For those of advanced tastes, the Modern Movement was a welcome corrective to the debased aesthetics of the commercial world. The products of light industry were as untutored in the 1920s and 30s as massed housing and both took scant interest in the idealist thinking that sought to harness architecture and design to social progress. Robert Best, one of Britain’s leading industrialists in this period, shared the goal of better mass education but was troubled by Modernism’s promoters, for reasons that they found hard to understand. If the few knew better than the many, and had an obligation to elevate them whether they liked it or not, where did this leave the democratic principles that our liberal society prided itself on? Best felt that the campaign to popularise Functionalist design took propaganda into territory that had uncomfortable political overtones. In this extraordinary memoir, written in the early 1950s but never previously published, Best explored his concern about the sense of noblesse oblige that lay behind such bodies as the Council of Industrial Design, set up in 1944 ostensibly to raise the saleability and quality of British manufacturing but also, in his view, to brainwash the public into denying what it liked in favour of more cultivated but untested alternatives.

Robert Best and his younger brother Frank were born into privileged middle-class Birmingham in the 1890s, where their father owned one of the UK's most successful lighting factories, supplying fashionable fittings to offices, hotels, restaurants and opera houses all over the word. Sent to the most enlightened new school of its day - Bedales - the boys not early enjoyed the freedom to explore their own interests but also absorbed the inspirational moral thinking of the school's founder and headmaster, J.H. Badley. "From Bedales to the Boche" charts their history at the school during its early years, and shows what Badley's idea of a progressive education consisted of. It also shows how the boys honed their ambitions to become music-hall entertainers, writing and performing their own material at home and at school, and eventually showing it to London impresarios. Their plans for the stage were interrupted, however, by their father's insistence that they study design at another progressive institution, the art school in Duesseldorf headed until 1907 by Peter Behrens. Best's account of his year there, and of Frank's the following year, provides an amusing interlude ahead of the First World War. When war broke out, the brothers enlisted at once into the Army Service Corps (ASC), which took them to the battlefields of northern France and to Dublin in 1916 to help quell the Easter Rising. Their passion, however, going back to their experiments with flight while at Bedales, was for the newly formed Royal Flying Corps, which they entered in late 1916, joining the Corps' new school and embarking on a training programme that Best describes in fascinating detail. After six months of training, the brothers were sent to France where the life expectancy of a pilot was about 4 months. Frank lasted five weeks; his plane was shot down, his body never found. In respect of his death, "From Bedales to the Boche" is rich in pathos. Best ends by showing how he and his parents responded to Frank's loss, and how he tried to rediscover and make sense of Germany after the war was over.