned Anglo-Catholic; and we say
with a little more assurance, To Dream is To Create. Finally, since this is a manifesto,
unencumbered with lurid inhibitions, led us gladly shout TO DREAM IS TO
CREATE.59

A similar association of the unconscious mind, accessed through dreams, and

the creative output of an artist is embodied in the figure of Graham Greene, of
whom Cedric Watts has written: ‘The unconscious mind was Greene’s quiet
collaborator: if a literary obstacle seemed insurmountable, he would read the
day’s work over before sleep, and in the morning would often find that the
obstacle had been removed by “the nègre in the cellar” ’.60 It’s a Battlefield, for
example, according to Watts, actually sprang from a dream. His other novels
and tales also incorporate significant dreams, ‘It appears that Greene’s reading
AT101 – 05-ch05 - Jemison
Figure 7. Julian Trevelyan,
Bolton: 1,000,000 Volts,
1937. Collage, pen and ink
on paper, 25.5 × 36.7 cm.
Location Unknown.
2/5/08 3:48 pm Page 116
116 ‘when will we have sleeping logicians?’
of Dunne accentuated an interest in dreams and prevision which pervades his
fiction and creates distinctive thematic and textural effects’.61 J. W. Dunne’s
geometric diagrams in An Experiment with Time (1927) could also be said to
offer a non-Klee-based precedent for Trevelyan’s similar scaffoldings.62
Therefore, although the attention paid by Trevelyan to dreams and
dreaming was vividly surrealist in character, it was at the same time very
obviously and firmly entrenched in British social reality. His Lancashire
rubbish-dump collages, epitomes of the nation’s urban and industrial decay,
likewise provide effective visualizations of the artist’s dream theories in their
acknowledgement of his belief in the ‘urgent’ need for ‘new myths’.63 This
Trevelyan achieved by means of his appropriation, and desecration, of the
Coronation covers of the Weekly Illustrated and of Picture Post. Both collages, as
a result, register an objection to this ceremony, which was so endowed with
mythical quality yet so indifferent to the people’s real needs. The ‘myth’, in the
turbulent period between 1937 and 1939, needed to be replaced by a
philosophy that was far more securely anchored in the realities of ordinary
everyday life.
Also completed in 1937, and similarly heralding the need for urgent change,
was Bolton: 1,000,000 Volts (Figure 7). This collage once again reveals
Trevelyan’s surrealist vision of Northern England as a degraded, decaying
urban technical milieu. However, this particular wasteland is rendered
sinister to an exceptionally alarming degree because Trevelyan shifts the
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Annette Joy Jemison 117

death-inducing electric currents, acknowledged in a number of his Bolton

photographs by their distant chains of pylons, into the foreground of his
image where a sign also forewarns: ‘DANGER TO LIFE: 1,000,000 VOLTS’.
The use of collage to represent this scene, a medium which in itself generates
an ‘electric’ charge in its presentation of a totality of fragments, actually
augments the sense of shock that reverberates.
Also secreted within this particular scene is surely a reference to Blackpool’s
Illuminations. Humphrey Spender photographed these famous lights
directly, both in close-up and as part of the wider seafront scene. Trevelyan,
however, chose to elicit a deeper issue provoked by the display in his
portrayal of the electricity with which the Illuminations were powered. This
approach is recurrent within Trevelyan’s working practices between 1937 and
1939, underlining subsidiary or supplementary occurrences so as to question
the typically unquestioned, and to accentuate the presence and impact of more
profound forms of reality. Instead of confirming the positive impact of
electricity upon modern life, as in the case of Blackpool’s almost fanatical
attention to its lights, Trevelyan focuses upon the potential dangers in a move
offering much scope for metaphorical suggestion. Electrical energy is
portrayed here in such a way to concur, perhaps, with European surrealist
interpretations of the wasteland as an indeterminate and hybrid site. It is more
likely, however, that Trevelyan is reiterating in visual terms his opinion
expressed in Indigo Days that Blackpool, a self-promoted health-giving and
escape-providing holiday destination for Lancashire’s workers, was in reality
nothing more than ‘a gigantic parody of factory life, a mad industrial Hell’,
and one which ‘left them slightly hysterical’.64
Julian Trevelyan’s orchestration of social elements marking a contemporary
crisis stands, therefore, to represent a period in history during which the
population of Britain was visibly affected by the convulsive, shape-shifting
forces at work within society. This is a situation encapsulated in the
photograph of the warped reflections of two women enclosed within
Blackpool’s Hall of Mirrors (see Figure 1). In his focused consideration of the
typically neglected scenarios stimulated by the decay of the nation’s urban
and industrial environments and, indeed, in his scrutiny of their inhabitants’
‘spare time’, Trevelyan captured an episode in British history during which
almost all things were seen to be dissolving, a moment ‘when the world we
knew seemed to be falling to pieces’.65 With a surrealist eye, he perceived and
even re-focused that central element of 1930s culture: entropy, the dissolution
of form. His photographs, collages and texts provide counterparts, therefore,
to the not entirely negative observation made by one anonymous Worktown
male: ‘It is only possible to be sure that I am alive. Little else seems as certain as
that in 1938’.66 This observation, in all its ambivalence, in fact strikes the
existentialist note that characterizes Julian Trevelyan’s work during these
three short years.

