Ways of Life: the story of how Jim Ede created Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge

In the 1950s, Jim Ede came to Cambridge to look for a stately home that he and his wife Helen could move into with their amazing art collection.

But when funds did not stretch this far, they eventually settled on four almost derelict cottages that were to become Kettle’s Yard.

Jim’s plan was to “make it all that I can of lived in beauty, and each room an atmosphere of quiet and simple charm and open to the public (in Cambridge to students especially)”.

And he started a tradition of loaning out paintings from his collection to University of Cambridge students so that they could experience beauty and art in their own lodgings.

Art critic Laura Freeman, who has written a new biography of Jim, which she will discuss at the Cambridge Literary Festival, has spent years delving into Jim’s archives and interviewing people who knew the collector and curator, whose passions inform every part of the house and gallery.

She says: “Jim’s great battle cry was that art is not for the elite. It’s not for the rich. It’s not for aristocrats, kings and queens and Popes - art is for everyone. And one of my bugbears as an art critic is I loathe it when you go to a museum, and the art is incomprehensible and the texts are even more incomprehensible.

“And you slightly feel like an outsider, that you’re not really allowed to somehow be in the art gang because you’re not cool enough or clever enough. And Jim’s great driving idea was that art was for everyone, beautiful rooms were a human right. Living in pleasant spaces surrounded by lovely things was spiritually and morally on a day-to-day basis uplifting. I think that’s the really important message that I hope people take away from from his life and from Kettle’s Yard.”

Ways of Life is a biography of Jim and tells the story of the Kettle’s Yard artists including Ben Nicholson, David Jones, Barbara Hepworth, Alfred Wallis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.

According to the book, the lives of Jim and the Kettle’s Yard artists represent a tipping point in 20th-century modernism: a new way of making and seeing, and a new way of living with art.

His vision was to influence the way we understand art and that it can be found wherever you look, even in a pebble or a feather. And he showed people that art was not just for galleries.

Laura says: “I got slightly cold feet after signing the contract to write this book because I thought, if all I’m going to say is this was a man with exquisite taste who made a lovely house, that’s going to be an extremely boring and indeed short book. And I think what’s fascinating about Jim is he’s so much more complicated than that, and he had his whole life before he came to Kettle’s Yard.

“He was in late middle age by the time he and Helen found the cottages that became Kettle’s Yard. But when he was young he was fun. He was a dandy, he was a man about town. He knew everyone there was to know in literary and artistic London in the roaring 20s. And the more I found about him, the more I realised how kind of contradictory he was, because I think the impression you get from Kettle’s Yard is of someone calm, serene, at ease with the world. And he wasn’t. I think he was a rather complicated, tortured, troubled soul in many ways.”

Laura believes Jim’s liking for order and light and space began forming as a result of his experiences in the First World War.

“He was in the trenches in the First World War, where he ends up with trench gastritis, stomach problems and jaundice, and he gets invalided out and he’s sent to a hospital in France, having been in a field hospital,” she says.

“He writes in this fragment of his war diary about the clean, scrubbed floors, the immaculate white sheets, the nurses in their white starched uniforms. And you don’t want to over-psychologise, but I think there is an element of when you’ve had chaos around you, creating calm in what you can control can be quite important. And I think as a way of stilling his nerves and his anxieties, and his worries he always created these, these very carefully considered rooms.”

Of course it wasn’t always easy living in such minimalist surroundings, as his wife Helen discovered.

“I think Jim probably made her life quite difficult,” says Laura. “She would say, ‘I can’t put my knitting down anywhere!’

“Personally, I love Kettle’s Yard, but I couldn’t live like that. I’ve got a 10-month-old baby and mess follows us around. When you look at Kettle’s Yard, you think, where was the ironing board or where was the sewing machine? Of course, all of the things that weren’t aesthetically right lived in Helen’s room. So I imagine it was probably a difficult place to kick your heels off and just relax. But on the other hand, many of the visitors I spoke to, men and women who are now in their 70s, 80s, even 90s, who went there when they were undergraduates, the word that kept coming up again and again was sanctuary. Because I think Jim did create something incredibly special and serene there. And I think a lot of people found it, if not a home then a kind of a refuge.”

On the other hand, when they first moved in, Helen had been recovering from a mastectomy following breast cancer and the first thing Jim did was to set up coconut bird feeders in the trees outside her bedroom window.

Laura says: “He did that so that when she was in bed, she could lie looking at the birds. So I think it’s nice that actually the first thing he arranged was that view before he even got started on the rooms.”

The serene life they lived in Cambridge was in contrast to the “roaring” 1920s, when Jim was working at the Tate gallery and he and Helen were at the centre of a whirlwind social life that revolved around parties at their house in Hampstead, London, which were attended by artists and aristocrats.

Laura says: “Jim had this slightly rueful phrase. He talks about his dukey days, as in wanting to court dukes and duchesses and get invited to society balls.That’s when he was quite a young man in his 20s, but he sort of repents of that and he realises he doesn’t want to be on the edges of the aristocracy because, actually, the best parties were being held by the Bloomsbury set or the dancers around Diaghilev’s ballet Russe, or Lady Ottoline Morell, who was a great society hostess.

