JOST A MON

Keen-eyed readers may have observed that the ninth month of roundups of translated crime fiction never appeared in these pages. The same readers may have then shrugged and moved on with their lives. A recent holiday interfered with the sequence of posts, so I'm combining two months' worth here. Camomile Street library has come up trumps with several of my books on order, and we have a bit of variety this time around.

I may be going out on a limb when I say that the development of popular literature generally follows the same pattern around the world. As a society becomes literate, readers will prefer light material - novellas and pulp, generally involving thrills or spills and sex and romance. Penny dreadfuls take off, often competing for attention by means of lurid covers and suggestive blurbs - not just because it doesn't require intense concentration to appreciate, but also because it is invariably cheaper than middle-class literature. The occasional pulp author will then transcend the genre and establish himself or herself with critical acclaim and gradually move up-market. The readership often will follow this author and introduce itself to other, more literary works. Meanwhile newly literate people continue to fill the voids left behind by this upward mobility and eagerly embrace the canon of pulp.

How's that for a thesis? I mentioned penny dreadfuls, but I should probably also include other gems of the canon, such as those anthologised in the The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction (selected and translated by Pritham Chakravarthy), and those lovingly referred to in Patricia Melo's In Praise of Lies. Both Brazil and India are roughly at the same level of economic development as far as the vast majority of people are concerned, and both countries have an enormous thirst for light reading and sensationalism. (One can see this in the wide reach of daytime soap operas on television in both countries.) The English translation of the original Tamil stories serves to include a more middle-class audience for what is essentially vernacular fiction; likewise Patricia Melo discusses the popularity of Brazilian noir among the socially downtrodden, and the cut-throat competition to serve it.

Now Melo does not address the consumers of the cheap literature; rather, she prefers to poke fun at the industry that supplies it. So we have Jose Gruber, a hack who copies the plots from greats of world literature and passes on the texts to a publisher who is unaware of Dickens and Dostoevsky; the readership doesn't know or care either. Jose falls in with a herpetologist, Melissa, who, unaware of his inspiration, believes that his is a fertile imagination. She then involves him in concocting clever plots of kill her husband, who she claims abuses her, and Jose is such a moral and physical coward that he ends up helping her. The stress results in his literary career stalling, with the publisher rejecting proposal after proposal (which lengthen in proportion to his desperation) as unworkable and uninteresting. The noirish aspects of the novel might have served to keep the plot ticking, but Melo is dissatisfied with satirising only the pulp industry and she switches her target to the self-help books that also attract a wide readership in Brazil. Between the crime committed and the unravelling of Melissa's and Jose's relationship, and his sudden success as a hack self-help author, there are suddenly too many threads in the novel, and it all gets increasingly inchoate. While the book started funny and clever, it appears as if Melo loses the plot herself as she goes along, and it ends up trying my patience.

The Blaft book is an uneven collection as well. There are two or three absolute sparklers, but the rest are somewhat pedestrian and obvious. I loved the brilliant wit and repartee of Pattukotai Prabakaran’s ‘Sweetheart, Please Die’ and the innuendo and bonhomie of Subha’s ‘Hurricane Vaij’, which were possibly the best stories in the book. Some of the stories are overtly preachy – offering a defence of a woman’s sexual rights, say, or urging honesty in a politician – and some involve mad scientists and that old favourite of Indian films, reincarnation and revenge. I guess this is not surprising: they must appeal to the lowest denominator, and so become obvious and forced. Still, it’s heartening to see that the remarkably prodigious authors of the stories (some of whom have written thousands of tales and novellas) are often capable of superb and sophisticated imagination, refusing to pander to the base, and, fortunately for us, Pritham Chakravarthy has located several gems of the genre, and published them here.

Being obvious is possibly the worst comment a reader can make on a crime novel, but what  is obvious to one person may be opaque to another. In Tefcros Michaelides's Pythagorean Crimes, the twist at the end depends for its surprise entirely on whether the reader knows the history of mathematics or not. The plot is rather straightforward - a Greek mathematician is found murdered and his best friend (the narrator) looks back on his career, hoping to find clues to his death in his past. The description of this past is possibly the weakest part of the book: Michaelides evidently believes that describing the excitement and fervour of early 20th century mathematics is insufficient to drive the book forward, so he throws in a long section on the development of modern art in the back alleys of Paris, introducing Picasso and his coterie, and claiming that Picasso's art was much informed by his own fascination for the foundations of logic. The plot hinges on an important question on the underlying consistency of mathematics, but surely it defies logic that the resolution to this question should verily be a life-and-death matter?

