Obituary: Henry Ford

Henry Ford

HENRY FORD, who retired in 1988 and has died, worked in the Maas Gallery in Mayfair for 28 years. With his colleague Jeremy Maas at the helm, he was at the forefront of the Pre-Raphaelite revival. He was a witty, gregarious but private man who lived for the present so avidly that in conversation he did not volunteer his previous record with the same voluble enthusiasm that he joined in the nearest party, and many of his closest friends knew little of the basic facts about him.

Michael Anthony Ford was born on the 27th of September 1936, only son of Geoffrey and Jane Ford (he was followed by a sister Victoria 12 years later, who survives him) and was nicknamed Henry after the motorcar tycoon. His father was a brewer. He won a scholarship to Oundle 1948, where his fondest memories were being taught by the writer, wit and broadcaster Arthur Marshall, and founding the school's private press - the Nene Press. His first love was not pictures, but books. Later he won another scholarship, to Selwyn College, Cambridge. Before going up he did his national service, passing out from Aldershot a Second Lieutenant in the Royal Artillery. He loved the camaraderie and structure of the army, but he also had a formative and traumatic experience there. Ford was in charge of a column of vehicles in Germany, and there was an accident in which a young girl was killed; it was probably the reason why Ford would never get behind the wheel of a car, and it may have also been a reason, too, why Ford avoided the yoke of official responsibility in life. After the army he went up to Cambridge, where he changed his degree to English in his second year. He must have been very unfocused at Cambridge, or very much in love, because he did badly, and he was quite obviously highly intelligent, with an amazing memory. He has been described as a ”favourite reference book”. His knowledge of English literature, particularly of the thirties, forties and fifties, was profound, but visible only in flashes, for he would go to manic lengths to conceal it. If you threw a casual line at him he would finish the poem for you. He particularly liked Patrick Hamilton, the alcoholic author of Hangover Square. Henry understood at first hand what J.B. Priestley described in Hamilton’s novels as "a kind of No-Man's-Land of shabby hotels, dingy boarding-houses and all those saloon bars where the homeless can meet".

After university in the late fifties he went to London and tried a number of jobs, settling in none. He sold advertising space for the Evening News, a job with an expense account that suited him very well until he tried to claim for a particularly convivial lunch that was not remotely work-related and put down the name of a long standing and important client whom he hadn’t seen for while. Unknown to him, this man had died a couple of months previously and Henry's head of department (who had to countersign the claim form) had attended the funeral.

About 1960, the year that the Maas Gallery was started, Ford needed somewhere to live in London. He had met Jeremy Maas at a dinner party, and rented a room in the basement of his house in Chelsea for a short while. Ford was a model lodger, as many will attest, and was immediately accepted into the family, making himself useful as a baby-sitter. After he left he remained close and it was only a step to working with Maas in the Gallery. Ford and Maas were a great double act, for they had a lot in common. Maas had had a very similar education, national service in the army, a degree in English Literature from Oxford, and had a puerile sense of humour. At eight years his senior, Maas was like an older brother to Ford. They shared books and discovered the music of Wagner, Mahler, and Bruckner together. The Times crossword was the most important occupation of the day, everything stopped for it and everyone helped with a clue. Ford could compose clerihews and limericks in seconds, and had an immense memory for them, nearly all unrepeatable in this place. Work was one long laugh then, and Ford was always at the centre of it. Famous names would often drop by, as much to join the fun as to see the pictures. Jo Lumley bought a picture and Ford tried desperately to deliver it, but was elegantly rebuffed. The Maas Gallery at that time championed the long-despised art of the Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood, and the sighing Celtic heroines of the pictures chimed with the hippy movement in the Sixties. It was cool, it was fun, and life was good.

The lavatory was Henry’s private retreat, and he decorated it with lewd postcards, cartoons and scatalogical jokes. He pasted a photograph of a particularly pompous picture dealer onto the lavatory seat, where it stayed even after the day this man paid us a visit and asked to use the loo, leaving wordlessly later, a little pale.

