Underground, Overground

by Andrew Martin

  The closed-down station still looks like a Tube station, in its coat of oxblood tiles, and no doubt many baffled tourists every day start hunting for it on the Tube map. But the name it bears is its original one, Strand, the second name Aldwych, which overlay Strand, having been removed. It seems to be going back in time, and it would be good if it became a theatre again, bringing some bright lights to a dull corner of London. Apparently the outline of the proscenium is clear to see in the booking office, if you know where to look. The Strand Theatre could open with a production of Miss Wingrove, or I could write a light-hearted Edwardian time-travel play especially for the occasion. It would be called … Before We Were So Rudely Interrupted.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  EVERYWHERE IN TRAINS

  ENTER STANLEY AND PICK

  Contemporary Londoners are no more likely to have heard of Stanley and Pick than of Yerkes, but if any two men made London what it is today, it is these two.

  Yet they were both from modest backgrounds and were not even Londoners but northerners by birth. Albert Stanley was also American in a way, because his family emigrated from Derbyshire to Detroit in 1880, when he was six, and he began his railway career as an office boy in the Detroit Street Railways Company. (Railways were in his blood, in that his father was a coach painter for Pullman, the luxury-carriage makers.) He was soon running the Detroit Street Railways, and then those of New Jersey. His coming to London, and his rise through the ranks of the Underground Electric Railways of London was made possible by the support of the American shareholders, who saw him as one of their own and believed he would look after their interests, about which they were wrong. Stanley became General Manager of UERL in 1907 and managing director in 1910, and one of his first acts was to unite the three Tubes owned by the UERL under one management, which the American shareholders had specifically not wanted to happen, fearing the loss of capital gains (a misplaced fear since their shares were, as Stephen Halliday points out in Underground to Everywhere, ‘virtually worthless’).

  Stanley – who became Lord Ashfield in 1920 – was a persuasive, charming man (very keen on women, and vice versa), who wanted to build himself an empire of transport in London. He smoked cigars and wore suits made by Henry Poole of Savile Row, which were known for their ‘American cut’; he had a good sense of humour and a knack for publicity. On the evening of 13 May 1924, a baby girl was born on a Bakerloo train. The child was christened – Stanley had the world believe – Thelma Ursula Beatrice Eleanor (think about it), and Stanley agreed to be her godfather, with the proviso that, ‘It would not do to encourage this sort of thing, as I am a busy man.’ (The disappointing fact of the matter is the child was actually christened Mary Ashfield Eleanor.)

  Frank Pick was a much chillier proposition. The son of a Methodist Lincolnshire draper, he grew up in York. After qualifying as a solicitor, he worked under George Gibb of the North Eastern Railway (and subsequently the Underground). The North Eastern was the biggest and most grown-up of the pre-grouping railway companies, being an early electrifier, the first railway to employ graduates, and a pioneer of market research and sophisticated advertising. The fastidious Pick lacked ‘the common touch’. He didn’t drink; he certainly did not smoke cigars, and when, during the Second World War, he crossed the path of a man who did, the chemistry was terrible, as we will see. For Winston Churchill, Pick was ‘the impeccable busman’. He was a workaholic, who communicated by memos written in tiny handwriting – and always in green ink. He joined the UERL in 1906, and in 1912 he sent one of his terrifying green ink missives to Stanley complaining about the ineffectual way the Underground Group advertised itself, and so Stanley put him in charge of Advertising and Traffic Development.

  From then on, Pick devoted himself to rationalising London – a doomed project, but nobody has ever given it such a good go as Pick. On his own boyhood visits to the city from York he’d been fascinated and appalled by the place: ‘There was too much of it; it was hopelessly confusing.’ Using the highest standards of design, he sought to tidy it up, make it knowable. In a biography of Pick, The Man Who Built London Transport (1979), by Christian Barman, he is quoted as writing to a friend during the Great War, ‘Another thing that seems to me so stupid is that here in London with unlimited opportunities one takes no advantage of them at all. When I lived in York or Newcastle I was much better able to know what was moving in things than I am now when I am in the middle of it.’ Yet he would be responsible for the further expansion of London, to the point where the city once again dismayed him by its size.

  In The Bus We Loved Travis Elborough writes that Stanley and Pick would have made a good cop show duo: ‘Sunday nights ITV1 … Ashfield and Pick: No Need to Ask a P’liceman. Bill Nighy is Lord Stanley and Warren Clarke is Frank Pick in Murder on the Metropolitan Line … The Piccadilly Palaver … The Arnos Grove Assassin … Sorry, Mr Man Ray, we’ll have to discuss this poster later, they’ve found another body in Dover Street.’ For Elborough, their contrasting natures were ‘essentially complementary’ and we can see them working a quick one-two as early as 1908. It was Stanley who initiated the action …

  On 26 February that year he called a meeting of the managers of the Underground lines, which resulted in the following press release:

  The following railways, viz. Baker Street & Waterloo, Central London, Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead City and South London, District, Great Northern and City, Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton, and Metropolitan have agreed to adopt the word ‘UNDERGROUND’ so that the Public may become accustomed to associate these lines as a complete system of Underground railways, and that the word ‘UNDERGROUND’ may be used by them in connection therewith, instead of the name of any individual Company, or abbreviation thereof, or the word ‘TUBE’.

