Beacon for Change

How the 1951 Festival of Britain Shaped the Modern Age

Barry Turner

• Publisher: Aurum
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781845137212
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

As the 2012 Olympics sets about re-making a whole swathe of east London, Barry Turner’s book marks the 60th anniversary of the Festival of Britain, which did the same for London’s South Bank after the war. Where the stupendous, Pharaonic construction site of the 2012 Olympics and its £9 bn budget is all in aid of a few weeks of running and cycle races, 60 years ago there was a far more ambitious cultural event. Centred on London’s South Bank, which was cleared of its industry and Victorian architecture, the Festival of Britain sought not only to celebrate the best of Britishness but also to set new standards and paradigms for modern design, aesthetics and architecture. With satellite festivals all over Britain, it attracted 8 ½ million visitors in a year (the Millennium Dome managed only 5 ½ million). The Royal Festival Hall was built, as well as the Dome of Discovery (then the largest unsupported roof in the world), and the long-lamented, Skylon (a futuristic aluminium pylon). The Scandinavian design we now take for granted with IKEA’s furniture was a big influence in the Festival buildings’ architecture. As well as nostalgic appeal its story constitutes a kind of sequel to David Kynaston’s Austerity Britain, as the Festival gave the British people permission to enjoy themselves and look forward at last to a future of modernity and prosperity.

CHAPTER ONE

The Festival of Britain was foremost a family outing. Some came for the spectacle of futuristic designs and bright colours, others to see modern technology in action, still others to experience a cultural reawakening after years of drab uniformity. But on one point everyone who paid their five shillings admission (four shillings from mid-afternoon) was agreed; they were there to enjoy themselves. Herbert Morrison, speaking for the government, wanted ‘to hear the people sing’ while Gerald Barry, the Festival impresario, said that what he was offering was a ‘tonic to the nation’.

The notion of having fun was distinctly novel in post-war Britain. Leftward-leaning historians who spend too long in the archives get hooked on the thrills of a social revolution, the creation of a welfare state by the first Labour government to command an absolute majority at Westminster. The Beveridge Report with its promise to combat the five great evils – want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness – caught the spirit of the time. But for the typical family, it was jam tomorrow, or maybe some day far off. Meanwhile, the daily routine was making do on very little, a routine that had a long tailback, with the war giving a further twist to the spiral of material decline that had started with the depression and mass unemployment of the 1930s.

Everything that mattered was in short supply. Butter, meat, tea and coal were all rationed and when, in 1949, restrictions were lifted on the sale of sweets and chocolates, the rush on the shops was so great the concession had to be withdrawn. Twenty million Britons lived in homes without baths and hot water while nearly a fifth of London’s homes were officially classed as slums. In the borough of Fulham alone, not otherwise designated as deprived, single-room accommodation was the lot of 7,000 families. Then to cap it all, came the winter of 1946–7, the harshest on record – the longest period without sun, the fiercest snowstorms, the lowest temperatures. Snowdrifts up to ten feet or more were whipped up by gale force winds. Cars, trucks and even trains disappeared under a white shroud, sometimes for days on end.

While the government could not be blamed for the weather, it did come under attack for failing to meet the demand for coal, then the main source of domestic heating and industrial energy. The assumption that the miners would rescue the country from its meteorological crisis was based on the optimism engendered by nationalisation. Taking the mines into public ownership (along with the railways, waterways, gas, electricity, the airways, the Bank of England and iron and steel) was supposed to usher in a new age of labour relations with management and workers in happy harmony. The reality was no change. Union leaders wanted better pay and conditions for their members, and they wanted it now while their bargaining position was strong. When the government refused to give way (many other special cases were in line waiting to see how the miners would fare), there was no alternative to cutting energy supplies.

The package of restrictions introduced was draconian. Even the most pessimistic commentators had not anticipated the complete suspension of household electricity supplies for three hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon. Television was closed down and the Third Programme, the cultural channel of BBC Radio, went off the air. All broadcasting had to cease at 11 p.m. The plug was pulled on greyhound racing, one of the few sports it was possible to hold in freezing weather, and there was to be no afternoon cinema. Newspapers were reduced to wartime size and some weekly journals like the Spectator, the New Statesman and The Economist were told to stop publication altogether.

As one factory after another locked its gates, the number of jobless rose from a few thousand to over a million. Before the winter was over, unemployment was to hit two million with another half million workers on short time, in total over 15 per cent of the nation’s workforce. One of the most painful images, long recalled from the winter of 1947, was of sullen householders with old prams and handcarts queuing outside gas works and coal merchants. It was like the 1930s all over again. There was one piece of good news in the offing. In February 1949, clothes came off rationing.

The challenge for the government was in persuading the country that there was a future worth working for. It was an uphill task. Cynicism was matched by a social malaise. Remembering the late forties, a boringly repetitive refrain comes to mind: ‘It can’t be done, Guv’. A Gallup poll revealed that 42 per cent of Britain’s population – and 58 per cent of those below the age of thirty – would emigrate ‘if free to do so’.¹ A young ex-serviceman spoke for many when he told an interviewer, ‘I wish I were anywhere but this goddamned country. There is nothing but queues and restrictions and forms and cold and no food.’

