By his second term at Liverpool College of Art, John was known as the most problematic student in any age group or any course: a troublemaker and subversive who resisted doing serious work himself and tried his utmost to distract his fellow students from theirs. Most of his instructors quickly decided he was unteachable, demanded little or no work from him, and avoided any confrontation over his behavior. His sculpture tutor, Philip Hartas, for one, was frankly intimidated by “a fellow who seemed to have been born without brakes.”
The sullen sartorial outsider of registration day had metamorphosed into something vaguely resembling an art student, though he would never completely discard his would-be tough Teddy Boy persona. “I became a bit artier…but I still dressed like a Ted, with tight drainies,” he recalled. “One week I’d go in with my college scarf…the next week I’d go for the leather jacket and jeans.”
The young people with whom he now spent his days were a great deal less shockable than his old classmates at Quarry Bank. The word fuck and its derivatives—still absolutely taboo in polite society and all printed matter—were used throughout college with a casualness that even the doggedly foul-mouthed Woolton Outlaw at first found surprising. Many students had flats of their own, and so could have sex whenever they pleased, in privacy and comfort rather than hastily and furtively in the cold outdoors. Almost everyone, male and female, drank heavily and chain-smoked; some even took illegal drugs, mostly acquired through the neighboring West Indian community—though John, at this stage, did not even dream such things existed.
On the outside, he might have been all swagger and defiance, but inside he was consumed with self-doubt, believing that he had got into college only by a fluke and possessed no aptitude for the work he was expected to do. “I should have been an illustrator or in the painting school,” he complained years later. “But I found myself in Lettering. They might as well have put me in sky-diving for the use I was at lettering.” (Once again, he sold himself short: the private sketchbooks containing his cartoons, nonsense poems, and stories were always lettered immaculately.)
“I think he felt frustrated, though he would never admit it,” recalled one of his first tutors, Arthur Ballard. “There he was, surrounded by people who had some talent with art, and I think he felt in a bit over his head. He would act in a daft manner to distract people and probably take away the fact that he wasn’t as good an artist as they were. He would act the fool, but underneath all that I could see he actually was a thinker.”
John liked Arthur Ballard, a friendly, red-whiskered bear of a man who had once been the army’s middleweight boxing champion. But in Ballard’s classes, he initially shone no brighter than in any others. Every Friday the members of his twelve-person Intermediate group were expected to display a painting or drawing in progress for assessment by Ballard and general discussion and criticism. John’s offerings were always far below the standard of the others’; on many occasions, he seemed too embarrassed show anything at all.
In an attempt to stimulate John’s enthusiasm, Ballard would sometimes take him to a club called the Basement in Mount Pleasant, run as a sideline by the painter Yankel Feather. “Ballard used to come in with this very serious-looking young lad, and talk to him for hours at a time,” Feather remembers. “Even in those days, I used to think he looked sort of half-Japanese. I remember the look he always used to give me, as if he wanted to tangle with me and see what I was made of.
“At the back of this old wine-cellar we used to have a grand piano with half its keys missing. John would get on that sometimes, and do Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven.” One time when he was bashing away, I told him ‘If you don’t stop that fucking noise, I’ll throw you out!’ In the vestibule of the club, I’d hung this big semi-abstract painting that I’d done; and as John walked past it on this day, he got a key or something out of his pocket and ripped the canvas along its whole length. ‘Cheerio, boss,’ was all he said.”
Ballard was beginning to despair of conjuring any worthwhile work from John when, in an empty lecture room one day, he happened on a notebook full of caricatures of college professors and students, poems, and satirical commentaries, which he thought “the wittiest thing I’d ever seen in my life.” The book contained no clue as to its author; Ballard had to do some detective work before discovering it was John’s. He didn’t let on that he’d found it until the next time his class were pinning up their work for discussion. “I brought out [his] notebook and we discussed the work in it,” Ballard remembered. “John had never expected anyone to look at it, let alone find it funny and brilliant. ‘When I talk about interpretation, boy, this is the kind of thing I mean as well,’ I told him. “This is the kind of thing I want you to be doing.”
