Recording Britain

The Pilgrim Trust is a national grant-making trust in the United Kingdom. It is based in London and is a registered charity under English law.

It was founded in 1930 with a two million pound grant by Edward Harkness, an American philanthropist. The trust's inaugural board were Stanley Baldwin, Sir James Irvine, Sir Josiah Stamp, John Buchan and Hugh Macmillan; its first secretary was former civil servant, Thomas Jones.

The preamble to the Trust Deed was written by John Buchan, and reads thus:

In 1940 the Trust funded a scheme "Recording the changing face of Britain" established by the Committee for the Employment of Artists in Wartime, part of the Ministry of Labour and National Service. Led by Sir Kenneth Clark, director of the National Gallery, it employed artists to record the home front in Britain, running until 1943. It was motivated by a desire to record and reflect the landscape, already undergoing a period of rapid change through urbanisation and changes in agriculture and further threatened by bombing and other effects of war. Some of the sixty three artists directly commissioned included John Piper, Sir William Russell Flint, Charles Knight, Malvina Cheek, George Hooper, Clifford Ellis and Rowland Hilder. A further thirty four artists contributed to the final total of over 1500 works. The collection was donated to the Victoria and Albert Museum by the Trust in 1949. Over a hundred works comprising the "Recording Scotland" part of the same scheme are held at the Museum Collections Unit, University of St. Andrews.

...
Wikipedia