All is lost.
Only two fragmentary diaries survive from the 1917–18 era, gifted to me by his nephew  living in Jamaica.

Their collection of musical instruments, including those so often mentioned in their books and which accompanied them on their travels, lie jealously guarded yet mouldering unloved, in the barn of a warehouse annexe of the South London museum to which they were entrusted.

Yet some several hundreds of their paintings survive: some in the Wellcome Institute; some in the Imperial War Museum; a scattering in various provincial galleries; many in the keeping of friends and relatives, every one of whom has nothing but fond memories of them. Invariably a smile will cross their faces as they recall   ‘Aah, yes . . . Jan and Cora . . .’ 

So, who were they?

Born the son of a  parson in 1882 Godfrey Jervis Gordon was educated at Marlborough College, Wiltshire, in keeping with its status as a college for the sons of clergy. His father was a scion of a wealthy Midlands family, his grandfather a one-time Mayor of Litchfield, but by the time Jan was born this wealth had become so very thinly spread amongst the huge extended family, all living off inherited capital, that Jan, as he had become known at college, was having to establish himself in a career. Influenced by his family’s connections he mistakenly elected to become a mining engineer, seduced as he says ‘by the sweet logic of mechanisms . . .’

Cora Josephine Turner, later known always as Jo, had been born three  years earlier in Buxton, Derbyshire, the youngest daughter of the locally noted Frederic Turner, himself the son of Samuel Turner to whom a monument still stands in Buxton.

Dr Frederic Turner was a stereotypical Victorian father, a GP, JP and workhouse guardian, who was much-loved by his patients yet who ruled his home with a rod of iron. Despite his display of temper in the face of Cora’s refusal to be bullied into becoming an unpaid nurse,and nannie and housekeeper to her Fathers new children by his second wife,and ending her days as a  spinster of the parish he finally agreed to her going to the Slade School of Art to study the subject for which she had already shown such talent.

While Cora was studying at the Slade School of Art, Jan had unenthusiastically embarked on a doomed bid to make a fortune mining tin in the Malay, his limited enthusiasm further dampened by his disquiet at the way the industry was run and his distaste at the exploitation of the local labour force. Nor did he endear himself to his employer when he was found sketching the fire that burnt down the mine buildings instead of endeavouring to save them.

A small legacy from one of his many maiden aunts enabled him to return to London and study for a while under Frank Brangwyn at the Kensington School of Art. Fate and events conspired to send both Jan and Cora independently to Paris.

 Thus 1906-07 found them both separatley cast adrift on the shores of Montparnasse, at that time just beginning to oust Montmartre as the artists’ chosen refuge. A growing but somewhat introspective Anglo-Saxon community centred around the many cheap studios and academies brought them together.

Few snatches of their life before 1914 have been able to be recovered, few enough to cause me intense frustration as their biographer.

They lived in and around the very hub of Montparnasse; they once took a studio in the very building that had recently housed Alphonse Mucha; they frequented the Closerie des Lilas, where they met with Picasso and ‘ . . .all the leading and lesser lights of the modern art movement . . .’ Did they ever trip over Modigliani lying drunk somewhere; did they regard him as a drunken nuisance or would they have spent a few francs on one of his sketches in the Dôme café? Did they share a table with the young Hemingway? Did Joyce sponge off them? Were they ever admitted to Gertrude Stein’s sanctum? They would have known of her and her art interests through Nina Hamnett, with whom Jan studied and of whom he was quite fond.

What of all the other characters and artists who used the Carrefour Vavin as their rendezvous? Jan initially lived in a hotel in the street behind the Cafe du Dôme and painted in the Luxembourg gardens, while Cora was a regular student at Colarossi’s academy in the Rue de la Grande Chaumière. Did Cora meet up with Arthur Ransome, who lived in the same block of studios at 9 Rue Campagne Premier? She certainly knew him as a girl and he may have been the subject of her first girlish love. All such tantalising possibilities remain unknown, the meat I have long striven to put upon the bones of what I have been able to discover about their early life in Paris.

It was the 1914-18 war that stunted their nascent artistic career, yet kick-started their literary career. They had begun to be noticed for their art when the war intervened. Jan was classed as unfit for military service but volunteered for service with the Red Cross in Serbia - how and with whom makes an amusing story of its own (see 'Jan and Cora in Serbia 1914-15' on this site).

On their return to London after the hardships and adventures alluded to above, Jan and Jo were sorely in need of some income and wrote about their adventures in the Westminster Gazette, which in turn led to a commission to write ' The Luck of Thirteen'  followed by 'A Balkan Freebooter', a transcript of a Balkan adventurer’s life story.

Jan, who by then had been ‘directed’ into war work, spent 18 months making aeroplane engine parts at Rolls Royce, Derby, but still managed to write numerous articles about art for New Age, New Witness, Nation, Country Life and others. He then went on to work on dazzle camouflage schemes for ships at the Royal Academy, for which he was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve. 

As soon as they were able, funded by Jan’s war gratuity and what he received as official war artist for the Navy Medical Section, they returned to Paris and thence to Spain. Jan had conceived a passion for the Spanish guitar during the war and was determined to sample the music of this instrument at source, along with Jo, who was an accomplished player of violin and piano, having studied at the Manchester Conservatory of Music.

The foundations of their unmistakable writing style were laid in Spain with their two books 'Poor Folk in Spain' and 'Misadventures With a Donkey'. No guide book plagiarism here, no ruins, no church entrails, no socialising with expatriates; Jan and Jo recorded everyday life and trivia and the characters they met with humour, neither condescending nor patronising, though one must sometimes remember that certain flavours of Jan’s phraseology that these days would be considered non-PC are but a
reflection of the education and attitudes of an England now a century past. Both these books are as highly regarded in Spain for the observations of ordinary daily life and customs contained therein, as is the Languedoc book in Najac. ‘Poor Folk’ is used to this day to illustrate the complexities and pitfalls of older English grammar and usage in the English department at Murcia University.

Who were the Gordons? Jan and Cora were a remarkably talented couple who wrote twelve captivating books about their travels between 1916 and 1933.
However, their output was by no means limited to travel literature: they taught at art schools; played European folk music on a variety of instruments with great accomplishment; and produced many paintings and etchings. Jan also had published a considerable number of articles on art criticism, several books on the history of art – and six novels.

The Gordon’s connection with France started long before  the First World War. Jan had studied at the London School of Art until he upped sticks to the Left Bank in Paris in 1906 after an ill-fated love affair. Here he met Cora, who, having completed four years at the Slade, had  fled to escape the clutches of her authoritarian father.

After their marriage in 1909, they became well-known figures in Montparnasse, though unlike many of the other writers and artists of that time they preferred to merge into the background of the quartier rather than join the hedonistic Anglo-American set that patronised the Parisian art scene. On the outbreak of war in 1914, the Gordons joined the Red Cross and found themselves in the Balkans the following year in time to experience the harrowing winter retreat of the Serbian Army.

At the end of the war, a small service gratuity enabled them to return to their Paris studio. It was now that they decided to combine their literary and artistic skills to research, write and illustrate their first travel book, 'Poor Folk in Spain', published in 1922. The following year, they returned to Spain, this time trekking across the southern half of the country with a donkey and cart. 'Misadventures With A Donkey in Spain' was very well received by the critics, with several reviewers comparing it favourably with Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey. Hard on the heels of this success came publication of  'Two Vagabonds in Languedoc'.

_{The rue du Cherche Midi, 6arr. Paris, the street on the right is where Jan and Cora lived     from just prior to  WW1 to 1932}