The New Elizabethan Age

Culture, Society and National Identity after World War II

Irene Morra, Rob Gossedge, Irene Morra, Rob Gossedge

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780857728678
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

In the first half of the twentieth century, many writers and artists turnedto the art and received example of the Elizabethans as a means ofarticulating an emphatic (and anti-Victorian) modernity. By the middleof that century, this cultural neo-Elizabethanism had become absorbedwithin a broader mainstream discourse of national identity, heritage andcultural performance. Taking strength from the Coronation of a new, youngQueen named Elizabeth, the New Elizabethanism of the 1950s heralded anation that would now see its 'modern', televised monarch preside over animminently glorious and artistic age.This book provides the first in-depth investigation of New Elizabethanismand its legacy. With contributions from leading cultural practitioners andscholars, its essays explore New Elizabethanism as variously manifestin ballet and opera, the Coronation broadcast and festivities, nationalhistoriography and myth, the idea of the 'Young Elizabethan', celebrations ofair travel and new technologies, and the New Shakespeareanism of theatreand television. As these essays expose, New Elizabethanism was muchmore than a brief moment of optimistic hyperbole.
Indeed, from moderndrama and film to the reinternment of Richard III, from the London Olympicsto the funeral of Margaret Thatcher, it continues to pervade contemporaryartistic expression, politics, and key moments of national pageantry.

PART IV

ELIZABETHANS YOUNG AND NEW

8

THE ARTS COUNCIL AND THE YOUNG ELIZABETHANS

TONY COULT

No one kno wot to do about anything at the moment so they say the future is in the hands of YOUTH […] All the same we are young elizabethans and it can’t be altered …

(Molesworth)1

Scenes from a film:

An apocalyptic London landscape. Children repeatedly smash a man’s head against a stone. Hundreds of youths pour down steps onto The Mall, a few hundred yards from Buckingham Palace, heading for a violent fight already started by hundreds more, overwhelmingly male, youth on the banks of the Thames by Southwark Bridge. This dystopian vision of violent children in a postwar urban wasteland is from the closing sequences of the first great Ealing Comedy, Hue and Cry, filmed in 1946.2

Those film scenes offer vibrant images of the potentially disruptive energies embodied by the postwar young. Set in and around the Blitz-ravaged docks near Southwark Bridge, Hue and Cry centres on a group of mainly working-class children and teenagers foiling a gang of fur thieves. Scripted by ex-police officer T. E. B. Clarke, its most memorable scenes show hundreds of young people swarming through London to ambush the gang’s rendezvous in the rubble by the river. The scenes take place not just on Bankside and in the East End, but on the steps down from the Duke of York Memorial onto the Mall, in an unmistakeable homage to Eisenstein’s revolutionary scene on the Potemkin Stairs. The hordes of children, enough to swamp the crooks by sheer weight of numbers, seem to come from all over the city, drawn by 1946 versions of social media. It is a comic-strip narrative in which a group of more-or-less self-managing young people perform acts of hearty, socially sanctioned violence. After they repeatedly smash the head of a crook against a stone, the boy hero later puts his crooked nemesis out of action by leaping from a height onto his ribcage, rendering him unconscious. In spite of its conservative conclusion (the crooks are conquered), the film also seems to hint that all these young energies might need either taming or harnessing. Indeed, the film’s final images in church confirm this containment: the choirboys first seen in the opening shots of the film, now bruised, bandaged and plastered from their worthy crime-fighting, find their potential for anarchic self-management safely reined in as they chorus, ‘O, For the Wings of a Dove’.

Something was released into the dust-laden air of the bombed cities, and whatever that energy was, the Arts Council began to acknowledge. In 1945, the Arts Council of Great Britain had been created out of the wartime Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA). Young people were not central to that founding, but the Council slowly awoke to a growing pressure to fund drama for young people, and, in so doing, stirred into life a series of debates about the financial mechanisms and political justifications for spending the money of taxpayers on drama for and by the young. Already in 1942, the Ministry of Information had commissioned a documentary, C.E.M.A.,3 to promote the organization’s work in raising morale and keeping up the spirits of wartime Britain. Children appear in it twice. There are scenes from a rehearsal and performance of a touring production of The Merry Wives of Windsor in which a child actor plays Page. There is also a very potent sequence earlier in the film that shows the Reginald Jacques Orchestra rehearsing in an ordnance factory. Workers stream out of the factory, and four boys peer through a gap in the factory fence. To the sound of the orchestra, they mimic the flute and violin they supposedly hear. The sequence is clearly rehearsed, and the whole film is carefully constructed to convey the essence of what the wartime government intended its audience to think about CEMA. Young people have clear roles: they are either quasi-professionals or they are larky voyeurs, good-naturedly parodying adult pretensions.

