Lost and found

I was looking online recently for information about Gerard Ceunis, when I came across a photograph of him for sale on eBay, the seller being an antiquarian dealer in Bourges, France. The photograph showed a young (-ish) Ceunis, standing next to one of his paintings, with others displayed on a wall behind him, and it was accompanied by some printed text in French. I decided to buy the photograph, partly because there are so few pictures of the artist in the public domain, but also because I found the story behind it intriguing.

This is my translation of the French text accompanying the photo:

In 1914 the Belgian artist and painter Gerard Ceunis organised an exhibition of paintings at Nieuport. The war came, the canvasses stayed at Nieuport where, one day, the English General Maitland took care of the said paintings by sending them to London, without knowing the name of the artist. The latter, with a view to his current exhibition at the Arlington Gallery, created from memory one of the paintings taken by General Maitland. During the opening of the exhibition the similarity of the subject struck of one the general’s officers and this is how the artist was able to come into possession of his missing works.

The photo shows GERARD CEUNIS NEXT TO THE PAINTING IN QUESTION WITH A PLAQUE FROM THE MAIN SQUARE OF NIEUPORT.

Nieuport – Nieuwport in Flemish – is a coastal town in West Flanders, Belgium, about 15 miles south-west of Ostend/Oostende, and about 50 miles west of Ghent/Gent. So far, I’ve been unable to find any information about any exhibitions held there in 1914. Gerard Ceunis fled to England with his wife Alice and young daughter Vanna soon after war broke out and Germany invaded his homeland in the summer of that year.

I’ve been unable to find any information about a ‘General Maitland’ who served in Belgium during the First World War. I wonder if the reference is actually to Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Fuller Maitland Wilson (1859 – 1941), a senior British Army officer who served with distinction in Flanders, France and later in Salonika? Perhaps the plaque from the Groote Markt / Grand Place in Nieuwport, on display in the photo, was a wartime souvenir brought back from Flanders by the general or one of his officers?

Ceunis’ exhibition at the Arlington Gallery, in Old Bond Street, London, took place in 1929. It apparently featured 60 of the artist’s paintings and was opened by none other than the Belgian ambassador. According to one source, the gallery, which had only been in operation for six years, ‘appears to have attracted the lesser-known artists of the period who probably found difficulty in getting shows at the bigger galleries either because it was felt they were not famous enough names or perhaps the other galleries took too great a commission.’

The typed text accompanying the photo is on a separate piece of paper, glued to the back of the copy which I purchased, which also bears the stamp of what seems to have been its place of origin – Photo ‘Actualite’ G. Champroux in Rue Royale, Brussels.  Intriguingly, it turns out that Georges Champroux (1899 – 1983) was a leading Belgian photojournalist, famous for a series of black-and-white photographs of Brussels at night. I assume that he was given the assignment to cover the story of the restoration of Gerard Ceunis’ paintings by a Belgian newspaper from which, perhaps, the text attached to my copy is taken. It would certainly have made for an eye-catching human interest story in Ceunis’ home country.

I suspect that the Arlington Gallery exhibition was one of the high points of Gerard Ceunis’ artistic career. I’m intrigued by the painting in the foreground, which I’ve not seen before and which appears to be of superior quality to many other works of his that I’ve seen. I’d be interested to see a full-colour reproduction, and to discover what became of it and of the other paintings in the exhibition.

Lilian Hall-Davis and the Pemberton family in Hitchin: an update

After writing my post last year about the possible descendants of the silent film star Lilian Hall-Davis (the focus of a lifelong obsession for Gerard Ceunis’ friend, the Flemish novelist Johan Daisne), I sought information via a number of Hitchin-based Facebook groups. For some reason I never got around to posting the responses I received, but a recent comment on that last post has prompted me to do so, rather belatedly.

As I wrote back then, Lilian’s only son, Grosvenor Pemberton, married a woman from Hitchin by the name of Cynthia Orson and they lived at 2 Waltham Villas, which was on the corner of St John’s Road, just a short walk from the Ceunis home on Gosmore Road. Their only son, Berkeley William Howard Pemberton, was born there in 1943. Here are some of the responses I received to my request for information about him, which contradict some of my earlier tentative conclusions:

There was a Howard Pemberton who lived in St John’s Road. He was friends with my brother-in-law. He worked in Hitchin but left to live in South Africa, I last saw him in Jo’burg during the early 1990s…I know he went with a lady from the bakers in the High Street. He was an unusual character but I always found him very friendly…I think Jean Redman was with Howard in South Africa. (Anthony Bone)

