[2] Noakes was born in Stepney in East London in 1936, and although as a dyslexic he was unresponsive to formal education in the local secondary school, he was encouraged to draw by his father (who died when Roy was twelve).

In 1962 Noakes was awarded a Beckwith Scholarship by the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers and travelled to Italy, where he studied the work of Giacomo Manzu and Medardo Rosso.

Noakes might have agreed, but the path he took in the 1960s related neither to the ‘abstraction’ of Anthony Caro, Phillip King or William Tucker, nor to the vestigial figurative tradition represented by John Davis or the mechanistics of George Fullard and Eduardo Paolozzi.

[4] He worked outside the mainstream or avant-garde cultural orthodoxies of his time, neither a brutalist, a conceptualist, nor involved with smooth or shiny surfaces that were barriers to expressing the dynamic potential of his materials.

After National Service in the Middle East, Noakes returned to study full-time at Kennington, from 1958 to 1962, making animated figures in a burst of creativity pent up during his enforced two-year absence.