One of Norman Cornish’s scenes of the industrial north-east

Norman Cornish, who has died aged 94, spent more than three decades working as a coal miner before making a successful career as an artist; he was the last painter from the so-called “Pitman’s Academy”, a pioneering arts community established in north-east England in the 1930s.

Cornish recorded the now largely forgotten environment of the north-east’s mining communities, portraying its knife-grinders and fish-and-chip vans; its vendors with their horse-drawn carts; men relaxing in the pub after work; and children skipping in the street. Motor cars do not feature.

^{Norman Cornish’s ‘Two Mean at Bar with Dog’}

Unlike the work of LS Lowry (whom Cornish knew), his pictures carry no sense of alienation; rather, they radiate a mellowness and warmth (his pub interiors are usually bathed in an amber glow) and a nostalgia for an era in which, despite its terrible deprivations, there was a rich feeling of community. They are not only works of art, but also socio-historical documents.

Cornish once observed: “If you see a street and it’s not terribly interesting, you don’t draw it. But then something happens. Some interesting people come in or a couple of dogs start fighting or some kids start playing with skipping ropes, and suddenly it enlivens the place and I want to draw it.”

^{One of Norman Cornish’s street scenes}

Norman Cornish was born on November 18 1919 at Spennymoor, in the Wear Valley, Co Durham, and he and his three younger brothers grew up in a terraced house next to the old ironworks, with no bathroom or lavatory. He would later retain vivid memories of the deprivation caused by the General Strike of 1926, and at the age of seven he contracted diphtheria.

Spennymoor had been a coal mining town since the 19th century (the first pit was dug in 1839), but by the time Norman was growing up most of the men were employed at nearby collieries such as Ferryhill, three miles distant. When Norman was 14 his father lost his job, and his eldest son — already passionate about painting and drawing — had to abandon his dreams of further education and start work.

Inevitably he went down the mine, and on Boxing Day 1933 he had his first shift at Ferryhill’s Dean and Chapter colliery (notorious for accidents, and known locally as “The Butcher’s Shop”). Cornish later wrote of his mining experience: “The dangers of gas, stone falls, the darkness and the restricted space, were all to shape these men into industrial gladiators.”

^{Norman Cornish: a self-portrait}

Not long after starting work Norman Cornish learned that there was a sketching club at Spennymoor, run under the aegis of the Spennymoor Settlement, which had been established in 1930 to give working-class families and the unemployed access to the arts; it also offered classes in practical skills such as joinery and shoe repair.

Cornish became an enthusiastic participant, showing some of his work in the Settlement’s annual art exhibition, and became a close friend of another member, Sid Chaplin, later well-known for his novels, short stories and television screenplays.

Gradually Cornish began to exhibit, but he was unable to acquire a set of oil paints until a well-off local woman (who lived in “a big hall”) admired one of his watercolours and asked why it was not painted in oils. When he said he could not afford to buy any, she wrote out a cheque.

^{Norman Cornish’s ‘Miner on Pit Road at Night’}

A number of gifted artists worked at the Settlement — among them the slightly younger Tom McGuinness (1926-2006), who would make a name as a painter of striking scenes of mining life — and collectively they became known as The Pitman’s Academy. In time they began to exhibit further afield, including at the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle upon Tyne, sometimes described as the “Royal Academy of the North”.

Cornish continued to work in the mines during the Second World War, and also served as a fire-watcher. In his spare time, though, he painted; and when the war came to an end he put on his first one-man show, at the People’s Theatre in Newcastle . In 1947 five of his paintings were purchased by Reg Revans, Director of Education for the newly-formed National Coal Board, for display at the Coal Board’s London office. On the back of this, Cornish was invited to help organise an exhibition in London entitled Art by the Miner .

In 1950 he graduated to more exalted company, showing alongside Henry Moore and others at a West End gallery in an exhibition called The Coal Miners. Throughout the Fifties he continued to show his work regularly in the north-east, forming an enduring relationship with the Stone Gallery in Newcastle, which also showed LS Lowry and the Cumbrian artist Sheila Fell. The Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath bought two of Cornish’s works — a source of wry amusement to the artist with his staunch socialist background.

