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He’s Hopper without the menace; Dame Laura Knight without the social comment. Yet for all his portrayal of the workaday life and leisure of a nation, Robert Johnston is virtually unacknowledged.
He was born, as far as is known, on Rothesay island off the Scottish coast in 1906, the eldest of three brothers. His siblings were William and Samuel. Robert and Samuel worked in the early Thirties painting cinema murals. The genre was an off-shoot of the worldwide social realist movement whose roots were entwined around Latin-American artists like José Orozco, the turbulent and controversial Diego Rivera and equally driven, Alfaro Siqueiros.
Their work, whose influence had, by the Johnstons’ day, spread to North America, often uttered strong political messages hinging on the worker, human suffering and civil unrest.
At face value it seems contrived to associate Robert Johnston, the creator of rural idylls for car brochures, of tradesmen depicted as happy in their work and scenes portraying the indulgences of rich men or celebrating capitalism, with a clutch of hot-blooded revolutionaries. Would we be better turning to the illustrations by Rockwell Kent, that put the novel Moby Dick on the map; to the gorgeous astrological images Kent produced with Joe Mielziner for the Cape Cinema at Dennis, Massachusetts, or even to John Gabriel Beckman’s fantasies, painted in 1929 on the walls of chewing gum magnate William Wrigley’s Avalon Casino in California.
In truth, both schools – the Latin-American muralists and the great fantasists from the United States – parallel the talents of Johnston. The scurrying, squawking, farmyard chickens of a pick-up truck brochure, the gentle lullaby of a fishing boat at rest, the invitation to golden sand in a railway poster are his. But there is agression too. The thundering, mechanised violence of the factory floor, the colossal presses, the stuttering crackle of an arc welder.
So was Robert Johnston a dissident? Definitely not. His and Samuel’s murals would be soporific rather than subversive; escapist not explosive. But there seems to have been a family restlessness. Samuel abandoned the depression-ridden Britain of the 1930s and moved to Australia and a railway job. Like many such emigrations, it didn’t work. He died, back in Rothesay, in 1938, still a young man, after some kind of domestic or workplace accident.
Painting Partner
Samuel’s Australian experiences may have deterred Robert from following a similar path, but not his brother, William, who also moved there with his wife, Mary, settled, and raised a son, Roland. This may account for Robert Johnston’s work occasionally surfacing in that country.
Johnston’s progress through the 1930s is very much a ‘closed book’. Deprived of Samuel, his painting partner, we wonder if Robert simply became a jobbing commercial artist. As war looms it is easy to see him in a similar role to the fictitious volunteer, Keith Lockhart, in Montsarrat’s The Cruel Sea – the peacetime journalist whose aptitude and commitment singles him out as a natural seafarer; because we do know, Robert Johnston commanded HMS Louis (after Sir Thomas Louis, one of Nelson’s captains at the Battle of the Nile) in WWll.
A product of the stormy west coast of Scotland, with a passion for the sea and ships, it would have been natural for Johnston to have associated himself with some kind of seamanship.
And he was good at it.
Louis was a ‘Lend-Lease’ Captain class frigate built in Boston, Massachusetts in 1943. Even given the pressures of wartime, to have taken command of the brand new ship as an acting lieutenant commander in November of that year illustrates that Johnston must have been a highly respected and competent sailor.
How distinguished was the ship’s overall career we do not know. But in August 1944 Louis sank the submarine U-445, with the loss of all hands, close to the German’s base in the Bay of Biscay. Johnston attacked with depth charges, one of the most technically demanding techniques in U-boat combat.
It seems likely he stayed with Louis until she was decommissioned in late 1945 or very early ’46 prior to being handed back to the Americans. Johnston himself seems to have been on the reservist register from 1937 to about 1951. Like many others he may have found himself at an anti-climatic loose-end post-War, but of course, he had his painting to which to resort and was about to enter his most prolific artistic period.
Skilfully Depicted
Why the Austin Motor Company was to figure so prominently in it, is hard to determine. The vehicle maker had been an exponent of artwork for publicity from as early as 1919. Norman Pett, a Birmingham artist, skilfully depicted Austin cars bringing post-War pleasure to their owners, but by 1932 he had forsaken the shapes of automobiles for those of a young lady who divested ever-increasing amounts of her clothing as the cartoon heroine, Jane, in the Daily Mirror newspaper.
The stylised cars – sometimes heavily so – continued, but from whose palette we don’t know. It could not have been Johnston. He was elsewhere. So how and why he came to the Midlands after WWll is a mystery. The story is made more complicated by the fact that Johnston seems to have painted from photographs, unlike Dame Laura Knight, for example, who actually set up her easel on the shop-floor.
Of the Austin work, the earliest examples could date from any of the last three years of the1940s by which time Johnston would have left the Navy. One is a Longbridge factory scene, dominated by the Austin A40, launched in 1947. A model from an earlier generation of cars, one of which remained in production until 1949, is included in the composition and broadens the possible time-span for Johnston starting work in Birmingham where his address was now 219 Kingsbury Road, Erdington.
Later he moved to what we might consider an extremely opulent looking house in the village of Brailes, near Banbury in Oxfordshire. Today, the configuration includes a stone outbuilding which may have been converted to, or constructed as, a studio. The impression of affluence though, is an illusion. A relative who visited the house recalls that there was no running water. We must remember that such large properties were not considered at all desirable in the austere post-War era and often available at giveaway prices.
That Robert Johnston was actually on the pay-roll at Austin is extremely unlikely. His immediate ‘boss’ would have been Dick Burzi, the company’s talented Italian stylist, and Johnston certainly had a drawing board in the design studio. But that may have been simply a convenience, extended to a freelancer.
Further evidence of Johnston’s status stems from the fact that he was by no means ‘exclusively Austin’ during the late 1940s and 50s. In 1946 he exhibited twice with the New English Art Club, although he was never a member, as is sometimes thought. The works were Curries Farm and Le Majestic. The second of which we must return to later.
Summer Exhibitioner
The NEAC is often viewed as a stepping stone to election as a Royal Academician. But there is a problem here. Johnston never made it . Yet he was a three-times summer exhibitioner at the Royal Academy - between 1943 and ’45 that is before his appearance at the New English Art Club. The paintings were Warwickshire ford (1943. Possibly this is of Eastcote ford near Solihull), A Snowy Day (1944) and 21st January 1945 (1945).
A possible explanation for the apparent contradiction in the time-line is that the NEAC has always prided itself on accommodating an impressionist approach whereas the Royal Academy position, for many years, was to represent a wide variety of schools in a classical ‘public gallery’ format. We can accept that Johnston may have felt more comfortable with the former than latter!
The artist was also a member of the the Royal Society of Marine Artists, joined in the late 1940s, the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours from 1954 and the Royal Institute of Oil Painters from1963. And it seems likely he was interested in all these organisations over a long period. He displayed Long Distance Trader and North Atlantic Barquentine at the RSMA in 1976 and on an occasion about which we cannot be clear, but perhaps on his entry to the Society, Skiff at Loch Fyne. This last is slightly confusing as there is an undated Johnston extant entitled Loch Fine Skiffs. This could be a second interpretation of the same scene or the same picture carelessly catalogued.
He was last in touch with the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours in 1983.
Longbridge apart, Johnston was most prolific as a railway and shipping poster artist but regrettably, here again, he never quite made it into either the ‘top link’ or took a ‘blue ribband’!
The golden era for advertising art was the 1930s when the independent railway operators, and specifically the London North Eastern Railway Company (LNER), cultivated what was effectively a new genre. Under the direction of publicity chief, William Teasdale, they commissioned some of the country’s finest artists to emulate the 19th century style of such icons as Toulouse Lautrec’s undoubted mastery of the technique of lithography – solid blocks of flat colour but used here in a 50 x 40 inch landscape format; tricks with perspective distorting the reality of the scene.
Johnston, of course, missed this age. Even had he not, we ought not to pretend that he was ever in the LNER league nor even that of the London Midland and Scottish (LMS). The poor relations in the railway advertizing world, whatever their other attributes, were the Great Western and the Southern railways.
The dismal environment of the 1947 nationalization programme was Johnston’s realm. Minehead and Tunbridge Wells portrayed for what had been ‘the Southern’. The Tunbridge poster especially, is unmistakably ‘Johnston’ with much of the boldness but attention to detail of the Austin pictures.
