John Craske was born in 1881 and in 1917, when he had just turned 36, he fell seriously ill. For the rest of his life he kept moving in and out of what was described as 'a stuporous state'. In 1923 he started making paintings of the sea and boats and the coastline seen from the sea, and later, when he was too ill to stand and paint, he turned to embroidery, which he could do lying in bed. His embroideries were also of the sea, including his masterpiece, a huge embroidery of the evacuation of Dunkirk. Very few facts about Craske are known, and only a few scattered photographs have survived, together with accounts by the writer Sylvia Townsend Warner and her lover Valentine Ackland, who discovered Craske in 1937. So Julia Blackburn's account of his life is far from a conventional biography.