Rails over the Ocean

It took 4,000 labourers 7 years to build a 120 mile railroad connecting mainland Florida with the city of Key West. The project was financed by Henry Flagler, fabulously wealthy founder of Standard Oil and cost more than $50 million.  Flagler was a master of manipulating markets and freezing out competitors and until the advent of Anti-Trust legislation, he and Rockefeller were well on the way to establishing undisputed control of the entire American market for oil and gas. On the plus side he was an attentive husband and in middle age accompanied his ailing spouse to Florida in search of a cure in warmer climes. At which point his interest in fossil fuels declined in favour of a new passion for developing resort hotels and transport infrastructure to expand the market for Florida tourism.  The system of “convict leasing” enabled local prisons to supply him with a regular source of (literally) captive labour for his projects.  In a weird parody of the Manifest Destiny, Flagler’s army of contractors relentlessly drove south, clearing wilderness, draining swamps, dredging channels, building roads and luxury hotels on a steady advance via St. Augustine and Palm Beach that ended in Miami.

The connection to Key West was planned to move freight that had travelled via the new Panama Canal northwards to customers across America but the anticipated traffic never materialised. The postcard view above shows a vast but relatively passive crowd gathered at Key West in January 1912 to greet the arrival of the first regular service on the new extension to the Florida East Coast Railway. In the 1920s there was a daily train from New York to Key West timed to connect with a ferry to Havana. Key West to Miami was a 4½ hour trip thanks to a 15 mph limit on all the oversea sections.  Maintenance was a constant drain on resources and the railroad was on the verge of insolvency when fate intervened in the form of the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 that overwhelmed the railroad beyond repair. In a final indignity, surviving sections of the infrastructure were commandeered to support a new Overseas Highway that survives to the present day. It had lasted for 23 years. Flagler died in 1913, just over a year after the railroad was inaugurated. If Flagler had not declined the honour of renaming Key Biscayne, there would be no city of Miami today - only Flagler and Flagler Beach, Flagler Dolphins, Flagler Vice, Flagler Art Deco …

 

Alphabet Books - ABC du Père Castor

For an illustrator a pictorial alphabet book presents a number of challenges, not least of which is the shortage of words beginning with q, x and z. Today’s example follows a thematic approach based on wild animals - a popular approach that focuses on groupings such as Flora, Fauna, Aquatic Life, Astronomy, Travel etc.  Père Castor illustrated books for children first appeared in France in the 1930s, English language versions were published by George, Allen and Unwin after the war in a series of 8 as Père Castor’s Wild Animal Books. In each volume the lively illustrations are the work of Latvian born illustrator, Feodor Rojankovsky (1891-1970), known professionally as Rojan.  Born as a Russian citizen and educated in St. Petersburg, he was conscripted into the White Army in 1919 and ended up as a p-o-w in Poland, by 1922 he was officially stateless. He found his way to Paris in 1925 and established himself as a commercial illustrator with a speciality in expensively produced volumes of suavely visualised erotic encounters before finding a niche in the world of books for children.  The drawings he produced for the Père Castor series have a wonderful sense of spontaneity achieved by a rich tonal range of closely controlled mark making on lithographic plates. As the blurb on the back of one volume nicely puts it - the book is “gently ablaze with Rojan’s lithographs”.  After arriving in the US in 1941 he began an almost 30 year career as an illustrator for children’s books.

Rojan’s cover design is a minor compositional triumph I can’t recall seeing elsewhere. The group of animals on the front cover are drawn again on the back as if viewed from behind. Each creature has a page to itself with the only exceptions at the end of the alphabet (from w to z) to cope with the limitations imposed by the problematic number of 26 letters. The placing on the page and the lightness of touch are a delight throughout the book. Another alphabet book (Off By Train) can be seen by following this link. The last image is my collection of Père Castor Wild Animal books.

