'An unorthodox visitor': Joseph Thorp

In other circumstances one would expect at least a mention in the school diary (in the 1920s and 30s written by the head boy), if not a note in the school newspaper, but both of these are silent: there is only one record of the extraordinary visit by the journalist and typographer Joseph Thorp to Bembridge School in the summer of 1931. This is a letter, written four decades later, from the antiquarian bookseller (and sometime Bembridge Master Printer) Anthony Doncaster, to the then headmaster, Peter Rendall. The letter is laid in to a copy of the Curwen Press Miscellany, 1931, which is preserved among the school records. After 43 years Doncaster had returned the book, rather reluctantly, to the school, where he now acknowledged it belonged, though as he explains, his possession of it up till then had been perfectly legitimate.

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.  

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Richard Smout of the Isle of Wight County Records Office for trawling on my behalf the large uncatalogued portion of the Whitehouse Archive; also the following archivists and librarians for their help in various ways: Stephen Wildman (Ruskin Library, University of Lancaster), Michael Maw (OUP Archives), and Julie-Ann Lambert (John Johnson Collection, Bodleian Library). I am grateful to Sian Evans and Ann Sutton who enabled me to access Bembridge School records. Among the ex-pupils who got in touch with me, Mike Conder was especially helpful.

My chief debt is to Jim Dearden who has assisted my work at every stage, from the mapping of the sources, through his patient replies to my many questions about printing at Bembridge (and the history of the school generally), to the improvement of the emerging text.

The society of the printing room

Though the guild system used at Bembridge (and other schools) in the 1920s and 30s derived from the arts and crafts movement, it had nothing to do, Whitehouse averred, with guild socialism in industrial organisation, such as that advocated by William Morris and G.D.H. Cole. His was rather ‘an experiment in reasonable freedom in education’, under which ‘certain special activities within the school have been organised in the spirit of the craft guilds of the middle ages’ – which left him with plenty of room for interpretative improvisation.

By Christmas 1920 there were probably still fewer than fifty boys on the school roll. But the newspaper that term reports the formation of no less than five guilds: woodworkers, printers, gardeners, builders and toymakers (for younger boys). Already from the autumn of 1919 the builders had been busy constructing a photographic dark room (a priority which reminds us that, while he had little time for modernism in art and literature, Whitehouse easily engaged with many features of technical modernity, including broadcast radio and the automobile – he liked big American cars) and by 1922, the gardeners had taken over a piece of ground to work, he says,

as a communal market garden, paying for the seed themselves, and selling the harvest to the school at current rates, and themselves deciding what they could [sic] do with the profit. It is a guild built on a basis of co-partnership. Careful accounts are kept…

However, all guilds, he maintained, would ‘undertake certain work for the general good of the school community’ – but some more, perhaps, than others.

In theory, at least, boys could join as many guilds as they liked, according to their interests. Each guild was ‘a little fraternity with three degrees of rank – apprentices, journeymen, masters.’

The boy passes from one to degree to another, according to merit, as he acquires the requisite skill. [The fraternity] is largely self-governing. The members of the guild have regular meetings, when they talk over the work they are doing, or contemplate doing – its difficulties and problems. They do a large part of the organization.

But at Bembridge the hierarchy was more extensive than this. The member of staff in charge of the activity covered by the guild was the ‘Grand Master’ – a title which in the case of the printers the sub-Warden Edward Daws only relinquished to arts and crafts teacher Ronald Muirhead in 1922, when press and composing rooms were united in a part of the sports pavilion. In addition, each guild had a President - who was of course Whitehouse himself.

How did all this work in practice? Writing sometime in the mid-1920s, Whitehouse found that there was ‘no feature in the life of the school that has given us more encouragement’, and the first government inspection, in 1932, commended the effectiveness of the guild system in motivating boys and developing a sense of responsibility. Printing room reports in the school newspaper at this period frequently close with notes on boys’ graduation within the guild (these only finally come to an end in the 1950s), and towards the end of the 1930s yet another rank, that of ‘Vice-Master’ was added, the building of the dedicated printing room in 1931 having significantly increased participation in printing.

But it’s rather doubtful as to how much genuine influence over their affairs was ever exercised by the printers as a community. I think to Whitehouse the availability of the resources of the printing room to the school as a whole, principally in the production of the school newspaper, and increasingly in the provision of all manner of useful ephemera - but also, at times, in a more idealistic sense, as a species of noble potentiality - was simply too important to permit any arrangement that might compromise what he conceived as its central role of service. There never seems to have been any question, for example, of control of funds, such as (so he claims) was the case with the gardeners, or the exercise of any form of entrepreneurship for the benefit of the guild alone. Independence, individual responsibility and initiative were admirable, and were certainly to be encouraged, but only within a firmly established pattern of obligations.

