After the Second World War, designer Beverley Pick noted with satisfaction that exhibitions had become ‘a powerful new propaganda medium capable of reaching a very broad section of the population’, with greater impact than many more established forms of advertising. If exhibitions had succeeded in fighting the war, Pick was excited by their potential for heralding peace.¹ Contemporaries echoed Pick’s sentiments, seeing exhibitions’ power as a newly potent form of propaganda.² Civil servants and journalists had weighed up exhibitions’ potential usefulness within the domestic wartime propaganda campaign, as discussed in Chapter 7, concluding that they still had value for communicating official messages to the public once the war was over. Elected in 1945, Clement Attlee’s Labour government used exhibitions for a range of causes, from justifying postwar military strategy to showing the workings of the embryonic National Health Service, all as part of an effective multi-form propaganda machinery created to channel the state’s power and to reach home and foreign audiences alike.

This final chapter proposes that in the immediate postwar period, exhibitions funded through the public purse operated as welfare, supporting and instructing the British population, initially through the Ministry of Information (MOI) and subsequently the newly constituted Central Office of Information (COI). It analyses exhibitions’ role in the period immediately following the war as a communications medium supporting government processes of domestic postwar recovery and reconstruction and the development of the British welfare state. Government exhibitions also explained investment in the national nuclear programme and excused processes and transitions of decolonisation. In the immediate postwar period, the British government also continued to use exhibitions to connect with foreign audiences: as vehicles of ‘soft power’, to project an identity as model social democracy, in preparation for a new type of global conflict in the form of the Cold War, and to recalibrate Britain’s standing on the world stage, despite waning international influence. Through exhibitions, the government created a presentation of Britain’s unity in diversity, compelling home audiences to engage with ‘British’ values in an increasingly uncertain world.

The majority of exhibitions discussed in this chapter were government-led and focused towards domestic audiences in Britain. They adapted the visual and spatial tropes developed during the war to create a tempered Modernism, suited to speaking to the British public. These include Germany Under Control (the final major exhibition held on London’s John Lewis bombsite, showing British government control of postwar Germany), The Health of the People (marking the centenary of the first Public Health Act and celebrating the new National Health Service), The Nation and the Child (illustrating milestones in education and welfare reform), The Miner Comes to Town (recruiting for miners in central London) and a series of small government exhibitions describing economic recovery including How Goes Britain, The Atom Train (showing potential applications of atomic energy) and Colonial Empire (justifying Britain’s continuing Empire). Many of those who designed these exhibitions would later come together as part of the mass team creating the eight nationwide exhibitions of the 1951 Festival of Britain, the major postwar government promotion of Britain as social democracy.³

This chapter ends by considering how far exhibitions continued to have currency for political activists such as the AIA in the postwar period. It discusses the AIA’s last exhibition as political organisation: The Mirror and the Square held at New Burlington Galleries in 1952, their final major exhibition before the requirement for artist members to subscribe to a common political clause was removed, making the AIA a more conventional exhibiting organisation thereafter. This exhibition and the debates enacted around it were emblematic of exhibitions disintegrating as arguments with the fragmentation of political positions in Britain, as the international storm-clouds of the Cold War gathered. Given this chapter’s focus is exhibitions’ political and official entanglements in Britain, I choose not to concentrate on the work of other artists’ groups whose work was focused through exhibitions immediately after the war, the most prominent of which, the Independent Group, has received significant attention elsewhere.⁴

Showcasing postwar reconstruction: Germany Under Control

The British government’s motivation for the continued use of exhibitions in the early postwar period matched cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s description of the BBC, which acted as an instrument of cultural education, ultimately intended to control and subordinate the population.⁵ Hall draws on political theorist Antonio Gramsci’s concept of a key function of state as raising the great mass of the population to a particular cultural and moral level, with popular culture at the centre of the state’s sphere of activity, understanding the BBC’s role as adapting citizens to ‘the necessities of the continuous development of the economic apparatus of production’.⁶ In much the same way, major exhibitions continued to be used by the British government, alongside broadcasts and other media, to persuade the population of the efficacy of their efforts, in this case towards recovery and reconstruction.

Germany Under Control, held on the John Lewis bombsite, was mounted to show how the government was exerting military power over Germany in the aftermath of war.⁷ It sought to show, ‘in miniature … graphically and effectively’, the birth of Nazism and its aftermath and the current ‘New Era’ in Germany, stressing the reconstruction efforts and the ‘re-education’ of the German people happening in the British military zone. During the period of planning for Germany Under Control, the MOI closed and was replaced by the government’s new Central Office of Information (COI), which continued to prioritise the making of exhibitions as one form of ‘material’, as they described them. COI Review explained: ‘our fundamental process is the making of material – of magazines and books, of films and exhibitions, of the whole range of visual, written, and spoken material’. At the COI, the creation of exhibitions as communications material sat once more alongside the production of magazines, books and films.⁸

