The familiar unknown

MARK CLEVERLEY: DESIGNER

by Jonty Valentine

David Bateman, 143 pp., August 2014, $60.00, 978 1 869 53869 9

Writing to a would-be British migrant to New Zealand in January 1961, Henry Holden, an economist at the Department of Industries and Commerce, observed that while 'New Zealand manufacturers are becoming increasingly aware of the merits of industrial design [...] it would seem that this interest has not yet developed to the point where full-time consultants have been established [...] Normal design services are rendered by Advertising Agencies and in some instances architects and publishers.' <Archives New Zealand, IC W1926 57/1/6 vol 1, letter from H C Holden to G King, 25 January 1961>. Holden was in a position to know about how design functioned and was perceived in New Zealand; he was a member of the industrial design study team established in May 1959 by Dr W B Sutch, permanent secretary of the Department of Industries and Commerce, to investigate the role of industrial design in New Zealand manufacturing with a view to establishing a design promotion body modelled on the British Council of Industrial Design (CoID).

In January 1961 Mark Cleverley was working as a draughtsman in the architectural department of the New Zealand Dairy Company Ltd in Hamilton; it was, as he recalls in the series of interviews with Jonty Valentine that form the core of this book, 'all a great buzz'. Like Sutch, Cleverley had ambitions for design in New Zealand and shortly after, as Sherry Blankenship recounts in her introductory biographical essay, moved with his wife and family to Christchurch where, as a recipient of one of the first Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council Scholarships, he enrolled as a student at the Ilam School of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury.  Cleverley was precisely the sort of person Sutch saw as a lynchpin of his vision of an intelligence-led economy, one characterised by 'brains and skills' not the production of raw material for conversion elsewhere.

In many respects, Cleverley's choice of Ilam, rather than, say Elam or the Wellington School of Design – soon to be incorporated into Wellington Polytechnic – was serendipitous notwithstanding the fact that the competing institutions were in the process of establishing industrial design courses. When Cleverly started his studies, the design component of the Ilam diploma course was taught by Florence Akins (1906-2012), who, as he observes 'was quite old-fashioned [...] virtually just craft'; Akins, the first Ilam student to be awarded a Diploma in Fine Art had been appointed to the staff in 1936. Things changed the following year when the new head of school, the English silversmith John Simpson, recruited his fellow countryman the designer Maurice Askew (1921 - ) to teach graphic design. Askew's approach to the subject was rooted in interwar European modernism and marked an abrupt shift in the school's teaching of not only two dimensional design but also three dimensional form.

Unidentified photographer, Queen Street 18 June 1964. The design of Robert Kerridge's 246 Queen Street development (Rigby-Mullan, 1959) embodied an alternative, commercial American-inspired, modernism, to that practiced by Cleverley
Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries (7-A918)

As Cleverley studied, so New Zealand attitudes toward design and its role in manufacturing underwent significant shifts. In Christchurch the recently founded Design Association of New Zealand (DANZ) attempted to establish a 'design centre', based on the CoID's eponymous London shopfront. There was a difference though, proposed Christchurch design centre was to be more shop and less front, more a sales outlet than an impartial design promotion agency, even if DANZ anticipated that it would be publicly funded. The Auckland cinema chain entrepreneur Robert Kerridge was more brazen, but equally unsuccessful, in seeking government support for the formation of a similar retail front as part of his 246 Queen Street retail development.

It's evident that the idea of a government-sponsored design promotion body was as misunderstood in New Zealand as it was elsewhere: designer practitioners argued these bodies should be all about their practice; retailers, importers and advertisers saw them as a profit-making opportunities; manufacturers and primary producer organisations identified them as a source of funding that could enable niche market penetration. At various times all three sectors expressed opposition to their formation and all three contributed to the demise of the New Zealand Industrial Design Council (NZIDC), the institutional outcome of Sutch's investigation, which was finally realised in November 1967 when an Order in Council brought into force the provisions of the Industrial Design Act 1966.

Confusion as to what design councils were conceived to do carries over in this book with Valentine thanking a practitioner body, the Designers Institute of New Zealand (DINZ) for permission to reproduce articles from Designscape, the influential magazine produced by the NZIDC from 1969 until 1984. In fact DINZ, which was formed in 1991, has no claim to ownership of the magazine. The NZIDC was  a government agency created by an Act of Parliament and the Act abolishing the council in 1988 transferred the Crown's residual ownership of the assets of the NZIDC, including copyright, to Telarc, a Crown Entity involved with quality control that had been established in 1972 by the dairy industry.

This sense of uncertainty about the ownership of design prompts a discussion of Cleverley's 1972 application to join the British design practitioner body, the Society of Industrial Artists and Designers. Now called the Chartered Society of Designers it formally coalesced in 1930 as the Society of Industrial Artists; a number of New Zealanders were early members including Len Lye, Eric Lee-Johnston and James Boswell. It had no formal connection with either the Council for Art and Industry, the first British design promotion body that operated from 1934 until 1939, or its successor body the CoID, established in 1944 and now called the Design Council. To the contrary, those responsible for appointing the first CoID deliberately sought industrialists and avoided practising designers. As the design writer John Gloag observed approvingly, it consisted 'almost entirely of specialists, moreover who know what they are talking about. There is not likely to be any "uplift" or "art blah" emitted from the deliberations of this body.' <National Archives BT/64/5173, letter from J Gloat to F Meynell, 21 December 1944>. By 'specialists' Gloag meant manufacturers; the 'art blah' came later.

Milner Gray (1899-1997) for the British Council of Industrial Design, Royal arms of England (c 1946).  Gray redesigned the arms for use as the council's logo. This version emphasised the council's role as a state body while conveying a somewhat whimsical sense of modernity

It's worth remembering that the CoID was established as a grant-aided body primarily 'to promote by all practicable means the improvement of design in the products of British industry'. Michael Farr, quoting from the Council's first annual report, defined the CoID's understanding of industrial design as 'not simply the plan of a particular product. It is a unity in the industrial process, a governing idea that owes something to creative design, something to the machine, something to the consumer, and links them all together.' <M Farr, Design in British industry: a mid-century survey (Cambridge: University Press, 1955), p. 209>. Design promotion bodies were primarily intended as policy tools for changing industrial mindsets, not for promoting the practice of design or protecting its practitioners.

