Isokon and the Bauhaus in Britain E-Book

Leyla Daybelge

• Herausgeber: Batsford
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 317

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

In the mid-1930s, three giants of the international Modern movement, Bauhaus professors Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer and László Moholy-Nagy, fled Nazi Germany and sought refuge in Hampstead in the most exciting new apartment block in Britain. The Lawn Road Flats, or Isokon building, was commissioned by the young visionary couple Jack and Molly Pritchard and designed by aspiring architect Wells Coates. Built in 1934 in response to the question 'How do we want to live now?' it was England's first modernist apartment building and was hugely influential in pioneering the concept of minimal living. During the mid-1930s and 1940s its flats, bar and dining club became an extraordinary creative nexus for international artists, writers and thinkers. Jack Pritchard employed Gropius, Breuer and Moholy-Nagy in his newly formed Isokon design company and the furniture, architecture and graphic art the three produced in pre-war England helped shape Modern Britain. This book tells the story of the Isokon, from its beginnings to the present day, and fully examines the work, artistic networks and legacy of the Bauhaus artists during their time in Britain. The tales are not just of design and architecture but war, sex, death, espionage and infamous dinner parties. Isokon resident Agatha Christie features in the book, as does Charlotte Perriand who Jack Pritchard commissioned for a pavilion design in 1930. The book is beautifully illustrated with largely unseen archive photography, and includes the work of photographer and Soviet spy Edith Tudor-Hart, as well as plans and sketches, menus, postcards and letters from the Pritchard family archive. In Spring 2018, the Isokon building and Breuer, Gropius and Moholy-Nagy were honoured with a Blue Plaque from English Heritage. 

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

1 JACK AND MOLLY

2 WELLS COATES

3 THE BAUHAUS

4 BUILDING THE FLATS

5 THE ARRIVAL OF THE BAUHAUSLERS

6 ISOKON FURNITURE

7 THE BAUHAUSLERS WORK OUTSIDE ISOKON

8 FOOD, BOOKS AND SPIES

9 THE WAR AND ITS AFTERMATH

10 THE 1950S AND 60S – THE REBIRTH OF ISOKON

11 THE DECLINE AND RESCUE OF LAWN ROAD FLATS

12 THE FUTURE

EPILOGUE

FOOTNOTES

PICTURE CREDITS

INDEX

INTRODUCTION

ON A BITTERLY COLD DAY IN MARCH 1931, THREE travellers left the railway station in the provincial German town of Dessau, in the Free State of Anhalt. Dressed in long, dark overcoats and trilby hats, they made their way along a short street of 19th-century wooden-framed houses, bracing themselves against the biting wind. Turning a corner, they stopped in their tracks. Before them lay the Bauhaus, the revolutionary school of art, architecture and design founded by Walter Gropius. They gazed at the complex of stark, geometric buildings, linked by an aerial glass bridge. It was a powerful vision of the future.1

One of the three, the English entrepreneur Jack Pritchard, reached for his cine-camera. Sensing this was a moment for posterity, he filmed his friends, architects Wells Coates and Serge Chermayeff, as they strode ahead of him towards the Bauhaus. Then through the camera’s lens, he avidly devoured the buildings’ architectural details, sweeping back and forth across the vast glass curtain wall, cantilevered steel-framed balconies, flat roofs and grey and white concrete facades. The shots were unsteady, as his hands shook with excitement. The school building, which had only opened just five years earlier in 1926, was now virtually deserted, under threat of imminent closure by the local Nazi party. In the Director’s office they were told that ‘Dr Gropius was no longer there, in fact no-one was there.’2 Disappointed, but ‘greatly impressed with the building as a building’, the trio explored the site, peering into empty workshops, classrooms, theatre, offices, student apartments and refectory, absorbing everything, including the radical serif-free font of the typography proudly proclaiming the art school’s name:

B

A

U

H

A

U

S

As snow began to fall, the men made the short journey to the nearby suburb of Törten. They wandered through the streets of small, low-cost, prefabricated houses that Walter Gropius had designed for industrial workers, leaving tracks of dark footprints in the gathering white.

Years later Pritchard recalled the significance of the visit: ‘It had a very powerful impact on me. I did not know it then, but both the Bauhaus and Walter Gropius were to have an enormous influence on much of my future.’3

In fact, the Bauhaus, its ideas and protagonists would influence not just Pritchard’s life, but also play a key role in the story of 20th-century design and architecture – in Britain and across the globe. Pritchard’s cine footage, rediscovered in 2016, contains some of the earliest-known moving images of the art school, and was certainly the first to be brought back to Britain. It represents the beginning of an important dialogue between the ideas of the Bauhaus Masters and a group of pioneers of British Modernism, which will form the narrative of this book.