I was at Bessemer School [in Hitchin] in the ‘50s and knew a Howard Pemberton, who I recall lived near St John’s Road. Could he have been related? We always thought of him as being ‘a bit posh’ at the time, but he was a great lad, full of energy!…I have a feeling he emigrated to South Africa. Another pupil from Bessemer…mentioned him when I was writing my book on Bessemer school. (Robert Prebble)

Howard came to my wedding in 1982 with Jean Redman…He was a regular fixture in The King’s Arms in the early 80s. Although I didn’t know him well he was a dapper and charming man in the old-fashioned sense. (Nick Stevens)

Howard Pemberton died in South Africa about 10 years ago…Never married. (Keith Porter)

So it would seem that, sadly, Lilian Hall-Davis has no surviving descendants who might help to solve the mystery of her possible residence in Hitchin…

Ceunis in the kitchen?

On a recent visit to North Hertfordshire Museum, we discovered that Gerard Ceunis has received an important accolade: one of his paintings (of Hitchin market place) has been turned into a souvenir tea towel!

Lilian Hall-Davis in Hitchin? A continuing mystery

Almost two years ago I wrote a post about an exhibition of Gerard Ceunis’ paintings in Hitchin, probably in the 1950s, which included a portrait of the English silent film star, Lilian Hall-Davis, who tragically took her own life in 1933. Shortly afterwards, a monochrome reproduction of the portrait was included in a package of items kindly sent to me from Belgium by the artist’s great niece, Elise De Cuyper.

Portrait of Lilian Hall-Davis by Gerard Ceunis

I already knew that the Belgian poet and novelist Johan Daisne (the pen name of Herman Thiery, 1912 – 1978), who had visited the Ceunis family at their home in Gosmore Road, Hitchin, in the summer of 1929 and developed a lifelong, unrequited passion for Gerard and Alice’s daughter Vanna, was also somewhat obsessed with Lilian Hall-Davis. Together with Vanna, and a number of idolised and idealised women, she had featured in his novels Lago Maggiore and Six Dominoes for Women.

Johan Daisne (via en.wikipedia.org)

Later, thanks to Johan Vanhecke’s comprehensive biography of Daisne, I learned more about the latter’s lifelong fascination with Hall-Davis. Johan also kindly sent me some extracts from Daisne’s book Filmathiek, a collection of his writings on cinema, which included further information, as well as some of the poems that Daisne had written about the actress. In that post, I recounted the astonishing story of how Daisne had written an article about Hall-Davis in a Belgian newspaper, which Gerard Ceunis came across purely by accident, after a copy was used to wrap an object sent to him by a shop in Ghent, and how Ceunis then wrote to Daisne to inform him  that the film star’s only son, Grosvenor Pemberton, was actually a neighbour and friend of the Ceunis family in Hitchin. Lilian Hall-Davis had married fellow actor Walter Icke Pemberton in 1918 and their son Grosvenor Charles was born in 1919. The Pemberton family’s origins were in Shropshire, and Grosvenor was apparently named after his grandfather Grosvenor Hooke Pemberton.

Apparently, Grosvenor Pemberton then sent Daisne some information about his late mother which the latter planned to include in a book about her, which sadly he never quite got around to writing. The most surprising piece of information that Daisne gleaned from these communications was that, according to him, Lilian Hall-Davis had actually been living in Hitchin, close to the Ceunis home, when he visited in 1929. In Daisne’s words:

She spent the last years of her life in Hitchin; she was there that time when I stayed at my friends’ villa; as I roamed around Hitchin, beside her garden hedge, perhaps under her weary gaze.

My own research has failed to find any evidence to confirm that Lilian Hall-Davis ever lived in Hitchin. The only Hertfordshire address I’ve been able to find for her is a cottage that she once owned in the village of Amwell, near Ware, some 20 miles from Hitchin. Nevertheless, I remain intrigued by the possibility that she lived here and retain a hope that, somehow, it might turn out to be true.

Searching for information on Ancestry and other websites, I discovered that Grosvenor Pemberton lived at 2 Waltham Villas, which the records describe as being on St Johns Road in Hitchin, but which is actually on the corner of that road and what is now Eynsford Court. It’s just a short walk from there to ‘Salve’, the former home of Gerard Ceunis, and would have been even quicker before the Park Way bypass and Three Moorhens roundabout sliced through the latter’s former garden.

