A very SS Great Britain family
We take a look at Kim Hicks and her creative family's connection to the SS Great Britain.
At SS Great Britain Trust we couldn’t be more grateful for the incredible support which Bristolians have given the ship ever since 1970. So many people have committed time and talent, raised funds, shared their expertise, or chosen SS Great Britain as the venue for their special celebrations. In a cast of thousands, the Hicks family stand out for their uniquely creative and inspiring contribution
Jerry and Anne were artists who engaged passionately with the city of Bristol, making their home here in the 1950s after meeting at the Slade Art School in London. They both campaigned to save Bristol’s historic Floating Harbour from destructive development and created site-specific artworks for public buildings and other spaces around the city. Their daughter Kim visited the Trust recently, to share the story of her parents’ project to create a mural on board the ship.
‘Our attachment to the ship started right from the whole story of her being brought home in 1970. My brother Simon and I were with our mum on the Clifton Suspension Bridge as SS Great Britain came up the river, and mum had gathered rose petals from the garden, and we scattered them from the bridge as she went under. Dad and Mum as artists were thrilled when something so beautiful came home – in those days just a rusted hulk, but they could see what it meant to Bristolians to have her back’.
Kim described how the whole family got involved in work to restore the ship as part of Bristol’s heritage. She and Simon helped out with fundraising activities, alongside their parents. When a new function room opened on board the SS Great Britain, Jerry and Anne saw the opportunity to enrich the space by visualizing a scene on deck during an ocean journey.
‘…so the idea began to grow, and once they’d measured up the space, they worked out how many figures to include, they’re just a little bit less than life-size… It was going to be called the Hayward Saloon after Jack Hayward, fantastic benefactor for the ship. So my mum said, “Well, he’s got to be in the mural then, hasn’t he?” And so Jack Hayward came to Bristol specially to have photographs taken.
Sir Jack Hayward, who supported the salvage of SS Great Britain in 1970, is featured ‘on deck’.
And my mum had made my dad this rather wonderful sort of Victorian-looking cloak with several capes across the shoulders. And they thought, “Well, that’s ideal”, they’d put Jack Hayward in that. So he was so sweet, he came and he stood on the top of the ship and they got these pictures of him in my dad’s cloak, ready to be in this group at one end of the mural.’
Jerry and Anne shared the planning, research and preparation, as well as the work of painting. Kim and her two young sons were models for some of the passengers shown enjoying the views from the ship’s deck, and are portrayed alongside Sir Jack Hayward and Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
‘So as a younger woman with my young kids, I would go over to my mum and dad’s house. There they would be in their studio, in a sort of garden room, with these big panels and all down the middle of the room there was a table with all these paints laid out and then brushes and water and you name it. They’d be mixing up colours and initially doing the drawings, drawing out the figures, and then beginning to paint it. They got the whole thing pretty much complete in the studio. And then it was brought on board the ship and mounted on the wall.
And then they completed the work once it was in situ, because obviously as an artist you need to see how it looks in the space and decide whether it needs more vibrancy or brighter colors or whatever. Their styles were similar, they were both realists as painters. I think my father was a slightly tighter painter. So, if you look at the portraits of Brunel and Brereton there, they’re very detailed portraits. My mum’s style is more fluid, has more of a flow through the brushwork. My dad always envied her. She always said she learned everything she knew about painting from him, and yet he envied her more relaxed style, I think.
Once they’d got the two halves up, they needed the mural to have a unity to it. And so, they worked across each other’s work, which is actually quite exceptional. Most artists are not keen on having someone else touch their work. But it was something they were doing together. So I don’t think they touched each other’s portraits, but they worked across one another’s sky and sea-scapes to give it this sense of being one piece of work though by the two artists.’
Kim’s own work as an actor has also taken inspiration from the history of people who travelled on SS Great Britain. After supporting her parents’ work on the mural, she got to know volunteer archivist Jean Young, who had built up a collection of diaries, letters and memoirs written by SS Great Britain passengers and crew between 1845 and 1886. Kim was thrilled by the richness and diversity of their voices. She immersed herself in a project to create a one-woman show which would share the stories of these Victorian voyagers.
Since 1999 Kim has performed “All Aboard, A Triton amongst the Minnows” in venues from Bath’s Ustinov Theatre to village halls to a cruise ship. In 2000 she presented it in Melbourne, Australia to an audience largely made up of descendants of SS Great Britain passengers and then in 2006 performed part of it on board for Simon and his bride when they chose the ship as the venue for their wedding.
Kim has sadly lost both her parents in recent years – but remembers how Anne kept painting right into her nineties, and thinking about the essential connections between place, people and past.
Thank you to Jerry, Anne and Kim, who have all shown how artists can help history stand up and talk to us. As SS Great Britain Trust looks to the future, we are excited by opportunities to work with new creative talent.
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