I am most appreciative of the recollections and recommendations offered to me by

Julian’s widow, Mary Fedden RA. I am grateful for the access that Mary so kindly
permitted me to Durham Wharf in Chiswick, Julian’s home and studio, to his
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118 ‘when will we have sleeping logicians?’

‘Worktown’ suitcase and to his boxes of photographs, which had been forgotten by all
but his own family. I also wish to express my gratitude to Ursula Mommens, Julian’s
first wife, for so willingly sharing her memories of his contributions to both Mass-
Observation and surrealism. My communications with Philip Trevelyan, Julian and
Ursula’s only son, have also proved to be revealing. Finally, it is fitting to acknowledge
the late Humphrey Spender, who died in March 2005. Having secured the full
cooperation of Mr Spender back in 2002, I had the pleasure of interviewing him at his
home and studio, and of speaking and corresponding with him on a number of
occasions until April 2004.
The distinguished research community and archival resources of the University of
Sussex have likewise played a vital part in the development of my research. The
institution’s archive of Mass-Observation has made its prints of Spender’s photo-
graphs readily available as comparative examples. The primary sources held by Bolton
Museum and Art Gallery have been equally invaluable, especially the 56 photographs
taken by Trevelyan in Bolton and Blackpool during 1937 and 1938. I am also
appreciative of the resources offered by the Wren Library of Trinity College,
Cambridge: the 66 boxes of papers accumulated by Trevelyan throughout his life,
incorporating correspondence, diaries, juvenile sketchbooks and revised drafts of the
artist-turned-camoufleur’s wartime reports.

Notes

1 The title to this article derives from: ‘A quand les logicians, les philosophes dormants? Je voudrais
dormir, pour pouvoir me livrer aux dormeurs’; André Breton’s ‘Manifeste du Surréalisme’ (1924), in
Breton, Manifestes du Surréalisme, ed. Jean-Jacques Pauvert, Paris: Pauvert, 1962, p.24.
2 My use of the term ‘spare time’ corresponds with Humphrey Jennings’ adoption of it in his eighteen-
minute film Spare Time (G.P.O. Film Unit, 1939). Jennings, as a poet-reporter in this work of surrealist
documentary, explores the ways in which British citizens, in towns – Sheffield, Manchester, South
Wales and Bolton – that were dominated by steel, cotton or coal, passed their non-working hours. The
film is brimming with Mass-Observation iconography. The fairground and the male-voice choir
appear, along with activities including comic-reading, darts-playing, smoking, dog-walking and
pigeon-keeping.
3 Graham Greene, in his equally socially sensitive novel of 1934, It’s a Battlefield, builds comparable
depths into his text, which are seen to surface periodically through characterization, as here in his
description of Conder: ‘For while they knew nothing of the captain of industry and laughed at the
revolutionary and smiled in private at the intimate of Scotland Yard, they had accepted for ten years
the family man, although he too was only one among the many impersonations of Conder’s sad and
unsatisfied brain. But it never occurred to him as strange that they should arbitrarily choose to
recognise this as reality among all his unrealities, even during the few minutes of the day when he was
the genuine Conder, an unmarried man with a collection of foreign coins, who lived in a bed-sitting-
room in Little Compton Street. … Conder walked away along a passage which flashed with distorting
mirrors.’ (Graham Greene, It’s a Battlefield, London: William Heinemann and Bodley Head, 1970, p.22).
4 Julian Trevelyan, ‘DREAMS’, Transition: An International Quarterly for Creative Experiment, Nos 19–20,
New York: Kraus Reprint Corporation, June 1930, p.121.
5 Tom Harrisson, Britain in the 30s, London: The Lion and Unicorn Press, 1975, p.1.
6 Charles Madge, ‘Anthropology at Home’, New Statesman and Nation, 2 January 1937, p.12. These
circumstances are explored in further detail by Ben Highmore in ‘Mass-Observation: a Science of
Everyday Life’, in Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: an Introduction, London: Routledge, 2002, pp.75–6.
Highmore reports here that Madge, on behalf of Humphrey Jennings, Kathleen Raine, David
Gascoyne, Stuart Legg and various other Blackheath friends, posted this letter in the newspaper
calling for voluntary observers to cooperate in their project seeking to collect ‘mass observations’.
7 Tom Harrisson, ‘Coconut Moon: a Philosophy of Cannibalism, in the New Hebrides’, New Statesman
and Nation, 2 January 1937, p.12.
8 Highmore, ‘Mass-Observation: a Science of Everyday Life’, p.85.
9 See Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Super-Modernity, London: Verso, 1995,
p.7.
10 Julian Trevelyan, Indigo Days: the Art and Memoirs of Julian Trevelyan, London: MacGibbon and Kee,
1957; reprinted Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996, p.81.
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Annette Joy Jemison 119

