Tradition and Modernity? Margaret Calkin James 1895-1985 and CH James 1893-1953

The Decorative Arts Society 1850 to the Present

Tradition and Modernity? Margaret Calkin James 1895-1985 and CH James 1893-1953Author(s): Betty MilesSource: The Journal of the Decorative Arts Society 1850 - the Present, No. 20 (1996), pp. 62-78Published by: The Decorative Arts Society 1850 to the PresentStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41809242 .

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Tradition and Modernity?

Margaret Calkin James 1895-1985

and CH James 1893-1953 by Betty Miles

Fig. 1 Ark and Rainbow symbol; one of various permutations of this theme devised by Margaret Calkin James for letterheads and rubber stamps.

At the Sign of the Rainbow was the title of an exhibition of the work of Margaret Calkin James1 because her chosen emblem (fig. 1 ) was an ark of refuge and a rainbow of promise. To many artists of her generation the images of menace - British identity threatened by International Modernism; rural landscape threatened by commercial development; English men and monuments threatened by war - were counter- balanced by an optimistic reforming zeal and a belief that their place as artists was to contribute to a better future for the whole of society. Political radicalism in Britain was often tempered by a respect for the past that tried the patience of more thorough-going continental Modernists.

A survey of the life and work of Margaret Calkin James appears in Women Designers between the Wars.2 As calligrapher, graphic designer, stage designer, textile printer, watercolour painter and printmaker, a glance at her order book shows that she was regularly employed throughout the inter- war period by the most progressive, prestigious and popular clients of the day. Her flexible, eclectic approach fitted the Arts and Crafts ideal of the well-rounded designer. Her artistic career was shaped by her early training, her marriage to a particular kind architect and the period of change through which they lived.

Born in 1895, Calkin entered the Central School of Arts and Crafts in 1914. A woman of her social standing and abilities might have been expected to opt for a fine art training at a time when the crafts were not highly esteemed by institutions like the Royal Academy of Arts.3 She preferred to embark on a course that offered links with industry and more practical usefulness. She adopted a multi-disciplinary approach (as artists like Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden were to do at the RCA a few years later) which helped to erode the hierarchical barriers between fine and 'commercial' art. Her adaptability was to prove necessary in the economic stringency of the Depression, but she also strove to challenge the ivory towers of the art establishment and make the visual arts more relevant to public life. (In 1915 Wyndham Lewis

accurately predicted that poster advertisements would educate public taste better than picture galleries.)

At the Central School Calkin learned to appreciate the outlook of its founder, WR Lethaby.4 Priority was given to acquiring skills and Calkin specialised in calligraphy. Graily Hewitt, who initiated her in the complexities of gilded illumination, insisted that a sound technique was the prerequisite for confident self-expression.5 After winning a Queen's Scholarship at the Central, Calkin progressed to larger-scale activities though she was never to relinquish the painstaking precision of calligraphy. The Westminster School of Art in Vincent Square founded an innovatory class focused on design for advertising and retailing, including posters, three-dimensional construction of figures and sets and the use of lighting in shop windows. Most important was the weaving of these elements into a unified design. Calkin, who had a pronounced theatrical bent, quickly transferred these new concepts to stage, property and costume design - she appeared in the title role of The Birth of a Pearl , a tableau mounted by Westminster students for the Chelsea Arts Ball (fig.2).

During her two years at the Central School, Calkin was involved with a network of contacts devoted to design reform. The grand old men of the Art Workers Guild were susceptible to her youthful zeal.6 In 1884, Lethaby had been one of the instigators of this Guild, the first organisation of professional designers, which later formed the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society: the privations of war did not prevent them from staging their Eleventh Annual Exhibition in 1 9 1 6. Calkin was one of the Westminster student volunteers who laboured by the side of Exhibition architect Frank Troup to transform the galleries at the Royal Academy of Arts.7 It is clear from a contemporary press report that calligraphy was still in demand, perhaps increasingly so because of the War: 'Rolls of Honour, Litanies, Canticles and so forth, penned in black or wrought in gleaming gold by that master scriptist Mr Graily Hewitt, who has an apt pupil in Miss Margaret Calkin.' 8 (fig.3) The appeal from the President of the Exhibition to 'substitute in every branch of production trained intelligence and skill for merely mechanical labour'9 was made in the belief that economic problems might still be solved by the old Arts and Crafts solutions. However, Roger Fry, who organised an Omega stand for the show, thought it mostly 'lunatic humbug and genteel nonsense'.10 He decried the 'hideous muddleheaded sentimentality of the English - wanting to mix in elevated moral feeling with everything' . 11 His participation goes to show that, even for artists of radical persuasions, financial necessity often outweighed principles.

Despite the emphasis of this exhibition, it had become clear to Lethaby that traditional handicrafts were not the way forward. In his view Britain's declining industries needed improved industrial design and a marketplace of more educated and discerning consumers. In 1914, in association with other designers, industrialists and economists, he helped to found the Design and Industries Association (DIA). This brought the crusading spirit of the Arts and Crafts Movement into the new era of industrial functionalism. 'Fitness for

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Fig.2 Press cutting from The Daily Star , 2 January, 1920.

purpose' was the theoretical foundation of Calkin's practical training and her own words bear out her early dedication to a functionalist credo: 'If we would all begin at home and be satisfied with bare necessities, banishing from our lives all those things that not only are not made or fitted for a specific purpose, but that we could do without, we should then find that the country would only produce the things that mattered, that work would be done well, and the workers would be happy.'12

The Central School offered the best opportunities then available for Calkin to learn the sort of skills previously only open to men, but even there it was commonly believed that many jobs could not possibly be done by mere women.13 'Necessity, during wartime, proved to women themselves that they could do many "men's jobs" '14 They could even do them equally well. A 'man's job' if ever there was one was Calkin's first post, created by the urgent needs of war. As head of the Art Department of the Central London YMCA she was responsible for the selection of some sixty thousand pictures and for the design and execution of numerous decorative schemes, friezes and curtains for YMCA Red Triangle army huts overseas. Her prodigious efforts were hailed as 'a labour of love'.15 After the War ended, the prejudice persisted 'that it wasn't quite normal for a woman to make money' 16 and that men needed higher wages as family breadwinners. To aggravate this, it was not genteel to discuss money, and thoroughly unBritish to argue about it.17 However, the experience and confidence gained at the YMCA was invaluable to Calkin and when the Art Department was closed at the end of the War she took over the premises as her own Rainbow Workshops (fig.4), retaining the existing goodwill and steadily building up a wider reputation. Hers was one of a burgeoning movement of Arts and Crafts-inspired ventures that brought artists into direct contact with the public,

Fig.3 Foreword from The Adoration of the Soldiers , , 1916. Text in French and English hand-written by Margaret Calkin.

Fig.4 Hanging signboard for Rainbow Workshops, 1920. Painted wood, double-sided.

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Fig. 5 One of a series of illustrated handbills for the Tableaux Vivants produced at the YMCA in January 1920.

Fig.6 'QED' poster for London Underground designed by Margaret Calkin James, 1929. reproduced with permission from the London Transport Museum.

bypassing a notoriously conservative network of wholesalers and retailers.

