Sir Gordon Russell

Presenter0:00

This download is the only extract the BBC has of this edition of Desert Island Discs. The presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:09

Where were you born to go?

Sir Gordon Russell0:10

Good.

Presenter0:10

Uh

Sir Gordon Russell0:10

In London.

Sir Gordon Russell0:12

They lived for ten years here.

Presenter0:14

But you weren't educated in London.

Sir Gordon Russell0:15

Yeah.

Presenter0:16

Web

Sir Gordon Russell0:17

Uh in Gloucestershire.

Sir Gordon Russell0:20

at um at Chipping Camden, an old grammar school there.

Presenter0:23

Yeah.

Presenter0:24

At school, were you taught well anything of arts and crafts, or was this an outside influence in your life?

Sir Gordon Russell0:30

Um will

Sir Gordon Russell0:33

I think really the actual teaching in the school was of no value at all, but the um

Sir Gordon Russell0:39

The ability to walk down the main street of Chipping Camden and look at the buildings and look at things that were happening.

Sir Gordon Russell0:46

was a great education, and particularly at that time because CR Ashby had just brought his Guild of Handicraft

Sir Gordon Russell0:55

down from the Milen Road, sixty craftsmen, sculptors, woodcarvers, gilders, enamellers, silversmiths and so on. And the impact of these expert craftsmen who of course were regarded as foreigners by the Camden people was something to remember in addition to all the local crafts, the building of walls in stone and stone roofs and

Sir Gordon Russell1:23

Um the making of wagons and harness and all kinds of things at that time.

Presenter1:29

Your father at that time earned

Presenter1:31

are a famous fourteenth-century Cotswold Inn.

Sir Gordon Russell1:35

Well, it was really um his buying the Ligan Arms that took us down to that um area. It was um it is a most beautiful house, which has been an inn certainly since um fifteen thirty. There's a record of it in the parish register.

Sir Gordon Russell1:53

And he set up a small workshop in order to repair.

Sir Gordon Russell1:58

um the house and things going into the house.

Presenter2:02

Hmm.

Sir Gordon Russell2:02

And um it was really from that that the other work stemmed.

Presenter2:07

You started working in in in this workshop when you left school.

Sir Gordon Russell2:10

Well, I was put in charge of it, but I I did all kinds of other things as well.

Presenter2:15

You have in your time worked in all materials, in wood, stone, glass, leather.

Sir Gordon Russell2:20

Well, I have had a sort of, um quite a number of them, including calligraphy.

Sir Gordon Russell2:25

And uh

Sir Gordon Russell2:27

I think v very often one gets an interest in another craft from knowing something about um

Sir Gordon Russell2:33

A quite different one.

Presenter2:35

Hmm

Presenter2:36

Of course the the First World War started when he was still a very young man.

Sir Gordon Russell2:41

Yes, I was twenty two. I joined the Worcestershire Regiment, went to France early in nineteen fifteen.

Sir Gordon Russell2:47

And um

Sir Gordon Russell2:49

was there until um uh the um big German attack in um

Sir Gordon Russell2:54

nineteen eighteen

Presenter2:56

Yes, you would have a crazy.

Sir Gordon Russell2:56

So when I got I hit in the arm and that finished the war for me.

Presenter3:00

You had a very rough war. You were at the Battle of Loos, the Somme, Ypres, Passchendaele, pretty well, all the bad places.

Sir Gordon Russell3:06

About

Presenter3:07

Did these experiences bring out

Presenter3:10

any bring about any major change in your ideas on life?

Sir Gordon Russell3:14

Oh yes. I think one couldn't possibly have that uh experience and be left unmoved.

Sir Gordon Russell3:20

Um first of all, the um

Sir Gordon Russell3:23

terrible destruction of life and of um splendid towns which can't be replaced at all so struck me

Sir Gordon Russell3:31

as something several.

Sir Gordon Russell3:33

frightful that one had got to see what could be done in the way of making a contribution oneself to something creative. I didn't want to

Sir Gordon Russell3:43

simply be in charge of a shop repairing old furniture. I really feel the antique dealer

Sir Gordon Russell3:50

who has never done anything for craftsmen or artists and uh is only interested in people who are dead unless of course they're customers.

Presenter4:00

So what was your contribution to be?

Sir Gordon Russell4:03

What matter?

Sir Gordon Russell4:04

The effort was to see whether I could make some furniture. First of all, furniture for the ligand arms, simple things like beds and so on. I wanted to make straightforward furniture that could be used, that wasn't an imitation of old work, but was of a very high quality. This was not an easy thing to do because

Sir Gordon Russell4:27

Men in our repair shop were joiners. They were not cabinet makers. It meant

Sir Gordon Russell4:33

Either training or importing a whole group of people.

Presenter4:38

You started designing furniture, Sir Gordon. This was handmade

Presenter4:42

High quality furniture. This wasn't really for ordinary living to start with, was it?

