Delectaland and the Havindens

There was a time when every town of a certain size would have its own brewery, lemonade factory, biscuit maker and confectionery producer.  Watford was large enough to have most of these businesses - confectionery was represented by Delectaland.  Judging by its publicity it was a business with its roots firmly planted in Fairyland in the belief that repeated exposure to diaphanous flutterings would develop a growing market for their exotically packaged sugary offerings.  This ad is from 1919, less than 12 months after the end of the Great War during which the factory served the nation by turning out thousands of explosive shells.  Eliminating the flavour of cordite from the Delecta range would have been a formidable task.  The Chairman of the company was Gustavus Havinden, who, inspired by the example of Lord Leverhulme’s paternalistic philanthropy, made plans to build housing and welfare facilities for his workforce.  Details of this scheme are hard to come by and it can be safely assumed that it didn’t amount to much. There are indications online that worker housing was built in Neston Road, North Watford but there’s nothing to confirm it.

Another reason for taking an interest in Mr. Havinden is his son Ashley, born in 1903 who would become one of the most versatile and influential designers in Britain.  The family link also explains why the young Havinden spent 18 months absorbing the technical side of the printing industry while employed in various print works in Watford.  This detailed understanding of the principles of typesetting, layout, photogravure and block making led to his first job at the newly established W S Crawford advertising agency where he would remain for his entire working life.  The lack of an art college background was no deterrent and may have been an advantage in allowing his natural instinct to range far and wide in search of visual ideas while rejecting the narrow categorisations of the ‘trained specialist’.  Crawford gave him the chance to live and work in Germany where he came to appreciate the superior power of German graphic design and illustration under the influence of Modernism and the infant Bauhaus. 

Having swerved the perils of art education where ‘commercial art’ was regarded as a second class activity, Ashley had no inhibitions about exploring any aspect of the visual arts that engaged his interests and he happily tried his hand at textile and rug design, interior design, and abstract painting.  Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson and John Piper were in his friendship group and he developed a keen interest in contemporary architecture to the extent that he moved his family into an apartment at Highpoint II, designed by Lubetkin in 1938.  This placed him at the heart of the North London friends of European Modernism where he continued his tireless promotion of Modernist values, working with European emigrés such as Herbert Bayer, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Walter Gropius and instrumental in organising Mondrian’s stay in London.  All of which was accomplished in a deeply conservative visual culture in which the prevailing advertising setting was dominated by a blend of Merrie England and  Imperial Victoriana with a dash of Regency Dandies plus Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh.

The illustrations are, in descending order: an ad for Delectaland from Colour magazine, 1919 - a self-portrait included as a plate in Ashley Havinden’s Line Drawing for Reproduction (published in 1933) - Ashley’s best known design for Eno’s Fruit Salt from 1927 - a post-war ad for Martini (1953), typical of Ashley’s mid-century phase - an illustrated magazine insert promoting the Delecta range for Christmas 1928 (by which time the business was less than 2 years away from closure in 1930) and the book cover for Line Drawing for Reproduction.  The key text is Ashley Havinden, Advertising & the Artist, Michael Havinden et al, Edinburgh 2003.

 

Eno’s “Fruit Salt”

In 1924, a bold and colourful poster designed by E McKnight Kauffer appeared on the nation’s billboards with the slogan “First Thing Every Morning”. E McKnight Kauffer, an American emigré, was Britain’s most avant-garde designer, the first to absorb the pictorial language of Cubism and a brave choice to publicise an antiquated Victorian product.  This marked a decisive break with Eno’s Victorian heritage and would be followed by a long association with contemporary designers including Ashley Havinden, Charles Pears and Austin Cooper as well as an extended series of variants on Kauffer’s original. The version shown above was an adaptation miniaturised for use on a Bryant & May matchbook cover.

Eno’s was a product of eternal Victorian anxieties around metabolism, digestion and bowel movements. Advertising was essential to its success and the name was prominently displayed on Victorian railway station platforms and almost every passing omnibus. The Victorian public had an insatiable appetite for miracle cures and instant remedies.  Pharmacists leapt into action, concocting an enormous range of chemical compounds and magic elixirs, to meet the demand. One of the most successful was a Newcastle chemist, James Crossley Eno who invented an effervescent powder that promised to ‘clear the intestines, rouse the torpid liver and stimulate the mucous membrane’.  Decoratively packaged and relentlessly publicised, it rapidly became the market leader and spawned many copies and imitations.

Eno saw no need to employ an advertising agency, convinced as he was that he could do a much better job himself with a mind well-stocked with aphorisms and received ideas.  His bizarre contributions to the history of Victorian advertising were memorably described by E S Turner thus.

The most eccentric, the most obstinately ‘different’ advertisements in late Victorian magazines, and for a long time afterwards, were those personally devised by the founder of Eno’s Fruit Salts. Three quarters of his space would be taken up by high-flown quotations on the theme of man’s unconquerable mind, from the ancient and modern philosophers.  The underlying theme, so far as it was distinguishable, was the sin of allowing the human intellect to be harnessed to a sluggish gut; but often the quotations came so thickly and haphazardly that it was impossible to trace a continuity of thought behind them. Now and again the compiler would throw in an uplifting poem which had taken his fancy, or perhaps an original rhymed tribute from a retired major-general. He kept an artist busy drawing scenes in which lost wanderers stumbled into forest glades and found words like ‘Integrity’ mysteriously carved on the rocks, or in which seated greybeards solemnly drew the attention of milkmaids to moral phrases graven on the ground before them. Sometimes the descent from the cloudless peaks of the intellect to the mucous walls of the intestinal canal was achieved almost in one sentence. For a generation the strong-minded founder of the firm fought off any suggestion that he should ‘modernize’ his announcements.

(The Shocking History of Advertising, 1965 Penguin edition, page 89.)

This drawing of the goddess Hygeia banishing the evil imps of ill-health marked a rare excursion by Arthur Rackham into the world of commercial art.  Taking a break from his routine of terrorising the children of the Edwardian professional classes with nursery tales transformed into nightmares, Rackham drew a small army of evil spirits, from Inferiority Complex to Raspberry Tongue via the Pip and Housemaid’s Knee, all sent packing by the purgative powers of Eno’s.  The mood lifted in the late 1920s when Eno’s engaged the services of W S Crawford advertising agency and began a dramatic shift to a more contemporary visual approach. After McKnight Kauffer came the young Ashley Havinden, who in 1927, fresh from an extended visit to study modern publicity in Germany, designed a famously dynamic ad in which 3 angular horsemen trailed banners emblazoned with the virtues of Eno’s on a diagonal march across the page.  The result owed more to the Gebrausgraphik tradition than to any Bauhaus influence.  It would be followed by many more ads designed to appeal to the contemporary eye while conveying a sense of breezy optimism about the comforting sense of well-being that awaited the consumer of Eno’s Fruit Salts.  Eno (minus the apostrophe ’s’) is today owned and marketed as an antacid in Asia and South America by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) - a curious afterlife for a quintessentially Victorian patent treatment.