Frank Pick - Personality

Personality

Biographers have characterised Pick as being "very shy", and "brilliant but lonely". Christian Barman described him as a person who inspired conflicting opinions about his personality and his actions: "a man about whom so many people held so many different views". Pick acknowledged that he could be difficult to work with: "I have always kept in mind my own frailties – a short temper. Impatience with fools, quickness rather than thoroughness. I am a bad hand at the gracious word or casual congratulation." His moralistic character led to friends giving him the nickname "Jonah". Pick valued criticism and savoured challenging debate, though he complained that he found it difficult to get people to stand up to him. UERL board member Sir Ernest Clark considered Pick to be perhaps too efficient and unable to fully delegate and relinquish responsibility: "his own efficiency has a bad effect on the efficiency of others... How can the housemaid take pride in a job to which the mistress will insist on putting the finishing touch?" Pick's friend Noel Carrington thought that his attention to detail made him the "ideal inspector general."

Pick ran his office on a fortnightly cycle and his workload was prodigious. Barman described Pick's office as a training school for future managers, with a regular turnover of staff who would go on to management positions when Pick thought them ready.

Ashfield considered that Pick possessed "a sterling character and steadfast loyalty", and "an administrative ability which was outstanding", with "a keen analytical mind which was able to seize upon essentials and then drive his way through to his goal, always strengthened by a sure knowledge of the problem and confidence in himself." Charles Holden described Pick's management of meetings: "Here his decisions were those of a benevolent dictator, and the members left the meeting with a clear sense of a task to be performed, difficult, perhaps, and sometimes impossible, as might subsequently prove to be, but usually well worth exploring if only in producing convincing proof of obstacles. Out of these exploratory methods there often emerged new and most interesting solutions, which Pick was quick to appreciate, and to adopt in substitution for his own proposals." Disliking honours, Pick declined offers of a knighthood and a peerage. He did accept, in 1932, the Soviet Union's Honorary Badge of Merit for his advice on the construction of the Moscow Metro. He was an honorary member of the Royal Institute of British Architects.