Margaret Calkin's plain clothes, cropped hair and determination to lead a more simple life in accordance with Arts and Crafts principles caused bewilderment but ultimately no alienation from her middle-class parents.18 During the early 'twenties came a break from tradition that nevertheless forged closer ties between the generations when Calkin and most of her family embraced the Christian Science religion. This requires a penetration beyond material appearances... that traditional orthodoxy associates with the hereafter, but that Christian Science considers to be a present fact of scientific demonstrability in human life... Matter is seen not as a God- created substance but as a limited mode of human perception.' 19 In an increasingly mechanistic cultural climate, Calkin's life and work upheld and believed in a spiritual order at odds with the secular tenets of some, though not all, Modernists: the painter Winifred Nicholson (represented in 'Modern British Art' at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1923) became interested in Christian Science at about the same time. In her painting and writing about light and colour she explored these 'limits of human perception'.20 Calkin always painted in conjunction with her other work but her watercolour flower studies betrayed no hint of mysticism, surrealism or abstraction and her still-life paintings and topographical landscapes were steadfastly traditional.

In 1921 the British Institute of Industrial Art21 , sponsored by the Boards of Education and Trade, mounted the British Industries Fair in which one of Calkin's 'Mayflower' banners was an exemplar of 'the increasing share that women are taking', not only as buyers for great firms but also in the actual 'design of things that we buy to add to the pleasure of our domestic surroundings.'22 No visual record of this touring Mayflower Pageant survives but the style and spirit of these 'striking banners' had a preamble that was much photographed and reported. This was Calkin's adaptation, as a series of vivid tableaux vivants , of Hilaire Belloc's 23

Cautionary Tales at the YMCA. Her costumes, props and stage sets were in the very latest jazz-age style: 'Firemen in Futurist Costumes!' ran one of many enthusiastic press headlines, which went on to commend her 'excellent miming' in a variety of tragicomic roles. The AA Journal praised the 'brilliant conventionalism' of her backdrops, her Egyptienesque costumes, her 'fantastically ingenious and pleasing props, especially the orange lion with the emerald eyes and finally her own 'spirited performance' . The success of CB Cochrane's Revue 'The League of Notions', sending up the League that was optimistically expected to end all wars, was due in no small measure to Calkin's humorous and imaginative sets and publicity.

The illustrated handbills for the Cautionary Tales (fig. 5) were reminiscent of another fashionable revival, that of traditional broadside ballad sheets, chap books, old printers' flowers and traditional type designs. In the early 'twenties Edward McKnight Kauffer's involvement in this vogue for reclaiming earlier forms did not prevent him from looking forward. As a Vorticist he had used abstraction in poster designs, hoping, like the Italian Futurists, to create dynamic symbols of optimism for post-war reconstruction and a new era of equal opportunity. Advances in colour lithography had greatly enlarged the scope for designers, but in 1913 aesthetic standards were not keeping pace: 'We see around us high technical skill, but almost no culture or taste. The artistic possibilities of lithography are scarcely realised by the public or the trade.'24 Between the wars Kauffer's radical innovations

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and genius for self-publicity did much to boost the reputation of the design profession. In January 1917, his famous poster 'Flight' was published in Colour magazine, and in 1920 his paintings were exhibited with former Vorticists such as Wyndham Lewis at the Mansard Gallery in Heals, Tottenham Court Road, not far from Calkin's workshop in Great Russell Street. It is no surprise to discover that his influence was even more direct: her 'QED' poster for London Underground (fig.6) was accorded a full-page reproduction in Commercial Art , October 1928, to demonstrate the effectiveness of Kauffer's tuition in poster design at the Westminster School of Art.25 His blending of old stability with new devices like symbolism and geometric flatness were very much in line with Calkin's own thinking. Kauffer wrote that in turning back to traditional principles 'the designer finds that the architecture of design has few "ground plans", but many

Marriage in 1922 meant the end of Calkin's independent endeavours at the Rainbow Workshops. Mrs Calkin James's primary role in the eyes of society was now the running of a home and the care of her war- wounded husband. By the end of the decade the rearing of three children added to her duties. Adapting to the new situation, her studios were to be private, purpose designed, and incorporated into each of the houses built or converted for his family by her husband, the architect CH James. Thus he endorsed her professional status and her door was closed upon staff or family when she donned her smock (blue cotton, replaced when necessary from a French paper pattern) and settled to work. CH James practised from four successive offices in WC2 and WC1 and he was affectionately remembered as a delightful egoist. Although his wife co-operated with him on certain projects and they had similar opinions on art and society, their working lives were separate. Calkin James, with significant emphasis, asserted that 'No wife can ever work with a husband at home ! ! '

Calkin James kept an order book which she had begun in the Rainbow Workshops and maintained throughout her working life. A gap in this book after 1921 signalled her adjustment to family life. It also denoted the forging of her new identity as designer for the modern industrial era. As well as houses for expanding suburbs and civic buildings for provincial towns, her husband was to design offices and factories for the manufacture and distribution of new consumer goods; these stemmed from scientific advances, new materials, new forms of power and the spread of cars, roads and transport networks for freight, mail and commuters. From America came the notions of marketing management, advertising agencies and the rapid inter-war development of mass advertising. Calkin James adapted to all this without departing from the outlook and disciplines she had adopted at the Central School.

The order book, reopened in 1927, provides a job-by-job record of the professional life of a freelance designer working in these new commercial and industrial circumstances. Each entry outlined the client, the brief and a deadline for completion or for submitting the rough. Occasionally dimensions were noted or an 'approx. estimate', often quoted in guineas. Many jobs entailed preliminary sketches or back- up material but these were systematically disposed of as each job was delivered and a line drawn through the entry (fig.7). The interchanging roles of agencies, clients and suppliers meant that the same names would reappear under various headings, for example, for a job recorded as 'Kynoch Press' a note was added 'Curwens to do printing'. In another entry with 'Curwen Press' as client, the job was a window bill for the Chelsea Flower Show (fig.8), ultimately financed by

Fig.7 Margaret Calkin James's Order Book: sample spread from 1931.

Fig.8 'Chelsea Flower Show', 1935. Reproduced with permission from the London Transport Museum.The Order Book entry ran:

Jan. 17th Curwen Press Design for Chelsea Flower Show Window Bill L.P.T.B.

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Fig.9 Illuminated and gilded title page for Lloyd's 'Address from the Brokers to the Underwriters', 1928. The bell from the Lutine of 1688 was still rung daily in the Lloyd's building. The stylised Arts and Crafts medievalism of the decorations and the old ship contrast boldly with the great symbols of modernity, the ocean liners of the Cunard and Orient lines.

London Transport.27 The 1928 costs of materials for her first major commission (fig.9) for Lloyds of London ('Vellum 16s 4d') make an interesting comparison with costs for a 1953 Illuminated Address to HM The King ('Vellum £4').