Founding members of the British Twentieth Century Group, Pritchard, Canadian Coates and Russian-born Chermayeff were part of a small, but growing band of individuals in Britain embracing the new architecture at the start of the 1930s. The movement was already well established in continental Europe – particularly in France, the Netherlands and Germany, where the Weimar government had been swift to realize the economic imperative of marrying art and industry.

The three men had travelled from London to Stuttgart on the Orient Express, ostensibly on a business trip, but the journey became something of an architectural pilgrimage, taking in many of Germany’s new modern developments – department stores, factories, private houses and residential estates.4 In Stuttgart they toured the experimental 1927 Weissenhof Estate, the work of 17 architects and a showcase for the new techniques and materials of International Modernism. Erich Mendelsohn, one of the founders of the influential Der Ring group of architects, showed the trio over his Metalworkers’ Union building in Berlin and entertained them at his spectacular new lakeside home, Am Rupenhorn.5 While in the city, they also visited the vast Großsiedlung Siemensstadt Estate and Bruno Taut’s monumental flat-roofed, horseshoe-shaped Hufeisensiedlung, built to house 3,000 members of the Gehag trade union.6 They had seen, at first hand, Modernism not just as a style breaking with the past, but as the realization of a new Utopian vision, that architecture could improve the lives of ordinary men and women in the 20th century.7

Pritchard filmed most of the Modernist landmarks they visited and Chermayeff also kept a photographic diary of their trip to Germany, which he published in a jaunty article in Architectural Review (AR) in November that year.8 The publication, and its stablemate Architects’ Journal (AJ), both owned and edited by Hubert de Cronin Hastings, played a key role in disseminating Modernist ideas and imagery in late 1920s and 1930s Britain, but prior to the visit of Pritchard and his colleagues, relatively little was known about the Bauhaus. The earliest mention of Walter Gropius and the foundation of the Bauhaus (at its first location, in Weimar), appeared in the July 1924 edition of AR in a series about German architects.9 At the time of the trio’s visit the only image of the Dessau Bauhaus that had been published in Britain was a single photograph in Bruno Taut’s 1929 book Modern Architecture, accompanied by the legend: ‘House for Students at Dessau’.10 The series of 14 Bauhaus Bücher (1925–30), edited by Walter Gropius and designed by Lászlo Móholy-Nagy had not yet been translated into English, so information about the school, its architecture and teaching methods was scarce and the proto-Modernists received only scant details from German magazines brought back to London, a few continental journals in the library of the Design and Industries Association, and the first-hand accounts of individuals such as Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst, founders of Dartington Hall School in Devon, who had visited the Weimar Bauhaus in the early 1920s.11

On their return to London, Pritchard, Coates and Chermayeff no doubt discussed their experiences with their friend, the influential architecture critic and bon viveur, Philip Morton Shand. A fluent German speaker, he travelled extensively on the continent as a correspondent for both AR and AJ and first wrote about the Bauhaus in June 1931, after the trio’s visit to Dessau. He was also instrumental in bringing Walter Gropius to Britain, first for an exhibition of his work at the Royal Institute of British Architects in May 1934 and, a few months later, to seek refuge from Nazi persecution. Morton Shand’s role in the story is a key one, as a translator of Gropius’s work and an early champion of plywood furniture.

Inspired by what they had seen in Germany, in autumn 1931 Jack Pritchard and Wells Coates set up Isokon, a company whose aim was to create mass-produced unit housing and furniture. Following discussions with Jack’s wife Rosemary ‘Molly’ Pritchard, a Cambridge graduate and trainee psychiatrist, they abandoned their earlier plans to build a pair of houses in Hampstead. Instead, Molly drew up a new brief for Coates to build an apartment block of ‘minimal’ flats, aimed at young, middle-class professionals with an annual income of around £500 per year. Considering both domestic and spatial reform, she asked: ‘How do we want to live? What sort of framework must we build around ourselves to make that living as pleasant as possible?’.12

Their conclusion was a community of small, serviced apartments with built-in furniture, into which tenants could move, bringing just ‘a rug, a vase and a favourite painting’. 13 Completed in summer 1934, Wells Coates’s Lawn Road Flats, or Isokon Building (as it later came to be known), is believed to be Britain’s first reinforced-concrete apartment building and a Modernist manifesto in both a material and philosophical sense. Hampstead was the perfect locus for this experiment in social living, being home to key figures in the English avant-garde and a focal point for cultural refugees from Nazi Europe.

