Family Britain, 1951-1957 (2 page)

Barry himself, editor of the
News Chronicle
but also the Festival’s originator and now its director-general, was one of the progressive, public-spirited, high-minded ‘herbivores’ (as opposed to ‘carnivores’, in Michael Frayn’s classic coinage) running the show. The emphasis on the future, above all on the Festival’s modernity, was at the very heart of what he and the others were trying to achieve. But crucially, it was a restrained, Scandinavian-style, ‘soft’ Modernism – startlingly novel to most British eyes, but in fact familiar to the cognoscenti since the 1930s – and far removed from the ‘hard’ Modernist precepts of Le Corbusier and his followers. It was a future, in other words, that came with a warm, unthreatening, scientific yet somehow companionable aura – a future imbued with benevolent, rational and deeply paternalistic assumptions.5

Inevitably the Festival got a mixed reception. ‘Don’t Let’s Make Fun of the Fair’ was the title of Noël Coward’s seemingly supportive but in fact condescending song, while the increasingly anti-Modernist John Betjeman was only relieved that he had not found ‘gambolling functionalists trying to be funny’. The conductor John Barbirolli bit his lip so effectively that it was not until four years later, on a visit to Australia, that he unguardedly described the Royal Festival Hall as ‘a black spot on the landscape if ever there was one’. The writer and broadcaster Marghanita Laski would for one have disagreed, hailing it as ‘the most exciting conception and achievement in the whole exhibition’. So too Dylan Thomas, who in a broadcast in June on the Welsh Home Service extolled ‘the shining Skylon, the skygoing nylon, the cylindrical leg-of-the-future jetting’, discovered in the Telecinema ‘a St Vitus’s gala of abstract shapes and shades in a St Swithin’s day of torrential dazzling darning needles’, and evoked at night-time ‘the lit pavilions, white, black, and silver in sweeps of stone and feathery steel’. Among architects, ‘hard’ Modernists like Ernö Goldfinger were of course underwhelmed, but the overall professional consensus was very positive, certainly among the ‘softs’. ‘The great thing is that in a single stride, though working under every possible handicap, our designers have unmistakeably taken the lead,’ declared the young, idealistic Lionel Brett in the
Observer
. ‘And they have put on a show so impossible not to enjoy that there is a real hope that it will mark the beginning of a modern style which will be generally accepted.’ John Summerson, perhaps the most distinguished architectural critic of the day, was almost equally enthusiastic. The Skylon was admittedly ‘a silly toy, a pretty toy and a dangerous one, whose merciless descending point is luckily just out of reach’, but otherwise, the buildings were ‘so good, so witty, so full of invention, so oddly and amusingly grouped’ that he was able to reassure his
New Statesman
readers that the South Bank was ‘an out-and-out winner’. For him, as for others, it was the optimistic start of a distinctive British Modernism.6

As for the public at large, the conventional wisdom is that the Festival was a resounding hit. The exhibits on the South Bank attracted almost eight and a half million visitors; a Gallup poll during the summer found that 58 per cent of people had a favourable impression of what they had seen and/or heard of the Festival; and ‘Skylon’ became an instant nickname for the long-limbed. Yet there are some debits to be entered. The American-style funfair rides at Battersea (such as the Skywheel, the Bubble-Bounce and the Flyo Plane) pulled in just as many daily visitors as the more worthy attractions on the South Bank; among those attractions, the less than educational ‘Home of the Future’ pavilion was the most popular exhibition; the overall figures for the South Bank would have been markedly less impressive without a 50-per-cent cut in evening ticket prices after early targets were not reached; those evening figures were further distorted by the South Bank’s increasing reputation as an easy pick-up place; and, in the country as a whole, there seems to have been apathy at least as much as enthusiasm – an apathy typified by the Festival’s lack of impact in Reading (notwithstanding the inevitable historical pageant), the flop of J. B. Priestley’s carefully timed novel
Festival at Farbridge
, and the unremarkable listening figures for BBC Radio’s almost saturation coverage (a trend that started when a repeat of
Mrs Dale’s Diary
on the Light Programme topped the audience for the Home Service coverage of the opening ceremony on the South Bank). Three schoolboys had perhaps representative experiences. John Simpson (seven) ‘saw the Skylon, and put on red and green plastic spectacles to watch a film in 3-D, and listened to a recording of the accents of England and someone saying in a Cockney accent, “Come on kettle, boil up” ’; Robert Hewison (eight) was ‘disappointed to discover that the soaring narrow pod of the Skylon was held up by wires’; and George MacBeth, about to go up to Oxford, won third prize in the North-East Regional Festival of Britain Competition with an unashamedly mocking poem in which the ‘rather depressed look of the dome’, the ‘finicky skylon confessing its failure on legs’ and the Festival Hall ‘on its very best behaviour’ induced between them no more than an adolescent ‘yawn’.7

