Brian & Nell Panter
From Lacey Green History
Brian Panter is mentioned in Social Snapshots 2001-2022 inc.
Brian and Nell Panter came to Loosley Row in 1962, having purchased 'Woodway Cottage', -the house on the bank facing down Woodway.
They were probably best known for their involvement with Lacey Green Productions, an amateur theatrical group which gave their profits to charity.
Hallmark June 1983. Parish Council Election. Brian Panter was returned unopposed. Also returned 1991.
Hallmark Advertisement. Brian Panter advertised lessons in Voice Promotion in October 1983
Brian Panter was the representative for Lacey Green Productions on the Village Hall Committee in 1995.
Hallmark October 1986. Brian Panter – Painter and Sculptor by Miles Marshall
In this issue, Brian Panter joins my 'Gallery of Local Craftsmen and Craftswomen' although he is probably better known in the village for his contributions to village drama in one form or another. Particularly perhaps through the work he has done for ‘Lacey Green Productions’, that splendid, independent, village organisation, founded and led by Julia Beaumont, which whilst working to raise money for very worthy causes, also provides our village with such excellent entertainment.
Many readers will remember with great pleasure, 'Joseph and his Technicolour Dream Coat' and 'The Wizard of Oz' both performed by Lacey Green Productions, whilst the vociferous boastings of the famous ‘Toad of Toad Hall' are still ringing in our ears! A great bonus of these large cast musical performances is the discovery of latent and often unsuspected talents for singing and acting amongst members of the community of all ages. Anything which is performed with such obvious enjoyment must be a treat for the audience.
Brian's wife Nell is a Stage director of the group so it is natural that Brian, himself a one-time actor, should also become involved in various aspects of production. As another engagement on the latter occasion prevented her from directing, Brian co-directed with Valerie Brookhouse and also under the traditional stage name 'Walter Plinge' played the Usher in the court scene besides designing the scenery. With able and willing assistants he actually painted most of it too.
The Panters are both involved in the ‘Open Book' another performing group which works both in the village and elsewhere to raise funds for a variety of charities and which arose from the ashes of the Hampden House Arts Association, founded in 1979. A small group from its Twelfth Night production company came together with a determination to prolong their enjoyable and successful association and have already made good their intentions.
He has been drawing and painting all his life and is an inveterate sketcher. He goes nowhere without his pocket sketchblock and a pencil. He will sketch anything which excites his attention and will while away a boring meeting with lightening drawings of any character in the room who makes a suitable subject. His unwitting sitters may also be fellow customers in some foreign cafe or an English pub - no-one is safe! But often his interest will be aroused by animals; perhaps more often by horses but also by dogs and other creatures.
Brian certainly has a deep feeling for and love of the Buckinghamshire countryside in its widely contrasting characters, from the Vale to the Chiltern Hills. His interest is caught not only by the form of the hills and valleys, the woods and trees but also by the effect of changing light and weather conditions on the landscapes, which he paints in watercolours, oils and the newish acrylic paints too. I was interested to learn that acrylic paints are also useful in painting stage scenery and that emulsion paint is also used for this purpose.
Besides his thoughtful and expressive landscapes and seascapes too, for he has a notable understanding of Ships and the sea, Brian has done much life drawing and painting and it may have been through this particular interest that he has developed his great skill in plastic sculptures or modelling. The subjects of this sculpture/portraiture range from ships to dogs but with particular emphasis on horses. Brian keeps an old and faithful horse which he rides and with whom he enjoys a special relationship of mutual trust and regard. I am sure this old retainer deserves at least some of the credit for the deep understanding of horses which shows up clearly enough in the charming sketch we have selected for our cover drawing and which must have helped too in achieving such lively and delightful action portraits of horses both with and without riders.
He started modelling in Plasticine some 25 years ago but of late has been using a new development of this material (not yet on sale to the public) which has the useful property of remaining malleable indefinitely until it is cured and hardened by a moderate heat treatment.
Although the finished sculpture is quite hard and rigid, during the modelling and curing process it must have the support of an internal metal framework or ‘armature' particularly if it is of a running or jumping horse with less than four feet on the ground. The thicker parts of the body must also be stiffened by the inclusion of other material to prevent sagging during the initial stages of the heat treatment which at first has a softening effort on the plastic. Once hardened the sculpture is ready for painting or at this stage it may alternatively be moulded for casting in metal or ceramic material.
Whilst in landscape painting, the choice of colour range or the selection of the artist's palette is usually a matter of artistic expression, the colouring of these sculptures tends to follow nature quite closely. The painting is delicately executed and the result is a gripping realism which can capture a fleeting moment of exquisite pleasure. A permanent reminder of perhaps a much-loved steed or faithful dog long after its comparatively brief life-span is ended. Such three-dimensional portraits are usually commissioned though on occasion Brian has followed some irresistible urge to record some particular horse or horse and rider for instance one elderly servant who was a living caricature, straight from Dickens or Anthony Trollope, who has been most faithfully portrayed from his pinched old face to his faded hunting pink and his seedy old mount.
