Adam Nicholson on the Festival of Britain from "Regeneration. The Story of the Dome" (HarperCollins, pub. 1999)
Most of the great expositions and expositions universelles both embraced enormous art exhibitions and sponsored large, serious and pioneering intellectual gatherings. The Paris exhibition of 1900, for example, was accompanied by the largest medical conference of all time, attended by thousands of researchers from all over the world. The Dome, Paul Greenhalgh suggests, "might have been the ideal opportunity for an epoch-breaking conference on the meaning and reality of globalisation. It has not done that."
In the mid nineties, particularly in the mind of Simon Jenkins, the one exhibition which loomed largest was the Festival of Britain. It had been intended as "a Tonic for the Nation", a brightening of the grey skies in austerity Britain. Gerald Barry had been adamant that the absurdities of the previous generations were not to be repeated. "There would be no Hall of Woollens," he had announced, "or Pavilion of Sweetmeats or Garden of Horticulture; there would be no mammoth mounds of apples or effigies of Royalty in edible fats." (There had been a Prince of Wales in butter at the 1924/1925 British Empire Exhibition at Wembley.) This was to be modern.
The festival had originally been conceived in 1943 by the Royal Society of Arts as an international exhibition with strong emphasis on trade. It would demonstrate to the world the British recovery from the war. Other nations would be invited to exhibit. It was in the that way to be more 1851 than 1924. It soon became apparent, though, that the extensive war damage made it impossible for that to go ahead and so the plan was pared down. It was to be a show about Britishness, its land and people, with an exhibition of arts alongside. The result was an event that slid towards insularity, more inward-looking (a decision was even taken to ban foreign foodstuffs from the South Bank restaurants and cafes), more old fashioned and more trivial than its great predecessor a century before, but perhaps more fun. Justifying this lightness of tone, Barry knew, he said, "that the British had been too busy making history for the last ten years to be in need of a gigantic, ponderous history lesson."
Once the idea of an international trade exhibition had been dropped, the Chancellor, Stafford Cripps, had decided that he did not want the Board of Trade involved. The budget was cut to one sixth of what had originally been proposed, and Cripps passed responsibility for it to Herbert Morrison, Lord President of the Council, who presented it to the House of Commons on 7 December 1947. Other ministers were not particularly keen to take it up and Morrison was the only senior minister without departmental responsibilities. In a remarkable parallel to the situation of his grandson, Peter Mandelson in 1997, Morrison wanted to take on the festival because it was one of the very few projects for which he had direct responsibility. Everything else in which he was interested could only be done by persuading other departments to do what he asked.
Morrison set up a non-political Festival Council to be responsible for major decisions and appointments. Its members were Kenneth Clark, John Gielgud, Malcolm Sargeant, A.P. Herbert, R.A. Butler and another leading Tory, Colonel Walter Elliott. They chose the South Bank site, rather than Osterley or Battersea Park, which had been discussed. Barry was appointed and he then engaged both Hugh Casson and Ralph Tubbs as architects. Both had done work for him at the "News Chronicle."
It was a deeply establishment exercise. According to the writer, Michael Frayn, it had "a herbivore character: upper-drawer, amateur, a posh, BBC-approved enterprise." It was conceived largely on the lawns of Barry's house at Petworth in Sussex, where the designers "paced the lawns in pairs, like the Walrus and the Carpenter, trying to grasp the immensity of our task and marshal the shapes and ships and sealing wax into some kind of order."
Frayn's herbivores were:
"radical middle, classes, the do-gooders, the readers of the News Chronicle, the Guardian and the Observer; the signers of petitions; the backbone of the BBC. In short the gentle ruminants, who look out from lush green pastures which are their natural station in life with eyes full of sorrow for less fortunate creatures, guiltily conscious of their advantages, though not usually ceasing to eat the grass."
