4. Looking over the ship railings: the colonial voyage and the empty ocean in Empire Marketing Board posters
Tricia Cusack
Introduction
Apart from studies of the Atlantic slave trade, humanities scholars, whether geographers, historians, or art historians, have traditionally paid relatively little attention to the space of the ocean.1 However, this is beginning to change: a ‘new thalassology’ (from thálassa [sea]) since the 1990s has been recasting a geographical and cultural history of the sea.2 Although recent art has explored marine themes,3 there have been few critical studies of visual art relating to the ocean.4 This chapter considers how ocean-space was represented in British Empire Marketing Board posters of the 1920s. It examines how shipboard life was shaped and imagined in relation to the constitution of an ‘empty’ ocean and how such representations contributed to the board’s imperial propaganda. The ocean had not always been pictured as ‘empty’. For example, European maps of the sixteenth century envisaged the surrounding seas as inhabited by fearsome monsters. However, from the seventeenth century such creatures were replaced by a modern grid depicting a featureless emptiness, an effect enhanced later when the ocean was coloured uniformly blue.5 Such imagery has reinforced the idea of the sea as empty; and western conceptions of the ocean have subsequently portrayed it as predominantly empty space, hence a space available for exploration and appropriation. This chapter suggests that Empire Marketing Board posters contributed to such representations of the ‘empty ocean’ and that this conception enabled an ‘imagined geography’ of empire to be drawn upon it.
This chapter focuses on a minority of Empire Marketing Board posters that represented the colonial voyage of settlers, administrators and others to and from Britain’s imperial territories. In the 1920s large, modern ocean liners were built for the long journey to the east. However, even an advanced modern ship constituted a precariously placed perch on the vast emptiness of the sea. If the ocean surface appeared empty, the depths remained threatening, with unknown predators and the possibility of sinking and drowning. During the recent world war the oceans had again been filled with monsters – the submarines which came up from below and sank thousands of ships, including the passenger liner Lusitania, which was torpedoed in 1915, killing over a thousand people. The sea held fearful memories.
In contrast to the frightening vacancy of the ocean, the modern passenger ship therefore had to be regarded as a place of order and safety. The new liners offered interior living spaces that mimicked the familiarity, security and traditionalism of a country house or club. Empire Marketing Board posters mitigated the terrifying spectacle of the empty ocean by featuring a confident upper-class family which might have emerged from such an interior. This family was located on the promenade deck, safely contained by railings and with an outlook across the water to land. In Empire Marketing Board posters, therefore, the ocean is constructed as empty and exploitable, but the fearful aspects of its emptiness are visually minimized, enabling the colonial voyage to appear safe, manageable and attractive.
Western conceptions of space have shifted since the latter part of the twentieth century, especially with regard to landscape. In the new scientific geography of the 1960s, space was treated as ‘an abstract dimension … in which human activities … took place. … Space was quite literally a nothingness, a simple surface for action’.6 This perspective began to be questioned from the 1970s by a view that space was not a fixed, given entity; rather, ideas of space were socially constructed. For example, the Marxist philosopher, Henri Lefebvre argued in 1974 that space should be regarded as actively ‘produced’ rather than as a pre-existing, inert container, noting that ‘[t]o speak of “producing space” sounds bizarre, so great is the sway still held by the idea that empty space is prior to whatever ends up filling it’.7 As Christopher Tilley concluded, ‘the meanings of space always involve a subjective dimension and cannot be understood apart from the symbolically constructed lifeworlds of social actors’.8 Tilley further proposed that western capitalist space had been characterized by emptiness, becoming ‘desanctified’ and ‘infinitely open’ and that ‘[o]nce stripped of sedimented human meanings … the landscape becomes a surface or volume like any other, open for exploitation and everywhere homogeneous … It becomes … something to be controlled and used’.9 Not unlike Tilley’s empty landscape of capitalism, the ocean has also been conceived of as an empty and homogenous surface, available for exploitation and control, but the route to such thinking may have been a little different. Although landscape spaces (actual or depicted) have increasingly been theorized as social productions,10 the ocean has generally continued to be seen as an archetypal ‘empty space’ or natural void, a blank arena foreign to the land. John Gillis, for example, has argued that the sea remains an alien and neglected space.11 Miles Ogborn commented that ‘[g]eography has long been landlocked’,12 while Philip E. Steinberg claimed that the ocean has been elided from ‘historical discourse’.13
Western visualizations of empire in the modern period have tended to overlook the ocean, or depict it as simply passive or negative space. The history of oceanic cartography, for example, was about delineating coastlines and islands. The Atlantic ocean moved from a marginal to a central position on maps, between America and Europe, but it ‘seemed to have been defined negatively, as that which was not land’.14 From the eighteenth century, artists were commissioned to accompany overseas voyages of discovery. They produced hundreds of drawings of coastlines, weather, peoples and plants, but the ocean itself was not of interest.15 The predominant themes of much colonial art included botany, ethnographic portraits of natives, portraits of the colonizers, hunting and landscape.16 When the ocean appeared in art, it was generally along the coast with a focus on the shore, or the passive backdrop for scenes of battle or shipwreck.
The ocean has, therefore, continued to be viewed as an empty space or void, although some of its human history, such as narratives of the Atlantic slave trade, has lately been reclaimed. This chapter proposes that Empire Marketing Board seascapes helped to produce the ocean as empty space. This served two functions: for the fictive colonial voyager, the sea was constituted simply as the benign passageway to an imperial territory; and by the same token, in looking out across that ocean space, the voyager also commanded it.
