Travel broadens the mind

An item that was recently added to The Army Children Archive (TACA) focuses on an interview with the artist Dame Elisabeth Frink (1930–93), which is part of the National Life Story Collection: Artists’ Lives on the British Library’s Archival Sound Recordings website. In it, Dame Elisabeth touches on the unsettled nature of her childhood, which, as she says, was due to her cavalry-officer father’s army career.


Dame Elisabeth notes that she didn’t travel abroad with her family until World War II had ended, but it seems that the peripatetic military lifestyle was then responsible for a significant experience at a crucial stage in her life, ‘at the beginning of my art studies’. This was when, on visiting Venice, she saw ‘the Doge’s Palace, St Mark’s Square, wonderful sculpture, men on horses. The horses of St Mark’s’.

Above: The Horses of St Mark, photographed by Carlo Naya (1816–82).

When young Elisabeth visited Venice, the Frink family was based in Trieste, on the northern Adriatic coast. Trieste had just been established as the Free Territory of Trieste when Elisabeth’s father, Brigadier Ralph Frink,* was posted there, as, in 1947, was also the father of TACA contributor Maggie Johns (née Sorrell), whose absorbing story you can read on TACA’s ‘Lives & times’ page (scroll down to ‘Personal story: a childhood spent in India, England and Italy’).


Testimonies like Elisabeth and Maggie’s show that exposure to different countries and cultures at an impressionable age can be enlightening and inspiring, as well as one of the lasting benefits for youngsters of the highly mobile service life. And in the case of artists like Elisabeth Frink, you could say that this ultimately benefits the rest of us, too.


*For more on the Frink family, see the Little Thurlow 2000 Project website: http://www.littlethurlow.org/dameelisabeth/1.htm