“Jim and Helen had this extraordinarily lovely house in Hampstead. Whenever I’m nearby I go and stand, slightly jealously, outside this beautiful Queen Anne house on Elm Row. It is remarkable that a young, very junior curator at the Tate could in those days afford a house that I think today is worth something like £10million, according to Zoopla. They used to host these Sunday soirees there and just invite anyone and everyone.

“I think because Jim had this beautiful house with these amazing rooms full of light and wood panelling and things like one exquisite Brancusi on the table and a Henri Gaudier-Brzeska on the windowsill, people would come to these parties to see the art and be there in the ambiance.

“Helen Ede was a good piano player, although she was very modest, to entertain them. They never really had much money. The joke that used to go around was that you had better eat dinner before you go up to the Edes’ because you only get two strawberries or two berries on a plate. And Jim said that they could never really afford to give them proper wine so they would serve ginger wine. But I would have liked to have been at those parties. That would have been good fun.”

Visitors to these parties included Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Stanley Spencer, Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, as well as TE Lawrence, Arnold Bennett, David Garnett and possibly Graham Greene.

“Jim had a gift for arranging rooms but somehow also for arranging people and putting odd juxtapositions of people together, and then somehow sort of facilitating conversation and helping them get along,” says Laura.

He met all of these people through working at the Tate as a curator, often not directly as a result of his day job but because he went to so many shows and openings every evening.

“He often did down his time at the Tate because I think he was rather unhappy as an employee,” says Laura.

“But the Tate certainly gave him cachet. So when someone grand or someone who was up and coming in the art world would come to the Tate, Jim might give them a tour. He also indefatigably went to every exhibition opening in London in the evenings after work. So,when Ben Nicholson or Barbara Hepworth or Henry Moore were young up and coming artists who nobody had ever heard of Jim was meeting them at private views and inviting himself around to their studios for tea and seeing their work literally as it came out from under the chisel or came off the easel.”

Jim had the “knack” for spotting talent, but Laura believes that is because he “put in the hours”

“Sometimes it’s hard to put your finger on why someone is a brilliant collector or a brilliant raconteur,” she says.

“I think it’s almost something innate, some people have a gift for it. And he clearly did, but it was also I think because he did put in the hours. He was often rather exhausted because having done the day job, you know, he would do the rounds of the galleries - talk to anyone and everyone. I think there were some people who he tried to champion and they slightly fell by the wayside. It can seem in hindsight that everybody he discovered went on to become a future star, but it’s only because we know about the future stars.”

And some of his most passionate pleas fell on deaf ears at the Tate, especially in the case of Van Gogh.

“He goes to Amsterdam. He meets the widow of the widow of Van Gogh’s brother, and she says we’ll go upstairs to the attic and have a rummage,” explains Laura.

“So he goes upstairs and walks down the corridor to this room and he describes that there being Van Goghs stacked six deep, and, and he makes a list. He makes an itinerary. Mrs Van Gogh writes him a list of prices she will offer them at and she calls them Jim’s prices, you know they’re low prices. And then he goes back to the Tate and they decide this Van Gogh is a bit modern. And they don’t bite!”

Among the paintings was Van Gogh’s most famous work, Sunflowers. “They did buy some of them but Britain would have a much much better collection of Van Goghs had they listened to Jim.”

Laura also examines the relationship of Jim and Helen, who appear to have enjoyed along and happy marriage. However, she believes that had he been born in another time Jim may have chosen to live his life differently.

“He was born in 1895, which was the year of the Oscar Wilde trial for homosexuality. Jim grew up in an incredibly strict Methodist family. I think had he been born in another age to a different sort of family he might have been gay,” says Laura.

”He might have allowed himself to be gay. I think his marriage to Helen was very long, very devoted, very happy, but I think it might not have been the primary relationship he might have wished for.

“There’s an unpublished memoir that Jim wrote called ‘Between Two Memories’ in which he does talk about crushes and just fondnesses for other men. I found no evidence that he ever had a love affair. He had these very intense male friendships, but I did look and I can’t find any evidence that he had a sexual relationship with anyone. Which I think must have been quite difficult and quite thwarting and quite sad.”

However the relationship between Jim and Helen, who had two daughters, was close.

“The part of the book where I had tears streaming down my face was about the death of Helen,” says Laura.

“When she died, you know, that they were together. Jim was holding her hand. And when Jim writes to one of their daughters that night to say what has happened, he described sitting there with Helen and the doctor. Jim had his hand on top of hers and Helen says ‘too heavy’ because his hands were too heavy. So he puts it under her hand so she has the comfort but not the weight. And then for the rest of his life he wore Helen’s wedding ring on a cord around his neck. And to keep warm he used to wrap himself in Helen’s Shetland shawls.

“I think sometimes we over-prioritise romantic love and diminish the importance of the love that comes from companionship. I think they absolutely have that. It’s funny actually. When I was writing the book I remembered when Prince Philip died and they kept playing that quote from the Queen saying, ‘he was my strength and stay’. And I think for Jim I think Helen was his strength and stay. I think he was sometimes prone to flights of fancy. And she was incredibly steady. And was a kind of anchor for him.”

Laura Freeman will be in conversation with Ruth Scurr at the Cambridge Literary Festival on November 19. Tickets, priced £14, are available from cambridgeliteraryfestival.com.