At the beginning of the Second World War the government had a great deal to think about. One important decision to be made was about the need to prevent damage and destruction by the enemy of vital factories producing materials for defending the country and waging war and other civilian assets such as power stations. Therefore, the Ministry of Home Security established the Camouflage Directorate with the objective of disguising factories and other installations so that they became difficult to identify and locate from the air. The stated aim was to render the target invisible to a pilot at a minimum of 5 miles distant and 5,000 feet height during daylight.
A hub was established at the Regent Hotel in Leamington Spa and the major location where work was undertaken was in a huge workshop in the Roller Skating Rink at the end of Victoria Colonnade in the town. This was on the site of what is now the Loft Theatre. A separate Naval Camouflage Unit was also based at the Art Gallery and Museum in Avenue Road.
The camouflaging process began with an officer flying over the prospective site, taking notes and photographs, and then returning to headquarters in the Regent Hotel. There, the notes and photographs were worked up into either perspective drawings or three dimensional models if the site was of particular strategic importance.
The people who worked there were known as ‘camoufleurs’. They were mainly established artists who had the understanding of scale, tone and colour to mask the installations and their surroundings. Their aim was to confuse the eye so that it was very nearly impossible to interpret and understand the scale and purpose of the buildings.
They used a mixture of light and dark shapes, tones and colours to break up the outlines of buildings. One basic technique was to spread netting across buildings and their surroundings and to position mock features such as buildings and trees onto the netting.
One artist, Colin Moss, recorded that in the Rink … “you worked on a scale model and … there was a turn-table which you could put it on and a moving light, which represented the sun or the moon, and you got up on a platform, which was about the scale height that a bombing pilot would come in at, and turn the thing around to see how it reacted to different times of day.”
As the threat from destruction by the Luftwaffe reduced, the work of the Directorate was wound down in 1943 and many of the artists were assigned for a month to recording camouflage in situ. Many of these paintings are now held by the Imperial War Museum in London, and others by Leamington Spa Art Gallery and Museum.
In their down-time the artists also painted and sketched what they saw about them. They painted murals in the British Restaurant off Regent Grove (now sadly lost). They painted the people they encountered, the houses and streets they lived in and the day to day life of the town. They also recorded how the war was affecting the town; the arrival of evacuees escaping the bombing in nearby Coventry; the aftermath of the bombing raids on Leamington and ‘Digging for Victory’ – the Jephson Gardens and land in Newbold Comyn were given over to growing cabbages and other vegetables.
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- Janey Ironside
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- Christopher Ironside
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- Colin Moss
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- Stephen Bone
At its peak the Directorate employed about 230 people and they included the following (their names are followed by an example of their later careers) –
Christopher Ironside (1913-1992) (designer of the UK’s first decimal coinage in 1971),
Janey Ironside (1919-1979), wife of Christopher (professor of fashion at the Royal College of Art),
Richard Guyatt (1914-2007) (professor of graphic design at the Royal College of Art),
Eric Schilsky (1898-1974) (head of the School of Sculpture at Edinburgh College of Art),
Julian Trevelyan (1910-1988) and Roland Penrose (1900-1984), leading lights of the English Surrealist movement,
Robert Goodden (1909-2002) (professor of silver smithing at the Royal College of Art),
Robert Darwin (1910-1974) (principal of the Royal College of Art),
Stephen Bone (1904-1958) (artist and sometime panellist on ‘Animal, Vegetable and Mineral’) and
Colin Moss (1914-2005) (a renowned Suffolk artist).
There is a Blue Plaque to recognise Christopher and Janey Ironside at No 11 Lansdowne Circus, where they lived for a time.
See also our page about Christopher and Janey Ironside written by their daughter Virginia
Sources
Images of camouflaged buildings are by Colin Moss, Imperial War Museum
Imperial War Museum, for information and picture images
Notes from an exhibition at the Leamington Art Gallery and Museum in 2016
Historic England
Colin Moss website, colinmoss.info
Michael Jeffs, December 2023