The changing perception of design by New Zealand businesses is encapsulated in a letter sent by T E Clark, managing director of Crown Lynn Potteries Ltd, to Sutch in July 1960 inviting him to 'favour us with your presence, and with a short address, at the presentation of prizes in Our Crown Lynn Design Contest for 1960.' Asserting that the design competition was 'second only to the Kelliher Prize' for painting, Clark noted that 'In this way [...] we are taking the first steps towards making the New Zealand pottery industry a 100% New Zealand industry, and opening a new field or the creative abilities of New Zealand designers' <Alexander Turnbull Library, Sutch Papers, 2002-012-22/7, letter from T E Clark to W B Sutch, 19 July 1960>. That the Crown Lynn design competition was viewed as second only to the Kelliher says more about the poverty of artistic patronage in New Zealand than it does about Crown Lynn's competition, which had earlier been criticised as unethical by the Association of New Zealand Art Societies. The competition however, raised the company's public profile and partly expunged its reputation for producing shoddy, ill-designed and dubiously labelled wares.

Cleverley won the first of his Crown Lynn design awards in 1961, but being a prizewinner in such a competition didn't seem to auger a career in New Zealand's under-capitalised and erratically managed ceramics industry. After having subsidised his university study by working at for the architectural practice Warren & Mahoney, Cleverley found employment as a graphic designer in Christchurch, with an advertising agency in Auckland and then, between 1966 and 1968, with the entrepreneurial packaging firm UEB Packaging Ltd.

Unidentified designer/UEB Packaging Ltd, Detail of packaging for British Wax candles (c 1974) showing the UEB logo.

UEB was a New Zealand firm that embraced the concept of good design with an almost evangelical fervour. during the late 1960s and 70s UEB's squared scroll logo was ubiquitous on an extraordinary range of consumer products. UEB had been established in 1947 by James Doig (1913-1984), a former Glaswegian merchant marine officer to manufacture cartons and boxes by the mid 1960s, the company had become one of the largest companies in the country and had expanded into fields such as carpet manufacturing. Aside from his entrepreneurial drive, Doig had a strong interest in design, recognised by his appointment as deputy chairman of the inaugural governing body of the NZIDC in 1966; he retired in 1973.

Mark Cleverley (1934?-)/Crown Lynn Potteries Limited,  Palm Springs styled by Dorothy L Thorpe earthenware plate (1967-1972). One of Cleverley's early challenges at Crown Lynn was to develop the American decorator Dorothy Thorpe's sketches into feasible production designs.
Portage Ceramics Trust (2008.1.626)

Cleverley though is best-known as a designer of Crown Lynn ceramics and he was finally recruited by the company as a development designer in 1967. This is where the informal interview format that forms the heart of the book shines. Valentine introduces a text Cleverley wrote for the NZIDC's magazine that prompts the latter into an extended and informative account of his work for the company <M Cleverley, 'Stacks of crockery', Designscape, no 58 (May 1974), pp. 5-7>. This liberty of expression enables a sense of how design functions; its interactive process as the designer both as a form maker intimately involved in the mechanics of production and as a mediator between the institutional power formations of the enterprise.

Notwithstanding the fact that much of his output for Crown Lynn has hitherto been either ignored or misattributed in the literature, Cleverley's work at Crown Lynn was technically innovative, visually exploratory, intellectually informed and of a quality and sophistication rarely seen in New Zealand manufactured goods. Unfortunately he was sidelined when the company's board initiated a series of what might best be euphemistically described as corporate blunders: it changed its name, acquired unrelated manufacturing interests, restructured its ceramics production while failing to support these changes with associated investment, dropped the design competition and employed a Royal College of the Arts graduate and former technical college lecturer, Tom Arnold, as design director. Arnold stayed less than three years before lasting less than a year running down the NZIDC as its penultimate director. The 1980s were not good years either for design or its promotion.

Mark Cleverley (1934?-) for New Zealand Post Office / Harrison & Sons, 10 cent definitive stamp (1969) with unidentified designer for New Zealand Post Office, commemorative envelope (1970)

But notwithstanding his impressive – if largely unrecognised – career as a designer of ceramics, it was in the esoteric field of stamp design that Cleverly made his most distinctive mark, as one of a small group of designers commissioned by the Post Office to invent a new image for New Zealand stamps between 1969 and 1974. This decision produced some of the best-designed stamps to be found anywhere in the world. Presumably in order to mollify conservative critics, the Post Office continued its tradition of simultaneously producing some of the more conservatively designed stamps to be issued anywhere.

Mark Cleverley (1934?) for New Zealand Post Office/Japanese Government Printing Bureau, Expo'70 stamps (1969) with [Mark Cleverley (1934?-) for New Zealand Post Office] commemorative envelope (1970)

The Post Office's decision to respond to criticism of its low design standards by improving the quality of its definitive stamps prompted the establishment of a design advisory committee in 1968, which included John Simpson of Ilam and Gil Docking of the Auckland City Art Gallery (as it was), along with 'all the old guard from the Post Office'. The committee ultimately invited a number of designers to submit proposals that resulted in a series of commissions for a new definitive range; Cleverley designed the 10c, 15c, 25c, 30c $1 and $2 issues; Maurice Askew, one of his lecturers at Ilam, designed the 28c and 50c stamps.

The resulting designs were the subject of a short, critical, assessment in the NZIDC's Designscape (no. 8 (October 1969), probably written by its director, Geoff Nees, which is reproduced – in all its glorious Letraset layout – in the book. While noting that 'the general standard is far superior to most previously produced [...] the new stamps represent a landmark in the history of the New Zealand Post Office', Nees cautioned that all was not good and compromises had been made. The English-born artist and designer Eileen Mayo's six stamps were derided as 'stodgy and ill-considered', a view that considering her long career as a stamp designer, was both damning and provocative. Cleverley's modernist designs were, however, the 'best of the lot'.