In the 1920s and 30s John Jarrold of Norwich was the doyen of poster printing, one of the few firms in the country with the skills and resources to perform this work. But post-WWll other firms had earned enviable reputations in the field. Johnston’s ‘Tunbridge’ design was executed by Leonard Ripley & Company who, earned a considerable reputation printing London Transport’s publicity material. ‘Minehead’ was handled by Jordison and Company Limited who although not amongst the transport world’s ‘chosen few’ were sufficiently respected to be high on the ‘reserve’ list.
At Least One
This suggests that Johnston himself was highly regarded as a commercial artist and it seems certain much poster work, other than the two that are known, for British Railways’ southern region, came his way. For instance, very logically, he worked for the Associated Humber Line, a shipping organization formed originally by two of the privately operated railroad companies, and latterly by the British Transport Commission. And, intriguingly, Johnston created at least one poster for The Orient Line – a beautiful portrayal of the 1948 liner RMS Orcades passing under Sydney Harbour Bridge.
Around the same time he was undertaking magazine and book illustration commissions. John Bull was a 1940s Odhams ‘monthly’ pitched at encapsulating post-War British life. Quite apart from some of the literary celebrities of the day, such as Agatha Christie and Nicholas Monsarrat writing for its pages, what were described as the ‘best illustrators’ were commissioned for the visuals – Robert Johnston among them.
Just the job for a proud patriot and it was to be under-pinned by his pictures for books and their covers. His best known contributions in this field are for the author Percy Westerman.
Westerman was a prolific writer of adventure stories for young people, often with a military or naval flavour. A master of the ‘ripping yarn’. He began writing in 1908 (supposedly for a bet that he could write a better ‘yarn’ than the one he was reading at the time) and after Lad of Grit he continued appearing until 1959 when Mistaken Identity was published, just posthumously. In all there were an amazing 178 books over 50 years, and well over 30 artists, including Johnston, were involved. He illustrated two ‘Westermans’. The last, that had originally appeared in The Scout magazine in 1937 under the title Fourteen Days a Prince; and Wrested from the Deep, from 1954 and originally for The Boys Own Paper in the mid-1930s.
It might be our romantic notion that Johnston, the heroic seafarer; the portrayer of beautiful ships in inspiring locations, sat down with Westerman and thrashed out the most dramatic interpretation of the adventure. But it didn’t work like that. In days when publishing was a much more respectable profession, and publishers more sympathetic to authors, a book editor would have selected likely passages for illustration and forwarded them to the chosen artist. The only illustrators Westerman is thought to have worked with directly were William Rainey and Frank Patterson, both of whom he knew personally.
Much more obscure was Johnston’s work on the books of Stephen Mogridge. Mogridge was best known for the New Forest series of adventures, some of which were aimed specifically at girls and penned under the pseudonym, Jill Stevens. Most contained an equestrian element, but drawing teenage girls and their ponies was not Johnston’s forté. Mogridge did, however, write juvenile thrillers and it was for these he took out his brushes. The Wreck Hunters and The Empty Boat Mystery, both from 1958, are much more his style and the only two Johnston ‘Mogridges’ known.
It’s not Moby Dick nor Hornblower. And like a generation of illustrators - Charles Murray Pradday, Ernest Boye Uden, JCB Knight, Ellis Silas – Johnston is just as over-looked. Val Biro, who was one of the most celebrated book artists of the time, and worked on the titles of such famous authors as Nevil Shute, C S Forester and Dennis Wheatley, and whose own artistic career has continued and flourished, has no recollection of Johnston. Yet for a time, he was up there with the greatest. A fellow illustrator on the Percy Waterman stories was Terence Cuneo, perhaps the most famous of all the 20th century painters of technical subjects and dramatic historical events. While the publishers themselves bear testimony to Johnston’s worth. Blackie and Son and Nelson, for example, were both bastions of the British industry and once household names.
It is reputed that when the legendary painter and sculptor, Sir Edwin Landseer, was asked for what he would most like to be remembered, he replied : ‘the man who did the lions’, alluding, of course, to his four bronze statues at the foot of Nelson’s column, in London.
We now have no way of knowing for what Robert Johnston would most like to be acknowledged. Perhaps it would be his work for the Austin Motor Company. That would certainly have made him prosperous. Leonard Lord, who ran the company throughout much of Johnston’s tenure, was not ungenerous when it came to any resource he thought necessary. Johnston’s first major undertaking was a sequence of as many as 10 industrial scenes in oil on wood for the Longbridge boardroom. Five are known to survive. Four with the British Motor Industry Heritage Trust and one in private hands.
Retirement Present
This last is particularly interesting. It is the illustration of the Austin A40 production line of around 1947. The painting was a retirement present, in 1974, to Dick Etheridge, the Works trade union convenor and Leonard Lord’s
formidable adversary in the industrial troubles of the late 1950s. Amusingly, Johnston returned to his easel to add Etheridge’s face peering though the window aperture of one of the car’s under construction. The artist ‘re-signed’ the picture to preserve the authenticity.
An even better known commission for Austin than the boardroom Works are the illustrations he provided, in 1955, for the company’s golden jubilee literature. There are more than 20 sketches that tell the firm’s story through the 50 years. They mostly portray ‘the Johnstonian good life’ as not only depicted in vehicle brochures, but in his railway and marine posters and scenes of the seashore and British countryside. And the most fitting backdrop for them was almost certainly a prestigious commemorative album presented to Austin dealers.
It is not known when Johnston’s relationship ended with what had become, in 1952, the British Motor Corporation (BMC) and then, in 1968, British Leyland. Leonard Lord relinquished his executive control in 1961 and died in 1967 while still holding the honorary post of president. Alec Issigonis, the designer of the iconic BMC Mini left, mercilessly humiliated, in 1971, and Burzi, whose ‘man’ Johnston had been, went at roughly the same time, but with more of his dignity intact. Times, though, and particularly personalities, were changing. Johnston would have realized that and been aware that photography was rapidly replacing artwork as a publicity medium. So it is fair to conclude he departed Longbridge at approximately the same time as the old order.
That leaves one final mystery. What was Robert Johnston doing in France? It has been suggested he exhibited at the ‘Paris Salon’. But that is not possible. The ‘salon’, in the correct sense of the term, was defunct long before Johnston even started painting. Yet that is not to say his work was not shown somewhere in the capital.
There is at least one pair of unconnected French paintings : Paris Street Corner and the untranslatable La Pline. But another painting, Tunny Boats, adds to the researcher’s difficulty because of the ambiguity of title, style and location. It seems a reasonable assumption that the setting could be Concarnaeu, or thereabouts, on France’s Brittany coast as the location is one of the largest fishing ports in the country, and was once known as ‘the town of 30 studios and 30 sardine factories’!
But ‘Tunny Boats’ was a subject approached by a wide variety of artists and by no means all dealt with the French fleet. The celebrated
Australian-American, Hayley Lever in 1926 would have been focusing on the US scene. Sydney Lough Thompson in 1921 featured Concarnaeu as almost certainly did Bernard Sickert – younger Brother of the Bloomsbury set’s, Walter.
Johnston’s style was not that far removed from either Thompson or Sickert and he may well have been trying to emulate at the same location one or both.
Another picture that is equally puzzling is Le Majestic shown by the New English Art Club in 1946. This could be a painting of a boat but someone with a maritime background, such as Johnston’s, is likely to have provided a more precise title. Thus we may be justified in thinking the work might depict a hotel or theatre or picture house and The Majestic cinema at Bastille in Paris may not be too outlandish a suggestion.
The final French mystery is a poste restante address in Villenne sur Seine given by Johnston to the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours in 1983, the year before he died. The small French town to the west of Paris is one of several clustered along the great river and favoured by artists. Monet lived for many years at Giverny which is only about 30 kilometres from Villenne. So are we to assume Johnston had a ‘second home’ in France or even ended his days there?
It is probably fair to say Robert Johnston was always on the cusp of major recognition. Certainly his best known work would have been that for the Austin Motor Company, but however realistically the brochure pictures were executed, however dynamic and clamorous the industrial scenes, they were always going to be submersed in the greater automotive picture. Similar fates befall nearly all commercial artists. The railway and liner posters are about the expectations of travel, the book cover about adventure or romance, not an expression of some ephemeral concept of the artist.
