profile

Joan Charnley was born on January 17th, 1928 in Ainsdale, an affluent seaside suburb of Southport, Lancashire.  The only child of Dora and Reginald Charnley she grew up in a large Edwardian semi-detached house at 31 Station Road. Her father Reginald was a self-employed estate agent and her mother an artist. As an only child she spent most of her early years with adult friends and was highly socialised. Hand-written books from her first year at school show how mature she was at the age of five, with a wide vocabulary and a passion for recording the world as she saw it.

Joan kept scrapbooks and sketchbooks throughout her childhood and adult life, each one displaying a rapid development in her aesthetic. She regularly talked of a happy childhood growing up in Ainsdale. Her house was in the middle of the busy sociable village and Ainsdale beach, which could be reached in only a few minutes’ walk, was a regular playground for the young Joan. Art was in her blood. Her mother Dora came from a long line of amateur artists, with Joan’s archive revealing original drawings and paintings by her mother, aunt and grandmother, mostly sketched whilst travelling across the country. The collection includes charming Victorian and Edwardian paintings from the Lake District, Yorkshire, Lancashire and Scotland. As the first woman in her family to enter further education Joan became the professional artist her female ancestors could only have dreamt of. After attending Scarisbrick Girls School in Ormskirk she applied to Manchester School of Art in 1946 to study textile design. 

Although it took three hours to travel from Ainsdale Station to Manchester Oxford Road, Joan chose to live at home throughout her time at art school and used the lengthy daily commute to read, draw and research her studies. Her impish character emerged on these daily journeys as she was joined by friends who held regular cherry stone competitions by spitting stones through the gap in the train window. But for most of the time Joan had her nose in a book and was an avid reader for the rest of her life. Joan’s private education combined with a career at art school helped to form her creative, witty and jolly personality. 

She spoke fondly of her time at Manchester School of Art and explained how it gave her the freedom to express herself whilst staying committed to a close-knit family where she was encouraged to be creative and nurtured to be successful. It was always heartwarming to hear her speak so fondly of her parents and their generous nature, wit and inclusiveness. In an era when children (especially girls) were seen but not heard, Joan’s voice was shouted loudly from the rooftops.

Leaving home after art college was a monumental moment for Joan, but it was made easier with the emotional help of her mother Dora and the financial help of her father Reginald. Dora gave her the strength to go out into the world as a single career woman and Reginald bought her a convertible car so she could do it in style. On a bright autumn day in 1951 Joan packed her bags, filled up the car she’d named ‘Armartha’ and drove east to start her first job as a lecturer in textile design at Great Yarmouth School of Art.

Single life in Great Yarmouth was exciting for Joan; she mixed with artists and writers, attended fashion shows and parties, and lived an independent bohemian life. She vividly described her Sunday mornings as a single woman in her 20s, reading a broadsheet newspaper, drinking fresh coffee and listening to Tom Lehrer on a Gramophone in her ground floor apartment, filled with modern furniture and mid-century artworks. She talked excitedly about her time in education and how important it was to pass her talent on to her students. As a young practitioner in education she would have been a breath of fresh air in a college staffed mainly by older men and Joan certainly made the best of it. 

Scrapbooks full of newspaper cuttings found in the Joan Charnley archive reveal how tenacious she was at self promotion. There wasn’t a single art class, fashion show or event attended that wasn’t sent to the local press. Faded newspaper cuttings show Joan attending parties and fashion shows teaching screen-printing at college and giving lectures in cold community halls. If Joan did it, the people of Norfolk knew about it.

In 1958 she was promoted to vice principal of Great Yarmouth School of Art and was well thought of and regarded by her peers. Her frustration in not being made principal was attributed to the fact that she was an unmarried woman. She often said, disparagingly, how the British educational system in the 1950s would not allow a single woman to hold such a senior position.

Joan was used to battling the establishment (despite attempts to suppress her voice as a woman) and within five years she was married to Archibald MacDonald, principal of Oldham College. Two weeks later she fulfilled her ambition and became principal of Oldham College of Further Education, a design college for adult women. Joan was vague about how and when she met Archibald (who she affectionately called ‘Archie’). She once suggested they’d met much earlier than 1963 when she was a younger student and he was a visiting lecturer. But all we know for certain is that they ‘bumped into each other’ in the intervening years and one day, out of the blue, they were married.

The wedding was a simple affair at Southport Register Office in front of Joan’s parents Dora and Reginald, and a couple of friends. They honeymooned on the Isle of Mull and two weeks later purchased their new home at No. 13 New Street, Uppermill for £250. Archibald hired people to renovate the house whilst Joan was in charge of the interior design; they were a great team.Throughout the 1960s, as principals of two northern art schools, Joan and Archibald were very much the art power couple, holding court in galleries and hosting dinner parties in New Street. Joan’s archive reveals photographs of Archibald and L.S. Lowry sitting together in a room in Oldham discussing curation, and pictures of Joan visiting galleries across the country. It must have been a fascinating time. 

