The ‘essential task of travel advertising’, wrote Howard Wadman in the 1938 Penrose Annual, was to
make [the public] come to your town. […] Like so many advertising problems, this one calls not for a brilliant “idea,” nor for an exhibition of contemporary art, but for just enough imagination to seize the essential atmosphere of the place in question, and enough craftsmanship to put it on paper.90
In other words, a little imagination went a long way. Too much experimentation, too much ‘contemporary art’, and the essential aim of the travel poster would be lost. Posters did not require an artist but rather a Purvisian ‘master craftsman’,91
someone who understood that a poster’s primary function was to sell. Such a view, Wadman argued, ‘cuts against both the high-brow and the low-brow attitudes’; indeed, he took pains to criticise the pernicious ‘Councillor Buzzfuzz’ of the English seaside resort and the ‘highly self-conscious tricks of the intellectuals’ equally.92
In his view, the ‘worn-out devices’ of Buzzfuzz et al. were ‘useless’,
89 Mukařovský describes ‘painted, graphic and plastic advertising’ as occupying ‘the borderline between art and total extra-aesthetics’ (Aesthetic Function, pp. 10-11).
90 Howard Wadman, ‘The Advertising of Travel’, Penrose Annual, 40, 1938, pp. 50-53 (p. 52).
91 ‘Master craftsman’ was Purvis’s preferred term. In his ‘Introduction’ to Poster Progress he wrote ‘I loathe the word “artist.” Personally I am as proud of being called a master craftsman as I imagine Michelangelo must have been, but I hope that I have not his arrogance with his critics’ (Purvis, ‘Introduction’, p. 10). Purvis’s preference may stem from his training at Camberwell, which emphasised training in trades and crafts such as architecture, wood carving and embroidery, as much as, if not more so, than the fine arts. For more on the modern use of the term craftsman, especially by Pick, see Saler’s The Avant-Garde in Interwar England, pp. 70-72, 154-55. 92 The character Councillor Buzzfuzz appears to have been Wadman’s creation, but both his ludicrous name and his coarse manner within the article (‘“Give ‘em a pretty girl in a bathing-dress,” says Councillor Buzzfuzz; “that’s what they like to look at.” Knowing chuckles all round the table.’) suggests a figure not unlike Arnold Bennett’s press mogul Sir Charles Worgan, encountered in Chapter 2: Buzzfuzz is a no-nonsense, purely
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but no more so than some of the advanced designs used by the London Underground, many of which were
nothing more than superb decorations of the Underground Railway, about as persuasive and relevant to their subject as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony would be.
Posters that are merely embellishments of station walls, or opportunities for young painters to exhibit themselves, may have great social significance and enormous cultural value, but they have no integrity as posters.
Function has its own values, and the integrity of a travel poster is in direct ratio to its effectiveness in making you want to go to a specific place. Travel advertising is not exempt from the first principles of all advertising. It does not exist for its own sake, but to turn the wheels of a great industry. It must sell, and it is about time some of our art students got wind of the fact.93
Although written a decade later than many of the texts discussed above, Wadman’s article is worth quoting at length because it touches upon many of the key points of contention about travel posters: namely, this conflict between a poster’s aesthetic and commercial functions. For Wadman, posters are often too aesthetic and not commercial or ‘persuasive’ enough. All of their noble qualities aside, a poster cannot be judged according to aesthetic criteria. They are not meant as ‘embellishments’ or ‘exhibits’ but as propaganda designed to sell.
Accordingly, if posters do not attract visitors to a town, ‘they have no integrity as posters’.94 Wadman’s view was shared by many involved in the industry. Writing in McKnight Kauffer’s Art of the Poster in 1924, Phillips Russell argued that while a poster could be appreciated by a historian or a collector ‘as an object of beauty’ and by an ‘artist as a conception or means of expression’, for the ‘business man, who is a producer of commodities, it possesses only one interest: Does it sell his goods?’95
Other critics and practitioners agreed that posters had to sell, but believed that the use of artistic tropes and techniques increased, not prevented, sales. In the July 1924 issue of Commercial Art, W. Gaunt claimed that a ‘faithful and literal rendering of some place, commodity, or whatever it is, does not hold the attention. […] But an arrangement of geometrical figures, of loops and lines, stimulates the imagination.’96
If the goal of a poster was to ‘shock’ and to attract
money-minded figure with reactionary taste in both politics and aesthetics. See Wadman, ‘Advertising of Travel’, p. 52.
