Chris Price passed away on Good Friday this year. He was a renowned and brilliant artist and illustrator. He is one of the most memorable people I ever met.
Chris is the person I remember and liked best at Hull University. We met because we were both doing joint degrees with Political Studies. We were in the same seminar groups. In our first year, 1966-67, Chris lived off campus, but in the second year he joined me in Morgan Hall at The Lawns residential campus in Cottingham. I had Room 2. Chris had Room 5 (I think it was 5). I first met Delisia then.
Being in Morgan Hall was mutually useful. Neither of us fitted in too well. There were nine to a floor around a central area with kitchen and tables. I recall the night ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ was premiered on the radio at 10 pm. Everyone scoffed and said The Beatles were finished. Chris and I declared it a work of genius.
We sat up all night on my balcony, fuelled by instant coffee, before the Political Philosophy Part One Exam. We managed to explain Hegel to each other successfully too.
Chris was a polymath. The first one I met, I think. He could talk fascinatingly about any subject that came up. It was always so enthusiastic. Topics I remember among so many.
The pre-Raphaelite paintings of Edwin Long.
The Yellow Book and Aubrey Beardsley.
Romanian and Hungarian fascism including the Romanian Legion of the Archangel Michael and The Iron Guard.
‘Trilby’ by George du Maurier,
The woodcuts of Eric Fraser.
Marvel comics
Reading Lorca’s poems aloud, acting them out.
The sculpture of Eric Gill.
William Godwin.
Philip Larkin
Hitler’s envoys to Tibetan monks to discover their secrets.
I directed John Whiting’s Saint’s Day for the Drama Society, Chris did set and costume design, and painted the pictures. It was really co-produced and co-directed. We did the casting together, worked on the set design together, attended rehearsals together.
Chris chose the Eric Fraser Radio Times woodcut we used on the Saints Day programme and publicity. He had a collection of Radio Times cuttings of Eric Fraser, had heard the radio version of the play which Fraser had illustrated, and kept the cutting which is reproduced on the programme. Chris was later to illustrate for the Radio Times. It was Chris’s idea to cover the stage with old books. He was friends with ex-students who ran a secondhand shop, and we got the university union van to fill up with all their battered and hard to sell stock. The cast were wading in books.
Chris designed the costumes:
This flier by Chris is the one that shows the themes of the play. Chris did the publicity fliers on Gestener, as he did many others. How many Gestetner artists were there? Chris may be unique. To make a Gestetner printing master you typed on a wax sheet and you could make 20 to 50 copies before it broke. Chris tried a stylus, but opted for a fine point Bic biro to draw on the wax sheets instead. Then we could run off copies till the wax broke. The wax breaking is why we had four or five different fliers.
Saint’s Day has an elderly artist painting a large picture in Act One, but the central female body was missing. In Act two it’s been painted in and looks like his daughter, Stella. Chris had to do the same painting twice, and it was probably 7 foot by 9 foot. He had a group of four threatening male figures. When the female figure was painted in for Act two, she was naked, with flowing hair (and flowing pubic hair). Chris wanted it to glow under lights so we got Humbrol metallic gold, silver and bronze model aircraft paint which he used over vermilion for the hair. In the third year, Chris had a bedsit in Pearson Park near Philip Larkin’s, and the paintings were there. At the end of the year neither of us could see a way of getting the paintings home (we were going to have one each). What happened to them? I don’t know.
We only have an idea of the composition from one of the publicity fliers. This is very close, though you have to imagine it painted in full colour.
This one is labelled ‘TONITE” and ‘THIS IS THE LAST HAND OUT’. It was foolscap so I had to photograph it rather than scan:
If you look at 5 o’clock, PV is a portrait of me with beard. Above me and to the right, CP is Chris with flares and paintbrushes. Down the left side is the large figure of John Simkins. At 7 o’clock ‘G. Scofield’ is Graham who played the elderly artist. Bottom left is Sian Nicholls who played Stella. Top right is DD, Damian Deus, at 3 o’clock is Bill Gillfillian. They are all recognisable.
We went on to do Drama Society publicity, but it broke down when the uptight mature student producing Mayakovsky’s The Bath House objected to Chris’s brilliant publicity Gestetners. Of course Chris had read Mayakovsky as can be seen.
He also did a Gestetner flier for my friends’ band, Ginger Man (John Wetton, Richard Palmer-James, John Hutcheson, Bob Jenkins). They said ‘We don’t dress like that,’ and Chris said, ‘I know. But you should.’ It was a blank so they could add specific gigs.
Chris also did the properly printed publicity pictures for the Folk Club and Jazz Club and Entertainments Committee, all run by Ed Bicknell as Social Secretary.
