Paedagogica Historica. International Journal of the History of Education
Vol. 41, No. 4/5
The Influence of School Architecture and Design on the Outdoor
Play Experience within the Primary School
Marc Armitage
Since the very earliest times, schools have provided a place (the playground) and a
time (playtimes) in which children can have time away from the direct involvement of
adults and formal learning. Although the basic design of school grounds has
changed in a number of ways over the years – from the subtle to the more direct –
what effect these changes have had on the overall education of the child is less
clear. Research has identified a number of positive effects on leaning that playtimes
and the informal use of school grounds provides, yet it is also clear that schools
themselves often greatly under-use this potential, or even actively restrict access to
it, as a counter to what is often seen the ‘problem’ playtime. This paper will draw
upon recent research into ‘what’ happens on school playgrounds and ‘where’ it
happens using visual examples from the UK The findings from this research will
explores the direct links that have been found between school building design and
children’s use of the outdoor environment for play.
Into the archive
2
A manila folder, about an inch thick, one among many folders of uncatalogued
educational records dating from the 1920s to the 1970s in Birmingham City Archives.
Folders consciously selected for preservation, but without an explanation as to why,
unopened for many years, and waiting to be read and turned into a narrative of the
past. The file, entitled Exhibition of Materials for Use in Elementary Schools, consists
of correspondence, minutes, circulars, notes and a single photograph. It is the
photograph which first attracts attention - a carefully organised display of educational
objects for young children. Attached to the photograph are several letters, two from
1936 and three from 1941. The first is from Miss Loveday to R. E. Cousens, an
Assistant Education Officer in Birmingham:
It is, I think, unfortunate that the arrangement has been altered since I last
saw it. I had struggled to suggest the presence of an occupant; with the
removal of the round table to the centre of the stage and the trains to the
forefront, the show has become merely a jumble of apparatus. Mr Collins
tells me that, with the exception of the water tray in place of the table, you
purpose to set up the bay exactly as in the photograph. Well I think it is a
pity. The focal point of interest has been destroyed.1
Cousens replied that he was sorry to have caused any disappointment and thought
the photograph was what “you and Dr Macgregor had determined … with Mr Pick.” 2
Loveday’s comment about a suggested ‘presence’ in the photograph is indicative of
a contemporary understanding of the interrelationship between objects, space and
pedagogy. It also prompted this viewer to look at the photograph again, to observe
1
E. Loveday to R. E. Cousens, 29.12.1936, Birmingham City Archives (BCA).
2
R. E. Cousens to E. Loveday 31.12.1936, Exhibition of Materials for Use in
Elementary Schools, BCA.
3
the objects and their spatial relations, and then to imagine that presence. The letters
from 1941 are about the availability of the photographic negative relating to the
“Birmingham exhibit.”3
Other documents in the folder reveal that the “exhibit” was “the nursery” and
had been produced by Birmingham LEA with the help of local Inspectors - Miss
Loveday and Dr Macgregor- attached to the Board of Education, that the project had
received full support from Birmingham Elementary Education Sub-Committee and
fulsome encouragement from the Board of Education: “[Birmingham] could put up a
show … as good as can be desired.”4 There is also in the file an inventory of the
objects for the exhibit and their cost. This was compiled by Macgregor and was used
3
P. Innes to Lewis and Randall, Architectural and Technical Photographers,
19.11.1941; Cousens to Loveday, 10.12.1941; Loveday to Cousens 13.12.1941, Exhibition
of Materials for Use in Elementary Schools, BCA.
4
F. Pick to Innes, 14.5.1936; Savage to Innes 18.5.1936; Innes to Pick, 23.5.1936,
Exhibition of Materials for Use in Elementary Schools, BCA.
4
to gain a grant of £25 from the city. The costing had been calculated from prices “in
toy shops in Birmingham, from the Dryad firm, from the Abbatt firm, from Philip &
Tacey, from the Chad Valley Toy works and elsewhere.”5
But what was this “show”?
The narrative constructed from this folder soon carried the reader far beyond
its Birmingham home and connected with London and Europe. What started as an
investigation into the material culture of schooling in an urban environment and an
apparent local disagreement over pedagogy developed into an exploration of ideas
circulating in the 1930s about design, the teaching of art, about children as both
producers and consumers and of the interactions between progressive educators
and artists committed to the Modernist project.
“All the paraphernalia of teaching:” Reconstructing an Exhibition
A circular was distributed to all Chief Education Officers in England and Wales
in late 1936 publicising an exhibition: “Design in Education, County Hall, 5-16
January 1937.” The circular locates the Birmingham exhibit in a broader context:
It will be recalled that one of the recommendations of the Council for Art and
Industry in their report on ‘Education for the consumer’ (HMSO 1935) was
that Local Education Authorities should regard it as a matter of urgency to
provide elementary schools with collections of well-designed common objects
for the lessons and that suitable facilities should be available for the display
of such objects and of pictures.
5
Memorandum J. MacGregor to R. E. Cousens, 18.6.1936, Exhibition of Materials for
Use in Elementary Schools, BCA.
5
An exhibition, it continued, had been assembled in London by the Council for Art and
Industry [CAI], London County Council [LCC] with the assistance of Birmingham,
Kent and Middlesex LEAs and University College, Leicester in order to show “the
great wealth of material available …and that all material may have an aesthetic
significance.”6 Enclosed with the circular was a short guide to “enable those visiting
the Exhibition to grasp the meaning of the exhibits.”7
The foreword to the exhibition guide was written by Frank Pick, Chair of the
CAI and expanded on the ideas expressed in the publicity to LEAs. The exhibition
was,
an attempt to show how, by a right choice, the materials used for teaching
in elementary schools might have a beauty and a quality which are the first
understanding of design. The craftsman [sic] asserts that there is a stimulus
in the material he handles; its properties inspire him to right treatment; its
colours persuade him to right blending; its texture or surface leads him to
right finish. The child in the school is capable, in his or her degree, of
responding to this stimulus; so it is important that the pens, the paper, the
books, all the paraphernalia of teaching should be chosen with an eye and
a touch for that which is stimulating.
6
London County Council Circular, Exhibition of Materials for Use in Elementary
Schools; Birmingham Institute for Art and Design (BIAD) Marion Richardson Archive, Ms
1115. Draft letter from Baldwin, Secretary of the Council for Art and Industry, BCA.
7
CAI Committee for the London County Council Exhibition, Minutes of Fourth
Meeting, 30.6.1936, Exhibition of Materials for Use in Elementary Schools. The exhibition
was also publicised through a poster produced by the London Passenger Transport Board,
BCA.
6
Pick acknowledged the earlier CAI report and stated, that once work started on the
exhibition “it seemed to escape beyond its original limits … the material grew wider
and wider in range. Almost everything was seen to have its educational significance”
and it “became a problem to define the exhibition.” As a consequence the opening
date for the exhibition was moved from the summer of 1936 to the beginning of
1937. The final exhibition was deemed by Pick to show that
what is used in the elementary school may have quality of material,
soundness of construction, fairness of colour and appropriateness of
design, in sum beauty.
He also hoped that educational authorities would
widen the collection of material which they supply for use in schools and will
buy with an appreciation of design and character even when it conflicts with
a strict economy; that they will remember that they are educating the future
consumer, and maybe setting a standard for industry in the next
generation.8
“Design in Education” was held in the Conference Hall at London County Hall
and was opened by Pick and Mrs E. M. Lowe, the Chair of the LCC Education
Committee, who stated:
For quite long enough we have put too much stress in education on
learning from books and books alone. Something much more is needed if a
child is to have a chance of all-round development.
Admission to the exhibition was free, and it was open daily between 11 and 8 and of
the 11,000 people concerned with education who attended the exhibition, a high
proportion were elementary school teachers; others included officials from the Board
8
Design in Education. Being an Exhibition of Material for use in Elementary Schools,
January 1937. London, 1937, 1-2, BCA.
7
of Education who later suggested that similar exhibitions should be sponsored
around the country.9 What did these 11,000 people encounter at County Hall?
The exhibition was organised into fourteen sections: Writing as a Form of Art,
Literature, Mathematics, Natural Science, Physical and Mechanical Sciences,
Geography, History, Weaving and Needlecraft, The Crafts: Bookbinding, Metalwork,
Woodwork and Plastics, Domestic Crafts, Music, Dancing and Drama, Nursery
School, Social History: The Story of London Transport told by Pictures and Models,
and Pictures in the School.10 Objects on display included different pens, brushes and
crayons; printed books, book illustrations; cubes, globes, cylinders, cones, paper
models, rulers, scissors, setsquares, counting apparatus, bricks; form in nature leaves, shells, honeycomb, stones, crystals, fossils; toys with a scientific basis - top,
9
Barman, Christian. The Man Who Built London Transport. Newton: Abbott, 1979,
172. This was a view shared by Pick who wrote Innes after the exhibition opened: “I hope
you will be encouraged by our exhibition in London to carry out further experiments of the
sort in conjunction with your Birmingham schools for I am only too conscious of the fact that
what we have done in London is merely a start towards the improvement of the equipment
and material to be used in elementary schools throughout the country, and that further
experiments are to be desired before even a reasonable standard with regard to such
material and equipment can be reached in all directions,” Pick to Innes, 7.1.1937, Exhibition
of Materials for Use in Elementary Schools, BCA.
