Abram Games and the Festival of Britain travel poster

Ambitious and proud Londoner, Abram Games was just 23 years old when he received a commission to design a poster for the visionary Frank Pick, then Chief Executive of the London Passenger Transport Board. This marked the dawn of Abram’s six-decade career. By the time he embarked on the design the Festival of Britain poster in 1951, he had already designed six posters for London Transport. Having spent the war years from 1940 to 1945, creating 100 posters for Army use, he had rightly earned the unique title, ‘Official War Poster Artist’.

In December 1947, Herbert Morrison, then the deputy Prime Minister of Clement Attlee’s Labour government and Leader of the House of Commons, announced that a ‘Festival of Britain’ would be held in 1951. Not only would it celebrate the centenary of the Great Exhibition of 1851, but it would also be ‘a national display illustrating the British contribution to civilization, past, present and future, in the arts, in science and technology, and in industrial design.’ It would be a ‘tonic to the nation’ - a nation, which was still suffering from rationing and post-war exhaustion.

By June 1948, the Executive Committee of the Festival invited Games and eleven other designers, including Tom Eckersley and FHK Henrion to enter a competition to design a symbol for the Festival of Britain. Eckersley and Henrion went on to design many striking posters for London Transport. Fortunately it was Games who not only won the competition, but who also won the Festival stamp competition thus establishing his reputation as one of Britain’s most notable designers.

Although he designed a mural, catalogue covers, a stamp and plaque for the Festival, Abram was never commissioned to design a poster for the Festival Committee though many of his posters were displayed in an outdoor International Poster Festival exhibition in Victoria Embankment Gardens and on hoardings on the Southbank in London. However, in 1950, the Publicity Officer of the London Transport Executive, Harold F Hutchinson, commissioned him to design a travel information panel poster (255mm H x 318mm W) specifically for the 1951 Festival of Britain.

Games, who never learnt to drive nor ever wanted to, would always travel on London Transport’s buses and trains, considering this valuable thinking time. On public transport he would not be disturbed by the telephone, unwanted guests or his three children. ‘I should have paid London Transport rent.’ he quipped. Time wasting was an anathema, so he aimed to produce six ideas for a poster on scrap paper he kept in his pockets or wallet before reaching his destination. His five times award winning Guinness ‘G’ poster was conceived on a bus journey on the back of a bus ticket! From the tops of buses, Abram was able to study and appreciate the posters on the hoardings – the art gallery for the people on the street. Early on, he had decided his motto would be ‘maximum meaning, minimum means’ and said of the poster;

The message must be given quickly and vividly so that the interest is subconsciously retained. The designer constructs, winds the spring, the viewers eye is caught and the spring is released.

Indeed, this he did for the London Transport Festival poster. Although he was a master of the airbrush and was still using it in his work up to the late 1950s, he did not use it in this poster. He provided the texture and shading using brushes of different thicknesses and mixed his gouache paint to achieve the desired colours and tones.

A spiral device appeared on his first sheet of progressives for the symbol and he used elements from his winning symbol design: union flag, arrows and compass points. The compass was now a weather vane and Britannia’s head, a roundel.

1951 was a good year for Abram and anyone else involved with the Festival. He went on to design thirteen more posters for London Transport and the tile mural at Stockwell station on the Victoria line.

See more posters by Abram Games in our collection online and learn more about the artist at www.abramgames.com.

Celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Festival of Britain with us at our next Museum After Dark event on 20 May 2021; an evening opening for adults to explore the Museum in a relaxed atmosphere, enjoy a drink at the Lower Deck bar, and take part in a quiz hosted by Museum Director, Sam Mullins OBE.