They had been in contact with Hartfried Neunzert, the Curator of the Museums of Landsberg-am-Lech which commemorate the work of Herkomer who was born at Waal, nearby, and an International Herkomer Exhibition was mounted in the Alt Rathaus.

After the Barbican and my experiences in other English galleries, I was so nervous, particularly about the miniatures, that I went myself to look after them.

Hartfried took me at once to my pictures. They were in a small room, beautifully arranged in one large locked showcase, with conservation lighting and humidifiers. I was so relieved and happy that I could enjoy my stay, especially when I learnt that my hotel was being paid for.

A year later, in 1989, Grant Longman and Bryen Wood mounted an exhibition of my mother's pictures in the Lucy Kemp-Welch Memorial Hall. Again Jim Murrell opened it and Charles Skilton, although a sick man came with copies of 'The Dance of the Opposites', the third book of my autobiography, straight from the printers.

The Mayor and Mayoress, the Member of Parliament, the Leader of the Council and a large crowd of local enthusiasts attended the Private View. The exhibition must have furthered the cause of Museum, but it could not launch the book. Charles Skilton died soon afterwards of cancer leaving his business in the hands of the receivers and 'The Dance of the Opposites' was sold off with the rest of the stock.

These three books should have established me but with the first two small editions unreviewed and out of print and the last perhaps pulped and my plays unwanted, I was still a lost writer - and my mother still a lost painter.

I had exhibited her work eight times in ten years but no critic had ever come to praise and write about her and, when Worcester College failed, no other institution had offered them a home and I had come to feel that I could do no more and go no further. Then, suddenly, I saw that I could.

I had come to Derbyshire, to these British Legion flats, after the failure of my play 'The Journey'. I had set out from here again and again with the pictures and looked everywhere for a home for them while, all the time, on my very doorstep was where they ought to be - in Chesterfield three miles away.

In once beautiful country, destroyed by coal and industry, deprived of culture, with no museum, art gallery or even a bookshop - the pictures and the town needed each other.

In July 1989, I wrote to Councillor Flanagan, the Leader of the Council
"I was left a collection of watercolours and drawings by my mother, Louie Burrell, when she died in 1971. I have been exhibiting them and now I am anxious to find a home for them...I would like to place them where they will be on permanent display in a town up till now starved of art. I have seen the rebuilding plans and, shocked that no provision has been made for an art gallery, am the more keen that this unique collection be used in the campaign for the regeneration of Chesterfield..."

I sent a copy of this letter to the MP Tony Benn. And he replied

" Like you I think it very important that art should be a part of daily life...it should be possible for the drawings and paintings to be exhibited...so that your mother's memory and the high quality of her art might be remembered."

And so it all began - the 5 year struggle to give a museum and art gallery to Chesterfield. Mr Cass, Head of the Department of Recreation and Leisure, took over the project and Anne-Marie Knowles, his assistant, came to see the pictures and proposed showing them in the new Exhibition Centre, the following year. While waiting for this, I finished the synopsis of the biography of my mother which Jim and I were going to write together.

In June, 1990, the exhibition was opened by the mayor and I spoke of the difficulties I had encountered in trying to give away a valuable and beautiful collection of pictures, and how pleased I was that Chesterfield, an old industrial town striving to transform itself, and only needing art to realise its ambitions - would solve my problem. I drew up a new will in favour of Chesterfield.

Jim wrote his synopsis and gave them both to Nicky Bird, the V&A publicity man, sure that he would find a publisher and I began work on my section of the book.

Then, the great art scandal broke! And Jim sent an SOS, 'Safeguard your bequest'.

Derbyshire County Council decided to sell master pictures and treasures belonging to the Buxton Museum and Art Gallery to offset poll-capping. An injunction restraining sales failed in the High Court and the Council simply undertook to give 21 days notice of any intention to dispose of any items. Grants given for some purchases might have to be repaid but covenants and bequests were disregarded and the Derbyshire Labour Group and it's leader, David Bookbinder, were described by the President of the Museums and Galleries Association as 'a law unto themselves, obsessed with litigation and ready to flout every code of practice and convention to achieve their ends'.

"If it comes to selling treasures as opposed to closing down nurseries and education facilities - then we will sell" asserted Bookbinder. While the furore raged, the move was described as a mere political act designed to strike at the Government.

I was frightened. The pictures were not safe. My will and the conditions I laid down were not enough. I went to London and appeared twice on Kaleidoscope, expressing my fears. When this was picked up by Sheffield I gave a radio interview, followed by notices in the local press and an assurance by Mr. Cass that he, too, condemned the sale of the Buxton pictures and that I need have no fears.

When I complained that no progress had been made, that a year had been spent considering the available buildings, he told me that Tapton House (then a school) had now been chosen, that structural engineers would be sent in during the winter and would report in March and the architects would begin work. The school would move out in two years time.

