Uncategorized Archives - Page 3 of 24

Owls in the kitchen

A mysterious package arrived in the post a few weeks ago. Unannounced and anonymous, it turned out to be a small selection of materials about one of my favourite artists and people, Barbara Jones.

There’s a couple of booklets – one a catalogue of an exhibition in Marlborough in 1999, the other a review of her life and works published in the journal of the Private Libraries Association. (I think my new aspiration may be to own a private library).

But best of all are a pair of cuttings. One is her obituary from – possibly – a Hampstead newspaper. (This is very brown as well as fragile, so I’ve scanned it in black and white for easier reading.)

Apologies for the slightly insane scale, but I wanted you to be able to read it.

The other, is even better, because it’s an article about Barbara Jones and her immensely quirky and desirable kitchen. Which of course includes the owl dishwasher, as featured on here (and BBC television) before. I think this dates from 1966 or so, as she mentioned having just finished Design for Death.

Click on this and it will get bigger. Living in an old house, I particularly like her approach to damp patches, which is just to cover them up with plastic daffodils. It’s an example we can all follow.

I really have no idea who sent me this at all. The very short note that came with these gems simply says that they were found in the clearing of a relative’s house and otherwise would have been recycled.

Whoever you are, thank you so much for not recycling. This package has given me an enormous amount of pleasure and I hope that in sharing it, a few more people will be delighted as well.

It’s no secret

auctions, Uncategorized

Today’s auctions are of the general railwayana type, which means that I am likely to get distracted by glittering treasures such as ticket inspector’s hat badges, armchairs and, naturally, giant gherkins.

Heinz enamel sign, in shape of gherkin

The sign is 51 inches across, a figure worth bearing in mind before you buy it. Although I do think it would look rather wonderful above my desk.

This is on offer at Great Western Railwayana, along with a quite extensive selection of posters, none of which, as usual, have estimates.

A brief survey of their last sale reveals them to be not quite as expensive as GCR, unless you are buying very old posters. Although there were a couple of anomalies, like this 1961 mermaid who went for £380, which was rather more than some ‘conventional’ railway posters.

While this went for a mind boggling £420.

I don’t know what that goes to show really.

To my joy, the new sale includes a Tom Eckersley I’ve never seen before.

This may not be quite as good, but it is still fun.

Porthcawl Railway poster children on beach 1962

The way prices are going at the moment, it will probably end up as one of the most expensive items in the sale. Although it might get pipped to the post by this Bromfield from 1963.

Or even this Bromfield from the very same year.

As far as I can tell, there aren’t that many railway posters for Dorset at all, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen one for Weymouth on its own. Presumably this is because the civic authorities didn’t want to cough up for a poster campaign. But I’d love to be corrected if anyone does know of any posters. (Double points for anything that’s not by Bromfield, as he did do at least two for Swanage, possibly more)

All of those ought to be knocked into a cocked hat, price wise, by this Eckersley, but may well not be.

Such times, my friends, such times.

Other than that, there are various views of town, country and seaside, a handful of bathing beauties and this RM Lander of Bath.

Lander Bath railway poster

Also this piece of wild optimism – just look at those continental parasols – which looks as though it might be by Lander but at the same time has odd lettering.

Aberdeen railway poster

Can anyone shed any light?

All I have managed to turn up is this, from 1958, which suggests that they had previous for dodgy lettering in Aberdeen, along with an artist who’d set his style very nicely in 1937 and wasn’t about to change for just anyone.

Apart from railway posters, there are also these three World War Two posters.

I’ve written about the top and bottom posters before, when a set were put up for sale by the family of the artist, Freddie Reeves. I was surprised to see them then, but this auction puts them a bit more into context, as apparently they have gummed backs and were intended for use inside carriages. But there are still some interesting questions that need answering here. Were the Railway companies printing their own propaganda posters, being the main one. Because if they were, it’s not mentioned in any of the books. There’s some research there for anyone who wants it. Just don’t ask me to do it.

Furthermore, there are these coach posters.

Newquay and racing coach posters
Something terrible seems to have happened to Newquay though, but I can’t work out if it’s atomic fallout or acid rain. Whichever, it’s probably best avoided.

There’s lots more, but you’ll have to go and look for yourself.

Also coming soon is an auction from Transport Auctions of London, but so far they’ve only sent me a PDF with teeny-tiny pictures in, so small that I can barely tell what poster they are talking about, never mind show on here. So that’ll have to wait for the moment.

great expectations

auctions, Uncategorized

Great Central Railwayana have a new auction coming up on 4th June, and the catalogue is now up on The Salesroom if you want to take a peek.

There are a couple of quite desirable items on there, my favourite probably being this Tom Purvis because – as any regular readers may have worked out – I am somewhat obsessed with the idea of camping coaches.