In fact, in the context of the system as a whole at Bembridge, there’s no pretence of self-government in Whitehouse’s description of the printers’ guild. Instead, he reiterates the craft’s educational values, and celebrates the continuity enacted as the boys ‘try to proceed upon the historic methods of printing’. He presents an almost hallowed occupation, the printers ‘keeping always before them the principle of perfect simplicity’.

What must have seemed latterly rather quaint, and more suited anyway to the small school (with its readier interaction of groups of mixed ages) which was by then being left behind, the guild hierarchy gradually fell out of favour after the second world war. Master Printers were replaced by Senior Printers (of which there were usually no more than two, chosen as much for their ability to take charge as their technical skill), and a somewhat ill-defined group of enthusiasts, never more than a dozen or so in number, known simply as ‘the printers’. After the late 1950s the guild survived really only in name, though it should be added that the spirit of a fraternity was always there to be rekindled in the printing room.

There is a reference to a ‘printers’ festival’ on 23rd November 1920, but for most of the 1920s and 30s the printers’ main social event was the termly Guild Tea. There is very little information to be found about these gatherings, but they appear to have been somewhat archly formal occasions. If he was able to, Whitehouse would preside; there would be his address, to which a senior boy might reply, and so on. To be looked forward to with relish, however, was the ‘printers’ breakfast’, a reward on the last day of term, or thereabouts, to those boys who had contributed most to the production of the school newspaper. It’s first mentioned as a tradition to be continued, at Coniston, and was perhaps an innovation of the 1930s, presumably Tom Stedman’s. Though not always available, as the cooperation of the school caterers couldn’t be guaranteed, it was enjoyed by generations of Bembridge printers until well into the 1980s.

The origins of ‘night printing’ and its attendant mysteries are appropriately obscure. The usefulness of a regular, flexible, late-night session, in the final weeks of term, to ensure the newspaper’s timely completion, may have been realised at almost any time. It was certainly taking place in 1957 when Dearden returned to Bembridge, but in living memory ‘night printing’ can only really be illuminated from the beginning of the 1960s. Following certain preparations for bed, ‘the printers’ would repair in the evening, after prep, to the printing room - and carry on into the night, with more or less commitment, with whatever had to be done: setting, dissing, wire-stitching, guillotining, working the Albion in teams of four - though the official hour or so was perhaps exceeded rather less often than many imagined. In the golden age before the link (in 1965) with the Whitehouse Memorial Building brought central heating, putting an end to it, there might be culinary feats performed on the printing room gas fire, hot toast and a drink perhaps, before the walk back to one’s far-away, long-since darkened dormitory.

Memory swarms around ‘night printing’. To some it was the simple pleasure of being out of uniform, or of being able to confound the suspicions of one’s adult superiors:

‘And where are you off to?’

‘Night printing, sir!’

To a few it was the chance to slip out into the privacy of the nearby squash-court for a cigarette. There might have been high jinks. The practice of an old trade initiation rite by which ink was rolled onto the torso of a new recruit to ‘the printers’ has been reliably reported, but it’s difficult to believe that this ever became established, as its consequences would have been so hard to conceal from the staff who would have quickly put an end to it. Doubtless ‘night printing’ lost much of its allure with the liberalisation of evening routines in the 1970s and 80s, but such was the geography of the Bembridge site – as a working school building the printing room was about as far as it was possible to get from the sleeping accommodation - the perception of whatever took place there was always enhanced by the sense of remoteness, heightened in bad weather, from the rest of the life of the school.

'Printed for the Yellowsands Press': the 1930s nativity plays

There are two published accounts by old boys of life at Bembridge in the 1920s and 30s, in the autobiographies of the journalist Robin Day (perhaps the school’s best-known alumnus) and the poet John Heath-Stubbs (both of whom, incidentally, received bursaries). Although for the school newspaper Day wrote with some affection of his time at Bembridge (much of it spent at Coniston), in Grand Inquisitor he strikes a brusquer note, especially regarding academic standards, which he thought were decidedly low (and having previously attended a grammar school he had a definite basis for comparison). He attributes his own success in getting to university mainly to the special interest shown in him by the masters Baggaley and Stedman, and even suggests that Whitehouse’s own lack of higher education led him to discount its benefit to others.

