Porcentaje de dosis en profundidad (PDD):

One war-time development which was of importance to the furniture industry was the Utility Furniture scheme which was introduced by the Board of Trade in 1942 to ensure that enough furniture was produced to replace that which had been destroyed by

bombing raids, and also provide furniture for newly-married couples setting up home.

The hand market provided some of this furniture, and indeed, prices for second-hand furniture increased, but some new furniture still had to be produced.⁵⁹¹ Timber shortages and price controls during the war years had limited furniture manufacture, and furniture firms had been encouraged to undertake work for local authorities, hospitals and the forces. The question was how to control who could purchase furniture during the war, but more importantly, who could make it. Timber was in short supply and there was the concern that manufacturers would make bad quality furniture and sell it at high prices to people who needed furniture whatever the cost.⁵⁹² The solution was a standard design which would make the best use of raw materials but which was also high quality.

As the CC41 book notes, the Utility scheme for furniture was ‘an unparalleled example of the total state control not only of the supply but more importantly, the design of an essential commodity’.⁵⁹³ As Sparke also notes, the scheme

also determined what kind of furniture should be manufactured, for what price and by whom. This was the first time that a government body had been vested

590Ibid., p. 124.

591J. Vaizey CC41: Utility Furniture and Fashion 1941-1951 (London: 1995) p. 5.

Ibid., p. 5.

593CC41: Utility Furniture and Fashion 1941-1951 (London: 1995) p. 7.

with enough authority to make sure that only the furniture it thought best for people was actually produced.⁵⁹⁴

Similarly, Attfield also recognises that the furniture industry at this time was: ‘the only sector of industry to be subjected to design by dictate as part of the programme of rationalisation introduced during the war, not only to deal with immediate problems thrown up by the state of emergency, but also to promote a design reform agenda of longer-term planned modernisation’.⁵⁹⁵

‘Standard Emergency Furniture’ had been introduced in 1941 due to the extreme timber shortages, but this furniture was very basic and was made by firms already contracted to produce canteen, office and hospital furniture.⁵⁹⁶ An advisory committee for Utility furniture was set up in 1942 after the timber quota allowed to firms was cut by one third and plywood was withdrawn from the quota as it was required for aircraft construction, and in 1943 the Design Panel was formed, chaired by the furniture designer Gordon Russell.⁵⁹⁷ The first pieces of furniture produced under the Utility scheme were done so by firms selected by the Board of Trade, and included in the first catalogue were a dining table and chairs, fireside chair, sideboard, kitchen cabinets, and a bedroom suite (bed, wardrobe, tallboy and dressing table).⁵⁹⁸ The range of furniture available was expanded as time went on: in 1945 all-metal bedsteads were included, and in 1946 other new ranges of furniture were introduced.⁵⁹⁹

The furniture produced under the scheme had, according to Sparke, to ‘conform to the highest possible tenets of quality and taste – according to the criteria of those in authority’.⁶⁰⁰ And those in authority had, through the Utility scheme, free reign to impose their ideas of ‘good design’ on the British public. Sparke notes that there was a feeling that ‘good taste’ had at last replaced much of the ‘tastelessness’ prevalent in

594P. Sparke Furniture (London, 1986) p. 73.

595Attfield, J ‘‘Give ‘em something dark and heavy’: The Role of Design in the material Culture of Popular British Furniture, 1939-1965’ Journal of Design History Vol. 9 no. 3, 1996, pp. 185-201.

http://jdh.oxfordjournals.org/

596CC41: Utility Furniture and Fashion 1941-1951 (London: 1995) p. 9.

597Ibid., p. 10 & P. Sparke Furniture (London, 1986) p.74.

598P. Sparke Furniture (London, 1986) p. 74.

599Ibid., p. 74.

600Ibid., p. 73.

popular furniture.⁶⁰¹ Rather in the way that Cole and Redgrave, in the late 1800s, had decided that art education could be standardised, and good design could be quantified and taught in stages, so those involved in the Utility scheme also thought that good design could be represented in standardised pieces of furniture. The furniture trade was initially opposed to any form of control over its activities, but by 1942 when the Utility Furniture Advisory Committee was formed, the trade journal Cabinet Maker stated that:

Our guess is, and our hope is, that the Committee will plump for sound, plain and functionally satisfactory furniture. If it does so, it will have left, after the war, a solid and nationally characteristic mark upon style.⁶⁰²

This comment suggests that the furniture trade was perhaps no longer as opposed to the Utility Scheme as they had been, and reactions to the first pieces of furniture proposed under the scheme were apparently favourable.⁶⁰³ Although one of the benefits of the scheme was that it was a chance to educate the public regarding good design via the furniture they bought through the scheme, this was not as successful as it was perhaps expected to be. One comment regarding the Utility furniture was that it was ‘Good, solid, sensible…that’s just what the public doesn’t like’.⁶⁰⁴ Similarly

Edwards argues that though Utility furniture was seen as exemplifying good design, the scheme was perhaps not as influential as it first appears:

Hailed by some as the great opportunity to once and for all change the course of furniture design, by others as a bureaucratic interference in an industry quite capable of looking after itself, and received with ambivalence by the customers it was designed for, it is little wonder that it did not survive much beyond the emergency period. The furniture produced under the scheme was ultimately the response to a peculiar situation and could not be expected to act as a catalyst for major changes in attitudes to furnishing.⁶⁰⁵

Attfield also argues that the attempt to standardise design was not realised through the Utility scheme:

There was disagreement among the various factions of the Good Design movement who did not agree over production methods, ideal materials or

601 Ibid., p. 75.

602Cited in CC41: Utility Furniture and Fashion 1941-1951 (London: 1995) p. 28.

603CC41: Utility Furniture and Fashion 1941-1951 (London: 1995) p 28.

604Cited in Ibid., p. 28.

605C. Edwards Twentieth Century Furniture: Materials, Manufacture and Markets (Manchester:

Manchester University Press, 1994) p. 183. Among those who cited utility furniture as being of good taste and design were Kenneth Holmes (‘The Linking of Technical and Art Education’ in Journal of the Royal Society of Arts vol. 98, No. 4818 (7 April, 1950) pp. 432-446).

aesthetics. In spite of lip service to ‘mass production’ and an ideal reflected in an aesthetic, standardisation of production or modularity of design was not

achieved.⁶⁰⁶

In 1948 the Utility scheme ended, following the end of rationing, though many manufacturers continued to produce Board of Trade approved Utility furniture until 1952, as this wasn’t subject to tax, unlike non-Utility furniture.⁶⁰⁷ Both Sparke and Edwards note that as soon as the Utility scheme ended, the public went back to purchasing the type of furniture it preferred: and this was not utility-style furniture.⁶⁰⁸ What they did want, Sparke suggests, was ‘more novelty, decoration, variation’, and there was a ‘stylistic free for all’ now that the control exerted by the Utility scheme had ended.⁶⁰⁹. Farr also noted that Utility Furniture, rather than having the effect of

persuading people that the clean lines and simpler designs of modern furniture were an improvement on the antique reproduction styles present before the war, was perhaps too stark and modern for the public, and they returned to pre-war styles once the Utility scheme ended.⁶¹⁰ While those behind the Utility furniture may have seen the scheme as a chance to promote good design in furniture, the public were not enamoured with the simpler designs and lack of ornament of Utility furniture. War-time production methods began to be introduced to the furniture industry, and it was these that would have more of an impact on the training of students at art schools than the war-time designs of the furniture itself.