Marketing the empire
The Empire Marketing Board was founded in 1926 by a Conservative government in order to enhance Britain’s trade with its empire amid postwar economic depression. The British empire in the 1920s included a quarter of the world’s land surface and a quarter of its population and Britain was the most powerful maritime nation in the world.17 However, the director of the Imperial Institute, William Furse, speaking in 1931 on the issue of inter-imperial trade, maintained that trade in the British empire had been slow to develop because of people’s ignorance of the Dominions and colonies and a lack of curiosity.18 The Empire Marketing Board aimed to foster imperial trade and to enhance people’s curiosity about and knowledge of the empire.19 There was also perhaps a need to burnish the image of the British empire following World War I and the notorious massacre of Indian protestors at Amritsar by the British Indian Army in April 1919.20
The Empire Marketing Board was a ‘constitutional oddity’, with a civil service staff and members including representatives from India, the Dominions and opposition parties.21 It included Frank Pick, who was creating a modern image for London Underground through a proliferation of posters commissioned from talented artists; and William Crawford, head of a major advertising agency and an early student of consumer psychology.22 In May 1926, Stephen Tallents, then imperial secretary for Northern Ireland, was invited by Leopold Amery, secretary of state for the colonies and chair of the Empire Marketing Board, to take the post of secretary to the new board, with nearly one million pounds per annum anticipated for publicity.23 Amery later explained that the aim was ‘to sell … the idea of Empire production and purchase, of the Empire as a co-operative venture’, not ‘to glorify [its] power or … wealth’.24 However, Tallents believed that England undersold itself: ‘No civilised country can today afford to neglect the projection of its national personality’.25 Tallents found that advertising was generally disregarded by government officials and that ‘publicity was regarded with a mixture of contempt and fear by my colleagues in the Government Service’.26 He had been impressed by a saying of Crawford’s that ‘[n]o one knows anything about advertising’.27 Tallents’s obituary praised him as ‘one of the first men in public service to realize the positive influence of advertising … as an instrument of official policy, and to develop its creative possibilities’.28
The Board launched various publicity ventures, one of the most visible being its poster campaign. Posters had become a practical medium of advertising from the later nineteenth century.29 In Britain by the 1920s and 1930s they were used by large organizations such as the General Post Office, London Underground and the various railway companies, as well as by the Empire Marketing Board. Like Crawford and Pick, Tallents considered that successful posters must be designed by artists, believing that ‘publicity, to be fully effective, must appeal not only to the intelligence but also to the imagination, and that this end is most surely achieved by the enlistment of artists’.30 However, artists’ designs were monitored to ensure the correct message was conveyed.31
Between 1926 and 1933, when the Empire Marketing Board was closed, hundreds of posters designed by artists were displayed nationwide on large oak-framed hoardings (or billboards), as well as shown on a smaller scale in shop windows.32 The sole audience until 1930 was the British public; later, the British public remained the main audience but some publicity abroad was agreed.33 Key artists commissioned by the Empire Marketing Board included MacDonald Gill and Charles Pears, who were among those from whom Pick had earlier commissioned posters for London Underground.34 The hoardings themselves were artfully organized. They were placed all over the country in ‘carefully-selected stations’35 and distinctively sited apart from commercial advertisements. Posters were normally grouped in a recognizable format of five, with two vertical, normally carrying lettering, and the other three horizontal and pictorial, all under a general caption.36 This arrangement meant that the larger posters could be almost free of written text and, especially as they were designed by artists, they seemed more like art than advertisement. This gave the posters the advantage of appearing to be purely aesthetic images, so disguising the imperial ideologies they carried.
A propaganda organization?
Empire Marketing Board posters were reproduced for classroom use in various sizes and new poster sets were sent to headteachers on the Board’s list, which by 1932 included 26,000 schools.37 Writing on behalf of the Empire Marketing Board in the Geographical Association’s journal Geography, A. C. Mason claimed: ‘It is no part of the EMB’s policy to use the schools for propaganda, but it has been felt that the interest of the public in Empire products, and the consequent voluntary goodwill which it is the Board’s object to further, can be aroused and fostered by a presentation of interesting and informative pictures’.38
In contrast, Stephen Constantine has argued that ‘the EMB was … rightly identified in public and political eyes as a propaganda organization’.39 In his study of propaganda and the British empire, John MacKenzie characterized propaganda as ‘the transmission of ideas and values from one person, or groups of persons, to another, with the specific intention of influencing the recipients’ attitudes in such a way that the interests of its authors will be enhanced’.40 On this definition, the Empire Marketing Board posters were clearly conveying propaganda. However, the public may rather have perceived them, in Mason’s terms, as ‘interesting and informative’. For example, as Constantine’s own research made clear, the materials offered free to schools were readily received and apparently taken at face value. One teacher wrote to the Board: ‘Your posters have been a god-send … They vivify … the very impression we wish our pupils to receive with respect to the … potentialities of our Empire’.41 The London Teacher stated: ‘Most teachers agree that the EMB posters have been an excellent visual aid to the teaching of geography’.42 At a Schoolboys’ Own exhibition in 1929, the Board continued its efforts by supplying 26,000 small reproductions of MacDonald Gill’s poster Highways of Empire.43
In line with Amery’s theme of co-operative harmony, Empire Marketing Board posters endeavoured to present the empire as a happy unity, with mutual benefits for Britain and its lands. In Melanie Horton’s view, the posters were designed to make British people ‘Empire-conscious consumers by encouraging them to see the Empire as an ethical concern’.44 The British flag and other national symbols make only occasional appearances, as in Hugh Williams’s poster Empire Marketing. Here, Williams jauntily transforms the lines and colours of the Union Jack into red and white roads and blue harbours, all occupied with road and sea transport, a metaphor for the busy imperial centre.45 However, other posters carried a more overtly racialized message of British superiority, for instance where white overseers are depicted as dominant in scale and/or attitude.46