New Zealand Post Office after Mark Cleverley (1934?-)/Harrison & Sons, 1974 Commonwealth Games commemorative issue with PD/Colin Simon (logo) commemorative envelope (1974). Cleverley disclaimed responsibility for the final stamp designs

These reductive, asymmetric designs challenged the Post Office's traditional approach to more than just the design of its stamps. For the 10 cent definitive he attempted to render the New Zealand armorial bearings in a more contemporary idiom, in much the way Milner Gray had updated the British arms for the CoID some two decades earlier. As Cleverley recounts, the proposal was rejected, as was his hopes of embossing the armorial. These designs perturbed the deeply conservative culture at the Post Office and Cleverley's last designs for it were for the 1974 Commonwealth Games.  However, as Blankenship recounts, his design requirements were too much for the then Postmaster General, the Labour party's Roger Douglas – who would later gain notoriety for his neoliberal reforms of the state apparatus, including the abolition of the NZIDC – and subsequent changes imposed by the Post Office prompted Cleverley to disavow his role as designer of the issue.

Blankenship fails to either identify Douglas as the obstructor or recognise that the Postmaster General was a political position – it was a Cabinet post – and thus that his intervention had a political dimension over and beyond the bureaucratic. This avoidance of social and political contexts denies an understanding of the impact Cleverley's designs for both Crown Lynn and the Post Office had on New Zealand in the 1970s. In an economically modest, conservative and homogenous society, suspicious of both the arts and innovation, modernist design – with the notable exception of motor vehicles – seems to have been regarded as a pathway to a sort of material perdition. In his modest way, Cleverley's designs of the nation's crockery and stamps made a significant if subtle contribution to the country's changing perception of the modern during the 1970s.

After leaving Crown Lynn in 1980, Cleverly took to teaching, initially at Ilam then at Wellington Polytechnic, retiring in 1996. Crown Lynn, by then a small part of the Ceramco Corporation Ltd, was shut down in 1989 by the asset-stripping, entrepreneurial businessmen who now controlled the company. The Post Office was split up and privatised and the NZIDC abolished. The society that over the 1970s had against its own inclinations developed a nascent manufacturing sector and a concurrent sense of design was now focussed on unbridled consumerism of products manufactured elsewhere and devoid of local design input.

Detail of the stamped mark on Crown Lynn Potteries Limited's Palm Springs wares. Mark Cleverley is acknowledged as the designer although his name is misspelt as 'Cleverly'

Valentine provides a reflective conclusion that acts as a terminal bookend to his interviews with Cleverley. In it he contextualises and critiques the forgoing conversation, locating it within the surprising normality of the designed product in 1970s New Zealand: the stamps, the Colin Simon logo, the Crown Lynn 'Apollo' dinner service along with the Lego building blocks and other international manifestations of the designed product that were available here. As he notes:

A lot of Mark's work will be familiar to many New Zealanders and will likely provoke similar personal memories and associations. But unlike literature or artworks that are viewed in galleries, hung on walls with labels to name the artist and explain what they are, most of these artefacts have not been attributed to an individual designer and certainly have not been explained, historicised or contextualised as such. The paradox of most designed objects is that while they are familiar and most likely encountered every day in our homes they cease to be consciously 'attended to' soon after purchase. And the result of this is that the makers of the objects, the designers, are completely forgotten. Actually, were most often never known by name.

This perceived need for identity is a problematic that teeters on the brink of a now discredited form of design history that has been identified by Tony Fry as a sort of canonisation: the 'great white men of modernist history' narrative. The suspicion that this text falls into the 'great white men' category of historical exegesis is somewhat reinforced by the series title 'Objectspace Masters of Craft', a designation that ultimately sits uncomfortably with the book's subject and content. A canonic history is one that 'is generative of design heroes and movements as the primary agents of the evolution of design; and a history which takes the canon as given knowledge and the foundation upon which to elaborate or criticise.' <T Fry, Design history Australia (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1988), p. 27>. Fry dismisses the validity of this premise, posing the fundamental query: 'what of all the other designed objects, the vast majority, which evolve and are used but are excluded from such a history?'.

Anonymous history – the phrase was coined by the architectural historian Sigfried Giedion in  his historical account of the industrialisation of commodities, Mechanization takes command: a contribution to anonymous history (1948) – raises another set of problematics. As Fry observes, much that Giedion discussed wasn't anonymous, 'all the objects which populate this history have the stamp of commodities; all have been named in the market-place.' Moreover, he effectively ignored the social relations of production by separating them into discrete economic and cultural spheres rather than seeing mechanisation as 'a function which acts on a specific society'. Fry asserts that 'while there were changes at the industrial point of production, which recast the social relations of production, these changes equally reconfigured the domestic, as re-ordered use and space.' <Fry, pp. 32-33.>. A similar prognosis might well be applied to Valentine's text, but in this case it would be redundant. His specificity is quite deliberate. Recognising the formal modernist demarcations, the 'need to differentiate between spheres of design', Valentine proffers the rationale

that when I play the role of a graphic-design writer I am conscious that my job is always to try to present an authentically design-based narrative, and part of doing that is to constantly question my own discipline's use of language and mythologies.

Imposing parameters on this history of design in New Zealand has not detracted from the power of the text nor the importance of its content. Unlike much of what passes for the written history of design in New Zealand, this is an intelligent, rigorous and perceptive recounting of a practice; a significant and important contribution to the archive. Rather than a 'revised New Zealand history from the perspective of a graphic designer', the entertaining anecdotes of a critic, or the well-rehearsed opinions of a practitioner, this is a key text in the nascent history of design in New Zealand.

Pirates of the South Pacific: a Crown Lynn story

[David Jenkin (1919-2002?), modeller?] for Ambrico Ltd, 'Paris' earthenware bowl, [about 1948]. Based on a British wartime Utility design,
 the bowl was produced using a second-hand press moulding machine imported from England in 1947.

