This interview is with Ken Garland, by the British Council and talks about Ken’s social commitment within his work, his involvement with the Campain For Nuclear Disarmament and the First Things First Manifesto.
There has always been a strong social – and socialist – commitment in your work. Where did that come from?
By the time I finished over two years’ National Service in the army in 1950, I had met and talked with many fellow soldiers from Glasgow, south Wales, Liverpool, Newcastle and Birmingham, and knew a lot more about the condition of the working class in Britain than I had before. Also, I had seen enough of the pretensions of the officer class. Within a year of being in London as a student, there was a crisis in the Labour government: Aneurin Bevan, Harold Wilson and John Freeman resigned their ministerial posts over what they thought to be the dilution of socialist principles, and we students were for them, almost to a man and woman. I suppose I can date my active social/political stance from that time.
What were the key influences on your approach to design?
I don’t have heroes as such. I have great respect for the work of some people, and quite often they are people who would be very impatient of politics. People like, say, Paul Rand and like Hans Schleger, a much-neglected designer who, being a refugee from Nazism, certainly had a political attitude. But he didn’t brandish it. And Jan Tschichold.
My greatest influences are probably Futurism, Dadaism and Surrealism, which is intriguing because the Futurists were crypto-fascists, after all. Also photography. Bill Brandt’s greatest work was his social commentary for Picture Post. My upbringing was punctuated by the weekly arrival of Picture Post, a hugely important magazine. That and Lilliput were the two things that influenced me most before I even thought about being a graphic designer. Wonderful. Anyone of my generation would say the same, I think.
How did your involvement with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament come about?
I went on the first CND march, in 1958, the one that went from London to Aldermaston. CND already had their symbol. It arrived in 1958, designed by a textile designer called Gerald Holtom. There was a black-and-white style already, because it was cheapest. It was a simple, you could say almost crude, printing technique – silkscreen – for the posters.
I didn’t do graphics for them until 1962. Robin Fior came to see me and said, “I’ve been asked by the Committee of 100, a splinter group of CND, to put together a group of designers who might help with publicity material, and would you like to do a poster to put on the Underground?” After seeing my poster for the Committee of 100, the general secretary of CND, Peggy Duff, came to see me and said, “I want you to work for us, and I would like you also to get some other designers together to work for us.” She became a very dear friend. Everything she asked me to do I did. If she wanted me to do it overnight, I did it overnight. Peggy turned up one Sunday morning and said, “We need a poster for showing in the Tube next week.” So I took the existing poster and gradually laid one poster on top of another and felt it said something about a march – like the dawn of something, like when the moon comes to full size from being small crescents.
The tall banners were designed for the 1963 Easter march. We had issued each CND branch with stencils and cheap black cloth so that they could make their own banners containing slogans such as “Against H Bases”. When the banners came together on the day, they looked as though they had all been done by one hand. On the march, I could not believe it. There were so many hundreds of them and when we marched along Whitehall it looked like an invading army. I got a letter from the chairman of CND, Canon Collins, saying that the banners were “quite the most efficient and attractive we have ever had”. Some time later, though, I felt a little queasy about them – they reminded me of the long banners used so effectively at Nazi rallies.
I’m still a member of CND and I still feel it’s a hugely important crusade, more than ever now.
What prompted your First Things First manifesto?
By the end of the 1963, I had been running my own business for a year and a half and I knew the kind of clients that I enjoyed. I found that the older generation of designers, who included many of my friends – I don’t want to suggest that there was anything hostile in our relationship – had missed a few pointers. The graphic design business was prepared to be a servant for whatever clients came along, and designers did not perhaps think too much about what they were working for, what influence it was having environmentally, politically, socially. I thought it wasn’t a bad idea that we should think a bit more about this because, after all, in those days we all had an affiliation to a left-wing party. We wanted social change and we felt we ought to be part of it.
Students keep wanting me to talk about First Things First [updated in 1999]. They ask, “Should we do more pro bono work?” Good God, no! How are you going to earn a living? How are you going to survive? They think they should have more social awareness in their teaching, and I say, “No, I think you should have social awareness in your life and then bring that back into your work. Your teaching would be best occupied with giving you skills, because if you don’t have skills you are nowhere.” All the time, over the years, I have been bothered by this fact, that people think that once you start talking about an ethical stance you are entitled to put aside all other interests and talk about that as if it were all that matters. It isn’t.
Interview: Jane Lamacraft
http://www.britishcouncil.org/ 
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