Notts painter revisits memories of VE Day in 1945

Bob Evans, who turns 80 in November, vividly remembers "standing on the Guildhall steps in Portsmouth watching all the bands go by with my dad who was a sergeant major in the Rifle Brigade.”

He was inspired by the build-up to the celebrations to make three new pictures - two in ink and white paint, and one in charcoal – which show a fireman rescuing a little girl from a bombed house, workmen in the ruins, and a spiv.

“I am trying to point out that the war wasn't all bunting and dancing in the streets - there was several other facets as well,” he said. “Crime increased fantastically.”

He is sceptical about the current wave of festivities, which he believes are “encouraged by the government for propaganda reasons.”

He grew up in Gosport which received 640 bombing raids between 1940 and 1945, and remembers sheltering under the kitchen table with his mother.

“Post-war austerity was as bad as the war but a bit quieter," he said.

“My dad got a job running a camp for displaced Ukrainians in Germany. Between the ages of eight and ten I lived a life of colonial luxury while the Germans were living in holes and starving.

“I think my dad was caught dealing on the black market and we came back to England. He went from being loved by thousands of Ukrainians to being a bobby in Kent.

“It was his job to guard Fort Halstead where Britain’s first atomic bomb was kept. He marched around the perimeter with a Colt 45 in his pocket in case the Russians found out where it was.”

Bob studied fine art in Nottingham after six years of ‘ducking and diving’ in Southsea, Spain and Birmingham and taught for ten years in Bramcote before turning professional.

For the last 45 years he has exhibited and sold oil paintings, watercolours, linocuts and charcoal drawings locally and nationally.

By his own estimate he has produced well over 1,000 paintings and continues to make between 25 and 35 a year.

Among his recent commissions is an oil painting to commemorate World War One, which is on display in Hucknall Library, and he continues to exhibit twice a year at the Lincolnshire Poacher on Mansfield Road, Nottingham.

Bob says he was ‘driven’ into science despite his real enthusiasm for painting and playing the trumpet in a jazz band.

He sold his first picture in 1957 for £20: “The trouble is the prices haven’t risen with inflation.”

A ‘light bulb’ went on in his head while watching a jazz band play at a pub in Bromley in 1956.

He memorised the scene then went home and stayed up all night drawing it.

“That was my first method,” he said. “Later I used a camera. I still have thousands of pictures in shoeboxes. These days I use a digital camera. The new pictures are taken from contemporary photographs.”