Gerald Summers left school at 16 and became an apprentice engineer at a machinery factory but this was interrupted within a year by Army service in 1916-18. His wife later recalled that it was while fighting in the trenches that he ‘began imagining dealing with wood and doing things with wood’. By the mid-1920s, he was working as a manager for Marconi’s Wireless Telegraph Company. There he met a co-worker, Marjorie Butcher, for whose flat he made plywood furniture, which led to his discussing setting up a furniture company (they married soon thereafter). They founded the Makers of Simple Furniture in late 1931 or early 1932, initially offering about six pieces of simply joined (‘screwed and glued’), rectilinear plywood furniture.

In late 1933 Gerald Summers met Jack (‘Plywood’) Pritchard, then employed as a marketing manager by Venesta, a partnership with and the UK distributor for plywood and plywood products made by the AM Luther Company of Riga, Estonia. Pritchard too had another life outside of his day job: in 1931 he had founded with his wife Molly and Canadian architect Wells Coates, Isokon, a company devoted to the design of modernist furniture but also to the building of modernist architecture. In 1934 Pritchard was focussed on the completion of London’s first modernist block of flats, Lawn Road Flats, Hampstead, which would provide a home for his family as well as for Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius in the same year.

Pritchard shared his considerable expertise in plywood with Summers, introducing him to more sophisticated ways of working with the material. He also sold to Summers Venesta ‘aerpoplane’ plywood, unusually thin, flexible and lightweight plywood, initially developed for use in aircraft, which Summers started to use in 1933 and 1934 to create a range of curvilinear plywood objects, including this trolley.

The construction of the trolley was unusual. The outer structure, shaped like an incomplete 8 in plan, was cut from a flat piece of highly flexible aeroplane plywood about 2.5 metres long, probably from a paper template. This was then painstakingly pinned to the three flat plywood shelves. The curvilinear piece was held in tension at each end by being notched into each shelf. Summers thereby avoided the alternative method of making which would have required gluing thin veneers on a shaped former. The shelves could then be added to the dried, fixed shape. For a maker not yet used to moulding, making the trolley from finished aeroplane plywood meant fewer production stages and no wet work. The shape, however, was a challenging and fiddly one to make, even with fewer production stages.

Summers’ design was ingenious and indicative of his increased understanding of his material. Like much of his furniture it was architectural in nature, often using structure in a clever way and deeply concerned with how useful the form would be to the consumer. Summers evidently preferred to work in isolation from fellow modernists. His wife explained that he had no interest in continental work nor did he travel there; that he did not read design magazines; nor did he regularly attend exhibitions. He had, however, a passionate believe in revealing the nature of plywood and refused, for instance, to use (or buy) more expensive veneers for the top and bottom layers of his pieces (as was common practice in plywood furniture), or to use non-functional bracing in his pieces (he wrote that ‘each part and member [should]…pull its weight…if we use a brace only to strengthen two members, the design is bad’). In his first brochure, his view of ‘simple furniture’ was expressed in the following poem:

let’s keep them functional
shaped for purpose pleasant to feel looking quiet
with guts cheerful
picked out with roses?
ugh
nor encrusted with cherubims
dust and death
this is life
what about space light and colour [sic]

The year this trolley was made, the Summers’s firm was growing and Gerald finally left his job at Marconi. The product line expanded, press coverage increased and his work was shown in numerous design exhibitions including the RIBA’s ‘Exhibition of Everyday Things’ (1936). Of 87 furniture exhibits in the RIBA exhibition, seven were illustrated in the catalogue and, remarkably, five were by Summers. Among them were two designs now in the V&A Collection.

Makers of Simple Furniture were not mass producers of furniture but they were clearly more successful that the Isokon Furniture Company (founded 1936 as a separate concern from Isokon Ltd). The Summers firm was not as successful as Alvar Aalto’s Artek company but it was a going concern that enabled the Summers’s to buy a house. Makers of Simple Furniture went bankrupt following the outbreak of war in 1939 (the only year for which there are extant figures) with 100 pieces on their order books