A. John Poole FRBS
father, artist and everyman
No matter what material he used for his sculpting, John Poole had the gift of turning it into something wonderful and otherworldly, often reflecting influences from classical sculpture and modernist trends. Metal, stone, clay, bronze, and modern resins and fondues all took on an organic energy of their own as they passed through his hands, as shown by his awards for pieces in materials as diverse as mild steel and Guiting stone.
As a result, he bestrode the British sculptural world of the second half of the Twentieth Century, and his studio produced the most beautiful works, which adorned churches, public buildings, parks, and private homes and gardens throughout the country. It remains a mystery why, despite being an agnostic himself, he produced religious Christian work often described by church people as holy, highlighting the complex relationship between his personal beliefs and artistic expression. He therefore helped others find the faith that eluded him to the end of his life.
But while artistic aficionados feted him and brought commissions and other rewards to his door, to me he was always something far more important: he was my father, and he was always there for me. Whether it was leaving his work to help me when I fell over as a child or guiding me through the emotional maze of my years as an architecture student, he was the one who always picked me up, dusted off life’s bruises, and set me on my way again.
As an artist and sculptor, my father had the good fortune of being mentored by William Bloye, who also bequeathed him his tools; Bloye’s mentor had been Eric Gill.
John’s first connection with the Cadbury family was through his work for William Bloye, the first sculptor for the Cadburys. The bonds strengthened when John became friends with Sir Adrian Cadbury while training at Sandhurst to become an officer with the Coldstream Guards. After the war, he set up his first studio in Bournville, Birmingham, in an old butcher’s shop, where he began his early career carving additional names on the graves of those killed during WWII. Later, he was commissioned to design and execute the Cadbury family memorials and to carve the capitals, font, and tabernacle at the church of St Francis of Assisi, the Cadburys’ family chapel.
It was at the Birmingham School of Art and Design on Margaret Street that he met my mother, Daphne, who would become a potter and jeweller and head of ceramics at Bournville School of Art. They were married on Dad’s first army leave by special license as they were only 19 years old – they forged parental consent!.
In 1961, they wanted more space to free their creativity, so they moved to the village of Bishampton in Worcestershire’s Vale of Evesham and into an old farmstead they purchased for the princely sum of £3,200. It was here that they raised their family and spent the rest of their lives, and it was here that I was born.
The name of the beautiful old farmhouse was Bunns Leys, meaning “Mr Bunn’s Fields”, and it gave me, my two brothers and my sister the most amazing freedom as we grew up. It seemed to us that we ran wild in the wonderful acre garden dominated by old orchards. Yet our parents were always there to watch out for us because they worked at home, which was wholly unusual in the 1960s.
Other children, however, were often reluctant to come and play with us because my father had a beard, and because that was also unusual at the time, it frightened them. The other thing that frightened them was a 15-foot-high statue of the Risen Christ in Glory, made of gilded mild steel, with His arms outstretched in welcome, spanning 12 feet. This statue, along with the preserved studio space, now serves as a lasting legacy, inspiring future generations in heritage skills and continuing my father’s artistic spirit.
Over the years, Bunns Leys evolved into a hive of ongoing creativity and the garden changed slowly and subtly from rough old orcharding to a pleasant and contemplative place. Certainly, it still had fruit trees and was still a place where a child could get lost from prying adult eyes and have a safe adventure. Still, it also gained a labyrinth of walkways between flowerbeds and shrubberies, statuary, gently playing fountains, and a stone love bench my father carved for my mother for one Valentine’s Day.
Throughout it all, my father was totally preoccupied with his art. It was his overriding passion when I was little, and it was still his overriding passion by the time I became an adult. As he strove to find that middle trade off faced by every artist between present material comforts and future glory, the commissions flowed in thick and fast: a cement fondue mural in Birmingham Rotunda, the main support of Brentwood Cathedral, the Royal coat of arms at Leicester Law Courts, the Tom Bowling Memorial for Lucas Engineering and his controversial naked sower outside Cannock Hill Library in Staffordshire were just a few of the high profile works which he gave to the world, and which now filling us with pride and respect for his lasting legacy.
