Juliet Gardiner on the Festival of Britain from "From The Bomb To The Beatles" (Collins & Brown, pub. 1999)
My slight adjustments to the text are shown in italics; this comes from Section 2 called "The Atomic Age" pages 48 to 59.
'The Festival (of Britain) is nation-wide. All through the summer, and all through the land, its spirit will be finding expression in a variety of British sights and a great range of British sounds. Taken together, these will add up to one united act of national reassessment and one corporate reaffirmation in the nation's future," explained one of the official guide books to the Festival, and went on to explain just how it had all come about. "It was in 1947 that His Majesty's Government decided that there should be displays to mark the centenary of the Great Exhibition of 1851, in the Arts, Architecture, Science, Technology and Industrial Design; so that this country and the world could pause to review British contributions to world civilization in the arts of peace."
The Festival might have been worthy in its intent, but it was nothing like as dull as the guide made it sound. Harold Nicholson went on the first day (to the South Bank Exhibition) with his wife, Vita Sackville-West, and the couple were "entranced from the first moment. It is rather a nuisance that we keep on running into the King and Queen , but nevertheless we enjoy it uproariously. It is the most intelligent exhibition that I have ever visited. I have never seen people so cheered up or amused, in spite of a fine drizzle of rain."
The writer and playwright Michael Frayn saw its real importance: "The Festival was a rainbow - a brilliant sign riding the tail of the storm and promising fairer weather. It marked the end of the hungry 'forties, and the beginning of an altogether easier decade."
The Great Exhibition Centenary Committee had begun its work in 1947: it was the responsibility of Herbert Morrison, Lord President of The Council (who, incidentally, was the maternal grandfather of the inspiration of Britain's millennium festivities, Peter Mandelson), and its Director General was Gerald Barry, who, as editor of the "News Chronicle", had been lobbying for such an event since VJ Day. It would be 'a tonic to the nation', Barry urged, and no one could deny this was needed. A number of interlocking committees were set up to bring this national 'bread and circuses' affair to fruition. Although, as it was "a British affair, it had to be more concentrated on arts and sciences..because Herbert Morrison was in it, he wanted the British people to have fun. He wanted it to be a fun thing,which made it unique..among all great exhibitions. He wanted the people to participate in it, he didn't want it to be a "them and us affair". He wanted the teaching side of it, which was about science and so on, to be played down, and a great deal of jam spread over the pill".
There never was an overall blueprint and for a long time the site was uncertain: Olympia and Earls Court were already booked; a huge field at Isleworth was considered, but rejected on the grounds of cost; the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum and other South Kensington museums were reluctant to shut their museums again for two or three years, since it was not so long ago that they had reopened; a proposal for 'recoverable standard shedding' in Battersea Park was thankfully dropped - and finally in 1948 twenty-seven acres of marshy, derelict, willow herb-filled bomb-site on the south bank of the Thames adjacent to Waterloo station and dissected by the railway bridge to Charing Cross, was chosen.
Though Barry intended the Festival to be awash with 'fun, fantasy and colour', it was never intended to be what anyone might consider to be vulgar. As Michael Frayn diagnosed, "It was scarcely the British of the working-classes back that was being feted. Apart from Herbert Morrison, there was almost no one of working-class background concerned in planning the Festival, and nothing about the result to suggest that the working-classes were anything more than the 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 "New 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."
Furthermore, the Director was astute: "One mistake we should not make, we should not fall into the error of supposing we were going to produce anything conclusive. In this sceptical age, the glorious assurance of the mid-Victorians would find no echo." So, meeting "on hilltops, in gardens, round a log-fire, wherever half a dozen people could foregather and talk...clambering among rubble and cement mixers, amid the uproar of cranes and pile drivers, in over-heated carriages and under-heated motor cars, tearing around the English landscape...in mayoral parlours, on fog-bound airfields, in lecture halls, youth centres, and standing on street corners waiting for a bus," the planners planned it. It was an impressive line-up of talent that heralded the renaissance of British architecture and design and confirmed the State's patronage of the arts. Some fifty architects and over one hundred designers were drafted away from the job of reconstruction, rehabilitation, and Utility production to construct something new and modern and amazing for the delectation of Festival-goers.
The team of architects and designers, led by Hugh Casson and Misha Black, designed a series of pavilions to house exhibits that narrated the story of 'the land and the people of Britain'. They were linked by piazzas where visitors could get - if not a pizza - at least a cup of tea and a plate of chips and peas. Influenced by Le Corbusier in his earlier period, the young architects and designers had a manifesto for modernism - and a penchant for neo-brutalist concrete. There was an aesthetic for every detail, from the litter bins, sign posts and cutlery to the ducks selected for the ornamental lake.
