{"meta":{"version":"2.1","_links":{"self":{"href":"https://api.vam.ac.uk/v2/object/O1532130"},"collection_page":{"href":"https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1532130/"}},"images":{"_primary_thumbnail":"https://framemark.vam.ac.uk/collections/2021MW4324/full/!100,100/0/default.jpg","_iiif_image":"https://framemark.vam.ac.uk/collections/2021MW4324/","_alt_iiif_image":[],"imageResolution":"high","_images_meta":[{"assetRef":"2021MW4324","copyright":"© Victoria and Albert Museum, London","sensitiveImage":false},{"assetRef":"2021MW4325","copyright":"© Victoria and Albert Museum, London","sensitiveImage":false},{"assetRef":"2021MX0548","copyright":"© Victoria and Albert Museum, London","sensitiveImage":false},{"assetRef":"2021MX0554","copyright":"© Victoria and Albert Museum, London","sensitiveImage":false},{"assetRef":"2021MX0555","copyright":"© Victoria and Albert Museum, London","sensitiveImage":false},{"assetRef":"2021MX0556","copyright":"© Victoria and Albert Museum, London","sensitiveImage":false}]},"see_also":{"_iiif_pres":"https://iiif.vam.ac.uk/collections/O1532130/manifest.json","_alt_iiif_pres":[]}},"record":{"systemNumber":"O1532130","accessionNumber":"W.7-2020","objectType":"Trolley","titles":[],"summaryDescription":"Gerald Summers left school at 16 and became an apprentice engineer at a machinery factory but this was  interrupted within a year by Army service in 1916-18. His wife later recalled that it was while fighting in the  trenches that he ‘began imagining dealing with wood and doing things with wood’. By the mid-1920s, he was  working as a manager for Marconi’s Wireless Telegraph Company. There he met a co-worker, Marjorie  Butcher, for whose flat he made plywood furniture, which led to his discussing setting up a furniture company  (they married soon thereafter). They founded the Makers of Simple Furniture in late 1931 or early 1932, initially  offering about six pieces of simply joined (‘screwed and glued’), rectilinear plywood furniture.\r\n\r\n\tIn late 1933 Gerald Summers met Jack (‘Plywood’) Pritchard, then employed as a marketing manager by  Venesta, a partnership with and the UK distributor for plywood and plywood products made by the AM Luther  Company of Riga, Estonia. Pritchard too had another life outside of his day job: in 1931 he had founded with  his wife Molly and Canadian architect Wells Coates, Isokon, a company devoted to the design of modernist  furniture but also to the building of modernist architecture. In 1934 Pritchard was focussed on the completion  of London’s first modernist block of flats, Lawn Road Flats, Hampstead, which would provide a home for his  family as well as for Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius in the same year.\r\n\r\n\tPritchard shared his considerable expertise in plywood with Summers, introducing him to more sophisticated  ways of working with the material. He also sold to Summers Venesta ‘aerpoplane’ plywood, unusually thin,  flexible and lightweight plywood, initially developed for use in aircraft, which Summers started to use in 1933  and 1934 to create a range of curvilinear plywood objects, including this trolley.\r\n\r\n\tThe construction of the trolley was unusual. The outer structure, shaped like an incomplete 8 in plan, was cut  from a flat piece of highly flexible aeroplane plywood about 2.5 metres long, probably from a paper template.  This was then painstakingly pinned to the three flat plywood shelves. The curvilinear piece was held in tension  at each end by being notched into each shelf. Summers thereby avoided the alternative method of making  which would have required gluing thin veneers on a shaped former. The shelves could then be added to the  dried, fixed shape. For a maker not yet used to moulding, making the trolley from finished aeroplane plywood  meant fewer production stages and no wet work. The shape, however, was a challenging and fiddly one to  make, even with fewer production stages.