  Furthermore,

  A sign containing the word ‘UNDERGROUND’ as well as a large map of the ‘Underground’ System, to be illuminated at night, will be placed on the outside of each Station on the railways enumerated.

  As regards the map, this was the beginning of an Aesop-like fable – ‘How the Underground lines got their colours’ – because they were all given a colour, although not the ‘right’ ones from today’s perspective. It was also the beginning of the path that would lead to London Transport. The lines had realised that they had better stop fighting each other, and stick together in the face of the onslaught from the motor buses that were making horse buses obsolete.

  There would be a system of through-ticketing, and a unifying slogan – ‘Underground to Everywhere … Quickest Way, Cheapest Fare’ – this having been suggested (the fact is somehow not very surprising) by a fourteen-year-old schoolboy called Edwin Parrington. Revenues began to pick up, modest dividends to be paid. In 1912 the UERL was able to absorb London’s largest bus company, the London General Omnibus Company. Now it could use the buses, with their low capital costs, to subsidise the three Tubes and the District.

  Meanwhile bus and tram competition was causing the Central London Railway to flounder after its early success, and as for the City & South London … that had always floundered. In early 1913 the UERL was able to absorb them both. By now it had also acquired several tram companies and had become known as either the Underground Group or, more sinisterly, The Combine. Of the Underground lines, only the Waterloo & City (which nestled comfortably in the bosom of its main-line parent, the London & South Western Railway), the maverick Metropolitan (which was still determined to make it into the big time on its own) and the Met’s strange-looking adopted child, The Big Tube, remained outside the embrace of the Underground Group.

  Although Stanley was the political operator while Pick was the aesthete, it was Stanley who made the early running in Underground design. In the conflicting accounts of the evolution of the Underground logo, Stanley is usually credited with being the initiator. He had, perhaps, been impressed by the stark and simple station names on the Paris Metro. He blended these with the wheel imagery of the London General Omnibus Compan
y to create a blue bar with the station name written in white upon it, and a red circle behind. The circle of the ‘bull’s-eye’ was to distinguish the station name from the surrounding advertisements.

  This bull’s-eye first appeared on District stations from 1908, and Frank Pick would oversee its refinement during the First World War. For him, the bull’s-eye was too blob-like. It did not ‘hold the eye’. He may have been influenced in his thinking by the logo of the Young Men’s Christian Association, which took the form of an inverted red triangle with a bar through it. The graceful thing about that triangle was that it was hollow, except for the bar running through it, and Pick would hollow out the red blob behind Stanley’s blue bar.

  The purpose of the roundel – as the bull’s-eye was coming to be called – was to carry the names of the stations, and therefore it had to harmonise with the lettering that spelled out those names. This was the beginning of the spread across the network – in station signage and also posters – of a plain and pure typeface designed for the Underground by a refined and venerated calligrapher called Edward Johnston, and officially called Underground Railway Block. In Just My Type: A Book about Fonts (2010) Simon Garfield describes Johnston as ‘a gaunt, fine-boned man with a full moustache’, and there’s a picture of him at work with a quill pen that makes him look as other-worldly as a medieval sprite. Pick had wanted a font that would ‘belong unmistakably to the times in which we lived’, and Garfield writes of what was generally called Johnston Sans that it may be regarded as ‘the first “people’s typeface”, the first to be designed for day-to-day use that was not associated with learning, political manifesto or class, but the need to travel’. The space between the letters is as important as the letters; there’s a calmness about this that clashes with the mindset of the typical, flustered commuter, but not in such a way as to constitute a moral reproof; and there is a levity about the typeface. The dot of the ‘i’ for example, is a diamond. Look at that ‘i’ when under stress in a Tube station. It’s like the wink of an eye.

  There is nonetheless a moral seriousness about it that suggests a public service rather than a public company, and that was the direction in which the Underground was travelling. At the time when the typeface was being rolled out, Pick was becoming associated with the Design and Industries Association. It (like the Arts and Crafts Movement, to which it was heir) took its cue from John Ruskin’s injunction to manufacturers – that they make ‘what will educate as it adorns’. From his contact with the Association, Pick distilled the essence of his philosophy, expressed in a lecture in 1916, ‘Everything is Made for a Use: The Test of the Goodness of a Thing is its Fitness for Use’. In The Man Who Built London Transport Christian Barman provides a vignette of another disciple of the Design and Industries Association, and a friend of Pick’s, Harold Curwen. Curwen had inherited a printing business in Plaistow, east London. In 1915 the government appealed for scrap metal to help the war effort. Curwen gazed at the ‘clever, fussy, pretentious Victorian typefaces spread about his composing room floor’ and felt a wave of revulsion. He sent away more than 200 founts of type, retaining just one plain one, Caslon Old Face. He became a martyr to his philosophy; one of his main clients, West Ham Corporation Tramways, ‘furious to receive their noteheadings set in Caslon … abruptly closed their account’. This was the revolutionary wave that Pick was riding.