In the foreshadowing of the nineties, the carnivores hated it - a waste of money when foreign currency was short and there were still Britons without a house. How could a Dome of Discovery be justified when there was still a famine of wood, steel and skilled labour? It was also foreign in influence when Europe was rife with communism. For the right-wingers, such as Evelyn Waugh, the Beaverbrook Press and Sir Thomas Beecham, it was "a monumental piece of imbecility." For puritan left-wingers, it was a middle-class indulgence with no opening or appeal for the working class people in whose name it was being created. All of them poured an unending rover of abuse on the scheme.
In October 1950 the festival budget was cut by £1 million but Morrison argued fiercely that to abandon it would be like going into mourning: "Is that the way to buck ourselves up when we are in difficulties? I do not think it is. It is profoundly important that we should keep the self-respect and morale of the British people on a high level. 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."
The preparation was a nightmare. Work started on the cramped and rubble-strewn site on 26 July 1949, with less than two years to go. Progress was pitiable. By 31 December 1949 only 831 out of the 6,000 required drawings had reached the contractors. The switchboard girl at the festival office used to answer with the words: "Festering Britain here, how can I help you?" Jacob Epstein, from whom the Arts Council had commissioned an important piece of sculpture for the festival, was turned away from Hugh Casson's office by the doorman because he looked like a drunk. Professor A.R. Richardson, a traffic expert, predicted that London would come to a halt. The Dome of Discovery was alive with rats until a matter of hours before the royal opening. Morrison "listened swivel-eyed and whistling under his breath" to Casson's anxieties, always encouraging and always optimistic. Eventually it was done.
Those who liked it loved it. Eight and half million visitors came to the South Bank between May and September, the five months for which the festival was open. Despite the wet, the British casualties in the war in Korea, the defection to Russia in May of Burgess and MacLean, there was a sudden feeling that the future - or at least the future with a U certificate - had arrived. Dylan Thomas was ecstatic:
"What everyone I know likes most in it is the gay absurd irrelevant delighting imagination that flies and booms and spurts and trickles out of the whole bright boiling; the linked terra-cotta man and woman fly-defying gravity and elegantly hurrying up a w.c. wall."
Visitors to the festival were sometimes found forming queues to nothing. over 100,000 came on one beautiful summer's day. There was dancing in the evening to Geraldo's Embassy Orchestra. Tractors rose and fell on hydraulic plinths in the Countryside Pavilion. There were husky dogs for the polar display (sitting on salt to simulate snow), and battery hens and Jersey cows (which had to be milked) in the Pavilion of Agriculture. It was the world of Daks, Kia-Ora and BOAC, the sort of place, according to one visitor, "Dan Dare strove to defend in 1999 from the appalling Treens of the Red Moon."
This was the landscape, as William Feaver has said, of "Braced legs, indoor plants, colour-rinse concrete, lily-of-the-valley splays of light bulbs, canework, aluminium lattices, Cotswold-type walling with picture windows, flying staircases, blond wood... All these became the Festival style." The festival, in other words, was responsible for more visual pollution than any other single event or influence in midtwentieth century Britain.
Labour lost the subsequent general election, even though they won more votes than the Conservatives. Attlee had delayed the date to take account of what he imagined would be the positive effect of the festival, but there is no evidence that it changed the outcome either way. A departmental committee at the Board of Trade chaired by Lord Ramsden had insisted, when the idea was resurrected by Gerald Barry, that if there were to be an exhibition, progress had to be made in the real world as well:
"To justify the heavy expenditure of money and the large allocation of labour necessary to make an exhibition a success, it is essential that in the meantime there must have been adequate progress made in the provision of dwelling houses, schools and other public institutions already promised, and in addition sufficient industrial buildings of all classes provided to enable industry to function efficiently."
After the election the new Minister of Works, David Eccles, immediately ordered the South Bank's demolition to make way for a garden that would be used the following year to help celebrate the Coronation; only the Festival Hall and the National Film Theatre were spared. There was nothing of the festival left, except in people's memories. It had been hell in preparation, diverting in effect, essentially unimportant in its legacy, but had added something to the gaiety of life. It had not been too expensive. It had been worth doing.