Derek Gardner, British Marine Painter: A Life Lived
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Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 12/02/2007 Telegraph
Derek Gardner, who died yesterday aged 92, was one of
the foremost exponents of British marine painting.
The crowning moment of his career came in 2005, the
bicentenary year of the Battle of Trafalgar, when an
exhibition of his work, including paintings of every ship in
which Nelson served, was held at Messum's gallery in Cork
Street, Mayfair. The show was a great success, as was the
accompanying book, Nelson's Ships: A Trafalgar Tribute,
which sold well on both sides of the Atlantic.
Gardner had himself seen action at sea during the
Second World War, in the Atlantic, the Arctic, the
Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. When serving in the
destroyer Broke in 1942, at the storming of Algiers, he was
wounded, and it was the partial deafness that resulted from
this that was to lead him to take up painting full time.
Derek George Montague Gardner was born in
Buckinghamshire on February 13 1914, the son of a civil
engineer who at the end of the Great War became docks
engineer for the Great Central Railway at Grimsby. As a boy
Derek often went with his father to look at the ships. "Even
as an eight-year-old I was transfixed," he recalled years
later.
In 1928, when Derek was 14, his father became chief
engineer of the Port of Glasgow and the Clyde Navigation
Trust; this was when Clydeside was the world's greatest
shipbuilding centre, and Derek was in his element. From
childhood he had been fascinated by civil engineering and
had enjoyed sketching ships and the sea. At Oundle he won
the school prize for drawing and absorbed the lessons of Sir
Charles Holmes's Notes on the Science of Picture Making.
He left school in 1931 to train in Glasgow as a civil
engineer, first with the London Midland & Scottish Railway
and later in the drawing office of Sir William Arrol & Co,
the firm which built the Forth Bridge.
At 20 he joined the RNVR as a midshipman, and he began
to paint watercolours of the warships in which he might
serve. He also read Robert Southey's Life of Nelson,
igniting a lifelong interest in Britain's greatest naval
hero and in the broad sweep of naval history.
In 1938 Gardner was appointed assistant docks engineer
at North Shields on the Tyne, another important shipbuilding
centre and a transit point for coal en route from Durham and
Northumberland to London.
In August 1939 he was called up by the Royal Navy.
From inspecting vessels in Scapa Flow, he was posted to
Broke as an anti-submarine officer. Broke escorted Atlantic
and Arctic convoys before being sent to the Mediterranean to
assist in the North African landings.
Along with the destroyer Malcolm, Broke was to secure
the port facilities and power station at Algiers, and to
prevent sabotage by the occupying Vichy French forces. "We
charged the boom at 25 knots just as daylight was coming,
expecting it to be mined," Gardner remembered. "But there
was no explosion. We broke the boom and landed our troops,
but the French brought up mortars and guns and we came under
heavy fire. I went ashore to deal with a blazing warehouse.
"As the ship was a sitting target alongside the quay,
the only course was to retire. This we then did under
intense gunfire, sustaining many hits as we cleared the
harbour."
The next day, making for Gibraltar, Broke sank. The
destroyer Zetland rescued everyone on board and returned
them to a now-pacified Algiers. The crew then headed for
England in convoy aboard a Dutch liner. The aircraft carrier
directly ahead was torpedoed, sinking with all hands.
Gardner was mentioned in dispatches for his role in
the storming of Algiers, from which he emerged with a loss
of hearing in one ear due to the ferocity of the gunfire.
In 1943 he joined the destroyer Highlander for the
decisive battle of the Atlantic, before his deafness
compelled him to abandon service at sea.
He was promoted to lieutenant-commander, joining the
staff of Admiral Sir Max Horton, C-in-C Western Approaches,
in Liverpool. At the end of the war in Europe he attained
the rank of acting commander, and he served as Assistant
Chief Staff Officer Ceylon, in Colombo, until the end of
1946.
Gardner then joined the colonial civil service and was
posted to Kenya, where he met his future wife, Mary, at a
dance in Mombasa. In 1951, when Gardner became regional
engineer for western Kenya, the couple moved to Kisumu on
the shores of Lake Victoria.
There followed five years at Nakuru, in the Rift
Valley, where the Gardners' house stood on the edge of the
extinct volcano crater that contains a huge soda lake with a
shimmering pink fringe from thousands of feeding flamingos.
Gardner, who had made watercolour sketches of naval vessels
during the war, now painted oils, watercolours and pastels
of local scenes.
Calamity came with an attack of tick typhus, which
destroyed the hearing in his good ear and with it his civil
engineering career; so in 1963, on the eve of Kenyan
independence, the family returned to England with no clear
idea of what the future might hold.
While restoring an old thatched cottage in Dorset,
Gardner worked on his painting, now concentrating on the
subject he loved best: ships and the sea. In due course his
paintings were seen at many exhibitions in London, and he
was acclaimed for his attention to historical detail and for
his scintillating depictions of sky, weather and water. As
shows and sales increased he built himself a fine studio,
and would work all day at his easel before, every evening,
immersing himself in books on naval history.
Derek Gardner is survived by his wife and by their son
and daughter.
To view some of his beautiful paintings::
http://www.jackfineart.com/gardn.htm
http://www.cranston-military-prints.co.uk/gardner.htm