Drawn before he entered the Slade, Spencer used pen and ink, a favourite medium for his early drawings. Born in Cookham in 1902, Roy Lacey is thought to be a son of the Laceys who kept the boatyard by the bridge. He leans over the back of a pew in the village church of Holy Trinity. With Spencer’s retentive visual memory it was not unknown for him to return to a motif years later, so that ‘In Church’, 1958, contains a similar figure.