The largest promise that loomed over the site in the first few days of the new year was provided by Kent County Planning Committee, which approved plans put forward on behalf of a firm who wanted to build a steel works on land in Sheerness. The company, Messrs Raine and Co. Ltd, proposed to construct a large factory on a twenty-one-acre site near New Road, creating jobs for between three and four hundred men. They envisaged using the new plant to melt scrap metal in furnaces, but they were confident that, even though some machining of steel would also be done on the premises, no excessive noise would emanate from their new factory. It would, as things turned out, be ten years before a steel mill opened on the Wellmarsh site directly to the north of New Road. Speedier improvements in the town’s condition would be introduced by a smaller company that fully understood the importance of branding, even though it escaped mention in the clerk of the council’s spirit-lifting new year announcement.
Towards the beginning of February 1962, Sheppey’s valiant Labour MP Mr Percy Wells made his way to the Earl’s Court Furniture Exhibition, in west London, in order to visit the stand of a company that was still settling into its new name, Race Furniture Ltd. Here he met the managing director, Mr J.W. Noel Jordan, his well-known director of design Mr Ernest Race, and also Mr Galsworthy, the office manager from the company’s new factory at Sheerness.22 Having admired some examples of the company’s new line of “Sheppey” branded chairs, he reminded these newcomers that Sheerness had gone through a difficult time since the closure of the naval dockyard in 1959, adding that “Your arrival in the town has been most helpful at a time when we badly needed new industry here and new jobs”.
The fact that Ernest Race Ltd would be joining the companies making their way to New Road had been announced with some pride by the Sheerness Times Guardian in June 1961, which was delighted to report that modern furniture which is exported all over the world and which has won a number of awards at design exhibitions was to be made in Sheerness.23 The factory was expected to be ready by the end of August, and the company’s existing works in Clapham would then be vacated. Ernest Race told the paper that the new factory would eventually employ about one hundred in all, mostly men but also some women. Ten key workers would be moving to the island from Clapham, but the rest would be recruited locally, and the firm was prepared to train a limited number of local people. New Road would be the company’s only factory, and 20% of its output would be shipped abroad, thus helping to increase the country’s export trade. The design department, which was mainly responsible when a new model won an award, would be staying in Clapham. The firm had only encountered one snag so far, which Ernest Race described as the usual one of that time, namely the provision of council housing for the key workers. It was likely the ten would move to Minster, although it also appeared that Sheppey Rural Council, which also faced acute pressure from local applicants, would not now have the houses ready until the end of the year.
Race Furniture Limited had first emerged as a subsidiary of a light engineering company founded by Noel Jordan in 1939. During the war, the firm, called Enness Sentinel, had manufactured precision tools, jigs, davits for lifeboats and convertors that allowed busses and other vehicles to be powered by gas rather than petrol. By 1945, however, Jordan was exploring the possibility that engineering techniques and modern materials such as steel, plywood, plastics and aluminium,24 might fruitfully be applied to the manufacture of furniture, an industry still dominated by craft techniques. He advertised for a designer in the Times, and found himself sifting through three hundred applications. It was at this juncture that Ernest Race, who had studied interior design at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London and then gone on to design and sell fabric woven in India, joined him as director of design.
