* Linocut print design Copyright © Martin J Walker, London 1968

"Hornsey 1968" by Lisa Tickner

A Commentary by 51 Questions, from Brian Marsh, thinking out loud.
Expanded between the questions after reading the "The Hornsey Affair" at the British Library.

p7 Obligatory Art History studies were not irrelevant, simply that the history of design wasn't taught in Art Colleges up to that time and art history was the preserve of non-practitioners from academic courses at universities. More importantly, too little modern art history was taught and too much analysis of religious art composition.
p8 Students of design were interested in design. Academia was not at the vanguard, more the rearguard.
p8 The Sit-In was not an eruption, it was a long pre-meditated unionized one-day strike that took on its own momentum. As soon as the meeting diverged from the agenda of watching films and went upstairs to continue debate the meeting took over the power.
p8 It seems that 14 Hanley Road was an undemocratic outpost for strategy.
p8 Lisa Tickner, definitely a contaminated witness! As for The Hornsey Affair, which I have not been able to read, - it sounds more like a Mills and Boon novel - I'll go to the library and order it! (Since first writing this commentary as a series of questions, I have read The Hornsey Affair at the British Library and extracted notes. Then I have worked through Hornsey 1968 a second time and added further notes, this time not in the form of questions.)
p8 "The Hornsey Affair", November 1968, published 1969. (I was overseas by 1969.)
p8 'rights of students' ­ and responsibilities to themselves and to society
'politics of design' - I was just interested in design as a means of creating change. (Green design. Design for Need.)
'the needs of capital' ­ profit, business growth, consumer addiction? Design for Greed.
'social role of art' ­ therapy? To replace religion? (St. Paul's versus Tate Modern?)
p9 Memories are fallible but archives, too, are shaped by investments, lapses and suppressions. ­ So many papers were Gestetnered it is frightening to look at them and see how trivial they were. "Words, words, words! I'm so sick of words! I get words all day through; First from him, now from you! Is all that you blighters can do?" To be sung loud and often in libraries!

Screen grab of Hornsey Gestetner in action - where are you now dear friend?

Ges ... Gestet ... Gestetner ... (Dubo ... Dubon ... Dubonnet) ... stet ... stet ...stet

p11 Document 3a. 'Student Action Committee'
The Students' Union couldn't function since the funds had been frozen and Pudney was not on the premises. The Student Action Committee sounds like an extension of the rugby team who cleared out Shelton's office.

"Sabbatical president"		"Rugby captain"

When the staff stole the action the SAC mysteriously became the Association of Members of Hornsey College of Art. It looks like the daily cash needs of the canteen and the Gestetner empire were managed by Prue Bramwell-Davis among others. (She seems to have been a moderating influence.)
p13 And it was a revolution, according to Tom Nairn at the time, in which 'a few North London crackpots achieved more than the working class of this overwhelmingly proletarian country'. Or 'spontaneist naivete' ­ Rushton and Wood.
Mostly a private or personal cultural revolution, hardly a proper revolution which overthrew the establishment and implemented lasting change. On the other hand the Soviet Union eventually collapsed, Mao's Cultural Revolution ended up with the Gang of Four on trial and soon enough free market capitalism in a one party state. France, still revolting at a low level most of the time. Perhaps revolution should just be continuous, perpetual commotion!
p13 Exactly how did the control of the Students' Union funds come about? Was this simply that the college or the council thought that the use of the funds were insufficiently accounted for ­ they may have been in the past ­ or was it set up by the sabbatical president of the union in order to provoke a confrontation? See Gravy for a proper account of student union funds.

p14 art students were widely perceived as apolitical,
Art and Design students were creative, idealistic, altruistic, humanist and environmentally aware but hardly party political as there was no hope for a Green or Ecological vote in an electoral system without proportional representation. CND ­ Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (from 1958), Greenpeace (from 1971) and FoE - Friends of the Earth (date unknown) were political outlets for such energies. Hornsey students were generally quite apathetic in union activity and it was the few party politicians who were actually the part of the problem in the union. Self-proclaimed opponents who chose to use confrontation for change rather than work by evolution of the system itself from within. And of course maturation of their own selves.
Students' rebellion Not so much a rebellion but we had not done National Service and we had been educated to think for ourselves and without taking orders we could represent ourselves and take direct action, to experiment.
p15 This was not the route I took. NDD was already phased out. For me GCE 'O'-level Art was including still life, flower drawing, Roman and other lettering and a craft option, usually pottery, but I did letter carving in wood as there wasn't enough kiln space. This was my fourteenth school so I never got kiln space! A-level GCE was pretty much more of the same. Pre-Diploma was well organized at Portsmouth College of Art and included life drawing, colour, stone sculpture, fibre-glass, metal, calligraphy and even art history. (Even if sometimes too much of the obsolete history of religious art!) The art history lectures were in a modern auditorium, but two lads sat at the back smoking herbal cigarettes! Before the year was out one was arrested and the other was dead ­ suicide. Portsmouth didn't have DipAD recognition in Graphic Design so I had to apply to a London college. Applications to Hornsey were oversubscribed ten to one. Maybe this just shows that there were far too many places for artists and far too few for designers. In fact many of the so-called artists would have benefited more from a design course and allowed their artistic pretensions to develop more privately without imposing them on others. Clearly they were brought up with the vocabulary and mindset of the Daily Worker, and from 1966 the Morning Star. For some, like Kim Howells, to be an artist was less attractive than being a politician.
p15 What has any of this to do with 'a broader strategy to modernize higher education in the context of the Cold War?' State the case, if you can make one.

p17 DipAD as degree level course
"The development of the DipAD as a degree-level course thus conjured in the same move a second class field of vocational students, courses and institutions."
Q1 Were the staff academically qualified to teach design at degree level? There was no evidence of syllabus/curriculum, marking systems ­ qualitative/quantitative. No indication of content, breadth and depth. Even in the final exhibition for assessment there was no evidence of objective criteria for awarding a grade.
p18 'test the ability of the colleges to evolve their own personal standards.'
The blind leading the blind!
p20 Polytechnic
Labour October 64
Anthony Crossland May 66 White Paper
p21 Nick Wright and Harold Shelton 1967
23 October 1967, Haringey Polly Wolly Diddle, Gravy

