For the last 17 years of his life my grandfather worked at
the Engelshoven Distillery, whose derelict shell can still be spotted, coarsely
veiled by a half-kilometre of straggly hedgerow, just outside Nijmegen, on the
road to Kleve.
The whiskeys produced here were aged in natural indoor ponds,
bedded with oak timbers. Every January, when the old logs were removed and
burned, the employees would gather around the bonfires; each man or woman swallowed-up
by an inner narrative that was informed partly by the potent fumes and partly
by the peculiarly animated flames.
The workers were encouraged by the distillery management to
record for posterity their spontaneously conceived fictions that straddled the
boundary between fever dreams and hallucinations. These were transcribed by the
secretarial pool and eventually complied into an anthology that captured the
imagination of the Dutch public and went on to become a best-seller across
northern Europe, with subsequent volumes selling in progressively diminishing quantities.
The stories that appear in this blog have been reproduced
with the kind permission of Engleshoven PLC.
The vanishing colours
of London (By Daniel Bitterlich)
On the morning of Monday the 9th of February,
1998, I read in the back pages of The Telegraph,
as a footnote to the main news, a brief paragraph mentioning that the long derelict
Waitlings paint factory has been divested
of its listed status by Tower Hamlets council. It was with this brazen flourish
of bureaucracy that the shell of an historical metropolitan building was demoted
in the eyes of the law to a corporeal afterimage on the London skyline, no
longer regarded as a structure in its own right, but as extraneous rubble on a brown-field
site primed for imminent redevelopment.
The decision had been sealed by an uncontested vote at an
open, yet obscurely advertised and poorly attended meeting, publicised a
fortnight in advance by a hand-written white card on the notice board of the
Bishops Lane branch library, and by an unobtrusive announcement in a local free
newspaper with limited distribution. That, three weeks later, the demolition of
the factory has yet to commence* is a
mystery and can only be the result of some contractual technicality, or dispute
between the site developer and the council.
As an aside, Tower Hamlets council employed very similar
underhand tactics when redeveloping the Victoria junction on Carnarvon Avenue.
Prior to its ceremonial unveiling as the new gateway to East London – a
bewildering labyrinth of traffic lights, pedestrian crossings and immense
expanses of peculiarly-shaped pavement -
the site had been occupied by a large roundabout; the surviving remnant of a former Royal Park. The
grove of seven ancient oaks that occupied this traffic island were cited as the
principle reason for its demolition. It was said that the age of the trees made
them a falls risk and that that their roots were inflicting damage to the
surface of the adjacent road. There was also some anti-youth sentiment stirred
up against local teens who had allegedly been using the grove as a late night
drinking spot.
I have been a peripheral member of a largely ineffectual local
protest group, with an itinerant membership, that campaigns on a broad range of
community issues. So far our victories have
tended to arrive in the form of delays to proposed actions by local government
or businesses that we consider to be undesirable. While the course of a battle
occasionally swings in our favour, the definitive outcome of these wars turns
against us with such unwavering regularity that one might think the little victories
we have been granted were a form of appeasement, intended to foster a belief
that all due consideration had been given to opposing viewpoints.
It had been hoped by some in the group (myself included) that
Waitlings might be granted a reprieve
and thereafter enjoy a renaissance both as a museum of art and as a much-needed
community space. In pursuit of that end we had enlisted the support of a number
of well-known authors and artists known to reside in East London or have family
roots in that part of the city. Unfortunately these tended to be of the sort
whose presence in the media is so ubiquitous that they become part of the
cultural wallpaper. Consequently their largely lacklustre championing of our cause did very little
to broaden awareness. Though it hardly matters anymore I will speak up where
they have failed to do so:
Waitlings was
founded in 1919 but only rose to cultural significance in 1966 when the ailing business
was taken over and extensively modernised by the New York Impressionist painter
- Michael Naylor -a proponent of the Colour Field school who had turned his
back on the American art scene and relocated to London (recognising the value
of an established brand he kept the name).
Naylor, who was a keen interior designer, was known for decorating interior
walls with swirls of colour whose visible brushstrokes created a low impact
impasto. The overall effect of this method is to lend the impression that the boundaries
of a room are still in the process of coalescing into a solid form. I recall being
invited to a party at Naylor’s home in Dagenham where the pale blue and white walls
of his lounge recalled, in abstract, the formation of low cloud on a spring
day.
It is, at this point, that I must confess a personal
attachment to Waitlings. I worked in
the factory briefly, following the completion of a fine art degree at
Goldsmiths, prior to obtaining a more lucrative position as a commercial artist
for Porter & Beel. I was installed in that part of the building in
which new tones were developed – a
department whose hiring remit was to employ those who had seen the colours of
life. Henceforth, I found myself sharing a crowded workspace with a diverse and
argumentative repertoire of slumming aristocrats, former soldiers, criminals (both
reformed and practicing), immigrants from far-flung corners of the world,
housewives and grandmothers, aspiring writers, budding artists and down on
their luck musicians.
Great emphasis was placed on the inspiration behind each new tone, which required justification by
means of a detailed personal biography describing its origins. When it came to
naming a new colour no indication was to be given of its shade. Instead it was to
be described to the public in the form of a short sentence that reflected its mood
and emotional roots.
My sole achievement during a seven week tenure at Waitlings was a dusky shade of lilac
that I christened “Helena’s dress at twilight” – as a tribute to my girlfriend who
I was very much in love with and hoped to marry. A few years after we separated
I read in the paper that, while wearing an unsuitable pair of high heels, she had
tumbled from the open stairwell of a London bus and fatally cracked her head
open on the curb of Shaftsbury Avenue. (I
have been unexpectedly re-acquainted with this tragedy twice since I first
read of it: Once when, by some disquieting twist of fate, I stumbled drunkenly
into the bedroom of a girl who I had become acquainted with only a few hours
earlier, to find the walls decorated in the same colour that I had conceived one
evening in the Summer of 1970. The second time, via a grainy, black and white
press-cutting depicting a member of the Saint John’s Ambulance brigade cradling
Helena’s bloodied curls, while surround by a small crowd of onlookers.)
The colours developed at Waitlings
(or in the parlance of the company – “Visualised”) were exhibited as 6x3 foot
rectangles, painted directly onto the whitewashed interior walls of the factory.
A broad corridor, lined with filing cabinets, on the third floor archived the precious
documentation relating to the inspiration for each new tone. We had hoped that
this data might play an instrumental role in the proposed Waitlings Museum of Art. To that end we had begun to copy the paperwork
with a view to displaying it next to each paint swatch. It seems that this was a
naively optimistic pre-emptive gesture on our parts. The factory will certainly
be demolished over the coming weeks. The mural of recurring rectangles, whose obscure
and poetic variations on the conventional colour palette stands as an abstract representation
of the personal history of the Waitlings’
workforce, will soon be lost forever.
* Surely the
point of this hastily conceived and covertly orchestrated action was to grant
Mrs Frost and her cronies the element of surprise and allow the bulldozers time
to move in before the protesters mobilised.
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