It's not often one hears of crime fiction from Africa that is written in a non-native language, although now that Afrikaans has been spoken in South Africa for close to 300 years, perhaps it is as native a tongue as any other. Deon Meyer is a successful author of thrillers set in that country, and he uses the medium to explore several unsavoury aspects of South African history. The nexus between the apartheid regime and the vastly influential military-industrial complex is reasonably well-known; what is perhaps less known is its constant interference in the affairs of neighbouring countries, either on the pretext of containing Communism, or to co-opt corrupt Black leaders of those countries. The story in Blood Safari is, as far as thrillers go, fairly faithful to the genre: a rich young woman thinks she has seen her long-dead brother on TV, her house is firebombed, she buys the services of a top-notch bodyguard (named Lemmer) who helps her in her search for her brother. Of course, the enemies are many and vicious, and when both get injured in an attack, Lemmer decides to go on the offensive himself. He is a man with a short fuse and can be indescribably vicious himself, so when the villains meet their comeuppance, they don't go gently into the unknown. Meyer throws in social commentary on present-day South Africa as well. There is corruption at higher levels that thwarts honest policemen, there are social schisms between the Afrikaners and the English-speakers; there is suspicion at every level between the blacks and whites; and there are tensions between the various nations of blacks, too, as they scramble for economic advancement and funding from an impoverished state. Underlying this all is a passionate cry to save Africa's wildlife as well, not just the popular creatures of tourist imagination, but also birds such as vultures that are held in such distaste by everyone.

Véronique Ovaldé's Kick the Animal Out is a narrative from the viewpoint of a mentally-unbalanced girl desperate to locate her mother. This is an exploration of the lush mindscape of the fifteen year-old Rose who adores her mother and is baffled and upset by her father's seeming lack of anxiety when her mother vanishes. She seeks answers in her mother's past, uncovering details of old loves and past crimes. This is a slim book set in a sunny coast of France completely at odds with Rose's anguish, and it drags the reader into her world of 'immeasurable loss' more surely and heartbreakingly than weightier tomes by less assured writers. Well worth a read.

One of the great canards of medieval life that have been promoted to outraged titillation in the world of entertainment is the putative droit du seigneur, the right of a feudal lord to bed the wives of his serfs on their wedding night. There is almost no evidence that such a right ever existed in law, though it is undeniable that serfs were abused and their wives very likely forced into granting sexual favours. Still, this is a favourite trope among writers of historical fiction (equally, directors of films set in the Middle Ages), and Ildefonso Falcones in his Cathedral of the Sea proves no different. Perhaps, though, we should believe Falcones - he is, after all, a lawyer himself, and he quotes Catalan legal documents (the Usatges) that purport to grant such rights. The novel, a sweeping history of the construction of the magnificent Cathedral of Santa María del Mar by indigent labourers as an act of love and devotion, starts with the violation of a woman on the night of her wedding. The story then follows the fortunes of the woman's husband, and then their son, against the background of the rise of Barcelona's maritime power. It is a gripping tale, incorporating miracles, internecine feuds, pogroms against Jews, naval battles, detailed explanations of construction techniques, sex and strife between diabolically devious women and inhumanly good men, envy between brothers, religious schisms, class struggles, and, if all this were not enough, the Inquisition. I'm well pleased with this, especially because there was nary a mention of the Templars.

Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Pledge is a tale of the fall of a brilliant Swiss detective. The denouement is somewhat pat, but the analysis of the detective's psyche is very good. A little girl is savagely murdered and the detective makes a promise to her mother that he will find the killer. When a suspect is arrested and he subsequently commits suicide, everybody is satisfied that the case is closed, even the victim's parents. But the detective is not convinced, and against all evidence and in the face of his superiors' disapproval, he lays an intricate trap to catch the killer. He is so obsessed with this plan that he doesn't mind sacrificing everything he has - his reputation, his relationships, even his 'adopted' family - to fulfil his pledge. The plan fails and he loses his mind, and when the explanation arrives (a bit contrived and convenient), it is far too late to save the detective. This is a small book, a quick but agonising read, and well worth for its insight into the extremes of human nature.

