British post war posters and graphics.
I’m really sorry to have to share the news that poster designer Pieter Huveneers has died on 14th June.
He was 92 and died in Australia, where he’d become one of the country’s leading design consultants, creating logos and corporate images for some of the biggest companies there.
During his time in Britain, he also designed some truly excellent posters.
If you want to know more, I’ve written about his career in both posters and beyond here.
On 16th July, Bloomsbury are holding their Poster Sale, in what I’m hoping will be the last auction for a while – I say this mainly because I want to write about other things for a chance.
I’m not so jaded that I am going to do this, but I am aware that I could almost substitute what I wrote about Onslows in here with different illustrations, because the two sales are following a very similar pattern.
In particular, they both have a big selection of GPO posters, although in the case of Bloomsbury, they sell them in lots of ten so the estimates, although nominally higher than Onslows are actually cheaper on a per poster basis. Which is confusing, in a trying to work out which brand of cornflakes in the supermarket is actually best value kind of way. Perhaps we should price posters per square centimetre for the sake of clarity. Anyway, these are what’s on offer, but bear in mind that each one comes with nine unphotographed others.
PIeter Huveneers, 1954, est. £150-250
Browning, 1955, est. £150-250
Gapp, 1951, est. £150-250
This also connects up with the Onlows sale in that these – rather than the set on offer at Onslows – are the ones rescued from a skip when the Post Office were having a clear out. So it’s an interesting coincidence that two sets have come on the market at the same time. There is one more lot on offer at Bloomsbury as well, fronted by this Tom Eckersley classic.
Tom Eckersley, 1955, est. £150-250
In another resemblance to Onslows, Bloomsbury also have a few fantastic Games posters tucked away at the end. I won’t go through them all, but mostly they are good but not news to me because they have been much reproduced, like this London Transport example.
Abram Games, 1950, est. £150-250
This one, however is both new to me and utterly wonderful.
Abram Games, 1952, est. £200-400
It’s apparently a British Railways poster – and given that it’s in the collection of the NRM I see no reason to doubt this – but it doesn’t say BR on it anyway. Which is unusual, but I imagine just the kind of thing Abram Games got away with and no one else was allowed to.
Onslows was full of Shell posters; Bloomsbury have but two. They are, however, this kind and so both preferable and more valuable.
Roland Suddaby, 1937, est. £300-500
After that, however, I start to run out. There are foreign posters (lots), film posters (just as many) and car posters (quite a few) but little to tickle my fancy. The best thing I could find is this Lander, and it’s not one of his best.
R M Lander, 1960, est. £200-400
The only other thing that is of interest, although strictly speaking it’s more of a print, is this item by James Fitton.
James Fitton, 1942, est. £300-500
Now I’ve come across one of these before. It’s a print by CEMA, wartime fore-runner to the Arts Council and the prints look to be precursors of the School Prints and Lyons editions. But I can’t find anything about them anywhere – do you lot know where they might be documented? Or even a decent history of CEMA itself would do. Anyway, there are actually a whole set available in the lot, so the estimate looks like somewhat of a bargain, if you like that kind of thing.
Even though it’s a bit short on my personal favourite kinds of posters, I still think the sale is good though, because I think Bloomsbury have answered the question that I asked a week or two ago, which was where are we to buy and sell mid range posters now that Christies have turned us away at the door? Here, it seems.
F M. 1960, est £200-400
That said, I do still have a couple of reservations. One is very simply that they are not trying very hard with their catalogue. For several of the posters I’ve illustrated up there, no dates have been given in the catalogue; in each case it’s been the matter of moments with Google for me to find out. And given that two of those posters are for the GPO and London Transport, who in each case have comprehensive online catalogues, with dates, it’s pretty poor.
The other is the estimates. They’re both wide and well, a bit vague. Surely that fantastic Games of Blackpool has to be worth more than the average Lander? So then I look at the catalogue and wonder how much they really know about their lots. Still, I don’t suppose it matters too much. This is, after all, an auction, and the market can judge for itself what a poster is worth. But I do still feel very slightly cheated.
Finally, in a shameless piece of self-advertisement, we are selling some posters on eBay. However, they are mostly world war two, mostly a bit shabby (OK, some a lot shabby) and surplus to requirements, so keep your expectations low and you won’t be disappointed.
couple of years ago now, I wrote a long piece on here about why some kinds of poster seem to survive in greater quantities than others. In short, the argument was that where posters do survive in large numbers, this tends to be because the institutions concerned – London Transport, the railway companies and Shell – had a system for selling them to the public.