In a fitting coda to that snowy day in Dessau in March 1931, Pritchard went on to offer accommodation in the flats to three giants of the Modern movement, the Bauhaus professors Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy and Marcel Breuer, who fled Germany as its political climate worsened. Pritchard employed them in his fledgling Isokon Furniture Company, to which they brought their considerable experience of industrial design. During their short stay in Britain between 1934 and 1937, they also worked on a wide range of other architectural and design projects, leaving their mark on British housing, education, retail, furniture, interior design and art. However, frustrated by the lack of opportunities in pre-war England they left London for the USA, where their work and teachings influenced a new generation of American architects and artists. After their departure, another Bauhäusler, the former metalwork professor Naum Slutzky, moved into the Lawn Road Flats and spent the rest of his life and career in Britain. Through his teaching work he championed the Bauhaus philosophy of marrying art with industry at the Royal College of Art and Birmingham College of Arts and Crafts.

The US work of Gropius, Breuer and Moholy-Nagy has been extensively documented, but the detailed story of the Bauhaus artists and their time in Britain has never been fully told. Similarly, although the Lawn Road Flats are frequently cited in histories of 20th-century British architecture, no comprehensive account of the Isokon Furniture Company has been published, other than Alastair Grieve’s short 2004 account, an expanded essay originally written to accompany the 1974 exhibition ‘Hampstead in the Thirties. A Committed Decade’ at Camden Arts Centre.14 David Burke’s 2014 The Lawn Road Flats: Spies, Writers and Artists looks more specifically at the Flats’ inhabitants, but with a strong emphasis on espionage.15.

This book attempts to tackle both stories, by providing a more in-depth examination of the Isokon flats – in their role as a crucible of Modernist ideas, and Jack and Molly Pritchard’s relationship over many decades with the Bauhaus artists, both personally and in the context of the Isokon Furniture Company.

Jack Pritchard’s greatest skill was as a catalyst. Between the 1930s and 1960s, he brought together some remarkably influential artists and thinkers of the time. The Flats and its social club, the Isobar, functioned rather like an old-fashioned telephone exchange, connecting era-defining people, conversations and ideas.

From the start, the Lawn Road Flats attracted a stellar cast of residents, who included artists, writers, scientists, architects, designers and, later, a network of notorious Soviet spies. The Bauhäuslers, Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand, Alvar Aalto, Bertrand Russell, Maxwell Fry, F.R.S. Yorke, Philip Morton Shand, Nikolaus Pevsner, Naum Gabo, Henry Moore, Edith Tudor-Hart, Frank Pick, Julian Huxley, Gerald Summers, Gordon Russell, Herbert Read, Agatha Christie, the Cambridge Five, even the first celebrity chef Philip Harben, all play key roles in the Isokon story. But it all begins with Jack and Molly Pritchard.

CHAPTER 1

JACK & MOLLY

IN THE SUMMER OF 1920, DURING HIS FIRST WEEK AT CAMBRIDGE, Jack Craven Pritchard met his future wife. Joining a lively party of undergraduates punting on the River Cam, he was introduced to Rosemary ‘Molly’ Cooke and their mutual attraction was instantaneous: ‘She and I seemed to know our feelings for each other from the start and, although there would be peccadilloes on the way, it was inevitable that Molly and I would ultimately come together.’1

On one level, their relationship was a classic case of opposites attracting. Pritchard was an extrovert and provocateur – his mantra was ‘Live dangerously! Don’t be comfortable. Take chances!’ – while Molly was cool, reserved and highly intellectual. What they shared, however, was a need to challenge the status quo and a desire to order their world using scientific, rational facts.

They were both the children of successful London lawyers. Pritchard, born in 1899, was the son of barrister, Clive Fleetwood Pritchard, who from 1902–3 was the second Mayor of Hampstead. He and his wife Lilian were a cosmopolitan couple who travelled widely throughout Europe, including visiting Paris for the 1900 exhibition.2 Jack and his three siblings were raised in a substantial red-brick villa in Hampstead’s leafy Maresfield Gardens, which was, he remembered, a fine house for parties. Pritchard senior took a keen interest in interior design and was an indulgent father. His four children were given freedom to run a model train between their rooms on the upper floor of the house. It should have been an idyllic childhood, but dyslexia blighted Jack’s early school days. He was unable to read until the age of 11 and felt his parents favoured his elder, more academic brother, Fleetwood, who was five years his senior. At 13, he followed Fleetwood to Oundle public school, and finally began to flourish under headmaster F.W. Sanderson (the first scientist to lead a public school), who encouraged Jack to question facts and think analytically. When it appeared Pritchard was not cut out for an academic career, he was channelled into the ‘Army class’, which prepared boys for practical careers in the services.