2 Waltham Villas, Hitchin (via google.co.uk/maps)

According to the records I’ve found, Grosvenor Charles Pemberton, then 23 and serving with the Royal Artillery, married Cynthia Joyce Orson, 22, who was working at a ‘radio works’ and living with her parents at 2 Waltham Villas, at Hitchin Register Office on 6^th December 1942.  Cynthia’s father William Harold Orson was a clerk with the Post Office.

I’ve also found evidence that Grosvenor and Cynthia Pemberton had a son, Berkeley William Howard Pemberton, who was born at 2 Waltham Villas on 27th November 1943. I wonder if the name ‘Berkeley’ was another Pemberton family throwback? Berkeley Pemberton seems to have been married twice. In 1971 he married Loraine Batchelor in Hampstead, and in 1979 he married Cynthia Rose Newman at Hitchin Register Office. Both bride and groom were said to have had their previous marriages dissolved. On both occasions, Berkeley Pemberton is described as a ‘publishing executive’. His second wife, Cynthia, is described as a ‘circulation manager (publishing)’, so one assumes that they met through their work. In both 1971 and 1979 Berkeley was living at the Pemberton family home at 2 Waltham Villas in Hitchin.

Grosvenor Pemberton died in 1973 and his wife Cynthia in 1991, both in Hitchin. Coincidentally, the other Cynthia Pemberton, Berkeley’s second wife, also died in 1991, but that was in Ermine, Lincolnshire. Despite extensive searches, I’ve found no further information about Berkeley himself, either about his professional life, or about his family: for example, did he and Cynthia, or he and his first wife, Loraine, have any children, and if so, are they (or perhaps Berkeley himself) still living? I suppose it’s possible that Berkeley discarded his rather unusual first name and used a different name in his professional life?

I would be very interested to hear from anyone with any information about or memories of the Pemberton family in Hitchin, and particularly from anyone who can help resolve the mystery as to whether Grosvenor’s mother, the tragic and enigmatic silent film star, Lilian Hall-Davis, ever lived in the town.

Gerard and Alice Ceunis at ‘Findagrave’

Last week I was contacted by Mike Gallagher who lives in Gosmore and had come across my research on Gerard Ceunis via a local website. Like me, Mike is a keen family historian and, in his words a ‘prolific user’ of the genealogical community website Findagrave, where you can search for the location of your ancestors’ burial. The website relies on individual researchers adding details of graves they have identified, which usually includes copies of inscriptions and photographs of tombstones.

Mike had noticed that there was no entry on Findagrave for either Gerard or Alice Ceunis, and at the same time had seen my photographs on this blog of their grave in the churchyard of St Ippolyts church. He asked whether he might use those photographs to create an entry on the website.

I was only too happy to oblige, and Mike has now created separate entries for Gerard and Alice, marking Gerard’s as belonging to a famous person. You can access the entry for Gerard here and for Alice here.

I’m grateful to Mike for making this information about Gerard and Alice more widely available and for helping to ensure that they are not forgotten.

More on the Ceunis family of Ghent

In an earlier post on this site I wrote about Gerard Ceunis’ family origins in Belgium, drawing on information supplied to me by Elsie De Cuyper, the artist’s great niece. Elise has also sent me some photographs of her grandfather, Florimond Ceunis, who was Gerard’s brother, and has kindly given me permission to share them on this blog.

As I’ve noted before, Gerard Jules Ceunis was born on 8^th December 1884 in Ghent, the youngest of the six children of newspaper typesetter and compositor Prosper Ceunis (1840 – 1897) and his wife Coleta, née Nicaes (1847 – 1931). Gerard’s older brothers and sisters were: Maria (1866 – 1871); Oscar (b. 1871); Charles (1877 – 1925); Florimond (1878 – 1962); and Marie (1878 – 1956).

Florimond and Mathilde Ceunis on their wedding day in 1915

Florimond and Mathilde Ceunis in their garden in 1953

Another photograph of Florimond and Mathilde in their garden

Florimond Ceunis married Mathilde De Vogelaere in 1915. According to Elsie De Cuyper, her grandparents kept a shop in Ghent which sold hosiery and related items, perhaps providing a clue as to why Gerard chose women’s clothing as the focus of his business after his move to England.

Florimond and Mathilde Ceunis’ daughter Bertha, born in 1922, was their only child. She married Roger De Cuyper, an artist who had studied art at the Atheneum in Ostend. Roger and Bertha’s daughter Elsie was born in 1946 and their son Frank Roger Florimond De Cuyper in 1957. As I’ve noted before, Frank is a widely published author of science fiction, under the name of Frank Roger.

