Paedagogica Historica. International Journal of the History of Education

Vol. 41, No. 4/5

The Influence of School Architecture and Design on the Outdoor Play Experience within the Primary School

Marc Armitage

Since the very earliest times, schools have provided a place (the playground) and a

time (playtimes) in which children can have time away from the direct involvement of

adults and formal learning. Although the basic design of school grounds has

changed in a number of ways over the years – from the subtle to the more direct –

what effect these changes have had on the overall education of the child is less

clear. Research has identified a number of positive effects on leaning that playtimes

and the informal use of school grounds provides, yet it is also clear that schools

themselves often greatly under-use this potential, or even actively restrict access to

it, as a counter to what is often seen the ‘problem’ playtime. This paper will draw

upon recent research into ‘what’ happens on school playgrounds and ‘where’ it

happens using visual examples from the UK The findings from this research will

explores the direct links that have been found between school building design and

children’s use of the outdoor environment for play.

Into the archive

A manila folder, about an inch thick, one among many folders of uncatalogued

educational records dating from the 1920s to the 1970s in Birmingham City Archives.

Folders consciously selected for preservation, but without an explanation as to why,

unopened for many years, and waiting to be read and turned into a narrative of the

past. The file, entitled Exhibition of Materials for Use in Elementary Schools, consists

of correspondence, minutes, circulars, notes and a single photograph. It is the

photograph which first attracts attention - a carefully organised display of educational

objects for young children. Attached to the photograph are several letters, two from

1936 and three from 1941. The first is from Miss Loveday to R. E. Cousens, an

Assistant Education Officer in Birmingham:

It is, I think, unfortunate that the arrangement has been altered since I last

saw it. I had struggled to suggest the presence of an occupant; with the

removal of the round table to the centre of the stage and the trains to the

forefront, the show has become merely a jumble of apparatus. Mr Collins

tells me that, with the exception of the water tray in place of the table, you

purpose to set up the bay exactly as in the photograph. Well I think it is a

pity. The focal point of interest has been destroyed.1

Cousens replied that he was sorry to have caused any disappointment and thought

the photograph was what “you and Dr Macgregor had determined … with Mr Pick.” 2

Loveday’s comment about a suggested ‘presence’ in the photograph is indicative of

a contemporary understanding of the interrelationship between objects, space and

pedagogy. It also prompted this viewer to look at the photograph again, to observe

1E. Loveday to R. E. Cousens, 29.12.1936, Birmingham City Archives (BCA).

2R. E. Cousens to E. Loveday 31.12.1936, Exhibition of Materials for Use in

Elementary Schools, BCA.

2

the objects and their spatial relations, and then to imagine that presence. The letters

from 1941 are about the availability of the photographic negative relating to the

“Birmingham exhibit.”3

Other documents in the folder reveal that the “exhibit” was “the nursery” and

had been produced by Birmingham LEA with the help of local Inspectors - Miss

Loveday and Dr Macgregor- attached to the Board of Education, that the project had

received full support from Birmingham Elementary Education Sub-Committee and

fulsome encouragement from the Board of Education: “[Birmingham] could put up a

show … as good as can be desired.”4 There is also in the file an inventory of the

objects for the exhibit and their cost. This was compiled by Macgregor and was used

to gain a grant of £25 from the city. The costing had been calculated from prices “ in

3P. Innes to Lewis and Randall, Architectural and Technical Photographers,

19.11.1941; Cousens to Loveday, 10.12.1941; Loveday to Cousens 13.12.1941, Exhibition

of Materials for Use in Elementary Schools, BCA.

4F. Pick to Innes, 14.5.1936; Savage to Innes 18.5.1936; Innes to Pick, 23.5.1936,

Exhibition of Materials for Use in Elementary Schools, BCA.

3

toy shops in Birmingham, from the Dryad firm, from the Abbatt firm, from Philip &

Tacey, from the Chad Valley Toy works and elsewhere.”5

But what was this “show”?

The narrative constructed from this folder soon carried the reader far beyond

its Birmingham home and connected with London and Europe. What started as an

investigation into the material culture of schooling in an urban environment and an

apparent local disagreement over pedagogy developed into an exploration of ideas

circulating in the 1930s about design, the teaching of art, about children as both

producers and consumers and of the interactions between progressive educators

and artists committed to the Modernist project.

“All the paraphernalia of teaching:” Reconstructing an Exhibition

A circular was distributed to all Chief Education Officers in England and Wales

in late 1936 publicising an exhibition: “Design in Education, County Hall, 5-16

January 1937.” The circular locates the Birmingham exhibit in a broader context:

It will be recalled that one of the recommendations of the Council for Art and

Industry in their report on ‘Education for the consumer’ (HMSO 1935) was

that Local Education Authorities should regard it as a matter of urgency to

provide elementary schools with collections of well-designed common objects

for the lessons and that suitable facilities should be available for the display

of such objects and of pictures.

An exhibition, it continued, had been assembled in London by the Council for Art and

Industry [CAI], London County Council [LCC] with the assistance of Birmingham,

5 Memorandum J. MacGregor to R. E. Cousens, 18.6.1936, Exhibition of Materials for

Use in Elementary Schools, BCA.

4

Kent and Middlesex LEAs and University College, Leicester in order to show “the

great wealth of material available …and that all material may have an aesthetic

significance.”6 Enclosed with the circular was a short guide to “enable those visiting

the Exhibition to grasp the meaning of the exhibits.”7

The foreword to the exhibition guide was written by Frank Pick, Chair of the

CAI and expanded on the ideas expressed in the publicity to LEAs. The exhibition

was,

an attempt to show how, by a right choice, the materials used for teaching

in elementary schools might have a beauty and a quality which are the first

understanding of design. The craftsman [sic] asserts that there is a stimulus

in the material he handles; its properties inspire him to right treatment; its

colours persuade him to right blending; its texture or surface leads him to

right finish. The child in the school is capable, in his or her degree, of

responding to this stimulus; so it is important that the pens, the paper, the

books, all the paraphernalia of teaching should be chosen with an eye and

a touch for that which is stimulating.

Pick acknowledged the earlier CAI report and stated, that once work started on the

exhibition “it seemed to escape beyond its original limits … the material grew wider

and wider in range. Almost everything was seen to have its educational significance”

and it “became a problem to define the exhibition.” As a consequence the opening

6London County Council Circular, Exhibition of Materials for Use in Elementary

Schools; Birmingham Institute for Art and Design (BIAD) Marion Richardson Archive, Ms

1115. Draft letter from Baldwin, Secretary of the Council for Art and Industry, BCA.

7CAI Committee for the London County Council Exhibition, Minutes of Fourth

Meeting, 30.6.1936, Exhibition of Materials for Use in Elementary Schools. The exhibition

was also publicised through a poster produced by the London Passenger Transport Board,

BCA.

5

date for the exhibition was moved from the summer of 1936 to the beginning of

1937. The final exhibition was deemed by Pick to show that

what is used in the elementary school may have quality of material,

soundness of construction, fairness of colour and appropriateness of

design, in sum beauty.

He also hoped that educational authorities would

widen the collection of material which they supply for use in schools and will

buy with an appreciation of design and character even when it conflicts with

a strict economy; that they will remember that they are educating the future

consumer, and maybe setting a standard for industry in the next

generation.8

“Design in Education” was held in the Conference Hall at London County Hall

and was opened by Pick and Mrs E. M. Lowe, the Chair of the LCC Education

Committee, who stated:

For quite long enough we have put too much stress in education on

learning from books and books alone. Something much more is needed if a

child is to have a chance of all-round development.

Admission to the exhibition was free, and it was open daily between 11 and 8 and of

the 11,000 people concerned with education who attended the exhibition, a high

proportion were elementary school teachers; others included officials from the Board

of Education who later suggested that similar exhibitions should be sponsored

around the country.9 What did these 11,000 people encounter at County Hall?

8Design in Education. Being an Exhibition of Material for use in Elementary Schools,

January 1937. London, 1937, 1-2, BCA.

9Barman, Christian. The Man Who Built London Transport. Newton: Abbott, 1979,

172. This was a view shared by Pick who wrote Innes after the exhibition opened: “I hope

you will be encouraged by our exhibition in London to carry out further experiments of the

6

The exhibition was organised into fourteen sections: Writing as a Form of Art,

Literature, Mathematics, Natural Science, Physical and Mechanical Sciences,

Geography, History, Weaving and Needlecraft, The Crafts: Bookbinding, Metalwork,

Woodwork and Plastics, Domestic Crafts, Music, Dancing and Drama, Nursery

School, Social History: The Story of London Transport told by Pictures and Models,

and Pictures in the School.10 Objects on display included different pens, brushes and

crayons; printed books, book illustrations; cubes, globes, cylinders, cones, paper

models, rulers, scissors, setsquares, counting apparatus, bricks; form in nature -

leaves, shells, honeycomb, stones, crystals, fossils; toys with a scientific basis - top,

kaleidoscope, crane, windmill, cart, simple steam engine, tuning fork, kites, prism,

zoetrope, magnet, megaphone, compass, pinhole camera; maps, plasticine maps in

relief, wall maps; historical objects, photographs; chalks, pencils, papers, paints,

basketwork, simple looms, clay, moulding tools, needlework, paper and sheet metal

work; common objects - labels, containers, pots, pans, wooden tools, knives, boxes;

wind and stringed instruments, puppets, model stage; and nursery toys. In all

sort in conjunction with your Birmingham schools for I am only too conscious of the fact that

what we have done in London is merely a start towards the improvement of the equipment

and material to be used in elementary schools throughout the country, and that further

experiments are to be desired before even a reasonable standard with regard to such

material and equipment can be reached in all directions,” Pick to Innes, 7.1.1937, Exhibition

of Materials for Use in Elementary Schools, BCA.