Maybe the irony for Johnston is that in the elitist British art world his acclaim at Austin as, effectively the publicist for largely undistinguished motor vehicles, was a stigma that obscured and detracted from his true artistic worth.
It is undeniable the work created for his principal employer, lesser patrons or privately, had merit. It would not have been displayed by the Royal Academy and the other prestigious bodies had it not. Perhaps he was no Hopper, no Laura Knight. Perhaps not even a Cuneo or an F Gordon Crosby. Perhaps his fascination is that we do not know quite who he was. In the meantime we can only ‘print the legend’.
Lest We Forget
I first made the acquaintance of Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens when I was a young man working temporarily in Britannic House, that arcs around Finsbury Circus in the City of London.
Arguably, the 1927 headquarters for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company was the most successful of more than 400 business premises he designed over 30 years, many the largest outside America.
Francis Derwent Wood’s four female sculptures decorating the outside of the building failed to arouse my youthful appreciation, although I vividly recall the story – possibly apocryphal – that the foyer was paved with armour plate salvaged from the German High Seas Fleet, scuttled at Scapa Flow in 1919.
I next encountered Lutyens under much less happy circumstances when I had moved to northern France. To a rolling agricultural landscape beneath a seemingly divinely lit sky, but where, visible from many a hilltop, his memorial to the missing dead of the Somme haunts the horizon.
About 60 kilometres (37 miles) from Thiepval the Canadian World War I Memorial stands on Vimy Ridge.
The escarpment, to the north of Arras, was the scene of a successful assault on German positions, between April 9 and 12, 1917, by four divisions of that nation’s expeditionary force. Part of the battle’s symbolism is that it was the first time all the Canadians in France had been in action together.
The memorial is the work of Toronto-born Walter Seymour Allward. Two ninety foot pylons reach skywards, adorned, as is the whole work, with sculpted figures. It dominates the surrounding typography for many miles.
Yet the purpose of this essay is not to compare Lutyens’ and Allward’s work ; to contend one is less appropriate than the other; more imposing than its counterpart.
Lutyens’ tribute is about scale. The horrendous scale of the First World War. An awfulness that was unknown before the coming of Hitler’s Germany.
Lutyens was, above all, an architect. Although he was named after a friend of his father’s, the painter and sculptor, Edwin Landseer, the Somme memorial is essentially architecture; not art. His 16 piers of red Accrington engineering brick, on 19 foot deep foundations of the same iron-hard material, accommodate the 64 Portland stone panels that bear the names of more than 172,190 British servicemen and their South African comrades that have no known grave.
Eighty percent of them fell at the Battle of the Somme between the first day, July 1, 1916, and November 18 that same year and are, now, ‘Known Only to God’.
The brick structures support an imposing 150-foot-high arch. As well as laurel wreaths encircling the names of lesser conflicts in the same campaign – Ancre, Albert, Delville Wood, Guillemont etcetera.
Lutyens is credited with being Britain’s greatest architect. His hallmark was an ability to adapt traditional styles to the needs of the day. Yet there could be no precedent for what Lutyens undertook as one of the Imperial (later Commonwealth) War Graves Commission’s principal architects. Thus Thiepval is simply architecture on a magnificent, but poignently humbling, scale.
That is not to say there is not ironic pathos to Lutyens’ memorial. Accrington brick came from the Lancashire district that spawned one of the most famous ‘Pals’ regiments – units based on individuals from the same communities - regional or professional. Two-hundred-and-thirty-five ‘Accringtons’ were killed and 350 wounded in 20 minutes on the first day of the Somme. They were trying to take the village of Serre, not far from Thiepval.
And on the day.
The great arch was dedicated by The Prince of Wales, on August 1, 1932, after five years in the building, and in the presence of French President Albert Lebrun, replacing President Paul Doumer. Doumer lost five of his eight children in the war – a tragic record only once equalled in Britain. Their father had been assassinated by an anarchist a few weeks before the ceremony.
Allward’s work is art, albeit of enormous proportions.
His approach was spacial composition that drew on classical form. No fewer than 150 sketches were required to earn him, in 1921, the assignment on Vimy Ridge.
After the foundations had been built in 1924 it would take 11 years to complete, once building had started in 1925. Until then, Allward had been looking for exactly the right material. He found it in the ruins of Emperor Diolectian’s ancient palace in what is now Croatia. It was a form of limestone quarried there at Serget by the Romans.
What he crafted it to create, like Lutyens at Theipval, concerns contemplation. But the message is much more focussed; not so esoteric as that from the Somme.
A group of figures from the 20 represent Canada, champion of the weak and oppressed ; sympathetic to the hungry and diseased. Another the breaking of the sword, flanked by a cannon draped in laurel and olive, spell the defeat of militarism. A third piece, mourning parents.
They were carved from half-sized maquettes, in temporary on-site studios.
Allward drew heavily on Michelangelo. On Pièta, depicting the dead Jesus on the lap of his mother; the only work the artist ever signed. He was also influenced by Florence’s Medici tomb.
For the largest work the influence is the Mater Dolorosa as interpreted by Titian, El Greco and others. A 30-ton statue of a standing women portrays Canada bereft. She looks out across the Plain of Douai towards a new dawn over the Nord Pas de Calais – part of which is now a UNESCO World Heritage.
Overall, the Vimy memorial pays tribute to the 60,000 Canadians who lost their lives in the Great War, but is actually inscribed with the names of more than
11, 000 who fell in France and have no known resting place.
Allward employed an advanced method of construction. Eleven thousand tons of concrete reinforced with 6000 of steel were bonded to a limestone core. In this one respect, the work of Allward was not up to that of the vastly exprienced, ‘master-craftsman’, Lutyens. Water penetrated the concrete and at the start of the 21st Century the memorial needed a 30-million-Canadian-dollar (about £18.5 million) restoration. It was re-dedicated in 2007.
But to reiterate, this is no critique of either work – Thiepval or Vimy Ridge. They are complimentary. See them both, many times. Together they equally touch and uplift the soul.
Biographer's Burden
One of the inevitable hazards for a writer of biography is discovering that, in reality, you have an aversion to the subject.
Meredith Daneman in her 2004 biography of ballerina, Margot Fonteyn, that was more than a decade in the penning, clearly becomes disenchanted with her ‘heroine’s’ - and the Royal Ballet’s - propensity for excluding other talents from the limelight until their hour had passed, to the overall detriment of ballet. Roger Lewis in his appraisal of Peter Sellers leads the reader to the conclusion the entertainer was an ‘evil monster’.
So have I grown to dislike Len Lord? After more than five years writing and active research; 40 years of interest, and a wife who says she has ‘lived’ with the industrialist since the day she met me over a quarter of a century ago.
Perhaps my original affection for Len had a firmer foundation than that of Daneman or Lewis. Their scholarship is much greater than mine and their perceptions and flair in presenting them admirable. But as a one-time news reporter, I was trained in clinical fairness and objectivity and I was helped in wishing to exercise both by others having already, or being in the process of, denigrating and maligning Len Lord to an absurd degree.
That, of course, offers no immunity to one’s own later disillusionment or even to ultimately foundering in the doldrums of opprobrium.
And indeed, here is a man whose flaws are sufficiently conspicuous for them to split the favourable impressions asunder.
To understand Len Lord one has first to recognize a world largely devoid of formalized social services, where there was virtually no funding to facilitate higher education for working class boys, let alone girls, and nothing at all for those from one-parent families. Most people, the ‘Lords’ included, would not have believed that ‘work and no play made Jack a dull boy’ and it made Len, spiced by a touch of his inherent genius, a very bright boy.
These attitudes were deeply ingrained in his psyche. In today’s laissez faire society, where there is unbridled molly-coddling for huge tracts of the community and unlimited Establishment provision, you cannot help but admire his approach. Len’s ethic was advancement by personal, often arduous, endeavour. There was no one to help him, nor to raise a latch; few to put in a ‘good word’. When he said in later life: ‘never in the field of human endeavour has so little been achieved by so many’ we may sneer; but he was right. Such mid-60s Socialist luminaries as Harold Wilson believed it too. ‘That’s the trouble with British Leyland. It takes nine men to do the work of three’.