Heath-Stubbs’s more wide-ranging recollections are also very critical of the school, in fact rather relentlessly so. He recalls Whitehouse as a ‘monster of egotism’. His account is marked by his obvious unhappiness as a boy at Bembridge (there is some evidence from his contemporary Tony Doncaster confirming this) though he acknowledges that the Island itself, and particularly the natural history of Whitecliff Bay and Brading Marshes, made a lasting impression on him  -  and despite the sourness he can be an astute observer. An apparently somewhat old-maidish boy, of poor eye-sight, dyspraxic, and essentially intellectual, he was clearly in the wrong place. Reading him we miss entirely the sense of idyll evoked by Whitehouse in Creative Education, and elsewhere: propaganda, to be sure, but for many boys of a less academic bent close to reality. Heath-Stubbs does have a little to say about the printing room, however. The tone is characteristic:

In the printing classes we produced the school magazine…We also set up various works of Whitehouse himself. Every year he would write a Nativity play for the boys to perform. This was printed and sold, of course, for the chapel fund. It would have been much more sensible if he had encouraged the boys themselves to create these Nativity plays, but nothing of the sort ever happened.

This is interesting as a description of what one might expect to have occurred at a slightly earlier date (before 1930), but contains one notable inaccuracy. None of the nativity plays written by Whitehouse (ostensibly in collaboration with the current head boy) from 1932 on was actually printed in school, though some of them bear the imprint ‘for the Yellowsands Press’. What Heath-Stubbs was actually remembering were probably programmes or invitations.

The matter of the imprint is not insignificant. There are fewer than half a dozen books with Yellowsands as a publishing imprint. They all date from this period, and most were produced for Whitehouse by John Johnson, Oxford University Printer. They include the two nativity plays The Road to Bethlehem (1933) and The Mystic Spring (1935) and the miscellany (containing Whitehouse’s address at the inauguration of the school chapel) Thy Youth and Age (1934). They speak to the contemporary urgency of Whitehouse’s ambition to express his own and the school’s influence through works that, while it would have been good to have produced them at Bembridge, lay beyond the scope of his schoolboy printers.

Although after 1931 Yellowsands printing became more productive, mainly because the new printing room attracted many more boys working in their own time, as regards school printing this extra capacity was probably largely taken up by the expansion of the newspaper (while for much of the earlier part of each term the printers were tied up with work on the Hymn Book). There could be no question of interfering with production of what was one of the main points of contact between what one parent described quaintly, but aptly, as the ‘Commonwealth of School and the Home Circle’ - as well as a wider world including the growing number of Old Bembridgians (who automatically received a copy of the newspaper). 

The newspaper had also become important to Whitehouse in another (if largely symbolic) way, providing some compensation for what he must have increasingly realised was the permanent loss of his political career:

In the strange world we live in we find ourselves in disagreement with the principles and methods of many European governments. We find false and inadequate the methods of making mass opinion by radio, newspaper and politician. We rejoice therefore that we have had in our newspaper a medium for expressing our faith in the unchanging message of the Prince of Peace.

Faith and politics were inextricable. An alternative to the exercise of official political influence lay at hand in a kind of sacred drama. He had seen in the nativity play the possibility of reaching a potentially far wider audience than the community of his school, and to exert influence again on a broader stage, and perhaps even in a higher realm. As the lights began to dim over Europe, he saw an opportunity for his school to rise to the challenge of the age with specific spiritual action.

From 1936 the autumn number of Bembridge School Newspaper is changed to the Christmas number (it had been so named before, but not consistently). To Whitehouse Christmas was ‘the greatest of all festivals’ (there was no cross in the school chapel in Whitehouse’s day). Everything about it, its stories, its poetry, its carols, were to be delighted in. And as he told his boys it was ‘a home festival’:

The happiness of your home is your greatest inheritance, and this we realise at Christmas. Let it lead you to the happiness of the spiritual world and to the friendship of the Great Friend.

The story of the nativity, which he saw as the first refugee story, symbolised ‘all that was necessary to a civilised world’.

The nativity plays Whitehouse wrote in the years leading up to the second world war are not among his most engaging writings. Stilted and didactic, they show little ear for dialogue. They are essential to an understanding of the man, however. They are by no means straightforward variations on a theme, but responses (at whatever distance) to the pressure of real current events, and incorporate in places allegorical elements reflecting them. They should be seen, as well, as part of the developing crisis of a man who, as Stuart Eagles remarks, was deeply haunted by the prospect of war, and the vulnerability of all that he had created at Bembridge. This was not just the school and his boys  - his vital, living heroes - but his great collection and championing of John Ruskin, the public reputation of whose work was then perhaps at its lowest ebb.

The last of these plays is ‘The Peacemaker’. It appears never to have been printed. It was first produced at Bembridge in the autumn term, 1939, and performed again the following January in London at the Rudolf Steiner Hall, specially hired for the occasion, where it was played to an invited audience. The summary of the plot in the review published in the school newspaper has the following:

The three Magi travelling to find the Prince of Peace are challenged by Herod and his soldiers. They are unable to prevent their [the Magi] going on and when they have gone Herod’s soldiers refuse to carry out the deeds of further violence he would have them do.