Q2 Students manipulated by Union and Staff? Apathy the norm.
For most students they would already graduate before the relocation to Cat Hill. Yes, more manipulation.
Action Committee: more power self-interest by Nick Wright?
p22 Eric Robinson's 'The New Polytechnics'
The whole debate about 'tiers', 'comprehensive' and all the associated political baggage seems to have failed to acknowledge the dual aspects of individual need (or potential) and academic merit. Now forty years on there are still grammar schools, public schools and even academies and then universities of all ranks. Then the annual agonizing about grade inflation at A-level GCSE has led to Baccalaureat and individual university entrance exams. So be it, the lunatics are finally running the asylums. Eventually everyone will get access to university education whether they benefit from it or not, they will accumulate debt, or drop out and still not necessarily be fit for meaningful employment. No-one will be allowed to fail because the system requires plumped up success tables. Yet at primary level SATs targets are continuing to be failed, pupils enter secondary school unable to read or write and provide fodder for gangs and a life of street crime.
And one in ten adults is functionally illiterate. And probably another 20% haven't read or written anything in years.
p23 Robinson; 'radicalizing and leavening'
What does that mean, dumbing down? Why does he so hate grammar schools? One minute the DipAD must be equivalent to a BA and briefly, when a first class honours, equal to ARCA.
Robinson; 'synergies . . .
Even the RCA when a post-graduate university couldn't sustain research with industrial sponsorship. For a brief period in the early 1970's creative and inventive research was conducted. In the USA vast sums of money would be thrown at research without vision. We had vision funded with peanuts. Then it degenerated into theoretical exercises in pseudo-academic departments ­ Liberal Studies writ large.
p25 Design Research Unit, Bauhaus, RCA
Q3 Did Shelton think he could compete with Misha Black, Bruce Archer and Michael Farr who were all jockeying for the same funds in commerce and academia? Farr went bust?
The combined arguments of General Studies and Nick Wright against Hornsey being part of Cat Hill seems to have had little substance.
So much for p113, General Studies staff, as academics blah, blah.
In the early 1970's the Textile Research Unit at the Royal College of Art collaborated with external funding from industry and government (Little Neddy) with fibre and fabric research, garment forming and anthropometry ­ Research Fellows in a multi-disciplinary team.
In the mid-1970's in Hong Kong the Department of Design
co-existed perfectly well with the other departments of Hong Kong Polytechnic and over time the original Ordinary and Higher Diploma Courses were fortified and elevated to degree status in a university. Other lower prestige colleges, both government and private continued.
p26 Financial irregularities ­ Union Funds
Q4 Shelton and the General Purposes Fund, the Film Society and then the Sabbatical President of the Union over the cheques co-signed by Pudney
Shelton wanted an electric car project at Hornsey, the Royal College of Art Department of Industrial Design developed an automotive styling group sponsored (by Ford) to do concept car drawings, and Hong Kong Polytechnic Department of Design made a car prototype ­ something worse than a Renault 2CV and made out of flat sheets of orange painted metal, battery powered. Now in Hong Kong (2008) there is a styling project for a car for disabled drivers. When will we learn that a century of the internal combustion engine has contributed to the waste of irreplaceable fossil fuels? We export factories for making private cars from Europe to China and then have to close polluting factories and stop fifty-per-cent of car use during the Beijing 2008 Olympics!
p27 Borough Treasurer, p117 33,
Shelton's failure to reply about discrepancies brought ever greater scrutiny, including the students union accounts. Nick Wright's sabbatical funding would get caught up in the same suspicion. Haringey Council were a bunch of 'butchers, bakers and candle-stick makers' who had no idea about design. Look at the Haringey Council symbol ­ influenced by Department of Graphic Design staff, selected by the council!
p118 35
With the 'rugby team' looking in Shelton's office and finding personal correspondence from female student(s) at South Grove was it now a matter of a personal duel? The previous alliance of extremes, union to the far Left, Shelton and cowed staff to the far Right, now broke explosively ­ the Sit-In was to bring down and humiliate Shelton and it succeeded in part.
p29 p120 44 Jack Shaw had used the studios at Bowes Road for some sort staff party and left all the desks unarranged for students to work. I spoke up as I was re-arranging the desks and Jack Shaw took me to his office for a reprimand. I was wearing brown leather boots I had bought in Finland and he commented that I was too big for my boots. What a petty man he was!
p29 April 68 President's sabbatical year ­ meeting 30 April to set up contingency fund
Q5 A Union Meeting, minutes? (page 120.45 minutes?)
Arthur Pudney, Bursar,
Q6 About this time Pudney showed cheque book requiring signature but not happy to release funds to Nick Wright on sabbatical. Pudney intimated that he had already been releasing funds to Nick Wright but could no longer do so. (9 May) Should documents referred to on p120 45 be looked at again? Pudney was ordered by the Borough Treasurer who oversaw him to freeze the Union funds? Did Jack Shaw have anything to do with it? Was he not Shelton's enforcer? (Decision taken on 23 May to release funds already too late as Sit-In was planned and organized? Of course it couldn't be stopped, what sort of politics would that be!)
Union meetings 21 and 22 May resolved to hold a critical seminar
Q7 Minutes?
23 May, release funds
Peter Hayman, vice-president
p30 At what point were the students consulted in an extraordinary general meeting to mandate the Student Action Committee's five point list of demands?
p31 They thought a Sit-In scheduled for 24-hours was a concession by the principal and a few rubbish films would keep the participants happy until the morning. It was not so. We knew that there was skullduggery afoot. The microphone was just another way of enforcing opinions much more slowly than heated argument which might release too much energy and truth. It was all smoke and mirrors, while the charade was played out like a Christmas pantomime. That's what politics is? The staff stole the initiative right out from under the noses of the student politicos. Which member of staff had prepared notes?
Somewhere in the run up to the Sit-In there should be an analysis of the National Union of Students, the election of Trevor Fisk and his contest with Digby Jacks and Jack Straw. What part did Digby Jacks and Jack Straw play in May 1968? And then the NUS election in 1969. There they all are; Kim Howells from South Wales, Jack Straw from Essex now floating like mold on the top of the beer slops of the stale brew of the New Labour Party. (Edit for further factual detail) Tom Forthrop, Radical Student Alliance.
p32 The top half of this page is fiction and doesn't sit with the other half.
p33 Kim Howells, in whose rooms the Sit-In was planned. Vietnam protests, replicate Paris. "The issue was art education"
Staff Council
Q8 Was this when academic staff saw opening to subvert student action?
Rugby team
Q9 Had the rugby team ransacked Shelton's desk drawer and found private letter from female student?
p35 Silent majority (apathetic) but right in noticing that it was a few militant students and academic staff who had subverted the system for heir own agendas under the pretext of democracy of AMHCA

AMHCA litho print		AMHCA limited edition silk screen

p124 20 Both situations prevailed: the previous power bases simply changed for new power bases and not representing the silent majority who by their silence were not contributing to the commonwealth of knowledge. I had been elected treasurer, I had said the post should be contested, I had stated that activities should be accountable and they were ­ in Gravy ­ and Pudney was the other cheque-book signatory. Nick Wright's private political and financial agenda were known to so few except the rugby team and his drinking buddies? The NUS influence, the Student Action Committee, the AMHCA, even the sabbatical were imposed externally but most importantly Shelton and Jack Shaw were not up to the job. Who employed these people? Shelton had his own ambitions in sponsored design research but he had already been long out-manoeuvred. Shaw, what did he do, anything?
p36 John Field, Lecturer in Art History
What was going on? Shelton should have fallen on his sword and done the honourable thing, resign. Admit he was a has-been. None of the face-saving procedures could any longer save the situation. The movement now needed a leader with charisma and authority and there were certainly no takers and no-one to parachute in from outside. The staff had jobs, which they were reluctant to sacrifice, most of the students had nothing to lose. But the students also had no control over their own leadership. At this point in a proper revolution there would be some 'blood' in the corridors, but there was none. It was all going to be derailed by the calendar. It was just a waiting game until the end of term when the council could close the building down. To make a proper change the building should have been irreversibly changed, or the case taken to the council ­ or better to the House of Commons, but no-one had the imagination to make the creative leap. We all had
an MP and we could have petitioned them all for intervention. Instead it was all paperwork, talk, words, inaction. But some of us had changed. What stayed within our heads, our understanding of creativity, of skills, of outcomes, of the meaning of design. Yet that had been there all along but it could be applied at another time and in another place. It seems that the SAC had no permanence and the greater will of the majority gradually re-asserted itself.
p37 What was John Field doing bringing his daughter in to watch? We had a serious, personal commitment to change for the common good. It was not a circus, we were not doing it for entertainment. The comparison with other revolutionary constituent assemblies was irritating. Their very irrelevance in their teaching had been an embarrassment. They never asked us what was going on in our heads. We were light years ahead of them. They were the living dead! Meanwhile the LSE was infiltrated by Special Branch or MI5 and Hornsey must have been next on the list. LSE had a longer history of political anarchy, we were small fry? They didn't think we had it in us.

p37 Professor Richard Wollheim, at University College London
Q10 Saw student delegation and agreed with logic of presentation, reference to Summerson/Coldstream, was it minuted? He later wrote in a newspaper: "Were the revolutionaries of Hornsey anticipating this country to be moving towards a situation where everyone could go to art school who wanted to, or were they, in advocating new selection preocedures that would be more efficient predictions of art capacity, seriously envisioning the possibility that a truly qualified intake might be very much smaller? The cause of reform may thrive on this ambiguity at the moment but it may well choke of it.
Q11 Similar delegations to University of Sussex?
Alex Roberts
Tom Nairn
John Field, brought a teenage daughter who was studying the French Revolution 'to observe a revolutionary constituent assembly in action' ­ see above.
Q12 In his own head?
R Buckminster Fuller had been to Hornsey before and delivered an eight hour lecture without notes, maybe in 1967. That was impressive. Really all that could be taken away from the experience was the phrase; "comprehensive anticipatory design science". Then the World Design Science Decade had been celebrated in Bloomsbury Square in 1967 with projects from Hornsey and Guildford among others, probably also the Architectural Association. The grey covered WDSD publications were about as dull as design could get and a great disincentive from swallowing the pill. Indeed Victor Papanek was more of the same or worse to come. Fuller's talk was so short in 1968 it only showed that his stamina was waning. Sir Robin Darwin was yet another of the old school who cared more about the symmetry of the armchairs in the senior common room at the RCA than about the real world.
Professor Richard Wollheim, if he was whom I met at UCL, might have been capable of credible intervention. Did we press him for a decision and an outcome in a fixed time framework? I doubt it. His letter refered to above doesn't show he had much will.
p38 Prue Bramwell-Davis, triple entry bookkeeping ­ did she know about the problems with Nick Wright and Pudney?

It has been confirmed that Pudney did release union funds to the sabbatical president of the union in 1967-68

Arthur Pudney

Sadly there is further record of union financial affairs in the archive for 1968-69 and 1969-70 showing the same state of affairs with union funds being overdrawn by over £1,000 and Pudney requiring the accounts to be balanced. The matter of the sabbatical presidency being funded by the union rumbled on, elections being carried out and activities conducted with candidates operating in 'acting' capacities and hamstrung by impeded access to funds.

