Tom Eckersley Archives - Page 11 of 13

Lucky Dip

other

As promised last week, it’s random image day – a whole heap of posters that I have discovered along the way but not managed to use in a post. All sizes, all shapes, every one a great piece of design.

Here’s a Mount/Evans for starters – it’s from the V&A collection and I’ve never seen it anywhere else.

It comes from their prints website (that is prints that they sell you, rather than the Prints and Drawings Department), which tells me it comes from 1960. One day I will rant about the impossibility of getting any kind of fix on what the V&A actually holds, but even describing what it does and doesn’t do is such a daunting task that it may take me a while.

This Reginald Mount (the third of a set which were up on eBay a while back) also comes from there.

And I can’t tell you a single thing about this (which, again, I’ve never seen before) because their system is so byzantine and strange that I now can’t find it again. But, is good.

Not only Reginald Mount, but Hans Unger would also like you to Keep Britain Tidy, although he is rather more anguished about it.

And yes, that is a photograph of a poster pinned to a piece of hessian. You’ve got to love the Design Council Slide Collection. As well as the seventies.

They also produced this pair of Eckersleys, which are a bit different to most of his work.

Not sure about the dates for these, the Design Council puts the first one at 1980, but it looks earlier than that, about the same period as the brochure cover. I’m also taking their dating with a pinch of salt, as they estimate the second one to be c1959-65 – despite the large black 1961 in the top right corner.

Meanwhile, back at the GPO, there are some very strange posters. This one, by Beaumont, for example.

Apparently this is from 1957, although it looks earlier to me. He was clearly saner in 1950 when he did this for them.

And finally, a random bit of early 60s kitch. They must have really loved that diving board at Weston Super Mare, I’ve seen it on so many posters.

Good, now I can tidy them all away. Only to start laying down some more, of course.

Tom Eckersley : life and work

designers

As promised a while back, the moderately personal biography from Tom Eckersley : A Life in Design, slightly edited down for your entertainment and education. With some pretty pictures too.

LCP Exhibition poster, 1979

Tom Eckersley OBE RDI AGI was born in Lowton, Lancashire on 30 September 1914. His birth preceded that of the concept of ‘graphic design’ as it is understood today, which, as Tom observes, had its roots in the twenties and thirties. Tom began his career at what he recalls as “that stimulating time when certain artists, supported by enlightened clients, saw opportunities to use their art and their vision to solve communication problems. They began to realise the many exciting visual possibilities that could be derived from the major art movements taking place in Europe between the wars.”

Tom Eckersley offset thingy
Press advertisement for paper manufacturers, c1965

Tom’s parents were great readers, their house was full of books on all subjects, and Tom spent a lot of his childhood reading and drawing. At his mother’s suggestion, he enrolled at Salford Art School at the age of 16. Here his artistic abilities and his dedicated approach to work were recognised and he was awarded the Heywood medal for best student. Here it was too that he met fellow student Eric Lombers, with whom he came to London in 1934 aged 20, to embark upon a career as a freelance poster designer.

Eckersley Lombers vintage poster for London Transport 1935
Eckersley Lombers, London Transport 1935

The two shared a tremendous enthusiasm for their art and for the poster. “The early thirties made a strong and lasting impression on me,” Tom reflects, “helping to shape my attitude to graphic work. At that time the poster was perhaps the most significant form of publicity, the great Cassandre and other French designers produced avant-garde posters, as did McKnight Kauffer and Hans Schleger in England. This greatly influenced me and I soon became seriously involved in poster design.”

Eckersley Lombers Austin Reed ad
Eckersley Lombers, Austin Reed poster, 1938

The Eckersley-Lombers team was fast established among leading poster artists at this exciting time in the history of commercial design. Certain clients and advertising agencies were looking to artist to produce material that was both functional and aesthetically pleasing, and the team was commissioned by Shell, the BBC, London Transport, the GPO, Austin Reed and advertising agency W S Crawford. Tom and Eric also worked as visiting lecturers in poster design at the Westminster School of Art.

Eckersley Lombers gas mask vintage poster
Eckersley Lombers, ARP poster, 1939

When war broke out the volume of commercial advertising declined. Tom and Eric joined the Royal Air Force and the Army respectively and so their partnership came to an end. Tom continued his creative output in the early war years with a powerful set of posters for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents.

Tom Eckersley ROSPA vintage poster rogue 1945
ROSPA, 1945

The ideas were conceived whilst he worked in camp, as a cartographer, and executed in a makeshift studio during 24-hour home leaves. Later he transferred to the Publicity Section of the Air Ministry, lived at home, and did work for a number of clients, including the GPO, an association which had begun before the war and continued for many decades after.

Eckersley GPO address letters vintage poster 1944
GPO, 1944

In 1948 Tom was awarded the OBE for services to British poster design. He had reached the top of his profession and many a ‘man in the street’ who did not know the Eckersley name was familiar with his posters. Tom’s flawless clarity of purpose, his rich imagination and his gentle humour had impressed many messages upon the public: that they should avoid industrial injuries, shave with Gillette razors, dress at Austin Reed and fill their cars with Shell, to name but a few.

