Festival of Britain Archives

Skylon Biro

Mr Crownfolio went off to do some shopping for our holiday the other day. He still has no sunhat, but we do now own this.

Given that the gardens were the slightly more raucous and, dare I say it, downmarket outpost of the Festival of Britain, I wasn’t expecting too much from the guide. But it’s a surprisingly interesting piece of design; take this contents page by Osbert Lancaster.

There are also some interesting layouts too.

Although I will spare you the rest of the poem which isn’t up to the standard of the typography.

The good design perhaps isn’t so surprising, as it turns out that one of the two editors and designers of the guide is Ruari McLean, founder of Motif, amongst other things.

He clearly commissioned some good artists but very few of the illustrations are credited – not just the full page spreads, but also the smaller black and white illustrations, in a whole range of styles, which are scattered throughout the text.

This is all part of trying to make the Battersea Pleasure Gardens (its name alluding to the old eighteenth century pleasure gardens at Ranleagh and Vauxhall) as uplifting and high-minded as the rest of the Festival. The guide makes it sound like a promenade of flowers, architecture, Punch and Judy Shows and orchestral music. The pictures, however, show that it was basically a very large funfair.

In the course of finding out all of this, I read an article which suggested that the Festival of Britain could be seen – if Battersea and the South Bank are thought of together – as the world’s first theme park, with the theme of course being Britain. It’s an interesting thought.

But I haven’t quite finished with the guide yet, because it’s also got some interesting advertisements in. One is by our old friends Lewitt-Him.

They designed the Festival Clock, which was one of the attractions of Battersea and apparently contained the most complicated clock mechanism ever built at that time. It was such a success that Guinness commissioned eight more, allowing the clock to tour department stores and amusement parks all over the country.

This Gillette advert, meanwhile, is a reminder that modern design still only had a very tenuous hold in 1951 Britain, and certainly hadn’t spread to packaging design.

Tom Eckersley’s Gillette posters from a year or so before suffered from just the same problems of contrast.

A copy of this hangs on our stairs and, every so often, I am still shocked again by the contrast between the modern image and the Victorian packaging.

Finally, though, there is this, which will just have to describe itself.

Truly it is a brave new world which has such things in it.

Death and the Poster Designer

designers

I’ve always loved the smiliness of Tom Eckersley’s posters.

Tom Eckersley vintage hastings travel poster
Hastings, n/d

Between the late forties and the mid 1950s, his work is filled with cheerful characters, from spoons to beach balls.

Eno’s Fruit Salts, 1947

Bridlington, British Railways, 1955

And of course people.

Guinness, 1956

So I was rather disappointed to discover that Eckersley himself didn’t like these posters later on in his life – he said that he wanted to get rid of the whimsy and the smiling faces as they almost made him angry. Which seems a harsh judgement on something so delightful.

Then, a couple of months ago, I read an interview with the poet Jo Shapcott, in which she discussed her experience of having cancer.

I ask whether that period changed her sense of the world. She says it did, dramatically. “When Dennis Potter was dying, he filmed that famous interview, in which he talked about looking out of the window, and observing the blossominess of the blossoms with an increased urgency and joy. And I think that does happen to cancer survivors – apparently it’s really common to feel euphoria[.]

But it was her final words which really struck me – and, strangely enough reminded me of all of the posters above.

Does she still feel the euphoria she did at the end of treatment? “I do,” she says. “All these years later, it hasn’t gone away.”

Because perhaps we – and also Tom Eckersley himself – have been doing the 1950s a disservice.

It’s really easy to characterise the early 1950s as an era which was almost feeble-witted. See the women gladly strap on their floral pinnies and get back into the kitchen while the men take their pipes, sow the vegetable garden and tidy out the shed. Imagine their pleasure in a brand new fridge or washing machine. Look at their simple-minded delight in the primary colours and pretty shapes of the Festival of Britain or happy posters with smiles on.

All of which is rather patronising, and, I think, wrong.

Because these are not a new generation of air-heads but the people who have lived through six years of war. For the first time it’s not only the men on active service who’ve faced death every day, but the women and children, the clerks and the old men too; they have all spent years in which they knew that they might not make it through to the next morning. Having lived with death breathing down their necks for so long, might they not feel euphoria too once it has departed?

They weren’t being dim when they they enjoyed the simple pleasures of their home, or the visual delights of the Festival of Britain. Rather than a child-like wonder, it was the more c0mplex pleasures of people who have been through the fires and survived. Perhaps, in fact, they were both more clever and more alive than we are now?

To be fair to Tom Eckersley, he himself partly knew this. Because he also said of these posters that they were done sincerely. It was just that he couldn’t ever do them again. Maybe, in the end, the euphoria does fade after all.

Tag: Festival of Britain

Skylon Biro

Death and the Poster Designer

Festival time