BAGDContext CSM

Night Mail is a 1936 documentary film about an LMS mail train from London to Scotland, produced by the GPO Film Unit. A poem by W. H. Auden was written for it, used in the closing few minutes, as was the music by Benjamin Britten.

The film was directed by Harry Watt and Basil Wright, and narrated by John Grierson and Stuart Legg. The Brazilian filmmaker Alberto Cavalcanti was sound director. The locomotive featured in the film was Royal Scot 6115 Scots Guardsman, built in 1927. The film has become a classic.

You can watch the film, here

The film has a spoken commentary that describes how the service works…

Crewe Control? Euston Telegraph. One-Five-Seven Postal, left at eight-thirty.

Class six engine, three hundred and forty tons, twelve vehicles…Eight-thirty pm, weekdays and Sundays, the down Postal Special leaves Euston for Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Aberdeen.

The Postal Special is a fast express, but it carries no passengers. It is manned by forty Post Office workers. Half-a-million letters are sorted, picked up, or dropped, at full speed during the night; or carried on to the morning delivery in Scotland.

Four million miles every year! That bit is shouted out.

Five hundred million letters every year! That bit, too.

Trains from Lincolnshire and Derbyshire connect at Tamworth.

Trains from Warwickshire and Leicestershire connect at Rugby.

At thirty-four points between London and Glasgow postmen wait with local mails to deliver them to the Postal Special. The mails have been roughly sorted, by district. The postmen set up a net to catch the mail dropped by the train. They strap up the mail bags in strong leather pouches. The pouches are fixed to a standard by a spring clip.

A net is swung out from the train as it approaches the standard. The impact releases the spring clip and the pouches are swept into the train. Those letters were posted in Bletchley (Milton Keynes) half-an-hour ago.

Crewe, the main junction for the midlands.

Trains from Bristol, Cardiff, Manchester, Stoke, Liverpool and Birmingham, bring a thousand bags of mails for the north, between ten fifty-seven and eleven thirty-nine pm.

The Control Room.

Expresses are reported at regular intervals.

The scheduled stop for the Postal Special is thirteen minutes. Five hundred bags must be unloaded, a thousand loaded, engines changed, and some of the English crew exchanged for Scots.

North, with a hundred tons of new letters to sort. The Postal Special picks up and distributes the mails to industrial England; the mines of Wigan, the steelworks of Warrington, and the machine-shops of Preston.

There are seven sorting vans on the Postal Special. Each sorter has forty-eight pigeon holes, each representing a town. The packets are sorted separately.

As the train progresses, the names, scribbled in chalk over the pigeon-holes, have to be changed. When a pigeon-hole is filled the letters are tied in a bundle. The bundles are put into a labelled bag hanging behind the sorters. When the bag is full it is tied, labelled, and sealed, ready for dispatch by apparatus, or at the next stop.

The film finishes with a section where movement, image, sound and verse combine. The verse is by WH Auden and gives a sense of what this service means in terms of personal feelings and issues of community. Here is the text of Auden’s poem

This is the night mail crossing the Border,

Bringing the cheque and the postal order,

Letters for the rich, letters for the poor, The shop at the corner, the girl next door.

Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:

The gradient’s against her, but she’s on time.

Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder

Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,

Snorting noisily as she passes

Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.

Birds turn their heads as she approaches,

Stare from bushes at her blank-faced coaches.

Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course;

They slumber on with paws across.

In the farm she passes no one wakes,

But a jug in a bedroom gently shakes.

Dawn freshens, Her climb is done.

Down towards Glasgow she descends,

Towards the steam tugs yelping down a glade of cranes

Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces

Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.

All Scotland waits for her:

In dark glens, beside pale-green lochs

Men long for news.

Letters of thanks, letters from banks, Letters of joy from girl and boy,

Receipted bills and invitations

To inspect new stock or to visit relations,

And applications for situations,

And timid lovers’ declarations,

And gossip, gossip from all the nations,

News circumstantial, news financial,

Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,

Letters with faces scrawled on the margin,

Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,

Letters to Scotland from the South of France,

Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands

Written on paper of every hue,

The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,

The chatty, the catty, the boring, the adoring,

The cold and official and the heart’s outpouring,

Clever, stupid, short and long,

The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.

Thousands are still asleep, Dreaming of terrifying monsters

Or of friendly tea beside the band in Cranston’s or Crawford’s:

Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh, Asleep in granite Aberdeen,

They continue their dreams,

But shall wake soon and hope for letters,

And none will hear the postman’s knock

Without a quickening of the heart,

For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

Model railway layouts always seemed to include a TPO set with trackside pickup. Here’s a lovely big tinplate mail coach.

Here’s an image I found on the internet. I’ve been researching Night Mail, the GPO film about the travelling post office between London and Glasgow…

This is an image of an American postal wagon, circa 1920 I guess. I liked the typographic detail on the railway car.