As well as the stated aims of increasing trade and enhancing knowledge of the empire, the Empire Marketing Board therefore fostered imperial ideology. While it has been debated whether Britain had an identifiable imperialist ideology,47 Stephen Howe concluded that ‘[e]mpire depended, in the sphere of ideology, on ideas about difference, and usually on a belief in superiority … By about 1900 … the most powerful notions were cultural, civilizational, and … racial’.48 It has been argued that through such means as advertising, which must include the work of the Empire Marketing Board, the empire permeated British culture, producing ‘an inchoate but powerful imperial mind-set’.49
Highways of empire
Empire Marketing Board posters that represented the colonial voyage imaginatively transported settlers and administrators from their home country to a smoothly accessed imperial territory. Tallents recalled commissioning MacDonald Gill, architect, muralist and graphic artist, to produce the first Empire Marketing Board poster, the map Highways of Empire, which was designed in 1927 and displayed that year as a giant hoarding measuring six by three metres.50 As J. B. Harley observed, ‘[m]aps were used to legitimize the reality of conquest and empire’.51 Gill’s poster located Britain at the centre of a map that marked out the empire in red. It showed lines of communication across the oceans, commanding sea passages radiating from the imperial centre to the colonies. Horton suggested that ‘[t]he world’s oceans connected different parts of Britain’s Empire, and their expanses drew attention to its full extent’.52
However, Empire Marketing Board posters did not so much draw attention to the extent of the oceans, but rather tended to minimize their vastness. Gill’s map used a mode of projection that expanded the land mass, enlarging Canada and India, for example, and squeezed the ocean, shrinking the relative size of the intervening seas (Figure 4.1). This focus on the imperial territories and on reducing the expanse of the oceans between them is reinforced by Gill’s jaunty graphics. On a decorative scroll in mid-ocean, Gill places the following quotation from Alexander Pope:
And seas but join the
regions they divide.53
The regions here are the British colonial territories and the seas joining them are Britain’s highways. A jokey sea-monster bears another scroll that makes this global ownership explicit:
Figure 4.1. MacDonald Gill, Highways of Empire, poster, Empire Marketing Board, 1927. Reproduced by kind permission of the Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa.
the billows foam.
Survey our Empire and
behold our home.54
One version of Gill’s map has an expansive gloss below the image, addressed to the public and useful for schools (Figure 4.1). Here, Gill explains the problem of map projection and says that his Highways of Empire takes a novel approach: ‘[It] shows the world as it would appear from an aeroplane so high above London that the pilot saw the continents stretched out beneath him. He would thus be given a vivid idea of how the British Empire is scattered in relation to the Home Country’.
Gill’s ocean, containing sea-monsters, is not depicted as empty, but Gill confides to his public: ‘To us these beasts are jokes, but to the Englishmen, who blazed the first trails along the highways of Empire, they would have seemed as real as a cow in a Devonshire meadow’.55 His public share the knowledge that such creatures are not to be taken seriously and that the modern ocean map is emptied of them. Gill’s Highways of Empire map and his accompanying notes seem intended to reassure viewers about the ownership, homeliness and accessibility of Britain’s oceanic empire.
The ‘empire’s highways’, clearly marked in Gill’s map, suggest speedy and efficient travel to the colonies.56 Indeed, from the nineteenth century the empire may have been viewed less as ‘an empire of commerce and the sea’, as it was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and more as ‘a territorial empire of conquest and settlement’.57 Steinberg argued that in the industrial capitalist period, economic activity focused on investment in ‘specific production and consumption sites’ rather than on ‘circulation across space’. As these sites were generally on land, ‘the deep sea became defined as a great void, idealized as outside society … an empty surface between the terrestrial places that “mattered”’.58 By the 1920s the imperial territories, rather than the sea itself, may have become the primary focus. Indeed, the colonial voyager did not necessarily want to be aware of crossing the oceans.
In the 1920s and 1930s liners voyaged to and from Europe and its colonies ‘like a commuter service’59 and it was the ‘“citizens of empire”’, the colonial administrators, civil servants, and settlers who filled the berths on ships bound for … Bombay … and other faraway places’.60 The Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P&O) constructed four ‘express steamers’ for the Indian colonial service.61 The Viceroy of India built in Glasgow for P&O, which entered the London-Suez-Bombay service in 1929, was designed for nearly 700 passengers, 415 first class and 258 second class. As it was Board policy to avoid advertising specific companies,62 the vessels referenced in Empire Marketing Board posters might represent any or all of these ships.
Contemporary poster images of passenger liners (Figure 4.2) emphasized their technological modernity and their impregnability.63 Nonetheless, the ship was vulnerable amid the vastness of the sea. Michel Foucault described the ship as ‘a piece of floating space, a placeless place … that is self-enclosed and, at the same time, delivered over to the boundless expanse of the ocean’.64 The ocean lacks the visual markers commonly found in landscapes, even deserts. It particularly lacks the components of landscape that Jay Appleton termed ‘prospect’ and ‘refuge’ – viewing places and hiding places – and which Appleton found recurrent in landscape painting.65 Furthermore, beneath this empty surface lay unknown depths and terrors. In this alien environment, exposed to the bleak emptiness of mid ocean, the ship is in such insecure circumstances that it needs, on the contrary, to appear to be a self-contained world, a space of order and regulation – shipshape. The voyage must invoke protected, home-like spaces, forgetful of the immensity of the sea. Roland Barthes has argued that ‘[the ship] is … the emblem of closure. An inclination for ships always means the joy of perfectly enclosing oneself … To like ships is first and foremost to like a house … since it is unremittingly closed, and not at all vague sailings into the unknown: a ship is a habitat before being a means of transport’.66
Figure 4.2. W. McDowell, Mauritania, poster, Cunard, c. 1920, from the collection of Gabrielle Cadringher.
