The Western Design

Misha Black was born in Russia in 1910 and came to Britain as a refugee. His career started in the 1930s, which were a period of rapid change in established ideas about design and society. Misha Black’s early experience was in poster and exhibition design. He had little formal training, although in 1928, returning from a project in Spain, he was able to spend some months in Paris studying art.

In 1933, he joined Bassett Gray, which became the Industrial Design Partnership; later the Industrial Design Unit, An early project of Black’s was the Kardomah cafes in London and Manchester; during this time he also worked in product design and began to write pointed and cogent articles on exhibition design and other topics.

With the arrival of war in 1939 he joined the Ministry of Information, where he was made Principal Exhibitions Designer. The Design Research Unit was set up in 1943, and in 1946 Black was involved in designing the ‘Britain can make it’ exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, their most significant early project, in which he tried to explain the role of the industrial designer with his ‘Birth of an Egg Cup’ display. This was in fact a sort of propaganda; the DRU was pushing for changes in the design world, lamenting that ‘there has never been a proper marriage between the engineer and the artist’

After World War Two, he was appointed to the co-ordinating committee of the Festival of Britain and was responsible for the widely respected Regatta Restaurant. Misha Black was involved with projects as diverse as the small mammal house at London Zoo, the BOAC workshops at London Heathrow, the Victoria Underground line and on a smaller scale a range of light fittings and kitchen implements. Misha Black is widely credited with developing the profession of Industrial Designer. This is blend of engineering and art whose role is to produce items which are both functional and aesthetically pleasing. He wrote: “The public do not ride in the locomotive, but it can attract much of their allegiance and pride, and transfer this to the system as a whole, as it had done in the steam tradition. A new diesel and electric tradition is being formed in Great Britain”

The Great Western Railway had always endeavoured to glamorise their most important expresses. British Railways hoped that they could emulate this with their new carriages and locomotives. A lot of time and attention was therefore devoted to the visual appearance of the locomotive, so that its profile matched the coaching stock, and the overall appearance was tidy and symmetrical in every dimension, down to details such as the colour schemes and the names to be applied.

Originally a list of names associated with the West Country was drawn up. Under this plan, D1013 would have become ‘Cader Idris’ and D1062 would have become ‘Tal-y-Llyn’. This plan was rejected as Western Region wished to link the names with a common theme. This was a long established tradition on the Great Western Railway with different classes of steam locomotives being named after Kings, Castles, Halls and Manors. Recent research by Western historian, Adrian Curtis, has disclosed that the ‘Western ‘prefix came about following a suggestion made by Mary Weller who was secretary to the Western Region General Manager Roy Hammond.

The first of the class, D1000 Western Enterprise was painted in a shade of pale yellow described as ‘Desert Sand’. The second, D1001 Western Pathfinder was painted maroon and the third D1002 Western Explorer was painted green. Misha Black was reported to be most unhappy with the maroon livery having preferred turquoise blue. Maroon become the standard livery for the class until 1966 when blue was adopted as the new livery for British Rail.

Misha Black was knighted in 1972 and died in 1977. This was the same year that the Westerns were finally withdrawn from service.