Here’s a railway transparency from the US Library of Congress collection. The library has a group of pictures taken by an employee of the US Farm Security Administration.

Here is a page form the little Railway Quiz book I mentioned earlier….

We’ve been watching a US TV series called Hell on Wheels. It’s basically a revenge and redemption tale set in the aftermath of the Civil War and against the westward push of the transcontinental railway…

The visual style of the film is based on both Once Upon a Time in the West and Heaven’s Gate.

Terrific.

I have a theory that the vast skies, of the American mid-west, drove people mad…

I’ve posted before about Edward McKnight Kauffer. Here’s an early design, by him, for a cotton manufacturer in manchester. These simple labels were attached to bales of printed cotton for export to the South American market.

Kauffer produced a series of labels over a number of years, 36 in total – 1916 through to 1926.

Here is the cover of a railway guide to the Cornish Riviera, published by the Great Western Railway in 1934. The text is by SPB Mais and the cover is by Edward McKnight Kauffer.

Kauffer was a genius of graphic design before the term really existed…He’s included as his own section in my book, Modern British Posters (2010). Here’s the text of that section…

The American artist and poster designer, Edward McKnight Kauffer (1890-1954), made a crucial contribution to design in Britain during the period before WW2.

Kauffer was born into the relative isolation of the American mid-west. His precocious artistic talent first expressed itself through sketching and painting. In 1907, Kauffer joined an itinerant theatrical troupe as a kind of factotum with responsibilities extending from scenery painting, to sales, and advertising. Kauffer was persuaded in 1910 to travel westward, to Calfornia, by an actor colleague and friend, Frank Bacon. In San Fransisco, Kauffer was introduced, through Bacon, to the artistic circle of the bookseller and art-dealer Paul Elder. It was whilst working in Elder’s gallery that Kauffer met Professor Joseph McKnight, Professor of Elementary Education at the University of Utah.

McKnight quickly recognised Kauffer as a promising, but unformed, artistic talent and resolved to help. His motives appear to have been entirely generous and derived from a combination of religious conviction and belief in the transforming power of education. McKnight sponsored Kauffer, in 1912, to study in Chicago and to travel to Paris, and across Europe, to advance his artistic development.

Whilst in Chicago, Kauffer was able to visit the Armory Show, which after its notorious debut in New York, had travelled into the American heartland. The Armory Show introduced America to the major artistic developments of European painting and sculpture ranging from Delacroix to Duchamp and from Picasso and Braque to Kandinsky.

The response to the show, amongst Kauffer’s colleagues in Chicago, was one of cultural outrage. For Kauffer, and based on what he had seen at the Armory Show, Europe offered a compelling combination of artistic ferment and advanced cultural tolerance. In 1913 Kauffer travelled to Europe, where his itinerary took him to Venice, Munich and Paris. In the end, Kauffer’s stay in Paris was curtailed by the beginning of WW1. In 1914, Kauffer moved to London, expecting to travel onto America without delay.

A combination of factors made Britain seem especially attractive to Kauffer. The general cultural atmosphere in London was more advanced and adventurous than in Chicago whilst, at the same time, appearing less obviously intimidating than that which he had encountered in Munich and Paris.

Kauffer resolved to commit himself to an artistic career in Britain and to stay, by his own efforts, for as long as possible. His interest in both landscape painting and formal experiment allowed his to join both Roger Fry’s Bloomsbury group and the more obviously avant-gardist grouping of Vorticist artists around Wyndham Lewis.

The response to Kauffer’s painting was not encouraging. In an effort to support himself he began to search out poster commissions and other design work. A meeting with John Hassall, in 1915, provided him with an introduction to Frank Pick…

The circuitous route by which Kauffer and Pick came to meet is important because it describes the combination of influences that Kauffer brought to poster design after 1915. His beginnings as a theatrical scenery painter, in Amerca, provided him with a clear sense of how scale, colour and simplification could be combined effectively. In Europe, Kauffer immediately responded to the sophisticated simplifications of Ludwig Hohlwein’s poster designs in Munich. By the time Kauffer reached Britain, he was familiar with a wide range of artistic ideas from across Europe.

Kauffer’s instinctive disposition towards the scale and drama of the poster, along with his conceptual and artistic sophistication, was unusual in Britain. The combination was attractive to Pick who, as a founder member of the DIA, was committed to improving general standards of design. Pick immediately began to commission poster designs from the young American. In the end, Kauffer and Pick worked together until 1939

McKnight Kauffer provided a new kind of bridge between the separate worlds of fine art and poster design. The first artists to attempt poster design had, typically, simply produced their usual work in poster form. Kauffer was able, by temperament and opportunity, to develop a visual language that synthesised a number of different visual elements from modern art into poster design. By producing, over time, a coherent visual language that combined colour, scale, abstraction, simplification, and integration, Kauffer was able to advance the scope of poster communication beyond the prosaic demands of the advertising industry. Suddenly, posters appeared bigger and brighter and more audacious.

