Douglas Percy Bliss:
Aerial View, circa 1940
Unmounted (ref: 9680)

Gouache and coloured pencil

Tags: Douglas Percy Bliss gouache pencil landscape transport

Provenance: The Artist's Studio

Douglas did not have an adventurous war and it had little impact on his work as an artist. He was past the age of conscription, having served in the First World War, so ‘to do his bit’ as he called it, he volunteered for the RAF Reserve, and was sent to an officer training centre in Uxbridge. Douglas was called up in 1941 and the RAF first stationed him at Felixstowe where he did a radar course. He served in Brighton and then Bournemouth for a time in 1942, where he learned to ride a motorbike. Most of 1942 and early 1943 was spent at Bishopriggs, Glasgow at a decoy site intended to simulate a city by the use of electric lights and flares sited in open countryside in order to attract enemy bombing and save nearby Glasgow. 

There were nearly 800 of these sites in a sophisticated civil defence system named Starfish. He spent a period during 1943 at Hoghton Tower in Lancashire, where mock tanks were made; later that year he was transferred for the rest of the war to join the Camouflage and Decoy Unit based at Pinewood Studios, 

We are grateful to Simon Lawrence of the Fleece Press for assistance.