Extract from 'Labour at 100' in "The Times" by Joanna Hunter : "Mandelson's grandfather at the other Dome".
"Morrison's tenure of the Foreign Office was, by general consensus, one of the least successful roles of his career. Born in Brixton on January 3, 1888, Morrison was a politician who would always be closely associated with London and not only for his enthusiasm for the Festival of Britain.
Largely self-educated and blind in one eye, he became Mayor of Hackney in 1919, and a member of the London County Council in 1922. He was elected to Parliament in 1923. Under Ramsay MacDonald he became Transport Minister, introducing the Road Traffic Act and the London Passenger Transport Board.
During the Second World War Morrison was Home Secretary, and Minister of Home Security. He created the National Fire Service, a civil defence uniform and an indoor bomb shelter. After the war he became Lord President and Leader of the House of Commons, moving to the Foreign Office in 1951.
However his lack of charisma was to cost him the leadership (of the Labour Party). In 1956 Morrison faced his final defeat when Hugh Gaitskell was elected Labour leader. It is generally believed that Clement Attlee held onto the leadership in order to block Morrison, who was, by that time, regarded as too old for the job.
By the time of his death in 1965 he was Lord Morrison of Lambeth. In his obituary in "The Times" - it was noted: "Few would deny Morrison the credit for many of the successes of the postwar Labour government..it as a joy to watch him...picking his way through the complexities and skirting the dangers like a cat walking across a mound of cans and broken bottles."
Extract from "Herbert Morrison, Portrait of a Politician" by B. Donoughue and G.W. Jones, published by Weidenfeld, 1973
Foreign Secretary: Humiliations, Resignations and Defeat, 1951
"The problem was that Morrison really cared about the Festival of Britain; it was in so many ways his pet project and he could not bear to let go at the very moment of its glorious triumph. He had taken over formal responsibility for the proposed Festival back in 1947* and had nurtured it through many difficulties. To him it was a great symbol of national regeneration. Announcing the government's intentions in December 1947, he recalled the Paris Exposition of 1878, which celebrated France's recovery from the defeat of 1870, and said that Britain now needed to demonstrate to the world that she had recovered from the exhausting victory of 1945. He appointed a Council** of distinguished advisers - including such prominent artistic figures as T.S. Elliott, Malcolm Sargent and John Gielgud - with General Lord Ismay, one of Churchill's war-horses from 1940, as Chairman and Gerald Barry as Director General. After examining many possibilities, including Hyde Park, the Council chose the south bank of the Thames between Waterloo Bridge and County Hall as its central exhibition site. There the story of Britain and its peoples was to be represented in a series of pavilions, each devoted to a significant aspect of national life - the home, school, industry, transport, the countryside etc. Local exhibitions and festivities were also organised throughout the country, making it a national jamboree with virtually every community involved.
Morrison was naturally delighted with the choice of the south bank site, between his beloved County Hall and his Waterloo Bridge. He had long wanted to see that bedraggled southern riverside turned into something of credit to London and pleasure to Londoners, especially South Londoners. When he personally first suggested it as the best location it was turned down as being too small. Barry was ideally looking for somewhere much larger than this thirty acres. Certain Council members - especially R.A. Butler and Walter Elliott - continued to press for the riverside, and when it was realized that the LCC independently wished to build a concert hall there, which would provide a permanent Festival asset at little extra cost to the government, the choice was made. Morrison jubilantly announced their decision to the Commons on 10 February 1949, claiming that the South Bank was the only site sufficiently spectacular, central and in keeping with the Festival theme of the 'new Britain springing from the battered fabric of the old.'
