Ten: The Pivotal Year

Review of the Year – The Festival of Britain – The Fun of the Fair

The Dome 2000

HEADLINES FOR THE YEAR 1951

I’m 12 years old now, and forces much bigger than me are poised to lift me up and out from the world where I’ve lived my entire life. On the brink of my teenage years, though ‘teenagers’ as such have still to be invented, I’m rightly bewildered by an unfathomable future: new home and school, new places to go and new friends to make. Balanced between two lives, about to grow through the next stage in unknown territory, my closest companions are the necessary pangs and awkwardness of puberty.

As my horizons prepare for wide-ranging expansion, this is a useful moment to put my personal life into the broader context beyond my limited corner of Shrewsbury, Salop. There’s plenty going on that I know very little about. Most of it is beyond most children. It’s one thing that makes their lives special and very different from everyone else’s. Whatever their generation’s place in time, they’ve no need to know about the latest General Election result. Foreign wars mean nothing to them, nor do income tax rates or any of the other issues that their elders bang on about in pubs. However, a healthy curiosity about our surroundings is a valuable component of our survival mechanism.

What was going on around me in 1951? With the year just begun, King George VI was appealing to the nation for help to locate the Coronation Stone, also known as the Stone of Scone and Stone of Destiny. This symbolic lump of sandstone had sat beneath the Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey for over 650 years. One of the monarch’s distant predecessors, Edward I, had lifted it from the Scots in 1294 and some of their descendants still wanted it back. There had been a Parliamentary Bill in 1924 to return the thing to Scotland, but it never reached second reading. Following its removal on Christmas Day 1950, the King asked everyone to ‘make it a matter of personal concern that the Stone should be recovered.’ It was found later during 1951 and returned to London, but the extent of anyone’s ‘personal concern’ remains unsaid. It may not have been the most stirring event of the year. But was one of these?

MISS SWEDEN WINS FIRST MISS WORLD CONTEST

VIENNESE PHILOSOPHER LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN DIES AGED 62

RANDOLPH TURPIN BECOMES WORLD MIDDLEWEIGHT BOXING CHAMPION DEFEATING SUGAR RAY ROBINSON

LEOPOLD KING OF THE BELGIANS ABDICATES

LEN HUTTON HITS 100TH CENTURY

SALINGER’S ‘CATCHER IN THE RYE’ PUBLISHED

SPIES BURGESS AND MACLEAN DEFECT TO RUSSIA

GENERAL ELECTION RETURNS SEPTUAGENARIAN CHURCHILL

US 22ND AMENDMENT LIMITS

PRESIDENCY TO TWO TERMS

SNOWDONIA, PEAK AND LAKE DISTRICTS BECOME NATIONAL PARKS

POPULATION CENSUS: 150.5 MILLION IN USA 361.8 MILLION IN INDIA

PAUL BRICKHILL’S ‘THE GREAT ESCAPE’ PUBLISHED

KWAME NKRUMAH RELEASED FROM PRISON IN GOLD COAST

The everyday life of the entire population during the immediate post-war years responded to food rationing – that, and the price of the food itself. Throughout that year, ration portions varied every few months, mostly downwards, as different commodities went into short supply. There were no supermarkets and no credit cards. Indeed, people were horrified at the thought of ‘getting into debt’. Government controlled many more prices than it does today, and they too varied every few months, mostly upwards. From 10th January the fresh meat ration was reduced to 1 shilling and twopence-worth (1s. 2d.) per week but, to compensate, the ration of 4d-worth of canned corned beef was restored. Whatever other foods I can recall from this period of my life, corned beef heads the list. I never liked it very much but had to eat a good deal of it during my childhood.

The price of hens’ eggs was increased by ½d. to 4½d. each, though there had been a special, temporary increase in rations for the Christmas period of things like sugar, sweets, cooking fats and tea. Newsprint and fuels such as electricity, coal and petrol were in irregular supply, often resulting in rationing by price. Fuel economy measures included a ban on lighting used for advertisements and shop windows. Local, suburban and cross-country train services were cut during the year.

Relieving a little of the gloom of rationing and price rises, some people received pay increases in 1951. Over 400,000 lower-paid coal miners received an increase to £6.7s.0d. a week if working underground. Surface workers’ wages went up to £5.10s.0d. a week. The Burnham Scales for teachers fixed the new annual maximum salary for qualified teachers at £630 for men and £504 for women. However, later in the year the government announced ‘with great regret’ that it had to reject the principle of ‘equal pay for equal work’ by men and women Civil Servants because of ‘very serious inflationary consequences.’ Another part of their justification was that the differential in many industries was far greater than that found in the Civil Service.

