Gun Deck

A (possibly Russian) seaman stands in the foreground on the gun deck of a convoy vessel with a view of laundry lines and artillery in the background.

Feliks Topolski was a Polish expressionist painter and draughtsman working primarily in the UK. He studied and worked in Italy and France before moving to Britain in 1935 after being commissioned to record King George V's Silver Jubilee. Late in July 1941 Topolski agreed to accompany the first British arctic convoy to Russia (destination Archangel). By this time he had been sub-contracted by the WAAC to the Polish Government in-Exile and was also working for the innovatory image-driven Picture Post publication, so was travelling as an accredited war artist. The first Arctic Convoy - codenamed ‘Dervish’- left Iceland on 21 August and arrived Archangel 31 August 1941 with a cargo of tanks, crated Hawker Hurricane fighters and ammunition. The convoy consisted of 6 merchant ships (Lancastrian Prince, New Westminster City, LC, Esneh, Trehata and the Dutch freighter Alchiba) and an oil tanker (Aldersdale) escorted by nine Royal Navy ships: three destroyers (Electra, Active and Impulsive), three minesweepers (Halcyon, Salamander and Harrier) and three armed anti-submarine trawlers (Hamlet, Macbeth and Ophelia). Feliks with two journalists sailed on the elderly Llanstephen Castle - one of six merchant ships to make the perilous journey, escorted by the minesweepers, destroyers and anti-submarine trawlers. In all, between August 1941 and May 1945, there were 78 Royal Navy escorted Arctic Convoys to Archangel and Murmansk: 85 merchant ships were lost and 16 Navy warships – including six destroyers and eight corvettes and armed trawlers – along with over 3,000 Royal Navy personnel and merchant seamen. The convoy Feliks was on was not attacked, though later convoys suffered horrendous casualties – PQ 17 in July 1942 lost 24 of its 35 merchant ships. Topolski arrived Archangel at the end August 1941 on board the Llanstephan Castle which had embarked from Liverpool earlier that month. By the standards of the much larger convoys that would follow, it provided a relatively small amount of relief but the propaganda value was immense, particularly at one of the lowest ebbs of the war. The convoy had evaded the entire German U-boat fleet, the feared German battleship Tirpitz, which had escaped from blockade during the voyage. It had thereby notched a small but very significant victory. After Archangel, Topolski flew to Moscow where he was briefly arrested for sketching in a café without a permit. In September 1941 he travelled to Samara on the Volga (then known as Kuibyshev) where a Polish army under cavalryman General Wladyslaw Anders (1892-1970) – he had commanded a cavalry brigade in 1939 - was gathering since late August 1941 in the vicinity of Orenberg. Topolski was a great visual documentarist. He did not become a naturalised Briton until after the War, in 1947. This meant that though he was chosen for individual war art commissions, his work did not have a central place in the panoply of British war art. Topolski's output was prolific and wide ranging and he produced a trio of books to accompany and document his wartime experiences. The absence of a prolonged official role meant he was able, within certain bounds, to determine his own itinerary and set his own creative targets.