"CIDER WITH LAURIE: Laurie Lee Remembered " by Barbara Hooper (£18.95 illustrated)
(This book was published in 1999 by "Peter Owen Publishers", London & Chester Springs: admin@peterowen.u-net.com )
An extract from Chapter 12 'Anni Mirabili: The 1950's', reproduced with the kind permission of the publishers.
"In the years leading up to 1951 Laurie's major preoccupation was the Festival of Britain. This was an echo of the Great Exhibition of 1851, devised to celebrate Britain's post-war recovery and to present her contemporary image to the world. Although junketings of all kinds, from building village bus shelters to historic pageants, took place all over the country, the main focus was London. Here the chief project was a tourist-orientated development on the south bank of the Thames near Waterloo Station, laid waste by the war. Some visitors applauded the more fantastic aspects of the scheme, although others attacked it for its mundaneness. The South Bank centre, as it became known, attracted as much criticism as praise, especially for the drab uniformity of its architecture. But visitors in their millions flocked to see it.
As a former staff member of the Ministry of Information Laurie was appointed the festival's Curator of Eccentricities and Caption-Writer-in-Chief - surely one of the most unorthodox government job descriptions ever invented. He was a Higher Executive Officer (a Civil Service ranking) at an annual salary rising from £715 to £865.
The post was to last for three years (planning had started in 1948). It entailed collecting inventors' oddities for an exhibit called Eccentrics' Corner and devising captions for some of the fantasy features under construction on the South Bank. Laurie looked to be an ideal incumbent, with his taste for jokes and his writing skills: 'Don't tease the locomotives - penalty forty shillings' or 'Storks nesting over the Birdcage Restaurant'.
A copy of "Punch" magazine from 30 April 1951 satirized the Festival of Britain in then-and-now cartoons.One showed a village that might almost be Slad, contrasting bucolic rural life in 1851 with orderly existence in 1951. A messy, cheerful farmyard had become the clinically tidy site for a library, with neat and docile bus queue next door. The satire would have appealed to Laurie.
Milldly teasing humour was his forte. He revelled in the Emmet railway in Battersea Pleasure Gardens (an adjunct of the festival site), carrying children between Far Tottering Station and Oystercreek. These whimsies were based on sketches by the "Punch" cartoonist Emmet, who also invented the White Knight wire figure to stand in the Lion and the Unicorn Pavilion, a setpiece on the South Bank. Lewis Carroll's White Knight epitomised the imagination of all great British eccentrics. The pavilion was planned to illustrate the 'paradoxical qualities that go to make up the Briton.'
The eminent architect Misha Black recalled that trying to tell the story of Britain in the pavilion, in a continuous narrative, was like cramming a gallon of exhibits into a pint pot of buildings. He doubted whether visitors took in more than a fraction of what was displayed. He noted that tens of thousands of words by Laurie, the official caption writer, and Lionel Birch, the caption editor, went into the explanatory script. The words were carefully and often brilliantly written, yet 'only a fraction of this verbosity was read.'
An official festival photo shows Laurie looking rather serious, wearing a check jacket, smoking a pipe and leaning against a table cluttered with oddities. A typed caption on the back reads: 'Laurie Lee, the Festival Caption-Writer, with some of the eccentricities (smoke-grinding machine, egg roundabout, etc.) he has been collecting for exhibition in the Eccentrics' Corner of the South Bank Exhibition, 12 April 1951.' (see below)
In 1976 a record of the festival, "A Tonic to the Nation", appeared in book form. In it Charles Plouviez, who had worked in the festival office, contributed a delightful pen-portrait of his colleague Laurie, who had been 'swept' into the Eccentrics' Corner of the Lion and the Unicorn Pavilion when his captions were finished. "His office up the corridor had become a small museum of oddities, and he was forever showing off his latest finds. He sauntered into my office one day with a violin and mandolin made from matchsticks, and together with Jim Holland, one of the chief designers, gave a spirited performance of a Telemann concerto."
A London art critic, G.S. Whittet, also remembered Laurie at the Festival of Britain Press Office: "a jolly interlude when the small room rang to the twanging guitar and rubicund voice of Laurie Lee in what seems at a distance to have been a rumty-tumty Gloucestershire calypso. Maybe "Cider with Rosie" would have made a good musical. It struck a note of the spirit of gaiety that pervaded everything."
Another leading poet, Roy Fuller, observed with surprise how many of his festival jobs- among them Laurie, whose "fantastic cast of mind was translated into curious actualities in the Lion and Unicorn feature."
Christopher Barry, son of the festival's Director General, Gerald Barry, recalled touring the South Bank site with his father, previously editor of the "News Chronicle." "My recollections begin with a visit to the construction site. I particularly recall entering the shadowy half-finished Dome of Discovery and our feeling of excitement as we mounted the concrete ramp. Laurie was Chief Caption Writer under Lionel Birch, and I know how important my father - as a newspaper editor - regarded good captions to be. He very much enjoyed Laurie's Eccentricities exhibit."
Crowds flocked to festival events in London, and every town and village rose to the occasion with some event to mark 1951 as a renewal year in national history. Laurie's own county of Gloucestershire had a festival village singled out to represent new rural housing. This was Stanton, near Broadway, commended to tourists for a row of council houses built in honey-yellow Cotswold stone. Other Cotswold villages planted a tree or put a seat on the village green. The novelist John Moore made Bredon, not far from Slad, the setting for "Dance and Skylark", a light-hearted skit on festival-mania.
For six months the country celebrated. A converted aircraft carrier, the "Campania", carried a floating 'festival' round the ports of Britain. A fleet of a hundred lorries transported a similar land-based 'carnival'.In May the festival had sprung to life with a grand service at St. Paul's Cathedral, and in September it ended with fireworks and brass bands on the South Bank.
When it was all over the South Bank fixtures and fittings were sold off at a public auction. There was a scramble for souvenirs. The event was reviewed with mixed emotions as a semi-successful display of pride and fun after the grim wartime and austere post-war years. Honours were handed out to those who had helped to put it all together. Knighthoods went to Gerald Barry and to Hugh Casson, the Chief Architect. Four people were created Companions of the British Empire, eight were awarded Orders of the British Empire, and ten were made Members of the British Empire. Among the ten was listed 'L.E.A. Lee, Exhibitions Department.'
The boy from Gloucestershire was now Laurie Lee, MBE, with a place in the ranks of the establishment, and he went to Buckingham Palace to be presented with his medal by King George VI."
(copyright Barbara Hooper 1999)