10The Committee were originally presented by Pick with a slightly different list of

organising themes: Writing, Literature, Mathematics, Science (nature), Science (Physical or

Exact Sciences), Geography, History, Arts and Crafts, Domestic Science, Music, the

Nursery School and History (Social). “Suggestions Towards a Scheme for an Exhibition of

Materials for Use in Elementary Schools,” 24 March 1936, Exhibition of Materials for Use in

Elementary Schools, BCA.

7

selections “a definite eye for colour” was “employed so that this eye is, as it were,

trained continuously.”11 Displayed alongside these objects and materials were

examples of children’s work in school “evoked by their understanding of material and

processes” and including drawings, models, figures etc made by children “for self-

realization of history.”12 A mathematical film made by Dr Walter Gropius was shown

as well as films prepared by the Post Office.13

Various organisations and individuals offered support and lent objects,

including the Design and Industries Association, the Central School of Arts and

Crafts, department of Overseas Trade, London School of Printing, Victoria and Albert

Museum, Bromley School of Art, Bromley School of Craft and Industrial Design,

Battersea School, Leicester College of Art, and Leicester City Museum. The London

Passenger Transport Board produced models and pictures, The Times newspaper

lent photographs, and the Punch illustrator, E. H. Shepard, lent original drawings.14

11Design in Education, passim; “Suggestions Towards a Scheme for an Exhibition of

Materials for Use in Elementary Schools,” 24.3.1936, Exhibition of Materials for Use in

Elementary Schools, BCA.

12“Suggestions Towards a Scheme for an Exhibition of Materials for Use in

Elementary Schools,” 24.3.1936, BCA.; Council for Art and Industry Committee for the

London County Council Exhibition. Minutes of Third Meeting, 27.5.1936, Exhibition of

Materials for Use in Elementary Schools, BCA.

13Council for Art and Industry Committee for the London County Council Exhibition,

Minutes of the Sixth Meeting, 30.11.1936, Exhibition of Materials for Use in Elementary

Schools, BCA.

14The original drawings included those for Wind in the Willows. Shepard worked for

the magazine Punch.

8

References to the enrichment of the curriculum, to colour and beauty, to

function and form, to fitness for purpose, abound in the exhibition guide written by

the different organisers and in the presentation of their ideas at planning meetings:

It will not be forgotten that first impressions are ineradicable, and that in

introducing the child to things and the representation of things, beauty is

most important, quite as important as goodness in relation to conduct and

character, or truth in relation to word and deed (Frank Pick);

… letters, printed or written are designed. They have a correct form which

is capable of a variety of treatment, but which must always be respected …

Writing is the basis of much of the work of the school whether cursive or

printed and throughout the school wherever it is used it should have the

same care and finish, the same regard for its fitness for the use to which it

is put, the same regard for its value as a means to tidiness, clearness,

balance or harmony - in a word beauty (Marion Richardson);

The study of nature based on seasonal change cannot but lead to an

appreciation of beauty of form and of colour, and what is perhaps most

important of all, the beauty of adaption of structure to function (H. M.

Walton);

and

Fitness for purpose, choice of suitable materials, soundness of

construction, due regard for proportion and the careful use of colour and

surface treatment, will be exemplified in the articles exhibited (G. H.

Leslie).

The exhibition organisers were also concerned with the development of new

skills in both children and teachers and in the circulation of “new” knowledge:

9

Mathematical instruction … not only develops logical thought, but also, in

particular, the individual’s power of visualising spatial relations … The

development in school of this optical spatial sense [is] … a medium by

which the general level of a people’s understanding of all kinds of technical

and artistic work may be raised. Good perceptible training will often enable

a pupil to discover results for himself [sic] and thus open the way for his

creative powers … the material exhibited … may be used by teachers to

make abstract mathematical ideas concrete …” (Walter Gropius);

… such study can only be adequately accomplished by insistence on

fundamentals of true scientific method - accurate observation and the

careful record of results so obtained (H. M. Walton);

and

Children will be brought face to face with real things and a check will be

placed on their accumulation of dead knowledge (F.L. Attenborough).

They praised the use of film and photography in teaching, but also celebrated the

centrality of the ‘good’ teacher in the learning process:

Modern History presents unlimited opportunities to the teacher with the

necessary genius and enthusiasm

and children who are “provided with appropriate materials” and are

in the charge of sensitive and well-trained teachers produce work which is

often remarkable for its imaginative idea;

and

One of the main objects has been to show how work of pleasing design and

high technical standard can be obtained from boys committed to the care of

well-trained and imaginative teachers who are capable of infusing

10

something of the spirit which exists between the eager apprentice and the

master-craftsman.15

This celebration of the centrality of the teacher and the qualities necessary to be

effective accords with a general consensus which can be found in 1930s educational

texts about the ‘good teacher.’16

The exhibition guide ends with a section entitled ‘Pictures in the School’ where

C.M Marriott of The Times and R. R. Tomlinson, Senior Art Inspector, LCC,

reaffirmed the importance of design appreciation:

Susceptibility to the direct appeal of form, colour, line and tone, irrespective

of information conveyed, is practically universal,

and the fundamental purpose of the exhibition as a learning experience:

It is generally agreed that while the substantial quality of British

manufactures is second to none, they often suffer from foreign superiority in

grace and design. Nothing could be better calculated to remedy this state of

affairs than the existence of a purchasing public trained from early youth in

the capacity to chose the better and leave the worse in all that concerns

form and colour. In the exercise of such capacity the transition from the

painted masterpiece, rightly seen, to the tea-cup is direct - though it may be

unconscious.

How objects were displayed was central to cultivating ‘aesthetic values’. They should

be ‘rightly seen’, pictures should be ‘hung with regard to the general architectural

character and effect of the room’, and materials should be ‘toned by the teacher’ to

15Design in Education, passim, BCA.

16See, for example, Grosvenor Ian, and Martin Lawn. “‘This is what we are and this is

what we do’: teacher identity and teacher work in mid-twentieth century English Education

Discourse,” Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 9, no. 3, (2001): 355-370.

11

“accord with the colour scheme of the particular classroom.”17 This concern was

translated into the exhibition displays themselves.

Pick asked the architect Maxwell Fry to coordinate the arrangements for

display. It was

not to be regarded as a museum of dead exhibits … [but] rather to be

thought of as a display to indicate to teachers how the best materials can

be employed in teaching various subjects in a way pleasing to the eye and

at the same time useful in purpose.18

The exhibition had, like the objects, to be functional:

the object is to convey a clear idea of treatment, method, aim, with regard

to some one lesson or series of lessons, by way of suggestion.19

Showcases were to be brown. As there was to be no catalogue it was decided that

label cards would be used and uniformity of lettering was “essential.” Marion

Richardson, LCC Inspector for Art, took responsibility and determined that labels

should be typewritten in black ink on white paper “as thick as possible” in sizes of

regular sub-divisions of foolscap octavo, with double spacing and capitals only for

titles.20 A contemporary newspaper report includes two photographs of the displays.

17Design in Education, 16-17, BCA.

18Internal Education Department Memorandum from Officers attending a Committee

Meeting of the Council for Art and Industry, 27.5.1936, Exhibition of Materials for Use in

Elementary Schools, BCA.

19“Suggestions Towards a Scheme for an Exhibition of Materials for Use in

Elementary Schools,” 24. 3.1936. Exhibition of Materials for Use in Elementary Schools,

BCA.

20Council for Art and Industry Committee for the London County Council Exhibition,

Minutes of the Fifth Meeting, 20.10.1936 and Sixth Meeting 30.11.1936, Exhibition of

Materials for Use in Elementary Schools, BCA.

12

In the first, posters about the history of transport can be seen on a specially

designed unit that incorporates a recess on which models of transport through time

are displayed. The second photograph is of a series of dioramas under the headings

“History of Public Education,” “Urban Schools, Rural Schools” and the “History of

Factory Conditions” and placed in front of them are large cut out figures mounted on

plywood. In both cases the emphasis was on visual content not written text.21

The “Design and Education” exhibition of early 1937 connected with other

expressions of concern about design and education. The exhibition’s opening had

been chosen to coincide with other professional education events in London,

including the Conference of Education Associations and the Annual Conference of

the National Society of Art Masters. The latter was addressed by W. T. Blackband, of

the School for Jewellers and Silversmiths, Birmingham, who expressed a desire to

arouse public interest in

good, sound, well made things, the desire to possess and know a properly

designed and properly made article even if it were only a household utensil

…badly designed and atrociously made goods … were doing much to

depress the average standard of taste.22

Similarly, in the same month that the exhibition opened the first set of Contemporary

Lithographs were made available for sale to schools. In the previous year Marion

Richardson and Henry Morris, had been consulted by Robert Wellington, the Director

of the Zwemmer Gallery, London about a scheme to introduce the work of living

artists to school children. They suggested that the best plan would be to invite some

chosen artists each to make a colour lithograph. A company, Contemporary

Lithographs, was set up by Wellington and the artist John Piper, to commission well

21Times Educational Supplement, 23.1.1937.

