AN EXTRACT FROM PETER HENNESSY'S "NEVER AGAIN: BRITAIN 1945 -1951" (JONATHAN CAPE, 1992)
CHAPTER 11: MID-CENTURY BRITAIN
Peter Hennessy also refers to the 'Festival of Britain' when he really means the South Bank Exhibition in London.
"The Festival of Britain, shimmering away on its South Bank site where a mountain of blitz-blown rubble had lain but a few years before, reflected it too - the conscious celebration of a settled, successful society, vindicated in twentieth-century war with its eye (in imitation of the Great Exhibition of 1851) on the technologies and markets of the century to come. 'There', between Waterloo Bridge and the LCC Headquarters in County Hall, 'the story of Britain 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.'
It was Herbert Morrison's show. He picked up the idea and ran with it, selling it to the Cabinet on the grounds that 'we ought to do something jolly...we need to give Britain a lift.' As opening day approached he put Mossadegh, Europe, the cares of the Foreign Secretaryship on one side and enjoyed himself. Eden rebuked him for it, as did the "Daily Telegragh", but Morrison didn't care. He sat in his box at the shiny, new Festival Hall (the occassion's lasting monument) at the opening concert, surrounded by members of the Royal Family, as the massed choirs belted out 'Land of Hope and Glory'.
The wags, as well as the Conservative Press, had a field day however. The Skylon, a kind of 'luminous exclamation mark' which towered over the site, was likened to the parlous state of the balance of payments-hit British economy ('no visible means of support'). The Beaverbrook Press attacked the whole idea as a socialist extravagance, 'Morrison's Folly', an absurd waste of £11 million of public money. Noel Coward sent it up in the lyric Revue of 1951 with his 'Don't Make Fun of the Fair':
"Take a nip from your brandy flask,
Scream and caper and shout,
Don't give anyone time to ask
What the Hell it's about."
Its brilliant display of the latest in British architecture and design (Gerald Barry and Hugh Casson turned out to be patrons of flair) caused the Festival to be described as 'all Heal let loose'.
Too much symbolism has been loaded retrospectively on to 'Morrison's Monument'. Christopher Booker is stretching too far in dumping responsibility for the environmental and planning failures, symbolised by the hated tower blocks (which were a feature of Macmillan's Britain and after, not Attlee's), on to the Festival and its creators. As Arthur Marwick put it:
Charles Plouviez has written of the Festival that : "It might be said to mark the beginning of our 'English disease' - the moment at which we stopped trying to lead the world as an industrial power, and started being the world's entertainers, coaxing tourists to laugh at our eccentricities, marvel at our traditions and wallow in our nostalgia." This is a wild judgement which ignores both the genuine and justified pride in real achievements made by 1951, and the preliminary indications of the transformations which were to come to full flood in the 60s."
Marwick had in mind the cultural transformation which did not burst through for another decade, until British tastes, life styles and social attitudes finally sloughed off the Thirties and Forties straightjackets in which they largely imprisoned when the crowds, confounding the critics, swarmed to the South Bank between May and September 1951. What the Festival did throw into sharp relief, however, was a long-standing divide in British society (which has done much to condition twentieth-century politics too) between what Michael Frayn, in a celebrated passage, called 'the Herbivores' and the 'Carnivores'. "With the exception of Herbert Morrison," Frayn wrote a dozen years after the labourers of the Ministry of Works had moved in and cleared the site (London's first skyscaper, the Shell Building, stands on the spot),
"there was almost no-one of working-class background concerned in planning the Festival, and nothing about the results to suggest that the working-classes were anything more than lovably human but essentially inert objects of benevolent administration.
In fact, Festival Britain was the Britain of the 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 Herbivores, or gentle ruminants, who look out from the lush 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. And in making the Festival they earned the contempt of the Carnivores - the readers of the "Daily Express", the Evelyn Waughs; the cast of the Directory of Directors - the members of the upper and middle-classes who believe if God had not wished them to prey on all smaller and weaker animals without scruple he would not have made them as they are."
Frayn saw the Festival as a kind of elegy for Mr. Attlee's Britain. Just over a month after the closing ceremony (with Geraldo and his Orchestra, Gracie Fields at the microphone, Kenneth Horne and Richard Murdoch cracking the jokes), the Labour Government fell and with it, in Frayn's depiction, the decade "sanctioned by the exigencies of the war and its aftermath" in which "the Herbovores had dominated the scene. By 1951 the regime which supported them was exhausted, and the Carnivores were ready to take over. The Festival was the last, and virtually the posthumous, work of the Herbivore Britain of the BBC News, the Crown Film Unit, the sweet ration, the Ealing comedies, Uncle Mac, Sylvia Peters...all the great fixed stars by which my childhood was navigated."
...the Festival of Britain has an altogether deeper and more alarming significance. For like its precursor in the glass palaces shining in Hyde Park in 1851, it was as much the creation of nervousness as of confidence. Hadn't Prince Albert intended the Great Exhibition to be a warning to British manufacturers not to rest on their laurels? Wasn't a certain Alfred Krupp of Essen the man whose material caused heads to turn (especially those interested in weaponry need to sustain great powerdom) at this celebration of British manufacturing prowess? What would the more thoughtful visitor to the Festival have made of Churchill's 1930 judgment as he or she gazed at the big steam locomotive made in Britain for export to India or looked at '25,000 photographs illustrating the wide range of British manufacturers' in the Design Review Pavilion? Would they have noticed, in Paul Addison's words, that: "In a whimisical fashion the Festival celebrated tradition as much as change.."
a humourous postscript!
Celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the first "Goon Show" in that same paper, Dave Gelly, exagerating but not too outrageously, put the event on a par with the Festival of Britain, declaring "There is a case for claiming that the Fifties actually began in May 1951, with the opening of the Festival of Britain and the start of the "Goon Show." The Festival laid out the future pattern for architecture, town planning and design, while the Goons set about reducing to rubble the redundant ediface of British Imperial smugness,"..