Elsie De Cuyper has shared with me some examples of her father, Roger De Cuyper’s work, including the linocut of a snowbound village which Elise sent me on a card last year. She also sent me the photograph, reproduced above, of her father at an exhibition of his paintings.

Elsie is something of an artist herself. Some of her pieces, including the image of a sunset over water, reproduced above, put me in mind of her great uncle Gerard Ceunis’ paintings, and I particularly like the muted colours of the snowy landscape in the picture reproduced on the Christmas card which I received from Elise just the other day:

Clearly, artistic and literary talent have been passed down through the generations in the Ceunis family.

His first exhibition?

The obituary of Gerard Ceunis published in the Hertfordshire Express, following the artist’s death in September 1964, claims that Ceunis’ first professional submission as a painter was in 1912, at the ‘Triennial Salon’, shortly after he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent. However, Christophe Verbruggen, in his highly informative article ‘The winding paths of Gerard Ceunis‘, states that the latter first exhibited professionally in the following year, at the Ghent Salon. Perhaps the two articles are referring to the same exhibition?

Poster for the 1913 International Exhibition held in Gent, Belgium. Printed by J. E. Goossens

(via en.wikipedia.org)

The newspaper obituary goes on to suggest that the first painting by Ceunis to be shown in public was entitled ‘Sunset’. However, I’ve discovered that this was actually the title of the painting that the twenty-nine-year-old artist submitted to the Universal Exposition which was hosted in Ghent in 1913. This was a major international event, with more than a dozen countries participating, and requiring a major programme of building and renovation in the city. The Flemish novelist Stefan Hertmans writes about the ‘Expo’ in his 2013 book Oorlog en Turpentijn (‘War and Turpentine’), which I’m currently reading (and which, incidentally, offers some fascinating insights into life in Ghent in the early twentieth century):

He [the writer’s grandfather] often roams the city, which is being turned upside down for the forthcoming world’s fair. La Grande Expo Internationale is expected to put Ghent on the world map. There is some controversy about the organization of the event and the costs. Early on, the French-speaking bourgeoisie takes the lead, mainly because the Germans are thinking about investing in the event. That incites the rising Flemish bourgeoisie to play the German card, in the knowledge that their German brothers support their struggle against Francophone supremacy in their own city. In short, as the Ghent World’s Fair approaches, German and French interests are already directly opposed. Amid the cacophony of world’s fairs in the early decades of the twentieth century, this is just one more disturbing sign of things to come. No one seems to recognize the squabbling in Ghent as a symbol of anything larger, except perhaps of the Franco-Prussian War forty years earlier and other conflicts of the past. Thanks to pressure from Ghent’s Francophone bourgeoisie, the French ultimately gain the upper hand. The Germans withdraw from the organizing committee and it becomes a completely French-language project, chaotic and poorly managed. No one really has any need for yet another international exhibition, except for the ambitious city of Ghent. The Flemish middle class grumbles, complaining that the enemy is now among Ghent’s own people – with their Francophone arrogance, the haute bourgeoisie are a ‘foreign element’ in the heart of their community. The first tears in the fabric are already visible, in a project that was meant as a show of unity.[1]

The exhibition catalogue, which is in French, lists Gerard Ceunis under ‘Groupe II. Beaux-Arts: Œuvres modernes’, and notes the title of his entry as ‘Coucher de Soleil’ – i.e. ‘Sunset’. In an earlier post, I wrote about Ceunis’ admiration for, and debt to, the Belgian luminist Emile Claus (whom Gerard and his friends had persuaded to be involved in their short-lived literary journal ‘Iris’ some years earlier), whose work included a number of striking paintings of sunsets. Both Ceunis’ granddaughter Tessa Cathcart and his great niece Elsie De Cuyper have sent me copies of an undated picture by Gerard of sunset on a river. I had always assumed this was a drawing, rather than a monochrome version of a painting, but I wonder if there is any connection with the painting Ceunis exhibited in 1913?

The catalogue for the Universal Exposition gives Gerard Ceunis’ address as ‘Rue Mercator, 8’ in Ghent. I assume this is a French rendering of (Geraard) Mercatorstraat, which is just to the north of the old city centre. If so, then the photograph below may show the house where Gerard was living at the time, with his wife Alice, whom he had married two years previously, and their infant daughter Vanna:

Geraard Mercatorstraat 8, Ghent (image via google.co.uk/maps)

The ‘Expo’ closed in November 2013. Within a year, the First World War had broken out, Germany had invaded Belgium, and Gerard Ceunis and his young family had fled to England, which would become their permanent home.

