Long predicted, long dreaded, the cuts have started to whammy the arts. By raiding its own piggy-bank the Arts Council of England has limited its initial trim to a half per cent reduction in everyone’s grant. That doesn’t sound catastrophic, but most people expect far worse after the Government’s spending review. Meanwhile the Culture Department has axed the British Film Institute’s grandiose plan for an arthouse multiplex. And around the country there are already tales of local authorities withdrawing most or all of their arts support.
If you talk to a lot of arts folk, as I do, you can easily form the impression that any further reduction in subsidy would mean the end of civilisation. But would it? Suppose the Government withdrew from supporting the arts altogether — as is largely the case in the United States. Would that trigger the closure of concert halls, theatres, opera houses, museums and galleries, and make hundreds of thousands of musicians, actors, writers, composers and dancers permanently unemployed?
One way of answering that question is to look at a period when the arts in Britain did survive without public subsidy. You don’t have to go back far. It was only in 1945 that Maynard Keynes dreamt up the notion of an Arts Council that would continue (and, it turned out, hugely expand) the Government’s wartime subsidy of the arts. Did culture in Britain not exist before that? To find out I dusted down The Times of exactly 100 years ago — June 24, 1910 — to see what was on offer for the punters of that subsidy-less age.
What it revealed astonished me. We spend £28 million of taxpayers’ lolly a year to keep the present-day Royal Opera House going. You would imagine that without this giant handout the place couldn’t stage opera at all. Yet between June 24 and 29, 1910, Covent Garden offered six different operas on consecutive days: The Barber of Seville, Lakmé, Louise, Pelléas, Faust and Les Huguenots. Dusty stuff? Hardly. Pelléas and Louise were less than ten years old and the others were written in the previous century. Compare that with the museum repertoire of today’s subsidised houses, where the staging of new work is regarded as a newsworthy event.
But that’s just Covent Garden, you say. In modern Britain we have many opera companies. Well, so did the Edwardians (although by then they were ex-Edwardians — the King had died seven weeks earlier). Over at Her Majesty’s Theatre the indefatigable Sir Thomas Beecham, using his family’s fortune (they made Beecham’s Powders), was offering a rival opera season. That week he presented three Mozart operas and The Tales of Hoffmann. Meanwhile touring companies such as the Carl Rosa and the D’Oyly Carte were crossing the country, offering very much what English Touring Opera or Glyndebourne Touring do today, but without a farthing of subsidy.
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What of spoken theatre? In 1910 there was no National Theatre. But The Times of June 24 lists 30 plays in the West End — the vast majority written in the previous 20 years by such weighty authors as Wilde, Maeterlinck, Shaw, Yeats and Synge. And they weren’t afraid to write about controversial subjects, even without subsidy! Much discussed in The Times that week was a play by Shaw, Press Cuttings, that tackled the hottest topic of the day — votes for women — and (shock, horror!) dared to side with the suffragettes.
Concert life in the summer of 1910? It was mouthwatering. London that week enjoyed recitals by the greatest pianist of the age (Wilhelm Backhaus), the greatest cellist (Pablo Casals) and the most formidable singer (Dame Clara Butt), and a dozen other luminaries. Then as now, four London orchestras were competing for audiences (but without relying on public funds). And in the regions thousands flocked to the big festivals, which commissioned far more new music than their modern-day successors do. Little wonder, for this was the heyday of Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Delius — giants of British music who flourished without government grants.
It was the same story in the visual arts. The Times lists dozens of exhibitions, mostly by living artists, many quite radical. On June 24 our art critic devoted 2,000 words (those were the days!) to admiring a comprehensive show of Japanese art. Somehow these works had been shipped around the world for Londoners to enjoy — all without subsidy.
Ah, you say, but without government subsidy wasn’t it only the rich who could afford to visit the theatres, concert halls or galleries? Oddly, this doesn’t seem true. Henry Wood’s Promenade Concerts brought top-quality music to anyone who stumped up sixpence (2.5p) for a ticket. A reasonable stalls seat at Covent Garden cost five shillings (25p). Multiply those figures by 80, to compensate for the rise in the retail price index over the past century. It becomes clear that, compared with buying food, clothing or a house, tickets to shows in the Edwardian era were actually rather a bargain.
And they had just as many glitzy new arts buildings as we have. This, after all, was the era of Frank Matcham, the great theatre architect whose incredible auditoriums — from the London Coliseum to the Blackpool Grand — now graced nearly every major British city. That very year, 1910, he opened another masterpiece in the West End: the Palladium.
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Yes, of course only the middle classes went to the theatre or the opera, and only the children of the middle classes had a good enough education to appreciate much of what the writers, composers and artists of the day were trying to say. But how different is that now, after 65 years of Arts Council subsidy?
The truth is that, if people enjoy the arts enough, they will find ways of paying for them — with or without the Government’s help. The received wisdom over the past six decades has been that certain “high-brow” art forms — opera, classical music, new plays, avant-garde sculpture — can survive only with subsidy. My brief expedition to 1910 suggests that this is nonsense. Of course some very self-important arts bureaucrats would lose their empires and maybe their jobs in a subsidy-less cultural world. But that’s not quite the same as the end of civilisation.