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Your loving friend, Stanley: The Great War Correspondence Between Stanley Spencer and Desmond Chute

This is the first book to collect the illustrated correspondence between Stanley Spencer and Desmond Chute. Chute (1895-1962) was an assistant to Eric Gill, becoming involved in the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic. He later became a Catholic priest in 1927, moving to Italy where he was a friend of Ezra Pound. The young Spencer met Chute whilst serving as an orderly in the Beaufort Military Hospital, Bristol during the First World War. Their friendship, which lasted until the late 1920s, had a profound influence on Spencer’s intellectual and spiritual development.

Your loving friend Stanley is based on interviews with family members, archive research and visits to sites associated with Spencer. Although these thirty-one letters had been reproduced previously in short extracts in Spencer literature, this is the first book to transcribe all the letters. All the illustrated letters are reproduced in facsimile. In a series of introductory essays, ‘Stanley Spencer at war and peace’, Gough contextualises the correspondence, discusses its importance to Spencer and provides previously unpublished information about the Chute family. The book was published in co-operation with the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham, and launched there with two lectures by Gough in July 2011.

In addition to transcribing the letters from the original, the book and the essays developed a number of themes first articulated in Gough’s ‘Journey to Burghclere’ (2006) and elaborated through a series of refereed articles, conference papers and further essays, in particular ‘The Artist at War: ‘A Very dangerous type of spectator’, an extended essay for Kingsley Baird’s catalogue at the National Army Museum, Waiouru, New Zealand. Your loving friend, Stanley was reviewed in Galleries Magazine (July 2011) by Philip Vann, who described ‘This gem of a book …’, and by David Lee in The Jackdaw (October 2011).