London Calling (13 page)

The exhibition, held at the Whitechapel Gallery in August 1956, was designed by Theo Crosby, the editor of
Architectural Design
, who had been inspired by attending a congress in Paris in 1954 which drew together artists and craftsmen, fine and applied
arts. Crosby conceived the exhibition as twelve teams of artists, architects, musicians and graphic designers working together
to express their view of the contemporary environment and its effect on the human senses. As Alloway put it: ‘a symbol-thick
scene, criss-crossed with the tracks of human activity’. Each team contained people from different disciplines, a radical
idea at the time, and they were told go away and talk amongst themselves, and decide who they wanted to work with. Less than
half of the exhibitors were from the Independent Group, but their influence was all-pervasive. The thirty-eight exhibitors
included Germano Facetti, Eduardo Paolozzi, Alison and Peter Smithson, Victor Pasmore, Erno Goldfinger, Kenneth Martin, Mary
Martin and Toni del Renzio.

The lavish spiral-bound catalogue was designed by Edward Wright and included essays by Reyner Banham and Lawrence Alloway.
Each team had its own area. The displays varied from purely architectural assemblages to communications and information theory,
but only one group dealt with symbols of popular culture. It was the room designed by Group Two that attracted the most attention
and controversy. Richard Hamilton, John McHale and John Voelcker displayed the billboard-size film poster for the new science
fiction film
Forbidden Planet
, released that spring, featuring an actual size Robby the Robot, a prescient move by Hamilton as Robby has since gone on
to become one of the most famous film robots of all time. Pasted over the poster was a life-size still of Marilyn Monroe with
her dress blowing up, from
The Seven Year Itch
. There was also a jukebox, seen, in 1956, as the symbol of American decadence but recognized by Hamilton as an extraordinary
piece of futuristic design. It was also here that Hamilton first exhibited his
Just What is It That Makes Today
’
s Homes So Different, So Appealing?
, which was also used as the exhibition poster; a piece now generally regarded as the first work of pop art. Unfortunately,
by the time the show opened, Hamilton and McHale were no longer getting on. When the idea of teams was first proposed, Hamilton
and John McHale knew they would enjoy working together. John Voelcker, the architect who designed the structure, was someone
Hamilton knew slightly and whom he liked very much so he was asked to build the room. McHale left for America on a two-year
scholarship shortly after the exhibition was planned, and though he was able to send masses of visual material to Hamilton,
his contribution was of necessity conducted via correspondence. Hamilton: ‘We could only correspond by letter, and their tone
became increasingly acrimonious. Finally, we were no longer friends.’
²¹
In fact, McHale contributed many of the ideas, and according to Magda Cordell the material in Hamilton’s famous
Just what…
collage came from John McHale’s files.
²²

Their installation explored the newly introduced elements in the British visual environment: American comics, Marilyn Monroe
and the jukebox. As the jukebox was free, people made so many selections that it took an hour before your record came on.
Hamilton: ‘There were all these games with sound, optical illusion and imagery. One chamber in the fun house was even a kind
of space capsule. There were portholes from science fiction which showed aliens looking through the windows.’
²³
Reyner Banham explained: ‘The key figures of the Independent Group were all brought up in the Pop belt somewhere. American
films and magazines were the only live culture we knew as kids.’
²⁴

There are conflicting claims as to who named Pop Art; Lawrence Alloway is usually given the credit. It took some time to become
a fully defined movement, and certainly when Richard Hamilton gave his famous definition in a letter of 16 January 1957 to
Peter and Alison Smithson he did not mean it as an art movement. He said that there was no such thing as ‘pop art’ at the
time and his use of the term was to refer solely to art manufactured for a mass audience as distinct from hand-crafted folksy
art.
²⁵

Pop Art is:

Popular (designed for a mass audience)

Transient (short-term solution)

Expendable (easily forgotten)

Low cost

Mass produced

Young (aimed at youth)

Witty

Sexy Gimmicky

Glamorous

Big business

But in 1957, the term still referred to the products of mass culture; and though both Paolozzi and Hamilton were making collages
of advertisements and American comics, it took a few more years for Pop Art as a movement to emerge. When it did, it transformed
the British art scene.

How many books that were once notorious now serve as instruction for youth!