While waiting for the report, I invited the Councillors to come and see the pictures. A few came and I began writing pamphlets to educate them. At the same time, Nicky Bird was failing to find a publisher for the biographer, even when he took the synopses to New York, and Jim was losing interest - and I was losing hope.

March came and went and, on April 10th, I wrote to Mr Cass:
" Since the first stage of the plan which you outlined to me last October has not been implemented and the art gallery project recedes I have decided to leave the Collection to trustees - and I have revoked my will..."

A month later, on May 21st, I heard that Tapton House was unobtainable and that Mr Cass and Councillor Brunt were going to drive round looking at other buildings. I wrote to Councillor Brunt:
" The media explosion alarmed many councillors and members of the public and I write now to make my position absolutely clear. I revoked my will because it did not safeguard the pictures and because no progress had been made. When the Collection is held by a Charity Commission Trust and the creation of an art gallery is definitely under way, then the pictures will once more be within my gift to Chesterfield. My intention has not weakened..." And I launched my first pamphlet.

The Deprivation of Art - and a Vision.

In 1936, I went to Russia for the Fourth World Theatre Festival. Conditions there were grim, food was short, people were sleeping under the arches in Moscow, beggars wrapped in rags were everywhere, transport was non-existent and purges were being carried out in the prisons - yet the theatres were full. Art was supreme.

Here in the Midlands, the Industrial Revolution started. Water, iron and coal, favourable to manufacture, were to be found and as the people left the land for the new factories, they were deprived of the beauty of their green neighbourhoods and their folk culture.

Imprisoned in the factories, generations were condemned to an environment that was black and ugly in which their spirituality and artistic sensibilities were suppressed. John Ruskin, the great art critic, was among the first to be aware of what was happening.

In 1845, when the first Working Mens' College was opened in London, he started classes in elementary drawing and painting in a room in Red Lion Square and for many years taught there himself. He did not hope to make carpenters and mechanics into great artists, only to restore something of their natural creativity which they had lost 'variously bound, embittered and wounded in the ugly prison house of London labour' - and to make them happier carpenters and mechanics.

He became a passionate social reformer, tirelessly trying to illuminate the lives of others. 'beauty had to be brought to the East End to counter the paralysing and degrading sight of the streets'.

When cholers broke out during a hot summer in districts where drainage was inadequate, he wrote in a pamphlet:
"If, suddenly, into the midst of a London dinner party, human being were borne into the midst of the company, famishing, pale with sickness, horrible in destitution, broken by despair and were laid one beside the chair of every guest, would only the crumbs of the dainties be passed to them, would only a passing glance, a passing thought be vouchsafed them...?"

When he became the first Slade Professor of Fine Arts in Oxford, he said in a lecture:
"I tell you that neither sound art, sound policy or religion can exist in England until, neglecting your own pleasure gardens, you resolve to restore the streets that are the habitat of the poor and the fields which are the playgrounds of their children and make them decent, orderly and pure."

As he wrote and lectured, the Working Mens' Colleges spread and in 1875, in a cottage, in the village of Walkeley, near Sheffield, art classes were started, designed to bring working men away from the foul smelling slums on the industrial east side and, in the good air of the west, introduce them to the beauties of art and nature.

When Toynbee Hall was founded in the East End of London and exhibitions of pictures were held, the first Warden, the Rev Samuel Barnett said: "The sight of the pictures...touched the memories and awoke the hopes of the people". And again: " Never in my intercourse with my neighbours have I been so conscious of their souls and their souls' needs as when they are hung round me listening to what I had to say of Watt's picture 'Time, Death and Judgement'.

That is the story, briefly told, of the physical, spiritual and artistic deprivations suffered by working people in the past in which Chesterfield has figured and been scarred.

Today, although the physical conditions have improved and it is no longer the simple struggle to give art to a brutalised class living in poverty and ugliness but to the whole nation, rich and poor alike, deprived and vulgarised and criminalised as great art becomes debased and a pop culture takes over.
But, once again, people with great names, and no names, speak up against the tide of barbarism and while I wait in my old age for it to turn, I fill the empty and receptive ground of Chesterfield with my vision of an art gallery which will serve as a school, a place of recreation and a temple where my mother's work will be displayed and people will take into themselves the beauty and spirituality of great art - and find joy and peace and amity in the experience. And children will grow up in creativeness and Chesterfield will testify that art is a basic need - and a way.

Because of the continuing uncertainty over Tapton House I wrote, on November 6th, to Councillor Brunt, asking why the Stephenson Memorial Hall could not be chosen with its many advantages over Tapton House...It stands empty and I favour it most strongly.

On November 12th, authority was given for the officers to prepare a scheme for a conversion of the Stephenson Memorial Hall.

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