He might have added that with Britain’s worldwide commitments – British troops were stationed in West Germany, Austria, Italy, Libya, Malta, Cyprus, throughout the Middle East and in an extensive patchwork of colonial outposts – there was a serious risk for anyone who had recently served in the military of being recalled to the colours. In July 1947, the National Service Act introduced conscription for eighteen months, a period soon extended to two years, for all men aged eighteen to twenty-six. In 1950 Britain spent 6.6 per cent of its gross domestic product on defence, more than any country except the Soviet Union.

The euphoria of victory in Europe had long since given way to an overriding sense of grievance and bitterness. The Festival was intended to change all that. A national pick-me-up, the party of a century had a serious underlying purpose, to demonstrate that Britain had within itself the talent, imagination and energy to create a new society. Gerald Barry spoke of encouraging higher standards, ‘to bring into being new works of art, new social amenities for the people … to give the younger architects, artists and designers a chance to prove their talent … and to leave behind some permanent contributions to the future’.² A framework for the Festival planners was thus established. An inviting image had to be created melding pleasure, education and inspiration.

The idea had as its starting point a proposal put to the government in 1943 by the Royal Society of Arts. Founded in 1754 to foster inventiveness and creativity, the RSA was – as it remains – a place where designers, artists and industrialists could find common ground. It was here in John Adam Street, just off London’s Strand, that the fashion for exhibitions evolved, initially for painters to display their canvases, but after the creation of the Royal Academy, chiefly for manufacturers to promote their latest products. Ever more ambitious projects led to the Great Exhibition of 1851, the proudest moment in the RSA’s history, though chief credit for the success of that enterprise must go to its royal sponsor, Prince Albert, who made of it a ringing proclamation of British leadership.

The Great Exhibition set a standard, adopted by all the successor trade exhibitions in Britain, France and the United States, of spectacular displays (the Crystal Palace, built with a single glass and iron framework and covering 19 acres, was alone worth the price of admission) which sought to ‘improve the taste of the middle classes, to inform manufacturers about mechanical improvements and to morally educate the working class’.³

Nothing quite so patronising entered the official records of 1951, but the broad principle of exposing fresh ideas to an unsophisticated audience in a language they could understand guided much of mid-twentieth century thinking. The response was positive, even enthusiastic. Learning was in vogue, as proved by the wartime popularity of the Army Bureau of Current Affairs, BBC programmes such as The Brains Trust and the oversubscription of a multitude of adult education classes and lectures. Equality meant equality of opportunity and while this assumed decent living standards for all, it also imposed on the intellectually advantaged a duty to inform and instruct. The sovereignty of the lowest common denominator was to come later.

The RSA’s proposal for a festival, to be held in 1951, was given a sympathetic hearing by the coalition government, confident by 1943 of ultimate victory over Germany. The political talk was of reconstruction and rejuvenation. A festival could be an important part of that. Further encouragement came in the form of an open letter in the News Chronicle to Sir Stafford Cripps, the then President of the Board of Trade. The writer, Gerald Barry, who also happened to be the paper’s editor, favoured an international fair in the grand tradition. He was pushing at an open door.

Cripps, an austere politician, was also a visionary dedicated to modernising Britain’s economic base. Barry’s proposal appealed to him as a much-needed stimulant to British exports, particularly to the States and other dollar economies. Already in hand were plans for a Britain Can Make It exhibition, organised by the Council of Industrial Design for the post-war reopening of the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington. Put together by Basil Spence, a young Scottish architect, Britain Can Make It promoted clean, modern design, displaying more than 6,000 products from 1,300 firms newly switched over from war work. A centenary celebration of 1851 would do yet more to prove that Britain was ready to move on from the mass production of the cheap and tawdry for uncomplaining markets in the sterling area. It might even shake up those tired heirs to the Industrial Revolution, owners and managers who, when times were bad, complained that they could not afford to invest and when times were good assumed that they didn’t have to.

Prompted by Barry, Cripps set up a committee ‘to consider the desirability of organising an exhibition in London in 1951’. Chaired by Lord Ramsden, it started deliberations in September 1945 and reported six months later. Allowing that Ramsden, a former Tory MP, was an enthusiast for building trade links, particularly with the Commonwealth and colonies, it was predictable that his committee should wholeheartedly endorse the guiding principles of the Great Exhibition by prescribing a ‘first category international exhibition to be held in London … to demonstrate to the world the recovery of the United Kingdom from the effects of the war in the moral, cultural, spiritual and material fields’.

Having stated his committee’s position, Ramsden set out the options for the site. The choice was narrowed by what were, in Ramsden’s view, two essential requirements. First, the exhibition should surpass the New York World’s Fair of 1939 ‘in scale and technical achievement’ and the Paris Exhibition of 1937 ‘in aesthetic excellence and personal appeal’. Both these events had spread themselves liberally, Paris over 250 acres, New York over 1,216 acres. Ramsden compromised on a minimum of 300 acres. To find such a space was challenge enough but Ramsden made it tougher still by his second requirement, that the site should be in central London.

