Austin Andrew Wright

Following his teacher training his first post was at The Downs, the Malvern College preparatory school, in 1934, where he taught painting and sculpture as well as French and German.

“approached Henry Moore for advice and encouragement, and recalled being told, quite bluntly, just to get on with it.” He branched out into teaching art, subsequently moving to The Mount, where he met Sue Midgley.

By the end of the war, and the conclusion of her training at the Central School of Speech and Drama, they married and moved, in 1946, into the 1793 house on the Green at Upper Poppleton that would become integral to his work.

One of his best-known works, Two Rings, which sat on Roppa Moor, Helmsley, was assumed to have been (in the words of Wright’s widow, Sue) “removed by the “metal merchants of Middlesbrough”, to melt them down for scrap”.

[5] As Timothy Rogers wrote in Wright’s obituary in the Guardian: “Diffident, modest, as quick to discount praise as to make light of disappointment, deeply rooted in his adopted Yorkshire, he was no more willing to court favours from the metropolis than were London critics to travel north.”[This quote needs a citation] Michael Lyons wrote in Sculpture in 1997 that: “… it was also true that he could have been better known and many people were aware of this.

Over exposure would have destroyed his talent and I think he knew it”[This quote needs a citation] A fuller obituary can be found in The Independent, written by James Hamilton.