BAGDContext CSM

One of the great railway films is David Lean and Noel Coward’s Brief Encounter (1945).

Brief Encounter is a 1945 British film directed by David Lean about British suburban life, centering on Laura, a married woman with children whose conventional life becomes increasingly complicated because of a chance meeting at a train station with a stranger, Alec. They inadvertently but quickly progress to an emotional love affair, which brings about unexpected consequences. The film stars Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard. The screenplay is by Noël Coward, based on his 1936 one-act play Still Life. The soundtrack prominently features the Piano Concerto No. 2 by Sergei Rachmaninoff, played by Eileen Joyce.

Nowadays, the film seems remarkable for the stoicism and restraint of the protagonists. As the emotional temperature of the film rises; trains thunder though the station. The Freudian potential of railway trains and station platforms is made completely explicit. But, nothing much happens…

Here is a terrific painting by the 20C American artist, Thomas Hart Benton. The painting is called The Sources of Country Music and dates from 1975. It was part of a grand scheme of murals that Benton produced for the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville.

Benton isn’t very well known outside America. His regionalist and figurative style of painting lost out to abstract expressionism in the post-WW2 battle for cultural supremacy.

Benton’s style is overblown for most modern tastes. However, I love the sense of emotional drama. You can feel the paintings in the same way that country and western songs are felt.

Luton Model Railway Club have made a display of the Great Train Robbery (1963). Brilliant. The model is on show at various events throughout the summer. Alan Baines, our BAGD course leader, recently saw it at Alexandra Palace in London.

The Great Train Robbery was the robbery of a Royal Mail train heading between Glasgow and London in the early hours of Thursday 8 August 1963.

After tampering with line signals, a 15-strong gang of robbers led by Bruce Reynolds attacked the train. Other gang members included Gordon Goody, Buster Edwards, Charlie Wilson, Roy James, John Daly, Jimmy White, Ronnie Biggs, Tommy Wisbey, Jim Hussey, Bob Welch and Roger Courdrey as well as three men known only as numbers ‘1’, ‘2’ and ‘3’. A 16th man, an unnamed retired train driver, was also present at the time of robbery.

With careful planning based on inside information from an individual known only as ‘The Ulsterman’, the robbers got away with over £2.6 million (the equivalent of £46 million today). The bulk of the stolen money was never recovered.

After the robbery the gang hid at Leatherslade Farm. When caught, the ringleaders were sentenced to 30 years in jail.

Biggs achieved notoriety by escaping from custody and living the life of a fugitive…eventually living in Brazil. His exploits, over the next forty odd years, were followed by the British media and he became something of a folk-hero. More recently, there have been a number of dramas on British television based on the events of the robbery and its aftermath.

I really like the idea of making a model of a cultural-event like this…next, a model railway layout of Brief Encounter (1945). With integrated digital multi-media!

PS My favorite object like this is the waxwork, in Paris, modelled after Gericault’s great painting of the Raft of the Medusa (1819).

Here are Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine in Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941). A train, a suit and glamour. Perfect.

Here is a painting, by the British artist, Evelyn Dunbar, of a WW2 hospital train. I remember this painting from when I was very small, (it was illustrated in one of our books at home). I think I was fascinated by the idea of a train with beds…which I was familiar with from France; and I was impressed by the terrible stillness of the scene. It’s definitely about the quiet before the storm, and how people find calm and consolation by concentrating on small tasks.

There’s a selection of her paintings, below. I love the technical precision of Dunbar’s work and the dignity she gives every person in her paintings. Everyone is concentrating on the task-in-hand and doing it as best they can – keeping calm, and carrying on!

I’ve written before about the impact of the train on  military thinking…the railway allowed for greater logistical reach and improved mobility. Troops and equipment could be moved about over large distances and at speed. This was crucial in the build up to battle; but it was also important for removing the injured from the front…

One of the basic principles of battlefield medicine is of triage. The military doctors evaluate the injured and sort those that can be helped, from those whose injuries are fatal. The non-fatally injured are then operated on, or moved to a more quiet area where they can be treated. In historical terms, battlefield surgery has mostly been about amputation!

The links between war and medicine are really interesting. The technical development of 20C warfare provided for the urgent development of techniques in reconstructive surgery (WW1), the treatment of severe burns (WW2), and open-heart surgery (post-WW2).

