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Cyril E Power – going down the tube between the wars and a visit to ‘Appy ‘Ampstead

What a cracking image! Sleek and modernistic. Very 1930’s. 

It’s called Whence and Whither – a great title to boot! – and was produced by Cyril E, for Edward, Power in 1930. (He had a son called Cyril A, for Arthur, Power hence the need for the middle name letter).

Cyril Power, born in Chelsea in London in 1872, was a architect who followed in his father’s footsteps career-wise. He had a succesful business as a practicing architect and he also lectured on the subject at University College, London and later at Goldsmith’s College down in New Cross. In his “other” life, he was a compulsive artist who worked in many styles including ink and pen, illustrations and oils.

In the late 1920’s, Power began using linocuts. This was, at the time, a new and cheap artistic process that had been developed in Germany before the Great War and was being experimented with across Europe. Fellow London artists, Claude Flight and Sybil Andrews (with whom he shared a studio) created a mini-school of London Linocutters and showed their work at a series of exhibitions in the Redfern Gallery, the first one in 1929.

He produced several of pictures of scenes from the london underground between 1929 and 1934. Ironically (and in an opposite trajectory to the typical “London” artist) he moved his family out of London during this period and so made these images as an exiled Londoner looking into the city from the outside. I think that they are lovely.

I’ve arranged the pictures as if they illustrated a trip on the tube to the fair on Hampstead Heath (although they weren’t painted in this order):

This is a close up of The Escalator (1930)  

And this one on The Tube Station (1925) itself

And then onto The Tube Train (1934)

Arriving in ‘Appy A’mpstead (1933)

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Hampstead Heath was the in place to go on Bank Holiday weekends. There was a funfair and tens of thousands congregated to enjoy an ‘Appy ‘Ampstead. You can see some excellent Pathe film of the 1931 event, here. Power’s inspiration is plain to see. Other artists drew upon the subject of this funfair, including Arthur Rackham in 1913, here, and various musicians including Albert Ketelby who composed Bank Holiday (‘Appy ‘Ampstead) as part of his Cockney Suite in 1924. Nothing goes together quite like Funfairs and cheap pop music, and there was inevitably a big music hall hit in the 1890’s to sing praise to the phenomenon and publicise the phrase ‘Appy ‘Ampstead, written by Albert Chevalier.

In a moment of serendipity, I’ve discovered (just this second!) that my favourite website of, and about, London songs The London Nobody Sings has covered this exact subject recently. Rather than re-invent the wheel, I suggest you go and read their piece on The ‘Ampstead Way. And you can see my previous blog on he wonders of The London Nobody Sings, here. Like the funfair, its always worth a visit!

My favourite ride at the funfair is The Merry Go Round (1929) and this is my favourite, and final, of these pictures by Power because of the feeling of exhilarating movement:

Cyril Power moved on to work in other styles but I think these linocuts were a great period of his work. He returned to London in later life and died in 1951. 

More songs than I can sing: this is the ultimate website dedicated to songs about London

The London Nobody Sings is a website that is dedicated to, and collects together, songs about London. It is put together by Yr Heart Out who also produces an “irregular” music publication called Your Heart Out (with an extra “ou”). Yr Heart Out (without the extra “ou”) selects the songs and then writes a context-setting blog entry to introduce the song which is always interesting in itself.

This collection is a project with a limited time frame and is intended to last for a year only. You can read more about the project here. It was started on June 25^th 2009, so we are about half way through now. The only rules for song selection are that “the songs must be brilliant and that the blindingly obvious numbers are excluded. The songs may be explicitly about London or obliquely about the city in some way.”

A new song is posted most days and I rarely fail to be surprised by a posting. In fact as somebody who spent 15 years in the music industry I am frequently surprised to have never heard of the musician, let alone the song. I am slightly ashamed to admit that I have only knew about a third of these London songs beforehand.  To be honest, I can understand why one or two of them never made it to a wider audience but generally the quality of the music is surprisingly high and even when they aren’t quite so good Yr Heart Out does a great curator’s role in explaining why the songs are interesting and how they fit into the London that they describe.

I have to watch myself with this website if I’m trying to get something done. I find it’s addictive like crack. Each day I go to the site to have a look at what today’s London song is and can discover I’m still there an hour or two later, lost in the middle of its archives playing song after song and reading the blog entries. It is a very pleasant and entertaining waste of time, though, like the best blogs are. 

The last five posts give you a flavor of the obscurity of many of the songs and the astonishing range of genres and the timeline of the songs chosen. Blak Twang’s Dettwerk South East, Wolfhound’s In Transit, Blossum Dearie’s  Sweet Georgie Fame, The  Nine Road possibly sung by Norman Beaton and Ian Whitcomb’s 1960’s pub knees up The Star : so you can see that it really is turning over a lot of old stones.  All, though, are worth a listen: I particularly like the Blossum Dearie record.

But its not all obscurities. The London Nobody Sings is a broad church. Today’s selection proves that fact. It is the truly wonderful Last Train To London by ELO. And what a mighty record it is. I can’t believe that I had forgotten all about it – and look at those moustaches. I’ve played it five times in a row while I’ve been writing this and its put me in a mood of over-whelming optimism and set fair for a day of high-achieving. A great way to start the day.

As the Yr Heart Out writes “There are plenty of great sites dedicated to photos and images about London. This site is designed to be a musical accompaniment.” And it is. It’s a great website.