We recommend you view this tree on a large screen. Click on the nodes to see the names.
I've added in the 9 new members, squeezed down the bottom of the tree. Soon we'll have run out of room and will have to do some major reshaping. Currently there is a trade off with the years people joined and the need to be near to their nominator and the lack of space in general; in some cases members who joined years apart are close together. It would be nice to improve this without making the tree too straggly. The graph could hold more information, perhaps each president's reign could be indicated in a different hue. With data there are many possibilities. These changes will be for next time. For now click on the circles to see the name and year of The London Group artists and you will learn that you are standing on the shoulders of giants.
Tim Pickup
Genetic Moo
So far I have managed to branch together just under one quarter of the 435(ish) historical members of the Group. The furthest back we have got is 1939, thanks to Moich being such a long serving member. Because each member of the group is nominated by an existing member, and then voted on by the 17 members of the Selection Committee, it should in theory be possible to create a tree which links all members. Unfortunately these links were never recorded, so we've had to do this step by step.
This is a living document which means more links can be added, as and when members contact me. All you need to do is tell me who nominated you to the group. Or who you nominated.
I can also make any amendments that are needed. In the course of reading your emails I was struck by how many people couldn't remember clearly who they had nominated. It was not so much forgetfulness, although the big hitters had understandably lost track, it was more the fact that each nominee has sometimes needed a primary and a secondary nominator. This has lead to several cases of two people claiming a member was theirs. I have tried to straighten this out as best I could.
Thanks to David Redfern for keeping the LG database without which none of this would be possible. I have decided to remove several Honorary members - in many cases these were secretaries or show organisers and I'm assuming the nomination process was sidestepped or by committee.
Each member is positioned according to the year they joined the group with 1913 at the top and 2022 at the bottom. You can see the specific years by clicking the SHOW_YEAR button. Each decade has its own colour. I have tried to keep members together who joined the group in the same year. For example you can see the bumper years of 1981 (22 new members) and 1990 (20 new members) across the middle of the tree. However due to the bulging contributions of some members it has been impossible to stick to this rule, and this will become harder the more links are added. A clean orderly graph is the priority.
On this point Jeff Dellow has caused an issue along with Irvin and Bowling. They've all been nominated twice to the group. In this case to avoid some kind of circular time warp I have excluded the second comings.
Peter Clossick once said to me the best way to change the group was to nominate new members, and he has certainly lived up to that advice with 13 London Group children. By the way mathematically speaking this tree is a directed graph and the common terminology for describing the links is as parents and children. I know Peter does have children but I suspect not 13. Which brings us onto grandchildren, which he also has. If you count the fecundity factor to include not just all children but all grandchildren and great grand children and so on then Suzan Swale just beats Peter with a combined forward family of 16 members. And going back further Gill Ingham beats this with 20+ spawn and I lost count.
Another notable point is that you are never too old or too new to the group to nominate. In fact nominating a new member is one of the few things a new member to the group can do, even before they get a vote! Several members told me they tried nominating once and after failing to succeed would never do so again. But don't give up; John Crossley for example has nominated two members to the group 32 years apart and Suzan Swale beats this with continuous nominations over 33 years.
As long as members are passionate enough about the group to put forward nominations we will surely thrive and our Family Tree will grow.