Tom Purvis, 1930s, est. £600-900

That does make it look particularly fun though.

I’m always a sucker for a nice Lander, and there are two good ones up this time round.

Lander, 1950s, est. £100-200

This, meanwhile, is of the same kind of vintage but a) is by someone called Harris about whom I know nothing, and b) isn’t actually a railway poster at all.

Harris, est. £80-120

Meanwhile, after years of invisibility, another copy of this has popped up six weeks after the last one. I will tell you all about Armengol one of these days, I promise.

Armengol, 1952, est £150-300

You need to pay attention to this one too, because I also will be writing more about this series in the next week or so. And it’s rather good to boot.

Langhammer, c.1960, est £150-300

Meanwhile this one may not be the best bit of design ever, but seeing as it both dates from 1946 and isn’t actually a railway poster, I reckon it’s probably quite rare.

Orr, 1946, est. £150-300

Finally, this is worth a mention simply for making explicit the thought process behind so many landscape-depicting railway posters.

Ronald Lampitt, c. late 1950s, est. £100-200.

In an interesting development, Lampitt has his own Twitter account. Life is a perpetual source of surprise to me.

While all those posters are very lovely, they’re not the most interesting discoveries about this auction. When I went onto the Great Central site to look at what posters they had, the link, accidentally, took me to the auction just gone past in March. It took me a few clicks to work out what had happened, which meant that I ended up looking at quite a few sold prices. And those turned out to be really rather interesting.

Quite a lot of ‘classic’ railway posters went pretty much for their estimates. I’ve pulled this one out simply as an example.

The estimate was £200-350, and it sold for £260. All fine and well there.

Here’s another, later example, which went for £360, with a top estimate of £300

I reckon that a good two thirds of the sale went in this way. A couple came in under and only one failed to sell at all. A normal day at the auction house.

That is, except for the posters that remained – perhaps ten or fifteen – where the bidding went mental. Estimates were being smashed all over the place.

Sometimes this can be accounted for by a poster being old and rare.

Hewins, est. £400-600, sold for £1,300

While others were design classics of one kind or another.

Frank Newbould, est. £150-300, sold for £1050

A BR(M) double royal poster, THE LANCASHIRE COAST, by Daphne Padde
Daphne Padden, est. £80-120, sold for £270

This is a really stylistically interesting and unusual poster, and the only example I’ve ever come across of the design at auction, so I can see why it went so high.

Dickens, 1960, est. £150-300, sold for £780.

Other posters behaved less explicably. Why is this seaside poster better than any other?

Anon, est. £100-200, sold for £460.

These boats don’t look particularly exceptional either, but people seem to want them.

A J Wilson, est £100-200, sold for £500.

There is a theme developing here, which is that posters of the Lancashire coast go for a lot of money. It’s a good theory, but doesn’t account for everything.

Frank Mason, est. £150-30o, sold for £540

While nothing at all can account for this.

Norman Wilkinson, est. £250-400, sold for £1800

I know, people like pictures of trains, and signal boxes, but I still find it bewildering.

So what have we learned from my trawl through auctions past? I’m not entirely sure, to be honest. One interpretation might be that the market is moving upwards a bit. That’s certainly true from the point of view of the railwayana auctioneers. Ten or fifteen years ago, posters were a small and rather disregarded sideline for them: now they are bringing in serious money.

But making a generalisation about values as a whole, I’m less sure about. The other piece of auction news that has come in recently is that Christies are closing down their entire poster department. On the one hand this, to paraphrase Morrissey, says nothing to me about my life. I can’t afford the prices, and don’t want most of the posters in their sales. I’m not even sure it’s a vote of any kind about the market; I suspect this is more about posters being small fry compared to the Very Expensive Art that they would prefer to sell.

So all I am left with is questions? Are posters getting cheaper or more expensive? Who’s going to sell the expensive posters now – are they all going to go at Railwayana auctions? And where will the London Transport Museum get rid of their surplus holdings now?

Any answers, please do type them out in the box below, because I certainly don’t know.

images

Uncategorized

Once again, this post comes to you courtesy of someone else’s generosity. In this case, it’s thanks to Mike Ashworth, who pointed me towards the Phyllis Nicklin collection, via this picture of Jiggins Lane in Bartley Green, Birmingham in 1953.

Great, isn’t it. And rare too. Considering how present posters were on the streets of Britain in the 1950s and 60s, pictures of them at work are few and far between. Which is a very sad thing if you are an obsessive like me.

There are plenty more where that came from too. Here’s the Jewellery Quarter in 1963.

(I’ll put links to larger pictures at the bottom of each picture so that you can stare at the text in more lovely detail than Quad Royal can handle, starting here.)

