Charles Hanford applies stagecraft in WWI camouflage

The American promoter and showman Phineas T. Barnum was born in 1810. He was immensely successful and widely known by 1859, the birth year of Charles B. Hanford, who would in time himself become a leading actor in Shakespearean plays. 

Hanford’s middle name was Barnum, not in homage to Phineas T. (although they may have been related) but because Barnum was his mother’s family’s name.

Hanford died in 1926. Near the end of his life (as reported in obituaries), while World War I was ongoing, he collaborated with Thomas A. Edison “in planning methods of camouflage for ships and land operations of the army, his stagecraft lending itself readily to this work.” In earlier blog posts, we've talked about various aspects of Edison's involvement in WWI camouflage.

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Anon, CAMOUFLAGE IN CLOTHES PASSES in The Cleveland Press, March 18, 1918—

There’s camouflage in warfare,
But for men whose forms are lean,
In spring styles stores are showing
No camouflage is seen.

“Conserve” is the the edict
Throughout the USA
And that applies to clothing
In quite a funny way.

For tailors have elected,
In making suits this spring,
To make lines they call “skeleton”
The fashionable thing.

Th shoulders have no padding,
The waistline’s pulled in tight,
No bit of cloth unneeded
Is anywhere in sight.

So if you’re thin, flat chested,
Or your shoulder blades are round,
Conceal the fact, you cannot,
To show, it’s surely bound.

But there, don’t look so gloomy,
Just think what you would do
If tailors had decided
To conserve in trousers too.

They might have made it rompers
Like children wear in play.
Or maybe trunks and long hose
Like they wore in Shakespeare’s day.

But we’re not the ones to grumble
When all is said and done,
For we’ll go in Injun blankets
If ’twill help to lick the Hun. 

RELATED LINKS    

Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work? /  Nature, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage /  Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage /  Optical science meets visual art /  Disruption versus dazzle / Chicanery and conspicuousness /  Under the big top at Sims' circus

Sale-priced books on camouflage / free shipping

contributions of Hollywood to WWI ground camouflage

Above Camouflage pattern (digitally-colorized, thus historically unreliable) on World War I huge long-range artillery, mounted for railway transport, c1918, unknown source.

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G.P. Harleman, News of Los Angeles and Vicinity in The Moving Picture World, December 1, 1917—

Lawson Organizes Camouflage Artists
Lee Lawson, [Hollywood] technical expert, has received from the Adjutant General authorization to form a company of two hundred and fifty men of the [motion picture] studio plants for the camouflage department to be incorporated in the Twenty-Fourth Engineers.

Lawson has been engaged at his trade locally for the past twelve years. He recently asked for authority to organize a company of camouflage artists. His appointment was made by Secretary of War [Newton] Baker.

All the ingenuity of “trick stuff” manifested in motion pictures will be transplanted to the camouflage activities in France. Scene painters, artists, sculptors, property men and numerous other classes of employees in studios will comprise the company.

Lawson already has sixty-four men enrolled. These will leave in a few days for American Lake [near Lakewood], Washington, where they will receive instruction in the most advanced methods of camouflage work.

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G.P. Harleman, News of Los Angeles and Vicinity in The Moving Picture World, December 15, 1917, page 1637—

Camouflage Artists Leave for Training
The greatest camouflage company in the world, according to Major George P. Robinson, United States Engineers Corps, left Los Angeles November 24, for an eastern training camp. There wre sixty-five men in the part, headed by Lee Lawson of the Universal. The personnel were recruited almost exclusively from the leading motion picture studios of Los Angeles.

“Nowhere else in the world could a company of men of similar qualifications have been recruited,” said Major Robinson. “The best scenic artists and men of kindred trades in the motion picture industry are here.”

Just before the train pulled out of the station Lee Lawson made a short speech to the crowd. “Friends, we’re going over there to fool the Kaiser, and if Yankee genius counts for anything we’ll be there with the goods,” he said.

The leave taking was different from any farewells given any party of soldiers leaving Los Angeles heretofore. Sixty-five young men, all of them known personally to the five hundred or more persons who bade them goodbye, caused everybody to cry goodbye to everybody else. It was a scene not easily forgotten.

