New website reveals the story of the lost Aero Girls (and boys)

Nearly a year after the search for the real life Rowntree Aero Girls began, I am delighted to announce the launch of a website dedicated to the remarkable stories of the women and men behind this collection of postwar paintings.

Left to right: Stephanie Tennant, Aero Girl portrait by Anthony Devas [R/Aerogirls];
Stephanie Tennant (Archive photograph, 1960s); Aero advert, 1956 [R/Guardbooks/W20] 

As many as 40 Aero Girls portraits appeared in Rowntree Aero chocolate advertising between 1950 and 1957, in British newspapers, magazines and early ITV commercials. An accompanying slogan proclaimed, “For her - AERO – the milk-chocolate that’s different!”

These representations of modern young women formed part of a successful campaign to relaunch the Aero bar onto the UK market following a break in production during the Second World War. Since the early 1990s, 20 of the portraits have been stored in the Rowntree & Co. Ltd Archive, with little known about the artists or the sitters. While the advertisers J. Walter Thompson wanted the portraits to stand out as being ‘different’ - like the chocolate itself - they kept the female sitters anonymous, and the product firmly in the foreground.

The Search

After launching a public appeal for information and hosting a landmark exhibition at York Mansion House in October 2013, we were contacted by our first living ‘Aero Girl’, Pamela Synge. Synge, now in her 90s, is a visual artist, performer and writer. Her portrait was also the only Aero painting to feature in a television advert, on the newly-launched ITV in 1955. 

Another of our early successes was tracing the last living Aero artist, Arnhem veteran Frederick Deane, whose recollections provided the names of two more Aero Girls, former JWT Art Department employee Rhona Lanzon and the Vogue model MyrtleCrawford. Then, in March 2014, we discovered that the renowned contemporary painter (and soon to be winner of the John Moores Painting Prize 2014) Rose Wylie had been an Aero Girl. Wylie reflects that she was a “rebellious art student” at the time, adding that her true image was “more punk than Mills & Boon cover.” In fact, many of the other Aero Girl sitters also worked in the creative industries, as painters, lithographers, film directors and dancers.

Relatives of the Aero Girls and Aero painters have been tireless in helping us to piece together countless fascinating stories behind the paintings, which lead from the battlefields of the Second World War, through polite society in post-war London, to present-day celebrity, touching on art, social history, fashion, the changing role of women and even the Profumo Affair.

Who Were the Aero Girls? project website pages (York Digital Library, 2014)

A new website gathers together archive images, footage, biographies and first-hand accounts about the Aero Girls collection for the very first time and you can explore it all at York Digital Library. 

Over the last few days we have been contacted by another Aero Girl, the subject of Anthony Devas’ Art Student (c.1950). Painter and former art teacher Barbara Pitt was aged 17 and studying at Goldsmiths College of Art, London, when Devas painted her portrait. She moved to South Africa in 1965, and contacted us from her home in Cape Town with some colourful reminiscences of bohemian London and invaluable material from her own archive.

We would love to continue adding information to our online resource. If you would like to contribute to the ‘Who Were the Aero Girls?’ project please contact us at borthwick-institute@york.ac.uk

Kerstin Doble, Project Curator: Who Were the Aero Girls?

 

Dishing the Dirt on the Atkinson Brierley Conservation Project

Drawing for Middlesborough War Memorial Gates at Albert Park from the Atkinson Brierley collection

Archivists might baulk at the old stereotype of the ‘dusty archive’, but it is an image that rings true
for some of the items in the Atkinson Brierley collection. When the collection was assessed in 2011/
2012 of the 6414 architectural plans there were only 99 that did not require cleaning. This is where
we volunteers come in. Thanks to generous funding from the Shepherd Charitable Trust, we meet
every Wednesday morning under the supervision of the Borthwick’s conservation technician, Tracy.
There are four regular members of our team – our longstanding volunteers, Catherine and Dave, and
more recent (August 2013) arrivals, Kate and myself. We also occasionally have additional students
or volunteers who want to find out more about conservation. At the start of the project we received
training in handling the plans and in careful cleaning with special brushes and smoke sponges, and
since then we have cleaned architectural plans of all shapes and sizes and in various degrees of
disrepair. We get through about 1.5 smoke sponges per two-hour session and, as of June 2014, have
now cleaned 25% of the plans identified for attention.

