The Dreamland Express

A group of children - boys and girls - lying face down on the ground, staring over the edge of a precipice.  One of the boys is upright and racing towards the edge in the company of a snake.  Is he planning to jump? The scene has been visualised from above giving a strong sense that they are looking into a terrifying void.  They are, in fact, at the edge of the world.  Beyond is the limitless emptiness of space. This anxiety inducing glimpse of infinity comes from a book for children, written and illustrated by H R Millar (1869-1942), the subject of our previous post.

The Dreamland Express was published by Oxford University Press in 1927 and copies are hard to find. A new edition was issued in 1989 and these scans come from one such copy.  Millar put his heart and soul into this book, writing an adventure story in which a trio of schoolboys follow a voyage of discovery through fantastical and other worldly landscapes, encountering a bewildering sequence of wild and dangerous animals, dragons, giants and citizens of exotic and eccentric civilisations.  Holding it all together was the series of trains in which the young adventurers travelled that enabled Millar to indulge his lifelong passion for railways and spice his narrative with romantic vignettes of life on the rails.  Millar begins his tale with a haunting description of the children discovering a passenger train all but concealed in dense woodland, headed by a majestic steam engine entangled in foliage. A full complement of crew are ready and waiting to welcome them on board and get the journey underway.

In the first half of the book the train races through imaginary cities on bridges and viaducts that have all but escaped the laws of gravity, arriving at an extraordinary cavernous station built in the style of Ancient Egypt. Along the way our heroes meet a flirtatious girl, always an uncomfortable moment of potential disruption to the simple pleasures of male companionship. Unlike John, Peter and George she is not granted the dignity of a name but she wins their respect by revealing an unexpected interest in trains, enough to admit her to the travelling band. Later the group is joined by a school swot whose function is to irritate with displays of pedantry.  The second half of the book involves an enforced change of train - the new locomotive is a decrepit specimen apparently riveted together from a motley assortment of life expired parts in the manner of W Heath Robinson. A Mysterious Oriental with a private train carrying a magnificent retinue of slaves and devoted followers enters the story and by sleight of hand substitutes their locomotive for something even worse - an Oriental fantasy made from porcelain and timber with a silken canopy covering the cab.  Despite the handicap of a disintegrating locomotive our heroes find time to rescue a slave from execution, win the favour of a Giant and emerge unscathed from a pitch-black Canyon of Darkness.

Millar’s visions of alternative worlds are brought to life with pen and ink drawing combined with colour washes - the results are close to the visual conventions of the comic strip. Echoes of Lyonel Feininger and Winsor McCay can be seen in Millar’s eccentric architectural fantasies although no evidence that he ever saw their work exists. Millar employed the voice of a narrator throughout to offer context and commentary and he didn’t flinch from challenging subject matter.  The image of the eternally burning city and the desperation of its inhabitants is the stuff of young nightmares and evokes a sense of dread equal to the confrontation with the edge of the world where the journey ends. Millar resolves this situation by having the three boys simultaneously awaken in their beds back home.  Normality has been restored and the boys can resume their natural progression to adulthood where John flies a Spitfire in the Battle of Britain, eventually becoming a Conservative MP, Peter survives the privations of a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, later rising through the ranks of the Anglican Church to become a Suffragan Bishop and George, having served as a Junior Officer in the Royal Navy, studies Fine Art at the Slade, briefly exhibits his paintings of railway disasters at the Beaux-Arts Gallery while becoming a notorious habitué of the Colony Room, bantering the night away with George Melly and Francis Bacon.

 

Great Railway Stations No. 13: Gare de Lens

Coal mining was the major activity for over a century in the medium sized town of Lens in Northern France but none of it remains today. Like many similar towns and cities in Britain it has struggled to find a new role for itself. In an effort to attract tourism, an annex of the Louvre (Louvre-Lens) opened in 2012. The gallery displays a selection of artworks brought from Paris for a provincial vacation. Visitor numbers have fallen from 900,000 in the first year to 450,000 in 2017 which suggests the Bilbao-effect is fading fast. Some of these visitors will have arrived by train in which case it’s to be hoped they had a good look at the station buildings or they would have missed one of France’s most distinctive and eccentric station buildings.

The present Gare de Lens was designed and built 1926-27 by architect, Urbain Cassan (1890 - 1979). Cassan also designed stations for Senlis, Brest and Saint-Quentin and later was involved in the design for the Tour Montparnasse (1973). For Lens, Cassan came up with a plan said to be inspired by the shape of a steam locomotive boiler in which the rounded arches represent the wheels and a tower to represent the funnel. The concourse and booking hall was decorated on all four walls with mosaic panels that portrayed the local industry, coal mining and the miners who extracted the coal in stylised pictorial form. They were the work of Auguste Labouret (1871-1964). Labouret was principally a stained glass artist with a reputation for the sensitive restoration of church stained glass. But he often worked on railway stations, among others, Saint Quentin (also designed by Cassan), Lyon and Gare Saint-Lazare.

Each decorative panel is about 1.5m in height, extending to almost the full width of the station interior. Over the ticket windows we see colliery winding gear and associated industrial buildings in a modified Cubist idiom. Another panel is flanked by grim-faced miners, shouldering pick-axes and gripping miners’ lamps against a backdrop of pit-heads, slag heaps and smoking chimneys. The third panel is a landscape of bridges and factory buildings with cargo ships and tugs. The final panel (and the one that greets the arriving passenger) continues and develops the communication theme, pipes and tubes, telegraph wires to one side – on the other a massive steam locomotive powers its way into the composition. The installation appears to be made with standard-size tiles, some of which are laid intact, though most are fragmented to a greater or lesser degree. The colour scheme is a muted harmony of blacks, whites, greys and brown.

The station buildings and the tower are all rendered and painted white with decorative patterned concrete mouldings. The Art Deco-inspired window frames are formed of slender, geometric glazing bars, painted in red. A Deco-styled font was used for the original cast iron signage on the platform. To see the resemblance to a steam engine requires a little imaginative effort but it remains a splendid conceit and the only scheme where Cassan attempted anything like it. To their credit, SNCF maintain the building in first class condition.

Bourneville 1927 Cocoa Story

Today we see how Frank Newbould (1887-1951), one of the greatest and most prolific of poster designers in the inter-war years, turned his talents to illustrating an instructional book for Cadbury’s, published in 1927. The visual idiom is the same as he employed on his work for the Empire Marketing Board – intense hues, strong tonal contrasts, all supported by beautifully observed drawing executed with flair. A little graphic wit is included where the artist notes the formal similarity between the small boats and the cocoa beans they are conveying. Newbould’s work has been featured here before and there are generous selections of his poster designs in the care of the National Railway Museum and London Transport Museum. The book itself is an example of a familiar type where a sober account of mercantile adventures in tropical territories is accompanied by exotic illustrations for the benefit of those children with limited capacity for the absorption of facts and figures.