^{Detail from Norman Cornish’s ‘Convivial Company’}

In 1962 Cornish was commissioned by County Hall in Durham to produce a 30ft mural depicting local life. The project brought his work to wider attention, and the following year he was featured in a programme in the BBC television arts series Monitor, introduced by Sir Hew Wheldon and entitled Two Border Artists (the other subject was Sheila Fell).

Throughout this period Cornish had remained working in the pits, but in 1966 — increasingly suffering from back problems — he left his job. Although he was allowed to remain in his National Coal Board house, he clearly had to continue to support his family (his wife, Sarah, and their son and daughter), and he was not confident that he could do so from painting.

But with his wife’s encouragement, he gave it a try, and he succeeded in making a living selling his paintings, while supplementing his income with a visiting lectureship at Sunderland College of Art.

In 1974 he was awarded an honorary MA by Newcastle University.

Cornish published, in 1989, an autobiography, A Slice of Life, with an introduction by Melvyn Bragg. In the same year he had a major retrospective at the University of Northumbria Gallery, and in 1992 a one-man exhibition at the same venue. In 1997 he presented a substantial number of his pictures to the University for its permanent collection.

He continued to paint into his nineties, and in 2009 he was the subject of a book, The Quintessential Cornish, by Robert McManners and Gillian Wales.

The story of north-east England’s miner/artists was turned into a play, The Pitmen Painters, by Lee Hall, author of the screenplay of the film Billy Elliot. It opened in Newcastle in 2007, and has since enjoyed successful runs at the National Theatre in London and on Broadway.

An exhibition of Norman Cornish’s work opened in March at the Kings Place Gallery, north London, and is scheduled to run until August 22.

Three years ago, in an interview with the BBC, Cornish recalled a conversation he had had with Lowry: “I remember we talked about what happened to an artist when he died. His work — was it forgotten or was it going to be cherished?”

Norman Cornish, born November 18 1919, died August 1 2014

Congratulations to the Guardian for publishing a front-page article commemorating the work of peacemakers in the first world war (In memoriam: A century on, time to hail the peacemakers, 28 July). On Monday 4 July, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) will stage events throughout the UK to commemorate the start of the war. In London, the event will recall the suffragists, meeting at Kingsway Hall, who delivered a plea to Downing Street, beseeching British political leaders to use their political skills to avoid the war. Sadly the plea was ignored.

The WILPF centenary congress at The Hague in April 2015 will bring together women of 43 countries to commemorate the work of women who met at The Hague in 1915. Then, 1,200 women from 12 countries met and passed 20 resolutions on war and its causes. Five elected delegates visited 21 heads of state in war-stricken Europe and America to inform statesmen of the resolutions and to urge them to implement continuous mediation.

In 2015, WILPF women at The Hague will acknowledge the efforts of all women who have continuously worked toward peace for 100 years and will formulate strategies that might inspire world leaders to resolve international disputes by peaceful methods.
Helen Kay
Edinburgh

• The bloodfest reported from conflict zones around the world no longer makes me weep. That alone is telling and sad. I do despair at times – but despair is manageable; the death of a child, lover, father – under a crumbled building, shot, blown up – how is that managed day in, day out? Thank you, Adam Hochschild and the Guardian. Front page news remembering and commemorating the peacemakers past and present. Peacemaking is a heroic activity – let us have a “Provide for Peace” to run alongside Help for Heroes.

Thousands said no to the call-up and killing of the first and second world wars – many were tortured and some died as a result of their stand. Bravery is not limited to aggression in the face of opposition, it is often about refusing to be aggressive. It is when you and I agree to fight that war ensues. You and I need to learn the far harder and braver skill of agreeing to make peace. We allow war to happen; when will we determine to make peace the norm?

Quakers do not have all the answers but they do know some pathways to a solution: courses, literature, peacemaking experience, exhibitions, activists available for anyone interested.
Anne McGurk
Bromley, Kent

• Adam Hochschild bemoans the lack of peace museums in Britain. On Monday, the market town of Thirsk is opening a week-long exhibition called “Choices 1914”. We have tried to preserve a balance between the pity of war and the objections to it. Over 80% of Thirsk’s young men joined up. As visitors enter, they will see the names of the 137 local men who gave their lives, with where and when they died. But the majority of the other exhibits will be by or about women and children. One room will be about the advocation and experience of war: the other about its objectors. We will even be displaying the original letter setting out the aims of the Union of Democratic Control, signed by the future Labour prime minister Ramsay MacDonald and Charles Trevelyan, one of the three Liberal ministers who resigned over the use of the royal prerogative to send Britain into war.
Jeremy Shaw
Thirsk, North Yorkshire