Note

1. From War and Turpentine by Stefan Hertmans, translated by David McKay, published by Penguin Random House UK, London.

The shop in the square revisited

This image, a reproduction of a postcard of Hitchin, showing the market square in 1922, was recently posted on a local Facebook group. I was immediately struck by the fact that the distinctive black-and-white design on the frontage of the shop in the centre of the photograph, which would become ‘Maison Gerard’, owned and managed by Gerard and Alice Ceunis, was already in existence at this date.

In the last post, I shared what appears to be the 1921 census record for the Ceunis family, placing them at a farm in Essex, where Gerard (for some reason using the pseudonym Ernest) was working as a groom and Alice as a housekeeper. It seems unlikely that they would have opened their shop in Hitchin within a year of this, and therefore my pet theory that the shop frontage was designed by Gerard is somewhat undermined.

Hitchin market square – with ‘Maison Gerard’ clearly visible – undated but possibly 1950s?

Gerard Ceunis, ‘Hitchin Marketplace’ (North Hertfordshire Museum)

In another earlier post, I shared my discovery of records which tracked Gerard Ceunis’ ownership of various premises in London in the 1920s and early 1930s. In June 1922, he and an erstwhile business partner dissolved their dressmaking concern in Rathbone Place in the West End, while a commercial directory from 1930 mentions Gerard’s ladies’ dress shop in Church Street, Enfield. However, an Enfield electoral register from the same year gives Ceunis’ home address as 7 Market Place, Hitchin – the site of Maison Gerard. By 1932, his home address had changed to ‘Salve’, the house Gerard built for himself and his family on Gosmore Road, Hitchin, though in 1935 he was still on the register in Enfield, suggesting that he kept his shop there even after opening Maison Gerard in Hitchin.

The site of ‘Maison Gerard’ today

From all of this, it seems likely that Gerard opened Maison Gerard in Hitchin market square in the late 1920s, or by 1930 at the latest. If the date on the postcard is correct, it means that the characteristic frontage, which can still be seen on the premises today, must have been erected by a previous owner. I wonder who that was?

The Ceunis family in the 1921 census

The UK census records for 1921 were recently released by the National Archives, so I’ve been searching online to see if I can find an entry for Gerard Ceunis and his family, who emigrated to England from Belgium during the First World War.

‘Melting Snow at Wormingford’ by John Northcote Nash (Beecroft Art Gallery)

My initial search for Gerard Ceunis’ name produced nothing, but when I searched solely for the surname ‘Ceunis’ I came upon a curious result. I found an Ernest Ceunis living at Rochfords Farm in the village of Wormingford, near Colchester in Essex. On the basis of the first name, I would have dismissed this particular record, if it hadn’t been for the fact that this individual is said to be living with his wife, Alice, and his daughter Jeanne. All three are said to have been born in ‘Ghent, Flanders, Belgium’, and their ages match those of Gerard and Alice Ceunis and their daughter Vanna, who in later life sometimes used the alternative name Jeanne.

‘Ernest’, Alice and Jeanne Ceunis in the 1921 census (via findmypast.co.uk)

Rochfords, Wormingford (via https://themovemarket.com)

In the 1921 census record ‘Ernest’ Ceunis is said to be working as a stud groom and Alice as a housekeeper for Major Cadbury-Brown, a gentleman farmer and former officer in the Royal Horse Artillery whose family, originally from Devon, were apparently part of the Cadbury chocolate clan. Interestingly, I’ve discovered that the Major was the father of the modernist architect Henry Thomas ‘Jim’ Cadbury-Brown, who would have been a child at the time.

H.T. ‘Jim’ Cadbury-Brown (via https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk)

I suppose I had assumed that Gerard and Alice started their clothing business soon after their arrival in England, and that they lived in London before settling in Hitchin, but this census record suggests that they may have pursued other occupations, and lived in other locations, in their early years in England. If ‘Ernest’ is in fact Gerard, then it confirms one’s sense of him as a man of many parts: poet, playwright, philosopher, painter, businessman – and stud groom!

But if this is indeed ‘our’ Ceunis family, I wonder why Gerard felt the need to disguise himself as ‘Ernest’?

A Merry Ceunis Christmas

Wishing all my readers and followers a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

As 2021 draws to a close, I’d like to thank all those who have helped with my research this year, and especially Tessa Cathcart, Elsie De Cuyper, Frank Roger, Johan Vanhecke, Kirmen Uribe, Elizabeth Macklin, Jackie Sablan, Rid Burnett and Ros Allwood.

(Thanks also to Elsie De Cuyper for the images in this post)