The surviving guard-books of Yellowsands ephemera contain numerous programmes and cast-lists for ‘The Peacemaker’ which was revived in school again and again during the war and the years immediately following. Of the earlier, published plays The Road to Bethlehem did enjoy modest sales and was available from the Oxford University Press until well into the 1960s, though it never made much money for the school, as was discovered after Whitehouse’s death, the printer’s distribution and warehousing costs nearly wiping out any profit from the royalties.

The woodcut, by Geoffrey Eyles, was much favoured by Whitehouse.

The Inspections of 1932 and 1949

The inspectors who visited Bembridge on behalf of the Oxford and Cambridge Examination Board in 1928 found that ‘the curriculum seems well balanced upon modern lines’, the extra time in the timetable allotted to ‘manual work of various kinds’ being accounted for ‘by the bold excision of Greek and German…altogether’ (despite Whitehouse’s avowed preference for modern languages the only one taught was French, and this remained the case until at least the end of the 1960s).

During our stay the ‘school exhibition’ was in progress, and we were greatly impressed thereby. It consisted of specimens of the boys’ work, done in their spare time, in model-making, wood-work, illuminating, boat-building, painting, pottery, wood-cuts, even sculpture, and the like, together with examples of their school-work, note-books, translations, etc.

‘It not only reflected great credit on all concerned, but was a welcome indication of a varied and keen interest in creative work’. Furthermore,

It is to be noted that much of the actual work about the school, the building of a new pavilion, fittings in the dormitories, the printing of the School magazine (an excellent production), and so on, is carried out by the boys themselves.

By the turn of the decade and the arrival, in 1932, of the first government inspectors, the arts and crafts identity of the school, centred on the growing Ruskin collection, and kept well in the public eye by Whitehouse’s stream of published commentary, was firmly established. A certain disparity of provision didn’t escape notice, however. With regard to the school premises as a whole, the report remarks that

In comparison with the fine art galleries and the school museum the classrooms seem rather cramped and in the inclement weather which obtained during the week of the inspection they seemed inadequately warmed.

Many of the staff were found to be academically underqualified, though ‘they are earnest and sincere people’. The exceptions in terms of attainment were the science and arts and crafts teachers – Baggaley and Muirhead – who are specifically praised by the inspectors, having produced much ‘enterprising and successful work’. And more generally ‘though the requirements of external examinations are treated with no great deference the actual results in most subjects are quite satisfactory’. Only the achievement in French and Latin was found to be mediocre.

There are a number of references to school printing in the 1932 inspectors’ report. The introductory observations note that

In Form III and upwards all boys give three periods a week to Manual Instruction and two or three to art. Gardening, Script Writing [i.e. formal handwriting or calligraphy] and Printing also appear on the timetable, while out of school hours boys are constantly occupied in practical pursuits.

The work produced independently in woodwork, however, ‘does not seem to reach the same high plane as the out of school work in the Printing room’.

There is a detailed appraisal in the body of the report, under ‘Art and Craft’. The achievement in wood engraving is commended, and

the School is most fortunate in possessing an admirable building with equipment for printing. [Forms] IIA, III, LIV [Lower 4th] and Shell have one or two periods assigned to this subject in their curriculum, and the craft has proved to be very attractive to a number of boys who spend much of their spare time printing a variety of matter from notices and programmes to the School Magazine and some small books, many of these with woodcut illustrations. The enthusiastic Master in charge should be able to develop this craft further, specially in the direction of experiments in good design. The addition of some new faces of type, when possible, would clearly be a great help in that direction. [This would take some time.]

It might be observed…that a more systematic planning of the Art and Craft work on a progressive basis, with the closest collaboration between the various members of staff concerned, should add to the variety of the types of work that could be done, and should lead to some remarkable results in a school where Art and Craft receive so full a share of sympathy.

Nonetheless, it was noticed that ‘a larger proportion of boys from this school have passed on to well known art schools, or in some cases directly into artistic work as a means of earning their livelihood, than is the case in schools of a more conventional type’.

The popularity out of school hours of the printing room - the new building was then not yet a year old – was noted with approval, also the effectiveness of the guild system as a stimulus to progress, and the various creative opportunities provided by the school newspaper and museum. Neither was it felt that the ordinary academic subjects were being neglected, in fact the school was performing here surprisingly well given that, as the inspectors put it, ‘the boys are by no means picked material intellectually’.

