This programme contains some scenes which some viewers may find upsetting.
# Pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag and smile, smile, smile
# While you've a Lucifer to light your fag... #
ECHOES OF SHELL FIRE
# Smile, boys, that's the style. #
There are some places where you really do keep company with ghosts.
You can hear their cries and their laments.
Each one of these lights means a hospital bed.
In each bed lies a man.
And every man in those beds has half their face missing.
In 1916, in July, they thought there would be 200 patients
who needed facial reconstruction
after receiving terrible wounds in the Battle of the Somme.
In the event, 2,000 were brought in
to wards that were specially made to receive them,
in this military hospital at Aldershot.
These were, one tabloid newspaper said, the loneliest tommies,
because no-one could or would look at them.
Mirrors were banned from these wards,
lest these poor people looked at their own distorted reflection -
the reflection, as somebody once said, of broken gargoyles.
But there was someone who looked these poor men in the eye.
The artist, Henry Tonks.
Tonks' job was to make images of the wounds,
but at the same time, he captured the humanity behind the mutilation.
They are some of the most astounding images
in all of British portraiture.
If you think about portraits,
they are of course, essentially, very often beautiful lies.
Whatever these are, they are not beautiful lies -
they are the truth.
Tonks' drawings challenge everything
we think a portrait should be.
Most of the portraits ever painted have been of the great and the good,
who've paid handsomely to look their best.
But there's always been a rogue strain -
a glorious strain in British art that tells it like it is -
according to which, all humanity is fit for portrayal.
Artists who've plunged into the crowd
and given us the true face of the people.
When I was growing up in London in the 1950s,
the words "Notting Hill" did not mean flat whites and designer jeans.
They meant race riots.
These streets were centre stage in a battle over the nation's identity,
triggered by the arrival of thousands of new faces
in towns and cities across Britain.
Among them was Charlie Phillips,
who came to London from Jamaica in 1956.
As a 12-year-old boy, armed with a camera,
he became the accidental chronicler of his embattled community.
This area was a ghetto.
Certain parts of it was a no-go area.
You'd have wire mesh covering your windows, because you don't know when
you're going to get firebombed or a brick through your windows, yeah?
"No dogs, no blacks, no Irish" - that was the era we were living in.
Like so many, Charlie suffered not just poisonous hostility,
but grim living conditions.
This was an era when the average family would live in a double room,
a family of two would live in a single room, yeah?
This was an era when the communal kitchen would be on the landing.
We all had paraffin heaters with a kettle on top.
This was the way our average immigrant would live.
You didn't pay your rent,
you'd find your things out on the street next morning, yeah?
Hostility bred closeness.
An 8pm curfew meant that after days spent
snapping the world on his doorstep,
Charlie's nights were spent developing his photographs
in the family bathtub.
He had no idea that what he was actually doing
was documenting history.
The type of people I was photographing was ordinary people.
I wasn't commissioned.
None of these photographs was I ever commissioned to take,
so I took it in my own time
and some of the people within this photograph,
I have a personal relationship with them,
because I was part of this community.
With an insider's street knowledge,
Charlie made portraits that are strikingly intimate.
The wonderful thing about this
is this kind of play between these two figures.
She's looking pensive,
and he's at this perfect film moment of lighting a cigarette,
so there's this absolutely wonderful drama between them.
So you, Charlie, are standing there -
are you looking at them and waiting for a moment like that?
I never set anything up, Simon.
When I shoot, I imagine myself as being a hunter
and the subjects being the prey,
so I shoot and ask questions after.
I always want to see truth, you know?
I always want to see truth in a picture.
It's a moment where you can treasure that moment
and you look back in 50 years and you can still see the beauty,
and this is when it becomes honest.
When he took these photographs,
Charlie revealed the real world behind the headlines -
the individuals in the crowd,
the faces that might otherwise have been forgotten.
Our history and our culture has only been passed down verbally
and when I take my photographs out,
it brings back memories to a lot of people,
especially the fifth generation,
who doesn't know who their great-granddad was,
or who their grandad was, or who their uncle was, you know?
So that becomes the emotional part of it, as well.
People actually come to my exhibition and started crying, and people.
You can see the emotion that's involved.
- 50 years of work, Simon. - Yeah. I do.
Well, what I love about these photos in particular
is that they are not editorials.
They don't actually preach at you,
they're just happenstance, really - they're a kind of slice of life
in which nothing is particularly forced,
and nothing is sanctimoniously optimistic.
