From the Jerusalem Diary of Eric Gill

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So imagine– no, in fact it’s probably best if you don’t try to imagine– how “put off” one of Gill’s younger daughters was when he “stayed ½ hour – put penis in her arse” in January of 1920, or on one afternoon in July of 1921 when he made his sixteen year old daughter Betty orgasm (and made her bring him to orgasm) just so they could watch the effect it had on their anuses: “Why should it contract during the orgasm, and why should a woman’s do the same as a man’s? There was a “quadruple relationship, with Gill’s two middle-aged-to-elderly dependants (May was in her forties, Mary now over sixty) competing with Daisy [a twenty year old youth] for his sexual attentions. Hepburn has talked to groups who work with those who have experienced sexual abuse, and he has accepted some of their advice. His attitude to animals, as to some extent to children, was that particularly Victorian combination of scientific curiosity mixed with high emotionalism.

The very hands that carved the stations were the hands that abused… He abused his maids, his prostitutes, animals, he was having sex with everything that moved – a very deranged man sexually.

During his career, Gill employed at least twenty-seven apprentices including his nephew John Skelton, Hilary Stratton, Desmond Chute, David Kindersley and Donald Potter. The series of life-drawings and prints of his daughters, including Girl in Bath and Hair Combing done at Ditchling, were considered among Gill's finest works. Quite why Gill was offered, let alone accepted, these honours from institutions he had openly reviled throughout his career is unclear. Arthur Tidman Gill had left the Congregational Church in 1878 over doctrinal disagreements and became a minister of the Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion, a grouping of Calvinist Methodists.

After a period of intense involvement with the Fabians, Gill became disillusioned with both them and the Arts and Craft movement. Although it is my daily prayer that Ian Watkins is nightly corn-holed in PRISON, I should be able to listen to his music if I have the wimsy to hear it [FYI, I’ve never heard of the band and since I am not a METAL-HEAD, I probably never will—Still, as an adult; I have the right of choice]. Eric Gill was one of the great British artists of the 20th century – and a sexual abuser of his own daughters. The first of these communities was at Ditchling in Sussex, where Gill established the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic for Catholic craftsmen. Even before the Leeds memorial controversy, Gill's series of illustrations that included the Nuptials of God, The Convert and Divine Lovers and his views on the sexual nature of Christianity were causing alarm within the Roman Catholic hierarchy and distancing Gill from other members of the Ditchling community.In 1934, Gill contributed art to an exhibition mounted by the left-wing Artists' International Association, and defended the exhibition against accusations in The Catholic Herald that its art was "anti-Christian". On January 12, 2022, an activist used a ladder to climb above the entrance to the BBC Broadcasting House in London and preceded to attack the statue of Prospero and Ariel prominently displayed above the door. I’m sure most of us don’t need much help to join this up to the relatively recent revelations about decades of child abuse by priests, but “never trust a man who wears a cassock” doesn’t seem a very useful lesson to take away from all this.