*

The 1932 inspectors recognised at Bembridge an unusual, ongoing educational experiment which they were prepared to view with a good deal of generosity:

It is held that it is through the arts and crafts that a boy can best gain the experience of absolute realisation of self in work, and that this experience has a beneficial effect upon the spirit in which he approaches any other kind of work. Up to what stage dependence can be placed upon the manual arts as affording a wide intellectual training, and how far it is possible to preserve this harmony of interest and activity when the other subjects of the curriculum come to be studied are problems of great interest and difficulty which are at any rate being faced here.

By 1949, in the radically altered circumstances of post-war austerity and the need for rapid reconstruction, and in an educational environment in which many of Whitehouse’s ideas were much less unfamiliar to the mainstream, this attitude had changed. The 1949 report is in places quite harsh, depicting a school failing in its key ideals, and while there is due respect for his pioneer work, there is no longer the deference to Whitehouse personally, detectable in 1932. In general, ‘the school is not well equipped for teaching purposes except in arts and crafts subjects’ and ‘except in history and crafts the standard of work is below the average to be found in schools which provide education for boys of similar ability’.

The teaching of science, in particular, where ‘no syllabus or records are available’, was found wanting, requiring especially the integration of biology, still covered in the curriculum by the relic of (essentially observational) ‘Nature Study’ which ‘has not been considered part of the real science course’.

The inspectors were understandably impatient, but perhaps occasionally they were unjust. They point to the school’s current failure to exploit its privileged location: ‘it is a disappointment that in a school with such excellent natural facilities so little use has been made of them for so long…in marine field work alone there are possibilities open to very few schools in the country’.  While it was true that four years had passed since the return from Coniston, there was a persistent underlying problem which was hardly confined to Bembridge: the shortage of suitably qualified staff.

The art master ‘had barely completed three weeks in the new and unequipped art room at the time of the inspection’.

The exhibition, illustrating the work of the past session and previous years, revealed a disappointingly low standard. In drawing and in painting there is no evidence of a tradition, and the very uneven quality indicates uncertain guidance in recent years…The virile quality of original and creative exercises has been replaced by a tendency to rely on derivation from existing sources. This is particularly noticeable in the woodcuts used in association with typography. It would no doubt help to regenerate a new and personal inspiration in the craft of wood-cutting and wood-engraving if this work could be linked more closely with creative design in the art room.

And there is a rather cutting conclusion, whose reference to his book of 1928 Whitehouse would not have missed: ‘there is a need for a vigorous…approach to the visual arts more in keeping with the original concept of a creative education’.

And yet amidst all this criticism the paragraph headed ‘Typography’ – the newly-infused word now used in place of ‘printing’, reflecting the mid-century emergence of the specialism of graphic design - is curiously muted, even a touch reverential, and not necessarily looking forward:

In the craft of hand-composition and printing with the hand-press the school has maintained an unbroken tradition. There is a good standard of craftsmanship in the various productions and the simple, unostentatious layout, enables boys to see, as they should, that the fascination of playing with movable type is not inconsistent with dignity and simplicity of design.

With its technical mystique, its clear reflection of the ‘real’ world of industry, its manifest purpose in the community in which it was set, the printing room in its heyday was ever apt to work its magic on the visitor, be they prospective parents being shown round by the Head, or boys’ families looking in on Foundation Day weekends (when the decks were cleared to show off the year’s work) – or hard-nosed school inspectors.

Early exhibitions

A note in the fourth number of the school newspaper, Christmas 1920, records a school exhibition in which were shown ‘rare and beautiful books collected by Warden, including Quala [sic], Kelmscott and Doves Presses’. The sheer depth of artistry and the technical finish of the books from the two latter presses might have been hard to relate to, but the Bembridge boy printers would surely have recognised the Caslon Old Face used by the homelier Cuala Press (of whose books Whitehouse possessed several examples), one of many presses which, like their own, had taken advice from Emery Walker.

The exhibition probably took place in the then newly-built Ruskin Museum. Only the second new building put up by Whitehouse at the school site it is the somewhat squat, white-painted structure immediately to the right inside the school gates. In my day, the mid-1960s, it served as an art room, but it was originally an exhibition room and was the principal such space at Bembridge before the Ruskin Galleries were built as part of New House in the late nineteen-twenties.

Exhibitions were central to Whitehouse’s project at Bembridge, both for their educational value and as a way of linking the school to the local community (hence the building’s position), and in addition to the annual, Foundation Day, show of school work, there were brought in over the years a number of notable exhibitions from outside. Generally, exhibitions were to provide, wherever possible, specific enhancement to the learning environment, being intended ‘to instruct and inspire, with particular regard to the needs of the boys who were definitely associated with the work to which the exhibition related’.

