Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Dramatis Personae
- Dedication
- Prologue
- 1 Remembrance of Things Past; Hampstead Man Among ‘The Modernists’
- 2 National Planning for the Future and the Arrival of Walter Gropius
- 3 1935: ‘Art crystallises the emotions of an age.’ Musicology and the Art of Espionage
- 4 Arnold Deutsch, Kim Philby and Austro-Marxism
- 5 The Isobar, Half-Hundred Club and the Arrival of Sonya
- 6 The Plot Thickens: Jurgen Kuczynski, Agatha Christie and Colletts Bookshop
- 7 Refugees, The Kuczynski Network, Churchill and Operation Barbarossa
- 8 Klaus Fuchs, Rothstein once more, and Charles Brasch
- 9 Vere Gordon Childe
- 10 The New Statesman, Ho Chi Minh and the End of an Era
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - National Planning for the Future and the Arrival of Walter Gropius
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Dramatis Personae
- Dedication
- Prologue
- 1 Remembrance of Things Past; Hampstead Man Among ‘The Modernists’
- 2 National Planning for the Future and the Arrival of Walter Gropius
- 3 1935: ‘Art crystallises the emotions of an age.’ Musicology and the Art of Espionage
- 4 Arnold Deutsch, Kim Philby and Austro-Marxism
- 5 The Isobar, Half-Hundred Club and the Arrival of Sonya
- 6 The Plot Thickens: Jurgen Kuczynski, Agatha Christie and Colletts Bookshop
- 7 Refugees, The Kuczynski Network, Churchill and Operation Barbarossa
- 8 Klaus Fuchs, Rothstein once more, and Charles Brasch
- 9 Vere Gordon Childe
- 10 The New Statesman, Ho Chi Minh and the End of an Era
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In December 1931 Wells Coates and Partners, the fledgling partnership between Jack Pritchard and Wells Coates, became Isokon Ltd. The name echoed Wells Coates' fondness for isometric drawings and for unit construction, and Jack Pritchard's long-standing concern with economic planning. Earlier that same year Pritchard had joined the influential policy think tank Political and Economic Planning (PEP), the forerunner of the Policy Studies Institute, suggesting its name at the society's inaugural meeting. Its guiding spirit was Sir Basil Blackett, a director of the Bank of England:
Basil Blackett was proposing a new society … he wanted a name that would suggest new ideas. ‘The aim of the society,’ he said, ‘would be concerned with political and economic planning.’ I suggested, more as a joke than seriously, that the name might be just that, Political and Economic Planning, PEP for short. Blackett thought that was marvellous and the name was adopted.
In his memoirs Israel Sieff quotes an advertisement drafted by Clough Williams Ellis: ‘PEP – try it in your bath.’
PEP had its origins, somewhat paradoxically, in the personal nostrum of press baron Lord Beaverbrook: ‘Empire Free Trade’, coined at a time when planning, as opposed to imperial preference, was in the air. Beaver-brook had persuaded the then owner of the long-established and influential magazine the Saturday Review, Lady Houston, an admirer of Mussolini and an implacable opponent of the Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald, to pledge her magazine's full support for his ‘Empire Free Trade Crusade’.
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- Information
- The Lawn Road FlatsSpies, Writers and Artists, pp. 27 - 52Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2014