Who was… Hugh Casson?

Hugh Casson was an architect and designer, who brought together a team of designers and artists in 1957 to design the interiors of P&O’s futuristic flagship passenger liner CANBERRA. Casson’s team designed everything from typefaces to tableware.

Born in 1910 and brought up in England and Burma (now Myanmar), Casson studied architecture at Cambridge University, under the modernist Christopher Nicholson. After the second world war he started an architectural practice with Neville Conder and was appointed director of architecture for the 1951 Festival of Britain on London’s South Bank. As a friend of the royal family, he designed interiors for the royal yacht BRITANNIA. He was also professor of interior and environmental design at the Royal College of Art from 1953 to 1975.

An impresario at work

In 1957, P&O’s chairman Donald Anderson, asked Casson to oversee the interior design of CANBERRA, the Company’s new passenger liner for the route between London and Australia. P&O had a reputation for conservative taste and stuffiness compared to its running mate the Orient Line, who had pioneered modernist ship design under Colin Anderson (Donald’s brother). With his establishment connections and proven ability to deliver a modern spectacle, Casson was a good choice for P&O to cautiously catch up.

For CANBERRA, Casson worked in what his biographer José Manser called ‘impresario mode’. He assembled, directed and commissioned a team of professional designers from his network and RCA colleagues, to design every aspect of the ship’s environment down to the furniture and stewards’ uniforms. His goal was to achieve an overall look and feel for the CANBERRA experience, even as individual designers’ style ran through first and tourist classes.

Casson’s vision for the ship was governed by an idea of aesthetic economy: ‘the achievement of the maximum of results by the minimum of means’. He eschewed bright colours in the design, recognising that the ship would be full of people wearing their own colourful clothes, travel through many kinds of daylight, and that the sea itself would be a constant backdrop for passengers.

Hugh Casson’s watercolour sketch of CANBERRA taking shape at Harland and Wolff’s shipyard in Belfast.

Featured Object

CANBERRA taking shape at Harland & Wolff Yard, Belfast (PAINTING)

The painting was gifted to the Company by the artist and architect Sir Hugh Casson in 1963. His original painting was a little larger but after framing he came to…

Casson himself together with Conder and Timothy Rendle designed the first class public rooms, and Casson’s wife Margaret designed the tableware. Art complemented design: Julian Trevelyan’s wood and zinc panels towered over the first class stairs; Edward Bawden’s mosaics formed an imaginary landscape surrounding the lido pool; and Edward Ardizzone’s murals lined the first class nursery. In the cabins, over 300 contemporary lithographs were selected from well-known artists.

A modern experience

Casson was also a talent-spotter: he commissioned David Hockney, studying at the RCA and barely in his twenties at the time, to add life to the ‘Pop Inn’, a coffee and juice bar for teenagers, Hockney burned sketches into the soft pine walls with a hot poker, sgraffito style, encouraging young passengers to add their own detail. The resulting contributions were more lavatorial than artistic, and the panels were removed in 1962.

CANBERRA had a long and successful sailing career, bringing Ten Pound Poms to new lives in Australia, and serving in the Falklands War in 1982. When the ship was finally withdrawn from service in 1997, P&O Heritage staff were able to safely remove many art works and elements of Casson’s original designs which are now in the collection.

In a letter to Donald Anderson, Casson described working on Canberra as “one of the most genuinely enjoyable projects upon which I have ever been engaged”. Like the Festival of Britain, Casson’s vision for a total modern shipboard experience can now only be seen in photographs and through individual objects. But there were also personal touches. Casson was a proficient and prolific watercolourist. As he oversaw everything from the line of the exterior to the cutlery, he also painted. A small watercolour of CANBERRA under construction is a reminder that Casson was always an artist as well as an impresario.