Here we go again, London Walkers. Wherever you are. Time for your daily London fix.
And I’d hazard a guess you’re wondering, what’s it going to be today? Which is part of the fun. It’s a Lucky Dip, this podcast. You never quite know what you’re going to get.
Except it’s London. Always London.
And today? Well, picture this.
Picture a young man.
Twenty-three years old.
North London.
Finsbury Park.
A bombed-out building. Walls gone. Windows gone. Rubble everywhere.
And standing there, amongst the ruins, a gang of young London toughs.
Dressed up to the nines.
Their Sunday best.
Suits. Ties. Sharp haircuts.
Looking as though they own the place.
They’re called the Guvnors.
And the young man taking their photograph is one of their own. He knows them. He grew up amongst them.
He’s got a camera.
And that camera is about to change his life.
Not that he knows it.
He’s not even a professional photographer.
But the photograph is a knockout.
It finds its way to The Observer.
The newspaper publishes it in 1959.
And suddenly everybody wants to know who this young photographer is.
His name?
Don McCullin.
And today, October 9th, is his birthday.
Born on October 9th, 1935.
Ninety-one years ago today.
One of the greatest photographers this country has ever produced.
And, yes, one of London’s own.
But what an extraordinary journey that photograph sets him on.
Because the young man photographing a gang of London toughs in the ruins of a bombed-out building is going to spend much of his working life photographing something infinitely more terrible.
War.
Real war.
Real ruins.
Real death.
And by the time he’s an old man, the things he has seen will have left wounds that no camera can photograph.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Let’s go back to Finsbury Park.
Back to the boy.
Because that’s where this story really begins.
London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time.
History time.
And today, the story of a London boy who showed the world what war looks like.
And discovered, eventually, that he needed to turn his camera on something very different indeed.
Don McCullin.
Born in St Pancras.
Brought up in Finsbury Park.
Not the comfortable London.
Not the London of drawing rooms and silver spoons.
The other London.
The London of poverty. Hardship. Violence.
An outside lavatory.
A tin bath.
One bath a week.
His father suffered terribly from asthma.
The family had very little money.
And then came the war.
The Second World War.
Little Don was evacuated.
Sent away from London.
To Somerset.
He was five years old.
Imagine that.
Five years old.
Taken away from everything familiar.
His home. His family. His London streets.
And deposited in the countryside, amongst strangers.
He was desperately unhappy.
But something happened.
The countryside got under his skin.
Its fields. Its trees. Its silence.
He didn’t know it then, of course.
But Somerset was going to come back into his life.
And when it did, it would matter enormously.
Back in London, his father died when Don was still a boy.
He left school at fifteen.
He’d shown artistic promise. Had even won a place at an art school.
But the family needed money.
So out into the working world he went.
Eventually he joined the RAF for his National Service.
And there, through a roundabout sequence of circumstances, he learned something about cameras. About film. About darkrooms.
He bought himself a camera.
A Rolleicord.
Second-hand.
And when he got back to London, he started taking pictures.
Pictures of the world he knew.
His own people.
His own streets.
His own London.
Including those Guvnors.
That gang photograph was taken in 1958.
Published the following year.
And it changed everything.
The boy who had left school without qualifications was suddenly in demand.
He was on his way.
And where was he going?
Well, first, to the streets and backwaters of Britain.
To poverty.
To homelessness.
To industrial towns.
To people the comfortable world preferred not to look at.
And then, abroad.
In 1964, Cyprus.
Violence between Greek and Turkish Cypriots.
Families terrorised.
People killed.
Communities torn apart.
McCullin photographed the suffering.
And the photographs won him international recognition.
But Cyprus was only the beginning.
Vietnam.
The Congo.
Biafra.
Cambodia.
Northern Ireland.
Lebanon.
Again and again, he went to the places where the world was tearing itself to pieces.
And brought back the pictures.
Not pretty pictures.
Not comforting pictures.
Pictures that made you look.
And made you wish you hadn’t.
One of his most famous photographs was taken during the Battle of Huế in Vietnam in 1968.
An American Marine.
A young man.
He’s wearing a helmet.
Clutching his rifle.
But it’s his face that stops you.
His eyes.
He seems to be looking straight through the world in front of him.
He’s there.
But somehow he isn’t there.
The photograph is called Shell-shocked US Marine.
And you don’t need a caption to tell you that something terrible has happened to that young man.
Something has broken.
It’s one of the most haunting photographs ever taken of a soldier.
And there’s a grim irony here.
Because Don McCullin, the man who took that photograph, would himself spend years struggling with what war had done to him.
Then there’s Biafra.
Nigeria.
The late 1960s.
