Laurence Whistler

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This download is the only extract the BBC has of this edition of Desert Island Discs. The presenter was Roy Plumley.

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When did you start writing poetry?

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I think I was fourteen. I was set a subject by a full master at school and um after that I got bitten with the idea. Who influenced you, uh, which poets influenced you? When I was very young, I mean at that sort of age, it was the Romantics very much, Shelley and Keats.

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Um and later on more modern birds. Um and um I think the influences change as one goes on through life, who knows?

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You were at school at Stowe, then you were

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Went to Oxford to bail you. What did you read? I read English at Oxford. With a view to what?

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Reviewed or nothing, just the writing. Yes. You were publishing poetry already? Uh yes, I was I published two books while I was at Oxford. Mm-hmm.

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And you won the Chancellor's Essay Prize. Yes. What did you do when you came down?

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I took a job, which an office job in Church Assembly which I was very bad at and I I hated an office job anyway. How long did it happen? Not very long, I think, only about uh

Laurence Whistler1:12

Yeah.

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ten months or so. I wasn't sacked actually, but I managed to get out.

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What did you decide to do next? Well, I was rescued by a publisher who said, Would you like to write a life of Birnborough? And um the reason he suggested this was that he knew that I was interested in architecture.

Laurence Whistler1:28

Yeah.

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and had thought of being an architect.

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And about that time you were awarded the first King's Gold Medal for Poetry. Yes, I think it it was that year, I think.

Laurence Whistler1:40

Yes, I think it's

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So you settle down? I settled down to do um to write this biography, and of course I heard nothing out of it.

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and um to earn what I could out of writing. I had a very easy going family. They didn't expect me to

Laurence Whistler1:53

And a vis

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Bringing in the cash very much. You are resigned to the fact that you won't get to make much money from poetry.

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Yes, I was. Yes. And when did you start glass engraving?

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It was just about that time, in nineteen thirty five, this is when things began to happen in my life. And uh by the time the of the war, four years later, th that was my main profession. I didn't learn much from writing.

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Now, mister Wesley, you began engraving on glasses. This is a a rather rare craft. What induced you to take it up?

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Well, this was really quite accidental. I'd written a sonnet about a house in uh Northumberland called Blagdon.

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And all I knew was that uh in Elizabethan times uh cuppets were scratched on windows.

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And I thought it would be amusing to write this poem on a window. Were there any other engravers working at that time?

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Uh in my kind of engraving, which was Diamond Point, uh I knew of none, and in fact there were none, I think, though there was uh one who was starting at about the same time as myself, it was W. J. Wilson, who was now the head of Whitefriars Glass, did inscriptional glasses, but we didn't know each other at that stage. Had you had any training as an artist?

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I'd had a I yes, I had really, but though not in an art school, because I was the younger brother of my elder brother, Rex, and I learnt a very great deal from him, and I had, on my own, studied architectural drawing. Yes. Now yours is it's mostly small scale work on goblets, wine glasses, small objects. Ye yes, that's it, yes, mostly.

Laurence Whistler3:24

Yeah.

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Do you also work on a bigger scale? Yes, I do. In recent years, I've worked on church windows, big screens. Um sometimes quite well, the size of an average um country church window is about the biggest scale I've I've done, I think. Yes. And you work with a diamond pencil? Well, on big scale work I use various techniques, including the use of a drill and and um factory techniques which are not done by myself but um arranged by myself. And then I work over it with my own kind of tool, which is mostly a steel point or tungsten carbide. Yes. But in small scale work it is with a diamond, now with a steel point.

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And most of the things that an ordinary pencil can do, that steel point can do as well, stippling and and and shading.

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Yes. In glass engraving you are putting on the light, not the shadow. If you're drawing an ink or pencil, you are necessarily putting on dark lines on a white surface or light surface. But uh glass engraving is always imagined as seen against a shadowy background, so that you're always

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drawing things by the light on them.

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A working mainly on curved surfaces must present problems of perspective. Yes, it does, and of course it gives opportunities which uh only glass uh can fulfil, which is rather fun. You can work on the curved surface of a glass on the back of a glass. That's to say you turned it round, finally.

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So that uh you have four surfaces, the outside and inside in front and the outside and inside at the back. Yes. And you can use all four sometimes, but certainly you can use two. In other words, the design could come round the front to some extent and still be seen on the back.

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Some of your more elaborate pieces must take a long time.

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It is a slow kind of work. There's no doubt it takes weeks to do. Mostly. Sometimes the thing is quicker, but I suppose a matter of weeks usually. And if you do make a slip, you can't, of course, paint anything out.

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You're not likely to make very bad slips because b uh because it's slow work. You can cover it up. You can't paint out, you can't rub out, of course not.

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Most of the pieces are commissioned, are they?

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They used to be, but I now prefer to do m pictorial glasses with um landscapes and that kind of thing on my own. Yes. And exhibit them, that kind of thing.

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With the pieces that take so long to to complete, it must be difficult to assemble enough for a full-scale exhibition.

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Yes, it is a problem. And of course an exhibition is not going to bulk very large, because the glasses themselves are only about ten inches high. But I did have an exhibition two years ago, and I'm going to have another one in America next year.

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Little man in Cambridge in this autumn.

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Where do you work, in London? No, I work in the country. I live in Lime Regis. I I work mostly there. But it doesn't require any very great uh

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elaborate um setting. You can do it anywhere well in fact.

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Let's talk about some of your books, Mr. Wisley. You've written illustrated books about your own glass engraving.

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Yes, I've done two books with the illustrations being photographs of the classes. I'm doing a third now to make a sort of trilogy, which will be out next year. And you wrote a book about the work of your brother Rex Whistler, and you've catalogued most of his work. Yes, I did a catalogue raisonnet of his work, and I did a short life of him uh before that.

Laurence Whistler6:39

Yeah.

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And you wrote a most moving book, The Initials in the Heart, about your first wife, Jill Furz, the actress who died in her twenties.

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and another book about festivals.

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Yes, I did a book after the war on festival customs, the customs of um English festival. It was called the English Festivals, um, Christmas, Easter and

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Midsummer and other things.

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Your son Simon is doing some glass engraving now. Yes, he is, yes. I've taught him since he was ten. He's now a professional engraver.

Laurence Whistler7:12

Yeah.

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He's also a musician.

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What else is on the stocks? What are you up to at the moment?

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Well, at the moment I'm eng engraving chiefly engraving glasses for this exhibition I mentioned in America next year. Uh trying to put by a certain number.

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And they're mostly in subjects of my own invention, um symbolic subjects or landscape subjects.