In 1970 I wandered around an unfamiliar part of West Devon. Down a grassy lane I came across a farmyard in which stood three circular hay stacks, each beautifully thatched. It resembled a picture by the 18th-century painter George Morland. There was nobody about and the yard had a haunted air. In a pub a few miles away, I discovered that the settlement was called Riddlecombe.
Two years later James Ravilious started work for the Beaford Centre, recording the society of this inaccessible and largely unchanged part of Devon. Seventeen years and 75,000 photographs later the project was closed. Ravilious’s pictures now form the major part of the archive, a unique record of the everyday life of the area. Nothing is missed: farming; schools; church and chapel; vicarage teas; hunting; tramps; weather, especially snow; doctors visiting — in fact everything that gave life, and to a degree still does, to this small rural enclave.
James Ravilious was born in August 1939 to the artist Eric Ravilious and his wife Tirzah, herself an accomplished artist, to be followed by John and Anne. In this biography Robin Ravilious, James’s widow and daughter of Laurence Whistler, the glass engraver, tells the story of James’s early life and their subsequent life together simply, directly and affectionately. A more intense and lyrical approach comes when she writes of the West Devon countryside that is part of her being.
Eric Ravilious waved to his son as he left the family’s Essex home as a war artist. James’s only memory of him was of waving back. Eric was lost in a plane near Iceland. There followed a childhood disrupted by his father’s death, by war and lack of money. It improved after his mother remarried the kindly Henry Swanzy, but that too came to an end with Tirzah’s death from cancer in 1951.
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