It’s been a day of remembering Leonard McComb, or Len as most people called him and McComb like a comb, not a coombe.  

There was a Requiem Mass at Westminster Cathedral where he did two mosaics in small apses on either side of the entrance – St. Francis preaching to the Birds:-

And St. Anthony to the Fishes:-

His father was a commercial artist in Manchester and he started out driving a milk van, although he hadn’t learned to drive.

He was Keeper of the RA Schools from 1995 to 1998 and I realise that many of the characteristics of the Life Room, including the boxes containing casts up the west wall, were not an inheritance from the St. Martin’s Lane Academy, but a creation of Len’s.