There's a black fellow here,
plonking a kiss on an old dear in a pub,
this particular pub, and it's just one of those golden moments.
There's a lovely picture of some schoolboys, actually,
who are laughing and giggling,
because that's what nine-year-olds do
when a camera is pointed at them.
And they haven't been set up like that.
Even the one which is destined to become -
not a word I like - an icon,
has that quality of nothing actually set in stone,
either for the worse, or for the better.
Here's a lovely picture of love, of a beautiful white girl
and an incredibly handsome black man together,
and they have both resolution and uncertainty written in their faces.
Charlie's photographs embody the drama of everyday life.
Each of these faces has its own story to tell.
And it's our fascination with each other's stories
that gives this kind of portraiture its rich intrigue.
This creative nosiness began centuries earlier.
In the 18th century,
no-one went after street stories like William Hogarth.
On 5th March, 1733,
Hogarth brought his brushes to Newgate Prison in London.
Waiting for him in her cell, her cheeks freshly rouged,
was a 22-year-old murderess,
Sarah Malcolm,
whose execution was just two days away.
Hardly one of the usual suspects to be immortalised in paint.
Sarah Malcolm is an incredible sensation, all over London.
She's been accused of an incredibly gory crime.
Her employer, an 80-year-old lady called Lydia Duncomb,
and her 60-year-old companion and the ladies' maid
have all been killed during a botched robbery.
The old ladies had been strangled
and the ladies' maid had had her throat cut from ear to ear.
This was just the stuff that the equivalent of the tabloids
really like to feed on.
And Hogarth - the supreme sensation sniffer in art -
recognises there's a killing to be made from a portrait of a killer.
Hogarth grows up on the streets.
His own father had been in prison for four years,
so he understands the underworld of London.
He knows the world of dirt and violence and robbery and mayhem
and he knows how he can turn it into art,
he can turn it into a market, he can turn it into
the kind of new portrait that will set London buzzing.
The vision of the convicted murderess,
who was nonetheless adamant to the end that she was innocent,
produced one of Hogarth's most compelling portraits.
The signs of the painter's skill and his imagination are all over this,
especially in these flashing passages of very, very freely-painted white
that describe the bonnet and the little collar
and her rolled up sleeves,
and the other tiny little details -
the minute lick of hair that comes out from under the bonnet.
And at the same time,
he's really making us interested in her character.
You have an incredible sense of her ferocious,
slightly animal, dangerous presence.
That body language, those meaty arms together.
And the wonderful expression, staring somewhat into the distance -
is it with defiance, or with the sense, possibly,
just of a shade of remorse? We'll never know.
So, it's a complicated picture -
all that's going on inside this frame, and behind it,
Hogarth has a wonderful instinct,
because he knows that although nobody usually does it,
out there, the public has as much appetite for a really great villain,
perhaps especially a woman villain,
as it does for yet another pompous military hero.
Within days of Sarah Malcolm's execution,
Hogarth transformed his oil sketch into an engraving,
selling the prints at just sixpence a pop.
And they sold like the hottest of cakes,
devoured by an eager public
curious to put a face to the name of the infamous murderess.
With prints like this,
Hogarth remade art as something both about and for the people.
But he didn't do it out of principle, or sentiment -
he did it for what counted
on the streets of eat-or-be-eaten 18th-century London -
the money.
His house in Chiswick is filled with the images
that earned him his fortune -
a bustling cast of scruffs and scumbags
he's invited in off the streets.
Painting and art isn't related to the street for a long, long time.
Art in Britain was about pleasing the King
and the court and the aristocracy.
There was no grungy theatre of seeing art,
until along comes Hogarth.
Hogarth thinks,
because he's come from this crummy world of urban noise,
you can make great art out of every conceivable kind of human type -
the mad, the eccentric, the filthy, the grotesque,
the stuttering, the muttering, the comic, the depraved.
So many of his prints are scenes of massive uproar.
He likes the circus, not the church.
He likes the street, not the palace.
That's what turns him on.
He wants noise. He does not want peace, quiet
and aristocratic definitions of beauty.
Everything you can possibly imagine is all happening, all at once.
This is Hogarth, the great animator of the human comedy,
and it's a glorious and brand-new thing.
By taking art off the walls of the lordly saloon
and onto the coffee house table,
Hogarth blazed a trail for a whole new tribe of artists.
His prints made it possible to make a living not just by
feeding the vanity of the mighty,
but by satisfying the public appetite
for the sensational stories of the streets.