Gianluca Morozzi has written a neat claustrophobic thriller set in the elevator of a residential building. In Blackout, three individuals, strangers to each other, enter the lift. Shortly thereafter, the power goes out and the trio is trapped between floors. Their back-stories are filled in between chapters that describe the continuously rising paranoia and terror within the cramped quarters of the lift. I’m not giving anything away when I say that one of the three is vicious serial killer, and his is the only background that is really relevant to the story. The other two could have been pilots or scuba-divers for all their lives had any consequence up to the point they are trapped. So far, so good. True to the genre, the innocents have to escape. How though? And is that all to the story? This is where Morozzi cranks up the unlikeliness factor, and the story – to my mind – degenerates to droll fantasy. It is written in that arch, self-consciously-talking-to-the-reader fashion that might grate on some; the staccato sentences might alienate others, but it is a thin book, trying a bit to be too clever, and will serve as a decent page-turner on a short trip to work.

Arch and knowing books are, thankfully, not a dime a dozen, but Jef Geeraerts’s Public Prosecutor, The is another such. Geeraerts doesn’t have much time for organised religion, I gather from this fable, or for money-grubbing men or women, most of whom end up perishing in some gruesome fashion or the other. The protagonist of this parody of the paranoid thriller genre is the Public Prosecutor of Antwerp, a man who owes his position to his wife’s noble family. He leads the usual life of an alpha male – he has a beautiful young mistress; his wealth does not stop him from seeking more; and, of course, he detests his wife, and hardly has any time for his sons. The wife is a deeply religious Catholic who wants one of her sons to enter Opus Dei, the usual villain in books involving religious skullduggery, and to that end is willing to sacrifice everything, including her husband. There are other unsavoury Opus Dei operatives with connections at the highest reaches of power – both financial and administrative – and there are sundry criminals out for revenge. None of the characters has any redeeming qualities but the Prosecutor, harried and hassled, ends up being strangely sympathetic. This is so earnest a book I cannot imagine Geeraerts wasn’t grinning ironically all the while he was writing it; good fun.

And the humour continues in the latest caper from Latin America that I’ve read: the Uruguayan-Cuban author Daniel Chavarría’s Adios Muchachos is a rollicking dissection of Cuban life, where years of Communism have only served to drive the capitalist fervour of the masses to feverish pitch and materialism rules above all. Unlike the corruption and drug-addled misery limned in Leonardo Padura’s Havana series, Chavarría’s book is far too good-humoured. It is also a sexy romp with the pneumatic bottom of the wondrously bright and beautiful Alicia running riot, trying to ensnare rich foreigners who might then take her away to their own rich lands where she could lead a life of luxury. Her modus operandi is to ride her bike, wiggling her alluring bottom to attract a rich man in a fancy car, and then falling spectacularly before the sucker, prompting him to come to her rescue. Her mother aids and abets her schemes, providing fancy food and culture to the man, causing him to get more and more besotted by Alicia. Unfortunately, Alicia then falls in with a Canadian ex-con whom she mistakes for her latest wealthy conquest. He is leading a double-life himself, trying to persuade a multinational corporation to fund marine archaeology (to make money out of selling salvaged treasure) while also hiding his less than salubrious past from his employers. An accidental death sparks panic in Alicia and Victor, but also hands them possibility to make large amounts of money, and at this point, Chavarría’s grip over the plot begins to loosen, and confusion takes over. In the classic manoeuvre of the author who’s lost interest in the proceedings, there’s a final roundup of what happens in the subsequent lives of the various characters. I’ve often wondered what purpose such a roundup serves: it’s as though the story somehow were unable to close by itself, and so an artificial conclusion is forced on the reader. Dissatisfying, surely?

And, to round off this roundup, we have Jean-Christophe Grangé’s The Empire of the Wolves, as harrowingly graphic as any lesbian crime author’s work (as Ian Rankin once pointed out to much controversy). A secret right-wing Turkish sect is busy butchering its way through the textile-worker community in Paris (all trafficked women from Turkey). The wife of a senior bureaucrat is having violent flashbacks that lead her towards paranoia and breakdown. The policeman investigating the serial killings is forced to rope in a retired colleague, a man who has been well-known for his efficiency in keeping crime down in the Turkish quarter in the past (and notorious for his corruption and brutality). The two of them determine that political schisms in Turkey and the spread of transnational criminal gangs led as much by ideology as mere lucre are the cause of the murders in Paris. Naturally, the killers are in search of one particular person, and it’s not difficult to discern early on who this person might be. After all, there are only two supposedly disparate strands in this novel, and so they have to connect at some point. The denouement is, once again, in classic mode: in the end there are two people out to get each other, there’s some grandiose recrimination, and an obvious conclusion. This novel, I thought, was a bit over the top; for a much more satisfying experience, check out Dominique Manotti’s Rough Trade (Eurocrime Series), which is taut, gripping and eminently true to life.