22Birmingham Post, 7.1.1937.

13

known artists to produce original prints in large editions (around 500) for sale to

educational establishments and the modest collector. Among those that made prints

were Piper, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, John Nash, Frances Hodgkins and Eric

Ravilious. They were asked to choose their own subjects, which would aim at

appealing to one of two age groups, four to five, or eight to nine. J. E. Barton

celebrating the project in the Architectural Review echoed all of the sentiments of the

exhibition,

Suitable building and equipment of schools is now an affair of first class

importance. The more enlightened local authorities have begun to realise

that the eye education of every child, for good or evil, goes on through

every hour of the day.23

The Times Educational Supplement was fulsome in its praise of the exhibition

when it opened. It was “remarkably interesting” and endorsed the idea that

some degree of sensibility in form and colour is practically universal, and

from the earliest age, and also that, for practical as well as moral reasons, it

needs to be cultivated. No better means to this could be devised than

collections of well designed objects to be seen and handled in the course of

the ordinary lessons.

Particular praise was directed towards the section on Mathematics organised by

Walter Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy. The paper also reported Frank Pick’s

opening address that

once the sense of beauty came by tradition; now it had to come by

education and training … The industrial era had destroyed too much, and

23Binyon, Helen. Eric Ravilious. Memoir of an Artist. Cambridge, 1983, 60, 80-81;

Barton, J. E. “Pictures in Schools.” Architectural Review, January (1937): 2-4.

14

only by hard work would they be able to re-establish the idea of beauty in

everyday things in everyday life.24

The conception and content of the 1937 exhibition was clearly shaped by the

individuals whom Pick assembled, by the vision of officers in the London County

Council and by the CAI report. It is to this report and these individuals that attention

will now turn.

Education for the Consumer

In 1931 the UK Board of Trade had appointed a Committee on Art and

Industry under Lord Gorell to consider the production and exhibition of articles of

good design and every-day use. Membership of the Committee included the artist

and critic Roger Fry and the art historian and writer Margaret Bulley. The report

provides a historical narrative of the use of exhibitions in England to promote better

design, beginning with three exhibitions organised by the Royal Society of Arts in the

1840s, followed by the 1851 Great Exhibition, the establishment of Henry Cole’s

Museum of Decorative Arts in South Kensington, the formation of the Arts and Crafts

Exhibition Society in 1887 and culminating in the establishment of the Design and

Industries Association (DIA) in 1915.25 The latter, had emerged as a perceived

solution to problems produced by the tensions between ‘artistic workmanship’ and

the demands of mass production and imitated the work of the German Werbund by

organising a programme of consumer education through exhibitions and

publications.26 Gorell’s committee, in making recommendations, found it difficult to

limit itself to the issue of an exhibitions programme and offered several observations

24Times Educational Supplement, 7.1.1937.

25Board of Trade. Art and Industry [Gorell Report]. London, 1932, passim.

15

for improving the design and quality of the products to be exhibited, including

“making the understanding and enjoyment of beautiful things an essential part of the

day-to-day life of the school.”27

Gorell made his report the following year and included two memoranda, the first by

Fry and the second by Bulley. Both of them make suggestions for new methods of

securing improved designs in future, and both make claims for the importance of

children’s art for developing ‘original ideas in design’. In particular Fry praised Marion

Richardson’s work with children, while Bulley advocated the establishment of a

Children’s School of Art along the lines of Paul Poiret’s Ecole Martine in Paris.28

Consequent on the Board of Trade’s acceptance of Gorell’s report, the Council for

Art and Industry was constituted under the chairmanship of Frank Pick in 1933.

At the second meeting of the Council for Art and Industry in March 1934 the

Council considered a report by E.M. O’R. Dickey, Staff Inspector for Art in the Board

of Education, on art teaching in primary schools. It was agreed that evidence should

be collected about school buildings in different countries and that the relationship

between education and the consumer be investigated. Two reports, for England and

Scotland respectively, were published within a few weeks of each other in 1936.29

The LCC Education Department prepared and printed its own summary of the CAI

report Education for the consumer and circulated it to all of its teachers. This was

26Sparke, Penny. Introduction to Design and Culture in the Twentieth Century.

London, 1986, 68.

27Board of Trade. Art and Industry, 15.

28Ibid., 44-51.

29Barman. The Man Who Built London Transport, 168-169.

16

followed by a request to the CAI to help organise an exhibition illustrating the

suggestions made in the report about teaching materials in schools.30

Education for the consumer argued that the success of any effort for the

improvement of the general standard of design “in articles of everyday” was

dependent “to a large extent upon the choice exercised by the purchasing public.”

Factory made articles could “be well made but also may possess beauty of form, of

proportion and of colour, combined together in appropriateness of design” and the

general public “should be educated to appreciate quality in design as in

manufacture.”The worker too needed

reminding that there can be beauty in the product of the machine, for the

subdivision of the industrial process has not only robbed him of any lively

conception of his task as a whole but has made it so fragmentary and at

times monotonous that it often has no educative value.

Such a task required active intervention, as there was

evidence that the British purchaser tends in the mass to be more

conservative than the foreigner. He [sic] is not insensitive to beauty, but, in

buying what he is used to, shows a readiness to accept the wares offered

without criticism and without demanding, or even realising that there might

be something better. This … state of affairs … must be remedied, if the

quality of design in British goods is to advance.

The development of design in industry was

30Ibid., 169. The joint planning committee was originally intended to consist of ten

members, consisting of four each from the CAI and the LCC and two from the Board of

Education. The LCC nominated four officers: Tomlinson, Richardson, Lowndes and Tyson or

Palfrey. An internal memorandum from the LCC gives a much narrower impression of what

the exhibition was to be about: “to show every-day things which could be used for the

teaching of art.” Marion Richardson Archive Ms 1792 Memorandum LCC, 28.2 1936, BIAD.

17

depend[ent] … upon the consumer’s demand and criticism; his choice must

represent an effective criticism; and his education will direct his choice.31

As a consequence the CAI reviewed the teaching of Art in Elementary schools, the

training of specialist art and craft teachers, school accommodation and the nature

and supply of equipment. The CAI accepted that educational authorities were

concerned with

providing ‘education for life’, that is, at preparing children, not only for work,

but also for all other things that go to make a full life,

but also argued that

Education must supply stage by stage a cultural background suited to these

objectives. The development of appreciation of art, of craftsmanship, and of

artistic ability in general, forms an integral part of education with such a

purpose and we are convinced of its importance.32

The Council rejected the current “narrow conception” of art education in schools to

drawing and painting and advocated a position where art education covered “the

creation of beautiful things in any material by any process with any tools.” The report

accepted certain “given” ideas about children and learning. Up to the age of eleven a

child “has an instinctive desire for expressing himself [sic] by the making of pictures

and of patterns;”this instinct can be affected by “unskilful teaching,” but generally

does not require “the guidance of specialist teacher.” After the age of eleven the

“creative power”’ in most children “becomes dormant” and the “power of

appreciation” becomes dependent on specialised teaching.33

The report concluded,

31CAI. Education for the Consumer. London, 1936, 7-9.

32Ibid., 10.

33Ibid., 11.

18

children’s surroundings, and the first impressions thereby created in their

minds, are important factors influencing their development and their outlook

on life.

It cited approvingly evidence received from the National Union of Teachers that the

environment “cramps the growth of artistic appreciation in poor children” and reports

from Geneva, Copenhagen, Lausanne, Rotterdam, Lyons and Stockholm that

“bright, harmonious [colour] schemes” in schools stimulated children

to appreciate colour and cleanliness’ and ‘provide[d] happier surroundings

for school work.

School furniture and equipment was found to be “too much dominated by

convention” and lagging “behind school architecture though the two ought obviously

to keep step.” There was “no better way of teaching design” than

by making the actual school an object lesson; it should be well planned, not

only in its general design, but in all the details of the furniture, equipment

and material brought into it.34

The training of art appreciation had to be related to “the child’s personal

experience, to the things that he sees in the shops, in the streets and in his home” or

it would be “devoid of reality.” Schools needed “a collection of such common objects

for [art] lessons” if teachers were to develop the child’s perception. Training in the

appreciation of Art depended “more on the things that are seen by the pupil than on

what is said by the teacher.” The teacher also needed to “understand the object used

for instruction, and the possibilities of the material and of the tools or processes

employed.” LEAs should collect suitable objects from manufacturers and department

stores which could then be lent to elementary schools and changed by circulation.

The selection of such objects was to be made “by reliable judges” and “ the question

34Ibid., 29-31.

19

of a national exhibition of a selection of these objects should be considered.” These

arrangements, the CAI suggested, could be supplemented by local museums and art

galleries who would maintain a collection of objects for circulation to the elementary

schools, as was being done in Leicester. Finally, every school should also have “an

accessible and conveniently arranged store-room for objects, materials and

pictures.”35

The membership of the Committee that drafted the report under Frank Pick’s

guidance included F. V. Burridge, E. McKnight Kauffer, and C. G. Holme and

evidence was received from amongst others E. M. O’R. Dickey, C. Birchenough,

Chief Inspector of Education for Kent, R. R. Tomlinson, Senior Art Inspector, London

County Council, and Marion Richardson, Art Inspector, LCC. All of these individuals

were part of the collective that produced the 1937 exhibition.36 The Committee also

included the artist Paul Nash.