10
The Committee were originally presented by Pick with a slightly different list of
organising themes: Writing, Literature, Mathematics, Science (nature), Science (Physical or
Exact Sciences), Geography, History, Arts and Crafts, Domestic Science, Music, the
Nursery School and History (Social). “Suggestions Towards a Scheme for an Exhibition of
Materials for Use in Elementary Schools,” 24 March 1936, Exhibition of Materials for Use in
Elementary Schools, BCA.
8
kaleidoscope, crane, windmill, cart, simple steam engine, tuning fork, kites, prism,
zoetrope, magnet, megaphone, compass, pinhole camera; maps, plasticine maps in
relief, wall maps; historical objects, photographs; chalks, pencils, papers, paints,
basketwork, simple looms, clay, moulding tools, needlework, paper and sheet metal
work; common objects - labels, containers, pots, pans, wooden tools, knives, boxes;
wind and stringed instruments, puppets, model stage; and nursery toys. In all
selections “a definite eye for colour” was “employed so that this eye is, as it were,
trained continuously.”11 Displayed alongside these objects and materials were
examples of children’s work in school “evoked by their understanding of material and
processes” and including drawings, models, figures etc made by children “for selfrealization of history.”12 A mathematical film made by Dr Walter Gropius was shown
as well as films prepared by the Post Office.13
Various organisations and individuals offered support and lent objects,
including the Design and Industries Association, the Central School of Arts and
Crafts, department of Overseas Trade, London School of Printing, Victoria and Albert
Museum, Bromley School of Art, Bromley School of Craft and Industrial Design,
Design in Education, passim; “Suggestions Towards a Scheme for an Exhibition of
11
Materials for Use in Elementary Schools,” 24.3.1936, Exhibition of Materials for Use in
Elementary Schools, BCA.
“Suggestions Towards a Scheme for an Exhibition of Materials for Use in
12
Elementary Schools,” 24.3.1936, BCA.; Council for Art and Industry Committee for the
London County Council Exhibition. Minutes of Third Meeting, 27.5.1936, Exhibition of
Materials for Use in Elementary Schools, BCA.
13
Council for Art and Industry Committee for the London County Council Exhibition,
Minutes of the Sixth Meeting, 30.11.1936, Exhibition of Materials for Use in Elementary
Schools, BCA.
9
Battersea School, Leicester College of Art, and Leicester City Museum. The London
Passenger Transport Board produced models and pictures, The Times newspaper
lent photographs, and the Punch illustrator, E. H. Shepard, lent original drawings.14
References to the enrichment of the curriculum, to colour and beauty, to
function and form, to fitness for purpose, abound in the exhibition guide written by
the different organisers and in the presentation of their ideas at planning meetings:
It will not be forgotten that first impressions are ineradicable, and that in
introducing the child to things and the representation of things, beauty is
most important, quite as important as goodness in relation to conduct and
character, or truth in relation to word and deed (Frank Pick);
… letters, printed or written are designed. They have a correct form which
is capable of a variety of treatment, but which must always be respected …
Writing is the basis of much of the work of the school whether cursive or
printed and throughout the school wherever it is used it should have the
same care and finish, the same regard for its fitness for the use to which it
is put, the same regard for its value as a means to tidiness, clearness,
balance or harmony - in a word beauty (Marion Richardson);
The study of nature based on seasonal change cannot but lead to an
appreciation of beauty of form and of colour, and what is perhaps most
important of all, the beauty of adaption of structure to function (H. M.
Walton);
and
Fitness for
purpose,
choice
of
suitable materials,
soundness
of
construction, due regard for proportion and the careful use of colour and
14
The original drawings included those for Wind in the Willows. Shepard worked for
the magazine Punch.
10
surface treatment, will be exemplified in the articles exhibited (G. H.
Leslie).
The exhibition organisers were also concerned with the development of new
skills in both children and teachers and in the circulation of “new” knowledge:
Mathematical instruction … not only develops logical thought, but also, in
particular, the individual’s power of visualising spatial relations … The
development in school of this optical spatial sense [is] … a medium by
which the general level of a people’s understanding of all kinds of technical
and artistic work may be raised. Good perceptible training will often enable
a pupil to discover results for himself [sic] and thus open the way for his
creative powers … the material exhibited … may be used by teachers to
make abstract mathematical ideas concrete …” (Walter Gropius);
… such study can only be adequately accomplished by insistence on
fundamentals of true scientific method - accurate observation and the
careful record of results so obtained (H. M. Walton);
and
Children will be brought face to face with real things and a check will be
placed on their accumulation of dead knowledge (F.L. Attenborough).
They praised the use of film and photography in teaching, but also celebrated the
centrality of the ‘good’ teacher in the learning process:
Modern History presents unlimited opportunities to the teacher with the
necessary genius and enthusiasm
and children who are “provided with appropriate materials” and are
in the charge of sensitive and well-trained teachers produce work which is
often remarkable for its imaginative idea;
and
11
One of the main objects has been to show how work of pleasing design and
high technical standard can be obtained from boys committed to the care of
well-trained and imaginative teachers who are capable of infusing
something of the spirit which exists between the eager apprentice and the
master-craftsman.15
This celebration of the centrality of the teacher and the qualities necessary to be
effective accords with a general consensus which can be found in 1930s educational
texts about the ‘good teacher.’16
The exhibition guide ends with a section entitled ‘Pictures in the School’ where
C.M Marriott of The Times and R. R. Tomlinson, Senior Art Inspector, LCC,
reaffirmed the importance of design appreciation:
Susceptibility to the direct appeal of form, colour, line and tone, irrespective
of information conveyed, is practically universal,
and the fundamental purpose of the exhibition as a learning experience:
It is generally agreed that while the substantial quality of British
manufactures is second to none, they often suffer from foreign superiority in
grace and design. Nothing could be better calculated to remedy this state of
affairs than the existence of a purchasing public trained from early youth in
the capacity to chose the better and leave the worse in all that concerns
form and colour. In the exercise of such capacity the transition from the
painted masterpiece, rightly seen, to the tea-cup is direct - though it may be
unconscious.
15
Design in Education, passim, BCA.
See, for example, Grosvenor Ian, and Martin Lawn. “‘This is what we are and this is
16
what we do’: teacher identity and teacher work in mid-twentieth century English Education
Discourse,” Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 9, no. 3, (2001): 355-370.
12
How objects were displayed was central to cultivating ‘aesthetic values’. They should
be ‘rightly seen’, pictures should be ‘hung with regard to the general architectural
character and effect of the room’, and materials should be ‘toned by the teacher’ to
“accord with the colour scheme of the particular classroom.”17 This concern was
translated into the exhibition displays themselves.
Pick asked the architect Maxwell Fry to coordinate the arrangements for
display. It was
not to be regarded as a museum of dead exhibits … [but] rather to be
thought of as a display to indicate to teachers how the best materials can
be employed in teaching various subjects in a way pleasing to the eye and
at the same time useful in purpose.18
The exhibition had, like the objects, to be functional:
the object is to convey a clear idea of treatment, method, aim, with regard
to some one lesson or series of lessons, by way of suggestion.19
Showcases were to be brown. As there was to be no catalogue it was decided that
label cards would be used and uniformity of lettering was “essential.” Marion
Richardson, LCC Inspector for Art, took responsibility and determined that labels
should be typewritten in black ink on white paper “as thick as possible” in sizes of
regular sub-divisions of foolscap octavo, with double spacing and capitals only for
17
Design in Education, 16-17, BCA.
18
Internal Education Department Memorandum from Officers attending a Committee
Meeting of the Council for Art and Industry, 27.5.1936, Exhibition of Materials for Use in
Elementary Schools, BCA.
“Suggestions Towards a Scheme for an Exhibition of Materials for Use in
19
Elementary Schools,” 24. 3.1936. Exhibition of Materials for Use in Elementary Schools,
BCA.
13
titles.20 A contemporary newspaper report includes two photographs of the displays.
In the first, posters about the history of transport can be seen on a specially
designed unit that incorporates a recess on which models of transport through time
are displayed. The second photograph is of a series of dioramas under the headings
“History of Public Education,” “Urban Schools, Rural Schools” and the “History of
Factory Conditions” and placed in front of them are large cut out figures mounted on
plywood. In both cases the emphasis was on visual content not written text.21
The “Design and Education” exhibition of early 1937 connected with other
expressions of concern about design and education. The exhibition’s opening had
been chosen to coincide with other professional education events in London,
including the Conference of Education Associations and the Annual Conference of
the National Society of Art Masters. The latter was addressed by W. T. Blackband, of
the School for Jewellers and Silversmiths, Birmingham, who expressed a desire to
arouse public interest in
good, sound, well made things, the desire to possess and know a properly
designed and properly made article even if it were only a household utensil
…badly designed and atrociously made goods … were doing much to
depress the average standard of taste.22
Similarly, in the same month that the exhibition opened the first set of Contemporary
Lithographs were made available for sale to schools. In the previous year Marion
Richardson and Henry Morris, had been consulted by Robert Wellington, the Director
20
Council for Art and Industry Committee for the London County Council Exhibition,
Minutes of the Fifth Meeting, 20.10.1936 and Sixth Meeting 30.11.1936, Exhibition of
Materials for Use in Elementary Schools, BCA.
