Archives: Persephone Post

One of  Golden’s many commissions for the Ministry of Labour, this time for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, this early 1940s poster demonstrates appropriate and inappropriate clothes to wear in the factory. The striking thing, of course, was that the government felt it was necessary to point this out to the new female work force. The Museum of London (where this poster is held) reminds us that in 1910 only 10% of married women worked outside the home; by 1990 it was more like 60%.

As well as her oil paintings Golden designed book jackets and in the 1940s produced lots of illustrations for the Ministry of Information. Her attention to detail is extraordinary: the spectators leaning out of the windows; each member of the Guard is distinct from the other. Towards the end of her life it seems she might have regretted these commercial works, sensing that they took her away from more ‘serious’ artistic endeavours.

This week on the post: paintings by the artist Grace Lydia Golden (1904-1993). She was born in East London and in the 1920s won scholarships to study at both Chelsea School of Art and the Royal College. Her sketching permit from the War Artists’ Advisory Committee allowed her to paint in public during WWII. This is An Emergency Food Office (1941) showing people queueing for their ration books.

In 1949 Edward Bawden did the drawings for a ‘King Penguin’ called Life in an English Village. Naturally the illustrations show life in Great Bardfield. This is the vicar writing his sermon; there are more pictures on this blog. Looking at Bawden’s illustrations inspire a re-reading of The Village (1952), with its astonishing ending. (Marghanita Laski had a special gift for endings, each one of the four novels we have in print has one that is amazing and stunning. So many novels just peter out but not Laski’s.)

Very pleased to have the opportunity for a Shell poster. This is 1936 and was therefore designed in the early Brick House years: when Edward Bawden married Charlotte Epton in 1932 he was fortunate enough to have been bought Brick House as a wedding present by his father – which is why he was able to offer lodgings to his friends.

Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious took lodgings in Brick House in 1931. By this time both were working one day a week for the Curwen Press; Bawden had designed this paper in 1928. Btw, our website now has https rather than just http at the beginning of its address (to make it even more secure). If you mysteriously can’t see the picture on this Post please update your browser or use Chrome which apparently updates itself automatically. 

A 1960 painting of Brick House in Great Bardfield by the excellent Ronald Maddox.

There is going to be a new book in September about the village in Essex which was lived in by so many superb artists from the 1930s onwards. In an article in the V & A Magazine (free if you have an annual membership) the authors, who are talking about Great Bardfield at the V & A on Monday 26th October at 7 pm, write that ‘the beautiful village remains intact, with a vibrant community, a small selection of shops, a museum with a bookshop and tea room. Interest in the other Bardfield artists [apart from Bawden and Ravilious] is growing and they are gradually gaining the recognition they deserve.’

This very sobering May 1941 photograph is taken from Southampton Row looking east across Boswell Street, New Street and Harpur Street towards the destroyed end of Lambs Conduit Street. The trees at the top are presumably in Coram’s Fields and Mecklenburgh  Square. The white block of flats at the top just to the right of the middle of the photograph might be the Modernist Trinity Court in Grays Inn Road, built six years before. Nb. by the time of this raid Virginia Woolf was dead; the day she and Leonard went up to their bombed flat in Mecklenburgh Square and rescued her diaries – ‘I began to hunt out diaries’ p. 331 Diary Volume 5 – had been Sunday October 20th  1940 and even then ‘damage in Bloomsbury considerable.’

The same spot a few months later, or even years later, perhaps in the autumn or winter since the women are wearing winter coats. This is how much of London looked during the 1950s. Now Holborn police station is on the right and there is an office block on the left.