For those of advanced tastes, the Modern Movement was a welcome
corrective to the debased aesthetics of the commercial world. The
products of light industry were as untutored in the 1920s and 30s as
massed housing and both took scant interest in the idealist thinking
that sought to harness architecture and design to social progress.
Robert Best, one of Britain's leading industrialists in this period,
shared the goal of better mass education but was troubled by Modernism's
promoters, for reasons that they found hard to understand. If the few
knew better than the many, and had an obligation to elevate them whether
they liked it or not, where did this leave the democratic principles
that our liberal society prided itself on? Best felt that the campaign
to popularise Functionalist design took propaganda into territory that
had uncomfortable political overtones. In this extraordinary memoir,
written in the early 1950s but never previously published, Best explored
his concern about the sense of noblesse oblige that lay behind such
bodies as the Council of Industrial Design, set up in 1944 ostensibly to
raise the saleability and quality of British manufacturing but also, in
his view, to brainwash the public into denying what it liked in favour
of more cultivated but untested alternatives.
