The Arts Interview: Myles Pepper II

Jon Gower

In the second part of a three-part series, Jon Gower talks to the Fishguard-based silversmith, gallery owner and arts promoter, Myles Pepper.

One of the most memorable meals in my life was served up and cooked by Myles Pepper. He had invited artists from Wales and Ireland to the West Wales Arts Centre in Fishguard, which he established in 1987. Here he insisted on people swapping tables after each and every course to add to the conviviality. By the last course a prodigious amount of alcohol had been taken and I found myself sharing a table with the Irish contingent, who had, along with all the other diners, partaken to the full.

One of those at our table suggested we should play ‘Yeats jukebox’ which involved us all imagining a jukebox at the table and then each in turn “selecting” a poem by W.B.Yeats which we would then recite. On realising I was the only one from Wales, and presuming that all the others would know some of their fellow countryman’s poems by heart I panicked somewhat, not wanting to let my country down. Luckily, I remembered a favourite piece of music, Peter Warlock’s song-cycle ‘The Curlew’ which is a setting of four Yeats poems. I could remember those, so when it was my turn I could play for Wales.

Cultural exchanges

Food is an important aspect of Myles Pepper’s decades long series of cultural exchanges between Wales and Ireland.

“When I started bringing people over from Ireland I knew you’ve got to feed people, especially young performers. People don’t think it’s exhausting playing music or singing. You understand that if someone’s run a hundred yards or a marathon they’re exhausted but you know a lot of energy goes into performances and especially kids – they need feeding – because in a two-hour concert there are tens of thousands of notes, so it’s very taxing.”

Some of the meals he’s prepared have been acts of reconciliation and bridge-building.

“I remember after one of the great tragedies in Ireland, the Armagh bombing, I got involved in the peace programme and I brought people over from the Warrenpoint area in the north of Ireland. They’d experienced terrible tragedies there. Not just the wider, known ones of the mass killings, but also incidents of properties being blown up and so on. I brought people over from there.

“One of them was a very close friend of President Mary McAleese, a lady called Eibhlis Farrell, who is also an extraordinary composer. In fact, I commissioned Eibhlis to write a piece for solo harp on the state occasion when Mary McAleese came to Wales which was performed by an outstanding young harpist in the Irish National Youth Orchestra. So that was one great connection. We got talking about Warrenpoint where there was a mortar
attack that killed 19 soldiers.

“I was interested in trying to bring people to the table to talk. So I offered to cook a meal up there. So they found me a venue which was the York Club in Warrenpoint. And I said I was going to cook a meal for 60 people and a lot of those people wouldn’t ever ordinarily speak to each other. I asked for help, I asked for three men to join me who couldn’t cook and they turned up at one o’clock and they all thought that I was just going to be making sandwiches. But I took two sides of strip loin over with two fillets of beef, a crate of asparagus from Manorbier and loads of Llangollen cheese.

“I took absolutely everything with me. I also took some Welsh wine, which wasn’t quite so fine in those early days, but it was appropriately a Glyndwr wine. Anyway, I cooked this meal, I managed to get it all done on time. One of President Bill Clinton’s chief advisors turned up for the meal.”

So did the food help build bridges?

“I’m told it did work. I facilitate a lot of meals like that, and people are observing what I was doing, they think, what am I doing putting these people together? I don’t actually know what they talk about. I’m not there to eavesdrop, I’m just there to facilitate. The only embarrassing thing that happened that night, it was gone four o’clock in the morning and Eibhlis Farrell got on the piano and said “Miles is now going to sing the Welsh National Anthem” and I’ve got a voice like a motherless calf, you know.”

Memorable

So which is Myles Pepper’s most memorable meal?

“There’ve been quite a few, but I was rightfully proud of the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park. You know, we’ve suffered in Wales from not being allowed to promote ourselves properly. Prior to the Senedd, any promotion of Wales abroad had to go through the British Tourist Authority and that was so far removed from Wales. A lot of people in Cardiff haven’t got a clue about rural Wales, but being run from London, they had no clue at all.

“But anyway, the Council for the National Parks of the United Kingdom issued an art commission, and I thought this is really exciting. So each of the national parks, there was one major commission given out and five minor ones. And the major commission for Pembrokeshire was given to an outstanding young artist by the name of Helen Chadwick, who really was a forerunner for people like Tracy Emin and Richard Long and people like
that.

“Helen made her base in Pembrokeshire with us, an absolutely fascinating lady and very connected with both art and science. She had a relationship with St. Thomas’s Hospital in London, where she had cells extracted from personal areas of her body and magnified thousands of times which she then transposed into her work, which is what her Pembrokeshire project was – some of her last works, tragically as she died at the age of 42.

“Helen felt unwell one evening in London when she was out having a meal as she was very upset because news had come out about the Sea Empress disaster down near Milford Haven. It was on our side to the north side of the haven, St Anne’s Head, that she did some of her work such as throwing paint into the sea and then lifting and putting it on canvas.

“She loved food and I loved cooking and I cooked a goose you know, it has that beautiful golden crust, I’d put mustard on it and so on. And she said, could I take a photograph? And I said, of course you can. She was a pixie-like person and all of a sudden she was up on top of the table, taking snaps.

“And she was taking photographs from all these obscure angles. She was like a dancer basically, a ballet dancer. So it was actually a live show for a while, watching her do this. And so she took all these photographs and I never saw them sadly. I went to a memorial event for her and I could hear all the great and the good talking about her and they had no idea about this very special artist’s time down in Pembrokeshire.”