On the eve of the First World War, the British Empire covered a quarter of the globe and governed 400 million people. When war broke out in 1914, Britain was overwhelmed by enthusiastic offers of support from every corner of the Empire, from the so-called White Dominions and the predominantly non-White Colonies. All wanted to prove their loyalty to the Empire.

At the outbreak of war, Mahatma Gandhi said of Indians: ‘If we desire its privileges, we should desire the responsibilities of membership of this great Empire.’ The Prime Minister of Canada was unequivocal: ‘When Britain is at war, Canada is at war. There’s no difference at all.’

The 150,000-strong Indian Army was huge, professional and available for immediate deployment, and it was keen to prove itself. However, there was initial resistance within the British establishment to the use of colonial soldiers in anything but a supporting role. The problem was that German forces on the continent outnumbered the British Expeditionary Force by something like ten-to-one. So the War Office had no real choice but to deploy the Indian Army, thus breaking the bizarre, unspoken gentlemen’s agreement on both sides to to have only White troops fighting in a European conflict. The Viceroy of India, Lord Harding, was gratified that the British authorities pragmatically dropped these objections, as he had suggested. He wrote to the Colonial Office in London:

September the 3rd, 1914.

I am now perfectly delighted at the idea of all our troops going to Europe. It has produced the best possible effect in India, for they feel now that the stigma of a colour bar has been removed and that our troops are in a position of equality with European troops, according to the standard of the civilised world.

By late autumn of 1914, one in every three soldiers under British command in France was from India. One of these soldiers was Manta Singh, a Sikh who had joined the Indian Army in the Punjab in 1906.

As his grandson, Jaiman Singh Johal says, because he was educated, he rose up to the rank of Subedar, above the ranks of the Sikhs and just below that of the white officers.

Army authorities prized Sikh soldiers, along with Nepalese Gurkhas, as coming from the so-called ‘martial races’. For Manta Singh and his comrades, the army was a good career option and one they took up willingly. In the official war diaries of Manta Singh’s regiment, the 15th Sikhs, it is evident that when they first arrive in France, the tone is pretty cheery.

This is September 26th. The march through Marseilles was one of great enthusiasm. Most enthusiastic reception extended to regiment throughout the journey. Baskets of fruits etc pressed on the men on every possible occasion.

We know a fair amount about what the Indian soldiers thought themselves because military censors monitored and recorded their letters. But when the troops first arrived in France, they can’t have had much to censor, and the letters are positively gushing. As an example, here is one from a Sikh (the letters were sorted by religion) went like this:

If you were to see the conditions of life here you would be astounded. What can be done? The man whom God wishes to punish is born in India.

Like all new troops on the Western front, Manta Singh and his regiment were unprepared for the dank trenches and unrelenting terror of industrialised warfare. Once they got to the front, the letters became less enthusiastic.

For God’s sake, don’t come, don’t come, don’t come to this war in Europe…

Tell my brother not to enlist. If you have any relatives, my advice is don’t let them enlist…

Cannons, machine guns, rifles and bombs are going day and night, just like the rains of the month of July and August…

Those who’ve escaped so far are like the few grains uncooked in a pot.

Unsurprisingly, the last one has a big red line down the side.

In March 1915, Manta Singh’s regiment prepared to face the horror of modern war in the first major British offensive on the Western Front, the Battle of Neuve-Chappelle. Half of the British fighting force, 20,000 men, were Indian Army soldiers. On the 12th March, the British made an early advance in the battle. But by the time Manta Singh was in the field, German reinforcements were putting up stiff resistance. It was during this battle that his friend and comrade, Captain Henderson (who appears standing next to him in the photograph below), was injured. Manta Singh pushed him to safety in a wheelbarrow he found in no-man’s land. He then returned to the chaos of battle.

Later, according to the war diary, ‘The ground in front was littered with German corpses and the whole place showed signs of the heavy fighting that had been going on there. The stretcher bearers were at work all night picking up the wounded. We had Subedar Gattajans killed and Subedar Manta Singh wounded. About 60 other ranks were killed and wounded.’

