Artist Maureen Briggs has come full circle in a life as colourful as the pictures she paints.
Brought up in Castle Douglas, the Glasgow School of Art graduate looks nothing like her 72 years, through which she’s emigrated to New Zealand as a teenager, taught art and photography in one of Glasgow’s roughest schools and, sadly, lost the love of her life 17 months ago.
Richard Ross was also an accomplished artist when he walked into Maureen’s gallery in 1998 – and the couple never parted until his untimely death on December 28, 2020.
“It was quite a blessing that it was lockdown year because I could look after him,” Maureen tells me with a slight catch in her voice.
“I did appointments for people or had them in the gallery two at a time and did mail order – that’s how we kept going.
“Richard and I were in art school in the same year. We had been together 21 years and Richard was working right up to before he died. How did we meet – well, I had a small gallery up near the Selkirk Arms.
“I had just opened and it was my only way of making a living.
“Then one day this chap arrived with a bag slung over his shoulder. I had two appointments at 4.30 and told him ‘I really don’t have time to see you today’.
“He said ‘take another look” and I replied ‘what?’
“I didn’t recognise him – I hadn’t seen him since art school. But if you reduce someone’s facial features everything fits and I said ‘oh, it’s you!’
“Richard had come to stay with his parents for a while and I offered him a room in the gallery where he could work.
“Then one thing led to another and, well, there you go!”
In 2000, Maureen tells me, the chance came to have a bigger shop with a house beside it – and the artists opened High St. Gallery in the new premises.
“Richard handled the technical side – he was a real whizz kid with websites and graphic design and I did front of house,” Maureen recalls.
“He hated the day-to-day stuff but was brilliant when we had an opening of an exhibition. We employed some youngsters from Kirkcudbright Academy to be waiters and waitresses to serve the wine.
“We got proper chefs jackets for them and they were all very polite.”
Four years later the new gallery got its big break – but, Maureen smiles, it didn’t come cheap.
“In 2004 we got invited to exhibit at the Glasgow Art Fair, which was quite a big deal. We thought, ‘God help us, that’s really expensive to do – but let’s do it!’
“It was a huge amount of work and great fun but you’d be absolutely exhausted when you packed up.
“The fair is a complete week and cost £3,000 for the stand alone, never mind everything else like accommodation.
“But you’d get something like 1,000 a people a day visiting the stand, picking up information and asking to be included on the mailing list for invitations to exhibition openings. When they came down to Kirkcudbright they enjoyed the gallery but also discovered the town itself, which was great.
“We got invited for the next six years and took around 160 paintings up each time, along with other bits and pieces for sale.”
How did High St. Gallery come to be invited to the premier event, I wonder?
“Unbeknown to us they sent the organiser down for a good look round,” laughs Maureen. “All he said was ‘we’ll be in touch’ and I thought ‘och, I’ll bet he says that to everybody’. But we got invited.”
Maureen takes me back to her roots in Castle Douglas where her father Albert was a builder and master stonemason with the family company Briggs Bros.
“He worked on historic buildings mainly on local estates,” she says.
“They employed him to renovate damaged stonework – that’s where my brother Andrew got his interest in stonework from.
“My dad got him a job as a draughtsman with top architect Anthony Woolfe in Gatehouse of Fleet.
“My dad used to let us play in the builders yard in Academy Street and I used to love rummaging around the drawers full of chisels and working tools.
“He was incredibly good at his job.”
From an early age Maureen loved drawing and making “little bits of pottery”, a pastime mum Josephine and her dad encouraged.
She attended Castle Douglas Primary, then the high school – S1 to S4 only in the 1960s – then Kirkcudbright Academy.
Education at Castle Douglas High, she confesses, holds few happy memories.
“It was a bit of a nightmare for me,” she says candidly. “I got bullied and it was like a free for all. It was just because I was academic – I was a wee bit odd.
“I just put up with it – what else could you do?
“There was not a lot of discipline and I was delighted to get to the academy. Going to art school was always my ambition, end of story. My dad wasn’t impressed – it was a case of ‘get a proper job – you want to think about going into the civil service’.
“My parents actually got me books and a prospectus for working with government.
“But I just thought ‘I don’t think so!’
Maureen produces another surprise when I learn how, aged 14, she and her family emigrated to New Zealand in 1964.
“That was a disaster,” she laughs.
“It was all on the £10 family emigration scheme – New Zealand and Australia were looking for skilled craftsmen and tradesmen at the time.
“One of my dad’s friends had a builders business and the company sponsored him. They were looking for skilled builders and my dad got the job. We went out on the SS Canberra which was the hospital ship in the Falklands War. It was awesome – we went through the Med and Suez then across the Indian Ocean to Australia and New Zealand.
“On the ship we were under my parents thumb and I remember being taken to a dance by my mother. This little Russian man came over and asked me to dance.
“I said I don’t dance – he clicked his heels and I asked him to dance with my mother, so I was relieved!”
The Canberra docked in Sydney, Maureen recalls, before steaming on to Wellington, where the emigrants disembarked. Next stop was their new home at Matamata near Hamilton, on New Zealand’s North Island.
The place was up a dirt road and had a backwater feel, its population a mixture of ethnic Maori and Europeans.