In 1914, Pritchard’s father died and during the First World War his mother let out their Hampstead home to Belgian refugees. This gave the boy his first insight into the plight of those fleeing oppression and perhaps paved the way for his own generosity to political exiles some 20 years later. In 1917, he successfully applied for a place as a naval cadet at Keyham Naval College at Devonport. The closest Pritchard came to enemy action during his two years in the Navy, was when his ship, HMS Lion escorted German cruisers for internment in Scapa Flow. He disliked the snobbery of the services and the rote learning required to pass the exams. His brother, meanwhile, served in Italy and was awarded the Military Cross.

Rosemary ‘Molly’ Cooke, c.1920.

Jack Pritchard as a teenager.

The Pritchard family outside Buckingham Palace c.1919. Mrs Lilian Pritchard, Lieutenant Fleetwood Pritchard and his wife Miriam, and Jack. In the background: Jack’s twin sisters Nancy and May.

Bright Young Things: Molly Cooke and friend, sunbathing on the River Cam, c.1920.

A photograph of the Pritchard family outside Buckingham Palace on the day of Fleetwood’s investiture, hints at the rivalry already apparent between the brothers.

On leaving the Navy, Jack enrolled at the London Polytechnic in Regent Street and, proving that he was merely a later developer, won a place at Pembroke College, Cambridge to read Engineering and Economics.

Before going up to Cambridge, Pritchard went to the Pelman Laboratory of Applied Psychology in Bloomsbury Street, London to sit a detailed psychological aptitude test, a new development in career guidance. It showed that he was ‘practical with facts, had strong visual and imaginative skills’ and was ‘original’.3

The Cambridge years were formative intellectually and politically for Pritchard and the alliances he and Molly forged during this period were to shape their lives and the entire Isokon project. He recalled: ‘I could now do, think, reason why, and say what I liked and work out my own discipline. I worked hard, went to many lectures, some outside my subject and also had a good time. It was like bright sunlight and an ever-expanding view.’4

Rosemary ‘Molly’ Cooke was the precociously bright child of solicitor Henry Cooke and his wife Rose, who, prior to her marriage, had worked in an infant-welfare clinic in Marylebone. The middle child of three, Molly spent her early years in Streatham, before the family moved to Argyll Road in Kensington. Although well-to-do, the Cooke parents instilled in their children a contempt for wasting money. Molly and her siblings did not spend their weekly allowance on sweets ‘like other children’, but would save up for something ‘really good’ – a box of tin soldiers or a bow and arrow.5

Molly was a physical child, who enjoyed activities in which she could pit herself against nature – climbing trees, ice skating and above all horse riding. The Cooke household was an artistic and musical one, but Molly described herself as the ‘black sheep’, and a ‘naughty and disagreeable child’. She claimed her mother sent her away to boarding school at the age of 9, for being ‘too upsetting an influence on the family’. At Lingholt prep school in Surrey, she felt the first stirrings of a vocation:

My favourite teacher of all was Miss Fuller, the science teacher… most of all I remember her placing a prism on a ray of sunlight and showing us how the rainbow colours appeared on a sheet of white paper. After that day I was going to be a scientist; and to my mind, then, the peak of science was medicine.6

Winning a scholarship to Cambridge from Godolphin and Latymer girl’s school in 1920, Molly was one of a mere handful of women reading medicine. She attended lectures in chemistry, anatomy and physiology, in addition to long sessions in the lab. However, there was more to Molly than blue-stockinged medic. She and Jack were part of the hedonistic generation of Bright Young Things. Molly and her peers were discarding their corsets, smoking and driving cars. She revelled in the social side of Cambridge life, particularly the boat races and May Balls.7 A photograph from her undergraduate days shows her with a friend, both sporting fashionable short bobs, sunbathing nude by the River Cam.