In just three days of fighting, the Indian forces had suffered more than 4000 casualties. Manta Singh and his wounded comrades were shipped from the front to hospital in England. And where could be more appropriate for an Indian soldier of the British Empire to recover than in Brighton’s Royal Pavilion, modelled on an Indian palace. At King George V’s suggestion, the city of Brighton had offered the Royal Pavilion for use as a hospital for the wounded of the Indian Army.

The wounded soldiers wrote home with their impressions.

We are in England. It’s a very fine country. The inhabitants are very amiable and very kind to us, so much so that our own people couldn’t be as much so. The food and the clothes and the buildings are very fine. Everything is such as one would not even see it in a dream. One should regard it as fairyland.

Another wounded Sikh wrote:

Do not be anxious about me. We’re very well looked after. Our hospital is in the place where the King used to have a throne. Men in hospital are tended like flowers, and the King and Queen sometime come to visit them.

This extraordinary archive shows that wounded Sikh, Hindu and Muslim soldiers convalesced in the Pavilion. But some of the patients were gravely injured. Manta Singh’s wounds had not healed. His family believe that he was at the Royal Pavilion Hospital, but it’s clear that at some stage he was in the Kitchener Indian hospital just down the road. There is a certificate signed by the Chief Resident Officer, listing Manta Singh’s wounds as ‘one, gunshot wound, left leg, two, gangrene of leg and toxaemia.’

Manta Singh had one, or possibly both his legs amputated. And then he died. His body was taken to the South Downs, one of 53 Sikh and Hindu soldiers who, having given their for King and Empire, were cremated in the open air, here, according to their beliefs. A monument to them, called the Chattri, stands on the very spot where the cremations took place. This was a remarkable act of what we would call cultural sensitivity on behalf of the British Army. Open-air cremations were illegal, and remain so to this day. But on this occasion, they were allowed.

An annual memorial service is organised by Brighton locals and Indian ex-servicemen. Captain Henderson, whose life Manta Singh had saved, survived the war. He, a professional soldier, had won the Sword of Honour at Sandhurst in 1911, and later sent out to India to join the 2nd 11th Sikhs, where Manta Singh was also serving. The regimental and family association endured into the next generation. There is a photograph of the sons of these two men standing next to each other, taken sometime in 1937.

Manta Singh’s experience coming so early in the war was a remarkably positive example of the Edwardian Empire working together. Years after the end of Empire, we may find it surprising.

But such loyalty and mutual respect was not unusual then.

[Text from Ian Hislop’s Not Forgotten, shown recently on Channel 4.]

What is the result of one of the most successful rebrands in design history? What made London Transport so easy to use, so cherished by the millions of commuters who travel by it? Where does Art Deco come into this story? In a recent programme on BBC Four titled Art Deco Icons, David Heathcote investigates the history of the famous London Underground, its logo and route map, its trains and stations, and talks about the wondrous building that is at its heart: the headquarters of this organisation atop St James’s Park station. 55 Broadway. This is a paraphrased transcript of the show.

In 1929, the building that stands here would have been the nearest experience for a Londoner to an American skyscraper. The Underground arrived directly beneath the building, and one could come the stairs and turn directly into the offices of London Transport. There were shops at this level, multiple exits out of the station; there is wonderful Art Deco detailing, classical columns in travertine marble; a big entrance hall protecting one from the elements; a clock with a jazz sunburst behind it right above the doors leading into the offices; the whole thing screamed modernity, sophistication, technical excellence.

Entering the office lobby, the bustle of the entrance hall dies away, and one is filled with a sense of purpose, of control.  On the wall are machines that tell the viewer to position of every train in the system, and the intervals between the trains. But that’s not all they do – they also give the illusion that the building is quietly, efficiently and solidly organising the transport of London. This is where it’s all made apparent, the language of control.

The walls are of travertine marble, with the grain of the stone leading sideways, providing a sense of flow; they look like rivers frozen in stone. And this motion is, of course, what this building is all about.

After the First World War, the many companies that ran the various lines of the Underground network were amalgamated into one structure. By the 1920s, the Underground Group organised Britain’s first truly modern transport system – not just trains, but also buses, and combining as well the design and engineering and technology and branding. The hub of the system was its new Art Deco headquarters at 55 Broadway in the heart of Westminster.

