By Laura Tanna, ContributorToday we begin to profile the 2003 nominees for the prestigious Gleaner Honour Award. Cecil Baugh is the nominee for Arts and Culture.
HE HAS come a long way from selling pottery door-to-door in the nation's capital.
The Honourable Cecil Archibald Baugh, O.J., Jamaica's internationally-acclaimed ceramist, was born on November 22, 1908 in Bangor Ridge, Portland, where his father Isaac Baugh owned 11 acres of land on which he earned his living as a sawyer, cutting down trees and making board for sale. Cecil soon learned the importance of hard work and independence.
His mother, Emma Baugh, a religious woman, farmed, then on Saturdays, sold the produce seven miles away in Buff Bay. Although Cecil had one sister and two brothers, he remembers distinctly that he was the one who from the age of nine made the journey on foot with his mother to Buff Bay and back and later, over the mountains to Kingston and back to take provisions for his brother Headley, who was training as an engineer in Kingston.
AN IMPACT
It was on one of these trips that in the early morning, Baugh came across some traditional potters opening their kiln. The beauty of functional objects created from simple clay had such an impact that he became obsessed with the idea that this would be his vocation.
His parents finally allowed him at age 17 to live with his brother in Kingston and apprenticed himself to Susan and Ethel Trenchfield, potters from St. Elizabeth. He also benefited from working with Wilfred Lord, whom Baugh calls one of Kingston's best free-form potters. In 1928 Baugh married Susan Trenchfield's niece, Beryl Ebanks, and they had three daughters.
Baugh worked at what many considered a menial, peasant occupation, making cooking pots or 'yabbas' and selling them in street markets, enduring the nomenclature 'Yabba Man' with quiet dignity.
After seven years, when Susan Trenchfield died, he left pottery to work as a groundskeeper at the St. James Country Club in Montego Bay, St. James, but 18 months later decided it was less demeaning to sell pottery door to door, which he did upon his return to Kingston. Now his pottery was glazed with what he calls his 'Egyptian Blue'. It sold sufficiently well that he returned to Montego Bay as a potter with his own studio: 'The Cornwall Clay Works'.
Participating in 1938 in an arts and crafts exhibition instituted by Theodore Sealy and George Bowen on Duke Street in Kingston, not only did Baugh's work receive an award, but he met the painter Albert Huie for the first time. Edna Manley also took part in this venture. Baugh worked for five years with great success at his studio in Montego Bay but realised that he could develop no further as a potter without further education.
In 1941 he volunteered to join the British Army as a means of travelling overseas and trained for a year in Lancashire, England, in the Royal Engineers before being sent to 'destination unknown' as one of 63 West Indians on-board a ship with 4,500 British comrades.
Refusing to submit to racial discrimination encountered in Durban, South Africa, during shore leave, Baugh and his colleagues found their final destination was Cairo, Egypt, where he served before being sent up the desert to Tel-el-Kabir where he was when the battle of El-Alamein started.
REPAIR TANKS
Baugh's job was to repair tanks and vehicles returning from the front, so he saw blood and destruction but survived while many of his 4,500 shipmates were killed in action. He spent three years in Egypt and when on leave visited Israel. He believes he was the first black soldier in the British Army to be posted to Aden, where he briefly attended art school.
He returned from the war in 1946, too late to see his mother, who died in 1945. One of Cecil's daughters also died in his absence and her death, coupled with years of separation, contributed to the end of his first marriage. His second wife, Iris Baugh, died tragically of heart failure in 1986.
He opened a pottery studio on Mountain View Avenue in 1946 and the following year, after an arts and crafts exhibition at the Institute of Jamaica, The Gleaner featured photos of his Egyptian Blue glazed pots on the front page. Offered a British Council Scholarship if he could wait until 1949, Baugh independently travelled on the SS Empire Windrush's first civilian post-war voyage from the Caribbean to the United Kingdom in June 1948.
Baugh contends "that journey was the start of my career as an art potter" because it enabled him to study for three months with Margaret Leach and then to complete his year in England at St. Ives, Cornwall studying with the famous British potter Bernard Leach, who had himself studied with masters in Japan. Baugh calls this period "My glory years."
For the first time he was immersed in all aspects of ceramics, from building wheels and kilns, to scientific knowledge about clays, glazes, firing and more, knowledge which he brought back to Jamaica and has shared with generations of potters here.
Today Cecil Baugh is Leach's oldest living former student and is highlighted in Marion Whybrow's book: The Leach Legacy: St. Ives Pottery And Its Influence.
In 1950, Baugh, with Edna Manley, Albert Huie, Lyndon Leslie and Jerry Isaacs, founded the School of Arts and Crafts, subsequently called the Jamaica School of Art, now known as the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts, where Baugh was head of Ceramics until his retirement in 1974.
His life, having spanned almost the entire 20th century, provides a slice of Jamaican social history along with examples of his works from the collections of his major supporters over the decades. Baugh has received many honours during his career: the Silver Musgrave Medal of the Institute of Jamaica (IOJ), 1964; the Order of Distinction, National Honours, 1975; the Norman Manley Award of Excellence, 1977; the Centenary Medal of the IOJ, 1980; the Jamaica Bauxite Institute Award, 1981; the Gold Musgrave Medal of the IOJ, 1984; the George William Gordon Award for Excellence in the Visual Arts, 1994; and the Order of Jamaica, presented in 2003.
A humble man of integrity, discipline and kindness, Cecil Baugh has been a mentor to many, so that his life's work encompasses the formation of humane values in others, as much as the creation of visually exciting works of art.