Modernists and Progressive Educationalists

The ideas presented in the exhibition, their form and content, the concern for

both function and aesthetics was determined by an assembly of individuals

committed to modernist design and progressive education (see Appendix). That said,

there was a core group whose personal imprint is clear to see in the exhibition: Frank

Pick, the driving force behind the exhibition, McKnight Kauffer, who had worked with

Pick on various projects since the 1920s, Maxwell Fry, the exhibitions designer, and

Marion Richardson, who was singled out for praise both by Pick and E. M. Rich,

35Ibid., 31-33.

36Ibid., 38; Appendix: List of Witnesses, 39.

20

Chief Education Officer of the LCC.37 It is in their interconnected life stories that the

genesis and execution of the exhibition in 1937 can be located; their professional

lives and interests placed them within national and European wide networks of

intellectual circulation and exchange. It was these connections which brought

Gropius (1883-1969) and Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) to work with the CAI and the

LCC in 1936 and 1937.

Frank Pick (1878-1941) was managing director in 1928, and vice-chairman, of

London Passenger Transport Board between 1933 and 1940. As a senior industrial

manager he used his position to promote modernist ideas in posters, lettering and

station design, commissioning amongst others the artists McKnight Kauffer, Eric Gill

and Edward Johnston. In the 1920s Pick had joined the Design and Industries

Association (DIA). He was sympathetic to the dual model of working undertaken by

the Deutscher Werkbund - promoting design for industry through bringing

industrialists, artists, craft workers and architects together and advocating higher

standards of public taste - which DIA attempted to transpose to an English context. 38

Other members of the DIA included McKnight Kauffer, the sociologist Seebohm

Rowntree, the economic historian R. H. Tawney, the educationalist Michael Sadler,

W. R. Lethaby, Head of the London Central School of Art and Crafts, and Brangwyn

Burridge, who succeeded him.39 Several of these figures later worked with Pick to

promote design at the CAI.

37Marion Richardson Archive Ms 1045 Pick to Richardson, 11.1.1937; 1253 Rich to

Richardson, 1.1937, BIAD.

38Sparke. Introduction to Design, 66-67. The Deutscher Werkbund was set up in

Munich in 1907 with the aim of improving the design and quality of German goods. See,

Campbell, J. The German Werkbund: The Politics of Reform in the Applied Arts. Princeton,

NJ, 1978.

21

Central to Pick’s ideas about design was visual education. In 1922, in notes

recorded for a lecture, he wrote:

Man’s rapid progress is based on words, we think in words, our minds

string words like beads … Pictures, visions, memories of things seen are

neglected. Children see the visions more than the grown-ups. We teach

them the craft of word-spinning. The damage is done, we should be

teaching them the art of seeing.40

This concern for the visual interest also found him exploring the visual environment

in schools. In the summer of 1930 he toured northern Europe with the architect

Charles Holden, visiting schools and in one report he wrote of a school in Hilversum,

Holland:

Great attention has been paid to the influence of the environment on the

child mind. The classrooms are admirably lit … and considerable use has

been made of bright colour. In one room, for instance, the doors were

painted green and the desks were treated in a number of harmonising

colours.41

Pick was also an executive member of the Council for the Preservation of

Rural England, an organisation, which like the DIA, subscribed to what David

Matless (1998) has described as a “modernism of orderly progress … a mix of

functionalist tradition with elements of the Modern Movement in architecture and

design.”42 Pick represented both English preservation and German modernism,

39Pevsner, Nicholas. “Patient Progress Three: The DIA.” In Studies in Art,

Architecture and Design, vol. 2, London, 1968, 227, 275.

40Barman. The Man Who Built London Transport,168-169.

41Ibid., 168. Pick commissioned Holden to design 55 Broadway and many tube

stations.

42Matless, David. Landscape and Englishness. London, 1998, 51.

22

advocating fitness for purpose in design alongside the social properties of

architecture. When Walter Gropius’ The New Architecture and the Bauhaus was

translated into English in 1935, Pick provided the Introduction, hailing the book as

connecting architecture and everyday design in order to “restore grace and order to

society,” with “spatial harmonies” and “functional qualities” making for “a new

architectonic arising out of a collective understanding of design in industry.”43 The

book did much to disseminate the Modernist principles behind Gropius’ method of

design. At the same time, Pick was also in the tradition of John Ruskin and William

Morris in his belief in the redemptive power design. The design historian Penny

Sparke has argued that British governmental activity in design reform in the interwar

years was generally unsuccessful as it was half-hearted, insular, poorly funded and

had consequently had little effect on either the British public or manufactory. That

said, she saw Frank Pick as a “farsighted and effective” design reformer who, along

with a few other individuals, architects and designers championed the international

Modernist ideal.44 In 1941, the year of his death, Pick wrote a short pamphlet, Paths

to Peace (London, 1941) in which he said:

There must be a new conception of education as the art of living, or skill in

living well. The pedagogues have held sway far too long; they are

ensconced in the Board of Education. Education is much more than

extending the years at school … It is finding in every human activity scope

for education and means of culture.45

43Pick, Frank. “Introduction” to Walter Gropius’ The New Architecture and the

Bauhaus. London, 1935.

44Sparke. Introduction to Design, 22-23.

45Quoted in Barman. The Man Who Built London Transport, 269.

23

Edward McKnight Kauffer (1890-1954) had studied in San Francisco, Chicago

and Paris before moving to England in 1914. He began as a painter and Roger Fry

wrote a catalogue preface for an exhibition of Kauffer’s watercolours in Birmingham

in the summer of 1917. In 1921 Kauffer abandoned painting in favour of poster

design, notably for Frank Pick and London Passenger Transport. In 1924 he wrote

The Art of the Poster, Its Origin, Evolution and Purpose. Kauffer served with Pick on

the CAI in the 1930s and was an early member of the anti-fascist Artists International

Association (AIA). The AIA stood for ‘Unity of Artists against Fascism, War and

Suppression of Culture’ and engaged in theoretical and critical work, political activity

- producing posters, banners and placards -, organising exhibitions and also

campaigning for members professional interests, reform of art education and teacher

training, and the need for government finance and patronage. Kauffer was involved

in organising an exhibition against war and fascism in November 1935 which

included work by both Moholy-Nagy and Eric Gill.46 Kauffer lived with Marion Dorn, a

textile designer who produced designs in the 1930s for Alistair Morton’s firm,

Edinburgh Weavers. Morton had been encouraged in his ideas by Moholy-Nagy and

Walter Gropius. Morton also produced designs by Ashley Havinden, who was a

close friend of Kauffer and had arranged design commissions for the American artist

in 1930.47 Kauffer was also a friend of the architect Fredrick Etchells, who translated

46Morris, L., and R. Radford. The Story of the Artists International Association 1933-

1953. Oxford, 1983, 23-30; Heinemann, Margaret. “The People’s Front and the

Intellectuals.” In Britain, Fascism and the Popular Front, edited by Jim Fyrth. London, 1985,

164-165.

47Anscombe, Isabelle. Omega and After. Bloomsbury and the Decorative Arts.

London, 1981, 133; Havinden, Michael. “Ashley Havinden 1903-1973. Life and Work.” In

Havinden, M., Richard Hollis, Ann Simpson and Alice Strang. Advertising and the Artist.

24

Le Corbusier’s book Vers une architecture.48 In 1937 Kauffer was not only involved in

the Design in Education exhibition, but also joined the advisory board of the

Reimann School and Studio in Regency Street, Westminster which opened to

provide professional training in commercial and industrial art. The School was

concerned with the fusion of theory and practice and was based on the Reimann

School in Berlin.49

E. Maxwell Fry (1899-1987) was one of the founders of the Modern

Architectural Research (MARS) Group in 1933, a London branch of the Congrès

Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne. MARS aimed to act as a support structure for

architects, engineers and theorists isolated in conservative 1930s Britain and

provided a link with the continental modern movement in art and design, and in

particular contact with Moholy-Nagy and Gropius at the Bauhaus school of design. 50

In the early 1930s Fry was active in the Design Industries Association and also was

involved with Frank Pick in a series of BBC radio programmes on modern design.51

Fry was introduced to the DIA through the designer Christian Barman, who was later

the biographer of Pick.52 It was Fry whom, along with Jack Pritchard, was

instrumental in bringing Gropius out of Hitler’s Germany in 1934. Fry later described

his role as acting as “a bogus employment agency” for “refugees from Germany.”53

Ashley Havinden. Edinburgh, 2003, 14.

48Hollis, Richard. “Ashley Havinden. Advertising and Art.” In Havinden et al.

Advertising and the Artist, 37.

49Times Educational Supplement, 16.1.1937.

50Fry, Maxwell. Autobiographical Sketches. London, 1975, 140-142.

51Pevsner. “Patient Progress Three: The DIA,” 235.

52Fry. Autobiographical Sketches. London, 1975, 133.

53Ibid., 146.

