BORKUM OF SPY FAME—NOW A GREAT NAVAL STATION
Water-colour sketch by the Author. Exhibited in London 1911
How strange, after such a span of time, to feel a little thrill of pleasure at the announcement of acceptance of something I had done! It shows that, after all, one is capable of new sensations along new lines, even when parallel ones.
Everyone was talking of Borkum in 1910. Two English officers had been arrested as spies there and imprisoned in a German fortress.
Mr. Percy Anderson, fresh from designing the dresses for Kismet, chanced to see a sketch I had made at Borkum a few years before.
“Why on earth don’t you send it to an exhibition?” he asked.
“I never show anything nowadays,” was my reply.
“Send this for a change, then—just get a frame and send it in.”
The frame was bought, and to the Lady Artists in Suffolk Street it went. A little thrill of joy passed through me when I opened an envelope with a bright red ticket:
Admit the artist to varnishing day.
A week later my little picture appeared in the Daily Graphic.