Joan and Archibald were an idiosyncratic couple. She was lively and outgoing, always the centre of attention, whilst he was shy and reserved. Described by Joan as ‘a dour Scot’, Archibald would sit in the corner quietly and leave dinner parties early, leaving Joan to stay on and entertain their guests.  Archibald was 20 years older than Joan and when he struggled with the onset of Parkinson’s Disease, Joan left her full-time job to look after him and run the house. But she was never a satisfied housewife and continued to work furiously throughout the 1970s and 1980s in her studio on the top floor of the house (this is now the Loom Shop Gallery at The Weavers Factory). In this large north-facing studio overlooking Church Road she would make brand new textiles and botanic designs.

She created tea towels, scarves and calendars. She designed men’s ties, cards, gift wrapping and brochures. She taught with John Nash at Flatford Mill and became a visiting lecturer in flora and fauna on CalMac tourist cruises of the Outer Hebrides in Scotland. Nobody knew more about the island of St Kilda than Joan Charnley.The 1990s and 2000s were Joan’s liberating autumn years; she travelled across the world as a single woman with friends, visiting places she’d always dreamt of.She toured the United States of America, India, Japan and Australia. She travelled across Europe, South America and celebrated her 80th birthday in the Galapagos Islands with her cousin Christopher Jones.

All of Joan’s travels, like every other event in her life, were carefully documented. Her archive includes boxes of travel journals, each one a work of art in itself, filled with photographs, drawings, tickets and beautifully-written descriptions of each day. Her travels across the world helped to inform her creative life with influences of Greece, India and South America popping up in her later textile designs. Although Joan kept most of her mid-century textile designs private, she wasn’t averse to having exhibitions to sell her other work. In the 20 years after Archibald died Joan exhibited more than  50 times in local and regional art galleries across the country.

In 2008, to celebrate turning 80, she held a retrospective solo exhibition at the Millyard Gallery in Uppermill. The exhibition was highly successful and well documented. Joan sold a large number of textile design fabrics, sketches and preparatory designs to the thousands of visitors, each of whom she carefully noted in her accompanying exhibition book. All of these precious documents, artworks and textile designs are now part of her archive at Manchester Metropolitan University Special Collections Museum.

In the summer of 2012 Julian Bovis and Nigel Durkan moved into the house next door to Joan. Their first meeting with Joan was non-eventful, and gave them nothing to suggest that one day she would be in the centre of their world and create a unique legacy that would change other people’s lives. 

All of that was still to come...

TIMELINE

1928 Born 17th January in Station Road, Ainsdale, Southport

1946-1949 Studied Textile Design at Manchester School of Art. 

1949 Wrote her thesis ‘Horizontality and Verticality’.

1950 Won prestigious Heywood Prize for Design from the Royal Manchester Institution

1950-1951 Studied for a postgraduate Diploma in Art and Design. 

1951 Travelled to London for the Festival of Britain where she met Heals design director Tom Worthington and sold designs to Sandersons.

1952-1963 Started teaching and became Vice-Principal and Head of Textiles at Great Yarmouth College of Art.

1963-1971 Married Archibald MacDonald and moved back to Manchester, taking up the position of Principal of Oldham College of Further Education. 

1972-1980 Worked with Joan Nash as course Director at Flatford Mill.

1980 Retired from teaching and studied botanical illustration.

2000 ‘Beachcomber’ design acquired by the V&A for their permanent textile collection.

2008 Held retrospective exhibition at Millyard Gallery, Uppermill, to celebrate her 80th birthday.

2012 Interviewed by textile writer Lesley Jackson, and included in her book ‘20th Century Pattern Design’.

2016 Died peacefully at home, aged 88.

JOAN’S EXHIBITIONS AT THE WEAVERS FACTORY

2019 - Cut Grass, Lavender and Chanel No.5 Click here
2020 - Sunflowers Click here
2021 - The History of Stripe - Click here

FESTIVAL OF BRITAIN

In the summer of 1951, a few weeks after completing her Diploma in Art and Design, Joan Charnley packed her artwork and her 1949 thesis ‘Horizontality and Verticality’ into an imperial-sized portfolio and took the train home from Manchester to Southport. She had won the Best Student Award every year for the past four years, but now her studies were over and it was time to decide what to do with the rest of her life.

