Scotland, CEMA and the Arts Council, 1919-1967

Background, Politics and Visual Art Policy

Euan McArthur

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317058748
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Historia del arte

A case study of the relationship between arts and cultural policy and nationalism, Scotland, CEMA and the Arts Council, 1919-1967: Background, Politics and Visual Art Policy examines the overlooked significance of Scotland in the development of British arts policy and institutions. This study is broadly relevant in an era of political devolution, which continues to pose questions for the constituent nations of Britain and their sense of self- and collective identities. Euan McArthur provides a clear account of the background to and evolution of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) and the Arts Council of Great Britain (ACGB) in Scotland up to the formation of the Scottish Arts Council (SAC) in 1967. He also presents a study of Scottish visual art policy and activities between 1940 and 1967, assessing the successes and failures of visual art policy in Scotland, including the degree to which it evolved differently from England. This development, leading to the re-naming of the Scottish Committee of the ACGB as the SAC, prepared the way for the expansion of activities that marked the 1970s and after. Based on extensive archival research, this book brings to light previously unavailable material, not covered in existing accounts of CEMA/ACGB.

PART I
BACKGROUND

1
Idealism and Welfare

Scotland did not figure in the events of the autumn of 1939 that led to CEMA’s formation, but it played an important, and in some respects decisive, role after April 1940 in shaping both CEMA and the Arts Council. The point matters because CEMA encountered the resistance that commonly meets ‘London bodies’ perceived to be interfering in Scottish affairs. Had circumstances been different, that might have been avoided because a Scottish presence can be traced in the deeper background, through the moderate, progressive social ethos that underpinned CEMA and in its twin roots in adult education and the voluntary sector. These were neither alien to Scotland nor lacked material Scottish connections.

The immediate origin of CEMA was a note sent to the Board of Education, in August or September 1939, by W.E. Williams, General Secretary of the British Institute of Adult Education (BIAE) in which he argued the case for wartime support for ‘cultural amenities’ in evacuation reception areas.¹ His associate (the éminence grise behind the scenes) was the uniquely influential Dr Thomas Jones, ex-Deputy Cabinet Secretary and Secretary of the Pilgrim Trust (known as ‘T.J.’ in Whitehall). By December, they had gained the backing of Lord de la Warr, President of the Board. The Pilgrim Trust, following its Secretary’s lead, put up £25,000 and by January 1940 a small committee was distributing the first grants. In April, the Treasury agreed a one-off grant of £50,000 and CEMA was upgraded from an informal committee identified with the Pilgrim Trust to a Council associated with the Board of Education.

CEMA was a child of war. The war posed an existential threat that legitimized a shift in government policy, which, though officially a short-term expedient, was hardly less remarkable for that: the assumption of a measure of responsibility for the ‘living arts’ – music, drama and contemporary visual art. The motives were mixed: to assert Britain’s commitment to the civilizing value of the arts independent of the state, to raise public morale, to protect the fabric of civil life and to create employment for artists. This was the basis on which the Treasury made its grant, but other motives were in play within the Board. One was to bolster the policy of evacuation, which, by December 1939, was in danger of collapse as people drifted home, the expected mass bombing having not materialized. For the same reason, the blackout and closure of places of entertainment were being criticized as overreactions. To Lord de la Warr, CEMA offered an instrument to win public opinion round again to the government’s side. There was also a moral scare about what young people might get up to on long, blacked-out evenings without wholesome diversion, but beyond this was another motive: Lord de la Warr hoped that CEMA would become a permanent extension of his department’s fiefdom, a hope shared by Williams and Jones.

In their personal and professional lives, Williams and Jones combined adult educational and voluntary sector interests, and in the preceding decade both had worked with the National Council for Social Service (NCSS) and the Dunfermline-based Carnegie United Kingdom Trust on cultural and educational schemes to ameliorate the impact of unemployment and help sustain urban and rural communities. The underlying purpose of that work, which they believed justified the continuation of state assistance into wartime, was to protect the life of civil society embodied in voluntary associations. In the eyes of its initiators, CEMA, even in the midst of a wartime emergency, would contribute to the growth of a better democracy by diffusing among the people new opportunities for personal development that would make them more complete as citizens.²

