EXTRACT FROM "THE PEOPLE'S PEACE (BRITISH HISTORY SINCE 1945)" BY KENNETH MORGAN (1998)
Three minor corrections to the original text are shown in italics: 'April' to read May, 'Battersea Fun Fair' to read Festival Pleasure Gardens,' Emmett' to read Emett. (References to Mandelson/Morrison respectively as 'planners' are debatable!)
"To Morrison's mind, consolidation should also be fun. In the depths of the years of austerity in the late 1940's, he outlined the prospect of a 'Festival of Britain' to echo the Great Exhibition of 1851. It should provide encouragement to the industrial designers, planners and artists of the nation, and offer a conspicuous platform for Britain's technical and scientific achievement as well. It should exploit the genious of artists like Graham Sutherland and John Piper, and the sculptor, Henry Moore, who won a prize at the Venice Biennale in 1948, a unique feat for an Englishman. The Festival should embody state-sponsored gaiety, not only in the main site on London's South Bank, a derelict stretch of the waterfront, but also in local initiatives of popular festivity. There was much public scepticism, and indeed ridicule, in the right-wing press at this expensive frivolity while the economy languished, and much doubt as to whether the country could afford it. Nevertheless, a great army of scientists and artists met the challenge with zest, notably Hugh Casson, designer of the main South Bank site. Gerald Barry, its director, was a prominent example of the type of progressive thirties intellectual whose conscience and zeal for public service had been kindled by the war. The Festival of Britain would appeal to the public's urge for innovation and experiment. It would also appeal to its patriotism, with much pageantry to evoke an imperial past. It would be Land of Hope and Glory in tune with the prosaic setting of Attlee's Britain. It would create colourful vistas of invention and fun for a weary, war-torn generation. And perhaps usefully too, it might be a useful bonus for Labour when the next general election came....
The Attlee legend was, in general, a warm, reassuring one. But it was also somewhat deceptive. To some degree it rested on purely fortuitous and temporary factors such as the defeat and prostration of European rivals (including the mass migration of Jewish scientists of much distinction from Nazi Germany to Britain). British exports flourished and British capital financed world trade and investment in something of a vacuum, and on the basis of an institutional and economic structure at home which the war years had not radically transformed.
The ambiguities of the nation came out fully in the last hurrah of Attlee's government, the 1951 Festival of Britain. The omens were not good, since the Festival opened in May amidst a mood of political and economic crisis. Strikes by building workers and heavy rains had made the preparations exceptionally difficult. Yet, in spite of all, it opened on time and was a triumphant success. Tens of thousands of adults, and more especially school children flocked to the South Bank site, to wander around the Dome of Discovery, gaze at the Skylon, and generally enjoy a festival of national celebration. Up and down the land, lesser festivals enlisted much civic and voluntary enthusiasm. A people curbed by years of total war and half-crushed by austerity and gloom, showed it had not lost the capacity for enjoying itself. Particular joy came from the Festival Pleasure Gardens, designed with help from Osbert Lancaster, John Piper, and others. With its theatre, grotto, and beer-gardens, along with a tree-walk and famous Emett railway of 'Punch' fame, it was a huge success, a revival of the old entertainments of Vauxhall and Ranelagh along the river in years gone by. Above all, the Festival made a spectacular setting as the showpiece for the inventiveness and genius of British scientists and technologists.
There was much that was good and encouraging about the Festival of Britain. But its impact was neither deep nor long-lasting. In 1952 the Churchill government dismantled the South Bank site, and sold its lease on Battersea Funfair in 1954, amidst little public protest. Only the Festival Hall lives on for a later generation to enjoy. In practice, the Festival appears to have had only a transient impact on British technological or design skills. Nor was its impact on British exports more than cosmetic. The contrast with the self-assured certainty of Queen Victoria's exhibition 'at the Crystal Palace' a hundred years earlier was all too clear. The main impression left by the Festival was not its innovation but its insularity. As in the 'Lion and the Unicorn Pavilion', it served to celebrate past glories, age-old institutions, and hallowed and cherished folkways. The British monarchy, British sports, British pub life, London's red buses, and the village bobby were on display, almost preserved in aspic. There was all too little that was dynamic or suggestive of the stimulus of other cultures. The point of reference was the Victorian or Edwardian past. Britain in 1951 was on display as the somewhat geriatric heir of those earlier societies, not the enterprising youthful harbinger of the new. The Festival pointed back in time, to the way in which continuities had been preserved and adapted to later circumstances. In this, the entire event mirrored Attlee's Britain, a resilient war victim, presided over by brave, honourable, but somewhat conservative men, and a premier whose instinct for change was still governed by the Stepney boys' clubs he had witnessed as a young Edwardian bourgeois nearly a half century earlier."
as a contemporary postscript to "it might be a useful bonus for Labour when the next general election came....":
"In 1998 Britain contemplated celebrating a millennium. How it would do so aroused controversy. The Millennium Dome being built at Greenwich attracted much of the same criticism as the highly successful Festival of Britain had done before 1951. Interestingly the 'planner' of the Dome was Peter Mandelson whose grandfather Herbert Morrison had 'planned' the Festival half a century earlier, though it was not clear that the virtual-reality theme park that was visualised would offer a 'national autobiography' as Gerald Barry had tried to do in the 1940s."