The Sketchbook War by Richard Knott

Author:Richard Knott
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780752493930
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2013-05-20T16:00:00+00:00

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On 5 September 1942 – a week before the Laconia was torpedoed – an official at the Admiralty, H.V. Markham, wrote to Tirzah Ravilious informing her that her husband was ‘missing’. Details were minimal. In the immediate aftermath she talked constantly about her lost husband: Christine Nash noted in her diary on 20 September that Tirzah was endeavouring to make out that it was for the best that he had died – if indeed he was dead − and that Eric had seemed unhappy about the war, and was troubled by the way his work got disturbed, muddle and children combining to take away a sense of peace. The uncertainty over his death – no body washed up on the Icelandic shore, no coffin or funeral cortege – was hard to bear, made worse by the fact that Tirzah was still recovering from her own serious illness. There were also three young children to care for, the youngest of whom, Anne, was just one year old. Tirzah wrote to Helen Binyon five weeks after the loss of her husband: ‘I don’t know what if any pension or money I shall get from the War Artists’ Committee.’

The authorities seemed less than warm-hearted to the grieving widow, embarking on a lengthy dispute over pension entitlement. The official view at the outset was that ‘Ravilious’ position in the Royal Marines was an honorary one. There being no pay, there can be no pension.’43 The correspondence between Mrs Ravilious (writing always as Eileen, not Tirzah) and officialdom in all its forms continued for well over a year.44 A minor complication was that the WAAC had only been told about the artist’s mission to Iceland on 2 September – several days after he had gone there. Moreover, for those civil servants at one remove from the WAAC it raised the thorny question of who exactly these artists were – they weren’t fighting troops after all, were they? There was a cold, bureaucratic tone to the official letters, a reluctance to concede an inch: ‘His captaincy was an honorary one which means that the normal Service regulations with regard to pensions do not apply.’45

By mid-January 1943, Tirzah had lost patience: she wrote a long, impassioned letter to Mr Elmslie Owen at the Ministry of Information. What seems to have provoked it, other than irritation with the grinding slowness of the process, was the fact that she had recently received ‘a widow’s pension form to fill up for women whose husbands have been killed while acting as air raid wardens.’46 That was not her only complaint: she had ‘so far not received any communication … except the original letter from the Admiralty’; she had not received a ‘presumed dead’ notice – required for the slow progress to be accelerated − she had not even received his expenses, ‘which would normally have been refunded to my husband for the three weeks prior to his death’. Moreover, of his personal effects, she had only received a map of Iceland and a few photographs – not the £50 he had left home with, or his kit.

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