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The Pipers of Fawley Bottom
John Egerton Christmas Piper, son of a solicitor,
was born in 1903 in Epsom when it was still the
countryside. His was an idyllic childhood in the
carefree days before the Great War: a boyhood of
bicycle rides and river swims. At a young age Piper
made guide books illustrated with his own drawings
of churches and monuments. A natural topographer,
later in life he would collaborate on the Shell series
of county guide books with his great friend John
Betjeman.
Piper’s father was keen for his son to follow in his
footsteps as a provincial lawyer and reluctantly but
loyally the young man obeyed but his heart wasn’t
ever in the law. After his father’s death in 1926
John Piper left the family firm to train as an artist.
Initially rejected by the Royal College of Art in
South Kensington he finally won a place there to
study painting having honed his skills for a few
years at the Richmond and Kingston Schools of Art.
At the start of the 1930s Piper became passionate
about abstract, meeting and admiring the works of
Henry Moore, Howard Hodgkins, Ben Nicholson
and Barbara Hepworth and even travelling to Paris
to meet Brancusi and Bracque. Although by the end
of the decade he would return to the representational
landscapes that occupied his youth, this interest in
the avant-garde was to serve him well for it would
be instrumantal in finding the love of his life – the
art critic and, later, librettist Myfanwy Evans.
Myfanwy Evans was born in 1911 in Hampstead, the
only child of a Welsh father who traced his roots to the
Welsh dairy farmers who had come to London and
settled with their herds in the rich pastures of the River
Fleet and a mother who traced her family to the
Huguenots. Myfanwy Evans was one of the first
women to graduate from Oxford University. In the
1930s she had been much taken with the new abstract
painting of Mondrian and Kandinsky in Paris and in
her first years with John Piper she would promote them
and the emerging young British avant-garde, founding
and editing a short-lived art magazine called
Axis.
As a student Myfanwy had enjoyed art reviews by
John Piper in the New Statesmen but their first meeting
was quite by chance. In the summer of 1934 Myfanwy
accepted an invitation from the artist Ivon Hitchens to
spend a weekend on the Suffolk Coast at Sizewell
about half way between Southwold and Aldeburgh.
She was met at the train station by another house guest,
John Piper and it is no exaggeration to say that it was
love at first sight. In truth many men were instantly
smitten by Myfanwy but this was mutual and instead
of going straight to their host the pair swam at Sizewell
Beach drying themselves by running along the beach.
Hitchens was by all accounts furious by their late
arrival but their romantic meeting was ever after
marked by their future friends Benjamin Britten and
Peter Pears who always raised their hats to the Pipers
when driving over the Sizewell level crossing.
(c) Michael Ward