An incidental impetus?

Milner Gray (1899-1997), logo for the Society of Industrial Artists, about 1933

In April 1949 the New Zealand Listener published a short article by the poet, lecturer, textile printer, music critic and general gadfly A R D Fairburn entitled ‘Art and industry’. Seen from the perspective of the early twenty-first century, the article has good claim to represent a bit of a threshold moment in the history of design in New Zealand as it was probably the first time the subject of industrial design was raised in a popular forum, rather than in specialist publications such as Home & Building, The Year Book of the Arts in New Zealand or the recently launched New Zealand Design Review.

Probably the first popular discussion of industrial design in New Zealand. A R D Fairburn, 'Art and industry',
New Zealand Listener, 20: 513 (22 April 1949), p. 8

Fairburn’s article discussed a visit to New Zealand by the British industrial designer Milner Gray, then president of the Society of Industrial Artists, a design practitioner body formed in 1930 'to advance and protect the interests of [designers] and to raise the standard of [design] in [Britain]'. Between 28 March and 10 April 1949, under the aegis of the British Council – the propaganda arm of the British government, Gray delivered a series of lectures on aspects of industrial design to audiences in Auckland and Wellington. Fairburn’s article, while the only critical commentary, wasn’t the only published record of Gray’s New Zealand expedition. His itinerary was tracked in the newspapers – in the women’s columns (‘Housewives helped by good design’, Auckland Star (29 March 1949), p. 3.) – and abridged versions of his lectures were subsequently published in the Wellington-based Design Review and some months later in Modern Manufacturing and the New Zealand Manufacturer as well as in The Australian Artist; Gray's tour also encompassed Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney.

E Mervyn Taylor (1906-1964), cover of Design Review, 2:2 (August-September 1949). Gray's visit coincided with the Architectural Centre's commissioning Taylor to re-package the New Zealand Design Review. Taylor's cover design incorporates one of Gray's pre-war designs; the issue contained an abridged transcript of Gray's lecture 'Package design in Great Britain' 

These reports and transcripts were for some time the only published records of Gray’s fortnight-long visit. Notwithstanding the singularity of the event, Gray's foray into the Antipodes has been excised from his biographies as being of no relevance to his role in creating design as an identifiable practice. From a New Zealand perspective, the visit subsequently became something of an embarrassment and the presence of one of the key figures in British design circles, was, until recently, air-brushed from the history of design in New Zealand, possibly because it was considered a diversion from the emerging national design discourse. In part, this reflected political reality. Some seven months after Gray left for Sydney, a conservative National party government was elected. The new administration had no interest in design matters and withdrew the scant funds that had been previously made available in the fields both of research and promotion on the grounds that subsidising such activities was inappropriate in a country whose primary function was to export the barely processed products of grass and to import the manufactured commodities of the ‘mother’ country.

Gray's lecture 'The industrial design profession in Great Britain'was published in the winter 1949 edition of The Australian Artist, edited by Richard  Haughton James, the first president of the Melbourne-based practitioner body, the Society of Designers for Industry. Reference to Gray's text is made on the upper left of the cover

The idea of sending someone to the Antipodes to talk about design generally and British design specifically seems to have occurred to British Council in early 1948. Design was not an unknown field to the council. The influential secretary of its Fine Arts Committee until late 1947, Alfred Appleby Longden, had been involved in a number of the British government’s design promotion initiatives since 1906; the committee's long-standing chairman was Eric McLagan, director of the Victoria & Albert Museum and, prior to the Second World War, a member of the Council for Art and Industry. However, the most notable exponent of design in the committee was the ubiquitous Kenneth Clark, formerly director of the National Gallery and an active member of the Board of Trade sub-committee that, in 1943, had recommended the formation of the Council of Industrial Design (CoID); the Council came into being in December 1944. Clark was, incidentally, from 1945-47, adviser to the Melbourne National Gallery of Victoria’s Felton Bequest and was a close friend of the recently appointed Herald Professor of Fine Art at the University of Melbourne, Joseph Burke – formerly private secretary to the British prime minister Clement Attlee – who had not only been involved in the formation of the CoID but was also acquainted with key members of a recently-established, design practitioner body, the Melbourne-based Society of Designers for Industry (SDI). 

