Modernity and 'English' tradition: Betjeman at The Architectural Review

Journal of Design History

Volumn 13, Issue 3, 2000, Pages 193-212

  Hiscock, Karin ^a  

^a CARDIFF METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

1930s England; Architecture; English identity; Graphic design; Modernism; Nationalism

Indexed keywords

EID: 34249192842     PISSN: 09524649     EISSN: 17417279     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/jdh/13.3.193     Document Type: Review

References (70)

1. In Charles Harrison's 'England's climate' in Brian Allen (ed.), Towards a Modern Art World, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London and New Haven, 1995, 'insular' is used pejoratively and in the context of other characteristics such as 'nostalgic', 'dogged empiricism', 'conservative critical rhetoric', 'dilettantism and amateurism'. Whilst in hindsight those terms may have attempted to characterize an attitude to modern artistic practice, in reality that attitude far from exhausted the scope of any of its authentic practices. It does not today act as a closure to understanding the expression of the modern condition in 1930s England.
2. See David Peters Corbett's The Modernity of English Art 1914-1930, Manchester University Press, 1997, for an investigation of the realities of the modern condition in England.
3. During Betjeman's time at The Architectural Review (hereafter AR)
4. Pevsner's Pioneers of Modern Design (to be published in 1936) was only in preparation, and the public at large would be working on a predominantly visually based conception of what constituted 'modern', which disassociated itself aesthetically from traditional, functional forms. Betjeman employs visual references to this connection in the content and layout of the AR.
5. This is demonstrably supported by certain content, in particular a series of articles between July 1934 and March 1935 by Philip Morton Shand, entitled 'Scenario for a human drama', which effectively pre-empted a course of development of 'modernism' espoused by Nikolaus Pevsner in his Pioneers of Modern Design, Faber & Faber 1936. Also referred to in the AR archive card 92. No archives remain from the AR for this period other than an incomplete series of typed index cards summarizing key events and individuals, somewhat anecdotally treated, and anonymously authored with some handwritten comments.
6. John Betjeman: Ghastly Good Taste: or, A Depressing Story of the Rise and Fall of English Architecture, Century Hutchinson Ltd./ The National Trust, 1986 (1933), p. 65, hereafter GGT.
7. According to Betjeman, 'over a dozen in number', in John Betjeman: 'Architecture', London Mercury, vol. 29, 1933, p. 65.
8. Candida Lycett Green (ed.), John Betjeman: Letters, Vol. 1: 1926-1951, Methuen, 1994, pp. 94, 139; AR archive card 94.
9. A. W. N. Pugin: Contrasts: or, A Parallel between the Noble Edifices of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, and Similar Buildings of the Present Day: Shewing the present Decay of Taste: Accompanied by Appropriate Text (Introduction H. R. Hitchcock), reprint of 2nd edn., Leicester University Press, 1969 (1836).
10. John Betjeman, 'Augustus Welby Pugin' Coming Home: An Anthology of Prose (Introduction Candida Lycett Green), Methuen, 1977, pp. 273-4.
11. He also shows his indebtedness to Pugin in his 1970 introduction to GGT, p. x.
12. The 'conditioned acceptance' is that expectation and desire for an aestheticized world re-presented in strategic picturing, as instigated in the eighteenth-century Picturesque movement.
13. Betjeman, 'Architecture', pp. 65-6.
14. Frederick Etchells was 'the pillar of john Betjeman's life' since their meeting in 1930. Lycett Green, op. cit., p. 94.
15. Here, Betjeman railed against the professionalization of architects and in particular 'middle class professionalism' through which 'architecture has been killed' (in December 1932 the Architects Registration Act was passed, with a guillotine for December 1933); he concurs with his hero Voysey over the erosion of individualism resulting from school-based training in architecture, John Betjeman: 'Charles Francis Annesley Voysey: the architect of individualism', AR, October 1931, pp. 93-6; in the publishing of GGT he hopes to 'dissuade the average architect from continuing in his profession' because of misguided priorities (GGT, pp. 12, 15-16); and he castigates 'art school students' for their crass product, the 'jazz-modern', the 'final fruit' of what he sees as 'excessive antiquarianism', in Antiquarian Prejudice, Hogarth Press, 1939, p. 22.
16. AR archive card 93.
