The self-taught maritime artist who transcends ‘naïve’ cliché

In the manner of Richard Holmes’s Footsteps, Julia Blackburn’s story of John Craske is as much autobiography as biography, as much about the hunt for information as the processed results of the search. The facts of John Craske’s life are briefly told: born in Norfolk in 1881 into a fishing family, he suffered some sort of mental and physical breakdown while training with the army in 1917 and for the remaining 25 or so years of his life dodged in and out of invalidism, sometimes bedridden for long periods, sometimes out fishing with his brothers, sometimes working as a fish merchant and perpetually supported and nursed by his devoted wife, Laura.

At some point in his enforced idleness he began to make toy boats, then graduated to painting the sea and ships — on odd bits of wood and paper, on chairs, walls, shutters and boxes. As illness made painting more difficult, he turned to embroidery and stitched away at the same maritime subjects.

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Lucy Letby and the killer nurse I worked with

The toymaking, painting, sewing fisherman acquired something of a local reputation and came to the attention of the poet Valentine Ackland, her lover Sylvia Townsend Warner and, through them, galleries in Aldeburgh, London and America.