The interiors of contemporary passenger liners had an interesting inverse relationship to their exteriors and, in turn, to the empty oceans surrounding them. Le Corbusier’s modernist manifesto of 1923 (Vers une Architecture) celebrated the ship as the pinnacle of modernist design. However, the interior of the ocean liner did not conform to modernist ideals. Modernist design was unpopular for built structures in 1920s England, as it did not suit a demand for reassuring solidity and homely comfort, met by using traditional materials and designs. Ship interiors similarly were intended to provide a reassuringly comfortable, even luxurious refuge from the seas. The modern vessel Viceroy of India was furnished in first class with panelled walls, Persian rugs and antiques and equipped with fireplaces (Figure 4.3).67 Indeed, William Miller suggested that ‘[t]he general decorative idea in first class aboard colonial liners such as the Viceroy of India was that passengers never left their London club or home in the English countryside’.68 A poster for Cunard (c.1914) (Figure 4.4) showing a section through the interior of the ocean liner Aquitania illustrates its subdivision into public rooms designed and furnished like a country house, with most of the passengers, aside from a few visible on the promenade decks, facing inwards. Arthur Davis, a British architect who had designed the public spaces of the Aquitania, commented in 1922 that when he had questioned his employer as to why a ship did not look like a ship inside, he was told: ‘[T]he people who use these ships are not pirates, they do not dance hornpipes … and the one thing they want to forget when they are on the vessel is that they are on a ship at all … If we could … get people to enjoy the sea, it would be a … good thing; but all we can do, as things are, is to give them gigantic floating hotels’.69 Curiously, contemporary posters illustrating those comforting ship interiors were uncommon, perhaps because the idea of a voyage was best advertised in the first instance by demonstrating the technological power of the modern liner.70
Figure 4.3. First class smoking room, Viceroy of India, designed by Hon. Elsie MacKay, photograph, 1929. © Stewart Bale, reproduced by kind permission of P&O Heritage Collection.
The family cruise
Following Gill’s map, subsequent posters in the Highways of Empire series, Suez Canal, Gibraltar and Bombay, all designed by the artist Charles Pears, were displayed in 1928 under the caption The Empire’s Highway to India.71 These invited viewers to participate in an imaginary voyage, whether they were potential settlers and colonial administrators or armchair travellers. Pears painted maritime subjects in oils and water-colour; and he had served as an officer in the Royal Marines and an official war artist in World War I. His painting was praised by Ezra Pound in 1919 as ‘the work of a man who has seen the sea’.72 Pears also worked as a travel-writer and illustrator and had illustrated thirty volumes of Charles Dickens’s works (1912–8).73 In addition to his familiarity with the ocean, Pears was adept at depicting human figures with minimal clues to indicate their status and character, which made him an ideal poster artist. His depictions of ocean travel played a dynamic part in what Horton described as the Empire Marketing Board’s ‘unfolding story of the sights … of the Empire … Posters on the street provided passers-by with a visual tour of the Empire, sometimes even positioning them as someone actually travelling within it’.74 For example, Suez Canal gives the viewer a privileged location on the ship’s bridge as it navigates the canal.
Figure 4.4. Section through ocean liner, Aquitania, poster, Cunard, c.1914. From the collection of Gabrielle Cadringher.
In Pears’s posters Gibraltar (Figure 4.5) and Bombay (Figure 4.6), the voyage is evoked by bringing a family group of passengers onto the promenade deck of their ‘floating hotel’. Viewers of these posters are positioned to identify with a white, upper-class, nuclear family – mother, father and child, the present or potential citizens of empire. The inclusion of a child matches the marketing interventions of the Empire Marketing Board which helped induct schoolchildren as future colonists.
In both posters the deck, edged by modern railings,75 acts as both prospect and refuge: a viewing-point and a place of retreat from the sea. In each scene the potential danger of the surrounding sea is signalled by a lifebelt hung on the rail, but the threat is simultaneously negated by this tidy sign of the ship’s safety procedures. The family is safely contained by the railings and the male figure in Gibraltar even has his back turned, exposed to the ocean. From their vantage point the passengers can look out across the empty space of the ocean to a passing or destined imperial landscape. Jonathan Smith has noted how ‘a landscape [whether painted or actual] situates its spectator in an Olympian position, and it rewards its spectator with the pleasures of distance and detachment and the personal inconsequence of all that they survey’.76 Pears’s posters situate the pictured figures, and indeed the fictive viewer, in a similarly Olympian position, detached and without need to act.
The relaxed demeanour of the passengers depicted in Gibraltar gives the scene the air of a holiday cruise. The sight of a British warship on patrol across the water has the effect only of enhancing security and, like Gill’s map, of claiming the seas for the empire. In Bombay the little family is preparing to disembark and all three figures have their attention fixed on the land across the ocean, where scudding yachts promise recreation and a safe harbour. The female figure, fashionably dressed and relaxed with hands in jacket pockets, recalls the elegant women shown shopping, or drinking tea, in other Empire Marketing Board posters.77 She also recalls the fashionable young women used in contemporary advertisements for the seaside, although etiquette dictated that passengers on deck be properly attired, regardless of climate.78 The male figure wears a topi, alluding both to the tropical climate of their destination and marking the familiar uniform of the colonial master. His ready suitcase alludes to the land where the ship will be safely docked. The viewer of the posters, like the depicted figures, regards the ocean from behind the ship railings, experiencing a vicarious sense of imperial adventure as they look across to a new land, but also a sense of security, protected from the unpredictable span of the sea.