Henry was a superb salesman. There is a story of him at about this time at a restaurant where the service was very slow and, tired of waiting for the change, his party left, Henry taking one of the chairs from the restaurant with him. On the street outside he sold the chair to some people he met going in, for the exact amount of the change.

Living artists showing at the Gallery have had good reason to thank Henry for his skills of salesmanship. Asked once his secret with the buyers, Henry said ”I am the precipice to their landslide”.

Henry’s writing was almost unreadable, hermetic and exclusive. It may have been one of his defenses, and he enjoyed the mayhem it could cause.

In 1969 Maas wrote his book Victorian Painters, and so began a long and imperceptible slide away from the pedestrian realities of commerce, towards the peaceful groves of academe. More dealers came forward to trade in Victorian pictures, and the salerooms after them. Prices rose fast, and it became harder to buy. Although Maas had grown in stature as an historian, and although he still traded effectively, the climate was harsher. Ford managed the Gallery adroitly in such a way as to ensure that it survived for the next generation,  and when I arrived to join the Gallery in 1983, after ”an expensive education completely wasted on the boy” as he would say, I was able gradually to take over. Eventually, in 1988, he moved over for me by retiring. It was, like most things he did, essentially selfless, and yet, in the event, it was the best thing that he could have done for himself too. He moved to Acton Beauchamp in Herefordshire and began a new phase, probably the happiest, of his life. He never looked back, describing London as ”that vile city – it brings me out in hives within half an hour of arriving at Paddington”.

Ford co-wrote a book, published in 1980, on the artist and illustrator Sidney Sime. Henry was always considered to have had great potential as a writer, and it is a shame that he did not deliver further on his promise. However, Ford the father was unquestionably his finest incarnation. In the early seventies, he was living in Eastbourne with a girlfriend, who had a baby by another man who was absent. Ford  decided to be a father to the boy, and saw him to manhood. The boy is now a television producer, and asserts that he would have probably become an estate agent in Eastbourne were it not for Ford.

Ford was like a man who cannot be captured with a still camera, but would be perectly caught on video. He needed movement to bestow relief across his character, to watch him tilt his head back and turn his heavy glasses on people like headlamps, or tuck his chin down into his chest for a moment in thought, only to push it up again abruptly with an explosive interjection. Even in repose his face was wonderfully mobile, alert and responsive, always ready with the quip, the laugh, the oath, the cigarette, the bottle.

He was a great listener. In conversation he missed nothing of his interlocutor’s intent, often extracting meaning where it had been concealed by art, or confused by emotion, or dispersed by waffle. He had quite extraordinary antennae for pretension, and would only let it escape unpunished if he liked the offender to much to make him the butt of his devastating scorn. Even then he could not let it go, often highlighting it with an observation so subtle that you could hear the blade hiss through the air and not see the cut strike home. Only a slight eddy in the conversation several seconds later would indicate that the culprit knew he had had his legs removed at the knees, for all to see but none to remark. If of drink he had drunk, however, all restraints were cast aside. The time is well remembered when Henry, after a very convivial lunch, took everyone for a walk and as they passed by a large house by the road, said in a loud, belligerent voice ”the man who lives here is a utter swine”. Immediately an angry red face appeared over the hedge, and Henry’s tone instantly changed to an ingratiating whine ”Oh good afternoon my lord”. To say that Henry was unconventional would be true, but it would be more accurate to say that he was anti-conventional.

If this has been a eulogy of Henry Ford, then it is appropriate, because it was hard to praise him to his face. He would deflect compliments with a phrase or a dismissive denial, but ever the contradiction, he loved appreciation and attention, he invited it - to dismiss it. He had faults, but he had none that were offensive to his friends. His humour and humanity outshone everything, even the anguish of his final illness.

Henry Ford died at 10 pm, Sunday 26 June, 2005, aged 68, peacefully in his sleep, of cancer. He had no children.

Rupert Maas 2005