The two earliest exhibitions recorded in the school newspaper appear, however, to have been largely composed of items from Whitehouse’s own collection. As well as other arts and crafts, both included sections of books, and in a diary entry of Oct. 9th 1921, Whitehouse notes a ‘Printers Guild mtg. at the exhibition…at mid-day. We went through specimens of printing from early  times in the history of the art, and examined the books from private presses on view’. Perhaps the participants’ appetite had been whetted by the lecture on the history of printing delivered that spring by one Parsons who had illustrated his talk with reproductions obtained from the British Museum and elsewhere. In the early days at least, Bembridge printers appear to have had ready access to contemporary or historical models of book-making of a high order (and as Whitehouse’s Ruskin collecting gathered pace, there would be examples of manuscript illumination and incunabula from Ruskin’s own library). 

This inspiration, together with developing practical skill, was soon seen to be bearing fruit. By the summer of 1923 the Guild of Printers is boasting that a ‘real monument [to greater technical knowledge] is embodied in the pages of this newspaper – in the care, patience and thought…[given]…in order to make it a worthy example of a great craft’. There are other small tokens of pride: for a few issues beginning that autumn the school shield on the title of the newspaper is printed in red; the Guild note in the summer issue, 1924, records that the workshop has been adorned with a piece of lettering in gold leaf.

Two years later, in the autumn of 1926, we find the Warden addressing the printers’ Guild Tea on the history of printing and showing the assembled company a book of 1507 (this would have been a Book of Hours, printed in Paris), which had belonged to Ruskin. The printers are by now contributing substantially to the annual School Exhibition. ‘The booklets, note paper, programmes and score cards printed by Rendall and Pearce were especially praiseworthy’, notes Muirhead in the summer of 1927 (the pair were made Master Printers that autumn).

The following spring number records an exhibition of ‘Written and Printed Books’ in the Ruskin Museum, which breaks new ground in its scope. ‘The books exhibited included a First Folio [a facsimile], some wonderful early printed books, including a Virgil of great beauty, printed in Venice in the 19th [sic] century, some beautiful modern books by way of contrast’. Examples of the ‘written book’ are reported to have included thirteenth and fourteenth century manuscripts, incorporating fine miniatures and illuminated borders.

It was at this time that, following some correspondence to which he had contributed in the Times Literary Supplement, Whitehouse was moved to make his own, somewhat idiosyncratic, contribution to the then rapidly developing literature of modern book production. At the Guild Tea of December 5th 1929 we find him in vain and generous mood: ‘The Warden at the conclusion of his address presented every member with an autographed copy of his new book, The Craftsmanship of Books’.

During the 1930s two substantial exhibitions of typographical interest were mounted at Bembridge School. There is really no equivalent to them in the later life of the school. The first ran for most of the spring term in 1933. It would appear to have been a much expanded and enlarged restaging of the 1928 show, taking advantage of the splendid new galleries in New House, and doubtless including some of Whitehouse’s new Ruskin acquisitions. It was given an extensive notice in the school newspaper.

The motif underlying this term’s exhibition was the development of books through the ages, with particular reference to printing. In his opening remarks the Warden stressed the fact that no attempt was being made to take sides on the questions of who printed the first book or where it was printed. We were concerned only with the finished products in so far as they were examples of beauty in work and craftsmanship.

In a series of cases along one wall were exhibited a series of rare and valuable books. The arrangement was in chronological order and above the cases were charts showing the various authors who worked during that particular century and what advances were made in printing. With the aid of these charts…the arrangement of the books could be more easily understood and the scope of the exhibition the more fully grasped.

At the beginning there were books fashioned by hand, such as the Flaunden Missal, beautifully illuminated and marvellously preserved. Then we advanced to one of the earliest books printed, to a facsimile of Shakespeare’s first folio, to first editions of Scott and Dickens. Among the modern books were many examples of fine printing and binding by William Morris’s Kelmscott Press, by the Gregynog Press, the Grayhound Press and the Golden Cockerel Press.

The focus on the contemporary, well-made trade edition, is noteworthy:

There were also exhibited the processes by which half-tone plates and line-blocks were produced and methods employed in binding a book. The high standard of work combined with cheapness which many modern firms were maintaining could be seen in a display of cheap yet attractively produced books. On the walls were charts illustrating such subjects as the Stationers’ Company, the printing of the Bible,  illumination of manuscripts, all of which greatly assisted those examining the exhibition.

