BALINGUP artist Doug Chambers has come a long way since hiding out in underground railway stations as a child from the blitz in wartime London.
However, the memories are clear to this day, and have even inspired a past exhibition.
Doug was five when the blitz started. His two older brothers were evacuated, but he was left with his mother and father.
“A siren would go off and there were all these places people could run to,” Doug said.
“For me that was an underground railway station. When you came out you would see buildings down, masses of them, and hundreds of people dead.”
Doug lived in the Dock Lands, and remembers hearing the noise of the aeroplanes.
“All the searchlights would suddenly lock on it, and the akak guns would fire at it. Sometimes the plane would burst into flames and sometimes it would fall in the middle of the city.”
Doug was evacuated five times before he caught up with his brothers.
“We returned to London because the war was supposed to be over, but the next things to arrive were doodlebugs - planes full of explosives. One of them crashed into a huge church steeple next to my school.
“Then there were V1 and V2 rockets fired across the channel, they blew up anything they landed on.”
Doug recalls that everything in the blitz happened in the dark.
“We had to cover all of the windows and no car headlights were allowed,” he said.
“When I was evacuated my parents couldn’t come to see me because they couldn’t drive out after work.”
For many years Doug sublimated these memories, until a brother, who still lives in England, wrote and asked if he could remember standing and watching the planes attacking each other overhead.
The question brought the memories flooding back, and led some years ago to an art exhibition.
Doug’s fascination with art began at a school in England that did not teach art at all.
“I used to make clay models of animals, outside of school,” Doug said.
“I decided to do the art exam and passed with flying colours; then my father decided to take me to the local art school.”
Doug went on to attend the Royal College of Art in London, and then went and taught in Kingston, Jamaica, at the Jamaican School of Art.
“I had two small children so I decided to go back to England, but it was too cold,” he said.
“I applied for jobs abroad and the day my daughter was born, two letters came – one from Canada and one from Australia.”
Doug flipped a coin to decide and ended up in Australia teaching at the WA Institute of Technology, now Curtin University.
He has since taught at universities in the Northern Territory and Tasmania, as well as holding a series of exhibitions in Perth.
He has artwork in most major collections, including the National Gallery in Canberra.
More recently he ran an art school in Albany for some time, and then came to Balingup purely by chance.
When a friend told him 10 years ago there was a house for sale in Balingup he went to see it, and said that he wouldn’t mind buying it.
“Before I could say Jack Robinson somebody else bought it,” he said.
Soon after a friend left a neighbouring house, which Doug bought. He has been living in Balingup since.
Doug most recently exhibited work in the South West Survey in Bunbury, where he met with some success as one of three artists to have their work bought by a major building firm for a total sum of $25,000.
Doug’s winning piece was titled “The Four Seasons,” and showed figures of women portrayed in different historical periods representing the four seasons.
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