From Gravy magazine

P126 36 This input from Paris was private. Perhaps it just provided a low standard of graphics that could be imitated? It had nothing to do with what we were engaged in. We had no cobble-stones, no vandalism, no cars to burn, no police to resist. We had no history of revolution, Cromwell and Charles I/II excepted, no compassion by their relatives in Buckingham Palace for the Czar of Russia and his family shot, burnt and buried in a well in a forest. Just the usual American interference in funding the wrong people; Trotsky with $10,000 in March 1917 to fund a socialist revolution.
p39 Cathles and Baines perhaps now realized that Shelton had been running their ship into the rocks. But of course there was postponed victimization and there was complete inaction. This was the point at which a real revolution would have attacked the council offices?
And a counter-revolution would have dealt with Shelton, Shaw, Pudney, Wright and Howells and so on?
p40 p128 43 This matter of not having a nominated leader to deal with is interesting. If one minute Nick Wright is President of the Union and taking action regarding sabbatical rights and so on, now we have a cover which denies accountability and responsibility and executive power. You can't have it both ways and no way! The union is again imitating the establishment!
As for the staff, they had piggy-backed the student action, tried to take it over, and now worried about their tenure. They were naïve. They were useless cogs in a derelict machine. They were dispensable. They were already irrelevant. We could study without them. We were our own masters. They were part of the second-hand furniture in a bric-a-brac sale at a charity shop.
I was nervously aware that I seemed to be the only year 3 graphics student to have been there from beginning to end. If anyone else was there, please say so.
p41 A domestic dispute (control over Student Union funds and the President's sabbatical year) had precipitated a struggle for wide-reaching reform not only in education but through it: 'One must recognize that in setting up a new educational structure at Hornsey one is creating the working model for a fundamental re-organization of the educational system, and thus, in effect, the value and priority system of our present society.'
Q13 Did no-one admit to the illegal misappropriation of funds to travel to Africa using film society profits, or to pay for the sabbatical presidency with union funds but no mandate, etc?
Q14 Was it Marxist democracy imposed by the rugby team?
The Foundation or Pre-Diploma year was supposed to sort out the specialism/specialisation that was inevitable in the next stage? And progress is not made by serial procrastination!
p42 This matter of interdisciplinary study was way beyond the employers, the educators and the funding structures. Universities barely worked this way with their ever increasing specialism, only designers had the peripheral vision and unusual academic background to see that teamwork was essential and that synergy would discover or invent entirely unexpected potential. Art and Design rose above Cinderella status and became a princess in the education sphere? Science and scientists or engineers (Misha Black) liked hierarchies, design needed teams of equals ­ and no prima donnas! No-one could have every skill required to conduct a multidisciplinary (design) research project but they could acquire a broader spectrum of skills and experiences. Still the progression had to build on understanding of ideas, materials and processes including why existing solutions became obsolete. Obsolescence also came about by dogmatic posturing and politics. The USSR collapsed just as readily as the free market economies could spiral into recession and did so in a cycle with almost every pendulum swing between Labour and Conservative and back again.
p43 p130 56 What a load of institutionalized prejudice! GCE's were not exactly a great effort at O or A level and this myth of the bohemian artist is just offensive. There was no respectability in listening to art historians who had no knowledge or experience or skills and creativity in Art or Design and were far from bohemian themselves. Just a load of tweedy-flannel dressed up as academic respectability, in fashion sense and oratory.
Class system. NB this was repeated 1970's in Hong Kong by Michael Farr ­ Ordinary Diploma in Higher Diploma as stepping stones via US style Credit Unit system to BA and MA. Full-time day students and part-time evening students.
Course content agreed by working committee of responsible staff including, Romeo LeMarie, Tony Lee and myself.
p130 55 The trivial matter of 'letters after their name' was nothing new, how long had artists been studying at the Royal Academy? What was the RCA up to if not becoming more exclusive in requiring applicants to the MA course to have a BA? How many artists sign their work with their suffix of letters, none? Employers look at your most recent relevant piece of work, they never ask to see the exam certificates. Only educational institutions pander to this obsession. And the professional bodies will sell you as many letters as you want for an annual subscription! Where are the emperor's clothes? Vincit Veritas.
p43 p130 56 Complete nonsense from beginning to end. My father enlisted as an apprentice, in his early teens, in the Royal Navy during the Great Depression. My mother was a hairdresser, briefly. They both served through the Second World War. They encouraged my brother, by sister and me to study. My brother went to University for civil engineering, my sister to a Technical College doing industrial catering, I went to Art College for graphic design. Both my brother and I went from 11-plus to grammar schools. We did not consider social class a factor in improving ourselves. We just studied taking whatever opportunities there were as they came. I did a paper-round and Saturday evening washing up in a restaurant kitchen. I bought a biology text book and an atlas since the schools didn't provide up-to-date text books. I still have both, and now many many more less used books, and my daughter used both books during her own grammar school studies. Yes, she was not challenged to fulfill her potential and had to be moved through four primary schools in the fifth most underachieving borough in England at the time. She was bullied by pupils and even head-teachers for being too clever. Every entrance exam she took bar one got her the offer of a place. But now the academic value of the secondary education sector is discredited by incompetent SATs marking and the out-sourced service is asked to re-fund millions of pounds. Deep down, honestly, any parent will know if their child is achieving their potential and is happy at school. But the schools are institutionally protective of their profession and do not listen when a parent advises them of their child's needs. Then at the end of year there is the pantomime of Parents' Evening to rubber stamp 9 months on what was being told at the beginning of the year.
p43 p130 57 Indeed, some, even many who took part in the Sit-In in 1968 were creative, academic and better than the university educated lecturers who knew insufficient about that new generation to lead them. The worst actually impeded our education simply failing to obtain the resources with which to allow us to work. They simply could not keep up with us. If we were prepared to work for 18-hours-a-day for 36 weeks a year they were facilitating our education for only 8-hours-a-day. I don't recall anyone ever saying that students at Hornsey College of Art weren't productive or motivated. On the contrary, it was the abundance of energy which the staff couldn't harness or contain.
P44 Misha Black was also perpetuating the segregation of so-called artists and designers at the Royal College of Art. Sir Robin Darwin filled the Kensington Gore building with Interior Design, Industrial Design, Textile Design, Ceramics and Glass, while Graphics was down at Exhibition Road along with Painting, while Sculpture and Film and Television were in odd buildings around and about. The RCA's own Archipelago! Then the several Research Units aligned with the departments were also held together in a funding umbrella carefully monitored by Bruce Archer. The same problems Shelton was having at Hornsey were pretty much replicated at the RCA. Misha Black had been involved with DRU and plum projects went through their private businesses, those that weren't possible there went through the departments whose professors delegated to their own research units and then to project teams. The politics of making funding applications went through government bodies and carpet-bagging trips to sponsoring companies. The Senior Common Room which had once been the preserve of the professors and their senior academic staff found they were now having to share the amenities with the Research Fellows. Most of the time the Research Fellows ate in the student canteen as it was more vibrant. Some students from Imperial College also ate there and the cross-fertilization of ideas was possible. We used their links to Atlas computers.
p44 Entry requirements to Hong Polytechnic Department of Design were based on a school certificate which expected some relevant subjects but there was also an IQ test and a drawing exam along with interviews and portfolios. The subjects studied at school gradually created a profile by which it could be reliably predicted which course the student would specialize in after the Foundation Course. There was no difficulty filling the courses each year but excessive expansion led to about ten per cent too many, unsuitable students, being taken on to the courses. This diluted the quality of the course.
p45 I don't recall any students at Hornsey ever having any reason to comment on or discuss their schooling, their GCE's or otherwise. Only one student appeared mid-year in Graphics and he was a mature student with schizophrenia and a problem with some part of his facial identity. He was taken on the course as a therapeutic solution. Similarly at Portsmouth College of Art a sculpture student expressed his schizophrenia through his work.
It would have been expected that everyone on the course would have schooling sufficient for the next step in their education. Each hoop is quickly forgotten as soon as it has been jumped through? They are frequently quite trivial challenges but necessary steps to take to progress.
p45 p131 66 With the post-war baby-boom generation the cannon fodder mentality of WWI and WWII was now applied to education. Those not in education would be getting up to mischief ­ the Mods and Rockers battles on the seafronts of south-east England for instance. Every course however vocational or academic was a statistic that also reduced the unemployment count. The same statistical juggling games continue to this day.
p45 Academic discussion about vocational versus liberal arts education
Q15 Whichever, employment was a desirable outcome and had to be based on technologies current in the world of applied design
p46 In practical terms, what was needed was something more flexible: an education in design methods and problem solving rather than a training in particular skills and techniques.
>>> This myth continues, now Design & Technology in secondary schools requires an understanding and synergy in the design process that is simply pretending that pupils can run before they can walk. Graffiti tagging is elevated to art when it is vandalism, street culture is elevated to music when it is noise.
Even at post-graduate level design method could pretend that creativity was a process conducted in a chart with a "black box". The emperor still has no clothes!
Forty years on this mystification is still cultivated in the gobbledy-gook in the prospectuses of the design courses, just as it was before, and the entry qualifications are simply reflecting that diversity of exams now brought to an application. Number One target in 1968 was remove GCE as a barrier to entry, but now it is replaced with ever more numerous yet flexible barriers. The fishing net is sized to catch the best available fish from a nearly empty sea.
p46 p132 75 William Morris would be turning in his grave!
p47 'Design for Whom?'
Edward de Bono, 'The Use of Lateral Thinking' ­ words, words, words ­ not a designer. Designers intuitively process and reconstruct creative influences in a space-time continuum, they don't need wordsmiths to reduce everything to two-dimensional networks and linear expressions.
Buckminster Fuller's WDSD publications ­ words, diagrams, words ­ where in Britain is there anything 40 years on?
p47 p133 77 Vance Packard: 'The Hidden Persuaders', 'The Status Seekers', 'The Wastemakers' ­ books, books, books ­ we knew all about these techniques, we were studying Graphic Design, the formulating, editing, styling and presentation of images and messages. And America was America and America is not Britain. The very distance of culture was widening and still is ­ who subscribes to the Kyoto Protocols and who doesn't? And why not?
p47 Papanek, Design for the Real World (1971) ­ Design for Need
Q16 What was Papanek up to exporting dollar imperialism and US consumer values to Africa ­ using the headlights of a Jeep as a slide projector?
Q17 What was he doing later in 1968 in Gothenburg repeating himself? His wife came and interrogated me as I had asked a critical question! She was like a blend of J Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy! The Papanek regime was just another part of the America myth building system.
Better to have a blend of Dyson and McCartney than Hoover and McCarthy! Home grown genius.
p48 Edward do Bono, Pevsner, etc
Q18 Did any designers worth their salt with creativity and genuine lateral thinking need to dull their minds with de Bono?
Pevsner's life perspective and focus was middle-European. It had small relevance to the Sixties Generation who had invented their own post-War British modernist culture, at last, odd though Peter Blake and Derek Boshier might have been at that time. Who was he to say that Complementary Studies were necessary? These dull, logical, academic minds wrongly assumed with their self-asserting superiority that simply because we were studying Art and Design that we were mentally retarded. At least we weren't intellectually constipated.
p48 p133 82 It's hard to remember anything of importance that was 'taught' about Byzantine and Mediaeval art but at the Royal Academy there had been an interesting exhibition including heavily carved wooden doors and panels from Hungary or Romania or some such place. (Elsewhere: in Finland Folison/Seurasaari, in Hungary Skansen, in Hong Kong Kam Tin walled village.) The failure of the whole teaching method (they might have been self-serving academics but they certainly weren't equipped with a relevant pedagogical methodology) was that it was time spent in the college rather than in a relevant museum or exhibition. It was through traveling to Paris with pals from my pre-diploma days at Portsmouth College of Art that I confirmed and reinforced my disinterest in Picasso but expanded my appreciation of Monet and Leonardo. Studying the great masters was improved by visiting the Victoria and Albert Museum, comparing sculptures of David by Donatello and Michaelangelo. I found no empathy with Rembrandt but years later when Vermeer's work was brought to London I could relate to his view. Modern Art, Primitive and non-European Art; this was more relevant than anything else as the British Museum put on excellent ethnographic displays then at the back of the Royal Academy with bold sculptures by First Nation Indians from British Columbia and exquisite pottery by the Incas and Aztecs. At the Whitechapel Gallery there was a brilliant exhibition of Modern Chairs which has not been bettered. In later years, when Mao Tse Tung's cultural revolution was destroying cultural artifacts right across China, I was able to build a rare collection of Yixing stoneware teapots while living for two years in Hong Kong.
Even Tate Britain showed an early Warhol 'self-portrait' in recent years that prompted me to 'study' again his language and produce some portraits, one of my daughter, in his manner and my own.
For the Sit-In to argue that art history 'should inform and permeate studies in art and design' and should be available 'through the course both formally and informally, but not compulsorily' is as valid as a delinquent and illiterate youth gang to say that they feel safer making their own rules and carrying a knife for their own protection and expecting 'respect' - until they are bleeding to death in the street. The political activists and staff activists were intellectually delinquent and illiterate, carrying out their campaign with a Gestetner. Naïve fools. Did Cromwell ride a quill-pen to battle? Knock me over wiv a fevver, guv. How was Guy Fawkes going to make his point? Not a damp squib. Did William Tyndale not read too much and run too slow! It's a killer, so much blind faith. The establishment seems to get its revenge in the end.

