1950s Design

It is not uncommon for great designers to derive inspiration from the natural world or the countryside. Here are two parts of a dinner service - a vegetable dish and a salad plate - from a design called Nature Study. It was produced by Midwinter and designed in 1955 by Terence Conran.


Midwinter Pottery was founded by William Robinson Midwinter in Stoke in 1910, started making dinner ware in the 1930s, and twenty years later was employing over 600 people. Its reputation was in traditional lines until the founder's son, Roy Midwinter, influenced by modern styling he had seen in America, launched the new Stylecraft range of tableware in 1953. The contemporary design and lively patterns - many by the firm's renowned designer Jessie Tait - were a great success in a market slowly emerging from post-war restrictions on consumer goods.

The new shapes, including the television screen-shaped plates quickly became 50s style icons.

A new version, the Fashion range, was added to Stylecraft in 1955 and amongst the first of its designs was Conran's Nature Study.


Then aged 24, this was one of Conran's early appearances on the design scene in his own right. After leaving St Martins College of Art and Design to do some work for the 1951 Festival of Britain, it was some fabric designs and an interest in Italian black and white styling that brought him to the attention of Roy Midwinter.

Conran produced other designs for Midwinter, including Saladware (below) and re-designed the firm's showroom in 1956. His own design practice was then under way, concentrating initially on furniture, and he opened his first Habitat shop in Chelsea in 1964.


Midwinter Potteries continued through to the 1980s. Their styles of the 50s and 60s have become modern classics and are now highly collectable.

Thatched cottage biscuit barrel, 1930s

Here’s something that I picked up recently at Alfie’s Antique Market in Marylebone, where you can immerse yourself in decades of twentieth century design. It’s a piece of Carlton Ware, (pattern no.806) part of a set known as cottage ware which included a honey pot, cheese dish, milk jug etc along with the biscuit barrel.


Carlton Ware was originally a trade name of the pottery firm Wiltshaw and Robinson which was founded in Stoke on Trent in 1890 and subsequently changed its name to Carlton Ware Ltd in 1958. Between the two World Wars, supplementing their high end output, the firm found a good deal of success with novelty and other ranges of bright and cheerful tableware aimed at the popular end of the market. The registered design number on the biscuit barrel (778973) puts it to 1932.

There can be few more iconic symbols of the English countryside than the thatched cottage and its associations with the rural picturesque that go back beyond the nineteenth century. In truth, it was a humble, poor man’s dwelling but yet an object of desire when viewed from an urban perspective. The reality of the countryside in the early 1930s, deep in agricultural depression, was that many thatched cottages were falling into ruin but yet the cosy symbolism remained.

Thatched roofing today scores highly on status value, the more so as interest in sustainable materials has increased. It is also high maintenance and not without controversy as owners, conservationists, planners and thatchers argue about the ethics of using cheaper and more convenient imported materials, instead of the home grown and ‘traditional’.

The School Prints II, 1947

Our other School Print, this one from the second series of 1947, is Harvesting by John Nash (1893-1977). It is a bright golden scene that typifies Nash’s finely observed but lighthearted sense of landscape and rural life. He was a natural, down to earth artist with no formal training behind him (unlike his brother Paul) and one who expressed himself through a charming romanticism and good humour in spite of serving as War Artist in both world wars.


Here, a field of corn is being cut and tied into sheaves by a horse drawn reaper binder. As the machine goes round in ever tighter circles, the rabbits trapped in what remains of the standing crop are obliged to make a run for it. Distracted from their task of collecting the sheaves into stooks, the other figures are trying to bag a rabbit or two for the pot, without too much success it seems.

There are so many neat touches in the picture: the glorious variety of trees that skirt the field; the ramshackle farm workers’ bikes propped in the hedge; the yappy dogs; and the curious geometric pattern of the remaining corn that can indeed result when starting at the outer edge and working inwards. In a very few years this kind of scene would be rare as the combine harvester replaced the binder, and shorter-strawed varieties of corn began to dominate.