93 Wadman, ‘Advertising of Travel’, p. 52.
94 Wadman’s critique is echoed in D. C. H. Watts’s article, ‘Evaluating British railway poster advertising: The London & North Eastern Railway between the wars’, The Journal of Transport History, 25.2 (2004), 23-56. In it, Watts assesses whether interwar LNER posters actually ‘promote[d] travel by LNER’, concluding that their failure to actually depict the train services being promoted led to a decrease in their effectiveness as advertisements (pp. 45-48).
95 Phillips Russell, ‘II. Purpose: The Poster as a Selling Device’, in The Art of the Poster: Its Origin, Evolution &
Purpose, ed. by Edward McKnight Kauffer (London: Cecil Palmer, 1924), pp. 33-45 (p. 33).
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attention, then ‘advanced’ art was clearly an important selling aid. Moreover, any advertiser who ignored the aesthetic was, warned A. Ryan, risking ‘los[ing] an incalculable but
tremendous advantage’. ‘Ordinary folk’, he wrote,
are simple, inarticulate, and not keenly interested in the arts. But they have a strong latent approval of decency and dignity in their surroundings, and pressure of steadily increasing force is being brought to bear on them to make this natural bias more pronounced. In short, the tide is turning against ugliness in advertising. Twenty years hence an unsightly poster will not be a commercial proposition, and those advertisers who realize this at once will save themselves most damaging loss of prestige.97
The fear of ‘loss of prestige’ was a very real one for companies competing in the increasingly crowded interwar mass-market.98 This notion of ‘prestige’ was of particular concern to the newly-established ‘big four’ railway companies. Formed on 1 January 1923 following the Railways Act of 1921, GWR, LNER, LMS and Southern were an amalgamation of many hundreds of different local services, grouped together into loose regions.99
As such, each company needed to establish a precise brand identity, to both distinguish itself in the minds of its customers and differentiate itself from its new competitors. The amalgamation process had led to intense rivalry between the newly-formed companies, especially the LMS and LNER, who both ran London to Scotland lines, and who engaged in a heated and well- publicised ‘Race to the North’ in 1928. Aside from issues of brand identity, the precise location and quality of the lines taken over meant that each company had a particular set of needs which had to be addressed through advertising. I will return to the LMS and LNER in more detail below; for now, I will explore the various needs of the newly-formed companies through a closer examination of the other two companies, examining a case study series of posters by T. D. Kerr for Southern.
Paul Rennie notes that as the Southern and Great Western Railways ‘operated, more- or-less, as a monopoly’, they saw ‘little virtue in using valuable display space to advertise [their] own efforts’.100
Despite the restructuring, the GWR had ‘retained its original name since 1835’; consequently, they ‘felt no great need to reassert its identity as the other companies did’.101
Instead of posters, they focused largely on press advertisements and
97 A. Ryan, ‘The Economics of Unsightly Advertising’, Penrose Annual, 33, 1931, pp. 79-82 (p. 81).
98 This general idea of ‘prestige’ or even ‘prestige posters’ as a category was much discussed in the interwar period. See, for instance, W. D. H. McCullough, ‘In defence of prestige’, Penrose Annual, 38, p. 1936, p. 39 (p. 39).
99 For more information on this amalgamation, see Cole and Durack, Railway Posters, pp. 6-17; Lorna Frost,
Railway Posters (Oxford: Shire Publications, 2012), pp. 23-39; and Paul Rennie, Modern British Posters: Art, Design, Communication (London: Black Dog Publishing Limited, 2010), p. 47.
100 Rennie, Modern British Posters, p. 47. 101 Frost, Railway Posters, p. 28.
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holiday brochures and guides: formats more suited to communicating specific information about services as opposed to brand awareness.102 Southern, on the other hand, used posters as part of a ‘“systematic scheme of connected and co-related publicity”’ to counter
increased criticism of their suburban services.103
Alongside press advertisements, information booklets and even an ‘Information Section’ at Waterloo Station, Southern issued a landmark series of four ‘Progress’ posters by T. D. Kerr (Figures 3.3-3.5).104
102 Cole and Durack, Railway Posters, p. 9; Frost, Railway Posters, pp. 28-29. 103 The Railway Gazette, quoted in Cole and Durack, Railway Posters, p. 10.
