Where Fish Comes From

I need to write about the Christies’ sale and will do that tomorrow, but in the meantime I have to show you this, because it is one of the oddest posters I have come across in a long while.

Milford Haven - Where Fish Comes From, GWR poster, c 1925.Artwork by John Hassall.

It’s a GWR poster by John Hassall (him of Bracing Skegness fame) and, well where to begin?

The caption isn’t the most obvious way of enticing visitors to anywhere, I would have thought,.  But what really fries my brain in this picture is the faces.  They look like people pushing their heads into one of those a seaside attractions, or as though photographs have been glued onto the artwork and then painted in.

In short it is weird and inexplicable and not like anything else, which is why you needed to see it.  End of broadcast.

  • The more I look at this poster, the less I understand what on earth it thinks it’s doing. But genius, definitely, nonetheless.

  • File under eccentric?…..there has to be more examples of such random genius elsewhere

  • Bring on the examples of random genius – I think we may need to have a competition for most eccentric poster one of these days.

    And I hadn’t even spotted the pipe. What does it all mean? Is there some kind of secret like the Da Vinci Code underlying it all??

  • He’s just pointing towards Milford. I’m old enough to remember people using their pipes like that to point things out. More curious for me, I’ve never thought of Milford Haven as a great fish port in the Newquay-Grimsby league. Probably was before the oil terminal.

  • Right, so that’s one mystery solved at least, although I am a bit surprised that all the tobacco doesn’t fall out when he does that.

  • The wording suggests that all Fish come from Milford Haven. Surely this can’t be the case ?

  • It’s like eels spawning in the Sargasso Sea, they’re all from Milford Haven in the end.

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