This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Before the Arts Council campaigns for state funding of the arts in Britain 1934-1944 Webber, Howard Simon Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 27. Sep. 2021 1 Before the Arts Council: Campaigns for state funding of the arts in Britain 1934-1944 Howard Webber A thesis submitted to the Department of Political Economy, King’s College, London, for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, April 2019 2 Abstract Before the Arts Council: Campaigns for state funding of the arts in Britain 1934-1944 This thesis examines the origins of government subsidy of live music and theatre in Britain before and during World War II. It challenges the prevailing narrative that in Britain before 1939 the issue was rarely raised and even more rarely supported. The thesis reveals that the 1930s was a period of intense discussion about state involvement in the arts, with active movements in favour of subsidy and strong support within parts of the government; and that these discussions continued during the war independently of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), the state agency set up to distribute money for theatre, music and the visual arts. This is the first attempt to study these issues in detail. The focus is research into three campaigns. First, Alfred Wareing’s League of Audiences gained thousands of column inches of favourable press coverage between 1934 and 1938 and at several points appeared close to success. It raised fundamental issues about the role of the arts in what many saw as a struggle against an increasingly mechanised society where film, radio and recording were damaging not only the live arts but society more generally. Second, the Stage and Allied Arts Defence League ran a remarkably successful campaign for ‘negative state subsidy’ - the removal of Entertainments Duty, imposed on live theatre and music in 1916. The tax concessions it gained in the 1930s were worth more than any annual grant to CEMA or the Arts Council before the 1950s. The third was John Christie’s ‘Council of Power’/National Council of Music, active from 1938 to 1944. Christie, founder of Glyndebourne Festival Opera, gathered some of the leading cultural figures of the day as an ‘alternative Arts Council’. During the war Christie’s Council attracted opposition from John Maynard Keynes, CEMA’s Chairman, and Rab Butler, the Minister responsible for CEMA. This conflict influenced the design and principles of the Arts Council. The thesis demonstrates that campaigns for state arts funding had high profile and considerable influence before and during the war; that the creation of an arm’s length government body to channel public funds to the arts was close to realisation in the 1930s; that through tax breaks the government actively supported live music and theatre during the 1930s; and that even after CEMA was established, its evolution into the Arts Council was neither smooth nor certain. 3 Acknowledgements These acknowledgements are deliberately brief and selective. Any attempt to include everyone who in one way or another helped with this thesis would inevitably fail. Among my fellow students, I thank particularly Clare Hoare and Helen Richardson for their consistent encouragement, support and advice. One archivist contributed greatly to this work: the eternally helpful Julia Aries at Glyndebourne. I am lucky indeed that the Glydebourne Archive, where much of my research was focused, has Julia in charge. During my MA at the late, lamented Institute/Centre for Contemporary British History, Doctor Michael Kandiah and Professor Pat Thane performed miracles in turning someone whose previous formal study of history had ended with a poor ‘A’ Level several decades ago into someone ready to take on research for a PhD. Pat then acted as an exemplary supervisor for this thesis. I am very grateful to both. And then there is my family. Not only did my wife Sandra and son Gabriel put up for years and years with my rambling on about subjects of at best limited interest to them; they also provided vital and more specific help – Sandra as a proof-reader with a fierce eye for detail, Gabriel with unrivalled IT support. My love and thanks to both of you. 4 Contents Abstract 2 Acknowledgements 3 Contents 4 Chapter 1: Introduction 7 Subject and research questions 7 Sources, methodology and structure of the thesis 10 Historiography 14 Chapter 2: Theatre and classical music in 1930s Britain 23 Introduction 23 Cinema v theatre 24 Broadcasting v live music 32 Conclusion 40 Chapter 3: The League of Audiences: (i) ‘I am progressing 42 almost beyond my hopes’ Introduction: a forgotten debate 42 ‘Advancing upon the iron portals of Whitehall’: the League begins 43 Alfred Wareing 43 The League and the press 48 The League’s supporters 51 The League’s programme 52 ‘A piece of idealistic blackmailing’: the League gains support 54 Chapter 4: The League of Audiences: (ii) Fear of the machine 62 and distrust of the state Introduction 62 The League and mechanised art: (i) ‘A sensation of impotence and 63 dumb acquiescence’ ‘Condemned to death by being canned alive’: the scope of the 63 issue ‘Death to Hollywood’? 68 5 Opposition to ‘mechanised music’ 72 The League and mechanised art: (ii) The involvement of the 75 Churches ‘Under the shadow of a new State obligation’: opposition to the 82 League of Audiences Conclusion 94 Chapter 5: The League of Audiences: (iii) Decline, fall and 96 legacy Introduction 96 ‘Mr Wareing is filled with something of the crank ingredient’: the 97 League of audiences and the BBC The League of Audiences and the theatrical establishment 101 The end of the League of Audiences: (a) Decline 108 The end of the League of Audiences: (b) Fall 114 The end of the League of Audiences: (c) Lingering death 122 The significance and legacy of the League of Audiences 125 Chapter 6: John Christie and the ‘Council of Power’: 1936-39 136 Introduction 136 The beginnings: ‘I want to form a Royal Society of Music’ 137 The Glyndebourne conference of March 1938 143 Christie prepares 143 Discussion at the conference 152 The July 1938 conference 158 Christie in the approach to war 164 Conclusion 171 Chapter 7: ‘CEMA is already broken down’: John Christie 172 and the National Council of Music 1939-41 Introduction 172 Preliminary lobbying: to summer 1940 173 ‘The psychological moment has arrived’: to December 1940 181 Christie and the musicians 181 Successes and excesses 186 ‘Let the flags be out. Let us drive in State’: to spring 1941 197 6 Christie’s friends and supporters in spring 1941 207 Conclusion 213 Chapter 8: Butler, Keynes and the end of Christie’s National 214 Council of Music: 1941-44 Global ambitions and legal minutiae: the NCM spring to autumn 214 1941 ‘We are at last unofficially accepted & wanted’: Christie 222 misunderstands – autumn 1941 to spring 1942 ‘Damn the machine’: Keynes blocks the NCM – spring and 234 summer 1942 ‘I see nothing but hate and envy’: late 1942 to spring 1943 243 The end of the NCM: spring 1943 to autumn 1944 255 Conclusion 261 Chapter 9: ‘No Levy on Laughter and no Fine on Fun!’: the 263 campaign against Entertainments Duty Introduction 263 Origin and history of Entertainments Duty to 1933 265 1933-34 - The Old Vic and Sadler's Wells: music, drama and 276 education The campaign 1933-39: ‘Why should “Crazy Nights at Clacton” 289 escape?’ Conclusion: 'Bringing an aesthetic principle into politics'? 304 Chapter 10: Conclusion: reclaiming lost history 307 Key lessons from the research 307 Areas for further research 310 Forgotten stories and false consensus 318 Bibliography 320 7 Chapter 1 Introduction War was the foundation of the arts Andrew Sinclair1 Subject and research questions This thesis examines the origins of government arts subsidy in Britain before and during World War II. In some respects this is well- trodden ground for cultural historians. The problem is that most who have written about it have deviated little from the path of those who went before. Despite its elliptical drafting, the quotation above, from Andrew Sinclair’s 1995 official history of the Arts Council of Great Britain, exemplifies the consensus: that the agencies delivering central government arts subsidy, from 1940 the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), from 1945 the Arts Council, were wholly a product of the war and lacked earlier roots.