The sculptor Michael Ayrton fashioned an exegesis of 'The Elements of the Source of Power'; painter Felix Topalski executed a 'Cavalcade of Commonwealth' on a railway arch; Lynn Chadwick created a hanging mobile, Eduardo Paolozzi designed a fountain and Reg Butler a spiky wrought-iron birdcage; Jacob Epstein sculpted a gilded bronze 'Youth Advances' to stand outside the Homes and Gardens Pavilion; Victor Passmore tiled a swirling 'jazz' mural in ceramic, which 'exploded' on the side of the Regatta Restaurant. The door handles in this Restaurant were "bronze hands modelled by Mitzi Cunliffe, which (her fellow sculptor) Barbara Hepworth refused to touch as she associated them with amputation." Henry Moore produced a bronze 'Reclining Figure' and Barbara Hepworth herself both an abstract sculpture and two monumental limestone figures called 'Contrapuntal Forms', which stood atop a podium outside the Dome of Discovery, a giant umbrella structure designed by Ralph Tubbs, which housed a microcosm of the whole world - including 'outer space'.
Then there was the Skylon - a poet's name for 'a vertical feature, a symbol of triumph and gaiety piercing the sky'. It was a giant, aluminium exclamation mark, the prize-winning design of the young architects Moya and Powell, which seemed to hover in the sky without visible means of support - "just like Britain", the wags said. (In fact the caption to a "Punch" cartoon!)
"The South Bank contains a new sort of narrative about Britain, an Exhibition designed to tell a story mainly through the medium, not of words, but of tangible things." Upstream from Hungerford Bridge, the pavilions told "the story of the Land of Britain and of things that the British have derived from their land...downstream from Hungerford Bridge (the circuit of pavilions) relates the story of the People of Britain in the context of their more domestic life and leisure." However, the pavilions were "placed in a certain deliberate sequence on the ground...and within each Pavilion, the displays are arranged in a certain order," explained the guide book. But in keeping with the spirit of the new age, it allowed that "this is a free country and any visitors who, from habit or inclination, feel impelled to start with the last chapter of the narrative (expressed in the pavilions or the guide books) and then zigzag their way backwards...will be as welcome as anyone else. But such visitors may find that some of the chapters will appear mystifying and inconsequent."
The upstream pavilions were bound to be somewhat museum educational in character with excursions around "the rich and varied wild life that inhabits these islands" and demonstrations of "how the British have drawn on their natural resources to produce raw materials for industry." But these pavilions gave the goods-starved visitors dreams to die for. There were to be "no stunts, but real goods to go into real shops and so be available for real people", decreed the director of the Council for Industrial Design, which oversaw all the designs, as his colleagues scoured the country for well-designed furniture, fabrics, pottery, glass and domestic appliances. In total, 10,000 objects were displayed representing the work of 3,500 firms.
But it was not all didacticism. The intention was that the Festival should be a 'people's show' - and that meant fun for everyone. In addition to the pavilions there were bamboo vistas and arcades, elaborate tea pavilions, which owed a lot to the artist John Piper and the cartoonist Osbert Lancaster; there was an art competition for which prominent contemporary artists were provided with a large canvas and simply told to get on with it : Lucien Freud was a winner with his 'Interior near Paddington', but neither Michael Ayrton nor John Minton was placed, and Francis bacon did not even enter; there was the 'Lion and Unicorn Pavilion' dedicated to the odd and whimsical, for which the poet Laurie Lee was hired to write the captions. The Lion and the Unicorn, which were modelled in straw like corn dollies, bore the legend: "we are...twin symbols of the Briton's character. As a Lion I give him solidarity and strength. With the Unicorn (which was engaged in a complicated device that let doves out of "a colossal rattan birdcage") he lets himself go.
Upstream from the (South Bank) exhibition, in Battersea Park was a recreation of the eighteenth-century pleasure gardens of Vauxhall, Cremorne and Ranelagh (its creation had involved cutting down a number of trees in the park 'late at night, having all the machinery there to cut the trees into logs and remove them by morning' and disguising the stumps with pots of geraniums.) Young women dressed like Nell Gwyn offered oranges, cajoling 'come, gentle people, buy', and "acrobats and aerial artists will give free performances at intervals throughout the day...the extensive floor of the Dance Pavilion (where people often danced in the rain and the autumn chill wearing overcoats and trilby hats) provides short sessions throughout the day...in the six-acre Amusement Park beside the Big Dipper and the Rotor, the ride that defies gravity...there is a Tree-top walk leading through the branches to a platform which gives a fine view of the gardens...there is a Clock Tower with working models which perform as each quarter strikes (the Guinness Festival Clock?). There is a grotto in the form of four caves which represent the elements of Wind, Fire, Earth and Water. Rowland Emett has designed a complete railway in miniature 500 yards long (called the Far Tottering and Oystercreek Railway), with all his characteristic fantasy...in the evenings the gardens will be transformed by the most spectacular and unusual displays and there will be nightly displays of fireworks."
