Arthur Berry (playwright)
He was born with a crippled arm; as he could not work as a miner or manual labourer, Berry was enrolled at the Burslem School of Art in the city.
[2] During his time at the Royal College the institution was evacuated from Kensington to Ambleside in the Lake District, to escape the German bombing of London during the Second World War.
It was also printed as a text in The Listener magazine (Christmas edition, 20–27 December 1979) and it starts with the lines: Berry wrote an autobiography titled A Three and Sevenpence Halfpenny Man.
The comparison was discussed in two related letters to The Sentinel: From July 2015 to January 2016 a major show titled Lowry and Berry: Observers of Urban Life, displaying works dating from the 1960s to 1994, was held at the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent.
Berry recalls the artistic inspiration he obtained from... "the streets of my early childhood, the moorland landscape, pit villages, public houses, chip shops, night town and later avenue life.
"[7] Lamenting change, he bemoans that, "the old wooden mangle rollers were replaced by rubber wringers, the iron range grate by little fancy tiled affairs, the elegant, slim paper packets of five Woodbines disappeared..."[7] He felt he had been born into a tightly cohesive society, but "the values that had held the working class together began to slowly be eroded.
"[7] He loved a world that was filled with, "a line of shunted coal waggons...wreaths of steam and a smell of gas...youths playing cards at the back of the old knackers yard...old men cough in the betting shops and huge fat women queue in the Co-op...the chain row and pit-head gear.
"[7] This was a "place of empty chapels and aborted kilns", "the window cleaner with wild eyes and a mania for gambling",[7] or indeed "an effeminate man who wears a ginger wig...muttering to himself all day, he pushes an old pram with a bird cage in it.
"[7] and even a visit to the gents could become an inspiring revelation: "as I stand piddling in the crazed urinal stall I can see the red and green tail lights of some night plane moving across this area of infinite velvet over the darkened hoop of the world.
"[11] He was "eloquent in every way...a vigorous and expressive poet...a writer of stories, a dramatist...grotesquely hilarious...[and] an inspiring teacher of art, loved and admired by his students."
"[11] He was really "a painter and poet of the cluttered and dying landscape of pits and ironworks...he writes of that world with unexpected imagery and a great roaring sense of humour, sometimes wry, often grotesque.
These include "a dirty-faced child", [Dandelions, 39] a "chinless creature with slack stockings", [39] and "a baby with a big head and a chalk-white face who didn't look as though it was for this world long".
[41] In a long poem, he describes lots of people one might encounter in a dole office: "the wives of unemployed window cleaners, threadbare dandies, part-time tatooists, ex-bin men with double ruptures, alcoholic chefs, addleheads, pinheads, honest clerks, and loud-mouthed shitheads, with hanging trouser arses, flyboys and water-headed idiots led by their mothers, and reasonable men, genuine victims with polished shoes."
[64] He describes "an old man in a gate hole spits into the cobbled backs and watches a young woman with a fat behind, pinning washing out, in a pair of slacks."
[65] He describes a pub regular called Bernard who "has a small stomach and has difficulty in polishing off a bag of crisps at one go", [67] Love, Berry suggests, "is also often held in silence and sometimes you don't know it's been there till it's gone".
"Local artist, poet and writer Arthur Berry had strong links with Smallthorne and this small display focuses on his paintings, writing and unique sense of humour.
