"FEW, BUT ROSES": CHAPTER THREE OF ANDREW SINCLAIR'S "ARTS AND CULTURES" (1995)
The Festival of Britain was the last child of wartime culture. It was dutiful and didactic with the eighteen million people who eventually visited the two thousand local events expecting to be educated as well as entertained. Both utilitarian and uplifting, it was a celebration of British achievements in science and technology and design as well as in the arts. Its saving grace was its sense of humour and widespread use of limited resources. 'One mistake we should not make,' wrote the Festival Director Gerald Barry, 'we should not fall into the error of supposing we are going to produce anything conclusive. In this sceptical age, the glorious assurance of the mid-Victorians would find no echo.'
This answer to the centenary of the Great Exhibition was not an expression of empire and might, but of experiment and gaiety. That was what Harold Nicholson discovered when he visited the festival on the South Bank, dominated by the largest hat in the world, the scalloped Dome of Discovery, and by the suspense of the elongated lozenge of the Skylon, which looked like Edward Lear's drawing of the Quangle-Wangle. Nicholson had expected the South Bank Exhibition to provide beauty and power, but not to be 'the very soul of wit... conceived in a mood of high spirits'. It was full of brave laughter, which might be gallows-humour. Yet it was not a memorial chapel or a monument to the past greatness, but a testament to present resilience, 'a clamorous assertion of our infinite gifts of adaptability and resource...resonant with the cries and gurgles of the world to be. I returned to the drab outside encouraged and entranced.'
The festival was the tribute of the old guard to the new planners of post-war Britain. It heralded the renaissance of British architecture and design and provided official confirmation of the state patronage of the arts. Some fifty architects and a hundred designers were commissioned to fabricate something for the festival: their energies were released from adapting Nissen huts, hangars, pillboxes and prefabs into making buildings bare and strange. If their gods were Gropius and Le Corbusier, if their nineteen-thirties student realism would lead to the mistaken concrete towers and 'new brutalism' of the nineteen-fifties, their festival work showed a sense of play as well as function. 'It was a second rush of discovery', the Georgian architectural expert John Summerson noted, 'and, it seems now, the one to carry English architecture out of one age into another.' Evelyn Waugh may have ended his autobiographical war triology of novels by damning the festival, but Unconditional Surrender did recognise the fact that the event was a watershed between two periods:
"In 1951, to celebrate the opening of a happier decade, the government decreed a Festival. Monstrous constructions appeared on the south bank of the Thames, the foundation stone was solemnly laid for a National Theatre, but there was little popular exuberance among the straitened people and dollar-bearing tourists curtailed their visits and sped to the countries of the Continent where, however precarious their condition, they ordered things better."
As the playwright Michael Frayn declared, 'The Festival was a rainbow - a brilliant sign riding the tail of the storm and promising fairer weather. It marked the ending of the hungry 'forties, and the beginning of an altogether easier decade." Restrictions were being lifted with the last gasp of the Labour Government, ousted by Winston Churchill and the Conservatives in the election of 1951. As the agent of the playwright Joe Orton was made to say in Alan Bennett's Prick Up Your Ears, the festival was 'when it all came off the ration...food, sex, life everything.' So it seemed for the young.
At last, austerity was ending, coupons could be jettisoned, even if there was not much to buy nor much money to spend. Stephen Spender thought that the festival symbolized the disapointment of the Labour Party's social revolution 'with its look of cut-rate cheerfulness cast in concrete and beflagged'. Yet at the half-cock apotheosis of the Festival of Britain, a cheap celebration that cost only eight million pounds and built the Royal Festival Hall to replace the bombed Queen's Hall as a concert centre, there was cause for a joyful requiem on the burial of the war decade. Orchestras and poetry readings, dramatic performances and art exhibitions, fireworks and sports days, radio shows and the first lengthy television programme on an artist, Henry Moore, broadcast the festivities to two thousand cities, towns and villages in Britain. The festival was, as its originator Herbert Morrison declared, 'the people giving themselves a pat on the back'.
One architect at the Festival, Basil Spence, who designed the Sea and Ships Pavilion, was to carry with him the style of the event into the new cathedral at Coventry, which was to rise from the rubble of the old blitzed place of worship. Other festival architects, particularly Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, would translate their construction of the New Schools Pavilion into the things themselves. But sculptors and artists proved the more apt designers of the festival, particularly John Piper and the cartoonist Osbert Lancaster. Their bamboo Grand Vistas and Arcades and Rotundas and Tea Houses and other fantastical creations at upriver Battersea in the Festival Gardens were based on memories of the old London pleasure pleasure gardens of Cremone, Ranelagh and Vauxhall - a style which Rayner Banham has called 'the English Picturesque'. In its role as patron and co-ordinator through Huw Wheldon, the Arts Council commissioned nearly fifty painters and half as many sculptors to grace the festival. Keith Vaughan did a nude Theseus mural for the Dome of Discovery, Michael Ayrton produced an exegis on The Elements as the Sources of Power, Victor Passmore wrought a ceramic mural for the Regatta Restaurant, and Feliks Topolski decorated a railway arch near the Transport Pavilion with a Cavalcade of Commonwealth. So short of funding was the Arts Council, and so short of material were the artists, that the Council presented large canvases to sixty artists for their free festival contributions to an art competition'; five winners were awarded £500 apiece, including Lucian Freud for his Interior near Paddington. Ayrton, Minton, Vaughan, Colquhoun and MacBryde all failed to win a prize for their pictures. Colquhoun was bitter about his exclusion from the festival, which seemed to mark his decline. And Francis Bacon never appeared there at all.
The sculptors were better represented, with Lyn Chadwick creating an abstract bronze for the courtyard of the Regatta Restaurant and a hanging mobile at the summit of the viewing tower, Reg Butler a wrought-iron birdcage, Barbara Hepworth both an abstract sculpture and the monumental group on the podium of the Dome of Discovery, Frank Dobson his London Pride near the main entrance of the Royal Festival Hall, Jacob Epstein a gilded bronze by the Homes and Gardens Pavilion, while Henry Moore executed a bronze Reclining Figure for the South Bank Exhibition itself and a Standing Figure for the gardens at Battersea. The Arts Council chose to celebrate Moore as Britain's premier artist, opening London's first retrospective exhibition of his work at the Tate Gallery across the river on the north bank of the Thames. As the biographer of the sculptor wrote, 'The Festival of Britain was in its way a Festival of Moore'.
The contribution of the British cinema to the festival was an accurate prediction of its own suicide. Although it reached its apogee during the war decade, its achievement was hardly represented. One whole exhibition was devoted to the British invention of television, still unseen in most homes at the time, while the Telecinema was specially designed for the showing of films and television and the latrst innovations of the trade, stereophonic sound called 'the borderless screen', cable television, three-dimensional stereoscopic films, and a tribute to the documentary tradition of the island. Television would erode the cinema industry and stereophonics and stereoscopics would not save it. The documentary would desert the big screen in the picture palace for the small box by the fireside; and so it would diminish a great tradition into a common denominator. A film to commemorate the architect of the movie camera, William Friese-Greene, The Magic Box was made, but it failed dismally. Already television was inheriting the invention of the moving pictures.
The Arts Council did something for literature at the festival, sponsoring eight touring exhibitions and one London show of books by a hundred contemporary authors. A few writers and poets lectured beside a rare book display at the Victoria and Albert Museum. One of them was Dylan Thomas, who packed the building for a reading of his verse. As well as the small subsidies to the poetry readers, the Arts Council announced an epic verse competition for poems of over three hundred lines in length and a Panel for Poetry, starring Richard Church, Christopher Hassall and C. Day Lews, was created to furnish good advice. The list of judges was doughty and worthy of the old establishment - Sir Kenneth Clark, Lord David Cecil, Professor C.M Bowra, T.S. Eliot's companion John Hayward, George 'Dadie' Rylands and Basil Willey. Fiercely attached by Scrutiny, the judges, indeed awared the wrong prizes to the wrong poets. Of the eight who received awards, only Robert Conquest and one minor poet, the Cornishmen Jack Clemo, ever achived a later reputation. It was the swansong of the old literary guard, but a marker of the creation of state patronage for poetry. As John Hayward pointed out when he deplored the standard of the two thousand entries, this was practically the first public support for the art since the post of Poet Laureate had been created, and it coincided with the nadir of the publication of poetry by commercial firms. In principle, the festival competition set a precedent for subsidising the Muse, although only Laurie Lee was asked to contribute directly to the (South Bank) exhibition, writing all the captions for the enigmatic Pavilion of the Lion and Unicorn including the wry statement, 'Democracy begins at home but doesn't stay there'.
For the drama, the festival provided promises without many performances, although the Arts Council did support most of the leading productions. An Old Vic season with seven classic plays in repertory, and the husband-and-wife double act of Laurence Oliver and Vivien Leigh alternating Antony and Cleopatra with Caesar and Cleopatra at the St. James's Theatre, were the major London attractions, while Salisbury commissioned Ronald Duncan to write Our Lady's Tumbler for performance in the cathedral there, and Christopher Fry's religious drama, A Sleep of Prisoners, progressed from one one country church to another, turning crypts into internment camps, and signalling the end of modern poetic drama as well as showing a play about prisoners of war...
The Arts Council deplored the fact that so few plays of contemporary merit had emerged for the festival, but it gave the drama prize in its competition to John Whiting for his Saint's Day as a new play of contemporary significance. and so it proved to be, although the only step towards the establishment of the long-awaited National Theatre was the laying of a foundation stone on the South Bank site. It was a stone that was to be moved so often before the National Theatre was to be built that the future Queen later suggested that it should have been mounted on a trolley.
Music, opera and ballet were the chief beneficiaries of the festival. Orchestral and choral works were commissioned from Sir Arnold Bax and Sir Arthur Bliss and many other composers, the opera of Billy Budd from Benjamin Britten, and a new ballet from the ailing Constant Lambert for the Sadler's Wells at Covent Garden. Concerts and festivals of music were encouraged and subsidized across the nation. Alicia Markova and Anton Dolin's small ballet company was successful enough to establish itself as the Festival Ballet, providing another major company for dance. The Arts Council also supported a Wagner season at Covent Garden and set the precedent for the lion's share of state funding to go to the opera, the ballet and the symphony orchestras. To the most expensive arts would it be given, even if their audiences were sometimes small.
The importance of the Festival of Britain was that it happened at all, with its cut-rate cheerfulness. Correctly it celebrated a state of the arts that had flourished in the nineteen-forties in spite of the conditions of war and the austerity of peace. It was also the end of the dreams of the planners of reconstruction as well as the last fanfare for an original age. King George the Sixth should have been present at the closing ceremony of the festival when its flag was hauled down and the crowd sang 'Abide With Me' and 'Auld Lang Syne' and 'God Save the King', but he was already beginning a descent into dying. The new Conservative Minister of Works showed an indecent haste in having the Pavilions of the Festival dismantled, including the Dome of Discovery and the Skylon. Only the Festival Hall, the Telecinema, a cafe below Waterloo Bridge and few high verandas survived the demolition. A huge site of twenty-seven acres was cleared. It was to be the most enduring legacy of the festival, which had reclaimed the area from swampland and blitzed bulidings. It would become in time, in a long time, the home of the South bank complex, where at last various disciplines would be housed and subsidised, a melange of concert halls and galleries, theatres and film auditoria and museums, a conglomeration of the arts that had huddled together with such stimulation and cross-pollination in central London during the previous decade.
The Arts Council was well pleased by the role it had played in organizing the Festival of Britain. For once, the retiring Chairman, Sir Ernest Pooley, blew the trumpet for himself and his organization. He had visited many of the large and small festivals promoted between local bodies and the Councils, and he had found the experience an exhilarating one. In the Annual report at the time of the Korean War he wrote:
'Dangers and anxieties continue to beset Great Britain, yet in this year of so many shadows, there has been more good art and music to be seen in this country than ever before. The public has shown, in its hundreds of thousands, that it has a keen and growing appetite for the serious pleasures, and we must hope for an increasing recognition of the fact by Parliament and Local Authorities, in whom is now invested the major responsibility for the patronage of the arts.'
The job of the Council had been to promote a London Season of the Arts in May and June of 1951: to foster arts festivals in twenty-two centres in England, Scotland and Wales, ranging from Bournemouth to Caerwys to Inverness; and to stimulate wherever possible the local effort and special occasion in artistic endeavour. Nearly two hundred orchestral and choral works by British composers were performed during the London Season. Although the seperate Opera and Ballet Panel was now absorbed again by the Music Panel, the opera programmes, arranged in consultation with the Council, at Covent Garden, Sadler's Wells and Glynbourne, showed the three opera houses at their best, even if the Benjamin Britten season at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, was not a financial success. Yet the national ballet and the Old Vic continued in their popularity and recognition. 'It can truly be claimed for the London Season of the Arts that the high reputation of our producers, actors and actresses was enhanced; that the galleries and national collections were seen in their glory; and that London's bid was to be recognized as the musical centre of the world was made more confidently than ever before.'
Yet the new festivals were the true triumphs. There was no doubt that they not only played a vital part in the Festival of Britain but were significant in their own right.
'York, for example, became for a fortnight a centre of intense brilliance which cannot be without a continuing effect on the cultural life of Yorkshire and the North generally. The magnificent clamour of Northern choirs singing with the great orchestras in the Minster, the performance of the York Mystery Plays, the exhibition of paintings from Yorkshire Houses, the beautifully refurbished Assembly Rooms, the concerts of chamber music, all took place in a city swept and garnished for a momentous occasion. Working to somewhat different ends, and drawing on different sources, the same was true of Norwich and Liverpool.'
About a quarter of the extra Treasury grant to the Council of £400,000 for 1951 had gone to the provincial arts festivals by way of guarentees, and the whole operation was a notable illustration of the Council's preference for working with established independent organizations wherever possible. The wise administration of the festival societies released the forces of local effort and initiative. And even more important, following the permanent gift to the arts of the Royal Festival Hall in London, 'several other cities, notably York, Liverpool, Norwich, King's Lynn, Inverness and Stratford, showed much imagination in seizing the opportunity offered in 1951 to renovate and put to new uses buildings of great beauty. Many provincial museums and galleries were cleaned and painted, some were refurbished, but there was little sign of any resolute decision to remove the trash that has accumulated over the ages in so many of them.'
These strong words about provincial taste compared with central choice and direction were echoed in what the Arts Council thought that the Festival of Britain had done for its guiding body. There were two notable by-products. The first was the invaluable experience and information about the artistic resources of the country as a whole.
' The Council's Festival files now include much of the raw material for compiling a Domesday Book of British artistic endeavour, and consequently, if its funds increase, the Council may be able to aid the further development of local initiative.
Secondly, the press and public alike vigoursly supported the (Arts) Festivals and the London Season; the amount of space and comment devoted to music, drama and the fine arts in the national and foreign press was very gratifying. The Festival of Britain as a whole was largely based on the proposition that the artist plays an important part in the life of the country..If the Festival has aroused great expectations it should be somebody's business to press for their realization, especially as most of the claimants for further aid have shown such readiness to bear their own share of the cost of disseminating the arts among the people of Britain.'
This panegyric on the success and the national role of the Arts Council flowed from the sinuous pen of William Emrys Williams. For he had superseded Mary Glasgow as Secretary-General.
ADDENDUM
An extract from Chapter Two "The Best and The Most":
The sharp rise in state expenditure, particularly in the performing arts, and the prospect of a large increase in the grant for the Festival of Britain in 1951 were a fillip to the new state organization. Although the funding of professional centres of excellence was growing, and although the Chairman was diminishing the expenditure on the legacy of wartime - the support of amateur groups and touring companies - the planning of Festival of Britain allowed Sir Ernest Pooley to redress the balance between the best and the most, between superior performance and access to it. At a special meeting at the Central Hall in Westminster in 1949, Pooley addressed the representatives of most of the local authorities in Britain. Within a couple of years before the Festival of Britain, the work of the Arts Council would be intensified - and it was to be given a special grant of £400,000 to activate matters, although the government would spend eight million pounds in total. As always, the Regional Officers were only too willing to help in that brilliant summer to be. And here, Pooley injected his normal note of prudence. It would be a mistake to think that the arts must necessarily be subsidized; a great number of concerts, plays and exhibitions should be self-supporting. 'Financial support is frequently both unnecessary and undesirable. What is nearly always necessary is professional guidance.' The wisest policy for 1951 was to concentrate on what each particular town did best, to bring local and special capacities or traditions to the highest pitch of excellence. There was also a need to provide permanent housing for the arts. 'And let us be gay,' Pooley entreated the municipal officers. 'Let us have entertainment.' He did not know quite what 'highbrow' exactly meant, but 'in so far as it is a term of reproach, let us not be highbrow. You can have high standards of performance without being highbrow. The arts can provide for those who appreciate them a fuller life and greater happiness. But don't submit to that depressing sense of superiority, and that "preciousness," too often affected by arts clubs and arts circles. Don't let us be afraid of being amused.'