200 miles away in London, Herbert Morrison’s Labour government was launching an exhibition designed to give British people something to look forward to after the devastation of the Second World War. The Festival of Britain would be a celebration of British design, architecture and the arts. And it would be exactly what Joan needed.

She sat down at her dining room table with a pen and paper, and a directory of London textile companies borrowed from the Manchester School of Art. In a letter to each company, Joan wrote that she would be attending the Festival of Britain and asked if she could meet and show her design portfolio. The response was overwhelming. She secured meetings with Liberty of London, Courtaulds, Ramm, Son & Cocker, Donal Brothers, Sanderson & Sons, and Heals. 

Joan arrived in London with a few days to spare. In the daytime she visited the Royal Festival Hall and the Tate Gallery and in the evenings she saw plays in the West End, writing enthusiastic postcards home to her mother. On the morning of October 23, 1951, Joan walked excitedly up Tottenham Court Road to meet Tom Worthington, head of textiles at Heals. This was going to be the meeting where she would sell her work and become a famous textile designer like her heroine Lucienne Day. 

The meeting did not go well. Like Lucienne Day, whose iconic ‘Calyx’ design was described as unsellable by Tom Worthington; “It wouldn’t sell a single yard”, Joan was also told that her designs were “too contemporary for the current market” and would never sell. The same story was repeated across the capital as textile houses shut their doors on Joan, deeming her work “too experimental” and “not commercial enough”. Crestfallen, Joan left London and took the long train ride home to Southport. She carefully placed her designs into storage and became a textiles lecturer at Great Yarmouth School of Art.

In 2016, when Joan died aged 88, her friends Julian Bovis and Nigel Durkan discovered the hidden designs in five leather portfolios underneath her desk. Each textile design was framed, labelled and dust-free. Now, 65-years on, the world is finally able to see Joan’s contemporary textile designs. And they are as bright, exciting and beautiful as the day they were made.

How an artist’s dying wish turned her neighbours into gallery curators

by Kate Kellaway, The Observer, March 2019

It was a week after the funeral of textile artist and teacher Joan Charnley, who died, at 84, in the summer of 2016, that her solicitor got in touch with her neighbours, Julian Bovis and Nigel Durkan, to tell them she had left them her house – a tall, listed Georgian building in Uppermill, on the edge of Saddleworth moor outside Manchester – and that she would like, although she understood it might not be possible, for it to be turned into what she quaintly called an “art house”. She described the two men, in her will, as her “soulmates”. In her lifetime, she referred to them simply as “the boys”. I meet “the boys” – both middle-aged – before the opening, on 6 April, of the Weavers Factory and at the end of more than two years of devoted slog during which they have made their neighbour’s dream come true. The gallery got its name because these houses were once a pre-industrial weavers’ factory. Their windows look on to a former steam mill. The houses’ window frames are painted black (originally to hide the soot). “Even the soot here is listed,” Bovis laughs.

Over lunch in their own house, Bovis and Durkan reminisce about their relationship with Charnley. What I want to know is: did they have any idea she was leaving them her house? None, they say. They were busy organising her funeral when the news came through and too grief-stricken to take it in. Durkan recalls every detail of the funeral (Bovis wrote the eulogy, Durkan oversaw refreshments). Two huge Saddleworth pies had been ordered, with “JO” the decoration in pastry on one, and “AN” adorning the other. But once they had recovered from all the work that follows a death, surely they must have hesitated before taking on the daunting transformation of her house? “No – we’d have been scared not to do it,” Bovis says. Charnley, they imagine, must have been waiting for the right moment to tell them about her plans, always believing there would be more time. Her aunt had lived to 104, she had told them she hoped to do the same.

Joan Charnley was born in Southport, in 1928, and married Scottish artist Archie MacDonald in the early 60s (he died in the 90s). The marriage was childless. Charnley seems to have chosen Bovis and Durkan as the sons she never had. Bovis, a former art director and artist himself, and Durkan, an art therapist, recall that there was nothing sudden about the relationship with Joan. They moved into their house in 2012 (she had been living in hers since 1963) but it was three months before they received an invitation to tea.

Bovis has since observed that the better she knew them, the further into the house they were permitted to go. At first, it was ground floor only; later, they were invited into what she jokingly referred to as the “grand salon” on the first floor; only much later – the ultimate vote of confidence – were they admitted to her studio at the top. It was in that studio, after her death, that they were thrilled to discover an “unbelievable” hoard of textiles going back to the 40s, 50s and 60s. Durkan explains that she had taken part in the Festival of Britain and shown her designs to Liberty and Heal’s but that Heal’s had judged them “too advanced” and warned her: “You’ll never sell them.” (“Idiots!” Durkan fumes.) Charnley’s work was ahead of its time, although Sanderson took a design called Beachcomber, now in the V&A. They show me a wonderful selection of textiles, including a bold, Ghanaian-inspired pattern, a profuse garden (she was a skilful botanical artist) and intricate repeat patterns of shells, leaves and birds. “We want to make her famous,” they say.