11 These studies followed in the tradition of the Booth and Rowntree investigations of the turn of the
century. See Hubert Llewellyn Smith, The New Survey of London Life and Labour, vols I–IX, London: P. S.
King, 1930–35, passim. See also David Caradog Jones, ed., The Social Survey of Merseyside, Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press, 1934.
12 Unfortunately, many of these volumes were never actually published. See Charles Madge and Tom
Harrisson, Mass-Observation, London: Frederick Muller, 1937; First Year’s Work 1937–38 by Mass-
Observation, London: Lindsay Drummond, 1938; Britain by Mass-Observation, Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1939, passim. See also John Sommerfield, ed., The Pub and the People: a Worktown Study by
Mass-Observation, London: Gollancz, 1943.
13 Tom Harrisson to Julian Trevelyan, 85, Davenport Street, Bolton, 1937, The Papers of Julian Otto
Trevelyan (Hereafter J. O. T. Papers), Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge, Box 26, Item 3.
14 Tom Harrisson to Julian Trevelyan, 7 June 1937, J. O. T. Papers, Box 26, Item 4. Harrisson is referring to
Ursula Trevelyan, Julian’s first wife.
15 Gary Cross, ed., Worktowners at Blackpool: Mass-Observation and Popular Leisure in the 1930s, London and
New York: Routledge, 1990, p.2.
16 Jenny Shaw, ‘Surrealism, Mass-Observation and Researching Imagination’, in Methodological
Imaginations, ed. E. Srina Lyon and Joan Busfield, London: Macmillan, 1996, p.12.
17 John K. Walton, ‘Afterword: Mass-Observation’s Blackpool and some Alternatives’, in Cross,
Worktowners at Blackpool, p.229.
18 Cross, Worktowners at Blackpool, p.51.
19 3 September 1947 marks the latest obtainable dreams-diary entry for Trevelyan, according to his
papers lodged in the Wren Library of Trinity College, Cambridge. See J. O. T. Papers, Box 59, Item 1.
20 Tyrus Miller, ‘In the Blitz of Dreams: Mass-Observation and the Historical Uses of Dream Reports’, in
New Formations: Mass-Observation as Poetics and Science, no. 44, ed. Laura Marcus, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, Autumn 2001, p.34. Miller is citing Madge and Harrisson, Mass-
Observation, p.38.
21 See Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, ed. James Strachey (1900), London: Allen and Unwin,
1954.
22 Walter Benjamin, ‘Traumkitsch’, in his Gesammelte Schriften, eds Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann
Schweppenhauser, Frankdurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977, p.620. See also Tyrus Miller, ‘From City-
Dreams to the Dreaming Collective: Walter Benjamin’s Political Dream Interpretation’, in Philosophy
and Social Criticism, vol.XXII, no.6, 1996, pp.87–111.
23 Peter Burke, ‘L’histoire sociale des rêves’, Annales: Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations, vol.XXVIII, no. 1,
January–February 1973, pp.329–42.
24 Ibid., p.329.
25 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Photography in the Service of Surrealism’, in Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingston,
L’Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism, London: Cross River Press, 1986, p.15. Krauss is citing Breton,
‘Le Surréalisme et la Peinture’, in La Révolution Surréaliste, Number 4, July 1925, p.28.
26 André Breton, La Révolution Surréaliste, no. 1, December 1924, p.3.
27 Trevelyan, ‘DREAMS’, pp.120 and 121. Trevelyan’s essay forms part of the manifesto of the avant-
garde ‘Experiment’ group, of which he was a member whilst at Cambridge. This document makes a
significant contribution to the early history of Surrealism in England. See ‘Cambridge Experiment: A
Manifesto of Young England’, Transition, nos 19–20, pp.107–140. Other contributors to the group’s
literary magazine, Experiment, included the poets Kathleen Raine and William Empson.
28 Humphrey Jennings, London Bulletin, June 1938, p.2.
29 Kathleen Raine (wife of Charles Madge) to Julian Trevelyan, 9, Paultons Square, Chelsea, 6 March
1939, J.O.T. Papers, Box 13, Item 2, fo.3.
30 Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, p.79.
Cunningham is referring to Tom Harrisson’s article ‘Mass-Opposition and Literature’, in Light and
Dark, vol II, no. 3, February 1938, pp.9–15. This was an Oxford literary magazine edited by Harrisson’s
friend Woodrow Wyatt. Graham Greene also instilled this essential sentiment within It’s a Battlefield in
his systematic and sustained mirroring of the lives of British factory-workers with the existence of
those behind bars (pp.13–14 and 24). It then reappears in the following extract in his textual
engagement with a mouse, of all things: ‘Mr Surrogate spread his fingers and withdrew suddenly and
simultaneously three editions of No Compensation. There, surprised in the act of dining, a nut between
its paws, sat a mouse … “Poor, poor little mouse”. He thought of the great Russian novelist comforted
in the Siberian prison by the nightly visitation of a mouse. “I too. The prison of this world”’. (Greene,
It’s a Battlefield, p.32).
31 In Bolton, in 1937, 10,758 people were registered as unemployed. This represented 11% of the working
population. The national average was 10.8%, with 6.4% in London and the South East. See ‘Report of
Bolton’s Medical Officer of Health’, Bolton: Central Office of Information, 1937.
32 See Madge, ‘Anthropology at Home’, p.12. Freud, in ‘The Uncanny’, writes with relation to repetition
and doubling, subjects which may be aligned with relentlessness: ‘The factor of the repetition of the
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120 ‘when will we have sleeping logicians?’