21
Times Educational Supplement, 23.1.1937.
22
Birmingham Post, 7.1.1937.
14
of the Zwemmer Gallery, London about a scheme to introduce the work of living
artists to school children. They suggested that the best plan would be to invite some
chosen artists each to make a colour lithograph. A company, Contemporary
Lithographs, was set up by Wellington and the artist John Piper, to commission well
known artists to produce original prints in large editions (around 500) for sale to
educational establishments and the modest collector. Among those that made prints
were Piper, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, John Nash, Frances Hodgkins and Eric
Ravilious. They were asked to choose their own subjects, which would aim at
appealing to one of two age groups, four to five, or eight to nine. J. E. Barton
celebrating the project in the Architectural Review echoed all of the sentiments of the
exhibition,
Suitable building and equipment of schools is now an affair of first class
importance. The more enlightened local authorities have begun to realise
that the eye education of every child, for good or evil, goes on through
every hour of the day.23
The Times Educational Supplement was fulsome in its praise of the exhibition
when it opened. It was “remarkably interesting” and endorsed the idea that
some degree of sensibility in form and colour is practically universal, and
from the earliest age, and also that, for practical as well as moral reasons, it
needs to be cultivated. No better means to this could be devised than
collections of well designed objects to be seen and handled in the course of
the ordinary lessons.
23
Binyon, Helen. Eric Ravilious. Memoir of an Artist. Cambridge, 1983, 60, 80-81;
Barton, J. E. “Pictures in Schools.” Architectural Review, January (1937): 2-4.
15
Particular praise was directed towards the section on Mathematics organised by
Walter Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy. The paper also reported Frank Pick’s
opening address that
once the sense of beauty came by tradition; now it had to come by
education and training … The industrial era had destroyed too much, and
only by hard work would they be able to re-establish the idea of beauty in
everyday things in everyday life.24
The conception and content of the 1937 exhibition was clearly shaped by the
individuals whom Pick assembled, by the vision of officers in the London County
Council and by the CAI report. It is to this report and these individuals that attention
will now turn.
Education for the Consumer
In 1931 the UK Board of Trade had appointed a Committee on Art and
Industry under Lord Gorell to consider the production and exhibition of articles of
good design and every-day use. Membership of the Committee included the artist
and critic Roger Fry and the art historian and writer Margaret Bulley. The report
provides a historical narrative of the use of exhibitions in England to promote better
design, beginning with three exhibitions organised by the Royal Society of Arts in the
1840s, followed by the 1851 Great Exhibition, the establishment of Henry Cole’s
Museum of Decorative Arts in South Kensington, the formation of the Arts and Crafts
Exhibition Society in 1887 and culminating in the establishment of the Design and
24
Times Educational Supplement, 7.1.1937.
16
Industries Association (DIA) in 1915.25 The latter, had emerged as a perceived
solution to problems produced by the tensions between ‘artistic workmanship’ and
the demands of mass production and imitated the work of the German Werbund by
organising a
programme of
consumer education
through exhibitions and
publications.26 Gorell’s committee, in making recommendations, found it difficult to
limit itself to the issue of an exhibitions programme and offered several observations
for improving the design and quality of the products to be exhibited, including
“making the understanding and enjoyment of beautiful things an essential part of the
day-to-day life of the school.”27
Gorell made his report the following year and included two memoranda, the first by
Fry and the second by Bulley. Both of them make suggestions for new methods of
securing improved designs in future, and both make claims for the importance of
children’s art for developing ‘original ideas in design’. In particular Fry praised Marion
Richardson’s work with children, while Bulley advocated the establishment of a
Children’s School of Art along the lines of Paul Poiret’s Ecole Martine in Paris.28
Consequent on the Board of Trade’s acceptance of Gorell’s report, the Council for
Art and Industry was constituted under the chairmanship of Frank Pick in 1933.
At the second meeting of the Council for Art and Industry in March 1934 the
Council considered a report by E.M. O’R. Dickey, Staff Inspector for Art in the Board
of Education, on art teaching in primary schools. It was agreed that evidence should
25
Board of Trade. Art and Industry [Gorell Report]. London, 1932, passim.
26
Sparke, Penny. Introduction to Design and Culture in the Twentieth Century.
London, 1986, 68.
27
Board of Trade. Art and Industry, 15.
28
Ibid., 44-51.
17
be collected about school buildings in different countries and that the relationship
between education and the consumer be investigated. Two reports, for England and
Scotland respectively, were published within a few weeks of each other in 1936.29
The LCC Education Department prepared and printed its own summary of the CAI
report Education for the consumer and circulated it to all of its teachers. This was
followed by a request to the CAI to help organise an exhibition illustrating the
suggestions made in the report about teaching materials in schools.30
Education for the consumer argued that the success of any effort for the
improvement of the general standard of design “in articles of everyday” was
dependent “to a large extent upon the choice exercised by the purchasing public.”
Factory made articles could “be well made but also may possess beauty of form, of
proportion and of colour, combined together in appropriateness of design” and the
general public “should be educated to appreciate quality in design as in
manufacture.”The worker too needed
reminding that there can be beauty in the product of the machine, for the
subdivision of the industrial process has not only robbed him of any lively
conception of his task as a whole but has made it so fragmentary and at
times monotonous that it often has no educative value.
Such a task required active intervention, as there was
29
Barman. The Man Who Built London Transport, 168-169.
30
Ibid., 169. The joint planning committee was originally intended to consist of ten
members, consisting of four each from the CAI and the LCC and two from the Board of
Education. The LCC nominated four officers: Tomlinson, Richardson, Lowndes and Tyson or
Palfrey. An internal memorandum from the LCC gives a much narrower impression of what
the exhibition was to be about: “to show every-day things which could be used for the
teaching of art.” Marion Richardson Archive Ms 1792 Memorandum LCC, 28.2 1936, BIAD.
18
evidence that the British purchaser tends in the mass to be more
conservative than the foreigner. He [sic] is not insensitive to beauty, but, in
buying what he is used to, shows a readiness to accept the wares offered
without criticism and without demanding, or even realising that there might
be something better. This … state of affairs … must be remedied, if the
quality of design in British goods is to advance.
The development of design in industry was
depend[ent] … upon the consumer’s demand and criticism; his choice must
represent an effective criticism; and his education will direct his choice.31
As a consequence the CAI reviewed the teaching of Art in Elementary schools, the
training of specialist art and craft teachers, school accommodation and the nature
and supply of equipment. The CAI accepted that educational authorities were
concerned with
providing ‘education for life’, that is, at preparing children, not only for work,
but also for all other things that go to make a full life,
but also argued that
Education must supply stage by stage a cultural background suited to these
objectives. The development of appreciation of art, of craftsmanship, and of
artistic ability in general, forms an integral part of education with such a
purpose and we are convinced of its importance.32
The Council rejected the current “narrow conception” of art education in schools to
drawing and painting and advocated a position where art education covered “the
creation of beautiful things in any material by any process with any tools.” The report
accepted certain “given” ideas about children and learning. Up to the age of eleven a
31
CAI. Education for the Consumer. London, 1936, 7-9.
32
Ibid., 10.
19
child “has an instinctive desire for expressing himself [sic] by the making of pictures
and of patterns;”this instinct can be affected by “unskilful teaching,” but generally
does not require “the guidance of specialist teacher.” After the age of eleven the
“creative power”’ in most children “becomes dormant” and the “power of
appreciation” becomes dependent on specialised teaching.33
The report concluded,
children’s surroundings, and the first impressions thereby created in their
minds, are important factors influencing their development and their outlook
on life.
It cited approvingly evidence received from the National Union of Teachers that the
environment “cramps the growth of artistic appreciation in poor children” and reports
from Geneva, Copenhagen, Lausanne, Rotterdam, Lyons and Stockholm that
“bright, harmonious [colour] schemes” in schools stimulated children
to appreciate colour and cleanliness’ and ‘provide[d] happier surroundings
for school work.
School furniture and equipment was found to be “too much dominated by
convention” and lagging “behind school architecture though the two ought obviously
to keep step.” There was “no better way of teaching design” than
by making the actual school an object lesson; it should be well planned, not
only in its general design, but in all the details of the furniture, equipment
and material brought into it.34
The training of art appreciation had to be related to “the child’s personal
experience, to the things that he sees in the shops, in the streets and in his home” or
it would be “devoid of reality.” Schools needed “a collection of such common objects
33
Ibid., 11.
34
Ibid., 29-31.
20
for [art] lessons” if teachers were to develop the child’s perception. Training in the
appreciation of Art depended “more on the things that are seen by the pupil than on
what is said by the teacher.” The teacher also needed to “understand the object used
for instruction, and the possibilities of the material and of the tools or processes
employed.” LEAs should collect suitable objects from manufacturers and department
stores which could then be lent to elementary schools and changed by circulation.
The selection of such objects was to be made “by reliable judges” and “the question
of a national exhibition of a selection of these objects should be considered.” These
arrangements, the CAI suggested, could be supplemented by local museums and art
galleries who would maintain a collection of objects for circulation to the elementary
schools, as was being done in Leicester. Finally, every school should also have “an
accessible and conveniently arranged store-room for objects, materials and
pictures.”35
The membership of the Committee that drafted the report under Frank Pick’s
guidance included F. V. Burridge, E. McKnight Kauffer, and C. G. Holme and
evidence was received from amongst others E. M. O’R. Dickey, C. Birchenough,
Chief Inspector of Education for Kent, R. R. Tomlinson, Senior Art Inspector, London
County Council, and Marion Richardson, Art Inspector, LCC. All of these individuals
were part of the collective that produced the 1937 exhibition.36 The Committee also
included the artist Paul Nash.