The construction programme had sticky patches, suffering from shortages of materials*** and labour disputes. Morrison at one point called in his old LCC colleague Richard Coppock to sort out industrial troubles on the site. Bevin was upset at not being consulted but Morrison was so pleased with Coppock's success at troubleshooting that he promised him a knighthood as a reward - and delivered it. He made few other ministerial interventions: once to remove mention of free school meals from the schools pavilion, because it might prove politically contentious; once to get Barry to inspect - and exonerate- a statue which had been commissioned for the South Bank and was rumoured in the press to be indecent; once to reorganize the Board for the separate Festival Gardens and funfair in Battersea Park, after it sank into financial chaos with projected losses rising from £1.5 million to £2.5 million, and the chairman and managing director resigned; and once to introduce a special bill to legalize Sunday opening of the Festival including the funfair. He failed in this latter endeavor. The bill was heavily rejected at the committee stage - a curious repetition of Morrison's previous defeat at the hands of Britain's roundheads when he tried in 1941 to legalize the opening of theatres on Sundays. Apart from these occasional direct interventions, Morrison, who always believed in delegation, generally left Barry and the official organizers to get on with the details of the job.
Morrison was of course not unaware that party political benefiets might be derived from the Festival celebrations. He was politician enough to appreciate Disraeli's dry comment a century earlier , that "this exhibition will be a boon to the Government, for it will make the public forget its misdeeds." But his main feeling certainly was that the British people had earned the chance of a little frivolity after eleven years of crisis. When the Exhibition opened he wrote: ' I want everyone in Britain to see it, to take part in it, to enjoy it. I want to see the people happy. I want to hear the people sing.' He 'convinced the cabinet that we ought to do something jolly', recalled one colleague. 'I can almost hear him now saying "we need something to give Britain a lift".' His personal identification with the Festival - in his own and in other people's minds- was total. When a Tory MP with a felicitious slip of the tongue referred to him as 'the Lord Festival' it seemed appropriate and stuck.
He attended an eve-of-Festival dinner on 2 May, at the elegant home of Political and Economic Planning in Queen Anne's Gate, and claimed, beaming with pleasure, that 'to have organised the Festival now may be madness but it is the sort of madness that has put us on the map and is going to keep us there'. Morrison ought really to have been attending the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe at Strasbourg, but he could not leave London at this time; he sent his junior minister, Lord Henderson, instead. Next day was the opening concert in the new Festival Hall. With orchestra, massed choirs, and royaly present among an excited audience. Morrison sat high up in a box, proud and moved as 'Land of Hope and Glory' reached its crescendo. The weather was fickle and it poured all next day when he took the King and Queen on a ninety-minute tour of the South Bank, but his spirits were strikingly undampened and undampable. In the evening he was in crackling good humour as guest of honour at the Lord Mayor's dinner to celebrate the Festival. 'This', remarked the Observer that weekend, 'has been Mr. Herbert Morrison's week and he has enjoyed it to the full. His speeches have been full of his special cockney humour...What he has most enjoyed has been giving Mr. Barry and his younger colleagues a chance. Some of the consequences- and especially the sculpture-have surprised him, but he has refrained from even the most avuncular protest.'
Authors' notes:
* The idea for a great Exhibition of 1951 to celebrate the centenary of the 1851 Exhibition, had been raised privately with the government by the Royal Society of Arts as early as 1943. It was given public impetus in an open letter from Gerald Barry to Stafford Cripps, as President of the Board of Trade, published in the "News Chronicle" in September 1945. Soon afterwards the government set up the Ramsden Committe to examine the proposal and the Committe decided in support of an international exhibition. Further consideration led the government to pare down its intention to a less ambitious national fair, and having lost its international trading aspects, Cripps insisted that responsibility for it be taken from the Board of Trade - and it went to Morrison.
** Beneath the Festival Council there was an executive committee of officials to carry out the detailed planning and to co-ordinate the contributions of the various departments of government. The financial vote for the Festival came under Morrison's responsibility.
*** The Festival Hall itself had to be changed from its original steel girder construction because of steel shortages. When a national cement famine developed in 1950, Morrison's scheme was frequently blamed.