Ernest Race Ltd, as the company was initially called, gained its licence to produce furniture at a time when the Board of Trade was seeking to increase the number of designs that could be approved under its Utility Furniture Scheme (a wartime measure that remained in place until 1953). Hardwood and fabric were not available to new furniture makers, so the company’s early designs were constructed with materials no longer so urgently required for military production. The firm’s first success was the BA 3 chair, made of cast aluminium alloy (some of it is said to have come from scrapped war planes) and with a seat upholstered in ex-RAF cotton duck.25 Unveiled in 1946 at the Council of Industrial Design’s “Britain Can Make It” exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the BA3 was taken up by upmarket modern-minded retailers including Heals and Dunn’s of Bromley. Also used in restaurants and troop ships, it was well on the way towards selling 250,000 pieces by the time it was awarded a gold medal at the Milan Triennale in 1954. By then, the firm was producing light, upholstered easy chairs and settees, and also the Roebuck: a stacking steel rod chair with plywood back and seat, which has been described as a vertically shaped answer to Charles Eames’s early LCM-1 chair. The Roebuck was launched in 1951, a year in which Race Furniture Ltd triumphed with two contemporary designs selected by the Council for Industrial Design for use at the Festival of Britain on London’s South Bank. The Springbok was a stackable outdoor chair of white enamelled mild steel rod, with atomic ball feet of cast aluminium, and both seat and back made of springs covered in PVC tube. Also stove enamelled in white, the Antelope had a coloured plywood seat, and the same ball feet as the Springbok. A work of antic modernism that wasn’t strictly modernist at all, the Antelope chair is said to have become widely regarded for its gaiety, elegance and wit26 and to have encapsulated the spirit of the festival. Other chairs would be contracted from Race by larger clients, including schools, universities, hospitals and shipping lines. The foldable Neptune deck chair, made of beech plywood, was commissioned for P&O for liners on its Orient Line. The smaller folding Cormorant chair, also designed for use on liners, was sold domestically too. The company’s first tip-up lecture theatre seating was made for the University of Liverpool Medical School in 1957, and then sold in modified form to many universities. It was partly with this sort of contract furniture in mind, that Ernest Race Ltd found itself looking at Sheerness as the possible site of a new government-subsidised factory.
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Race’s factory in Sheerness was designed in a frantic hurry — a Board of Trade deadline only allowed the architects forty-eight hours from start to finish — and then built as cheaply as possible by Atcost Factories Ltd of Tunbridge Wells. Consisting initially of four bays, but open to later expansion, it was constructed out of pore-cast concrete frames with walls of brick and patent glazing cladding, and a ceiling of glass fibre mat sandwiched between two skins of asbestos cement. Some of the equipment had been transferred from London, but the factory, which was intended to include all the processes involved in furniture production, contained new facilities too: descaling and derusting tanks in the stove enamelling department, along with new electrostatic spraying equipment and stove ovens, which would combine to secure a 70% saving in paint while also making it possible to dry a completed metal frame in just over a minute.
Back to the Marsh: preparing the ground for Race’s factory at New Road
Ernest Race Ltd had changed its name to Race Furniture Ltd by 30 March 1962, when the time came, just a day before the second anniversary of the closing of the dockyard, for its staff of some fifty workers to “down tools” for the official opening of their factory on New Road.27 According to a company press release, theirs was “understood to be the third new factory to come into operation on the Isle of Sheppey since the closure of the Nore Command and Naval Dockyards brought heavy unemployment to the area in 1959”. The statement also acknowledged that the new industries were “part of a Board of Trade drive to help the area with leased factories”.
This was borne out by the Chairman of Sheerness Council, Cllr. A.H. R. Copeland, who used his introductory words to welcome Race Furniture to the island on behalf of all three Island Councils: “We are delighted to see them here, not only for the rates they will pay
us, but because they are the type of firm Sheppey wants”. Having commended the company for “helping us to bridge the gap” caused by the closure of the dockyard, he added: “they are producing wholly modern furniture which in itself is wonderful to have in Sheerness”.
The opening was carried out by Paul Reilly, who a few years earlier had succeeded the furniture designer Gordon Russell as director of the Council of Industrial Design. Reilly, whose Council had been backing Race since the early days of the “Britain Can Make It” exhibition, was full of optimism about the factory: it promised work and skilled employment in Sheppey, but it also represented an internationally significant advance for British design. Hailing the company as a “text-book example” of what his own organisation had been campaigning for over the previous fifteen or so years, Reilly declared the meeting of Noel Jordan and Ernest Race to have been “one of the most fortunate occurrences in the story of British furniture”. Jordan had shown courage as well as remarkable foresight in deciding to turn his wartime engineering company over to making metal furniture. He had quickly proved the “ideal” entrepreneur to open up this new line of business just as Race himself had proved to be the “ideal” designer.