Nowhere was better for an aspiring artist to hunt down inspiration
than the streets of late 18th-century Edinburgh,
the only British city to rival London for its social richness.
Here, much of the population was crowded into
a higgledy-piggledy assembly of ancient streets -
rich and poor living on top of each other
in towering tenements.
Among them was a young barber called John Kay,
who, when business was slow,
made sketches of the world passing by his window.
Kay was as sharp with his etching needle
as he was with his razor and scissors.
He becomes a fantastic virtuoso
at conveying the likeness, the look,
the face of some of the most richly coloured figures in Edinburgh.
And one of the people who comes into his shop
is so taken with Kay and all of his aspects
that he gives him the wherewithal to actually do it -
to give up the snip-snip and start being
the great portraitist of late 18th-century Edinburgh.
Kay's wife said of him,
"He cared for no employment except that of etching likenesses,"
and this is what he did, compulsively, obsessively.
From 1784-1822, he created some 900 etchings,
immortalising for all to see
the immense parade of types who made up his great city.
The educated and the ignorant,
the new-fangled and the obstinately old-fashioned,
the lordly and the lunatic.
Here are some of my favourite Kay characters -
and how could they not be?
This one is really scary!
You have to love her, she's called Margaret Suttie
and she's a salt vendor.
She walks the streets of Edinburgh
with this big pack of salt on her back.
So, she's a pretty old-ish lady,
but she must have been tough as nails,
cos of the heavy load she's carrying.
Now, the thing about Margaret Suttie is that her mother was a witch -
uh-oh - and some people said,
"Uh-oh, like mother, like daughter."
And what Kay has done, which is so fantastic,
he's got a classic witch's face in profile -
that strong nose, the sort of eyebrows from Hell.
And actually, Kay has done this wonderful crosshatching.
He's made everything dark and heavy and alarming.
And here is Andrew Donaldson, with the beard.
And it's a completely different kind of print,
full-on, these wonderful eyes, this immense, flowing beard.
He's actually a learned scholar of Hebrew and Greek.
He walks around carrying a psalm book, which he recites out loud,
of course, what you do in Edinburgh -
straight from the Hebrew.
And Donaldson will not shave,
because he said, "God's creation being perfect,
"it would be sinful to amend it in any way".
So, no shaving for the rest of his life.
He has a beard as long as the Royal Mile.
It's a very sweet and endearing portrait.
And here's why I feel a real emotional
and psychological connection with John Kay,
because he understood instinctively,
in a very intellectual city like Edinburgh,
something that all historians have to know - and that's that history
isn't just made up of self-important, swaggering people
making grandiose public utterances in big, public spaces.
It's also made up of the Margaret Sutties and the Andrew Donaldsons -
an infinity of wonderful characters, without whom
history loses all its richness, all its human variety, all its reality,
and we would not know about any of these people,
were it not for the quizzical eye and large heart of John Kay.
Kay made a roaring trade from a small print shop
he opened on Parliament Square -
his window packed full of his droll characters.
But while many were delighted to see themselves immortalised in print,
others were less so.
There's always someone without a sense of humour, isn't there?
And one of them we know a bit about is a very large gentlemen,
both in the sense of his dignity and the sense of his physical size.
He's called Mr Hamilton Bell.
Well, even such worthy figures of Edinburgh society
like a wee dram now and again,
and when he is obviously totally smashed,
he decides one night that he'll take a bet and the bet is
that he can walk from Edinburgh to Musselburgh, seven miles,
with somebody on his back
and the person on his back is the bar boy.
And there he is, in the print,
perched on the back of this enormous man.
Not only will he do this, but he will actually
have a race with someone else walking to Musselburgh,
who has nobody on his back at all.
So, the race goes ahead and Hamilton Bell wins.
Now, you would think, if you were Hamilton Bell,
you'd be very happy for John Kay to immortalise you
in this fantastic feat of heroic sportsmanship -
but no, he's a sore winner!
He actually takes John Kay to court, for the sheer indignity of it!
So, Kay has a wonderful comeback.
He makes another print of the court case,
which, not surprisingly, John Kay wins.
And here's Hamilton Bell - furious, goggle-eyed,
with absolutely apoplectic rage at the way the case has come out.
Hamilton Bell was not the only member of well-to-do Edinburgh society
who objected to having their likenesses served up
for the entertainment of the public.
On at least one occasion, Kay was beaten up.
More often, his prints were the victims of physical assault,
destroyed by unhappy subjects
desperate to avoid the humiliation of being exhibited in his window.