same thing will perhaps not appeal to everyone as a source of uncanny feeling. From what I have
observed, this phenomenon does undoubtedly, subject to certain conditions and combined with
certain circumstances, arouse an uncanny feeling, which, furthermore, recalls the sense of helplessness
experienced in some dream-states’; Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ (1919), in The Penguin Freud Library: Art and
Literature, vol. XIV, ed. James Strachey, London: Penguin, 1985, pp.358–9.
33 Ian Walker has made a careful investigation of the European surrealist appropriation of the
indeterminate and hybrid areas of interwar Paris, and two of these locations, the banlieue and the Zone,
are of particular relevance to Trevelyan’s documentation of Bolton’s wastelands. See Ian Walker, City
Gorged with Dreams: Surrealism and Documentary Photography in Interwar Paris, Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2002, pp.117–22.
34 Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Travelling between the Wars, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980,
p.52.
35 Humphrey Jennings to Julian Trevelyan, 68a, Saint Andrew’s Street, Cambridge, 5 May 1930, J. O. T.
Papers, Box 2, Item 23, fo. 1.
36 Kathleen Raine to Julian Trevelyan, Cockley Moor, Dockray, Penrith, undated, J. O. T. Papers, Box 13,
Item 8, fo.2.
37 The seven figures present include Michael and Tanya Wickham, Arpoid Szesser, Viera da Silva, Kay
Granville and Ursula Trevelyan.
38 Cross, Worktowners at Blackpool, pp.8–9.
39 Ibid, p.9. Cross is citing ‘The National Committee to Provide Holidays for Unemployed Workers in
Distressed Areas’, London: Trades Union Congress Archive (Ref: HD5106), 1938. Henri Cartier-
Bresson’s glimpse of a utopian future, as presented in his 1938 photograph ‘Picnic on the Marne’, also
provides visual evidence of the political sanctioning of the industrial holiday.
40 The dream-works of British Surrealist Reuben Mednikoff (1906–76), such as ‘The Anatomy of Space’ of
1936, offer examples of diagnostic Surrealist visual productions. Mednikoff was heavily influenced by
the work of his partner, Freudian psychoanalyst Dr Grace Pailthorpe. Living together in Port Isaac in
Cornwall, they conducted experiments in psychoanalysis, delving into the far reaches of the
subconscious. Mednikoff also exhibited at the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936.
41 For further details concerning these medical trials, see Trevelyan, Indigo Days, pp.74–6.
42 Trevelyan, ibid, p.66. Trevelyan is referring to French painter Amédée Ozenfant (1886–1966). This
manipulation of linear constructions is also manifested in Trevelyan’s photographing, in 1939, of the
folkloric memorial sculptures placed in Cassis upon French graves. This study, comprising ten
photographs documenting intricate wire constructions and colourful beaded wreaths and crosses,
presents a series of surrealist images which blend the ethereal realm of funeral memory with a
revisiting of the everyday gardening world of Bolton’s allotments. It also anticipates the impending
war. Trevelyan and his surrealist colleagues were fascinated by these found objects to such an extent
that they even collected together and removed the items that had been discarded from the graves,
Trevelyan later displaying one of these sculptures upon an indigo-blue door at his beloved Thames-
side home, Durham Wharf.
43 Trevelyan was also personally acquainted with Calder, having encountered him in Paris in 1931; See
Indigo Days, pp.29–30.
44 Michel Remy, Surrealism in Britain, Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999, p.137.
45 Tim Edensor, Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality, Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005,
pp.3–4.
46 Julian Trevelyan, ‘Mythos’, in The Painter’s Object, ed. Myfanwy Evans, London: Gerald Howe, 1937,
pp.59–60. A similarly expressive surrealist urbanism is explored in the London-inspired antecedent
poetry of Arthur Rimbaud (1854–91), and in his ‘Villes’ poems in Les Illuminations in particular: ‘These
are towns! This is a people for whom these Alleghenies and Lebanons of dream have ascended!
Cottages of crystal and wood that move on invisible rails and pulleys. Ancient craters girded with
colossi and copper palm trees roar melodiously amid fires’; Arthur Rimbaud, ‘Villes’, in The
Autobiography of Surrealism, ed. Marcel Jean, New York: Viking Press, 1980, pp.16–17. Trevelyan would
have known of these filigree poetic images and scaffoldings, as Rimbaud was a key figure in
surrealism. See also Rimbaud, Illuminations, ed. Albert Py, Genève: Librairie Droz, 1967.
47 Also notable is the title of this painting, which suggests a reference to the extraordinary proto-
surrealist structure the Palais Idéal which was built at Hauterives by the untutored artist, the Facteur
Cheval, between 1879 and 1912. The Palais Idéal was a site much loved by the surrealists for its dream-
like qualities, and by Trevelyan who visited it more than once during the 1930s, and again in the 1950s.
48 Julian and Ursula divorced in 1950.
49 Tanya Wickham (wife of Mass-Observation artist Michael Wickham) to Julian Trevelyan, France,
undated; J. O .T. Papers, Box 18, Item 17.
50 Trevelyan, Indigo Days, p.84.
51 Piper was personally acquainted with Trevelyan and the remains of their 1938 correspondence are
held by the Wren Library of Trinity College, Cambridge. J. O. T. Papers, Box 23, Item 71.
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Annette Joy Jemison 121