Figure 4.5. Charles Pears, Gibraltar: The Empire’s Highway to India, poster, Empire Marketing Board, 1928. © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.
Figure 4.6. Charles Pears, Bombay: The Empire’s Highway to India, poster, Empire Marketing Board, 1928. © Manchester City Galleries.
In designing Gibraltar and Bombay Pears may have drawn upon prewar posters executed for specific shipping lines which similarly focused on the pleasure and security of life on deck as a privileged passenger, while underplaying the agency of the sea. A poster of about 1900 for the Belgian-American Red Star Line depicts a woman reclining in her deck-chair shaded by a parasol; beyond the railings, the sea is uniformly blocked in blue, like a map, the only feature being another liner steaming by. In a poster of 1907, Red Star included a woman looking over the ship railings holding a small pair of binoculars – like opera glasses – again ready to catch the spectacle of another ship. The only feature of the intervening sea is the watery shadow of the passing vessel. A poster for South Atlantic United Carriers (Figure 4.7), published the year before Gibraltar and Bombay, employs a similar theme, with a well-dressed couple standing either side of a lifebelt on the railings, the man inspecting a passing liner through small binoculars across a pale-apricot, featureless sea.
‘The empire is your garden’
Despite its island status and maritime history, Britain, along with other western countries, has tended to focus less on the idea of ‘man’ as a sailor than as a gardener.79 This was especially so in the 1920s and 1930s, when great value was placed on Britain’s rural landscape, so much so that addresses by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin were ‘littered with respectful eulogies to the English countryside and the sons of the soil’.80 An Empire Marketing Board poster of 1928 by Harold Sandys Williamson depicts John Bull emerging from a fruit shop where a bold notice in the shop window advises customers that ‘[t]he Empire is Your Garden’.81 Many Empire Marketing Board posters evoked the imperial territories by depicting their produce in scenes of lush vegetation, abundant growth and co-operative harvesting, fostering the idea of the empire as a productive garden, even an exotic extension of the English garden.82 This idea again glossed over the vast ocean space between Britain and its overseas territories.
Figure 4.7. Brézil-Plata, poster, South Atlantic Chargeurs Réunis, c.1928. From the collection of Gabrielle Cadringher.
In contrast to the construct of the empty ocean, the sea could be depicted as ‘full’ and energized when the propaganda purpose required it. As well as overseas harvests, Empire Marketing Board posters advertised produce from the metropole. In Pears’s There’s all the health of the sea in fish (1931) (Figure 4.8), the sea has quite different connotations to those of passive emptiness.83 These British waters are not empty, but full of health-giving fish. The sea is not a neutral presence here, but invigorating, as well as rough and hazardous. The poster depicts a trawler surging through heavy, grey-green seas, the men well wrapped in waterproofs and occupied with nets. It represents a brave venture by the British fishermen who set out to face the unpredictable dangers of the open seas, not a safe and comfortable cruise to the colonies across smooth waters.
Figure 4.8. Charles Pears, There’s All the Health of the Sea in Fish: Caught by British Fishermen, poster, Empire Marketing Board, 1931. © Manchester City Galleries.
Redeeming the empire
The Empire Marketing Board was terminated in 1933 when tariff protection was introduced, a preferred option for the Dominions.84 Its posters had been admired by both critics and the public. Pears’s images of faraway cruises offered something aspirational, even material for day-dreaming, as viewers were invited to share in an adventurous imperial identity. Gill’s Highways of Empire map was especially popular and an enthused passer-by wrote of it: ‘I cannot help being struck by the magnificent map of the world … I must have one; if you can’t [supply it] I think I shall strip the hoarding’.85 Gill, typically, ornamented his map with playful vignettes of the Greek gods of the four winds.86 His style also allowed a blip on the eve of the unveiling of his map to be easily remedied. At the Imperial Conference of 1926, where it was to be ‘the principal item of a meagre display of publicity material … in the rooms of the Royal Academy’, it was noticed that Gill had placed polar bears at the South Pole, an error likely to be picked up by at least the prime minister of New Zealand. At Tallents’s suggestion, this was resolved by inserting a speech bubble asking, ‘Where are we?’.87 The Daily Telegraph reported of Gill’s map that ‘[t]he instant effect is to rivet the attention and closer study reveals a mass of detail … so full of humour and instruction that it is no wonder that the police have already had to exhort people to “move along please”’.88
The Board’s displays were praised even by the president of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England, the earl of Crawford and Balcarres, when he addressed the unsightly spread of insensitive advertising in a paper to the Royal Society of Arts in 1931. He regarded the posters, which he said were a daily sight on the Empire Marketing Board hoardings, as ‘[a] considered scheme of advertising, displayed in carefully-selected stations, always designed in a dignified and artistic manner … one has to stand up against them to appreciate what they say, but as far as … posters are concerned nothing could be better’.89
Perhaps the most significant legacy of the Empire Marketing Board poster campaign was a rehabilitation of imperial ideology through the means of art. For example, Furse in 1931 commented that the Empire Marketing Board had ‘done much to make many of our people Empire-minded’;90 and Professor J. Coatman in the same year observed that ‘[i]n this country the Empire Marketing Board had clearly made the Empire … good news … There had been built up a corpus of imperial opinion and sentiment’.91 The Times in 1934 concluded that through the Empire Marketing Board ‘[w]ords and symbols which had become tainted by unfortunate association were redeemed by art’.92 The poster art of Gill and Pears was undoubtedly able to redeem the idea of empire exactly because its audience could regard it as art; that is, as engaging and entertaining but untainted by politics. The Highways of Empire posters made the sea into a benign connector of imperial territories by obliterating uncomfortable historical memories and by neutralizing associations of danger at sea. These posters helped to bring the empire nearer to Britain by closing up and glossing over the empty space of the ocean, an emptiness that otherwise might have induced fear in the colonial voyager. The colonial voyage was presented as a family cruise, adventurous but safe, carefree and ethically commendable. Empire Marketing Board posters therefore created and reflected what Edward Said has termed an ‘imaginative geography’ of empire.93 The depicted emptiness of the ocean was an elite construction, much like the ‘empty landscapes’ so often claimed and occupied by colonizers. The fictive colonial voyager not only looks out over the empty ocean towards land, but commands that space; as Gill’s sea-borne message prompts:
Survey our empire and
behold our home.94
Empire Marketing Board images allowed Britain to take symbolic control of the ocean’s highways, while its fearful aspects were visually minimized for British spectators by the artfulness of Gill’s mapping and Pears’s depictions of a holiday cruise. The ocean was constructed as a benign passageway to imperial territories, occluding alternative narratives of the colonial voyage.95 Whether potential passengers or armchair travellers, viewers could participate in an imaginary voyage that placed them at the heart of the imperial project.
