Sculptor and campaigner born in Toxteth, Liverpool. Dooley was an apprentice welder at the Cammell Laird shipyard, Birkenhead, and a Mersey tugboat sailor before joining the Irish Guards in 1945. While in the army he converted to Roman Catholicism and also joined the Communist Party. His political beliefs led him to clash with authority, and during a tour in the Middle East he became so involved in the Palestinian struggle that he ended up in a military prison. It was while in prison that he first began to make sculptures as a self-taught artist. Dooley left the Army in 1952 and lived in London. He studied drawing in a class at the Whitechapel Gallery. He later worked as a caretaker and model at St Martin’s College of Art, where many students were working with industrial steel and using factory welding techniques. He began to use discarded metal to make his own sculptures. Reg Butler influenced his work and, although he never formally enrolled at the art school, he did attend some sculpture classes and learned new ideas and techniques from students and staff at the College. He eventually attracted attention as a talented artist and a forceful speaker. In 1962 he was given a solo exhibition by St Martin’s Gallery. Both his work and his direct manner and speech seemed to challenge the atmosphere of the post-war art world. Dooley returned to Liverpool in about 1963. While undertaking casual work he tried to make a living as a sculptor, and eventually set up a studio on Slater Street, Liverpool. Here he was rapidly successful and became unofficial sculptor of the Mersey Beat scene. Several celebrities, including George Melly, bought his work. In 1964 he was commissioned to create The Stations of the Cross, for St Mary’s Church, Leyland, Lancashire, and in about 1965 his figure of Christ on the Princes Avenue Methodist Church, Liverpool, which attracted much attention. These commissions helped to secure Dooley’s reputation for making monumental religious art in bronze or scrap metal and, over the next 10 years, he produced a number of large-scale commissions, especially for churches in Britain, Spain and South America. These include the Risen Christ for Our Lady of the Wayside in Solihull and a St Mary for St Nicholas’s, Liverpool. He also made a number of smaller bronze figures and animals which can now be seen in public collections; examples include Horse (1964, Gallery Oldham); Cat (1971, New Art Gallery, Walsall); Satan (Williamson Art Gallery & Museum, Birkenhead); and Fighter and Female Figure (both 1972, Harris Museum & Art Gallery, Preston). During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Dooley became known as a campaigner. He protested about the number of London artists in the Liverpool John Moores Exhibition and also championed amateur artists, establishing a Worker Artists’ Association and establishing the Bluecoat Chambers street railings as an exhibition venue in 1969. He joined the Liverpool Academy and attempted to reform it. He regarded himself as the unofficial speaker for the ordinary people of Liverpool and rejected all intellectual approaches to art in favour of a rather simplistic populism. In the early 1970s he set up a studio in a converted public house in Woolton, Liverpool. He appeared on television on the Tonight programme and on This is Your Life. He made a documentary for BBC 2 called One Pair of Eyes. He also made one of his most famous public works: the Beatles memorial, Four Lads Who Shook the World, in Mathew Street, Liverpool (1974). Between 1974 and 1979 he was working on La Pasionaria, a memorial to the British volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, erected on the Glasgow Custom House Quay. He continued to work in a basement studio of the Liverpool Academy and was supported by a loyal patron until his death. In 2007, the Heritage Lottery Fund provided funding for the archiving of Dooley’s effects and work, and for research into his life and art. It is expected that this will result in the creation of a permanent exhibition or museum.
Sources include: correspondence from Bill Longshaw, Dooley Project Co-Ordinator, Liverpool Academy, Liverpool, to Emma Roberts, 24 July 2008.
Bibliography: D. Buckman, Artists in Britain since 1945 (2 vols: A–L, M–Z), Bristol, 2006; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Liverpool, Liverpool, 1997, pp. 108–10; P. Davies, Liverpool Seen, Bristol, 1992, pp. 134–39; Guardian, 17 January 1994 (obituary); Liverpool Echo, 8 January 1994 (obituary); R. McKenzie, Public Sculpture of Glasgow, Liverpool, 2002, pp. 75–77; E. Morris and E. Roberts, Public Sculpture of Cheshire and Merseyside, Liverpool, 2012, p. 107; J. Willett, Art in a City, London, 1967, pp. 173–76.
Emma Roberts, 2012