LEARN & ENJOY

Train Yourself to Better Work / Treat Yourself to Better Play

On 19 March 2022 a London Transport poster by McKnight Kauffer, advertising London County Council (LCC) evening classes, is offered for sale at a London auction house (est £180-£360). It is in fact a small panel poster, only 25.5 x 32cm, displayed on glass panels inside Underground carriages.

1937 Rugby League Cup Final panel poster by Gill Lancaster

Torchlight Tattoo Wimbledon Stadium, 1939, Joy Williams

Wimbledon Championship panel poster, 1939, Leonard Applebee

Seating moquette design, Colindale, designed by Marion Dorn

This gives me the opportunity to investigate a pair of London Transport Double Royal (normal size for Underground Posters – 63.5 x 101.6 cm) posters rather obscurely titled Train Yourself to Better Work and Treat Yourself to Better Play, but similar in style to the Learn and Enjoy panel poster.

Exhibited by themselves they make little sense, but generally they were displayed against the following rather dull text based poster, also designed by Kauffer. Curious too that, unlike the panel poster, they advertised evening classes run by Surrey County Council, not by London County Council.

Kauffer applies one of his trademark motifs of a pair of fluffy clouds, and cleverly incorporates a photograph of the head of a young Grecian utilising the negative for one poster, and a positive print on the other.

He had been interested in photography for some considerable time, owning a number of cameras. In 1932 he made a darkroom for himself to print his own work. He learnt the techniques of developing a film and enlarging and printing from fellow designer, Maurice Beck. In the 1920s Beck shared a photography studio with Helen Mcgregor photographing society figures for Vogue and other magazines of the time. In the 1930s Beck produced photomontage poster designs for London Transport. Not to be confused with Richard Beck who also designed photomontage posters for London Transport.

This is the same head in an experimental photograph by Kauffer.

It is rare to see a set of preliminary designs by McKnight Kauffer leading up to a final design– but the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York hold four such works. I include two of these preliminary designs. The hand-drawn lettering on these rough designs was almost certainly by Sidney Garrad, Kauffer’s studio assistant. The lettering on the printed posters was also by Sidney Garrad. The text was typeset using London Transport’s own typeface, Johnston Sans.

Kauffer used the same Greek head on his photomontage book jacket design for Art Now, Herbert Read,

Faber & Faber, 1933