DESIGN

London Calling

London Transport Museum Head Curator Matt Brosnan uncovers the stories behind ten iconic Boat Race posters

WORDS MATT BROSNAN

If you travel regularly on London’s vast public transport system today, you will see image-rich posters all around you, increasingly supplemented with digital advertising.

Yet in the early twentieth century, the use of pictorial posters was a new and novel thing. Posters quickly became one of the major forms of mass communication and the examples published by the London Underground and London Transport were both effective and eye-catching.

This all started in 1908, when the Underground’s Publicity Manager, Frank Pick, commissioned the organisation’s first ever pictorial poster. Before this time, most posters were based solely on lettering and typography and were plastered all over platforms, walkways and station exteriors in an indiscriminate mess of advertising. The various underground railways were separate, private companies with their own approach to signs and maps.

“It appears The Boat Race was among one of the very first sporting events to feature in an Underground poster, with the first instance dating from 1911.”

As someone who grew up in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, Frank Pick appreciated how navigating your way around the capital’s transport network could be confusing. At the same time, he was part of a growing organisation called the Underground Group, which in a short period brought together several of the previously separate underground railways into one company. This gave him the opportunity to start the process of creating what would eventually become one of the best-known brand identities in the world.

Boat Race Day; Saturday 30th March (1912) by Charles Sharland

This example by the designer Charles Sharland is among the earliest Boat Race posters published by the Underground in 1912. It presents an attractive bird’s eye view of the race in progress, the two boats leaving watery ripples in their wakes. The lettering at the top of the poster, with a large ‘U’ and ‘D’, was part of the Underground Group’s branding in this early part of the twentieth century, with this lettering often appearing on posters, maps and even tiling. Charles Sharland designed 108 posters for the Underground between 1908 and 1922 through his role as a designer for Waterlow & Sons, one of the Underground’s most trusted printers of posters.

Boat Race (1924) by Kate M Burrell and Bernard Leslie Kearley

Boat Race 1923 (1923) by Charles Paine

Boat Race (1921) by Charles Paine

By the 1920s, the Underground’s posters were widely known as a byword for artistic quality. These three Boat Race posters from the 1920s all adopt similar styles, using shades of blue to emphasise the water and the colours associated with the two universities. They use flat colour rather than extensive shading to make the posters bold, very much reflecting the style of the time. They also all have echoes of art deco style, a growing influence in the 1920s, from the geometric shapes of the boats and oars to the stylish typography.

In 1908, the Underground Group first started using a clear motif for its station signs. This was initially a solid red disc with a bar through the middle, bearing the name of the station against a blue background. You can still see a few examples of these on the network today, as well as numerous examples in the London Transport Museum collection. Around ten years later, this symbol was further refined into what was sometimes referred to as the ‘bull’s eye’, or simply roundel, by a designer called Edward Johnston.

Frank Pick commissioned Johnston to design a signature typeface for the Underground, which is known as the Johnston font and is still used, in mildly updated form, by Transport for London (TfL) today. It is also the official font of The Boat Race. Johnston then took on the redesign of the roundel, incorporating his Johnston font within associated signage. This was rolled out across the 1920s and 1930s. By the time all of London’s Underground, bus and tram services were brought together under a unified London Transport in 1933, the organisation already had a signature style ready to be further deployed. Fittingly, London Transport’s founding Chief Executive was Frank Pick, the person who initiated this process.

Posters were also a key part of this identity. After Pick had commissioned the Underground Group’s first pictorial poster in 1908, the organisation quickly worked with an increasing array of artists and designers to produce attractive and striking posters to promote the network. In these early years, the posters were intended to encourage customers to use the Underground more. This was at a point when the Underground Group was a large, private company looking to generate income. Later on, particularly after the creation of London Transport, the aim was to sustain the usefulness and operation of the wider network, as well as to generally associate the organisation with high quality art and design and a cohesive brand identity.

The posters themselves tended to emphasise the destination rather than the means of getting there. This meant they often depicted interesting places to visit and major events that travellers would want to attend, all reachable by public transport. The most common subjects for Underground and London Transport posters were trips to places like Kew Gardens, the Zoo and London’s many museums and galleries, as well as ceremonial or sporting occasions like Trooping the Colour, Wimbledon, the FA Cup football final and the latest cricket Test match.

