This web site is intended to hold a biography and a gallery of works. That is a longer term project, to start with there's very little here but come back in a few months (or years!) and there should eventually be some updates. The information here initially is from memory, facts, figures, dates will be corrected as I check back with source materials.
Phyllis Jones was born in Middlesborough in 1910. Having won a competition for a graphic design which encouraged her to pursue art as a career she went on to art college in London and earned a teaching diploma, becoming a school art-teacher.
In 1939 she married school teacher Brian Hindle and moved to Birmingham where she remained until her death in 1999. Until about 1960 she was housewife and mother but had started to teach a few adult evening classes. The death of Brian in 1962 was not just the serious blow of the death of a spouse but also a major financial problem. At that time teachers spouses got no support from the education authority or the accrued pension rights. State benefits were small. Brian had no life insurance or other assets. Death duties of about £400 were payable on his estate a suburban semi worth at most £4000. Adjusted for inflation the 2014 equivalent of £400 would be about £8000, average incomes at the time were around £900 p.a. Phyllis still had 3 dependent children, a mortgage and was only earning pin-money from the evening classes.
Initially she found more teaching work in a local junior school and was able to build on her contacts from teaching evening classes to get further classes and later a permanent staff position at the Birmingham College of Arts and Domestic Science.
Phyllis had not been very active as an artist since marriage but became more prolific starting in the 1960s.
Her sadness at seeing the destruction of many of the wonderful historic (Victorian) buildings of the city centre led her to start recording them before or during demolition and this led to following up with paintings of the reconstruction.
In later years an interest in bridges as a subject for paintings led to a wider interest in the steel industry which was in decline. She was able to get access to many of the steel works around the country and create paintings of the processes before the plants were closed down.
She also painted portraits, landscapes, flowers and worked in a variety of other media.
Her role at the college expanded, a separate art department was created of which she was appointed head. She was always keen to experiment with new materials and techniques largely for the benefit of the students. It was not an art college but art and design was increasingly being recognised as an important component of many of the courses. Chefs needed to undertand the importance of visual presentation of food and I remember how chocolate and cake tins were collected to use a substitutes for cakes for catering students to use to learn decorative icing techniques. The hairdressers course required that students create an artwork representative of a hair style, for those students who struggled with drawing Phyllis would try them out with alternatives, maybe that student could work better with clay, collage, fabrics or even a more abstract representation. Her view was that everyone has artistic capabilities the problem is finding the way each individual can best express them (she claimed that even the poorest student could create a presentable piece of work with scraperboard).