My father’s job meant Civil Service pay was always being talked about in our house. Pay claims seemed to take a year or two to resolve, familiarising me as I grew up with the concept of ‘back pay’. This lump sum could take precedence over the size of the salary increase itself, and the moment a claim had been settled, negotiations were begun on the next one. Naturally, the back pay was extremely welcome, enabling people to have a decent holiday or to buy a new wireless. Civil Service pay increases in 1951 saw men and women over 25 receive rises of £35 and £30 a year respectively. Lower-paid staff, such as typists and clerical assistants, received increases between 5 and 14 shillings a week. Further up the pecking order, the maximum annual salary of a Chief Executive Officer went up to £1,325.

Some matters were less serious than rationing, pay or prices:

VATICAN BANS CLERGY ROTARY CLUB MEMBERSHIP

‘ . . . beware of associations which are secret, condemned, seditious or suspected’

25 SWEDISH REINDEER IMPORTED TO HIGHLANDS AND ISLANDS

UK Reindeer Council says increased reindeer population could benefit

the Scottish economy

OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE BOAT RACE RE-ROWED EASTER MONDAY

In the first attempt, Oxford’s boat had sunk a few minutes after the start

‘X’ FILM CERTIFICATE REPLACES ‘H’ FOR HORROR FILMS

No children allowed in under 16. No more looking for adults to take you in

BBC ANNOUNCES TEN TELEVISION TRANSMITTING STATIONS

National coverage anticipated by 1954; commercial sponsorship even suggested

INCOME TAX INCREASED TO 3 SHILLINGS IN THE POUND ON FIRST £50

Five shillings on next £200, Standard Rate 9/6d on income over £250

PURCHASE TAX INCREASED FROM 33⅓% TO 66⅔% AT A STROKE

Affecting motor cars, radios, domestic electrical appliances, sewing machines

PETROL PRICE UP TO 3/6d PER GALLON

STATE PENSION UP TO £2.10s.0d PER WEEK FOR MARRIED COUPLE

Behind all this, the Korean War continued, with major commitments from American, British and Commonwealth armed forces. Most informed observers saw little or no hope of ending it, particularly of ending it soon. As it happened, this depressing situation changed within the year. General Douglas MacArthur, Commander-in-Chief of practically every US military operation in the Far East, made a dramatic and fateful statement. He announced that he was prepared to meet the enemy’s C-in-C in the field at any time to discuss ways of achieving the UN’s objectives for Korea without further bloodshed.

Washington saw this as a political, rather than a military, initiative, taken without the authority of either the President or the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Having gone completely beyond his official terms of reference, he was recalled and relieved of all his Far East commands. They sacked him. But a few months later, the first armistice talks began at Kaesong, and, after breaking down initially, were later resumed as the more substantial peace talks at Panmunjom.

Meanwhile, America’s atomic bomb tests on their new range in Nevada broke windows 75 miles away in Las Vegas and the glare was seen in San Francisco, 450 miles away. And today, in the changed world order as I write just over 50 years later, North Korea (one of President Bush II’s so-called ‘rogue states’) announces that it has enough re-processed plutonium to provide six nuclear devices and will continue to develop its nuclear ‘deterrent’ capacity.

Here are some more headlines from this momentous year of my life:

POUND’S PURCHASING POWER THREE QUARTERS OF 1945 VALUE

BACON AND SWEETS RATIONS REDUCED AGAIN

NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE PUBLISHES FIRST YEAR’S REPORT

MOST DAILY NEWSPAPERS COST 1½d, SUNDAYS 2½d.

TRAVELLERS CAN NOW TAKE BANKNOTES WORTH £10 IN OR OUT

‘ARTISTIC’ CBES FOR PEGGY ASHCROFT, EDMUND BLUNDEN

IVY COMPTON-BURNETT, MARGOT FONTEYN

KEELE UNIVERSITY OPENS WITH 150 STUDENTS, COST £1.5 MILLION

CAR MAKERS MORRIS AND AUSTIN MERGE

LIBYA ACHIEVES INDEPENDENCE

GRAHAM BROWN MOVES TO STAFFORDSHIRE AGED TWELVE

By the time school had finished for the summer holidays, I’d given my new address to close friends like Michael Evans and Chris Cureton, vowing to meet again – which we did during the coming years. In the preparations to leave Shrewsbury, I recall nothing about throwing things away, packing, or the very act of moving day itself. We had no car. Perhaps one of my father’s colleagues drove us the 40 miles to Eccleshall, Staffs, hoping to get there before the removal van. It’s just as likely that we caught the bus down to Shrewsbury station and went by train. I can easily imagine my father planning the whole thing in the minutest detail. I do know for certain, from her own comments to me much later, that my mother shed many tears that day. My own part in it is a complete blank.

