Denis Constanduros Archives

Back again

I know that I keep promising to come back to subjects on this blog, and then it never quite happens. There on the other hand, sometimes subjects come back to me, especially designers. One of the great joys of writing about a particular designer is that quite often people get in contact with their own memories of the person concerned. I’ve blogged about this before with Hans Unger, and it’s wonderful to get a sense of how much that person was respected and remembered. Recently, quite a few people emailed who had worked with Pieter Huveneers. In addition to being a great designer, he must also have been an inspiring boss and mentor.

I was also sent this by Jim Pennington, who never worked for Huveneers but does know good design when it comes his way.

It’s manual of transistors from the late 195os or early 1960s. Everything you need to know about the valves of the day, apparently. But rather lovely.

More surprisingly, a lot of people have got in contact about Denis Constanduros who, you may remember, did a few rather lovely posters for Shell and then saw how the world was going and went off to produce historical TV dramas instead.

He seems to have had a large extended family which, combined with a highly googlable surname,means that lots of his relatives have found the blog and got in touch. His grandson sent me a very interesting range of material, including this 1939 article from the Radio Times.

So, in between the water carrying and play writing he was still painting as well. There is also a picture of him and his aunt Mabel from the year before.

Meanwhile, Jonathan Spector, who isn’t a relative, sent me this book jacket illustration by Denis, for one of his aunt’s books.

This only survived by dint of being a wartime rarity. Jonathan bought a wholly other book, called People are Curious, written by James Hanley and published in reprint edition in 1945. But on the reverse of the jacket, off centre, was this – obviously the result of wartime paper rationing. I think I preferred his posters though.

That’s not the only email that arrives here at Crownfolio Towers either. Quad Royal is now important enough, it seems, to get press releases. So should you want this poster, for example, for a scooter which was apparently ‘a joy to own, as long as someone else was paying the repair bills’,

I can tell you that there’s a gallery in Canada with just the thing for you.

Back on home turf, I’ve also been contacted by VintageSeekers, who are a new antiques site with a small number vintage posters on their books.

What Vintage Seekers is, though, is a shop window for dealers, which means that you are paying not only dealers’ prices, but commission on top. So the poster above, quite apart from being for a place which you’d only want a poster of if you’d never been there, is £695.

I did get mildly excited when I saw a link to a Whisky Galore poster, as I had some memory that it was a good one. What I was thinking of was this, which is by Tom Eckersley and I have been meaning to put up for your delectation for ages now.

What I actually saw when I got to the page was this.

Which is rather more in the style of a Ladybird book and, furthermore, will set you back £2,800.

All of which is enough to send me back into the arms of eBay, where even the silly prices suddenly look more reasonable. This wartime Pat Keely is £99.95.

While the listing doesn’t mention his name, this car ferry poster is by Lander (and dates from 1960, fact fans).

This is a bit of an oddity, as I have no idea what the Pye logo is doing there, particularly as the poster seems to have ended up in America.

Although apparently the poster says that Pye were Britain’s largest exporters of radio and television. I’m still not really any the wiser.

Finally, what I need right now is a time machine, to go straight back to 1973 and attend this.

Imagine the bargains there would be for the taking.

Commentary

other

Today, I’m turning the blog over to the floor, because there have been lots of interesting comments recently. Some of them are thought-provoking enough to need whole blog posts in reply (like yesterday’s). But there are also plenty more which deserve attention too. So here goes.

Hans Unger vintage GPO TV licence poster 1954
Hans Unger, GPO, 1954

Firstly, the post on Hans Unger and his life attracted an evocative reminiscence from D.E., which I definitely didn’t want to leave languishing at the bottom of an old post from last month.