104 See Cole and Durack, Railway Posters, pp. 10-11. Only 3 of the 4 ‘Progress’ posters survive in the National Railway Museum’s collection; the final poster, ‘Rolling Stock’, is not represented.
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Figure 3.3: T. D. Kerr, Electrification!, Progress Poster No. 1, Southern, 1925
Figure 3.4: T. D. Kerr, Steam!, Progress Poster No. 2, Southern, 1925
Figure 3.5: T. D. Kerr, The Viaduct, Progress Poster No. 3, Southern, 1925
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Quite how modern these posters were can only be appreciated when compared to other Southern posters produced in the same year, such as Figures 3.6 and 3.7 below:
Figure 3.6: Artist unknown, Margate, Southern, 1925
Figure 3.7: Artist unknown, Where the South Downs Slope to the Sea, Southern, 1925
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Figures 3.6 and 3.7 are fairly representative of the pre-war style of poster advertising still lingering into the mid-twenties. As John Hewitt observes, before and during the war, posters primarily consisted of existing paintings purchased and then reproduced as posters.105
While the above two images may have been commissioned directly by Southern, the structure of the image remains unchanged from the pre-war era: an oil painting
surrounded by a monotone border reminiscent of a picture frame, containing small blocks of serif type and the company logo. The images resemble paintings more than posters, with the majority of the space dedicated to a faithful, realistic depiction of the advertised
location.
In contrast, Kerr’s ‘Progress’ posters are unequivocally conceived and designed as posters. The text is an integral part of the poster; text and image work together directly to create a coherent message, one that works both at a distance and close-up. The text describes at some length the precise improvements that are being made to Southern services, including details of expenditure, but it is not necessary for the viewer to read the text to grasp the message being portrayed. The simple, clean lines of the graphics; the striking primary palette and the bold, sans serif typeface all contribute to a startling sense of modernity and ‘progress’. There is a visual coherence within each image, but more
importantly within the series as a whole, a sense further emphasised by the decision to use a ‘double royal’ as opposed to the usual ‘quad royal’ poster size.106
The smaller, vertical dimensions of these images would have allowed them to be displayed together more easily. It is also worth noting that the majority of London Underground posters used the double royal format as these were more suited to tube stations; in following the lead of Frank Pick and the London Underground, Southern could tacitly align themselves with the most
‘advanced’ of all the transport companies. Underground posters, even as early as 1925, were already instantly recognisable both for their design structure and their uniform use of
Johnston Sans. By adopting a similar, if rather thicker, ‘humanist’ sans serif type for their revised logo,107
Southern tapped into the Underground’s reputation for modernity,
105 John Hewitt, ‘Posters of Distinction: Art, Advertising and the London, Midland, and Scottish Railways’,
Design Issues, 16.1 (Spring 2000), 16-35 (p. 18).
106 Paul Rennie writes that ‘poster sizes were made consistent from the 1880s onwards’ in multiples of ‘Crown’ (15 x 20”) and ‘Royal’ (25 x 20”) proportions. The vertical double royal therefore measured 40 x 25” and the horizontal quad royal 40 x 50”. See Rennie, Modern British Posters, n. p. The quad royal was the most common size used for railway advertising, although London Transport regularly used vertical double royal sizes.
107 It is difficult to identify the precise typeface used for Southern’s publicity during this period. It is reminiscent of the two primary ‘humanist’ sans serif fonts from the period, Johnston Sans and Gill Sans, although the latter was not introduced until 1927. According to Gavin Ambrose and Paul Harris, humanist sans serif typefaces are
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suggesting that their railway services were as organised and progressive as their publicity. For a service suffering from accusations of overcrowding, such posters were a
masterstroke: the generous use of white space and the uncluttered graphics and fonts create a calm sense of spaciousness.
