Fred was running the thriving family business – Broomford Mill – that specialised in spinning lustrous wool for weaving braids for uniforms.

Edward didn't complete his engineering degree but he did learn German and most significantly he studied art in his spare time at the Knirr School.

[5] Wadsworth was now the beneficiary of a £250 a year income – probably via a trust fund set up by his aunt Annie – [6] making him financially independent of his father.

Wadsworth's lecturer in art history at the Slade was Roger Fry who brought the work of European modern artists such as Cezanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh to London in a major exhibition 'Manet and the Post-Impressionists' at the Grafton Galleries towards the end of 1910.

Edward Wadsworth describes him as slowly developing in style and choice of media whilst at the Slade, yet only really making a real aesthetic leap when he met up with Wyndham Lewis.

Vorticism managed to continue into 1915, with a Vorticist exhibition in June at the Doré Gallery and a second edition of BLAST published to coincide with the show – Wadsworth contributed to both.

[17] Wadsworth signed up for the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve on 10 June 1916[18] and as a temporary sub-lieutenant he was based at Mudros on the island of Lemnos, Greece.

Known as dazzle ships, the optical effects confused enemy U-boats when trying to identify types of vessels and to pinpoint their direction and speed of travel.

[22] However, the pen and ink drawings of industrial landscapes that Wadsworth exhibited there were developed by him into a one-man show The Black Country that was also linked to a publication.

He returned to Portland the following year and painted watercolour studies and experimented with tempera – a medium associated with the work of early Renaissance artists.

[25] A series of landscape pictures depicting strikingly calm coastal towns and ports in Britain and France using tempera was seen as Wadsworth adopting a more 'naturalistic' mode but it is perhaps fairer to say they marked a return to more representational picture making – a position adopted by other avant-garde painters, such as Picasso, Braque and Derain, in the immediate post-war years and referred to as a 'return to order'.

Perhaps following ideas articulated by Léger[28] and to some extent exemplified in the work of the German Neue Sachlichkeit painters, Wadsworth juxtaposed modern manufactured objects such as marine navigational equipment with symbols of culture, contrasting the organic – such as sea shells – with the manufactured and using dramatic perspective effects to contrast the small with the vast.

Guests included avant-garde artists such as Paul Nash, Max Ernst, Pierre Roy, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Roland Penrose, Lee Miller and Henry Moore alongside art critics, actors, musicians, opera singers and dancers.

[35] The mid-1930s saw two commissions that placed Wadsworth at the forefront of art deco design – the tea room of the De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill-on-Sea and two huge paintings for the Cunard Line's RMS Queen Mary.

[37] For the first time Wadsworth's finances were under pressure and this may have contributed to his decision to start exhibiting at the Royal Academy summer show.

This book was initiated by his grandsons Derek von Bethmann-Hollweg and Alexander Hollweg, who also became a painter and sculptor and whose life and work was celebrated in a major retrospective exhibition at The Museum of Somerset (November 2023-March 2024).

After suggesting the idea and title to Andy McCluskey of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Saville carried the theme over to the sleeve design of their album Dazzle Ships (1983).