25

Pritchard, a furniture manufacturer worked with new materials, such as plywood, and

was heavily influenced by the experimental ideas of designers, craftsmen and

architects in Scandinavia and Germany, and in particular those of the Bauhaus

School.54 Pritchard was also active in the DIA.55 On his arrival in England Pritchard

had established Gropius at the Isokon Building, Lawn Road an experiment in

collective housing designed for left-wing intellectuals by the architect Wells Coates in

1934. The Isobar, a clubroom on the ground floor designed by the Bauhaus émigré

Marcel Breuer was a favourite meeting place for many members of the Modernist

Movement in London including Barbara Hepworth, Herbert Read, Henry Moore, Ben

Nicholson and Naum Gabo. The arrival of Gropius in 1934 and Moholy-Nagy in 1935

meant that London, and particular Hamstead, became in the late 1930s the centre

for the International Modern Movement. Pritchard worked to find Gropius design

commissions, including a scheme for a block of flats in Selly Oak, Birmingham; an

exhibition of Gropius’ work toured to the city in 1934 and he spoke with architects in

the Birmingham area during at visit in the same year.56 It was Pritchard who, in the

same year, introduced Gropius to Henry Morris, Chief Education Officer for

Cambridgeshire, a meeting which he described as “Enlightened architect met

enlightened educationist: result: orgasm.”57 Gropius confirmed Morris in the opinion

54Binyon. Eric Ravilious, 57.

55Fry. Autobiographical Sketches, 137-138.

56Elliott, David. “Gropius in England: A Documentation 1934-1937.” In: Benton,

Charlotte. A Different World. Émigré Architects in Britain 1928-1958. London, 1995, 108,

115; Foster, Andy. “’A Pevsner’ city guide to Birmingham.” In Royal Institute of British

Architects. West Midlands Yearbook 2003. Birmingham, 2003, 13. The Birmingham architect

Sargent Florence was a friend of Gropius and in the 1930s employed Nicholas Pevsner.

26

of designing “all contemporary buildings without regard to traditional style.”58 He

determined to employ Gropius to design, with Maxwell Fry with whom he had

entered into partnership, Impington Village College and with Pritchard raised the

money to pay their fees. Pritchard also persuaded the architect and friend of Frank

Pick, Charles Holden, to endorse the project:

Mr Fry brings to the partnership feeling for the English tradition and a highly

developed practical sense, while Professor Gropius possesses one of the

most original architectural minds of our time, deeply interested in the social

aspect of building and most accomplished using all the results of modern

research.59

Morris described Gropius’ plans for Impington Village College in 1936 as “superb: a

veritable architectural seduction, chaste and severe, but intense” and the following

year declared the design “a masterpiece.”60 The College opened in 1939 and

Nicholas Pevsner, the architectural historian, described it as “one of the best

buildings of its date in England, if not the best.”61 Gropius and Fry also designed a

57Quoted in Rée, Harry. Educator Extraordinary. The Life and Achievement of Henry

Morris. London: Peter Owen, 1985, 70-71.

58Ibid., 66.

59Elliott. “Gropius in England.” 120. The letter was written by Holden and W. G.

Constable, the Slade Art Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cambridge, John Maynard

Keynes and C. H. Reilly, formerly Professor of Architecture at the University of Liverpool

60Rée. Educator Extraordinary, 6, 64.

61Pevsner, Nicholas. Cambridgeshire. Harmondsworth, 1954, second edition 1970,

412-413. Herbert Read held similar views, writing “We turn, then, to the practical question: is

it possible, not merely to conceive, but to build and introduce into the existing educational

system, schools which provide the essentials of an educative environment? The answer is

yes: it has been in at least one instance, and a model perhaps not perfect in every detail, but

27

Village School for Papworth in 1937. The project was never realised although it was

published in Circle - An International Survey of Modern Art edited by J. L. Martin,

Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo.62 Gropius left London for North America and the

post of Professor of Architecture in the Graduate School of Design at Harvard in

1937. Moholy Nagy, who later followed Gropius to America, was also involved in

designing the interior colour schemes for another of Morris’ Villages Colleges at

Linton.63 Fry was a friend of both McKnight Kauffer and Ashley Havinden and

Havinden, in turn, found design work for Moholy-Nagy after his arrival in 1935. 64 Fry,

who also developed a close friendship with Moholy-Nagy and worked with him on a

series of collaborative projects, described him as having an imagination “so fertile …

that ideas tumbled out of him too fast to put to account” and to walk through London

practical, functional and beautiful does exist on English Soil … the Village College at

Impington …,” Education Through Art. London, 1956, 292-293. Stillman and Cleary

particularly drew attention to the library at the College as “an example of good modern

design.” “The bookcases are set well apart and are raised above the floor for convenience of

access and to allow for ease of cleaning. Painted white, they lighten the effect in the room

and make full play with the colours provided by the books. The simplicity of the room gives it

an air of rest and quiet,” Stillman C. G., and R. C. Cleary. The Modern School. London,

1949, 114.

62Elliott. “Gropius in England.“ 121.

63Ibid., 112, 227 note 29.

64Fry. Art in the Machine Age, passim; Havinden. “Ashley Havinden.” 14; Simpson,

Ann. “Ashley Havinden. Architecture and Interiors.” In Havinden, Advertising and the Artist,

67; Senter, T. “Moholy-Nagy’s English Photography.” Burlington Magazine, no. 944 (1981),

659.

28

with him “gave one eye, … new senses for the sights and sounds, the irregularities

and eccentricities of a too familiar townscape.”65

In January 1938 Fry and the MARS group organised an exhibition at the New

Burlington Galleries, London to present “the practical advantages” of modern

architecture and “the enjoyment that is to be derived from them.” Fry later went into

partnership with Le Corbusier.66

Marion Richardson (1892-1946) trained as an art teacher at Birmingham

School of Art and was appointed, at nineteen, an art mistress at nearby Dudley Girls’

High School. After an unsuccessful interview for a London teaching post in 1917

Richardson visited an ‘Exhibition of Children’s Drawings’ at Roger Fry’s Omega

Workshops.67 Richardson knew of Fry through his sister Margery (1874-1958) who

had been the warden (1904-14) at her student residence at University House,

Birmingham in 1910. Roger Fry (1866-1934) had started the Omega Workshops in

London in 1913 with the aim of producing decorative art from a background not of

crafts but of painting. Richardson showed examples of her pupils’ work to Fry who

enjoyed their “simplicity and freshness” and he displayed some of their work before

the end of 1917. Fry praised Richardson’s resistance to teaching-as-instruction:

“Miss Richardson has found out how not to impose a ready-made pictorial formula

on the all too suggestible child-mind. That is, I think, the most essential discovery

65Fry. Autobiographical Sketches, 156.

66Ibid., 140-142, 145, 154-155.

67Richardson, Marion. Art and the Child. London, 1948, 11-12, 30. Roger Fry is not

known to be related to Maxwell Fry.

29

she has made - she has found how not to teach and yet to inspire.”68 He described

Richardson’s method in a letter to Vanessa Bell in 1917 as

making the children put down their own visualizations - ‘drawing’ with eyes

shut etc69

and in a letter to his daughter Pamela

I think all she does is to make them put down the composition with their

eyes shut and then work from that. The things are simply too lovely for

anything. They illustrate homes and scenes of their lives and all sorts of

things and everyone who’s seen them is amazed and full of jealousy for

these lucky kids. I’m trying to get the Minister of Education [H. A. L. Fisher]

to see them and see if we can’t do something to stop the teaching of art.70

Richardson’s approach - bringing out the individual child’s expressive capacities,

encouraging the drawing, not of objects, but of ideas - was not new, but built on

practices advocated by her former tutor Robert Catterson-Smith, Principal at

Birmingham School of Art and by Frank Cizek, Professor at the Academy of Fine

Arts Vienna.71 This connection with past practices was alluded to by Sir Kenneth

Clark, Director of the National Gallery, in his Introduction to Richardson’s

68Fry, Roger. “Children’s Drawings.” The Burlington Magazine, XL, (January 1924),

35-41.

69Anscombe. Omega and After, 75-76.

70Roger Fry to Pamela Fry, 7.1.1917. In Letters of Roger Fry, edited by D. Sutton. Vol

2. London: 1972, 395.

71Green, Christopher. “Expanding the Canon. Roger Fry’s Evaluations of the

‘Civilised’ and the ‘Savage’.” In Art Made Modern. Roger Fry’s Vision of Art, edited by C.

Green. London, 1999, 129; Jameson, Kenneth. Pre-School and Infant Art. London, 1968,

114; Marion Richardson Archive. Producing a Biographical and Critical Monograph based on

the Marion Richardson Archive: Crosscurrents (unpublished report 1977), 3, BIAD.

30

autobiographical Art and the Child (1948), but he also pointed to her tenacity, energy

and vision:

the pages that follow tell, with the simplicity of a saint, the story of a great

reform in education. Revolutions, we are told, are never the work of a single

individual: the ground is prepared, there are precursors and unknown

fellow-workers … artists had already become aware of the vivid, expressive

painting which children could produce if allowed to work in their own ways.