Modernists and Progressive Educationalists
35
Ibid., 31-33.
36
Ibid., 38; Appendix: List of Witnesses, 39.
21
The ideas presented in the exhibition, their form and content, the concern for
both function and aesthetics was determined by an assembly of individuals
committed to modernist design and progressive education (see Appendix). That said,
there was a core group whose personal imprint is clear to see in the exhibition: Frank
Pick, the driving force behind the exhibition, McKnight Kauffer, who had worked with
Pick on various projects since the 1920s, Maxwell Fry, the exhibitions designer, and
Marion Richardson, who was singled out for praise both by Pick and E. M. Rich,
Chief Education Officer of the LCC.37 It is in their interconnected life stories that the
genesis and execution of the exhibition in 1937 can be located; their professional
lives and interests placed them within national and European wide networks of
intellectual circulation and exchange. It was these connections which brought
Gropius (1883-1969) and Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) to work with the CAI and the
LCC in 1936 and 1937.
Frank Pick (1878-1941) was managing director in 1928, and vice-chairman, of
London Passenger Transport Board between 1933 and 1940. As a senior industrial
manager he used his position to promote modernist ideas in posters, lettering and
station design, commissioning amongst others the artists McKnight Kauffer, Eric Gill
and Edward Johnston. In the 1920s Pick had joined the Design and Industries
Association (DIA). He was sympathetic to the dual model of working undertaken by
the Deutscher Werkbund - promoting design for industry through bringing
industrialists, artists, craft workers and architects together and advocating higher
37
Marion Richardson Archive Ms 1045 Pick to Richardson, 11.1.1937; 1253 Rich to
Richardson, 1.1937, BIAD.
22
standards of public taste - which DIA attempted to transpose to an English context.38
Other members of the DIA included McKnight Kauffer, the sociologist Seebohm
Rowntree, the economic historian R. H. Tawney, the educationalist Michael Sadler,
W. R. Lethaby, Head of the London Central School of Art and Crafts, and Brangwyn
Burridge, who succeeded him.39 Several of these figures later worked with Pick to
promote design at the CAI.
Central to Pick’s ideas about design was visual education. In 1922, in notes
recorded for a lecture, he wrote:
Man’s rapid progress is based on words, we think in words, our minds
string words like beads … Pictures, visions, memories of things seen are
neglected. Children see the visions more than the grown-ups. We teach
them the craft of word-spinning. The damage is done, we should be
teaching them the art of seeing.40
This concern for the visual interest also found him exploring the visual environment
in schools. In the summer of 1930 he toured northern Europe with the architect
Charles Holden, visiting schools and in one report he wrote of a school in Hilversum,
Holland:
Great attention has been paid to the influence of the environment on the
child mind. The classrooms are admirably lit … and considerable use has
38
Sparke. Introduction to Design, 66-67. The Deutscher Werkbund was set up in
Munich in 1907 with the aim of improving the design and quality of German goods. See,
Campbell, J. The German Werkbund: The Politics of Reform in the Applied Arts. Princeton,
NJ, 1978.
Pevsner, Nicholas. “Patient Progress Three: The DIA.” In Studies in Art,
39
Architecture and Design, vol. 2, London, 1968, 227, 275.
40
Barman. The Man Who Built London Transport,168-169.
23
been made of bright colour. In one room, for instance, the doors were
painted green and the desks were treated in a number of harmonising
colours.41
Pick was also an executive member of the Council for the Preservation of
Rural England, an organisation, which like the DIA, subscribed to what David
Matless (1998) has described as a “modernism of orderly progress … a mix of
functionalist tradition with elements of the Modern Movement in architecture and
design.”42 Pick represented both English preservation and German modernism,
advocating fitness for purpose in design alongside the social properties of
architecture. When Walter Gropius’ The New Architecture and the Bauhaus was
translated into English in 1935, Pick provided the Introduction, hailing the book as
connecting architecture and everyday design in order to “restore grace and order to
society,” with “spatial harmonies” and “functional qualities” making for “a new
architectonic arising out of a collective understanding of design in industry.” 43 The
book did much to disseminate the Modernist principles behind Gropius’ method of
design. At the same time, Pick was also in the tradition of John Ruskin and William
Morris in his belief in the redemptive power design. The design historian Penny
Sparke has argued that British governmental activity in design reform in the interwar
years was generally unsuccessful as it was half-hearted, insular, poorly funded and
had consequently had little effect on either the British public or manufactory. That
said, she saw Frank Pick as a “farsighted and effective” design reformer who, along
Ibid., 168. Pick commissioned Holden to design 55 Broadway and many tube
41
stations.
42
Matless, David. Landscape and Englishness. London, 1998, 51.
Pick, Frank. “Introduction” to Walter Gropius’ The New Architecture and the
43
Bauhaus. London, 1935.
24
with a few other individuals, architects and designers championed the international
Modernist ideal.44 In 1941, the year of his death, Pick wrote a short pamphlet, Paths
to Peace (London, 1941) in which he said:
There must be a new conception of education as the art of living, or skill in
living well. The pedagogues have held sway far too long; they are
ensconced in the Board of Education. Education is much more than
extending the years at school … It is finding in every human activity scope
for education and means of culture.45
Edward McKnight Kauffer (1890-1954) had studied in San Francisco, Chicago
and Paris before moving to England in 1914. He began as a painter and Roger Fry
wrote a catalogue preface for an exhibition of Kauffer’s watercolours in Birmingham
in the summer of 1917. In 1921 Kauffer abandoned painting in favour of poster
design, notably for Frank Pick and London Passenger Transport. In 1924 he wrote
The Art of the Poster, Its Origin, Evolution and Purpose. Kauffer served with Pick on
the CAI in the 1930s and was an early member of the anti-fascist Artists International
Association (AIA). The AIA stood for ‘Unity of Artists against Fascism, War and
Suppression of Culture’ and engaged in theoretical and critical work, political activity
- producing posters, banners and placards -, organising exhibitions and also
campaigning for members professional interests, reform of art education and teacher
training, and the need for government finance and patronage. Kauffer was involved
in organising an exhibition against war and fascism in November 1935 which
included work by both Moholy-Nagy and Eric Gill.46 Kauffer lived with Marion Dorn, a
44
Sparke. Introduction to Design, 22-23.
45
Quoted in Barman. The Man Who Built London Transport, 269.
46
Morris, L., and R. Radford. The Story of the Artists International Association 1933-
1953. Oxford, 1983, 23-30; Heinemann, Margaret. “The People’s Front and the
25
textile designer who produced designs in the 1930s for Alistair Morton’s firm,
Edinburgh Weavers. Morton had been encouraged in his ideas by Moholy-Nagy and
Walter Gropius. Morton also produced designs by Ashley Havinden, who was a
close friend of Kauffer and had arranged design commissions for the American artist
in 1930.47 Kauffer was also a friend of the architect Fredrick Etchells, who translated
Le Corbusier’s book Vers une architecture.48 In 1937 Kauffer was not only involved
in the Design in Education exhibition, but also joined the advisory board of the
Reimann School and Studio in Regency Street, Westminster which opened to
provide professional training in commercial and industrial art. The School was
concerned with the fusion of theory and practice and was based on the Reimann
School in Berlin.49
E. Maxwell Fry (1899-1987) was one of the founders of the Modern
Architectural Research (MARS) Group in 1933, a London branch of the Congrès
Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne. MARS aimed to act as a support structure for
architects, engineers and theorists isolated in conservative 1930s Britain and
provided a link with the continental modern movement in art and design, and in
Intellectuals.” In Britain, Fascism and the Popular Front, edited by Jim Fyrth. London, 1985,
164-165.
47
Anscombe, Isabelle. Omega and After. Bloomsbury and the Decorative Arts.
London, 1981, 133; Havinden, Michael. “Ashley Havinden 1903-1973. Life and Work.” In
Havinden, M., Richard Hollis, Ann Simpson and Alice Strang. Advertising and the Artist.
Ashley Havinden. Edinburgh, 2003, 14.
Hollis, Richard. “Ashley Havinden. Advertising and Art.” In Havinden et al.
48
Advertising and the Artist, 37.
49
Times Educational Supplement, 16.1.1937.
26
particular contact with Moholy-Nagy and Gropius at the Bauhaus school of design. 50
In the early 1930s Fry was active in the Design Industries Association and also was
involved with Frank Pick in a series of BBC radio programmes on modern design. 51
Fry was introduced to the DIA through the designer Christian Barman, who was later
the biographer of Pick.52 It was Fry whom, along with Jack Pritchard, was
instrumental in bringing Gropius out of Hitler’s Germany in 1934. Fry later described
his role as acting as “a bogus employment agency” for “refugees from Germany.”53
Pritchard, a furniture manufacturer worked with new materials, such as plywood, and
was heavily influenced by the experimental ideas of designers, craftsmen and
architects in Scandinavia and Germany, and in particular those of the Bauhaus
School.54 Pritchard was also active in the DIA.55 On his arrival in England Pritchard
had established Gropius at the Isokon Building, Lawn Road an experiment in
collective housing designed for left-wing intellectuals by the architect Wells Coates in
1934. The Isobar, a clubroom on the ground floor designed by the Bauhaus émigré
Marcel Breuer was a favourite meeting place for many members of the Modernist
Movement in London including Barbara Hepworth, Herbert Read, Henry Moore, Ben
Nicholson and Naum Gabo. The arrival of Gropius in 1934 and Moholy-Nagy in 1935
meant that London, and particular Hamstead, became in the late 1930s the centre
for the International Modern Movement. Pritchard worked to find Gropius design
50
Fry, Maxwell. Autobiographical Sketches. London, 1975, 140-142.
