Stop and Look – Convoy Arriving with Wounded by Stanley Spencer (1927)

The Sandham Memorial Chapel at Burghclere in Hampshire is an extraordinary place. It was built between 1924 and 1927 by Louis and Mary Behrend in memory of Mary’s brother Lieutenant Henry Willoughby Sandham, who had died just after the First World War from wounds received on military service in Macedonia. The Behrends had asked Stanley Spencer to decorate it, and he was able to dictate the proportions of the building and the layout of the paintings in it.

They wanted to call it an “Oratory” — a place of private devotion — but Spencer saw it as a more public monument, a modern version of Giotto’s famous Arena Chapel in Padua, and a “Chapel” it eventually became.

Spencer had served in the Macedonian campaign himself, and scenes from it formed one thread of the scheme he devised for the Chapel. Another was the Beaufort War Hospital outside Bristol where he had served as a medical orderly. Many of the subjects that he painted depict life in the hospital, and particularly the day-to-day chores of the staff there, and the routines of the patients — the wounded soldiers, their treatment, the dressing of their injuries and so on.

The walls of the Chapel are twenty-one feet high. A large and moving Resurrection of the Soldiers fills the whole of the end wall behind the altar. On the side walls are two sequences of tall, round-arched panels with beneath the main subjects a succession of “predella panels” depicting men performing chores or enduring their treatment: bed-making, scrubbing the floor, washing lockers, filling tea-urns, moving kit-bags.

Spencer’s view of these tasks was deeply religious; he saw them all, and the soldiers who performed them, as suffused with a sort of holy joy. The seventeenth-century poet George Herbert had famously described the sanctity of commonplace acts in his poem, The Elixir:     

All may of Thee partake:
         Nothing can be so mean,
Which with his tincture—”for Thy sake”—
         Will not grow bright and clean.

         A servant with this clause
         Makes drudgery divine:
Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws,
         Makes that and th’ action fine.

Spencer interpreted the War Hospital as a kind of Purgatory. It had been built by the Victorians as a lunatic asylum and was grim enough. He described the actual gates of the place as: “high and massive as the gate of hell … a vile, cast iron structure…”But for him, it’s not a case of ‘abandon all hope, ye who enter.” His gates don’t look anything like that.

His view is more matter-of-fact since ordinary fact is sacred. His picture of the opening of the hospital gates to receive a bus-load of wounded men is constructed in a tightly confined space, so that we seem to hear the scrape of the iron bars on the gravel, the squeak of the hinges. Everything is almost shockingly close at hand.

The bus, squeezed so tight among blossoming hedges that it looks hardly able to move forward, is reminiscent of a charabanc crammed with holiday-makers. The two men opening the gates are in everyday clothes (one has a bunch of keys on his belt) and are just doing their job. Life inside will be difficult, uncomfortable in many ways, but the aim is to extend compassion to people who have suffered: to let them in. Perhaps there’s a contemporary message here, too.

The Chapel passed into the care of the National Trust in 1947 and is open to the public, well worth an inspiring visit.

Stanley Spencer’s Convoy Arriving with Wounded canvas at the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Burghclere.

Andrew Wilton was the first Curator of the Clore Gallery for the Turner Collection at Tate Britain and is the author of many works on the artist.