This piece was written by Holland himself and is illustrated with an advertisement he drew for Shell and another set he did for a tobacco company.
FITZROY STREET
By my last College year I had forsaken the Fulham Road for Fitzroy Street, having a room at No 8 Whistler Studios, a house which disappeared during the War or the post-war years, but had housed many well-known artists, from Whistler himself, Sickert, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. Today the site is occupied by advertising agency offices; then Fitzroy Street and its continuation Charlotte Street were near slums, noisy and dusty, with many crowded rag trade workshops and antique furniture factories. Soon after my Shell work developed I was approached by an advertising agency to discuss a proposition and a vast brown Daimler, with chauffeur to match, arrived to convey me to this appointment.
Lord and Thomas was a leading American Agency group with a European office in London, and then handled the large and rewarding Shell account. The arrival of Jack Beddlington at Shell as Publicity Director obviously had the Agency baffled. For one thing, he was new to the advertising game; equally clearly he had little respect for American advertising or for its accepted practitioners. The only certainty was that he approved my drawings, since he sent them to the Agency to be used in the current campaigns, so they took the understandable course of offering me about twice what I might earn by teaching in an art school, to join their staff. It was not a hard decision to take, like most second steps on the primrose path.
Small as the Agency was by post-war standards, when the leaders might employ staff of many hundreds or a thousand, it handled in addition to Shell some important accounts, the most demanding being a great US tobacco corporation, which was on the point of launching an American style cigarette on the British market. The parent company was based in Chicago, its head alleged to be the Czar of tobacco advertising and the villain of at least one huckstering novella of the period.
The new cigarette was to resemble the Lucky Strike brand and carried the caption “It’s Toasted”, though what the benefit of this alleged processing was supposed to offer I can no longer recall. It was to be soft-packed in the American or continental manner, quite unlike the British Gold Flake Craven A tradition, to mention only tow of the popular brands of the day. The launching campaign therefore had to overcome a number of native prejudices, and was to consist of showers of testimonials from all facets of British life - jockeys, poets, actors and actresses of course, politicians, leaders of society, night club entertainers, writers, dramatists, artists, legal eagles, columnists, trainers, boxers, City men, bon viveurs, debutantes and the peerage in general. I do not recall now any bishops or law lords contributing, but certainly the Sitwells, Lady Diana Duff Cooper, Margot Asquith, Lord Castlerosse I do remember, no less than the panic that overtook the chief copywriter when a cablegram from Chicago commanded “Get testimonial signature George Bernard Shaw.”
It was a testimonial to the power of the press and well-financed advertising that for two or three weeks this innovation was forced into the top-selling brand position, an eminence it could not sustain once curiosity had been satisfied. It eventually declined to be one of those less familiar packs that only the most sophisticated and eclectic of tobacconists would choose to display.
Many of the required testimonials were secured in the small hours, in night clubs and cabarets, and the agency staff would be expected to stand by until one or two o’clock in the morning, when the two London directors would return, not always very sure of foot or speech, to hand over the night’s haul to be rushed through the necessary processes and appear in the first available editions. When all had been put in hand we adjoined to a nearby family hotel much favoured by returned colonial officers and missionaries, where the younger members would be dissuaded by the management from playing football in bathrooms and corridors and we would bed down, to saunter back to the Agency by the following midday to repeat the routine, sometimes for a week at a time. It was possible to buy a way out of any difficulty, as for instance when the Daily Mail instituted a Truth in Advertising campaign that seemed to threaten the claim that the tobacco was toasted.
Enlightening as was this intensive experience of old style advertising techniques at their most cynical, it was not for this I came to feel, that I had spent my years as an art student, and when the inevitable happened and Jack Beddington transferred the Shell account to a smaller British agency, I felt that my loyalties and interests lay more with the account than the Agency and offered my resignation.
This was received in the best tradition of the taciturn business man, the managing director dropping a bundle of pound notes in front of me with the valediction “No ill feelings, but don’t come back this afternoon.” Sensible enough in retrospect I decided, though unexpected at the time and very deflating.
It was Easter, and with money in my pocket, where else to head but to Paris. There, two days later and after midnight, I was sitting with a painter friend in the Rotonde at Montparnasse, when in the mirror I was facing I saw the agency staff descending the staircase that lead from the dance floor. Shutting my eyes on what could have been a drink inspired vision, a slap on the shoulder established the reality of the encounter. It seemed that after my defection, Chicago had launched a cereal campaign for a hypothetical continental market and the whole crew had been flown over at short notice to work on this in Paris. It was in character that they were flown back just as unexpectedly, as we were later assured by two young ladies in afternoon negligée left to mourn their departure in one of the expensive hotel suites they had occupied. It was equally in character that shortly afterward, on a similar Paris foray, the managing director expired in embarrassing circumstances, and the misadventures of his colleague, which involved protracted convalescence in a Swiss clinic and his resignation, lead to the London office being drastically re-organized by its American overlords.
I was now freelancing, chiefly for the English agency which now handled the Shell account. Nothing could have been less like the American approach, more English, even amateurish, than the operating of this agency. It was owned and more or less consisted of a middle-aged copywriter who had made his name with a regular miscellany for Fortnum and Mason. At some time this had been described by George Bernard Shaw as the only contemporary comic writing he found admirable or words to that effect, and this benediction was used extensively in the agency’s own publicity. This self-declared misogynist lived with an aged mother near Westminster Cathedral, from which he set out every morning with stacks of flimsies covered with ideas, captions, copy and sketches so enigmatic that they in turn required explanatory captions - “This is a man looking at the moon through a telescope and seeing a filling station with petrol pumps etc.”
Almost every day I was summoned to collect a batch of these inspirations to see what I could make of them visually, summonses which often started with adjurations to avoid marriage if one would have a productive and rewarding life. Beddington had at this time taken on as personal assistant Nicholas Bentley, who claimed that one of his previous jobs had been as circus clown, and continued as office clown by filling the misogynist’s umbrella with confetti when opportunity presented itself. This freelance life gave me, if not the best of both worlds, some opportunity to do my own work, and I was able to exhibit the occasional painting or print at a variety of exhibitions.
This was the beginning of the thirties, and few decades have been more fully written up, or with greater insight than the late twenties and the thirties, the years when the post Great war generation was coming to maturity. Evelyn Waugh, Christopher Isherwood, Anthony Powell and above all George Orwell have given their own accounts of the period and there are many others. But writers and poets were not the only creative people to be affected by the unsettled intellectual climate, my only reason for offering my own reflections on the years so well described in the work of the authors listed above.
Orwell, in “Inside the Whale”, claims that as early as 1934 and 35 it was considered eccentric in literary circles not to be more or less “left”. “Communism” was simply something to believe in; here was a Church, an army, an orthodoxy, a discipline ... the Communism of the English intellectual is something explicable enough. It is the patriotism of the deracinated.” Orwell and re-read for his uncompromising analysis of his literary contemporaries; in the same essay he comments that while the outstanding writers of the earlier years, the twenties, were of very varied origins - and most of them at some time had to struggle against poverty, neglect and even downright persecution ... nearly all the younger writers of the thirties fitted easily into the public school, university, Bloomsbury pattern.
While artists and graphic designers have come from a wider class range, including those in which flourish the artisan skills, they are not so quickly responsive to the moods and trends of the age, and the retreat to the Ivory Tower need not always be a reproach. With few exceptions the more advanced painting of the twenties might be described as Post Impressionism anglicized. Much of it marched under the banner of Significant Form, a phrase the significance of which was never very clear. Content mattered little, manner and treatment everything.