Pevsner. “Patient Progress Three: The DIA,” 235.
51
52
Fry. Autobiographical Sketches. London, 1975, 133.
53
Ibid., 146.
54
Binyon. Eric Ravilious, 57.
55
Fry. Autobiographical Sketches, 137-138.
27
commissions, including a scheme for a block of flats in Selly Oak, Birmingham; an
exhibition of Gropius’ work toured to the city in 1934 and he spoke with architects in
the Birmingham area during at visit in the same year.56 It was Pritchard who, in the
same year, introduced Gropius to Henry Morris, Chief Education Officer for
Cambridgeshire, a meeting which he described as “Enlightened architect met
enlightened educationist: result: orgasm.”57 Gropius confirmed Morris in the opinion
of designing “all contemporary buildings without regard to traditional style.”58 He
determined to employ Gropius to design, with Maxwell Fry with whom he had
entered into partnership, Impington Village College and with Pritchard raised the
money to pay their fees. Pritchard also persuaded the architect and friend of Frank
Pick, Charles Holden, to endorse the project:
Mr Fry brings to the partnership feeling for the English tradition and a highly
developed practical sense, while Professor Gropius possesses one of the
most original architectural minds of our time, deeply interested in the social
Elliott, David. “Gropius in England: A Documentation 1934-1937.” In: Benton,
56
Charlotte. A Different World. Émigré Architects in Britain 1928-1958. London, 1995, 108,
115; Foster, Andy. “’A Pevsner’ city guide to Birmingham.” In Royal Institute of British
Architects. West Midlands Yearbook 2003. Birmingham, 2003, 13. The Birmingham architect
Sargent Florence was a friend of Gropius and in the 1930s employed Nicholas Pevsner.
57
Quoted in Rée, Harry. Educator Extraordinary. The Life and Achievement of Henry
Morris. London: Peter Owen, 1985, 70-71.
58
Ibid., 66.
28
aspect of building and most accomplished using all the results of modern
research.59
Morris described Gropius’ plans for Impington Village College in 1936 as “superb: a
veritable architectural seduction, chaste and severe, but intense” and the following
year declared the design “a masterpiece.”60 The College opened in 1939 and
Nicholas Pevsner, the architectural historian, described it as “one of the best
buildings of its date in England, if not the best.”61 Gropius and Fry also designed a
Village School for Papworth in 1937. The project was never realised although it was
published in Circle - An International Survey of Modern Art edited by J. L. Martin,
Elliott. “Gropius in England.” 120. The letter was written by Holden and W. G.
59
Constable, the Slade Art Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cambridge, John Maynard
Keynes and C. H. Reilly, formerly Professor of Architecture at the University of Liverpool
60
Rée. Educator Extraordinary, 6, 64.
61
Pevsner, Nicholas. Cambridgeshire. Harmondsworth, 1954, second edition 1970,
412-413. Herbert Read held similar views, writing “We turn, then, to the practical question: is
it possible, not merely to conceive, but to build and introduce into the existing educational
system, schools which provide the essentials of an educative environment? The answer is
yes: it has been in at least one instance, and a model perhaps not perfect in every detail, but
practical, functional and beautiful does exist on English Soil … the Village College at
Impington …,” Education Through Art. London, 1956, 292-293. Stillman and Cleary
particularly drew attention to the library at the College as “an example of good modern
design.” “The bookcases are set well apart and are raised above the floor for convenience of
access and to allow for ease of cleaning. Painted white, they lighten the effect in the room
and make full play with the colours provided by the books. The simplicity of the room gives it
an air of rest and quiet,” Stillman C. G., and R. C. Cleary. The Modern School. London,
1949, 114.
29
Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo.62 Gropius left London for North America and the
post of Professor of Architecture in the Graduate School of Design at Harvard in
1937. Moholy Nagy, who later followed Gropius to America, was also involved in
designing the interior colour schemes for another of Morris’ Villages Colleges at
Linton.63 Fry was a friend of both McKnight Kauffer and Ashley Havinden and
Havinden, in turn, found design work for Moholy-Nagy after his arrival in 1935.64 Fry,
who also developed a close friendship with Moholy-Nagy and worked with him on a
series of collaborative projects, described him as having an imagination “so fertile …
that ideas tumbled out of him too fast to put to account” and to walk through London
with him “gave one eye, … new senses for the sights and sounds, the irregularities
and eccentricities of a too familiar townscape.”65
In January 1938 Fry and the MARS group organised an exhibition at the New
Burlington Galleries, London to present “the practical advantages” of modern
architecture and “the enjoyment that is to be derived from them.” Fry later went into
partnership with Le Corbusier.66
Marion Richardson (1892-1946) trained as an art teacher at Birmingham
School of Art and was appointed, at nineteen, an art mistress at nearby Dudley Girls’
High School. After an unsuccessful interview for a London teaching post in 1917
Elliott. “Gropius in England.“ 121.
62
63
Ibid., 112, 227 note 29.
Fry. Art in the Machine Age, passim; Havinden. “Ashley Havinden.” 14; Simpson,
64
Ann. “Ashley Havinden. Architecture and Interiors.” In Havinden, Advertising and the Artist,
67; Senter, T. “Moholy-Nagy’s English Photography.” Burlington Magazine, no. 944 (1981),
659.
65
Fry. Autobiographical Sketches, 156.
66
Ibid., 140-142, 145, 154-155.
30
Richardson visited an ‘Exhibition of Children’s Drawings’ at Roger Fry’s Omega
Workshops.67 Richardson knew of Fry through his sister Margery (1874-1958) who
had been the warden (1904-14) at her student residence at University House,
Birmingham in 1910. Roger Fry (1866-1934) had started the Omega Workshops in
London in 1913 with the aim of producing decorative art from a background not of
crafts but of painting. Richardson showed examples of her pupils’ work to Fry who
enjoyed their “simplicity and freshness” and he displayed some of their work before
the end of 1917. Fry praised Richardson’s resistance to teaching-as-instruction:
“Miss Richardson has found out how not to impose a ready-made pictorial formula
on the all too suggestible child-mind. That is, I think, the most essential discovery
she has made - she has found how not to teach and yet to inspire.”68 He described
Richardson’s method in a letter to Vanessa Bell in 1917 as
making the children put down their own visualizations - ‘drawing’ with eyes
shut etc69
and in a letter to his daughter Pamela
I think all she does is to make them put down the composition with their
eyes shut and then work from that. The things are simply too lovely for
anything. They illustrate homes and scenes of their lives and all sorts of
things and everyone who’s seen them is amazed and full of jealousy for
67
Richardson, Marion. Art and the Child. London, 1948, 11-12, 30. Roger Fry is not
known to be related to Maxwell Fry.
Fry, Roger. “Children’s Drawings.” The Burlington Magazine, XL, (January 1924),
68
35-41.
69
Anscombe. Omega and After, 75-76.
31
these lucky kids. I’m trying to get the Minister of Education [H. A. L. Fisher]
to see them and see if we can’t do something to stop the teaching of art.70
Richardson’s approach - bringing out the individual child’s expressive capacities,
encouraging the drawing, not of objects, but of ideas - was not new, but built on
practices advocated by her former tutor Robert Catterson-Smith, Principal at
Birmingham School of Art and by Frank Cizek, Professor at the Academy of Fine
Arts Vienna.71 This connection with past practices was alluded to by Sir Kenneth
Clark, Director of the National Gallery, in his Introduction to Richardson’s
autobiographical Art and the Child (1948), but he also pointed to her tenacity, energy
and vision:
the pages that follow tell, with the simplicity of a saint, the story of a great
reform in education. Revolutions, we are told, are never the work of a single
individual: the ground is prepared, there are precursors and unknown
fellow-workers … artists had already become aware of the vivid, expressive
painting which children could produce if allowed to work in their own ways.
Still, it was Marion Richardson alone who recognised that this power of
imaginative expression could be developed in almost every child as part of
his [sic] education, and, thanks to her vision and tenacity, this discovery did
70
Roger Fry to Pamela Fry, 7.1.1917. In Letters of Roger Fry, edited by D. Sutton. Vol
2. London: 1972, 395.
Green, Christopher. “Expanding the Canon. Roger Fry’s Evaluations of the
71
‘Civilised’ and the ‘Savage’.” In Art Made Modern. Roger Fry’s Vision of Art, edited by C.
Green. London, 1999, 129; Jameson, Kenneth. Pre-School and Infant Art. London, 1968,
114; Marion Richardson Archive. Producing a Biographical and Critical Monograph based on
the Marion Richardson Archive: Crosscurrents (unpublished report 1977), 3, BIAD.
