The book is inscribed thus: ‘For the students of the finest
school in England, from “T”, 1931’. ‘T’ was how Thorp signed his reviews as
theatre critic of Punch, which
position he had held since 1915. But his main interests were in the fields of
advertising, publicity and typographic reform. Born in 1873, and therefore an
exact contemporary of Whitehouse, Thorp had spent ten years as a Jesuit priest
before not so much abandoning – he appears to have been pushed – as translating
his religious vocation into one of secular enthusiasm. ‘With the instincts of a
professional entertainer’, his DNB biographer
writes, ‘and a flair for making networks of personal contacts, Thorp adored
trumpeting a cause’.
Chief among the causes he espoused was the improvement in
design of everyday goods, especially printed matter, and as a leading light of
the Design and Industries Federation, founded in 1915 (motto: Fitness for purpose), he belongs to that
broad movement which sought the reconciliation of Arts and Crafts ideals to the
needs of industrial production. Another of his causes (to which Doncaster
alludes in his account of the lecture Thorp gave at Bembridge) was the
development of a common language of signs in public spaces, where in Britain,
at least, he was a pioneer.
The title of his Printing for business: a manual of
printing practice in non-technical idiom (1919), a book ground-breaking in
its day, speaks for itself. His monograph on Eric Gill, the first, appeared in
1929. At the time of his visit to Bembridge he was publishing the second part
of an article on the standardization of letterform nomenclature. A
quintessential figure of the inter-war typographic revival Thorp bursts into
the Yellowsands story with a phenomenal potentiality. But Bembridge was hardly
ready for him.
One obituary attributes his success as a theatre critic to the
fact of his always being able to maintain ‘an eager expectancy’. An
accomplished speaker, he was a born persuader and motivator of the shy and
gifted, and with a social conscience too – in fact, though he was probably well
to the left of him politically, as a reformer he had much in common with his
Bembridge host – but he had a tendency to over-reach, and socially he was much
too fast for Whitehouse.
Exactly how Thorp’s visit came about isn’t clear. Doncaster
states that by coincidence Whitehouse had been reading a book or article by
Thorp when ‘out of the blue’ he invited himself to stay. Thorp may have simply
read about the activities of Bembridge School in the press (where in the early
days especially the Warden was always busy promoting them), but it’s much more
likely he was prompted by contact with one of the many friends and
acquaintances he shared with Whitehouse.
In the present context, Emery Walker springs to mind, though
there’s no evidence he had any involvement with Bembridge beyond his initial
advice to Whitehouse on setting up a printing press and the loan of his name to
the first school advisory council (more’s the pity, one’s tempted to add:
judging by his commitment to some of the other presses who sought his advice,
Walker might have had much more to contribute, had he been asked). More likely
candidates are figures such as the artist Albert Rutherston, who had been the
subject of an exhibition at Bembridge, or Claude Lovat Fraser whose work for
the Curwen Press to a great extent characterises Thorp’s time with that firm as
publicist, or indeed Thorp’s fellow Punch
stalwart, the writer A.P. Herbert, a particularly warmly-received visitor
to the school, who was Whitehouse’s tenant at Hammersmith Terrace. At any rate,
Thorp arrived, and at first it seems that Whitehouse was delighted by his
ebullient presence.
But it soon appeared that he [Whitehouse] had met his match in
eccentricity and wayward behaviour…on being taken round the form rooms (and I
was present when this happened), Warden with a flourish and with his usual
gesture of flicking his fingers, said to T., ‘The boys in this school have the
finest view of any school in England’. ‘Yes,’ snapped back Thorp, striding out
of the room as he spoke, ‘and that is why they sit with their backs towards it,
I suppose’.
Whitehouse was left stranded, but there was much more. Thorp
seemed to find fault everywhere: the tools in the woodwork room should be
replaced – Thorp knew where to obtain much better ones; similarly the equipment
in the school laboratories. At supper, to which as Master of the Guild of
Printers, Doncaster was invited, Thorp proposed that his wife should be
commissioned to provide the school with ‘some proper murals’, but ‘You must buy
a decent bed for her to sleep in – not one of those damned school beds you made
me lie in last night’.
He threatened to stay at the school for a further week, but
was somehow prevailed upon to leave, and it was then when in a state of
distraction that the book…was thrust upon me with the remark from Warden that
he did not want it to sully the name of the school.
Had Thorp and Whitehouse been able to make common cause
typographically we can only guess at how the course of Bembridge printing might
have been altered. As for the book, a wonderful gift had been spurned, a fine album
of the best contemporary trade practice,
historically informed (it includes an article by Harry Carter – late of the
parish - on sanserif types), technically impeccable, a book which would become
an icon of English typography between the wars – and to Thorp an object of
special personal pride, he having introduced to Harold Curwen its editor and
genius, Oliver Simon.
Doncaster, a typophile, certainly treasured it. The eldest of
three brothers, all dedicated school printers who all, for a time, appear to
have entertained the idea of a professional career in printing, he left
Bembridge at the end of the summer term, 1932. By the autumn we find him
resident at George Cadbury’s Quaker foundation, the Woodbrooke Settlement,
Selly Oak (doubtless arranged for him by Whitehouse) and attending the
Birmingham School of Arts and Crafts (and printing there?). He seems to have
been something of a Whitehouse favourite, and as a senior printer with ‘the
power to inspire a group of younger boys’ he was much missed in the printing
room. One of his brothers, either Richard or Michael, was sent to Oxford the
following year to meet John Johnson with a view to taking up a printing
apprenticeship. But this came to nothing. There were none available in the
foreseeable future and anyway, as Johnson explained, at 19 it was really too
late for the young man. Apparently unaware of the strength of trade union
rules, Whitehouse had been dismayed by Doncaster’s report when he returned to
school that on being shown round the Oxford printing works he had not been
permitted to so much as touch a piece of type.