But Pandora's box had been opened.
The public appetite for portraiture of the people
was stronger than ever.
The entertainment to be had
from looking at the faces of ordinary men and women
had given rise to a whole new market -
one that a new breed of artist would be eager to exploit.
We usually think of photography as the medium which created
a true portraiture for the people.
But decades earlier, an art form emerged
which meant hefty sums and lengthy sittings
would be a thing of the past.
Brighton's Chain Pier
was one of the humming centres of this portrait revolution.
In the early 19th century,
holiday-makers could peel off the promenade, out of the sun,
and into a darkened room,
where, for a couple of shillings and two minutes of their time,
they could purchase their portrait as a souvenir of the day.
Hundreds of artists,
wielding lightning scissors and minuscule paint brushes,
set up shop in towns and cities across Britain,
churning out likenesses that catered to our human obsession
to see and own images of ourselves.
Silhouettes, also known as shades,
a kind of trace profile of individual persons,
sometimes family groups as well,
would genuinely revolutionise who portraiture was for,
who could own it.
Ironically, I think, they were based on a craving
to imitate rather grand objects -
coins, medals, cameos -
things reserved for the mighty.
But they were done so quickly and done so cheaply
that almost anybody with a modest income
could afford to have them done.
All sorts of technical refinements -
partly smudging, partly exquisite kind of free painting,
could embellish the basic profile outline.
Details of hair style, wig,
little ribbons at the end of your pigtail, collars, bonnets...
You name it, you could have it.
But their strength was in their simplicity,
and the infinite variety of the human face.
And when you look at them, actually, what is remarkable is,
you do actually have the strongest sense of the personality of these sitters -
upright, grandiose,
simple, honest, demure,
young ones, old ones, babies, grandpas, family groups,
sometimes pets, absolutely everything.
So, it's not surprising that they were in tremendous demand.
So, for the first time, anyone who had just a little money
could be part of the world of silhouette portraiture.
And that's what made the silhouette
the very first authentic portraiture of the people.
But for some artists,
the "snip me quick" approach to portraiture
could never truly capture the heroic spirit of the people.
The artist most determined to go beyond shadow likeness
to full-on heroic immortalisation of working people
was the unlikeliest person imaginable.
A man whose melancholy presence
haunted the leafy suburbs of Hampstead in the 1850s.
Ford Madox Brown.
If you want an example of the ultimate outsider in art,
you couldn't do better than Ford Madox Brown.
This is a person with a real genius, a real gift for painting,
but wow, does he make it difficult for himself.
He may be the single most wretched person,
both in terms of criticising himself, relentlessly and endlessly,
and ultimately, the rest of the world as well.
He has it tough, but boy, he really makes it tough.
How do we know this? Well, he keeps an extraordinary diary.
Everything is absolutely here.
How much work he did, long walks in the rain, his insomnia,
his toothache, his belly ache, his ingrown toenails...
You name it, he absolutely has it.
It's as though the cliche about you need to suffer -
wow, how you need to suffer - in order to make art
was written a script, specifically for Ford Madox Brown.
For years, he struggled to sell his work,
or gain the recognition he felt he deserved from the art establishment,
leaving Ford Madox Brown in a state of perpetual despair.
But one day, in 1852, he stumbled into this street in Hampstead
and was confronted by a vision.
It's a Ford Madox Brown bonus category, solid gold epiphany -
Navvies digging up the road,
waterworks in London.
Plus ca change, right, you fellow Londoners?
Now, navvies were regarded as dodgy customers
in the middle of the 19th century.
They were migrant workers, they were suspicious,
they could come and go as they wanted.
Not for Ford Maddox Brown.
What he sees in front of him with those navvies
is something like Michelangelo's David.
They represent everything that is noble in English life,
amidst the dross and the misery and hypocrisy and rubbish
with which he thinks he's surrounded.
He begins in a rushing fury of enthusiasm
and for the next 13 years,
this labour of love remains his consuming obsession.
Describing the enterprise as a "species of intoxication",
for the first time, he's really happy about what he's doing.
He would muster all his skill as a painter to bestow on these men
the dignity usually reserved for the great heroes of history.
Well, if you can hack your way
through the forest of Victorian people,
you do get to the heroic central idea
that was burning away in Ford Madox Brown's feverish brain
for all those years.
These four navvies, illuminated by hot July sunlight,
so that the figures who'd be in the darkness
of the Victorian social hierarchy and its imagination -
the manual toilers - become genuinely noble types.