Pritchard’s young American economics professor, Philip Sargant Florence, was to play an important role in Jack and Molly’s life. In 1914, he travelled to Germany, visiting the Deutsche Werkbund exhibition in Cologne, and was one of the few in Britain to have seen the work of Walter Gropius. He and his wife Lella, a writer and feminist, held strong left-wing views and also introduced the Pritchards to the prominent Marxist historian Maurice Dobb, a central figure in the burgeoning Communist scene at Cambridge.

Through Florence, Jack and Molly also met the charismatic Henry Morris, Chief Education Officer for Cambridgeshire, whom Pritchard credited with ‘changing his life’.8 He became a frequent, rather shy visitor to Morris’s elegant rooms in Trinity Street in Cambridge and joined a small group for long walks on Sundays, listening to his flamboyant friend declaim on mediocrity, insincerity in design and the narrowness of the education system.9 Morris, who coined the phrase ‘education from cradle to grave’, would later commission Gropius to design the influential Impington Village College, near Cambridge.

Jack and Molly Pritchard, 1924, Aldeburgh Beach, Suffolk.

The Pritchards’ at home card, 1924.

Jack with cine camera, Cornwall, late 1920s.

One Easter vacation, possibly inspired by Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, Pritchard and three friends travelled to London and back by canoe. Their round-trip, from the River Granta to Cadogan Pier in Chelsea, took nine days and was followed by the national press. On the day of his final university exam, Pritchard faced a dilemma. He had been invited to the wedding of a naval friend, which was taking place at 2.30pm in Surrey. His exam paper was due to finish at midday. How could he possibly attend? Revealing the entrepreneurial skills that would later stand him in good stead, he hired a three-passenger aeroplane and sold seats to his brother, two friends and his mother, who obligingly booked return tickets, and made it to the wedding. Fittingly, his paper was on the economics of transport. Despite his many extensive extra-curricular activities, Pritchard left Cambridge with a first in Economics and a second in Engineering. Molly was awarded a first in Natural Sciences and completed her medical training at London’s Charing Cross Hospital between 1921 and 1924.

The couple married at Kensington Registry Office in August 1924 and spent their honeymoon in Leven in Yorkshire, where Molly carried out a fortnight’s locum. Returning to London, they set up home in Devonshire Terrace in Paddington. After the wedding, Molly continued postgraduate work in bacteriology and pathology at Charing Cross, reaching the post of assistant pathologist. She then moved to the drug manufacturer Glaxo to work on the newly discovered health benefits of cod-liver oil. Alfred Bacharach, a director of Glaxo, introduced Molly to the left-wing 1917 Club in Gerrard Street, Soho, where she began to lunch each day. Before long the Pritchards were socializing in the Bloomsbury Group circle.

In 1926 they moved to 79 Platt’s Lane, a four-storey Edwardian house in Hampstead. Their first son Jonathan was born later that year, followed in 1928 by Jeremy. Influenced by the teachings of Dr Eric Pritchard, who had run Molly’s mother’s infant clinic in Marylebone, Molly and Jack followed a strict childcare regime with their boys, feeding them by the clock and rarely picking them up. Keen to test conventional wisdom on child development, Jack devised and patented a frame on wheels to assist his infant sons to walk from an early age.10 Unusually for a woman of her class, Molly continued to study full-time after they were born, taking courses in psychopathology and psychology at University College London. Her interest in psychotherapy, that most ‘modern’ branch of medicine, was influenced by two Cambridge friends, Portia Holman and Doris Howard, who had already entered the profession. It was through Holman that Molly met Beatrix Tudor-Hart.

The daughter of Canadian artist Percyval Tudor-Hart, Beatrix spent her early childhood in Paris, spoke six languages and, defying her father, gained a scholarship to read Classics at Newnham College, Cambridge. She studied child psychology in Vienna and taught for a year at Beacon Hill, the progressive school in Sussex established by philosopher Bertrand Russell and his wife Dorothy. She also caught Jack’s eye. ‘She was a fine, tall girl, handsome and intelligent and was passionately concerned with education. She desperately wanted a child of her own. I was much impressed with her,’ Jack recalled.11 Beatrix and Jack embarked on an affair. While Molly was pregnant with her first child, Tudor-Hart invited the couple to stay at her father’s villa in France. It was here that Jennifer, Beatrix’s daughter with Jack, was conceived.12 The Pritchards, in keeping with their progressive political and social views, adopted a relaxed attitude to marital fidelity and Molly, who went on to enjoy her own affair with architect Wells Coates, took a philosophical approach to the matter. However, according to family legend, Molly’s mother was appalled that Beatrix was seen pushing a pram around Hampstead with Jack Pritchard’s baby in it.13

In 1928, Beatrix and Molly set up The Children’s Group, a nursery school on the top floor of the Pritchards’ home, in Platt’s Lane which their children attended. Molly’s growing understanding of child psychology had caused her to regret the experimental, hands-off manner in which she and Jack had raised their infant sons. Influenced by Bertrand Russell’s treatise On Education (and, no doubt, Beatrix Tudor-Hart) they sent Jonathan and Jeremy to Beacon Hill, where pupils were allowed to set their own boundaries. The Pritchards’ interest in education was to last a lifetime.