  PERSUADING PEOPLE TO MAKE JOURNEYS IT HAD NOT OCCURRED TO THEM TO MAKE: THE UNDERGROUND POSTER

  We will continue with Pick, and another aspect of his vision of a corporate identity for the Underground: his commissioning of posters. Pick’s job was both ‘advertising’ and ‘traffic development’. In fact, he would straddle the worlds of engineering and art: he commissioned both posters that encouraged people to use the Underground lines and also new Underground lines themselves.

  The Underground made money from renting poster space to other firms. Posters were the chief advertising medium of the time; they were also the graffiti of the time, the Johnston font being a reaction against their clutter of typefaces. But Pick would claim the poster for art through his work with such eminences as Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland and the American Edward McKnight Kauffer.

  The first notable posters commissioned by Pick were by John Hassall (creator of the cherubic, skipping, Jolly Fisherman, who found Skegness ‘so bracing’), and they showed an unexpectedly whimsical aspect of Pick’s character. One of these, When in Doubt Take the Underground (1913), depicts a dazed, Chaplinesque man consulting his watch and looking perplexed. Well, he would look perplexed – he hasn’t yet noticed the light of the Underground station sign behind him. The posters that followed over the next thirty years might be read as an exercise in the education of the little man. He would be told about one-off entertainments: Trooping the Colour, Derby Day, the Third Test Match at The Oval, with the nearest stations listed. He would on occasion be bluntly instructed to move to an address on one of the new Underground extensions: for example, Move to Edgware (1924). More often, he would be encouraged to live life to the full, especially insofar as this involved travel in the off-peak or at weekends, because the main purpose of the poster campaign was, in the words of Frank Pick, to ‘persuade people to make journeys it had not occurred to them to make’. The little man would be peremptorily told, It’s a Bank Holiday, Go Out. One Pick-commissioned poster of the 1930s showed an oil painting of a raucous West End pub, and I once asked a curator of the London Transport Museum what it had been promoting: ‘Oh you know,’ he said, ‘just … going to the pub.’

  Punch resented this straying of the Underground into extracurricular areas, and in 1921 it retaliated:

  To the directors of the Underground … We like looking at your pretty posters. But do you seriously believe that anyone who has not got to go on your wretched railway already will be induced to go on it by seeing a picture – even a picture of a barge labelled BARNES? If you didn’t spend so much money on trying to persuade people to go to Barnes you would be able to take me to Charing Cross for a reasonable fare.

  But in Studies in Art, Architecture and Design (1968) Nikolaus Pevsner would write of Underground posters that ‘no exhibition of modern painting, no lecturing, no school teaching, can have had anything like so wide an effect on the educatable masses.’

  He was referring particularly to the posters of 1930–40, which would become increasingly confident and modernistic. They highlighted the technical dynamism of the Underground, using imagery redolent of the Futurists, and much use of the words ‘Power’ and ‘Speed’. The figurative ones also attest to an almost triumphalist confidence by showing an upmarket Underground clientele. In the presence of these glitzy types, our little Chaplinesque man might have felt ill at ease. For example, The Playgoer Travels Underground (1930), by Charles Pears, shows a couple arriving at a restaurant for a late dinner – he in his dinner jacket, she in her fur stole – who look as though they actually travel by chauffer-driven car, and the deep bow with which the waiter is greeting them suggests the same. The Underground begins to seem almost decadent, a bad influence. A poster of 1938 by Marc Severin asked the subversive question, ‘Why go Home?’ Another poster ordered, ‘Play between 6 and 12.’ The aim in both cases was to stagger the rush hour, but the charm of these productions from our perspective is that they show a London in which people do more than just watch television in the evenings.

  The number of self-promoting posters put out by the Underground has declined ever since the war. Colour photography has undermined the poster. The main ‘spend’ is on digital and radio advertising, and although some of its posters (now commissioned for it by agencies) still aspire to be more than mere adverts, the artistic credibility of London Underground rests with the ‘Art on the Underground’ programme, which makes parts of stations into what are in effect art galleries for the display of works by ‘young and aspiring’ artists. I put it to Richard Parry, Deputy Managing Director of the Underground, that being so packed, the system couldn’t handle any more pas
sengers, and so didn’t advertise for them. ‘I think we would be in the business of promoting the right mode choice,’ he said, after a longish pause for thought. ‘For instance … Leicester Square to Covent Garden … we might point out that it was quicker to walk.’

  Undergound posters by (clockwork from top left) Verney L. Danvers, Charles Pears, Mark Laurence and John Hassall. As commissioned by Frank Pick, they sought to make the Underground synonymous with London and London synonymous with pleasure. The equation was all the easier to accept, given that the posters were works of art in themselves.

  THE END OF WALKING (AND THE EXPANSION OF LONDON)

  If Pick and Ashfield began by persuading people to make journeys they didn’t strictly have to make, they would – as we shall see – end their careers having created a much-expanded city into which millions were locked into a daily rail commute by rail. As Punch wrote, in its spasm of reaction against Pick’s posters, ‘Man is born free and is everywhere in trains.’