FROM THE MEMOIR

Whatever may have engaged me during 1951, the marvels of the Festival of Britain stand out above everything else. This countrywide celebration was conceived as a comforting pat on the back for the entire nation following the austerity of the war years and their aftermath. Inspired by the Great Exhibition of 1851 a century before, it was opened by King George VI from the steps of St Paul’s on 3rd May. It was an exceptional event in my pivotal year. As I may have reflected on my own life up to that point, and wondered about its immediate future, similarly Britain was to present a report on its long progress through the centuries and offer enticing glimpses of its possible futures.

The dust of the Second World War was still settling. Gerald Barry, editor of the News Chronicle, wrote an open letter to Sir Stafford Cripps, President of the Board of Trade, on 14th September 1945. Later becoming Director General of the Festival of Britain, he suggested ‘a great Trade and Cultural Exhibition’, possibly to mark the centenary of the 1851 event:

It would be the means of attracting to this country not only traders with

millions of pounds at their disposal but large numbers of foreign tourists

who would spend their money in the country and – we may hope – would

be encouraged to repeat their visits in future years. It would provide a

challenge to British architects and engineers, which we might reasonably

expect, would result in overseas orders.

Above all, it would afford an opportunity for assembling in London an

international collection of exhibits in the fields of the Arts and of Science,

and of representing developments in the arts and crafts which have taken

place in the world behind the cultural blackout of the war.

Apparently Cripps replied, in his own handwriting in red ink, that he thought ‘perhaps it might be a good idea’. Planning began properly in April 1948 and the project was seen from the start as a set of major exhibitions staged in London, together with some 1,700 localities throughout the country providing festivities of their own. It was hoped that ‘these local events [would] have some permanent value, great or small, to mark the importance of the occasion and to enrich the life of the community for the future.’ Like it or not, the Festival and its preparations would take place against the background of war in Korea and the Cold War across Europe. This only stirred Barry and his colleagues to greater determination that it should both happen and succeed. In his mind, the Festival would send out an even larger message than simply celebration of the country’s scientific and artistic achievements. He wrote in the Daily Mail Preview and Guide in 1951:

That the Festival should occur when the international skies have grown a

good deal more menacing than they were when it was first conceived does

not detract from – it enhances – its validity . . . the British people should

demonstrate to their friends and allies their confidence, resilience and

dependability. It is equally important that, being obliged by fate to step

straight out of one period of austerity into another, we should find some

tonic to send us to our next tasks replenished, and newly aware of the

value of those things we are once more called on to defend.

The great event became known as ‘A Tonic to the Nation’ and, at the same time, a serious vehicle for propaganda of the ‘This Island Race’ type. I was probably hardly aware of that explicit thread of patriotism at the time. On the other hand, much of the population at large would very likely respond positively to the sentiment, being well attuned to its reverberations during the war years and to the grand rhetoric of Empire with which they had grown up.

There was plenty more of that in Gerald Barry’s piece, with phrases like ‘in a world given over to violence, it is important to show that a free nation still has a mind to the creative virtues’; ‘to demonstrate to the unfree world that one of the privileges of democracies is to enjoy freedom of travel and intercourse and the exchange of knowledge and ideas’; ‘we are compelled . . . to take up the challenge once more and impose on ourselves without respite a fresh period of austerity’; ‘we are resilient, resolute and confident’.

Like any large-scale venture, getting it all together was never going to be easy. Barry speaks later of ‘what frenzied planning, what ardours and endurances, what advances and disappointments!’ Such factors certainly surfaced during the planning of its successor, the Millennium Dome, fifty years later. The difficulties involved in that undertaking deserve looking into, but my own perspective on the Festival of Britain is no more than that of a young boy stimulated, excited and sometimes amazed, by what he saw there. I was reasonably familiar with London by then, particularly with the West End and the great parks where my parents had often taken me and, naturally, with the suburbs where grandparents and other relations lived. I knew what London felt like, what her buildings looked like and how they were mostly bigger, older and generally dirtier than anything I was used to at home.