This meant that the historic Boat Race between the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, taking place along the River Thames every year, was a completely natural topic for Underground and London Transport posters.

In fact, it appears that the Boat Race was among one of the very first sporting events to feature in an Underground poster, with the first instance of this dating from 1911, only three years after the first Underground pictorial poster.

At London Transport Museum we are fortunate to hold around 34,000 posters, representing around 7,000 individual designs, which represent the poster commissioning of the Underground, London Transport and, since 2000, Transport for London. This is one of the best collections of British twentieth century graphic design. Among this total, around 125 posters relate to the Boat Race, with around 50 individual designs.

Boat Race (1932) by Vera Willoughby

Boat Race Saturday (1933) by Andre Edouard Marty

These two posters date from around the time of London Transport’s creation in 1933, by which time the network’s posters were well renowned. Vera Willoughby (1870-1939) was one of many artists who enhanced their reputations with London Transport poster commissions, with her design here a particularly interesting one. She directly links the Boat Race in progress, both water and spectators coordinated in Oxbridge blues, with the Underground train beneath. It was less common for vehicles to feature in tandem with the event itself in a poster. By contrast, the design by French artist André Édouard Marty (1882-1974) is more minimal, using his characteristically restrained colour palette. Marty was known for his fashion illustrations for the likes of Vogue and Vanity Fair, the style of which is very much reflected in this poster.

Boat Race April 6th 2.45pm (1935) by Herry Perry

Boat Race (1937) by Percy Drake Brookshaw

Both these poster from the mid-1930s use shades of blue and green to create unified designs, as well as emphasising the synchronised movement of the boat crews on the water. Herry Perry (1897-1962) was a wood engraver, graphic artist and painter perhaps best known for the 54 posters she designed for the Underground and London Transport between 1928 and 1937. She was particularly prolific in designing smaller format posters like these, known as panel posters, which were often used to promote sporting events. They were usually displayed inside glass panels within the interiors of Tube trains. The panel poster by Percy Drake Brookshaw (1907-1993) advertises the Boat Race of 1937, with his design placing emphasis on the back-breaking exertion of the rowers.

Boat Race (1951) by Tom Eckersley

Boat Races (1959) by Anne Hickmott

These two panel posters both date from the 1950s and utilise the distinctive blues of Cambridge and Oxford. Tom Eckersley (1914-1997) playfully creates characters out of a pair of wooden oars, bellowing out instructions to their crews in colour-coordinated gear. Eckersley was a hugely influential poster designer active from the 1930s right up to the 1990s and designed numerous posters for London Transport. The design by Anne Hickmott (born 1935) is her only poster for London Transport, using a distinctive graphic style that reflected her work as a printmaker. A red dot represents each rower and cox, tying the design to the red Underground lettering and roundel in the bottom left and top right corners of the poster.

By the time Anne Hickmott’s poster was published in 1959, the influence of posters as a means of communication to a mass audience was on the wane. The advent of television advertising and other forms of media meant the poster was not as dominant as it once was. London Transport published fewer posters and commissioned fewer individual poster artists, with advertising agencies increasingly employed to produce campaigns that included TV, radio and poster advertising.

While today Transport for London commissions far fewer posters than London Transport’s mid-century heyday, there have still been Boat Race posters in the twenty-first century. Transport for London also continues to use many aspects of its timeless design identity, from the use of the Johnston font and roundel to the ongoing Art on the Underground programme that displays contemporary art around the network. London’s public transport continues to keep the city moving, including transporting spectators to the banks of the River Thames to enjoy one of the capital’s historic sporting occasions. •

London Transport Museum’s collection documents the story of how art and design has influenced transport in the capital. Visitors to the Covent Garden Museum can now explore its latest exhibition, Art deco: the golden age of poster design. Hosted in its Global Poster Gallery, the exhibition features original 1920s and 1930s transport posters and artworks, photography, short films, ceramics and other objects to mark the centenary of the 1925 Paris exhibition where art deco originated.

www.ltmuseum.co.uk