Motion pictures: an analysis of the posters of Victorian Railways during the 1920s and 1930s

Abstract

One element of the unrelenting enthusiasm for railway history is the poster. It is evident in the large body of literature, both academic and lay, on the subject. The majority of the literature though, deals with the posters of North America and Europe. Their Australian counterparts have not received the attention they deserve, something this paper attempts to redress. It undertakes an extensive examination of the many railway posters produced by Victorian Railways (VR), between the wars, under its visionary Head Commissioner, Harold Clapp. Utilising a geo-semiotic approach, it is argued that the railway posters of this period provide insights into the development of Victoria's tourist geography – an inventory of places and regions imbued with recreational and leisure assets. In so doing, trains, tourists, destinations and beaches were illustrated and ‘verbalised’ as never before, using state-of-the-art techniques, derived from the new field of commercial art.

Keywords:

• Geo-semiotics
• railway posters
• Harold Clapp
• Victorian Railways
• commercial art
• Australian National Tourist Association

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Colin Symes is an Honorary Associate of Macquarie University's School of Education. He is the author of several books including Setting the record straight: a material of history of classical recording, and Transporting moments. Recent papers have appeared in Mobilities, Time and Society and Annals of Leisure Research.

Notes

¹ New Era in Commercial Art (Melbourne: Art Training Institute, c. 1934).

²John Hewitt, ‘East Coast Joys: Tom Purvis and the LNER’, Journal of Design History 8 (1995): 291–311.

³Mark Ovenden, London Underground by Design (London: Penguin, 2013), 160.

⁴For more, see John William Knott, ‘The ‘Conquering Car’: Technology, Symbolism and the Motorisation of Australia before the War’, Australian Historical Studies 31 (2000): 1–26 and Leigh Edmonds, ‘How Australians were Made Airminded’, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 7 (1993): 183–206.

⁵Julian Treuherz and Ian Kennedy, ‘The Machine Age’ in The Railway: Art in the Age of Steam, ed. Ian Kennedy and Julian Treuherz (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); for more on railways and Australia painting, see Gavin Fry and David Burke, Paint on the Tracks: Australian Artists and the Railway (Sydney: S. H. Ervin/National Trust of Australia (NSW), 1994).

⁶For example, Teri J. Edelstein, ‘The Art of Posters: Strategies and Debates’, in Art for All: British Posters for Travel, ed. Teri J. Edelstein (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), 17–41; John Hewitt, ‘Posters of Distinction: Art, Advertising and the London, Midland, and Scottish Railways’, Design Issues 16 (1995): 16–35. Neill Atkinson, ‘‘Call of the Beaches’: Rail Travel and the Democratisation of Holidays in Interwar New Zealand’, The Journal of Transport History 33, no. 1 (2012): 1–20; Ralph Harrington, ‘Beyond the Bathing Belle: Images of Women in Inter-War Railway Publicity’, The Journal of Transport History 25, no. 1 (2004): 22–45. Among the few studies of Australian posters are Peter Spearritt's ‘Sites and Sights: Australian Travel Posters 1909–1990’, in Trading Places: Australian Travel Posters 1909–1990 (Clayton, Vic.: Monash University Gallery and National Centre for Australian Studies, 1991) and Deirdre Gilfedder's ‘The Visual Rhetoric of Australian Posters between the Wars: Building a New Nation’, Cultures of the Commonwealth 15/16 (2010): 95–105.

⁷Peter Stanley, What did you do in the War Daddy? A History of Propaganda Posters (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1983), 16.

⁸Michelle M. Metro-Roland, Tourists, Signs and the City: the Semiotics of Culture in an Urban Landscape (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011).

⁹Under the title Public Transport Corporation: Photographic Collection of Railway Negatives, the negatives are in Box Item Numbers 500/01 to 677/01 and are available digitally from http://prov.vic.gov.au/index_search?searchid=41 The National Library of Australia and State Libraries of Victoria and NSW, also hold originals of some of the posters, some of which are available on-line.

¹⁰Catherine Flood, ‘Pictorial Posters in Britain at the Turn of the Twentieth Century’, in London Transport Posters: A Century of Art and Design, ed. David Bownes and Oliver Green (Farnham: Lund Humphries in association with London Transport Museum, 2008), 15.

¹¹C. Wolmar, The Subterranean Railway: How the London Underground Was Built and How It Changed the City Forever (London: Atlantic Books, 2004), 273. In due recognition of his role in elevating the poster's artistic status in the UK, one of the first of the monographs devoted to the subject was dedicated to Frank Pick, for example, Edward McKnight Kauffer, ed., The Art of the Poster: Its Origin, Evolution and Purpose (London: Cecil Palmer, 1924). Even so, Pick's artists were not as advanced as some of their European counterparts, for example, Alfonse Mucha and Adolphe Cassandre.

¹²B. Cole and R. Durack, Railway Posters 1923–1947: From the Collection of the National Railway Museum, York, England (New York: Rizzoli, 1992), 8.

¹³A. Cooper, Making a Poster (London: Studio Publications, 1938), 24.

¹⁴P. Russell, ‘The Poster as Selling Device’, in The Art of the Poster (see note 12), 40.

¹⁵A. Cooper, Making a Poster, 30.

¹⁶ibid., 24.

¹⁷Elizabeth Guffey, Posters: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books, 2014), 14; Catherine Flood, ‘Pictorial posters in Britain at the turn of the Twentieth Century’, in London Transport Posters: A Century of Art and Design (see Note 10), 23.

¹⁸Nickolaus Pevsner, ‘Patient Progress One: Frank Pick,’ Studies in Art, Architecture and Design, Vol. 2 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1968), 208.

¹⁹See P. Rennie, Modern British Posters: Art, Design and Communication (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2010).