The twenty-four School Prints were produced by a process known as auto-lithography in which the artists themselves applied their designs directly to the stone block. It was this that enabled the company, somewhat controversially, to term them as ‘original’ lithographs. They sold in large numbers to both schools and the general public and captured a mood in those early post-War years.

The School Prints, 1940s

The latest two acquisitions relate to the post-War, moving forward and new beginning, aspect of the 1940s. They are two original lithographs from the School Prints series of 1946 and 1947. This one, No.3 in the first series of twelve issued in 1946, is titled Tractor and was by the artist Kenneth Rowntree (1915-1997).


School Prints Ltd was an idealistic enterprise set up originally in the 1930s with the aim of making available to schools, and particularly those children who would probably never visit a gallery, reproductions of great paintings. It was the brainchild of Derek Rawnsley, grandson of Canon Rawnsley of The National Trust fame (see earlier post). In 1941, now serving as an RAF pilot, he married the equally well connected Brenda Hugh-Jones and it was she who was to keep the School Prints project going after his death two years later and once her own distinguished war service was over.

With the idea now to commission artists to produce 'original' lithographs for sale to primary schools, Brenda Rawnsley put a team of experts and advisors together. It was headed by Herbert Read who has been described as the leading spokesman for the arts of his generation, an anarchist and a visionary who believed that art should be the basis of all learning. 'Education through Art', he wrote, 'is education for peace'.

Kenneth Rowntree a Quaker and conscientious objector, had been one of the artists commissioned during the war by The Pilgrim Trust for its Recording Britain project with the purpose of distilling aspects of heritage, landscape and the British way of life that might not survive the hostilities. In 'Tractor', he provides a soothing image of pastoral peace and calm to heal a young generation scarred by war.

In the tractor and plough, Rowntree's distinctive style of the very flat but highly detailed image is evident. He may well have taken the similar type of views to be found in manufacturers' catalogues of the day as his guide. The tractor depicted is clearly a Standard Fordson, in the harvest gold livery that was first used in 1937.


And the plough? A Ransomes No.12 two furrow self-lift - a common tractor plough of the period made by the famous Ipswich manufacturer.

Grow Your Own Food poster, 1942

Any consideration of the countryside in the 1940s will tend to fall into two parts. On the one hand there is the War, and on the other there is what happened – in the way of a new beginning - immediately following. To represent the Second World War, we have purchased an original signed poster dating from 1942 by Abram Games (1914-1996).

Games was one of the most influential graphic designers of the twentieth century with a gallery of iconic images, including the emblem for the 1951 Festival of Britain, to his credit. He was officially appointed War Office Poster Designer and came up with 100 designs, among them a couple of Grow Your Own Food examples. Posters and slogans were a vital means of communication and encouragement at the time.

1942 was a critical year in the War for food supplies. The Battle of the Atlantic in the spring threatened to throttle imports with 275 merchant ships being lost in March alone. The national food production strategy demanded that a further 1.75 million acres of land be ploughed to help make up the shortfall whilst in the same year conscription of farm workers was lowered to the age of 18 and drained a further 100,000 men from the land. Recruitment of Land Girls was accelerated and the nation at large was enjoined to do its bit.

Games’ poster, with its bottom line of ‘supply your own cookhouse’ was directed at the military as an encouragement for service personnel to turn available parts of their bases into allotments for food production.

Eric Newton, writing about posters in the journal Art and Industry in July 1943 said: 'Suddenly with the outbreak of war, the poster trebled its importance. From being a commercial luxury it became a national necessity. Yesterday it was a frivolous temptation. Today it is a weapon to be reckoned with.'

Farming Toys

This subject will crop up more than once over the course of the project because of the enduring way that toys both shape and reflect notions of farming and the countryside from an early age.