Civil war.
Starvation.
Children dying.
McCullin photographed a desperately emaciated little boy with albinism, clutching an empty food tin.
It’s almost unbearable to look at.
And yet that was precisely the point.
Look.
See what’s happening.
Don’t turn away.
That was McCullin’s mission.
He wasn’t photographing generals congratulating themselves.
Or politicians delivering speeches.
He was photographing the people who paid the price.
The civilians.
The children.
The wounded.
The dying.
The people whose names would never appear in the history books.
And he paid a price himself.
He was wounded in Cambodia.
Imprisoned in Uganda.
He had close calls with death.
But the physical dangers were only part of it.
Because there was another sort of damage.
The damage that comes from seeing too much.
And remembering too much.
And being unable to forget.
McCullin has talked about this with extraordinary candour.
The nightmares.
The guilt.
Coming home from places where children had starved to death.
And finding himself back in the comfortable world of Britain.
Seeing food being wasted.
Knowing what he’d just seen.
Knowing what other human beings were enduring.
How do you carry that around?
How do you put it away?
How do you sleep at night?
He couldn’t always.
The memories followed him home.
Into his bedroom.
Into his dreams.
The war didn’t necessarily end when he boarded the aircraft home.
It came home with him.
And then there was the terrible question that haunted him.
What good had all those photographs done?
He’d risked his life to show the world the horrors of war.
But the wars kept coming.
Another war.
Another massacre.
Another starving child.
Another ruined city.
Had anything changed?
Had anyone really listened?
And imagine the moral burden.
You build a great career.
You become famous.
You win prizes.
People admire your work.
And what are the photographs of?
Other people’s misery.
Other people’s suffering.
Other people’s dead.
That troubled him deeply.
He had become one of the most celebrated photographers in the world.
But he was carrying something the applause couldn’t lift.
And then, slowly, another world began to take possession of his camera.
Not the battlefield.
The countryside.
Somerset.
Remember Somerset?
The little London boy evacuated there during the Second World War.
Well, decades later, he made his home there.
And began photographing landscapes.
Not sunlit picture-postcard landscapes.
Oh, no.
This is Don McCullin.
He likes winter.
Bare trees.
Dark clouds.
Fields under water.
Cold mornings.
Brooding skies.
Trees that look like skeletons.
Landscapes that can be almost as sombre as his photographs of war.
But there’s a fundamental difference.
No one is dying.
No one is being tortured.
No child is starving.
And for the man behind the camera, that matters enormously.
He can stand on a hill in Somerset for hours.
Waiting.
Watching.
Studying the light.
He doesn’t have to race towards gunfire.
Doesn’t have to photograph somebody’s last moments.
He can simply be there.
Alone.
With the landscape.
With the silence.
With his camera.
And he has described that experience as a form of healing.
In fact, he has said that the landscape became his therapist.
Think of that.
After all those years photographing the worst things human beings can do to one another, he turns to the natural world.
Not because he has forgotten.
He hasn’t.
He says the memories are still there.
But because he needs somewhere to put down the burden, if only for a little while.
And here is something I find particularly moving.
The countryside was his refuge.
But even there, he didn’t suddenly start making pretty photographs.
Those winter landscapes can be dark.
Bleak.
Almost threatening.
As though the darkness he has seen in human affairs has followed him into the fields.
Perhaps you can leave the battlefield.
But the battlefield doesn’t entirely leave you.
And perhaps that’s why those landscapes are so powerful.
They aren’t simply photographs of Somerset.
They’re photographs of Somerset seen through the eyes of Don McCullin.
The man who saw too much.
And now, at ninety-one, he’s still with us.
Sir Don McCullin.
Knighted for his services to photography.
One of the great witnesses of the twentieth century.
A man who has given us some of the most powerful images ever made.
And to think where it began.
In Finsbury Park.
A bombed-out building.
A group of young London toughs.
Their Sunday suits.
A camera.
A young man who had no idea what lay ahead of him.
And there’s something else.
Something I keep coming back to.
That little boy.
Five years old.
Evacuated from London to Somerset.
Homesick.
Longing to get back to his own streets.
And then, more than half a century later, the old man in Somerset.
Standing on a hill.
Camera in hand.
Looking out across a winter landscape.
Trying to find some peace.
The little boy couldn’t wait to get back to London.
The old man needed to get away from the world.
And it was the same countryside that received them both.
Happy birthday, Don McCullin.
And thank you.
For looking at things the rest of us found too painful to look at.
And making sure we saw them too.
London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time.
History time.
And today, a London boy who travelled the world, showed us its darkest corners, and came home looking for the light.
See you tomorrow.