written by George Fejer (1990s)

edited by Juli Fejer (2025)

 

The conventional way to profile what followed the boringly-elegant designs of the 1930s, and the non-designs of the embattled 1940s, is to describe the oeuvre of a handful of outstanding designers.  This can be done in a fairly arbitrary fashion, just take Raymond Loewy, Walter Darwin Teague and Buckminster Fuller of the USA, Arne Jacobsen and a few of the big Swedish/Danish designers, Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Brewer of the émigrés, the Russells (Dick and Gordon) the Days (Robin and Lucienne) and Bob Heritage from England, plus a few of the countless brilliant Italians from Gio Ponti onwards.

 

Such an approach highlights the peaks of achievement which is standard practice among art historians so much under the spell of hero worship.  The picture you get in a museum of an era is usually that of bright highlights – the peaks of human achievement.  Never mind the humdrum, the valleys.  Maybe it all comes from the appreciation of ancient Egyptian art with its obelisks and pyramids surviving but not much of the humble dwellings of the toiling masses which vanished into sand.

 

I remember the’ 50s in England vividly.  Whoever is going to write the history of every day industrial design of the sort that people actually understood, the furniture they actually bought (rather than looked at) will need the information which is lurking in the minds, files and plan chests of the humble footsoldiers of design, the sort of projects I and my studio handled – and got paid for.  Nothing heroic – not the stuff that personality cults are made of, but vitally characteristic of a decade that climbed on the back of the early 20th century and influenced the rest of it.  So here is my “mass observation of one” which I hope will be added to those of colleagues, still around to tell their tales.

 

The decade started on a note of high hopes, following soon after the “BRITAIN CAN MAKE IT” exhibition at the V&A in 1947.  This exhibition set the mood but not the conditions under which Britain could actually deliver the goods.  There was a whole world outside to be rebuilt after the destructions of war.  Entrepreneurs and industrialists had proved that they could achieve the virtually impossible with little help from the rest of the world, and were bulging with self-confidence and newly acquired expertise in all fields – except industrial design.

 

The Council of Industrial Design was one of a string of new agencies to steer manufacturers to greater competence and expertise in advancing quality in all things.  The entrepreneurs of Britain made a beeline to the Council of Industrial Design to find out what to make instead of bombs and uniforms.  Rationing was still on.  Against this background a relatively new breed of expertise came into force.  Whoever heard of industrial design in prewar days?

 

The idea of a “FESTIVAL OF BRITAIN” came into being to stimulate creative ideas and commemorate the Great Exhibition of 1851.  The idea was stimulating, fun and taking the slogan “Export or Die” seriously – all at the same time.  It was also intended to show that architecture and industrial design were not just foreign ideas.  “Literati” and publicists got together with professionals from the visual arts to spark off a nationwide event with its centre of gravity on London’s Southbank and Battersea Funfair, but with travelling exhibitions.  It is characteristic of the era, that the Festival Presentation Board, under the chairmanship of Gerald Barry was actually dominated by designers of calibre.  Misha Black, Hugh Casson, James Gardner, Mark Hartland Thomas and James Holland – names most of us can recall years later, because they proved influential long after the Festival.

 

It is worth remembering also that by 1950 the standard of exhibition design was very high.  Big names like Basil Spence (of Coventry Cathedral fame) and nearly all the prestigious architects’ offices were engaged with exhibition projects.  Even one-man firms were busy with stands for Earls Court, Olympia, Castle Bromwich (B.I.F) and there was no shortage of expertise or skilled contractors.  When picking the designers for the Festival, the team included people like Henrion, Wells Coates, Beverley Pick, RD Russell, Robin Day, R Guyatt, Stefan Buzas and a dozen more big names.

 

Warnett Kennedy – who went to Canada – often delegated the smaller and more difficult stands to me, so when he was faced with the entire interior of the Power and Production Pavilion (next to the Dome of Discoveries) I was given three sections.