Germany Under Control was only partially complete by the time it opened in June 1946, with a military band and music played on a cinema organ at the ceremony attended by military and religious dignitaries. Herbert Morrison, President of the Council and Minister in charge of the COI, spoke, sharing his enthusiasm for exhibitions, which had continuing significance to the COI as a means for ‘enlightening the British public’.⁹ The pamphlet Germany – Our Way was distributed free of charge, while a cinema showed short films reinforcing the exhibition’s messages and the BBC scheduled television programmes to send these ideas about a changing Germany even further.¹⁰ Those who shaped the exhibition’s initial development were largely from military backgrounds, with limited expertise in visual presentation due to the mass resignation of the MOI design team on its closure earlier the same year, as COI exhibitions lead Cecil Cooke explained. The exhibition used many of the same elements as previous MOI exhibitions, with charts, maps, graphs, drawings and photographic collages central, but lacked something of the visual panache of earlier shows. One room spectacularised Germany’s collapse in 1945, using murals and photographs set in spotlit niches to dramatise different aspects of the collapse affecting transport and production and offering a rogues’ gallery of the Nazis who had brought the country down.

As an afterthought, designer James Holland (who had been central to MOI wartime exhibitions) created a ‘popular’ side, to bring more interesting objects including a tank and a Volkswagen car shipped from Hamburg.¹¹ 221,000 people paid to visit the exhibition on Oxford Street before it toured to fifteen cities around the United Kingdom.¹² Demonstrators were positioned around the site to answer visitors’ questions, which, they reported, ranged from ‘Why are we sending new potatoes to Germany from the Channel Islands instead of having them in England?’ to ‘Why are the Jews still kept at Belsen concentration camp?’¹³ Internal government correspondence showed misgivings about the exhibition’s ‘bad presentation’ and overuse of specialist language.¹⁴ But the major public criticism was that although it was interesting to see how Germany was being managed, the exhibition did not explain what the country was gaining from the £88 million spent on it. Mass Observation diarist B. Charles visited Germany Under Control in April 1947 while it was touring, recording that he found it interesting but ‘I can’t, however, imagine WHY it is being held, unless it is to try to prove to the British people the enormous amount of work being done by the British in their Zone’.¹⁵ The government’s messages were evidently not reaching every visitor, throwing up questions as to the effectiveness of this form.

Exhibitions and the early welfare state: The Health of the People

The experience of war had transformed social attitudes in Britain. A major strand of the COI’s postwar exhibitions work was focused on developing public understanding of the transformations towards the ‘welfare state’, a society based on social consensus. A series of government exhibitions picked up themes from the Beveridge Report. Social Insurance and Allied Services, as the report was titled, had been published in 1942, catching the public imagination with its focus on attacking the ‘evils’ of ‘Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness’, describing steps to universalise good healthcare, education and housing and to create employment.¹⁶ Attlee’s government set about transforming Beveridge’s vision into a reality. With Minister of Health Aneurin Bevan leading, the central plank of this vision was to create a universal health service, with exhibitions allied to the cause. Printed Advertising magazine explained that exhibitions had a key role in the mixed ecology of government communication for social education, declaring that ‘Films, exhibitions, and press and poster advertising, used with skill and vision, can form an integral part of the citizen’s social education’. They pointed to the government’s use of health exhibitions to give guidance on guarding health, with Bevan using exhibition openings as occasions at which to showcase the government’s programme of modernisation.¹⁷

Marking the centenary of the first Public Health Act, the COI mounted The Health of the People exhibition at their large Marble Arch site from May to June 1948, opened by Princess Elizabeth.¹⁸ Held in the immediate aftermath of the National Health Service Act 1946, which brought medical care under public administration, the exhibition set out to explain the positive difference that new health services would make.¹⁹ Designed by C. F. Garney, working with a scriptwriter and taking guidance from technical experts, it relied on the popular trope of using historical comparisons to highlight the path towards progress over the century from 1848 to 1948. The BBC used the exhibition as the occasion on which to broadcast a discussion of the NHS in ‘What’s Your Worry?’, a slot on radio’s Woman’s Hour.²⁰

COI Review explained how the research team of designer and scriptwriter had worked together to assess potential for ‘visual presentation’, helping visitors conceive of industrial ‘squalor’ and the ‘inhumanity’ of early nineteenth-century Britain.²¹ On arrival at The Health of the People, visitors were confronted with the woodblock of a disorderly Victorian crowd with the slogan ‘Industry drew the workless into the cities’, a full-scale model of an early nineteenth-century cellar slum with people dossing down on a sooty floor and several scenes from ‘100 years ago’, such as children as chimney sweeps in dioramas, paper sculptures representing Victorian health reformers and enlarged cartoons from Victorian magazines. All of this represented the ‘before’. After passing through this section, all subsequent displays showed the ‘after’.