A headache for the organisers in the early weeks was litter, but the situation improved once the public-address system began to say loudly and frequently, ‘This is
your
exhibition; please help to keep it tidy.’ The problem had been ironed out by the second Monday in June, when Henry St John, a misanthropic civil servant living on his own in Acton, paid 5s to take his father to ‘the South Bank exhibition’ on what seems to have been a particularly busy morning:

We explored part of the Dome of Discovery, but a broadcast voice asked people to keep on the move, as others outside were waiting to get in. The Dome contained exhibits on synthetic dyes, electrical instruments, mutation of species, physiology of sex, a megatherium or ground sloth, a developing embryo, and many other things which require, but did not get, unhurried study . . .

After a long wait in another queue, we had a fair lunch at 3/3 each in a cafeteria. D showed some desire to go in the shot tower into which however a long queue was winding, so we had a superficial look round the health pavilion, which dealt with blood, the nervous system, vaccination, training of nurses, surgical instruments, burns etc. The only noticeable foreigners I saw at the exhibition were 2 Asiatics, 2 American servicemen, 1 negro, and 1 woman talking French.

Another diarist, Anthony Heap, waited until a Tuesday evening in mid-July:

From what I’d read and heard about the Exhibition, I’d surmised that there was very little in it likely to appeal to anyone of my unscientific, unmechanical and generally unprogressive turn of mind. And how right my surmise proved to be! 99 per cent of the exhibits on view in the various pavilions are devoted to different aspects of the ‘Land’ and the ‘People’ of Britain and the entire contents of the dimly-lit Dome of Discovery were of no interest to me whatsoever.

Admittedly the whole thing is handsomely designed, laid out and, at nightfall, illuminated. And, unlike the Pleasure Gardens at Battersea Park, there are hundreds of comfortable chairs all over the place where one can rest one’s weary limbs free of charge – as well as a continuous supply of good tuneful music relayed through amplifiers so that it can be heard where e’r one wanders – or sits.

Even so, the evening scarcely seemed worth the 6/6 it cost me . . .

Next evening his wife Marjorie went. ‘M thinks the South Bank Exhibition an absolutely wonderful show,’ noted a fair-minded Heap, ‘and, after dark, a really enchanting spot.’8

It was not just on the South Bank that a clear drift towards the modern was under way. July 1951 saw not only the publication of the first (
Cornwall
) of the
Buildings of England
series by the broadly pro-Modernist, anti-Victorian architectural critic Nikolaus Pevsner but also the gathering at High Leigh, a rather rundown Victorian mansion near Hoddesdon in Hertfordshire, of the delegates from CIAM 8 – the eighth meeting of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne, a body which since the 1930s had in large part been devoted to the ideals of Le Corbusier, who was himself president. As usual, the application of the very latest technology to the problems of mass housing was CIAM’s particular preoccupation; the Congress looked ahead in its familiar utopian way to ‘an unlimited, inexhaustible, universal and completely flexible flow of atomic and molecular materials and energy . . . the age-old dream, hope or demand for unlimited, universal, automatic, and almost magical abundance and leisure’. Nevertheless, there was on this occasion some criticism of the Modernist dream, to judge by the account of a dissenting home delegate, Frederic Osborn: ‘I was amazed, and momentarily encouraged, by support from all the French housing planning people present, whose spokesman not only brilliantly exploded Le Corbusier’s mad 14-storey glass-house at Marseilles [the renowned Unité d’Habitation, nearing completion], but expressed astonishment that England, the envied country of the family home with garden, should be increasingly piling houses on top of each other,’ he reported soon afterwards to Lewis Mumford in America. ‘The high officials of our own housing and planning ministry were undoubtedly impressed by these attacks, which were really unanswerable.’

Osborn, in charge of the Town and Country Planning Association, had for years been waging a doughty campaign in favour of dispersal from the unhealthy, overcrowded inner city to new towns and, if necessary, elsewhere, and against what he saw as the multi-storey, high-rise fallacy. His letter went on about ‘high officials’:

But the drift of things is simply too much for them. I am more and more convinced that we must lose unless somehow we can bring the force of popular opinion to bear – and I just don’t see how to do it. I can’t get the money, and I can’t get together even a dozen passionate enthusiasts to splutter along with me. I feel spent and futile, and can take no pleasure in dialectical triumphs that are just throwing the sand against the wind. Your way is the only way: to write books that build new foundations of thought. But that is a twenty-five year process, and therefore not for me at my age [66].

