Gentlemanly Professional and Men-about-Town: Occupational Identities Amongst London Advertising Men, 1951-67

The paper explores the subjective identities of London advertising men in the immediate post-war decades. It does so in the context of both the moves to professionalize advertising in these years and in relation to shifts in the commercial geography of the city and its new cultures of consumption. While often aspiring to the status of professional experts, London advertising men found themselves caught between this and competing, non-professional identifications. I explore these subjective contradictions by looking at the working lives of two advertising men from this period: Hubert Oughton, Chairman and Managing Director of W.S Crawford Ltd and his Vice-Chairman, Ashley Havinden. Both men were drawn to the ideal of the professional advertising man, but in their different ways found this subverted by their attachment to more entrepreneurial and artistic identifications. At the same time, Havinden and Oughton used the opportunity of working in London?s cultural economy to pursue the identity of the post-war man-about-town.