They could almost be taken out of Renaissance sculpture.
They look beautiful, particularly the figure on the left,
with this handsome profile and this sort of perfectly chiselled body.
In the shadows, there's a pile up of characters
embodying the evils and ruin of violence and dishonesty.
Vagrant children,
the idle rich,
the unemployed
and the downright shifty.
In his eagerness to leave nothing and no-one out,
Brown overdoes the walk-on parts,
so that his central message gets lost in the crush.
There is some wonderful painting that goes on here,
but it's a painting of great, fastidious overwork, one has to say.
That's the most magnificent shovel - with its clotted, mortar-y surface -
that you'll ever find in any English painting.
The scarf around this figure's head here
is done with the kind of finicky beauty of a needle worker,
a tapestry maker - it's brilliantly coloured, it's a beautiful thing.
But it is, essentially, slightly unreal.
There is not a trace of dirt
or grime or soot or grease or oil on it at all.
And yet, something extraordinary kind of registers in all this.
If we actually think of it not essentially as a kind of summary of
Victorian social reality, but as a kind of social altar piece,
complete with the frame -
look at that frame, especially designed for the picture
and biblical inscriptions over it -
then we can see that it was, in some ways,
a hymn to the redemptive quality of labour,
by which Ford Madox Brown lived his entire life.
For all its problems, the picture did give Ford Madox Brown
the critical acclaim he'd always craved.
But it was possible to make heroic images of working people
with natural simplicity,
rather than stagy overcrowding.
It was done with a quite different medium...
..photography.
These images of the fishermen and women of Newhaven
were captured in Scotland in the 1840s.
They came about as the result of a personal alchemy -
an artistic partnership, forged here on Calton Hill in Edinburgh.
The two figures involved were called Robert Adamson
and David Octavius Hill,
and they represent, really, the two halves of the Scottish brain.
On the one hand, the scientific and on the other hand, the poetic.
Robert Adamson was the scientist -
rather shy, reserved,
a little bit nervous, inward, not very articulate,
and often quite ill.
David Octavius Hill, on the other hand, was outgoing,
expansive, a landscape painter -
rather fresh, simple, quite pretty landscapes.
Together, they were much more than the sum of their parts.
They really did create an astonishing kind of photography,
so early on in its history.
Hill and Adamson had decided that this brand-new medium
would not just be reserved for the socially grand.
Like so many Victorians, they were dismayed
by what factory life had done to ordinary working people.
But rather than train their camera lens on the urban gloom of the city,
they looked, romantically,
for a community not yet machine-stamped by the modern world.
And they found such a place on their doorstep,
a mile or so away.
Well, why did they think that they'd found the ideal community
they were looking for, here in Newhaven?
Well, it was a fishing village
that hadn't really changed for hundreds of years
and didn't seem to be about to change, either.
It was a place of about 2,000 souls.
The families all knew each other, they all married each other,
they all went out to work in the same way,
the men often at night.
The women, who did really a lot of the tough, rough work,
heaved those baskets of fish up the hill to Edinburgh.
They knew, of course, that Newhaven was no Utopia,
but their affection for it was only increased by the fact
that life here was not easy.
There were those terrible nights when women looked to the storm
and thought maybe their menfolk weren't coming back,
and at those times, they leaned on each other.
It was a community which got through hard times, shoulder to shoulder.
What the two photographers knew they were looking at
was exactly what had gone missing from industrial Scotland -
the social solidarity of friends and families.
This is what they wanted to put on record.
Their images, carefully composed
and always photographed in the glare of the coastal sun,
captured not only what they saw, but how they felt about these people.
In the weather-beaten faces of these men, women and children,
they'd found their working-class heroes.
And with the genius of their camera,
they had transformed them into high art.
Well, this is really nothing short of a miracle, I think,
in the history of image-making in British life,
because just a very few years after photography is invented in Britain,
we have an extraordinary portrait of an entire world
of the fishing community at Newhaven.
And it's done with such vividness and immediacy and drama,
without any kind of arty poses,
that it's already streaked miles ahead of anything painting could do.
But most of all,
you have an extraordinary range of powerful human types.
Here, for example, is an astonishing study -
very dramatic, very beautiful -
of one of the fisherman, called Willie Liston,
who is cleaning a line with the razor edge of mussels.
They've posed him with his hat falling down over his brow,
so that it casts a deep shadow
over his unbelievably handsome, beautiful face.