32
not remain a mere experiment … but spread throughout this country,
Canada and America.72
Through Fry and the Omega Workshops Richardson was brought in contact
with other artists (Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Mark Gertler, Paul Nash, Wyndham
Lewis and McNight Kauffer), writers and critics.73 The latter included Margaret
Bulley, who would later serve with Fry on the Gorell Committee in 1931, where he
praised Richardson’s innovative methods in his memorandum. Bulley, on meeting
Richardson, persuaded the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester to exhibit the
children’s drawings and designs. Fry contributed a catalogue introduction. This was
followed by requests from cotton manufacturers to sell some of the block-printed
patterns for reproduction.74 In the 1920s Bulley corresponded regularly with
Richardson about the relationship between art practice and theory; correspondence
which was also driven by their shared Christian Science beliefs. She also used
Richardson’s pupils in a ‘taste’ test - presenting children with four pairs of art
reproductions - to try to determine whether there was a correlation between
intelligence and taste.75 Richardson’s work was later a central focus of Bulley’s Art
and Understanding (1936) - the book was dedicated to her - and includes a
comparison of work done by her pupils with that produced by Cizek’s pupils.76
Clark, Sir Kenneth. “Introduction.” In Richardson. Art and the Child, 7.
72
73
Anscombe. Omega and After, passim.
74
Richardson. Art and the Child, 35.
75
Crosscurrents, 13-15. Bulley collaborated with the psychologist Cyril Burt on a
design taste test for the BBC in 1933, see Holdsworth, Bruce. “English Art Education
between the Wars.” Journal of Art and Design Education, 3, no. 2, (1984), 169.
Holdsworth. “Art Education between the Wars:” 161, 170.
76
33
The connections with the Fry family continued to shape Richardson’s life. In
1918 through the intercession of Margery Fry, Richardson became a volunteer at
Birmingham Prison, taking Handicraft and Embroidery Classes.77 The following year
Roger Fry organised a second exhibition of Richardson’s children’s drawings at the
Omega but there was very little interest and the art critic of The Times, CluttonBrock, Fry reported to Vanessa Bell ‘missed all that was good’ and ‘bitterly
disappointed’ Richardson with his comments.78 Another children’s exhibition followed
in 1920 and Richardson met the teacher art educator R. R. Tomlinson79. Margery Fry
later invited Richardson to join herself and her brother in the house they shared in
London and while with them Richardson advertised private art tuition for children,
before becoming a part time tutor on a new Graduate Course for art students run by
the London Day Training College. She also maintained some teaching in Dudley. 80
The following year Richardson organised an exhibition of the work of her pupils at
the Independent Gallery, London which Roger Fry praised in the Burlington
Magazine. In 1925 she was a delegate of the Association of Assistant Mistresses at
the Paris meeting of the International Federation of Art Teachers and she also
travelled to Russia to see schools and prisons and observe art lessons. 81 On the
return journey she visited Vienna in order to have discussions with the art educator
Margery Fry and Richardson grew closer over time. Fry wrote to Richardson: “How
77
nice it is for me who have no children to have something so near a very nice daughter as
you are.” Marion Richardson Archive Ms 255 Fry to Richardson, 22.1.1933, BIAD.
78
Anscombe. Omega and After, 100-101; Roger Fry to Vanessa Bell 22.2.1919 in
Sutton. Letters of Roger Fry, 405-406.
Holdsworth. “Art Education between the Wars.” 175.
79
Green. “Expanding the Canon.” 129; Richardson. Art and the Child, 42.
80
81
Marion Richardson Archive Ms 3153, BIAD.
34
Franz Cizek. He had become interested while a student in the uninhibited drawings
with which young children covered the pavements and walls outside the house
where he lodged and the restricted academic drawings they were called upon to
produce in school.82 Richardson had previously seen a touring exhibition in England
of drawings from Cizek’s Children’s Art Classes, which had been organised by
Francesca Wilson (1888-1981), a schoolteacher from Birmingham on behalf of the
Save the Children Fund in 1921.
Francesca Wilson, who was a friend of Margery Fry and had worked with her
in France for the Friends’ War Victims Relief Committee during the First World War,
met Cizek through the intercession of Bertram Hawker (who had helped to introduce
Montessori ideas to England) when she was doing refugee work in Vienna in 1920.
Wilson selected pictures from Cizek’s collection for a touring exhibition, organised
their reproduction “as postcards or lithographs,” and wrote explanatory pamphlets
which were later sold at the exhibition which toured Britain for two years and for
several years more, the United States. One image, Herta Zuckermann’s ‘Spring’ was
according to Wilson, “to be seen in almost every kindergarten in England and
America.”83 Richardson made the same observation in her autobiography: “[images]
were reproduced, sold by the thousand, and quickly found their way into [English]
schools and nurseries.”84 Wilson balanced teaching with refugee work and political
activism (she was a member of the Women’s International League) throughout the
82
Jameson. Pre-School and Infant Art, 114; Wilson, F. M. In the Margins of Chaos.
London, 1944, 124-128.
83
Wilson. In the Margins of Chaos, 126; Wilson, Francesca. Rebel daughter of a
country house. The Life of Eglantyre Jebb. London, 1967, 201-202.
84
Richardson. Art and the Child, 51-52.
35
1920s and 30s and was instrumental in bringing the German architectural and
design historian Nicholas Pevsner (1902-83) to Britain [and Birmingham] in 1933. 85
In 1930 Richardson was appointed District Inspector of Art under the London
County Council, and began working closely with Tomlinson who was Senior
Inspector for Art. The same year saw her in correspondence with the psychologist
Cyril Burt about the psychology of aesthetic development in children of junior school
age and she commented on Burt’s writing in this area.86 In 1933 she organised
another exhibition of children’s drawings which Roger Fry again praised and
publicised.87 In 1934 Richardson accepted an invitation from the Carnegie Trust to
undertake a lecture tour around the University Summer Schools of Canada.
Richardson took an exhibition of children’s work. The same year she was involved in
another Cizek exhibition in London and both her work with children and his featured
in Tomlinson’s Picture Making by Children (1934), the first full-length book to show
illustrations of contemporary methods in art teaching.88 The following year she was
involved with organising a series of lectures and persuaded Sir Kenneth Clark to
85
Newnham College Roll Letter. Cambridge, 1982, 62; Bachtin, Nicholas. Lectures
and Essays. Birmingham, 1963, 10-12.
86
Marion Richardson Archive Ms 112 Cyril Burt to Marion Richardson, 16.4.1930: Ms
113, Burt to Richardson, 8.5.1930, BIAD.
Fry, Roger. “Children’s Drawings at the County Hall.” The New Statesman and
87
Nation (24 June 1933), 844-845.
Holdsworth. “Art Education between the Wars.” 168. R. R. Tomlinson, continued to
88
promote children’s art and produced Children as Artists. London, 1944. He later became
involved in School Prints, a similar venture to that pioneered by Contemporary Lithographs
[see above] and organised by Brenda Rawnsley and Herbert Read. The Contemporary
Lithographs project had been abandoned due to paper shortages with the advent of war.
36
participate even though he had “long ago sworn never to give another lecture.”
Clark’s reason for changing his mind was Richardson’s work which was “so valuable
and interesting.”89
At Birmingham School of Art Richardson had been taught calligraphy by a
pupil of Edward Johnston, who had taught at the Central School of Arts and Crafts
and had been commissioned by Frank Pick in 1916 to design the type face for
London Underground’s corporate identity. Eric Gill worked on the project with
Johnston.90 Richardson maintained an active interest in writing and in the 1930s also
became occupied with “studying the spontaneous scribble of very small children” and
the importance of natural movement and this led her “to search till I found a way of
teaching both writing and drawing which sacrificed nothing of Nature’s rich dowry.”
Richardson explored these issues in her book Writing and Writing Patterns (1935)91
and in the summer of 1937 she presented an address on handwriting at the Eighth
International Congress on Art Education on ‘Drawing and Art Applied to Industry’
which was organised within the Paris International Exhibition. The Congress’ themes
included:
89
Marion Richardson Archive Ms 1279 Sir Kenneth Clark to Richardson, 27.2.1935,
BIAD.
90
Yorke, Malcolm. Eric Gill. Man of Flesh and Spirit. 1981, 257.
See Davis, Tom. “The acquisition of handwriting in the UK” documents the influence
91
of Marion Richardson’s “Round hand system” in primary schools, the system developed in
1935
recommended
joining
most
but
not
all
www.bham.ac.uk/english/bibliography/handwriting/new_webpages/acquisition.html.
Accessed 1st September 2003.
letters.”
37
Artistic culture in the nation, the teaching of art, equipment of art rooms,
manual and visual tendencies of children, modern conception of decorative
design, reform of handwriting, history of art and training of the teacher.
The Chairman of the organising British Committee was Richardson’s colleague R. R.
Tomlinson of the LCC.92 The British Pavilion at the Paris Exhibition was organised by
the CAI under Frank Pick’s guidance, with selection again being determined by “the
English tradition of sound construction and good workmanship.” The Council used
the designs of Eric Ravilious, Ashley Havinden and Maxwell Fry. 93 At the end of the
year Pick contacted Richardson suggesting another project:
What do you say to collecting together some 50 or more illustrated books
for children up to, say, the age of 14 or 15 and divide them into two groups,
books for the younger ones and books for the older ones … What sort of
illustrations would you seek to put before the children? That is to say, what
is the finished kind of art they would have to look at?
