1947

The Edinburgh Festivals

Course 5 · Chapter 2 · 1947 and the First Festival

The usual story is short: in 1947 a group of people decided that Edinburgh should host a festival of the arts, the world's performers came, and some who were not invited came anyway. That story is mostly right, but it hides the people, the arguments and the doubts. This chapter looks at what the founders wanted, who they were, what the first programme contained and how the uninvited companies became the Fringe. Names, dates and figures are from general knowledge and flagged "check".

The Post-War Moment

Rebuilding

In 1945 Europe's cultural life was damaged by war, and several countries were looking for ways to reconnect their audiences and artists (check). A festival of international music and drama fitted that mood.

An idea in the air

The idea of a festival in Britain was discussed by people in the arts, and the names of several of them are attached to it in different accounts (check). Festivals such as Salzburg and Glyndebourne were models.

A city to host it

Edinburgh was undamaged, had an attractive setting, and had civic leaders keen to host (check the weight of each reason, Chapter 1).

The Founders

Rudolf Bing. The Austrian-born general manager of the Glyndebourne opera, usually named as the festival's first artistic director and the driving force (check). He later ran the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
Local backers. The city's Lord Provost, Sir John Falconer, and others in the council, in business and in the arts gave the plan political and financial support (check names and roles).
The aim. To present the highest standard of international performance, in a "festival of the flowering of the human spirit", a phrase often quoted (check the wording and who said it).
The caution. Accounts credit different people with the idea, and several sources disagree on who did what.

The First Programme

Item (check each)	Detail
Dates	The first International Festival ran for about three weeks in August and September 1947.
Orchestras	The Vienna Philharmonic, conducted by Bruno Walter, was a major attraction, with other orchestras also appearing.
Singers	The British contralto Kathleen Ferrier took part in a performance with Bruno Walter, which is often remembered (check the work and the details).
Opera and drama	Glyndebourne opera and the Old Vic theatre company took part, among others.
Venues	Halls such as the Usher Hall and the Assembly Hall, and theatres in the city.

Why the Vienna Philharmonic mattered Only two years after the war, an Austrian orchestra, with a conductor who had been forced to leave Germany and Austria, performing in a British city had a meaning beyond the music. Writers have described it as a gesture of reconciliation (check). Whether performers and audiences saw it in those terms at the time is harder to establish than later accounts suggest.

The Eight Who Came Anyway

The story. Several performing groups that were not invited to the official programme came to Edinburgh in 1947 and staged their own shows in whatever venues they could find. Commonly eight groups are mentioned, six from Scotland and two from England (check the number and the origins).
The name. The word "Fringe" is usually credited to the Scottish writer Robert Kemp, who in 1948 wrote of "round the fringe of the official Festival drama" (check the wording and the source, and whether the name was in use earlier).
No organisation yet. There was no organising body and no programme: the Fringe grew over years, and the formal Fringe Society was set up in 1959 (Chapter 3; check).
Origin story and record. The origin story is tidy. Historians and archivists have found a more tangled record, with groups coming for different reasons, and some accounts are written long after the event (check).

A British comparison Britain's 1951 Festival of Britain, held on London's South Bank, had a similar post-war purpose of lifting national spirits through culture (check the dates and aims). Edinburgh's festival was smaller, but its international programme and its later open-access Fringe let it outlast the London event, which was dismantled after a single summer.

Check the details Origin stories collect later polish. Check the number of companies, the wording of the quotations, the roles of named individuals and the dates of the first programme against the festivals' archives and contemporary newspaper reports.

Exercises

Exercise 1

Summarise in six sentences why the International Festival began in Edinburgh in 1947, naming at least two people and two conditions that helped.

→ Solution

Exercise 2

Explain why the opening programme, and the Vienna Philharmonic in particular, is often described as significant, and say what evidence you would need to check that description.

→ Solution

Exercise 3

Write a short paragraph on how the Fringe origin story could be tested, naming two kinds of source and one weakness of each.

→ Solution

Quick Reference

Founded: 1947, Rudolf Bing as artistic director, civic backing from the city (check)
First programme: the Vienna Philharmonic, Bruno Walter, Glyndebourne, the Old Vic (check)
The Fringe: uninvited companies in 1947; the name from Robert Kemp in 1948 (check)
Models: Salzburg, Glyndebourne, and the Festival of Britain as a parallel (check)
The caution: origin stories are tidier than the record