\r\n\r\n\tSummers’ design was ingenious and indicative of his increased understanding of his material. Like much of  his furniture it was architectural in nature, often using structure in a clever way and deeply concerned with how  useful the form would be to the consumer. Summers evidently preferred to work in isolation from fellow  modernists. His wife explained that he had no interest in continental work nor did he travel there; that he did  not read design magazines; nor did he regularly attend exhibitions. He had, however, a passionate believe in  revealing the nature of plywood and refused, for instance, to use (or buy) more expensive veneers for the top  and bottom layers of his pieces (as was common practice in plywood furniture), or to use non-functional  bracing in his pieces (he wrote that ‘each part and member [should]…pull its weight…if we use a brace only to  strengthen two members, the design is bad’). In his first brochure, his view of ‘simple furniture’ was  expressed in the following poem:\r\n\r\n\tlet’s keep them functional\r\n\tshaped for purpose pleasant to feel looking quiet\r\n\twith guts cheerful\r\n\tpicked out with roses?\r\n\tugh\r\n\tnor encrusted with cherubims \r\n\tdust and death\r\n\tthis is life\r\n\twhat about space light and colour [sic]\r\n\r\n\tThe year this trolley was made, the Summers’s firm was growing and Gerald finally left his job at Marconi. The  product line expanded, press coverage increased and his work was shown in numerous design exhibitions  including the RIBA’s ‘Exhibition of Everyday Things’ (1936). Of 87 furniture exhibits in the RIBA exhibition,  seven were illustrated in the catalogue and, remarkably, five were by Summers. Among them were two  designs now in the V&A Collection.\r\n\r\n\tMakers of Simple Furniture were not mass producers of furniture but they were clearly more successful that  the Isokon Furniture Company (founded 1936 as a separate concern from Isokon Ltd). The Summers firm  was not as successful as Alvar Aalto’s Artek company but it was a going concern that enabled the Summers’s  to buy a house. Makers of Simple Furniture went bankrupt following the outbreak of war in 1939 (the only year  for which there are extant figures) with 100 pieces on their order books\r\n","physicalDescription":"","artistMakerPerson":[{"name":{"text":"Gerald Summers","id":"A18332"},"association":{"text":"Designer","id":"x36960"},"note":""}],"artistMakerOrganisations":[{"name":{"text":"Makers of Simple Furniture","id":"A18333"},"association":{"text":"Producer","id":"AAT197742"},"note":""}],"artistMakerPeople":[],"materials":[{"text":"plywood","id":"AAT12849"}],"techniques":[],"materialsAndTechniques":"","categories":[],"styles":[],"collectionCode":{"text":"FWK","id":"THES48597"},"images":["2021MW4324","2021MW4325","2021MX0548","2021MX0554","2021MX0555","2021MX0556"],"imageResolution":"high","galleryLocations":[{"current":{"text":"003","id":"THES344729"},"free":"","case":"","shelf":"","box":""}],"partTypes":[[{"text":"Trolley","id":"x43564"}]],"contentWarnings":[{"apprise":"","note":""}],"placesOfOrigin":[],"productionDates":[],"associatedObjects":[],"creditLine":"","dimensions":[{"dimension":"Height","value":"710","unit":"mm","qualifier":"","date":{"text":"27/02/2020","earliest":"2020-02-27","latest":"2020-02-27"},"part":"","note":""},{"dimension":"Width","value":"950","unit":"mm","qualifier":"","date":{"text":"27/02/2020","earliest":"2020-02-27","latest":"2020-02-27"},"part":"","note":""},{"dimension":"Depth","value":"435","unit":"mm","qualifier":"","date":{"text":"27/02/2020","earliest":"2020-02-27","latest":"2020-02-27"},"part":"","note":""}],"dimensionsNote":"","marksAndInscriptions":[],"objectHistory":"This is one of the most interesting and rare examples of British plywood furniture of the 1930s. Not only was it  designed and made by Gerald Summers, a leading designer and maker of such furniture but, shortly after it  was introduced, it was retailed by Jack Pritchard’s Isokon firm, one of the leading lights of inter-war British  modernism. That it was Pritchard who taught Summers how to work with plywood beyond basic joinery,  resulting in elaborately moulded forms, only adds to the trolley’s interest.","historicalContext":"","briefDescription":"Trolley made from plywood","bibliographicReferences":[],"production":"","productionType":{"text":"","id":""},"contentDescription":"","contentPlaces":[],"associatedPlaces":[],"contentPerson":[],"associatedPerson":[],"contentOrganisations":[],"associatedOrganisations":[],"contentPeople":[],"associatedPeople":[],"contentEvents":[],"associatedEvents":[],"contentOthers":[],"contentConcepts":[],"contentLiteraryRefs":[],"galleryLabels":[],"partNumbers":["W.7-2020"],"accessionNumberNum":"7","accessionNumberPrefix":"W","accessionYear":2020,"otherNumbers":[],"copyNumber":"","aspects":["WHOLE"],"assets":[],"recordModificationDate":"2025-04-09","recordCreationDate":"2020-02-26","availableToBook":false}}