I’m starting with a tractor because it is one of those instantly recognisable objects, like the steam train, that children are drawn to almost intuitively, whatever their background. This is the Fordson Major die-cast toy tractor, No.128F, that was made over the period 1948-1958 by W.Britain Ltd.



This was the first new tractor to be made by Britains post-War. Until the 1970s, they made only Ford and Massey Ferguson tractors but thereafter added many other manufacturers and machines to the list. The older examples like this one are no longer toys as they have become highly collectable and fetch prices way beyond pocket money levels - particularly if the original box is intact.


Britains was founded by William Britain senior (1828-1906) and specialised initially in toy soldiers. But after the First World War, market demand for less militaristic toys saw it branch out into the Home Farm Series of animals, implements and other paraphernalia of the farm. It became a household name and the brand still exists although the firm was bought out by Ertl, another famous die-cast toy maker, in 1997.

The Fordson Major E27N tractor was launched from the Dagenham factory in 1945. It was a step up from the smaller pre-War type of Fordson and was available with hydraulic three-point linkage and a range of mounted implements. By 1951, 200,000 had been built for use in Britain and overseas.

The Laura Ashley dress, 1970s

After the loud brashness of the 1960s, one branch of womens fashion in the early/mid 70s saw a return to quieter pastoral themes rooted in popular rural nostalgia of the day. The name most associated with this trend is Laura Ashley so, in the month that has seen the death of co-founder Bernard Ashley, this seems the appropriate opportunity to reveal the two latest acquisitions.

We have a smock top from the 1970s, evidence of a renewed enthusiasm at the time for a style traditionally associated with the countryside.



And a folk or ‘prairie’ dress of simple lines, definitely not of the city, with that almost home-made look.



The firm began as a small husband and wife operation in the early 1950s but reached its zenith in the 70s when the trademark floral designs and pastel colours were applied to dresses of a cottage style and make that harked back to a mythical past of uncomplicated home loving country life. Ironically, on the back of this success, the Ashleys enjoyed all the trappings of a mega rich lifestyle before Laura’s premature death in 1985 was followed by a stockmarket flotation and, ultimately, corporate shake down.


Laura Ashley production started in London in the early 1950s, moved to Kent in 1955 and then to Carno in Powys, Wales, in 1961.

This was the look that characterised campus parties and formals in the mid 1970s.

The Barbour Jacket

A classic Barbour waxed jacket has now been acquired as part of this project. It dates from the 1980s when the Barbour made that cultural breakthrough from looking good in the field to being part of urban chic. In the punk and post-punk world of anti-establishment anti fashion, it was seized upon by the metropolitan elite, and its aspirants, as a counter symbol of an unchanging order and of the solid and practical virtues often associated with the countryside.


In fact, the Barbour story itself is quite prosaic. John Barbour, from a farming background in Galloway, established a drapers shop in South Shields in 1894. Workwear was one of its specialities, including oilskins for the fishermen, shipbuilders, farmers and shepherds of the area. From 1908, mail order was an important part of the business, and in the 1930s a successful range of oiled cotton suits for motorcycle wear was introduced.


During the War years and after, its reputation for heavy duty weatherproof outdoor clothing for both civilian and military use grew and then it was in the early 1980s that a new range of light jackets - the Bedale, the Border and the Beaufort - was introduced for the wider leisure market with appeal to town and country alike.


How do you date a Barbour?
Look at the Royal Warrants. Barbour received Royal Warrants from the Duke of Edinburgh in 1974, Her Majesty the Queen in 1982 and the Prince of Wales in 1987. Our example has the first two warrants but not the third so dates from between 1982 and 1987.


Our example comes from Yorkshire. It has encountered barbed wire fences and has the patches to prove it. The closest many Barbours come to a flock of sheep now is the crowds at Shepherds Bush market. From the Sunday Sun, April 2008: 'They were once the preserve of royalty and farmers but now it appears Barbour jackets are becoming the latest fashion fad for trendy pop singers and celebrities.