There had been the usual calls for the postponement or cancellation of the Festival: the Beaverbrook papers, the "Daily Express" and the "Evening Standard", began calling it "Morrison's Folly" and inviting their readers to send in postcards why they thought the Festival should be called off (few did). An architect pronounced the South bank site was too small and predicted thousands would fall into the Thames in the crush. But, just like Prince Albert, a hundred years earlier, the organizers ignored the jeremiads and the Festival was 95 per cent ready on time, despite the unpropitious circumstances of its post-war construction. It had cost £8 million, which by any reckoning was pretty cut-price. King George VI opened it from the steps of St. Paul's on 3 May 1951 (it had been suggested that the royal couple should perform the ceremony on Tower Hill and travel to the South Bank in the Royal Barge, but the King declined, saying that the Tower had far too many bloody associations for the royal line, and anyway the barge leaked). "The Times" reported "People in Joyous Mood" and the next day, in pouring rain, the gates were opened to let in first of what would be eight million visitors. The Festival closed at the end of September: Gracie Fields - who insisted on being paid in dollars - was the star attraction, but as the crowds belted out 'Auld Lang Syne' and then stood for the National Anthem, as the Festival Flag was lowered, their King, who had opened the Festival, was in the early stages of dying just a mile or so across the river.
The Labour Party, under whose rather remote auspices the Festival had been planned and held, was out of office the month after it closed, and there was an unseemly political rush to clear away the evidence of its success. "I am unwilling", declared the new Minister of Works, David Eccles to become the caretaker of empty and deteriorating structures." The Festival Hall, a long-awaited London concert hall with its 'contemporary' interior of wood-clad walls, projecting boxes for the audience, decorative screens, superb acoustics and laminated plywood chairs, was the only permanent structure. Apart from that a cafe and a couple of other structures were the only constructions allowed to remain.
The Marquis of Bath had been fairly interested in taking the Skylon for Longleat, and there was the inevitable offer of a million dollars from the US if that and the Dome of Discovery were shipped across the Atlantic. In the end the site was saved for car parks and one of the least distinguished office blocks in the capital, before it began to fill with other artistic housings a couple of decades later, while the Skylon was chopped up and turned into ashtrays.
But the Festival was more than the sum of the London sites: there was also a Land Travelling Exhibition, which toured the country 'with a fleet of lorries' and a 'Festival Ship', Campania. It told "the same story as the South Bank but in miniature" when it docked at coastal towns from May to October and all over the country "Festival Events were arranged ...in spontaneous expressions of citizenship", from ubiquitous displays of historical pageantry to basketball in Colchester and madrigals on the river at Cambridge; and the parish council of a Kent village dug up the turf of the Kentish Downs among the Nissen huts, bomb craters and a wartime airstrip into the shape of Abram Games' Festival symbol - simplified a bit of course.
Just as 'new' had become a hopeful catchword at the end of the 1940's, so 'Festival' came to encompass more than just a collection of exhibition sites. It was, as one of the official guides said, "the occasion for a national spring-cleaning, for repointing and repainting the Town Hall, gilding the church clock, for planting window boxes, flower baskets and temporary gardens, for painting the street lamps, decorating the streets and floodlit buildings." At the same time, "rural and urban district councils have planned more ambitious schemes...like a new sewerage system or changing the street lights from gas to electricity..Houses, cottages and clubs have been built for old age pensioners. Playing fields and sports clubs have been made or improved...There are places where 1951 will see the foundation stone of the new Town Hall or where a new park will be opened for the first time...In some places, a village hall has been built and in others, where money has yet to be found, the events arranged by the local Festival may open the account". And, in a note to warm the heart of the 'ruminants', the guide book proclaimed, "this is an appropriate moment to offer a report on local progress in housing, schools or public health and there could be no better year for beginning new enterprises in various fields of local government. Many public buildings, roads, parks, recreation grounds will bear the figure '1951' as a witness of the inspiration which this Festival will have given to projects already in progress. Some corporations have planned to hold 'Open House' for those interested in local government and others have arranged exhibitions showing the history of public administration in their community."
It was, as the guide said, "an act of national autobiography, cities and towns throughout the country are presenting their own account of themselves."