Still, it was Marion Richardson alone who recognised that this power of

imaginative expression could be developed in almost every child as part of

his [sic] education, and, thanks to her vision and tenacity, this discovery did

not remain a mere experiment … but spread throughout this country,

Canada and America.72

Through Fry and the Omega Workshops Richardson was brought in contact

with other artists (Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Mark Gertler, Paul Nash, Wyndham

Lewis and McNight Kauffer), writers and critics.73 The latter included Margaret Bulley,

who would later serve with Fry on the Gorell Committee in 1931, where he praised

Richardson’s innovative methods in his memorandum. Bulley, on meeting

Richardson, persuaded the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester to exhibit the

children’s drawings and designs. Fry contributed a catalogue introduction. This was

followed by requests from cotton manufacturers to sell some of the block-printed

patterns for reproduction.74 In the 1920s Bulley corresponded regularly with

Richardson about the relationship between art practice and theory; correspondence

which was also driven by their shared Christian Science beliefs. She also used

Richardson’s pupils in a ‘taste’ test - presenting children with four pairs of art

72Clark, Sir Kenneth. “Introduction.” In Richardson. Art and the Child, 7.

73Anscombe. Omega and After, passim.

74Richardson. Art and the Child, 35.

31

reproductions - to try to determine whether there was a correlation between

intelligence and taste.75 Richardson’s work was later a central focus of Bulley’s Art

and Understanding (1936) - the book was dedicated to her - and includes a

comparison of work done by her pupils with that produced by Cizek’s pupils.76

The connections with the Fry family continued to shape Richardson’s life. In

1918 through the intercession of Margery Fry, Richardson became a volunteer at

Birmingham Prison, taking Handicraft and Embroidery Classes.77 The following year

Roger Fry organised a second exhibition of Richardson’s children’s drawings at the

Omega but there was very little interest and the art critic of The Times, Clutton-

Brock, Fry reported to Vanessa Bell ‘missed all that was good’ and ‘bitterly

disappointed’ Richardson with his comments.78 Another children’s exhibition followed

in 1920 and Richardson met the teacher art educator R. R. Tomlinson79. Margery Fry

later invited Richardson to join herself and her brother in the house they shared in

London and while with them Richardson advertised private art tuition for children,

before becoming a part time tutor on a new Graduate Course for art students run by

the London Day Training College. She also maintained some teaching in Dudley.80

75Crosscurrents, 13-15. Bulley collaborated with the psychologist Cyril Burt on a

design taste test for the BBC in 1933, see Holdsworth, Bruce. “English Art Education

between the Wars.” Journal of Art and Design Education, 3, no. 2, (1984), 169.

76Holdsworth. “Art Education between the Wars:” 161, 170.

77Margery Fry and Richardson grew closer over time. Fry wrote to Richardson: “How

nice it is for me who have no children to have something so near a very nice daughter as

you are.” Marion Richardson Archive Ms 255 Fry to Richardson, 22.1.1933, BIAD.

78Anscombe. Omega and After, 100-101; Roger Fry to Vanessa Bell 22.2.1919 in

Sutton. Letters of Roger Fry, 405-406.

79Holdsworth. “Art Education between the Wars.” 175.

80Green. “Expanding the Canon.” 129; Richardson. Art and the Child, 42.

32

The following year Richardson organised an exhibition of the work of her pupils at

the Independent Gallery, London which Roger Fry praised in the Burlington

Magazine. In 1925 she was a delegate of the Association of Assistant Mistresses at

the Paris meeting of the International Federation of Art Teachers and she also

travelled to Russia to see schools and prisons and observe art lessons.81 On the

return journey she visited Vienna in order to have discussions with the art educator

Franz Cizek. He had become interested while a student in the uninhibited drawings

with which young children covered the pavements and walls outside the house

where he lodged and the restricted academic drawings they were called upon to

produce in school.82 Richardson had previously seen a touring exhibition in England

of drawings from Cizek’s Children’s Art Classes, which had been organised by

Francesca Wilson (1888-1981), a schoolteacher from Birmingham on behalf of the

Save the Children Fund in 1921.

Francesca Wilson, who was a friend of Margery Fry and had worked with her

in France for the Friends’ War Victims Relief Committee during the First World War,

met Cizek through the intercession of Bertram Hawker (who had helped to introduce

Montessori ideas to England) when she was doing refugee work in Vienna in 1920.

Wilson selected pictures from Cizek’s collection for a touring exhibition, organised

their reproduction “as postcards or lithographs,” and wrote explanatory pamphlets

which were later sold at the exhibition which toured Britain for two years and for

several years more, the United States. One image, Herta Zuckermann’s ‘Spring’ was

according to Wilson, “to be seen in almost every kindergarten in England and

81Marion Richardson Archive Ms 3153, BIAD.

82Jameson. Pre-School and Infant Art, 114; Wilson, F. M. In the Margins of Chaos.

London, 1944, 124-128.

33

America.”83 Richardson made the same observation in her autobiography: “[images]

were reproduced, sold by the thousand, and quickly found their way into [English]

schools and nurseries.”84 Wilson balanced teaching with refugee work and political

activism (she was a member of the Women’s International League) throughout the

1920s and 30s and was instrumental in bringing the German architectural and

design historian Nicholas Pevsner (1902-83) to Britain [and Birmingham] in 1933. 85

In 1930 Richardson was appointed District Inspector of Art under the London

County Council, and began working closely with Tomlinson who was Senior

Inspector for Art. The same year saw her in correspondence with the psychologist

Cyril Burt about the psychology of aesthetic development in children of junior school

age and she commented on Burt’s writing in this area.86 In 1933 she organised

another exhibition of children’s drawings which Roger Fry again praised and

publicised.87 In 1934 Richardson accepted an invitation from the Carnegie Trust to

undertake a lecture tour around the University Summer Schools of Canada.

Richardson took an exhibition of children’s work. The same year she was involved in

another Cizek exhibition in London and both her work with children and his featured

in Tomlinson’s Picture Making by Children (1934), the first full-length book to show

83Wilson. In the Margins of Chaos, 126; Wilson, Francesca. Rebel daughter of a

country house. The Life of Eglantyre Jebb. London, 1967, 201-202.

84Richardson. Art and the Child, 51-52.

85Newnham College Roll Letter. Cambridge, 1982, 62; Bachtin, Nicholas. Lectures

and Essays. Birmingham, 1963, 10-12.

86Marion Richardson Archive Ms 112 Cyril Burt to Marion Richardson, 16.4.1930: Ms

113, Burt to Richardson, 8.5.1930, BIAD.

87Fry, Roger. “Children’s Drawings at the County Hall.” The New Statesman and

Nation (24 June 1933), 844-845.

34

illustrations of contemporary methods in art teaching.88 The following year she was

involved with organising a series of lectures and persuaded Sir Kenneth Clark to

participate even though he had “long ago sworn never to give another lecture.”

Clark’s reason for changing his mind was Richardson’s work which was “so valuable

and interesting.”89

At Birmingham School of Art Richardson had been taught calligraphy by a

pupil of Edward Johnston, who had taught at the Central School of Arts and Crafts

and had been commissioned by Frank Pick in 1916 to design the type face for

London Underground’s corporate identity. Eric Gill worked on the project with

Johnston.90 Richardson maintained an active interest in writing and in the 1930s also

became occupied with “studying the spontaneous scribble of very small children” and

the importance of natural movement and this led her “to search till I found a way of

teaching both writing and drawing which sacrificed nothing of Nature’s rich dowry.”

Richardson explored these issues in her book Writing and Writing Patterns (1935)91

88Holdsworth. “Art Education between the Wars.” 168. R. R. Tomlinson, continued to

promote children’s art and produced Children as Artists. London, 1944. He later became

involved in School Prints, a similar venture to that pioneered by Contemporary Lithographs

[see above] and organised by Brenda Rawnsley and Herbert Read. The Contemporary

Lithographs project had been abandoned due to paper shortages with the advent of war.

89Marion Richardson Archive Ms 1279 Sir Kenneth Clark to Richardson, 27.2.1935,

BIAD.

90Yorke, Malcolm. Eric Gill. Man of Flesh and Spirit. 1981, 257.

91See Davis, Tom. “The acquisition of handwriting in the UK” documents the influence

of Marion Richardson’s “Round hand system” in primary schools, the system developed in

1935 recommended joining most but not all letters.”

www.bham.ac.uk/english/bibliography/handwriting/new_webpages/acquisition.html.

Accessed 1st September 2003.

35

and in the summer of 1937 she presented an address on handwriting at the Eighth

International Congress on Art Education on ‘Drawing and Art Applied to Industry’

which was organised within the Paris International Exhibition. The Congress’ themes

included:

Artistic culture in the nation, the teaching of art, equipment of art rooms,

manual and visual tendencies of children, modern conception of decorative

design, reform of handwriting, history of art and training of the teacher.

The Chairman of the organising British Committee was Richardson’s colleague R. R.

Tomlinson of the LCC.92 The British Pavilion at the Paris Exhibition was organised by

the CAI under Frank Pick’s guidance, with selection again being determined by “the

English tradition of sound construction and good workmanship.” The Council used

the designs of Eric Ravilious, Ashley Havinden and Maxwell Fry.93 At the end of the

year Pick contacted Richardson suggesting another project:

What do you say to collecting together some 50 or more illustrated books

for children up to, say, the age of 14 or 15 and divide them into two groups,

books for the younger ones and books for the older ones … What sort of

illustrations would you seek to put before the children? That is to say, what

is the finished kind of art they would have to look at?