I lived in Hans’s house in Muswell Hill with my parents from shortly before his death until the late 70s. Hans rented us the upstairs of his semi-detatched, furnished the whole place for us all the way down to the linens, plates, and cutlery, and was very kind. My mum, herself a Jewish escapee from Nazi Europe, and an artist, marveled at him and his work. It wasn’t long after we moved in, sadly, that we became concerned at not seeing him for a few days, and… well… led to his discovery with a bottle of sleeping pills by his bedside, with a goodbye note. Needless to say, shocking for a 14 year old. Still, we stayed in the house for about 4 more years, and had Hans’s giant outdoor mosaic to look at in the back yard, the stained glass over the front door, and several of his LT posters scattered throughout the house.

Hans’s spirit was complemented well by the woman who moved into the lower part of the house afterwards. I believe that she knew Hans, and herself was a Jewish South African illustationist – Lixi Darvall. She filled the house with art and laughter, but sadly, she too died while we lived there, in her case from cancer.

I remember the house well, full of art and artists, and of the odd collection of Jewish survivors, and am fond of all those creations by these wonderful people.

It’s wonderful to hear him remembered as a person as well as a designer.

Hans Unger vintage London Transport poster Christopher Wren 1957
Hans Unger, London Transport (half of pair poster), 1957

But comments can also be corrections, and I was put right after complaining that a whole host of London Transport posters on eBay didn’t look linen mounted to me. I now know that I was wrong, as Martin Steenson told me that old-fashioned linen mountings were often trimmed to the size of the poster. Mike Ashworth gave an explanation of just why these particular posters might have been mounted this way, too.

I suspect many of the posters such as these currently on sale at Ebay have, over time, been released from the spares held by the old LT Publicity stocks by the LT Museum. I recall that many of these ‘information’ posters (rather then pictorial posters) were linen backed so that they could be trimmed and then used on a more semi-permanent basis at offices, stops, etc. A good example would be the LT ‘you are here’ posters (the area maps for tube stations) that were printed in 10s or 20s (as spares/replacements) and that were seldom replaced. The ‘spares’ were released to dealers etc by LTM some years ago and now show face on Ebay and at dealers – they’re often linen backed, either trimmed or not.

We have this one, also linen mounted, and now I know why it is the way it is, so thank you.

Finally, more of an addendum. When I wrote about Denis Constanduros last week, I couldn’t work out whether the artist of the Shell posters was the same man who went on to adapt Jane Austen for the television in the 1960s. It turns out – perhaps not surprisingly given his rather less than common name – that it was.

I found out thanks to the wonder that is our local library system, which lets me order books online from about six different counties around. So, from the depths of the Somerset Reserve Stacks, I called up My Grandfather by Denis Constanduros on the offchance that it might reveal something. I can’t tell you anything about the merits of the book itself yet, but it did contain this biography of Denis himself.

Born in 1910, Denis Constanduros escaped a formal education and had, instead, a succession of private tutors. He was only 15 when he sold his first cartoon caricatures of Wimbledon players and characters to the press. Later, he went to Chelsea Art School and produced Shell posters at the same time as Graham Sutherland and McKnight Kauffer.

At the age of 27, he had his first radio play produced, although he had already collaborated with his aunt, Mabel Constanduros, on some of the Buggins Family sketches.

The mother of Denis Constanduros was a daughter of Richard Tilling of the successful Tillings Transport group. The two daughters married two sons of the Constanduros family. Denis’ father was an unqualified architect and a compulsive gambler, and his mother and father parted company after the First World War.

In 1938, Denis Constanduros married Barbara Neill and moved to Wiltshire. Classified unfit, although he had at one time been mixed doubles champion of Portugal, he spent much of the Second World War working in the office of a munitions factory. in 1948, he had his first television play accepted and My Grandfather was published.

The West Country radio serial Denis Constanduros created and wrote, At the Luscombes ran for 16 years. He adapted many classic novels for television during the 1960s and 1970s, including works by H.G. Wells, Henry James and Jane Austen, and died in 1978.

So now we know. The Shell Art Collection at Beaulieu tells me that he did six artworks for Shell, but I haven’t been able to find images of any of the others. Still, these two are so lovely that I, for one, am very happy to see them again.

Finally, a dilemma, posed by “mm” last week.