Linocut © Martin J Walker, London 1968

p49 Bauhaus?
Q19 The backfacing stance of British design, even including the 1951 Festival of Britain, was so unattractive (also to British children) and to Bauhaus geniuses such as Laszlo Moholy-Nagy that they soon left for the USA. The whole system of Bauhaus logic was flawed in most international adaptations since it relied too much on the mantra of Form follows Function and missed the juxtaposing forces of Human Factors/Ergonomics, adaptation and cultural setting. Finland made the best humanist expression of the International Modernist Movement with Aalto, Franck, Wirkkala, Marimekko, Eskolin, Tapiovaara, Schultén, Nurmesniemi, Hassi, Saarinen, Kukkapuro, Aarnio, etc. Who in Hornsey was aware of modern design outside the Bauhaus strait-jacket? The staff were a product of mittel-Europa with all the accents of refugees. Completely ignorant of Finland, Sweden, Britain and America. (Which direction were refugees coming from? None of the above.) Carrying their own private versions of European continental culture. They were neither integrated nor assimilated. And they were not designers. No use to us. And we were still stuck with Pugin, Voysey and Morris. Bring back Guy Fawkes?
Creativity [invention] (HK ­ US credit unit system from course by projects)
Q20 Creativity was expounded by a few visiting lecturers who introduced old text books familiar to academics such as On Growth and Form by D'Arcy Thompson, or Mathematical Models by Cundy and Rollett. But who had the time or resources to intensively study this way ­ they certainly never gave any tuition? And what technology except an enquiring mind and a pencil or some coloured lights? No access to X-rays, to medical anatomy, or Edward Muybridge or Marey's chronophotography. Hardly a mention of Balla. Visual Research was barely half a step forward from a good Pre-Dip course such as at Portsmouth. But it was of worth.
Who went on to do truly creative and inventive work? Resulting in Patents?
P49 p134 87 The Heads of Department, the robber barons, or were they lobotomized gulag functionaries, had no idea of what was required to investigate research into the educational process itself! That was going on in the brains of the talented students and no-one was talking to us, except for the jump now ­ how high ­ school of bullying.
p50 The Network System. I only got a go at content in Hong Kong with Romeo LeMarie and Tony Lee. We thrashed out what we wanted every student to know in year 1 before they even had any idea of specialization. That was in 1976-78. A different gulag, different robber baron.
p50 p135 89 More evidence that the major players not only knew how to work the system but that the Architectural Association was the 'class' base from which they operated. Keith Critchlow introduced R Buckminster Fuller to Hornsey and Guildford and had a foothold in the AA. Now it seems that Prue Bramwell-Davis was destined for the same salvation. I wouldn't normally let the word 'class' into my vocabulary but the AA and the Interior Design Department at the RCA were in a class of their own. The words posh or moneyed come to mind? Not that there is anything wrong with being well spoken or prudent.
When graphics staff had the chance to get a group of students working competitively on an interesting subject it was plain to see that the best parts of several ended up stimulating a commercial project in their own consultancies. Or another student seeing some work stored in Crouch End Hill would take it wholesale into a gallery and exhibit as their own. Lucky I wasn't into pushing folk off tall buildings! Pacifism is hard to maintain under such provocation. No, staff and students in a common project is not a goer. Education is about the student, the individual, not the salaried staff milking us.