But did the harshness of those days make Len Lord himself, unrealistically and debilitatingly harsh. When Lord was developing his motor industry management career, principally in the 1930s, the shopfloor norm was seasonal redundancy without compensation. Lay-offs of the largely non-unionized workforce in summer when sales were slack, reinstatement for the fortunate in the run up to the Motor Show each autumn, when stock was needed. Len did no more or less than follow custom and practice. His prescribed role was not that of social reformer. Change came through hard work and promotion to a post that was not seasonably dispensible!
Yet we encounter major contradictions in the man’s character for which he can only be criticized with the benefit of hindsight.
Right to run
the Works
Len certainly had a strong regard for the hard working employee. But not for trade unions or organized Socialism. And he abhorred, at that time, Communists, in common, however paranoid, with huge numbers of Western Europeans (and, of course, Americans). He believed emphatically in the boss’s right to run the Works without consultation or input (or meddling as he would have viewed it) from the shopfloor.
Yet his belief in the working man bordered on the niave. When William Morris
established a fund for deprived areas it was Len’s dynamism, perception, decisiveness and good heart that set more enterprising individuals on the road to their own business than any of the other individuals involved. They, Winston Churchill chided in parliament, were: ‘decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent.’
The pressures on Len to make a vast array and quantity of equipment when War came, were phenomenal. He was unaware, or more likely turned a blind eye to, the disruptive elements among the British working classes. Our belief in ‘a Dunkirk spirit’ on the Home Front can colour not only our judgement of history, but of Len. The popular and respected Wartime Labour Minister of Labour and National Service, Ernest Bevin, would have been embarrassed to note that in engineering alone, 79,000 days lost to strikes when he took office in 1940, had peaked at 600,000 in 1944 and was consistently around 320,000 during the darkest years of the conflict.
Though Harold Macmillan, as MP for Stockton-on-Tees from 1931-40, and much more a ‘one nation’ Tory than Len Lord, may have thought: the miners were ‘the best men in the world. They beat the Kaiser’s army and they beat Hitler’s army’ . The truth was disgracefully different.
By the end of hostilities, overall union membership had soared from six million in 1938 to over nine by 1946. Yet Len was not deflected from his industrial relations, or political, thinking. But he continued to have an affectionate respect for the worker. ‘You never hear of the honest hard worker. I don’t know why. I’ve got thousands in my factory’.
The Veteran Car Club jamboree he initiated at Longbridge in 1948 was essentially ‘a fun day out for all the family’. ‘A rally for the pleasure and entertainment of his company’s many thousands of workpeople and their families immediately appealed to him’, said club president, James Allday.
The Austin golden jubilee celebrations in 1955 were in the same vein, though on a broader canvas.
Economic and
social plight
By then the order of the day was production. It is easy for us to overlook just how dire post-War Britain’s economic and social plight actually was. The Lease Lend debt to America was astronomic (about £460 billion at today’s values) and not redeemed until 2006. There was little of anything in the shops. The new Labour government’s reforming policies would soon be largely in ruins. As an American journalist put it: ‘A country so small and weak as Portugal could have invaded and conquered England prostrated by cold. If ever a people deserved a happier fate it was the common people of Britain.’
To earn dollars (£88 million worth – more than any other industrialist) of course Len Lord bought production by succumbing to shopfloor pressure: ‘If the labour force got a bit uppity and asked for more money, we just paid up to keep the tracks running. It sowed the seeds of future problems’, one contemporary put it.
If Len Lord had not ‘kept the tracks running’ and had precipitated a major stoppage he would have been reviled by all and sundry at the time, just as much as he would be by today’s commentators.
With increasing trade union influence and Len Lord’s intransigient dogmatism, conflict was inevitable. It came starkly and brutally in 1956 with the two week strike over non-negotiable, uncompensated, redundancy. Len lost the argument. In a way, it was the beginning of BMC’s, and thus British Leyland’s nemesis, and of Len Lord’s.
It was unfortunate that Len’s protagonist, Works convenor, Dick Etheridge, however commendably committed to workers’ rights, was a dedicated Communist. No accommodation was possible. Had it have been, both men
may have learned much and the industry been a better place.
Did Len, on this occasion, learn more than Dick? Maybe he did. He certainly came to recognize the necessity for effective labour relations. But in achieving that end he was not best served by those around him.
When Len Lord’s conduct of the business itself is examined many are ready to criticize. Failure to rationalize makes, models and plant. Unrealistic pricing; for the Mini especially. (The lamentable build quality of what was being made tended to develop in the 60s when Len was no longer in charge).
Yet he had never shrunk from rationalization. Wolseley, Morris and MG had all had strong doses of that medicine. All the early volume produced cars at Austin built under Len’s aegis, pre- and post-War, were rationalized to varying degrees and there was conformity on engines and transmissions at BMC.
The later failures to act were not so much born of an out-dated, sentimentalized, public perception that individual makes were built to traditional Coventry or Abingdon standards, but of political mantra. The government’s, not Len’s.
Full employment were two irrefutable watchwords, and dalliance with the motor industry, was seen as the lever to throttle inflation. Marketing and production planning were impossible; divestment of excessive capacity equally so. Len’s balance sheets, at the time, just about justified the status quo and a wide diversity of makes and models introduced a little flexibility and manoeuvrability into the economic uncertainty.
Criticisms of his pricing is more nebulous. Not everyone believes Lord was an inept cost analysist. There are contrary views from respected authorities that date from his earliest days at Morris and to much later.
Certainly the Mini was under-priced. Probably it never realized its financial potential. We are dazzled by the glitterati – Snowdon, Sellers, Secombe, Twiggy et al - who made it chic and ultimately globally iconic. We forget the model was not an initial success. It looked, in a highly competitive, rather conservative, marketplace, like being a ‘dud’. It very much needed to be ‘priced to sell’.
Should Lord have upped the tag once sales took off? No. Herbert Austin, buoyed by bursting order-books for his pre-WWl 20 hp, raised the price post-War to make production profitable. Result, such an exodus of customers it contributed to his bankruptcy. Rolls-Royce faced the same dilemma at the same time with the Silver Ghost. As in Austin’s case the answer was a smaller, cheaper car.
Thus Len Lord is ‘between a rock and a hard place’. He believes high volume equals profitabily. There are precedents. Morris pulled it off in 1921. But the circumstances were entirely different. Austin subscribed to the ‘inheritance factor’ – the customer who likes a Seven will buy a Ten next, where there are better margins. Again, the circumstances were different. Len’s judgement was seriously flawed. We can only sympathize.
A fair
assumption
Predictions as to what might have happened at BMC had Len Lord remained in executive control beyond 1961 are dangerous.
It’s a fair assumption his business and engineering acumen would have eventually led him to ‘bite the rationalization bullet’.
The industrial relations denouement is ‘harder to call’. Len was unlikely ever to have established a rapport with Dick Etheridge. Even less so with successors like Derek Robinson.
But Harold Wilson? His administration had told Michael Edwardes in 1971, on his appointmant as British Leyland chief: ‘make British Leyland work; or close it’. It’s possible Len could have developed a mutual respect for Harold and they then worked constructively towards solutions that would have benefited the nation.
After all, it was Miles Thomas, a much less adept or rounded character than Len Lord, who implied in his autobiography: ‘these Socialist politicians weren’t so bad once you got to know them socially’!
For a biographer there are grave pitfalls when he or she comes to examine the subject’s personality and private life. Len was so ‘closed’ he is singularly difficult.
‘Inferiority complex’ is a frequent jibe. This makes little sense, especially latterly.
He had huge material wealth and prestige, the lifestyle of a country gentleman that he seemed to crave, children any father would have loved and been proud of and a supportive and amiable wife to whom he was married for nearly 50 years.
Was he malicious and vindictive? Those who actually knew him say definitely not. But his propensity to act against individuals who had seriously erred, well after the event had passed, could have made him seem so. It may be, in common with most normal human beings, he wanted to be liked and was hesitant to strike, however justified. The dismissal of Hancock, Haefli, Hess and Palmer are classic examples.
George Harriman spoke of the ‘heart of gold’. There are plenty of examples, though perhaps more in his private, than public, life. Yet he was conspicuously generous, sensitive, articulate (whether or not he swore a lot) could be charming, especially to women, and humorous when in the mood.
