Stanley Spencer and the Sandham Memorial Chapel

For many years through my 20s, flitting between my parents' home in Sussex and University and then work in Oxford, I passed the sign on the A34 that points the turnoff to the Sandham Memorial Chapel. For a long time – not even after the name Stanley Spencer started to really mean something to me – did I bother to stop. Yet this was one of the most significant personal records of the First World War in the country, by one of its greatest artists. I wonder now why it did not register more strongly on my cultural radar. Yet I have heard since that for a long time this was the case, and that the chapel was frequently empty. Spencer had wanted it to be built in his home village of Cookham, in Berkshire. Burghclere is hardly out of the way, but the chapel would probably have received more attention there than in initially did in Hampshire.

In more recent decades, however, interest has grown considerably. But it was still a stroke of genius on the part of the National Trust when during the recent restoration of the chapel it took sixteen of the paintings to London and then Chichester and put them on display. Also on show were some of Spencer’s preparatory drawings and letters, together with a few paintings by his friend Henry Lamb, including his masterpiece, Irish Troops in the Judean Hills surprised by a Turkish Bombardment (1919).

Spencer had been staying at Lamb’s house in Poole, Dorset in 1923 when John Louis Behrend and his wife Mary paid a visit. They had already bought paintings by Spencer, and were intrigued to find the artist poring over a scheme of drawings that he called ‘a sort of Odyssey of my war experiences’. As a student, Spencer had been fascinated by the work of Giotto, and his vision was for a chapel entirely decorated with his own scheme of paintings. The Behrends duly commissioned both a purpose-built chapel and its decorations. Mary Behrend’s brother, Lieutenant Henry Sandham, had died on active service in Salonika, and the chapel would eventually be dedicated to his memory.

The Great War had come as a rude interruption to Spencer’s artistic development. Having left the Slade School of Art only two years before, he was riding the crest of a wave. Masterpieces such as Zacharias and Elizabeth had been completed, and his self-portrait, now in the Tate collection, displayed both his technical ability as well as his incredible self-confidence. (The larger-than-life scale of the painting may have been a compensation for his diminutive size - about 5 foot two inches.)

Stanley Spencer, Self-Portrait (1914), oil on canvas, Tate collection

But then the war came; for the first time in his life he started to struggle. The atmosphere in Cookham, the inspiration behind all of his work, was suddenly all wrong. A deeply (if idiosyncratically) religious man, he agonized over the question of whether or not to enlist. ‘It is terrible to be a civilian’, he wrote to friends in May 1915. ‘God says: “You must go, but I give you the power to obey or disobey this command.” If you do not go, then you feel something has gone from you.’ Two months later, having volunteered with the Royal Army Medical Corps, he was posted to a lunatic asylum in Bristol that had been hastily converted in to a military hospital. ‘This vile place’, he called it in a letter to Lamb.

It is Spencer’s experiences at the Beaufort War Hospital that form the first part of the Sandham series. His new existence as a medical orderly was tedious, repetitive and subordinate – everything his life as an artist was not. A friend advised him to read St Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions. Augustine’s recognition of God’s presence in every action, however small or routine, helped bring meaning to Spencer’s work: ‘Ever busy yet ever at rest. Gathering yet never needing, bearing, filling, guarding, creating, nourishing, perfecting, seeking though thou hast no lack.’ It was this discovery that made his life bearable, and which over a decade later he painted so lovingly at Sandham – from washing the baths, scrubbing the floors and sorting the laundry to helping the injured men with their bread and jam.

In 1916 Spencer volunteered for overseas service. He was sent to Salonika, serving first with the Royal Army Medical Corps, then as an infantry private with the Berkshire Regiment. These experiences form the second part of the Beaufort series: map reading, making firebelts, filling water bottles, battling with mosquito nets. This is the everyday life of war; there is no violence, no combat. Death is present only in the culmination of the work: the Resurrection of the Soldiers, where the fallen rise in perfection from their graves to lay white crosses at the feet of Christ.

Though it took Spencer some time to settle on the final design and subject for this large wall behind the chapel’s altar, it would prove to be the key to the whole scheme. As he reflected in the 1940s, ‘This picture is supposed to be a reflection of the general attitude & behavior of men during the war. As soon as I decided in [sic] this it seemed that every army incident was a coin, the obverse of which was presented to me & on the unseen face of which was the Resurrection.’ 

When the art historian R.H. Wilenski saw Spencer’s completed sequence of paintings in 1933, he wrote of his sense ‘that every one of the thousand memories recorded had been driven into the artist’s consciousness like a sharp-pointed nail’. It is a vivid – and accurate – description. This was Spencer’s catharsis. Here he unloaded his experience of the war, and made it something mundane yet wonderful, and never to be forgotten.