Part of Herbert Morrison's speech to the House of Commons on 10 February 1949: Public Works (Festival of Britain) Bill, Order for Second Read.
"As the House is aware, last spring the Government set up the Festival Council which had placed on it the task of supervising the arrangements for the Festival of Britain, 1951. We thought it right to appoint to that Council a number of hon. Members representative of both sides of this House, and others with special qualifications in the fields of administration, science and the arts, under the chairmanship of General Lord Ismay. One of the first big tasks of the (Festival) Council was to advise what sort of main Exhibition should be held in 1951 and where it should be located in view of the many economic and other difficulties of the country.
On account of the needs of the British Industries Fair and the export drive the Government were unable to agree that the Festival should use Earls Court and Olympia; and owing to shortages of labour and of steel and other materials it also proved impossible to meet the cost in resources of staging a big exhibition in Hyde Park or Battersea Park, quite apart from the objection to the use of so much public space for such a purpose. Wembley, the Crystal Palace, and other sites were also looked at and found wanting. The idea of finding house-room for the Exhibition in the museum quarter of South Kensington proved impracticable upon examination.
After long and anxious scrutiny the Festival Council came to the conclusion that, with all its drawbacks, the South Bank site between County Hall and Waterloo Road was the only one which was at once sufficiently spectacular, central, and in harmony with the theme of a new Britain springing from the battered fabric of the old, to be acceptable. The South Bank offered a site of 30 acres in the heart of London and promised that much of the work and all the goodwill put into 1951 would serve an enduring purpose in promoting the overdue development of the south side of the river".(taken from Hansard)
An interview with the Rt. Hon. Herbert Morrison, MP in "The Times" Festival of Britain Supplement, May 1951.
THE MEANING OF THIS YEAR - A CHALLENGE TO BRITISH LEADERSHIP
No one can yet say what the lasting value of the Festival of Britain will be, and judging by what has been written about 1851, I doubt whether even the historians will ever agree upon it. All the same , it is useful to consider now what lasting value the promoters of the Festival hope and aim to see it achieve.
First, the Festival is a commemoration of the Great Exhibition of 1851. That Exhibition, inspired and directed by Albert the Prince Consort, marked in some ways the beginning of the modern age. It expressed what some would call the One World outlook, and it stressed the decisive part which the arts and sciences could play in transforming civilization. It was a bold and noble effort which contributed greatly to British leadership and prestige throughout the Victorian age, and it would be unworthy of us not to commemorate and revive the spirit of that achievement.
There are special reasons also why even if the occasion did not exist it would have been necessary to invent it. Wars and slumps have put a distorted importance on the purely material aspects of civilization. Many of the highest values of civilization have had to be treated as "inessentials" of low priority among the claims to money, man-power, and materials. A great nation with historic civilizing influence cannot indefinately carry on in this way. We must do justice once more to the intangibles without which our British civilization cannot be worthy of its name.
Quite 90 per cent. of our people have a great unsatisfied hunger to see and experience the stimulus and enjoyment of civilized amenities. Every progressive business now recognizes that men and women do not give of their best unless they are shown pretty clearly what they are working for and unless they can feel that in some sense it is their show. Yet we expect many millions of people to toil and if necessary to die for their country who live in conditions where they can hardly catch the slightest glimpse of what their country and its civilization really mean. To put it at its lowest, we will not get the full patriotic effort which the nation needs if we stick to the outworn slogan: "Theirs not to reason why". We would do better to follow the homely advice: "Let the dog see the rabbit."
The problem is specially serious for those who live out of London, especially in areas blighted by industrialism or remote from modern services and amenities. Broadcasting, television, the cinema, and the Press are constantly bringing before these people how much they are missing compared with Londoners. It is essential - and I speak as a Londoner - that the so-called provinces of England, and also Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, should be given no cause to feel that they are becoming a species of second-class citizens. It is long overdue for all the cultures and local community life of all these parts of Great Britain to be deliberately and powerfully encouraged and their best traditions and amenities worthily preserved. London is not Britain, any more than Paris is France or New York the United States.
