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OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 19/8/2021, SPi
Picturing England
between the Wars
Word and Image 1918–1940
STUART SILLARS
1
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 19/8/2021, SPi
3
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© Stuart Sillars 2021
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First Edition published in 2021
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OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 19/8/2021, SPi
Contents
Prologue ix
List of Figures xv
List of Plates xxi
A Note on Illustrations xxv
Acknowledgements xxvii
Introduction 1
viii
Prologue
Visible Silence, Still as the Hour Glass
Like the Cenotaph, the empty tomb designed by Edwin Lutyens, a larger absent
presence broods over the years between wars, the time aptly defined as the twenty-
year truce: the fifty-one months and three days of severance, loss and bewildered
suffering that, already in 1920, had been called the First World War. Any address,
familial, local, national, must rest on some awareness of this massive collective
bereavement, and the efforts to come to terms with it. Language stumbles; some
broader avenue of purpose, longer and firmer, demands itself. Within and along
words surfaces the idea of an older nature, shared within a visionary company,
now yearned for through ideals and desires of the present.
The sheer physical nature of the Cenotaph, insistent in its emptiness, is just as
revealing about patterns of idea, thought and belief. It is not its massive structure
alone, or the presence or absence of inscriptions, its location, nor even its very
existence. What makes it such a powerful entity is the way in which it melds
together its use of language and its imposing visible form. That elements from
each medium work for many without their being recognized in any way does not
diminish them; we might just as well try to diagnose the power of great music or
an ancient cathedral.
First constructed out of wood, intended as a temporary structure as part of the
Peace Day parade on 19 July 1919 (Figure 1), the Cenotaph instantly affected
public opinion: after parliamentary debate, it was transformed into a permanent
structure of Portland Stone. Like the original, its large vertical plinth reached its
climax in a horizontal structure resembling a coffin. On two sides it bore the
Union Flag and those of the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force. Three stone wreaths
were its only ornament: there was no cross or religious symbol. While at first
glance defined by right angles, all of its seemingly straight lines are either curved
or angled. The verticals have a batter, an architectural term for a rearward slant:
their lines taper to meet at a thousand feet above ground. All the horizontals use
an architectural principle known to the Greeks as entasis; they are very slightly
convex, in an arc with a centre 900 feet below. The structure’s mass rests on
regular patterns, the base of three equal cubes, the vertical form of three equal
squares. Outlines give a sense of the organic, in place of something merely
mechanical; the balanced masses suggest a rhythmic symmetry. The use of
Portland Stone, one of the most commonly used English sculptural materials,
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x
Figure 1. The Cenotaph and the Victory Parade, 1919, Illustrated London News
26 July 1919. Via Humanities Library, University of Bergen
xi
empty tomb itself; but beyond it there is a suggestion of something beyond words,
but not beyond some sense of feeling.
While these are physical elements of design, visual yet not visible, they are
matched by the structure’s use of language. Where earlier memorials carry lengthy
inscriptions, the Cenotaph has only three words: ‘The Glorious Dead’. With the
absence of a cross, this avoids any particular belief, instead embracing all, and
none. The image presented in the Illustrated London News included the words
four times, once in the drawing itself and three times in the accompanying
caption. Already, they have assumed the importance of a mantra, enshrined
both in the monument itself and in accompanying discussions. Yet the words
have a larger, unacknowledged and for many unrecognized, reference:
May the souls of the faithful departed rest in peace and rise again in glory.
The words, known as the Vestry Prayer, are traditionally spoken by the priest to the
choir before processing into the church before many Church of England services.
For generations, then and still, they are part of a ritual turned almost to an instinct:
it is hard to believe that, for many at that time, even those of sorely tried belief, they
did not resonate somehow in the words of the Cenotaph. Another ritual developed
in the habit, begun soon after the Cenotaph’s unveiling, for men to remove their
hats when passing. At the centre of an irregular circle linking Downing Street,
Whitehall, and Westminster, the Cenotaph’s location is almost the pivot of the State
itself, suggesting that death in battle is mourned by those in authority.
Few of these elements would be absorbed consciously. Instead, they are sub-
sumed into larger feelings of impalpable loss, displacement, perhaps consolation,
the rightness of memorial made physical through something seen, and made part
of a longer process of mourning. In the coming together of word and structure,
neither explicit yet each powerful through design and reference, something of
great power has been made. This text is balanced in ritual by another: words from
Laurence Binyon’s poem ‘For the Fallen’. First published in The Times in 1914,
part of its text soon took on a larger function, ceremonial yet personal, when
spoken in countless acts of remembrance and still used as such today. Priest, vicar,
or celebrant would say the words ‘At the going down of the sun, and in the
morning/ We will remember them’. The congregation would reply ‘We will
remember them’. Their deep personal, as well as communal, resonance is shown
in another text of word and image from the Illustrated London News of 1919
(Figure 2). It shows a little-known moment when, in the early hours before the
parades, a group of women laid flowers at the cenotaph. In the accompanying text,
Binyon’s words appear twice; ‘The Glorious Dead’, three times. Intimate, private
acts of commemoration have become a much larger, shared ceremony, both fused
into the visual presence and ceremonial exchange of words in speech, print, and
public structure.