Crown Lynn, the brand name adopted in 1948 by the industrial porcelain (sic) department of the Auckland brick and tile manufacturer Ambrico Ltd has, in recent years, become synonymous with an idea that New Zealanders, when pushed, can turn themselves to producing anything. In this meme Crown Lynn is envisaged as a 'New Zealand icon'; it's a manifestation of a 'number eight wire' mentality; an example of how a plucky New Zealand entrepreneur can build a 'world class' business from scratch, notwithstanding the interference of – usually socialist – governments; and it was compelled to close due to a combination the abolition of the protective tariff and action of bloody-minded unions, unwilling to accept change. More than anything though, it's products are perceived as embodying 'Kiwiana', a term defined by the sociologist Claudia Bell for 'New Zealand locally-produced objects from the post-war period: everyday objects, once prosaic, [which] are now the stuff of wilful nostalgia.' <C Bell, 'Not really beautiful but iconic: New Zealand's Crown Lynn ceramics', Journal of Design History, 25:4 (2012), 414-426, p. 414> It's a compelling myth, all the more so for being a significant distortion of the history of the pottery. It is a carefully confected narrative fostered by the company and, since its demise, by collectors of the factory's wares.

At the beginning of May 2015 Te Toi Uku, the Portage Ceramics Trust, launched a small, entrance-by-appointment 'museum', Te Toi Uku Clayworks, in premises located on land that had previously formed a part of the Ambrico Ltd site. More a display storage facility with a limited on-line access handle than a museum, it's based around a collection formed by the late Richard Quinn (1946-2009) who, following the closure of the pottery in 1989, retrieved a vast array of material from the abandoned works. Although untrained and lacking in any institutional support, Quinn's collecting was of critical significance in terms of a future understanding of when, how and what the factory produced. His work in preserving not only the shards, moulds and other relics of the factory but also its associated documentation was remarkably similar in intent to the actions of the Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences in Sydney in the early 1980s to collect and preserve what was left of the productions of the architectural fittings manufacturer, Wunderlich Ltd, at its Redfern factory.

Opening of Te Toi Uku Clayworks display storage facility in New Lynn, 2 May 2015.
David Cunliffe MP, Facebook

The difference between the two recovery operations is that the Wunderlich rescue was undertaken by trained professionals, received financial assistance from the factory's owner, CSR Building Products,  and was, ultimately, stored under climate-controlled conditions. By contrast Quinn's activities, although condoned by the company owning the closed works, were unfunded, unsystematic and initially at least stored in what was a tin shed. In 1993, the Waitakere City Council employed heavy-handed techniques to exclude Quinn from the site and effectively confiscated his collection on dubious legal grounds. After seven years of legal tussling the council grudgingly paid Quinn $130,000 for the collection that forms the basis of Te Toi Uku.

A selection of Crown Lynn ceramics on display in the New Lynn Library building, May 2015. Lighting is not optimal

Having no dedicated premises in which to either store or display the material, the city council installed a small selection of wares in the newly constructed New Lynn library - in a corridor leading to the public toilets. Following the demise of the Waitakere City Council with the advent of the Auckland unitary council, ownership of the collection was transferred to the Portage Ceramics Trust.

Milton Pottery, Press-moulded earthenware ewer decorated with 'Sailing Boats' transfer prints, [about 1880].
The pottery also made tableware decorated with the English-designed transfer prints.
Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (CG001651)

Despite the ready availability of the raw materials, the production of ceramics in New Zealand has always been a risk. Historically, the local market was small and, being far removed from the flow of new patterns and fashions, was deeply conservative in its buying habits. As in most colonial economies, consumers were satisfied by a steady stream of English-made wares entering the country under preferential tariffs. There were attempts to establish a ceramics industry, following a traditional provincial British pattern, which saw brick and tile works expand their production to include 'fancies' such as crudely modelled vases and figures before moving into the production of more sophisticated ornamental and useful wares and, in a few instances, tablewares. The Milton Pottery, which operated in South Otago between 1873 and 1915 seems to have produced transfer-printed tableware from 1877 <G Henry, New Zealand pottery. 2nd ed. (Auckland: Reed, 1999),  p. 35>. While the quality of the wares produced at Milton may have been comparable with the low-end productions of Staffordshire, they were unable to compete in a market that not only favoured British productions but was also rigged by British manufacturers to ensure their continued dominance.

Given that it was not subject to competition from overseas manufacturers, brick making was in most instances a profitable industry: both raw materials and labour were relatively cheap and available and while the majority of the country's domestic building stock was of timber construction there was a growing demand for bricks for commercial buildings. During the 1920s a number of Auckland potteries were consolidated by the Clark family into a single concern the Amalgamated Brick and Pipe Company Ltd (Ambrico) giving them what amounted to a monopoly over brick and pipe production in the Auckland region. The company suffered during the Great Depression with the collapse of the building industry but the election of a Labour party government in 1935 prompted a turnaround in its fortunes. Labour's state housing programme not only launched a massive building spree but it also specified that the 3500 new homes intended to be built annually should be constructed of New Zealand materials. For Ambrico this meant an increase in the production of bricks and pipes and the cash-flow generated by expanded business enabled the company to diversify its output in 1938 into the production of dry-pressed tiles and electrical fittings. Responsibility for the concern was given to Thomas Edwin Clark (1917-2005), the 21 year old son of the managing director.

Ambrico's decision to expand its manufacturing base reflected the intent of legislation introduced into Parliament in 1936 by the new Labour administration. The Industrial Efficiency Act was intended 'to promote the economic welfare of New Zealand by providing for the promotion of new industries in the most economic form and by so regulating the general organisation, development and operation of industries that a greater measure of industrial efficiency will be secured.' Significantly, the Act also enabled government to provide monetary incentives to manufacturers. A further incentive for local manufacture came in 1938 when, due in part to capital flight and a consequent run on New Zealand overseas funds, the government introduced an import licensing scheme that sought to limit excessive imports of commodities whilst encouraging local industry. This remarkable shift in government policy attracted the ire not only of the British manufacturers and government but also local importers and the conservative opposition but it formed a solid foundation for Ambrico's later success.