I began my biography of Len Lord admiring him greatly. I ended the book with deep affection for him.
He was born, as far as is known, on Rothesay island off the Scottish coast in 1906, the eldest of three brothers. His siblings were William and Samuel. Robert and Samuel worked in the early Thirties painting cinema murals. The genre was an off-shoot of the worldwide social realist movement whose roots were entwined around Latin-American artists like José Orozco, the turbulent and controversial Diego Rivera and equally driven, Alfaro Siqueiros.
Their work, whose influence had, by the Johnstons’ day, spread to North America, often uttered strong political messages hinging on the worker, human suffering and civil unrest.
At face value it seems contrived to associate Robert Johnston, the creator of rural idylls for car brochures, of tradesmen depicted as happy in their work and scenes portraying the indulgences of rich men or celebrating capitalism, with a clutch of hot-blooded revolutionaries. Would we be better turning to the illustrations by Rockwell Kent, that put the novel Moby Dick on the map; to the gorgeous astrological images Kent produced with Joe Mielziner for the Cape Cinema at Dennis, Massachusetts, or even to John Gabriel Beckman’s fantasies, painted in 1929 on the walls of chewing gum magnate William Wrigley’s Avalon Casino in California.
In truth, both schools – the Latin-American muralists and the great fantasists from the United States – parallel the talents of Johnston. The scurrying, squawking, farmyard chickens of a pick-up truck brochure, the gentle lullaby of a fishing boat at rest, the invitation to golden sand in a railway poster are his. But there is agression too. The thundering, mechanised violence of the factory floor, the colossal presses, the stuttering crackle of an arc welder.
So was Robert Johnston a dissident? Definitely not. His and Samuel’s murals would be soporific rather than subversive; escapist not explosive. But there seems to have been a family restlessness. Samuel abandoned the depression-ridden Britain of the 1930s and moved to Australia and a railway job. Like many such emigrations, it didn’t work. He died, back in Rothesay, in 1938, still a young man, after some kind of domestic or workplace accident.
Painting Partner
Samuel’s Australian experiences may have deterred Robert from following a similar path, but not his brother, William, who also moved there with his wife, Mary, settled, and raised a son, Roland. This may account for Robert Johnston’s work occasionally surfacing in that country.
Johnston’s progress through the 1930s is very much a ‘closed book’. Deprived of Samuel, his painting partner, we wonder if Robert simply became a jobbing commercial artist. As war looms it is easy to see him in a similar role to the fictitious volunteer, Keith Lockhart, in Montsarrat’s The Cruel Sea – the peacetime journalist whose aptitude and commitment singles him out as a natural seafarer; because we do know, Robert Johnston commanded HMS Louis (after Sir Thomas Louis, one of Nelson’s captains at the Battle of the Nile) in WWll.
A product of the stormy west coast of Scotland, with a passion for the sea and ships, it would have been natural for Johnston to have associated himself with some kind of seamanship.
And he was good at it.
Louis was a ‘Lend-Lease’ Captain class frigate built in Boston, Massachusetts in 1943. Even given the pressures of wartime, to have taken command of the brand new ship as an acting lieutenant commander in November of that year illustrates that Johnston must have been a highly respected and competent sailor.
How distinguished was the ship’s overall career we do not know. But in August 1944 Louis sank the submarine U-445, with the loss of all hands, close to the German’s base in the Bay of Biscay. Johnston attacked with depth charges, one of the most technically demanding techniques in U-boat combat.
It seems likely he stayed with Louis until she was decommissioned in late 1945 or very early ’46 prior to being handed back to the Americans. Johnston himself seems to have been on the reservist register from 1937 to about 1951. Like many others he may have found himself at an anti-climatic loose-end post-War, but of course, he had his painting to which to resort and was about to enter his most prolific artistic period.
Skilfully Depicted
Why the Austin Motor Company was to figure so prominently in it, is hard to determine. The vehicle maker had been an exponent of artwork for publicity from as early as 1919. Norman Pett, a Birmingham artist, skilfully depicted Austin cars bringing post-War pleasure to their owners, but by 1932 he had forsaken the shapes of automobiles for those of a young lady who divested ever-increasing amounts of her clothing as the cartoon heroine, Jane, in the Daily Mirror newspaper.
The stylised cars – sometimes heavily so – continued, but from whose palette we don’t know. It could not have been Johnston. He was elsewhere. So how and why he came to the Midlands after WWll is a mystery. The story is made more complicated by the fact that Johnston seems to have painted from photographs, unlike Dame Laura Knight, for example, who actually set up her easel on the shop-floor.
Of the Austin work, the earliest examples could date from any of the last three years of the1940s by which time Johnston would have left the Navy. One is a Longbridge factory scene, dominated by the Austin A40, launched in 1947. A model from an earlier generation of cars, one of which remained in production until 1949, is included in the composition and broadens the possible time-span for Johnston starting work in Birmingham where his address was now 219 Kingsbury Road, Erdington.
Later he moved to what we might consider an extremely opulent looking house in the village of Brailes, near Banbury in Oxfordshire. Today, the configuration includes a stone outbuilding which may have been converted to, or constructed as, a studio. The impression of affluence though, is an illusion. A relative who visited the house recalls that there was no running water. We must remember that such large properties were not considered at all desirable in the austere post-War era and often available at giveaway prices.
That Robert Johnston was actually on the pay-roll at Austin is extremely unlikely. His immediate ‘boss’ would have been Dick Burzi, the company’s talented Italian stylist, and Johnston certainly had a drawing board in the design studio. But that may have been simply a convenience, extended to a freelancer.
Further evidence of Johnston’s status stems from the fact that he was by no means ‘exclusively Austin’ during the late 1940s and 50s. In 1946 he exhibited twice with the New English Art Club, although he was never a member, as is sometimes thought. The works were Curries Farm and Le Majestic. The second of which we must return to later.
Summer Exhibitioner
The NEAC is often viewed as a stepping stone to election as a Royal Academician. But there is a problem here. Johnston never made it . Yet he was a three-times summer exhibitioner at the Royal Academy - between 1943 and ’45 that is before his appearance at the New English Art Club. The paintings were Warwickshire ford (1943. Possibly this is of Eastcote ford near Solihull), A Snowy Day (1944) and 21st January 1945 (1945).
A possible explanation for the apparent contradiction in the time-line is that the NEAC has always prided itself on accommodating an impressionist approach whereas the Royal Academy position, for many years, was to represent a wide variety of schools in a classical ‘public gallery’ format. We can accept that Johnston may have felt more comfortable with the former than latter!
The artist was also a member of the the Royal Society of Marine Artists, joined in the late 1940s, the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours from 1954 and the Royal Institute of Oil Painters from1963. And it seems likely he was interested in all these organisations over a long period. He displayed Long Distance Trader and North Atlantic Barquentine at the RSMA in 1976 and on an occasion about which we cannot be clear, but perhaps on his entry to the Society, Skiff at Loch Fyne. This last is slightly confusing as there is an undated Johnston extant entitled Loch Fine Skiffs. This could be a second interpretation of the same scene or the same picture carelessly catalogued.
He was last in touch with the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours in 1983.
Longbridge apart, Johnston was most prolific as a railway and shipping poster artist but regrettably, here again, he never quite made it into either the ‘top link’ or took a ‘blue ribband’!
The golden era for advertising art was the 1930s when the independent railway operators, and specifically the London North Eastern Railway Company (LNER), cultivated what was effectively a new genre. Under the direction of publicity chief, William Teasdale, they commissioned some of the country’s finest artists to emulate the 19th century style of such icons as Toulouse Lautrec’s undoubted mastery of the technique of lithography – solid blocks of flat colour but used here in a 50 x 40 inch landscape format; tricks with perspective distorting the reality of the scene.
Johnston, of course, missed this age. Even had he not, we ought not to pretend that he was ever in the LNER league nor even that of the London Midland and Scottish (LMS). The poor relations in the railway advertizing world, whatever their other attributes, were the Great Western and the Southern railways.
The dismal environment of the 1947 nationalization programme was Johnston’s realm. Minehead and Tunbridge Wells portrayed for what had been ‘the Southern’. The Tunbridge poster especially, is unmistakably ‘Johnston’ with much of the boldness but attention to detail of the Austin pictures.
