POSTERS FOR SHELL- NASH AND THE SURREALISTS

Every year Shell had a poster to denote Winter, and then Summer. All you had to do was to depict Winter. Kauffer did one. You didn't have to worry about cars and petrol pumps. It was recocognised every year by the public. Jack Beddington appreciated the arts very much. He was a strong and determined man, a strong personality like Frank Pick. Bought paintings and supported young artists. His brother Fred was in one of the London Galleries.

Jack wouldn't stand for any nonsense. His boss was a man called Halford a very fine man who had appointed him and gave him a free hand. Shell had their own agency called Regency Advertising within the Shell Building. The Art Director under Beddington was Tom Gentleman, father of David.. Lots of good writers also worked there, such as John Betjeman. You felt you'd arrived if you worked there.

Time to Change to WINTER SHELL The poster was again done with a stencil. My wife knitted the glove and I had it photographed.

SCIENTISTS PREFER SHELL How did you do the strata? We put down paint and Gloy to stop it drying. We dragged a comb through it like they used to do in faking grain for doors in Housepainting. There was something of Max Ernst in the poster. Nash too. I went to the International Surrealist Exhibition at the Royal Academy. I thought Paul Nash had done some very good things. And he was a person who rather got slated at the time, sneered at. I loved that painting of the beach with breakwaters. The wreckage of the plane. The First World War works. He was a person I looked up to in the Thirties.

We got a lot from Leger and the Parisian Cubists, Gris in particular. You can easily imagine text put into their works while in Britain, text put the image beyond the pale. I was less influenced by the crystalline surface in early Braque and Picasso. Le Corbusier's Purist still lives I liked.

There were artists in the Thirties you associated with traditional styles, like Purvis and Newbould. You looked at the hoardings and you knew they had done this poster or that. Shell posters were different. I didn't do any work for them after the War. Beddington had gone.