Joseph Pike: The Happy Catholic Artist

Joseph Pike

Joseph Pike has been described as ‘an artist of unusual merit’, who ‘recorded with outstanding ability the architecture of all periods which exists in contemporary Britain’. A master of the art of pencil drawing, he produced evocative sketches of old churches, and colleges, monasteries and modern offices, picturesque street scenes in historic towns such as Rugby and Chester, as well as a great number of London landmarks. His illustrations were commissioned by authors architects and publishers, reproduced in books and on postcards, sold as prints and exhibited on the walls of the Royal Academy.

When he died in 1956, the Catholic Herald referred to him as ‘a distinguished artist, though not personally well known,’ and until the publication of this biography little has been written about his life and work. Joseph Pike: The Happy Catholic Artist reveals the man behind the art, beginning with his roots in Bristol and his education by the monks of Ampleforth Abbey, marking the beginning of a lifelong association with the Benedictines. Early attempts to launch a professional career as an artist were interrupted by military service in the First World War, and it was only through dogged determination and hard work that he managed to establish himself in the 1920s.

Although there is little explicit religious content in his work, Joseph Pike was a devout Catholic who worked with many of the leading figures in the literary and artistic revival that transformed Catholic culture in interwar Britain. This biography explores his friendships with the likes of Ronald Knox and Bede Camm, his work for the Benedictine monks of Caldey Island and the Dominican Friars in London and Oxford, and demonstrates how his artwork helped preserve the memory of the Catholic martyrs and ‘forgotten shrines’ of historic England.

This is the story of a remarkable artist and quiet, modest man, hugely admired by his contemporaries, whose contribution to 20th century British art deserves greater recognition.

Joseph Pike

‘The Happy Catholic Artist’

James Downs

Copyright © 2018 James Downs

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

The descendants of Joseph and Constance Pike

would like to remember

Barbara Mary Codrington (née Pike)

Anthony Joseph Cyprian Pike

and

Margaret Anne Salmon (née Pike)

We would also like to thank James Downs.

Words are not enough.

Contents

List of illustrations

Introduction

Notes

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

About the Author

Illustrations

The Artist at Work

St Paul’s from Ludgate Hill, London

St Marie’s Church, Rugby (1930)

Bishop’s Palace, Bristol (1914)

Byland Abbey (1901)

Ampleforth, The Aisle Screen (1903)

Ampleforth Church, North Aisle Screen (1921)

St Thomas’ Rood Screen, Bridford (1906)

Padley Hall Chapel (1910)

Father talking to Bishop Burton (27 July 1913)

Ordination of Fr. Albert (Anthony Bertram) Pike OP, (27 July 1913)

Four Pike brothers

Bede Camm and Biddy, Caldey Island (1913)

Caldey Abbey & Priory Bay (1913 postcard)

The Refectory, Caldey Abbey (1913 postcard)

Bristol Grey Friars (1914)

Lieutenant Pike with fellow army officers (1915)

Crosse and Blackwell building, Soho Square

Foregate Street, Chester (1920)

Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, Fleet Street (1928)

Ampleforth Church from the Square (1921)

Ampleforth Entrance Hall (1921)

Cathédrale St Sauveur, Bruges (1922)

Selwyn Quadrangle, Denstone (1922)

St Edmunds Shrine Chapel (1923)

Subiaco Monsatery, Italy (1923)

Joseph Pike and Constance Carroll wedding (26 April 1924)

Sisters of Charity Convent at Châteaudun (1929)

Novitiate at Chartres (1929)

Royal Bath Hotel, Bournemouth (1930s)

The Mermaid Inn, Rye (1927)

The Tower of London (1930s)

Rugby, The School from the Close (1930)

The Undercroft, Prinknash Abbey (1940)

Llandaff Cathedral (1949)

Rue des Petits Fossés, Lourdes (1948)

The London Oratory (1949)

Joe with his son Anthony

Joe with his daughters Barbara and Pegs

Norbury Church from the South (1907)

Greenwich and Selworthy (1924)

An Old House in York

Boat Studies (1909)

The Old Lifeboat at Porthoustock

The Fishermans Hard, Littlehampton (1935)

Polperro (1921)

Fish Street, St Ives

At Hastings (1927)

St Anthony’s, Watch Bell Street, Rye (1927)

A Bit of Old Broadstairs (1926)

St John’s Church, Cardiff

Chester Cathedral (1913)

Stratford-on-Avon (1928)

Llanthony Priory (1936)

The Royal Exchange (1945)

The Abbot’s Chapel, Caldey (1913)

Potterne Village (1923)

The Artist at Work

Introduction

In 1591 a young carpenter from Moordown in Dorset was hanged, drawn and quartered in Dorchester. William Pike had been converted to Catholicism by Father Thomas Pilchard, a native of Battle, Sussex, chaplain to the Catholic family of Arundell at nearby Chideock Castle. Although Pilchard had been executed in 1587 – probably not long after Pike was received into the Catholic Church – the priest had clearly made a strong impression. When the carpenter was asked to recant and save his life and family, ‘he boldly replied that it did not become a son of Mr. Pilchard to do so.’¹

