David Holmes
Quirky art director whose commissions ranged from Raffles hotel to the Macallan malt whisky
DAVID HOLMES, who has died a week after his 85th birthday, was possibly the most talented and most fastidious, and certainly the quirkiest, art director in the London advertising industry of the 1970s.
Holmes was more than an advertising designer. He was a fine illustrator and artist, exhibiting in three Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions. His pictures revealed a mind drawn to the lightness, humour and fun of things. He had wide interests, but advertising, art and design were his first loves.
He was sometimes described as the most expensive art buyer in London. That was because he made it his business to know exactly which photographer or artist was right for the task. Cost was not his criterion, but he never let money come between him and the result.
Early in Holmes’s career, while he was at Colman Prentis & Varley, he commissioned Peter Blake (later Sir Peter) to do some drawings for London Zoo’s guidebook. Blake would become a lifelong friend and worked with Holmes on a cluster of projects.
Holmes’s most famous and enduring work was for Macallan malt whisky. In the late 1970s, he met Peter Shiach, the chairman of Macallan. In those days, like many other malt distillers, Macallan sold most of their production to blended brands. This made them dependent on other companies’ fortunes. Now, they wanted to control their own.
So Shiach had made the decision in the late 1960s to keep laying down casks of the Macallan, tying up product at huge expense, to mature for 10 years and more. He met Holmes when the 10 years were almost up, and said he wanted a brochure to talk not to the world at large but to a select few, encompassing everyone “important” in the world of whisky.
Holmes produced The Remarkable History of The Macallan, contained in a large and handsome brown folder which looked as if it had been conjured from the head clerk’s ledger in the happier days of Scrooge and Marley. Inside was a 13-page account of the distillery, its location overlooking the Spey, its spring water, its distillery stream, its mountain, its pot stills and its people.
It was written in copperplate script and lavishly illustrated by Sara Midda, who became a leading watercolourist. Only 900 copies were printed, and they soon became sought after. So started the rise of the Macallan. The brochures are now reputed to be worth £1,000 each.
He was born Frederick Cecil Holmes on September 10 1933 in Ealing, the oldest of three boys. As a child he was “Buster” to his family. He disliked “Fred” and “Freddy” and started using “David” in his early twenties. His parents were Norman Holmes, a car mechanic who had a car hire firm and then a car repair business – and who had helped to design the release mechanism for the Horsa Glider as used in Operation Market Garden – and Kathleen “Kitty” (née Bennett). When war broke out the family was evacuated to Long Crendon in Buckinghamshire.
Holmes attended Ealing School of Art, then did National Service with the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, before joining a series of advertising agencies, passing onwards every two years or so, until he co-founded Holmes Knight Ritchie.
Over the years he worked on accounts for glamorous as well as more industrial companies, including one that made steel tubes. This was a challenge, but on discovering that they supplied the sports industry, he created a memorable image of a cupid buying an arrow in an old-fashioned sports shop.
His most distinctive work was done for Macallan. He originated a series of pen and ink illustrations placed in national newspapers “where intelligent readers would see them”.
As Macallan became bigger spenders, he designed more strange and wonderful things for them, including a cinema commercial featuring Brian Blessed and Miriam Margolyes, and large posters. One featured “The Colossus of Nose”, sited in an Ozymandian desert, while another featured a tumbling cherub, with a tray and goblet of nectar sent flying by Zeus, and the strapline: “Take away the nectar and bring me a Macallan.”
By the time the campaign ended around 1994, and Macallan was sold to a large drinks consortium, it was a multi-million pound account and Macallan’s sales had grown to be reportedly the world’s third largest-selling single Highland malt. Holmes was also active on the charity front, often working without charge. His best-known work was for the Salvation Army – “For God’s sake care, give us a pound”. Holmes gently coaxed various eminent photographers (Terence Donovan, David Bailey, David Steen) to work for nothing in exchange for artist’s credits. He did work for several more charities, including Common Ground.
On other fronts, he illustrated various books including Waterlog, his friend Roger Deakin’s bestselling book about wild swimming. He helped create the instructive children’s brand My First Books and briefed Peter Blake on the label for The Macallan’s 1926 bottling, for which Holmes designed a dark wooden tantalus (one of which sold recently for £500,000).
Among other work he visited Singapore many times to do designs and posters for Raffles, his favourite hotel, and designed two sets of Royal Mail stamps. Last year he published a book of his life and work, A Brush with the Music of Time, the cover of which showed him dancing as Fred Astaire. He was a snappy dresser and an inspired dresser-upper.
David Holmes is also credited with having some involvement in the founding of the Glastonbury Festival. He took his family to Worthy Farm every summer from the mid-1960s; one evening, after a pint or two of cider, Michael Eavis asked his opinion about having a yearly festival on the farm. “Go for it,” Holmes said. He was a proficient piper, and was once threatened with arrest by a policeman for playing the bagpipes on Primrose Hill.
Holmes had his redeeming weaknesses. He was not the complete all-rounder (he could not spell or do maths, and hated technology), but he was puckish and full of life.
David Holmes married Marie Wilkinson in 1961; she survives him, with their daughter and two sons.
David Holmes, born September 10 1933, died September 29 2018