I spoke to a lovely gentleman called Joe who talked to me about the all jobs he used to do.. one of which was a flag layer before it came to his time to do his duty in the army...for Joe this was when the war was over, but men were still sent to do there bit for two years and he was sent to the Navy, where he got made to be an officers cook, which he hated. He said he could never understand how that happened when all the experience he had was working on the roads. Nowadays you have to have a degree most of the time in order to do what you want to do, but Joe in his day they had no choice but to do as they were told and get on with it. I asked him would he have it any other way if he could go back and he said he wouldn't, as he learnt a lot of skills which he wouldn't have learnt had he not been made to do it. When the two years were up, he went back to flag laying, and doing other odd jobs like painting and decorating and then he went on to garden designing. He made gardening into his full time job as he enjoyed doing it a lot.
He also mentioned that after the war had ended, people went out ballroom dancing to cheer themselves up and to start having some fun. And Joe went out dancing every evening in the Town Hall in Stockport (the wedding cake is what they used to call it) and he said that he loved it so much he began to teach it. However then he went on to say that dancing started to fade out as soon as the TV came along, nobody bothered to go out anymore which I thought was sad. So Joe was quite the busy man..a very hard working man at that it seems, as he was never off his feet, and I absolutely admire him for it.
So when it came to illustrating my ideas..I did find it abit hard at first because Joe didn't really talk to me much about the war...and I didn't particularly want to keep asking questions about it when he was happy talking to me about dancing and all the jobs he used to do. So my ideas I kept simple and I drew the objects in which he would have used in the navy as a cook and wrapped some flowers around it to represent that he was a gardener too. My other image is of a couple dancing, as I image that people would have carried on dancing despite there being damaged buildings form the war. Having done these, I could then think about how I would include Stockport, and so I added a map of Stockport for the background. However the dancing image I only included the words Stockport at the bottom...like a street sign. But I think I may redo the whole image and include the Town Hall instead so that people no when they look at the image that its about Stockport and it history.
I'm not particularly keen on this image....the drawings get lost in the map. But these were at first just my rough sketches and ideas that I thought I'd get to redo, however the project was only short so there wasn't much time, so I worked with what I had.
I think there's importance to this project, because learning about history can be hard sometimes as there so many things to know and it can seem quite overwhelming. But when you narrow it down to hearing about someone's life you can connect with it. Because it becomes real when you realise they were real people that had to go through such an incredibly difficult time. Everything has a story to go with it, and when you understand it, you can appreciate it a lot more.
So below is the final image that I went with..I included Stockport's Town Hall, and I went with developing the whisk image instead of the dancers because I thought not only are the dancers drawn terribly anyway. the whisk holds more of the story. The history of the man named Joe who had no choice but to work as an officers cook in the Navy, who then went on to become a gardener later on in life and the Town Hall was where he use to go to dance!
And even though this image doesn't scream the history of wartime...seeing the object of the whisk with the flowers around it, will probably make you wonder...why is there a whisk with flowers around it? And thats the beauty of illustration, is that it leaves you either wanting to find out or make up your own reason and story about it!