Reilly declared Race Furniture to be one of “a handful of firms … keeping the real traditions of British furniture alive”. They were doing this, he emphasised, “not by reproducing our past, not by copying our foreign competitors, but by constant research, experiment and development and by a real understanding of the time in which we live”. He commended the “unmistakable Englishness” of Race Furniture and its works — a robust and forward-looking Englishness that was achieved through “sheer, honest quality and common sense, coupled with the same modest good manners that were visible in the best of our 18th century pieces”. Reilly commended both the courage with which the company had pursued its goals, and the “unmistakable conviction running through the Race catalogue. There is nothing opportunist, meretricious or fortuitous about Race designs”. The company exemplified “design” as the Council of Industrial Design liked to promote it — i.e. “design in its widest sense, which includes design for efficient production as well as design for use and enjoyment”.
Reilly insisted that moving to Sheerness should not be seen as a retreat into some sort of outer darkness. On the contrary, the relocation of the company’s production facilities near the emerging new port impressed him as “a symbol of closer links with Europe and of further export effort”. He was confident that the project would succeed, “for the very good reason that they have chosen to come to Sheerness”. The assumption behind this schmoozing remark was that “there must surely be a natural, ingrained feeling for the well-found and the shipshape in and around Sheerness” since dockyards have long been good custodians of quality and of craftsmanship. “I believe that the people of Sheerness who work here, will soon sense the connection between past and present and will recognise in the precision and finish of Race furniture a worthy outlet for their skills”.
Such then, was the promise coming to New Road: an exercise in contemporary Britishness, conceived as confident as well as modest, progressive and technologically adept in its carriage of history and tradition. Unlike the time-warped pieces Uwe Johnson had placed in his imaginary Institute for the Preservation of British Customs in New York, Race’s furniture was “modern in materials, modern in method and very properly modern in conception”.28
Mr Noel Jordan, whose company had been so generously praised as a furnisher to the world as well as a renewed England, accepted Reilly’s tribute. Speaking at the Furniture Show in London, in early February 1962, he had remarked that, with his firm’s new factory in Sheerness, he was already keen to make good use of old fruit trees from Kent orchards. He understood that large scale felling of fruit trees had been necessitated by blight, but insisted that cherry, pear, apple and plum trees did not have to be sawn up and sold as firewood. “We feel this is a pity, for these are fine timbers and very suitable for use in furniture which does not require very large sections. The trees are discarded because they are past their fruit production peak, but the timber is mature and sound”.29 If the timber were “utilised in English furniture” then the balance of payments problem would be helped, since less timber would have to be imported. For Reilly, as for Percy Wells MP, this confirmed the considerable virtues of the company: “From what I read about their plans to exploit the splendid fruit woods from the Kentish orchards — from the Garden of England that is — I do not doubt that the Englishness of Race furniture will continue to match the thorough Englishness of its two founders”. We can safely assume that every one of these optimists trusted that the firm’s Sheppey employees would respond to the demand for a more flexible, contemporary and outward-looking expression of Englishness than was described in one of the books on Johnson’s shelves. The English: Are They Human? was the pre-war best seller in which the Dutch professor and long-standing Londoner, G.J. Renier, had cast an appraising continental eye over the unintellectual, hypocritical, prurient, animal-loving, trusting, sex-starved English and hoped for better days.30
In the firm’s early months on Sheppey, modern furniture-making was portrayed as a natural diversification of the skills of the dockyard. As a trade magazine put it in May 1962, “welders are now using their craft again to make the metal frames used in so many Race chairs and tables, sailmakers are proving to be some of the best upholstery cover makers the company has had, and painters are adapting their skill to the electrostatic spraying equipment, which is new even to the furniture industry”.31 This was a fetching idea, but not always easy in practice. It is said that some of “the welders, boilermakers and chippies” who did try to make the adjustment struggled to get used to working on a scale that seemed more appropriate to watchmaking.32 Meanwhile, the company found gaps in the skills that were available on the island: there were, for example, “virtually no skilled upholsterers from Sheerness, which was a long way from any traditional furniture making area”.33