The cost of these sculptures must vary according to the work involved but a horse and rider such as I have described starts around £150. A horse without rider or a dog would obviously cost less. He showed me two lovely studies of a retriever dog and a small pony.
But Brian is by no means obsessed with horses and I saw a major work of modelling, which has entailed some 54 years work: an action portrait of H.M.S. Bluebell some two and a half feet long (1/72 scale) a Corvette, in fact a sister ship to one in which Brian served for some time during the war as a gunner. Rather more of his wartime service was spent in defensively armed merchant ships on convoy duty, on one occasion he was in a disguised and armed tanker, carrying both oil and ammunition when it was torpedoed but that is another story. Suffice it to say that Brian was sufficiently intimately acquainted with the detail and routine of a Corvette to portray H.M.S. Bluebell with incredible accuracy, even to the deployment on deck of the ship's duty crew at a particular point of the watch.
Bluebell is there before you, riding the ocean swell with a realism to make land-lubbers feel quite queasy. The painting is superb, both of the beautifully modelled sea and the ship which bears all the Signs of action and salt water on its battle-scarred war paint. Small wonder that since I saw the model it has been enthusiastically purchased, together with one of Brian's paintings, by the Royal Naval Museum at Portsmouth Dockyard.
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Nell died in 1990. Jane Tyrer, a member of the group, published a tribute in Hallmark. See 1990 Obituary Nell Panter of Lacey Green Productions.
Brian died in 2018. (an excerpt of this obituary, from 1962 when he came to Loosley Row is repeated under 2018 Brian Panter obituary
Brian and Nell's daughter, sister of Rachel, wrote the following obituary which was published in Hallmark.
Remembering My Father - Brian Panter 1924-2018
My father was what you might call a larger than life character. I have only just begun to understand the meaning of that, now that his presence has passed out of our lives. Like most big personalities, he was a person of complexities, and many contradictions - dualities you might say - as a father, husband, son, friend, actor and artist. Recognising and celebrating those complexities is the best way I know to honour him
Whilst in his latter years he lived in his beloved Chiltern Hills, he also had an abiding love for the Vale of Aylesbury, spreading as it does towards North Bucks where he was born, in a cottage in 1924, into a farming family. Life was hard and when my father was four, his father had a mental health breakdown, due to the pressures of farming and what we'd nowadays call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after his wartime experiences at Gallipolli. I believe my father inherited his father's depression and looking back, probably suffered from it much of his life, although he only received treatment for it in later years.
The family went to stay in London for a period whilst my grandfather got treatment. When he recovered enough to work, they lived in the house of a wealthy American family who employed both my father's parents, where he experienced something of the sophistication and luxury offered by middle class city life. Returning to the village, to hand-pumped water and an outside lavatory, must have highlighted at an early age, the basic nature of country life. Decades later, in a Lacey Green parish council meeting, he reportedly challenged an individual who cited the 'historical character of the village' as grounds for opposing a new housing development with: "what character would that be then? The days when you had to go to the end of the garden for a crap?"
When the family returned to Bucks, my grandfather took a job as a farm bailiff at 'the big house' at Lillingstone Darrel, and it was here that my father's love of horses and fox hunting grew. I admit - and this is a bit problematic for me these days, especially given the political company I keep - that as a child I shared his love of riding to hounds, going to a couple of meets a season which was all we could afford. My father's passion sprang from his experiences as a stable boy, riding out the master's second horse, always rooted in the countryside. At the Old Berkley Hunt down the road, he knew the terrier man, the hunt servant, the farmers, the fence menders. Indeed, Dad took the job of fence mender one season soon after we moved to Princes Risborough, and I have memories of riding with him in the ancient land-rover to help rebuild farmers' fences damaged by horses ridden to hounds.
He joined the Royal Navy at eighteen, and, like his father, his wartime experiences stayed with him for life. Sailing on warships in convoy with merchant navy vessels, mostly in the North Atlantic, he was twice torpedoed and rescued from the sea. He was part of the D Day Landings in 1944 and whilst he played down his role in the action, he was moored off Arramanche, in a ship full of ammunition and explosives, and had it been hit, all the crew would have perished. I'm sure most of you heard his navy stories at some time or another - possibly more than once - and it occurs to me that his desire to talk about his experiences was his way of dealing with traumatic events at such a young and formative age.
My father grew up speaking in a broad Bucks accent, which he didn't lose until he attended RADA in the late 40's. This is strange to imagine for all of us here, for whom his stage RP pronunciation and rich vowels are so dominant in our memory of him. It was part of his transition from country boy to actor and man about town.
When he met my Mother whilst in rep at Oxford Playhouse, the re-invention escalated. She was a middle class girl from South Bucks, he the son of a poor farmer from North Bucks. I think he fell doubly in love - with my mother who was glamorous, feisty and funny - but also with the family and the security of the big house in Beaconsfield. He adored and admired my maternal grandparents, and I have an abiding memory of my parents and grandparents singing Gilbert and Sullivan in four-part harmony while doing the washing up after Sunday dinner.