Jack’s first position on leaving Cambridge was as a graduate trainee with the Michelin Tyre Company. A stint followed selling advertising space for The Field and World Today magazines. His brother, Fleetwood, had established an influential advertising and public relations agency, Wood, Pritchard and Partners, with architectural historian and critic, John Gloag, who became a great friend and mentor to Jack. Gloag introduced him to the Design and Industries Association (DIA), an organization that aimed to forge ties between British manufacturers and designers. Its mantra was ‘fitness for purpose’ and between 1927 and 1932 the DIA published a series of important quarterly journals covering the latest developments in European architecture. Pritchard joined the editorial board of the DIA publication, Design in Industry, which enabled him: ‘to meet a variety of people with somewhat similar interests and [it] provided confidence to experiment with new ideas.’

It was during these years that the Pritchard brothers began producing their own short films. They made several amusing Chaplin-esque shorts starring friends and family. They also recorded idyllic holidays at Craven Cottage, the family’s seaside home at Southwold in Suffolk, where they sailed and built railway tracks in the garden. A prophetic time-lapse sequence shows the adults building ‘The Little White House’, a self-assembly, one-roomed garden house for the young Pritchard cousins. It was minimal living in its simplest form. Jack and Fleetwood also recorded their extensive foreign travels, including a visit to Morocco, where the white, flat-roofed, geometric architecture is strikingly similar to what was then being created by the European Modernists. Nude swimming, skiing, sailing – the world captured on the Pritchards’ cine reels shows a privileged and cosmopolitan family, who played as hard as they worked. In 1927, the brothers established The Projectors’ Club, which screened commercial movies, documentaries and members’ productions.14 It is entirely possible that Jack Pritchard showed the footage of his 1931 architectural travels in Germany to members of the club.

Jack and Jeremy Pritchard, 1930.

Molly’s friend and business partner, the brilliant Beatrix Tudor-Hart. She was also Jack’s lover, and together they had a daughter, Jennifer.

Nude sunbathing, as part of the Modernists’ break with Victorian moral values: Jack, Molly and two friends.

In September 1925 Jack joined Venesta, a British company formed in 1897 to import plywood from the Estonian manufacturer A.M. Luther. The firm initially produced tea chests for the Indian and Ceylon tea trade and later diversified into hatboxes and suitcases. By the 1920s, plywood was being adopted by the furniture industry and by architects for interior construction. Pritchard could see the enormous potential of the material, but it had something of an image problem, which he was determined to tackle.

Plywood was then regarded as a cheap substitute for solid wood, even by some of those in the firm, and while I was principally employed to advertise and promote existing Venesta products, I believed it was important to find uses where its intrinsic qualities could be used.15

He was tasked with finding a market for Plymax, a new Venesta product in which thin metal sheets, such as copper and steel, were bonded to plywood, creating a material of great strength. At John Gloag’s suggestion, Jack placed an advertisement in The Times describing the qualities of Plymax and asking for suggestions for its use. Deciding to experiment himself, Pritchard designed a small sideboard, with a Monel metal Plymax top and copper Plymax sides and doors, which was manufactured by Crossley and Brown. The result – strictly geometric, with exposed hinges and raised on cylindrical legs – which he nicknamed ‘The Oven’ for its industrial appearance, is now in the collection of the Victoria and Albert museum.

EARLY ENCOUNTERS WITH MODERNISM

Modernism in 1920s England was still very much in its infancy, but those seeking a visual language that broke with the past began to meet at Finella, the Cambridge home of the influential English don Mansfield Forbes. In 1927 Forbes commissioned the young Australian architect Raymond McGrath to transform the interiors of his Italianate Victorian villa. He believed ‘that the furniture, buildings, habits and opinions of a past century [were] not suitable for modern people’ and decreed that McGrath should employ only the very latest materials for the project.16 McGrath chose Venesta Plymax for one of Finella’s most outstanding features, a dramatic pair of pinky, copper-faced folding doors, which divided Forbes’s drawing rooms. It was here, in the salons known as ‘The Pinks’, enjoying Forbes’s legendary hospitality, that a small group of proto-Modernists met to hammer out the manifesto for MARS, the Modern Architectural Research Group, outlined further in the next chapter.

