Some years ago Don Maclean, comedian and passionate historian, took KBH on a trip to the battlefields of Northern France.  This experience spawned an interest which almost became an obsession - not to depict battle scenes, but private and intimate moments of soldiers in the trenches. An exhibition of 30 paintings at the ‘In and Out’ Club, Piccadilly, in London in 1993 showed images such as soldiers washing in dirty water in a shell hole; brewing tea and smoking cigarettes between battles, and playing football in the famous Christmas truce of 1914.  Prince Charles opened a retrospective exhibition in 1995.  A WW1 veteran who ‘went over the top’ on the first day of the battle of the Somme on his sixteenth birthday said that the paintings were perfect in every way except one – KBH had not managed to capture the smell!

Click on each image to see the full painting.