To understand the complex from which CEMA sprang, and to uncover the Scottish dimension buried inside its ‘pre-history’, three events in the years immediately following the First World War are crucial. They are the publication in 1919 of the Final Report of the Adult Education Committee of the Ministry of Reconstruction (called The 1919 Report), the founding of the NCSS in the same year, and of the BIAE in 1921. In a number of ways (which will be explored in the next chapter), these three together created the cultural matrix in which CEMA had its origin and contributed something to its founding concept; and a Scottish component was not lacking. CEMA’s birth, however, cannot be accounted for simply in pragmatic terms. Its origin must be sought in ideas and values prevalent in the adult education and social service sectors between the wars, values that were shared by Tom Jones and W.E. Williams. These were to a significant degree the product of the social theory of British philosophical idealism, which in England was founded on the teaching of T.H. Green and in Scotland of Edward Caird.

It was the legacy of Caird that Tom Jones encountered as a young man studying at Glasgow University between 1895 and 1900. There he fell under the influence of fellow Welshman, Henry Jones, who had succeeded his teacher Caird as Professor of Moral Philosophy in 1893 when Caird was appointed Master of Balliol College, Oxford. Henry Jones’s ‘practical creed’ of active citizenship inspired Tom Jones to live and work at the university’s student settlement, and led him into membership of the Christian Socialist League, the International Labour Party and to found a branch of the Fabian Society. Ultimately liberal in outlook, he worked relentlessly to advance social welfare and adult education, including, in 1927, founding Coleg Harlech as a residential adult educational college.

His other major influence from Glasgow was William Smart, the Professor of Political Economy, with whom he had begun to lecture before graduating in 1900. When Smart was appointed to the Poor Law Commission in 1905, Tom Jones became the commission’s Special Investigator in Scotland. Though admiring aspects of Beatrice Webb’s advocacy of a state socialized welfare system in the Minority Report, he preferred the Majority Report’s recommendation of a mixed economy of state and voluntary sector assistance, which reflected the influence of the Charity Organization Society and its self-help ethos.³ Founded by Octavia Hill in 1869 (with financial help from John Ruskin), the society was dominated by philosophical idealists including Smart, Henry Jones, Bernard and Helen Bosanquet, and its Secretary (from 1875 to 1914) the Scot, Charles Loch, who had studied under Green.

Tom Jones finally left Glasgow in 1909, to take up the new Chair of Economics at Queen’s University, Belfast. His 14 years in Glasgow confirmed his political and social outlook and left him with an enduring network of friendships and connections. During his short time in Belfast he instigated the founding of a Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) branch, and, after his return to Wales in 1911 to lead the campaign against tuberculosis, he maintained his commitment to the movement, working with another Scottish idealist philosopher and student of Caird, J.S. Mackenzie.

Philosophical Idealism and Social Theory

Oxford and Glasgow Universities were the leading centres of philosophical idealism in Britain in the late nineteenth century. Although Kantian Transcendental Idealism was a profound influence on some (among them Caird) it was the monism of Fichte and, above all, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Philosophy of Right (and later responses to Hegel, such as Bruno Bauer’s) that underlay British idealist social theory. Christianity, too, was of more or less central importance. Despite individual variations, there was a relatively consistent core that might be summarized thus: each individual stands in relation to the totality of other minds, not in isolation from them; in consequence, the spiritual dialectic of progress depends upon the self-realization of individuals contributing to the good of the whole. Because the state is the embodiment of the general will of society, and the progress of society is founded upon individual moral self-development, the state’s primary duty is to enable that development by creating the social conditions in which individuals may flourish to the fullest degree. The idealism that Tom Jones found in Glasgow, then, provided a theoretical and moral framework for political and social reform by combining an organic conception of state and society, mingled with a spiritual teleology and social evolutionism.

The success of idealist social theory in the Victorian and Edwardian periods depended on the gradual rise of the middle classes to political and economic power and to the weakening of resistance to the expansion of the state. Matching this was the progressive growth of civil society and an ethic of service founded on the recognition that society is composed of interdependent actors: as Hegel wrote, ‘a system which interweaves the subsistence, happiness and rights of the individual with the subsistence, happiness and right of all’.⁴ Central to civil society is voluntary association for the multiplicity of purposes (political, spiritual, intellectual, cultural and sporting) that bring people together. The elevation of the place of voluntary association in public discourse in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reflected a fear that the traditional relationships between people on which society depended were fraying in the conditions of modern life, hence theories of reciprocity began to extend to the state’s responsibility to maintain the conditions in which a free citizenry could flourish. The state was not merely an external coercive power, but was bound to its polity by moral obligations. Idealist interpretations of Rousseau’s ‘general will’, Fichte’s identification of the individual mind with the totality of humanity, and the trend to conceive of society as an organism, all contributed to the rethinking of the state-society relationship (not necessarily in democratic ways) because the state could be regarded as an expression of society, and hence unified, in some essential way, with it.

