Commercial Art / Art and Industry en | June 1, 1928 | page 180 - International Advertising & Design DataBase

CELEBRITIES OF ADVERTISING II.—FRANK PICK By Sagittarius THE Underground is one of the most modern things we have in England. It is safe, quick, clean and decorative. Its trains are good as architecture and its posters are good as publicity. Both partake of the modern revolt against dowdiness, the one by necessity, perhaps, but the other certainly by intention. A coach of the surface railways is still quite like the coach of the days before steam but a coach on the Underground is like a sitting-room of the day after to-morrow. Its posters are sufficiently of the present time to be called futuristic by those who still live fifty years ago, but tfiey are so excellent of their kind that they brighten the lives of even the most conservative of Londoners. Such an amount of enlightenment must be due to something. There must be an individual reason for that distinctive character which Bus and Tube possess, and that individual reason is very largely contained in the personality of Mr. Frank Pick, the new Managing Director at Broadway, Westminster. There is no reason, as far as one knows, save Mr. Pick, why Underground advertising should not be quite ordinary. There is enough commonplace advertising in England for such a circumstance to cause no comment. After all, people must get home from the office, and a titillation of the aesthetic sense is not absolutely necessary to make them start out on tlie homeward journey. There is no rival concern which is bent on making people walk, and competition of any sort is not very serious. Such is the super ficial argument often to be heard. But this was realised, and is met by the fact that the Underground advertising is not directed to establishing a state of affairs which already exists. It suggests pleasure journeys, shopping excursions, trips to green places which are, after all, not very 168 far off and can be reached one drowsy Saturday when the town stifles in the heat. The Underground under Mr. Pick's guidance has added to its business by revealing fresh sources of recreation. Mr. Pick is in his fiftieth year. Twenty- two of those have been devoted to London transport, and all the time since he qualified as a lawyer has been given to some form of traffic, for he was once on the staff of the L.N.E.R. From Lincolnshire he went to York from York he went to Sunderland and Newcastle-on-Tyne, and thence, in 1906, to the Metropolis, where he has gone on from success to success. The know ledge of travel he has not acquired in this period is not worth acquiring, and the number of organisations dealing with it, to which he belongs, makes an imposing list far too long to be written down here. He gives the impression of alert efficiency, and also of something rather more than efficiency. He is creative as well as competent, and he knows how to interest multitudes as well as see that they are conveyed in vehicles without being killed. A succession of first-rate artists have found themselves in the posters he has commissioned and the wait on the platform is turned from tedium to pleasure by the perpetual revelation it displays of week-end landscapes. It is a delight to go through the caverns measureless to man of which he is the overseer even so far as Morden. Of his activities in dealing with the publicity of the Empire Marketing Board it is scarcely yet time to speak. It is more difficult through the medium of the poster to sell the mahogany of West Africa than a day at Hampstead Heath, but linking up the Empire by publicity is a magnificent undertaking in which he has full scope for his abilities. c>

Previous Next

Nov	DEC	Jun
	01
2016	2017	2020