 

Beasts of Burden

Time for some postcards featuring unskilled manual labour - the jobs nobody wants to do unless economic necessity prevails. Curious that postcard producers should take an interest in such humble activity but their efforts resulted in many types and subsets.  Local colour was the polite term for singling out workers from the bottom of the economic ladder and printing multiple copies of their likenesses to be sold to visitors, travellers and tourists.  As the decades passed these images would become documentary evidence of lost ways of life but nothing could have been further from their minds.  Sales figures and turnover were paramount and if demand could be generated for such subjects the market would provide.  For the purchasers and the recipients back home they were mildly diverting examples of life’s rich pageant and a reminder of the road that led from indigence and idleness to penury. Plus the self satisfaction derived from observing those trapped by a fate that you have avoided. Miners and metal bashers served as respected exemplars of the dignity of labour - none of that applied to the street sweepers, porters, agricultural labourers and scavengers featured here.

 

Centurion Bar, Newcastle Station

I first glimpsed this extraordinary interior about 10 years ago from the doorway.  Within was the intimidating spectacle of a vast darkened room, echoing to the declamatory racket of a regiment of raucous drinkers, their attention fixed on a Premier League football game showing on an enormous plasma screen. On that occasion I went no further but promised to return at a more opportune moment.  Last August was my chance to revisit and we must thank the North Eastern Railway for this dazzling space - in 1892-93 the space was transformed by architect William Bell from a conventional waiting room into a beautiful ceramic clad First Class Refreshment Room. A Baroque styled decorative scheme was applied in faience supplied by Burmantofts of Leeds that not only covered the walls but extended upward to enclose the lantern ceiling surround. Browns, yellows and greens predominate. There was an interlude in the 1960s when the room was converted for British Transport Police use as holding cells for Geordie miscreants and it was only in 2000 that the stud walls came down to reveal the concealed ceramic splendour. When restoration was complete the only absent feature was the semicircular faience-clad bar that was lost at some point. It’s a reminder of how unusual it is in this country that the public are permitted to patronise such opulent premises without paying a premium for the privilege.

 

Guinness Scrapbook 1937

We like to think of embarrassment as a uniquely British thing but the concept is present in every known language. It’s especially prevalent among the English thanks to the local tradition of invented codes of behaviour, vocabulary, idioms, pronunciations - all designed to divide outsiders from insiders and perpetuate class distinctions.  Cartoonist H M Bateman arrived in England from South Africa with a readymade chip resting on his shoulder, a grumpy disposition and a casual fluency in drawing social tableaus. Ideally qualified to explore the English world of embarrassment and unwitting social transgression, he took pleasure in distorting the human features to convey all the nuances of social terror and personal humiliation - hair that quivers as it uplifts from the scalp, eyes on the verge of exploding from their sockets, lips that tremble and splutter, bodies that vibrate with shame.  A new genre was created in which the discomfort of disgraced victims was mercilessly exposed for the entertainment of all. When he wasn’t working much of his time was spent in protracted and ultimately unsuccessful disputation with tax authorities having conceived an obsessive aversion to all forms of taxation.

The Guinness offer to the nation’s doctors for 1937 was a collection of literary and visual tributes to the virtues of the famous stout presented the reader as if pasted into a scrapbook with a cover design by Antony Groves-Raines, many if not all of them were extracted from previous advertising campaigns. The page sequence was broken up with full page colour cartoons drawn by Bateman, themed around the worlds of golf, cricket and performance, relatively gentle in tone. Several of these had already featured in press and magazine ads. The choice of subjects reveals an assumption that the medical profession of the day was exclusively male - not really unsafe for 1937. For another selection of Bateman’s work for Guinness, please follow this link.  As for the product, Guinness has never been more popular with a new generation falling for its distinctive charms to the point where the brewers were declaring a shortage late last year which had the desired effect of boosting sales even further as consumers rushed to stockpile.  Diageo (corporate owners of the brand) responded to their good fortune, not as you might expect by expanding production but by considering selling the company to take advantage of its increase in value.  Must be what they teach in business school.