This biography concerns the life of another Pike, also a Catholic from the West Country, whose illustrations for Bede Camm’s book Forgotten Shrines (1910) helped perpetuate the memory of the recusants and martyrs who adhered to the Catholic faith during the centuries of persecution. Places of religious significance were a natural choice for someone who had been educated in a Benedictine monastery and had two brothers serving as Dominican friars, yet such scenes represent only a part of the artist’s output. Joseph Pike – known as ‘Joe’ to family and friends – produced a large body of work over four decades as a professional artist, including lively sketches of historic towns and cities such as Rugby, Chester and Stratford-upon-Avon, evocative views of lost corners of London and Bristol, atmospheric drawings of ruined abbeys and country churches, along with a rich variety of commercial illustrations for hotel brochures, company histories and sales catalogues. The fine detail and crisp lines of much of this work give Joe’s drawings a sense of precision akin to architectural drawing, which perhaps reveals the debt he owed to time spent working in an architect’s office. His sensitivity for the form and substance of stonework was perhaps best expressed in the monochrome tones of pencil drawings but he was equally effective when deploying colour: in addition to the attractive postcards produced to accompany his most popular commissions, he painted landscape scenes in oils, pastels and watercolours, as well as experimenting with lithography. Many of the media and processes used by Joseph Pike have fallen out of favour in our digital age, and an examination of his work provides a fascinating insight into the strategies employed commercial artists in the early 20th century to improve print quality, boost sales and enhance professional reputation. What is particularly interesting about his life and career is the way that he succeeded in connecting disparate cultural and religious strands; studying Joseph Pike’s work in detail reveals a sense of unity in diversity, opening up new ways of understanding how the often-fraught relationship between artistic talent, commercial necessity and religious principles can flourish.

This was an artist who learned to draw in a monastery and whose life’s work was rooted in the piety and principles of Benedictine monasticism, and yet at the same time was highly-respected for his work in the advertising industry which his contemporary George Orwell castigated as ‘the dirtiest ramp that capitalism has yet produced.’² Working during a period of social upheaval and deep soul-searching about national identity, Joe shared his contemporaries’ fascination with iconic landmarks and genre scenes that seem quintessentially English in character. In his drawings of medieval parish churches and timber-framed Tudor inns there is an undeniable sense of nostalgia for the traditions of a bygone age, if not the utopian ‘Merrie England’ that some of his Catholic peers still sought. Yet unlike most of the artists who suggested that the true heart of England lay in a rural idyll of thatched cottages, tumbledown mills, village greens and rustic bridges, Joseph Pike’s topographical drawings are predominantly urban. His town centres juxtapose crumbling alms-houses with the sleek walls of modern office blocks, and when drawing Shakespeare’s birthplace he was unafraid to include a motor car parked outside the cottage. Rather than drawing attention to the disparate elements that make up the social traditions and landscape of Britain, Joe’s pictures suggest instead an organic unity underpinning the whole. It is a message that is as relevant for our own time as it was in his. Although he remains a peripheral figure of the 20th century Catholic revival, he had personal connections with literary figures such as Bede Camm and Ronald Knox, commercial dynasties including the Hansom and Hardman families, as well as influential religious communities belonging to the Benedictine and Dominican orders. It can be argued that his illustrations played a significant role in disseminating Catholic culture: as Aidan Nichols has observed of this period, ‘the real intellectual strength of the English Catholic Church would lie in…its theology of culture: its willed act of presence in [a] variety of domains – from art to politics...its main claim to the attention of posterity lies in this resolute endeavour to bring a Catholic sensibility to bear on cultural life.’³ The Catholicism of Joseph Pike’s art should not be sought in explicitly religious imagery or publications, because the popular artistic appeal of his illustrative style transcended narrow sectarian concerns, whatever the subject. It is found rather in the quiet industrious piety that permeated his work, dissolving the distinction between religious and secular, and refuting any lingering suspicion that Roman Catholicism was somehow un-English. It was a principle that would have resonated strongly with the martyrs and recusants of old, and one that was captured perfectly in an obituary printed under the heading ‘The Happy Catholic Artist’:

All his life Joseph Pike shunned publicity and hated advertisement. He was a very happy person – happy in his work, happy in his home, happiest in his Church… It would be in the tradition of other artists if, now that he is dead, collectors should seek eagerly for his work.

