The previous chapter noted that the banner of the Kensal Green Branch of the National Union of General Workers, 1910 (Plate 63), contained an image taken almost directly from Walter Crane's cartoon The Workers' May-Pole of 1894. An artist, designer, illustrator and writer, Walter Crane was a wealthy man of the middle classes. In 1884, he had declared himself a socialist, and this chapter considers how his politics influenced and impinged upon the designs he produced for the working classes.

As discussed in Chapter 7, it has been argued that any political movement employs a cultural framework or a ‘master fiction’, the centre of which has sacred status, by which to define itself and give its members a sense of their place. Within trade union emblems, the ‘sacred centre’ had been present in the harking back to the patron saint of the guild and trade, to biblical mentions of the trade, to classical mythology and to the inclusion of portraits of famous men and their heirs, the present day workers and leaders of the union, amongst gods and virtues. But, over time, the machine itself came to occupy this ‘sacred space’.

Marx and Engels, in The Communist Manifesto, had concluded that mass production by machine had resulted in the loss of the individual character of goods, the workman becoming merely an appendage of the machine, his work monotonous and boring. William Morris, who became a socialist in 1883, was also of this opinion.