Shang­hai to Ohakune

Some of the life and times of illus­trator Den­nis Beytagh

Words: Ham­ish Thompson

Tour­ist poster, 1960 (40×26.5 inches). “Hav­ing arrived only five years earlier it was the part of the coun­try that I was most famil­iar with … I felt that the view of Wel­ling­ton har­bour look­ing up towards Ruapehu was an ideal way to depict the coun­try … The poster was designed to be dis­played in Lon­don Under­ground sta­tions to draw people to New Zea­l­and – I reduced everything to a simple com­bin­a­tion of images so people could study it at length while wait­ing for the trains to come through.”

My first encounter with Den­nis Beytagh was a poster all blue and green and busy – pro­mot­ing New Zealand’s tour­ist delights to weary Lon­don com­muters in the 1960s. The design cap­tiv­ated me, with its feel-alive mix of good humour and acute obser­va­tion. It turned out the image was the man’s own view of an adop­ted coun­try – and could almost have been drawn from the front win­dow of the house he built on a steep hill­side above Wel­ling­ton har­bour.
Den­nis Beytagh is some­thing of a do-it-yourself mas­ter. He’s cer­tainly done a lot of it: school in Shang­hai, ser­vice in the Royal Indian Navy, graphic design in May­fair stu­dios, fur­niture fea­tured in Vogue and sold in Sloane Square, lec­tur­ing at art schools like St Mar­tins and Ham­mer­smith. His was the era of poster col­our, gou­ache and water­col­our rendered painstak­ingly on art­boards with Kodat­race over­lays – the art­work for the old ‘double ele­phant’ size poster for the National Pub­li­city Stu­dios took three weeks to complete.

When he fled Eng­land (“I was mar­ried with a fam­ily of three young chil­dren under the age of seven, liv­ing in a two-bedroom flat in Par­sons Green and facing a post WWII atomic cold war con­flict in Europe”), Beytagh turned that ‘can do, will do’ atti­tude to his advant­age.
In New Zea­l­and he found work in advert­ising agen­cies but quickly also made him­self a name as a freel­ance designer – and while he may have been a favour­ite of book pub­lish­ers, he also turned his hand to tour­ist posters, indus­trial products (the first all-NZ elec­tric tooth­brush for instance), design courses, and Read­ers Digest how-to manu­als.
In 1957 he bought a sec­tion in Wellington’s north-facing hill sub­urb Roseneath, and spent the week­ends cut­ting a ledge out of its rot­ten rock to site a three-bedroom house. “In order to pay for the sec­tion and the house and the children’s private school fees, and yet give me enough time for my grow­ing freel­ance com­mit­ments dur­ing the day, I star­ted work­ing at The Domin­ion’s news­pa­per night­shift, wrap­ping and pack­ing the next morning’s dis­tri­bu­tion from mid­night until 4am, and then deliv­er­ing some 400 cop­ies each morn­ing in my Mor­ris Minor con­vert­ible … which was ideal because, with the hood down, I could throw the papers from the road on to porches and ver­an­das while steer­ing with my knees! This daily routine I kept up for six years.”
Dur­ing these years Beytagh com­pleted the poster for the Lon­don Under­ground that caught my eye in the Alex­an­der Turn­bull Lib­rary – I was research­ing for Paste Up: A Cen­tury of New Zea­l­and Poster Art. It was also when he designed many of the books fea­tured on these pages, and The New Zea­l­and Listener masthead. I’ve spent a lot of time look­ing through New Zealand’s graphic design record in recent years, and Beytagh’s work stands out for its com­bin­a­tion of soph­ist­ic­ated draughts­man­ship and charm and vigour.

Beytagh's masthead designs included work for the New Zea­l­and Listener.

He’s always been one to rise to a chal­lenge. When com­mis­sioned by the National Book­sellers Asso­ci­ation to design book tokens, year after year after year, he some­how repeatedly man­aged to find a fresh approach – by turn­ing to pho­to­graphs of type per­haps, or a mosaic of broken tiles set in wet plaster.

Some of Beytagh's book token designs. Book tokens – 1960 – 68 In 1960 Roy Par­sons (then head of the New Zea­l­and Book­sellers Asso­ci­ation) com­mis­sioned Beytagh to design a book token range, with a novel design due each year. Ini­tial designs were illus­trated, with all sorts of innov­a­tions com­ing later as he sought to keep the con­cepts fresh.

