Sound progressive views?

Some of the most ubiquitous examples of New Zealand design – light switches – have been produced by the Christchurch-based electrical products manufacturer Plastic and Diecasting Ltd, known after 1957 as PDL Industries Ltd. Founded in 1938 to manufacture components for a plumbing and heating concern, the company was reinvented in 1948 when it engaged Robertson Stewart, a Christchurch-born electrician who, in 1935, had been sent by his former employer to train in England as a plastics technician. Soon after joining PDL, Stewart was made general manager; he later bought the company. Taking advantage of an expanding market for plastic wares and the ready availability of casein, a dairy by-product, Stewart revolutionised PDL’s output by introducing an extensive range of well-designed electrical fittings and architectural hardware.

Stewart was the only manufacturer profiled by the New Zealand Design Review in its five-year existence. Published in August 1949, the anonymous two-page article was titled ‘New Zealand Manufacturer has sound progressive views’ and it was supported by not only expensive photographs but also an editorial by the Wellington teacher and critic Edward Simpson, the review’s editor. 

E Mervyn Taylor, cover for the New Zealand Design Review, 

August 1949 depicting a bottle designed by Milner Gray

Inspired by a series of lectures delivered by the British industrial designer Milner Gray during a British Council-organised visit to New Zealand, the editorial railed against the conservatism of the majority of New Zealand manufacturers who had no interest in design and, certainly, no interest in the modernism espoused by the Design Review. The editorial asserted that even when faced with an avalanche of modern, well-designed objects from Britain, ‘the New Zealand manufacturer […] is not likely to re-design his wares while he cannot produce enough to satisfy the market and is short of staff. He is going to need much persuasion even then.’

In the article, Stewart was portrayed as embodying the antithesis of this philistine, not to say troglodytic, stance: ‘It is hard to express what a joyful kick we derived from an interview with Mr R H Stewart […] who supplied us with his views on design for the manufacturer of goods in New Zealand’. The article approvingly observed that ‘as the services of industrial designers are not available’, the company’s products were designed by Stewart who, sensibly, submitted them ‘step by step to an architect conversant with modern design and with an active interest in the improvement of design in New Zealand manufactures.’ Stewart’s innovative take on manufacturing and the Design Review’s enthusiastic support of his enterprise raises a number of points respecting the nature of design in post-war New Zealand. In fact, the timing of the article is critical as it occurred months before the November 1949 general election, one in which the roles of the producers and consumers of manufactured commodities were never more widely debated.

In response to adverse economic circumstances during the Great Depression and, later the Second World War, the Labour party administration had imposed restrictions on the availability of manufactured commodities in New Zealand through an import licensing regime. While fiscally responsible it was unpopular and the conservative National party opposition was quick to exploit this antipathy. National went into the election declaring that one of its planks was to ‘allow the people, not the State, to decide what they shall buy, and how they will spend their money. We will abolish restrictions on goods from Britain that cannot be economically produced in our own factories.’ It was evidently a political irrelevance that Britain wasn’t exactly keen on exporting to New Zealand, as its membership of the Sterling Area did nothing to reduce Britain’s catastrophic overseas debt. As was the fact that import restrictions provided New Zealand manufacturers, such as PDL and Ambrico – the makers of Crown Lynn pottery, with a protected market, enabling them to flourish, notwithstanding the deficient quality of their production. Ironically, the direction of both companies supported National. Notwithstanding his support for modernist design but contrary to the Design Review’s headline, Stewart’s views were far from progressive; to the contrary, he later opined that 'It has been my observation in life that many Labour Party supporters are non-achievers.'

The final issue of the New Zealand Design Review,

April 1954. Among the houses under review was one 

by the Auckland design group Brenner Associates

A trope emerged amongst those interested in design matters locally that linked the issue of import restrictions and, ipso facto, the Labour party to an antipathy towards modern design. Another article published that same August in the short-lived journal Modern Manufacturing and under the corporate authorship of the Auckland design group Brenner Associates, clearly identified the culprit, explaining that 'All too frequently the [New Zealand] manufacturer and his executives are vaguely aware of the fact that their products are not all that they could be, but they are lulled into silence by the comforting assurance that foreign products are excluded from this market by a benevolent government hell-bent on mothering the country out of existence.' It was a mistaken allocation of blame; what the critics of this de facto protection failed to understand was the fact that neither government nor the few manufacturers of commodities operating in the country were in a position to dictate what was imported. That responsibility lay in the hands of what operated as a cabal of the local agents of British manufacturers and the members of  bodies such as the New Zealand Importers' Federation. It was their conservative, commercial interests that were the drivers in determining what was available to the New Zealand consumer, not the government or the manufacturers.

 The National party won the 1949 election, but the victorious politicians had no interest in design and they ultimately withdrew the small Department of Internal Affairs grant that enabled the Design Review to survive. The promotion of modernist design by conservative interests continued as a odd feature of the nascent design discourse in New Zealand for some years. If in Britain, modernism was ineluctably associated with a controlled economy and rampant socialism, the same cannot be said for New Zealand. The National prime minister Sidney Holland fought tooth and nail, in the face of vehement British Conservative party antipathy, for the construction of a modernist New Zealand House in London’s West End, designed by the socialist architect Robert Matthew. Holland wanted - and obtained - a building exhibiting sophistication and culture in the hope that it would attract the right sort of British immigrant. 

As late as 1958, attempts were made by conservative Christchurch interests to promote a local version of the Council of Industrial Design, the wartime creation of the British Labour politician Hugh Dalton. To their consternation they discovered that they had been trumped by the left when it emerged that the second Labour administration, elected in November 1957, was planning its own design council, one that rather being an inappropriately scaled replica of the British model would respond to local needs. In doing so, Labour was finally exhibiting those ‘sound progressive views’ that the Design Review had once, mistakenly, attributed to Stewart.