Avis Saltsman - Artist

Genealogy Pages - Origins Essay page 1

These pages are included as they may be of interest to other Saltsmans, Salzmanns etc.

Essay on my Origins - Version of May 1997 - Page One

I was born in 1935 in Lancashire and have been a teacher and visual artist for forty years. I recently realised that I had not understood the origins of my father's family, a fact which has, after sixty years cast a whole new light on my life.. It may not be of such importance to my brother and sister because they were born later, although it certainly must have affected them because of its profound and even tragic influence on our parents experience and behaviour, both totally innocent parties. Now that I have worked this out, with the aid of research done by my brother, I feel extremely sad, as it meant that I filled the vacuum with wrong interpretations, particularly of my mother's attitude towards me.

Up to the age of almost five I had a very happy childhood in an eastern suburb of Manchester looking towards Ashton-under-Lyne and the Pennines. Mine was a close and happy family consisting of, as well as myself and my parents, my mother's parents and her brother's family living near to each other half a mile away. I remember Christmases at my grandmother's house with pleasure.

My maternal Grandmother was Frances Elizabeth Roberts whose mother Maria spoke only Welsh, and would be, with her husband, among the wave of Welsh seeking work in Northern industrial cities. She remembered an 'Aunty Charlotte', youngest daughter of a great-uncle who was a doctor vaccinating the population of Honolulu, capital of the Hawaiian islands and whose eldest son went to school on a camel with the Prince of Honolulu. So some of their family were among the Welsh who populated distant and exotic places like the still existing Welsh colony in Patagonia. Frances Elizabeth was a good craftswoman, being able to tackle very complex knitting patterns. When I was about eight she knitted me a Fair Isle short-sleeved jumper with fourteen colours and many lines, each with a different pattern. Many years later my most complex screenprints have up to fourteen colours.

My maternal Grandfather was Ernest Stansfield, which is a Yorkshire name, and all I know about his family is that he had a brother Harold who was an art teacher. Ernest became managing director of a scrap cotton company, Butterworths, having started as office boy. He had served in the First World War in France when his children, my uncle and mother were three and two years old. He volunteered to be a driver although he had never driven. He calculated, I imagine, that he might survive to see his young family again with the protection of a vehicle. He soon learned to drive and his strategy obviously worked as he lived until the 1950's, dying a few months after my grandmother, who had kept the family during that first war by running a wool shop in Clayton.

Both of my father's parents were dead before I was born, my father's mother, Caroline Daniels having died the year before my parents married in 1934. Hers was probably another Welsh family immigrated to Liverpool, as Daniels is also a Welsh name. Her father, a giant of a man who was 6ft 5 ins. tall and wore size 22 collars, built sailing ships. Her brother or uncle William Daniels was a well-known Liverpool artist of the time, painting Victorian subjects like 'The Flower Seller', still, I believe in the vaults of the Walker Art Gallery. My mother kept an illuminated address presented to William Daniels after a dinner in his honour for painting the Lord Major of Liverpool. Definitely a conventional artist, friend of the Liverpool Establishment, but it was the style of the day.

My mother also had some designs which I only vaguely knew were connected with my father's family. It was never made completely clear whose they were. Some were 'bread and butter' designs for the Victorian period, such as tweed and lace patterns, but others were quite different. They seemed to be well in advance of their time, geometric patterns, such as in Italian Futurist art or the English Vorticists before the First World War or, as a friend recently pointed out, the Vienna Secession.