In 1924 Kauffer wrote his Art of the Poster, an important book that established the historical and aesthetic developemnts that defined the modern poster. This intelligent and rigorous engagement with the activities of graphic design began to establish a new standard of professionalism and conceptual sophistication for the industry.

During the 1920s and 1930s Kauffer established himself as the most important poster and graphic designer in Britain. He worked for Pick and for Stephen Tallents at the Post Office and for many, many other clients.

Kauffer forged an especially productive relationship with the sophisticated Jack Beddington of Shell. A more-or-less continuous stream of Kauffer posters contributed to the Shell campaign from 1929 onwards. The posters show the constant experiment and range of influences that drove Kauffer onwards.

In addition to the consistent patronage offered him by these figures, Kauffer was also helped by the support of Peter Gregory, a director of the printing firm Lund Humphries. The printers were also the publishers of The Penrose Annual. This book was the trade annual in which were combined writings and examples of technical innovation, aesthetic experiment and cultural engagement.

Gregory was conscious of the relationship between modern technological development in the print industry and the opportunity for new forms of visual communication. Lund Humphries positioned themselves, within the print industry, as pioneers of both technological development and innovation and also of design and visual invention. In practical terms, this meant attempting to understand how photographic elements could be integrated into the existing visual language of the print economy.

In order to drive this project forward, Gregory gave Kauffer a studio at the firm’s London offices in Bedford Square. With the resources of the printing firm behind him, the Kauffer studio became a kind of visual laboratory. The studio was a bigger and more collective environment in which to work. The implicit direction, across every activities of the studio and its resources, was towards experimentation and problem solving in creative design.

The offices also included a gallery space where exhibitions of international and new work were presented to the public. These spaces became, by the end of the 1930s, the main entry point for émigré artists and designers into London’s creative economy.

By the 1930s, Kauffer had become established, by reputation and work, as the major modernist designer in Britain. His work for Shell provided him with a direct association with one of Britain’s largest companies. The campaign was recognised as the most sophisticated of artistic advertising and the work was seen and recognised at local and international level. In addition, his studio at Lund Humphries became the starting point for a dialogue, with other designers, about efforts to integrate surrealist and photographic elements into the visual repertoire of poster design.

Kauffer designed a number of posters for the Great Western Railway for holiday destinations in Cornwall and Devon.

Here’s a lovely bit of “home-made” graphic design for an Ian Allan. It’s a pocket-sized quiz book. Ideal for the time spent waiting for things to happen on the railway station platform.

I love the arbitrary design choices – it’s just what they had to hand. The idea of using an appropriate typeface, for instance, didn’t worry them. Incidentally, the oversized shadow italic used for the title was popular for shop-fronts in the 1950s.

The lettering looks like a rub-down. Letraset started in 1959 and was huge in the 1960s. But, this looks like a 1950s design and the engine is from the 1930s.

It’s a real throwback.

PS

The questions are really difficult and need a detailed knowledge of railways to answer. So, not just a game.

In the years after WW2, the French railways, SNCF, began an ambitious project to electrify their mainline services. This was all part of rebuilding the railways after the war and, also, of re-establishing France’s reputation as a technical power-house.

By the 1955, French passenger trains held the world speed records for railways at just above 300kph. The engine was a type CC7100, built by Alstom.

There’s an old black-and-white film of the 1955 record on YouTube.

The more recent TGV record stands at almost 60okph! Also, powered by Alstom. If you want to know how fast 600kph is at ground level, watch the film on YouTube.

Don’t forget that film will tend to slow things down!

Here’s another picture found by my colleague, David Hendley. In this one, the engine is moving and the picture is taken, I guess, from a bridge above the tracks.

The photographer has chosen his spot well. The train is moving slowly and applying power to get the heavy freight train moving. There may be a little up-hill slope to make things more interesting. The blowing engine – with steam and smoke flying – is working really hard.

The best place to get this kind of image in London is on the pull up from Euston to Camden. You just need to know when a steam train is scheduled. The cutting, out of Euston, is pretty steep to Camden. In the early days there was a system of ropes to haul trains up. Later, the engines were doubled up.

Because of the way that the cutting is built, you’ll have to take a small photographer’s ladder to see over the wall.

Incidentally, the steam, smoke and soot, associated with all this effort is what blighted the area north of Euston. Camden and Primrose Hill were both blighted and given over to cheap bed-sits, with large populations of people coming and going.

The west-coast mainline electrification in the 1960s was the signal for the gentrification for this part of London.