I’ve got mixed feelings about all this pre-auction promotion…Of course, if you alert me to something I’ve missed it’s great. But if you alert everyone else to something I’ve spotted and I’m hoping has slipped under everyone elses radar it’s not so good! I’m not sure what the answer is…Only discuss items post auction?

Now I have to admit that I have the advantage here, because if I spot a potential bargain coming up, I do only mention it once the auction has been and gone – as with the Constanduros above. Which means that I can’t really judge this one fairly. Although my personal suspicion is that no one takes the blindest notice of what I write on here, and one of these days I’m going to go back over all of the things I’ve highlighted on eBay to prove this, as I will happily bet that loads of them don’t even get a bid.

But what do you think? Would you rather hear about auctions coming up and take the risk that I might reveal one of your carefully-spotted bargains? Or would you rather I shut up until it’s been and gone? And have you ever gone for something because I mentioned it? Answers in the box below, if you don’t mind.

While I write this, incidentally, the Christies Auction is rattling away in the corner of Mr Crownfolio’s screen and it is officially Going Bonkers, with everything way over estimate. More next week.

That’s Shell, that was

eBay

I really wish I hadn’t started this post now. It was meant to be a simple one about stuff on eBay, and now it’s gone and turned into a mystery.

The beginning was this poster, which ended two days ago. Along with a confession.

Which is that I didn’t actually mention it while it was on sale, on the off-chance that it went un-noticed and we could pick it up for a pittance. Some chance – six bidders and twenty bids pushed it up to £412. I almost wish that we’d gone that high.

So, piqued, I started investigating Denis Constanduros. It turns out that he also did this rather lovely rendering of Llanthony Abbey (one of my favourite places anyway) for Shell.

As well as this Farmers Prefer Shell poster too. Which, although very pretty, I find a bit odd because looks as though someone’s just being eaten by the machinery.

But that’s about it. His only artistic remains seem to be those three Shell posters, all probably pre-war. So what’s the problem, you say?

Well there’s also a Denis Constanduros who wrote a 1940s radio serial called ‘At the Luscombes’ about West Country village life (by coincidence, set no more than ten or so miles from here, in a place I drive through quite regularly). Who then – unless there’s a third Denis Constanduros which I have to say seems pretty unlikely – worked throughout the 1960s and 70s on adapting classic books for television, particularly Jane Austen. That Denis Constanduros died in 1978. But is it all the same one? Did he just do a few posters and then go off into writing, in the style of an earlier Patrick Tilley? I do not have the foggiest idea, the internet is just confusing me and the Shell Poster Book says nothing at all. Can anyone else shed any light?

I’m bothered not just because it’s not making sense and so needs sorting out, but also because these three posters are all really rather good. They’re very much of their late-1930s period, but in a good way, with echoes of Ravilious in the style and colours. And also in the subject matter of course; Ravilious wasn’t just a painter of chalk hills, but also drew the Long Man himself too.

So it seems a pity that Constanduros never painted much more than his Shell posters. But then, if it was him who went on to write ‘At the Luscombes” and adapt classic novels for television, his journey was very much that of his times. Before the war, the poster was king. But afterwards, the new, shiny, exciting broadcast media took all the glory; if you had the talent for it, who wouldn’t have made the switch. Posters were no longer the place for a smart young man to be any more, there were new and more exciting furrows to plough.

One final note, and that’s the price. Its not remarkable for itself – it’s a fine poster and well worth the money. But it is remarkable for having been achieved where it was – I can’t remember having seen a poster match the price it would have reached at a specialist poster auction on eBay before. Not that many of that quality turn up, but still, it’s an interesting precedent. (I can’t be bothered to do the maths, but I wonder how the eBay selling fees compare to Christies charges. Not that well, I should have thought…)

And, having said that these things don’t turn up very often, there in fact a couple more classics out there right now. This Henrion,

And this John Bainbridge too.

They’re both from the same seller, and it will be interesting to see how they go.

The Bainbridge, meanwhile, is also being offered by Sotherans at the moment. for £895. If eBay can scale those heights, that really would be a turn up for the books.