But I said at the time, that post was very much a work in progress. Now things have moved on a bit, because Rik Shepherd has been in contact through both comments and email with some additional information about how GPO posters were also sold. And very interesting it is too.
The reason for this is that Mr Shepherd senior, his father, was, in the best possible way, a bit of a chancer, something probably best explained by his son.
Dad did have a habit of writing to organisations on the offchance that they wanted to give/sell him something – the request for part of London Road station when it was turning into Piccadilly failed, the request for tickets from the closing Mumbles railway yielded a destination blind from one of their trams, and we’ve got a stack of timetables and promo brochures from oodles of US railroad companies.
One of the organisations that he regularly bothered was the GPO, as Rik explained when he commented on the original blog post.
If I’d known there was interest in cut-down & framed posters in-situ, I’d have taken pictures of my parents bedroom before we started clearing the house.
They had trimmed and framed copies of the GPO “Use Your Correct Address” posters of Eilean Donan (John Minton) and Brookland (David Knight) on the wall for at least the last decade. We’ve also found a trimmed copy of Minton’s Iwerne Abbey, a trimmed and framed Minton Greenwich which I vaguely remember being on the walls in the 60s & 70s, and what we think is a trimmed David Knight Polruan.
Dad seems to have got the Minton posters in April 1957 by writing to the Mount Pleasant offices. The three cost 3s 0d in total (1/6d for Iwerne, 1s for Greenwich and 6d for Eilean Donan) and were sent out with a note from a Mr R. Weeber giving the prices and the rather polite request “Perhaps you will kindly forward a remittance for 3s.0d. in due course.”
What’s even better is that Mr Shepherd Sr also kept the correspondence.
(I’ve put these images in quite big, so just click on them if you want to read the text properly)
I love the fact that they’re only asking for payment after the posters have been sent out. Those were the days.
Mr Shepherd senior didn’t give up at with that, though. Go forward ten years, and he is once more trying to order some posters from the GPO.
But as you can see, times have changed, and the GPO now have an order form available – and what’s more, here it is.
I would like to order all of those please, with a particular emphasis on the last one which is new to me and splendidly moody.
And I used to live there too.
Now all of this would be fascinating enough on its own. But what makes all of this even more important is that there doesn’t seem to have been many records of this kept elsewhere (a fact that possibly we could have guessed from the slightly ad-hoc nature of that order form).
I asked Anna Flood, archivist at the British Postal Museum and Archive, what they knew about the poster selling, and she couldn’t find anything about this in the books or in their records. Which is rather exciting really, as it means that Quad Royal has – thanks to Rik Shepherd – managed to uncover a brand new historical fact here. I’m quite chuffed.
The only reference Anna could find in their archives is one which doesn’t shed any light on Mr Shepherd’s poster buying, but does stretch the timescale back quite a bit, in fact to this series of posters.
POST 33/4722 – Publicity: supply to school, posters, leaflets, first issue – 1934
Re the H.S. Williamson series of posters:
– PRD 88 – Relays carrying the King’s messages, 1482
– PRD 89 – Mails for the Packets arriving at Falmouth, 1833
– PRD 90 – Loading mails at the docks in London, 1934
– PRD 91 – Loading air mails for the Empire, Croydon 1934
‘It is likely that the issue of these posters [to schools] will give rise to further demands for them….c) from private individuals, who want one or more of the posters for nursery or other house decoration’………’As regards c), posters will be sold, so far as stocks permit, at the following prices, to include packing and postage:- Single posters 1s each. Set of four posters 3s.’…..’Persons desiring to buy posters should be advised to write to the Controller, Post Office Stores Department, Mount Pleasant Depot, EC1, [Public Relations Department, GPO, London, EC1 – crossed out] specifying the title of the poster or posters they desire to buy and enclosing a postal order for the necessary amount.’ 13th November, 1934, Public Relations Department.
A later memo states ‘ copies may be obtained on personal application to the Public Relations Department, Armour House, 40 St Martins-le-Grand, London, EC1’. Dated 28/11/34.
And she comments,
So indeed, as early as 1934 the Post Office PRD was allowing members of the public to purchase GPO posters (maybe because of the costs involved in producing runs of posters, hence they didn’t want the expenditure to go to waste, and maybe also because the PO was intent in raising its public profile at the time, hence the ‘schools’ campaign). However, it may have taken a while for the process to become formalised, with the issue of ‘for sale’ lists and order forms, such as those Rik Shepherd has.