Part of the reason that these pictures are so wonderful is that, although clearly she was a very good photographer with an eye for the perfect shot, Phyllis Nicklin took them as record, not art. She worked as an extra-mural Geography tutor at Birmingham University and took slides as a record of how Birmingham was changing in the years after the war. At least that’s the assumption, but there’s no proof. Nicklin died in post, in 1969, so the slides were left in the custody of the University without any kind of manifesto or description of how we are meant to see them.

(larger image)

Whatever her motives, what we do have is photographs of posters, doing their thing, from the early 1950s – that’s 1954 above – right up until a year before her death, in late 1968.

(larger image)

I can find a whole heap of reasons to be interested in these images. Seeing posters in the location that they were designed for is interesting enough in itself, as is the fact that these pictures mostly show commercial posters of the kind that very rarely survive or are even recorded in Britain. But there’s more to be seen in them beyond that. Phyllis Nicklin’s slides underline another issue that I’ve been thinking about for a while, and that’s how crowded with information the world around the posters was.

Nowadays, if you do ever see one of these posters, it’s likely to be framed and separated off from any distraction, more often than not on the white wall of a gallery, or the tastefully pale walls of chez Crownfolio. But pretty much the only poster in the Nicklin images which is displayed in such a separated way is the giant gin poster above in 1968, and even that’s juxtaposed with factory roofs and signs.

Look at the first few pictures again though, and these posters are all displayed in groups that have been put together at random with no thought for design or complementarity. It’s a Darwinian visual world out there, and these posters have to fight amongst themselves for attention.

But other posters aren’t the half of what’s going on. Take a look at the bottom left corner of the very first picture. The Rowntrees poster is on its own, but it is up against two enamel signs. These posters – in 1967 – are facing similar competition.

(larger image)

Post-war posters weren’t displayed in a visually blank environment, far from it. They were surrounded by all sorts of other text, advertising other things, in different ways. However we see them now, back then they were part of a whole and very varied ecosystem of text and advertising messages.

In the picture above, the posters above look modern in comparison with the old fashioned text of the enamel signs, although I can see that for some advertisers, the impression of tradition and permanency that these kinds of advertising give would be a bonus rather than a disadvantage. Windolene is up to date and disposable, but Woodbines will always be there when you need them.

In some places, these other advertisements were the only kind available. This newsagent in 1953 is dense with text and information, but none of it comes from a poster.

(larger image)

It’s worth noting Robin Starch didn’t confine its advertising to enamel; here it is in 1960, on another newsagent, advertising on a poster instead. Or perhaps in addition to: I have no idea how their advertising budget was spent, nor how long enamel signs remained on display.

(larger image)

Please note that I’m doing very well here by not making any jokes at all about starching robins.

The enamel signs weren’t the only kind of text that the posters were in competition with either, nor the oldest.

(larger image)

That poor Surf poster above has to get its message through against a positive babel of painted wall adverts, boards advertising taxis and smaller posters. Were we to see it in a gallery, we’d be hard-pressed to imagine it operating under those – rather unfavourable – conditions. But perhaps we should try a bit harder next time. We might not like it, but this is how the posters were designed to be seen.

There is plenty more to enjoy in the archive apart from the posters. Phyllis Nicklin was right to record so much of Birmingham: she depicts a world that we can hardly recognise now. Here’s a photograph taken on the edge of the suburbs in 1953.

It looks not only bucolic but a relic of an age utterly passed with its teetering hayrick.

Except there’s an irony. The website which houses Nicklin’s photograph has also identified the locations where she took them on Google Maps. Every single one of the buildings that I’ve shown in this post has gone: replaced by newer factories, modern flats or sometimes just a blank piece of tarmac without a building on it at all. Nothing she saw remains, with once exception. And that’s the field, which is as rolling and undeveloped as it ever was.

And when I went to look at it on Google Streetview, they’re still bringing in the harvest.

The Nicklin photographs have been championed by the website Brumpic, and you can find out more about her on there. A selection of photographs have also been catalogued by the University of Birmingham, and you an find those here. Do go and look, it’s worth the effort.

Push once

Uncategorized

I’m finding it hard to get worked up about auctions at the moment. This might be because I’m getting jaded, but I think it’s more that there isn’t that much of interest coming through at the moment (and if anyone has any theories as to why this might be, please do let me know in the comments box below). Having said that, there are two auctions tomorrow (sorry!) that might be worth our attention.

The first is from Transport Auctions of London (not to be confused with London Transport Auctions who are entirely different and have an auction coming up next month). This contains a lot of things that are not posters, so if you are after cap badges or a rather splendidly named category called ‘relics’ you are on your own. Go and look, you might want something like this.