A meeting of the Board of Education on 18 December 1939 was to result in the founding of the prototype for the postwar Arts Council of Great Britain. A memorandum stated:

This country is supposed to be fighting for civilization and democracy and if these things mean anything they mean a way of life where people have liberty and opportunity to pursue the things of peace.4

In that memo, the arts are identified as corpuscular carriers of instrumental ‘goods’ in the national bloodstream, including civilization, democracy and liberty. Undoubtedly some of the thinking influencing those broadly social democratic aims would have constituted, by 1939, a recognition that both Soviet communism and National Socialism had captured the arts for their respective ideologies and bound them to the state apparatus, with prohibitions and highly directive artistic policies. (The memo was written not just after the declaration of war but in what must have been a gloomy awareness of the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact signed earlier that summer.) Both regimes had encouraged significant youth drama activity; the Soviet Union in particular drew on a rich tradition of youth theatre stretching back to Stanislavsky.

The 1946 Royal Charter, remoulding CEMA into the Arts Council, made no specific provision for young people. It also used the term ‘fine arts’ deliberately to exclude the amateur and semi-professional work that CEMA had instigated under wartime pressures and priorities. In the move from CEMA to the Arts Council, the key transformational policy of that great helmsman of the early Arts Council, John Maynard Keynes, was to privilege, in a period when state funding was very tight, established support for professional arts over anything that still smacked of CEMA’s proto-community arts remit. In that climate, theatre for the young was always going to fight for status.

Mary Glasgow, a key figure in CEMA before she became in 1951 the first Arts Council Secretary-General under Keynes’ chairmanship, had also been a Schools Inspector before working for CEMA, and was one of the first Arts Council members to raise the possibility of the Arts Council taking children seriously at all. She observed that there was nothing in the Council’s Charter that limited interest to adults. This potential welcoming of the young, however, then retreats into an anxiety that conflates common reflections on teaching practice at the time with purely arts matters:

An advertised connection with education, such as the phrase ‘sponsored by the Great Whoopington Education Committee’ on a concert poster is not always helpful. Any suggestion of ‘welfare’ or ‘improvement’ may be fatal to the success of a venture and the Education Committee does not always enjoy the highest possible local prestige.5

At the same time as his Secretary-General was opening up the idea of the Arts Council as at least thinking about the young, Keynes cast his personal chill over the whole prospect of a policy to fund young people’s theatre. Keynes’ choice of language in his final published writing, The Arts Council: Its Policy and Hopes, is powerful in its wish to distance itself not just from the instrumentalist idealism of CEMA, but specifically from the classroom:

The artist walks where the breath of the spirit blows him. He cannot be told his direction; he does not know it himself. But he leads the rest of us into fresh pastures and teaches us to love and to enjoy what we often begin by rejecting, enlarging our sensibility and purifying our instincts […] But do not think of the Arts Council as a schoolmaster. Your enjoyment will be our first aim.6

Set against this vision of artists as passive victims of their artistic impulses is the dread of any kind of inculcation, preaching or propaganda. Such distaste is understandable from the bombsites and trauma of a war still being fought against a totalitarian state even as the words were broadcast. Keynes accomplishes two things. He has fun at the expense of an easy target – teachers – but at the back of his imaginings is also the sense that to admit any instrumental purpose to art is off limits.

Already in the documentary C.E.M.A., children are cheeky outsiders staring in at an adult world. After the war, other media began to look ahead to the world those outsiders and their brothers and sisters would create and be created by. Humphrey Jennings’ 1945 documentary, A Diary for Timothy, is one manifestation of this postwar visioning of the young. It scans many of the events of the war from the perspective of a newborn baby whose father is serving abroad. Its script, co-authored by Jennings, Dylan Thomas and E. M. Forster, looks forward to the postwar world with a questioning optimism. Michael Redgrave’s concluding voice-over to a wide-awake baby asks:

Will it be like that again? Are you going to have greed for money or power ousting decency from the world as they have in the past? Or are you going to make the world a different place? You, and the other babies?7

In the exhausted moment of imminent victory, A Diary for Timothy’s anxious optimism signalled an important question. One answer culturally for some young people was to be identified by their elders as New Elizabethans, essentially a cult of youth, even if it was in practice largely middle-class youth. If the Festival of Britain was ‘A Tonic for the Nation’, the New Elizabethan brand provided a bottle of pop and lashings of ginger beer for its supposedly patriotic youth; its head was the monarchy, its state-sponsored pageant was the 1953 Coronation and its house journal was the Young Elizabethan magazine. This publication was the home of he whom Philip Hensher has identified as the great antihero of the postwar world.8 Eclipsing Alan Sillitoe’s Arthur Seaton, John Osborne’s Jimmy Porter, or Samuel Beckett’s Vladimir an...