Just confirmed: My coffee-table book is now also available in 'Kindred and Company' 851 E 4th Ave, Post Falls, ID

Reuniting the pages of time

by Keith Harrop

Frances Dorothy Beresfield Maule Kerr

I wanted to share a lovely, true tale. It's a bit long, but it's worth it. It may even make you smile a little.

While researching my'Anicurio Collection book, I kept seeing beautiful, petite, pen and ink illustrations and watercolor paintings by an unkown Edwardian English artist, Dorothy B. M. Kerr. They captured the emerging dress sense of both men and women. Particularly the 'new woman' of the Edwardian era. Free-spirited. 

I brought four of her small original watercolor illustrations to inspire me. I inspected them closely to try to unlock the secret of how she could do such fine, delicate work on such a small scale.

I wanted to know more about this mysterious lady.  I then saw illustrations by Dorothy available from various sources, but unfortunately, I found that they were all from three very old, water-damaged sketchbooks which had been cut up, separated, and resold online.  

As an artist, I felt very sad about this. Sketchbooks are very personal to an artist. It's sort of like your diary - very personal.  So I wanted to try my best to reunite the pages with the original sketchbooks. Try to put it all back together again for Dorothy, and it would also help me learn a little more about the artist.

Which brings me to where I am today. I was able to reunite about half the books, totaling 66 pieces. I also acquired an original letter from Dorothy. I feel good about this because its magnificent body of work tells us a great deal about the period.


Dorothy herself remains an enigma to me. I kind of like it that way. I've done my research to the best of my abilities, and all I can find about her is that her drawings are from 1903-05. She would have been 18-20 years old. She studied at art school (rare for a woman at the time) and aspired to be an illustrator before marrying William Arthur Griffiths (born 1881). They had three children, all of whom served in WWII.
The eldest Son was killed in action in 1938 while serving with the Indian Army on the North-West Frontier.

Her second son, Patrick, was killed after boarding a French submarine during Operation Catapult. A controversial operation that pitted the British and French forces against each other.

The younger brother, Guy, led an extraordinary life during the Second World War. On day one of WWII, while flying an aircraft to sink a German U-Boat, his bomb prematurely exploded, killing his co-pilot and forcing him to ditch at 300mph. His plane capsized. Stuck upside down in a sinking craft, his luck held. The crash loosened the engine, which detached and sank from the cockpit.  He was able to swim out through the hole, then was picked up by an Allied ship, only to find out the U-boat he had tried to sink had now captured it. The German commander told him to get back into the water and swim to the U-boat. He did so, climbed aboard, and frantically opened the hatch as a second wave of British warplanes now began spraying the submerging craft, with him still on top.

He was sent to the infamous Stalag Luft III (Immortalized in the film 'The Great Escape.' There, he used his artistic skills to create fake sketches of nonexistent planes and forged documents to confuse Nazi intelligence. He ultimately escaped. But instead of trying to find his way back to England, he calmly strolled into an officers' mess filled with German soldiers and ordered a meal. Seeing him eating alone, he was invited to join the officers. He passed himself off as Hungarian. The Germans later offered him the role of overseeing the Anglo-American POWs. He would then surprise the American soldiers by leading them in the interrogation room, then sneaking them out as free men through the back.


Dorothy's Son, Guy, is 4th from the left. Did you also notice Lt. Peter Butterworth? (2nd. from the right) Later, a successful actor in the legendary 'Carry-On films'.

Guy was also an artist and a budding cartoonist. He held his mother’s sketchbooks until his death in 1999, marking it with his own initials GBK Griffiths 1959. Furthermore, there is a small out-of-place cartoon in one of the books. This puzzled me for a long time. I was eventually able to conclude that it was in fact a drawing from Guy, not Dorothy. I suspect it was an early whimsical addition to her book by her young Son.





(Above) Guy's cartoon I found in one of Dorothy's sketch-books.

I also suspect that a torn letter in this book, written in a different hand, may be from Dorothy's husband, William (but I couldn't swear to it). So that nicely tied their story together, Mother, Father, and Son.
She's a bit frustrating because I see huge progress and potential in her style and confidence in just 2-3 years. Her proportions got better, her pen and ink work was first class, and she clearly studied Charles Dana Gibson and his 'Gibson Girls' style. But seemed to move beyond that and was finding her own signature style. And then it gets frustrating, because she was still so young when she stopped drawing and got married. She always wanted to be a book illustrator.  I don't know how Dorothy's story ends, but I like that, in her letter thanking a cousin for a financial loan to continue her art classes, she ends by saying, "I do hope I'm going to get on and do something."

 Biographical Profile

  • Full Name: Frances Dorothy Beresford Maule Kerr (later Griffiths).
  • Birth: Circa 1883–1885.
  • Family Origins: Born into a middle-class military family with significant social standing. She was the great-granddaughter of Sir William Drysdale.
  • Education: Unusually for a woman of her era, she attended art school (likely in London or the Southeast) around 1900–1902.
  • Marriage: Married William Arthur Griffiths (born 1881), a senior Admiralty civil servant, likely between 1905 and 1910.
  • Death: 1974 (Registered in the Chichester/West Sussex area).



I would like to extend my thanks to:
John Dell of Dingeraviation.net for his assitance in research of Lt Guy B.K. Griffiths.
A detailed account of his daring wartime excapades can be found here:
The sinking of the SS Fanad
Guy's great escape


If anyone reading this has any of Dorothy's works for sale or any information on her at all, please let me know. 

 

 

 

 

 


 


 

 

 

(Above) 

My favorite piece in the whole collection. A couple of drawings of liberated women doing exactly what was frowned upon in the Victorian era.

In the late Victorian era, the term "The Revolt of the Daughters" (and its subsequent label: "Revolting Daughters") referred to a significant social movement in the 1890s where middle-class young women began to rebel against the strict domestic restrictions of their parents.
The 'Revolting Daughter' comment was a clever wordplay. Critics used the term "Revolting Daughters" as a double entendre: Women were staging an uprising against the traditional family structure, and socially their behavior was seen as "revolting" (repulsive) to the "Natural Order" of womanhood.

The phrase was popularized by an influential article titled "The Revolt of the Daughters" written by B.A. Crackanthorpe in January 1894
Sadly, the hole in the page cuts away part ofthe strong image. I believe the missing words preceding 'a schorcher' were: 'Phew, what a scorcher!' This was a popular newspaper headline in Britain. It was rolled out every time there was a heatwave. I remember even in the 1970's and 80's newspapers papers still used it.

The other side of the hole has traces of a watercolor design around its edges. I believe that Dorothy probably painted something and unfortunately, cut it out to make a round cameo piece.



 Dorothy was entering into a financial loan agreement with a friend or family member. This was to fund her art school lessons. 'I do hope I am going to get on and do something and not waste all this great deal of money.'......I wonder why this letter was never sent?

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