In the lift lobby of the building, a lovely space, is a really American, compressed version of the spaces one associates with the skyscrapers of Chicago and New York. In particular, reminiscent of the Empire State Building is the vertical display that tells one where the lifts are. It may only go up to ten floors, but the up-thrust and narrowness suggests a rapid climb, a tower block of great height. The lift lobby has other design touches – bursts on the wall rendered in bronze, indirect lighting via inverted hemispherical shades – all suggestive of that same modernity. By the time one arrives at this lobby, one has already passed through much of the ground floor of the building, the shops and the transport and the arcade: everything is indoors, an entire block.

55 Broadway was big, bold, modern, and much of the pleasure was in the Deco detail. Even the little-visited parts of it are lovely. The use of the travertine marble suggests vast indoor spaces, flat and neutral; but the plainness is brought to life by highlights such as the bronze balustrade along the stairs, shined up to gleam like gold, with an oft-used Art Deco sunburst motif whose rays propel one up and away. Further up the stairs, the marble gives way to tile, a square tessellation that offers hygiene, brightness, freshness and airiness.

The building was designed by the architect Charles Holden. He was influenced by American skyscrapers, and the Paris Exposition of 1925, the birthplace of Art Deco. His intention was to create a modern, functional building that provided a bright and light working environment focusing on the needs of the people who would use it. Among the ideas he brought in from America was the mail system – chutes through which mail could be dropped for collection and dispatch from the lower levels. Indeed, one can still see the labelling plaque: Cutler Mailing System, Cutler-Mail-Chute-Co. Rochester, NY, USA; and the language in the building suggests ‘We are American, we are efficient.’ America at the time was synonymous with the future, and much of the no-nonsense aura of efficiency was no doubt provided by the electric clocks everywhere.

Although 55 Broadway was Holden’s vision, it was the brainchild of the new Underground Group’s managing director, Frank Pick. These two men were pivotal in the development of London Transport. Together, they undertook a massive modernisation of all the assets of the organisation to make it fit for the 20th century.

Pick was a managing whiz, and while he could not do design, he knew exactly which people to bring in to sort out the buildings, the rolling stock, the textiles. A rarity among accountants, he kept abreast of the latest in European trends in art and architecture, he knew all the modernists, and was able to fuse their ideas with a kind of English modernity, which was almost medieval in its attention to detail and love of craft. Meanwhile, Holden designed and built many of the stations on the Piccadilly and Northern lines, working flat out from 1922 to the beginning of the Second World War.

Pick and Holden were very close associates, so close that they occasionally fell out. Indeed, once Pick threatened to sack Holden when he found out that the latter had given the design commission for Hampstead station to one of his junior architects. The problem was that this was Pick’s home station, and naturally he wanted the senior man to do it up as well as he could…

The posh floor was the tenth, the topmost. The executive dining room is on it; the ceilings are twice the height of other floors, and there is a managerial roof garden! And as a tall building, 55 Broadway offered a reframing of not just offices and transport, but also luxury: height, being above everyone else, was almost the definition of luxury. Standing here in 1929, Pick and Holden could see that they had built a monument to the centrality of London’s transport: they were easily storeys above any other building in the district, and had splendid views across the metropolis.

When completed, this was a glittering white monolith, taller than anything else in London, a testament to the ambition and drive of the new organisation. It was modern and primitive at the same time and very American. Art Deco, of course, drew much inspiration from the primitivism of ancient cultures. Most obviously, the structure of 55 Broadway is reminiscent of a Babylonian ziggurat; equally, however, its situation on an entire block, squatting between streets, was a consequence of a design dynamic that originated in the USA in the 1880s, when the first skyscrapers were put up. 55 Broadway, then, is not a relic of Victorian, Dickensian Britain; it is the vanguard of a new, futuristic Britain.

Portland stone, the material of choice for British architects, lying somewhat between limestone and marble, and used extensively in 55 Broadway, epitomises the country, redolent of the White Cliffs of Dover, but also stuffed with fossils, and thus it combines ancientness and modernity. It is clean, modern, but suffused with the sediment of old Britain squashed into lumps of stone, and ideal for a headquarters: nothing says ‘stability’ and ‘forever-ness’ like this stone.  

Holden intended the building as a new Temple of the Winds. Aware that it was likely to shock, he commissioned works by avant-garde sculptors like Henry Moore and Eric Gill to adorn each elevation. He chose Jacob Epstein, one of the most controversial artists of the time, to create two works, called Night and Day. It was a bold choice. 