• Your article on the Manchester Guardian’s opposition to the 1914-18 war (‘If we rush into war it will be both a crime and an act of supreme folly’, 2 August) reminds me that HG Wells, in a number of articles from 1914 onwards, had optimistically predicted that it would be “the war to end war”, a phrase that was to be widely adopted throughout the conflict. Wells had hoped that the war would usher in the potential to realise his utopian ideas for social and political reform. The second world war and the current horrific events in Gaza and elsewhere prove how misguided Wells had been. As his 1932 novel The Bulpington of Blup testifies, Wells was to become extremely embittered when it became clear that the war had changed nothing. However, he went on to have a significant influence on the 1948 universal declaration of human rights. Wells was a remarkable man in remarkable times.
Professor Linda Dryden
Edinburgh Napier University

• Your piece about Jill Gibbon (The woman turning arms fairs into art, 28 July) inexplicably fails to mention that her drawings appear regularly in Peace News. I write a regular column for PN and I’m proud to be a contributor alongside her and its other excellent writers, cartoonists and photographers. In all your coverage of the first world war, I can’t remember any reference to Peace News, which was founded in 1936 as a reaction against the nationalism and patriotism of 1914-18. It remains a politically unaligned pacifist paper and the only such voice in the UK.
Jeff Cloves
Stroud, Gloucestershire

• Your leading writers (The front lines, 26 July) missed the diary entry by Violet Bonham-Carter who recorded Winston Churchill as saying in 1915: “I love this war. I know it’s smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment, and yet – I can’t help it – I enjoy every second of it.” Oh, what a lovely war, indeed!
Jamie Dockery
Clydebank, Scotland 

• One of the untold stories is the Scottish women’s hospital on the western front. The hospital was unique because all the personnel, surgeons, doctors, nurses, orderlies, stretcher bearers and ambulance drivers were women. It was situated in the abbey at Royaumont, 30 miles north of Paris, and came under the auspices of the French government and French Red Cross. When the British government had been offered the hospital in 1914, they turned it down because it was to be run by women! The French were very glad to have it and the hospital soon gained a good medical reputation under the leadership of Frances Ivens. My mother was a doctor there during the last year of the war.
Ann Fox
Port Sunlight, Wirral

• Ironically, one of the best ways of getting accurate information about events on the western front was to be an imprisoned conscientious objector (How state and press kept truth off the front page, 28 July). According to Fenner Brockway, it was the Walton Leader, a tiny underground prison journal produced by conscientious objectors in Walton prison, which published an exclusive account of the slaughter at Passchendaele, brought into prison by an objector who had shared a guard room with a survivor of that particular bloodbath.
Ann Kramer
Hastings, East Sussex

• Thank you foryour comprehensive article on the Manchester Guardian’s “vehement campaign against Britain’s involvement in the first world war”. While there have been programmes on TV on some of what is reported by you on the disagreements among cabinet members of the government at the time, I do not remember it being said that we had no legal responsibility any more to defend the neutrality of Belgium.

I deduce from the article that an important reason we went to war was the fear that if we did not the current government would be swept from power; and that the decision to go to war was not fully debated by MPs. I think the article should be included in the curriculum for all pupils in secondary schools, and be discussed along with the implications for the organisation of society today and the nature of decision-making.
John Haworth
Visiting research fellow, Manchester Metropolitan University

• The dust has almost settled on the 100th anniversaries, with the case for British war entry, depressingly, having dominated. But there is one more to go. This is the 6 August war credit debate in the House of Commons, when the prime minister, Herbert Asquith, in asking for the first of a succession of loans to fight the war, at last made the government’s case to parliament for its declaration of war on Germany. This was two days into the war – which says it all about that war and democracy.

