To those aware of its origins, The Henry Moore Sculpture Gallery on the Headrow, Leeds, is the continuing tribute to Jeffrey Sherwin,who has died at the age of 82. It was his vision and dogged negotiating skills that brought it about. As a newly-elected Conservative Councillor and the party’s spokesman on leisure services, he had the idea of establishing such a prestigious gallery in Leeds. At the time Labour was in control of the City Council, and he tried without success to persuade his opposite number to take on the idea. He was similarly rebuffed by his own party chiefs when the Conservatives gained control in 1976, but he set about gathering influential support until it was eventually accepted.
The next step was to persuade Henry Moore that his foundation should endow the gallery. He was a somewhat shy man so Sherwin put together a small group of convivial councillors who entertained Henry Moore for lunch in one of the Lord Mayor’s private rooms. He enjoyed this and subsequent lunches with the same group and the Henry Moore Foundation provided a key £100,000 grant. Moore, himself, laid the foundation stone on April 10,1980.
Jeffrey Sherwin was very much a Leeds man, born in the city, the only child of Maurice Sherwin, also a GP, and Rachey, a ceramicist. After Leeds Grammar School, he studied medicine at Leeds University, establishing himself as a much loved GP in the Harehills area. His father had qualified under the family name of Morris Shernovtch before changing it to Maurice Sherwin in the early 1920s. The Shernovitch family came to Leeds around 1900 from Bessarabia in the Russian Empire, which was ceded to Russia from the Ottoman Empire and is largely now in Moldova. Curiously, only Maurice changed his name at the time, though another branch of the family later shortened the name to Sherne.
Jeffrey qualified in 1961 and joined his father’s practice. In 1968 he married Ruth Israel, a talented pianist and herself, the daughter of a doctor in Middlesbrough. She studied at the Royal Academy of Music and, after some years as a music teacher, came to Leeds to study piano with Fanny Waterman. The pair met at a graduates’ evening in Leeds.
Dr Sherwin began his political career as a Liberal, contesting the Wortley ward unsuccessfully in 1963, but switched to the Conservatives, winning the Talbot ward at his first attempt in 1971. He held the seat until the ward boundaries were all changed in 1980. He then contested Barwick and Kippax, losing to Labour. He was later made an Honorary Alderman.
Dr Sherwin was loud and brash but was generally forgiven because he was a constant source of ideas. He followed the Henry Moore sculpture gallery by seeking to solve the city’s lack of an adequate concert hall with his proposed adaptation of the Corn Exchange. He had been one of the early members of the Leeds Civic Trust and he persuaded the Trust to support the Corn Exchange scheme, but it was rejected by the city council. In 1968 John Betjaman made a film about the changing face of Leeds and it was Dr Sherwin who brought him to the city.
He was also noted as a knowledgeable art collector, possessing works by Jacob Kramer, John Bratby, Henry Moore and his particular obsession, the English Surrealists, who featured in his 2014 book British Surrealism Opened Up. The book discusses the friendship between Moore and that other Leeds-educated artist, Damien Hirst. Sherwin countered arguments that Hirst was not a Surrealist by asking what else a cow pickled in formaldehyde could possibly be! Sherwin’s collection of 220 paintings was the subject of a 2009 exhibition, British Surrealism in Context: A Collector’s Eye, at Leeds Art Gallery.
Another early enthusiasm was for the Morris Minor car and he once drove a Morris 1000 convertible to Moscow where, when parked in Red Square, it became an object of considerable interest to the locals.
He died of an abdominal aortic aneurysm and is survived by Ruth, his wife of 50 years, and his sons Jonathan and Adam.
Michael Meadowcroft
Dr Jeffrey Sherwin: born January 5, 1936. Died November 12, 2018