‘I shudder at what will happen in the meantime,’ he ended bleakly. ‘And so I pursue the short cut route which isn’t open.’9

A month later, on 15 August, the winner was announced of the competition to design a new cathedral for Coventry, to be built next to the ruins of the blitzed old one. Three assessors – all of them architects, selected by the Royal Institute of British Architects – chose an up-and-coming Scottish architect, Basil Spence, who had been responsible for the Sea and Ships pavilion on the South Bank and whose design for Coventry was very much in approved ‘Festival’ style. ‘It is the one I should have chosen myself,’ declared the Bishop of Coventry. ‘It is imaginative, modern and magnificently sensitive to the site.’ One of his clergymen, however, begged to differ. ‘So far I have only seen the reproduction of the original rough sketch,’ the Rev. H.N.M. Artus of Arley Rectory wrote immediately to the local paper. ‘It appeared to be yet one more super-cinema, mammoth insurance company’s offices, or even a block of flats. I was just wondering why there was a bit of a church attached to it when I saw, to my amazement, that this was the prize-winning design for Coventry Cathedral.’ In short, ‘I think this thing is a horror’. N. B. Waddell of 384 Radford Road, Coventry, agreed: ‘A lot of people, with great affectation, will make much of it because it is the winning design, but for me it is no more satisfying than the paintings in a modern style which deface some of our art exhibitions.’

Over the next few weeks – as the architectural journals sang an almost unanimous chorus of praise, interrupted only by some Modernists wondering whether Spence had gone far enough – a flurry of other letters appeared in the
Coventry Evening Telegraph
. Not all were negative, but D. Kaye, chairman of the Coventry Society of Architects, was clearly on the defensive when he insisted that the new cathedral would ‘aesthetically be a jewel in the heart of Coventry’. His assertion earned a memorable riposte from F. Bliss Burbidge of Belvedere Road, Coventry: ‘I should like to repudiate the idea that only architects can estimate the beauty of a cathedral; it may be flattering to their own conceit but it will not hold water.’ The controversy rumbled on through the autumn, with Spence at one point reassuring a sceptical Coventry Diocesan Conference that ‘modern science can produce as beautiful work in cement as our predecessors did with stone’. But by early 1952, once he had amended his design so that the large glass screen dividing the porch from the nave no longer needed to be lowered below the level of the floor (a feature that had prompted the phrase ‘push-button Cathedral’), it was clear that the people of Coventry were eventually going to get a new, signature place of worship. ‘What I feel absolutely certain of is that it is honest and that it is original,’ Pevsner pronounced on radio’s Third Programme. ‘What it may lack in monumentality, it will gain in life.’10

The battle in 1951 between the old and the new was played out perhaps most piquantly on two summer evenings at the Royal Festival Hall. On the first, 14 July, Princess Elizabeth was present at an explicitly ‘traditional’ concert put on by the National Federation of Jazz Organizations. Humphrey Lyttelton, Monty Sunshine and Wally Fawkes (the cartoonist ‘Trog’) were among the musicians, with Deryck Guyler as compère. A performance of ‘Rock Island Line’ by Mick Mulligan and his Magnolia Jazz Band introduced the night’s first vocalist, George Melly. ‘He began the song cleverly but failed to hold on to his advantage,’ noted
Melody Maker
’s rather sniffy reviewer, Max Jones. ‘I began to fidget before it was through.’ Indeed, Jones’s verdict on the concert as a whole was pretty disparaging: ‘For the experienced listener I believe it became something of a bore before the evening was out. Certainly there were moments when I wished I was on the North Bank.’ Two evenings later there was no royal presence at an equally explicitly ‘modernist’ concert, this time with Steve Race the compère, the Johnny Dankworth Seven (Cleo Laine on vocals) the undoubted star turn, and the American critic Leonard Feather as
MM
’s reviewer. ‘British jazz came of age last Monday night,’ began his piece, and he declared that the concert had gone far to ‘helping to prove that modern music in Britain need not consider itself a mere Cinderella sister of the American family’. Perhaps, though, the Princess did not unduly mind missing ‘the very cool groove of “Seven Not Out” ’.11