Yet he could mix with and talk to anyone. This was no remote, supercilious academic in an ivory tower, but someone who knew and understood his art, the commercial powerhouse on which it was based and the world in which he lived. To the man in the street, he was a stonemason who would chat with a bricklayer in a pub as one craftsman to another and share a building site joke. At the same time, he could be the feted artist who dined with members of the nobility who admired his work. He was a thorough gentleman, always kind and courteous to those he met, but paradoxically he was also an intellectual Marxist with a hearty irreverence for authority.
In the early 2000s, it was a difficult time for the family; my mother and both my brothers died within a short span of each other. However, as he grew older, when many men would have retired, his art remained important to him because it gave him the solace he needed to endure the personal tragedies which overtook him. During this time, he completed such significant works as the Home Guard Memorial (2000), Coventry Cathedral, Madonna and Child, St Mary's Church, Lapworth (2001); Roundel celebrating the life of Rosalind Caird Cathedral archivist (2004); A commemorative plaque celebrating William Small, Physician of the Lunar Society, St Philip's Cathedral, Birmingham (2005); a Bishop's Chair, Church of St Mary, Shrawley (2008)
A year after my mother died, in 2006, John suffered renal failure and, after 16 weeks in and out of hospital, following the ward sister's comment that he would die if he did not leave hospital, he discharged himself with my help. He slowly recovered his health, but true to form, as soon as he could walk again, he demanded to return to Bunns Leys so he could get back to work.
Moving pained him; his back ached especially, and he had lost much muscle tone. Still, he refused to be downcast; he exercised regularly, determined to get back to full health and to live to 100. So as his strength returned, as his main carer in the final years of his life, I found myself landed with an 81-year-old teenager. He used to go out to pubs at night, leaving me at home fuming and worrying about him, but his greatest transgression was when he was driving back from Cornwall, where, despite his infirmity, he had carved more than eighty letters on a memorial in just three days. As he returned up the motorway, a police car stopped him, and the officer asked to see his driving licence. When the officer studied it and saw from it how old my father was, he burst out laughing.
“I hope I am still driving at 95 miles per hour when I’m 81,” he said and let Dad go without booking him.
Dad was cock-a-hoop when he got home and told me about it, but I was absolutely livid. After all the care in nursing him back to health, he was still a daredevil. Soon after this, we found that the pains in his back were not from the renal failure but from a much more deadly cause. All the time, his art had been slowly killing him. Unknown to us, he had contracted lung cancer, almost certainly because of working with carcinogenic resins years before in the 1960s.
At this time, in 2008, he was working furiously on his last big commission, which the noted publisher Felix Dennis had given him. Dad had worked for Felix some years before, when he made a 1 ½ life-size statue of Icarus, the mythical Greek youth who flew with artificial wings and died when he flew too near the sun, melting the wax holding the feathers together. The work had been cast in bronze for the extensive grounds surrounding the publisher’s Warwickshire mansion, and Felix now wanted my father to repeat the exercise with a statue of the poet, John Donne. Dad really admired Donne’s poetry and working on the statue became therapeutic and took him beyond the pain.
When it was finished, we had a little launch party to celebrate. The next day, Dad took to his bed and never walked again. Still, he kept modelling in clay, and in his final months he produced little works I could cast, put his affairs in order, and labelled his work, records, and personal mementoes. He died in 2009, but I like to think that he is still with us in some way because one of his favourite sayings was something written by the Roman poet, Horace, more than 2,000 years ago:
NON OMNIS MORIAR
I shall not altogether die.
One of the last things he did was to design all the family gravestones and, being too ill himself, commission a mason, Steve Allard and Sons, to complete the carving on his behalf, along with a panel fixed to the garden wall which reads as follows,
‘BUNNS LEYS Daphne and John Poole lived, loved and worked here
1961 – 2009’