Advertising agencies employed teams of in-house designers, but though some jobs were recorded in the order book under Stuarts, APM or Regent Advertising Services, Calkin James had no regular commitment and usually worked directly for clients. Despite close contact with those who commissioned their work28, designers were, as far as the public was concerned, a largely anonymous service. In 1922 the Curwen Press launched their printed pattern papers with an edition of 475 sheets of Calkin James's 'Harlequin', soon to be reprinted as it proved popular with publishers and bookbinders (fig. 10). By 1938, more than 24,000 sheets had been printed but Calkin James's name was never added (though papers by Edward Bawden, Harold Jones and others did bear the artists' names.)29. Another pattern was issued in 1927 and her fee was £3-15s-7d. There was no further remuneration though it, too, was in print for several decades. But if copyright laws concerning royalties or repeat fees had been in force, the Curwen Press would not have been willing to risk imaginative ventures like these papers. As it was, 'by the end of 1937, 7536 sheets had been sold, but receipts from sales still lagged behind the sums so far invested.'30

The advantages of the Poster - size, clarity and simplicity - were never so well exploited as in the inter-war period. Designers like Calkin James had to execute their visual ideas manually and the symbolic interpretations were partly a result of the limitations as well as the possibilities of the lithographic process.31 Poster designs by avant-garde artists, or reflecting fine art trends, were part of a new marketing drive led by 'a handful of high-minded autocrats'32 "DIA enthusiasts like Frank Pick of the London Transport Passenger Board and later the Empire Marketing Board, Sir Stephen Tallents of the Post Office and the EMB and Jack Beddington of Shell Mex (fig. II).33 All appeared regularly in Calkin James's order book. Pick's willingness to give artists a free hand earned the tube platform the title of 'the poor man's picture gallery' , just as Wyndham Lewis had predicted. It did not happen all

Fig. 10 Two pattern papers by Margaret Calkin James from A Specimen Book of Pattern Papers designed for and in use at The Curwen Press , Introduction by Paul Nash, Fleuron Ltd, 1928.

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Fig. 1 1 Colour rough of a design for Shell Mex, one of few surviving examples of original artwork by Margaret Calkin James. During holidays at West Wittering in the late twenties they could watch the annual Schneider Trophy taking place off the Isle of Wight. Shell Mex marketed an image: in this campaign they laid claim to the speed, power and glamour of the new technology.

at once since the conservative British public found even a poster like Calkin's 'Kenwood' exceedingly 'modern' (fig. 12). While patrician arbiters of public taste like Sir Kenneth Clark applauded the work of the artists of the new corporate patrons, it must be remembered that the taste of the majority of marketing men in Britain was still for banal illustration and fussy typography. By 1938 Austin Cooper's book on poster design could still weigh up the merits of naturalistic and stylised renderings for posters and conclude that either method could be employed so long as the result was 'swift and efficient communication' but that 'formalised design' was much more likely to succeed than realism and the 'poster must move with the times in concept and execution'34. Taken on their own, Calkin James's posters could be slotted into a Modernist framework, but just because she adapted formally to the 'changing functions and contexts' does not indicate a change of values.35 For posters like 'Bluebell Time' (fig. 13) she transformed the delicate observations of her water-colour studies into flat patterns, sharp contrasts and repetitive forms for instant impact, while her 1937 cover for the Coronation Number of the Manchester Guardian is a more formal piece of heraldry for a traditional occasion (fig. 14). Lettering and imagery were similarly suited to subject matter for the BBC programme covers of 1929 and 1930 (fig. 15).

Marriage to CH James linked her even more strongly to the world of establishment architects and artists. James, like

his early masters Sir Edwin Lutyens and then Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin, was an Associate36 of the Royal Academy of Arts and a regular exhibitor in their annual Summer Exhibition. To Herbert Read and other proponents of Modernism, the RA in its 'venerable senility'37 epitomised the shackles of a dead tradition - they wanted to be done with British sentimentality and nostalgia for the past and hurry into the new machine aesthetic. In reality the Academy had far more success between the wars than Read or the DIA had in 'keeping in touch with the interests and perceptions of ordinary people.' Sir William Llewellyn PRA, wrote in 1935 that the role of the Royal Academy was to foster 'a living and growing tradition' while acting as 'a steadying influence on the exuberance or haste of innovators'.

Looking back at the literary mood of Britain, Lord Annan wrote that 'Modernism did not sweep all before it between the Wars. Probably more members of Our Age remained true to Rupert Brooke and Georgian literature. They ... were haunted by the disappearance of rural England, obsessed with the countryside, with country ways, with flowers and dells and harvest home. They saw the home counties being submerged by metro-land and suburbia.' 38 By chance, Calkin James's Bloomsbury workshop in Great Russell Street was near the house of WH Davies, the celebrated Georgian poet. The project of the Georgian poets and artists of 1910-1920

Fig. 12 'Kenwood' poster design for London Transport by Margaret Calkin James, 1935. Reproduced with permission from the London Transport Museum.

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Fig. 13 'Bluebell Time' poster design for London Under ground by Margaret Calkin James, 1931. Reproduced with permission from the London Transport Museum.

Fig. 14 Cover design by Margaret Calkin James for the Manchester Guardian , 1937.

Fig. 15 Programme covers designed by Margaret Calkin James for the BBC, 1929 and 1930.

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Fig. 16 Book Jackets by Margaret Calkin James, mounted for display in the British Art in Industry Exhibition at the Royal Academy, 1935.

with their 'liberal Georgian landscape vision of England' was to 'to catalogue countryside motifs in an anti-sublime mode' , later to be linked with the 'Recording Britain' project of 1940.39 The Jameses worked in the context of a capital city but

both retained this essentially Georgian frame of mind; he loved cricket and the music of Elgar and she wrote, in 1944 of obtaining a sketching permit for the Norfolk Broads: 'but one never loses sight of occasional red roofs and I never feel we are in real country' . During the Second World War Calkin James was working on a collection of flower studies to be published together with an anthology of verse. Her selected authors were either concerned with a spiritual quest or with evocations of rural life, for example 'some wizard quotes from Vita Sackville- West's poems especially The Land. ... I have also got hold of the Collected Poems of Mary Webb...'40

With minimal government funding but much DIA enthusiasm the Council for Art and Industry was established in 1934. With Frank Pick as their energetic chairman they issued publications and arranged exhibitions to ensure that consumers, designers and manufacturers would all be educated in design matters. Walter Gropius, former director of the Bauhaus, arrived in England in 1934 and 'the progressive thinkers of the 'thirties faced with mass- unemployment and slump, and with a flood of positive propaganda about the command economy in the USSR, argued that planning and communal effort should extend to all areas of craft, design, art and architecture'.41 They railed against the 'costly and depraved standards' set by the British Art in Industry Exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1935. In an otherwise scathing review, Herbert Read grudgingly allowed that the display of printing and book production, which included some of Calkin James's work, was 'representative of the fairly high standard which prevails in this industry' (fig. 16).42

In 1937 the Council for Art and Industry suggested a National Register of Industrial Art Designers, which was duly implemented by the Board of Trade. Anthony Bertram trumpeted this in his BBC radio broadcasts, putting a high premium on originality and creative ability: 'Adapters and

copyists need not apply'.43 Margaret Calkin James was registered at an early stage. This was not surprising as the Jameses lived at the hub of the universe in terms of the British arts scene, mingling with 'those in the know from NW1 to NW5'.44 German style efficiency was needed in the 'thirties to update British mass-produced goods, and the DIA pundits armed themselves with 'yardsticks of Bauhaus origins',45 just as in 1915 they had looked to the German Werkbund to dictate 'standards of functional efficiency, fitness for purpose, truth to materials and economy of means'.46 All of these slogans would have a familiar ring to Calkin James, and no wonder - the Werkbund had been established in the first place 'to develop precisely what Germany found admirable about British Arts and Crafts'.47