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xii
Figure 2. Women laying flowers at the Cenotaph, 1919, Illustrated London News
26 July 1919. Via Humanities Library, University of Bergen
Such fusion of word and visual mass recurs in many of Lutyens’ other memor-
ials. Most pervasive, because used in many settings, is the large, horizontal
monolith known simply as the War Stone (see Figure 46). Designed for war
cemeteries in France and Belgium, it also forms the centre of memorials in
Manchester and Southampton. Its elevation, on a plinth three steps above ground,
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xiii
gives it the appearance of an altar, but one without Christian symbols. It suggests
itself as the centre of some kind of ceremony, shared across religious denomin-
ations, appropriate to its location in allowing visitors to the graves to conduct their
own mourning rituals. Inscribed in large capitals of a formal, classical font, are
words from the King James Bible: ‘Their Name Liveth for Evermore’. More
directly Christian than the wording on the Cenotaph, the inscription lets the
single visitor place personal grief within something larger, while retaining its
private force. This is helped by the grammatical structure, at first confusing,
with the singular ‘Name’ beating against the plural ‘Their’, yet reinforced by the
singular ‘Liveth’. It is subtle, barely noticeable; but the effect is powerful, linking
individual loss with a notion of shared grief. It hints at the idea of community of
suffering that, for many who fought, was perhaps its only justification, that of
working together in some kind of shared cause. The feeling is elevated, without
any hint of vainglory, for the mourners. Within the elemental force of the stone
the text becomes both common and intimate, the two working towards one
purpose. And in their combination of simple vocabulary and breadth of reference,
they invite and facilitate rituals of mourning both intimate and shared.
Forms of word and visual masses both contain features essential to the separate
identities of each medium, the wholly visual and the wholly verbal. Both are
immediate when seen, if not understood fully. Each rests on mysteries innate to
itself to create its effect, made at a level beneath simple transliteration. Brought
together, the elements produce and define the unique force of each object, a power
beyond simple grasp, assimilated without conscious awareness. Form is essential
to both structures. The Cenotaph works through mathematical logic and half-
remembered inscription; the War Stone approaches, but does not quite fulfil, the
proportions of the Golden Mean, an incompleteness paired with its contradictory
yet inclusive inscription. The two are perhaps the supreme example of the coming
together of word and image that, for reasons of economy, production, education,
are unique to the period.
* * *
‘Visible silence, still as the hour glass’: the words, from Rossetti’s poem ‘Silent Noon’,
have a fusion of senses that achieves a wholly new intensity when seen before the
Cenotaph and the War Stone. Like so many earlier poems they are redefined by later
circumstance, later experience. The vocal setting by Ralph Vaughan Williams, made
as early as 1904, with its halting, almost limping accompaniment, has the same kind
of transformation across media, across senses, of so many works of its time. In later
years the visible silence, the stillness, reverberates throughout the period, and the
coming together of word and image, as here and elsewhere in the changed meanings
of earlier writings, assumes a new, consolatory role.
Like the physical memorials the words and music have a personal as well as a
communal, shared effect, echoing far beyond their unveiling. As a child I would
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xiv
hear my father singing the Vaughan Williams with his fine tenor voice: I still have
the photograph which shows him carrying the cross at the head of the choir, at the
consecration of the war memorial in Woodford Green, its list of names prominent
in the newly carved stone. The photograph becomes an emblem of each gener-
ation’s, each individual’s, need to grieve, to find objects of ritual focus, some
shared, some personal, and perhaps always made anew in the effort to find
meaning or purpose from the inexplicable. Word, image, music: all are part of
the period, in its effort to mourn, to understand, to somehow continue, and
rebuild some kind of national and personal identity, to recapture the always
imaginary but now lost, English, Eden.
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List of Figures
1. The Cenotaph and the Victory Parade, 1919, Illustrated London News
26 July 1919. Via Humanities Library, University of Bergen x
2. Women laying flowers at the Cenotaph, 1919, Illustrated London News
26 July 1919. Via Humanities Library, University of Bergen xii
3. Frontispiece and title page, from London’s Countryside by Edric Holmes, 1927 7
4. The Kentish Downs, London’s Countryside 8
5. High Wycombe, London’s Countryside 10
6. Ely Cathedral, from Wonderful Britain edited by J. A. Hammerton, ?1924 22
7. Ely Cathedral by F. L. Griggs, from Highways and Byways in Cambridgeshire
and Ely by Edward Conybeare, 1910 23
8. ‘Looking towards Seaton’, from Let’s Get Out Here by S. P. B. Mais, 1937.
