The Ironsides, Janey and Christopher

I am delighted that Leamington had chosen to commemorate my parents with a Blue Plaque, because I lived in Lansdowne Circus until I was 2 1/2 and it was here that my parents were happiest.  (Their marriage didn’t last long after the end of the war and their return to London).

My parents, Janey and Christopher Ironside, lived at 11 Lansdowne Circus during the years of the Second World War when my father was a Camouflage Officer in Leamington Spa.

They met at the then Central School of Arts and Crafts in London, where my mother was learning dressmaking and my father was teaching life-drawing.  They took one look at each other and decided each was the “most attractive person they had ever seen” and married in 1939.

Leamington Spa was at that time full of artists who had applied to the Ministry of Home Office security to become Camouflage Officers as their own specialised contribution to the war effort.  A key figure in this effort was Robin Darwin, the artistic administrator, who was to play a huge part in my parents’ separate futures.

The Camouflage Unit existed in what was then the Leamington Ice Rink which was at the far end of Victoria Colonnade, roughly the site of the Loft Theatre.  It was converted into a giant studio, housing models of vulnerable factories, aerodromes, housing estates and so on.  The idea was to disguise them from enemy bombers by using netting, paint, and false scenery so that they looked like rivers, farmland covered in sheep or innocent forests.  By constructing a false sun, moon and clouds, even the weather conditions were reproduced so that the disguises would look authentic at different times of day and in different weather conditions.

At the time, my mother Janey had, besides being a mother to me and cooking and cleaning for our two lodgers (both of whom also worked in Camouflage), taken a job at the Lockheed Factory, and later, the records section of the Camouflage Office.  She also worked as a volunteer at a home in Leamington set up to house evacuee children who could not be billeted with local families because of various medical or social problems.  But all the time she was yearning to design clothes, often running up her own stunning creations out of blackout material.

Once the war was over and they returned to London, Janey started up her own dressmaking business in our house in Chelsea, making dresses for various grand customers who were delighted to find such a talented “little dressmaker” round the corner.

My father tried to make a living working at a design studio in South Kensington until Robin Darwin, who had been in charge of camouflage activities in Leamington, was made Rector of the Royal College of Art in London.  He immediately sacked all the existing staff and installed many of his old colleagues from the Camouflage Units that he had worked with, including my father, who taught not only at the Sculpture School but also at the Painting School where he taught David Hockney.

On top of his teaching job, my father, with his brother Robin Ironside, designed stage sets, tapestries, stamps and plaques, and alone, the coinage for numerous currencies around the world. In 1960 he won a competition to design the reverses of the first decimal coinage in the UK, which came into circulation in 1968.

But Robin Darwin had not forgotten my mother in his new reign at the RCA.  First he asked her to take on the job of assistant to Madge Garland, who was running the Fashion School and later, when Madge resigned, installed her as the first Professor of Fashion at the RCA in 1956.

My mother was indeed a new broom.  She threw out the old rules that decreed that students should wear white gloves and carry furled umbrellas at all times, and nurtured such talent as Ossie Clark, Zandra Rhodes, Bill Gibb, Antony Price, Foale and Tuffin and a host of fashion designers who went on to become young stars of the Sixties fashion revolution.  She also introduced a menswear department which raised a lot of eyebrows at the time.  The yearly fashion show at the Royal College, with loud pop music, dancing models with Vidal hairdos and wearing revolutionary designs, became front page news.

Sadly, my parents divorced in 1961 and, having fallen out badly with Robin Darwin my mother resigned from RCA in 1968. But I like to think their artistic legacy, nurtured in Leamington Spa, still lingers.