That is why, whereas the 1851 Exhibition was an international show entirely concentrated in the West End of London, the 1951 Festival of Britain is decentralized in well over a thousand significant programmes and events all over England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Just as there had never been a great exhibition before 1851, so there has never before been such a great effort to put every part of the country on show. The Festival is not another big exhibition, but something as new of its kind as the Crystal Palace was in its own day, and no doubt it will have its imitators and successors. The Festival is the British showing themselves to themselves - and to the world.
The 1851 Exhibition was organized by a Royal Commission which continues to this day, but some of the opportunities for following it up were missed because there was no continuing body responsible. The 1951 model takes account of this, and continuing bodies such as the Arts Council, the Council of Industrial Design, and the British Film Institute have been expanded so they will be well placed to take advantage of any impetus which the Festival gives in their own particular field.
The Festival has deliberately focused on the arts and sciences - on showing what we have done in them and on stimulating our people to do even better. Few people realize how greatly our position in the arts, for example, has changed for the better even since 20 years ago. In the composition of music, in ballet , in acting, in film production, in sculpture, and in certain areas of industrial design we hold a position which most countries can envy. I believe the richness of the Festival programmes will astonish even many of the best informed critics, and will give us a new kind of prestige such as France and certain other countries have held for many generations. Such prestige and goodwill are most important assets in all sorts of ways, and it would be sheer blindness to regard the efforts which earn them as being "inessential". Another most important aspect of the Festival is its focus on modern architecture and design. Designers of all kinds of products, from cups and saucers to ocean liners can do much to make or mar our success as an exporting nation, and they cannot do their job in face of public apathy or indifference to design. The right demand and constructive criticism must flourish in the country of origin, and importing countries must have reason to look on Britain as a country which knows what good design is and which looks for it as a matter of course in its home market.
The architectural problem is also partly one of public understanding and criticism of modern architecture, but that is not all. Owing to economic depression and war few younger architects have had the opportunities for developing their talents and for experimenting sufficiently with the new techniques and materials now available. The South Bank Exhibition, the Exhibition of Architecture and other Festival occasions provide a valuable laboratory for modern architectural building experiment, and it would be surprising if no results of lasting value accrue from this. I would specially mention the Royal Festival Hall, put up with such skill and rapidity by the London County Council architects - a building we can be proud of.
Our prestige and leadership in the sciences are more widely recognized, but again their benefiets are restricted by public ignorance of what they are all about - and there is still far too many people at all levels of society who are grossly ignorant about everything to do with science. Great ingenuity has been shown by the designers of the Exhibitions of Science and of Industrial Power, and on the South Bank, in vividly presenting the methods and results of modern science. These displays cannot fail to stimulate imagination and further the fuller use of science for the benefiet of all.
As a nation we have been great travellers overseas, but we have done too little to attract visitors who wish to see our country. Owing largely to the difficult international situation the tourist influx this summer may not be as great as was at one time thought, but a vast amount of publicity will be given all over the world to Britain and the British way of life, while at home a great concerted effort is being made to ease and improve the accommodation and movement of tourists. The Festival Pleasure Gardens in Battersea Park will demonstrate a type of amenity which a country hoping to attract tourists must provide - convieniantly available for those who live here too.
Another important aspect of the Festival is the tidying up and beautifying of town and country. It is only too easy in the conditions we have been through to become careless, tolerating eyesores and missing all kinds of opportunities for adding to amenities. The Festival has given a direct challenge to every community to make the best of itself. It is certainly to be hoped that the bands of public-spirited citizens in towns and villages who are doing so much to brighten their own communities will do even better in later years, and start competing with one another.