 

• Plastics Industry in Britain

• Rubber Industry in Britain

• Commerce in Britain

These proved difficult because the client was not just the Festival Authority but numerous trade associations which produced miles of briefing with hundreds of books and umpteen statistical references to absorb, before attempting to start the design.

 

It is difficult to imagine now what the profile of the plastics industry was back then.  There were practically no styrenes, which later became the workhorse of the industry, and injection mouldings were rare and unreliable compared with solid bakelite compression mouldings.  Yet, all the growing points were already in place to allow the spectacular developments of plastics that followed.

 

One sketch for the Rubber Industry stand showed the hundreds of small exhibits that had to be considered, prepared, fixed and explained on captions.  Its history and achievements, had to be displayed and captioned, after studying miles of literature and technical data. 

 

The Commerce display presented a different problem.  I got my briefing from people like Lloyds, the Port of London, the insurance groups, and having drawn up a briefing I progressed to a presentation of expensive “vitrines” filled with dioramas, back-lit transparencies and figurines to represent units of statistics.  the picturesque background to British insurance was displayed using fire plaques and fiery horses speeding the private fire fighters and pumps.  Paintings of the old East India docks and drawings of the great Eastern laying the first transatlantic cable came in handy to present Commerce as a flywheel that connects manufacturing with worldwide markets.

 

New products and new markets were being invented.  We designers sincerely believed in those worldwide markets being dependent on what we did on our drawing boards and in the factories of the UK.  And that the whole of the built environment needed revolutionary changes. 

 

To continue with my “mass observation of one” here are a few tales that have never been told (a consultant’s lips are sealed – up to a point!)

 

Venesta Ltd were traditionally in the habit of commissioning industrial designers of calibre like Serge Chermayeff, before he went to Chicago.  They kept me busy for years inventing metal and wood structures PLYMAX, VENDURA &VENDURAFORM – some of which were used in ships, buses and station wagons.  In those days cars were not only designed abroad.

 

Brockhouse Industries first commissioned me to design exhibition stands and caravans for them.  They also had an interesting product based on the old wartime paratrooper’s bike (that came down in containers) which they wanted to update.  We all felt that there was something in the air about scooters.  Our design was somewhat ahead of the Vespa and Lambretta of Italy, both in time and in ergonomics, but our schemes got pushed on the back burner. 

 

In the early 1950s people became very energy conscious.  The Ladybird rechargeable- at- home electric car which I designed was much admired at the Council of Industrial Design but my contacts (Lansing Bagnall, which made forklift trucks) decided that the time for electric vehicles had not yet arrived!

 

Morphy Richards was another client.  Initially I designed door chimes for them.  DW Morphy (a very good designer in his own right) was very interested in my concept of reviving the hay box idea with slow cooking you need little input of heat and there is much saving of energy through insulation.  Morphy and his chief engineer Russell (Russell Hobbs fame later) encouraged me to design and invent and patented a cook pot, we called “Simmerpot”.  This did indeed simmer from 1951 to 1955.  The patent was assigned to Morphy Richards but they never made it due to the phenomenal success of the products already running.  Maybe “they also serve” who just wait to bring out new lines when old ones fail.

 

American alarm clocks were coming in and Westclox made them in Dumbarton.  The company commissioned me in 1951 to design new cases around the existing movements to appeal to the UK market.  Our collaboration broke down, however, due to my inability to acquire the Scottish language in order to communicate with the enthusiastic and able engineers in Dumbarton.

 

Hygena were a successful company making 3 foot and 4 foot-wide dome-topped kitchen cabinets in large numbers.  The Directors, Arthur Webb and George Nunn, felt that something else needed looking into.  In 1953 they asked the Council of Industrial Design for names of possible design consultants to join them in crystal-ball-gazing.  I was the first to roll up in my Morris Minor for an interview.  It was made very clear to me that Hygena being enormously successful with freestanding cabinets did not want some designer to “innovate the company right out of business”.  I came away with a commission worth £70 to redesign the interior of a cabinet.  For the next 20 years we were successful in all our new designs.  Eventually there were Hygena kitchens in most roads in all large towns and Hygena became a brand leader in production and distribution of kitchen units.  We even nibbled at the appliance market.  In fact, one of the first things I proposed to them was a built-in refrigerator, built as part of the storage unit system.  (I had to shop around to find a motor compressor, stacked condenser, thermostat, insulation and other parts.)

