the ephemera of jomaire and sam

glasgow school of art 1959

My parents were gifted and complicated, like many creative people are. For better or worse, they were an inseparable pair. After my mother’s death in 2002 my father really didn’t care too much to carry on without her and passed away in 2006. When they met, they had both been top of their year at Glasgow Art School. Bill was awarded the travelling scholarship on graduation in 1959 and Rosemary won the Goldsmith’s Hall medal for design the same year. Owing to many factors, their life together did not quite live up to the promise of the heady days of art school in Glasgow and their career beginnings in London. They moved to the Isle of Bute in 1968 where my sister Janie and I grew up. Bill and Rosemary lived a modest and fairly reclusive existance together from there on, making jewellery and other things, enjoying their grandchildren and drinking coffee at 11am, 3pm and 9pm every day like clockwork [and if the weather was good, in their garden] by the sea shore.

When my father learned that he was going to die, his first thoughts were to the letters he and my mother exchanged while he toured Europe for his scholarship. He asked me to get rid of them because no-one would want them and he couldn’t bear to think of them fluttering across the coup [rubbish tip] in the breeze. He had a flair for pathos, did Bill. But I kept them. I have only read one or two over the years but I am so glad I didn’t throw them away. They are a record of the extraordinary young people they both were, once upon a time. His nickname was Sam, from the music hall song popular at the time ‘Sam Hall’ and she was ‘Jomaire’ which is what her younger sister Violet called her, when she was too young to say ‘Rosemary’.

For mum and dad - eternally ‘Jomaire and Sam’