I don’t think we’re in a position to write an entire thesis on GPO poster survival from these small scraps of information. But what this does show is that, although they may not have advertised the fact, the GPO did sell posters to private individuals and this is most likely the way that GPO posters, in their smaller numbers survive today.
It’s also interesting to note that the posters that the GPO thought that people were interested in buying in 1967 (as shown on the order form) and indeed the posters that Mr Shepherd was actually interested in buying in 1957, were the ‘artistic’ ones, i.e. the ones in which a fine artist had been commissioned to create a painting which was then turned into a poster. Because in 1957, the GPO was also producing posters like these:
Admittedly they weren’t quite scaling the same graphic heights in 1967, but there was still Daphne Padden and Kenneth Bromfield on show in your local post office.
But these weren’t the posters that people were meant to buy or wanted to buy. So fewer of these survive than of the ‘artistic’ ones. A quick trawl through Onslows’ archives does seem to support this theory, as many more of the painterly posters seem to come up for auction than the more graphic ones. Which is of course a great shame, as it’s the graphic design that I at least would rather be buying nowadays. But I can’t really blame the public for buying what they liked at the time. At least I don’t think I can.
That’s not the important point though, I’m still very happy that we’ve managed to find another small piece of the jigsaw and discover how a few more posters survived. So if anyone else out there has something that they think might be interesting, please do get in touch. You never know, it might be a piece of information that no one has known until now.
Oh, and GPO correspondence wasn’t all that Mr Shepherd kept – more on his archive next week.
Apologies in advance if this post ends up being a bit like the parish newsletter today, but there are a few things I’d to tell you about, even though they aren’t entirely related. So bear with me, and the flower rota will be at the end.
Firstly and also excitingly, the BPMA have also got in contact with Pieter Huveneers, and he is going to answer some questions on their blog in January. So if there’s anything you’d like to ask him about poster design, the GPO or being a design guru in Australia, now is your chance. All the details are on their blog.
The artwork above with the bite taken out of it is from their collections, as is the poster below.
This is of course a poster announcing the arrival of a medium – television – which would in the end kill the poster itself stone dead. Still, Huveneers wasn’t to know.
While I’m on the subject of the BPMA, they are once again selling lovely poster Christmas cards, including this lovely Hass.
But there are a whole range of designs, quite a few of which have already featured on Quad Royal before now, and you may find them here.
Most of the rest of our parish consists, as ever, of eBay. In summary, there are some nice posters out there; however people mostly want rather larger sums of money for them than we – along with I suspect most of the rest of the parishioners – are prepared to pay. With that in mind, here’s the best of the bunch.
Your starter is a lovely Dorrit Dekk, mounted on linen too. Starting price, £224-ish (it’s in America), although it doesn’t deserve that on the grounds of the foreshortened photography alone.
Another photography award goes to the seller of this Pye Radio poster, who has managed to photograph it looking like a giant billboard on the A4.
It is in fact only 74cm long, which probably also means that £49.99 is a fairly optimistic valuation.
All of which means that when both the above Guinness posters start at a slightly more reasonable £99, I am pleasantly surprised. The top one is, I think, by R Peppe and dates from 1962, although the listing doesn’t tell you any of that. The other one I have never seen before in my life, and all I can find out is that it might be by someone called E Hanna, so if anyone can enlighten me further about it, please do. Rather good, though, don’t you think?
Cheaper, and possibly even more fantastic still, are these two Australian emigration posters.
The listing (which in turn wins a prize for being one of the longest I have ever encountered) describes them as being possibly the work of Douglas Annand. A brief trawl through google leaves me unconvinced, but he did do this poster.
And also these rather great P&O Menu cards too (via this Australian blog).
Regardless of whether he did those other two posters, they are very still good. Even better, both auctions started at a thoroughly reasonable £9.99, but with bids already in I am expecting them to go higher.
Digression over, I can also tell you that it is possible to buy expensive posters in places other than eBay.
This GPO poster is up for auction by Poster Auctions International with an estimate of $400-600. I’m usually quite fond of this series of posters, but this one has to be one of the least appealing. So have this one as a palate cleanser instead.
There that’s better, isn’t it. All that remains a reminder that the Church Christmas Fair is this Saturday and Holy Communion is at the usual time of 11.30 on Sunday. See you all then.
