I bought an amazing new book “the eagle annual of the cutaways” (2008) in Motor Books the other day and felt it deserved its very own post. I used to love these kind of diagrams that were in popular use in the children’s books i had growing up. I’d spend hours combing over the colourful and highly details drawings of trains, cars, jumbo jets and London’s Underground stations - and now finally I know where they originate; The Eagle Comic for Boys (1950-69). The style was named ‘cutaway’ in that it would show the inner workings of a process by literally cutting away the top layer to reveal its inner mechanics, labeling all the distinct parts and describing them in detail along the side. The main vision behind the comic’s layout was down to a small dedicated team lead by a man called Leslie Ashwell Wood whose signature can be found on the majority of pictures.
The cutaways are part of an exciting nostalgic period of time in the technical engineering development of Britain. They provided a glimpse of a vibrant and prosperous future for a war weary country, and similar to the World Fairs they focused upon British technological advances in an attempt to encourage the population to consume national produce to invigorate the failing economy once more.
It seems a bit weird now that a comic would dedicate full page spreads to beautifully intricate and well laid out drawings of mundane things like motorways or bus routes because now we all experience these situations under duress as they are nothing short of a chore. But this was a vision of an alternative future for Britain, it was an idea of the future of things that appeared to be emerging in the 1950s and that sadly had all but disappeared by the late 60s. The interesting thing about all the cutaways is the emphasis they place upon the culture of public ownership and wealth. They cover such situations as the local mobile dentist, the manufacture of milk or the televising of the Queen’s coronation and so portray a desire for a turely civic world.
The cutaways kept a captivated audience, me included, and you can really get a genuine sense of positive belief that was held in these new technological innovations, that they were to herald a bright new future for Britain and provide exciting new prospects and thrilling adventures in daily living. For me they are quite the fetish object in the beauty and precision of their working parts, being able to catch a glimpse underneath a process mapped out in such seeming simplicity is a rare treat.
My favourite cutaways of all were the ones that took apart buildings or areas, showing them as processes or ecologies. I’ve put one in below as an example which is of Liverpool’s Metropolitan Cathedral. Sadly the annual is laid out so that most of the cutaways are straddled across the page divide and so I can’t get a good scan of many of them so these will have to do.