You know, this is the Marlon Brando of Newhaven -
and gorgeously dressed.
If you can possibly be a dandy and a fisherman, it's him.
So, you have all the classic attributes
of Art's ideal of what beauty is,
but you have a real bloke, doing a real thing in a real place.
And the miracle is, I still don't get, actually,
how the two men managed to get these people
to be so unselfconscious in what they were doing.
In the eyes of the photographers,
the women of Newhaven formed a real sisterhood.
The society of what they themselves called "chummies" -
mutually supportive, gossipy,
un-intimidated by men,
whether fishermen or photographers.
Hill and Adamson know, actually,
what the engine of Newhaven life is about.
Its pulse, its motor, are its women.
So, the women are really beautifully done.
Occasionally, old ladies and widows appear,
but you know, it's very striking how the beauties of Newhaven
make a majestic appearance in these pictures.
Girls, young women are what makes Newhaven tick.
They are the life and soul.
The women hold the whole thing together.
Hill and Adamson's photographs were so natural, yet so dramatic,
that they silenced those who insisted that photography
could never really aspire to the heights of Art.
This was, undeniably, great art -
and critics raved about the beauty of the fishwives,
comparing their portraits to works by Rembrandt, Reynolds and Raeburn.
But in the early 20th century,
the camera focused on women in a way that was far less romantic.
CCTV ZOOMS
In 1913,
art galleries across Britain received some suspect visitors -
the suffragettes.
Though they'd pay their entrance fee like everyone else,
they were not here to admire the art.
They were scoping out the latest frontline
in their increasingly militant campaign for the vote.
Well, the suffragettes, in their righteous indignation,
hated the notion that art was actually more precious
than matters of human life.
They took particular exception to the fact
that men were drooling over the bodies of naked women in museums,
while having a deaf ear to the living cause of Votes For Women,
and the other many oppressions to which women were subject.
So, they decided to do something about it -
something that would shock the complacency of those same men
who ruled the art world.
Suddenly, all over London, you could hear the sound of tinkling glass
as militant suffragettes took axes and meat cleavers
to the treasures of the art world.
And one of their targets resided here,
in the National Portrait Gallery.
The act was so violent and so disturbing
that it got all of Fleet Street in a frenzy.
It's the 18th of July, 1914. What do the morning papers say?
Here's our morning paper coverage.
They all have one fantastic story.
"Picture outrage by wild woman!
"A fury with a chopper!
"Wild Woman at National Portrait Gallery!"
And what has happened is that the previous morning,
a woman who turns out to be called Ann Hunt has taken a meat cleaver
and actually smashed the glass
and cut up Sir John Millais' portrait of Thomas Carlyle,
the great historian.
The choice of target probably wasn't an accident.
By attacking Thomas Carlyle - a founder of the gallery
and inclined to thinking about
the great heroes of history as exclusively male -
Ann Hunt was hitting the patriarchy where it hurt the most.
The interesting thing to me
is that the way it's described in some of these reports
is as if Thomas Carlyle had been personally attacked.
He's actually been dead for 25 years.
It's a sort of backhand complement to the power of portraiture.
"Examination of the picture showed that the injuries were serious -
"one cut, nearly a foot long,
"extended from several inches above the head,
"to below the moustache on the left side of the face.
"Another commenced above the head,
"practically lopped off the left ear."
Gosh, there's not much left of Carlyle at all.
What a terrible mess.
There is this tremendous uproar,
a fantastic hue and cry.
And it's again, a sort of tribute to the power of art,
that it could become a target of all this righteous rage.
Ann Hunt was locked away -
but at a time when every suffragette prisoner
was championed as a martyr for the cause,
the authorities devised extraordinary new measures
to put an end to the suffragette rampage.
A new type of portrait was born -
one we are all too familiar with today.
Surveillance photographs -
secret photographs taken by the state
and circulated around threatened institutions,
in order to identify potential attackers.
Now, of course, the suffragettes
were not about to allow themselves to be photographed.
They were not going to have mug-shots taken of them
when they entered prison.
So, all sorts of new ways had to be invented in secret,
to catch these images.
The latest camera technology was used -
long lenses, fast films...
..and they used particular photographers.
There was a creepy little man -
I expect he was creepy - called Mr Barrett,
who used to sit outside Holloway Prison
so that he could get shots of the women
exercising in the exercise yard.
And the results are these remarkable photos -
really sinister things.
If you think about portraits as essentially
based on an understanding between an artist and a sitter,
there is none of that understanding here.