Influences from the continent did nothing to alleviate the oppressive situation for women in Britain. While other institutions were reserved for men only, Laura Knight won something of a victory: elected ARA in 1927, she became a household name whose appeal to ordinary people was recognized when she was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1929. (Knight's popularity also confirms the enduring appeal of the Georgian pursuit of 'an idyllic and redemptive rural life' ) She was the first painter to be thus honoured though her work and the RA itself came to be disregarded since they played no part in the history of Modernism. Katy Deepwell points out that 'it is just at a time when women were gaining greater economic and political freedom that women's cultural production has been progressively written out of the discipline of art history'.48

Inevitably the failure to take women seriously was something of a professional disadvantage to a designer like Calkin. Fiona MacCarthy saw it as a 'cliquish immaturity' on the part of the male establishment that had handicapped the whole of the British design enterprise.49 She had the temerity to review the history and question 'the moral bases, the idealistic motives' and the 'hierarchic patterns' of that élite tradition. She detected flaws in their moralising, puritan outlook; in their snobbish distrust of trade and commerce; in their ruralists' lack of urgency; in their insular suspicion of foreign values and fashions. Her crowning indictment was

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Fig. 17 Book Jackets designed by Margaret Calkin James for Jonathan Cape. Many Cape publications appeared in series over several years. Altogether she drew six alphabets for them.

that it 'has always been a very masculine tradition.' In the complacency of these comradely British male networks, MacCarthy detected a kind of inward-looking inertia and challenged their failure to appoint a female Master of Faculty of Royal Designers.50 So in any review of Calkin's achievements the narrow limitations prescribed to middle- class ladies in polite society must be borne in mind. The enlightened Karl Parsons,51 writing to congratulate Miss Calkin on her Queen's Scholarship success in 1915, added 'I do hope you won't go on suggesting to yourself that there are certain things which you can't do.'52

The pattern of privileged male exclusivity so long taken for granted in British society was again manifested in the Double Crown Club, formed in 1924 by Oliver Simon and Hubert Foss. The James's next-door neighbour in Hampstead Way, G Wren Howard, partner of the publisher Jonathan Cape, was one of 40 founder members who planned to dine together at regular intervals to discuss and maintain high standards of book design and production. Many members of this club were engaged in similar work to Calkin James, for the same clients, but women were not considered for membership, just as they were not able to join the Arts Club53 or the Athenaeum, where so many links were forged both personally and professionally. CFA Voysey's 'sincere congratulations' on Calkin James's 'splendid exhibition'54 (Cooling Galleries, New Bond Street, April 1935) were naturally addressed to his Arts Club crony, CH James Esq, and not to the artist herself.

At Jonathan Cape, G Wren Howard was responsible for the appearance and production of the firm's publications. Calkin James's work over two decades measured up to his high standards of craftsmanship and design and also those of John Lane at the Bodley Head. She designed lettering and layouts for their books as well as labels, leaflets, press advertisements and showcards. All displayed the characteristics of the English typographic reform inspired at first by William Morris and subsequently by the private presses at the beginning of the twentieth century. In calligraphy, lettering and typography, continental and English approaches differed more sharply than in any of the other visual arts. A recent account of the work of Anna Simons in Germany between the Wars55 deals with the effects on calligraphy of the much more highly charged political situation there. While German calligraphers attempted to change the rules for changed times, Anna Simons adhered to Morris's and Lethaby's fundamentals as laid down by Edward Johnston. She stressed that a grasp of first principles did not inhibit, but rather liberated, the contemporary calligrapher. Her Lettering of Today (1937) included an illustration of Calkin James's book jacket lettering as a model for modern designers (fig. 17). In The 20th Century Book John Lewis contrasted the best of each in examples of the work of 'the rationalist Morison and the intuitive Tschichold'56 Again it is clear that the design of the Europeans was wedded to the politics of protest whereas in Morison's view type design should not be 'strongly marked and highly individualistic' but should develop only 'at the pace of the most conservative reader'.57

In architecture, too, the outright rejection of tradition and revivalism was more strongly expressed on the Continent, especially in Germany and Austria, where taste in the various stylistic revivals was at its nadir and, as Muthesius had

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admitted, no strong domestic tradition existed comparable with the English houses of Shaw, Webb and Newton.58 Calkin James's early studies applied to new circumstances and unprecedented opportunities were paralleled by her husband's traditional architectural training and his subsequent blend of tradition and innovation. He too shared the convictions of William Morris and WR Lethaby that art should be wedded to morality, politics and religion.

Lethaby, 'unlike the pioneers of the Modern Movement... could never, either in theory or in practice, contemplate a total break with the past' . His conception of modernism 'could only emerge from a developing tradition.'59 The same conception was frequently expressed in CH James's early lectures to the Architectural Association and in his publications. Good architecture was not necessarily a matter of originality or newness, it was 'more frequently merely the development of old ideas to suit new conditions.' To him the Georgian cottage was the building type most suited to every place and condition since a certain economy was inherent in its charm - its 'essential simplicity, its lack of conscious design and obtrusive features.' The fashion then deplored by architects of all types was the 'Tudorbethan' style favoured by private speculators, erecting their pairs of semis at random in sprawling suburbs or ugly ribbon development. CH James wished they could be persuaded that an architect was 'as essential to a cottage as to a mansion or a town hall'.60 Soundness of construction, honesty to materials and suitability to the individual locality could all be achieved in even the very simplest of groups, though he would brook no economies at the expense of 'reasonable permanence'. He was well aware of conditions in the wake of the First World War: a severe shortage of houses, a slum clearance problem and the vital factor of minimum cost. Those wishing to contribute solutions to these problems (himself included) would find it 'impossible to design satisfactory buildings without making a careful study of the outlook and habits of life of those who are to occupy them.'

CH James excelled in the planning of 'small houses' .61 They were not usually so small as to exclude accommodation for the maid. The inclusion of servants' accommodation in their own houses was as important as the provision of a studio for Calkin James, since without domestic help it would have been impossible for her to continue with her freelance work. Even in the worst years of the Slump there was always at least one servant living in62, because Mrs James's income was all the more necessary at a time when architects could find very little employment. Widowed in the early fifties, Calkin James moved to Cannon Cottage in Hampstead, where she painted a trompe l'oeil 18th century window plus servant on the plain brick wall at the back: ruefully she declared that the window and equally the maid looking out were now 'wishful thinking' (fig. 18). This window mural, like many of the decorative designs undertaken after her marriage, was for her own home. A link between the original Rainbow Workshop and the first studio of her married life survives above the front door of No. 1 Hampstead Way - a horizontal carved and painted relief of the ark and the rainbow with the deluge depicted in panels on either side.63 The beachscape mural in the bathroom of 39 South Grove, with its sand dunes and pink and white striped bathing tent, was painted out and the wrought iron family initials that once surmounted the back garden door of Hornbeams disappeared. "Orthodox histories of design" wrote Helen Rees "mirror social convention by confining its study to the professional realm, so that domestic or unpaid work is automatically off limits".64

Fig. 1 8 Trompe I ' oeil mural on exterior brick wall by Margaret Calkin James, c.1955.