In March 1948 Violet Merriman of the Lectures Department at the British Council, approached Cycill Tomrley, design advice officer at the CoID seeking advice as to who might be recruited as ‘a practical speaker with a knowledge of the distributive and selling side of consumer goods as well as the design side, so that he (sic) is equipped to inform and enlighten any sort of audience even the specialist trade audiences and students of design, rather than discuss the social and theoretical aspect of industrial design’ (University of Brighton Design Archives, 85/12, Memo from C Tomrley to M Hartland Thomas, 06 April 1948). After extended discussions with the CoID and having rejected a number of the proffered candidates – such as Bill Newman, editor of the retail trade journal Store – the British Council finally selected Gray.

Milner Gray (1899-1997) for A J Wilkinson Ltd, 'Bizarre for Clarice Cliff' earthenware plate, 1935.
Te Papa Tongarewa/National Museum of New Zealand. Gift of Walter Cook, 1992 (CG001946)
CC BY-NC-ND license

As a practicing designer, Gray was perhaps not the obvious candidate for a tour of the frontiers of what was still referred to as 'the Empire'. His urbanity and wit were qualities not usually held in high regarded in provincial circles, but he was an articulate speaker and an effective motivator. He had been the key figure not only in the establishment in the late 1920s of the Society of Industrial Artists (SIA), the most enduring design practitioner body in Britain but also in its post-war reconstruction. During the Second World War, Gray had been appointed head of the Exhibitions Branch and principal design adviser at the Ministry of Information. He also played a part in the formation of the CoID where he both acted as an advocate for design practitioners as well as contributing to the understanding of what design entailed amongst those directly responsible for its formation. In 1942, together with Misha Black, Marcus Brumwell and Herbert Read, he founded one of the most successful twentieth century British design consultancies, Design Research Unit.

Unidentified photographer, Meeting of the Design Research Unit's board of associated designers, March 1948. In what seems to be a parody of the iconography of the Christian 'last supper', Gray is seated third from the left
From M Cotton, Design Research Unit 1942-72 ([London]: Koenig Books, [2010]

British Council tours of the Antipodes – which began in 1946 following a change in government foreign policy – had hitherto focussed on exporting British cultural values: music, art, the theatre and literature. In 1947 the Old Vic Theatre Company, led by Lawrence Oliver and Vivien Leigh, and the Boyd Neel Orchestra toured Australia and New Zealand to considerable acclaim and profit. In 1948, the Council exhibited Henry Moore drawings and sculpture in the Australian state capitals – although not in New Zealand – again and surprisingly, to popular acclaim. This new proposal for a design-focussed tour with ‘a practical speaker’ was, as Merriman acknowledged ‘rather the opposite of what one would expect of the British Council’.  

The rationale behind the British Council's design tour is obscure but it is evident that it was not prompted by any specific recognition of an interest in design emanating from either Australia or New Zealand, notwithstanding the emergence of a modernist design discourse in both countries. While the British Council’s representative in Wellington, John Bostock, was undoubtedly aware of the activities of the Architectural Centre and its publication the New Zealand Design Review, this was not a factor in the Council’s decision. Moreover, the decision to add a New Zealand leg onto Gray's touring schedule seems to have resulted from concerns in the newly-established Wellington office of the British Council that New Zealand businesses and consumers were increasingly swayed by United States influences. In 1946 New Zealand negotiated a settlement of its Lend-Lease Agreement debts with the United States in a manner that ensured the acceded funds –  some USD4million –  remained in the country, being used to acquire property locally and to foster cultural initiatives such as the United States Foreign Information Service (later the United States Information Agency) and the Fulbright Programme. As in Europe and Japan, assimilation of United States technologies and management methods largely stemmed from local manufacturers, businessmen and, to a lesser extent, officials from government agencies.

While design had next to no profile in New Zealand at government level, the British post-war Labour government saw design as a critical component of the country's export-led economic recovery programme. As Stafford Cripps, president of the Board of Trade, declared in a speech to the SIA in December 1945 'The efficiency of our industries depends to a very great extent upon our combining the latest results of scientific and industrial research on the part of large and small firms alike with an attractive and suitable appearance and shape.' (S Cripps, 'The industrial designer', Democracy alive (London: Sedgwick & Jackson, 1946), p. 87). Cripps' vision did not sit well with British manufacturers who, rather than subscribing to this brave, new world, reverted to manufacturing the sort of thing they had produced prior to the war, employing the same outmoded processes in the expectation that their overseas markets were as conservative as their taste. In an effort to overcome this opposition to innovation, Cripps inaugurated a series of working parties formed of representatives from both employer and employee organisations. A part of their brief was to address the issue of design and its applicability to industry. In the case of the Pottery Working Party, this move failed to gain the support of both manufacturers and the unionised workforce; it was rejected out of hand. Designers, the Pottery Working Party argued, should, primarily, be industry-trained and, in any case, 'Creative designers are born, not made'. The government's industry-based Design Centre proposals were summarily dismissed as something that might be contemplated in the future. (Great Britain, Board of Trade, Working party reports: pottery (London: HMSO, 1946), p.23; p. 32.)