p50 p135 90 Clive Latimer, Stuart Brisley and Peter Kuttner, Bruce Lacey, and Peter Sedgeley, among others, were engaged in projects at Middle Earth. They recruited like minded students in voluntary teams. Who trousered the profit? Or should I have put it, who carried the loss? Later the documentation of events appears to have added to the careers and accounts of catalogue designers, magazine publisher, art book writers and so on. No, the only 'free flow of creative activity' seems to have been in the direction of the careers and bank accounts of the prime movers disguised as benevolent staff. Once again the benefit flows to the control of power. Knowledge of the self-interest of the participants ensures that in fact the administrative power base is simply replaced by the network manipulators who ensure that it certainly wasn't a 'complete option system of a random nature', but rather an extendable, operational structure, one in which the coherent group was an alternative source of exploitation and power (so that the cumulative build-up of experience was still available for exploiting).
p50 p135 91 Buckminster Fuller was a alien but benevolent individual from the USA where he had a huge power base supporting his empire, John McHale ran the back-up crew for WDSD.
p51 p136 93 This tutor based approach was just more of the university academic system being forced into the traditional art college and moving power from the department heads and the students to the 'projects' and the tutors. Send them back to their universities, oh! That's where they have already found a job. We didn't need them in the first place! If you were an artist or a designer and you could just do the work without writing about it or talking about it how could the tutors understand what you were doing if you didn't annotate your sketchbooks ­ write signposts for them all over your work so they could have a cocktail party conversation about it? Now the whole process of annotation has been institutionalized and handed down to the GCSE system.
p51 p136 94 It looks like Herbert Read (died 1968!) would have been a great antidote to the Marxists at Hornsey.
Then in the unionized world of typesetting it was a brand new newspaper that took on the Spanish practices of the linotype-setters in Fleet Street. Eddie Shah started the Today newspaper.
P51 p136 95 Misha Black liked the power monopoly he could maintain in placing enforcers like L Bruce Archer in Design Research at the Royal College of Art. Why should he weaken his power-base with a network structure. The Royal College of Art was sclerotic and unable to take cross-disciplinary applications far less multi-disciplinary work. But he was not entirely wrong either, the best teams are of non-competing specialists each contributing to a broader vision but none wholly capable of doing the whole project entirely by themselves. Synergy did work. In hard economic times the commercial research companies were going to the wall, too many chiefs and not enough indians, and it was possible to package Research Fellows in Departments with lower overheads and the cachet of academic respectability ­ Royal College ­ and even that would fail when the International Monetary Fund told the government it was going bust. Exit commercial funding. Exit little Neddy. Exit skilled team, yet another diaspora.
p52 p137 96 If you actually don't know what a network system is and how such a so called dynamic system could be implemented and progressively maintained and adapted, then the hypothetical now has to be the basis for an experiment so the students are now guinea-pigs or laboratory rats in a dilettante's social experiment. No thankyou. Experimental art is always offered when the lecturer doesn't know what to teach and the student can't explain what they expect to learnt and the prospectus needs to look avant garde. Of course all the colleges have the same script-writer until experimental merely means that each person is doing the same thing for the first time and coming to a different outcome. No wonder! Perhaps the Sit-In missed the target and should have aimed at the sociologists amongst them?
P52 p137 97 'go out into society, armed with their own conviction, and change it from within' rejecting the art-object but drawing on their training in communication.
One minute we are giving credibility to the DipAD as a qualification for teaching (later supplemented by the PGCE) and like music, art education is in massive surplus to the needs of a consumer society so we ensure that Music and Art are embedded in the schools and employment is guaranteed. As for Mathematicians, Scientists, Engineers, Technologists, Linguists, Geographers ­ who are required to provide a broad education and career opportunity ­ it is the Designers who would draw from these others in making aesthetic and technical leaps in design evolution. But don't rely on the scientists understanding that their work can cause disasters as well as have potential for good. The nuclear waste of the last sixty-odd years is still an unpriced, unpaid for hazard, and the bio-fuels process has created price and supply distortions in the food markets with riots all around the third world. Once again first world fuel means third world starvation.
p53 p137 98/99 Interesting that Aneurin Thomas should have had such pro-polytechnic ideas while Shelton was waging a campaign against them with Haringey. Of course he left in 1967 to be replaced by Jack Shaw.
As for Paul Oliver's vision it sounds like an idealized hippy commune, fine in the perpetual sunshine of California but too wet and cold in England. Utopian technologies being tested at the Centre for Alternative Technology at Machynlleth, Powys.
Forty years on ecological housing has made great progress.
p54 p138 104 My experience of the arrival of the alsatian dogs was that I had been working on making a bowl in the ground floor ceramics workshop. The black and white glazes were drying and it was ready for the kiln. A door opened directly to the garden and when I opened the door there was a man and a dog already standing by the door blocking my exit. I quietly closed the door again and went back into the building to tell others.
P56 p138 107 So with the collapse of the promises and the sealing of the buildings, the Gestetner machine gravitates (or levitates) to David Page's home studio. This seems to show how pivotal this repro gadget was to the wordsmiths.
The Battersea Gallery money-raising activity appears long after the Sit-In had ended. The established gallery artists and Royal College of Art graduates and professors are supporting anti-establishment action. They don't want the competition? Yet at the RCA the departments are run in their own distinctive ways; Ceramics and Glass by Lord Queensberry with Eduardo Paolozzi having his hobby of judo as a style and discipline. (In one other department the interview process was completed with a signature required on an agreement to not participate in any political activity! - the turning of the screws.)
p57 Linear system, network system, matrix system ­ ICA ­ MORADE.
Q21 The RCA couldn't offer a cross-disciplinary MA? How could a DipAD provide what was years away? Industrially sponsored multi-disciplinary, team-based research projects were struggling for funding through the next five years. The government was heading through its cyclical pendulum swing between boom and bust, this time as now heading towards bust.
p59 p141/2 1/6 Lord Longford, Chair of the Hornsey Commission, seems to have had insufficient power or mandate to sack Shelton which by now was the logical position in a business with stakeholders at the AGM. Now the NUS withdrawal of support appears to undermine the mantle assumed by Nick Wright as sabbatical President of the Hornsey Branch of the NUS, even though the NUS way moving to the left. The college governors over-ruled his submission that he was not an assessable student but a union official. I can see that he was elected President of Hornsey College of Art Students' Union, but that appears to have been the extent and the limit of his position. The establishment of sabbatical status was taken and given by the Haringey council in their machinations over access to the student union funds. In fact it was perhaps the mechanism by which Shelton and others could manipulate the situation. Lord Queensberry and Sir Robin Darwin could made grandiose gestures as their own Royal College of Art was in a unique position being a university college granting its own degrees, if not then, shortly. That Summerson should have disagreed with their intervention only reveals that no-one, not even the namesake of an obsolete committee whose schemes had led in time to this position, could come to the point of fair and decisive conclusions for progress and change. Everyone involved while qualified to have another job and an opinion on this situation but with no ability to take the matter by the scruff of the neck and work it out decisively. Incompetence rules! They had taken no part in the discussions and the writings, they had no claim to authorship or authority over anything.
p62 p144 21 The locally elected councilors could hold firm, and continue to prevaricate while being determined, providing squalid conditions for students and staff, and substantially ignore the establishment, the aristocracy and the professionals. Definitely too important a responsibility for them.
p63 p146 28 The 'Short List' is as badly presented as any committee built assembly of parts as could be come up with for the design of a camel! One or two humps? White or brown?
"College policy should be based on a clear statement of objectives.
Now the objectives need to be elaborated for the benefit of Haringey Council and Harold Shelton. No doubt Shelton had already expounded his views and even published them in the prospectus. Prospectus-speak was a special form of gobbledy-gook that looked professional but meant little. It was generalized and undeliverable. Sweet nothings.
"The college should be primarily concerned with preparing people to produce effective and creative solutions to problems.
This is where a few words are not enough. 'Creativity' can be a subjective matter. Just another of the risky words like 'experimental' which to an art student means one thing but to a laboratory technician means another. Art students say their work is experimental when they are merely doing something they have not done before, while a scientist will be measuring and comparing results from experiments conducted under controlled and variable conditions in research to prove a thesis.
"Courses should be organized according to aimed-for performance rather than according to traditional boundaries of subject or materials.
It gets worse. One minute we are trying to get rid of linear courses and the next we have courses that have 'aimed-for performance'. The synergy of focused interest, multi-skilled and multi-media invention can result in novel solutions with unexpected results and performance. Design research can be done at all levels and stages of existing and novel processes whether within traditional boundaries of subjects or materials. Problem Solving sounds like evolution in the craft traditions while Solution Finding may be an open ended investigation of a completely novel and alternative and previously unknown concept.
At the level at which most people are introduced to art and design education there is plenty of value in experiencing traditional craft and material skills simply in order to transcend them and go on to a greater specialism or further ways of thinking and doing.

In "Visual Research" I looked at primrose and Japanese flowering cherry blossoms to symbolise abstract structures.* These cycloids resulted. Some time later I analysed the relationships of the Departments and Research activities at the Royal College of Art using the same visualisation. More recently I applied it to the National Curriculum as shown below and implemented in an Open University project in Design & Technology: Click to open link and Click again link to open dnshort.ppt