In the 1920s and 30s John Jarrold of Norwich was the doyen of poster printing, one of the few firms in the country with the skills and resources to perform this work. But post-WWll other firms had earned enviable reputations in the field. Johnston’s ‘Tunbridge’ design was executed by Leonard Ripley & Company who, earned a considerable reputation printing London Transport’s publicity material. ‘Minehead’ was handled by Jordison and Company Limited who although not amongst the transport world’s ‘chosen few’ were sufficiently respected to be high on the ‘reserve’ list.
At Least One
This suggests that Johnston himself was highly regarded as a commercial artist and it seems certain much poster work, other than the two that are known, for British Railways’ southern region, came his way. For instance, very logically, he worked for the Associated Humber Line, a shipping organization formed originally by two of the privately operated railroad companies, and latterly by the British Transport Commission. And, intriguingly, Johnston created at least one poster for The Orient Line – a beautiful portrayal of the 1948 liner RMS Orcades passing under Sydney Harbour Bridge.
Around the same time he was undertaking magazine and book illustration commissions. John Bull was a 1940s Odhams ‘monthly’ pitched at encapsulating post-War British life. Quite apart from some of the literary celebrities of the day, such as Agatha Christie and Nicholas Monsarrat writing for its pages, what were described as the ‘best illustrators’ were commissioned for the visuals – Robert Johnston among them.
Just the job for a proud patriot and it was to be under-pinned by his pictures for books and their covers. His best known contributions in this field are for the author Percy Westerman.
Westerman was a prolific writer of adventure stories for young people, often with a military or naval flavour. A master of the ‘ripping yarn’. He began writing in 1908 (supposedly for a bet that he could write a better ‘yarn’ than the one he was reading at the time) and after Lad of Grit he continued appearing until 1959 when Mistaken Identity was published, just posthumously. In all there were an amazing 178 books over 50 years, and well over 30 artists, including Johnston, were involved. He illustrated two ‘Westermans’. The last, that had originally appeared in The Scout magazine in 1937 under the title Fourteen Days a Prince; and Wrested from the Deep, from 1954 and originally for The Boys Own Paper in the mid-1930s.
It might be our romantic notion that Johnston, the heroic seafarer; the portrayer of beautiful ships in inspiring locations, sat down with Westerman and thrashed out the most dramatic interpretation of the adventure. But it didn’t work like that. In days when publishing was a much more respectable profession, and publishers more sympathetic to authors, a book editor would have selected likely passages for illustration and forwarded them to the chosen artist. The only illustrators Westerman is thought to have worked with directly were William Rainey and Frank Patterson, both of whom he knew personally.
Much more obscure was Johnston’s work on the books of Stephen Mogridge. Mogridge was best known for the New Forest series of adventures, some of which were aimed specifically at girls and penned under the pseudonym, Jill Stevens. Most contained an equestrian element, but drawing teenage girls and their ponies was not Johnston’s forté. Mogridge did, however, write juvenile thrillers and it was for these he took out his brushes. The Wreck Hunters and The Empty Boat Mystery, both from 1958, are much more his style and the only two Johnston ‘Mogridges’ known.
It’s not Moby Dick nor Hornblower. And like a generation of illustrators - Charles Murray Pradday, Ernest Boye Uden, JCB Knight, Ellis Silas – Johnston is just as over-looked. Val Biro, who was one of the most celebrated book artists of the time, and worked on the titles of such famous authors as Nevil Shute, C S Forester and Dennis Wheatley, and whose own artistic career has continued and flourished, has no recollection of Johnston. Yet for a time, he was up there with the greatest. A fellow illustrator on the Percy Waterman stories was Terence Cuneo, perhaps the most famous of all the 20th century painters of technical subjects and dramatic historical events. While the publishers themselves bear testimony to Johnston’s worth. Blackie and Son and Nelson, for example, were both bastions of the British industry and once household names.
It is reputed that when the legendary painter and sculptor, Sir Edwin Landseer, was asked for what he would most like to be remembered, he replied : ‘the man who did the lions’, alluding, of course, to his four bronze statues at the foot of Nelson’s column, in London.
We now have no way of knowing for what Robert Johnston would most like to be acknowledged. Perhaps it would be his work for the Austin Motor Company. That would certainly have made him prosperous. Leonard Lord, who ran the company throughout much of Johnston’s tenure, was not ungenerous when it came to any resource he thought necessary. Johnston’s first major undertaking was a sequence of as many as 10 industrial scenes in oil on wood for the Longbridge boardroom. Five are known to survive. Four with the British Motor Industry Heritage Trust and one in private hands.
Retirement Present
This last is particularly interesting. It is the illustration of the Austin A40 production line of around 1947. The painting was a retirement present, in 1974, to Dick Etheridge, the Works trade union convenor and Leonard Lord’s
formidable adversary in the industrial troubles of the late 1950s. Amusingly, Johnston returned to his easel to add Etheridge’s face peering though the window aperture of one of the car’s under construction. The artist ‘re-signed’ the picture to preserve the authenticity.
An even better known commission for Austin than the boardroom Works are the illustrations he provided, in 1955, for the company’s golden jubilee literature. There are more than 20 sketches that tell the firm’s story through the 50 years. They mostly portray ‘the Johnstonian good life’ as not only depicted in vehicle brochures, but in his railway and marine posters and scenes of the seashore and British countryside. And the most fitting backdrop for them was almost certainly a prestigious commemorative album presented to Austin dealers.
It is not known when Johnston’s relationship ended with what had become, in 1952, the British Motor Corporation (BMC) and then, in 1968, British Leyland. Leonard Lord relinquished his executive control in 1961 and died in 1967 while still holding the honorary post of president. Alec Issigonis, the designer of the iconic BMC Mini left, mercilessly humiliated, in 1971, and Burzi, whose ‘man’ Johnston had been, went at roughly the same time, but with more of his dignity intact. Times, though, and particularly personalities, were changing. Johnston would have realized that and been aware that photography was rapidly replacing artwork as a publicity medium. So it is fair to conclude he departed Longbridge at approximately the same time as the old order.
That leaves one final mystery. What was Robert Johnston doing in France? It has been suggested he exhibited at the ‘Paris Salon’. But that is not possible. The ‘salon’, in the correct sense of the term, was defunct long before Johnston even started painting. Yet that is not to say his work was not shown somewhere in the capital.
There is at least one pair of unconnected French paintings : Paris Street Corner and the untranslatable La Pline. But another painting, Tunny Boats, adds to the researcher’s difficulty because of the ambiguity of title, style and location. It seems a reasonable assumption that the setting could be Concarnaeu, or thereabouts, on France’s Brittany coast as the location is one of the largest fishing ports in the country, and was once known as ‘the town of 30 studios and 30 sardine factories’!
But ‘Tunny Boats’ was a subject approached by a wide variety of artists and by no means all dealt with the French fleet. The celebrated
Australian-American, Hayley Lever in 1926 would have been focusing on the US scene. Sydney Lough Thompson in 1921 featured Concarnaeu as almost certainly did Bernard Sickert – younger Brother of the Bloomsbury set’s, Walter.
Johnston’s style was not that far removed from either Thompson or Sickert and he may well have been trying to emulate at the same location one or both.
Another picture that is equally puzzling is Le Majestic shown by the New English Art Club in 1946. This could be a painting of a boat but someone with a maritime background, such as Johnston’s, is likely to have provided a more precise title. Thus we may be justified in thinking the work might depict a hotel or theatre or picture house and The Majestic cinema at Bastille in Paris may not be too outlandish a suggestion.
The final French mystery is a poste restante address in Villenne sur Seine given by Johnston to the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours in 1983, the year before he died. The small French town to the west of Paris is one of several clustered along the great river and favoured by artists. Monet lived for many years at Giverny which is only about 30 kilometres from Villenne. So are we to assume Johnston had a ‘second home’ in France or even ended his days there?
It is probably fair to say Robert Johnston was always on the cusp of major recognition. Certainly his best known work would have been that for the Austin Motor Company, but however realistically the brochure pictures were executed, however dynamic and clamorous the industrial scenes, they were always going to be submersed in the greater automotive picture. Similar fates befall nearly all commercial artists. The railway and liner posters are about the expectations of travel, the book cover about adventure or romance, not an expression of some ephemeral concept of the artist.
