THE NORFOLK MURALS OF JOHN MORAY-SMITH

After a visit to Cromer Museum earlier this year to see the John Moray-Smith seaside mural (detail above), a subsequent Twitter conversation with the museum prompted me to look for some of Moray-Smith’s other murals around Norwich.

Moray-Smith was an Italian traveller who married a Norwich woman, Katrina Moray-Smith and took her name, after coming to England as a prisoner in the First World War. He worked for Watney-Mann’s Norwich Brewery in the 1940s and 1950’s.

Cromer Museum houses three of Moray-Smith’s plaster relief artworks from 1951 including a portrait of the famous Lifeboat coxwain Henry Blogg, a mural of a 19^th century lifeboat launch, and the aforementioned beachscape. The two murals were taken from the Ship Hotel in Church Street, Cromer, which closed in 1984.

Detail from Cromer seaside mural

Henry Blogg

I’ve only included some small details of the seaside mural here, as I recommended you to visit the museum itself to fully appreciate the scale and quality of the work.

Three of Moray-Smith’s artworks can be found at pubs in the centre of Norwich, which I visited this summer. 

The Coachmaker's Arms

The Coachmaker’s Arms, St. Stephen’s Road, NR1 3SP, has a representation of St. Stephen’s Gate and dates from 1937.

The Berstrete Gates

The Berstrete Gates, Ber Street, NR1 3EN, similarly shows a picture (1937) of some long-gone city gates from Norwich’s city walls.

Grazing sheep in The Woolpack

The Woolpack in Golden Ball Street, NR1 3EH, houses the most impressive collection of Moray-Smith plaques (from 1938). There were originally six pictures illustrating different aspects of the wool trade from sheep grazing, to shearing, market trading and export, five of which can be found in the pub today. Go and have a look at them whilst supping some local Woodforde's beer.







I later returned to Norwich and went to look for the mural at the Prince of Denmark, Denmark Road, NR3 4JQ. The size of this mural presents an impressive figure which can be seen easily from across the road and from the path outside the pub. 

Information taken from Cromer Museum and the Norwich Society.

The Queer Postcards of Donald McGill

In his well-known essay on the comic postcard, Orwell highlights a number of recurrent themes which McGill’s cards are reliant upon, namely: sex, home life, drunkenness, W. C. jokes, inter-working class snobbery, stock figures, and politics. Obscenity plays a large part in the humour of these cards, in the double entendres of the written text and in the visualisation of voluptuous women with ‘grossly over-emphasised’ breasts and buttocks, which he claims, are ‘caricatures of the Englishman’s secret ideal’ (Orwell, 2000: 198).

However, the McGill postcard museum at Ryde on the Isle of Wight reveals another theme that Orwell’s essay chooses not to highlight: homosexual stereotyping and androgyny. The short crop hairstyles of 1920s/’30s women and dandification of men, and the subsequent blurring of genders appears to have prompted most of these comic images.

Here are a few amusing examples...

Masculine women and feminine men

Seaside peepers take a closer look...

A woman golfer puts the men's noses out of joint

A postcard from the daring resort of Great Yarmouth!



The dandy



Link to the McGill postcard museum

Further reading: Orwell, George, 2000, Essays, London: Penguin