Submarine Engineer

This coloured lithograph depicts the shop front of Siebe, Gorman & Co. Ltd of 187 Westminster Bridge Road, London. The shop supplied diving and underwater equipment. The window display features a selection of diving helmets and a mannequin modelling a diving suit. The base of the display has been made to resemble the sea floor with oyster shells and a starfish. The number of the shop, ‘187’, is written above the door on the left. The shop sign above the window reads ‘Submarine &’. The incompleteness of the sign implies that the window display is part of a larger shop front.

The print come from a series of twenty-four lithographs of shops and businesses that Eric Ravilious produced for ‘High Street’, an illustrated book printed by Curwen Press and published in 1938 by Country Life with text by J.M. Richards.

Ravilious conceived the idea for the book together with his lover and fellow artist Helen Binyon, with whom he had previously planned to collaborate on an ‘A-Z of shops’. He took inspiration from Soviet children’s books featuring lithographed scenes of everyday life and French children’s books depicting shop fronts, such as those by Père Castor. Although initially declined by the Golden Cockerel Press, Ravilious’s illustrations were picked up by Noel Carrington, an adviser to Country Life Publications, and Richards was commissioned to write the accompanying text, which included quotations from the featured shopkeepers.

All the prints depicted real-life businesses that were operating in Ravilious’s time, but the project was also tinged with nostalgia. Many of the highly specialised shops selected for inclusion in ‘High Street’ were already anachronistic in the 1930s, a time when department and chain stores (‘big multiple stores’, as Richards calls them in the book) were on the rise, bringing greater uniformity to British high streets.

‘High Street’ sold well and was favourably reviewed upon its publication in 1938, and the book and its prints subsequently became coveted collectors’ items, especially after the original lithographic plates were destroyed in the Blitz, preventing the printing of further copies. Ravilious himself was another victim of the Second World War, dying on active service as an official war artist when his aircraft was lost in 1942.

Many of the businesses featured in ‘High Street’ are commonplace: a butcher, a baker, a pharmacy and a pub. Others, however, are more niche or unexpected – perhaps none more so than Siebe, Gorman & Co. Richards’s text noted that ‘the window is lined with oyster shells to show that pearl fishing is one of the most important uses of diving apparatus'. Yet the shop was famous for a more unusual use of underwater equipment, having supplied the diving suit worn by Salvador Dalí at the opening of the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in the summer of 1936. Both Dalí’s stunt and Ravilious’s immortalisation of Siebe’s window display highlight a preoccupation with oceanic and marine imagery in interwar art and culture.

Another print from ‘High Street’, depicting Bassett-Lowke’s model shop at 112 High Holborn, London, is ZBB0506.