A dirty plan from the collection

It might seem like a fairly mundane task, but cleaning the plans is a really important part of ensuring the Atkinson Brierley collection remains accessible to the public. Even when the plans don’t look particularly dirty, they can carry ingrained dust and grime which then rubs off on archive user’s hands and can be transferred onto other documents. Over time, the dirt will cause the document to deteriorate, so it’s really important that we clean as many of the plans as possible. Doing so means that people can continue to visit the Borthwick and use this fascinating collection, which includes plans of many of the public buildings in and around York, providing a wonderful source for localand family historians as well as those interested in architectural history from the Georgian period onwards. The collection includes documents as well as plans, and covers schools, churches, war memorials and country houses, not only in Yorkshire but as far afield as Ypres in Belgium.

Our volunteers hard at work!

As for us, the volunteers, we’ve gained a vital insight into what goes on behind the scenes in an archive. Every week, we handle a number of interesting documents and learn more about howthey are cared for. We’ve also had talks on more intensive conservation procedures from the team, and learned about a digitisation project which used some of the plans we had cleaned to create an exhibition about the war memorials designed by the architectural firm. Last but not least, there is always good conversation during our sessions, and even occasionally cake and a coffee once the plans are safely back in storage! Our current list of plans to clean stands at 4618 documents, and we are hoping to secure funding to continue with the project after our current grant expires in October. The best thing about working on the project is the sense of helping to preserve a collection so that it can continue to be enjoyed for a long time to come, and possibly be digitised for even wider use.




We’d love to hear from others who’ve used the collection – what do you love about the plans and why?

Ruth Mather, Volunteer, Atkinson Brierley Conservation Project

George Isaac Sidebottom: Spot the Cat

Small oil painting, coloured, from Retreat Archives c.1890-1900 by George Isaac Sidebottom

Like most archives, although most of our holdings are manuscripts on parchment or paper, bound into volumes and loose leaf, we do have other objects in our strong-rooms. 

This painting shows people in the grounds of the Retreat, York, in the late nineteenth century. The Retreat was, and is, a psychiatric hospital run by the Society of Friends. It was established in the late eighteenth century and pioneered moral treatment for the mentally ill. The hospital saw its patients as no less human because of their illness, and emphasised that they should be cared for just like other people. This certainly does not sound unreasonable today but at the time it was extraordinary - standard Georgian treatments for mental patients included chaining to walls, leaving them naked in bare cells and sound beatings.

By the time of this painting, moral treatment was standard and you can see here that the patients were occupied with a variety of sports and activities including golf, cricket, tennis, croquet and football. Some figures in the background are riding bicycles. A slightly surreal element is provided by a patient lying under the tree in a bed. Painting was another pass-time. We know this because the artist who painted this picture was a Retreat patient at the time.

George Isaac Sidebottom was resident at the Retreat from 1894 until 1912. He had been a merchant in the north-west of England and was a non-conformist. He suffered from moral and religious delusions and had been ill, and in care, for some years before his admission. A letter from the transferring doctor called him "a very good fellow indeed it would be hard to find a more agreeable man. He can paint watercolours very decently, sings a little... and can accompany himself fairly well." In his case-notes, George is described as occupying himself in painting, reading, walking (including walking into town) and singing. He even played the piano, and there is correspondence to show that he was allowed to acquire a piano for his room.

He had a keen interest in games at the Retreat, and played cards, billiards, chess, croquet, cricket, hockey and tennis; he even skated in January 1895. He attended the Retreat's 'entertainments' and 'amusements' (which vary from picnics to dances to amateur dramatics) and had holidays in Scarborough at the Retreat's branch house.

References to paintings are made throughout although unfortunately this particular painting was not mentioned specifically. In January 1896 he 'painted a scene for the Lady's party at the beginning of the month' and in October that year 'he occupied himself with painting in oils and gives great attention to his work'. In December 1900 he was 'busy on a scene for the Xmas party'. Towards the end of his life, George painted 'peculiar' caricature portraits, which gave him much satisfaction. He continued painting virtually up to his death at the Retreat in early 1912.

This painting provides us an interesting glimpse of life inside a Victorian mental hospital from the patient's point of view which is all too rare among psychiatric archives. But, since this post is in honour of World Cat Day I also have to ask... Can you spot the cat? Comment below when you spot him (and no peeking until you do!)

Written by Alexandra Medcalf.