Maybe the irony for Johnston is that in the elitist British art world his acclaim at Austin as, effectively the publicist for largely undistinguished motor vehicles, was a stigma that obscured and detracted from his true artistic worth.
It is undeniable the work created for his principal employer, lesser patrons or privately, had merit. It would not have been displayed by the Royal Academy and the other prestigious bodies had it not. Perhaps he was no Hopper, no Laura Knight. Perhaps not even a Cuneo or an F Gordon Crosby. Perhaps his fascination is that we do not know quite who he was. In the meantime we can only ‘print the legend’.
Lest We Forget
I first made the acquaintance of Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens when I was a young man working temporarily in Britannic House, that arcs around Finsbury Circus in the City of London.
Arguably, the 1927 headquarters for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company was the most successful of more than 400 business premises he designed over 30 years, many the largest outside America.
Francis Derwent Wood’s four female sculptures decorating the outside of the building failed to arouse my youthful appreciation, although I vividly recall the story – possibly apocryphal – that the foyer was paved with armour plate salvaged from the German High Seas Fleet, scuttled at Scapa Flow in 1919.
I next encountered Lutyens under much less happy circumstances when I had moved to northern France. To a rolling agricultural landscape beneath a seemingly divinely lit sky, but where, visible from many a hilltop, his memorial to the missing dead of the Somme haunts the horizon.
About 60 kilometres (37 miles) from Thiepval the Canadian World War I Memorial stands on Vimy Ridge.
The escarpment, to the north of Arras, was the scene of a successful assault on German positions, between April 9 and 12, 1917, by four divisions of that nation’s expeditionary force. Part of the battle’s symbolism is that it was the first time all the Canadians in France had been in action together.
The memorial is the work of Toronto-born Walter Seymour Allward. Two ninety foot pylons reach skywards, adorned, as is the whole work, with sculpted figures. It dominates the surrounding typography for many miles.
Yet the purpose of this essay is not to compare Lutyens’ and Allward’s work ; to contend one is less appropriate than the other; more imposing than its counterpart.
Lutyens’ tribute is about scale. The horrendous scale of the First World War. An awfulness that was unknown before the coming of Hitler’s Germany.
Lutyens was, above all, an architect. Although he was named after a friend of his father’s, the painter and sculptor, Edwin Landseer, the Somme memorial is essentially architecture; not art. His 16 piers of red Accrington engineering brick, on 19 foot deep foundations of the same iron-hard material, accommodate the 64 Portland stone panels that bear the names of more than 172,190 British servicemen and their South African comrades that have no known grave.
Eighty percent of them fell at the Battle of the Somme between the first day, July 1, 1916, and November 18 that same year and are, now, ‘Known Only to God’.
The brick structures support an imposing 150-foot-high arch. As well as laurel wreaths encircling the names of lesser conflicts in the same campaign – Ancre, Albert, Delville Wood, Guillemont etcetera.
Lutyens is credited with being Britain’s greatest architect. His hallmark was an ability to adapt traditional styles to the needs of the day. Yet there could be no precedent for what Lutyens undertook as one of the Imperial (later Commonwealth) War Graves Commission’s principal architects. Thus Thiepval is simply architecture on a magnificent, but poignently humbling, scale.
That is not to say there is not ironic pathos to Lutyens’ memorial. Accrington brick came from the Lancashire district that spawned one of the most famous ‘Pals’ regiments – units based on individuals from the same communities - regional or professional. Two-hundred-and-thirty-five ‘Accringtons’ were killed and 350 wounded in 20 minutes on the first day of the Somme. They were trying to take the village of Serre, not far from Thiepval.
And on the day.
The great arch was dedicated by The Prince of Wales, on August 1, 1932, after five years in the building, and in the presence of French President Albert Lebrun, replacing President Paul Doumer. Doumer lost five of his eight children in the war – a tragic record only once equalled in Britain. Their father had been assassinated by an anarchist a few weeks before the ceremony.
Allward’s work is art, albeit of enormous proportions.
His approach was spacial composition that drew on classical form. No fewer than 150 sketches were required to earn him, in 1921, the assignment on Vimy Ridge.
After the foundations had been built in 1924 it would take 11 years to complete, once building had started in 1925. Until then, Allward had been looking for exactly the right material. He found it in the ruins of Emperor Diolectian’s ancient palace in what is now Croatia. It was a form of limestone quarried there at Serget by the Romans.
What he crafted it to create, like Lutyens at Theipval, concerns contemplation. But the message is much more focussed; not so esoteric as that from the Somme.
A group of figures from the 20 represent Canada, champion of the weak and oppressed ; sympathetic to the hungry and diseased. Another the breaking of the sword, flanked by a cannon draped in laurel and olive, spell the defeat of militarism. A third piece, mourning parents.
They were carved from half-sized maquettes, in temporary on-site studios.
Allward drew heavily on Michelangelo. On Pièta, depicting the dead Jesus on the lap of his mother; the only work the artist ever signed. He was also influenced by Florence’s Medici tomb.
For the largest work the influence is the Mater Dolorosa as interpreted by Titian, El Greco and others. A 30-ton statue of a standing women portrays Canada bereft. She looks out across the Plain of Douai towards a new dawn over the Nord Pas de Calais – part of which is now a UNESCO World Heritage.
Overall, the Vimy memorial pays tribute to the 60,000 Canadians who lost their lives in the Great War, but is actually inscribed with the names of more than
11, 000 who fell in France and have no known resting place.
Allward employed an advanced method of construction. Eleven thousand tons of concrete reinforced with 6000 of steel were bonded to a limestone core. In this one respect, the work of Allward was not up to that of the vastly exprienced, ‘master-craftsman’, Lutyens. Water penetrated the concrete and at the start of the 21st Century the memorial needed a 30-million-Canadian-dollar (about £18.5 million) restoration. It was re-dedicated in 2007.
But to reiterate, this is no critique of either work – Thiepval or Vimy Ridge. They are complimentary. See them both, many times. Together they equally touch and uplift the soul.
Biographer's Burden
One of the inevitable hazards for a writer of biography is discovering that, in reality, you have an aversion to the subject.
Meredith Daneman in her 2004 biography of ballerina, Margot Fonteyn, that was more than a decade in the penning, clearly becomes disenchanted with her ‘heroine’s’ - and the Royal Ballet’s - propensity for excluding other talents from the limelight until their hour had passed, to the overall detriment of ballet. Roger Lewis in his appraisal of Peter Sellers leads the reader to the conclusion the entertainer was an ‘evil monster’.
So have I grown to dislike Len Lord? After more than five years writing and active research; 40 years of interest, and a wife who says she has ‘lived’ with the industrialist since the day she met me over a quarter of a century ago.
Perhaps my original affection for Len had a firmer foundation than that of Daneman or Lewis. Their scholarship is much greater than mine and their perceptions and flair in presenting them admirable. But as a one-time news reporter, I was trained in clinical fairness and objectivity and I was helped in wishing to exercise both by others having already, or being in the process of, denigrating and maligning Len Lord to an absurd degree.
That, of course, offers no immunity to one’s own later disillusionment or even to ultimately foundering in the doldrums of opprobrium.
And indeed, here is a man whose flaws are sufficiently conspicuous for them to split the favourable impressions asunder.
To understand Len Lord one has first to recognize a world largely devoid of formalized social services, where there was virtually no funding to facilitate higher education for working class boys, let alone girls, and nothing at all for those from one-parent families. Most people, the ‘Lords’ included, would not have believed that ‘work and no play made Jack a dull boy’ and it made Len, spiced by a touch of his inherent genius, a very bright boy.
These attitudes were deeply ingrained in his psyche. In today’s laissez faire society, where there is unbridled molly-coddling for huge tracts of the community and unlimited Establishment provision, you cannot help but admire his approach. Len’s ethic was advancement by personal, often arduous, endeavour. There was no one to help him, nor to raise a latch; few to put in a ‘good word’. When he said in later life: ‘never in the field of human endeavour has so little been achieved by so many’ we may sneer; but he was right. Such mid-60s Socialist luminaries as Harold Wilson believed it too. ‘That’s the trouble with British Leyland. It takes nine men to do the work of three’.