In Book V of The Wealth of Nations (1776) Adam Smith proposed that popular education ought to be undertaken by the state to counteract the intellectual and spiritual damage caused by the industrial division of labour, and in 1825, Francis Jeffrey added a political motive to Smith’s moral one, when he advised that the preservation of the social order required the education of the poor to prevent ‘a mutual exchange of property and conditions’.⁵ As wealth spread more widely through society in the second half of the nineteenth century, justification for the extreme inequality of its distribution was required, and a moral defence was found in philanthropic service by the ‘superior classes’ for their ‘inferiors’. Equally, as industrial society developed, the social consequences of the failure of the market to provide adequately without ameliorative legislation became inescapable, setting in train the elaboration of government which, in many ways, marks the beginning of the corporatist culture to which CEMA belonged.

The belief that conflicting interests of wealth and class could be reconciled by achieving a higher moral perspective (not by the abolition of class itself) separated utopian socialism and liberal reformism from the revolutionary socialism of Marx, which inverted the order: it is change in material relations that will change hearts and minds. The idealist reformers, whose fear of social atomisation and revolution drove their interventionist social ethics, repudiated Marx, and he had equally little influence on the labour movement in Britain before the early twentieth century (Richard Owen, the Chartists and Ruskin were of much greater importance).

Interest in classical and modern idealism had been encouraged in England from the 1820s onwards by, amongst others, F.D. Maurice and Benjamin Jowett. Maurice’s vision of society as a Christian brotherhood in which all polarities, including class, would be reconciled, infused Christian Socialism and was given practical application in the Working Men’s College (1854). Their example, of idealism mingled with religious philanthropy to underpin social action, influenced later developments including the founding of the WEA. It was Jowett, at Balliol in the late 1850s, who introduced T.H. Green and, in the early 1860s, the Greenock-born Snell scholar, Edward Caird, to German idealism. Green spent his life at Balliol, and in his mature thinking, elements from idealism, evangelism and Carlylean moralism produced a synthesis that was to infuse social liberalism into the first decades of the twentieth century (H.H. Asquith being one who acknowledged his influence). For Green, altruistic service was the means by which ultimate human good would be progressively actualized in history.

Idealism began the climb towards its zenith in Scotland when Caird returned to Glasgow University in 1866, but it had already penetrated the Scottish universities through the influence of Maurice and John Stuart Blackie, Professor of Greek at Edinburgh University. J.F. Ferrier had published his indigenous ‘absolute real idealism’ in the Institutes of Metaphysics in 1854 but had been largely ignored, while James Hutchison Stirling’s The Secret of Hegel of 1865 had gained a wide readership. Caird’s contribution was less as an original thinker than as an inspiring teacher, his enormous influence on his students depending more on the tone of his lectures than their clarity of content. As described by Henry Jones and J.H. Muirhead, ‘The effect of Caird’s teaching was more a spirit than an argument’. The same authors note that while few of his students became academics, his vision prepared many to lead a morally purposeful life.⁶

Through Jowett, Green and Arnold Toynbee, Balliol led Oxford’s extension movement in the 1880s, from which Samuel and Henrietta Barnett’s extra-mural educational work sprang. It was Samuel Barnett who, in 1885, persuaded Oxford to found Toynbee Hall, in Whitechapel, the first of the university settlements (where university people could work in areas of severe poverty), and who initiated the Pictures for the Poor exhibitions that ran until 1913. Inspired by Christian Socialism, in 1889 two of Green’s High Church followers, Henry Scott Holland and Charles Gore, established the Christian Social Union, one of its members, Albert Mansbridge, founding the WEA in 1903 in the spirit (as h...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I: BACKGROUND
• PART II: POLITICS
• PART III: VISUAL ART POLICY
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Scottish Committee Members, 1943–67
• Bibliography
• Index