Laura Knight – A Balloon Site, Coventry

Laura Knight, A Balloon Site, Coventry, 1943, oil on canvas, Imperial War Museum, London

Laura Knight was commissioned as an official artist during the second world war and many of her works from the period serve obvious propaganda purposes. This one depicts women from the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) wrangling a barrage balloon into position and shows them ‘doing their bit’ on the home front, heroically playing their part in the defence of the country against enemy attack from the air. Its outwardly persuasive messaging was intended to bolster recruitment by emphasising the idea that women’s contributions to the war effort were critical to a successful outcome. But aside from its ostensible preachiness I also admire the work for its delight in dynamic physicality and for the dramatic sensuousness of the balloon itself.

The city of Coventry, with its many aircraft and motor factories and more generally its concentration of vital heavy industry, was a prime target for the Luftwaffe and had suffered one of the most devastating raids of the war on the night of November 14^th, 1940. The medieval city centre was flattened, and it is estimated that more than sixty percent of the buildings in the wider Coventry area were destroyed or damaged, as were a third of its factories. Aside from anti-aircraft guns and the deployment of RAF night fighting sorties, barrage balloons filled with hydrogen and tethered to the ground by steel wire cables were another form of defence against aerial bombardment but had seemingly done little to prevent the devastation. The theory was that the obvious need to avoid these cables would force the bombers to a higher altitude and so impair their targeting accuracy and their presence would also deter strafing attacks from dive bombers. So, the balloons became a familiar sight in the skies above major industrial cities, but the public would rarely see them in such close proximity as depicted here by Knight.

With its nose pointing skywards, the blimp occupies most of the top half of the painting and its softly billowing form speaks of lightness and a straining for ascension – it has already escaped the upper frame of the painting. Its sheer volume is spectacular, thrilling, even theatrical, and it takes the combined strength of the four women and the mechanical advantage of reeving the rope through the pulley block, to keep it in check. The complex array of dangling tethers, like a galleon’s elaborate rigging, underlines the technical expertise in play as much as the physical force. A windsock on the left together with the smoke from the factories in the background moving from left to right, tells us that although this is a bright day, it is not a still one and the balloon strains lumberingly against the resistance of the women’s efforts.

The cotton fabric of this airborne leviathan was rubberized to help prevent the hydrogen from leaking and was further coated with aluminium ‘silver dope’ to reflect the sun’s rays and prevent the gas inside from overheating. Knight’s depiction of this satiny materiality is masterly. The unseen sun shines from top right and gleams whitely on the tops of the stabilising fins and merges into a greeny ochre on its shaded underside, reflecting the grassiness of this mooring site overlooking the city. Knight’s handling of painted volume is deeply expressive of the paradoxical lighter-than-air heft of the inflatable. Like the contemporary artist Jeff Koon’s silver dog, the balloon connotes a sense of optimism or at least a feeling of irrepressibility. It gestures at the vincibility of the impersonal enemies above and the indomitable morale strength of those they seek to destroy below.

It is the contrast between the sheer feet-dug-in muscled groundedness of the women and the flyaway instability of the balloon that makes for such a compellingly energetic painting. In the foreground, four women in ascending levels of uprightness pull ‘manfully’ on a rope, all facing in the same direction and fully engaged in their common endeavour. Meanwhile, their booted NCO stands a distance away with her hands resting on the back of her hips, and elbows commandingly akimbo, doubtless issuing instructions as if to a competitive trial of strength team. We are meant to see something literal in the term ‘tug o’ war’ here. Its meaning is clear: ‘if we all pull together, we can win this war.’ Or conversely: ‘if you the viewer don’t join in, you are letting the side down.’ The painting glorifies communality, collective effort, and the equal importance of the domestic front battle versus the one being waged overseas.

It also makes a clear point about the salience of military hierarchy and the chain of command in times of war. All the WAAFs wear the same ‘bluette’ Combination Suits and each have their sleeves rolled back, signalling to us the exertion involved in their work, so there is a flattening of the usual social pecking order in all this uniformity, albeit it is obvious who is in charge. But this still leaves room for individuality. Some wear regulation baggy berets while others wear the standard issue peaked cap. Beneath these, the soft curls and ‘victory rolls’ of each woman’s hairstyle is evident and signals their femininity while conforming to the hair-should-always- be-worn-above-the-collar ordinance.

There is a tomboyish and cheerful outdoorsiness to the scene, a certain decency in the willing suspension of peacetime women-centric interests in favour of physical graft and the camaraderie of sisterhood. These are women who have agency and have shunned the mere passivity and circumscription of supportive domestic roles. Although they have made themselves subordinate to the apparatus of military rank, they have transcended traditional gender hierarchies in pursuit of the greater good and in the interests of greater self-determination. The painting was, and remains, inspiring.

The WAAFs toil against a background of Coventry’s factories, the essential industries that were ‘the engine’ room of war. The implication is that the sweat and application that they bring to bear was also to be found in the smoke-stacked manufactories behind them, and all was geared to the National Undertaking.

Knight’s painting style in this period has a realist documentary quality that befits her subject matter. It is reminiscent of some of the Soviet-era art that idealised and even romanticised the harsh actuality of life and depicted the heroic proletariat playing their part in what was a wider ideological struggle. A few critics in the period objected to Knight’s illustration-like smoothness and glamorisation of subjects (today we might call it mid-century Ladybird book orderliness), preferring the ‘honest’ grittiness of earlier British modernism to be found in the works of Sickert with his ‘dirty’ palette and the distortions of Edward Burra’s netherworld scenes. But this misses the point of works such as Balloon Site. Knight did not set out to satirise or to reveal seediness or express a sense of urban alienation. Her purpose was an esprit de corps-encouraging summons and a recognition of modernity’s other characteristics: dynamism, progress, and human goodness in the face of barbarity.

That balloon, like the others four we can see already aloft in the sky over the city, is like an aspiration or a prayer that will levitate and float on high. No matter how clumsy, hulking, and awkward its handling at ground level may be, no matter how unfeasible it seems on earth, it has the scale and ambition to soar, hearteningly high.