As seems also to have been the case in 1928, some of the items described here were lent by Oxford University Press. John Johnson, always ‘happy to oblige one who has been as good a friend to the Press as you’ – he was printing most of Whitehouse’s books at this period – had sent two boxes of material, one ‘containing seven books for exhibition purposes’ (probably including the First Folio, which looks like the facsimile of the Bridgewater Library copy, edited by Sidney Lee and published by the Clarendon Press in 1902), the other ‘the same gear for production that I sent you before’ (presumably referring to the 1928 exhibition), most likely relating to the exhibits concerning photo-mechanical processes and the techniques of book-binding.

The masters R.G. Lloyd and T.M. Stedman appear to have done a great deal of the preparatory work for the exhibition, Whitehouse’s contribution being presented as more that of the generous patron (as he often liked to be seen) than the instigator, though he was ‘ever ready to assist those working with him’. A number of boys, ‘enthusiastic workers…prepared charts and mounted illustrations’. Masters availed themselves of the opportunity to bring their classes to inspect the show and conduct question and answer sessions. The exhibition was held to be a great success.

In contrast to this is the remarkable one-man show dedicated to Eric Gill (by this date a widely-known public figure) mounted in the spring term, 1936, and reported by Stedman in the fiftieth number of the school newspaper. One longs to find some photographic record of this exhibition but, as in 1933, none seems to have been made. But although it’s not quite clear how much of Gill’s typographic work was shown other than the Golden Cockerel Four Gospels (to which Stedman, recent successor to Muirhead in the printing room, brings his printer’s eye), there was much else to interest the printers.

The aim of the show was to bring together a collection representing all aspects of Gill’s art and craft.

The exhibition gave a very good idea of the versatility of the man. There was one piece of sculpture, a piper surrounded by children. In addition to this there was a large number of photographs of the more important works he had executed. A group of photographs showed the Stations of the Cross, which are in Westminster Cathedral. Then there were the figures of Ariel and Prospero, which are over the entrance to Broadcasting House. The War memorial of Leeds University was very striking in its symbolic theme, Christ driving the money changers from the temple. On a smaller scale, but exquisite in its treatment, was the memorial to Winston Churchill’s daughter.

Another feature of the exhibition was a large number of woodcuts which had been used to illustrate books. These were remarkable for their firmness of line and for their design. The human figures were so fitted into their designs of leaves and stems that, although at first one commented on the absence of ornament, on closer examination one realised that the design and treatment were most elaborate. This was clearly shown in the capitals for the Four Gospels.

The actual woodblocks themselves had been filled with gesso which stood out white against the black of the block. In themselves they were of considerable beauty.

Gill had designed a number of founts of type and had set up a press upon which he printed with some of them. In some cases private firms had used his types to produce very beautiful books. A wonderful edition of the Four Gospels printed by the Golden Cockerel Press, and illustrated by Eric Gill was shown. We found at first that it was perhaps a little disturbing to see the uneven right hand side of the page, but apart from this and a few minor considerations in the shape of one or two letters, the type was easy to read and pleasing to the eye.

There was on exhibition a number of original drawings. The most elaborate was the preliminary full size drawing of the Crucifixion, which had been designed for the chapel of Rossall School. There was a small but very interesting group of pencil drawings of heads. These had not been shaded but were the hard lines the sculptor would employ…

There were some architectural drawings, too, one imagines from the beginning of Gill’s career. All in all, the show was ‘a very valuable contribution to the cultural life of the school, in that it has brought us into direct contact with the work of one of the foremost practising craftsmen of the day’. The Warden is thanked for obtaining the exhibits (but was his the original contact with the Gill studio?). He had been assisted in arranging the exhibition by the staff brothers Basil and Niel Rocke.  

Evacuation: printing at Coniston

With the fall of France in 1940 the south coast became the front line, the nearby Portsmouth naval base and dockyard were that much closer to a confident enemy, and what may have been regarded up until then as a precautionary measure was now deemed a necessity. Whitehouse’s adventure island at the end of an island, field of youthful chivalry, fastness of the old Liberalism, where Ruskin’s flame had been safe from the various gales of the twentieth century: modernism, psychoanalysis, Bloomsbury, revolutionary socialism – was physically threatened. According to Stedman, the challenge of the evacuation of Bembridge School to Coniston gave the ageing Whitehouse a new lease of life.

The Waterhead Hotel at Coniston had come on the market just at the right moment. It would provide the school’s base for the duration of the war. Although capacious, Ruskin’s old home Brantwood, bought by Whitehouse in 1932, lacked the basic sanitary facilities for conversion to a school building, though it might have accommodated some staff. But it would be Whitehouse alone who would make his quarters there.