This debate, like the adjournment debate which Liberal backbenchers forced on the evening of 3 August, after foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey’s afternoon speech, which sent the Conservatives and Irish Nationalists into raptures but stunned his own party, of course has not featured in the sanitised patriotic histories. When I researched the Hansards of this time, I found them crackling with the anger of government backbenchers about the revelations of the pre-existing military commitment to France. They are well-thumbed pages – they have evidently been carefully read down the years. In the 6 August debate, one contribution stands out. It was made by Liberal Sir Wilfrid Lawson: “We have heard in the last few days a great deal about honour; we have heard something about morality and something about self-interest. As to honour, I see nothing honourable whatever in our present proceedings; surely the most supreme of British interests lies in peace, and not in war. As far as the morality is concerned, when we are engaged, as we are now, in organised murder, I think the less said about morality the better. I was sent to support – as I understood – a policy of peace, retrenchment and reform. Where are they all now? All swallowed up in the bloody abyss of war!”

The horrors of the consequences of the first world war with Britain in it, which have included the Nazis and much more, continue to evolve, with the Iraq/Syria and Israel/Gaza turmoil as today’s post-first world war hotspots (deriving from the Sykes-Picot agreement, 1916, and the Balfour declaration, 1917, respectively). What a pity the Guardian was not listened to.
Duncan Marlor
Matlock, Derbyshire

• Your correspondent Adam Hochschild rightly mentions several persons who stood against the collective group-think that propelled the nations of Europe into the maelstrom of the summer of 1914 I believe that there is one other figure that Mr Hochschild could have mentioned, namely that of Germany’s ambassador to Britain, Prince Lichnowsky. It was he who, in those days of late July 1914, made repeated pleas to his government in Berlin to get behind Sir Edward Grey’s plan to hold a roundtable conference of all the powers involved, which would have averted disaster. I have read that Lichnowsky was so well-respected that he was given a guard of honour when he departed Britain after war had been declared. He sat out the war years in Germany in disgrace for his alleged sympathetic attitude to Britain, until his death in 1928.

At least dying when he did he didn’t bear witness to the ultimate degradation, when his country fell into the hands of criminals five years later.
Nigel Baldwin
Portsmouth

• Alan Travis’s report repeats the old canard that people in Britain in 1914 believed that the war would be over Christmas. In fact this is a fabrication of post-war myth, and estimates in the early months of the war differed enormously. “From three weeks to three years have been suggested as the probable duration, with every variety of intermediate estimate,” one military correspondent reported that August.
Mark Bostridge
London

• Reading Hans-Ulrich Wehler’s obituary (2 August) days before the anniversary reinforced the view that the Great War was the fault of a few aristocratic, monarchist, nationalist, very rightwing, anti-democratic old men, especially in Germany and Austria-Hungary. Millions sacrificed their young lives fighting for these incompetent people. The war was not the responsibility of the citizens of the various powers – and certainly not the women.

How typical that rightwing nationalist and anti-democratic men are behind the conflicts of 2014. How unsurprising that in August 2014 so few British people can identify names such as Berchtold, Conrad, Bethmann-Hollweg, Moltke, Jagow, Sukhomlinov and even Sir Edward Grey. It is no consolation to discover on recent visits to Vienna and Munich that some locals were similarly ignorant, blaming every nation other than their own for the 1914-18 war.

As a result, I dread the nonsense that will be written and spoken about the period after the end of the war.
Jeff Dunn
Crosby, Merseyside

Some feel we should use the past tense when talking about the past, and some disagree

Sir, I am reading Melvyn Bragg’s piece (July 30) on the use of the historic present tense and am surprised to note that he does not give any examples. Perhaps he should in future.

Ian Cherry
Preston

Sir, The historic present is confusing and awkward. Melvyn Bragg, in his confession, proved his point that it is here to stay, within one paragraph: ‘Chaucer employs it at will’.

Douglas McQuaid
Oxhey, Herts

Sir, The usefulness of the historic present is that it gently emphasises that the protagonists were not aware of what happened next. It suggests a step into the then unknown; the past tense records a step towards a known outcome.

Will Wyatt
Middle Barton, Oxon

Sir, Melvyn Bragg hosts a radio show called In Our Time that has discussed such contemporary topics as Abelard and Heloise, the battles of Bannockburn and Bosworth Field, and the Abbasid Caliphs. Is it any wonder that he favours the historic present? As a historian I’m happy with it in small doses. I think of it as a kind of submerged direct speech.

