Ede attended the Leys School in Cambridge. He deepened his
knowledge of art history in the town's library and Fitzwilliam
Museum, frequented the Botanic Gardens, and walked across fields
to Grantchester, visiting the tea garden at Orchard House, where
Rupert Brooke lodged. Hearing Elgar in King's College Chapel, he
experienced an epiphany, later recalling how he 'was spellbound &
did throw my spiritual hat in the air – indeed walked on air'.
2
Staying
during school holidays with his friend Donald Winnicott, later a
renowned psychoanalyst and paediatrician, Ede enacted a curiously
prophetic ritual: shifting the drawing room's piano and furniture to
create a light, airy space.
Aged fifteen or sixteen, Ede suffered a breakdown and did not return
to the Leys. He wanted to become an artist. Despite his parents'
disapproval, he enrolled at the Newlyn School of Painting, under the
direction of Stanhope Forbes, then, in 1913, at Edinburgh College
of Art, where he met his future wife, Helen Schlapp. A pianist, art
student, and like Ede a lover of the countryside and flowers, Helen
was refreshingly down-to-earth. After Ede returned from war service
in Flanders and India, and had enrolled at the Slade, they married in
2 Ede, letter to Mary Adams (née Ede), 3 May 1977,
in Laura Freeman, Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the
Kettle's Yard Artists, Jonathan Cape, London,
2023, p.13.
Jim's Bedroom. Photograph by Mark Dalton, 2025. © Courtesy Kettle's Yard.
6
