The Subterranean Railway (33 page)

Ultimately, Pick was relaxed about having being ‘nationalized’. As his biographer puts it, ‘Pick had always been willing to accept the principle of public control, not as a good thing in itself, but as an evil necessary to check and restrain another and greater evil – the rapacity of a profit-hungry business enjoying monopolistic power. He saw the LPTB as an experiment in monopoly power which might give London better forms of public administration … “It is a new start in life. All that I have done in the past may be forgotten.”’
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In his letter accepting the job at LT, he wrote: ‘Now begins the tussle to show that the board of public character can conduct its business on strictly commercial lines.’
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It was, like so much of the Underground’s history, a great experiment. And it was a big organization. At its establishment LT employed over 70,500 staff, which rose to almost 100,000 by 1947. LT did everything. It encompassed the whole supply chain in a way that is unheard of today when outsourcing is the norm. LT designed its own trains and buses, ran a myriad of support services such as food production and engineering shops, and looked after its employees in a benevolent way. Indeed, LT was seen as a good employer, offering relatively high wages, staff messrooms, sports associations and the prospect of a retirement home. The job was secure, too, during a period when unemployment was an ever-present fear. The wages of
the disparate organizations which made up LT were harmonized, largely upwards, to give the staff a sense of belonging. It was a uniform service, run to some extent, like the railways, on militaristic lines, and promotion was on a ‘Buggins’s turn’ basis, through longevity rather than ability. The good conditions were partly a result of Pick’s policy of paying fair wages with the expectation of high standards in return, but the staff were also very strongly unionized. The ability to go on strike has always been a powerful weapon for transport workers, since they are in a strong position to wreck the economics of their employer. Train drivers were relatively well paid, getting ninety-three shillings (around fifty times more in 2012 money, say £250) per week after six years’ service while a guard with a similar length of service received sixty-eight shillings. Booking clerks were paid something in between those two. Pick himself did all right, earning £10,000 per year, an enormous sum equivalent to £400,000 today, which was surprisingly uncontroversial.

Despite the glowing reputation of London Transport in this period, there was never a clear notion of how best to run the organization. There were frequent changes in structure, ranging from lumping all the operations under one head to creating separate divisions for the various modes of travel. Indeed, the success of London Transport during this period owes more to the individuals who were in charge than to the structures they managed. Pick was in no doubt about this.

The London Underground was, by the time of the inauguration of London Transport, at its historic best in terms of service, with many of the central stations refurbished and some of the extensions that now stretched deep into the suburbs beginning to be well used. It had expanded further in the east with the District reaching Upminster in 1932. Overcrowding, which had often been the source of complaint in the 1920s, remained, but there was more capacity in the network and, with a lot of new rolling stock, many passengers’ perception of the system was a favourable one. However, much investment was still
needed but the scheme devised by Ashfield and Pick, the New Works Programme, could not be started until 1935 when, again, government terms were favourable and the structure of London Transport had begun to settle down. In the meantime, there were growing numbers of passengers – 416 million in 1934 – and the organization’s confidence in its own status was shown by its occupation of the Charles Holden-designed building at 55 Broadway over St James’s Park station as its headquarters. That stark modern temple was the tallest office building in London when it opened in 1929, though its height was somewhat disguised by its bulk and the way that the floors are broken up in rectangular sections. The Broadway block had caused a furore when it was first built because of the two statues of nudes by Jacob Epstein overlooking the street. One displayed the male organ in all its splendour, but fortunately they were at first-floor level, making them vandal-(or rather philistine-) proof, and they survived, remaining largely unnoticed by the public today.

The hiatus from the lengthy birth pangs of London Transport created a backlog of investment in the existing system, and the need for various long-discussed extensions had become more pressing. Again, as had become the pattern, the investment plans had to wait for the government to initiate yet another Keynesian-style programme to bring down unemployment. This happened in 1935 and Ashfield and Pick were, as ever, ready with a whole host of schemes and plans which they dusted down with great haste to present to the government. The overall scheme was a joint plan with the railways of which the main elements for the Underground were extensions both eastwards and westwards to the Central; taking the Highgate section of the Northern out to East Finchley and, eventually, High Barnet, Bushey and Alexandra Palace (sadly the latter two were dropped); sorting out the bottleneck between Baker Street and Waterloo; reconstructing several stations including King’s Cross; and various other important ancillary works such as improving the power supply. The total estimate of the cost was £40m, later increased to £45m, financed by
money raised with government backing, which meant it cost £330,000 less in interest annually than if it had been borrowed at commercial rates. It was an arrangement under which, as one historian put it, ‘Pick and Ashfield were able to run a public corporation raising funds where they saw fit, with little day to day interference from government and none from the private sector. They worked exclusively in the public interest but without their hands tied by political or economic dogma.’
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Apart from not including the suburban railways, the other flaw in the design of London Transport – as Pick had foreseen – was that it had been burdened with debt rather than given the clean financial slate it needed. In a speech in November 1936, Ashfield warned that the financial prospect was not a cheerful one. The rising cost of wages and pensions, demand for provision for renewals, stock redemption arrangements and the expense of financing extensions into the suburbs would mean that LT would be running a £3m deficit annually by the mid-1940s. As the war intervened, changing completely the finances of the organization and blocking the last part of the investment programme, Ashfield’s prediction was never put to the test.

London Transport may have enjoyed a heyday during this period but it never really had time to settle down. Within six brief years of its creation, Britain was at war, and in between the organization had to bed itself in, implement a massive investment programme and cope with a growing financial crisis. It was, indeed, a successful organization, but it is remembered as such largely because of its brilliant public relations, notably its huge range of memorable posters, and the sheer consistency of design, policed so carefully by Pick.