These are all about mistrust,
suspicion, danger and coercion.
But the images are themselves striking
and actually beautiful, I think -
and unintentionally heroic.
The suffering these women endured for the vote
is written all over that gaunt face.
In the summer of 1914,
the suffragettes suspended their campaign
and the heroism of the women gave way to the patriotism of men.
As thousands of fresh-faced troops marched off to war,
loved ones worried about what might happen to their boys at the front.
SHELL FIRE
For many, the answer was beyond their worst nightmares.
Over the course of the conflict,
thousands of men were admitted to a pioneering facial surgery unit
run by Dr Harold Gillies.
Their faces had been blown to pieces by the machines of war.
It was in him that they invested all their hopes
for a return to normal life.
Gillies was the head surgeon in this facial surgery unit,
but he was also very adventurous.
He was something of a maverick.
He wanted to do something really ambitious,
which would bring back some semblance of humanity
to these terribly disfigured people.
Normally, all that happened was to save a life,
skin was pulled over this deep wound, and they were sutured up,
there were stitches and it was hoped that the soldier
might more or less resemble something that wasn't a monster.
Gillies was both very imaginative and deeply compassionate.
He had something much more aesthetic in mind -
a true remodelling.
He wanted to do something to really rebuild a face
and rebuild a sense of their dignity,
the possibility of self-respect.
In order to take the measure of the damaged tissue
and how best it might be repaired,
Gillies needed to study images of the wounded faces in colour.
When he discovered that the artist Henry Tonks -
professor at the Slade School of Art -
was working at the hospital,
he lost no time in approaching him to see if he could help.
At 52, Tonks was too old for active service,
but, determined to do his bit for the war effort,
had volunteered as an orderly.
The important thing about Tonks
was that he learnt his drawing in another life.
He had been a surgeon.
That's the way he'd started his career.
In fact, he'd learnt drawing at medical school
and then, as a demonstrator in anatomy.
He'd been seized by an art passion.
He wanted to draw anything he could -
corpses if necessary, live bodies when he could.
He made it his passion.
So, it was through medicine, through surgery, that he came to art.
Together, they decided
that something extraordinary could be produced.
They would make a kind of anti-portrait, if you like -
a portrait of a face becoming rescued,
and from that ambition,
from that wiring together of two extraordinary personalities,
the most remarkable images -
unforgettable images - came about.
Confronted with what he described as
"the poor, ruined faces of England",
Tonks created imagery that transcends its purpose
as mere medical illustration.
With his unique and indivisibly anatomical
and artistic grasp of flesh and bone,
he achieved a perfect union
between clinical dispassion and artistic compassion...
..creating, indirectly, works of humane beauty.
Look at this face here.
This belongs to a Bradford tailor called Walter Ashworth,
who was actually very badly wounded on the very first day -
in fact, probably the first minutes of the Battle of the Somme.
His regiment, the Bradford Pals,
didn't even really get beyond their own lines
before they were cut to pieces by enemy fire.
He was terribly badly wounded,
he was brought to the hospital at Aldershot,
looking like that.
The whole of his chin and mouth had been absolutely, horribly, shot away
and there's the diagram done by Gillies and Tonks,
for what to do with it.
And there's the result of the surgery,
which is really a miracle, in a way.
Typically, Gillies said
it left him with a whimsical, but a not unpleasant smile.
It's an absolutely beautiful portrait,
one of the most memorable British portraits I've ever seen.
And here, the medium is very important - it's pastel.
Pastel's the softest of all drawing mediums and therefore,
it's incredibly appropriate for a kind of drawing
which is to do with the malleability,
the softness, the changeability of actual, modelled flesh.
So Tonks, who is a genius draftsman,
uses it very tenderly.
Look again at those two faces
and tell me that's not the product of a real heart and soul.
Here's the thing about Henry Tonks -
the other thing which he was passionate about
was that art had a morally redemptive function.
This, in a world where everything is about Modernist experiment -
art was morally redemptive, said Tonks.
Which is why he said,
"These are the only works of which I am not ashamed."
All of our artists who've pictured the faces of the people
were in some way kicking against restraints, decorum,
the barriers of taste which prescribed
who was and who wasn't suitable for portrayal.
In our own time,
cultural barriers have become the great bugbear of British life,
forces which want to pigeonhole us into this or that identity.
And working today in Liverpool,
there are two artists who've made a career
out of resisting those separations -
between cultures, Indian and British,
art, high and low, between each other.
