One such work is his Big Ben the Bargee, showing a bargeman and his wife and completed in June 1943 (National Maritime Museum, London).

Throughout the rest of the war Hailstone travelled through Algiers, Malta and southern Italy, recording the activities of the Merchant Navy in a similar, sympathetic vein.

[2] In June 1945, Hailstone was transferred to the Ministry of Information to record the work of the South East Asia Command during the Burma Campaign.

[4] The Mellon portrait led to several commissions in America which provided the funds to save the tower and some ancillary buildings of Hadlow Castle, where Hailstone had lived from 1951, from demolition.

[9][8] A portrait of South African industrialist Harry Oppenheimer by Hailstone was burned by demonstrators during the Rhodes Must Fall upheaval at the University of Cape Town in February 2016.