17. Betjeman's most useful articles published in the AR during his assistant editorship, for the purpose of this paper, are: 'The new Chair of Art,' December 1930; 'Charles Annesley Voysey', October 1931; 'The death of Modernism', December 1931; 'The truth about Waterloo Bridge', March 1932; and 'Leeds: a city of contrasts,' October 1933.
18. The CPRE was established in 1926, championed by architect and planner Patrick Abercrombie who published The Preservation of Rural England, London, in 1926. Betjeman had joined others in the lobby against the infiltration of the countryside by the clutter of signs and plotland development.
19. Listed in a 'Devil's Dictionary', in architect Clough Williams-Ellis's England and the Octopus, Geoffrey Blès, London, 1928.
20. See David Matless, Landscape and Englishness, Reaktion, 1998, pp. 47-8, for the impact of signs and hoardings upon the countryside at this time.
21. Particularly earlier on in Betjeman's post this kind of exposure was typical, e.g. AR, February 1930, pp. 58-9; September 1930, pp. 145-7; October 1930, pp. 150-1; February 1931, p. 147; March 1931, pp. 110-11; May 1931, p. 183.
22. For example, Williams-Ellis, op. cit.
23. and later, Britain and the Beast, Dent, London, 1937;
24. H. H. Peach & N. Carrington (eds.), The Face of the Land, Allen & Unwin, London, 1930 (this last was the DIA yearbook for 1929-30).
25. For an examination of the debates over criteria for and publication of preservation policy during this period, see Matless, op. cit., pp. 25ff.
26. and John Lowerson, 'Battles for the countryside', in Frank Gloversmith (ed.). Class, Culture and Social Change, Harvester Press, Sussex and NJ, 1980, pp. 258-68.
27. Peter Fleetwood Hesketh drew for this pull-out '... "The street of taste, or the march of English art down the ages" with traffic to match. This kind of pull-out was also an old-fashioned thing to do, and the style of architectural caricature was deliberately based on Pugin's caricatures in his book Contrasts (1836)'. Betjeman, GGT, p. x.
28. The Claude Glass is described by Christopher Hussey in his essay, The Picturesque (G. P. Putnam's Sons, London and New York, 1927, p. 107) as 'a plano-convex mirror of about four inches in diameter on a black foil and bound up like a pocketbook which is "... perhaps the best and most convenient substitute for a Camera Obscura". The device was, and to some extent still is, employed by landscape painters in assisting them to determine the tonal values of planes. The slight convexity of the glass, moreover, gathers every scene reflected in it into a tiny picture, and by reducing the colour into a lower ratio, accentuates the tonal values: Much will the Mirrour teach, or evening gray, When o'er some ample space her twilight ray Obscurely gleams; hence Art shall best perceive On distant parts what fainter lines to give (W. Mason, The English Garden, 1772-81, iv.i.529).' Of significance to my argument is the role that artifice played in the use of the Claude Glass, being that of selective viewing, moreover the fact that to use this method the viewer had to place themselves with the required view behind them. It was a borrowed view in this respect.
29. Christopher Hussey was a friend of Betjeman, and in the 1950s they were together on the Royal Fine Art Commission, and the Victorian Society. In the 1970 introduction of GGT, Betjeman acknowledges his debt to Hussey's The Picturesque, GGT, p. xxi.
30. In GGT he celebrated the functional building of the Regency period (p. 67) and the influence of industrialism, citing factories as 'cathedrals' and warehouses 'so plain as to be "modern", so useful as to be terrifying' (p. 83) and the iron and glass railway and public architecture of the Victorian era as 'honest and often imaginative' (pp. 97-8).
31. In Antiquarian Prejudice, op. cit. he argues for the 'decent and convenient mass produced houses' of Germany and America (p. 21), yet his ambivalence to modern functionalism underlies his comment on Etchell's translation of Le Corbusier's Towards a New Architecture, John Rodker, London, 1926, 'which was compulsive and compulsory reading for all who were slightly left and thought that nothing was quite so up to date as the architecture of France and Germany' (GGT, p. xxii) and is born of suspicion of fashion and 'alien' influence.
32. See note 14. Voysey had published Individuality, Chapman & Hall, in 1915.
33. The term 'taste' here also echoes Pugin's use of it in his lengthy title (Contrasts ..., op. cit.). The sentiment is continued by Betjeman.
34. Betjeman, GGT, pp. 16-18.
35. This is quoted from Sir Thomas Jackson, Reason in Architecture, London, 1906, whom Betjeman much admired.
36. Betjeman, 'The death of Modernism', p. 161.
37. Betjeman, Antiquarian Prejudice, p. 19.
38. Betjeman, GGT, p. 19.