By the time of the creation of London Transport, the Underground’s tradition of innovative design had been in place for twenty years. Pick was a great pioneer in that respect, understanding right from the beginning the importance of good design in conveying the objectives of an organization. In 1909 Pick, who had frequently complained about the poor quality of the Underground Company’s promotional material, was appointed traffic development officer with a remit to
take responsibility for the design of its publicity literature; a task, incidentally, for which he was totally unqualified given that he was a solicitor by profession. What he did have, though, was a tremendous eye for design, and he can lay claim for establishing the image of London Transport as we know it. Every poster had a message to convey which was part of a wider purpose, that of convincing the public that the Underground system was an easy, convenient, fast, reliable and safe form of transport. The legacy of London Underground in commissioning art works is unique among transport organizations or, probably, among commercial business of any kind. As Pick’s biographer puts it:

For anybody who was strange to London, uncertain of the way, uncertain of the time it would take to get there, the posters were there to say: walk this way, the Underground will take care of you. An underground liftman standing beside his open gate calls ‘let us give you a lift’; the underground stations are chessmen on a board beneath which is printed ‘your next move’; another time the mood switches to the poetical but it is tongue in cheek: the underground railways are soaring female figures that bear above their heads a crepuscular London skyline gathered under the ball and cross of St Paul’s.
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One of the earliest posters commissioned by Pick shows his ability to use design to wider effect. The poster depicts a stylized idyllic family scene, a cunningly disguised semi-detached house, with no other housing anywhere to be seen as even the other half of the building is cut off by the edge. Produced in 1908 soon after the opening of the Hampstead railway, the poster simply says ‘Golders Green A place of delightful prospects’. The railway terminated there at the time and it is the weekend, probably a Saturday. The man is busy watering his sunflowers while the woman is sitting in a chair rolling a ball of wool, a three-year-old straight out of a Pears soap advertisement at her feet.
You can almost feel the balmy air, and, just to make sure, there is a poem stressing the quietness of the scene and its distance from the hubbub of the metropolis.

The posters selected by Pick reflect his personality and those designed in the early days of London Transport very much reflect the Zeitgeist. They show a self-confidence with a slightly patronizing do-gooder tone but their artistry and elegance make one forget that. They exhort Londoners to travel by the Underground: perhaps to go to the Wimbledon tennis or a walk in the Chiltern Hills, using one of the three books of walks published by London Underground. Fresh air was certainly a common theme. But Pick and the others who commissioned the artists were not scared of posters with an elliptical message. For example, one by Graham Sutherland shows no people, just a desk with a typewriter and a torn newspaper cutting that starts: ‘Go out in the country. The spring days which come in mid-winter are always the best of the year …’ Several posters from the 1930s have a Soviet feel, with heavy-set workers toiling and powerful images of tools or engines.

There are not many organizations which can lay claim to having commissioned their own typeface in order to establish their identity. In 1915, Pick asked Edward Johnston, a leading calligrapher, to develop a typeface for station signage and posters. The result, Johnston, is familiar to all Londoners and still in use today; Johnston worked with the Underground and then London Transport for the rest of his life. Yet although the script was widely adopted for notices and posters, Pick did not require his designers always to use Johnston. There are many examples of other typefaces, but somehow there is a unity of image that marks out printed material for London Transport produced during Pick’s tenure. One strange exception to the overall excellence was the tickets, whose format has been circumscribed more by what the automatic dispensers, first used in 1908, were able to issue cheaply – particularly after self-printing ticket machines were introduced in 1930 – than by any design considerations.

As a demonstration of just how far Pick went in maintaining high design standards, in the Acton depot of the London Transport museum there is a beautiful 1930s style oval table, covered in green baize with an embossed fleur-de-lis pattern around the rim, on which he held meetings in his office. The eight chairs around the table are also stylish, simple and armless, covered in a pleasing mauve woollen material speckled with blue and red which appears so durable that the whole set looks as if it is being offered for sale as new. The cupboard, which appears to have been standard, is even more solid. It is a miniature of the front of the 55 Broadway building, square with flat two-inch bevelled edges and the three slightly raised square panels that make it unmistakably 1930s. Pick had selected all this furniture as a way of emphasizing the unity of image and purpose of London Transport.

The consistent quality of the posters commissioned by Pick was not happenstance. For Pick, good design was good business and he expended an enormous amount of energy and thought into it. While the quality of the work had already attracted widespread admiration by the early 1930s, the establishment of LT with its corporate strength and financial stability gave Pick a wonderful platform to pursue his interest in showing how design could establish the image of an organization and be used for marketing its services, convincing the public that every care had been taken in providing them with the best possible service. Unlike the Underground Company, which had been one among many competing organizations, London Transport represented the whole of the capital; and given this single public authority responsible for bus, tram and underground railway operations, Pick saw it as essential to develop a design ethic for the whole organization. The board backed him in these efforts not only because they recognized that establishing such an identity was important in presenting a good face to the public but also, as the historians of LT design put it, because ‘the new board saw immediately that if the group was to function effectively, it must replace that loyalty [to their previous employers] with an allegiance to the new organization’.
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Consequently, the new identity was used as a business tool both to display to the public the integrated transport system and also to unite the workforce. This corporate image, a novel concept expressed particularly through the logo,
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was immediately displayed everywhere in the capital – on liveries, uniforms, signage and printed material. Indeed, because Pick and Ashfield sought to widen their organization’s services as far as possible to what, today, would be known as the ‘travel to work area’, the logo and LT’s neat liveries could be seen on country buses and Green Line coaches in towns and villages as far as fifty miles from the centre of the capital.