"NOW THAT THE WAR IS OVER, A SOCIAL HISTORY OF BRITAIN 1945-51" BY PAUL ADDISON (published by BBC and Cape, 1985) note: the names shown in bold are links to other pages on this web site.
Chapter 8 "Festival Times"
One by one different subjects have been explored in earlier chapters. Now is the time to look back over the road from 1945 to see how far the British have travelled, and where they were hoping to by 1951, when the Attlee government fell. One extraordinary event acts as a sign post along the way. On 2 May, 1951 in a speech from the steps's of St. Paul's Cathedral, King George VI inaugurated the Festival of Britain. Conceived as an official celebration of Britain's recovery from the war, the Festival ran for five months. Eight million people visited the main attractions in London, the South Bank Exhibition and the Festival Pleasure Gardens. Regional and travelling exhibitions spread the Festival spirit around the country, and every town and village was invited to arrange its own festivities. The Rank Organisation, joining in the fun, announced a Miss Festival of Britain competion, with a world tour for the lucky winner. A mixture of cultural high jinks and Butlin pleasures, the Festival had few solemn messages to impart. But whimisical constructions such as the Skylon or Rowland Emett's Far Tottering and Oystercreek Railway, did perhaps have something important to say: that the good, grey forties were over.
Two general elections took place on either side of the Festival. In February 1950 the Labour Party scraped home with its overall majority cut to a bare five seats. after an agonising second term punctuated by the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, the commitment of British troops to fight alongside the Americans, the launching of an enormous rearmament programme, and a crisis with Iran that almost led to another war in the summer of 1951, the government staggered into a general election in October 1951. This time the Conservatives, led by Churchill, were returned to power with an overall majority of seventeen.
The heroic phase of post-war history was over and social change moved on from questions of structure to questions of style. The market set the pace as new styles of consumption emerged with new status distinctions to accompany them. And here we come to the significance of the Festival of Britain. But in the main it was a visual romp, a revolt - to borrow George Melly's phrase about pop culture - into style.
The pretext for the Festival of Britain was the centenary of the Great Exhibition of 1851. At first the idea was to hold another great international trade exhibition, to be sponsored by Cripps and the Board of Trade with the accent on exports. As in 1851, Britain would show itself off as the workshop of the world. But owing to the heavy cost of staging an international exhibition the government decided that a purely British trade fair would be preferable. In 1947 Cripps passed the project on to the Lord President of the Council, Herbert Morrison, who had the bright idea to celebrate the recovery of Britain from the war. With the aid of Max Nicholson, a temporary civil servant of unconventional opinions, Morrison conceived the Festival as an exercise in cultural partiotism accompanied by bread and circuses. In its more earnest aspects the Festival was intended to commemorate the contributions of the British to the arts of peace. But probably the overiding purpose, in Morrison's opinion, was to give the people a splash of colour and pleasure as a relief from austerity. As Max Nicholson explains: "It had to be a British affair and therefore it had to be rather concentrated on the arts and sciences. And above all, 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 I think among all the 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."
Morrison no doubt had an eye on the electoral implications of the Festival, though no one could have anticipated in 1947 that there was likely to be a general election in 1951. But the Festival was carefully staged as a truly national event, with royal patronage and a Festival Council representing all parties and a galaxy of famous names from the arts including T.S. Eliot, John Gielgud, and Malcolm Sargeant. 'Pug' Ismay, who had been Churchill's representative on the Chiefs of Staff Commitee during the war, was prevailed upon to serve as chairman of the Festival Council. This artful appointment had the effect of preventing Churchill, who was known to be hostile, from coming out openly against the Festival.
The Festival Council served as a front. Effective planning was in the hands of a number of interlocking councils and commitees which included the Arts Council, the Council for Industrial Design, and a specially constituted Council of Architecture of which Hugh Casson was director. At the apex of the Festival organisation was the director-general, Gerald Barry.
All told, the Festival of Britain was an affair of immense ramifications. A book would be needed to explain the full proceedings. There was no master plan, and the Festival in its final form was the upshot of chance and hectic improvisation. It (the South Bank Exhibition) might have been held at Olympia or Earls's Court but for the fact that both exhibition halls were already booked for the summer of 1951. It might have been held in standardised sheds in Battersea if the government had not rejected the idea. By a supreme stroke of good fortune the chance arose of siting the main exhibition on the South Bank of the Thames between County Hall and Waterloo Bridge.
By exhibition standards the space available - twenty-seven acres - was tiny, and bisected by the railway bridge in Charing Cross. But it was an open space by the river, enabling Casson and his fellow architects to lay it out as a miniature wonderland. Here on the South Bank a long series of pavilions and displays unfolded the story of the land and people of Britain, and the role of the British in exploration and discovery. The Skylon, a slim, silvery pencil of aluminium and steel, hung in mid-air, or so it appeared from a distance. The Dome of Discovery, the largest dome ever constructed, was perched on slender stilts. Two and a half miles upstream in Battersea, a host of amusements was laid on in the Festival Pleasure Gardens. There visitors could enjoy the firework displays, the Emett railway, the Mississippi Showboat, or a large circular dance-hall held up by the largest tent pole ever erected.