The artistes, John Renbourn, Bert Jansch, Davy Graham, Martin Carthy all looked cooler and more iconic in Chris’s pictures than in real life. I have a couple somewhere but can’t find them.
We collaborated on a cartoon strip, ‘The Red Asp’ for the Hull underground paper, which only went to one now much valued edition. A pity, we had worked out twelve episodes. We wrote to Stan Lee at Marvel Comics and got an encouraging reply. Chris worked on character sketches. For fear these are taken as too un-PC, the story is of a bunch of phenomenally racist French legionaries who rape a girl in 1955. her father was French, her mother Vietnamese. Time passes and she becomes the heroine of the story, the Red Asp, who will seek and punish each of the men. That would take place in 1968 in a different location with a different character per episde,
This was a sample for a later encounter with Snopes, one of the men:
A Marvel connected incident? One of the papers, The Sunday Times or Observer, had an article saying students were all taking drugs. We composed a comic letter saying it would be fun if it was true, but the only drug in use at Hull was cocoa at ten o’clock. We signed it Steve Rogers (the name is that of Captain America). It was published. Apparently the vice chancellor ordered a search for this Steve Rogers (perhaps thinking our letter would put 6th form kids off applying). Dire threats were made if Steve Rogers were to be found. He never was. I claim the statute of limitations in admitting it was us.
Chris was fond of searching the antique shops of Beverley, buying stuff (including original copies of The Yellow Book) and taking it to London to re-sell. We did a trawl together once, and he saw some ancient pharmacist’s pestles and mortars. He bought them and announced a large profit. Who would have known? Then when a Hull cinema closed, Chris managed to get some of the 1930s and older cinema posters.
We both frequented a second-hand bookshop in Hull. The owner had piles of 18th and 19th century books, and you could ask him to pull out an illustration and he would watercolour it. We thought this a fascinating act of desecration.
During pre-production of Saints Day, we walked into The Buttery on Saturday night, the odd name for the café and bar, and it was full of drunken Newcastle University rugby players having drinking, burping and farting contests. They had just started smashing glasses and overturning tables. We turned to leave and we both had longish hair for the time, and were well-dressed (well, Chris was. I hope I was. Far less elegant, but more early hippy) The rugby players made insulting remarks about us, so Chris blew them a kiss, and I gave them the two fingered salute. As we got outside, it must have just sunk into their drink sodden brains because there were shouts of ‘Get them.’ We exited at speed, and because Chris was using the nearby drama workshop to do the paintings, I had the keys. We nipped in, locked the door and sat cowering on the floor under the windows for an hour while the rugby players searched for us. ‘They can’t have got far!’ was being shouted. There’s a coda to that. We were having dinner with one of Karen’s friends a dozen years later. Her husband, a dentist, was reminiscing about his days in Newcastle’s rugby team. I said I remembered when they played Hull. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘Great! We smashed up the bar.’
We were in the 1968 sit in. Many memories. One was painting a banner saying FREE UNIVERSITY OF HULL and Chris obviously wanted the lettering to be artistically pleasing. We were cheerfully sitting on the floor (I was colouring in) and the famed Tom Fawthrop came over, sneered, and said ‘Come the Revolution artists and actors will be the first useless people put against the wall and shot.’ We laughed, then realised he meant it. He also had a room on our floor, next to Chris.
We were in the same third year seminar groups for politics; War & International Crisis with Dr Kirby, and Politics and The One Party State with Bob Benewick. Dr Benewick had two huge posters, Karl Marx and then Harpo Marx pointing at Karl and laughing. Dr Kirby wasn’t much older than us, had a strong London accent and seemed to find us highly amusing, always addressing us formally as Mr Price and Mr Viney. I guess we looked out of place among the dowdy political student attire. Chris always looked impeccably smart and fashionable. I fear I wore Moroccan shirts and beads, but my turquoise shirt was a present from Tangier and was exactly the same as the one George Harrison wears on the “White Album” photo cards.
After Hull, I ran into Chris in Kings Road in 1971 and we had a lengthy coffee.
Years later, I was at the art meeting for one of my ELT books at Oxford University Press. It was the B&W Workbook. Most of the illustration had been commissioned from Ed McLachlan and we were looking at portfolios for a couple more. I recognised Chris’s style instantly. He was the obvious choice and we got back in touch. I only wish it could have been the whole book.
Karen and I subsequently had lunch with Chris and Delisia at the Hotel du Vin in Winchester which had some of Chris’s paintings.
Since then we kept in touch by e-mail. I have all of Chris’s Christmas card illustrations, and kept the Gestetner fliers for drama and Ginger Man as well as some of the sketches for set design and the characters for the Red Asp.
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