Reforming British industry or vindicating existing practices. Unidentified designer, cover of Great Britain, Board of Trade, Working party reports: pottery 
(London: HMSO, 1946) 

Charged with articulating the government line, the CoID responded to the snub. Writing in the trade journal British Industries, its newly appointed director Gordon Russell asserted 'The Council is most anxious to be of service to industry and there is little doubt that there are many firms whose design standards are not good enough to maintain sales in the face of real competition. I was told the other day of a case in New Zealand where a consignment of a certain British commodity was being jobbed off at about 50 per cent of the ceiling price because the standard of design was low.' (G Russell, 'Britain a pioneer in design', British Industries, 35:5 (May 1948), p. 135.) Just as the success of the British fine arts pavilion at the Christchurch New Zealand International Exhibition of 1906-07 had sparked a British government design initiative - the formation of the Exhibitions Branch of the Board of Trade, so reports of trading failures in New Zealand seem to have prompted the British Council into entering into the field of design promotion.

In the eyes of the British Council Gray's fortnight in New Zealand passed off satisfactorily, almost successfully. In the afterglow, Fairburn declared that Gray had 'done more, perhaps, than any other man to raise the profession of industrial designing to its present high status', an observation that suggests he had been speaking to someone with direct experience of Gray's activities in the SIA - possibly his friend Eric Lee-Johnson. In both Auckland and Wellington Gray delivered four carefully scripted lectures to audiences of between 150 and 200 persons in Auckland and around 100 in Wellington, as well as undertaking radio interviews in both cities. Throughout his lectures Gray sought to counteract the perception that British design was deficient although he allowed that 'The design of cheap mass-produced articles is still, with few exceptions, as unsatisfactory in Great Britain as in most countries.' The problem, Gray asserted, lay both with manufacturers and designers and he argued that 'the approach to industrial design must be a synthesis of the three ideals of form and function, sales appeal and economic production–fitness for purpose, design for selling, and design for making.' (M Gray, 'Design in everyday life', New Zealand Design Review, 2:1 (June-July 1949), p. 10).

E Mervyn Taylor (1906-1964), cover of New Zealand Design Review, 2:1 (June-July 1949). The most tangible record of Gray's visit was the 'Industrial Design Number' dedicated issue of the Design Review, which reproduced abridged transcripts of two of Gray's lectures.
New Zealand Electronic Text Collection 

But if the British Council was hoping that Gray's tour might prompt a resurgence of faith in British manufactured commodities they were sadly mistaken. Reporting on Gray's visit Bostock observed that 'owing to the pressure of other business, it was impossible for the Minister of Education and for the Minister of Industries and Commerce to meet Mr Gray'. Instead he was lunched by the governor general, Bernard Freyberg, attended 'a small cocktail party given by Mr Vernon Brown, architect and lecturer at the [Auckland] University [College], and attended by representatives of the University [...] and the Auckland Manufacturers' Association.' A meeting with members of the Manufacturers' Research Committee of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research led to a request for 'a small travelling Exhibition to illustrate good design'. Bostock speculated that Gray's tour might prompt the formation of a local 'Society of Industrial Artists, whose members would initially be drawn from the fields of Architecture and Art, there being no recognised Industrial Design Specialists as yet in this country.' Such a society, he opined, would probably 'reduce the "piracy" of designs which is at present widespread here.' (National Archives of the United Kingdom, BW83/9, Letter from J Bostock to Lectures Department, 12 April 1949).

Bostock's prognostication as to the incidental impetus Gray's visit might have on New Zealand design proved wrong. By the end of 1949 the Auckland Design Guild, 'an association providing for the exchange of ideas on the arts and sciences connected with design', which had been established in the July following Gray's visit had folded on unrecognised ideological grounds; the incoming government had withdrawn the small subsidy provided to the Architectural Centre for publication of the Design Review; and New Zealand manufacturing companies, notably the newly established Crown Lynn brand, continued to pirate imperfect imitations of British commodities. Moreover, the production standards of British manufactures continued to be criticised: in July 1952 a National party backbencher, T P Shand, was moved to comment in the House of Representatives about the quality of imported British goods, declaring that 'I say to the English manufacturer and his agent in New Zealand that they are doing a very bad turn when they put rubbish on the market [...] we have had some shocking rubbish by way of English crockery in the last three or four years [...] I think it fair to say the the New Zealand manufacturers of crockery got blamed for some of it' (NZPD, vol. 297, (June- August 1952), pp. 86-87). By identifying the connection between manufacturer and importer, Shand got it right. The problem with British manufactures wasn't the deficiency of British design, but rather a deficiency in what was despatched to this, the least critical of consumer markets; Gray's 'cheap mass-produced articles', invariably retailed in New Zealand at highly inflated prices. 