(The Catholic Herald, 10 August 1956)

Chapter 1

The Catholic Revival

In order to fully understand the relationship between Joseph Pike’s faith, life and art, it is necessary to remember that the Catholic community in England was only just emerging from a dark period over which the Reformation still cast a long shadow. By the Act of Supremacy in 1535, King Henry VIII appointed himself Head of the Church of England and assumed all powers of jurisdiction over church doctrine, clergy appointments, rituals, revenues and lands that had previously belonged to the Pope. Over the next seven years his vice-regent Thomas Cromwell oversaw the ‘dissolution of the monasteries’ by which all religious houses were disbanded. The Anglican Church took on a more Protestant character under Henry’s son Edward VI (1547-53) before suffering a violent reversal under the rule of his Catholic half-sister Mary I (1553-58.) It was only under the long reign of Mary’s half-sister Elizabeth I (1558-1603) that a more moderate form of Anglicanism was established, retaining some external forms of Catholicism – such as the episcopate – while rejecting papal authority, and at the same time avoiding the extreme Protestantism practiced in Calvin’s Geneva. The Elizabethan Settlement was a strategic compromise, intended to accommodate diverse religious views and thus bring an end to the conflict and bloodshed of recent decades. The degree of religious tolerance this implied did not, however, extend to Roman Catholic beliefs and practices which would remain forbidden by law for over 230 years, apart from a brief respite under James II.

At the start of Elizabeth’s reign, there was little active persecution of Catholics: small fines were levied for not attending the Anglican church, with heftier fines for those attending Catholic services. Scattered pockets of Catholicism lingered on in parts of the country, particularly where powerful families remained loyal to the old faith and could offer a hiding place for a Catholic priest and a private chapel in which he could celebrate Mass. Doing so was punishable by death, but active persecution only began after 1570 when Pope Pius V excommunicated Elizabeth and the political threat from the Catholic powers of Europe intensified. In 1585 Queen Elizabeth passed an ‘Act against Jesuits, seminary priests, and such other like disobedient persons’ which declared that any priest ordained during her reign could be executed for high treason if found on English soil.

Despite this, hundreds of priests risked their lives to minister to the loyal Catholic community during the ensuing decades, using an underground network of Catholic households where they could be concealed and supplied with money, disguises and horses. To prevent capture in the case of raids, ‘priest-holes’ were constructed in many of these houses. The best-known builder of priest-holes was St Nicholas Owen, a carpenter from Oxford who crafted elaborate hiding places with seats and feeding-traps, in which a priest could survive for several days between the walls or beneath the floors. The autobiography of Fr. John Gerard SJ (1564-1637) provides a vivid and fascinating picture of life under these conditions.

Even for those not living such lives of peril, there was a raft of laws excluding Catholics from public life or owning or inheriting property, as well as providing incentives for others to inform on Catholic relatives or neighbours. This situation persisted until the late 18th century when a blend of factors, such as a new spirit of religious toleration built on Enlightenment principles, an influx of exiled clergy from Revolutionary France and political issues relating to Ireland, led to these laws gradually being relaxed. Concessions made by the Papists Act (1778) and Catholic Relief Acts (1791 and 1829) were far from being universally accepted – in reaction to the Papists Act, the Gordon Riots in 1780 claimed over 300 lives – and Catholic monks and nuns were still forbidden from wearing their distinctive religious habits in public, as well as from making public profession of religious vows. These stipulations were still capable of being enforced as late as 1924, when they were debated in the House of Commons.¹

Although the Catholic population grew rapidly during the 19th century, much of this was due to the arrival of Irish immigrants, producing an odd imbalance that separated the large mass of working-class urban Catholics of Irish ancestry from the small, closely-knit group of landed families and gentry who had clung on to the Catholic faith in rural counties. A Catholic middle-class barely existed until the first stream of Anglican converts began in the 1840s, and it was not until the middle of the twentieth century that suburban professionals began to represent a sizeable portion of the Catholic community.²

During this period there was no official Catholic hierarchy in Britain, and the needs of clergy and laity were overseen by two or three ‘vicars apostolic’ who acted on behalf of the Roman Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith. There were no dioceses, just districts (London, Northern, Midland and Western) and no parishes, just ‘missions.’³ It was not until 1851 that the hierarchy was restored in England and Wales, while Scotland had to wait until 1878. Although Robert Peel’s Catholic Relief Act (1829) had removed the majority of the penal laws, anti-Catholic feeling remained strong, and Cardinal Wiseman’s tactless and triumphalist statement on the occasion of the hierarchy’s restoration provoked riots and outrage.⁴ The following year saw John Henry Newman preach at the first Provincial Synod of Westminster, and a passage from this sermon is worth quoting at length for what it conveys about how Catholics saw themselves.

No longer the Catholic Church in the country; nay, no longer, I may say, a Catholic community – but a few adherents of the Old Religion, moving silently and sorrowfully about, as memorials of what had been. ‘The Roman Catholics’ – not a sect, not even an interest, as men conceived of it, – not a body, however small, representative of the Great Communion abroad – but a mere handful of individuals, who might be counted, like the pebbles and detritus of the great deluge, and who, forsooth, merely happened to retain a creed which, in its day indeed, was the profession of a Church. Here a set of poor Irishmen, coming and going at harvest time, or a colony of