Singer Lily Allen, actress Sadie Frost and socialite Peaches Geldof have all been spotted wearing the North-made traditional waxed garment, regularly worn by the Queen and Prince Charles.

The all-weather country jackets are usually worn during field sports or for working outdoors in the country. But it appears young urbanites don’t care about the brand’s former Sloaney connections and are turning it into a must-have style trend.

Sir Bob Geldof’s daughter Peaches wore hers with a pair of hot pants at Glastonbury, while Lily Allen even performs gigs in hers. The celebrity endorsement has sent tills ringing at the South Tyneside-based business, which employs 450 people at its offices in South Shields, and has seen turnover hit £65m'.

1960s motoring

My father first bought a car in 1961 - a Ford Popular, like the second vehicle from the left above - and as far as I am aware he never used public transport again. One pound would get you four gallons of petrol and the ritual Sunday afternoon excursions into the greener corners of Kent and Surrey - along with most of South London's population - are part of childhood memory. Summer holidays would see daring expeditions to unknown parts, the west country or North Wales perhaps, which in pre-motorway days might take 12 hours on the road and encounter major traffic bottlenecks at every market town along the way.

Aga Update

(See earlier post of 10th November 08)
In his column in The Guardian this week, George Monbiot launched his own one man campaign against the Aga. Railing against its carbon output, he stormed 'I've lost count of the number of aspirational middle-class greens I know who own one of these monsters and believe that they are somehow compatible (perhaps because they look good in a country kitchen) with a green lifestyle'. So the iconography remains as potent as ever.

Meanwhile Aga shares fell 10 per cent on news that the firm, having already cut 400 jobs, would be announcing appreciably lower profits for the second half of 2008.

The car and the countryside

The motor car’s impact on the countryside over the twentieth century was of course immense and will be explored at a number of points in this project. From the beginning, rural imagery has been deployed to sell cars and present them in a positive light. Prior to the First World War, motor cars were predominantly the preserve of the ruling elite and the rich enthusiast. It was in the inter-War period that cars moved into the realm of the middle class and began to exert a powerful influence on patterns of life and work and recreation. By the 1960s, the car had moved further to become a mass consumer item with all the resulting pressures and consequences that have continued to unfold since.

Two advertisement illustrations below, both from Country Life, relate to the earlier part of the story. The first, from Easter 1915, shows a couple taking what by implication looks like a proprietary spin around the estate in their large stately Daimler. The message is that the car is at one with the solid and traditional values of the rural landscape beyond and is also fit for a wounded hero to travel in, whilst perfectly capable of being handled by a woman.


The second is only a few years later, 1923, but the image is subtly different. The car is not just passing through the countryside but here is part of it and is a vehicle of work rather than purely leisure and with a farmer owner, albeit one of the more well-heeled variety.

Chad Valley Jig-saw Puzzle from the 1920s

This is a 120 piece wooden jig-saw puzzle entitled A Cotswold Alley. It comes from the heyday of the jig-saw's mass popularity as a family pastime in the 1920s and 30s. The classic cottage scene it depicts follows sentimental rural imagery that has dug itself into English culture over the last two hundred years as industrialisation and urbanisation took hold. This 'chocolate box' image of the countryside strenghtened in potency through the twentieth century and was deployed commercially at all levels.


Chad Valley traces its origins to a printing company set up by Anthony Johnson in Birmingham in the early nineteenth century. By the end of the century, the firm had re-located to the Chad Valley Works at Harbourne and was diversifying into the production of cardboard games. Between the two world wars, the company established its reputation as a major toy producer. The Chad Valley trade name was acquired by Woolworths in 1988.

Tri-ang Dolls' House, 1937

This classic dolls house from the 1930s, known as 'The Stockbroker House', has been added to the project.