Sir Gordon Russell4:46

Oh, yes, it was, but it was fairly expensive furniture being handmade. And, of course, um

Sir Gordon Russell4:53

It was um very much um individual pieces rather than suites of furniture.

Sir Gordon Russell5:00

I I didn't know anything at the time of how the furniture trade sold furniture nearly always in suites.

Sir Gordon Russell5:07

My background was um old furniture, which uh was nearly always um made individually. And it's only in the eighteenth century that one got complete schemes of furniture in a room.

Presenter5:21

Uh

Sir Gordon Russell5:21

Yeah.

Presenter5:22

What happened when World War two started?

Sir Gordon Russell5:24

Well, World War Two, you see, cut off immediately the supply of timber. Timber was so short that we were only allowed to use a certain

Sir Gordon Russell5:34

amount of timber in any piece of furniture. And later on, of course.

Sir Gordon Russell5:40

Um utility furniture.

Sir Gordon Russell5:43

Um um started in nineteen fifty-two.

Presenter5:47

Yes, you were mainly responsible for the design and and manufacture of utility furniture.

Sir Gordon Russell5:52

Well, I was chairman of the design panel at the Board of Trade and we were were at the height of the uh

Sir Gordon Russell5:58

Utility furniture scheme. We had nearly seven hundred firms up and down the country making furniture.

Sir Gordon Russell6:05

and that had to be designed very simply.

Sir Gordon Russell6:09

in so that almost anyone with a reasonable equipment of woodworking machines could make it, because the large, highly skilled firms, highly mechanized firms, were making things like mosquito aircraft. And the curious thing was that the answer

Sir Gordon Russell6:28

uh in this state of uh national emergency was a good a good, simple, modern design. There wasn't enough timber to make barbers legs, there wasn't enough labor to do little bits of carving.

Presenter6:41

Yes, did did utility furniture uh change the design trends of furniture more or less permanently?

Sir Gordon Russell6:48

Well, I think it did. It's very difficult to estimate. It'll be easier probably in uh some years' time to look back and see that. But

Sir Gordon Russell6:56

I think on the whole people got used to rather simpler and better shapes.

Sir Gordon Russell7:03

And certainly there is there is um quite a lot.

Sir Gordon Russell7:06

of much better furniture available to day than there was before the war.

Presenter7:11

The war was still on when the Council of Industrial Design was was formed. You would have found a member, wouldn't you?

Sir Gordon Russell7:17

Yes, I I was um

Sir Gordon Russell7:19

really came in on a good many of the early discussions before it was set up, because I knew Sir Thomas Barlow, who became its first chairman, who was then director of of civilian clothing at the Board of Trade.

Presenter7:33

What was the object of the council?

Sir Gordon Russell7:35

Well the objects of the Council were to improve the standards of design in British industry by all practicable means. This practicable means didn't include any kind of dictation or control, something that I would have been very much against. It's only under the

Sir Gordon Russell7:53

tremendous emergency of wartime that one should have standard designs, I think, and there was no alternative then.

Presenter8:02

Yes, in your own words, good design is not a luxury.

Sir Gordon Russell8:05

It's certainly not a luxury. We we regard it as an essential part of doing a a job of high quality.

Presenter8:13

Sir Gordon, you were Director of the Council of Industrial Design for twelve years, from 1947 to 1959.

Presenter8:19

Now you've told us the objects of the council. To what extent do you think you succeeded in achieving them?

Sir Gordon Russell8:27

I think this um it's very difficult to say that. Uh w we made a beginning. Uh whether our generation can do much more than make a beginning, I don't know. We had

Sir Gordon Russell8:38

over a hundred years of pretty l

Sir Gordon Russell8:41

minimal attention to design problems. We have to remember in the nineteenth century anything that was solidly made could be sold. The question of uh

Sir Gordon Russell8:52

The finer points of design hardly entered, and and very often things which were very inconvenient to use went on being made for a long time.

Presenter9:00

Uh

Sir Gordon Russell9:04

Um by inconvenient to yours.

Sir Gordon Russell9:06

I mean dials in the wrong place to look at or too highly lighted or not lighted enough and so on.

Presenter9:13

You're especially interested in garden design, aren't you?

Sir Gordon Russell9:17

Yes, I I find

Sir Gordon Russell9:20

Garden design, one of the most fascinating things. I am extremely proud.

Sir Gordon Russell9:25

of being an honorary associate of the Institute of Landscape Gardeners.

Sir Gordon Russell9:32

Garden design, you see, is different from any other kind of design. No two sites are the same.

Sir Gordon Russell9:39

Nor are they the same at different times of year, or in different years trees grow.

Sir Gordon Russell9:46

and give an en entirely different um um feeling to a garden two or three years from uh when you're looking at it. And I think in England on the whole we are

Sir Gordon Russell9:58

very capable horticulturists.

Sir Gordon Russell10:01

but not really very good garden designers.