But the Festival had engaged the creativity of architects and designers to produce a built environment both modern and truly different in every way from the buildings and urban facilities we would recognise. I think that’s what made the greatest impression on me at the South Bank – the look of things, from buildings the like of which you’d never seen before anywhere to the weird ‘futuristic’ shapes of the flower pots, the chairs and tables in the restaurants and practically everything else you came across. They used space in new ways. I was excited by split levels inside buildings, by raised walkways, even by the fact of moving around between the buildings without being on a pavement alongside a road. The seeds of my later attraction to modern visual arts, and especially modern architecture, may have been sown there in 1951.

What can I really recall of what I saw that day? The South Bank site was a mass of separate, themed pavilions, occupying the entire area between Waterloo Bridge and County Hall, neatly cut into two by Hungerford Railway Bridge. The old Shot Tower, one of several that had formerly stood on this bank of the river, was the only historical building to be spared as the site was redeveloped. That tower was demolished, along with all the other Festival buildings - except for the Royal Festival Hall, which was retained and has since been reworked several times. So much for Barry’s hope that something permanent would remain ‘to enrich the life of the community for the future.’ The new Conservative government dismantled virtually the whole thing.

The pavilions contained displays - hi-tech for their time – about the history and culture of Britain and the British. Land of Britain showed how the British Isles were formed and how our natural wealth had come about. Other Pavilions expressed themes such as the Natural Scene and Country, Minerals of the Island, Power and Production, Sea and Ships and People of Britain. In one of them, I kept going back to a display showing a three-dimensional model of the English landscape that changed its appearance several times with the passing centuries, perhaps an early hologram. I kept looking because I just couldn’t quite believe it and wanted to see it do it again and again. By contrast, the contents of the huge glass-fronted Transport Pavilion, up against Hungerford Bridge, were much more concrete and substantial. Some objects were too big to go inside, such as an Indian Railways steam locomotive built by North British Locomotive Works, neatly combining the themes of Empire and Technology.

I know the Royal Festival Hall delighted me with its curved roof and the imaginative use of glass everywhere. It seemed a wonderful and beautiful building to me then and, in spite of significant changes to its appearance since, it still remains one of my favourite London buildings. For the first time I saw trees growing inside a building and different floor levels generating new and exciting uses of space. It was like buildings inside a building. Whatever it contained, it was the kind of place where someone like me could just wander around, slightly open-mouthed, looking and wondering and having their incomplete mind expanded. Somewhere high above its frontage, I can still see the enormous Henry Moore sculpture of rugged, lumpy Island Race man and woman, dressed in their shapeless, nautical woollens, looking stoically out over the River Thames and beyond to the heights of Hampstead.

The centrepiece of the whole site was the Dome of Discovery. With the Skylon, it became a Festival icon in the public mind. Both made extensive use of the relatively new material, aluminium. The self-supporting Dome of 365 feet diameter displayed Britain’s long superiority in discovery and exploration worldwide and offered projections of the eventual challenges of space travel. One display was even linked to a radio telescope on top of the Shot Tower. The beauty of the Skylon was that it had no practical purpose whatsoever except simply to be itself, a kind of impossible structure. Commentators have described it as ‘elegant, pencil-like’, acting as ‘a modernistic symbol of the rebirth of Britain after the dark days of the war’. It was ‘250 feet high and 14 feet wide at its maximum, suspended vertically 40 feet above the ground in a cradle of steel cables from three supporting pylons’. It looked as though nothing was supporting it, especially at night when it was lit from inside.

Two other things impressed me more than anything, and I suppose they were bound to because of their closeness to magical experiences I had never had before: the Television Pavilion and the Telecinema, which provided the foundation for the later National Film Theatre, tucked beneath Waterloo Bridge. Here I saw not only the latest in television, the wonder that I only ever experienced during the occasional visits to my grandparents, but also films in 3D which you viewed through cardboard spectacles with one red and one green lens. For reasons I can never fathom now, I always took moving pictures seriously, always thought they ‘mattered’ in cultural life. I went to a film society’s screenings throughout my teenage years in Staffordshire, then joined the NFT and took the journal Sight and Sound for years when I lived in London. Perhaps this was another aspect of my later life with its roots in the Festival of Britain

The Festival attracted a remarkable total of 8.5 million people in the five months it was open. I recently saw a photograph of the crowds milling around among the South Bank Pavilions. Two things stand out. One is that they’re not actually ‘milling around’ at all. They appear to be moving about in an extremely orderly and disciplined way up and down the walkways and across the open spaces. There’s a sense of controlled behaviour, of the deeply embedded British queuing instinct – and certainly no police in sight. Though not there myself, reports of the opening of the Millennium Dome 2000 and of events along the banks of the Thames that night suggest a very different public approach fifty years later, with the police present but virtually unable to deal with anything because of the massive, milling crowds.