Hyde Park was top choice, not least because it was the original home of the Crystal Palace, but thought was also given to the area close to Waterloo Station on the Thames’ south bank, much of it laid waste by the Luftwaffe. The unsavoury reputation of the district with its narrow streets and back-to-back slums stretching to the Elephant and Castle may have given pause, though limits on the available area, short of wholesale demolition, were another deterrent. A throwaway comment was later picked up as significant. The success of the 1937 Paris Exhibition, said Ramsden, was partly because ‘full use had been made of the banks of the Seine’. There were those who wondered, could not the Thames serve the same purpose?

The delivery of Ramsden’s report in March 1946 had as its immediate effect the concentration of political minds. Filling in the details produced a raft of objections, starting with the likely cost. It was all very well for Ramsden to assert that ‘no money or effort should be spared’ but there were too many other claims on public finances to permit any great budgetary freedom. Then again, Hyde Park was judged a non-starter as an exhibition site. At a time when many of London’s parks were still under wartime cultivation or in use as military installations, Hyde Park was that rare thing, a large open space for general recreation, not to mention lunchtime strolls by civil servants from the neighbouring government buildings.

For a second round of deliberation a committee of government insiders representing relevant departments was brought into play. At this stage, the brief was still to find a site that could accommodate an international exhibition to rival the pre-war extravaganzas in New York and Paris. This assumed up to fifty million visitors over six months with an exhibition staff of at least 10,000. Given that London, unlike Paris and New York, was short on broad boulevards and that traffic congestion, even with petrol rationing, was already a planner’s nightmare, the consensus inevitably favoured a site close to but not in central London, preferably one that could provide a permanent home for an annual British Industry Fair.

The search for the ideal venue spread far and wide. Woolwich Arsenal and adjoining marshes offered 650 acres but they were eight and a half miles from the West End. Even further away from the city’s heartland were Trent Park in Cockfosters (950 acres) and Hampton Court Park (450 acres). Closer in, Battersea Park, covering 215 acres including 15 acres of lake, found favour, as did Sydenham, where the Crystal Palace had been reincarnated until it burned down in 1936, and Alexandra Palace, a grandiloquent Victorian edifice in north London, designed for ‘recreation, education and entertainment’.

Among the more original proposals was to clear 15 acres of accommodation at Wormwood Scrubs, a Victorian prison overdue for replacement, which taken in conjunction with neighbouring ground would serve as a permanent exhibition centre. The idea fell foul of Home Office economies. Wormwood Scrubs, with all its inadequacies, still holds prisoners.

There was another look at the South Bank in the light of proposals by the London County Council (LCC) to transform the bombed area into a cultural and recreational centre. But no sooner was this considered than all the familiar qualms resurfaced. The site was too small, it was divided by a railway (‘unless a connection could be driven through under the road and rail bridgeheads’) and there was no embankment to hold back the Thames.⁴ Eventually the consensus settled on Osterley Park in West London, one-time home of the Earls of Jersey, where a neoclassical stately home was set in 300 acres of landscaped parkland.

While the civil servants were huddled together, the RSA came back into the act by staging a Festival Conference for interested individuals and organisations. To say that it was an eclectic gathering is to put it mildly. Wartime regulations had spawned a profusion of trade and professional bodies, most of which were keen to contribute their expertise. Together they set the parameters for subsequent debates on whether to hold a festival and if held, on its scope and size.

The cheerleaders were headed by Alfred Bossom, an architect who had owned a successful American practice before being elected Conservative MP for Maidstone. With his acquired transatlantic energy, Bossom was impatient with convoluted discussions. ‘Let’s get on with it’ was his entreaty. Site size was an irrelevance since the Festival could be split between a nucleus in London and numerous specialised exhibitions further out. As to the cost and labour involved, believing it could not be done was all part of a British malaise. ‘We are held down by the feeling “We can’t do it”. We’ve got to throw off this lethargy.’⁵

First on his feet to make strenuous objection to Bossom’s crack about national lethargy was a Mr Jacobs from the London Trades Council, speaking on behalf of the trades unions. There was no lethargy among his members, he declared, before launching a long diatribe which suggested lethargy and defeatism at every turn. London couldn’t cope with thousands of visitors, the transport system was sure to break down and criminal elements would thrive in the chaos. Anyway, skilled labour would be far better occupied on less frivolous projects.⁶

It took the wonderfully named Dowager Lady Swaythling, representing the Electrical Association of Women, to reintroduce a note of buoyancy with a call for ‘vision and progress’.⁷ Taking up the theme, several speakers agreed the case for rejuvenating the South Bank, ‘un...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Introduction
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Chapter Seven
• Chapter Eight
• Chapter Nine
• Chapter Ten
• Chapter Eleven
• Chapter Twelve
• Chapter Thirteen
• Chapter Fourteen
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• Copyright