Tom Eckersley Gillette dog poster
Magazine advertisement for Gillette, early 1950s

His great qualities had created lasting images that pleased, amused and were rcalled and talked about long after the campaigns had run their time. Tom’s international reputation was established too, and in 1950 he was elected member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale.

Tom Eckersley private presses exhibition poster LCP
LCP Exhibition poster, n.d.

In 1957, Tom became Head of Design at the London College of Printing, a post which he held until 1977, whilst designing posters for a number of clients, some new, like Cooks and UNICEF, and some of whom, like London Transport and W S Crawford, had first commissioned his work before the war.

Tom Eckersley Lincolnshire Vintage poster British Railways
Lincolnshire, British Railways, 1961

[This biography was written in 1994, Tom Eckersley died in 1997. All images come from the Eckersley archive at the University of the Arts.]

Addendum: I carefully typed all of this out, and then found another, possibly even more interesting, biography as a PDF. So now you can choose between them.

Sell me something, please

Different trains of thought

railway posters

Another online archive of lovely posters for your education and enlightenment today. But, nothing is straightforward in this world, so this is another archive with its own quirks and priorities. Here, though, they’re more understandable, because this archive isn’t meant for the likes of you and me. It’s the National Railway Museum poster collection, and it’s designed for railway buffs.

Whitley Bay, Amstutz, 1954

Wondering what I am talking about? Try here. This is the main search page for the NRM’s poster collection, your gateway to more than ten thousand railway posters. Now I might want to search these by date, or by the subject of the poster, or even by the designer. Not a chance. I can filter them by category (of which there is only one, All, which is philosophically quite interesting), or I can sort them by railway company. So should I ever want to see every poster for the Axminster and Lyme Regis Light Railway, I am fine. Should, however, my life not be organised in terms of various railway operators I am rather up the Swannee.

Morecambe, Lance Cattermole, 1960

It’s such a radically different perpective on the world that it makes me laugh rather than drives me to fury. Although this is mainly because there are a couple of get-arounds by which I can find what I am looking for. The first is the search box in the top right corner. Although this searches the entire site, not just the poster collection, “Morecambe poster” or “Amstutz poster” generally gets you a full list of results, even if in text form, usually including several repetitions, and with only about half a chance of an image when you click on the individual object.

Lincolnshire, Tom Purvis, no date

But not even this isn’t as infuriating as it might be. Because, elsewhere, there is a much better search engine. The National Museum of Science and Industry runs not only the NRM, but also the Science Museum and the National Media Museum. And it too has a search engine – although, wierdly, I can’t find any way of accessing it from their home page. Perhaps it’s a secret and I’m not meant to be using it. In which case, apologies.

From this, you get a much neater page of search results, with thumbnail images where they exist. Plus, as an added bonus, your search can also turn up some additional Science Museum holdings, like this cheerful little Eckerlsey Lombers for the Ministry of Food.

What’s odd about these two search pages though, is that they don’t turn up the same results. (This next bit may end up being a bit geeky, so if you’re not interested, skip on a bit). The NRM search will miss out lots of items. Say you run a search like “studio seven” (I would recommend it, incidentally, as you can see from the results below). This 1958 Studio Seven poster appears when you search on the NMSI.

But doesn’t when you search the NRM – only if you search for “Dover Studio Seven”. And even then, there isn’t an illustration or a date. The same happens with this poster.

From which we could perhaps conclude that the NMSI search engine is a superior thing and the NRM one a bit random. Which is probably true. But what is more than passing strange is that even when each search engine comes up with the same thing, the pictures are different. The NMSI has proper scans.

Studio Seven, Minehead 1962

Whereas the NRM have flattened the poster with a bit of perspex, taken a picture and said, will this do? (Much like we do, I admit, but then we’re not a national institution in charge of a major archive.)

Now I’m not just doing this to poke fun at the NRM, there is a point. The pictures show that these two search pages aren’t just different ways into the same database, they’re totally separate entities. Which means that all of this information, on ten thousand posters and lord alone knows how many engines, sprockets and pictures of stations, has been catalogued twice. At best it’s a waste of time, at worst it must have cost an awful lot of unnecessary money. Or maybe there is a good reason for this, and I have missed it, in which case I’d like to know.

Studio Seven, Rhyl, 1955

So, nerdy bit over, there is still a rather wonderful and under-used collection to be found at the NRM, whichever search engine you view it through. And it’s another example of how the internet can do things for museums that a building can’t. If you go to the NRM hoping to see posters (as Mr Crownfolio and I, sad cases that we are, did on our honeymoon) you will be disappointed, as only a tiny proportion of what they hold will be on show. Surf the archives though, and you can look at whatever you like. If you can find it.

Studio Seven, By Train to London, 1960

Shine a light

eBay

This was sold on eBay on Friday.

From 1944, it is a lovely piece of Hans Schleger/Zero in prime linen-mounted condition. Mr Crownfolio and I did have rather deluded hopes of picking it up for a pittance, seeing as it was being sold in the States. But it went for nearly £250 – unsurprisingly – which means that I can bring myself to tell you that the same seller has another one from the series on offer this week.