The other thing is the drab clothing of people in 1951. We wouldn’t have noticed it much at the time, having known little else, but those austerity years could never be accused of being stylish or colourful. It seems to me now that we must have waited another full decade before white shirts, dark suits and gabardine raincoats ceased to be the universal weekday dress for men who worked in offices. I remember when I was preparing for an interview in the very early Sixties, and one of my senior managers advised me to wear a white shirt. He said I should avoid a pink shirt, which, apart from tiny check patterns, was about the only other shirt colour you could get from Marks and Spencer. He told me pink was only worn by extremely arty types who worked in advertising or by men of uncertain sexuality. As hindsight shows us now, male clothing fashions since then have gone through any number of phases, frequently repeated, some deliberately expressing ugliness, drabness or ‘grunge’ in their striving for the nondescript, though still always hoping to be noticed or recognised as being in fashion.

In the early 1950s the logo industry as we know it now had hardly been born. Some form of advertising has always existed ever since people began making things and wanting other people to buy them. There were brand names and branded adverts but these were all in place long before the commercial psychologists got hold of the game, selling goods and services on the basis of their ‘image’ rather than on their basic merits. Our eye was generally caught then by a slogan such as ‘My Goodness, My Guinness’, later ‘Guinness for Strength’ with the tough little blue-collar man carrying a massive steel girder on his shoulder. Later, Guinness adopted the toucan, balancing two pints of the dark fluid on its multi-coloured beak: ‘When only toucan do’. There were none of the abstract – and often meaningless - identifiers that we have now for things like the railways, electricity suppliers, television companies, BT and practically everybody else. Large corporations today will pay so-called image consultants tens of thousands of pounds to produce these icons, only to do exactly the same again a few years later when they think they need to ‘re-brand’ themselves.

The Festival of Britain did have a logo that may have been a precursor of the whole of modern logology. The smart, clean, simple design in red, white and blue was an abstract image of Britannia’s head on top of a four-armed cross with pointed arms, with a string of bunting linking the two outstretched points at left and right. Between the bunting and the lateral arms of the cross, the figures ’19 ‘ to the left and ‘51’ to the right fixed the year. At school we drew it and coloured it in time and again. Its very simplicity appealed because it meant we could copy it and reproduce it freehand to scale on squared paper with different dimensions. Experimenting with it, we found that it lost its impact if you made it too big, and we were definitely not the ones to dip our toes into unpatriotic waters and try it in different colours.

The Festival spawned the usual collection of souvenirs, overseen by the Souvenirs Committee. One of their comments at the time regretted that so many of the items submitted for approval were so dully utilitarian. If you wanted tatty knick-knacks to remind you of the experience, they were there in abundance. Among many other things, the literature mentions scarves, ties and braces; ashtrays, pencils, pencil sharpeners and paperweights; balloons and bookmarks; teaspoons, tea caddies and mugs. I had a pencil with gold lettering along it and a rubber on one end. There were also serious items from manufacturers like Wedgwood, special adverts from the major car-manufacturers, and the Royal Mint produced a special five-shilling piece. My grandparents gave me one, but I no longer have it.

I do still have one of the rectangular commemorative stamps issued for the Festival. The old ‘Weston’ album contains a bright red used 2½d. stamp, with Britannia’s head at the left, looking directly across the stamp to King George VI’s head, which looks back at her from an oval lozenge, topped by the crown. The figures 1851-1951 are curved across the top and the words FESTIVAL OF BRITAIN run straight along the bottom, with a central symbolic arrangement involving a cornucopia and the sceptre of Mercury, the winger messenger. It seems to me now that ordinary letter post must have cost 2½d. through most of my childhood. People called it a ‘tuppence-ha’penny’ or ‘tuppenny-ha’penny’ stamp. Later I know it went up dramatically to 3d., called ‘threpenny’ or ‘thruppenny’. The effect of this increase on the populace at large was probably of similar gravity to the time when a pint of beer first passed the two-shilling (2/-) threshold in the early Sixties. After that, things were definitely never quite the same, ever again.