Pritchard’s first encounter with a Modern interior had taken place in 1925, when he had visited the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris and seen Le Corbusier’s Pavillon de l’Espirit Nouveau. Tucked away amidst the Art Deco excess, this concrete, steel and glass ‘minimum dwelling’ was an essay in standardization and mass production. At the end of 1929, Pritchard returned to Paris. He visited the Salon d’Automne and was struck by Corbusier, Jeanneret and Perriand’s one-roomed ‘apartment for two’ in which every item of furniture was multifunctional and ingeniously movable. Encouraged by John Gloag, he took the audacious step of asking Corbusier’s architectural practice if it would design an exhibition stand for Venesta for the 1930 Building Trades Exhibition in London.

The brief was handed to Charlotte Perriand, with whom Jack struck up a lively friendship. He recalled she was:

A strikingly handsome girl, hair cropped and round her neck a string of white beads almost an inch in diameter… She showed me her flat, highly efficient and a sliding table that seemed to vanish into nowhere.17

Le Corbusier’s 1925 Pavillon had been built around a living tree and Perriand borrowed a similar motif for the Venesta stand, incorporating a whole birch tree (which had to be specially imported) as a witty reference to the origins of plywood.18 The stand, which consisted of a Plymax ceiling and pillar, showcased different grades and finishes of Venesta plywood (a sales approach Jack had pioneered), and demonstrated the various uses to which they might be put. Perriand travelled to London to supervise the installation and Jack made every effort to introduce the brilliant and beautiful young designer to his wide circle of architectural friends. He took a box at the Cambridge Theatre, where Serge Chermayeff had recently designed the interiors, and they had supper at the architect’s home. He brought Perriand to Finella to meet Mansfield Forbes and Raymond McGrath, and he and Molly took her sailing on the River Blyth in Suffolk.19 The Architectural Association (AA) held a dinner in her honour and Venesta’s stand was favourably received in the September issues of The Builder and The Architects’ Journal.

Charlotte Perriand’s Venesta stand, 1930 Building Trades Exhibition, Olympia, London.

‘The Oven’, Jack Pritchard’s Plymax sideboard, 1929, now in the collection of the V&A.

Designer Charlotte Perriand, who won many admirers on her visit to London in 1930.

PRITCHARD POLITICS

Jack and Molly’s commitment to Socialism had crystallized at Cambridge and they were now part of a firmly left-wing intellectual and social set, which believed the nation was losing its way after the Great War. The General Strike of 1926, which their Marxist friend Maurice Dobbs predicted would herald ‘the great revolution’, was a seminal moment for the couple. As the government imposed reduced wages and longer hours on the nation’s miners, 1.7 million workers, including staff at Venesta’s warehouse in Millwall and factory in Silvertown, downed tools in solidarity. Amidst a crackdown on the media, Jack and Molly volunteered to help the TUC distribute The British Worker newspaper. They borrowed a van and delivered the paper around London and as far afield as Leicester.

Pritchard increasingly believed that social and economic problems could be improved by better planning of available resources. It was a view shared by Gerald Barry, editor of The Weekly Review (later part of the New Statesman). Barry commissioned a young journalist, Max Nicholson, to draw up a Soviet-style National Plan, calling on a high-powered group of advisers from industry, commerce and the Bank of England to contribute ideas. Nicholson’s influential article led to the creation of the think tank, ‘Political and Economic Planning’, of which Pritchard became a founding member (he claimed credit for inventing its acronym, ‘PEP’). Other founding members, some of whom would resurface at the Lawn Road Flats and its club, the Isobar, included the founder of Dartington Hall school Leonard Elmhirst; zoologist Julian Huxley; research chemist Sir Henry Bunbury; journalist John Pinder; and industrialists Josiah Stamp and Israel Sieff. Over the course of three years, PEP produced a host of far-sighted policy studies on subjects including provision of a state health service, the education system, and, as war approached, air-raid precautions.

