The Plymouth Rubens
Fifty years ago, I was the editor of the Sunday Times Magazine.
My brief from the editor of the paper, Harry Evans, was to make it more British, more fun, more stories.
One day in 1976, I got some transparencies from a Plymouth journalist, Allen Saddler. They were by a 49-year-old landlady, Beryl Cook, who was showing her paintings for the first time, at Plymouth Arts Centre.
I looked at them and laughed. Not often did I smile at any of our colour-mag pix. I took them to the art department and said, ‘Look, aren’t these funny?’
The art editor flicked through them on his lightbox and said, ‘Derivative, naive, amateur… The seasides of Britain are filled with Sunday-afternoon painters doing this sort of boring stuff. Next!’
I went back to my desk, furious. I had bowed to the art department’s visual wisdom for two years, as I know bugger all about photography and design.
This time, though, I said, ‘Hard cheese. I am the editor of this mag. We are using them in the next edition.’
I rang the landlady myself, just to check she existed. I talked to her about her life, and asked the freelance to do a proper interview.
Her first press interview turned out to be gripping.
‘I’ve always thought people might be offended,’ she said, pointing out portraits of robust women in a Plymouth pub. ‘I think they’re lovely, but I do realise that other people don’t see things in the same light, do you see?’
She pointed to the bowlers (above) on Plymouth Hoe, in white skirts, blouses, and straw hats, goosing each other. ‘I get bored very quickly – so I like to do something to brighten things up,’ Beryl said of the goosing. ‘And I’m very fond of design – the way they go round.’
There could be a darker side. There was one picture of her at the beach at Looe, stabbing tourists, ‘I’d had enough of them that year. So I decided to finish them off.’
Self-taught, she had come to painting in middle age. Born in Surrey on 10th September 1926, she left school at 14 and for a while was a chorus girl in a travelling show.
She had begun painting in 1964 in what was then Salisbury, Rhodesia, where her husband, John Cook, formerly of the merchant navy, was a car-sales manager. He’d given her a children’s painting kit to stave off boredom.
She proceeded to do a picture of a lady with large breasts, standing behind a shelf. John called it ‘Hangover’.
‘After that, I didn’t paint any more,’ Beryl told the Sunday Times. ‘I didn’t think it was necessary. I pinned it on the wall and thought it was quite satisfactory.’
They came back to Looe in Cornwall in 1965. It was only when they moved to Plymouth, six years later, to run a boarding house that she got the painting kit out again.
She was fascinated by her guests – people on their hols having seaside fun. She loved the graffiti in bus shelters and included them in her paintings – ‘I shagged a froggy’, ‘Steve loves Bum’, ‘Jimmy Carter pees the bed’.
She told the Sunday Times about those first pictures, ‘By this time, I realised that I could at least fill in the whole page. I thought that was quite an achievement, to do the backgrounds too.’
Beryl began painting on driftwood. ‘Everybody else was painting. You know what they’re like in Cornwall.’
Three-plywood turned out to be best: ‘If it’s going to warp, it does it straight away. When I’ve finished, I put them on the wall and knock four nails straight through them, one in each corner. That’s my treatment for them. It soon straightens them out.’
Her no-nonsense treatment meant she squeezed paint straight from the tube – mixing ‘makes everything muddy’. She added, ‘I think that colours look brighter to me than they do to other people.’
She was completely vanity-free. The interviewer asked her if the Old Masters had any influence on her. ‘Rubens?’ he suggested.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’ll start signing them B Rubens.’
In the end, we used eight of her paintings across five pages – including the magazine cover. Because she was unknown, she was unnamed – identified on the cover only as ‘a seaside landlady’.
I wrote the headline, which I was quite pleased with – ‘Plymouth Ho Ho’.
The reaction from readers was terrific. They agreed that Beryl Cook was funny and irreverent. She was also a social commentator, showing real British seaside life at the time – pubs, bingo halls, drag shows, fat women on the beach.
The following week, the Portal Gallery in the West End rang us, trying to track her down and take her on.
For the next 20 years or so, her work seemed to be everywhere – on postcards, greetings cards, calendars.
Melvyn Bragg did a South Bank Show on her. As a working-class lad, brought up in a pub, he recognised her subjects.
In a newspaper poll, she was voted the most popular artist in the country.
Yet the art establishment continued to be sniffy about her pictures. Perhaps this was because her subject was working-class life: in pubs, bingo halls, gay bars, drag shows, a dwarf dancing in a pub, women on the beach spilling out of their cossies – exaggerated in a way, but affectionate.
She gave us a laff, unlike the revered painters of the day such as Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. She did get an OBE in 1995 – acceptance at last. She died in 2008, aged 81.
When I looked at her paintings for sale, featured in that article, there was one I particularly liked.
Reminiscent of Donald McGill’s saucy postcards, Three Girls in Bikinis showed them, eyes closed, spread out flat in the garden (above).
It reminded me of my sisters in the backyard of our Carlisle council house in the fifties, trying desperately to get a tan.
I offered to buy it from her. She hadn’t sold many so far – just 10 out of 70, selling for around £45. I paid £20 – as it wasn’t very big and was done on hardboard.
A couple of weeks ago, I got a visit from a radio crew doing a Radio 4 documentary about her for her centenary in September. They had dug out the Sunday Times piece that sparked off her career.
As we stood looking at my painting of the sunbathers, I suddenly noticed something I had missed for 50 years.
Next to the sunbathing women, there was a plant pot. Going close up, I realised there was a tiny image on it. It looked like a face. The radio presenter, Louisa Buck, identified the face. It was Beryl Cook.
She had included herself in the painting, as a private joke. I wanted to ring my late wife, the novelist Margaret Forster, up in heaven, and tell her.
Very stupidly, we had it hanging for a few years in our kitchen conservatory. The woman at the top originally had a bright red bikini. The sun has faded it to a dull orange. Tut tut.
Not that it bothers me – or my children. They argue about who will inherit it when I pop it.
Gawd knows how much it is worth now. These days, an original Beryl Cook can go for £60,000.
Not bad for an amateur Sunday afternoon-painter who couldn’t even afford proper canvas.
Beryl Cook: Pride and Joy is on show at The Box, Plymouth (until 31 May 2026)