 

Meanwhile the big engineering firms like AEI – Hotpoint, and Electrolux, were working full steam on metal box cabinets.  But in 1958 I was asked by Hotpoint to design for them.  They were moderately receptive to my enthusiasm for coordinating kitchen cabinetry with refrigerators, but accepted certain basic ideas which led to the built in-or built-out concept.

 

Hotpoint co-operated with Hygena and we nearly designed that ideal combination of units-plus-appliances made to fit together.  The Iced Diamond refrigerators were launched at the end of the decade after some epic struggles in design and prototype work.  The vacuum cleaner I designed for Hotpoint, however, never went into production.  Their salespeople thought it bore no resemblance to Hoover and would therefore never sell.

 

No such constraints were applied by Corfield-Sigg, when I worked on their Crown Merton brand of holloware.  My studio was employed between 1955 and the takeover of 1972 to produce all the designs for kettles, pots and pans and stainless-steel kitchen tools, while the firm made their own diecastings, plastic mouldings, flow turnings, pressings in aluminium and stainless steel.  We learned a great deal about how to co-operate with all levels successfully in harmony with the firm’s engineers and sales staff.

 

At this time my studio was also busy with lots of little projects designing handles and locks, a children’s sewing machine (Sydney & Bird) sales aids, and of course the inevitable exhibition display stands like the one for Croxton and Garry in 1957.

 

Another preoccupation of the 1950s was the redesign of all things to sit on.  Public seating, armchairs, unit seating chairs that nest, plastic seat shells, metal chairs – all had changed by the end of the decade.  We designers were set on the idea of creating the most perfect chair.  All the big Danish designers did well.  Robin Day’s polyprop chair became an omnipresent cheap classic.  Ernest Race’s work rocketed to fame.  My client Arthur Webb (of Hygena) acquired another Liverpool firm called Guy Rogers Ltd, who were doing well with cheap fireside chairs and leathercloth three-piece suites in the North.  “I want you to design a range that is cosmopolitan rather than provincial and suits the home and the contract field equally well – in other words repeat the Hygena success!”  So we did just that, by designing the sort of products that were totally missing and marginally improving others, also designing the showrooms and exhibitions of the company.  Between 1955 and 1971 we designed dozens of ranges with an inner grid of standardisation and utilisation linking many of them.  The company grew in stature and esteem so much so that it became a target for a takeover bid.

 

My studio was commissioned to rethink the CWS Furniture range.  This is a story that I have never told until now and which for students of design presents a cautionary tale.  We were asked to design 3 ranges for 3 factories: bedrooms for Enfield, dining furniture for Radcliffe and wardrobes for Shirley, Birmingham, under the unifying concept of the “Universe” range (no less!).  Between 1958 and 1960 we worked very hard but we did not realise that there was a fatal flaw in the way the project had been set up.  The CWS Furniture was only available through Co-op stores, but the stores were not restricted to selling the CWS.  In fact, they preferred nationally-advertised competitor products and lured the customer to them by giving discounts.  A no-win situation which guaranteed commercial failure, which I did not spot until years later.

 

Similar difficulties beset another client Remploy Ltd, for whom I designed electrical appliances – irons, blower heaters and radiant fires.  There was an uneasy interface between these products and those of the “free market” where there were no special conditions for the workforce.

 

So here is my personal account of design projects in the 1950s, each with a different pattern of serving clients and a very wide public.  There were, of course, other projects and more repetitive types of work. My case studies characterise the sort of projects that the ordinary rank and file of designers were tackling.  They do not portray all the designs of the 50s, but they do give one designer’s personal view of that decade.  In all, the decade was a very significant link between the years of recovery from the Second World War and the new age of the 1960s.  Looking back, I ask myself whether we, designers, exerted the right influences on the built environment and the products?