TEACHING AND THE LONDON COLLEGE OF PRINTING

The first place I ever taught was the Westminster School of Art at an evening class that had been taken originally by Austin Cooper. This was about 1937. One morning I got a telephone call from Austin Cooper. He said he liked the work we had been doing. He was going to be Principal of the Ryman School just opening. Would we like his evening class job at Westminster? It was a lovely art school with some really interesting people - Mark Gertler , Bernard Meninsky. Very nice atmosphere there. It closed when the War started. Cooper was a good teacher and a very pleasant man.

After the War I taught at the Borough Polytechnic where Bomberg was. I knew him very well. He was full of vitality. he said he liked my work a lot. Rolf Brandt taught there. he had not taught before. I had originally met him through Hans Schleger.Rolf had a collection of Swiss posters I hadn't seen so I rang him up and we became the best of friends. He was a marvelous teacher Rolf

After the Borough, it was the London College of Printing. I was going through a bad patch in my work. Bill Stobbs [the Principal] rang me up and said there was a job going. This was in 1955 I think. I'd never thought of doing a full time job teaching and he told me that I could carry on doing my own work as well. So I took the job up and never regretted the decision. As soon as I took the job, the demand for my work suddenly picked up, but the job just didn't make a difference. It was very odd but delightful.

Did you strike a balance between teaching and your practice?

I managed it and it meant I could be more choosy in what I took on. It worked. I learnt so much from it all. I hadn't had much to do with typography before but there were some very good typographers there. I always did the typography in my early posters and looking back there are some times when there is little relationship between letter and image.It was exciting being with professional typographers.

There was a great atmosphere there and there were some very good people at the LCP. I tried to develop that atmosphere and I think I succeeded. The social mix was excellent. Stobbs was a factor - an MA at Durham where I think he did Art History. He did illustration too and was an excellent organiser. I wasn't fond of the organisation tasks. Never very good at it. But things were freer then.

We had big end of term shows of student work, as well as work from outside, such as shows of Paul Rand, Saul Bass, and an AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts) travelling show, George Adam set them up. He would travel to the States. It was quite easy to get the material. It's very important for the students to see good work. That's how you learn a hell of a lot. Look at the Italian Masters copying from sources.

Bill Stobbs went to Maidstone and I became Head of Department. I was there until 1976 and I often wondered what would have happened to my life without the LCP. I got a great deal out of it.

THE EQUUS POSTER

The students at the LCP had to produce a folder of designs for Peter Schaffer's play EQUUS after being briefed by the director. They asked me to do a poster for the show of the student work. I wanted an image that gave a violent stamping feeling. It was about 1982 after I had left . I'd love to do more theatre and ballet work. Many people are philistine when it comes to the visual arts. Richard Eckersley did some work for the Arts Council and they were really philistine.

Films and Plays can be really exciting challenges for the Poster Artist. The Poles did some exciting work. Ealing Films tried, but they weren't all that marvelous. They did try to get away from the usual film poster. There's so much damn type in the Ealing posters. Each person had to have his name bigger than another actor.It makes it impossible. The Poles didn't do that.

LONG HAIR CAN BE DANGEROUS

This was a poster to alert students at the LCP to the dangers of long hair catching in machinery. When I was working for ROSPA during the war, there were some people scalped by their hair catching. The solution couldn't be realistic, you couldn't get a photograph of the accident, so I concentrated on the hair itself and the horrified expression of the girl. If you are showing a ferry disaster, you don't show people leaping into the water - just a bit of wreckage, a child's toy floating. There was a good article by Mary Gowing in ART AND INDUSTRY, I remember.

Do you keep roughs and drawing for your posters?

They seem to get lost. Abram [Games} keeps every damn thing. When I came to do sections of my book Poster Design (1954) I had to make roughs up for the Eno advertisement because I had lost them. All done from memory. You just can't reproduce thought.