In his post-visit report to the British Council, Gray was somewhat less sanguine than Bostock in his opinions, observing that 'No Australasian style of design in mass-produced goods has yet evolved, and in most cases it is evident that little or no thought has been given to the subject. There are few competent designers practicing in either Australia or New Zealand, and the present tendency is for those of outstanding ability to emigrate to the UK or USA, where greater opportunities are offered.' (National Archives of the United Kingdom, BW83/9, Memorandum from M Gray to the British Council, 21 April 1949). The British Council heeded Gray's advice; industrial design was subsequently deemed a subject best ignored when considering tours of New Zealand. It would take the best part of a decade before steps were taken to invest design with an independent institutional profile in New Zealand. 

Industry and the artist: Eric Lee-Johnson and design

Eric A Johnson and his dog, London, about 1937
Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington, Purchased 1997 with New Zealand Lottery Grants Board funds

In the painter and photographer Eric Lee-Johnson’s somewhat hastily written and lightly edited autobiography, passing reference is made to his becoming ‘one of the original members of the Institute of Industrial Design’ whilst in London in the 1930s, noting that ‘I was invited to join by the organiser, Milner Grey (sic), and took no active part beyond attending lectures, but was glad to lend my name to the aims of such movements (sic).’ (Eric Lee-Johnson, No road to follow: autobiography of a New Zealand artist (Auckland: Godwit, 1994), p. 31).

There was no such organisation as the Institute of Industrial Design, organised by Milner Gray, constituted in London during the 1930s. However, Gray was one of the founder members of a group of practicing designers that in September 1930 became the Society of Industrial Artists (SIA). The SIA aimed at ‘becoming a controlling authority to advance and protect the interests of Industrial Artists and at raising the standard of Industrial Art in this country, both from an economic and cultural standpoint.’ (James Holland, Minerva at fifty (Westerham, Kent: Hurtwood, 1980), p. 1).

Eric A Johnson – as he was then known – arrived in London in May 1930 and, as an employee of some of London’s leading advertising agencies, initially S H Benson Ltd and, later, Arks Publicity Ltd, he would have been intimately acquainted with the efforts of British designers to obtain professional recognition. Johnson was not the only New Zealander to be recruited to the SIA; others known to have been members included his friend from Elam days, the designer and artist James Boswell and the radical filmmaker and kinetic artist Len Lye.

Eric A Johnson's packaging design for Alfred Imhof & Sons Ltd, about 1937

Lee-Johnson’s activities as an industrial designer remain obscure: as with his photography, he evidently felt that knowledge of his work as a designer would compromise his reputation as a painter. The only known example of his work in this field was the design of the packaging of long-playing gramophone needles that he undertook for the record shop Alfred Imhof & Sons Ltd of 110 New Oxford Street while he was at Arks Publicity Ltd. The packaging design Johnson developed for Imhof was typical of the work undertaken by his London contemporaries such as Gray and Ashley Havinden. Influenced by German modernist designers, it was suited for mass display, employed new font types - usually sans serif, employed high contrast tonal fields and, characteristic of the work of many of the London designers, was slightly whimsical. 

Milner Gray's packaging design for Ilford Ltd, about 1937

The formation of the SIA came at a critical time in the emergence of design as a clearly identifiable practice during the first half of the twentieth century. While the ‘industrial arts’ had been a part of the state’s teaching curricula since the 1830s, it had been regarded as a ‘minor art’, a ‘decorative art’, an ‘applied art’. Industrial artists were regarded as little more than ornamentalists and decorators, who, on the odd occasion they were employed by manufacturers, were required to produce superficial designs that could be adapted to the dominant requirements of mass production. Other designers, such as Johnson, were identified, more often than not equally pejoratively, as commercial artists and typographers and they were often employed as technicians in printing offices and, from the 1890s, in advertising agencies.