In a way, I’m not really upset that we didn’t get the first poster. It’s a classic, but I’m not sure I like it enough (certainly not £250 of enough). Would it ever get framed and hung on the wall? I don’t think so.

One of the reasons is that it may be a classic World War Two London Transport poster, but I’m not sure it’s a classic Schleger. His posters are usually either a bit stranger, or at very least a bit wittier, like this GPO poster from just a year or two later (known in our house as the ‘Prawn Chef’).

I wonder if there is a reason why his London Transport posters are so sensible. Because the other thing that has struck me about the two offered on eBay is just how much they resemble other designers’ work on the same themes – and how much they all resemble each other.

Here’s Tom Eckersley on the other side of the question – reminding bus drivers to stop when they are hailed in the blackout.

And also reminding the drivers to save rubber.

While James Fitton (whose work really does deserve more appreciation than it gets) informs the travelling public that they too can help save this precious wartime commodity.

And finally, we’re pretty much back at the beginning again, as Fitton also tells us how not to flag down a bus during the blackout.

Two things strike me from this series. One is what a great designer James Fitton was, in particular for his luminous use of colour. His posters easily stand up to the work of both Eckersley and Schleger.

The other – which was the thought that started all of this off – is that, for such a diverse set of designers, the results do have more in common than I would expect. This is mainly in the way that they’ve all used a simplicity of technique, each poster illustrating the issue fairly literally with no visual puns or distracting images. I wonder whether, somewhere in the heart of the London Transport wartime archives, there is a memo which says: This is war. And safety. So don’t let the designers get away with any of their clever-clever stuff. Oh, and on the way out, make sure you give them an airbrush. Perhaps I should write to the London Transport Museum and ask.

Operator, I can’t find anything

archives

I’ve been meaning for a while to do a series of posts looking at the different archives that sit out there on the web, just waiting for you to rummage through their files of wonderful vintage posters. These resources have exploded in the last few years, and it’s now easy to find out incredible amounts about the history of posters without ever leaving your chair – the kind of research that would have taken years and many many train journeys in the past, even had it been possible at all. So, while the archives may not be making me fitter, I am certainly now both better off, and considerably more informed than I would otherwise have been. Hurrah for the internet.

My thoughts were that I’d start with one of the straightforwardly brilliant ones, like the London Transport Museum catalogue – a complete itemisation of every poster and artwork they own, image-led, designed for users rather than museum curators. But in fact, I find myself wanting to begin with two really quirky ones. So today’s is the BT archive, which until a couple of weeks ago, I didn’t even know existed.

Pieter Huveneers Telephone poster
Pieter Huveneers, c1950.

The archivist at the BPMA very kindly pointed me in their direction, because the two collections are separated siblings. When British Telecom was split off from the GPO in 1980, they got the posters about telephones and telegraphs, and the Post Office got the ones about letters. But the artists, the poster sizes and even the cataloguing systems are very much the same.

Zero, 1944, TCB 319/PRD 375

That, sadly, is where the resemblance ends. The BPMA catalogue interface is lovely; it’s reasonably intuitive, I can find what I am looking for with some confidence, and all of the pictorial material is illustrated. The BT catalogue is, if I am entirely honest, a pig. The search logic follows its own rules, there is a wierd link called “ContextRef” which throws up an apparently random list of related material (which then defaults to the search page if you click on anything), and, worst of all, only about 10% of the material is illustrated. What’s particularly annoying about that is that, in researching this, I’ve found a company who claim to have had the contract to digitise the entire BT archives. So where have all these pictures gone then? Although, on the plus side, I did find this 1948 Eckersley on their blog, and I swear I’ve never seen it before (if you have, please do say in the contact box below).

But, as you can see, I have spent rather longer than I intended sifting through page after page of slightly dry records (I don’t, I have to say, like reading catalogue numbers) in search of the few illustrations that do exist. Because the few that are there are wonderful. This wartime Henrion is particularly wierd – I’d like to find out more about him, some of the images are really quite disconcerting.

Although this one, from 1951, is quite benign.

Then, after the best part of an evening reading ContextRef numbers and swearing, I found out how to buck the system. Some, and quite possibly all the images are available through the BT image sales website. Which is organised by picture, and theme, making finding images less of a needle in a haystack hunt.

Reiss telephone less vintage gpo poster
Reiss, 1945

There are disadvantages, like the fact that there are rather more pictures of trimphones and Busby than there are posters, and the images are watermarked.. But it does at least, in the advertising and wartime sections, give you a rough overview of what kind of posters the GPO was producing and whether or not you might want to look at some more.

This isn’t the first time I’ve used the image sales get round; for a long time, the only way to find out what posters the National Railway Museum held was to go via the Science and Society website. The NRM now do have a searchable online catalogue (of a railway buff kind) which is better than the slightly random selection that Science and Society used to dole out. But if you’re searching an archive through image sales (do you hear me V&A as well?) it’s a sign that they could, possibly, do more towards making them available on the web.

Moan over. So here’s one last nice poster to cheer ourselves up, a faultless Unger from 1951. Pip pip.