Other Activities
A thing may be right and beautiful and true without being lovable, though a thing cannot be lovable without being also in itself right and beautiful and true. Love is the harmony which such a thing awakes in the emotions; it is the harmony of what it feels to be. It adds the heart, as we call it, to the conscience, the sense, and the mind, to make the four great organs of being.
Frank Pick, Lecture at the Royal Scottish Academy, 1916Pick's interest in design led to his involvement in the founding, in 1915, of the Design and Industries Association. The organisation aimed to bring manufacturers and designers together to improve the quality of industrial design. Through his improvements in the UERL's advertising and branding, Pick was considered by many of its members to be taking a practical lead in achieving the organisation's aims and he was soon lecturing on the subject, giving talks during 1916 and 1917 at the Art Workers Guild in London, at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh and elsewhere. After the First World War, Pick continued to give talks regularly and published articles on design. He also began to set out his ideas on reconstruction and town planning, an area of design he became interested in through its connection to transport planning. He wrote and lectured extensively on this subject during the 1920s and 1930s including presenting a 14,000 word paper to the Institute of Transport in 1927 and addressing the International Housing and Town Planning Congress in 1939. Concerned about the uncontrolled and unchecked growth of London, partly facilitated by the new lines that London Underground was building, Pick was a strong supporter of the need for a green belt around the capital to maintain open space within reach of urban areas.
One day the ice will descend and blot out all traces of man's works. The earth will grow cold. Nature will return to her kingdom and spread her snowy pall over the last man, and there will be nothing but barren rocks again ... Man will have disappeared from the face of the earth with the world that he had made. His day will be done. And the evening and the morning were the eighth day. Will man be able to say:"and, behold, it was very good?"
Frank Pick, This is the World that Man Made, or The New Creation, 1922In 1922, he wrote and published privately a pamphlet This is the World that Man Made, or The New Creation that was influenced by the rationalist writing of Ray Lankester. In it Pick was pessimistic that mankind was not achieving its creative potential. He returned to the subject in lectures he gave in the 1930s when he outlined his concern that at some not too distant point progress in civilisation would come to a natural end and a stable condition would arise where, he believed, it would be hard to maintain creativity and an entropic decline would follow. Later, in the last year of his life and with the Second World War under way, he published two booklets on post war reconstruction, Britain Must Rebuild and Paths to Peace. Pick wrote the introduction to the English translation of Walter Gropius's The New Architecture and the Bauhaus published in 1935.
Beside his positions at the UERL and LPTB, Pick held a number of industrial administrative and advisory positions. In 1917, during the First World War, Pick was appointed to be head of the Mines Directorate's Household Fuel and Lighting Department at the Board of Trade where Albert Stanley was the President. Pick was responsible for the control of the rationing and distribution of domestic fuel supplies. He remained in this position until June 1919. In 1928, he was appointed as a member of the Royal Commission On Police Powers and Procedure. He also served as a member of the London and Home Counties Traffic Advisory Committee and as a member of the Crown Lands Advisory Committee.
Pick was President of the Institute of Transport for 1931/32. He was President of the Design and Industries Association from 1932 to 1934 and the chairman of the Board of Trade's Council for Art and Industry from 1934 to 1939.
During 1938, the government appointed Pick to plan the transport operations for the evacuation of civilians from London. Initially scheduled for 30 September 1938, the plans were cancelled when Neville Chamberlain's Munich conference with Adolf Hitler averted war that year, but were activated a year later at the beginning of September 1939 on the declaration of war with Germany. After leaving the LPTB, Pick visited British ports for the Ministry of Transport to prepare a report on methods of improving port operations and cargo handling. In August 1940, he reluctantly accepted the position of director-general of the Ministry of Information. His time at the Ministry of Information was short and unhappy and he left after four months and returned to the Ministry of Transport, where he carried out studies on improvements in the use of Britain's canals and rivers.
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