London with its vast population and long arrears of redevelopment is a special problem, and it is a great satisfaction to me that the Council of the Festival of Britain chose for their main exhibition the South Bank site, and thus made a start with the long-delayed redevelopment of South London. The Festival will make everyone recognize the mistake of imagining that the Thames is a river with only one bank, and it is my hope and conviction that, once having seen the possibilities of the South Bank, London will embrace them in a big way.
To conclude then, I am not prophesying what the lasting value of the Festival will be. All I can say is that if it revives some of the spirit of 1851, if it cheers up the British people and helps them to understand, and improve upon, and hold fast to the best of their ways of life; if it throws open more widely the doors of the arts and sciences and their appreciation and use; if it tells the world something more of the reasons why Britain has been, and is, and will be a great nation and one which every traveller should visit; if it stirs up people to brighten and tidy and improve their own towns and villages; if it disperses any illusion that the cultures and achievements of the North, and East, and Midlands, and West, and of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are in any way inferior to those of London; if it helps to bring Londoners to tackle the long-neglected redevelopment of their own great city, the Festival of Britain will certainly have amply justified itself.
A message from the Rt. Hon. Herbert Morrison, P.C., M.P. Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs ( from "Daily Mail" Preview and Guide, May 1951)
Difficulties faced and overcome...
"In spite of the present troubled state of the world, arrangements for the Festival of Britain are being pressed onwards to completion with the help of a Council representative of all Parliamentary parties, of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and of the Arts and Sciences generally. Countless difficulties have already been faced and overcome.
The Festival will display, in historical perspective, the latest achievements of British science, technology, industrial design, architecture, town and country planning, music, printing, sculpture, literature, drama, film-making and recreation of all kinds - in fact all things of the mind and spirit which we have to work so hard to produce and to struggle so vigilantly to defend in these difficult times. I feel confident that the Festival will provide greater opportunities than ever before for us and our visitors to comprehend the wealth and variety of Britain's contribution to civilization."
Herbert Morrison having his palm read by Mrs Vaughan Williams
WELCOME TO BRITAIN by The Right Hon. Herbert S. Morrison, M.P.
Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs
"We are so accustomed in Britain to taking for granted our way of life, our science, our literature and other achievements that we need to take stock from time to time if only in order to see how our performance compares with others, and where it is most important for us to do better in future.
The Festival of Britain which is being held this summer is quite a new experiment in putting a mirror in front of ourselves for our own benefiet as well as that of the outside world. The Festival is not just another exhibition, but a concerted programme of exhibitions, arts festivals, pageants, community improvement schemes and many other events, spread all other the United Kingdom- including plenty of spontaneous local effort- and designed to correct any distortion resulting from a decade of siege and austerity. We in Britain believe in keeping our sense of proportion and in overcoming the alternate menaces of war and economic disasters, without in the process deserting or destroying the basic civilization which we have struggled (so far successfully) to save.
We do not believe that life is, or ever can be for us, something contained in abstractions and watertight compartments. The spirit and liveliness of our arts and sciences have a lot to do with the vitality of our democratic way of life and also with our historical capacity to respond to the challenges of aggressors, and to the changing needs of world trade and development.
We are not therefore running the Festival with any direct material motive, but on the other hand we are far from seeing any inconsistency between the needs of economic recovery and advance, and the spiritual, creative and recreative activities with which the Festival is mainly concerned. We think that all these things fit together in the British way of life, and it is even possible that on some of them visitors to this country may find that they have something to learn from their comments and criticisms which will help to ensure that the mirror we are holding up to ourselves will show us faithfully, and will stimulate us to further efforts.
Readers of this special issue of Britain Today will learn from it something of the purposes and scope of the Festival, and I hope that as many as possible of them will come to Britain to see the Festival for themselves. There is unlikely to be for many years so good an opportunity of learning so much about so many sides of the British way of life and of the great part which Britain is going to play in the second half of the twentieth century." (BRITAIN TO-DAY, FESTIVAL NUMBER, MAY'51)