52 Highmore, ‘Mass-Observation: a Science of Everyday Life’, p.94.

53 David Trotter, Cooking with Mud: The Idea of Mess in Nineteenth-Century Art and Fiction, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000, p.326.
54 James Clifford, ‘On Ethnographic Surrealism’, in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century
Ethnography, Literature, and Art, Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1994, p.146.
55 This collage is prescient of the series of photographs taken by Humphrey Spender in 1984
documenting the demolition of Davenport Street, Bolton, which included Mass-Observation’s
headquarters.
56 Julian Trevelyan, ‘Dreams’ (unpublished diary), 28 November 1945; J. O. T. Papers, Box 59, Item 1, fo.6.
57 Ibid., 3 January 1946, Ibid, p.8.
58 Ibid., 15 January 1946, Ibid, p.10.
59 Trevelyan, ‘DREAMS’, p.122. Trevelyan is referring to Sir William Joynson-Hicks (1865–1932), a
member of the Conservative Party. In October 1922, Andrew Bonar Law appointed Joynson-Hicks as
his Postmaster-General. Following the 1924 General Election, Stanley Baldwin promoted him to the
post of Home Secretary. During the General Strike, he worked closely with Baldwin, Arthur Steel-
Maitland (Minister of Labour) and Winston Churchill (Chancellor of the Exchequer) to defeat the
miners. Joynson-Hicks retired from the House of Commons before the 1929 General Election.
60 Cedric Watts, A Preface to Greene, London and New York: Longman, 1997, p.133. Watts is quoting from
Graham Greene’s Ways of Escape, London: The Bodley Head, 1980, pp.274–5.
61 Watts, A Preface to Greene, p.134.
62 J. W. Dunne, An Experiment with Time, London: Faber and Faber, 1934.
63 Trevelyan, ‘Mythos’, p.60.
64 Trevelyan, Indigo Days, p.100.
65 Ibid, p.115.
66 Cross, Worktowners at Blackpool, p.25.
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