Open Government Licence; Science and Society Picture Library 30
9. Page opening from Holiday Haunts 1938, Great Western Railway. Open
Government Licence; Science and Society Picture Library 32
10. Title page from Dorset by Paul Nash, 1936. Shell marks reproduced by
permission of Shell Brands International AG 34
11. Page from Oxon by John Piper et al., 1938. Shell marks reproduced by
permission of Shell Brands International AG 36
12. Finchingfield, from English Villages and Hamlets, by Humphrey
Pakington, 1934 43
Supplied with permission of Batsford, Pavilion Books
13. Winsford, from English Villages and Hamlets. Supplied with permission
of Batsford, Pavilion Books 45
14. Lower and Upper Middle Class Suburbs, from The Spirit of London by Paul
Cohen-Portheim, 1935. Supplied with permission of Batsford, Pavilion Books 47
15. Page opening from The English Cottage. Supplied with permission of
Batsford, Pavilion Books 49
16. Graf Zeppelin airship, from The Book of Speed edited by Stephen
King-Hall, 1935 51
Supplied with permission of Batsford, Pavilion Books
17. Cottage vignette by Joan Hassall, from Portrait of a Village by Francis
Brett Young, 1937. The Estate of Joan Hassall 55
18. The Garage, from Portrait of a Village. The Estate of Joan Hassall 56
19. ‘Down the Road’, from Portrait of a Village. The Estate of Joan Hassall 57
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20. Somme villages, from Illustrated Michelin Guides to the Battlefields, 1919 61
21. Street Scene in Shoreditch, Illustrated London News, 18 October 1919.
Via Humanities Library, University of Bergen 69
22. An Air Factory’s Garden Village, Illustrated London News, 18 October 1919.
Via Humanities Library, University of Bergen 70
23. Spacing of houses, from the Tudor Walters Report, 1918. Open Government
Licence. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge
University Library, Command paper Cd. 1919 72
24. Contours for housing planning, from the Tudor Walters Report. Open
Government Licence. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of
Cambridge University Library, Command paper Cd. 1919 73
25. House building on inclines, from the Tudor Walters Report. Open Government
Licence. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge
University Library, Command paper Cd. 1919 74
26. House plans, from the Tudor Walters Report. Open Government Licence.
Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University
Library, Command paper Cd. 1919 76
27. ‘Winders’, from the Tudor Walters Report. Open Government Licence.
Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University
Library, Command paper Cd. 1919 77
28. Cover design for The Home I Want by Richard Reiss, 1919. © Town and
Country Planning Collection/Mary Evans Picture Library 78
29. Street of houses, from The Building of Twelve Thousand Houses by J. Tudor
Walters, 1927. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge
University Library, S437.b92.2 80
30. First prize winning design, Daily Mail Designs for (Workers’) Houses.
© Associated Newspapers Ltd. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics
of Cambridge University Library, 1919.12.39 84
31. First prize winning design, Daily Mail Ideal Houses, 1927. © Associated
Newspapers Ltd. The University of Southampton, Library and Arts, Digital
Scholarship Team 85
32. House design with garden, Daily Mail Ideal Houses. © Associated
Newspapers Ltd. The University of Southampton, Library and Arts,
Digital Scholarship Team 87
33. Front board from The House you Want by R. Randal Phillips, 1923 91
34. Bentley Cottage, from Small Family Houses by R. Randal Phillips, 1924 94
35. Houses at Frinton-on-Sea, from Houses for Moderate Means by R. Randal
Phillips, 1936 97
36. ‘Highpoint II’, The Architectural Review, October 1938. © Gordon Cullen
Estate and © emap. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of
Cambridge University Library, P402.a.6 103
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57. Robert ploughing, by Norman Hepple, from Seven for a Secret by Mary Webb 166
