It cost threepence and its cover picture featured King George VI standing on
the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral, declaring the Festival of Britain open on
Thursday May 3, 1951. The Times’s Festival of Britain supplement is
truly of another time. The then-Queen (later Queen Mother) and
fearsome-looking Queen Mary have dead animals slung around their necks,
there are men in heraldic uniform looking glum. Everyone is standing ramrod
straight. In less than a year Princess Elizabeth would be Queen.
There’s a tantalising contrast here: such old-school pomp for a Festival that
was an attempt to showcase technical and design innovation, to throw off the
misery and straitened atmosphere of the postwar years. On page five is a
wonderful aerial shot of the South Bank, where the Festival of Britain was
based. We see the Dome of Discovery (sexier and more successful than the
Millennium Dome) and, most iconically, Skylon, the 300ft, cigar-shaped
“vertical feature in steel and aluminium” designed by Hidalgo Moya and
Philip Powell.
It may be black and white, but the design of the supplement aims to be as
innovative as architectural, design and technological change the Festival of
Britain set out to celebrate. The newspapers of the day were noted for their
dryness, the close-type of the front page, the lack of pictures. Not the
Festival of Britain supplement, which has a wonderful airiness: huge
pictures, wide, spacey columns of text and bold headlines based around the
industries celebrated at the Festival – “Gaiety and Beauty, Charms of the
Festival Pleasure Gardens”.
The big difference from today is tone: the writers, nearly all unbylined, have
a wonderful, though intimidating, stentorian tone. “The Theatre of Today –
Receptive to the Ideas of Our Times” is written “from Our Dramatic Critic”;
five years prior to the volcanic impact of John Osborne’s Look
Back In Anger, the critic records “a sanely adventurous” approach by
theatrical writers and directors.
“Our architectural correspondent” notes that London planners must confront the
problem of having “a far higher density of population than is ideally
desirable”. Plus ça change. . . Many of the issues the writers raise ring
presciently with today. The Festival is a moment to celebrate the past while
looking to the future; a time of change to be embraced rather than feared.
“Our Music Critic” records a “large, new, uninstructed, but hungry”
potential audience for classical music.
Only one essay strikes a sour note: The editor of the Times Literary
Supplementsays, postwar, “poets and novelists have lost much ground to
biographers, historians and sociologists. . . The poet and novelist find it
much harder to take hold of a changing world [and] flourish best in stable
societies”. This seems odd today, where writers of all kinds are only too
ready to tackle issues such as 9/11.
While the adverts are wonderful – Ovaltine, BOAC, Cable and Wireless Services
– one of the most fascinating spreads compares England, 1851 (“Comfort and
squalor in Disraeli’s Two Nations”) with England, 1951 (“The Common Weal,
and Its Problems of Free Will”). In 1951, with feminism still over a decade
away, Dudley Carew notes that “the plea of Virginia Woolf for a room of her
own has been answered, if a trifle ambiguously, by the offer of a small
bedsit”.
Then, as now, there are concerns over the power of television (Carew writes
that it is “an instrument of incalculable influence, of tremendous
potentialities for good and evil, most of which seem not yet to be
recognised”). The essay also shows what a canard it is to look back to the
fifties as a golden age of good behaviour, civility and solidly held values.
Carew evokes an age “overshadowed by the atom-bomb”, where “standards of
honesty and morality have declined even as laws and regulations have
increased”. Its citizens are worried about “juvenile delinquency”, and “much
of graciousness, of beauty, of content, of good living and fine
craftsmanship has passed from our English life perhaps for ever”.
But there is still an absolute sense of Britain as an imperial power. “We
project the decency of a tried way of life to sore peoples everywhere,” the
writer noted of the King’s 1951 Festival of Britain address, broadcast
world-wide on the radio.
This jolts: how relatively quickly this moral certainty came to be eroded. Our
imperial past is now regarded rather shamefully. Our central place on the
world stage has been displaced. We are suspicious of change, distrust
authority, and live in the shadow of bombs different from the atom. Yet
still the Queen commands affection and respect. And still, London, and It
may be black and white, but the design of the supplement aims to be as
innovative as architectural, design and technological change the Festival of
Britain set out to celebrate. The newspapers of the day were noted for their
dryness, the close-type of the front page, the lack of pictures. Not the
Festival of Britain supplement, which has a wonderful airiness: huge
pictures, wide, spacey columns of text and bold headlines based around the
industries celebrated at the Festival – “Gaiety and Beauty, Charms of the
Festival Pleasure Gardens”.