From the start, part of Gerald Barry’s grand vision was to release great open spaces in central London for the Festival. They included ‘above all, the incomparable river frontage of Battersea Park’. This became officially The Festival Pleasure Gardens, perhaps to echo the entertainments of the Vauxhall and Ranelagh Gardens of earlier centuries. As our nuclear family reached the entrance, some time before the concept of the nuclear family had been coined, my mother said: ‘Here’s half-a-crown for you to spend at the Battersea Funfair. Off you go.’ I forget what you had to pay for a go on something there, and I could probably have used several half-crowns without much trouble. Even so, a half-crown coin always seemed a bit special, so much larger and heavier than any of the other coins. To me, it was still a lot of money in one go.

Whatever my parents did until we regrouped, it must have included refreshments because, along with a theatre, children’s zoo, a water-splash ride and all the usual ‘fun of the fair’ stalls and sideshows, there were so-called ‘beer gardens’. Any phrase including the word ‘beer’ would have attracted my father’s attention. While the beer garden concept may have felt a bit foreign, he would quickly have overcome any doubts on that subject. I can picture him saying rather seriously to my mother at some point: ‘I wonder what these – what do they call them? – “beer gardens” are all about’. Would he have engaged with Rowland Emmett’s crazy Far Tottering and Oyster Creek Railway or the raised walkway built high up through the trees? Somehow I doubt it. He would have settled for a sit down with a couple of pints and a sandwich.

We were to meet again later by the most obvious landmark in the whole place, the Guinness Clock. This was the star attraction and had received serious exposure in the newspapers. It was a modern imitation and extension of the great clocks you find in some European cities, where carillons ring out on the hour and miniature human figures come out and go round, with tiny model men hitting bells with hammers. The Guinness Clock was 25 feet high and said to be the most complex clock mechanism built in Britain for three centuries. It was so popular that eventually eight smaller travelling versions were built that went to holiday resorts, shows and carnivals around the country for the next 10 years. One even went to America.

The show ran for four-and-a-half minutes every quarter of an hour:

. . . which featured well-known characters from Guinness advertisements;

a sea lion balancing a glass of Guinness on its nose; an ostrich which had

just swallowed a glass of Guinness and the glass was now half-way

down its neck; an assortment of animals, including a pelican, a bear, a lion,

a tortoise, a kangaroo, a crocodile and even an upside-down kinkajou. There

were also characters from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland – most notably

the Mad Hatter. The most famous of all, however, was the Guinness toucan,

a feature of the brewer’s adverts from 1935 to1982.

- George Simner, Festival of Britain Society

I must have watched it perform several times, so there was never much doubt that I would be safely there when my parents returned, my half-crown long since used and forgotten. Earlier on, I remember dithering at the entrance to the Tree Walk, and then magnificently overcoming my fear of heights and gingerly treading the walkway high among the leaves and branches. Where the rest of the money had gone, I have no idea.

In spite of ‘public scepticism, and indeed ridicule, in the right-wing press at this expensive frivolity while the economy languished, and much doubt as to whether the country could afford it’ (it cost £11 million), the Festival of Britain as a whole was extremely successful. The Labour government that put it all together had even imagined that it could pay them a handy dividend at the next general election. Another hope dashed. Historian Kenneth Morgan summarises the results of the Festival with some disappointment:

In practice, the Festival appears to have had only a transient impact on British

technological or design skills. Nor was its impact on British exports more than

cosmetic. The contrast with the self-assured certainty of Queen Victoria’s

exhibition ‘at the Crystal Palace’ a hundred years earlier was all too clear.

The main impression left by the Festival was not its innovation but its insularity.

As in the ‘Lion and the Unicorn Pavilion’, it served to celebrate past glories,

age-old institutions, and hallowed and cherished folkways. The British monarchy,

British sports, British pub life, London’s red buses, and the village bobby were on

display, almost preserved in aspic . . . The point of reference was the Victorian or

Edwardian past. Britain in 1951 was on display as the somewhat geriatric heir of

those earlier societies, not the enterprising youthful harbinger of the new.

Kenneth Morgan: The People’s Peace (1998)

Others have more upbeat views of it across the fifty years. Jane Bown, distinguished veteran Observer photographer said:

It was a marvellous uplifting experience. We were young, the war was over,

and there we were, full of hope, dancing on the South Bank. The breath-taking

shapes and colours evoked a wonderful feeling of freedom.

Countering the ‘disaffection of old-school architects trying to keep in with the young’ Alan Powers of the Twentieth Century Society believes that the Festival is now more widely recognised:

as the catalyst of a post-war design renaissance, as a parent of the Arts Council,

and, as Hugh Casson put it, as a ‘pattern book for our new urban landscapes.’