The Singh Twins.
Their grandparents fled to Britain
to escape violent division in India.
Our family came to England in 1948.
I think it was during, or just after the partition -
basically, to avoid the political turmoil in Punjab at that time.
My grandfather had already been working in Britain for a while
and he called the rest of the family over here.
- What was your grandfather doing? - He was a peddler.
This is traditional within our particular community of Sikhs,
the Sikh tradition that we come from.
Our father started off helping our grandfather
with the door-to-door sales - the peddling - and then he decided
he wanted to do something that would earn him respect.
Their father trained as a medic, and one of their first portraits
was a tribute to him and his achievements.
It's the archetypal portrait of the migrant story,
of the rags to riches, and it really shows the whole of his life,
from his birth place in Amritsar, and then coming to England through
- the partition... - ..Which is up in the top left corner? - The Golden Temple.
Then, you move to an area of the painting which represents partition.
You have Gandhi striding across India - bleeding India.
And then, the ship that our father came on to England
is Bombay to Tilbury, docking in London.
But then also, the cityscape transitions into that of Liverpool,
which is where the family eventually settled.
That was a painting that we did almost straight out of university,
when we were looking at issues of identity
and the experience of being British Asians.
And I think what we were trying to do
was show a positive image of Asians in Britain.
When we were growing up as teenagers here, it was very much divisive -
assimilation or conformity -
and you almost have to pick one camp or the other.
"Are you British or are you Indian?"
Which was a bizarre concept to us, because of course, being born here,
although our heritage is Indian, we felt both.
We took from both worlds.
Inseparable from each other,
working together side-by-side,
the Singh Twins refuse to make any kind of divide
between their identities as Sikhs and as Britons.
Their determination to be both finds expression in all of their work,
which uses ancient techniques of Indian miniature painting
to tell contemporary British stories.
But it was an approach that didn't win them any fans
at art college in the '80s.
I think it became very clear, quite early on during that course,
that there were taboos within what you could and couldn't study.
The course was very much orientated towards
the so-called "fathers of western art" -
Picasso, Matisse, Gauguin and the likes.
We had always been interested in the more decorative kinds of art,
the romantic periods of pre-Raphaelites, Art Nouveau -
and the other passion of course that we had
was the Indian miniature tradition,
which is akin to the medieval manuscript tradition
in the European style of painting,
which was completely dismissed by our tutors.
I mean, they said, actually to our faces,
that it was backward and outdated
and really had no place within contemporary art
and so, that was a red rag to a bull, really,
Because I think we felt that the criticism we received at art college
went deeper than just art.
We felt it was part of that whole criticism of Asian culture
and the way in which it was perceived -
as being something that was backward and outdated.
The Singh Twins stuck to their guns.
Their work became the visual expression of their refusal
to conform or be ghettoised.
We wanted the work to speak for us and we realised, at that point,
that the work was a political tool in itself,
and just by remaining true to that language
that eventually, we would make the point
and hopefully, get acceptance for that language in contemporary art.
From this true grit
and determination against cultural isolation
comes work that is socially inclusive and expansive.
Nobody in British life is missing.
Paintings that are a riotous, Technicolor expression
of what the face of Britain could and should be.
Well, this particular painting
sums up everything that the Singh Twins do.
If you want an example of something
which perfectly and un-problematically brings together
two different worlds of culture -
the culture of Indian Mughal miniature painting
and the raw culture of Merseyside,
they have so nailed it.
And partly, it's a matter of the composition of the picture.
Down below, we have something like
a Sikh or a Mughal celebration in a lagoon,
these wonderfully stylised little waves,
this beautiful, ornamental decoration.
So lovely and so difficult to do,
even with the perfectly exquisite, fine-boned Singh Twins' fingers.
And then, you notice all of Liverpool happening.
There is the football supporter
in the really unpleasant Union Jack Y-fronts,
there is the tormented wife of a Liverpool football supporter,
looking as though she's about to
drown herself in the Mersey with misery.
There is this wonderful line of policemen descending into the crowd.
On the right-hand side, the Singh family itself
is right in the middle of the rest of Liverpool
and it's a happy family.
The thing is actually alive with sound and noise
and fun and celebration.
It's one big, British party.
Division and suffering and sorrow line the face of Britain,
but this is not a sorrowing picture.
This is a celebration of the fact
that there is not one face of Britain.
There are many.
And we should shout that from the rooftops, as they do,
with the Mersey rolling past.