The 1930s brought suburbanisation to new heights. More and more people wanted to be in touch with the countryside, have their own garden, and commute to the town. Unchecked ribbon development was often the result.


Suburban house designs drew on clichéd rural styles of the past with pebbledash, mock Tudor features and latticed windows much in evidence. Of course, these houses also now had electric lighting, indoor bathrooms and a garage. The dolls house shows how deeply embedded these aspirations were in our culture, right down to the level of children’s play.



George and Joseph Lines, trading as Lines Bros, were important toy makers of the nineteenth century. They were making dolls' houses by the early 1900s. Joseph's three sons set up their own similar business after the First World War with the trade name Triangtois. On the death of Joseph Lines in 1931, the two firms united under the name of Tri-ang Toys. They made a range of dolls houses in the 1930s, including some in the modernist style, but the most popular were the mock-Tudor suburban models.

Trees and Cows wallpaper, 1920s

This was one of a number of wallpaper designs produced by Edward Bawden (see earlier post) in the 1920s. At first laboriously hand-printed by Bawden himself using the lino-cut method, they were adopted by the Curwen Press in 1926 and became more widely available as lithograph printed papers. A sheet of the Trees and Cows design has been acquired for this project. A tranquil, if rather mesmerising, rural motif like this brought a touch of the countryside into urban and suburban homes of the pre-War era.

The Curwen Press was founded in 1863 in Plaistow, East London and was initially primarily concerned with printing music. The founder’s grandson, Harold Curwen, was joined by Oliver Simon in 1920 and together they breathed new life into commercial art and design of the period. Simon had connections at the Royal College of Art (his uncle was Principal) which enabled him to sign up artists such as Paul Nash, Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden for a range of projects from book illustration to lettering to advertising posters. Bawden frequently worked for the Press and contributed in the later 1930s a number of illustrations for the You Can be Sure of Shell poster campaign, like the one of Blandford Forum below.

Steven Spurrier

The pictorial map that accompanied Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons when it was first published in 1930 was drawn by Steven Spurrier (1878-1961). He was also commissioned to provide illustrations throughout the book but they didn’t match what Ransome had in mind and were never used. They are now in the collections of the Brotherton Library in Leeds. Ransome's adventure story drew upon his own childhood memories of holidays by Coniston Water in the Lake District.

Spurrier was a prolific commercial artist in the decades on either side of the Second World War with the Illustrated London News in particular using a lot of his work. He also exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1913 and was elected RBA in 1933 and RA in 1952. Born in London, Spurrier was imbued with that urban vision of the vitality of the rural outdoors, as indicated in the holiday poster below.


Spurrier’s style captured perfectly the mood of the day. This oil painting of his from the 1940s, Portrait of a Country Girl, with its ruddy-cheeked references to a healthy and wholesome rural life, is part of this project.

James Ravilious

Just to follow up a comment on the earlier piece about Eric Ravilious, it is very true that Eric’s son James has also made a significant contribution to contemporary perceptions of the countryside. He is Eric’s second son and taught painting in London for a number of years before moving in the early 1970s to North Devon, birthplace of his wife Robin. In 1972, he was commissioned by the Beaford Centre to make a photographic record of life in and around the village of Dolton where he lived. The result is a wonderful natural portrait of the countryside and its people. The images today are to be found reproduced in books and as cards nationwide.


Beaford, a village south of Barnstaple, was chosen in 1966 as the base for a North Devon offshoot of the Dartington Hall Trust with a brief to develop education, community and arts initiatives in the area. Dartington itself has a place in the story of the twentieth century countryside. The estate was purchased by Leonard Elmhirst and his wealthy American wife, Dorothy, shortly after their marriage in 1925 and they used it as a laboratory to develop their own vision of a sustainable countryside based on agricultural development, rural regeneration and encouragement of the arts.

