Robert Colquhoun was one half of ‘The Two Roberts’. He was well known in Soho and Fitzrovia for his hard drinking and relationships with many other Bohemians stranded in London during World War II. But, who is Fred Urquhart I hear you ask and how does he fit in ?
Its a very good question, and one that I would have been unable to answer until quite recently. I purchased a wonderful oil monotype of a head which was signed and dated but incorrectly attributed to a work that post dated this particular piece, so I began to research it. The frame, and the frame of a second work, was in poor condition but had removal company labels verso with two surnames hand written on them . The only other clue I had was that they were from a house clearance in Musselburgh, Scotland and found in a pile of other ‘worthless’ paintings. I began by doing my usual checks without much luck until I pursued the surname Urquhart and the story began to unravel.
Fred Urquhart had died in Musselburgh in 1995 , having moved back to Scotland from East Sussex, but the question was how did his surname come to be on the back of the artwork , what was the correct title of the work and how does he link to Robert Colquhoun? This is what my research revealed .
Frederick Burrows Urquhart was born on 12 July 1912 in Edinburgh. He became a writer and he wrote a number of novels. Fred Urquhart's strength was the short story in which his characters did the talking. He had an ear for all forms of accent and dialect and took ungrammatical yet creative liberties with the language. Although he spent many years in southern England after the war, his creative impulses were rooted in Lowland Scotland: on the Firth of Forth and Clydeside; in coastal Wigtownshire where he was at school for a while; and on Tayside, where he also spent some of his childhood . His stories generally dealt with the lives of ordinary people, and the cruelty and violence of such lives was a constant theme. He was particularly sensitive to the violence dealt out to women, and was able to portray the female psyche with insight and tenderness. The ugliness of war (he was a pacifist) was an extension of these concerns. On leaving school at the age of fifteen he worked for some years in a bookshop in Edinburgh. At the same time he began to write, and from the early 1930s onwards had stories published in periodicals as well as broadcast on the radio. He left the bookshop in 1935 to concentrate on writing. His first published novel was Time Will Knit (1938), the story of working-class Edinburgh life. When war came in 1939 Urquhart, as a declared conscientious objector, was sent to work on the land. It was at this point that his first collection of short stories appeared, I fell for a Sailor (1940).
In 1944 Urquhart was working in England at Woburn Abbey, the estate of the Duke of Bedford, which made a good base for contacting artistic and literary circles in London. It was as a result of working there that Fred was introduced to the Roberts by the Scottish poet Tom Scott during one of his weekend trips from Woburn to London and I gather that he also met George Orwell because of a connection to the magazine "Tribune". He became part of the Scottish contingent of painters, poets and novelist who would erupted into Soho and Fitzrovia on binge drinking evenings at The Wheatsheaf pub in Rathbone place . I am told by his friend Colin Affleck that Fred often reminisced about the Roberts and other figures from his Soho days. Others included W.S. Graham , the Two Roberts, David Archer , Julian Orde and Robert Frame. After the war Urquart lived with his lover and companion, the dancer Peter Wyndham Allen, and had moved into a house in Ashdown Forest in East Sussex in 1958, but when Wyndham Allen died in 1990 Urquhart moved back to Scotland and settled in Musselburgh where he died a few years later.
So that had solved part of my question as to how Urquhart and Colquhoun were linked but I then wanted to find out the true identity of the artwork I had purchased . Working on the presumption that Urquhart had been gifted or purchased the work in the 1940’s I started to trawl the exhibitions . After a good deal of research I was able to track down the exact title ‘Man’s Head’ and dimensions of the piece and the fact that it was lent by Fred Urquhart for the major exhibition of Colquhoun work at The Whitechapel Gallery March - May 1958 and is number 232 in the catalogue .I love the social history wrapped up in the artists lives and the artwork themselves as they are integrally linked , it was a joy to find out the true identity of the artwork and to understand how treasured it must have been as Urquhart had it in every home he lived until the day he died.
The artwork is now looking very well indeed housed in its original period frame but with a new none acidic mount so that it can be enjoyed for another 75 years , or more!