1 Hampstead Way, their first home in Hampstead Garden Suburb, was a simple and compact 3-bedroomed house designed by CH James. Calkin James's workroom, 30 feet long, occupyied the whole of the roof space (figs. 19 and 20). The house is a model of economy in planning and 'the utmost has been done to eliminate labour and secure comfort' .65 This included fitted lavatory basins, fitted cupboards and shelving, louvred shutters to the sunny south and solid, dust-free panels instead of balusters. He skilfully arranged hall, stairs and landings to avoid wasting space on passages (fig 21).

The growing family moved in 1929 to Fairway House, planned by CH James as one of a group in Fairway Close, Wildwood Road, NW11. Each house was different yet each was 'polite to its neighbours' as part of a larger whole. Here, as in all his buildings, he aspired to a feeling of considered communal development. 66 This house, with Calkin James's pleasant ground floor studio overlooking the garden, was sold during the Depression.

In 1934 CH James was praised in the architectural press67 for the admirably restrained conversion of an adjoining pair of nineteenth-century houses in South Grove, Highgate, one of which became their home for the next two years. The room converted into a studio for Calkin James was photographed by Dell and Wainwright (famous for creating many striking images of Modernist buildings for Architectural Review between the Wars) and it shows the same reticence and economy of means yielding maximum effect (fig.22). The settee was a plan chest covered with a Heal's mattress, ending in a rounded cocktail cabinet. The floor was covered with

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Fig. 19 Garden front of No. 1 Hampstead Way, designed by CH James in 1923.

large plywood squares stained silver grey and the folding doors simplified by covering them with plywood. The curtains bear a large leaf pattern in the style of Marion Dorn which sits happily enough with the Persian rug; the streamlined modernity of the fixtures and fittings also blends comfortably with what was retained of the 18th century - the proportions of the room, the cornice and the pattern of the glazing bars.

Finally CH James was able to build his showpiece, 'Hornbeams', in Winnington Road N2. They lived there for three years until it was requisitioned in 1939, returned in 1945 and remained there until CH James died in 1953. 'Hornbeams' was featured in the architectural press as a striking example of an architect's house, illustrating the attention to detail68

and his choice of quality building materials. Here again the studio, next to the large living room, opened onto the back garden. There were also dining and sitting rooms and kitchen; open-plan living was not favoured by CH James.69

In 1938 JM Richards compiled a potted history of the English house. More to the point, he revised it in 1960, 70 by which time he could confidently cite CH James's Georgian revival style as the 1920s stage in the evolution of Modernism. A photograph of one of James's Welwyn Garden City houses built in 1927 preceded the advent of Modernism proper as displayed in the next picture of Maxwell Fry's sleek white concrete mansion, 'Miramonte', built a decade later. As Richards saw it, the 'rationalised English house' of the

Fig.21 Ground and first floor plans of 1 Hampstead Way.

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Fig.20 Margaret Calkin James and her first child, Brian, seated near the trellis at 1 Hampstead Way, 1925.

Fig.22 Margaret Calkin James's studio at 39, South Grove. Photo: Dell and Wainwright. Reproduced with permission from the Architects Journal .

previous century and the pioneering work of men like Voysey were the real precursors of this new 'non-stylistic' architecture.71 So it was important for Richards' scheme to portray CH James's Georgian framework as something 'essentially rational and the only logical form for the small house' ; any period references were an incidental matter of details and proportions. Late Victorian romanticism and its decline into a caricature Tudor in the speculative suburban villa was contrasted with the 'charm and dignity' of James's small houses. England was at last following the revolution already going on in the rest of Europe, 'abandoning period styles and searching for an architecture attuned to modern life and its scientific basis; particularly one that would take more advantage of modern methods of construction and equipment and the mass production of building parts.'

In reality continental Modernism had no such momentum and met with much resistance. Richards and other impatient fans campaigned to enhance its appeal by contrasting its buildings and inherent

attitudes with those of the die- hard traditionalists, but there was no such simplistic polarity. In 'The Myth of Function'72 Tim Benton traces a much more complex situation fragmented across 'schools' of Modernist, Rationalist and Traditional as well as within the Modernist tradition itself.73 As in architecture, so in all the arts, 'the sacred geometries of the Modern Movement' took shape very gradually and met with varying degrees of comprehension and resistance.74

Though not Modernists, the Jameses would certainly not have regarded themselves as reactionaries. Like Sir Edward Maufe, they both propounded a 'modernism' that relied on evolution rather than revolution. Maufe75 and CH James were both included in John Betjeman's list of architects of the 1920s who looked to the past and to developments abroad to escape from Edwardian vulgarity. With his usual twinkle Betjeman described them as 'masters of a new restrained style springing from late Georgian and late

Gothic after a visit to Scandinavia'.76 For large public commissions CH James would have been the first to agree that the Rationalism of Scandinavia offered an appropriate mixture of the functional, the traditional and the humanist.77

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Fig.23 The new City Hall, Norwich, 1938, designed by CH James and SR Pierce. Reproduced with permission from the Architects Journal .

The building of Norwich City Hall, a commission he won in conjunction with SR Pierce, was delayed by the Depression, but when it finally opened to a fanfare of publicity in 1938 it was described by John Summerson as 'the psychologically correct answer to the problem of an up-to-date civic centre in an old cathedral town' (fig.23).78 Most of the buildings with comparable 'news value', as listed in a special Architectural Review feature on Norwich City Hall, were vaguely 'Swedish Modern', such as the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-on-Avon or the RIBA Building in Portland Place, but the feature also included one outright period fake - Liberty's in Great Marlborough Street - and one example of full-blown Modernism - the De La Wan- Pavilion in Bexhill. Like Grey Wornum's new RIBA building, Norwich City Hall aroused controversy for being too bland for some tastes and too progressive for others. The painter John Piper was a war artist who recorded the bombed-out destruction of Bath and Coventry. In 1944 he wrote 'It is no use crying over the destruction of a church or two when you allow your market place to be dominated by a building as negative in taste as the Norwich City Hall.'79

In true Swedish style, a team of craftsmen was employed at Norwich. Calkin's woodblock fabric design, 'Rope and Thistle' (fig.24), originally designed for 'Hornbeams', was printed up on a commercial scale for use in the Marriage Suite and another of her designs was specially commissioned for the Lady Members' Room. On one previous occasion, 5 October 1932, her order book records a commission from the Edinburgh Weavers for 'Designs for Woven and Printed fabric repeats' . Otherwise, her designs were for 'Hornbeams' , and were printed on a table specially constructed in the attic before the rest of the house, including her studio, was completed. The methodical 'house-keeping' of the order book can also be observed in her sample book of woodblock designs for fabric printing. Pattern samples in various colour options were pasted next to dye recipes; though they were designed and printed in her home for private family use, she brought her customary professionalism to bear (fig. 25).