“We went to school with the Maori children and they were a bit like bullies,” she says. “They were very big and pushed you out of the way. It was quite a contrast to Castle Douglas. You had to wear this horrendous uniform – an all-in-one gymslip, brogues and a beret on your head. Andrew went to New Zealand with a Beatles haircut and a pencil-thin suit like John Lennon.
“When he got to New Zealand he was put in a class of big rugby players and told to wear short trousers and a cap to school.
“He refused to do that and absolutely hated it from day one. All the guys were big bruisers with the same sort of attitude – very macho and very misogynistic.
“They kept the sexes apart except in class.
“For some subjects like French you learned with the upper school so you were in with 16-year-olds as well. They called me a Pommie swot – you can imagine how that made you feel at that age. My mother found it very strange because there was a definite divide between men and women.
“The women had to go to afternoon tea – it was like something out of the Southern US or the colonies. You had to make cakes and take them then sit with these older ladies who were all very dry and very polite and you’d think ‘God, this isn’t very nice!’
“I suppose it would have been a bit more cosmopolitan in the cities like Auckland.
“Matamata was a backwater in the main with a dirt road but they were all newly-built houses.”
Maureen was not on her own in finding New Zealand a bit staid – ‘The Big Yin’ had the same problem.
“Billy Connolly did a tour of New Zealand and he thought ‘Hmmm, not much fun around here,’” she recalls.
And as it turned out, the Briggs’ time in NZ was short.
“The country was absolutely beautiful,” she recalls. “But my mother was so unhappy and so was Andrew. So in 1965 my dad decided the family should come back. Our ship, the Southern Cross, was much smaller than the Canberra and we were heading to Fremantle in Western Australia when suddenly this hurricane hit.
“We were the only ship in the Great Australian Bight and the waves ripped off the stabilising planes. I thought we were going to die – it was rolling so much that one minute you could see the sky through the porthole then it was underwater the next.
“The storm lasted about a day and they had to send a tug out to take us to Fremantle for repairs. On the way home we called in at Durban and Cape Town, where we were given guards to take us into town.
“Two black guys were walking up the pavement towards us and the guard said ‘you see these white ladies kaffir’ then hit him with his baton into the gutter.
“I was so shocked – I couldn’t believe it.”
Maureen returned to Kirkcudbright Academy and gained five Highers, including in her favourite subjects – art, English and history.
Glasgow School of Art (GSA) was her goal and entry requirements were tough but, Maureen recounts, she applied anyway.
Then, thinking she hadn’t been accepted, she resolved to do a year at Carlisle College then try again.
“I waited six weeks – then I got a letter from Glasgow saying I had been accepted,” she smiles. “I hesitated but the director of education at Dumfries said: ‘Get your bags packed now and get up the road – do you know how many people get accepted for Glasgow?’
“A local solicitor gave me an address in Hill Street near the art school. I knocked on the door and this rough looking woman came out. ‘I was given your address by an ex-student’, I told her. She said ‘Oh no dear, I don’t think you would like to live here – this is the red light district!’”
Maureen tells me she was “extremely privileged” to be taught by renowned artist William Drummond Bone, the nephew of Muirhead Bone famed for beautiful etchings and drawings of the Clyde shipyards.
“He was a very strict teacher and lecturer,” Maureen recalls. “He was quite old when he taught us and nobody in any of his sections would ever let him down. He just had this aura and we had total respect for him.
“Every Friday we were told to fill our sketch books by Monday – and every Monday he would have ‘the good pile’ and ‘the bad pile’. If you did not make the grade you were kicked out – it was very full on.
“Most of the lecturers were extremely nice but I did not like one – he was very misogynistic.
“‘Effing women – they’re only good for one thing’, he said, thinking it was funny.
“What a thing to say to a 19-year-old girl!”
Maureen’s fields of interest at the GSA were illustration and painting – with her skills in painting animals leading to some interesting assignments.
“I was asked to do a poster for Glasgow Zoo,” she says. “It all had to be hand done with Letracet – there were no computers in those days and there was no margin for error.
“I left art school in 1972 and did graphic design for a couple of years.
“But it was not much money so I went to Jordanhill and was a teacher of art at Notre Dame School for Girls in the West End, then St Leonard’s in Easterhouse, where I set up a photographic department for the fifth and sixth years.
“It was an incredibly rough school – it even had a resident glazier. Part of my remit was drug patrol – you went out to make sure the kids got in okay and weren’t getting hounded by drug dealers or madames from brothels.
“By 1979 I was pregnant – I’d got married the year before but things didn’t work out – and I brought my son John down to Kirkcudbright, to a wee cottage opposite Castledykes Primary School.
“I started painting again and doing commissions – cats were my favourite subject and they were often painted in the owner’s favourite chair or part of the garden.”
After 12 years of exhibiting with different galleries, Maureen tells me, she took the plunge and set up Maureen Briggs Fine Art.
She asked a few artist friends to exhibit their work and diversified into antiques and collectibles.
“They got people coming in and a lot of the time they walked out with a painting,” Maureen smiles.
“Then in 1998 Richard walked into the gallery – he’d heard about it through the grapevine. We were basically two people at a crossroads in our lives.
“We were extremely well matched – and he left a huge hole when I lost him.
“It’s only now that I’m beginning to feel more interested in what I’m doing again.”