But did the harshness of those days make Len Lord himself, unrealistically and debilitatingly harsh. When Lord was developing his motor industry management career, principally in the 1930s, the shopfloor norm was seasonal redundancy without compensation. Lay-offs of the largely non-unionized workforce in summer when sales were slack, reinstatement for the fortunate in the run up to the Motor Show each autumn, when stock was needed. Len did no more or less than follow custom and practice. His prescribed role was not that of social reformer. Change came through hard work and promotion to a post that was not seasonably dispensible!
Yet we encounter major contradictions in the man’s character for which he can only be criticized with the benefit of hindsight.
Right to run
the Works
Len certainly had a strong regard for the hard working employee. But not for trade unions or organized Socialism. And he abhorred, at that time, Communists, in common, however paranoid, with huge numbers of Western Europeans (and, of course, Americans). He believed emphatically in the boss’s right to run the Works without consultation or input (or meddling as he would have viewed it) from the shopfloor.
Yet his belief in the working man bordered on the niave. When William Morris
established a fund for deprived areas it was Len’s dynamism, perception, decisiveness and good heart that set more enterprising individuals on the road to their own business than any of the other individuals involved. They, Winston Churchill chided in parliament, were: ‘decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent.’
The pressures on Len to make a vast array and quantity of equipment when War came, were phenomenal. He was unaware, or more likely turned a blind eye to, the disruptive elements among the British working classes. Our belief in ‘a Dunkirk spirit’ on the Home Front can colour not only our judgement of history, but of Len. The popular and respected Wartime Labour Minister of Labour and National Service, Ernest Bevin, would have been embarrassed to note that in engineering alone, 79,000 days lost to strikes when he took office in 1940, had peaked at 600,000 in 1944 and was consistently around 320,000 during the darkest years of the conflict.
Though Harold Macmillan, as MP for Stockton-on-Tees from 1931-40, and much more a ‘one nation’ Tory than Len Lord, may have thought: the miners were ‘the best men in the world. They beat the Kaiser’s army and they beat Hitler’s army’ . The truth was disgracefully different.
By the end of hostilities, overall union membership had soared from six million in 1938 to over nine by 1946. Yet Len was not deflected from his industrial relations, or political, thinking. But he continued to have an affectionate respect for the worker. ‘You never hear of the honest hard worker. I don’t know why. I’ve got thousands in my factory’.
The Veteran Car Club jamboree he initiated at Longbridge in 1948 was essentially ‘a fun day out for all the family’. ‘A rally for the pleasure and entertainment of his company’s many thousands of workpeople and their families immediately appealed to him’, said club president, James Allday.
The Austin golden jubilee celebrations in 1955 were in the same vein, though on a broader canvas.
Economic and
social plight
By then the order of the day was production. It is easy for us to overlook just how dire post-War Britain’s economic and social plight actually was. The Lease Lend debt to America was astronomic (about £460 billion at today’s values) and not redeemed until 2006. There was little of anything in the shops. The new Labour government’s reforming policies would soon be largely in ruins. As an American journalist put it: ‘A country so small and weak as Portugal could have invaded and conquered England prostrated by cold. If ever a people deserved a happier fate it was the common people of Britain.’
To earn dollars (£88 million worth – more than any other industrialist) of course Len Lord bought production by succumbing to shopfloor pressure: ‘If the labour force got a bit uppity and asked for more money, we just paid up to keep the tracks running. It sowed the seeds of future problems’, one contemporary put it.
If Len Lord had not ‘kept the tracks running’ and had precipitated a major stoppage he would have been reviled by all and sundry at the time, just as much as he would be by today’s commentators.
With increasing trade union influence and Len Lord’s intransigient dogmatism, conflict was inevitable. It came starkly and brutally in 1956 with the two week strike over non-negotiable, uncompensated, redundancy. Len lost the argument. In a way, it was the beginning of BMC’s, and thus British Leyland’s nemesis, and of Len Lord’s.
It was unfortunate that Len’s protagonist, Works convenor, Dick Etheridge, however commendably committed to workers’ rights, was a dedicated Communist. No accommodation was possible. Had it have been, both men
may have learned much and the industry been a better place.
Did Len, on this occasion, learn more than Dick? Maybe he did. He certainly came to recognize the necessity for effective labour relations. But in achieving that end he was not best served by those around him.
When Len Lord’s conduct of the business itself is examined many are ready to criticize. Failure to rationalize makes, models and plant. Unrealistic pricing; for the Mini especially. (The lamentable build quality of what was being made tended to develop in the 60s when Len was no longer in charge).
Yet he had never shrunk from rationalization. Wolseley, Morris and MG had all had strong doses of that medicine. All the early volume produced cars at Austin built under Len’s aegis, pre- and post-War, were rationalized to varying degrees and there was conformity on engines and transmissions at BMC.
The later failures to act were not so much born of an out-dated, sentimentalized, public perception that individual makes were built to traditional Coventry or Abingdon standards, but of political mantra. The government’s, not Len’s.
Full employment were two irrefutable watchwords, and dalliance with the motor industry, was seen as the lever to throttle inflation. Marketing and production planning were impossible; divestment of excessive capacity equally so. Len’s balance sheets, at the time, just about justified the status quo and a wide diversity of makes and models introduced a little flexibility and manoeuvrability into the economic uncertainty.
Criticisms of his pricing is more nebulous. Not everyone believes Lord was an inept cost analysist. There are contrary views from respected authorities that date from his earliest days at Morris and to much later.
Certainly the Mini was under-priced. Probably it never realized its financial potential. We are dazzled by the glitterati – Snowdon, Sellers, Secombe, Twiggy et al - who made it chic and ultimately globally iconic. We forget the model was not an initial success. It looked, in a highly competitive, rather conservative, marketplace, like being a ‘dud’. It very much needed to be ‘priced to sell’.
Should Lord have upped the tag once sales took off? No. Herbert Austin, buoyed by bursting order-books for his pre-WWl 20 hp, raised the price post-War to make production profitable. Result, such an exodus of customers it contributed to his bankruptcy. Rolls-Royce faced the same dilemma at the same time with the Silver Ghost. As in Austin’s case the answer was a smaller, cheaper car.
Thus Len Lord is ‘between a rock and a hard place’. He believes high volume equals profitabily. There are precedents. Morris pulled it off in 1921. But the circumstances were entirely different. Austin subscribed to the ‘inheritance factor’ – the customer who likes a Seven will buy a Ten next, where there are better margins. Again, the circumstances were different. Len’s judgement was seriously flawed. We can only sympathize.
A fair
assumption
Predictions as to what might have happened at BMC had Len Lord remained in executive control beyond 1961 are dangerous.
It’s a fair assumption his business and engineering acumen would have eventually led him to ‘bite the rationalization bullet’.
The industrial relations denouement is ‘harder to call’. Len was unlikely ever to have established a rapport with Dick Etheridge. Even less so with successors like Derek Robinson.
But Harold Wilson? His administration had told Michael Edwardes in 1971, on his appointmant as British Leyland chief: ‘make British Leyland work; or close it’. It’s possible Len could have developed a mutual respect for Harold and they then worked constructively towards solutions that would have benefited the nation.
After all, it was Miles Thomas, a much less adept or rounded character than Len Lord, who implied in his autobiography: ‘these Socialist politicians weren’t so bad once you got to know them socially’!
For a biographer there are grave pitfalls when he or she comes to examine the subject’s personality and private life. Len was so ‘closed’ he is singularly difficult.
‘Inferiority complex’ is a frequent jibe. This makes little sense, especially latterly.
He had huge material wealth and prestige, the lifestyle of a country gentleman that he seemed to crave, children any father would have loved and been proud of and a supportive and amiable wife to whom he was married for nearly 50 years.
Was he malicious and vindictive? Those who actually knew him say definitely not. But his propensity to act against individuals who had seriously erred, well after the event had passed, could have made him seem so. It may be, in common with most normal human beings, he wanted to be liked and was hesitant to strike, however justified. The dismissal of Hancock, Haefli, Hess and Palmer are classic examples.
George Harriman spoke of the ‘heart of gold’. There are plenty of examples, though perhaps more in his private, than public, life. Yet he was conspicuously generous, sensitive, articulate (whether or not he swore a lot) could be charming, especially to women, and humorous when in the mood.
I began my biography of Len Lord admiring him greatly. I ended the book with deep affection for him.