The story of WW1 reconstructive surgery is quite well known now. The widespread use of powerful artillery during WW1 produced a terrible new kind of shrapnel exit-wound. This could leave someone without half a face! At first, medical efforts were directed at simply making sure the wounds healed. That wasn’t easy. Survival and recovery produced its own trauma associated with disfigurement and isolation. Humane doctors began to consider the possibilities of reconstructive techniques and grafts. The hospital at Sidcup, Kent, was one of the main centres for this work. Sir Harold Gillies was the pioneer surgeon associated with this work.

The early efforts at this kind of surgery were documented by the artist and surgeon, Henry Tonks. Some of his work is displayed at the NPG, London, for the centenary of WW1. Tonks was a Professor at the Slade School of Art. In a previous life, he had been the assistant to the great Victorian surgeon, Sir Frederick Treves at the London Hospital. Treves is a very significant historical figure, but he is nowadays mostly associated with the story of Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man. This story was made into a film by David Lynch (1980).

By a terrible co-incidence, there is a BBC1TV Sunday evening drama, based on WW1 nursing, called Field of Blood…

The technical development of mechanical war on land and in the air, during WW2, provided for many more injuries through the serious burns. These new types of injury were addressed through surgery and salt bath treatments at East Grinstead. The pioneer surgeon at East grinstead was Sir Archibald McIndoe.

McIndoe understood that the traumas associated with injury were both physical and psychological. At East Grinstead, he established a social club for his patients. This allowed them to begin the difficult process of post-injury social integration.

The major problems associated with battlefield amputation were blood loss and infection. New techniques to stem blood loss allowed for surgeons to attempt more complex forms of surgery. During the 1950s and 1960s rapid progress was made so that, by the end of the 1960s, a successful heart-transplant was completed. This was a direct and positive consequence of new techniques pioneered during WW2 and on military battlefields in Asia – think MASH (Mobile Army Surgical Hospital) with helicopter support.

The development of penicillin greatly reduced the threat associated with battlefield infection.

I did find a pretty good website about railway surgery, with a page about US military hospital trains…

http://railwaysurgery.org/Army.htm

The site is dedicated to railway surgery; which, in America, is a branch of surgery devoted to looking after railway employees and the specific traumas associated with work on the railroad.

Just in case anyone thinks this is all historical, here is a picture of a modern hospital train in India.

You can see Evelyn Dunbar’s work at the Imperial War Museum, London.  There’s a BBC website slide show of her paintings and there’s a wiki entry. It turns out Evelyn was a neighbour of ours in East Kent. Hopefully, we’ll find one of her paintings one day.

Here’s a terrific advertising image from the early 1960s for the “hi-dome” observation car on the Santa Fe railway. This isn’t just a great advertising image though…it’s an image about a new kind of seeing!

Of course, seeing and cognition and understanding are all connected. So, seeing in new and exciting (technologically enhanced) ways allows us to understand the world in a new and different way.

During the 19C, Hermann von Helmholtz conceptualised the cognitive model of the intelligent eye. This understood the human eye and brain to be connected. Accordingly, physiological, cognitive and epistemological considerations had to be made in relation to each other. The eye became understood as part of a pattern-recognition approach to cognitive formation and problem solving. Later, the Gestalt psychologists constructed a whole theory of psychological development around this idea. I think that this is still broadly correct.

In the early 1970s, John Berger made a series of films for BBC TV called, Ways of Seeing. In the films, Berger unpicked the ideological and political assumptions that support the way we see the world. He revealed that, in fact, there were many different ways of seeing and understanding the world. It’s just that we usually think of the way that we see the world as natural and don’t think about it much. This is always an individual disaster and leads, inevitably, to a kind of false consciousness. This effects people at every level in society and with very damaging consequences.

Peculiarly, Berger didn’t really consider the impact that technology has on vision and, subsequently, upon vision, cognition and ideology. Obviously, and along with photography and cinema, motor cars and airplanes; the railway played an important role in affording people a different perspective on the world.

Wolfgang Schivelbusch (1986) provides the starting-point for our contemporary understanding of the cultural meanings of the railway system and its mechanical technologies. George Revill (2012.48) briefly describes Schivelbusch’s idea, as follows

the experience of railway travel also shaped the way landscape was viewed…the conventional way of looking at landscape prior to the railway was to observe a receding vista from a static viewpoint, a detailed and closely observed foreground giving way to a more generalised middle ground which guided the eye to towards a specific distant object of interest. From the moving train perspectives were always changing, eye catching focal points in the middle distance were alternately visible and obscured, close and distant, while the foreground whizzed past in a perpetual blur. The speed of travel by railway made it impossible to form such a well-ordered and closely observed landscape in the mind’s eye.

Schivelbusch also connected this insight to the developing 19C spectacular and its attendant ocular entertainments of the diorama and panorama. Indeed, Schivelbusch suggests that the railway experience became the, defacto, optical entertainment before cinema.