Beytagh made a sig­ni­fic­ant con­tri­bu­tion to graphic design train­ing in New Zea­l­and, as one of the founders of the dip­loma pro­gramme at the former Wel­ling­ton Poly­tech­nic. He taught there, with breaks for sab­bat­ic­als and research trips and for­ays into Read­ers Digest design edit­or­ships in Sydney, for over 20 years. And in a rare turn on the old maxim of “them that can’t, teach”, he decided that when he couldn’t really “do and teach” any­more, he would instead write: “the advent of com­puter tech­no­logy in rela­tion to graph­ics … and slightly fail­ing eye­sight (I was then approach­ing 60), per­suaded me to take the altern­at­ive option of com­mu­nic­a­tion by words rather than pic­tures”.
Beytagh has lived in Ohak­une since 1974, where he has been involved with local news pub­lic­a­tions, most recently the Ruapehu Bul­letin. I can’t help but won­der, when his neigh­bours turn the pages of their local rag, if they have any idea of the place their humble scribe occu­pies in the his­tory of New Zea­l­and design. They would, if they looked, find them­selves on the mem­or­able graphic map he drew, nearly 50 years ago – below a snowy Mount Ruapehu.

An adept and ver­sat­ile designer-illustrator of posters, book jack­ets, and logo­types in many dif­fer­ent styles, Beytagh was sought after by New Zea­l­and pub­lish­ers. His work is dis­tin­guished by express­ive typo­graphy and integ­rated design, which cre­ates them­atic rela­tion­ships between text and illus­tra­tion. From fam­ous works of New Zea­l­and lit­er­at­ure – the first edi­tion of Janet Frame’s Owls Do Cry is one of the best dust jack­ets on any book prin­ted in New Zea­l­and – to how-to guides like Bet­ter Bowls, Beytagh’s designs always served the sense of a book

Den­nis Beytagh pot­ted cur­riculum vitae:
Born 1924 Shang­hai; 1937 fam­ily to Van­couver and Eng­land. 1942 joined Royal Navy, served in Nor­mandy; later joined Royal Indian Navy. 1946 – 49 trained at London’s Cent­ral School of Arts and Crafts (along with Ter­ence Con­ran). 1949 – 1955 in Lon­don: indus­trial design­ers Ray­mond Loewy Asso­ci­ates; advert­ising agency Col­man Pren­tice & Var­ley; freel­ance book jacket design (includ­ing Collins, Michael Joseph, Heine­mann); freel­ance fur­niture design; teach­ing at St Mar­tins School of Art, Regent Street Poly­tech­nic, Ham­mer­smith School of Art, Brighton Col­lege of Arts and Crafts. 1955 RMS Ran­gitane to Wel­ling­ton, advert­ising agency J Ing­lis Wright. 1957 Gold­berg Advert­ising; began freel­ance design and illus­tra­tion (includ­ing AW&AH Reed, Albion Wright, National Pub­li­city Stu­dios, also RALTA product design). 1959 began involve­ment with what became Wel­ling­ton Poly­tech­nic design dip­loma pro­gramme. 1971 – 74 design editor Aus­tralian edi­tion of Read­ers Digest Repair Manual. 1974 began report­ing Tur­angi & Ruapehu Chron­icle. 1978 designer Read­ers Digest Motor­ing Guide to Aus­tralia. 1983 editor Waimarino Bul­letin, later Ruapehu Bul­letin.

The hour­glass on the cover of From Ply­mouth to New Ply­mouth speaks of the trick­ling pro­gress of migration

Siver Fern with spine at left. One aspect of jacket design that Beytagh paid par­tic­u­lar atten­tion to was the spine – he felt that it should be a con­cen­trated ver­sion of the front cover. Books in a store, after all, often had to be “judged by their spine”.

Some of Beytagh's dust jacket designs.

With its bright style con­trast­ing with the unex­pec­ted sub­ject mat­ter, Her­it­age Des­troyed eas­ily con­veys a sense of an idyll been dozered. Fresh­wa­ter Admiral sug­gests both leis­ure and reward – the uni­form hung up on a hook and a bounty of moun­ted fish.

Book jacket and end­pa­per design – 1964. The Tender Trav­el­ler: a New Zeal­ander abroad, by Susan Graham.

Graphic designer, illus­trator and edu­cator Den­nis Beytagh.

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