Rachel and I never knew either of my father's parents, they both died before we were born. I think my father felt guilty that he became distanced from his father after his mother's death, as his new life in the theatre developed, and as he grew closer to his in-laws.
My mother gave up acting when she started a family, but my father was still working in the theatre when I was born. He was at The Old Vic playing the Prince of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice and was apparently congratulated by Ralph Richardson on my birth. He continued his acting career a couple of years more, but gave up in 1958, walking away from the offer of a good part in the movie Ben Hur. And this remains one of the greatest mysteries of his life - why he gave up a profession he loved at what might have been the cusp of a breakthrough. It's a decision he never fully explained, but one which I have no doubt he came to regret. Throughout childhood, my memories of him are against a backdrop of a series of sales jobs he must have disliked, and a deep desire to revisit his past in the theatre. When he took early retirement in his late 50's, he returned to professional acting, and did some of his best work, notably in Blues for Mister Charlie at Sheffield Crucible and The Price and Hamlet at Wycombe Theatre Company. Of course his theatre passion also found outlet over many years in Lacey Green Productions as a director and performer, and who can forget his Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz?
I suspect his reasons for leaving acting were, like everything, complex, but a strong driver was fatherhood - they were about to have a second child. In later years he said that he was a terrible father, but - like most parents - he did his best. He wasn't a perfect father by any means. He had a sudden and sometimes violent temper, and he and my mother had blazing rows. He was quite intolerant of opposing political views especially in the young. It was only in adulthood that I realised that not all family Sunday dinners were conducted at the volume and level of vitriolic debate which characterised the Panter table. But he was also a dedicated and imaginative father, with a sense of wonder and adventure, which he tried to create for us. I have a vivid image of one Guy Fawkes night - I must have been four. He was running around the garden setting off fireworks for us: me standing on the path in my wellies, and Rachel in my mother's arms behind the French windows. Decades later, on Guy Fawkes night at Woodway, Rory and Hamish performed an impromptu fire staff display for their aged Grandfather, outside his window, which brought back that memory full circle.
And a memory of the winter of 1962 when we'd just arrived in Princes Risborough, when Dad and I climbed the Whiteleaf Cross in two feet of snow. I've no idea why he led this expedition, apart from the sheer adventure and challenge of it.
And of course, the many, many hours spent together on horseback riding across hill and vale, through woods and field and looking after our horses in all weathers. I recognise now that my Mother and Rachel, being less horse obsessed, sacrificed other things to pay for the horses, and even then I was aware of heated discussions about money.
The other aspect of his life which runs back before my earliest memories, is Dad as an artist. There were always some of his paintings - horses or ships - on the walls of our houses. He painted and sketched all his life, and sculpted models of horses, including commissions. He also built a detailed scale model of HMS Clematis on which he served during the war, and this is now gifted to the Merseyside Maritime Museum. Drawing remained the chief joy in his later years, he always carried a small sketch pad in his pocket. It was a way for him to connect with the world, often spending hours in public places sketching the people he saw. He was never happier than at Sally's art classes at Phoenix Studios in Towersey which he managed to attend up until his stroke last year, which cruelly took away his ability to wield a drawing tool or pen.
He was, as many of you will have experienced, a pessimist, with an apparently Eyeore-like outlook upon the world, but here is another contradiction. He always maintained that he was in a strange way an optimist and adopted pessimism as a strategy to protect himself from disappointment.
My father was a romantic at heart. As a very young man during the war, he fell in love and became engaged. Tragically, his fiancé died and on the rebound from this, closely followed by the death of his mother, he got married at the end of the war to a woman in Hull. This first marriage did not survive his re-invention and move to London.
He was devastated by my mother's death in 1990, but not long afterwards he formed a relationship with Jeanette, in which he found great joy and comfort. Jeanette was an important person in helping him engage with his grandchildren, arranging outings and treats, and even after their romantic relationship had passed into companionship, she remained a close family friend until her death a few years ago.
In 2017 at the age of 93, he was asked to speak The Immortal Words at 11am on Remembrance Sunday in the library, where he spent many hours. I was visiting and helped him put on his medals and walk round the corner. There was a small group of friends there, some librarians and a few members of the public, and he spoke the words with resonance and great depth. 'They Shall not grow old as we who are left grow old' had a special significance to him. So many of his peers and the women he loved were dead, he was finding old age intolerable and knew he was approaching the end his life. I felt very proud of him. It was the last remembrance Sunday he spoke at. By the following year his stroke had taken away his power of speech and we'd lost access to his memories and the connection to the act of remembrance.
He loved all his grandchildren : Rory, Holly, Faye and Hamish, and he loved to hear them play music. On that theme of remembrance, we ask my son, Rory, to play The Last Post for his Grandad