Pity those unfortunate artists who get written out of history

People find it easier to credit one person than two, particularly if one is the bigger name

It is curious how people can be written out of history, not least art history. I thought this again when I was reading about Peter Blake's knighthood in the honours list last weekend. Blake's is a richly deserved honour. The pop artist has an affability and natural curiosity to match his talent, and has brought change to bear at the Royal Academy, where his hanging of the Summer Exhibition last year brought BritArt into the annual celebration of Middle England.

What interested, though did not surprise, me was that Peter Blake, in all the newspaper reports of his knighthood, was referred to as the creator of the Beatles' Sgt Pepper album cover.

Up to a point. The cover of that seminal recording was in fact created by Blake and his then wife and fellow artist Jann Haworth, once a key figure among the Ruralist group of painters. But Ms Haworth's role in the iconic cover is rarely acknowledged. Most pop and many art historians are unaware of her. Few, if any, of the legion of Beatles biographers have ever heard of her.

I met her a few years ago during one of her London exhibitions. She told me how she had been playing Trivial Pursuit and answered the question of who designed the famous cover. But she got it wrong, because the makers Trivial Pursuit, like everyone else credited only her former husband. However, she had a hand in much of the concept, including the celebrities as cloth sculptures, a technique in which she specialised.

She told me when I met her: "Peter and I were there at the time, talking to Paul and John, and working out what the Pepper cover would be. I said I thought it would be very nice not to have real lettering on the cover, but to have something like clocks in civic parks, making the lettering an integral part of the piece. The old lady and Shirley Temple figure in the foreground were mine, and the idea of going for 3-D figures in a setting was something I was doing at the time. The crowd concept was Peter's."

So clearly, hers was a pretty heavy involvement in the concept. Peter Blake, I should stress, does not seek to exclude her from the credit. But why does everyone else? If I were a feminist historian, I suppose I would say that it is just part of a cycle of women's contributions being ignored. But I don't think that is the case. Perhaps her divorce from Blake led to the art world ignoring her.

I also think that people simply find it easier to credit one person rather than two with an artistic achievement, particularly if one of the pair is a bigger name. Will Cohu, who ran the studio theatre at Chichester with a young Sam Mendes, and now has a national newspaper column writing about his dog, never gets a mention in profiles of Mendes, which invariably assume that Mendes ran the theatre solo.

Readers may have other examples of creative people who have been written out of the script or have received less than their due over the years. Let me know. In the meantime, it would be nice to give Jann Haworth her small but rightful place in the Beatles' story.

¿ Without wishing to emulate the fawning of Joanna Lumley, who described Prince Charles as "our host and our hero" at the launch of the Prince of Wales Arts & Kids Foundation on Thursday, I'd give the Prince some credit for being politically incorrect in his defence of high art. Though one of the Foundation's advisers told me all too predictably, "We want to give disadvantaged children access to all sorts of arts. We'd be happy to take them to a Westlife concert," the Prince was refreshingly old-fashioned. "We want to take them away from the computer game and the television screen," he said, "and take them into the theatre and the poetry room."

¿ I noted last week that little had changed since Sir Richard Eyre said a year ago that the high cost of tickets, drinks and programmes put young people off going to the theatre. Add to that list the price of interval ice creams. At the opening of Bombay Dreams at the Apollo Victoria this week, a small vanilla tub cost £3. Those youngsters are best advised to stay in their seats and read a book – the programme is also £3 -- otherwise they might have nothing left for the fare home.

¿ The dispute between Mike Batt, the producer of the classical crossover outfit the Planets, and the music publishers of the late John Cage, over who owns copyright to a track of 60 seconds' silence on the new Planets album, must surely have no precedent in the history of copyright battles.

When I asked Batt how the wrangle was progressing, he summed it up appropriately: "Even if it was his silence," Mike Batt said, "it's my arrangement."

d.lister@independent.co.uk