Sir Roy Strong, former director of the V and A, has written that the Festival was ‘the last really great stylistic statement this country made’, adding ‘No-one who lived through this period will forget it. I just wish I’d been there.’

He was right. I was there and have not forgotten it, though my perspective on it was much more basic. For me, the Funfair was fun, and the South Bank itself my first taste – and it did seem like a big taste – of a feeling that I can only call modernity. From my provincial ‘point of reference’ of the immediate post-war years out there in a rurally surrounded county town, I’d never seen neon lighting in a shop window, except occasionally in London. Even the least imaginative red wording over a shop doorway excited me as we went through the dark south London suburbs on the top deck of the Number 12. I was dazzled and intrigued by the shapes of the objects and buildings in that single day on the South Bank. I responded excitedly to the latest techniques of visual communication, the images, the symbols and the modern lettering on everything. I found myself in a strange environment of newness with no reference lines back to anything I’d known before. After all, I had no larger viewpoint from which to judge it or make comparisons.

The eight million who attended probably enjoyed most of what they saw and did, and cherished that brief taste of their prescribed ‘Tonic’ after the war years. When telling other people recently that I was working on the year 1951, many of a certain age have said immediately ‘Oh, yes, 1951, the Festival of Britain’. Today, websites are devoted to it where people can exchange their fond and fragile memories. Some have only vague recollections and hope that others can reinforce them or correct their uncertain recall. Some provide additional information about things hardly understood at the time. Others will pay good money to add still more souvenir objects to their collections of Festival memorabilia.

POSTSCRIPT: Editing and re-setting this text for the new website, I'm reading Alan Bennett's Keeping On Keeping On (2016), his latest collection of diary entries and other prose works. He is five years older than I am, so was in his early teens in 1951. During the years 2005-2008 his diary has already mentioned the Festival of Britain several times.

BACK TO THE PRESENT: A TALE OF TWO DOMES

For us now, there’s something else we can’t escape and shouldn’t ignore. The Festival of Britain was ridiculed by some during its development stage, particularly in the right-wing press. Like many expensive projects in times of competing priorities, it was widely thought to be a quite unnecessary use of limited public funds. And it had its unmistakeable centrepiece, the Dome of Discovery. These observations reverberate powerfully for us, just over five decades later. The image of the two domes, with much apparently in common, spans the half-century. It makes the ideal link between now, the most recent bit of the long past, and then, a point only two generations back in that same past. We can reinforce that connection through two politicians. The Home Secretary Herbert Morrison was appointed in 1947 as the Cabinet member to oversee the Festival preparations. His grandson is Peter Mandelson, whose constant energy drove the Millennium Dome towards the year 2000, for an eventual cost of over £800 million.

Stephen Bayley was creative director of the Dome project for six months. In his article that the journal History Today declined to publish in 2001, he compares the two events:

Addressing an aspiring nation of ambitious and proud survivors, the Festival

of Britain created an optimistic mood in architecture and design that lasted a

generation. It employed great artists; it was directed with confidence and flair.

The Dome, by contrast, assumed its public was moronic; they repaid the

compliment by making the New Millennium Experience the most reviled

popular exercise bar mass murder.

He attacks Mandelson for failing to use the opportunity and the budget ‘to involve great artists, designers and architects. The opportunity was not so much ignored as vehemently rejected. Mandelson decided on mediocrity . . .’ In the end, the comparisons become grotesque:

In 1951, spiritual, creative and recreative activities pointed to a period when

politicians could say, without a hint of irony, that we had never had it so good.

Half a century later, after nearly a billion pounds had been blown and the aftershocks

of scandal and corruption had not yet subsided, not even the most mendacious

politician could find anything positive to say about [it].

The Festival of Britain, Bayley says, ‘benefited from an unambiguous brief and clear direction . . . confidence and authority’ while its successor, in ‘an atmosphere of furtive paranoia . . . became a paradigm of bad management with dire results: there was not a single item in the cavernous hulk of the Dome worth saving.’ He concludes:

While the Festival of Britain was touching, enigmatic, stimulating and memorable,

the Dome was a travesty: vast without being impressive, vulgar without being

interesting and didactic without being educational, expensive, but worthless.

