Remembering Benton End
With Cedric Morris' godson, Peregrine Cedric Banbury
Cedric Morris, Portrait of Ralph Banbury, 1936
Peregrine Cedric Banbury, the godson of Cedric Morris, visited Benton End many times in the sixties and seventies, and has very kindly shared his memories with us:
Your father was Ralph Banbury, a close friend of Cedric and Lett for many years. How did they meet?
In 1935, Ralph enrolled at the Slade, where he mixed with a plethora of artists, including Cedric Morris, Arthur Lett-Haines, Stephen Tomlin (Bloomsbury group sculptor), John Skeaping (sculptor and first husband of Barbara Hepworth), Paul Odo Cross (ballet dancer), Lucian Freud, and Dylan Thomas.
Ralph visited Pound Farm – Cedric and Lett’s home before moving to Benton End – many times and was one of the first pupils at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in early 1937. Pound Farm burned to the ground in 1939 (reputedly the fire was caused by Lucian Freud’s discarded cigarette) and Cedric and Lett moved to Benton End, in Hadleigh, where the school re-opened. Other pupils and visitors included Barbara Hepworth, Maggi Hambling, Joan Warburton, John Nash, Francis Bacon, Ronald Blythe and Stephen Spender. Ian Brinkworth was one of the teachers and Ralph was a part time manager of the school helping Cedric and Lett, and working with Millie Hayes, the housekeeper at Benton End, who was still there when I used to go to Benton End in the 1960s and 1970s.
Cedric with Millie Hayes and Maggie Hambling at Benton End, 1980
You visited Benton End several times. Do you have any fond memories you can share with us? What was Cedric and Lett’s character like?
Ralph died in 1951, when I was three, but my mother (Leslie) would take me to Benton End fairly often as Cedric was one of my godfathers. Cedric and Lett were always very welcoming, and I think we used to just turn up but perhaps Leslie had rung them. Benton End was very much “open house” with people coming and going. If Cedric got bored, he retreated to his studio and Millie forbade anyone entering. Cedric and Lett often sparred with each other over lunch. Of the two I would say Lett was the more outgoing. Cedric could be quite reserved by comparison but that’s only an impression I have sixty years on.
Cedric and Leslie at Benton End
We know that, equally to enjoying the garden, cooking and sharing food was a central part of life at Benton End. Do you have any memories of the food that Lett and Millie served?
As I recall them, meals were “interesting” as Millie wasn’t very cordon bleu and there was often a fair bit of banter about what was being served. My abiding memory of where we ate was a large painting of shags on a cliff side. I think Cedric’s studio was behind the kitchen/dining area. I recall a light, cluttered place with lots of canvases.
Millie Hayes in Cedric or Lett’s studio at Benton End, 1970s. Photograph © Dinah and Wilfrid Wood
Cedric generously gifted his plants and flowers to close friends. Were you or any other family member a lucky recipient?
When I married my second wife, Sue, and took her to meet Cedric, he very kindly gave us a landscape he painted in 1956 of Malveira, Lisbon as well as the portrait of my father [see above]. I had a further four paintings by Cedric (a couple of Suffolk landscapes and a couple of North African landscapes). I’ve given nearly all my pictures to my sons but have kept back Ralph’s double portrait of Dylan and Caitlin Thomas, which was exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery’s 1994 exhibition The Sitwells and The Arts of the 1920s and 1930s.
My mother was a keen gardener and Cedric often gave her irises from Benton End, which were still going when I sold the house in Hertfordshire seven or eight years ago. I did bring a couple of them with me to Wales, so in a way that’s an enduring memory. When I visited in later years, the irises were still abundant, as were the weeds, and the garden became a bit unkempt, hardly surprising given Cedric’s advancing years.
Cedric Morris in his garden at Benton End. Photograph © The Beth Chatto Estate.