39. This correlation was also observed by J. M. Richards (Betjeman's successor at the AR) in his commentary to the frontispiece of F. R. S. Yorke's The Modern House in England, The Architectural Prees, 2nd edn. reprinted 1943 (1937).
40. Betjeman's working relationship and deep admiration for certain of his colleagues, who were avowedly modernist in their outlook, did much at the time to temper his overly romantic attitude whilst in post. GGT, pp. xxii-xxiii.
41. John Betjeman, Mount Zion: or in Touch with the Infinite, The James Press, 1931. James funded the publication.
42. Lycett Green observes that the sub-title was 'presumably adapted from Ralph Waldo Trine's devotional work, In Tune with the Infinite, then in vogue'.
43. Lycett Green, op. cit., pp. 47-8.
44. The coloured papers disappeared altogether by the beginning of 1935, although the paper types remained a distinctive feature of the AR for 'some 60 yean'. The Architectural Review: The First 100 Years, AR, May 1996, p. 43, fn. 8.
45. Hubert de Cronin Hastings and Betjeman shared the same humour, priorities and attitude towards the kind of product the AR was to be. Generally, H devolved most of the editorial decisions to B, according to comments in his letter in Lycett Green, op. cit., p. 123.
46. Moholy Nagy for example, fresh from the Bauhaus, and Bruiguière.
47. 'Maxwell Fry says Dell and Wainwright invented Modernism', AR archive, card 104.
48. 'Hubert de Cronin Hastings: "Details large, general views small"', AR archive, card 94.
49. AR archive, card 92.
50. O. Blakeston & F. Bruiguière, Few Are Chosen, London, 1931. Bruiguière was also filming at this time.
51. John Betjeman, Devon Shell Guide, Architectural Press, 1935, p. 24.
52. See Stanley Baldwin's published speech 'England' in On England and Other Addresses, London, 1926, reprinted Philip Allan, London, 1933.
53. See also Martin Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850-1980, Cambridge University Press, pp. 41-80, for an account of this emerging perspective.
54. English cultural history was being popularized in the form of groups promoting leisure activities, which placed the public in the idealized environments of the rural, landed classes, e.g. walking: 1929, Youth Hostels Association; 1932, Ramblers' Association; the Footpaths Act in 1934 enabled more access to England's countryside; on the conservation front, the Council for the Protection of Rural England was formed in 1926, and in the architectural area, the National Trust Historic Country Houses Scheme was started in 1936 and architects such as Clough Williams-Ellis had popularized architecture and environment in a series of publications since the 1920s: 1924, The Pleasures of Architecture, Jonathan Cape, London, 1928, England and the Octopus; 1937, Britain and the Beast.
55. For an account of this area, see: David Watkin, The Rise of Architectural History, Architectural Press, 1983 (1980)
56. Ch. IV, 'The history of the "English tradition" 1900-1945'.
57. Baldwin, 'England', p. 5.
58. For public perceptions and experience of the English landscape, see Matless, op. cit., pp. 62-100;
59. and John Taylor, A Dream of England: Landscape, Photography and the Tourist's Imagination, Manchester University Press, 1994, in particular pp. 64-89, 126-35.
60. AR, May 1931, p. 184.
61. The Georgian Society, which he was instrumental in founding, was not formed until 1937.
62. Lycett Green, op. cit., p. 102.
63. Cornwall Illustrated was a prototype guidebook commissioned by Beddington which Betjeman worked on during the early 1930s. It was published in 1934.
64. Lycett Green, op. cit., p. 125.
65. Nathaniel Lloyd, The History of the English House, The Architectural Press, London, 1931.
66. I am indebted to Dr Catherine Brace at the University of Exeter for her informative unpublished paper '"The legacy of England": B. T. Batsford, dust jacket art and the formation of English national identity cl920-1950', given at the 1998 AGM and Conference of the Association of Art Historians, in which this notion is explored.
67. AR, September 1933, pp. 96-7, 102-3.
68. As well as hiking, the 1930s also saw a rise in the cult of health and sport. Sunbathing and acquiring a suntan signified the healthy outdoors and the luxury of leisure. Seaside resorts developed hotel and leisure facilities for the extra influx of visitors during summer months, usually in the sleek architectural aesthetic, redolent of ocean-going linen.
69. John Betjeman, 'Leeds: a city of contrasts', AR, October 1933, pp. 129-34.
70. This condition being no more poignant than in its current counterpart, the tension of today's Britain of the European Union, a battleground of an identity where Britain's internal devolution further imposes re-readings of 'English'.