Shipbuilding on the Clyde

A commission at Port Glasgow

Spencer was commissioned by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee on 6 June 1940, after drawing at Lithgow’s yards in Port Glasgow that May. He painted the first work, Burners, at the White Hart Inn in Leonard Stanley, Gloucestershire, during July and August. Observation and painting took place in different settings. ^[3]

These were merchant ships, built for the urgent business of carrying supplies. The Stanley Spencer Gallery identifies the vessels as ‘Y’ Class Standard Ships, constructed with increasing use of prefabrication to replace merchant shipping lost to submarines in the Atlantic. That context gives the quiet concentration of Spencer’s figures its wartime significance. Their absorbed actions are part of a much larger struggle, even when the fighting lies outside the picture. ^[4]

Port Glasgow also offered Spencer a subject that could sustain repeated looking. Shipbuilding involved different kinds of knowledge, different tools and very different movements of the body. Cutting a line in a steel plate was not the same action as fitting a pipe or hauling a heated section. Rather than compressing that variety into a distant view of a completed ship, the series gives particular operations room to unfold. Its titles preserve those differences: Burners, Welders, Riveters, Riggers, The Template, Bending the Keel Plate, Plumbers and The Furnaces. ^[5]

Paintings made from panels

Eight paintings need not mean eight canvases. IWM records that Burners comprises three, with an enlarged central section. A constituent panel, a complete composition and the whole series are different things. ^[3]

The long formats make an unusual demand on the viewer. A conventional view of a shipyard might give priority to a hull, cranes or a skyline. These paintings ask us to move along the work and pause over separate clusters of activity. The task, the person performing it and the surrounding pieces of metal continually share attention. There is no need to identify one commanding individual before the scene begins to make sense. Its subject is distributed through the work itself.

Art historian Thomas Bromwell describes the series as intended for an altarpiece-like display. That comparison helps explain how distinct scenes could contribute to a larger ensemble. It concerns the organisation of the pictures, without requiring each tool to become a religious symbol. ^[1]

The completed cycle should also be distinguished from Spencer’s larger ambitions for it. Plans for an installation extending around a room went beyond the eight finished works. The paintings that survive are substantial achievements in their own right, rather than evidence that a complete, larger decorative scheme was carried out. ^[5]

Looking into The Furnaces

In The Furnaces, the brightest area sits just above the centre. The rectangular furnace mouth appears almost white, while the heated metal descends towards the workers in a long band of yellow and orange. Dark framing above it gives the light a sharply defined enclosure. Instead of floating across the picture as a general glow, the heat seems to have a precise place of origin. The eye can find it immediately, then follow its effect through the surrounding bodies. ^[2]

The men occupy much more of the composition than the furnace opening. On either side they bend, reach or pull, their arms extending through the space between them. Some appear in profile, others turn their backs, and the nearest figure faces towards us. These changes of orientation keep the group from becoming a repeated row. Each man has a particular position within a collective action, and our view of him depends on where that action places his body.

Look especially at the foreground. A man in a patterned sleeveless pullover steps towards the lower edge, his head tilted down and his hands held behind him. Behind him, another figure bends across the space. At the left, a worker stoops beside a crowded container of metal implements. Such figures bring the picture almost up to the spectator’s feet. The furnace remains visible beyond them, but getting to it with the eye means passing through the men.

The floor is equally active. Rows of dark holes run across its warm brown surface, supplying a measured pattern underneath irregular boots, limbs and tools. The repeated dots establish a continuous field while the figures break it into changing shapes. Look from the floor to the clothes and another set of small repetitions appears: checks, stripes and the knitted pattern across the nearest man’s chest. The picture holds together through these modest visual correspondences, as well as through its central blaze.

Above, the workshop seems tightly packed. A man attends the fire at the upper left; at the right, stacked lengths of metal tilt through an angular framework. Two oval openings in the furnace structure bring another kind of rounded shape into the upper centre. Spencer leaves little empty space, yet the various materials remain legible. Soft clothing, hard metal and luminous heat are brought close enough to compare without becoming interchangeable. ^[2]

It is tempting to treat the furnace as the picture’s sole drama. The longer one looks, however, the more the different human postures matter. Heat supplies the striking centre, but effort spreads outwards through the whole group. The composition makes collective labour visible through differences of balance and direction. That is why the scene rewards attention even after its brightest effect has become familiar.

From observation to composition

A surviving Plumbers drawing at the Stanley Spencer Gallery helps reveal the distance between noticing a useful detail and finding its final place in a painting. Dated about 1944, it is worked in pencil and coloured chalk on paper. The gallery identifies it as a study for a passage to the left of the central section in the finished Plumbers, dated 1944–45. The sheet is therefore evidence of preparation for a particular part, rather than a miniature version of the entire composition. ^[4]

In the drawing, large curving pipes occupy the space alongside workers, and a squared grid extends across the paper. The pipe bends insist on being followed: a rounded elbow turns the eye before a straight length directs it elsewhere. Human bodies have to fit around those fixed shapes. Even at this preparatory stage, the relationship between a worker and the thing being handled is more informative than an isolated likeness would be. The grid adds a second order to the scene, crossing the irregular forms with small, regular divisions. ^[4]

IWM describes Spencer painting Burners in patches, moving between figures and metal plates. In his November 1942 letter to Elmslie Owen at the Ministry of Information, quoted by IWM, Spencer called the workers “a series of decorative figures”, explaining his interest in their varied positions. ^[3]

Work, attention and belief

Bromwell connects Spencer’s attentiveness to humble tasks with his belief that they could glorify God. That context allows a religious dimension to the shipbuilding pictures without assigning identities as saints to particular workers. Meaning can reside in the attention bestowed on an ordinary act. ^[1]

The shipbuilding paintings remain a separate group from the Port Glasgow resurrection pictures discussed by Bromwell. Here, the bodies perform practical operations; they are not rising from graves. Their visual importance comes through their closeness, the elaborate compositions and the care with which their activity occupies the picture. ^[1]

Public pictures of wartime labour

The series began reaching an audience while the war was still being fought. Burners appeared in the War Artists’ Exhibition at the National Gallery in October 1940. Its early exhibition reminds us that these were contemporary public images of wartime work, made while the need for ships was immediate. The finished cycle nevertheless extended beyond the war: Spencer completed it in his house at Cookham in 1946. ^{[3] [6]}

In The Furnaces, urgency takes the form of directed effort. A boot is planted, a shoulder turns, hands maintain their grip and a group makes the difficult movement possible. The furnace’s light holds the centre, but the action carries our attention away from it, through the men and towards the foreground. The series preserves that scale of human action within the immense undertaking of building ships.