²⁰One review of an exhibition of English railway posters, held at ‘Anthony Hordern's Emporium' in 1923, calls for Australia's attractions to be ‘similarly advertised' (Artistic Posters, The Sydney Morning Herald, September 8, 1923, 10).

²¹Barbara Goode Matthews, ‘Artists in Poster Land’, Art in Australia November 25, 1940, 53–6.

²²J. Cullen, No Other Man, No Other Store: The Extraordinary Life of Sir Charles Lloyd Jones, Painter, Patron and Patriot 1878–1958. (Melbourne: Macmillan, 2013), 79.

²³N. Catts, ‘The Use of the Poster Needs to be Understood’, Exhibition of Modern Posters, collected by C. Lloyd Jones, Held at the Education Department's Art Gallery, May 11–28, 1918.

²⁴Harold W. Clapp, ‘Running Trains and Writing Slogans,’ The Herald, October 18, 1924, 15.

²⁵Ibid., For more Clapp's business style, see John Sinclair, ‘Agents of “Americanisation”: Individual Entrepreneurship and the Genesis of Consumer Industries’, Journal of Australian Studies 90 (2007): 17–33.

²⁶See Patsy Adam-Smith's chapter on Harold Clapp in Romance of Victorian Railways (Adelaide: Rigby, 1989), 102.

²⁷ Report of the Victorian Railways Commissioners for the Year ended 30th June, 1925 (Melbourne: H. J. Green Government Printer, 1925), 36.

²⁸See Robert Lee, Transport: an Australian History. (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2010) and also C. Symes ‘“Even our 2nd Class Cars Are More Comfortable than Motor Buses!” An Analysis of Victorian Railway Posters Between the Wars’, unpublished paper.

²⁹This followed yet another exhibition of British railway posters held in Melbourne, and whose virtues Brumaire Young, in a lecture presented, in April 1929, to the city's Arts and Craft Society had extolled.

³⁰Cited in ‘Posters and Art’, The Victorian Railways Magazine, June, 1929, 10.

³¹M. Hetherington, James Northfield and the Art of Selling Australia (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2006), 8.

³²The Prime Minister's comments are on a stencilled explanatory note intended for the booklet's reviewers. Australia Calls You: the Continent of Opportunity (Sydney: The Commissioners, 1928).

³³Development and Migration Commission. Appendix V: Advertising Australia. Second Annual Report, period ending December 31, 1928 (Canberra: Government Printer, 1929), 50–1.

³⁴Veritas, ‘Australia's Leading Salesman’, The Victorian Railways Magazine, July 1928, 13, 44. It seems likely that Hyland's example might have influenced the Empire Marketing Board's own publicity strategies.

³⁵Development and Migration Commission, 52.

³⁶Spearritt, ‘Sites and Sights: Australian Travel Posters 1909–1990’.

³⁷See Roland Marchand's Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 140.

³⁸Indeed some London Underground posters, for example, McKnight Kauffer's ‘Twickenham by Train’, were produced with the home market in mind, see Claire Dobbin ‘Art for All: the Reception of Underground Posters’, in London Transport Posters: A Century of Art and Design, eds. David Bownes and Oliver Green, 222–3.

³⁹Peter Spearritt, ‘Sellheim, Gert Hugo Emmanuel (1901–1970)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 16 (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2002).

⁴⁰One of his posters achieved international recognition from the International Committee on Nutrition, and was seen as a way of fuelling European demand for ‘meat, butter and fruit', ‘V. R. Poster Praised by Geneva Committee’, The V. R. Newsletter, June 1937, 1.

⁴¹Pace Hewitt, see note 6.

⁴²A case in point was the stall at the Children's Welfare Association, which was festooned with VR posters and slogans. See photograph in The Victorian Railways Magazine, December 1925, 713.

⁴³‘Holidays on Easy Terms’, The Victorian Railways Magazine, June 1927, iv.

⁴⁴‘Holiday Saving Stamps’, The Argus (Melbourne), September 20, 1937, 8.

⁴⁵J. Taylor, ‘Kodak and the ‘English’ Market between the Wars’, Journal of Design History 7 (1994): 29–42; Anne Willis, Picturing Australia: A History of Photography (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1988). I have not been able to establish whether Kodak had any sponsorship deal with VR.

⁴⁶Janice Newton, ‘Domesticating the Bush', Journal of Australian Studies 20 (1996): 67–80.

⁴⁷No doubt this stemmed from fears about intemperate use of leisure time. See Richard White, Holidays: A History of Getting Away in Australia (North Melbourne: Pluto Press, 2005).

⁴⁸‘The Chalet, Mt Buffalo’, Report of the Victorian Railways Commissioners for the Year Ended 30th June, 1925 (Melbourne: H. J. Green Government Printer, 1925), 37.

⁴⁹See Hetherington, James Northfield and the Art of Selling Australia, 28.

⁵⁰It was known for its therapeutic effects on pthsisis, asthma and liver ailments (Jim Davidson and Peter Spearritt. Holiday Business: Tourism in Australia Since 1870 (Carlton, Vic.: The Miegunyah Press, 2000), 221.

⁵¹S. W. Ward, Selling Places: The Marketing and Promotion of Towns and Cities (London: E. and F. N. Spon, 1998).

⁵² Travel in North Easter Victoria Australia (Melbourne: Victorian Government Tourist Bureau, 1939).

⁵³R. Butler, ‘The Streets as Art Galleries’: Poster Art in Australia’, in Trading Places: Australian Travel Posters, 1909–1930 (Clayton, Vic.: Monash University Gallery and National Centre for Australian Studies, 1991), 21.

⁵⁴J. D. Michie, ‘Railway Movies’, The Victorian Railways Magazine, May 1927, 13–15.