1 For studies of the Atlantic slave trade, see M. Rediker, The Slave Ship: a Human History (London, 2007); H. S. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge, 2010); J. Walvin, Crossings: Africa, the Americas and the Atlantic Slave Trade (London, 2013). For many authors the space of the slave ship is more salient than the space of the ocean.
2 P. Horden and N. Purcell, ‘The Mediterranean and “the new thalassology”’, American Hist. R., cxi (2006), 722–40, at p. 723; S. Mentz, At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean (London, 2009), p. xi: Mentz gives the derivation as thalassos but the correct term is thálassa. Recent studies of ocean space include P. E. Steinberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean (Cambridge, 2001); B. Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concepts and Contours (Cambridge, Mass., 2005); K. Wigen, ‘Introduction’, in Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges, ed. J. H. Bentley, R. Bridenthal and Kären Wigen (Honolulu, Haw., 2007), pp. 1–18; J. Mack, The Sea: a Cultural History (London, 2011).
3 For contemporary art of the sea, see The Power of the Sea: Making Waves in British Art 1790–2014, ed. J. Kerr and C. Payne (Bristol, 2014).
4 For exceptions, see, e.g.: B. Smith, Imagining the Pacific: in the Wake of the Cook Voyages (Carlton, 1992); C. Payne, Where the Sea Meets the Land: Artists on the Coast in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Bristol, 2007); G. Quilley, Empire to Nation: Art, History and the Visualization of Maritime Britain 1768–1829 (New Haven, Conn. and London, 2011); Art and Identity at the Water’s Edge, ed. T. Cusack (Abingdon, 2016); Framing the Ocean 1700 to the Present: Envisaging the Sea as Social Space, ed. T. Cusack (Abingdon, 2016).
5 Steinberg, Social Construction of the Ocean, pp. 105, 114.
6 C. Tilley, A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments (Oxford, 1994), p. 9.
7 H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (Oxford, 1991 [1974]), p.15..
8 Tilley, Phenomenology of Landscape, pp. 10–11.
9 Tilley, Phenomenology of Landscape, pp. 20–1.
10 See S. Daniels, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States (Cambridge, 1993).
11 J. R. Gillis, The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History (Chicago, Ill. and London, 2012), pp. 7, 13, 149.
12 M. Ogborn, ‘Review of P. E. Steinberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean (CUP 2001)’, Progress in Human Geography, xxvi (2002), 849–51, at p. 849.
13 H. K. Van Tilburg, ‘Review of P. E. Steinberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean (CUP 2001)’, Jour. of World History, xv (2004), 88–90, at p. 89.
14 C. Lois, ‘From Mare Tenebrorum to Atlantic ocean: a cartographical biography (1470– 1900)’, in Cusack, Framing the Ocean, pp. 23–36, at pp. 25, 30–3.
15 Cusack, Framing the Ocean, p. 7; Smith, Imagining the Pacific, pp. 43–7.
16 See, e.g., Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature, ed. D. P. Miller and P. H. Reill (Cambridge, 1996); J. R. Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualisation of the British Empire (London, 1997); B. F. Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting (Durham, N.C. and London, 1999); B. Douglas, ‘Art as ethno-historical test: science, representation and indigenous presence in eighteenth and nineteenth century oceanic voyage literature’, in Double Vision: Art Histories and Colonial Histories in the Pacific, ed. N. Thomas and D. Losche (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 65–99; W. Beinart and L. Hughes, Environment and Empire (Oxford, 2007).
17 A. Jackson, The British Empire: a Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2013), p. 12.
18 W. Furse, ‘Some aspects of inter-imperial trade’, Jour. Royal Society of Arts, lxxix (1931) 488–98, at p. 496. In 1926, some territories had been granted Dominion status, while others remained colonies.
19 W. Elliot, ‘The work of the Empire Marketing Board’, Jour. Royal Society of Arts, lxxix (1931), 736–48, at p. 738.
20 See D. Sayer, ‘British reaction to the Amritsar massacre 1919–1920’, Past & Present, cxxxi (May 1991), 130–64; N. Lloyd, The Amritsar Massacre: the Untold Story of One Fateful Day (London, 2011).
21 Furse, ‘Some aspects of inter-imperial trade’, p. 493; S. Constantine, ‘“Bringing the empire alive”: the Empire Marketing Board and imperial propaganda, 1926–33’, in Imperialism and Popular Culture, ed. J. M. MacKenzie (Manchester, 1986), pp. 192–231, at p. 198; S. Constantine, Buy and Build: the Advertising Posters of the Empire Marketing Board (London, 1986), p. 3.