*Cycloids Copyright © R Brian Marsh, initiative.cafe London

"There should be an emphasis on learning design techniques rather than memorizing specific information.
This is almost meaningless unless it is elaborated further. Design techniques could be manual or mechanized and related to different technologies. As for memorizing specific information, are we now criticizing Art History for being a slide show with facts, figures and opinions to be digested without discussion? Is classical design accepted because it appeals to Prince Charles, is the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery really a carbuncle? Or is the whole infrastructure of big Art and Christianity within the institutions to be included? Can iconoclasm be part of the prerequisite for change; to make an omelette first break eggs. At Hornsey, which eggs should we have been breaking? Humpty Dumpty?
"Direct interaction between students and staff across courses and years should be encouraged.
This of course might suit some people. It does make assessment for individuals graduating more complicated if they are marked in groups. Worse, many teamwork projects were set with a view to siphoning off interesting material to contribute to out of college activities by staff and students alike. Copyright abuse.
"The main aim of the assessment should be feedback with a view to improvement.
First and foremost there should be self-assessment? Then there should be peer assessment, and expert assessment, if you wish then course assessment. Any assessment should have an agreed definition of quantitative and qualitative criteria and a moderating system to remove personality conflicts.
"Participation in decision-making should be maximized.
If the course is in decision making clearly this should be so, but for some people external decision making by committees is completely anathema. And some committees seem to consider that life is one long discussion about decision-making. Then they graduate to become quangos and red tape and regulations and union rules and white papers and top down centralized, heavy, expensive bureaucratic government. Then freedom and creativity is crushed. Actions speak louder than words?
"There should be as many options open to the student as possible for as long as possible.
As many or as few as the individual and the course require? For as long as possible is a cop out, and an indecision. It might be impossible?
"The Association of Members of Hornsey College of Art, properly constituted and recognized by the local education committee, should have the right to discuss any college matter.
Hornsey students supported certain union activities; the Film Society, the Dances/Pop Concerts, a few played rugby ­ was there a girls' team, I doubt it ­ but the majority of the students were not active in the everyday running of their union. They might think it a laugh to go to the town hall and get in the local papers in an Anti-Poly demonstration. Extraordinary that they played the mini-skirt card every time, and got away with it too. It's like Rag Week in a university. So easy it seems to lead a mass of students like a flock of sheep! And these are supposed to be highly individualized sentient beings.
Social responsibility was delegated to an exclusive, self-promoting minority who did their business off campus. Just as the staff had meetings before meetings. Just as the council had meetings in camera. Just as Shelton had or didn't have meetings upon his whim.
"Students should have a probationary period with right of appeal before any disciplinary action is taken.
Now we students are 'criminalized' without charge! If everybody is part of AMHCA then all administrative, teaching and technical staff should share the same disciplinary procedure? Perhaps all 'teachers' should have fixed term contracts of no more than five years in one institution. And the Principal should be required to teach. Part of the continuing revolution! If you are so good then many other colleges will be head-hunting you. If you are just keeping dead-men's shoes warm then it's time for a bit of invigorating fresh air and competition.
Did he have an hereditary title or otherwise? What was his probationary period?
p65? Network system
Q22 Many people responsible for art and design education had spent several years during WWII doing little more than designing camouflage patterns for buildings and vehicles. They had no creative career experience and little administrative genius. How could they understand the new generation of GCE empowered DipADers?
p65 p149 35 The Select Committee Report 'noting that it received little evidence to support any theory of an international conspiracy to promote student unrest in Britain.' The evidence was being collected at LSE and Hornsey. Americans influencing LSE, LSE influencing Hornsey, Hornsey visiting Paris . . .
The evidence elsewhere appears to show that the National Union of Students was in the process of adopting a party political stance that would attempt to politicize student unions. A few of these happened to be in art colleges but each college had its own nucleus some of whom were associated with visiting lecturers/artists. Some of the unionized and political students went on to careers in unions and entered parliamentary politics and appear to have had no talent or interest in art or design before or after Hornsey College of Art. In the case of London School of Economics the appointment of staff from overseas caused a political reaction within the LSE and was part of the nature of that institution, including sit-ins, hunger strikes and arrests. Even deaths.
p66 p149 37 Shelton and others elsewhere likewise generated departments with staffing hierarchies, associated equipments and facilities, and larger student uptake as each, any and all would give them larger budgets, fiefdoms and fame. Not least of all, larger salaries.
p66 p149 38 Now after Longford, Summerson, Coldstream, Wollheim, uncle-Tom-Cobley and all, even the Select Committee 'did not feel itself competent to pronounce on the students' desire for a more integrated 'network system' . . .
p148 34 Students: 'We have not said anything we want to say'.
This is a familiar problem, the further the discussion gets from the point, the more the participants go through face-saving procedures to demonstrate that their procedures have been followed. It doesn't solve the problem or prevent it happening again. It all comes back to holding power. Students graduate and become mere statistics. Principals use these statistics for political reasons and to retain power.
p66 p149 41 Bernard Hancock at Graphics probably shared the same authoritarian management systems that had got Jack Shaw promotion to Vice-Principal. To my recollection SIAD membership was by subscription. Not too far removed from buying a qualification from a spam email address? Want a degree ­ yours for $99.99 ­ no attendance required.
In David Page's response to the Principal's request for concrete proposals for improving student morale he doesn't seem to have looked far. In 1967-68 there were dances with top bands, and a film society with generally excellent 'art' films not available in the high streets. Some students and staff had been working together at Middle Earth in Covent Garden putting on all sorts of contemporary works. The national museums and galleries were, along with the Design Centre in Haymarket, offering plenty of exhibitions and events such as The Motor Show was there for such special interests. To have a debating society, a magazine, seminars or a bar would hardly have done anything for morale. What was lacking was a decent liaison with prospective employers so that holiday jobs could have relevance and a better reward than farm labouring, postal delivery, bread factory work or woodyard labour. Work-placement, job hunting; that was completely lacking. And many prospective employers were quite unimpressed by the sort of portfolio that could be put together from the teaching and resources of Bowes Road. On the other hand, such advertising agency employers were also completely enslaved to the product lines of their clients right down to the exact specification of half-tone screens of their car photography.
p67 p150 42 Shelton's inability to lead except in his own self-interest was one of the reasons he could not accommodate anything except a return to the status quo as at 27 April 1968. He and Nick Wright seem to have fallen out some time after the Anti-Poly campaign when their interests diverged. Perhaps his shuffling of incomes around projects and departments had drawn attention from the council and the administration. This attention went as far as everyone looking closely at the Student Union accounts the funds for which were passed through via the council. The advance planning seems to have been in the Student Action Committee, or the rugby team, or the culture of unions and left wing politics in the mining valleys of South Wales or the motor industry of Luton. Stick a pin in any of the above locations and see where the pain reflex comes from?
The Commission had not heard evidence of international conspiracy, certainly from the students. Who knows if the NUS or the LSE were direct or indirect contributors along with Tariq Ali and Vanessa Redgrave at Grosvenor Square? Beware the power of television! If any small hint of international influence might be interpreted it would be students bringing posters back from l'Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. But for those who never saw them, who studied at Bowes Road and at Crouch End Hill, there was absolutely no motivation except a complete dissatisfaction with the location, facilities and staffing of the college. Some of the students were better resourced and connected, some were equally competitive. Just a rare few were out-and-out politicos. As for the staff there was the same spectrum and the same few politicos. If there was any outside connection it went little further than Guildford or any other college where part-time or visiting lecturers divided their time but probably saw the same sort of amateur standard of leadership from college and council alike.
If Shelton thought the union funds matter had been resolved by 28 May perhaps he was ambivalent in explaining it to the college treasurer or the council treasurer. Certainly I, as student union treasurer, never had communication with anyone other than Pudney. Gravy published the union accounts for all to see.
Sir Robin Darwin, and Professor Misha Black, would have seen Shelton as a competitor for industrial and government sponsorship of their departments and research units. They and Professor L Bruce Archer would not have wanted Hornsey to have set up in competition any more than had already been achieved.
p67 p150 44 Everyone central to promoting a twenty-four hour Sit-In now seems to be running away from thinking that it might even start or go on beyond the printed schedule. Yet when the meeting separated and half watched films while the other half went upstairs to continue talking there was already momentum to study the academic problems that hindered us. The union funds were never mentioned. The sabbatical was not mentioned. Even Shelton was never mentioned. Now the open-ended debate had taken on its own hesitant momentum trying to ignore every outside factor and simply to think purely what a Utopian education in art and design should comprise. The premises, the staff, the administration, the courses, the students' interests ­ these were all intimately interconnected. The momentum of the forum accelerated and simply took the action away from Nick Wright. Any conversations he might have had with Shelton were simply obsolete. Now it was not their Sit-In but ours. Kim Howells had been sidelined. His hang-ups with his art were not our concern anyway. We were designers and we were focused on changing anything and everything through Design. Art was a fossilized beast which now by evolution was surviving in its red-hot technological species of Design. (Wasn't there an exhibition at the V&A in 1972 themed on 'From today Painting is Dead' ­ on account of the power of photography.)
p68 Nick Wright a Communist
David Page an unsectarian socialist, anarchist
Kim Howells an anarchist ­ father, lorry driver and communist
Jim Singh-Sandhu an anarcho-syndicalist
Tom Nairn a non-aligned Marxist
David Warren Piper, Alex Roberts and Prue Bramwell-Davis apolitical pragmatists interested in design solutions to social problems.