At the end of his letter he noted:

The penalty of your success is that you have got to go further, so I can only

think of new tasks for you.94

92Marion Richardson Archive Ms 1459 Poster for The International Congress on Art

Education, Paris July 30 - August 5, 1937; Ms 1453, 1458, 1459, BIAD.

93Simpson. “Ashley Havinden. Architecture and Interiors.” 74.

94Marion Richardson Archive Ms 461 Pick to Richardson, 25.11.1937, BIAD.

36

The following year Richardson staged another exhibition of children’s work at the

Conference Hall for the LCC, which was opened by Sir Kenneth Clark, ran for eight

weeks and received 26,000 visitors.95

“Design in Education:” an Education Exhibition Reconsidered

The “Design in Education” exhibition, as already noted, was well received in

1937. Its content was seen as relevant and it connected with modernist agendas

circulating amongst some designers, architects and educators, but what of the view

from the vantage point of the present. What claims can be made for the story that

unfolded as the contents of the manila folder in the archive was narrativised? Indeed,

there is in this account of events in 1936 and 1937, as in any narrative text, more

than one story. Just as the exhibition escaped “beyond its original limits … [as] the

material grew wider and wider in range,” so too did the narrative associated with its

reconstruction. There is a story of objects in schools, of the material culture of

schooling, another story is of the use of exhibitions to shift popular perceptions, a

third story is about the appreciation of the aesthetic and changing ideas about art

education in schools, and there is a story about the production, reception and

dissemination of knowledge - the ideas of the Bauhaus in particular - in early

twentieth century Europe. Each of these stories readily generates further research

questions and issues.

The Bauhaus has been described as “the opening chapter to the narrative of

twentieth century design.” From its inception it was premised on the notion of a

“return.” First it drew on ideas about the “child-as-artist” and “the childhood of art”

which aimed to liberate students’ creativity through a return to childhood, by

95Richardson. Art and the Child, 79.

37

introducing elementary explorations of forms and materials, blind drawing and

rhythmic drawing motions. Ideas which had been promoted by Johannes Itten and

Cizek in Vienna, Hermann Obrist in Munich and Adolf Holzel in Stuttgart. This

pedagogy was gradually transformed towards a more rational and industrial

vocabulary of form under the influence of Wassily Kandinsky, Gropius and Moholy-

Nagy. This pedagogy focused on training students in those elements of the visual

that could be described as elementary, essential and originary. Under Gropius the

Bauhaus expanded the concept of architectural design and training by bringing

together artists, craftsmen, engineers and planners to work with architects. Science,

engineering and industry were welcomed. Students at the Bauhaus were introduced

to composition, colour, materials and three-dimensional form which familiarised them

with the techniques, concepts and formal relationships fundamental to all visual

expression, whether it be sculpture, metal work, painting or lettering.96 The Bauhaus,

according to its third and final director, was “not an institution with a clear programme

- it was an idea,” nevertheless it laid the foundations for modern industrial design

education. The Bauhaus vision embraced the objective values of standardisation

associated with mass production alongside a commitment to the humanism of craft

production.97 Maxwell Fry summed up the impact of the Bauhaus vision on England:

we realised that the task he [Gropius] set us would last our life-time, that we

were concerned now not with architecture alone, but with society.98

Before leaving England in March 1937 Gropius wrote:

96J. Abbott Miller, “Elementary School.” In The ABC’s of … The Bauhaus and Design

Theory, edited by E. Lupton and J. Abbot Miller. London, 1993, 4-5, 20

97Mies van der Rohe (1954) quoted in Wingler, H. Bauhaus - Weimar Dessau Berlin

Chicago. Cambridge, Mass., 1969, 17.

98Fry. Autobiographical Sketches, 147.

38

There ought to be a general basic training in art for all, starting with the

smallest child, followed by specialist training as soon as necessary, but as

late as possible. We need a new ground-work for all schools, a preliminary

artistic training … in keeping with experience gained from Froebel and

Montessori … the whole task of the teacher is to keep the child’s

imagination awake and constantly to stimulate its desire to model and

draw.99

The London Exhibition was collectively authored. It represents the reception

and dissemination of Bauhaus ideas. The exhibition with its breadth of coverage, its

concern with form, colour and materials directed towards promoting the ‘art of

seeing’ in children and teachers and the creation of a unity between art and industry

stands as a public endorsement of Modernism, both in relation to design and

educational practice. ‘Fitness for purpose’ was the lexicon of this endorsement. That

said, elements of a functionalist tradition and orderly progress is evident in this

version of the Modernist project.

It is also possible to project the ideas about design and education embodied in

the exhibition backwards into the nineteenth century. E. R. Robson’s illustrated

School Architecture (1874) offered “practical remarks on the planning, designing,

building and furnishing of school-houses.” For Robson the health and happiness of

both the teacher and the child were dependent of the “manner in which their school-

houses” were “constructed and furnished.”100 Robson’s colleague John Moss

contributed a chapter on “School Furniture and Apparatus” where he wrote:

Suitable appliances are to the teacher very much what proper tools are to

the handicraftsman [sic] … The furniture of the school-room should be 99Gropius, Walter. “Art Education and the State.” In Circle, edited by J. L. Martin, Ben

Nicholson and N. Gatson. London, 1937, 238.

100Robson, E. R. School Architecture. London, 1874, 7.

39

graceful in form and good in quality and finish. Children are particularly

susceptible of surrounding influences, and their daily familiarisation with

beauty and form or colour in the simplest and most ordinary objects, cannot

fail to assist in fostering the seeds of taste … In our time it is desirable to

extend the process of education …by the adoption of good and tasteful

designs as well as of superior workmanship for the necessary mechanical

aids. The insensible influence thus exerted will not be without due fruit in

future years, and, in the present, will assist in promoting a love for the

school.101

The ideas and actions embodied in the 1937 exhibition can also be viewed as

connecting with what Matless has persuasively written about as the emergence in

England in the 1940s of a linkage between visual education and the spaces of

citizenship into a ‘wider design for life’. In particular, Matless has documented how

the Council for Visual Education (constituent bodies included both the Council for the

Preservation of Rural England and the Design and Industries Association) in the

years immediately after the Second World War sought to cultivate through a series of

pamphlets “intelligent opinion” so that the new citizen would welcome the modern.

For example, W. F. Morris in The Future Citizen and his Surroundings (1946) set out

the Council of Visual Education’s programme for raising “the uneducated taste of the

great majority.” Morris judged that:

The capacity for good judgement in aesthetic matters is latent in most

children, but is warped or suppressed by bad surroundings or strong

misleading suggestions in youth or adolescence …

and children should be

101Moss, John. “School Furniture and Apparatus.” In Robson. School Architecture,

360.

40

taught impatience with things unnecessarily drab or squalid, and should be

infected with a desire to remove or improve them.

Similarly, William Ellis, in his Foreword to Hervey Adams’s Art and Everyman

(London, 1946), argued that

it is through the schools alone that we can break into this vicious circle of

shoddy education and de-based public taste.

Finally, Nicholas Pevsner argued Visual Pleasures from Everyday Things (London,

1946) that visual pleasure derived from order and design, and every element in the

environment should embody such principles. The visually enabled citizen would revel

in a designed country:

Visual education … is concerned with things in nature as much as with

man-made things. Possibly only one in a thousand today knows what to do

with his [sic] eyes beyond using them for utilitarian purposes … Very few

realise that any tree, any leaf, any stone - and also any pot, any rug, any

spoon - can be regarded aesthetically.102

The exhibition as it developed through the committee meetings in 1936 and in

its final form in January 1937 also represents an example of networks in action, of

social actors being mobilised through formal and informal relations. Individuals within

a network are nodal points of contact and mapping these contacts allows us to

illuminate the links between agencies and action, between - in this case - individuals

interested in education and those professionally involved. Telling the story of a

network is not straightforward. As here, with the focus being on just four individuals

Pick, Kauffer, Maxwell Fry and Richardson, there is a concern with identifying

linkages, which can result in factual indigestion for the reader, yet it is in the detail

that the complexity of interactions can best be appreciated. Other linkages could

102Matless. Landscape and Englishness, 260-263.

41

have been made by adding additional nodal points in the network, Dr P. B. Ballard,

for example, a colleague of Richardson’s at the LCC, was her mentor reading and

correcting the draft of her autobiography, was deeply interested in child psychology

and art and active in international groupings looking at intelligence testing and

examination performance.103 This was a network which had at its core a concern with

the ‘art of seeing’ and how this could be developed in children, in particular through a

new pedagogy of art education. How these ideas were received and decoded,

selected and promoted, modified or rejected, how they were transmitted and

circulated, and how individual contacts were made, organised and sustained are all

questions which need further exploration if this network in action is to be understood.

