1926 

It is 1926, and the British Empire is on its arse. The future Queen Elizabeth is born amid miners strikes, floods, and the building of a new greyhound racing track in Manchester. Agatha Christie goes missing. An act is passed called the Electricity (Supply) Act 1926, which establishes the groundwork for what is to become the National Grid. Also the Great Depression. Also, the First World War has just happened. Also, many former colonies have become independent or are in the process of gaining independence. When you have your fingers in a lot of pies (pies you didn’t even bake and forcibly stole from the windowsill), it’s likely there’s going to be at least one with something dangerous in it. Like a snake. Or, the decline of free trade. And while it is technically peace time, something has shifted in the minds of the British public; the message of colonial dominance is wearing thin. 

Fretful and fearing irrelevance, the British colonial government established the Empire Marketing Board (EMB) to re-sell and visually rebrand the British Empire to the public as ‘non-threatening’, ‘non-political’ and ‘non-exploitative’ (Empire Marketing Board Posters, Manchester Art Gallery Press). Taking root in public spaces such as trains stations and cinemas, the EMB’s documentary films and poster campaign mark a crucial moment in the decline of popularity of the Empire; revealing a key ideological failure in the efforts to move away from the jingoism of Victorian Imperialism. The most recognisable of these efforts is the film unit, established and headed by Stephen Tallents and John Grierson. Together, they created some of the first examples of documentary film in the post-war period; most notable is Grierson’s Drifters (1929) which tells the story of Britain’s North Sea herring fishery by showing the risks ordinary people were facing to feed themselves and the nation. 

Images of plenty

Thanks to Grierson, ‘social reality’, insofar as propaganda can represent reality, fed into the broader strategy of the EMB to remind audiences of the conveyor belt of dependency between Britain and the countries it colonised. By focusing on agriculture, the fantasy of foreign lands, which continues to distort views of the global south, was newly coded in films like Song of Ceylon (1934) in order to depict dominion not so much as coercion, but as a naturally forming, interdependent relationship. While the film unit’s legacy is better remembered, the EMB was also responsible for a significant poster campaign, the existence of which was largely forgotten about. Until - the 1990s, when the posters were discovered by Manchester Art Gallery staff. Turns out they were gifted to the gallery in 1933, after the EMB’s disbandment, in recognition of their importance as industrial art. Over the course of its short lifespan (1926-1933), the EMB commissioned 222 lithograph posters plus custom frames from artists including Macdonald Gill - the creator of the
Gill Sans font. Gill is credited with designing one of the most famous posters of the set: Highways of Empire, a sprawling world map showing the shipping routes between Britain, colonised states and the rest of the world. In the image, little ships speed along dotted lines or ‘highways’, creating a sense of connectedness that is most likely inspired by Gill’s work with Frank Pick on the maps for the London Underground. While the map is rendered in gentle pastel tones whereby the sea is an inoffensive duck-egg blue, Britain’s then-colonies are set - apart in bright red, like bloodstains. 

Alongside visions of grandeur and magnitude were close-up scenes of the empire. These images elevated virtues such as hard work, honesty and familial kinship, and define part of the EMB’s core initiative; to bring empire home - to the heart. The desire to transmit relatability is evident in H.S Williamson’s lithograph series Drink Empire Grown Tea, in which the relationship between the colonies and Britain is flattened into a set of companion prints titled Picking Empire Grown Tea and Drinking Empire Grown Tea. In Picking, a woman of colour stands straight up against a shrub, picking tea leaves. She is barefoot, draped in a dress made up of yellow and pink block colours. Drinking by contrast, shows a white woman, smartly dressed holding a cup of tea. If placed side-by-side, they seem to occupy the same scene. The complex, violent and exploitative process necessary in creating that soul-warming cuppa is simplified to the point of erasure. While these posters are as racially problematic as the colonial art of the 1800s, what is unique to this era is a mutuality between the women; they both fulfil their function as part of the great family of empire (the first stirrings of what was to become the ‘Commonwealth’), yet remain fundamentally distinct. It is perhaps no accident that the white woman’s dress is a polka-dot mix of the colours featured in the picker’s dress; the colonised woman is pure ingredient; the unprocessed, raw material that allows the other woman her leisure. 