At the end of his letter he noted:
The penalty of your success is that you have got to go further, so I can only
think of new tasks for you.94
The following year Richardson staged another exhibition of children’s work at the
Conference Hall for the LCC, which was opened by Sir Kenneth Clark, ran for eight
weeks and received 26,000 visitors.95
92
Marion Richardson Archive Ms 1459 Poster for The International Congress on Art
Education, Paris July 30 - August 5, 1937; Ms 1453, 1458, 1459, BIAD.
Simpson. “Ashley Havinden. Architecture and Interiors.” 74.
93
94
Marion Richardson Archive Ms 461 Pick to Richardson, 25.11.1937, BIAD.
95
Richardson. Art and the Child, 79.
38
“Design in Education:” an Education Exhibition Reconsidered
The “Design in Education” exhibition, as already noted, was well received in
1937. Its content was seen as relevant and it connected with modernist agendas
circulating amongst some designers, architects and educators, but what of the view
from the vantage point of the present. What claims can be made for the story that
unfolded as the contents of the manila folder in the archive was narrativised? Indeed,
there is in this account of events in 1936 and 1937, as in any narrative text, more
than one story. Just as the exhibition escaped “beyond its original limits … [as] the
material grew wider and wider in range,” so too did the narrative associated with its
reconstruction. There is a story of objects in schools, of the material culture of
schooling, another story is of the use of exhibitions to shift popular perceptions, a
third story is about the appreciation of the aesthetic and changing ideas about art
education in schools, and there is a story about the production, reception and
dissemination of knowledge - the ideas of the Bauhaus in particular - in early
twentieth century Europe. Each of these stories readily generates further research
questions and issues.
The Bauhaus has been described as “the opening chapter to the narrative of
twentieth century design.” From its inception it was premised on the notion of a
“return.” First it drew on ideas about the “child-as-artist” and “the childhood of art”
which aimed to liberate students’ creativity through a return to childhood, by
introducing elementary explorations of forms and materials, blind drawing and
rhythmic drawing motions. Ideas which had been promoted by Johannes Itten and
Cizek in Vienna, Hermann Obrist in Munich and Adolf Holzel in Stuttgart. This
39
pedagogy was gradually transformed towards a more rational and industrial
vocabulary of form under the influence of Wassily Kandinsky, Gropius and MoholyNagy. This pedagogy focused on training students in those elements of the visual
that could be described as elementary, essential and originary. Under Gropius the
Bauhaus expanded the concept of architectural design and training by bringing
together artists, craftsmen, engineers and planners to work with architects. Science,
engineering and industry were welcomed. Students at the Bauhaus were introduced
to composition, colour, materials and three-dimensional form which familiarised them
with the techniques, concepts and formal relationships fundamental to all visual
expression, whether it be sculpture, metal work, painting or lettering. 96 The Bauhaus,
according to its third and final director, was “not an institution with a clear programme
- it was an idea,” nevertheless it laid the foundations for modern industrial design
education. The Bauhaus vision embraced the objective values of standardisation
associated with mass production alongside a commitment to the humanism of craft
production.97 Maxwell Fry summed up the impact of the Bauhaus vision on England:
we realised that the task he [Gropius] set us would last our life-time, that we
were concerned now not with architecture alone, but with society.98
Before leaving England in March 1937 Gropius wrote:
There ought to be a general basic training in art for all, starting with the
smallest child, followed by specialist training as soon as necessary, but as
late as possible. We need a new ground-work for all schools, a preliminary
J. Abbott Miller, “Elementary School.” In The ABC’s of … The Bauhaus and Design
96
Theory, edited by E. Lupton and J. Abbot Miller. London, 1993, 4-5, 20
97
Mies van der Rohe (1954) quoted in Wingler, H. Bauhaus - Weimar Dessau Berlin
Chicago. Cambridge, Mass., 1969, 17.
Fry. Autobiographical Sketches, 147.
98
40
artistic training … in keeping with experience gained from Froebel and
Montessori … the whole task of the teacher is to keep the child’s
imagination awake and constantly to stimulate its desire to model and
draw.99
The London Exhibition was collectively authored. It represents the reception
and dissemination of Bauhaus ideas. The exhibition with its breadth of coverage, its
concern with form, colour and materials directed towards promoting the ‘art of
seeing’ in children and teachers and the creation of a unity between art and industry
stands as a public endorsement of Modernism, both in relation to design and
educational practice. ‘Fitness for purpose’ was the lexicon of this endorsement. That
said, elements of a functionalist tradition and orderly progress is evident in this
version of the Modernist project.
It is also possible to project the ideas about design and education embodied in
the exhibition backwards into the nineteenth century. E. R. Robson’s illustrated
School Architecture (1874) offered “practical remarks on the planning, designing,
building and furnishing of school-houses.” For Robson the health and happiness of
both the teacher and the child were dependent of the “manner in which their schoolhouses” were “constructed and furnished.”100 Robson’s colleague John Moss
contributed a chapter on “School Furniture and Apparatus” where he wrote:
Suitable appliances are to the teacher very much what proper tools are to
the handicraftsman [sic] … The furniture of the school-room should be
graceful in form and good in quality and finish. Children are particularly
susceptible of surrounding influences, and their daily familiarisation with
Gropius, Walter. “Art Education and the State.” In Circle, edited by J. L. Martin, Ben
99
Nicholson and N. Gatson. London, 1937, 238.
100
Robson, E. R. School Architecture. London, 1874, 7.
41
beauty and form or colour in the simplest and most ordinary objects, cannot
fail to assist in fostering the seeds of taste … In our time it is desirable to
extend the process of education …by the adoption of good and tasteful
designs as well as of superior workmanship for the necessary mechanical
aids. The insensible influence thus exerted will not be without due fruit in
future years, and, in the present, will assist in promoting a love for the
school.101
The ideas and actions embodied in the 1937 exhibition can also be viewed as
connecting with what Matless has persuasively written about as the emergence in
England in the 1940s of a linkage between visual education and the spaces of
citizenship into a ‘wider design for life’. In particular, Matless has documented how
the Council for Visual Education (constituent bodies included both the Council for the
Preservation of Rural England and the Design and Industries Association) in the
years immediately after the Second World War sought to cultivate through a series of
pamphlets “intelligent opinion” so that the new citizen would welcome the modern.
For example, W. F. Morris in The Future Citizen and his Surroundings (1946) set out
the Council of Visual Education’s programme for raising “the uneducated taste of the
great majority.” Morris judged that:
The capacity for good judgement in aesthetic matters is latent in most
children, but is warped or suppressed by bad surroundings or strong
misleading suggestions in youth or adolescence …
and children should be
taught impatience with things unnecessarily drab or squalid, and should be
infected with a desire to remove or improve them.
Moss, John. “School Furniture and Apparatus.” In Robson. School Architecture,
101
360.
42
Similarly, William Ellis, in his Foreword to Hervey Adams’s Art and Everyman
(London, 1946), argued that
it is through the schools alone that we can break into this vicious circle of
shoddy education and de-based public taste.
Finally, Nicholas Pevsner argued Visual Pleasures from Everyday Things (London,
1946) that visual pleasure derived from order and design, and every element in the
environment should embody such principles. The visually enabled citizen would revel
in a designed country:
Visual education … is concerned with things in nature as much as with
man-made things. Possibly only one in a thousand today knows what to do
with his [sic] eyes beyond using them for utilitarian purposes … Very few
realise that any tree, any leaf, any stone - and also any pot, any rug, any
spoon - can be regarded aesthetically.102
The exhibition as it developed through the committee meetings in 1936 and in
its final form in January 1937 also represents an example of networks in action, of
social actors being mobilised through formal and informal relations. Individuals within
a network are nodal points of contact and mapping these contacts allows us to
illuminate the links between agencies and action, between - in this case - individuals
interested in education and those professionally involved. Telling the story of a
network is not straightforward. As here, with the focus being on just four individuals
Pick, Kauffer, Maxwell Fry and Richardson, there is a concern with identifying
linkages, which can result in factual indigestion for the reader, yet it is in the detail
that the complexity of interactions can best be appreciated. Other linkages could
have been made by adding additional nodal points in the network, Dr P. B. Ballard,
for example, a colleague of Richardson’s at the LCC, was her mentor reading and
102
Matless. Landscape and Englishness, 260-263.
43
correcting the draft of her autobiography, was deeply interested in child psychology
and art and active in international groupings looking at intelligence testing and
examination performance.103 This was a network which had at its core a concern
with the ‘art of seeing’ and how this could be developed in children, in particular
through a new pedagogy of art education. How these ideas were received and
decoded, selected and promoted, modified or rejected, how they were transmitted
and circulated, and how individual contacts were made, organised and sustained are
all questions which need further exploration if this network in action is to be
understood. Indeed, the role of networks in developing a disciplinary field in
education is an area of research still awaiting its historians.104
One transmitting agent for this network in action was the exhibition itself.
