Clare Wilburn, the fictional heroine of Francis Brett Youngâs Portrait of Clare (1927), struggled to find happiness throughout her life. After the death of her mother and her fatherâs remarriage, she endured an austere upbringing, a turbulent youth and several failed relationships. In the bookâs final phase, Clare secludes herself in a fishing village on the southern horn of Torbay. There, settled in a trawlermanâs house overlooking the anchorage, she finds a serenity not known previously. Brett Young describes how Clare chanced upon this sanctuary, having chosen it for no other reason than, when travelling in a railway carriage on her way to Wychbury, a photograph of the harbour had caught her eye and held it.1 The reader is offered no further details about why this view in particular captured her attention, but is meant to infer that, at a low point in her life, the photograph alerted Clare to the existence of a different world which promised escape and recovery. Seated in the carriage, Clare was persuaded by a photograph intended to do just that: captivate daily commuters with the prospect of a holiday away from their quotidian responsibilities in a world that was more attractive and fantastical by comparison. Access to this world required passengers simply do as they did every day: board the train, show the ticket and make the journey.
At the time when Portrait of Clare was first published, advertising photographs were the constant companions on many journeys, as publicity-minded railway companies sought to showcase their services to passengers who, confined to the railway carriage, represented a captive audience. The fictional Clare Wilburn was like millions of customers in real life who were greeted by railway advertising photographs each time they entered the booking hall, arrived at the platform or boarded the train. In addition, Britainâs railway companies offered photographic views in a truly diverse assortment of guidebooks and pamphlets. These publications were designed to satisfy a range of tastes and pockets, covering niche interests and pastimes, introducing readers to different regions or exhibiting all that a particular railway had to offer in weighty tomes of over one thousand pages. Although these publications were in essence advertising, they were however sold to customers, with the largest guides costing a relatively inexpensive 6d. This was a price which many were willing to pay: railway literature was eagerly anticipated and proved incredibly popular, with the chief guides selling close to a quarter of a million copies each. Millions of customers were therefore exposed to the railwaysâ competing promotional messages, which asked them to consider their everyday surroundings and picture what time away could do for their health, their relationship with families, to satisfy their interests and hobbies, and how it might affect their outlook on life.
Yet despite their popularity, the railwaysâ advertising photographs, and the popular publications which they appeared in, have been almost completely overlooked by historians. Partly, this is due to the fact that the photographers and publicists responsible for their creation commonly laboured in obscurity: little is known about their background, artistic direction or working relationships. The same is true of the creative and corporate processes behind the output. Although thousands of original negatives survive, there is very little complementary information about why they were taken or selected for publication over others. These challenges complicate the integration of photographs into the broader cultures of railway and photographic advertising across the first half of the twentieth century, and the railwaysâ photographic output has been overshadowed by the interest in their pictorial posters. But to overlook them is to ignore a significant advertising medium which for some railways represented the âfront lineâ of their promotional strategies. They are the material legacy of a major corporate image-making process which sought to capture and package for sale all that the railways had to offer during a period of increasing competition for customersâ leisure time and expenditure.
This volume considers the development of railway advertising from 1900 to the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, to better understand why and how Britainâs railway companies built up such an extensive photographic library to sell country destinations, seaside resorts, urban sights and, not least, railway travel. It seeks to unravel the complex and ever changing processes behind corporate sales communications and the resources dedicated to understanding passengers and encouraging them to consume. Shifting the emphasis away from pictorial posters, it contends that whilst photographs were initially prized by advertisers for their ability to show products and services with unparalleled realism, the railwaysâ usage went far beyond providing an authentic record of locales in the areas listed above. Britainâs railway companies used photographic guidebooks to engage customersâ anxieties about the disappearance of traditional landscapes and local values; the modernisation of British culture and business operations; the place of the seaside in the collective imagination; the changing role of women as consumers and advertisers; as well as changing habits of moving and consuming travel. Railway photography was highly narrative; using models and carefully staged arrangements, it was intended to communicate vividly with passengers based on their tastes and abilities to consume. This volume maintains that the changing face of railway photographic advertising is therefore illustrative of a collective shift in the railwaysâ corporate mindset, away from a âtake-it-or-leave-itâ attitude to customers, and towards a developing view which saw them as individuals with different needs and desires which required satisfaction. Whilst the primary aim was to safeguard the railway business, the products of this process packaged and sold Britain on an enormous scale to customers at home and abroad, creating a corporate vision of Britain on holiday as well as contributing to how millions viewed themselves and the world around them.
The Railway Companies of Great Britain
Following their initial availability as a form of passenger transport in the 1830s, railways rapidly revolutionised how far and how fast people and goods moved, challenging long-established notions of time and distance in the process.2 They stimulated and gave access to new forms of consumption, and influenced the spatial development of many towns and cities. In these early years, however, they possessed little notion of serving passengers, or improving comfort and safety beyond the first class carriages. It was left up to the government to require basic standards: Gladstoneâs well-known Act of 1844 stipulated that a third class train should run every day at one penny per mile, and that it should provide seats and basic protection from the weather.3 Yet for many years even such statutory conditions remained exceptional.
Certain companies grew large as they absorbed smaller regional concerns. Some became enormous, and enormously complex, businesses which dominated travel and employment across the districts they served. As Simmons and Gourvish have shown, few of the railway pioneers were professional men and the technical problems of railway management were only partly understood.4 However, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards the growth of railways as big businesses reduced the incentive for impulsive action: Gourvish has identified the increasing importance of the railway general manager, a position created in response to the need for strategic direction and management.5 As well as reconceptualising operating policies around the notion of âpublic serviceâ, railwaymen began to study their customersâ requirements and sponsor the idea that passengers did not represent a disorganised mass but functioned as groups which could be appealed to through dedicated and persuasive promotions.6
By the late nineteenth century, Britainâs railways were some of the countryâs largest businesses, pervasive behemoths with intricate corporate cultures, and an inescapable part of everyday life for millions of people. With the outbreak of the First World War the companies were taken into state control and put into service for the war effort. However, upon their release from governmental restriction they were in bad shape financially, their machinery and workforce similarly beleaguered. The solution was to compulsorily reorganise over one hundred individual companies into the âBig Fourâ regional railways, comprising the London and North Eastern Railway (LNER), Southern Railway (SR), the London Midland and Scottish (LMS), and the Great Western Railway (GWR). The theory was that larger, regional companies would increase efficiency, rationalise operations and discourage uneconomical competition.7 However, in the interwar years they faced many new challenges: mounting rivalry from road transport, the decline of traditional heavy industry, more discerning passenger requirements, as well as intensifying competition for their discretionary income.
Although this book considers the development of advertising theories and techniques across the railway industry, it pursues a detailed case study of the GWR, one of the worldâs oldest and most successful railway companies. This choice is partly down to the fact that the GWR is somewhat of an anomaly, being the only member of the âBig Fourâ to survive amalgamation with its corporate identity intact. This unbroken history allows a unique assessment of the growth of advertising during the period under consideration. The GWR was also a prolific photographer and publisher, making it an immediately practical choice for this first in-depth study of railway photographic advertising. Much is also known about the GWRâs general and ...