A VERY HAMPSTEAD COUPLE

In 1929, Molly and Jack bought a plot of land for £1,500 in Lawn Road, south-east Hampstead. The sloping plot faced a row of Edwardian houses and backed onto a wooded hillside with tennis courts beyond. It was conveniently located just a short walk from Belsize Park Underground in one direction and Hampstead Heath Overground in the other. In 1930, they asked Molly’s sister Jill and her husband Harry Harrison, both AA-trained architects to design two houses for the site – one for themselves, and the other for Beatrix Tudor-Hart.20

We had not yet learnt the importance of the ‘brief’. Harry made a first sketch. It was of a charming little neo-Georgian house that gave a nod to the modern. It was white amongst the trees, with corner windows. The drawing was shown at the Royal Academy.21

Precisely when Jack and Molly rejected Cooke and Harrison’s plan is not on record, nor is whether it caused a family rift, but the couple’s interest in Modernism and their understanding of its capacity to effect positive social change were developing rapidly. Hampstead in the 1930s had a unique cultural and political micro-climate which made it the perfect birthplace for the Pritchards’ forthcoming architectural experiment. Perched high above London, its hilly streets were a mixture of grand Victorian mansions, aspirational Edwardian terraces, seedy cobbled lanes and rundown mews. Between the wars, its open spaces and cheap studio space meant the village and area surrounding Lawn Road were home to a large number of British painters and sculptors. In the late 1920s, Tasker Road became the centre for a group of key figures in the English avant-garde. Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore and Ben Nicholson lived and worked in the purpose-built Mall Studios. In 1932, they formed Unit One – a collective of 11 artists and architects to formally establish a Modern style in England. It was the first attempt to unite the aims of architecture and art, and its members included Nash, Nicholson, Hepworth, Moore and Wells Coates who were all united in their commitment to express ‘a strictly contemporary spirit’. Their neighbour, the art historian Herbert Read, was instrumental in championing their work and he edited the manifesto which accompanied their group exhibition at the Mayor Gallery in Cork Street.22 As the 1930s progressed and the political landscape darkened, a wave of important émigré artists and thinkers from Europe converged on this corner of North London. The streets of NW3 contained a truly remarkable concentration of intellectual talent. Most, along with Jack and Molly Pritchard, shared a belief that Socialism would deliver a better future.

Jack and Molly Pritchard, 1928, Aldeburgh, Suffolk.

CHAPTER 2

WELLS COATES

A compactly built man with a Ronald Colman moustache and crisply waving hair, well-dressed for all occasions with a way of switching on social charm as though it was a beam from an electric torch; a voluble conversationalist whose talk was spiced with Services terminology and avante-garde jargon; ingratiatingly attentive to women, with a line of talk about places he had been to like Japan, which other people hadn’t. Such was the picture too many people got of Wells Coates, from which they may have drawn the conclusions that he was vain, a playboy and a fashion-monger… he was none of these things… underneath his elaborately social manner and his line of talk lay an intensely serious personality, with unswerving integrity about the things he regarded as important…1

WELLS WINTEMUTE COATES’S UNORTHODOX education goes some way to explaining the singular and somewhat compartmentalized personality, described in his 1958 obituary by J.M. Richards, editor of Architectural Review. Wells was born in Japan in 1895, the eldest of six children to parents who were Canadian Methodist missionaries. Reverend Harper Havelock Coates was Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Aoyama theological college in Tokyo and prior to her marriage his formidable mother, Agnes Wintemute, had studied architecture under father of American Modern architecture Louis Sullivan in Chicago. The couple had arrived in Japan at the tail end of the Meiji era, a time of intense modernization, during which the country underwent far-reaching transformations. While the Japanese were reinventing themselves in a Western manner, Coates’s parents made a concerted effort to incorporate many elements of traditional Japanese culture into their son’s education. They employed an English tutor, George Edward Luckman Gauntlett, who, in addition to teaching Coates the usual Western academic curriculum, devised an unconventional and highly practical programme for their son. It included paper making and printing; silkworm-rearing, spinning and weaving; boat building; cooking and the traditional Japanese rituals of serving food. Coates also studied shorthand and typing and how to manage his finances, budgeting with the pocket money he was made to earn from his parents.2 Coates was a driven and competitive child, highly attuned to the beauty of his surroundings and, from an early age, he was intrigued to discover the way in which things worked. In a diary entry from 1909, he described a family outing to the grand Mitsukoshi department store in Tokyo:

It was such a large store that when anyone bought anything, and wanted change, they put the money into small cans, which slid along wires… The toys I liked best were a small dynamo about four inches in diameter which cost 25 yen, a small boiler with a smoke-stack and flywheel and everything exactly like a real engine which cost the same, a small moving picture magic lantern which cost 14 yen and 3 yen air rifles.3