With the flow of oil and gas from the North Sea it was hard to get a hearing for the debate which concerns us now forty years on: the environment; solar, wind and wave power ­ alternatives to coal and other fossil fuels ­ but especially the catastrophically expensive nuclear fuel and power industry even before Chernobyl and the ever present risk of nuclear terrorism and weapons proliferation.
We were interested in Design for Need in its many forms and interpretations but not least of all a place to live, an emotionally and financially rewarding employment, and peace and freedom. All the other materialistic and consumer matters were a matter of personal choice, style and taste. R Buckminster Fuller's WDSD went some way to a common design cause, but even he was by now monopolizing the microphone and listening to himself.
Q22 Would they, the lists of nameists on p68, all have better fitted into the old style Bauhaus?
Too many talkers and writers and not enough action!
Why did National Socialism close the Bauhaus!
p69 p153 55 Howells perhaps just made a career in self publicity by posing and speaking out which he continued through the Falklands War at great risk to the those engaged on the front line.
Q23 If he was so unhappy with the art world why was he enrolled? He had full freedom of choice.
The small talk on the Welsh Communist Party blogs and websites seems to rumble on about all sorts of factional interests.
p70 At this stage it seems that there are only a very few players left with personal agendas: (Nick Wright is obsolete.) Howells is still raising his provincial voice from the valleys whether in Wales or Crouch End but no-one is listening. Baines is an immovable object confronting David Warren Piper for his dogmatic theories and academic posturing. The daily life of the college, whether in whatever departments in remote buildings were still operating or not as the case may be, or the fluctuating number of students continuing only in Crouch End Hill, the daily life of the students was entirely concentrated on the quality and nature of the (art and) design education and its ramifications beyond the college in their future lives and careers. Some perhaps were not even old enough to vote for change by the ballot box. Others, even if they did vote, would find the electoral system un-representative. Party politics was only of interest to the local government functionaries. And least of all, Shelton was never interested in anything but absolute power and control. He froze in the face of the out-pourings of his own Gestetner in its revolutions. At least the Gestetner was, by design, in constant revolution! We were talking, not shouting, we were thinking and writing. We were studying, which is exactly what students at college were expected to do. Most of the time we were being reasonable. Unusually we were studying publicly twenty-four hours of the day, a relay team, in a marathon, thinking together on one of the biggest ideas that would empower us for the rest of our lives.
p74 Credit Unit system
Q24 Why adopt a Credit Unit system if there is difficulty enough deciding what course content and style should have been?
Perhaps it is easier to have a pick-and-mix menu where the decisions are delegated and the indecisions are hidden. No-one now has to have the vision to see the whole universe.
It was just a fashion that was exported also to Hong Kong Polytechnic with Michael Farr as Head of the Department of Design. The academic unit was Philosophy. Pals from England. No use at all to Hong Kong and China coming up to 1997.
p74 p157 77 It looks as though David Joseph really was in the wrong place at the wrong time. His course option subjects look eminently sensible. But the newly energized heads of department would be fortifying their own powers in their own buildings and the hint of yet another American import idea would not be easy to swallow. The speed at which the college had developed had not allowed for the refinement of outlined courses, getting everyone to march in step. Now to go to the other extreme, everyone dancing to their own tune, was just too progressive. Even just to settle on something acceptable to everyone somewhere in the middle would probably not have got approval because it was no longer about building ivory towers but keeping a few overcrowded slums patched up until the move to Cat Hill. The Sit-In should have happened in 1967 when it might have made a significant contribution to the polytechnic debate. But in 1968 it had already missed the boat, or bus, as the case may be. I had no idea where Cat Hill was and I wasn't much bothered either way as I wouldn't be studying there.
p79 p161 99 The vote of no confidence in the Principal and administration is wholly consistent with the situation at that point in time. Clearly the students are still doing all the work and getting none of the rewards.
I wonder if there are now procedures by which the governors can deal with the situation that Shelton brought about?
p80 p163 103 John and Barbara Latham wrote a letter with a 'Proposal for a Department of Eventstructure, Hornsey, June 1968'.
They had already been two years developing the Artist Placement Group. Another outlet for their events was the Middle Earth in Covent Garden and the activities collectively known as WHSHT ­ the World Health, Sanity and Hygiene Trust. This included Student Brisley, Peter Kuttner. Jim Singh Sandhu and myself among several others participated in The Draft which was directed by Stuart Brisley.
Could this not have co-existed with painting and sculpture? Was the Light/Sound Workshop not just another duplication?
In later years, with the complexity of productions by a major industrial conference company, I packaged product launches in a theatrical setting with audio-visuals with multi-screen and multi-projector presentations, performances and lighting. Some would call it industrial theatre.
p80 p164 103 Aneurin Thomas, contribution to the Joint Committee. They should have sacked Shelton and made Thomas the principal.
p80 p164 103 Joint Committee meeting with the NUS: Nick Wright, ex-Hornsey student and member of the NUS Art Colleges Advisory Panel, etc.
This detail shows that Nick Wright had changed horses mid race and ridden with the NUS, unionism, communism, etc.
p80 p164 104 Now Summerson has caught up with the student movement and invited "What we want them to do is to open the door to liberalization and to take the initiative in introducing innovations."
Yet in July 1968 he had been saying:
Summerson at the Round House conference in July 1968, said: "And now you are asking me my opinion on something on which my opinion is quite worthless. I am not an artist, I don't teach in an art school ­ I teach, but not art. I must repeat, my personal opinion here is worthless."
Mindless innovation can be as shallow as novelty for the sake of fashion. Part of the process of consumerism and materialism addictions. How many electric kettle designs can a methodological 'black box' unnecessarily generate?
p80 How many are needed?
Market forces will determine that, but an educated person takes that education for life.
What social and economic conditions encourage and increase demand for good design . . . ?
Almost every word in this sentence is loaded with meaning but just the single word 'good' is pivotal. Should designing be a neutral, merchantable, professional skill or service irrespective of the product, or does design carry with it an aesthetic quality that can be set on a universal scale from bad to good? Good for whom, for what, when and where, why and how? Good for ego, for profit, by a thousand other criteria! Good for the establishment, good for the title perhaps? Good for self-centred little me, or him?
p81 The fine art component was now quietly dropped, strengthening the growing autonomy of design.
This is illogical. The language of point, line, plane, form, texture, colour, space, movement, sound and time ­ just to start with a few essentials ­ is the same form-giving language and skill that is common to all of the plastic arts whether their application or outlet is in a frame, a gallery, a television or a satellite in space.
The missing element for many was science and technology. Art was the runt of the academic litter where the illiterate and the glitterati played together.
p81 p162 107 It seems that Pevsner suffered the same constipated thinking as Suzanne Lang. They mistook their opinions for facts. We had a different perspective. We could think for ourselves. The evolution of design processes was advancing so rapidly that what previously had been limited by clients was now unlimited by free-thinking imagination in the information technology age.
p81 A and B courses.
Q25 Who would want to take the B-road?
Misha Black's penchant for engineering versus David Warren Piper's academic theories didn't appeal to natural designers. Only by having a hunger for power could Black be engaged in street sign design for Westminster with results contradicting common sense and legibility research findings published by the relevant research unit at the RCA. It looks like Piper's train of thought was better informed but nowhere visualized in a way that could be assimilated by design illiterates. On the other hand all this talk was non-productive to designers who knew perfectly well what they were doing and just wanted to get on with it.