22 P. J. Atkins, ‘Food and the Empire Marketing Board in Britain, 1926–1933’, 8th Symposium of the ICREFH [International Commission for Research into European Food History] (Prague, 2003), p. 10 (a shorter version was published as P. J. Atkins, ‘The Empire Marketing Board’, in The diffusion of food culture in Europe from the late eighteenth century to the present day, ed. D. J. Oddy and L. Petráňová (Prague, 2005), pp. 248–55); ‘Frank Pick: design patron (1878–1941): designing modern Britain’ <http://design.designmuseum.org/design/frank-pick> [accessed 14 Sept. 2015]. Pick chaired the poster sub-committee (Constantine, ‘Bringing the empire alive’, p. 211).
23 S. Tallents, ‘Advertising and public relations to-day’, Jour. Royal Society of Arts, civ (1955), 94–107, at p. 95; ‘Death of Sir Stephen Tallents’, Jour. Royal Society of Arts, cvi (1958), 810–2, at p. 810.
24 Leo Amery, quoted in P. M. Taylor, The Projection of Britain: British Overseas Publicity and Propaganda 1919–1939 (Cambridge, 2008), p. 104.
25 Stephen Tallents (‘The projection of England’, 1932), quoted in Taylor, The Projection of Britain, p. 111. In his pamphlet ‘The projection of England’, Tallents’s suggested topics for projection were nationalistic, including monarchy, navy and ‘Trooping the Colour’ (J. M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: the Manipulation of British Public Opinion 1880–1960 (Manchester, 1986), p. 84).
26 Tallents, ‘Advertising and public relations to-day’, p. 96.
27 Tallents, ‘Advertising and public relations to-day’, p. 96.
28 ‘Death of Sir Stephen Tallents’, p. 811.
29 This was enabled partly through the development of lithographic techniques over the 19th century.
30 Tallents, ‘Advertising and public relations to-day’, p. 102; Constantine, ‘Bringing the empire alive’, pp. 203–4.
31 M. Horton, Empire Marketing Board Posters (London, 2010) (unpag.).
32 Elliot, ‘The work of the Empire Marketing Board’, p. 738.
33 Taylor, The Projection of Britain, p. 104.
34 Commissioned by Pick, Gill designed a celebrated pictorial map for London Underground in 1914 called ‘Wonderground’. Pears designed posters for London Underground and various other railway companies as well as for the EMB.
35 The earl of Crawford and Balcarres, ‘The preservation of the countryside’, Jour. Royal Society of Arts, lxxix (1931), 661–74, at p. 664.
36 Central and outer posters usually measured 1½ m. by 1 m. and the two narrower ones 0.6 m. by 1 m.
37 A. C. Mason, ‘EMB material for teachers of geography’, Geography, xvii (1932), 225–8, at p. 226.
38 Mason, ‘EMB material’, p. 226.
39 Constantine, ‘Bringing the empire alive’, p. 200.
40 MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, p. 3.
41 Quoted in Constantine, ‘Bringing the empire alive’, p. 213.
42 London Teacher (Dec. 1928), quoted in Constantine, ‘Bringing the empire alive’, p. 213.
43 Constantine, Buy and Build, p. 11.
44 Horton, Empire Marketing Board Posters (unpag.).
45 See Manchester Art Gallery Collections <http://manchesterartgallery.org/collections/search/?collections-search=empire+marketing+board> [accessed 24 Sept. 2015].
46 E.g. in Empire Tobacco from Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland (1930) by A. P. Allinson an affable but dominant white male figure chats to a small black boy, while adult Africans harvest in the background. In two further posters by Allinson, East African Transport – Old Style and East African Transport – New Style, the British are depicted as dominant agents of modernization (Manchester Art Gallery Collections <http://manchesterartgallery.org/collections/search/?collections-search=empire+marketing+board> [accessed 24 Sept. 2015]).
47 S. Howe, ‘Empire and ideology’, in The British Empire: Themes and Perspectives, ed. S. Stockwell (Oxford, 2008), pp. 157–76, at p. 157.
48 Howe, ‘Empire and ideology’, p. 166.
49 Jackson, The British Empire p. 5.
50 Atkins, ‘Food and the Empire Marketing Board’, p. 10; this consisted of 48 sheets.
51 J. B. Harley: The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, ed. P. Laxton (Baltimore, Md. and London, 2001), p. 57.
52 Horton, Empire Marketing Board Posters (unpag.).
53 Line 398 of Pope’s poem ‘Windsor Forest’ (1713).
54 From Lord Byron, The Corsair (1814), Canto i. Stanza I.
55 From MacDonald Gill’s written text below his image of Highways of Empire (1927): see Figure 4.1.
56 Early 20th-century posters advertising travel by aeroplanes and zeppelins similarly tended to close up the skies and the ocean to make journeys seem faster and safer and scarcely out of sight of land. They achieved a territorialization of space which might be compared to the imperial highways of the ocean and conquered empty spaces on the ground as well as in the air (Leonie Schuster and author in conversation, Apr. 2015).
57 Jackson, The British Empire, p. 14.
58 Steinberg, Social Construction of the Ocean, p. 208.
59 C. Deakes, A Postcard History of the Passenger Liner (Barnsley, 2012 [2005]), p. 13.
60 W. H. Miller, Jr., Picture History of British Ocean Liners 1900 to the Present (Mineola, N.Y., 2001), p. 1.
61 The Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P&O) acquired a royal charter in 1840 <http://www.poheritage.com/our-history/company-guides/peninsular-and-oriental-steam-navigation-company/NextPage?pageIndex=0> [accessed 10 Apr. 2016].