WALTER BENJAMIN
,
One Way Street

One of the artists in Group One of the
This is Tomorrow
show was Germano Facetti, an Italian designer who, at the age of sixteen, was arrested in Italy in 1943 by the Germans as
an armed member of the resistance and deported to the Mauthausen death camp in Austria. He survived. While working for a Milan
architectural practice he met Mary Crittal, an English architect, and in 1950 moved with her to London. He became the art
director of Aldus Books, and spent most of his free time at the Café Torino on Old Compton Street. It was here he was commissioned
by David Archer to design his new bookshop on Greek Street. His cool, modern, very Italian design sensibility – bands of rainbow
colours, enlarged black-and-white photographs, single colour spaces – had a big impact on British graphic design in the early
sixties. He was asked by Allen Lane to redesign Penguin Books in the early sixties and in 1964 he designed the new paperback
section of Better Books on New Compton Street.

David Archer’s Bookshop opened early in 1956 at 34 Greek Street, opposite the stage door of the Palace Theatre almost on the
corner with Shaftsbury Avenue. Archer was a tall, thin man who held himself rigid as if he was afraid he might break. He was
nervous, always moving, courteous, always trying to help, smiling, his large, deep-set eyes blinking behind large spectacles.
He spoke with an impeccable upper-class accent, marred by a slight stutter. He had a withered arm that he disguised by always
using it to carry a pile of books and magazines. Before the war he owned the Parton Bookshop, from which he ran the Parton
Press, where he was the first to publish Herbert Read, Dylan Thomas, George Barker, David Gascoyne and W. S. Graham.

The shop cost £3,000 to open, a huge sum in those days. Much of it went on the fittings: Germano Facetti designed the shop
façade on clean modern lines and, as the walls were covered in bookcases, he pasted portraits of poets, both historical and
contemporary, chosen by himself and Archer, on the ceiling. The shop comprised a long rectangular room with new books in the
front, in the middle a small specialized lending library containing many rare first editions, a coffee bar in the back and
a gallery in the basement. The real reason for the bookshop was to act as a literary salon.

When Archer was out book-buying, the shop was manned by a series of impecunious poets and painters: George Barker, Robert
Colquhoun, Dom Moraes or Tristram Hull, the editor of
Nimbus
. Not long after it opened, Archer appointed as manager Ralph Abercrombie, the son of the poet Lascelles Abercrombie. Henrietta
Moraes ran the coffee bar. At Facetti’s request, Archer’s boyfriend, John Deakin, blew up a photograph of Henrietta to nine
feet by seven and used it to fill the alcove at the back of the shop in the coffee bar. The coffee bar was very cheap, and
as Henrietta bought all the tarts and cakes from Floris, the expensive patisserie on Brewer Street, it lost money on each
sale. Christopher Logue described the shop in his memoirs: ‘David’s was open, fresh, friendly, with people standing about
talking, trying to catch the eye of the black-haired sumptuous beauty, whose name I soon learned was Henrietta.’
¹
Dom Moraes: ‘She discharged her duties with a sort of ferocious efficiency, and was constantly surrounded by young writers,
with whom she carried on bantering flirtations.’
²

Archer was still wealthy enough not to be interested in making money; he just wanted a salon. Bernard Kops: ‘David owned a
third of Wiltshire, and could not wait to give it away.’
³
Anyone rash enough to attempt to buy a book was firmly discouraged and asked ‘Are you sure you want to buy it? I’m sure Foyles
or Better Books would have it’ and given directions. Even at the height of the Angry Young Men sensation, when customers came
in looking for Colin Wilson’s
Outsider
, he would direct them to the competition, despite having sixty copies in stock and Wilson himself probably sitting in the
back of the shop willing to sign them. Colin MacInnes, Michael Hastings, Robert Nye, Christopher Logue with his hat, cloak
and stick, looking every inch the poet, all came in to pass the time of day and drink endless free cups of coffee, but they
never bought a book. The poet Dannie Abse worked as a doctor and had his surgery in Soho, so he was a frequent visitor. As
Dom Moraes said: ‘Every young writer in town used it as a club, drank free coffee there and borrowed the books.’