But from the first decade of the twentieth century attitudes towards design in Britain – and to a lesser extent in the ‘colonies’ –­ began to change as the decadence of Britain’s manufacturing sector became increasingly apparent. Officials at the British Board of Trade, somewhat optimistically, identified design as a missing ingredient in the production process by as early as 1908. But it wasn’t until after the First World War that the first hesitant steps were taken in an attempt to address design deficiencies of the manufacturing sector.

The most notable of these measures resulted from the indefatigable endeavours of one of the most unlikely design promoters, Sir Hubert Llewellyn Smith, permanent secretary of the Board of Trade from 1908 to 1919 and subsequently Chief Economic Adviser to the Government until 1927. In 1919 Llewellyn Smith wrote - anonymously - a short pamphlet, Art and industry, for the Ministry for Reconstruction that argued a greater role for design in the British industrial environment. Shortly afterwards he managed to extract seed funding from the Treasury for the establishment of a prototype design promotion organisation, the pompously named British Institute of Industrial Art, which functioned, anaemically, until 1933. He also published a theoretical text, The economic laws of art production (London: Oxford University Press, 1924) and the following year taught a course on industrial art to students enrolled for the London School of Economics’ new commerce degree; it was not popular and William Pember Reeves, president of the LSE and a former High Commissioner for New Zealand, had the embarrassing task of informing Llewellyn Smith that his services were no longer required.

Llewellyn Smith was also the major driving force behind the next two measures implemented by the British state in what was an, at times, contradictory design promotion strategy: the formation of the Council for Art and Industry (1934) and the introduction of a National Register of Industrial Art Designers (1936), a state-funded registration formwork for designers, which while not offering the same level of professional protection that had been afforded to architects by the 1931 Architects (Registration) Act, at least provided a level of official recognition for the nascent practice: registered designers were able to employ the post-nominal NRIAD.

It wasn’t only officialdom that was interested in design in Britain. While the formation in 1916 of the Design & Industries Association - modelled on the Deutsche Werkbund (1907) - was probably the result of yet another Llewellyn Smith initiative, the private sector, notably the advertising industry, was beginning to understand how design could radically alter consumer preferences. Probably the most innovative advertising agency in London was W S Crawford Ltd. In 1925 its chairman, Sir William Crawford, who had attended the University of Tübingen prior to the First World War, invited members of the Bundes Deutscher Gebrauchsgraphiker, the highly influential professional association of German graphic designers to London, a seemingly fugitive event that not only acted as a catalyst for modernism in Britain but also provided British designers with a template of how to organise design practice. The SIA can be viewed as one of the more tangible results of this visit.

Lee-Johnson returned to New Zealand in 1938 and his career as a practicing industrial designer came to an abrupt close. Lacking any significant manufacturing sector and with a consumer market inured to the traditional, there was no recognisable demand for the well-designed products of modernism, even in the advertising industry where he was employed. Surprisingly, given his involvement with the SIA during his years in London, Lee-Johnson does not appear to have been involved with Milner Gray’s 1949 visit to New Zealand and there is no evidence that he retained his membership of the practitioner body following his return to the country.

Instead of practising industrial design, Lee-Johnson began to write about it. His first article ‘Industry and the Artist’ was published in Art in New Zealand in March 1943. In it he lamented the poor standard of design prevailing across the country, arguing that ‘The bad designing in the past of most things produced in New Zealand […] was the artist’s personal responsibility, although noting that ‘this position exists because of the shortsightedness of the majority of our industrialists.’ (Art in New Zealand, no. 3 (1943), p. 3).

Page from 'New Zealand postage stamp design' from the Arts Year Book, no 7,
edited by Eric Lee-Johnson (1951)

It was not a sophisticated analysis of the situation and took little account either of the realities of New Zealand’s trading position as a captive market for British manufacturers or, indeed, the realpolitik of a wartime economy. Lee-Johnson’s views on design shifted; in his last published essay on design matters, ‘New Zealand postage stamp design’, he recognised that his simplistic analysis of the design process was a more complex process and that good design was not just an issue for designers and manufacturers but also other involved parties such as consumers and, critically, the state. (Arts Year Book, no. 7 (1951), pp. 91-96).

Like that other Elam-trained designer, Jo Sinel, Eric Lee-Johnson can be counted among the first New Zealanders to be regarded as industrial designers yet, due primarily to limited opportunity, neither practiced in the country. Lee-Johnson’s impact on New Zealand design comes through his informed writing about the subject at a time few New Zealanders were even aware of the practice.

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.