62 Constantine, Buy and Build, p. 12.
63 There are numerous examples (see e.g., G. Cadringher and A. Massey, Ocean Liner Posters (Woodbridge, 2011), pp. 72–3, 94–5).
64 M. Foucault, ‘Different spaces’, in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, ed. J. D. Faubion (3 vols., London, 2000), ii. 175–85, at pp. 184–5.
65 J. Appleton, The Symbolism of Habitat: an Interpretation of Landscape in the Arts (Seattle, Wash., 1990), pp. 25–7.
66 R. Barthes, Mythologies (London, 1973 [1957]), p. 66.
67 The relative speed of flying provided another reason why the ocean liner needed to be luxurious, so the sea passage might offer comfort if not speed. Gill notes on his poster Highways of Empire that ‘[a]ir routes are bringing India within five days of us’ and his map includes a little biplane drawn overhead.
68 Miller, Picture History of British Ocean Liners, p. 35.
69 Arthur Davis (1922), quoted in G. Piouffre, First Class: Legendary Ocean Liner Voyages Around the World, trans. B. Mellor (New York, 2009), p. 118. The Aquitania sailed from Liverpool via Gibraltar to Bombay in the 1920s.
70 Deakes commented that scenes of shipboard life were ‘strangely avoided by most lines’ (Deakes, A Postcard History, p. 23). This was also the case with postcards (Deakes, A Postcard History, p. 24).
71 Suez Canal, Gibraltar and Bombay are all to be found in the collection of Manchester Art Gallery (216 posters, including some repeats) (Manchester Art Gallery Collections <http://manchesterartgallery.org/collections/search/?collections-search=empire+marketing+board> [accessed 24 Sept. 2015]).
72 Ezra Pound, under the pseudonym B. H. Dias (1919), quoted in ‘The Modernist Journals Project: Charles Pears 1873–1958’ <http://www.brown.edu/Departments/MCM/people/scholes/MJPstuff/24bNew/Pears/Pears.html> [accessed 15 Sept. 2015]. Pears was also an official war artist in the Second World War and president of the Society of Marine Artists.
73 Pears’s illustrated books included From the Thames to the Seine (1910) and From the Thames to the Netherlands: a Voyage in the Waterways of Zealand and down the Belgian Coast (1914).
74 Horton, Empire Marketing Board Posters (unpag.).
75 The clean line of the railings and functional lifebelt belong to the ship’s modern exterior.
76 J. Smith, ‘The lie that blinds: destabilizing the text of landscape’, in Place/Culture/Representation, ed. J. Duncan and D. Ley (London, 1993), pp. 78–92, at pp. 78–9.
77 E.g. Drinking Empire Grown Tea (n.d.) <http://manchesterartgallery.org/collections/search/collection/?id=1935.637> [accessed Feb. 2017].
78 Conditions on board for passages across the Indian Ocean and Red Sea before forms of air conditioning were uncomfortable, with daytime temperatures inside reaching over 100 degrees (Miller, Picture History of British Ocean Liners, p. 33).
79 See Gillis, The Human Shore.
80 J. Black, The British Seaborne Empire (London, 2004), p. 364. Baldwin was Conservative prime minister from 1923 to 1929 and from 1935 to 1937.
81 See no title, Manchester Art Gallery Collections <http://manchesterartgallery.org/collections/search/collection/?id=1935.759> [accessed Feb. 2017].
82 E.g., pastoral images such as Edgar Ainsworth’s The Market Garden of the Tropics – Malayan Pineapples (1931) (Manchester Art Gallery Collections <http://manchesterartgallery.org/collections/search/?collections-search=empire+marketing+board> [accessed 24 Sept. 2015]). For a discussion of the idea of the English garden as a model and metaphor for the British empire and the role of Empire Marketing Board posters in such constructions, see T. Cusack, ‘“The empire is your garden”: cottage imagery and nationalism in England and Ireland (c.1880–c.1940)’, in Genius Loci: National and Regional in Architecture; between History and Practice, ed. C. Popescu and I. Teodorescu (Bucharest, 2002), pp. 48–51, at p. 51.
83 There’s All the Health of the Sea in Fish is found in Manchester Art Gallery Collections <http://manchesterartgallery.org/collections/search/collection/?id=1935.744> [accessed 5 Apr. 2019].
84 Constantine, ‘Bringing the empire alive’, p. 220.
85 Quoted in Atkins, ‘Food and the Empire Marketing Board’, p. II.
86 Gill produced a number of world maps centred on Britain and edged with entertaining vignettes, such as his map of mail steamship routes for the GPO in 1937.
87 Tallents, ‘Advertising and public relations to-day’, p. 96. On Gill’s map the exact words uttered by the polar bear are: ‘Why are we here? We belong to the North Pole!’ (see Figure 4.1.).
88 ‘Marketing the Empire’, University of Brighton, A Digital Resource (2011) <http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/projects/macdonald-gill/max-gill/section-6-marketing-the-empire> [accessed 22 Jan. 2019].
89 Earl of Crawford, ‘The preservation of the countryside’, p. 664.
90 Furse, ‘Some aspects of inter-imperial trade’, p. 493.
91 Professor J. Coatman, in the discussion of Elliot’s paper: Elliot, ‘The work of the Empire Marketing Board’, p. 747.
92 Quoted in Constantine, ‘Bringing the empire alive’, p. 217.
93 Edward Said introduced the term ‘imaginative geography’ in his discussion of the west’s construction of the east in E. W. Said, Orientalism (London, 1991 [1978]), pp. 57, 71. This was possibly the first use of the term (Ryan, Picturing Empire, p. 25).
94 From Lord Byron, The Corsair (1814), Canto i. Stanza 1.
95 E.g., the stories of those below deck.