The carriers he employed weren’t removal men: it was remembered that most of the work involved in preparing the three lorry-loads of school equipment which made their way north in the summer of 1940 was done by the staff. Neither were the carriers able to cope alone with the printing press. Following the arrival of the main transport, Stedman had to return to Bembridge to organise evacuation of the printing room, an earlier decision not to do so having been reversed. All the type in galley was dissed and the two formes for the eight-page, token edition of the Newspaper, put together before the end of the (much fore-shortened) summer term, were wrapped up in corrugated cardboard. He dismantled and packed the Albion himself and to secure the type-cases for removal screwed them together one upon another – a stack of about ten he says – using an empty one as a cover.

The new printing room at Coniston was the smaller of two garages [belonging to the Waterhead Hotel] which had once been coach houses. Two big swing doors ran the full height of the room, the walls were of unsurfaced slate and the floor, liberally covered with oil from its previous occupants, was of uneven slate flags. To get a level site for the press part of this was dug up, two sleepers were laid parallel to one another and the feet of the press rested on them. Lighting was installed, the cases were set up and rough benches were constructed [by the printers themselves] for the guillotine and for the correction of galleys and formes.

But the printers’ difficulties were by no means at an end:

The blackout presented a great problem for after we had evolved a successful system for blacking out the room there was still the difficulty that to open the door would let out a great flood of light into the courtyard outside. So a ‘light boy’ had to be appointed whose job was to put out all the lights whenever anyone wanted to go in or out of the room, a most tedious and tiresome proceeding for all concerned but one for which we could find no other solution.

The dry-stone walls of the garage were unsurfaced, making the work space extremely draughty. It was

almost impossible for the press worker putting on the paper to get the individual sheets into the pins. But with time and ingenuity this was overcome, though never completely eliminated.

There’s no mention of cold. There are in the records some wonderful summer photographs of the school at Coniston: parties hiking on the Old Man; long-limbed youths in front of skiffs and sailing dinghies drawn up Swallows and Amazons-like on the shore at what must be the bottom of the meadow below Brantwood - but for a largely southern-based school population, as they returned each autumn, the lake village must have seemed very far away - something like seven and a half hours of wartime stopping train from Euston, with only the refreshment you took with you, Stedman recalled.

Resilience, ingenuity, improvisation and adaptability were the order of the day. Besides the privations of their draughty garage (later remembered as ‘the old building opposite the old cowshed’), for the printers this mainly meant getting used to wartime paper shortages. The length and print-run of the Newspaper had to be severely restricted. The grey cover paper used became unobtainable so the wrapper was abandoned (only to be restored some two decades later when Dearden became Printer). Instead of the cream, antique laid papers of ordinary times the printers had to make do with whatever was available, frequently characterless, machine-finished stock of inferior colour and opacity. Inking and pressure needed constant review and adjustment.

Looking back in 1959 on the Coniston experience as a whole, Stedman saw it as the core-test of the school’s fitness for post-war growth. But the process wasn’t, perhaps, without loss. The beginning of the end of the Guild system in the printing room may be traceable to this time. The rather small group of entirely Coniston-trained printers who returned to Bembridge in the autumn of 1945 must have felt a special bond.

One change associated with printing in the Coniston years is the addition of the Foundation Day programme to the normal round of school jobbing work. Before the war Whitehouse had always had this done commercially – a reflection of his caution and circumspection when it came to the matter of the school’s public image. But this increase was exceptional in what were generally much reduced circumstances.

Just one pamphlet was printed in Coniston, Wartime Christmas, the text of Whitehouse’s address at the school carol service in 1941. The Newspaper suggests that printing was completed the following spring (though according to Dearden in Printing at Coniston the work was largely set and printed by pupil A.C. Birkett over the Christmas holiday).

Wartime Christmas is among the most poignant and compelling of all Yellowsands printings - and a gem of the pre-Dearden era of typographic austerity. Though one comes to see Stedman as above all the rationalist in the printing room, in another sense his leadership had embraced the limited resources (though in the continuing absence of italic he had wisely added versatile small caps to the palette), and he came as close as anyone to establishing the unaffected art of grace and simplicity Whitehouse envisaged there. A meditation on the meaning of the Nativity in the midst of war, Wartime Christmas looks to the coming new world, setting forth the requirements for the settlement in ‘the extension of peace’. It combines something of the public mood behind the then imminent Beveridge Report with a memorably succinct statement of several of Whitehouse’s long-held ideas on social and educational reform, and national security. All this couched in his inimitable, at times Utopian rhetoric, with its unmistakable dash of Protestant mysticism. ‘The first divine message to mankind at the Nativity was the proclamation of peace on earth, and goodwill to all men’. ‘Christmas,’ he told the boys

gives us all the same opportunity for thought. We are able to link our lives to the unseen.

Beyond the thought of waiting presents, goodness knows what they made of this.