The one called Day, when it was put up, caused great offence, great scandal, because the penis of the boy clinging to his father was an extra inch-and-a-half longer, with the result that when the rain ran down it, water cascaded off its tip and onto the street. So an inch-and-a-half had to come off.

The primitivism of the sculpture represents the power of electricity. Both modernism and primitivism talked about huge, uncontrolled forces. Electricity was akin to the puissance of ancient gods; in Epstein’s Day, the ancient, primitive god is sending his son off to his job in the world. Likewise, the Underground becomes the manifestation of a powerful heavy primitive god.

Crucially, Frank Pick understood the value of good design, and that the look of London Transport was its personality. He began the process of modernisation by commissioning painters for posters that would encourage commuters to use the system in their leisure time. In the 1920s, bright, colourful Art Deco designs produced by the best artists of the day were always given pride of place in the Tube stations. Pick understood just how persuasive they could be in persuading the public that this was a modern, forward-looking transport system.  

In the London Transport Museum are over 20,000 posters from the various lives of the network. Those chosen by Pick from 55 Broadway were pivotal in the development of the Underground. Clive Gardiner was an example of an avant-garde artist employing some of the contemporary cubist ideas that struck a chord in the travelling public; another was Jean Dupas, who, like Gardiner, worked in his own style, and achieved much acclaim. The idea was to promote off-peak travel among Londoners; some of the posters targeted women, suggesting they were modern and independent and fashionable and could take in the city on a day out. The posters were placed inside the exits of stations so that people could see them on their way home: perhaps a glimmer of an idea of what to do on the weekend might then dawn in their minds.

The posters were the starting point of one of the most radical redesign projects ever undertaken by a single company. Pick and Holden were able to do this because Art Deco is a total style, appropriate for all the company’s assets, from its headquarters on 55 Broadway to the smallest fittings on its station platforms, and so too the trains that ran on its tracks. One of the first trains that had all its running gears underneath it was the 1938 Rolling Stock which remained in use till the 1980s. It was styled in an Art Deco way, with Art Deco lampshades (called ‘shovel shades’ by workers on the LU), and the red-and-green seating fabric (called moquette) designed by the foremost textile designers of the day, people like Edith Marx and Marion Dorn; the overall effect of comfort and spaciousness that enticed passengers. Frank Pick had an idea of ‘fitness for purpose’, and these trains achieved much of that goal: technically better than the prior generation of trains, more comfortable, much more easy to use. Indeed, Pick, despite being extraordinarily busy at the upper levels of the administration, still took an afternoon off every week to go over the samples and design ideas that were being proposed by his commissions, and personally signed off the ones he felt were the best. That level of total control brought a sense of order to what used to be a disparate system in the decades before, and reassured passengers that they were getting a consistent service.

Other aspects of the total design overhaul were the kiosks for cigarettes and newspapers that used to be placed within the stations; the passimeter, the ticket dispenser and passenger counting booth; and, of course, the signage and plaques for information. The earlier signs were difficult to read, cramped texts in multiple fonts, very Victorian.

Pick commissioned Edward Johnston, one of the leading calligraphers of the day, to design a new Underground font, a uniform typeface that enabled clear and unambiguous signage, including the roundel logo, all surrounded by much white space.

During the 1920s and 30s, the Tube network pushed further and further out of dirty and crowded central London to new and leafy suburbs. It was Charles Holden who oversaw the design of new stations, which became increasingly radical for suburban London. As a result, London Transport’s stations number more listed buildings than any other public body in Britain.

Southgate is one of Holden’s stations on the Piccadilly Line. It was opened in 1933, and was considered one of his most dazzling creations. It had escalators, which were possibly the most modern thing the passengers had seen; the escalator tunnel was warm-lit, spacious and welcoming, taking the passengers up to the light; at the top, arriving at the main hall, one would see the relief-panel on the ceiling, like water radiating out after a drop falls in it. Of course, one is now en route home, after a long grimy day at work, and this was a wondrous welcome back.

It is easy to be jaded by stations such as these today, but in the 1930s, these were the frontline of international avant-gardism, European modernism and Hollywood and the cinema, a touch of the future for the commuting classes of London.

From its heart at 55 Broadway to the very farthest reaches of the system, in the posters, the stations and the trains, Holden and Pick’s Art Deco designs enriched and advanced the lives of millions of people in the 1930s.  But London Transport’s bright new world still endures even now in the 21st century, fulfilling the purpose for which it was meticulously designed.