More than once CH James became embroiled in heated controversies between modernising developers and traditionalist local preservation societies. When Matthew Drysdale, the chairman of Lloyds, wanted to revamp his house, No. 5 The Grove, Highgate, there was an uproar from

those who wanted to keep every remaining jot of eighteenth- century heritage intact. James, with his mastery of sympathetic period restoration, made adjustments to the façade that were entirely in harmony with its neighbours, cleared away old extensions to build an imposing, symmetrical garden front, installed every modern convenience and only used concrete and new building methods in ways that blended seamlessly; the client was satisfied with his well-appointed modernity and the conservationists were entirely appeased.

Public bodies met with just as much resistance as private individuals. Hampstead Borough Council's plans to redevelop the old Wells and Assembly Rooms caused so much hostility and opposition that CH James was summoned to appear on behalf of his clients in a court of enquiry. Hampstead Heath Preservation Society objected to losing existing buildings and to a state-aided scheme being built in their back yard. CH James's defence of the plans was so persuasive that he won the support of Sir Kenneth and Lady Clark, who withdrew all their objections. Of the old buildings on the site, only Burgh House, a Queen Anne building, was worth retaining. The demolition of the others enhanced its setting and also left room for the erection of Wells House, which was designed to fit happily with its neighbour. This design won the approval of the Royal Fine Art Commission, and the building was awarded a London Architecture Bronze Medal and a Ministry of Health Housing Medal.*

CH James was prepared to co-operate in more radical solutions to the urban housing problem. Elizabeth Denby 's 1934 report80 stressed the urgency of planning, and the need to learn from abroad (especially from France) how to combine imagination with economy in the new construction methods. CH James echoed her social concerns. In 1937 he worked with Robert Atkinson, Grey Wornum81 and Maxwell Fry on the design of Kensal House in Ladbroke Grove, built for the Gas, Light and Coke Company along the lines recommended by Elizabeth Denby. At exactly the same time their own home, 'Hornbeams', gave both the Jameses an opportunity to carry out their personal preferences for traditional craftsmanship and materials.82

With her husband's career prospering and another war looming, Calkin's career entered another stage. Commissioned designs for print featured less in the order book to be replaced by more lengthy 'one-off' projects. 'Hornbeams' was requisitioned and the family evacuated to Chipping Camden with its sympathetic Arts and Crafts associations . For the Artists ' General Benevolent Institute she made forays to John Lewis's remnant sale in order to run up multiple small garments for bombed-out children and now there was more time and opportunity for landscapes and flower paintings. In the austerity of the post-war period publishers were unwilling to risk the expense of publishing the flower anthology; equally dispiriting were the requests from the Medici Society, who purchased two sheets of flower studies for posters in 1957: the colours had to be crudely 'bumped up' to allow for the technical limitations of colour reproduction and also for prevailing market tastes. Undaunted, Calkin James focussed on the two strands of work in which she had maximum creative freedom: calligraphy and a renewed enthusiasm for woodblock and later lino printing, exhibiting regularly at the Royal Academy. One melancholy project83 was a book of names of the local war dead for St Peter's Church, Brighton. There is a lively feeling that each is an individual rather than one of a monotonous list, unobtrusively accomplished by the changes of colour and by

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Fig.25 Sample book of wood block designs for fabric printing, with notes of dye recipes. This spread shows the school room fabric, which incorporated many of Calkin James's favourite motifs, including the ark and rainbow.

simple ornaments designed to fit the varying spaces between names and ranks: another example of unity in diversity.

During the Second World War, Leamington Spa was the location of the Camouflage Directorate and many artists (including CH James, with 'Tom' Monnington and other colleagues from the Royal Academy) managed to affiliate themselves with this unit. As a result, this small Midlands town had 'the greatest concentration of artists anywhere in Britain'84. CH James secured the job of redesigning the town centre and the plans85 show how he retained the 'urbane Regency character', but was prepared to compulsorily purchase and reconstruct as much as was necessary to bring the town right up-to-date. Wider roads, precincts with minimal traffic for shopping and commercial centres, zones for light industries, new housing, schools, clinics, open spaces, a new bus station and a new library and art gallery were all carefully considered. CH James always maintained the minute attention to detail he had first learned from Lutyens and here he combined it with Parker and Unwin's town planning principles.

In 1949 Calkin James's long-standing professional status was publicly recognized when the London County Council invited her to represent them on the Board of Directors of the Central School of Arts and Crafts. Impatient with public committees and administration, she would have declined in any case, but she was a sufficiently political animal to blench at a letter signed by the secretary of the Conservative Party. She had no wish to contribute to what she regarded as establishment complacency, though she worked within the established system for change and improvement. However by the 1960s, when Modernism seemed to have triumphed, the pre-war generation of reformers appeared merely insular, suspicious of foreign influences and resistant to progress. From the heady perspective of 1964 Michael Frayn dismissed ideas like theirs as the delusions of 'Herbivores'86 Such a sweeping view overlooks the complexities of their specific historical, cultural and social context. The determination to

Fig.24 Rope and Thistle block printed textile designed by Margaret Calkin James, 1936.

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change what was wrong went with a pride in being British that survived the privations of war and the Depression.

One of CH James's obituarists stated that 'he never got entangled in new ideas. He perfected and simplified the one he understood.'87 Both husband and wife found early in life the principles they would build upon professionally. They applied their talents to a broad range of problems but neither of them abandoned their ideals. These were aptly summed up in the October 1921 issue of Colour magazine: the 'good work' of Miss Margaret B Calkin in her Rainbow Workshops was coincidentally assessed next to a paragraph about the 'daring experiments' being carried out by CH James. Calkin's enterprise was likened to an early Italian painter's studio, with the rider that 'there is no attempt to imitate the past but, on the contrary, a keen attention to the requirements of modern life' . The writer then cited the work of CH James and others at Welwyn Garden City as evidence that at least some architects "are building in the conviction that beauty is a consequence of purpose perfectly fulfilled".88

Betty Miles trained as a painter/printmaker at Birmingham College of Art, and practised for some years as an artist and illustrator. As a postgraduate student in the History of Art and Design at Brighton and Sussex Universities she contributed to the exhibition and publication Women Designers Between the Wars in 1993 and was then employed to help research the exhibition and edit the publication SHOP: Batch Production , Limited edition, Multiples , Self-publishing , Small Run at Brighton University in 1994.

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Notes 1. Burgh House, Hampstead, June 1996. 2. This exhibition and its accompanying book added the names

and work of women designers to the existing history of Modernism, but questioned certain hidden assumptions and entrenched attitudes by which they were disadvantaged at the time and subsequently neglected by Modernist art historians still working within a hierarchical and patriarchal framework. (Eds.) Jill Seddon and Suzette Worden, Women Designing: Redefining Design in Britain Between the Wars University of Brighton 1994.

3. Even in the Royal College of Art, though it had begun as a design school, the fine arts of painting and sculpture were far more prestigious. Peggy Angus, who began her training at the RCA Painting School , was conscious of "a great loss of caste" when she transferred to the Design School. Carolyn Trant 'An Interview with Peggy Angus' in Seddon and Worden (eds.) Women Designing ibid. p.99.

