Ray Watkinson

Art historian and William Morris enthusiast

Raymond Watkinson, art historian and teacher: born Manchester 17 December 1913; married; died Brighton, East Sussex 13 January 2003.

To describe Ray Watkinson as an art historian will seem to the many who knew him during his long and active life as absurdly reductive. For he was a man of impressively wide interests, with an astonishing range of knowledge, a cultural critic of distinction before that term came into use.

Less than a month before his death Watkinson was able to explain the mysterious initials "PSA" shown on a late-Victorian photograph of a well-groomed group on a boat at Hammersmith Pier as meaning "Pleasant Sunday Afternoons", and to offer some characteristic comments on the likely politics of the group – Watkinson was a lifelong Communist, in the sense of the term in which it was also true of William Morris, whose personality and achievement he so much admired.

Ray Watkinson was someone to whom one could always turn for a piece of recondite information but, more than that, he was an inspiring teacher who shared his enthusiasms with all those with whom he came into contact, either by word of mouth or by letter. Those letters, eccentrically typed on an increasingly ancient machine never superseded by a word processor, were packed with news and opinions articulated with an energy reminiscent of Thomas Carlyle (whose politics he abominated).

He wrote appreciatively about many artists, including the robust William Hogarth and the great Northumbrian engraver Thomas Bewick, but his major books were on the 19th century – William Morris as a Designer (1967), Pre-Raphaelite Art and Design (1970), and, co- authored with Teresa Newman, Ford Madox Brown (1991). These books have helped to shape our understanding of the Victorian period.

Raymond Watkinson was born into a working-class Methodist family in Manchester in 1913, and his abilities took him to Stretford Grammar School and the Manchester School of Art before he began his career as teacher and scholar of the arts and crafts, a career which took him to Poole, Watford (where his politics got him dismissed), Woolwich, Brighton, the London College of Printing, and Goldsmith's College.

In the Thirties, he was active in Aid for Spain and other left-wing groups, and he became art critic of the Daily Worker. During the Second World War, he was involved in drawing technical illustrations at the Avro aircraft factory in Manchester. In later years, Brighton was his place of residence, in a three-storey terraced house convenient for the station, where the visitor would find shelves of books uniformly covered in brown paper, as well as genial hospitality and wide-ranging conversation; he arranged for this remarkable library to go to the University of Brighton.

I first met Ray Watkinson at a conference on William Morris in Loughborough in 1977, where his wide-ranging talk on "Morris as Designer", subtitled "Art, Work and Social Order", delivered with few or no notes, impressed me with its remarkable clarity of both thought and delivery. The relationship that began then was to prove a lasting one, in the course of which I was encouraged in numerous letters to bestir myself on behalf of the Cause – for Watkinson, principally that of Morris the designer and political activist. I must have been one of a very large number who, over the years, found themselves indebted to him for helping them to develop intellectually and personally in response to the vitality of his commitment.

Ray Watkinson was a formative influence on the development of the William Morris Society (founded in 1955), serving for many years on its committee, editing its Journal, and eventually in 1991 becoming its president. He was a Trustee of the William Morris Gallery, of Kelmscott House in Hammersmith and of the Red House in Bexleyheath (recently acquired by the National Trust), as well as chair of the Marx Memorial Library. He resigned the presidency of the society on reaching the age of 80, but to the end of his life continued to offer his advice to the editors of the Journal and to the Honorary Secretaries of the society, advice that was not always followed, but was always recognised as meant to keep its recipients up to the mark set by Morris.

With his impressive beard, Watkinson somewhat resembled his hero, but his trim figure never resembled the stout Morris of Edward Burne-Jones's caricatures. Like Morris, Watkinson strove to encourage a saner attitude to life and politics, and he made a significant contribution to that cause.

Peter Faulkner