Viewing the exhibition in this way draws attention to an area relatively unexplored by
103
Read. Education through Art, 67-68; Maclure, Stuart. One Hundred Years of
London Education. London: Allen Lane, 1970, 37, 57; Ballard, P. B. “What London Children
like to draw.” The Journal of Experimental Pedagogy (1911-12), 185-197; Ballard, P. B. “The
Elementary Schools of London” Appendix 1 of LCC Annual Report (1925), 38; Topham
Vinall, J. W. School Drawing and Colour Work. London: Gresham Publishing, nd., 118-119;
Marion Richardson Archive Ms. 1001 Ballard to Richardson, 30.8.1946, BIAD. Ballard was
the only individual listed in the acknowledgments of Richardson’s autobiography. In a review
of her Art and the Child, he described Richardson as a “dominant figure in the educational
world” and “the English Cizek.” News clippings The Teachers World 8.12.1948, BIAD.
Thanks to Martin Lawn for information about Ballard and intelligence testing.
See, Silver, Harold. “Britain’s Educational Worlds.” In Education, Change and the
104
Policy Process. Lewes, 1990, 147-165; and Hofstetter, Rita and Bernard Schneuwly (ed.).
“The Role of Congresses and Institutes in the Emergence of the Educational Sciences.”
Paedagogica Historica, XL, no. 5/6 (2004), special issue.
44
historians of education - the role of exhibitions in promoting educational ideas.
Marion Richardson, in her autobiography, noted the importance of educational
exhibitions as “a means” for the LCC to keep “in touch with its teachers,” as “source
of inspiration and refreshment” and the Conference Hall “as the setting” for the more
important of these: “Teachers, children, parents, public, and Press were brought
together and met with the Council members in a way that would have otherwise
been impossible.”105 The importance of education exhibitions as a mechanism for
disseminating ideas was widely recognised. As noted earlier, the Gorell Committee
presented in its report a historical narrative of the use of exhibitions in England to
promote design education, Frank Tate organised an exhibition on the work of
Victorian state schools in Australia in 1906 which attracted 250,000 visitors over
sixteen days and exhibitions were a common feature at national and international
congresses.106 The use of an exhibition to put across the CAI design agenda was
judged successful as it was followed in the June by a second exhibition focusing on
“Furnishing the Working Class Home.” The agenda was the same - the promotion of
fitness for purpose and aesthetics in design.
The “Design and Education” exhibition was concerned with presenting
designed objects for use in elementary schools to its visiting public. Teachers and
pupils, in classrooms and schools, work with and through objects and materials all
105
Richardson. Art and the Child, 77.
106
Selleck, Richard. Frank Tate. A Biography. Melbourne, 1982, 164-167. Thanks to
Martin Lawn for this reference. For exhibitions attached to national meetings, see, for
example, Education (15 January 1937), 95-97; and for international congresses, see, for
example, League of the Empire. Official Report of the Federal Conference on Education,
Caxton Hall, Westminister. London, 1907.
45
the time. Teachers in their work share their lives with objects. They help to define
their work identity. Without these objects and the routines developed around their
use, schools could not operate. Yet this element of schooling remains a largely
obscured or ignored area of study in histories of national schooling. Historians need
to look much closer at the school as a site of consumption, to engage with the
material culture of schooling, to investigate why and how objects came into school,
the processes of production and marketing, and the meanings which surround their
use. All objects, from rulers to classroom design, are active, being social agents in
themselves as they expand the range of human action and mediate meanings
between teachers and pupils. In short, historians need to map and understand the
interrelationship in the past between artefacts, actors and structures.107
This leads to a further, if local, point. In 2002 the Design Council in England
produced a report entitled Kit for Purpose: design to deliver creative learning. It
documented how in the UK spending on educational resources comes to nearly
£1billion a year, but much of what was bought was ‘poorly designed, standardised
and well behind adult workplaces’. With the support of the Department for Education
and Skills the Design Council followed up the report with two further funded projects:
Schools Renaissance and the School Furniture for the Future Scheme which both
aim to bring about ‘smart spending’ on ‘good design for schools’. What is interesting
in the report and the subsequent projects is there is no historical dimension. It is as if
the concerns with progressive educational ideas and design solutions about
classrooms in the past never happened. That said, the CAI’s ambition for the “actual
school” to be “an object lesson; … well planned, not only in its general design, but in
See Grosvenor, Ian, and Martin Lawn. “Material Cultures of Schooling: Micro
107
histories of Objects and Routines,” unpublished paper presented at ECER Lisbon, 2001.
46
all the details of the furniture, equipment and material brought into it” went unfulfilled
in the decades following the Second World War. Pick and Richardson were both
dead by 1946, Gropius and Moholy-Nagy were engaged with new projects in the
America, and Britain entered a period of social reconstruction coupled with economic
uncertainty and austerity A concern with poor design in English schools and its
impact on teaching and learning has remained a trace element in reports and studies
of schooling since the 1950s. It can be found, for example, in the Ministry of
Education report Physical Education in the Primary School (1952), in Edward
Blishen’s The School That I’d Like (1969) and it permeates the evidence collected in
The School Id Like (2003).108
Finally, there is another story threaded through this account of the 1937
exhibition. The Cizek exhibition organised by Francesca Wilson in 1921 was used to
raise public awareness of the plight of children in Europe in the aftermath of the First
World War. Gropius and Moholy-Nagy arrived in England in 1934 and 1935
respectively as intellectual refugees from Hitler’s Germany. Newspaper reports of the
exhibition in January 1937 share space with accounts of the fall of Madrid. Three
months after the exhibition opened Wilson travelled to Spain as a refugee worker.
Helen Grant, a lecturer in Spanish at the University of Birmingham, who was also a
108
For example: “There is still much to be done in designing and adjusting school
furniture to meet the needs of children. Although much furniture is now designed so that it
can be moved and stacked, the underlying idea seems to be that all the children in a class
must be able to write simultaneously, and that for this purpose desks equal in number to the
children in the class are necessary. It may be that this idea should be modified.” Ministry of
Education. Physical Education in the Primary School Part One. Moving and Growing.
London, 1952, 79-80; Blishen, Edward. The School That I’d Like. London, 1969, passim;
Burke Catherine, and Ian Grosvenor. The School I’d Like. London, 2003, passim.
47
friend of both Margery Fry and Marion Richardson, accompanied her. In 1938 the
Nazis closed Cizek’s school in Vienna.109 Sometimes when we venture into the
archive our vision can become too focused, the “art of seeing” requires us always to
seek out the bigger picture.
109
Marion Richardson Archive Ms 255 Fry to Richardson, 22.7.1933, BIAD; Wilson. In
the Margins of Chaos, 174-177; Fyrth, Jim. The Signal Was Spain. The Aid Spain Movement
in Britain 1936-39. London, 1986, 163-173; Coates, Andrew. “Observation and Drawing: a
Justification for their Inclusion in the Primary School Curriculum.” Journal of Art and Design
Education, 3, no. 2, (1984), 194-195.
48
Appendix: The Exhibition Planning Committee110
Frank Pick, Chair of Council for Art and Industry.
E. McKnight Kauffer Artist
Miss Marion Richardson Inspector with London County Council [Writing]
Dr P. B. Ballard Inspector for London County Council [Literature]
E. Maxwell Fry, Architect, Exhibition Designer
G.A.N. Lowndes, Assistant Education Officer, London County Council [Social History]
G. W. Buckle, Board of Education
F. V. Burridge Former Principal of the Central School of Arts and Crafts
R. R. Tomlinson Senior Art Inspector, London County Council [Pictures in the School]
R. W. Baldwin, Member of Council for Art and Industry. Secretary to Planning Committee
Geoffrey Holme, Member of Council for Art and Industry [Domestic Science]
G. F. Quarmby G. B. Tyson, London County Council
Dr Walter Gropius, Architect [Mathematics]
Professor Moholy-Nagy, Painter, photographer and designer [Mathematics]
E. Salter Davies, Chief Education Officer Kent
H. M. Walton, Secretary Middlesex Education Committee
E. M. O’R Dickey, Staff Inspector for Art, Board of Education
Bayliss Allen, Bromley Borough [Arts and Craft]
Mr C. Birchenough, Chief Inspector of Education for Kent [Arts and Craft]
G. H. Leslie [Physical Science]
? Norwell [Nursery schools]
Mrs Marjorie Quennell Curator of Geffrey Museum [History]
F. L. Attenborough Lecturer at Leicester University [Geography]
S. W. Howe [Science/Nature]
R. Jacques [Music]
U. V. Bogaerde Art Editor, The Times
C. M. Marriot, The Times [Pictures in the School]
Mr Adkins School Inspector, Mathematical Specialist
Mr Drury, Brixton School [Mathematics]
Mr Bell ‘an educationalist’
Miss Bright [Domestic Science]
Square brackets identify an area of responsibility in the exhibition .
110
49
Mr Waiting [History]
Sir Henry Richards [Science - Nature] Head teacher of a school in Hertingfordbury
Major J. J. Astor [History]
Sir Percy Buck [Music]
M. N. Anderson, Member of Design and Industries Association
F. G. M. Richards
H. Jude
F. Q. Rosser
Birmingham:
Dr Peter Innes, Chief Education Officer, Birmingham
Mr R. E. Cousens, Assistant Education Officer, Birminghham
Miss Loveday & Miss MacGregor, HMI Birmingham [Nursery]
Messrs G. H. & S. Keen Ltd [Nursery exhibit suppliers]
Paul and Marjorie Abbatt Ltd [Nursery exhibit suppliers]
50