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The story of George Jeffery: 40 years of screeving!
IN LONDON—Artist sketching artist on the Thames Embankment one blustering morning in winter was too much for the curiosity of the occasional riverside strollers, particularly as one of the artists happened to be chalking a series of colourful pictures on the stone flags.
And so large a crowd came to stare that George Jeffery, pavement artist, had an audience, such as he has rarely had since the days before trams, when Londoners walked and knew the pavements all too well. George Jeffery, you see has been painting pictures on the Embankment since 1897.
Anyone who cares to draw on the pavement in London may do so, provided he does not impede the progress of pedestrians. It is a right which has never been questioned. Pavement artistry is a traditional temporary occupation for many jobless men, and for numerous others it is a complete career.
The oldest established members of this fraternity of the sidewalk academy are “characters,” well known to Londoners. There is, for instance, the ‘Gallery Man’, who chalks on the stone flags at various points copies of famous pictures and inscribes besides each a neatly written potted history. And then, at Hyde Park Corner, there is a cheery fellow who intersperses his pictures with comic comment on the world at large.
Illustration of George Jeffery: as published in The Christian Science Monitor 1937
But George Jeffery is the veteran of them all. Kneeling there on the Embankment he told how he had walked from Portsmouth to take up his career as a pavement artist and how that career had served him well enough to bring up three children. “There’s only mother and me at home now, and our granddaughter,” he said. “It’s difficult at this job nowadays, but we manage. But the children are doing well for themselves, Very well.”
He stared reflectively ahead of him, perhaps remembering his first clumsy efforts on the pavement, back before the beginning of the century, “I found out it’s not near so easy as it looks,” he declared, with a shake of his head, “not near so easy, I couldn’t do it at all to start with; had to start at the bottom, so to speak, with a herring on a plate. But I learnt from others and by observing. I reckon I always find how to do these pictures a bit better every day. You can always learn something new.”
His pictures were flowers and landscapes. He was rather sorry he had not done his “best work” that particular day. “You ought to see my Dartmoor, studies of the moors. I got a lovely heather colour, look.” And he worked one of his chalks on the pavement. He makes all his own colours, baking thick slabs in “Mother’s oven, you know.”
George Jeffery reckons he makes out all right because he knows how to save. “I put a shilling by here and there, for the wet days.” The “rainy day” Is no mere metaphor to the pavement artist. It is a very real thing, and, in London, occurs rather too frequently. But George makes out, because, he says, he does not spend any money on drink. He tucks it away, “to surprise mother.”
And, so every day he sits on one heel, in the shadow of the Embankment making pictures on the stone paving. It takes two or three hours to get the work finished, and each evening the pavement must be scrubbed clean. That is all that the police ask of him, and he is very conscientious about it……
Published in the Christian Science Monitor: 27th November 1937
Researched and transcribed by Philip Battle
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