Eric Fuller joined the firm as an apprentice upholsterer in 1962, having just completed two years in the merchant navy and stepped ashore in Sheerness looking for work. It was, he thinks, his familiarity with discipline rather than any pre-existing skill that clinched the job for him and he had no recollection of working alongside veterans of the dockyard. The workforce he recalls had been hired locally and trained from scratch under iron discipline. “You kept your head down”, he recalls. “You couldn’t even stand with legs crossed”. The foreman, a Clapham veteran named Fred Wright who used to turn up every morning with bowler hat and umbrella, made sure of that. Fuller’s memory is confirmed by a man named “Jack” who was recently interviewed about his experience of leaving school on Sheppey. He described going along to “Ray’s Furniture” [sic] to find work: “I walked in there and it was like going back to school. I said ‘Oh God I thought I’d got shot of your lot.’ Half my flipping class was there”.34
As the first new range of furniture to emerge from Race Furniture’s Sheerness factory. the “Sheppey” chairs and settees were designed for quantity production and constructed from “a standard set of interchangeable mass-produced components from which a number of alternative versions could be assembled”.35 The simplicity of the “Sheppey” range was considered appropriate for an English version of the “Swedish design” so much admired by Ernest Race since the Thirties. Technically less challenging to produce than Johnson’s broken chair by the Eames brothers, it was well adjusted to the limited skill base available to the firm during its early days on Sheppey.
Room setting with “Sheppey” chairs and settee. Design Council, London, 1962.
Intended for use in school common rooms and public seating areas as well as in domestic homes, the Sheppey range was promoted as proof of the company’s ongoing determination to conceive design as closely connected to the manufacturing process and packaging too. Be they chairs or settees, the pieces were assembled according to the modular system of “knock down” furnitur
e, introduced by the firm that had already come to epitomised Modern Danish design, France and Son, and adopted by Race Furniture Ltd many years before the “flat pack” system was popularised in Britain by Terence Conran’s Habitat. Each item, be it chair or settee, came in interchangeable parts — metal frame, wooden end-frames, and cushions — that could be packed into two boxes and then assembled with only four nuts and screws per piece. The latex-foam cushions were side-seamed with, “for neatness”, a single cross seam. They could be upholstered in a range of materials, depending on the decision of the customer. The front and back of the frame was made of sixteen-gauge 1.5-inch diameter steel tube and electrically welded to mild steel strips before being “electrostatically sprayed with a satin aluminium stove enamel” and fitted with British-made Pirelli Extraflex webbing.
Aluminium fillets in the arm of a “Sheppey” Chair.
An upholstered version of the end-frame was available, but bare wood was the intended form. It is possible that the end-frames of some of the first examples really were made with lengths of pear and apple from Kentish orchards, but the examples displayed at the Earl’s Court Furniture Exhibition used yew and ash, the latter from trees “felled on the South Downs between Lewes and Brighton — some from the site of the University of Sussex”.36 The visible joints in these end-frames featured a nice detail of which the company was particularly proud. Just as the famous Danish designer, Hans Wegner, would place signature details in his chairs (e.g. the oak fill over the screws in the teak backrests of the CH23 dining chairs designed for Carl Hansen and Co. in 1950/1), so the exposed corner of each “Sheppey” end frame featured two thin aluminium strips, which might have looked “superficially like inlay”, but were actually triangular fillets held in place with Araldite glue. “The use of fillets is not uncommon in furniture construction but has rarely been used so successfully to give a decorative effect as well as extra strength”. The woodwork was finally brushed with melamine lacquer and lightly polished to produce a “protective shine”. It was a “Sheppey” chair made of ash that won the Design Award in 1963.
The Sea View Has Me Again Page 30