Yet he had abilities that went far beyond cartooning, even if he chose to reveal them only in flashes, and almost never on demand. He certainly was not the poor relation in his set when they were sent out of college to sketch from life in the cathedral precincts or the Williamson Square livestock market. The accepted method was to work in small dabs and stabs, with painstaking shading and cross-hatching. John, however, could capture a face or object in a single bold, unwavering line, much as one of his earliest artist heroes, Henri Matisse, was wont to do. He was also capable of impressing his painting tutor, an energetic Welshman named Charlie Burton. “I thought he had the potential to be very good,” Burton says. “But he didn’t really have the right temperament for a painter, which means spending a lot of time on your own. John always had to have a crowd around him—and he had to be in control of them. One day, I told his group what I wanted them to do, and went out of the room for a few minutes. When I came back, John had them all rolling around in fits of laughter. Then he gave them a look as if to say ‘What a load of absolute idiots you lot are.’ Chilled them to the bone, he did.”
Just as he and his fellow Woolton wankers had fantasized, his course did include life drawing of a nude female, to which Intermediate students eventually graduated from Grecian busts and the college skeleton. Not only that; June Furlong, the model who usually sat for John’s group, was a gorgeous twenty-seven-year-old with the kind of voluptuous severity as a rule seen in shadowy “art” photographs. A forthright Scouser despite her exotic looks, she had modeled at most of London’s premier art schools and was on friendly terms with many famous painters, among them Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, and Frank Auerbach.
June ran the life class more strictly than any tutor, quelling the smallest hint of unrest among its male members with a ferocious eye, creating the severely practical atmosphere of—in her own phrase—“a clinic.” She had received advance warning of John’s fractiousness, and prepared herself for the worst when she saw him perched with dangling legs on the wooden shelf above the sink where students washed their brushes and palettes. (The shelf’s being just too high to sit on with comfort made it irresistible to John.)
“But I never had the slightest bit of trouble with him,” June remembers. “And never had a bad word from him. When he came in for a class, he’d pull his chair right up close to me and we’d talk, talk, talk for the whole time—about art, about the colleges where I’d worked in London and all the artists I’d met. And there was something about him you couldn’t help but take notice of, even though no one seemed to think his work was much good. I remember thinking ‘You, mate…you’ll either end up at the bottom or you’re going to the very top.’”
Clinical though June made the ambience, fascinating though her anecdotes about Augustus John and the Slade Art School, she was still the sexiest woman John had encountered outside Brigitte Bardot films or the pages of Razzle magazine. He once made an attempt to proposition her, as hundreds must have done before him, but was rebuffed without serious damage to his amour propre. “I said to him ‘How much money have you got, John? I’m not sitting over a half of bitter at Ye Cracke, you know. I go to the Adelphi.’”
He needed an accomplice at college no less than at school, and Russell Jeffrey Mohammed
soon stepped into the role of Ginger to his William, Lotton to his Shennon. Jeff Mohammed lived in Dids-bury, Manchester, but boasted a complex pedigree—a father who was an Indian silk merchant and an Italian mother born within the sacred precincts of Vatican City in Rome. Aged twenty-seven, ten years older than John, he epitomized the college’s open-door policy; before deciding to study art, he had experimented with a variety of jobs and done National Service as a military policeman in Malaya.
Jeff was tall and handsome, with the bearing of an Indian rajah and a voice that still bore traces of the public school to which his polyglot parents had sent him. He played jazz clarinet and was a passionate trad enthusiast who treated the latter encroachments of modern jazz as a personal insult. When the great Humphrey Lyttelton temporarily forsook the Dixieland style to make records with a more modern feel, Jeff waited until Lyttelton played a gig in Manchester, then confronted him, denounced him as a traitor, and ended by punching him in the nose.
By the time he met John, his eccentricities were already a byword among his fellow students. When he received his grant money, he would change it all into half-crown coins, turn the light off in his bedroom, then fling them far and wide, so that in later weeks when he became hard up, there was always hope of finding a stray half-crown under his bed or on top of his wardrobe. One of his favorite tricks was to select a pub or workmen’s “caff” where every face was uncompromisingly white and fling open its door with a ringingly authoritative cry of “Right! All foreigners out of here!”