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.
Right, back to the bookstacks once more. In a way I’m rather pleased that there’s a backlog of things I need to write about, it shows that posters and graphic design are starting to be taken seriously. But more than most, today’s book is both necessary and useful.
It’s GPO Design
What you get is a fairly straightforward run through the history and structures of the GPO as it affects poster design, the varying kinds of GPO posters and what they were meant to achieve, and a look at some of the artist and designers who worked on the campaigns. Plus of course, lots of lovely posters to look at.
Tom Eckersley, 1957
It’s simple, but given that absolutely nothing else is available, it’s exactly what’s needed.
So, for example, I now know why so many GPO schools posters survive compared to the commercial campaigns: they were sent out in their thousands to schools, where they were so much more likely to be kept, or at least thrown to the back of a cupboard, compared with the ones sent out to Post Offices.
John Armstrong, educational poster, 1935
Although, I have to say, I don’t find the designs of the school posters half as satisfying as the commercial ones, as they have a tendency towards the dreary. The only exceptions being the McKnight Kauffer ones, which are rather fine.
McKnight Kauffer, educational poster, 1937
The book has provoked me to some thoughts, though. Although they’re not really criticisms of the book itself, as it is meant to be a brief and straightforward run through. My target is probably more design history as a whole, as reflected in this particular text.
What is starting to bother me is the existence of an established hierarchy of designers. At the top of the tree are those who were also fine artists. The chapter on individual designers here begins with Paul Nash, and moves on to ‘fellow member of Unit One, theatre designer and surrealist’ John Armstrong’, only later moving on to the poster designers themselves.
Implicit here is the idea that design itself is not enough, it is better (whether that is aesthetically more pleasing or simply more worthy) if it has been touched by the hallowed hand of fine art. Alone, it does not deserve the attention.
Perhaps it is possible that posters designed by artists are generally better, although I’m not sure I subscribe to this point of view. But where it really gets irritating is the continual reproduction of this Vanessa Bell design. It turns up everywhere that GPO design is discussed.
Now, this is a failed poster. It was rejected by the GPO and never used. Even Bell herself didn’t think the design worked.
I don’t know why it has been so, but for some reason it has taken me ages to do anything I thought would do at all – I think partly because of the difficulty of getting several figures into a small space and yet making them tell at a distance. I have stood about in Post Offices until your employees looked so suspicious I had to leave! – and yet I don’t know that in the end what I have done has much resemblance to a Post Office. However, there it is…
Letter from Vanessa Bell in BPMA archive, quoted in essay by Margaret Timmers
It is possible to see the design as an example of where art and commercialism failed to meet, and Rennie does discuss it in this context briefly. But I don’t think that this alone is enough to account for its ubiquity. Because this isn’t just art, it’s Bloomsbury art. And Britain loves the Bloomsberries, to the extent that it can skew our critical and historical judgement sometimes.
But even when we get the artists out of the way, the book still chooses to comment on the prevailing list of designers, from Austin Cooper and McKnight Kauffer at the top, then moving down to the post-war brigade of Eckersley, Henrion, Schleger et al. (How and why this canon has developed is an interesting question and one I’ll come back to another day as this post is already quite long enough as it is.)
Hans Schleger, 1945
Partly this annoys me because I got my critical grounding in English Literature during the late 1980s, where any belief in the Canon of Dead White Males was to be stamped on as a sign of a backward and outmoded way of thinking. I’m probably not so extreme about it now, but the ingrained urge to stamp hasn’t quite gone yet.
But again, I also think that it can get in the way of us seeing what is really there.
Pieter Huveneers, 1954
Because one of the joys of the GPO Archive is that they commissioned a wide range of artists, some of whose work I’ve never seen anywhere else. (The illustrations of the book do reflect this, by the way.)
For example, I was furtling around in there this morning for another reason altogether and came across this, which I have known and liked for ages.
Derrick Hass, 1954
It’s by Derrick Hass, who also did this Christmas design, as seen on here before.
Now it turns out, after I got curious, that Derrick Hass went on to have an extraordinary career in advertising, working as an art director in most of London’s top agencies for almost forty years, and winning prizes for his work into the 1990s. His life and work is an important part of graphic design history, and one I’d like to know more about.
But if we only keeps looking at what we already know, histories like that will fall by the wayside. So it’s fantastic that one book on GPO Design is at last available, but now we need a much bigger one too. One which tells all the stories.