4. 'It was not... that Lethaby ever showed you how to do things. He just showed you how to think about them.' Godfrey Rubens 'Introduction' in Sylvia Backemeyer and Theresa Gronberg (eds .)W.R. Lethaby 1857-1931 Lund Humphries, London 1984, p.10.

5. Graily Hewitt Handwriting, Everyman 's Handicraft LCC Central School of Arts and Crafts 1915 p. 14.

6. Half a century later she recalled in a letter that Frank Troup had grown so fond as to declare his intentions. 'He wrote to mother first who had to say no (I was 19!) . . .he certainly was a dear!' From another admirer, whose life drawing class she attended, came one of his own pastel drawings inscribed 'To dear M. Calkin from Ernest Jackson.'

7. An unlikely setting, since it was the RA snobbishness regarding the crafts that originally 'gave impetus to the formation of the Society' Peter Rose 'It Must Be Done Now: The Arts and Crafts Exhibition at Burlington House, 1916' Decorative Arts Society Journal no. 17, p. 3.

8. 'The Arts and Crafts Exhibition: Pleasure, Profit and Patriotism' Glasgow Herald 31 November, 1916

9. Henry Wood, ibid. 10. Roger Fry , letter to his mother 1916, quoted by Isabelle

Anscombe Omega and After: Thames & Hudson, London 1981, p.74.

11. Roger Fry, letter to Vanessa Bell 1916, ibid., p.73. 12. Margaret Calkin Colour October 1921, p. vii. 13. "on one occasion a prospective female bookbinding student

was informed by the School that both the bookbinders' and silversmiths' trades had threatened to withdraw all their men from the classes if women were admitted". Eds. Sylvia Backemeyer and Therese Groenberg W R Lethaby 1837-1931 Architecture, Design and Education Lund Humphries, London 1984 p.110.

14. Caption to a 1916 photograph of women setting up type, Maureen Hill , Women in the Twentieth Century Chapmans London 1991.

15. Queen 13 November 1920. 16. Enid Marx in an interview with Helen Salter, in Seddon and

Worden (eds.) Women Designing ibid. p. 92. 17. She was quite right not to worry about her pay ... to have

collaborated in such a production is almost sufficient reward in itself' Frank Troup, letter to Mrs. Calkin, 7 January 1917 in praise of her daughter's labours on the handwriting, in English and in French, of a long prose poem, The Adoration of the Soldiers, by Emile Cammaerts.

18. Dora Carrington, another 'product of the protected suburbs', entered the Slade in 1910 and had her hair cut soon afterwards to assert not only artistic freedom but also personal independence from her parents and an angry rejection of bourgeois conventions. Gretchen Gerzina Carrington John Murray, London 1989, p. 19.

19. Encyclopaedia Britannica 1984, quoted by Judith Collins Winifred Nicholson Tate Gallery, London 1987.

20. Andrew Nicholson (ed.) Unknown Colour: Paintings, Letters, Writings by Winifred Nicholson Faber and Faber, London 1987.

21. Lethaby and the DIA were behind the BUA, as they continued to press a succession of reluctant governments for more intervention on behalf of 'good' design,

22. 'Industries Fair: Some Feminine Interests', The Daily Telegraph 26 February 1921. Calkin designed and made proscenium curtains bearing the legend 'Let us now praise famous men', as well as 22 of the banners inscribed with the

names of the Pilgrim Fathers and a conventionalised Mayflower motif. The Mayflower Pageant was first performed in Plymouth in August 1920, next in London, then it toured the provinces.

23. Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) is now remembered chiefly for his light verse but in the early years of the century he was a popular satirist, polemicist and challenger of settled assumptions.

24. This was the lament of Gerald Meynell,of the Westminster Press, who helped to remedy the situation by bringing artists like Kauffer and Edward Johnston into contact with clients like Frank Pick. Mark Haworth-Booth, EMcKnight Kauffer: a designer and his public Gordon Fraser Gallery Limited, London and Bedford 1979, p.34.

25. Also mentioned was her friend and contemporary Frank H. Dowden who took over the class from Kauffer. 'New Talent: The Westminster School of Art', Commercial Art Vol V No 28 October 1928, pp. 179-81.

26. Mark Haworth-Booth, ibid, p.37. 27. This, after 1933, was the new identity of the transport network

directed by Frank Pick. Before that 'Underground' frequently cropped up as a client. Initially she dealt with a Mr Patmore, though by 1928 it was Pick who exclaimed 'Impossible!' when her husband delivered a job on her behalf because she was giving birth to her third child.

28. Calkin James received friendly letters from eminent clients, including one from Sir Stephen Tallents in July 1935 when the Post Office launched the first Greetings Telegram, which she had designed.

29. The unequal treatment and the commercial exploitation of famous names is underlined in Fiona Hackney's article 'Women at Curwen' ibid. p.51.

30. David McKitterick A New Specimen Book of Curwen Pattern Papers The Whittington Press, Gloucestershire 1937.

3 1 . Colour photography would later tempt designers to simulate reality too exactly, thus losing the impact of the more symbolic interpretations. Armin Hofman, 'Thoughts on the Poster' in Dawn Ades, The 20th-century Poster Abbeville Press, New York, 1984.

32. David Bernstein, Introduction to The Shell Poster Book Hamish Hamilton, London 1992.

33. Roger Fry, writing for The Spectator in 1923, had seen the potential for posters to 'redress the balance in favour of art.' Most manufacturers were not bold enough to have artists designing their mass-produced textiles or pottery, but the ephemeral nature and relative cheapness of posters were an encouragement to the industrialist to take risks. Roger Fry quoted in Mark Haworth-Booth, ibid. p.42.

34. Austin Cooper Making a Poster Studio, London 1938, p. 27. 35. Jeremy Aynsley 'Graphic Design' in Hazel Conway (ed.)

Design History: a Students ' Handbook Allen & Unwin, London 1987, p. 138.

36. Associate of the Royal Academy 1937, Royal Academician 1947, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts 1951.

37. C Maresco Pearce, Architectural Review Vol 69 June 1931 p. 189. Discussing the Summer Exhibition of 1931, the editor expressed the hope that a glimmer of 'sane modernism' might be creeping in, but the artists asked to comment were all in agreement with Paul Nash: anything hung in the RA was there for political reasons and not on aesthetic merit; the gulf between 'modern' and 'Academy' work was too wide to allow for showing them together.

38. Noel Annan, Our Age, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London 1990, pp.87-88.

39. David Mellor, Gill Saunders and Patrick Wright Recording Britain : A Pictorial Domesday of pre-war Britain David and Charles London 1990, p. 10.

40. letter to Elizabeth Argent (née James), 3 September 1944. 41. Tanya Harrod 'Herbert Read' Crafts no. 123, July /August

1993, p.14. 42. Herbert Read 'A General Impression of the Exhibition' in The

Listener 9 January 1935, p. 51. 43 . Anthony Bertram Design Penguin, London 1 938, p. 1 1 1 . 44. Here Feaver is referring to the avant-garde artists of the time,

but the Jameses would assuredly have thought themselves to be 'in the know'. William Feaver 'Art at the Time' in Jennifer Hawkins and Marianne Hollis (eds.) Thirties: British art and design before the war Hay ward Gallery exhibition catalogue, Arts Council of Great Britain, London 1979, p. 33.

