Sir Ernest Gowers, KCB, KBE, Senior Regional Commissioner For London; Lieutenant Colonel AJ Child, OBE,...

Creator: Frampton, Meredith (1894-1984) A triple portrait of Sir Ernest Gowers, senior regional commissioner for London; AJ Child, director of operations and Intelligence; and KAL Parker, deputy chief administrative officer, in the London Civil Defence Region Control Room, London, 1943. Gowers stands on the left in front of a map of London on the wall. The War Artists Advisory Committee had commissioned a portrait of Gowers, described by The Times as 'one of the greatest public servants of his day'. The Control Room was based in a specially constructed, highly protected building, sited half underground between the Geology and Natural History Museums in Kensington. Its function was to co-ordinate civil defence operations across the London local authorities, and to collect and evaluate information about the raids and their effects. Meredith Frampton was a British official war artist, best known for his Portrait Of A Young Woman (1935). Many of his commissioned portraits were highly acclaimed and Tate held a retrospective of Frampton's art in 1982.