Indeed, the role of networks in developing a disciplinary field in education is an area

of research still awaiting its historians.104

103Read. Education through Art, 67-68; Maclure, Stuart. One Hundred Years of

London Education. London: Allen Lane, 1970, 37, 57; Ballard, P. B. “What London Children

like to draw.” The Journal of Experimental Pedagogy (1911-12), 185-197; Ballard, P. B. “The

Elementary Schools of London” Appendix 1 of LCC Annual Report (1925), 38; Topham

Vinall, J. W. School Drawing and Colour Work. London: Gresham Publishing, nd., 118-119;

Marion Richardson Archive Ms. 1001 Ballard to Richardson, 30.8.1946, BIAD. Ballard was

the only individual listed in the acknowledgments of Richardson’s autobiography. In a review

of her Art and the Child, he described Richardson as a “dominant figure in the educational

world” and “the English Cizek.” News clippings The Teachers World 8.12.1948, BIAD.

Thanks to Martin Lawn for information about Ballard and intelligence testing.

104See, Silver, Harold. “Britain’s Educational Worlds.” In Education, Change and the

Policy Process. Lewes, 1990, 147-165; and Hofstetter, Rita and Bernard Schneuwly (ed.).

“The Role of Congresses and Institutes in the Emergence of the Educational Sciences.”

Paedagogica Historica, XL, no. 5/6 (2004), special issue.

42

One transmitting agent for this network in action was the exhibition itself.

Viewing the exhibition in this way draws attention to an area relatively unexplored by

historians of education - the role of exhibitions in promoting educational ideas.

Marion Richardson, in her autobiography, noted the importance of educational

exhibitions as “a means” for the LCC to keep “in touch with its teachers,” as “source

of inspiration and refreshment” and the Conference Hall “as the setting” for the more

important of these: “Teachers, children, parents, public, and Press were brought

together and met with the Council members in a way that would have otherwise

been impossible.”105 The importance of education exhibitions as a mechanism for

disseminating ideas was widely recognised. As noted earlier, the Gorell Committee

presented in its report a historical narrative of the use of exhibitions in England to

promote design education, Frank Tate organised an exhibition on the work of

Victorian state schools in Australia in 1906 which attracted 250,000 visitors over

sixteen days and exhibitions were a common feature at national and international

congresses.106 The use of an exhibition to put across the CAI design agenda was

judged successful as it was followed in the June by a second exhibition focusing on

“Furnishing the Working Class Home.” The agenda was the same - the promotion of

fitness for purpose and aesthetics in design.

The “Design and Education” exhibition was concerned with presenting

designed objects for use in elementary schools to its visiting public. Teachers and

105Richardson. Art and the Child, 77.

106Selleck, Richard. Frank Tate. A Biography. Melbourne, 1982, 164-167. Thanks to

Martin Lawn for this reference. For exhibitions attached to national meetings, see, for

example, Education (15 January 1937), 95-97; and for international congresses, see, for

example, League of the Empire. Official Report of the Federal Conference on Education,

Caxton Hall, Westminister. London, 1907.

43

pupils, in classrooms and schools, work with and through objects and materials all

the time. Teachers in their work share their lives with objects. They help to define

their work identity. Without these objects and the routines developed around their

use, schools could not operate. Yet this element of schooling remains a largely

obscured or ignored area of study in histories of national schooling. Historians need

to look much closer at the school as a site of consumption, to engage with the

material culture of schooling, to investigate why and how objects came into school,

the processes of production and marketing, and the meanings which surround their

use. All objects, from rulers to classroom design, are active, being social agents in

themselves as they expand the range of human action and mediate meanings

between teachers and pupils. In short, historians need to map and understand the

interrelationship in the past between artefacts, actors and structures.107

This leads to a further, if local, point. In 2002 the Design Council in England

produced a report entitled Kit for Purpose: design to deliver creative learning. It

documented how in the UK spending on educational resources comes to nearly

£1billion a year, but much of what was bought was ‘poorly designed, standardised

and well behind adult workplaces’. With the support of the Department for Education

and Skills the Design Council followed up the report with two further funded projects:

Schools Renaissance and the School Furniture for the Future Scheme which both

aim to bring about ‘smart spending’ on ‘good design for schools’. What is interesting

in the report and the subsequent projects is there is no historical dimension. It is as if

the concerns with progressive educational ideas and design solutions about

classrooms in the past never happened. That said, the CAI’s ambition for the “actual

school” to be “an object lesson; … well planned, not only in its general design, but in

107See Grosvenor, Ian, and Martin Lawn. “Material Cultures of Schooling: Micro

histories of Objects and Routines,” unpublished paper presented at ECER Lisbon, 2001.

44

all the details of the furniture, equipment and material brought into it” went unfulfilled

in the decades following the Second World War. Pick and Richardson were both

dead by 1946, Gropius and Moholy-Nagy were engaged with new projects in the

America, and Britain entered a period of social reconstruction coupled with economic

uncertainty and austerity A concern with poor design in English schools and its

impact on teaching and learning has remained a trace element in reports and studies

of schooling since the 1950s. It can be found, for example, in the Ministry of

Education report Physical Education in the Primary School (1952), in Edward

Blishen’s The School That I’d Like (1969) and it permeates the evidence collected in

The School Id Like (2003).108

Finally, there is another story threaded through this account of the 1937

exhibition. The Cizek exhibition organised by Francesca Wilson in 1921 was used to

raise public awareness of the plight of children in Europe in the aftermath of the First

World War. Gropius and Moholy-Nagy arrived in England in 1934 and 1935

respectively as intellectual refugees from Hitler’s Germany. Newspaper reports of the

exhibition in January 1937 share space with accounts of the fall of Madrid. Three

months after the exhibition opened Wilson travelled to Spain as a refugee worker.

Helen Grant, a lecturer in Spanish at the University of Birmingham, who was also a

108For example: “There is still much to be done in designing and adjusting school

furniture to meet the needs of children. Although much furniture is now designed so that it

can be moved and stacked, the underlying idea seems to be that all the children in a class

must be able to write simultaneously, and that for this purpose desks equal in number to the

children in the class are necessary. It may be that this idea should be modified.” Ministry of

Education. Physical Education in the Primary School Part One. Moving and Growing.

London, 1952, 79-80; Blishen, Edward. The School That I’d Like. London, 1969, passim;

Burke Catherine, and Ian Grosvenor. The School I’d Like. London, 2003, passim.

45

friend of both Margery Fry and Marion Richardson, accompanied her. In 1938 the

Nazis closed Cizek’s school in Vienna.109 Sometimes when we venture into the

archive our vision can become too focused, the “art of seeing” requires us always to

seek out the bigger picture.

109Marion Richardson Archive Ms 255 Fry to Richardson, 22.7.1933, BIAD; Wilson. In

the Margins of Chaos, 174-177; Fyrth, Jim. The Signal Was Spain. The Aid Spain Movement

in Britain 1936-39. London, 1986, 163-173; Coates, Andrew. “Observation and Drawing: a

Justification for their Inclusion in the Primary School Curriculum.” Journal of Art and Design

Education, 3, no. 2, (1984), 194-195.

46

Appendix: The Exhibition Planning Committee110

Frank Pick, Chair of Council for Art and Industry.

E. McKnight Kauffer Artist

Miss Marion Richardson Inspector with London County Council [Writing]

Dr P. B. Ballard Inspector for London County Council [Literature]

E. Maxwell Fry, Architect, Exhibition Designer

G.A.N. Lowndes, Assistant Education Officer, London County Council [Social History]

G. W. Buckle, Board of Education

F. V. Burridge Former Principal of the Central School of Arts and Crafts

R. R. Tomlinson Senior Art Inspector, London County Council [Pictures in the School]

R. W. Baldwin, Member of Council for Art and Industry. Secretary to Planning Committee

Geoffrey Holme, Member of Council for Art and Industry [Domestic Science]

G. F. Quarmby G. B. Tyson, London County Council

Dr Walter Gropius, Architect [Mathematics]

Professor Moholy-Nagy, Painter, photographer and designer [Mathematics]

E. Salter Davies, Chief Education Officer Kent

H. M. Walton, Secretary Middlesex Education Committee

E. M. O’R Dickey, Staff Inspector for Art, Board of Education

Bayliss Allen, Bromley Borough [Arts and Craft]

Mr C. Birchenough, Chief Inspector of Education for Kent [Arts and Craft]

G. H. Leslie [Physical Science]

? Norwell [Nursery schools]

Mrs Marjorie Quennell Curator of Geffrey Museum [History]

F. L. Attenborough Lecturer at Leicester University [Geography]

S. W. Howe [Science/Nature]

R. Jacques [Music]

U. V. Bogaerde Art Editor, The Times

C. M. Marriot, The Times [Pictures in the School]

Mr Adkins School Inspector, Mathematical Specialist

Mr Drury, Brixton School [Mathematics]

Mr Bell ‘an educationalist’

Miss Bright [Domestic Science]

110Square brackets identify an area of responsibility in the exhibition.

47

Mr Waiting [History]

Sir Henry Richards [Science - Nature] Head teacher of a school in Hertingfordbury

Major J. J. Astor [History]

Sir Percy Buck [Music]

M. N. Anderson, Member of Design and Industries Association

F. G. M. Richards

H. Jude

F. Q. Rosser

Birmingham:

Dr Peter Innes, Chief Education Officer, Birmingham

Mr R. E. Cousens, Assistant Education Officer, Birminghham

Miss Loveday & Miss MacGregor, HMI Birmingham [Nursery]

Messrs G. H. & S. Keen Ltd [Nursery exhibit suppliers]

Paul and Marjorie Abbatt Ltd [Nursery exhibit suppliers]

48

49