The battle for Gerry's Pompeii: Campaigning to save one man's fantastical art collection

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Melanie McDonagh1 November 2019

If you pass by a little road in Westbourne Park, you’ll notice nothing out of the ordinary; a quiet house on a quiet street in sight of the gargantuan Trellick Tower. At the back of the house, on the Grand Union Canal, though, it’s something else.

Boats going by this bit of the water can glimpse a remarkable vista, something that looks like a formal garden above the canal front, and on the wall underneath — part of it painted a defiant red — a dazzling selection of pieces set into the whitewashed plaster: bits of brightly coloured tiles, sections of bas relief, plaster faces, a little relief of St Francis, colourful glass and, in front, Italianate statues. And below that, there’s a series of solemn shin-high figures in clay, with the faces grey, eyes red-rimmed, wigs painted black, coats white, and coloured glass for the decorations on the statues’ breasts.

The ladies are in white, like clay versions of china shepherdesses. For these are models of important people. The names describe Queen Maeve, fifth-century Irish princess; Richard Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnell; Prince George of Denmark, and the like — historical figures that don’t have as much resonance now as they once did. The male figures are taken from one mould, named and dressed up with minor variations for each personage and a description.

To add to the fantastical character of it all, it seems no one saw anyone working there; it might have been done by elves. There is a clue, however, on one of the statues: Gerry, Gardener, it says. He was the man who created them all. As it happens, the riverfront wasn’t his property; this was an instance of what we’d now call guerrilla gardening, or guerrilla statuary, and he had to climb over the wall at night to get to it.

This garden and apartment, remarkable inside and out, are the work of Gerry Dalton, a shy Irishman who came to London from Athlone in 1959 when he was 24. Like many Irish people who came here in the Fifties he took on manual work: a series of jobs as a porter in Paddington, in a factory and in a succession of kitchens including a grand one at the Institute of Directors where they were visited by Prince Charles — finding work in London was easy in those days. After he retired he devoted himself, over 30 years, to turning his one-bedroom flat and garden into a fantastical world: Gerry’s Pompeii, he called it once. He died last month, aged 84.

Now, in a bid to preserve this extraordinary place — this mishmash of models, pictures, statues and formal garden — his admirers and friends are lobbying the trust that owns it, Notting Hill Genesis Housing Association, to give them enough time to find a way to preserve it, three to six months, rather than passing the property to another tenant. If they succeed and if the neighbours’ needs are met — the little flat could perhaps be turned into a unique community museum, where people can see what one man can do to a little one-bed flat and garden. The property is currently valued at around £550,000, so that would take a pretty big crowdfunding push.

The woman fronting the campaign, Sasha Galitzine, 30, has shown at least 400 people around so far: TV camera operators, journalists, critics. The letter of support for the campaign has been signed by a remarkable range of people and museum directors, including Jarvis Cocker, Paloma Faith, Tristram Hunt, director of the V&A and Sir Charles Saumarez Smith of the RA. Neighbours who remember Gerry kindly are supportive. The Greater London Authority Culture at Risk department at City Hall is trying its best to help.

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When visitors first come into the house, the shared hall seems unchanged since the Seventies. Inside Gerry’s ground-floor flat the wallpaper is old-fashioned and faded, the very smell of the place the same as it might have been 30 years ago.

But inside, it’s more a big doll’s house of homemade fantasies. On the mantelpiece there’s a bust of Queen Victoria next to a little statue of Charlie Chaplin next to a Beefeater and a little girl on a pony, which a label tells us is Princess Mary, Daughter of George III. Underneath are knights next to Queen Elizabeth. On the walls are historical scenes, battlefields and wives of Henry VIII. Some are hand-tinted, many labelled. Every shelf, almost every bit of wall is covered with a jumble of highly coloured statues of eminent personages next to pure kitsch.

On the floor, there are models of palaces, castles and stately homes — Buckingham Palace, Sudeley House — all painted white. You take the roof off, and you find a room full of tiny portraits. In fact the astonishing thing is that Gerry ever managed to find room for a bed among all these castles on the floor.

On the wall is a photo of the man himself when he was younger. He was, says Sasha, a modest man but he was quietly pleased when she would tell him that he was a genius. In a transcript of an interview he gave before he died, he observed: “I never thought I would do so much, but I did do. In the days before television we didn’t have much to do so we had to devote our minds to something else. One thing is, it kept me off the streets.”

The rest of the flat is as packed as the sitting room. In the bathroom, there’s a reproduction of the Last Supper, with more busts on the shelf, and another model of a castle. The hall is densely packed with more pictures. The kitchen has a model of a mausoleum, labelled Tomb House, which he filled with little tombs, each with an effigy on top, and portraits on the walls.

And outside in the garden are the pièces de résistance: rows and rows of little grey-faced models: Jonathan Swift next to the Sun King (lots of coloured glass), Oliver Cromwell — a bad man in Gerry’s view — and Princess Sophia; each figure almost identical to the next, with dates. What they oddly call to mind are the spectral models you find in Mexico for the Day of the Dead, only these are uniform.

The whole thing reflects the mind and interests and background of its maker. Gerry didn’t have much schooling. While young he went to work for a kindly retired English colonel, Harry Rice, and his young wife, Cynthia, in their house (it was actually called Done Roaming), garden and remarkable arboretum. That love of ambitious gardening stayed with him. Like many immigrant Irish of the time, he was a royalist. He was an autodidact, like other intelligent men who left school at 14, so his curiosity was wide-ranging: you can tell from the painstaking inscriptions on his models.

Stoic: Gerry Dalton
Lily Bertrand-Web

Plainly he found these historical figures fascinating, especially those that impinged on the history he’d have learned at school (Cromwell and the Stuarts, plus Pope Paul VI in the hall). There’s a decided Irish bias in his selection of notables.

So why has this idiosyncratic jumble of models and statues and pictures attracted the kind of attention it has? It is precisely because he was an untutored amateur enthusiast, a man creating a little kingdom out of his tiny, modest domestic space. The grand term for it is outsider art; it’s the passion of a man who liked creating things and he happened to enjoy using junk, discarded material, to do it.

As one neighbour, Nick Hall, said: “He was indicative of a certain generation of tough, stoic men who made their way to England to work with their hands as a way out of the poverty of Ireland as it was at the time... And maintaining a little bit of that generation would mean a huge deal as a way of preserving both Gerry’s memory and the men and women of that era”.

He knew, says Sasha, that he was doing something remarkable. He said in his interview, “They’ll be astonished what they’ll find in my garden in years to come. It’ll be like Pompeii or something — Gerry’s Pompeii.”

It’s pleasing to think what Gerry would have made of the plaudits now. Sasha and her friends visited him during his last illness in hospital. Towards the end he struggled to tell her something. She strained to listen, thinking he was about to tell her about the collection, only to hear him croak: “Can you get me custard?” An ordinary man, who made his own little kingdom.

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