Dorset Family Search

Statutory holidays were not introduced until 1938, and it is estimated that up to then only about 28% of the country’s workforce enjoyed holidays with pay; most people still worked a Saturday morning shift, and shop-staff, who had to work all Saturday, had been granted a half-day in lieu only in the 1920s. Thus, the ‘day in the sun’ of the exhibition title is the August bank holiday, that brief moment of almost universal liberation when hundreds of trains took day-trippers to Blackpool, Margate, Southend, Brighton, Clacton and other accessible seaside resorts. The railway companies became important commissioners of artwork for posters, such as Tom Purvis’s East Coast Joys (Fig. 2) for the London & North Eastern, and Andrew Johnson’s The South Coast is the Sunny Coast for the Southern Railway. Nobody was more important in this field than Frank Pick of the London Passenger Transport Board, whose collaboration with artists is being celebrated in an exhibition entitled ‘Away we go!’ at the Fry Gallery in Saffron Walden. The London Passenger Transport Board embraced not only the underground, but also Green Line Coaches, and the Fry’s exhibition, utilising the archive of the London Transport Museum, consists of advertising material drawn or engraved by Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious (Figs. 8 and 9). Month by month Bawden ‘doodled’ his way around the calendar, detailing London’s attractions and emphasising the service provided by the underground railway; in different mood, Ravilious produced punchy, dramatic woodcuts to accompany the Green Line text. Today it is hard to believe that the cut of a leafy lane and sunburst over a five-bar gate was created to advertise the coach-service to Crawley, ‘a friendly old coaching town half-way between London and Brighton’, as the accompanying text says.

Suburbia and ribbon development spread along the arterial roads, and it was these new roads that enabled city dwellers to get out into the countryside. They were eloquently, if patronisingly, described by J.B. Priestley in his English Journey of 1934 as passing their unredeemed lowness, not only in the sense of obscenity, but lowness of outlook in every direction. The slightest hint of “higher” influences would ruin them utterly.’ (1) They capture the essence of the ‘kiss-me-quick’ culture of the seaside resorts that attracted the slum-dwellers of the great industrial cities.