In a famous essay on the Festival, written in 1963, Michael Frayn argued that it expressed the values of the radical middle classes who planned it:
"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."
Sir Hugh Casson does not demur:
"Gerald Barry was our leader. I suppose you would call him a wet now, he was a Hampstead intellctual, he'd been editor of a left-wing paper, he had liberal views. The whole smell of the place was rather like the Workers Education Association. We all had, I suppose in a way, rather naive views that England could be better and was going to be better - that the arts and architecture and music and healthy air and Jaeger underwear and all those things, which the garden city movement stood for, were in fact the keys to some sort of vague Utopia."
The narrative of the land and the people, devised by Ian Cox, the Director of Science, to link all the exhibits in the twenty-seven pavilions on the site, was laboriously educational. Visitors were advised to folllow a plan with a dotted red line taking them all the way from the Land of Britain ("How the natural wealth of the British Isles came into being") to Design Review ("A novel display, with information of 25,000 photographs illustrating the wide range of British manufacturers") . Twenty-five thousand photographs to see in the twenty-seventh pavilion? With information service? Might this not be the psychological moment at which to dash off and see Oscar the Rubber Octopus in his tank at the Pleasure Gardens?
That was one side of the Festival. In some ways it was another paternalistic exercise in educating the masses and elevating their taste - yet this shaded easily into advance propaganda for a colour supplement way of life. The architects and designers on the South Bank were propagandising modern styles. The piazzas, terraces, murals and modern sculptures, the chairs with spindly legs and the spidery staircases rising into the air with no visible means of support, were intended as examples for the rest of Britain to imitate.
In so far as the South Bank itself had a serious message to convey about the state of the nation, it was best expressed by Humphrey Jennings in his very last documentary film "Family Portrait". A lyrical celebration of Britain, past and present, and steeped in historical romanticism, it is a beautifully made film. The sincerity of the enterprise is impossible to doubt. But viewed in the 1980's it comes as a shock. The tone is one of overwhelming complacency. The celebration of British literary, scientific and industrial triumphs is a cultural equivalent of 'Land of Hope and Glory'. The cosy presentation of British society as a family divided, not by class, but by a rift between the imaginative and practical sides of the national character is really sentimental guff. Jennings' film may be taken as a measure of the sublime sense of insular content reflected in various corners of the Festival. In a whimsical fashion the Festival celebrated tradition as much as change. Though John Betjeman had no part in the Festival, a Betjemanesque affection for Victoriana was evident in the Emett railway, or the section of the South Bank devoted to the English seaside holiday. The middle-class radicalism identified by Frayn was losing its cutting edge.
Not that it mattered to the eight million people who visited the South Bank and the Pleasure Gardens. (Or did four million people go twice?) Statistics are often a conundrum. Whatever the intentions of the Festival organisers, the Festival worked because, as Morrison had intended, it was great fun. There was open-air dancing every night in the summer on the Fairway of the South Bank. When autumn came, couples danced in their overcoats. The attraction was not the opportunity to dance - for there were plenty of dance-halls but the environment. Among the grime and ruins of London, the South Bank was an enclave of colour and light, full of attractive novelties. "It was a gigantic toyshop", said the journalist Patrick O'Donovan "for adults."
On 29 September 1951 the Festival came to an end. That evening, Geraldo and his orchestra played on the Fairway, Richard Murdoch and Kenneth Horne supplied the jokes, and Gracie Fields topped the bill- demanding, it was noted, payment in dollars. 'Auld Land Syne' and the National Anthem were sung and the crowds melted away, leaving the site deserted. It had never been intended that the exhibition structures should be permanent, but arrangements might have been made to preserve the Skylon or the Dome by moving them elsewhere. When, however the Conservatives were returned to office, they were keen to remove a monument to the previous administration. Apart from the Festival Hall, which had been planned from the start as permanent, everything was knocked down.
Sir David Eccles, the Minister of Works, took pleasure in exercising his responsibilities for the demolition. Yet while the Festival may be seen as the last expression of the spirit of 1945, it was more significant in foreshadowing the future. The Festival helped to popularise a new style of living. The television pavilion, or the Homes and Gardens exhibition, the piazzas and brightly decorated restaurants, the accent on youth and fashion after the gerontacy of the Attlee government, foretold the consumer boom of the later 1950's. "Work or want" would no longer be the slogan. "Let's be frank about it", Harold Macmillan was to say in July 1957, " most of our people have never had it so good."
POSTSCRIPT ON THE EXHIBITION OF ARCHITECTURE
The blueprints were still on the drawing board when, in 1948, the LCC was invited to contribute an 'Exhibition of Live Architecture' to the forthcoming Festival of Britain. The LCC decided that part of one of the Poplar neighbourhoods should be completed in time for the festival and displayed to the public as a demonstration of the potential of planning. The choice fell on Neighbourhood Nine- which had yet to receive its name of Lansbury in honour of the pioneer East End socialist, George Lansbury. An area of thirty acres, comprising about a quarter of the neighbourhood, was marked out as the Lansbury estate and construction rushed forward to meet the Festival deadline. By the time the festival opened in May, 1951 Lansbury was just about ready, with residents installed and shops open.