Regrets? I don’t think so. I don’t have many regrets but one is certainly that I didn’t ever meet in person my maternal grandfather John Parkinson Hully. J.P.Hully was a British modernist designer with a long career in various art forms especially jewellery and furniture design. J.P.Hully, then living in Bath, worked for eighteen months with Marcel Breuer of the legendary Bauhaus in the mid-1930s in Bristol in the south of the UK. Southern Bauhaus anyone? Marcel Breuer knew my grandfather’s work and to escape the Nazis he moved to Bristol to work with him in the Gane studios for a while before he settled permanently in the United Sates.
John Parkinson Hully was born in 1882 and died in 1944. When he died the National Register of Industrial Art Designers regretted losing ‘one of its most distinguished designers’. J.P. Hully was educated at the Friends School in Lancaster and worked for Gillows of Lancaster and subsequently P.E. Gane of Bristol and as Chief Designer for Bath Cabinet Makers, who ‘produced some of the most distinguished British furniture from the late 1890s through to, at least, the 1930s’. These were the 1930s of Nazi power but also of British Modernism – of British Art Deco and definitely, maybe, British Bauhaus. Hully’s designs from 1928 were described as ‘modernist’, the ‘geometrical lines showing he was well up to date with advanced thinking’. His designs and papers are collected today for art and design posterity in a small archive at the Geffrye Museum in Shoreditch, East London. A few years ago Tara and I wrote a treatise on him based on this wonderful archive, about his place in British modernist history, which is published in an international online art and design journal and is freely available to download.
For eighteen months, after the Nazi onslaught against the Bauhaus, Marcel Breuer, legendary designer of the Bauhaus, worked with J.P. Hully at P.E.Gane Ltd at College Green in Bristol. Gane’s were seen as very fortunate to have working with them at the same time, both ‘the simple contemporary elegance’ of the modern design work of J.P. Hully and the ‘epoch-making’ work of Marcel Breuer. Gane’s officially remarked: ‘the firm was very fortunate when J.P.Hully, one of Britain’s best designers, offered his services to the company. This true artist and charming man was equally at home with traditional and modern work, and he had the knack of designing gracefully just what any particular house required. He knew that good contemporary design can indeed live in the same room with Sheraton or Chippendale. In 1936 after the brilliant experiment of the Bauhaus at Dessau had broken up under the pressure of Nazi reaction, its famous leaders Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer came to England and Crofton Gane at once secured Breuer as consultant designer. Breuer decorated and furnished Mr Gane’s new home, and the Gane craftsmen had the eye-opening experience of making to Breuer’s design some remarkable new furniture for a flat at Highpoint in Highgate, London. At the Royal Show at Bristol in 1936 Marcel Breuer built as a setting for Gane furniture a pavilion in Cotswold stone – the first demonstration in Britain of the intense stimulation produced by a revolutionary design in an ancient material. All this work was given nation-wide publicity by the architectural press’. The property owner in Highgate was a Mrs Ventris who later recalled: ‘it was very fortunate for me that Mr Breuer came over to England because I had long admired photographs of the beautiful house he built at Wiesbaden. I felt that I was obliged to live in the limited space of a modern flat it would be an architect and not a decorator who could organize that space and make it serve the ends of work and pleasure. And to Mr Breuer’s gift of originality as architect and craftsman (it will be remembered that he was the inventor of tubular steel furniture) is added the colour-sense of the painter…seeing these clean and lovely lines, and appreciating the perfection of workmanship to which they are allied, I realize that the “modern” is not something to be enjoyed only at exhibitions and between the pages of magazines but that it is practical, stimulating and essentially good to live with.’
My grandfather died before I was born but he remains an inspiration to me as a writer. There are two surviving photos of my grandfather sitting working at his desk and I keep them on my own desk as a staunch reminder to me ‘when routine bites hard and ambitions are low’ to quote the late Ian Curtis of Joy Division, another but very different highpoint of British modernism.
