Orwell’s unicorn

One of the things I’ve really enjoyed about my break is the leisurely opportunity to follow up lines of enquiry that have arisen out my research for our last book, but which I’ve had no time (until now) to pursue.

For example, back in the summer when I was working on an essay about Margery Allingham’s great 1940s thriller, Traitor’s Purse (1941), I was interested in how the experience of blackout coloured Britain’s national mood, as well as defining the novel’s paranoid style (Traitor’s Purse is set in a dark and surreal wartime landscape in which a protagonist has literally “blacked out” after a knock on the head). I thought that the digital collections of the IWM might give me a nice research route into understanding how wartime blackout actually looked and felt, and I wasn’t disappointed. I began exploring their wonderful collections of objects and print ephemera produced around Britain during the 1940s and only came up for air several days later. Wow!

I discovered that the public information posters produced for RoSPA and London Transport (during years in which blackout conditions caused a significant upsurge in accidents) created a visual language that seemed directly expressive of the literary landscape of Traitor’s Purse: a noir-ish world of shadows, staring eyes, disembodied limbs, and dangerous objects half-glimpsed in the darkness.

These images provided a rich illustrative context for the piece which I called “Blackout Noir” (and which is published, alongside other essays, in Margery Allingham’s Mysterious Knits). But beyond my immediate interest in how Margery Allingham’s work engaged with, and reflected, the shifting cultural mood of 1941, the images I saw while poking about the IWM collections really struck me in several different ways.

These posters were distinctive and bold. Their visual simplicity belied an often sophisticated graphic fusion of medium and message.

Some posters combined elements of continental surrealism with an unusual modernist style that also seemed distinctively British.

The posters did not patronise their audience, but rather addressed them, as engaged observers, in a range of different ways. Many told a story through a combination of bold, colourful imagery, humour, and visual-verbal puns . . .

. . .while others were quite simply great examples of inventive poster design, with their own extraordinary graphic power

Just by spending a few days really looking at these images (only a few of which I’d seen before) I discovered that 1940s British public information posters were not (as I’d somehow assumed) straightforward pieces of scolding propaganda, but novel and interesting works of graphic design in their own right, using the visual languages of modernist aesthetics and advertising in highly creative ways to engage their audience.

At this point, I had to move on, and write another essay, on a different topic, but I kept thinking about the visual creativity and cultural context of these 1940s posters.

Who had designed them? Who commissioned them? How had they been produced and where were they displayed? (Some posters were obviously meant for display in military or industrial settings, while others addressed themselves to a more “general” public eye) And why had I (someone who enjoys thinking about many aspects of 1940s and 50s popular culture) never properly looked at these inventive images before?

I could answer my last question very easily: I hadn’t looked at these posters because I’d associated them with the utterly repellent, lowest common denominator, Keep Calm and Carry On aesthetic that came to dominate the Cameron / Osborne years in Britain, in which an idea of the ol’ Blitz spirit was harnessed (as it – groan – so often is) to the reactionary forces of conservative nostalgia.

Even seeing the words Keep Calm and Carry On (which, incidentally, were stolen from the design of a public information poster produced during the difficult months of the Phoney War that was very rarely ever displayed) still induces in me a distinctive combination of nausea and rage (at the sheer audacity of the use of the 1940s as the ideological wallpaper for Osborne’s cruel politics of austerity). I hadn’t looked at wartime public information posters because I’d associated them with this toxic conservative crap and therefore hadn’t wanted to look at them.

But the more I looked at these posters the more I realised that so many of them were an expression not of conservative nostalgia or reactionary nationalism but rather of the thing that I honestly love most about Britain in the 1940s and early ’50s. This thing – and it’s very much a leftist cultural politics as well as an aesthetic – is there very powerfully in Humphrey Jennings documentaries and the anti-materialist turn of the narrative films of Powell and Pressburger. It’s there in the faces of the ordinary people celebrated in the pages of Tom Hopkinson’s Picture Post. It’s there in the post-war decor and factory lighting schemes that Robert Wilson produced for the British Colour Council (which I write about in Colour at Work) as well as in the important work Barbara Jones did celebrating vernacular folk art and ephemera at the Festival of Britain. And it’s what Veronica Horwell discovered in the pages of 1940s Vogue and writes so very persuasively about here.

I think of this thing as Orwell’s unicorn (if you’ve read Orwell’s 1941 essay, The Lion and the Unicorn and / or 1984 you’ll know what I mean). If you look carefully, you’ll discover Orwell’s unicorn in the most unlikely corners of 1940s British popular culture, so really I should not have been surprised to find it hiding in plain sight in posters promoting public safety and army education.

Anyway, for the past few weeks, I have been happily pursuing Orwell’s unicorn through the world of 1940s graphic design. I’ve enjoyed reading about the lives and work of Tom Eckersley and Hans Schleger (“Zéro”), about Frank Pick at London Transport and Jack Beddington at the MOI. I’ve enjoyed finding out about the 1936 international surrealism exhibition in London, about RoSPA and ABCA, about the history and politics of the poster, the practicalities of its creation and reproduction, and the technologies of print and colour lithography in Britain at mid century. I feel that I’ve discovered, in the research and writing of Paul Rennie, someone who is a kind of aesthetic kindred spirit, and through the careful, tireless work of Naomi Games, I’ve been able to learn about her utterly inspirational father, Abram, whose story – on more than one occasion – has moved me to tears.

I intend to stick on the trail of Orwell’s unicorn, the thing that, to me, defines Britain’s mid-century modernist moment as a powerful, fleeting something of genuine beauty and hope. That moment was, as Stuart Hall puts it, “demotic, egalitarian, socially democratic” and we need the optimism and humour that were its key characteristics perhaps now more than ever. I am so happy to have spotted it in the work of Abram Games, Hans Schleger and Tom Eckersley, and feel that it is especially important to explore and celebrate the many ostensibly ephemeral forms of popular culture that define the textures of our national past – detective novels, designs for fabric and for furniture, fashion magazines, factory interiors, public information posters – if only to prevent the unicorn from being consumed by an ever-more rapacious conservative lion in the service of its own story.

Further reading

I’ve written more about British culture in the 1940s and 50s in Colour at Work and Margery Allingham’s Mysterious Knits

For a good introduction to the work of Abram Games, read this interview with his daughter, Naomi.

Catherine Flood, British Posters: Advertising, Art and Activism (2012)

Naomi Games, Abram Games, Graphic Designer: Maximum Meaning, Minimum Means (2003)

__ A symbol for the Festival: Abram Games and the Festival of Britain (2010)

__ Abram Games: His Wartime Work (2019)

Stuart Hall, The Social Eye of Picture Post (1972) reprinted in Writings on Media (2021)

Barbara Jones, Black Eyes and Lemonade (1951). See this exploration of the landmark exhibition (and catalogue) by MERL

George Orwell The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (1941)

__1984 (1949)

Paul Rennie Social Vision in Eye 52: 2004

__SocialVision: Visual Culture and Social Democracy in Britain (2008)

__Modern British Posters: Art, Design, Communication (2010)

__Safety First: Vintage Posters from RoSPA’s Archive (2015)

__Tom Eckersley: A Mid Century Modern Master (2021)

Pat Schleger, Zéro, Hans Schleger: A Life of Design (2001)

Susan Sontag, Posters: Advertisement, Art, Political Artefact, Commodity (1970)