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45. Paul Reilly An Eye on Design: An Autobiography Max Reinhardt, London 1987, p.68.

46. Paul Reilly ibid. 47. Carol Hogben 'Design Introduction' in Hawkins and Hollis

(eds.) Thirties, ibid., p.72. Also see footnote no. 58. 48. Katy Deepwell 'Women Artists Working in Britain between the

Wars' Sybil Oldfield (ed.) This Working-Day World: Women's Lives and Culture(s) in Britain 1914-1945 Taylor & Francis, London 1994, p. 141.

49. 'This has always been a very masculine tradition, born in the male enclaves from the Artworkers' Guild to the SIA Cock Tavern: gathering on gathering of friendly men in tweedy suits.' Fiona MacCarthy ' Pushing the Tank Uphill' : the British Tradition in Design Address to the RS A , London, 1982.

50. A situation subsequently remedied by the appointment of Jean Muir.

51. Karl Parsons 1884-1934 had been teaching stained glass at Central School since 1904.

52. Karl Parsons, letter to Calkin, 1 July 1915. 53. Members could bring guests on Wednesday evenings, and on

certain exceptionally grand occasions, so now and then CH James brought his wife and, in later years, his daughters.

54. 'especially the designs and illuminations' added Voysey, himself a prolific pattern-maker. Post card signed 'CFAV', 5 April 1935.

55. Brody Neuenschwander 'The Origins of the Modern Movement in Germany' Dot the I - Journal of Letter Exchange Spring 1991, pp.4- 15.

56. John Lewis The 20th Century Book The Herbert Press, London 1984, p.69.

57. Stanley Morison First Principles of Typography Cambridge University Press 1936, p. 11.

58. Hermann Muthesius published a special study of English houses while posted with the German Embassy in London, 1896-1903; English Arts and Crafts notions of combining art, industry, crafts and trades were soon to turn up in the German Werkbund begun in 1907.

59. Gillian Nay lor 'Lethaby and the Myth of Modernism' in Backemeyer and Gronberg (eds.) W.R. Lethaby. ibid., p.48.

60. Given the input of an architect of quality, CH James believed that every group of cottages, however simple, could be 'a work of art' CH James and FR Yerbury Small Houses for the Community Crosby Lockwood & Son, London 1928 p.30.

61. Obituary The Times 10 February 1953. 62. As a rule they had a cook and a governess (often a European

refugee) and occasionally they also employed a 'house parlour man'.

63. Calkin James restored this piece in the 1950s. 64. Helen Rees 'Women at the Design Museum' Women Arts Slide

Library Journal no. 30. 65. R. Randall Phillips Small Family Houses Country Life, 1924

pp. 118-122. 66. CH James considered the context for every type of building: 'a

little 1930 factory off Savile Row by CH James, where the plain building face of good proportion, was sensitively attuned to the differing heights of buildings on either side' HAN Brockman The British Architect in Industry 1841-1940 p. 148.

67. 'Two Houses in South Grove, Highgate' The Architects' Journal , Vol. 80, 5 July, 1934, p.lOff.

68. As well as the soft furnishings hand block-printed by Calkin James, the children's bathroom was 'pleasantly tiled in lemon, white and grey, to Mrs James' design' RIBA Journal, 10 January 1938, p. 239; also see Country Life 5 August 1939, pp. 124-5 .

69. Even in the smallest council house plans he still tried to allow for a separate parlour. Well aware that some tenants merely used it as the 'temple of the household gods', he still defended the conventional subdivisions of domestic space on psychological grounds as well as for economy on fuel.

70. JM Richards A Miniature History of the English House 1938, 2nd ed. 1960.

71. Voysey himself resisted all attempts to associate him with the modern movement, since he was a champion of the individual and saw it as a manifestation of a totally false system, that of collectivism.

72. Tim Benton 'The Myth of Function' in Paul Greenhalgh (ed.) Modernism in Design Reaktion Books, London 1990, pp.40 - 51.

73. ibid., p.51. 74. Gillian Naylor's summary of the hopes, fears and fanaticisms

of the Modern Movement reveals the extent of public resistance in Britain at a psychological level as well as on practical grounds. Gillian Naylor, 'Modernism, Threadbare or Heroic?' Architectural Review , Vol CLXII, no. 966, pp. 107-11.

75. In 1932 Maufe said of Guildford Cathedral: 'The ideal has been to produce a design, definitely of our own time, yet in the line of the great English cathedrals, to build anew on tradition.' He called for an aesthetic 'founded on preferences originally necessary for survival, since beauty comes from function based on early and vitally useful instincts - function not only in the narrow, practical sense but function that includes the spirit.' Sir Edward Maufe Guildford Cathedral , introductory guide, Pitkin, London 1972, p.24.

76. John Betjeman A Pictorial History of English Architecture John Murray, London 1972, p.98 .

77. Gillian Naylor 'Swedish Grace' in Paul Greenhalgh (ed.) Modernism in Design Reaktion Books, London 1990, p. 173.

78. John Summerson 'Norwich City Hall' The Listener 3 November 1938, p.934.

79. John Piper, 'Fully Licensed', quoted in Alan Powers, 'Piper's Place', Architectural Review 174, November 1983 p.90.

80. Elizabeth Denby in Design for Today April 1934, pp. 122-125. 8 1 . Wornum employed Calkin James in his office for a short spell

in 1928. In fact RIBA work on exhibitions, signs, posters, labels, cards etc. appear regularly in her order book, culminating in 'Prayers for Slough' in May 1937, when another of her husband's elegant municipal buildings was dedicated.

82. Betty Miles 'Margaret Calkin James', (Eds.) Jill Seddon and Suzette Worden, Women Designing: Redefining Design in Britain Between the Wars University of Brighton 1994, p. 11 8.

83. Her son Brian, born in 1925, was killed in action in 1944. 84. Between a hundred and fifty and two hundred artists were

working there and the Artists International Association established an Artists and Designers' Collective, including Richard Carline, Robin Darwin, Stephen Bone and Julian Trevelyan. Lynda Morris and Robert Radford The Story of the Artists International Association 1933-1953 , Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1983, p.65.

85. Architect and Building News 11 July 1947. 86. Frayn described the Festival of Britain as the swan song of

these radical middle-class do-gooders: 'the Herbivores, or gentle ruminants who look out from the lush pastures which are their natural station in life with eyes full of sorrow for less fortunate creatures, guiltily conscious of their advantages, though not usually ceasing to eat the grass.' When the Carnivores resumed power in 1951 'it soon became plain that the balance of power and privilege had hardly changed.' Michael Frayn, 'Festival' eds M Sissons and P French The Age of Austerity 1945-51 , 1964.

87. Arthur Kenyon, CBE FRIBA Obituary, CH James, The Builder , 13 Feb, 1953, p.264.

88. Notes, Colour October 1921, library.

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Documents

Tradition and Modernity? Margaret Calkin James 1895-1985 and CH James 1893-1953