OTD in early British television: 9 February 1939
John Wyver writes: the evening of Thursday 9 February 1939 saw a 40-minute edition of Contrasts, which was a catch-all title for juxtapositions of variety artists from differing traditions. This was a particularly eclectic line-up featuring dancers from Java and Bali performing Japanese classical dance; singers Harry van Oss and Naya Grecia; Dutch-born writer and actor Selma van Diaz performing ‘The Lady’s Maid’ monologue-as-short-story by Katherine Mansfield; and dances by Pola Nirenska, a Polish Jewish refugee who had been a pupil of modernist dance pioneer Mary Wigman.
This modernist melange was assembled by the artist Pearl Binder, who was not only a co-founder in 1933 of the radical Artists International Association but also an Alexandra Palace regular providing illustrations for television talks about fashion and other subjects.
Pearl (‘Polly’) Binder is a fascinating figure, and perhaps a surprising one to find in the orbit of pre-war AP. Born in Manchester in 1904 to a father who was a Jewish tailor who had come to Britain in 1890, she studied art in London after the First World War and specialised in lithography (see above, ‘Wentworth Street, Whitechapel’, 1932). She became known for her drawings and prints of everyday London life, especially scenes from the East End.
In 1933, along with Misha Black, James Boswell, Edward Ardizzone, Peter Laszlo Peri and others she set up Artists’ International Association, which Wikipedia describes in this way:
Essentially set up as a radically left political organisation, the AIA embraced all styles of art both modernist and traditional, but the core committee preferenced realism. Its later aim was to promote the “Unity of Artists for Peace, Democracy and Cultural Development”.
They held a series of large group exhibitions on political and social themes. Their first exhibition was hosted in a showroom on Charlotte Street in 1934, entitled The Social Scene.[4] In 1935 they nailed their radical politics to the mast with an exhibition entitled Artists Against Fascism and War.
She first provided blackboard illustrations to a television talks programme for The World of Women in March 1937. Other appearances soon followed, including drawings of the crowds at the Coronation, and pictures drawn ‘live’ for the fashion series Clothes-Line and Clothes Through the Centuries. She also contributed drawings to the history of Britain series, Rough Island Story.
The final programme in the Clothes-Line series was shown on 9 December 1937, which was the year that she married Elwyn Jones, later a prominent Welsh barrister and Labour politician. Less than a month after that Clothes-Line appearance, she gave birth to Josephine, who went on to work in television. Pearl herself continued to work as an author and illustrator through to the mid-1980s, and she died in 1990.
There is a lovely tribute to Pearl Binder in a 2014 blog post from Tyne & Wear Archives and Museums, which features ‘Evacuation Scheme, 1939’, a print that the artist made for the AIA Everyman print series, and there is a further discussion of her work from Spitalfields Life (although when I access this page the illustrations do not appear).
Pearl Binder’s challenging Contrasts bill was far from television’s pre-war norm, but it demonstrates how a combination of an individual’s passion for particular ideas, the medium’s relentless demands for material, and AP’s comparative openness to contemporary forms, could create showcases for a remarkable diversity of performance.
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