p81 p165 110 Again Pevsner demonstrates an ignorance of the speed of change in textile technology, aesthetics and design. Where surface decoration of printed textiles appears to be his reference for a splash of Giotto, the industrial processes of the textile industry are advancing with increased computerization, novel printing technologies, dying, fibre processes and garment pre-shaping. (Textile Research Unit, Royal College of Art.)
p82 Thatcher
Q26 Corner shop daughter and scientist, what chance that Thatcher would understand Art and Design? In Education she took free milk out of the primary schools.
p82 p165 112 Perhaps if 'the sloppy past' of the NDD was sliding back, flavoured with the demagoguery of 1968, and the NUS unanimously rejected it ­ despite Nick Wright's mantle of member of the NUS Art Colleges Advisory Panel, we now have the proof that the whole gang were unfit for the tasks of the committee that they sat on. But don't imagine that David Hockney's opinion would have any relevance to contribute to the debate. Even Narcissus's mirror would have cracked in his studio art activities.
Shelton's industrialists were already scurrying to Misha Black's coat-tails and taking their sponsorship to the Royal College of Art. It seems that a polytechnic would have been a better retirement home for Shelton but he just couldn't face reality. And has Digby Jacks now turned a deaf ear to his advisor, Nick Wright. The lone (David Warren) Piper is playing the last lament?
p88, 89 Design for Need
Q27 This was focused excessively by product designers to problem-solving methods applied to specifically identifiable disabilities.
The global, fundamental responses to catastrophic disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis and refugee displacement did not feature until Design for Need at RCA in 1970's. In turn this developed into a Design for Need Lifecycle encompassing the product, the user, the lifecycle and recycling of the product. This was hinted at by Buckminster Fuller's Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science but these were never installed into the Design Education Curriculum. Why not?
p83 With regard to Nairn's 'crackpots', they were predominantly the theorists, politicists, nationalists. The rest of us just got on with practical matters of being (artists and) designers.
And with regard to Rushton's and Wood's 'apologists', ten years after the event, what's bothering you ­ Too much art theory?
p84 p167 5 These side-line commentators seem to be infected with a bad dose of sociophilia with a complication of voyeurism. Even a Teach-Yourself-Revolution handbook from Foyles wouldn't have contributed to the situation.
Too many of the men of letters had read too much. Their heads simply didn't function in the world of lateral thinking, visual research, and invention. They followed rules and precedents instead of transcending rules and doing the unprecedented. When all the isms and ists are worn out you have to start with an open mind.
p85 Clearly Rushton and Wood have a problem understanding design and creativity if they have to resort to yet another Marxist analysis. Original thinking is required, a copied script is academically bankrupt. Hornsey was doing a rare piece in the sharing of a commonwealth of experiences. The final documents were frequently a dull expression of the imaginative dreams and aspirations while the processing of the committees appears to have been an institutionalized reflex in dousing the flames of enlightenment. But each participant was armed for life with an inoculation against brainwashing.
p87 p169 18 There it is, from Kim Howells' own lips, a delegation of Hornsey students at the LSE occupation of October 1967. Delegated on whose authority?
The LSE was the training ground for sit-ins and leftist agitators.
Kim Howells probably found not only was art not his cup of tea but that Hornsey College of Art had insufficient politically literate students, at least not sympathetic with his limitations. We had no place for it in the ingredients of being creative, inventive or perceptive designers, we were interested in the intellectual processes of designing and even words were a poor substitute for creative activity. Words were a disabling translation from reality and the senses.
The sit-in was already a compromise and any subsequent committees a charade.
As for politics, that 'has been colonized by the incomprehensible classes.' Strange, that sounds familiar, I wonder who said something similar to that?
P87 p169 18 Prue Bramwell-Davis also has no memory of sectarian divisions emerging in sit-in debates.
That's right. It was very quickly established that there was to be no deviation from the debating agenda. On the one hand this could be incredibly boring when encountering trivial matters, but when things were buzzing along it was fairly easy to build a running consensus. Anyway, many decisions were instinctive. But the majority of students were still in the archipelago, and for those of us who weren't, there was little opportunity for dissent.
p87 p169 20 More of the usual Howellsian mumbo-jumbo. For someone who appears to have submitted a 20-minute film about politics and riots in Paris, Tokyo and the USA and is consequently un-assessed for his diploma, who opposed the gallery system, who formed the core of fine art students of the Student Action Committee, who planned the sit-in in his own flat, how can we expect him to understand that the very collective mass of participants were engaged in an evolutionary cultural process that was not in itself art (or design) but was for art (and design).
Better this than 'catastrophic art' such as the spectacular explosion of a manned NASA space rocket at take-off, or Shuttle breaking up on re-entering the atmosphere, or the similarly spectacular event of the collapse of the Twin Towers in New York ­ probably the most watched and most repeated film about politics that has been viewed as a spectacular event!
(That also said a lot about the limitations of an architectural education and structural engineering.)
Did this transcend bourgeois art by a collective, revolutionary cultural practice that was not 'art'? Is the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion also artistic? Would prime minister's questions win the Turner Prize? Would Turner have lent his temerarious name to the art award, or been fighting against it?
p88 p170 21 The problems at Bowes Road were several; there was little need to hand-set type, it was like walking into a Time Team history re-enactment. I had already learnt how to use a sable brush to paint Roman capitals, or Rockwell slab serif, and a different brush or pen for Irish half-uncials, and then there was Letraset. Photosetting was unavailable but imminent in the continuing industrial revolution. That also was going to be superceded by personal computing and the internet. The medium was not the message. The content was the message. Bowes Road was unable to deal with the message, just the style. Style was liable to fashion and triviality. Content was forbidden. The prospectus was about style. The Sit-In was about content.
p88 p170 22 Just as the Bauhaus design methodology strangled itself with the mantra of Form follows Function and pre-dated the human factors/ergonomics ingredients, so Problem Solving required the designer to contribute their own value judgments and humanism in the process and outcome.
p88 p170 24 Design for Need is open to many individual interpretations. At the Royal College of Art in 1976 there was a Design for Need exhibition and symposium. In Sweden in 1968, Finland in 1969, I had continued ideas of structural paper products and when the opportunity arose in 1976 I presented my solution for a 'decimal house'. In 2003 in a secondary school, I presented the idea of the Design for Need Lifecycle ­ Creativity in Design & Technology from Conception to Recycling. This was carried through as a study programme for a Maize Mill for Africa. A footnote to the activity was on Why Teach Design & Technology.
p89 p171 25 "A person who designs . . . etc."
The word 'community' seems to validate the whole paragraph.
Those of us participating in the sit-in were participating in an intellectual process, with meaningful relationships and imagination, insight and understanding of the world and an ability to communicate.
p89 p171 28 Sadly the continuing escalation of environmental disasters impacting on ever denser human populations results in non-governmental agencies delivering inappropriate solutions from afar. In the case of the tsunami an encampment of sheds made of corrugated iron were uninhabitable because they virtually cooked the inhabitants in the tropical disaster area. International fund-raisers even with local advisors apply inappropriate design solutions ignoring local materials. In fact, after Burma, it is not just the political will that is needed, it is the education of communities and societies ­ borrowing from Buckminster Fuller ­ in comprehensive, anticipatory design science. In the case of catastrophic disasters each family, community and society needs to have a disaster recovery plan. This should start with an understanding of emergency survival techniques; how to prevent disease, how to provide shelter, to manage water and food rations, and to communicate with the world beyond the disaster area.
This is the real design revolution when a need for design and design for need coincide. Unfortunately politics and politicians again fail the people.
p94 Art Theory
Q28 Another distracting discourse on theory of action rather than action itself ­ is this just naval gazing, hot air, puff?
p101 p183 8 "Whatever the difficulties . . ." Peter Green and Richard Robins found different ways of observing and acknowledging that Hornsey had contributed to its incarnation as the Faculty of Art and Design at Middlesex University. Shelton had stood in the way of the inevitability of the polytechnic move and Nick Wright had colluded with him. The Hornsey Sit-In had been instigated by the wrong people for the wrong reasons. The few who persevered among the other students and the staff, mainly those accustomed to each other in Crouch End Hill, had a more confident way of handling activities. Coming from Bowes Road, not incorporated in the Alexandra Palace clique, yet part of the student union committee, I participated but was not always fully in agreement.
But the question now should not be, was it worth it, but yes, I am still doing it and I would do it all again.
p110.5 anti-poly campaign 1967 printed in graphics department, 23 Oct 67
Q29 Why did the printing facilities matter so much? The ideas and the photography were hardly worth the expense.
p118.35 Q30 Was Cat Hill so far out that it was unattractive to students?
Or was it just unattractive to staff who would prefer to be closer to Hornsey? Big fish in a small pond, or small fish in a big pond? Power and status.
p118.41 Nick Wright
Q31 Where was all this union minded enquiry coming from, NUS, LSE, Communist Party? It had little interest or resonance with students interested in studying design.
p119 educational aims, relevance of courses
Q32 The quality of the staff, the projects, the facilities at Bowes Road did impact on students and interest them but only one third year student participated full time in the Sit-In.
suicides at Ally Pally
Q33 It was said that there were suicides at Alexandra Palace among the art students. Was this so? Was it the lifestyle choices of the individuals, or the facilities and course?
Design of Haringey symbol, female student
Q34 Who was the designer of the Haringey Council symbol?
A female student at Bowes Road.
Jack Shaw, ex-head of graphics, vice-principal
p120.45 20 May, HCASU General Bulletin
Q35 The anti-poly campaign was in Shelton's interest, fearing loss of power, but not affecting students who would graduate long before the facilities were built. It would be of use to political figures in the union just for their own politics careers. Were the silent majority not just being manipulated as usual?
p120.46 Pudney
Q36 Were some funds actually subverted? I think so.
p121.48 23 May
Q37 Who were Wright and Hayman to assert rights in pursuit of just demands? Their own political agenda?
Diploma Show at Bowes Road rather than external location
Q38 Because of the Sit-In the normally public display for final assessment was in the departments rather than in a public location?
p121.49 Student Action Committee ­ who?
Q39 This seems to have been a group of politically motivated Art students, not Design students, based at Alexandra Palace?
p122.9 Martin Walker
p122.11 Nick Wright, R Jerram, C Francis, Alex Roberts, Kim Howells, Martin Walker
Q40 Did any staff ever set limits on what students did in their own free time or in their own minds? I don't think so. It was clear that many had no self-direction or initiative, they were complacent and generally uncritical.
p123.15 Kim Howells and Jim Singh Sandhu and others entered Shelton's office
Q41 Was this the start of the discovery of private documents?
p124.20 Alex Roberts, student, microphone
Q42 Yes, it was all very slow and tiringly prescribed, prepared and predictable. Bureaucratic, hardly democratic or creative! But sincere and well meant.
p126.32 Bucky, 45 minutes, weak
Q43 All this networking with outsiders was part of the personal agenda of social climbers. It had no benefit to the majority but was a distraction from graduating and effecting permanent change for the good. Licking up to the establishment was simply joining yet another herd?
p127.36 Clive Tickner, Paris posters
Q44 These French posters were only seen by the inner clique? In fact the Sit-In was a group of competing cliques each exploiting the vacuum created by the absence of Shelton and the charade that was the reputation of Hornsey built with assistance of the media.
David Robins
Q45 Who is he?
p127.37 Set-project work we were against
Q46 Later MA by Project was available at Central School of Art
There's a time and a place for projects. It's the petty free-bee projects for the council ­ their symbol ­ or for exploitative design organizations with visiting lecturers milking student ideas to apply in their corporate identity projects.
p130.55 Letters after name
Q47 This included MSIAD, Bla-bla, bla-bla pay your annual subscription, join the club.
p133.77 Fred Scott, industrial design tutor, Archigram, James Mellor, ind des
Q48 Did no-one see through Papanek? Was Buckminster Fuller just an eccentric with a small formula for designing industrially and inventing vocabulary? Did he defeat the tyranny of the cube? Or just supplant it with the dome? Anyway, it was an American aesthetic imperialism we could do without? (Sadly mother Earth is pricked by ever more and taller towers, each city wanting the tallest: Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur, Dubai.) Graphic designers didn't need Vance Packard to bore them to death with paperbacks about persuasion. No thankyou either to de Bono. If you can't be creative yourself or design, talk about it, write about it, philosophize about it, make some art history of it, but why don't you just leave designers alone to get on with what they can do without all the theorizing.
p134 Bauhaus again!
Q49 When was anyone going to debunk this sterile, un-spontaneous, formulaic approach to colour, form, etc.?
D'Arcy Thompson, on Growth and Form
Cundy & Rollett, Mathematical models
21 June 68, Buckminster Fuller
p138.107 Derek Boshier, Stuart Brisley etc
Hockney, Moore, Paolozzi . . .
Q50 The Sit-In was long over, these establishment figures had already monopolized their own niches in the system. Some of their long boring shadows dragged across the art landscape for decades!
p159.85 General Purposes Fund
Q51 Was this whole Hornsey myth not predictable with unsuitable facilities, unqualified staff, inadequate council resources, hugely idealistic and scholarly students who could kick for freedom of thought by direct action? Add a dose of financial impropriety by administration ­ Shelton/Shaw/Pudney ­ and the Union politicos/Wright and their aspirations for funded sabbaticals and a future in the government. Didn't they have the decency to be artists and designers after all that? The wrong people in the wrong place doing the wrong things just for themselves. That's politics then? Nothing has changed!