Amalgamated Brick and Pipe Company, partially vitrified earthenware bowl produced for the United States Joint Purchasing Board
for use by United States service personnel in New Zealand, [about 1942-44].
Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (CG002430)

World War I had closed the rarely profitable Milton Pottery; World War II was the making of what became Crown Lynn. New Zealand's reliance on British ceramic manufacturers had significant repercussions when the supply was interrupted not only by the destruction of British plants and the enemy's control of shipping lanes but also by the repurposing of industry. Ornamental 'china' imports dropped from a value of £80,000 in 1938 to a mere £9,000 in 1941. Worse hit were the institutional users of 'hotel ware', the utilitarian tableware used in hotels, schools, the railways and the military. The situation was exacerbated in 1942 with the arrival in New Zealand of elements of the United States armed forces.  In order to deal with this unanticipated demand the National Supply Council, which had been established in 1936, realised that it would have to kick start local production and instructed the Department of Industries and Commerce to locate a suitable concern. In conjunction with the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, Clark investigated the availability of suitable clay bodies and began production of crude but serviceable substitutes for the imported wares. Further state assistance came when the concern was declared an Essential Industrial Undertaking, enabling it to obtain labour and essential imported raw materials and to construct a new, semi automated factory.

With a captive, almost competition-free, market and a new, government-subsidised, plant, Ambrico expanded its production to include domestic tablewares, imitating the form, if not the quality of British Utility wares, with their 'reduction of form to a bare ascetic minimum with the total elimination of any colouration', to employ Graham McLaren's evocative description of the type <G McLaren, 'Utility forgot: shaping the future of the British pottery industry 1941-45', in J Attfield, ed. Utility reassessed: the role of ethics in the practice of design (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 157-170, p. 157>. They were not popular with local consumers more comfortable with the gaudier effusions of the British pre-war pottery industry. Moreover there were quality issues with the New Zealand version. Wholesalers complained that Ambrico wares 'had proved so unsatisfactory to handle, that by common consent of all the firm, the Directors and the travellers, we all preferred to do without it.'<G Jackson, in New Zealand Board of Trade, Public tariff inquiry. Tariff items 214 & 215, china ware, etc. Transcript of proceedings (1952). Archives New Zealand, IC/10/ACC W2537>.

Crown Lynn Potteries Ltd, 'Crown Lynn' earthenware plate, [about 1950]. The central transfer print was sourced in England and the delicate painting of the rim was undertaken by staff recruited in Staffordshire.
Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (CG002482)

The end of the war saw the gradual dismantling of the restrictions and opportunities of the command economy and the resumption of ceramic imports from Britain. Nonetheless Ambrico was in a strong competitive position. British manufacturers were directing their output primarily to non Sterling bloc economies and import licensing combined with high tariffs on non-British production meant that other overseas manufacturers such as those in Europe and the United States were actively discriminated against by government fiat. Moreover a decision to devalue the New Zealand pound meant Ambrico was in a position to contemplate exporting its wares into the Australian market. In 1947 Clark accompanied by an Ambrico board member Len Stevens (1890-1973) travelled to the United Kingdom where, with the agreement of government, they acquired a number of second-hand machines, observed new patterns and shapes and recruited specialist workers amongst those dissatisfied with the grim conditions prevailing in post-war Britain. The inclusion of Stevens, an Auckland lawyer, chairman of the Dominion Breweries and a key confidant of the construction magnate James Fletcher, suggests Ambrico had been embraced by the Auckland business community.  In what would be recognised today as a blatant instance of intellectual piracy, Ambrico began producing imitations of British lines, more often than not ambiguously branded as being of 'British' origin and with names – such as 'Fancy Fayre', 'Regal Potteries' and 'Crown Lynn' – more redolent of the pot banks of Staffordshire than the industrial periphery of Auckland.

Keith Murray (1892-1981), designer, for  Josiah Wedgwood & Sons Ltd, earthenware vase shape no. 3765 (about 1930).
Shapiro Auctioneers, Sydney

Ernest Shufflebotham (1908-1994) for Crown Lynn Potteries Ltd, earthenware vase (about 1950).
Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, The Walter C Cook Decorative Art Collection, gift of Walter Cook, 1992 (CG001939)

Probably the most blatant example of piracy by the newly-formed Crown Lynn Potteries Ltd was its imitation of a series of vases produced by Josiah Wedgwood & Sons Ltd after designs by the architect of its Barlaston premises, Keith Murray. Murray's designs – he was not a potter – were popular amongst New Zealand consumers not least for Murray's tenuous connection with the country (he was born and spent his first fourteen years here) but they were expensive and scarce. Among the fifteen English staff recruited by Clark in 1947 was a former employee of the Wedgwood concern, Ernest Shufflebotham who, on his arrival at New Lynn in 1948 was set to producing imitations of the wares he had thrown and turned in England. Rather than exhibiting the finely-honed quality of the originals, Shufflebotham's reproductions while competently produced were crudely mechanical and dipped in thick white matt glazes that obscured the turned bands. In 1953, in an effort to further expand the company's consumer base, Clark employed a Dutch ceramic designer Frank Carpay to produce a range of modernistic hand painted wares under the self-consciously exotic 'Handwerk' label that captured the spirit if not the quality of some of the Scandinavian and Italian ceramics being imported in small quantities to satisfy a niche market for well-designed products. Clark declared that he was using Carpay's 'fine china' in a 'campaign to educate the public away from imported china of the "pretty rosebud" variety' <'No "museum pieces": new venture in the manufacture of china', New Zealand Manufacturer (15 December 1953), p. 35>.

