The story of the mural by it's creator, the artist Eric Rimmington.

I was an ex-service student at the Southern College of Art, Portsmouth from 1947 to 1949. David Pare, Head of Painting, was active in obtaining sites for students to paint murals. I painted three; the first in the Civil Defence HQ (now demolished), the second on the staircase of Beddow Hall, then a college hostel. This was about five feet by sixteen feet in size, and up to 1993 was still in place, the premises now being private apartments. The third was the Trafalgar House mural.

In the spring of 1949 I was asked to make a design and proposal for the committee of this Trafalgar Services' Club, a Church of England 'Soldiers', Sailors' and Airmen's' Institute'. Documentation for this, with other material, is held by Trevor Brown at Trafalgar House.

The club prepared the wall and I worked in oils on a white oil undercoat. ft took about three months of almost continuous work. My impression was that committee was pleased. They used a photograph of it on the front of a booklet commemorating the coronation in 1953, recording that it was "presented by the first commission of HMS Theseus". On finishing the mural in October 1949 I went to the Slade School of Art in London.

During the war there had been quite a lot of murals painted in Britain, in such places as the 'British restaurants' where cheap, good food was provided for ordinary people. These were to be found in most towns. By 1949 they were being pulled down or used for other purposes but I remembered what they stood for, and how the murals contributed to the spirit of the time. In 1944, while on leave from the army before going overseas I had made a trip to the Sandham Memorial Chapel at Burghclere in Berkshire with its cycle of wall paintings by Stanley Spencer, telling of his experience of army life in the first World War. I got there about two in the afternoon and only darkness could get me away. It was the most important art experience of my life; Spencer's feat of making 'grand art' out of small personal events seemed extraordinary. The idea has remained with me ever since. I didn't (and don't) have Spencer's visionary talent, his sense of drama, but I had and still have a fascination with the ordinary, with things which may not be noticed, what I now think of as a challenge to a 'hierarchy of importance' of people and phenomena.

In the Trafalgar House mural I wanted to put into a space as big as Italian Renaissance frescoes, the people around me in 1949. These people had recently experienced six years of war and I had them standing, unconsciously taking in their position in history. The background panorama shows the Vikings, Henry VIII's fleet, the cathedral, the High Street in the eighteenth century and the nineteenth century Southsea Common. The 1949 people stand in the town station. I thought of railway travel (which had played such an important part in everyone's wartime life) as a metaphor for the passage of time. There are a lot of servicemen returning home but also younger and older people, nobody notable. I thought their ordinariness worthy of celebration in itself Some climb staircases from the past (below) or to the future (above), though this kind of symbolism was only peripheral. Nothing remarkable happens, which in a way is what the late forties and early fifties were like; a kind of space or time between.

Three generations of ordinary Portsmouth people have had the mural as part of their everyday environment. A photograph taken in 1953 shows the club being used by young servicemen, just the kind who appear in the painting. When the premises were subsequently used as a hostel by the University the mural room became the crèche for the children of students. Its role in the life of the town has been uninterrupted since it was completed. ft seems to me that the proposed change of use for the building could offer the chance for the painting to continue its contribution to the local sense of identity and be a point of interest for visitors from elsewhere.

Eric Rimmington
April 2002