The big difference from today is tone: the writers, nearly all unbylined, have
a wonderful, though intimidating, stentorian tone. “The Theatre of Today –
Receptive to the Ideas of Our Times” is written “from Our Dramatic Critic”;
five years prior to the volcanic impact of John Osborne’s Look
Back In Anger, the critic records “a sanely adventurous” approach by
theatrical writers and directors.
“Our architectural correspondent” notes that London planners must confront the
problem of having “a far the South Bank in particular, are a mighty beating
heart.
Carew ended his essay by hailing lighthouses “burning brightly” as something a
vexed nation could take pride in. Today, for me, the same pride can be found
on the South Bank, symbolised by the redesigned RFH and surrounding streets,
the gorgeous new BFI extension, the grass on the outside of the National
Theatre, the fact that you can walk beside the wonderful Thames from Tower
Hill down past Tate Modern and the Eye to Westminster. Stand on the recast
Hungerford Bridge, which links the South Bank to Embankment, day or night,
and marvel at our chaotic, ever-changing capital city. In the best way it
makes you proud to be British.
I was there. . . Royal Festival Hall veterans share their memories Gordon
Bowyer, 84, Greenwich Both architects on the Sports Pavilion in the Festival
of Britain, Gordon and his wife Ursula were students of Peter Moro, head of
detail design development in RFH.
Peter Moro taught us at the Regent Street Polytechnic School of Architecture,
and chose 6 or 8 of his favourite students for the design group for the
interior work of the RFH. We were excluded because we had the job at the
Sports Pavilion, but those chosen were all friends of ours. It was a great
rush for both the Sports Pavilion and the RFH – everyone was working
desperately hard.
We weren’t at the 1951 opening but we came to a preconcert, and it was
tremendous. I was amazingly impressed with the hall. Coming back into the
new hall I was very concerned about the ceiling baffles being taken out –
those aeroplane-type shapes were so distinctly Moro. It has been sensitively
done, but it is rather bland now. It has lost that quirky detail that no
other concert hall in the world has.
Jean Symons, 79, Marylebone
Working at the Royal Festival Hall site from 1949-50 as an architecture
student, Jean kept a diary that was published in 2000.
I was a student at the Architecture Association, and I felt I couldn’t qualify
until I’d seen something built. The RFH used materials unavailable during
the war: we hadn’t seen anything like it. We all tried to get jobs there.
One of my favourite memories is from the opening day. Just before the
dedication, I was in a lift with the Lord Mayor of London and his large mace
bearer, who both insisted on getting in despite being told that it couldn’t
take that much weight. It stuck between two floors. They said not to worry –
the hall wouldn’t be opened without them, and then I heard the national
anthem coming down the lift shaft. The dedication had gone ahead and the
Lord Mayor was very cross!
Yvonne Pegler, 69, north London
First visited the hall in 1951, Yvonne has spent £30,000 on tickets since box
office computerisation in 1992.
I first went into the hall a fortnight before it opened. I was 13, and the
firm my father worked for did the blinds and curtains in the hall. I was
awestruck by the building – it was so different from anything I’d ever seen.
A man I didn’t recognise asked me if I’d like a tour of the building. When
we got back, my father was horrified when he saw who I was with: it was
Leslie Martin, the Head of Design.
My first concert was in the first week. It took my breath away. Now I come
four or five times a week. Over the years, three concerts stand out: Pierre
Monteux conducting Berlioz, Rudolf Kempe conducting Strauss, and Eugene
Ormandy conducting Sibelius.
There are lots of differences in the details of the new hall, but the overall
effect is the same, and I’m glad.
Denby Richards, 83, north London
Having attended the inaugural concert as a critic, Denby is now the editor of
Musical Opinion magazine.
In 1948, I was shown the plans for the new hall and I couldn’t imagine it
would be much good, because my memory was of Queen’s Hall which had been
bombed. At the concert, the acoustic didn’t give me the warmth that I’d had
at the Queen’s Hall. During the years the acoustics were changed, and it did
improve.
My great memory was of Toscanini. Watching his rehearsals of two Brahms
concerts was wonderful, and that was the beginning of my falling in love
with the hall. Interviews by Louise Cohen