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News of Cinema and Film Gossip in The New York Sun, February 2, 1919, p. 39—

Lieutenant Lee Lawson, former technical director, Sergeant Clarence DeWitt and Sergeant H. Divver, formerly of Universal City, for over nine months members of a camouflage regiment in France, has returned to the studio. When America entered the war Lieutenant Lee [sic] assembled scenic artists, sculptors, directors and property men in a camouflage platoon. He was wounded twice, Sergeant DeWitt gassed, and Sergeant Divver wounded twice.

RELATED LINKS    

Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work?

 Nature, Art, and Camouflage

 Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage

 Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage

 Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage

 Optical science meets visual art

 Disruption versus dazzle

 Chicanery and conspicuousness

 Under the big top at Sims' circus

to conceal and reveal / tandem aspects of camouflage

In 1917, when the US entered World War I, it was decided that artists, architects, set designers, and others would be recruited as camouflage practitioners. As a result, various civilian US schools began to offer courses in camouflage design. In this government photograph from 1918, a camouflage instructor at Columbia University is shown at work on a demonstration of “high difference” or “disruptive” ship camouflage, also known as “dazzle.” The same policy was continued during WWII.

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Donald Oenslager, The Theatre of Donald Oenslager. Middleton CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1978, p. 12—

Then came those barren years of World War II. My abrupt transfer from my private world of stage design to the defensive world of camouflage was dramatic. I discovered that the temporary characteristics of stage design and camouflage are synonymous. With the same tricks one conceals what exists and by the corollary reveals what does not exist.

WWI-era Scenic Film Camouflage at Lasky Studios

Above Photograph of Hollywood scenic designer Glen Dunaway (1895-1923), manager at the Lasky Studio in 1920, as published in THE SCENIC ART IN MOTION PICTURES: Glen Dunaway, Chief Scenic Artist, Explains Colorful Phase of Important Studio Work in Muncie Evening Press (Muncie IN). November 20, 1920. “Mr. Dunaway,” (not to be confused with Glenn Dunaway, a possible relative, who was a race car driver) the article states, “is a camouflage expert…” (not literally) in view of the highly deceptive effects that he creates for filmmaking purposes. Unfortunately, he died of carbon monoxide poisoning (adjudged accidental), as the result of a defective room heater, at the Lasky Studios on April 23, 1923.

Pictured in the same article is a scenic artist named Hans Ledeboer (1874-1962), described as “the most prominent” artist on Dunaway’s staff. He “was born in Holland of Dutch and French parentage and studied art and decoration in Rotterdam and The Hague. Twelve years ago [c1908] he came to America because of the wider opportunities offered by this country for his work… Since coming to America he had achieved considerable fame. In Chicago, he was commissioned to paint Holland scenes for the Onndaga Hotel in Syracuse NY, and later he also did the mural decorations for the San Francisco Exposition, and for that work [he] was awarded a gold medal. For the past three years he has decorated, each year, the great auto show room at the Pacific Auditorium in San Francisco, where the auto show is held annually.”

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Anon, MOVIE FACTS AND FANCIES in The Boston Globe. October 1, 1921, p. 12. Extended portions of this text were published (with attribution to Marvin M. Riddle) in The Photodramatist, with the title "From Pen to Silversheet." January (pp. 35-37) and February 1922—

The studio scenic artist of today is a high-class interior decorator.

In addltlon to this he is an expert camouflage artist and a perfect copyist. The controlling principal in his work, however, is the photographic value of colors. Under the eye of the camera colors are often very deceptive, and often a color which seems lighter to the eye than another color might on the screen register a darker shade of gray than that color.

Often two colors which seem to form a most artistic and beautiful combination to the human eye, will, when photographed, present a most inharmonious, discordant color scheme, which is very ugly to look upon. Only by a careful study and a perfect knowledge of the photographic values of color does the scenic artist avoid such color clashes.

The art of camouflage also is a very important phase of the studio scene painter’s art. He must make the imitation appear exactly like the real. Some of the commonest of such problems are included in the following examples: The camouflage of compo[sition] board square[s] and the proper laying of them so that when photographed they resemble a tile or stone floor; the painting of surfaces so that the photographic result[s] [are indistinguishable from] bronze, gold or other metals.

The artist can, with a few well-placed strokes of his brush, dipped in the right kind of paint, make a new brick wall like the side of a dingy tenement house. He can give to a new redwood panelled wall the effect of an oak panel, hundreds of years old.