Despite their age difference, the pairing of John and Jeff Mohammed had something inevitable about it. They belonged to different workgroups and so spent most of each day apart, but wherever their paths crossed, John’s manic laughter instantly redoubled. Although Jeff’s greater worldliness and experience were part of the attraction for him, they always treated each other as equals. They had the same fondness for books, poetry, and language, the same interest in mildly occult things like Ouija boards and palmistry, the same unerring eye for human oddity, the same inexhaustible compulsion to make fun. Even their mutually inimical musical tastes, trad versus rock, caused no serious disagreement. Jeff never managed to turn John on to Satchmo Armstrong or Kid Ory, just as he himself remained impervious to the magic of Elvis and Buddy Holly. However, he possessed a large collection of jazz record albums, in those days almost the only kind to feature contemporary design and typography on their covers. John grudgingly conceded there was something in the look, if not the sound.
The two were most commonly to be found at Ye Cracke, an eccentric little mock-Tudor pub in Rice Street, just a couple of blocks from college, where both students and teaching staff would democratically forgather. Its art-college clientele favored the larger rear bar whose walls displayed two outsize etchings—one of Marshal Blucher greeting the Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo, the other of Horatio Nelson’s death at Trafalgar. John’s and Jeff’s favorite roost was a bench below the Nelson scene, between side panels of British sailors watching their admiral’s last moments. The horrified look on every face in the composition led John to retitle it Who Farted?
This being northern England, the beer came in pints, in straight glasses rather than tankards, wherein to leave the slightest drop cast doubt on the drinker’s very manhood. Army life had made Jeff a seasoned drinker whose affability never faltered as the score of pints mounted. But John, then and always, needed little more than the proverbial “sniff of the barmaid’s apron” to put him under the influence. And a drunk John, then and always, turned into an addle-brained kamikaze, ready to insult anyone and assault anyone. “I always got a little violent on drink,” he would admit. “[Jeff] was like a bodyguard for me. So whenever I got into some controversy, he’d ease me out of it.”
Occasionally they made up a threesome with Jeff’s girlfriend, Ann Mason, whose sharp eye had noted every wrong detail of John’s Registration Day outfit and who—like other females on their course—regarded him with an uneasy mixture of distaste and awe. Ann says that while Jeff’s pranks always had an underlying kindliness, John seemed to recognize no boundaries of conscience or compassion in his urge to flout authority and do down the softies and drips. On the annual Panto Day, for instance, when the college joined with Liverpool University to raise money for charity, he would simply pocket the contents of the collection tin he had taken through the streets. He also continued his boyhood habit of shoplifting, even though the risks in central Liverpool were far greater than in rural Woolton. One of his habitual targets was an art-materials shop run by a pair of old ladies, both too nearsighted to realize how many of their brushes, pencils, and sketchbooks he was filching.
One day, when John and Ann sat near each other in a lecture, she began idly sketching him. Later, in one of the painting rooms, she developed her sketch into the first full-length portrait she had ever done—and the only one she ever would. John sat for her for a couple of hours with surprising forbearance, though, as she recalls, “I had to pretend I wasn’t painting him and he pretended he wasn’t posing.” The portrait shows him seated on a turned-round wooden chair with his arms folded tightly over its back and his knees thrust out on either side; he is wearing a dark jacket and olive suede shoes (bought on a grant-spending spree with Jeff) and his usually hidden Buddy Holly glasses. The effect is of barely contained energy: a figure coiled to spring, or maybe run for cover.
John may have learned next to nothing from his college teachers. But that does not mean he learned nothing at college. His friendship with Stuart Sutcliffe amounted to a one-man degree course, even if largely conducted in student flats and smoky bar-parlors. And here, no scholarship boy with a virtuous cargo of GCE passes could have been more attentive, receptive, or enthralled.