Paul Champion, Queen Elizabeth II visiting Crown Lynn, 1963.
Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries (1055-1)

Crown Lynn's dependence on pirated designs suggests design was a problematic for the company and its management; an unresolved hiatus in the process of making, mediating and consuming the wares it produced. Clark's recruitment of English pottery workers along with the acquisition of relatively new machinery indicates an awareness of the problem. Moreover, Clark was an enthusiastic publicist and, from the start, Crown Lynn was prominently featured in the local press as well as being involved in trade fairs, retail displays and tours by the monarch, politicians and other celebrities. Clark seems to have gauged the local mass market well. By producing wares that imitated those of Staffordshire Crown Lynn responded to a consumer demand that, over decades, had been carefully groomed by import agents and retailers to appreciate the more traditional productions of English manufacturers.

These strategies were reactive and failed to address fundamental problems such as production quality which, compared with imported wares, remained crude. The English-recruited staff were all of relatively low status; craftsmen, not educated professionals. The machinery acquired in 1947 was technologically redundant even before it was installed: a British manufacturer observed that he was:

Staggered by some of the most basic principles employed [at Crown Lynn], which I cannot for the life of me imagine were put-in in 1947. If they had been put-in in 1897, I should have thought it would have been more reasonable [...] I mean some of this things there – take the casting: tub and bucket. Well it is going back to the days of bows and arrows <R Bloore, in New Zealand Board of Trade, Public tariff inquiry. Tariff items 214 & 215, china ware, etc. Transcript of proceedings (1952). Archives New Zealand, IC/10/ACC W2537>.

Worse still, the Labour administration's revaluation of the New Zealand pound in 1948 eliminated what had been a 25 per cent subsidy of the company's exports and the election of a National party administration in 1949 on a promise of ending import licensing seemed set to usher in a collapse of the hard-won domestic market but the company continued to expand. Notwithstanding Clark's claim that labour costs were high 'due to New Zealand's higher standard of living' it transpired that they were half those prevailing in England – largely due to a predominantly female workforce – and  could have been lower had production been more efficient. For its first twenty years Crown Lynn seems to have epitomised that quintessentially colonial mentality of 'cobbling things together on the cheap'.

Sparrow Industrial Pictures Ltd, [Women moulding handles for cups at Crown Lynn Potteries Ltd, (about 1955)].
Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira

By 1956 it was apparent that Crown Lynn was struggling to survive. Following a disastrous fire the company's banker, the British-owned National Bank of New Zealand Ltd instructed Clark to lay off staff: along with tens of production staff, Carpay was 'let go' and Shufflebotham returned to Wedgwood. Production was scaled back to those basic lines that were guaranteed to sell. This gloomy state of affairs seemed set to continue (Clark took to motor racing) when, at the general election of November 1957, a Labour government was returned with a slim majority. The new administration not only advocated an expansion of manufacturing but was also compelled to re-impose import licensing in an attempt to stabilise New Zealand's volatile currency. Moreover, in July 1960, it introduced tariff protection on a number of commodities produced by what were described as 'one-unit' industries; these included Crown Lynn.

Labour's industrial policy ensured Crown Lynn's survival, most notably its strategy of encouraging good design not only in the production of commodities but also in terms of educating retailers and consumers. In its annual report for 1959 the Department of Industries and Commerce asserted that 'In an age when technical skill is of such importance, the function of good design in unifying the qualities of utility, durability, harmony and balance is an important factor in [industrial] development.'<'Report of the Department of Industries and Commerce for the year ending 31 March 1959', AJHR, 4 (1959), H44, p. 19>. This officially-promoted focus on design did more than anything to change not only the appearance of Crown Lynn's products and how they were marketed but also the way the company's management understood that design was more than a concern for appearance but had an impact on every aspect of its activities.

Barry Woods, [Window display by Allan Smith at the Milne & Choyce department store, Palmerston North, about 1963]. Crown Lynn's changed attitude to design during the 1960s extended to controlling its retail image even in provincial New Zealand
Palmerston North City Library

Ambrico/Crown Lynn resorted to design piracy during the late 1940s and 50s because not only was it expedient but also, located at the end of the colonial supply chain, it could get away with it. What might have appeared to be a good business move – getting something for nothing and making a profit on it – in practice turned out to be a disaster. For all its publicity-driven bluster, Crown Lynn management's failure to recognise design as a process concealed a range of critical issues that it consistently failed to address. Its products were derivative, not 'iconic'; it's reliance on 'number eight wire' technology resulted in low production standards; its export 'success' was dependent on a cheap, largely female, labour force, tariff protection and an undervalued currency; its existence and continued survival was brokered on the initiatives of and the support provided by two Labour party administrations. Its heyday during the 1960s and 70s resulted from its adoption of a design led strategy of growth that was predicated on the financial and logistical support of the state.  Crown Lynn Potteries Ltd – renamed Ceramco Ltd in 1974 and the Ceramco Corporation in 1987 – collapsed when the fourth Labour government's attempts to remedy the macroeconomic ills bequeathed by its National party predecessors unleashed the demons of neoliberalism. The production of ceramics was by now a minor part of the Ceramco Corporation's activities and the board, disinterested in the product, unfettered by regulation, devoid of social responsibility and obsessed with the chimera of profit, curtailed investment, asset-stripped the company, laid off staff and in May 1989 finally closed it down.

Teenage dream: rapid response collecting

Unidentified designers for Eylure, 'Katy Perry lashes' false eyelash set, manufactured by PT Korindah, Indonesia, 2013, 
Victoria & Albert Museum, given by Gethin Chamberlain (CD.24:1 to 5-2014)

At the end of 2013 the Victoria & Albert Museum in London – Britain’s national museum of art and design – announced a new collection strategy aimed at ‘collecting objects as soon as they become newsworthy, to reflect the changing way fast moving global events influence society.’ The strategy is manifest in the museum’s recently formed ‘Contemporary Architecture, Design and Digital team’ headed up by the architectural journalist Kieran Long. The objects collected are exhibited in a new Rapid Response section of the museum’s recently refurbished Twentieth Century Gallery. The sort of things being assembled include a Liberator handgun – ‘the first 3D-printed “wiki-weapon”, Katy Perry false eyelashes made for an American-owned British company in Indonesia (£5.95) and a panel of spike studs used in London to deter the homeless from sleeping on the exteriors of the  premises of the better off. Recognising the inherent banality of many of these objects, Long argues that these usually fugitive things are precisely what a future generation will want to see in its museums ‘because lots of valuable things are kept by people’ (Rose Etherington ['Interview with Kieran Long'], Deezen 18 Dec 2013).