These experiences and entertainments provide for a new kind of technically mediated spectator. The subtitle of Schivelbusch’s book is the industrialisation of time and space. The reference to industrialisation is telling and distinguishes an experience that, by virtue of technology addresses the mass of population.

These ideas are described in detail by Ana Parejo Vadillo and John Plunkett who, in Beaumont and Freeman (2007), explicitly link the experience of the railway passenger with ocular formation and cognitive training. The ocular and cognitive discipline implicit in this formation is obviously significant in relation to the requirements of industrial society.

Jonathan Crary (2001) has described how the development of ocular entertainments at the end of the 19C feeds into the interactive and experiential characteristics of speed, acceleration and modernity. Nowadays, we are going through the same process in relation to big data, real-time modelling and operational research.

James Flynn has identified a specific consequence of all this. It is that the cognitive training implicit in this multi-channel and interactive experience actually develops visual and spatial intelligence. This improvement can actually be measured, over time, and in relation to urban populations in developed economies. It is expressed as higher IQ scores.

So, riding on the train, and looking out of the window,  actually makes you cleverer. Glamour and intelligence together, amazing!

Here’s the picture from the beginning in its advert form…

A note about US railways…

The traditional saloon car of the US railroads had open platforms at each end. These provided for open air and panoramic views, especially from the very rear of the train. The bigger loading gauge of US railways made two-storey carriages possible. The raised observation suite allowed for increased comfort and panoramic views through 360 degrees. Each of the major railroad companies had high-rise observation cars during the 1960s.

The smaller loading gauge of UK railways means that these US style high-level observation cars are not practical. Accordingly, the UK observation car is usually a rear-end glazed saloon. Not as practical and not as glamorous.

We continue with our American theme…this is a terrific and dramatic photograph of a streamlined class 3460, 4-6-4 Hudson, by Henry Dreyfuss and Baldwin Loco, for the Santa Fe Railroad (1937). This was The Blue Goose.

By virtue of size and efficiency, these big engines were able to keep going, at good speed, and over long distances. In the days before widespread air transport, these trains provided the luxury express travel of the celebrity and business elites in North America. The Santa Fe linked Chicago and Los Angeles; so the train was constantly used by Hollywood A-listers.

I have a great weakness for colour and scale; it’s what first drew me to posters and graphic design. Similarly with railway trains; I’m less interested in the machinery and most interested in the movement, scale, colour, and typography, of individual trains.

The term supergraphics is usually understood in terms of architecture. The idea of large-scale typographic elements was promoted, in the UK, by Edward Wright (Chelsea) and Gordon Cullen’s conceptualisation of Townscape. The 1960s architectural avant-garde group, Archigram, used supergraphics to animate their megastructures.

The idea of supergraphics was undermined by a general animosity towards advertising and a cultural suspicion of the urban spectacular. British high-tech architects haven’t really embraced the concept either. They’ve generally been unwilling to compromise on material integrity and engineering rhetoric. Only the Pompidou by Rogers and Piano has successfully embraced the civic potential of spectacular.

In the US, they have really big trains. The scaling-up plays to the strengths of the machine-age aesthetic, and the punchy graphic style gives dynamism and flair to the whole train ensemble. It’s the logical end-point of Raymond Loewy’s integrated and streamlined approach to industrial design.

The Cinema-Scope title sequence of Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), by John Sturges and with Spencer Tracy, has the streamlined diesel train thundering across the desert and with the titles and credits in monster type…

By a happy co-incidence, the film has just been shown on TV. You can catch-up, online, by using your UAL log-in with Box of Broadcasts.

PS/ These pictures come from a website called curbside classics – it’s mostly cars; but there are some trains too.

I just found this book from 1944. It’s a story about railways illustrated with colour photographs of model layouts. The photos are by Paul Henning, who must have been a contemporary of John Hinde. The book was designed by George Adams and has a few charming illustrations by Patric F OKeefee

The book was published by Collins and printed by Adprint Ltd, who later became Thames and Hudson. It’s incredible to think that the illustration of books by colour photographs was still in its first stage back then.

The book must have been popular – it was reprinted every year for at least ten years…

John Hinde is well known nowadays and is remembered for his photographs for Butlin’s Holiday Camps. Paul Henning is much less well known – anybody know anything about him?

Here’s the lovely endpaper design of the book.

The world in miniature of model railways is compelling – it speaks to the powerful Freudian themes of voyeurism and control. I’ve posted before about some of the meanings associated with this.