Highways, with its veneer of geographical precision, points to the increasing fear from the colonial government that knowledge of Empire was being lost, but also to the belief that the posters had affective potential, beyond mere advertising. Tallents believed that stylistic variation would apply and sustain pressure on people’s imaginations in order to arouse ‘colonial sentiment’. While maintaining a heavy editorial hand, Tallents did afford artists relative freedom in their designs, allowing experimentation with novel styles and techniques. Drink Empire Grown Tea blends flat, graphic block colouring with photorealism giving the posters photographic, granular feel. By contrast, Highways of Empire is almost a collage of cartographic styles through the ages; blending the fantastical and ornate details of Medieval and Renaissance maps with the solemnity and exactitude of the Enlightenment. 

While the posters are not straightforwardly educational (they were intended to function as art objects, creating an enlivening ‘sentiment’) they do, like the documentaries, project verisimilitude. Imagine only ever having read about Zambia (then Northern Rhodesia) until you see the sketchy, modernist-influenced poster titled Empire Tobacco From Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, from the series ‘Colonial Progress Brings Home Prosperity’ by Adrian Allison. Before you google the poster, let me warn you- it’s a disturbing image. In the foreground, a small Zambian child stands with their hands tucked behind their back as if in a military line. Their gender is indeterminate. They look up at a man dressed all in white. In his hand, a pipe. Behind him, a tobacco field is farmed by indistinct black figures. In the end, even Modernism’s seemingly-celebratory obsession with Africa can’t mask the reality that nothing about the empire had fundamentally changed, despite the EMB’s efforts to reorient the role of Empire in people’s lives - to the core of their economic, religious, cultural and social lives. It is chilling to observe how confidently and menacingly the idea of a co-operative and even benevolent empire is faked in this image. In this way, the art of the posters, with their many warped imperial inventions, create a visual vocabulary that once more disguises dominion as the fantastical, romanticised but also, contradictorily, as the factual; a disguise otherwise known as ‘Orientalism’. This concept, coined by Edward Said, neatly sums up the way Western societies, in presuming their own superiority, construct stereotypical images and models of the ‘Oriental World’ in order to authenticate and advance colonial dominance in all areas of life such as economics, law, etc. Both the posters and the films evidence a moment of change in colonial history, whereby a post-war atmosphere made it hard to justify inhumanity, so dominion had to be hidden, subdued, reimagined and painted anew. And Tallents believed that art was the key. 

Do you still eat the fruit if it is rotten inside?

That more or less describes the final dilemma a modern audience faces when viewing these posters, though it is a dilemma that would certainly have existed for the original viewers. We are greedy for beauty, and there is an urge, when seeing something beautiful, to own it in some way. To take a part of it home with you. You go to the Tate and buy a postcard to remember you have a pulse and an aesthetic sensibility.  It is the desire to have and to hold. Without knowing the context of an image such as Highways you might actually want the poster up on your wall, it’s just a map isn’t it? Moving beyond the interminable fact that the British Empire was abhorrent, and its legacy perpetuates abhorrences, we can consider our confused relationship to its art. A similar conflict surfaces with figures like Picasso or Woody Allen, and is often brought into conversation as if exposing the fact that beautiful art is not above morality, is shocking. However, the posters go to show that this conflict lies at the very heart of enjoying culture - and it will not go away. We have to let go of neutrality. Beautiful images can be made by terrible people. Or, people with terrible ideas. We should not look away even if the sour, bitter taste of rot is there. 

The posters are currently not on display, however an argument could be made for their place as part of a permanent exhibition; the posters are beautiful - they allow us to explore that bizarre and creepy feeling of thinking something is striking as the facts sink in. We need to be exposed to all the ways in which the British Empire had a hold on our minds (even where it failed). It tests us. It can take us anywhere. It is a sting. It will force us to say it all again and louder this time. To find cracks in the message. Perhaps what we have lost is the discerning eye to look through the pile of apples and to pick the one that is fresh. But you can still eat around it like? 

1933

It is 1933 and the EMB have officially disbanded. The National Grid is completed. By this time, Agatha Christie had been found, hiding from her husband in a hotel in Harrogate. The Milk Marketing board is established. Then, Adolf Hitler is appointed chancellor of the Nazi party.