New Zealand doesn't have a 'national museum of art and design', but as in New Zealand, the British media tend to avoid mentioning museums – unless there’s a scandal in the making – but commentary in quality newspapers such as the Guardian, in magazines like Dezeen and on sites such as Design Observer has been generally positive. Oliver Wainwright, writing in the Guardian, emphasises how important it is to regard the material collected under this strategy against the narrative of the museum’s collection of ‘the embroidered thrones and lacquered vases of despots and dictators’, arguing that ‘Rapid Response brings these stories to the fore, as a powerful reminder that, beyond the craft of their making, every object is political.’ Nonetheless, Wainwright cautions that ‘It is a curatorial approach that at times feels a little too journalistic, a bit like walking through a “most read” list of articles-as-objects’.

Twitter profile summary of Fiona Hughes, assistant editor, arts, Evening Standard newspaper, July 2014

It’s perhaps natural that journalists would mandate the initiative of another journalist, particularly one that highlights the contemporary and the newsworthy. Equally telling is the decision by the museum's management to resource a team comprising four curators dedicated to collecting the contemporary, particularly in an institution that for much of its existence has been significantly under-resourced, at least from a curatorial perspective. There’s no indication that this situation has changed but even the most traditional observer will recognise there’s little media purchase to be found in a scholarly study of sixteenth century German stoneware vessels. One of the few negative responses in the British press to the V&A’s new strategy has been the almost predictable publication of an excerpt from the museum’s press release in the ‘Pseuds corner’ column of the satirical magazine Private Eye (no. 1369 (27 June-10 July 2014), p. 33).

Kieren Long's Twitter page, July 2014

Media savviness would appear to be the rationale both behind the the appointment of this high-profile curatorial team and the adoption of this strategy. Long has shifted from reporting news to collecting the ‘realia’ of news and being a part of the reportage. In many ways, it’s not too far removed from the role he played in the BBC series ‘Restoration Home’ where Long, employed as an architectural history pundit, would represent an anonymous research assistant’s archival work about a building to its current owners who would then use it to inform their amateur efforts to obscure Britain’s built heritage. Complementing his profile as a talking head and a widely published journalist, Long has a quantifiable social media presence: he’s on Twitter (@kieranlong) although his Facebook presence is mediated through the museum, as indeed are blog entries from members of the Contemporary Architecture, Design and Digital team. The Twitter feed for the new strategy has its own hashtag: #RapidResponseCollecting.

Twitter profile summary of Tom Dyckhoff, presenter of the 'Great Interior Design Challenge' show on BBC1, July 2014

All is not well though. The architectural journalist and BBC pundit Tom Dyckhoff recently tweeted his displeasure at the scale and location of the Rapid Response section of the Twentieth Century Gallery, suggesting it was 'wee' and 'tucked away' and that it should be relocated to 'the main reception'. Tellingly, Dyckhoff's tweet was retweeted by Long, which might suggest a degree of concurrence with the views expressed.  Such a repositioning might engender a new range of problems, not least the fact that instead of highlighting the material acquired under the rapid response collecting mantra against the museum's historical collection, it would be competing with the museum's shop, located prominently near the 'main reception'.

David Iliff, Foyer of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2012.
The museum's shop, surmounted on the mezzanine level by George Gilbert Scott's Hereford Screen (1862), is to the right of the photograph, directly in a processional line from its principal public entrance to the left.
Wikimedia Commons license CC-BY-SA 3.0

The idea of collecting quotidian and popular objects is no innovation; social history museums, for example, do it all the time. In interviews with the press, Long has cited an earlier precedent at the V&A in the activities of the CirculationDepartment, which, from the early twentieth century until 1977, collected contemporary work as part of its circulating (hence the departmental title) exhibitions programme. Although the primary curatorial departments in the V&A did reluctantly – and occasionally controversially ­– collect the odd contemporaneously made object from the start, the first systemic collection of the contemporary to be shown in its walls was undertaken privately under the aegis of the British Institute of Industrial Art (1920-1933). Following the closure in 1921 of the Institute’s short-lived Knightsbridge gallery – dubbed by a journalist wag on the Daily Chronicle ‘the state art shop’ ­– it convinced the V&A to allow it to exhibit a selection of contemporary designed objects in the museum's – rather inappropriately scaled and peripherally located – North Court. The majority of these pieces were collected by the art writer and proselytiser Margaret Hattersley Bulley (1882-1959) who, on the demise of the institute following the formation of the better-funded and organised Council for Art and Industry, endowed the collection to the V&A.

[Hannah Ritchie (1915-1940)], Cover of Margaret H Bulley, Have you good taste? A guide to the appreciation of the lesser arts (London: Methuen, 1933). 
Ritchie appears to have been a pupil at a London County Council school influenced by the theories of its inspector of art, the art pedagogue Marion Richardson

More recently the V&A has initiated other programmes addressing contemporary consumption including the 2000 exhibition 'Brand new' which took 'a challenging look at consumer culture and the proliferation of brand identities.' Unlike the rapid response collecting strategy, the exhibition critically examined the nature of contemporary consumption in particular the relationship between brands and consumer behaviour. While the exhibition was neither the result of a deliberate collecting strategy nor focussed exclusively on the contemporary, it was an interesting indicator of the way the institution had changed its approach to the contemporary. 

