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The Contemporary Interpretation of the English Tradition
Discovery is not synonymous with understanding: to his dying day, Columbus believed that the New World he had found was India or old Cathay. Many of the enthusiastic discoverers of industrial design believed and went on believing that they had found the old joyful craft spirit humming away in the factory. Although they appreciated the existence of industrial design, they were unable to apprehend that its genesis and nature were separate and apart from the craft revival, and they habitually assumed that the work of artist-craftsmen like Ernest Gimson could be cited as exemplifying aesthetic excellence in the same breath as they praised the form of a well-designed, mass-produced aluminium kettle or saucepan. The artist-craftsmen knew better than that: Gimson is quoted as saying: 'Let machinery be honest.... and make its own machine-buildings and its own machine-furniture; let it make its chairs and tables of stamped aluminium if it likes: why not?' (Ernest Gimson: his Life and Work, Shakespeare Head Press, 1924, page 14.) That was a plea for an honest acknowledgement of the respective virtues of design arising from the practice of handicrafts and the operation of industrial production; it echoed Lethaby's views in his essay on 'Art and Workmanship'. The products of industrial design had their own special excellence, 'good in a secondary order', to repeat Lethaby's words; 'shapely, smooth, strong, well fitting, useful; in fact, like a machine itself.
Despite all the preliminary confusions that attended the gradual recognition of industrial design, three aspects of the English tradition became clearly observable by the end of the nineteen-twenties. The British Empire Exhibition had, in 1924, assembled a great assortment of examples of every branch of industrial and decorative art; and the influence of one of the most discerning and practical patrons of industrial design, Sir Lawrence Weaver, was apparent in the selection and display of the exhibits. It was easier after that exhibition had set new and higher standards - at least in the officially sponsored sections - to classify contemporary design under the following sections:- The design of products in industries that had a craft basis, such as printing, textiles, pottery, domestic glass and furniture.
- Design in industries that were based almost wholly upon machine production, and which manufactured such semi-mechanical articles as gramophones, refrigerators, cooking appliances of all kinds, and, later, radio sets.
- Industrial design for such large-scale mobile and static objects as railway rolling stock, trams, buses, trolley buses, motor cars, railway station equipment, and so forth.
Those classifications are still valid. Sections I and II occasionally overlapped; for instance, some types of furniture were produced almost entirely by mechanical means, while some makers employed machinery only for converting material into workable units, thereafter using the tools and methods of the traditional craftsman. Furniture by designers like Sir Ambrose Heal and Gordon Russell was never the result of a conscious compromise between hand-work and mechanical production; it derived benefit from all the research work in design which they had done themselves as practising and accomplished artist-craftsmen, and from their ability to organise and use mechanical methods where they were economically appropriate. Their furniture represented different but unmistakable expressions of the English tradition.
The most outstanding examples of the emergence of that tradition in terms of large-scale industrial design were provided by the London Traffic Combine - that most enlightened precursor of the London Passenger Transport Board. The rolling stock, stations and equipment, signs, lettering and posters of the London Underground railways, and the progressive development of vehicle design by the London General Omnibus Company, the Metropolitan Electric Tramways, and other constituent companies of the Combine, reflected in contemporary terms the English genius for the apt use of materials, and the capacity to evolve tidy forms and to invent gay finishes. These triumphs of industrial design were made possible by the educated and enlightened patronage of Frank Pick, the joint-managing-director of the London Underground group, and later the vice-chairman of the London Passenger Transport Board.
It may seem that all these various activities are unrelated, and that the expression of the English tradition in design is diffused and incoherent compared with the gracious unity of the golden age, when a universal system determined the designer's approach to every problem. But to-day there is greater scope than ever for the unique genius possessed by English designers for gaining sympathetic rather than dictatorial control over materials and the technique of production. Once again, woodwork affords a most instructive illustration of the perpetuation of that sympathy with materials; though now the decorative attributes of wood are differently accentuated. The furniture of such designers as R. W. Symonds, unlike the work of the Morris school of artist-craftsmen, continues the English tradition from the point where it was left by Thomas Sheraton in the early years of the nineteenth century. Closely akin to the spirit and character of our age, yet deriving some of its strength from memories of the craft revival, is the furniture designed by men like Gordon Russell, and his brother, R. D. Russell, and architects who are also industrial designers, like Wells Goates, Frederick Gibberd, and Maxwell Fry, who have accepted and mastered the technique of machine production. In common with the executant craftsmen-designers of the Middle Ages, they exhibit a familiarity in the handling of the materials they select which is neither contemptuous nor arrogant, and they sustain their mastery of plywood and steel, aluminium alloys, plastics and glass as lightly and easily and untyrannically as the smiths and carpenters and masons of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries who worked with iron and oak and stone.
Thus the threads of the English tradition run back to medieval England, back to the wisdom of men who worked with simple tools, few materials and abundant ingenuity. In this sketch of a large subject it has been recorded how those threads were unravelled in the sixteenth century; knitted up again into a great national pattern by the pioneer work of that master designer, Inigo Jones, and once more unravelled when the golden age of design was destroyed by the First Industrial Revolution and the Romantic Movement in taste. William Morris and his followers attempted to pick up the threads once again, but only succeeded in weaving an archaic though lovely and instructive pattern, which they draped over the real problems of their age, and thus prevented the English tradition from finding conscious expression in terms of industrial design and production, until the opening decades of the twentieth century. Before that happened the tradition was submerged by a wave of faking and imitation; and the real English genius for design was masked by a false 'Olde England' - a shoddy and flimsy form of taste which still persists. Only very slowly is it being realised that 'ye olde England' is neither old nor English but a shallow sham, and that the real English tradition in design is alight and alive to-day all about us—in the wayside shelters of glass and steel, made for Green Line coach passengers; in the cast iron telephone kiosks, designed for the G.P.O., by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott; in our pillar boxes and telephone instruments; in the radio sets designed by R. D. Russell and Wells Coates; in the form and character and finish of some of the permanent prefabricated houses, notably those designed by Frederick Gibberd and F. R. S. Yorke; in the decorative patterns and shapes of Keith Murray's designs for domestic glass; in the superstructure and equipment designed by Brian O'Rorke for passenger liners; in the gay and subtle patterns created for textiles by Paul Nash and Marian Pepler and the decorative industrial art of Milner Gray and Eric Ravilious. In such work, the spirit of England resides: exuberant and vivid as ever; different in execution but changeless in character.
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