In 1897 when the Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain) was nearing completion they got the plasterers in. And plasterers being plasterers, did what plasterers always do, they left a hidden note to be found by future generations. They got their wish.
This was placed here on the fourth of June 1897, Jubilee year, by the plasterers working on the job, hoping when this is found the Plasterers Association may be still flourishing. Please let us know in the Other World when you get this, so we can drink your health.
Signed: N. Gallop, F. Wilkins, H. Sainsbury, J. Chester, A. Pickernell (secretary)
The writer, perhaps the secretary, is hesitant to say whether plasterers fetch up in heaven or hell and opt for the ‘other world’ but given the lovely, humorous nature of the note I reckon it must be the former.
How much of their work remains, I have no idea, but I like to think that some of the UK’s greatest paintings hang in front of their smooth plaster work. This evening I plan to raise a glass and drink to the health of Messrs Gallop, Wilkins, Sainsbury, Chester and Pickernell.
Seventy years later
Just over seventy years after this note was written a callow youth visited the Tate for the first time. I was 16 years old and a pupil at a dreary boarding school in the Midlands. A school trip was arranged to visit the Tate Gallery in London. I didn’t have much interest in art and knew nothing about the artist whose exhibition we were going to see. All that mattered was escaping school and getting to London.
I’m not sure I’d ever seen pop art before, but I knew right away I loved it, particularly when we learnt that the artist, Eduardo Paolozzi, had made robots for the exhibition and at the last moment had carved them up and dumped them in a skip. When you’re a teenager at school in Rutland you feel like carving your life up and putting it in a skip. Here was something I could work with.
I think there were also some Warhol’s on display; possibly the Marylyn screen prints. It was all so new and so fresh, I couldn’t get enough of it. I now live around the corner from Tate Britain, but I’ll never forget my first visit.
A Little London Life 