Asked what Joan was like as a character, they alight on the same adjective: “Cheeky.” Durkan says: “Her public persona was upstanding, proper, well-spoken – queen of etiquette – yet behind it all, she was raucous and subversive. She thought she was subtle but the faces she would pull!” There was more than a touch of the thespian about her.

What comes across most strongly is the fun the three of them had. There were themed dinners where Charnley would appear in fancy dress: with French moustache, Indian crown, Russian fur hat (depending on the menu). Reminiscing about the days when she taught at Flatford Mill in Suffolk with the painter John Nash (she and her husband had also been friends with LS Lowry), she would shout out: “We’d be smoking, drinking whisky and eating marmalade!” Her voice was “like Margaret Rutherford’s”. Durkan is keen that no one gets the wrong end of the stick: “We didn’t look after her. She was no doddery old bird, she was fierce.” They show me a snap of her dressed up in Father Christmas kit – “the full Santa”. She had turned up on their doorstep with rouged cheeks, a homemade, cotton-wool beard and with a black bin-liner stuffed full of gifts (little did they know what a huge gift would one day be coming their way).

During the 50s and early 60s, before she married, Charnley had lectured in textiles at Great Yarmouth (the school no longer exists). And she only missed out on becoming principal because, Durkan explains, unmarried women were not considered eligible during that era. Since her death, the two men have made a pilgrimage to East Anglia, taking with them her sketchbooks and meticulously – delightedly – retracing her steps.

They explain that she was never going to be held back by being a widow. She once told them that, on the day her husband died, there had been a village party going on at the top of the hill. She told herself she had a choice and that life, like the party, must go on – and went up the hill. Her spirit seldom flagged: at 80 she took off on a trip to the Galápagos islands.

It took months, after Charnley’s death, to clear the house. It had been a weaver’s cottage, a temperance hotel, a gambling den and a coffin-makers (Archie MacDonald had even fashioned a table out of coffin boards). But it was a house never destined to be funereal and besides, it is Bovis and Durkan’s belief that the most powerful memorials are about continuing life: at the Weavers Factory, workshops will flourish in what was once Charnley’s studio. It took a year to convert the house – fortunately, Bovis had, as a young man, trained as an architect. The result is a gem: stylishly quirky, in keeping with Charnley’s eccentricity. There are, in addition to the assorted gallery spaces, a tea-bar and shop. In what used to be the kitchen, there is an antique grocer’s counter with cards and wrapping paper reproducing Charnley’s sketches – another form of afterlife. On the ground floor, there is handsome York stone paving, lifted from the small, fern-filled garden. The grand salon is an elegant space with beams that were, as Durkan has recently discovered, taken from Prussian ships decommissioned at the end of the 1700s.

They had been fearful that converting the house might neutralise Joan – but the Georgian building was never about to turn into a white cube. “It’s a gallery and her house,” they say. They have hung on to two of her chairs, her father’s stepladder and her little kitchen stool. They are determined that because she could not abide “sloppy work or mediocrity”, they will only show work by artists they love. Two years’ worth of shows are already planned. They stress this will never be a “poncey” gallery. It will be “democratic”. There will be no manifestos by artists: the work will speak for itself. But there will be a selection of short films, made by Bovis, about artists’ lives, shown in the “blue movie room” (thus named because it is painted blue).

The focus will be on young, as-yet-unknown artists and older, neglected artists. They plan to feature Ivon and Jack (both 23), who are singular and lively furniture designers, and Seamus Killick, 28, born in Wales and based in Glasgow, who will receive the Factory’s first bursary with a project about fires in Saddleworth’s cotton mills. “We have also found loads of women like Joan. The wonderful potter Pat Kaye and the superb artist Elizabeth Woodare both octogenarians.” They are chuffed, too, to be involving students aged 16-18 from Oldham College who will be curating a show inspired by Charnley’s life (education was important to her). The invitation to the Weavers launch is a sketch by a 16-year-old, who was inspired by hearing that Charnley’s three favourite scents were freshly mown grass, lavender and Chanel No 5.

It is touching to meet Bovis and Durkan in a world where most stories about neighbours involve a failure to get on, and they admit to feeling emotional as they relive their friendship and show me around their immaculate gallery spaces. And when I suggest that the progression through the front door, into the grand salon and into the studio now seems to have gone a step further, Bovis agrees at once: “Into our heads.” And he then admits that the biggest surprise is that Joan is “in our lives more than ever before”.