Or you might not. Whatever you decide, there are also a small handful of posters.

TYV, 1938, est. £50-75

The main theme of today seems to be posters that I own already. The bull above comes under that heading as does this rather untypical Eckersley-Lombers.

Eckersley/Lombers, 1936, est £75-100

Unusually, most of the other posters I like are also pre-war, such as this appropriately seasonal offering.

Major, 1931, est. £120-170

The design of this poster is less striking, but I am intrigued by the premise. Why don’t we have real cows in the ticket halls of stations now?

Anonymous, 1935, est. £60-80

Meanwhile at GW Railwayana there are also posters. Rather greedily, we have two copies of this one, so we won’t be competing if any of you are after it, which you should be.

There are also American posters, and also a lot of pastel-tinted scenic views which I am mostly going to ignore.

This seaside poster, however, is great, although I know nothing about Armengol whatsoever. However a brief google convinces me that he is very interesting indeed, so we’ll return to him another day.

Mario Armengol, 1952.

No estimates, sadly, because that’s how railwayana works, so your guess is as good as mine, and quite probably better. This one usually goes quite cheap though, can’t think why.

Frank Newbould, 1950

Of the views, this is probably the boldest and most striking.

D. Irwin Brown, 1932.

Although there are a couple of Lander maps which might put up a good fight too.

Poster British Railways 'Dorset' by Lander double royal 25in x 40in. Map image of the county showing places of interest with a numbered key below. Published by the Southern Region of British Railways

Even on something as workaday as a map, he never fails to use brilliant contrast. Kent is on offer too if you happen to live there.

Beyond that it all gets a bit patchy. There are a set of modern (ish) posters expressing British Rail through the medium of station roofs, which I admire rather than actually like. This one’s Newcastle.

Brendan Neiland, 1991

If it’s modernity you’re after, I think this is doing a much better job.

Kenneth Leech, 1960

That’s a BR Class 28 locomotive on a freight train, for those of you who care about these things. I can’t quite manage to. I think he’s the same Leech who designed this very different poster only a few years before and which is also in the auction.

I have written about the numbers of people on a beach before, but I’ve got more to add to that one of these days. For now we’ll just note that, travelling by train, you are unlikely ever to arrive at such an empty beach. Unless it’s actually February.

There are also, as seems to be customary in railwayana auctions these days, a smattering of wartime propaganda posters. This one is the most interesting, a statement which tells you everything you need to know about the rest.

Some of the best design on offer in fact comes in the form of carriage prints rather than posters. This is battered but glorious, not just for its design but also the evocation of an entirely disappeared world of railway hotels. I was going to say elegant railway hotels, but I’m not certain that the Royal at Grimsby Docks would qualify.

The catalogue only tells me that it’s rare, so if anyone can add any more to that, please do.

This Bromfield is a version of a poster, but none the less pleasing for that.

It’s probably easier to find space for on a wall too. Hmm, best I don’t think about that too hard…

Back in time for posters

Uncategorized

Do you remember the ghosts of Notting Hill Gate?

These were the posters discovered during a renovation of the tube station a few years ago. A fascinating time capsule, they provided an evocative wormhole back to the concerns and consumerism of the late 1950s, all documented by LT’s Head of Design and Heritage, Mike Ashworth.

Where we lead, the French follow. Or so it seems.

Old posters revealed on Paris Metro at Trinité station

The Paris metro station of Trinité is being prepared for renovation. As layers of cladding were stripped back, a whole archive of posters was revealed here too.

By a curious coincidence, the posters date from just a year later than the Notting Hill survivors, revealing the everyday life of Paris in 1959.

A life which, in some ways, was very different to ours. The left-hand poster is apparently a roll-call of all those convicted of offences on the network, while the right is about visits to the underground tombs of the city.

Neither of which were found anywhere near the walls of Notting Hill Gate.

But what really strikes me about these posters is that, dare I say it, the overall standard of design is not as good as those in London. I wasn’t expecting that at all, when design historians spend so much time apologising for British design in comparison to Continental trends, but it’s true.

Of course there are some good posters. In fact this one looks great and I quite fancy a copy.

I’d love to be able to see more of this intriguing fragment too.

But overall, I’m afraid to say that I think Notting Hill Gate would have been a more visually pleasing place to catch the train.

The other thing that strikes me about the comparison though, is more about the present day. The posters in Paris are only here for you to see today because they were snapped by a passing commuter, although fortunately one who is a professional photographer.

He’s called Yann Covès, and all of the photographs on here are his.

Whereas in London, the notion of heritage is so much more entrenched that LT have a man to manage it. Which I also think is probably better, but then I’m British so I would say that, wouldn’t I?