Charles Franklin White
Charles Franklin White (1892-1975) was a highly talented, rather reclusive artist and art teacher who lived for most of his life in a large timber-framed house opposite the school in Church Street. His work found its way into collections including the British Museum and the Ashmolean, Oxford, and into the hands of private collectors like Noel Coward and the Queen Mother.
He came to Britain from near Adelaide, Australia, before the First World War and studied art in Paris and at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. As a student he drew crashed enemy aircraft for the Admiralty and in 1919 landed a job teaching at the Slade. The same year, enchanted by the English countryside, he came with his wife Olga to Shoreham, naming the house he bought “Reedbeds” after the Australian suburb he grew up in.
In the 1920s he started inviting his students down to Shoreham for study weekends, turning Reedbeds into an informal art school. Franklin White (he was always known by these last two names) also started a cycle of sketches and paintings of locals – almost all of them tradesmen and working people, often relaxing in the village’s many pubs. He’d buy them a drink first to put them at ease, and the remarkable results are an unsentimental but compassionate record of Shoreham residents a century ago.
Franklin White shunned most trends in contemporary art and distrusted dealers, preferring that collectors “seek him out” in the words of his obituary in the Times, which added: “He never cared for public life or the towns.” He cared even less for modern advances like phones and television, which he described as “time wasters” in an interview with Kent Life.
He retired – after 38 years at the Slade – in 1957, at around the time of the death of Olga. Reedbeds then became an art school for everyone (or for everyone who could pay a guinea a day for tuition) and a sign outside announced: The Samuel Palmer School of Fine Art. Franklin White ran the school with a former student, Gertrude Granger, whom he married in 1964, and with Edmund, one of his four children with Olga. After Franklin White’s death in 1975, Gertrude kept the school going for a number of years. She died in 2011.
On their gravestone in the churchyard is Franklin White’s tribute to Shoreham and the rural world that inspired him: “It was the cottage gardens, the apple trees and the great barns that kept me in this country and prevented me from returning to Australia.”
You can read more about Franklin White in our booklet “Franklin White’s Shoreham Characters” and in Publication No 38, “Reedbeds: The Lives of a Shoreham House”.
by James Saynor