The Rt Rev Professor NT Wright
St Andrews

Sir, I disagree with Melvyn Bragg about the use of the historic present. I find a book using this tense highly annoying (including Wolf Hall). If I persevere I am jarred by occasional lapses. Leave the past where it belongs — in the past tense.

Sheila Taylor
Pevensey Bay, E Sussex

Sir, As TS Eliot says in Burnt Norton: “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future / And time future contained in time past.” On that basis, could we persuade John Humphrys, Melvyn Bragg and Matthew Parris to shake hands and defuse the tense argument about the historic present?

Yanka Gavin
London SW11

Sir, You would think that Melvyn Bragg and John Humphrys have read no fiction. Hilary Mantel, who won the Man Booker prize two years in a row, uses the historic present (as I do now) almost continuously, and to the ultimate point of the Immediate Present: here, now, he stands before you.

David Tipping
Sherborne, Dorset

Sir, The present historic is used by people who need to make an uninteresting subject more exciting. They often fail, but by so doing make themselves sound pretentious, thus further devaluing their subject. In the real world — anywhere not in academia, the media or literature — the present historic is used rarely.

Charles Vaughton
Retford, Notts

Sir, Lord Bragg rightly refuses to de-demonise “wicked”, but the real threat to our language and culture comes from the interrogatory uplift. There are few more troubling experiences of linguistic vandalism than hearing academics resort to the cadences of Antipodean populist soaps. Since we live in an age when parliament is happy to legislate against thought crime can we expect a law to prohibit giving the impression a question is being asked when no actual question is intended?

Canon Dr Gavin Ashenden
Villedieu-les-Poêles, Normandy

How much did he contribute to the beginning of the hostilities in 1914?

Sir, Professor Röhl (letter, Aug 1) hopes we will ignore revisionist works suggesting the Kaiser was not solely responsible for the Great War, but who to blame for our own entry is far from clear.

The British cabinet remained calm in the aftermath of continental mobilisation with most opposed to involvement in the Balkans or the provision of aid to France and Russia.

The great exception was the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, who off his own bat mobilised the British Navy and placed the First Fleet on war alert in the North Sea.

If mobilisation is what really tipped a nation into the conflict, Churchill’s pre-emptive actions are more blameworthy than Foreign Secretary Edward Grey’s specious diplomacy.

To the dismay of Prime Minister Asquith, Churchill was outrageously bellicose in cabinet and Lloyd George noted that he dashed around with the “radiance of really happy man”.

Of course, when it was over and 16 million were dead, Churchill contacted Beaverbrook as he wrote Politicians and the War, hoping he would not be portrayed as a “warmonger”.

Dr John Cameron

St Andrews

Elderberries are lusciously ripe early this year but they are toxic to humans

Sir, At the risk of causing another corncockle panic, may I remind readers of Derwent May’s Nature Notes (July 30) that elderberries, eaten raw, are poisonous to human beings. One or two will do no harm, but members of a family in Sweden who each consumed a bowlful died. We must respect our elders.

Dave French

Bath

Fracking in the Weald ‘cannot’ threaten chalk aquifers, says drill company boss

Sir, You report (“Park fears fracking will pollute water”, July 29) that more than a million people in the South Downs and surrounding cities such as Chichester and Brighton rely on the chalk aquifer for drinking water. This chalk is not present under the centre of the Weald area, where Celtique is seeking permission for exploratory drilling, so our operations could not contaminate the chalk aquifer.

The absence of this chalk has been confirmed by independent geological and hydrological studies, as well as in a report from the British Geological Survey and Environment Agency published in July. We hope that this latest study gives the Mineral Planning Authority and people in the area greater confidence that onshore exploration can be undertaken safely in the South Downs National Park.

Geoff Davies

Celtique Energie

A bit of so-called humour in a German newspaper prompted a range of responses but not much laughter

Sir Your headline “German tabloid opens fire on ‘drunk, stupid Brits’” (July 31) was misleading. The word used by Bild is englisch.

Eva Tyson

Dalgety Bay, Fife

Sir, Whatever happened to the Scottish “Anyone But England” brigade? One heart-warming aspect of the Glasgow games was the way the home audience enthusiastically cheered not only their own competitors and those of Wales and Northern Ireland but also the English. I wonder what Alex Salmond made of that.

Barry Norman

Datchworth, Herts