George Barker was there most days, whether he was working there or
not. Barker was once championed by T. S. Eliot and published by Faber, but is now largely forgotten. He was violent towards
women, particularly when he was taking benzedrine, and could not get over the fact that Elizabeth Smart, the mother of four
of his fourteen or fifteen children, was a more celebrated writer than he.
⁴
Her
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
, the brilliant account of their disastrous love affair, is now taught in schools as a twentieth-century classic. He forbade
his next girlfriend, Betty Cass, to write, work or drive. He believed that society should look after the poet, which in his
case meant that even after fathering his fifth child he was still living at home, being looked after by his mother, leaving
his wives and children to look after themselves. Barker wore an American leather jacket and a peaked cap to hide his baldness.
He affected absurd pseudo-American mannerisms of speech: ‘Get that, baby!’, ‘Silly baby’, picked up during his time in New
York with Smart, which he felt made him appear something of a hipster but in fact made his friends laugh at him behind his
back. When he left the bar the Roberts would mock him mercilessly: ‘Silly baby, Colquhoun!’, ‘Silly child, MacBryde!’ It infuriated
Francis Bacon to be referred to as ‘baby’ but there were some who put up with him.
⁵

For weeks, to their considerable inconvenience, nobody was able to enter the lavatory because Bernard Kops, then penniless
and newly married, had locked himself up in it to write a play. From time to time he emerged from his small room and drank
some coffee, the caffeine only serving to further increase his exhilaration. Normally very talkative, he now became increasingly
over-stimulated, his skin flushed and his blue eyes bulging with excitement. And for due cause, because the play,
The Hamlet of Stepney Green
, was to bring him considerable success and launch his career. Kops was first introduced to Archer by Dom Moraes, who, though
he had not read a word of Kops’s work, praised him as a genius to Archer. Kops: ‘I was not embarrassed, and did not contradict
him. I asked David about his ability to recognize talent. “Dear boy, I know absolutely nothing about poetry. I just have a
certain instinct for certain people.”’

Just before lunchtime Archer would raid the till and head across the street to the Coach and Horses. The shop was losing so
much money that in the end Archer agreed to let Abercrombie buy a cash box for the takings to which he would not have the
key. One day Henrietta returned to the shop after closing to get something she had forgotten and found Archer jumping up and
down in rage on the cash box in an attempt to burst it open. He looked at her, embarrassed and murmured: ‘Silly old me.’ Most
of his money went on Deakin, who lived off of him shamelessly, but any
hungry poet or writer would be the beneficiary of his largesse, which, in order not to cause untoward embarrassment, came
in the form of a ten-shilling note folded into a matchbox and slipped unobtrusively into the young man’s pocket, though few
of the recipients were likely to feel any awkwardness at relieving him of money. In some cases the matches were probably discarded
without the treasure ever being found. It was in this way that he funded Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso when they found
themselves penniless on Soho’s streets in 1958, self-consciously explaining it was ‘for poetry’s sake’.

It soon became obvious that Ralph Abernathy needed an assistant so Archer employed a young painter who had recently been discharged
from a mental hospital. The first day the painter attacked the shelves with a feather duster, dusting indiscriminately. The
second day he had dusted all the books so he began to dust Archer himself. Archer, characteristically, fled to the Coach and
Horses. The painter began to dust Ralph, then Henrietta and finally Dom Moraes. One by one they followed Archer across the
street, where they peered anxiously through the pub window at the shop. They saw potential customers enter and then quickly
exit, pursued by the painter with his duster. Ralph telephoned the hospital and that evening a van pulled up outside the shop,
filled with men in white coats, who took him away.
⁶

The bookshop played a role in many people’s lives. It was there that Dan Farson met Colin Wilson, which helped launch his
career as a television presenter. Farson joined Associated Rediffusion and, in September 1956, Wilson was the first person
he interviewed. This was well received and led to an interview with Cecil Beaton and then one with Paul Getty. John Deakin,
who had befriended Farson, was outraged that Farson should be successful and did his best to undermine his show, feeding Caitlin
Thomas so many drinks before her appearance that she had to be taken off the air, though these days her drunken performance
would be regarded as good lively television. As Farson said: ‘Deakin is almost physically sick at the thought of someone’s
success.’ Deakin worked hard to build disunity between friends, spreading false rumours and undermining friendships with pernicious
innuendo and gossip. Farson: ‘He was treacherous to his friends, and possessed a skill in playing one off against the other.
Archer and myself were constant victims.’
⁷