Rural Arts and Crafts

This copper tray is the latest addition to the project. It bears the stamp of the Keswick School of Industrial Arts and was made in about 1903. The School was a scion of the Arts and Crafts movement of the second half of the nineteenth century and was dedicated to the promotion of hand-crafted skills and of inspiration drawn from the natural world, as a way of combating the perceived de-humanising effects of industrialisation.

The school was founded by Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley (1851-1920), friend of John Ruskin and Beatrix Potter, campaigner for the protection of the Lake District and co-founder and secretary of the National Trust. It was initially based in parish rooms close to Rawnsley’s church at Crosthwaite, near Keswick. In 1894, the school moved to purpose-built premises and through its apprentice scheme and night classes steadily achieved a national reputation in decorative metalwork.

The school changed and diversified over the years but remained in operation all the way through to 1984. The tray is a reminder from the early twentieth century of a social philosophy set within a rural context. Rawnsley is a key figure in the origins of the conservation movement.

Shaping the Methodology

This is a new type of project that involves the development of new approaches. We are consciously trying to break away from the collecting framework that a museum such as this has operated within hitherto.

We are targeting the twentieth century on a decade by decade basis and will develop themes within each that will knit together into an overall story. Themes are beginning to emerge through the knocking around of key words. So for example below:

1900s end of the old order; divided society
1910s War and Remembrance
1920s discontent and inspiration
1930s resurgence; rural suburbia
1940s modernisation; the new England
1950s hope and chemicals
1960s motor cars and urban invaders
1970s agri-business; nostalgia; folk revival
1980s conservation; New Ageism
1990s contested countryside; another new order

Running through and alongside this are three thematic streams of material;

□ Art, style and design in the rural context, because our collecting has previously been characterised primarily by technology, technique and tradition

□ Rural icons of the 20th century: material with a strong rural association or origin which has crossed over into mainstream culture.

□ Commonplace/otherwise overlooked items of importance to the countryside and country life as suggested by individuals and the public.

Eric Ravilious

Eric Ravilious (1903-1942), with Paul Nash as one of his teachers and Edward Bawden as a close friend, was an artist and designer who expressed the mood of the inter-war English countryside as powerfully as anyone. His downland scenes of the 1930s, drawing on his Sussex boyhood, are very human in scale and light in touch and yet there is a more sombre tone beneath, part melancholy and part nostalgia for something lost.


Ravilious brought this same perspective into a wide range of commercial design commissions. One claim has it that it was Noel Carrington – see earlier post about Puffin Books – who introduced him to Wedgwood in 1936. His designs for them, described as examples of archaic modernism, included the Garden and the Harvest Festival dinner services in the years immediately before the Second War. Ravilious died in 1942 whilst on duty as a War Artist with the RAF. Wedgwood revived the two dinner service designs in the 1950s. A plate from each has been acquired for this project.

Baler twine and welly boots as 20thc icons?

There should be a place in this project for some of those less lauded but now indispensable items without which life on the land would be that much more difficult. So ran the thread of a lively discussion last week on the online forum of Farmers Weekly readers.

Baler twine in particular received many votes, with contributors vying amongst themselves to record its multitude of secondary uses on the farm: everything from calving ropes, to an emergency repair on a water main, to replacement bucket handles. No farmer it seems leaves home without a few strands in his pocket, just in case they might come in handy to mend a bit of fencing or tie up a gate.


It all goes back to the introduction of the reaper binder which by the 1890s was tying its sheaves with string, rather than the wire that was tried first. Binders were later replaced by combines but hay and straw balers continue to use large quantities of twine. Originally, the string or twine was made from fibres of the sisal plant but since the 1970s, polypropylene - a very strong and virtually everlasting man-made fibre - has taken over and become a ubiquitous part of the countryside.

Wellington boots were amongst other items mentioned. It's difficult to imagine life without them. I don't know when rubber boots became commonplace on the farm. We'll have to start logging their appearance in the photographic archive. This is an image from 1947: