"FROM RATIONING TO ROCK, THE 1950s REVISITED" BY STUART HYLTON (SUTTON PUBLISHING, 1998)
SHOWTIME! THE FESTIVAL OF BRITAIN, CHAPTER TWO
"In 1851 the Victorians held a Great Exhibition to celebrate the achievements of the greatest nation in the world. A hundred years later, a nation impoverished by two world wars could no longer lay claim to that title, but it was sorely in need of the boost to national pride that such an event could provide. Foreign Secretary Herbert Morrison described the Festival as 'Britain giving itself a pat on the back' and summed up the idea in a speech at the Mansion House:
'The twilight war, the cold war which could go on for another ten or fifteen years (in which) you need something to keep pride, the self-respect and national virility of the British people vigorous and successful. If the Festival of Britain had not been thought of before that situation arose then we should have had to invent it.'
But the Festival was not just for cheering us up. Its tourist potential was not lost on a Government which, among other promotions, dispatched a fleet of red London buses on a tour of the continent to attract visitors to our shores in Festival year. Although the Festival of Britain was a nationwide celebration, its centrepiece was to be 27 acres of industrial wasteland on the south bank of the Thames, opposite Charing Cross station. On a site split in two by the Hungerford railway viaduct, a team of some thirty architects under Hugh Casson created what was described as "a gaily coloured scene given over to modern architecture at its most experimental and display technique at its most ingenious." Not everyone was equally enamoured of their efforts. Lord Strabolgi, speaking at the annual dinner of the Association of Architects and Surveyors, reflected on how depressed he was at the state of modern buildings in London - especially those being erected for the Festival. He consoled himself with the thought that most of them would be pulled down as soon as the Festival finished.
Design featured prominently in the whole concept of the Festival. The Council of Industrial Design decreed that 'only souvenirs of a good standard of workmanship shall be sold at the 1951 Festival of Britain'. They set up a committee to vet prototypes of approved souvenirs. Some people found it difficult to see the committee's benign influence in what they perceived as some tatty objects appearing on the market. The Council felt obliged to point out that it was a festival, and that frivolous items, as well as beautiful pieces of work, should be admitted.
One half of the site was given over to Britain, her resources and achievements; the other half to the British people and their way of life. A Dome of Discovery celebrated exploration of all kinds, from pioneering trips to the furthest corners of the world to British achievements in atomic physics. By night, the vertical feature of the Festival, the 'Skylon', seemed to be suspended by magic above the ground, a 292 -foot cigar pointing into the sky. The joke of the day was that, like Britain, it had no visible means of support. Students scaled the Skylon before the opening, celebrating the event by tying a scarf around the top of it. Their efforts were no doubt particularly admired by the member of staff who was given the job of getting it down. Coal-mining, and shipbuilding featured prominently among the industrial exhibits..
One corner of the Festival buildings was to be peculiarly (in every sense of the word) British. Writer Laurie Lee, co-orgainser of the pavilion concerned, explained to the press:
'Within that pavilion, there rightly belongs, we believe, a corner devoted wholly to British eccentricity and wit...For eccentricity.. we require something rich and strange, something altogether unheard of; objects, for instance, that are curious and unusual; models constructed of the most unlikely materials, ingenious machines evolved for unpredictable purposes...'
One of the first to reply was the humourist J.B. Morton, better known as the newspaper columnist Beachcomber, who offered (among other items) a boot-rack made of polished rice grains and a concrete bowler hat. Fellow eccentrics also responded with enthusiasm, and the organisers were soon promised a device for screwing on to the backs of chickens to count the number of eggs laid; a rubber bus that could be deflated to go under low bridges; a machine for grinding smoke and another for detecting the smell of broken glass in underground china shops. Despite this wealth of offers, the organisers continued to advertise for more items (preferably ones large enogh to be visible.) Click here for more on Laurie Lee.
The run-up to the Festival also highlighted some of the more bizarre aspects of our archaic Sunday Observance laws. It emerged that plans to open the Festival on a Sunday (vital to its prospects of commercial success) could fall foul of various pieces of legislation passed between 1625 and 1780. A Bill had to be introduced in Parliament to exempt the Sunday afternoon opening of the Festival from these laws. As far as the Festival itself was concerned, there seemed to be little opposition to it opening, except in the wilder reaches of the Lord's Day Obervance Society. Many more, including the mainstream churches, were opposed to allowing the Pleasure Gardens, also planned as part of the Festival, to open. The Methodists put it thus: 'The Sunday opening of the amusement park would be utterly contrary to the best traditions of british life, which it is the aim of the Festival to present, and we are therefore resolutely opposed to it.'
Opinion in Parliament was also divided about the opening of the Pleasure Gardens on the Sabbath. For every objection about noise or disturbance (usually from people who lived far from the site) there was someone to say that their objection was akin to the old maid who opposed mixed bathing on the opposite side of the bay because she could see it from the roof of her house with the aid of a telescope. Those who supported the Sunday opening of the Festival, but not of the Pleasure Gardens, were accused of operating one law for the rich and another for the poor. George Thomas, future speaker of the House of Commons, was a leading opponent of it opening. He told the House about the sleazy types who hung around fairgrounds. Such places were, he said, 'not an innocent hurdy gurdy with the voices of healthy children'. In similar vein, Colonel Wigg, the member for Dudley, told the House: 'Funfairs do not always take an innocent form. I recall some years ago that in Blackpool an unfrocked clergyman exhibited himself in a barrel.' Although we were denied the fascinating details of what form this exhibition took, the very prospect of it was clearly enough to scare off the members. The proposal to allow Sunday opening of the Pleasure Gardens was rejected by a substantial majority.
There were even those who opposed the very idea of having a Funfair as part of the Festival. The Marquess of Reading spoke for the 'killjoy tendency' in the House of Lords, saying that he thought it struck a discordant note with the rest of the project:
'The mood of the country now is not a particularly light-hearted one, in which people feel frivolous or escapist, but rather it is serious and resolute. I find it difficult to understand why this Exhibition, otherwise a dignified representative parade of what this country has achieved, should be let down by this ill-timed attempt to provide an amusement park.'
He called for the whole idea to be dropped, but the Lord Chancellor did not go along with him. He thought that the logical extension of the Marquess's argument would be to close all theatres, cinemas and places of entertainment. To close down the amusements fair would be just what the Communists would want them to do and the Government therefore would not do it.
But what the Marquess could not do, it seemed for a while the construction workers on the site might achieve. To compound weeks of bad weather delaying construction, the electricians, closely followed by most of the remaining builders went on strike. They were demanding an extra 2d an hour'exhibition money' whatever that might be. The weather and the industrial action so delayed work that the Pleasure Gardens did not open until after the Whitsun holiday. A deputation of irate showmen descended on the hapless managing director of the Gardens, to tell him (no doubt in their best fairground bellows) what they thought of the situation.
The Festival was launched from the steps of St. Paul's Cathedral by the King. As part of the celebrations, he also opened the Royal Festival Hall with a concert of English music. The concert hall was described as being the London County Council's baby, this being a time when London was still important enough to have its own citywide local government. The rather less stately task of opening the Pleasure Gardens was given to Princess Margaret.
The public received the Festival enthusiastically. On the first day, a crowd just short of the capacity of 60,000 was achieved and advance bookings of school parties alone totalled between 300,000 and 400,000. But not all was sweetness and, more particularly, light. The Festival was blamed for power cuts elsewhere in the centre of London, despite all the external lights being switched off as a precaution in periods of peak power. The Russian Communists seized upon this aspect of the Festival for their coverage in Pravda, also broadcast on Russian radio:
'Along the South Bank in the evenings garlands of multi-coloured lights glitter and illuminate a gigantic cigar which is the main ornmament of the Festival. The site is also floodlit. But within a few hours, within various parts of London and in neighbouring cities, the power has to be cut... Lifts stop operating, rail traffic is disorganised and many factories have to stop work. Thus does relentless reality expose the attempts of the Labourite rulers to use the British Festival for concealing the country's unattractive situation today.'
There were also complaints abou the cost of food on sale there. A chicken sandwich cost between 2s 6d and 3s and a sit-doen tea 5s a head, while the set dinner menu was 7s 6d. The authorities responded to the complaints by blaming teething problems. Eventually, more cheap sandwiches were promised and afternoon tea was reduced from 5s to 3s.
But it was not just London that went Festival crazy. Festivals were breaking out like wildfire all over the country. A 16,000 aircraft carrier, the Festival of Britain ship Campania, with the 300ft x 70ft hangar below its flight deck converted into a miniature exhibition hall, was 'opened' in Southampton by Admiral Sir Arthur Power and set off on a tour of the nation's seaports. For those cities without a seaport, the Travelling Land Exhibition was opened by the Lord Privy Seal. A hundred lorries containing 5,000 exhibits were to make three week visits to Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, and Nottingham. The list of exhibits sounds like the work of some amibitious but seriously deranged kleptomaniac, including as it did a turbo jet engine, fishing flies, an old cricket bat, an electric bed warmer and a saling ship figurehead. It also featured a car of the future which 'gives the driver a better view yet seems by its contours to be pointing backwards'. Just to complete this extraordinary cocktail, three rubber figures in the foyer represented man in the stoner age, in the industrial age and in the electrical age.
When it opened in Machester, twenty-one searchlights illuminated the skies; there was a full-sized theatre and 40,000 feet of exhibition space divided into six sections: materials and skills; inventions, discovery and design; people at home; people at play; people at work and people travelling. A corridor of time held sixteen giant pendulums, each containing a lighted display of Britain's progress through the ages; there were fashion shows in the theatre; a dome with fluorescent mosaic ceiling; a model railway and puppet display for the children; the story of the jet engine and the Exhibition's own radio transmitting and receiving station. In short, there was something for everybody, provided you liked one of the above. On a smaller scale, it was reported that over 900 Festival programmes - most of them local authority-supported - had been drawn up around the country. There were carnivals, sports, displays and more historical pageants than you could shake a sword at; Festival parks, playing fields and old folks' housing were springing up on every side. Bermondsey offered a prize for the best-cultivated bomb site in the Borough, while the most impecunious (or unimaginative) parish council seemed to manage at least a bonfire.
For those of a less serious disposition, the Battersea funfair, more properly known as the Festival Pleasure Gardens, eventually opened to offer attractions such as the Big Dipper, the Dragon Ride and the Octopus. One especially favoured attraction was the Rotor, which pinned its customers to the wall, in definance of gravity, by centrifugal force. The safety of the rides was tested the night before they opened to the paying public by getting the local inner city children in to try them for free. These children were clearly not well nourished enough, since four women subsequently fell through the floor of the caterpillar ride, fortunately without serious injury to themselves or the caterpillar. A spoof forerunner of the Docklands Railway served the funfair, with a bizarre pseudo-Victorian engine called Daisy transporting people between the stations of Oystercreek and Far Tottering. It was designed by the cartoonist and fantastic engineer Roland Emett, and was said to show ' a characteristic air of dilapidation' - something which would have been all too familar to users of British Railways of the day. Signs warned the public that 'it is forbidden to tease the engine'...
People waited for five hours in queues up to a mile long to get into the funfair on the first day. When they did, they found two thousand workers still beavering away to get the gardens finished. What the public did not see was the 12ft python that had escaped from a snale-charmers's tent. It was fortunately tracked down, with the skills of another python, just before the public were admitted.
Of all the exhibits, only the Royal Festival Hall was intended as a permanent feature. By the end of its allotted time, eight million visitors had passed through the Festival's gates. The new Conservative Government, who had never been keen on it, left the site as a derelict car park for many years after its closure."