Courtesy of Bridgeman Images
58. Gideon ploughing, by Rowland Hilder, in Precious Bane by Mary Webb.
By kind permission of the estate of Rowland Hilder 170
59. The hay wagon, by Rowland Hilder, in Precious Bane by Mary Webb. By
kind permission of the estate of Rowland Hilder 171
60. ‘Skating waiters’, The Graphic, 12 March 1932. Via Humanities Library,
University of Bergen 177
61. ‘Day Fashions’, The Graphic, 12 March 1932. Via Humanities Library,
University of Bergen 178
62. Illustration by Steven Spurrier to L. P. Hartley’s story ‘Cotillon’, Illustrated
London News, Christmas 1930. Via Humanities Library, University of Bergen 181
63. Hawker Henley light bombers, The Aeroplane, 1939. Courtesy of Key
Publishing 187
64–5 Facing pages showing a bomber factory, Illustrated London News, 11
March 1939 Via Humanities Library, University of Bergen 189
66. Back cover, Woman and Home, January 1928. © Ti Media Ltd 196
67. Illustration by Oakdale to ‘The Glorified Girl’ by Charles Collins, Woman
and Home, January 1928. © Ti Media Ltd 199
68. Unsigned illustration to ‘Compensation’ by Jane Beech, Woman’s Own,
3 April 1937 © Ti Media Ltd 201
69. Unsigned illustration by to ‘The Man without Dress Clothes’, Woman’s Own,
3 April 1937. © Ti Media Ltd 203
70. ‘Readers’ Wrinkles’, Practical and Amateur Wireless, 29 January 1938.
© Ti Media Ltd 209
71. ‘Phoebe and Miranda’ by ‘V. M.’, Great War Adventures, Sixteenth
Series, ?1936 211
72. Illustration by Howard Oldham to ‘The Joy Ride: A New Biggles Story’ by
W. E. Johns, Popular Flying, February 1933 213
73. Cutaway drawing of warplanes, Illustrated London News, 10 June 1939. Via
Humanities Library, University of Bergen 215
74. Preface to The King’s Air Force. © Ti Media Ltd 219
75. ‘Spraying a Live Ground-Target’, Flying, 14 January 1939. © Ti Media Ltd 223
76. ‘The Householder’s Part in A. R. P.’, Illustrated London News, 16 July 1938.
Via Humanities Library, University of Bergen 228
77. ‘How to Choose a Refuge Room’, The Protection of your Home against
Air Raids, March 1938. Open Government Licence 229
78. Steel air raid shelter delivery and assembly, Illustrated London News,
4 March 1939. Via Humanities Library, University of Bergen 230
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 19/8/2021, SPi
The Princess had cause then, and stronger reason soon after, for
her melancholy. She had written a number of letters to her family and
friends in Germany. These she intrusted to the Rev. Dr. Randolph,
who was about to proceed to Brunswick, for delivery. The illness of
Mrs. Randolph kept the doctor in England, and he returned the
letters to the Princess of Wales, under a cover addressed to Lady
Jersey. The letters fell into the Queen’s hands. This, however, was
only discovered later; and the discovery accounted for the cold
reserve of Queen Charlotte towards the Princess, for the letters
contained some sarcastic remarks upon the Queen’s appearance
and manners. In the meantime, on the packet failing to reach its
proper owner, due inquiry was made, but nothing further was
discovered, except that the reverend doctor declared that he had
transmitted it to Lady Jersey, and that individual solemnly protested
she had never received it. That it reached Queen Charlotte, was
opened, and the contents read, was only ascertained at a later
period.
In whatever rudeness of expression the Princess may have
indulged, her fault was a venial one compared with those of her
handsome and worthless husband. While she was in almost solitary
confinement at Brighton he was in London, the most honoured guest
at many a brilliant party, with Mrs. Fitzherbert for a companion. On
several occasions these two were together, even when the Princess
was present. The latter, by this time, knew of the private marriage of
her husband with the lady, and that he had denied, through Fox, who
was made the mouthpiece of the lie, that his ‘friendship’ with Mrs.
Fitzherbert had ever gone to the extent of marriage. If we have to
censure the after-conduct of the Princess, let us not forget this
abominable provocation.
Except from the kindly-natured old King, Caroline experienced
little kindness, even during the time immediately previous to the birth
of her only child, the Princess Charlotte. This event took place at ten
in the morning of the 7th of January 1796, amid the usual solemn
formalities and the ordinary witnesses. Addresses of congratulation
were not lacking. Among them the city of London prepared one for
the Prince, but the conventionally ‘happy father,’ who had looked
down upon his legitimate child with the critical remark that ‘it was a
fine girl,’ declined to receive the congratulations of the City, unless in
private. The pretext given was that a public reception was too
expensive a matter in the Prince’s reduced condition; and the pretext
was so insulting to the common sense of the corporation that the
members very properly refused to ‘go up’ at all.
The truth was that the Prince shrunk from being congratulated
upon his prospects as a husband, seeing that he was about to
separate himself for ever from the society of his wife. The latter had
caused the removal of Lady Jersey from her household. This was
effected by the hearty intervention of him whom the Scottish papers
not inaptly called that ‘decent man, the King.’