Stu was the same age as John but had arrived at college from Prescot Grammar School a year earlier. He was far and away the most talented student in the place, gifted with a seemingly effortless mastery of every medium he touched, drawing, painting, or sculpture. He was also phenomenally energetic, filling canvases and sketchbooks with work of a maturity that dazzled his instructors, then hurtling on to the next thing almost before they had time to articulate their praise. Small and feminine featured, with luxuriant backswept hair, he was often likened to the short-lived screen idol James Dean—a comparison that would prove all too sadly appropriate. In fact, the dark glasses he often wore denoted a more obscure role-model, Zbigniew Cybulski, protégé of the Polish film director Andrzej Wajda and sometimes called “the James Dean of Poland.”
Stu functioned on an altogether more grown-up level than John. Though his Scottish middle-class parents lived in Liverpool, he had a flat in Percy Street, which he shared with his close friend Rod Murray. Recognizing him to be in a class of his own, the college let him do much of his work there also. His main tutor, the tolerant Arthur Ballard, would drop by regularly to see him, bringing half a bottle of whiskey for refreshment, but seldom made any effort to control the roaring flood of his creativity.
John met Stu through Bill Harry, another fellow student destined to play a significant role in his later life. Bill, in fact, was the archetypal working-class hero, having fought his way to college from an impoverished childhood in Parliament Street, near the docks, where wartime bomb rubble remained still uncleared and terrifying mobs with names like the Chain Gang and the Peanut Gang ruled the neighborhood. A compulsive reader, writer, cartoonist, organizer, and entrepreneur, he found few kindred spirits apart from Stu and Rod Murray in a student body he considered largely time-wasting “dilettanti.”
Bill discovered that John shared his own interest in writing and, at Ye Cracke one lunchtime, asked to read some of his work. Diffidently murmuring something about “a poem,” John pulled two bedraggled sheets of paper from his jeans pocket and handed them over. Bill expected the standard teenage knock-off of Byron or the American Beats; instead, he found himself reading a Goonish pastiche of The Archers, BBC radio’s agricultural drama, that made him guffaw out loud.
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John, as it happened, already knew about Stu Sutcliffe, and was more than happy for Bill Harry to introduce them formally at Ye Cracke, under the distracted gaze of the dying Lord Nelson. “If John ever thought anything or anyone was really good,” Rod Murray remembers, “he turned into a completely different person. Much quieter, more thoughtful…ready to talk seriously about serious things. And he thought Stu was really good.”
The admiration was by no means all on one side. Along with other diverse subject matter, Stu also enjoyed cartooning, as did Bill Harry. To John’s amazement, both of them heaped praise on his drawings for technique as well as wit, comparing him with Saul Steinberg, whose whimsical, perspectiveless covers for The New Yorker magazine they had found in the college library. Suddenly, John was being taken seriously by the most talented artist on his horizon.
Stu’s sister Pauline—in later life a respected therapist—thinks it hard to overrate the redemptive effect of this. “John had a desperate quest for a certain kind of nurturing. Stuart’s nurturing was unconditional…. He loved him. And John recognized that Stuart believed in him…that he believed he wasn’t just a mad, destructive anarchist, but was somebody of worth. Stuart freed John’s own creative spirit.”
John in effect led a double life at college, reflecting the two utterly different sides of his personality. For every drunken foray with Jeff Mohammed there would be a long, serious talk with Stu Sutcliffe, together with Bill Harry and Rod Murray or tête-à-tête. In common with only a few visual artists, Stu could verbalize his aims and intentions, and possessed intellectual curiosity outside his own field. At the time he met John, his personal reading list included Turgenev, Benvenuto Cellini, Herbert Read, Osbert Sitwell, and James Joyce. He was also heavily into Søren Kierkegaard, the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher who first said that in an irrational world, truth can only be subjective and individual. “We’d sit around for hours, asking, ‘Who are we? Why are we here? What are we for?’” Bill remembers. It was from Stu that John first heard about Dadaism, the principle—to be so spectacularly demonstrated by his future second wife—that no subject matter is too shocking or absurd to deserve the name of art. “Without Stu Sutcliffe,” Arthur Ballard said, “John wouldn’t have known Dada from a donkey.”