Of the Great Exhibition of 1851, Disraeli had said: “this exhibition will be a boon

to the Government, for it will make the public forget its misdeeds.” Unfortunately

for New Labour, the Dome is a terrible reminder of them. The Festival of Britain

offered escape from the age of austerity. The Millennium Dome was a pitiable

memorial to an age of excess.

Sir Terence Conran came to a similar conclusion in The Sunday Times of 14th April 2002, saying that the earlier event ‘was carried out with passion and heartfelt enthusiasm, whereas the Dome was riddled with cynicism, confusion and political interference.’

In fact, the Dome of 2000 was first proposed by John Major’s Conservative government to greet the new millennium as an antidote to Britain’s ‘damaged culture, with low self-esteem, shrinking pride and a diminishing position in the world.’ Like others before them, it should engender ‘optimism for the future’. After considerable dithering by the new Cabinet, the Blair government reluctantly decided to pursue the idea. The Dome would be ‘the greatest show on earth’ and inspire in people ‘memories so strong that it will give them that abiding sense of purpose and unity that stays with them through the rest of their lives.’

While many of those who went to it enjoyed the Dome experience, it never generated the necessary national interest and excitement. After all, what was it celebrating? Nothing more than a mathematical accident, a year with three noughts. It certainly didn’t follow a great period of British ingenuity or historical achievement, but rather a period of disgracefully weak national leadership and unashamed political sleaze. For most people, it simply never captured the imagination. The opening night probably wrote the script for the rest of its first phase of existence. As Mandelson himself says now:

A long queue of VIPs and almost every national newspaper editor in the land

waited in the wet and cold at London’s Stratford station before they got through

security into the Dome. It was no laughing matter (especially for the VIPs) and

the Dome was repaid in the press handsomely – and destructively – for this

heinous crime.

Peter Mandelson: GQ, July 2002

After that, the press never let up. A selection of Guardian headlines to articles and reports during 2000 includes: Dome saviour faces corruption charge; The dome condemned; My crown of thorns; Doomed to endure the dome; They’re all domed; The folly built by our leaders that makes fools of us all. Late in 2000, the Government appointed David James, a so-called ‘corporate fixer’ to get a grip on the Dome. One of his first acts was to commission a massive auditors’ report. He thought the most serious error was building the thing in the first place and, on top of that, building it at Greenwich. He thought, too, that the sale to Japanese firm Nomura at a mere £105 million was ‘a killing’. Who would disagree? Even Nomura themselves later decided that perhaps it wasn’t even worth that price. James criticised management style and practice, particularly:

Where they were amiss was in not providing an adequate record of what they

were doing and committing to in very many areas. There were 2,800 separate

contracts and every one of those was set up in a hurry. The biggest single

omission was no single register of all the assets was compiled, so we now have

no immediate point of reference of what is being sold to Nomura.

Later, during 2003, while the Dome had been closed and empty and costing us £250,000 a month to maintain in that condition, the BBC headlines speak of Dome boss pinpoints failures; Sale of Dome ‘mishandled’; Dome contents sell-off ‘madness’; Bank drops Dome bid; The Dome: a political tent. One journalist wrote ‘Every night I pray that the Dome story will never go away, and it looks as though my prayers are being answered.’ In July, under the headline ‘The dome: new delay, new doubts’, the Guardian tells us the Dome is unlikely to re-open in any form before 2007:

The long-awaited reincarnation of the dome has slipped up to two years

behind schedule . . . at a time when Philip Anschutz, the American billionaire

taking over the structure, is being forced to defend his reputation from a wave

of attacks on the other side of the Atlantic. Qwest, the empire Mr Anschutz

founded and which remains his biggest investment and prime source of his

$4bn fortune, is facing multiple investigations and lawsuits . . .

He intends to turn it into a 26,000-seat entertainment and sports complex,

staging basketball and gymnastics if Britain hosts the 2012 Olympics, in a deal

which fails to guarantee the government any return on the millions the structure

has already swallowed.

The Millennium Dome story began in earnest when New Labour came to power in 1997. As I write several years later, it appears the story may run and run, a continuing source of bad news – and expense - for the government, providing fruitful material for hungry newspapers for years to come. It has certainly not provided the ‘abiding sense of purpose and unity’ that Blair was expecting from ‘the greatest show on earth.’

Nor has it resembled in any sense at all the magnificence of British achievements trumpeted by its glittering predecessor, the Great Exhibition of 1851. But that very Crystal Palace, in its last resting place in southeast London, is where I have to go now to complete the circle of my memoir. Finding where my parents lived and the place where I was born will connect the very earliest moments of my life to the most recent.

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