Today Len Deighton (1929-2026) is best remembered as the writer of gritty spy novels, including The IPCRESS File (1962), Funeral in Berlin (1964) and SS-GB (1978). But before he became a best-selling author, Deighton (who died earlier this year) was a successful book illustrator and commercial artist. He also designed a poster, or more accurately a pair of posters, for London Transport, which is the subject of today’s post.

Deighton’s career in commercial art began after National Service (obligatory for most British men at the time). Using a service grant, he enrolled at St Martins School of Art (now Central St Martins) and graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1955. With this solid training behind him, Deighton quickly found work with advertising agencies in London and New York where he specialised in magazine illustration and book cover design. By the late 1950s he’d illustrated over 200 dust jackets, including the UK edition of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), and was well on the way to establishing a name for himself.

Like other commercial artists of his generation there was one prize, however, that he sought more than any other: a poster commission for London Underground. As Deighton wrote at the time, “the excitement of a London Transport poster is the plum we all look forward to”.  His chance came towards the end of 1956 when he speculatively submitted a portfolio of recent work to Harold Hutchison, Head of Publicity at London Transport. Impressed, Hutchison commissioned Deighton to illustrate a pair of posters promoting excursions to the countryside for the 1957 Spring/Summer Season.

Village Life, London Transport booklet, 1957

Thanks to a surviving cache of letters in the London Transport Museum archives, it’s possible to piece together some details of how the final artwork came about. The commission was for two complimentary posters which would be displayed together, a so-called ‘pair poster’, with one panel consisting mainly of text leaving the other free for an enlarged image. Publication was set to tie in with the release of a new London Transport guidebook, Village Life, which detailed daytrips for Londoners via the Underground and the company’s fleet of Green Line buses and coaches.

The pair posters in-situ (left), Aldgate East Underground station, 16 August 1957. 

Photograph: Colin Tait. Copyright London Transport Museum.

 

The advertising ‘copy’ for the text panel would have been supplied by London Transport, with Deighton given a more-or-less free hand to devise the accompanying illustrations. The resulting artwork consists of a montage of images suggesting life in a quintessential English village from springtime to mid-summer, while the accompanying text tells us that “a visitor to the Capital cannot claim to have really seen London if he has neglected London’s Country and has not seen its villages.”

Printed in February 1957 in a run of 2500 by the Curwen Press, the poster was intended for display over several months. With this in mind, the illustrations at the top of pictorial poster have a more wintry feel than those in the centre and at the base, suggesting the passing of the seasons.

In the top section, a half-timbered village shop sells newspapers, sweets and postage stamps, while members of the local hunt have gathered for picturesque effect (foxhunting being less controversial in 1950s’s Britain than it was to become). For the latter image, Hutchison supplied Deighton with a reference photograph of the West Kent Hunt depicting the Master of the Hunt, AS Gasselle, in conversation with the racehorse trainer Peter Cazalet. I wonder if either man knew of their starring roles, or recognised their likenesses on the hoardings? Probably not.

In contrast, the remainder of the poster presents an altogether sunnier view of the countryside, aimed at enticing Londoners with thoughts of rural pubs and games of cricket played on the village green. The rustic impression is completed with a tumbledown shed pasted with posters for a film show ("shed, behind library"), a Handicraft & Dairy Show ("in aid of the steeple fun"), and a Dance at the Church Hall ("postponed"), together with an old farm cart and foraging hens.

The hens reappear on the text panel to provide some visual unity, where they’ve been joined by an owl and, somewhat bafflingly, a litter of kittens.

Deighton, who was in New York when the poster first went up, wrote to Hutchison in September 1957 that he was “delighted to be greeted by the poster on my return from America”. He also asked that he might be considered for a follow up commission. Hutchison replied that more work could indeed be a possibility, adding that the poster had “been very well received.” But the opportunity didn’t arise, and by 1961 Deighton’s new career as a writer was underway.

Hutchison clearly admired the posters, though. The pictorial half was included in the Underground’s Centenary Poster exhibition at the Royal Institute Galleries in 1963 and featured in the accompanying London Transport publication. It was also favourably reviewed in contemporary design magazines, such as Graphis (May 1959), and has found a place in several retrospective surveys of Underground art ever since.

An original pair of Deighton’s posters, from the archive of the Curwen Studio, is currently available for sale here.

In writing this blog, I would like to acknowledge London Transport Museum’s superb online collection, where the letters referred to above can be found together with photographs of the posters in situ.