According to Beverley Cole and Richard Durack, such ‘Progress’ posters ‘served a dual purpose’: they ‘informed the general public’ about the progress of improvements and the date by which they would be finished, and they ‘satisfied the shareholders that their money was being usefully spent’.108
In other words, in the ‘Progress’ posters, the aesthetic function is somewhat subordinated to what Mukařovský might term ‘publicity’ and
‘communicative’ functions. Publicity, much like Art, is a vague term, one that carries
connotations of commercialism, but is not directly confined to increasing sales. It can apply broadly to the general promotion of a company, goods or services (namely, brand
awareness) or more precisely to the promotion of specific innovations. Evidently, there is an overlap between so-called ‘publicity’ and ‘communicative’ functions, but publicity usually carries a more emotive element, such as the creation of prestige or the generation of goodwill towards a company. In the context of railway posters, a text in which the
communicative function dominates would be one of the handbills produced and displayed to advertise a particular change in services.109
The ‘Progress’ posters, however, appear to be doing something more complex by using a combination of the communicative, publicity and aesthetic functions to achieve a number of specific purposes: to quash complaints, to increase customer confidence, to appease shareholders and to depict Southern as modern and progressive. Although the posters were designed for an ostensibly commercial concern, their primary aim or function was not to sell – at least not directly. The posters would have primarily been displayed in Southern stations, so the audience would have been comprised of existing customers. Instead of attracting more customers, the aim of the posters was to mollify existing, disgruntled ones (and, presumably, to justify any increase in fares resulting
those ‘based on Roman inscription capitals’; as such, they have ‘more stroke weight contrast’ than fonts like Futura, also 1927. Humanist sans serif typefaces also have ‘splayed “M”, “N”, “V” and “W” characters’. See Gavin Ambrose and Paul Harris, The Visual Dictionary of Typography (Lausanne: AVA, 2010), p. 133. When designing Gill Sans, Eric Gill was influenced by Johnston’s earlier typeface for London Underground; it is therefore likely that whoever designed the Southern typeface also based it on Johnston Sans, adding enough weight to distinguish it from the Underground typeface.
108 Cole and Durack, Railway Posters, p. 65.
109 Even here aesthetic and publicity functions are present: the LNER, for instance, changed all of its handbills and posters to Gill Sans from 1927 onwards. By introducing this universal typeface, the company was able to create a sense of brand identity and beauty even in purely typographic posters. See Cecil Dandridge, ‘An Account of the LNER Type Standardisation’, Monotype Recorder, Winter 1933, pp. 7-11.
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from the works). In ‘Art and Commerce’, Fry says of advertising in general, and railway posters in particular, that
Advertisement is used not so much to induce us to buy as to make us willing to pay far more for things than they cost to produce. Thus the railway companies give us progressively worse and worse accommodation but, by advertisement, they produce in the public a non-critical state of romantic enthusiasm for the line. (p. 58)
Kerr’s series of posters appear to do just that: to produce this ‘non-critical state of
romantic enthusiasm for the line’. In order to create this enthusiasm, as we have seen, Kerr uses a mix of the aesthetic, communicative and publicity functions to create texts which promote Southern on several different levels. To create such a feeling of enthusiasm or to assuage even the company’s most vocal critics required artistry and an appeal to the emotions, not just a straightforward reporting of facts.
What is evident from the ‘Progress’ posters is that there is a great deal of overlap between different functions present in a single text. Mukařovský’s reminder that the aesthetic and the extra-aesthetic are not ‘precisely defined and mutually exclusive areas’ seems particularly relevant here. But his statement that a line can be drawn between those texts in which the aesthetic is dominant (art) and those in which it is subordinated (not art) is also useful: in Kerr’s posters, the aesthetic is utilised less for its own sake (to make
beautiful posters) and more to aid more the publicity function (to create the impression of a modern, sophisticated company). As with the magazines studied in Chapter 2, it is the demands made by context and projected audience which determine the precise form – or, in this case, the particular weighting given to the aesthetic – that a text takes. In the context of customer dissatisfaction, the priority for Southern executives was, as the Railway Gazette put it in 1927, to create ‘“propaganda designed to develop the kinship of interests between public and railway”.’110
For the LNER and LMS, on the other hand, the direct competition between their very similar services led to the privileging of the aesthetic as the primary means of distinction.
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