A collecting strategy aimed at acquiring the banal rather than the precious follows much of the thinking espoused by what might be described as the first generation of design historians – as opposed to, say, art or architectural historians with an interest in design – such as Adrian Forty and Jonathan Woodham. Forty's 1986 text Objects of desire: design and society since 1750 (London: Thames & Hudson) made what was then a radical assertion that design was shaped by economic, social and ideological decisions and that it was best expressed in everyday objects. Woodham in Twentieth-century design (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) elaborated on this view declaring that the best known and by implication the most successful designs of the twentieth century were found in the marketplace, not the museum. This emphasis on the consumer experience – on the the exchange value of the commodity rather than the singularity of the design, the significance of the designer or the sagacity of the manufacturer – marks an important shift in institutional approach to collecting. It's a blurring of the distinction between the shop and the museum, locating the museum as a site of entertainment, a distraction, an asylum; no less, a contemporary Benjaminian Passegen.

It would require no great stretch of the imagination to think that the V&A's media-driven rapid response collecting strategy might appeal to the management of the handful of museums in New Zealand that acquire designed objects for their collections. It's a relatively cheap move and would require no great outlay other than staff costs and a small acquisitions budget. For all that, it probably wouldn't work for any number of reasons, not least the facts that New Zealand has neither that many design-minded media celebrities nor museums with collections of ‘the embroidered thrones and lacquered vases of despots and dictators’ to act as a contextual backdrop for the new material. 

David Jenkin (1919-c. 2002), presentation vase commemorating the production of the '100 millionth article' at Crown Lynn Potteries Ltd, New Zealand. 
Presented to Walter Nash, prime minister of New Zealand, in July 1959.
Te Papa Tongarewa/National Museum of New Zealand, gift of the Nash family 1996 (CG00271)

As a museum whose collection, among other things, encompasses art, design and social history, Te Papa has, over the years, collected both the local versions of 'embroidered thrones and lacquered vases' as well as 'newsworthy' objects. The former might best be represented by the covered vase produced in 1959 by the Crown Lynn factory and presented to the prime minister, the crockery-minded Walter Nash.* It must be pointed out that no matter the slurs of his opponents, Nash hardly fitted the mould of a despot or dictator. Despite the fact that it wasn't collected contemporaneously, this crudely conceived if technically perfect vase – it has the appearance of being carved from a lump of lard – is the ideal exemplar of the New Zealand market place as it was in 1959. Its form is derivative and anachronistic and it was manufactured using outdated and imported, second-hand technology. There's a certain irony in that, arguably, Nash and his second Labour party administration (1957-1960) did more than any government, before or after, both to encourage the growth of manufacturing industry in New Zealand and to address the abysmal standard of design embodied by the vase. Except as a product of Crown Lynn's marketing department, Nash's vase had no consumer profile; despite its political resonances, no one bought or sold it and, strangely enough, while the event of its presentation was considered newsworthy, the piece itself was not illustrated but referred to, glancingly and inaccurately, in newspaper reports of the occasion as a 'loving cup'.

Unidentified designers,  'Carlton Ware' cup and saucer, commemorating the New Zealand Centennial Exhibition 1940, 
manufactured by Wiltshaw and Robinson Ltd, England, 1939. 
Te Papa Tongarewa/National Museum of New Zealand, purchased 1980 with the Minister's discretionary funds (CG001344)

Equally un-newsworthy but distinctly quotidian is the collection of ceramic souvenirs from the 1940 New Zealand Centennial Exhibition acquired by the museum in 1980. These knickknacks – souvenir ashtrays, cups and saucers, egg cups and the like, standard low-end productions decorated with a clobbered transfer print of Edward Anscombe's temporary Centennial Tower – were produced in England to satisfy not so much local consumer demand for material memories of a national event but more the balance sheets of the British manufacturers, export agents, confirmers and shippers charged with supplying the New Zealand manufactured commodities market, who effectively defined consumer choice. Acquired institutionally as part of a social history collecting strategy some forty years after their production, these tawdry memorabilia of a newsworthy event were, individually, as un-newsworthy as Nash's vase. But in terms of what they represented in the way they were produced, mediated and consumed were accurate reflections of the country's material culture as it was embodied at a particular moment. 

The V&A's new rapid response collecting strategy is neither new nor is it about collecting. Its Liberator handgun doesn't even need to be collected as an object but merely recorded as a line of computing code that with the appropriate software can be produced by a 3D printer anywhere, anytime. It is, in effect, a dematerialised commodity; it doesn't need to exist physically in a collection to convey the reason why the V&A decided to mediate its existence. It's telling that a recent article on Michael Brand, director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, quotes him asserting that '"the age of collecting is over", and that the future for museums and galleries worldwide is collaboration and loan.' (Peter Robb, 'Brand management', The Monthly (August 2014), p. 36). Brand's comment is perhaps best understood from his background as a former director of the Getty Museum where his major role seems to have been remediating and unpicking the rapacious collecting activities of the museum's former curator of antiquities Marion True rather than expending its vast acquisitions budget on extending the museum's collection. Brand's comment shouldn't be seen as merely the frustrated comments of the director of an art gallery with a notably modest collection – at least by international metrics – and little chance of improving it. Brand is, apparently, 'formidably well connected with the world's leading institutions - the Hermitage in Russia, the Harvard Museum, the Courtauld Institute in London, the American Association of Museum Directors, and so on.', so what he says has a universal currency. What he appears to be advocating is something similar to what the V&A has done with its de-objectified collecting strategy. By advocating a focus on loan-based exhibitions Brand, like Martin Roth at the V&A, is not only condoning but also encouraging a McLuhanesque shift in the public gaze, from the collection to the shop. At least Brand hasn't yet promulgated a collecting strategy that gives all the appearance of being driven by the fickle chimera of popularity.

Postscript

The underwhelming experience of what Katy Perry eye lashes created by Eylure look like when they're put on display in the V&A's Rapid Response Collecting 'gallery':

* Keith Sinclair, Walter Nash (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1976), p. 182, observed that in July 1939, during the humiliating negotiations around the 1938-39 exchange crisis, Nash 'had done a certain amount of travelling about Britain, mainly talking to disgruntled crockery and other manufacturers.' Is there a connection between Nash's visits to the 'disgruntled crockery manufacturers' and the tawdry Centennial Exhibition souvenirs they despatched to New Zealand soon after?

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.