The story of war
- Posted by Amy Bell
- On May 29, 2024
Roger Golland OBE, a BSS trustee, explores contrasting images of war at London’s Guildhall Art Gallery and the Imperial War Museum, a tale of two artists.
Part 1: Rule Britannia
Dominating the Guildhall Art Gallery in the heart of the City of London is a painting twice the size of a roadside hoarding. On one side, red-coated soldiers cluster around a General on a handsome white horse, bathed in the glare of white smoke.
He points to the other, darker, distant, half of the scene, where flames billow and sailors cling to wreckage and toppled masts. It is 13 September 1782. Our heroic General on the battlements is George Augustus Elliot, governor of Gibraltar, and the sailors being rescued by plucky British marines in smart uniforms are Spanish and their French allies. Subtle propaganda it isn’t.
The painting, ‘The Defeat of the Floating Batteries at Gibraltar’, celebrates a decisive action towards the end of the long siege of the Rock during the War of American Independence. Three years into the siege, a French military engineer, Chevalier d’Arcon, had persuaded his leaders that a new wonder weapon, ten unsinkable barges made of heavy timber sandwiching layers of wet sand, would be able to line up off Gibraltar ’s harbour walls and blast the defenders to smithereens at short range. It was shock and awe before the term was invented. Supported by echelons of cannon arrayed to the north and a sizable fleet with plenty of Admirals, the predicted crushing defeat of the garrison attracted crowds of excitable onlookers on the hills.
But the ruse didn’t work. Disciplined British artillery fired red hot shot, cooked in portable furnaces and nicknamed hot potatoes, at the attacking forces all day, eventually setting fire to the fleet and bringing about an ignominious withdrawal. Contemporary reports claimed only a few dozen British casualties against twenty times that many on the other side.
Losses would have been higher still were it not for the gallantry of the British officer, Roger Curtis, who boated out to pick up some 350 survivors, as ships’ magazines exploded all around. The General was subsequently created the first Lord Heathfield; the Colonel got a Knighthood.
It might seem ironic that the artist recording this British triumph was an American portraitist, born in Boston, called John Singleton Copley. He was commissioned by the City of London and the finished work hung in the Common Council Chamber and, from 1886, in the original Guildhall Gallery.
It was removed for safety during the Blitz in 1941, three weeks before the Gallery was destroyed. It remained hidden away in warehouses for almost sixty years. It was only when the modern Gallery was rebuilt in 1999 (on top of the remains of London’s Roman amphitheatre), with a two storey rear wall and viewing balconies to match the heights over Gibraltar, that the picture returned to its present location in London.
Once hostilities ceased King George III warned that Gibraltar could be the source of another war, or at least of a constant lurking enmity. He did not think peace would be complete until Britain got rid of it. But, as the painting shows, it had become an emotional symbol of British resolve and no British government since then has thought it politically feasible to give up sovereignty. Sieges haven’t worked. It remains a hot potato.
The Guildhall Art Gallery is free to visit.
Part 2: They are human after all
A weary boy props his head with his left arm. There are rings on his fingers. A single grenade is perched on the bench beside him. The bench is mottled green, like his military fatigues. He looks at and beyond the viewer. Where is he? Why is he there? Where did the grenade come from? Whose agenda is he serving? What happened to him? Where is he now? Who captured the moment? Why does the picture stir sensations of sorrow and guilt?
In the vernacular of gallery curators nowadays art challenges us to pause, it interrogates our prejudices, invites us to see the humanity in a stranger. A picture provokes. This is what Tim Hetherington’s 2003 photograph of a young rebel in Liberia magnificently does. The questions are partly resolved by other images nearby: the leader of the rebel movement, handsomely groomed in a shiny grey suit, serene in a chair the size of a throne, swags of gold curtain behind; a crowd of gesticulating youngsters in t-shirts and flip-flops brandishing Kalashnikovs, setting off on a long walk to the capital; looters fleeing an emptied container dumped incongruously in front of a Toyota showroom.
Storyteller: Photography by Tim Hetherington is a posthumous exhibition on the third floor gallery of the Imperial War Museum in Lambeth. He was killed, aged 41, while filming in Misurata during the uprising against Gaddafi in 2011. Already acknowledged by his peers as an innovator in his craft, someone who went to war zones not so much to document the fighting as to portray the emotions of those caught up in it, he was increasingly turning his camera on those wielding the camera, wondering whether the loop of protagonist and observer was itself shaping the truth. Did photo-journalism for Vanity Fair have less integrity than plastering his pictures onto corrugated iron fences for local students to view? Or teaching warriors to film themselves?
Hetherington is perhaps best known for his award-winning video Restrepo, filmed when he was embedded for weeks with a platoon of young US Army soldiers high in the Korengal Valley in eastern Afghanistan in 2007. In one short clip displayed at the exhibition a soldier has just discovered his sergeant disembowelled by a stray mortar from across the hills. The raw inarticulate grief at the sudden loss of his comrade, the futility of it all, has a universal resonance. Back with the platoon at their hilltop outpost in 2008, Hetherington took a series of photos of them asleep on their camp-beds, curled up bodies as vulnerable as baby seals. How many mothers never saw their sons again?
The visitor to the exhibition is bound to wonder where Hetherington got the urge to head towards danger and bear witness. We are not given the full biography but it must be relevant that he was schooled at Stonyhurst in Catholic social teaching. He studied English Literature at Oxford, before deciding that modern media offered new avenues to tell complex stories. He started out doing commissions for the Big Issue, London’s campaigning magazine for the homeless. He mastered digital photography and film cameras, but often preferred to use rolls of film, which required him to take his time with composition and win the trust of his subjects. He frequently went back. His extensive diaries show he was constantly questioning his own motivations and the message he wanted to convey.
There isn’t an answer of course to the question about what happened to the West African boy with the grenade. If he’s still alive, he’ll be in his thirties. But the thought can’t be suppressed – is he on a rubber dinghy near you, seeking a lasting escape from conflict? Was it just fate that delivered him a uniform and grenade, while you enjoyed free access to a gallery?
The Storyteller: Photography by Tim Hetherington exhibition is at the Imperial War Museum until the end of September 2024.
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