Some years ago I acquired a few pencil sketches and woodcuts of Deal by an artist named Pat Moody. Dating back from the early 1950s, the pictures were of exceptional quality and I assumed, belonged to the hand of a trained draughtsman. The subjects were familiar street scenes; narrow cobbled lanes and old Georgian cottages, working men on the seafront, eking out a frugal living sewing fishing nets.
Researching the name, I admit that I was somewhat surprised to learn that the artist was female. A friend and native of the Deal recalled the woman from his childhood, remembering her as a mad old lady who used to shout and bang pots and pans at him for playing outside her house on Middle Street.
Through a young boy's eyes, I remembered scary old ladies like that from my own childhood growing up in London in the 1970s. Those haggard old spinsters with dyed hair, I couldn't imagine ever being young or pretty. The terrifying old boots, dressed head to toe in black that I hid behind my mother from, thinking they were the witches from Snow White, rather than sad lonely women, mourning husbands who tragically they had barely loved or known.
At first, most obvious lines of enquiries into the artist drew a blank. There were no auction records of Moody's work and little history, other than an interesting footnote about how she'd been a founder member of the Deal Karate Club.
Born in 1913, Pat Moody was an extraordinary woman. A trailblazer who defied all conventions and a hugely talented artist of her time. Locals still reminisce about the Bugeye Sprite, Pat Moody used to drive at high careering speeds through the town, and tell me, how she sometimes boasted of joining the Mile High Club in a Spitfire plane!
Her first real adventure began when she travelled to Europe in her late teens. For a young, working-class woman from Kent, it must have been a mind blowing experience. Carrying her sketchbook and camera wherever she went, she visited Paris and later lived in Berlin, a wildly creative fleshpot, still in the grips of Cabaret.
Then, as Hitler rose to power, the young artist returned home and trained as a nurse. A few years into the war, Pat found herself stationed in North Africa with the British Army, living and working amongst the Bedouin tribes of Algeria, the seriously wounded and the sick. Facing unimaginable sights, Moody captured tented hospital scenes, the romantic desert landscape and its native people on paper.
Moody's free, fluid and vibrant style stands up with some of the best war artists of the era and I believe, her remarkable catalogue of work from this period belongs somewhere beyond an archive at The Royal College of Nursing.
After the war, Pat remained close to her mother in Deal and began to sell her prints and postcards in the gift shops around the town. In the 1960s, she worked as a taxi driver, as well as on the boats. Married twice, Moody's extraordinary life reads like a real 'Girl's Own' story, but it is rather sad that her pictures ended up in dimly lit corridors of village halls, rather than London art galleries. "She did some amazing bitter, comedic war hospital scenes that hung in The Landmark Centre for ages.' Lizzie Douglas from the Deal Local History group told me . "I always liked looking at them."
I suppose I must have missed them, like you I guess.
These days in Deal, as I regularly despair at some of the overpriced tat in shop windows that criminally passes as contemporary art, a part of me regrets that I wasn't around in Pat Moody's Bugeye Sprite time, and that more people haven't seen or heard what an exceptional talent and wonderful character she was. Perhaps it's time.
Pat Moody with her Bugeye Sprite in Deal, (1913 - 2002)
Show us more. They (and Patricia's story) are absolutely magical.
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