To spell out the changes to healthcare, Health of the People used another popular trope for explaining wider change: locating a fictional family within it, whom visitors could follow through the exhibition’s whole narrative.²² In this case, the fictional ‘Average family’ of ‘Home Town’ – ‘John Average (employed)’, ‘Mary Average (housewife)’, ‘Katie Average (schoolchild)’ and ‘Billy Average (infant)’ – were shown living under the new health system.²³ Statistical panels, illuminated to reveal facts in a sequence, compared the population’s health in 1848 and 1948. A range of visual means was used to try to make the information playful and engaging, including typography, text panels and display structures made from strung wires. A polemical narrative was set out on panels, one of which read ‘Chadwick believed that sanitation would put doctors out of business. He was wrong …’ A diorama dramatised ‘the health team, consisting of the family doctor, dentist nurse, etc’, another the protection of towns and the water supply. These were text-heavy displays with a serious intention.

An extensive painted mural showed women using maternity services, doctors operating in pristine theatres and scientists working in state-of-the-art laboratories, dramatising the new service as orderly and efficient. Another display explained infrastructure as key to good health, including water supply, sewerage and refuse collection. Sculptor Richard Huws designed a mechanical man, ‘Godfrey’, which animated the body’s mechanisms for digestion, breathing and blood circulation, while a photographic display showed images of children being well looked after at nursery, school and home, to inspire trust in the structures of the state to envelope every aspect of family life, including in the home.²⁴ Following the story of the Average family, with a narrative thread running from the exhibition’s start to finish, softened and personalised the exhibition’s didactic conclusion: a ‘word to John & Mary Average’ explaining what visitors should do to ‘master the simple rules of health’, with seven rules spelt out and an interactive, press-button display showing the sixteen aids newly available as part of the NHS.²⁵ Near the end, a display celebrated ‘100 years of progress’ from the Public Health Act of 1848 to the present, with expanded photographs of happy, healthy families alongside the acknowledgement that ‘much remains to conquer still’ (Figure 8.1). All of this was intended to promote the multiple benefits of the NHS to ordinary, working people.

8.1 Health of the People exhibition, mounted by the Central Office of Information at Marble Arch: display about 100 years of progress from the Public Health Act of 1848 to the present. Image courtesy of the Wellcome Collection. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

While the government was mounting exhibitions on this subject, in 1946 Ernö Goldfinger and his architectural partner Colin Penn developed an exhibition on the National Health Service for the ABCA, which they licensed out.²⁶ Twenty panels introduced the new Service and contrasted ‘bad environment’, which caused ill-health, with ‘good environment’ as ‘the basis of health’. They showed ‘medical services to-day’, the current distribution of doctors and medical services and explained the NHS Bill 1946, including its financing and how services might work in future. Several panels also showed what health centres might look like, developing a long-standing interest of Goldfinger’s in the structure of spaces for social use. The Education Department of the Admiralty bought 150 sets of Goldfinger’s exhibition for distribution around the country. The Ministry of Health refused to take it, however, admitting in correspondence that ‘frankly, this is not an exhibition which this Department would want to use, or with which to have its name associated with in any way’ and explaining they objected to the exhibition’s mixing of ‘humorous drawings’ with ‘the serious treatment … adopted for the subject as a whole’, anticipating that nurses, health visitors and midwives would resent it. The Department offered factual corrections and said they thought the layout of the proposed health centre ‘unsuitable’.²⁷

Picturing milestones in social reform: The Nation and the Child

The COI’s exhibitions promoting social change were shown across several public contexts, including commercial ones. The Nation and the Child, a display created by the COI with four government ministries, illustrated milestones in welfare and education reform. It was mounted at the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition in 1948.²⁸ The exhibition mapped the period ‘from the days when children were sent down coalmines and up chimneys to the present day when everything … is done to educate and prepare them for work in which they will be happy’.²⁹ Typographer Charles Hasler oversaw the design, using Blado Italic, Legend and Poliphilus typefaces. He was soon after to become the chair of the Festival of Britain’s Typography Panel. Dorothy Rogers created paper sculptures to animate historic scenes and architect Gordon Bowyer playfully simulated children’s toys to create display vehicles and visual interest: a pile of children’s bricks with playful fonts and paper drum. The figure of an emaciated child, sculpted by George Fullard, formed part of a display on nineteenth-century child slavery (Figure 8.2). This acted as a foil to the exhibition’s narrative of progress a century on.

The exhibition’s playful exterior was not enough to mask its strongly didactic intention, with design bureaucrat Paul Reilly criticising the display’s ‘long-winded’ text, smothering its ‘worthy message with too many words’.³⁰ Text was integral to the communication of messages of this form of exhibition, but the verbosity of overly text-reliant exhibitions was becoming a regular problem, limiting their usefulness. Given the designers’ intention to have a wide public reach and engagement, to represent subjects in visual and verbal form, and in three dimensions, the exhibitions, in being overly wordy, and with the visual elements appearing more like window dressing, were failing to distinguish themselves sufficiently from more effective written forms such as magazines, books or pamphlets.

8.2 The Nation and the Child, with typographer design by Charles Hasler, using Blado Italic, Legend and Poliphilus typefaces, and an emaciated child sculpted by George Fullard. Crown Copyright Reserved. Image courtesy of the Museum of Domestic Design & Architecture, Middlesex University, www.moda.mdx.ac.uk. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

Bolstering declining industries: The Miner Comes to Town

The government had identified attracting people back into declining industries such as coalmining as potentially a key driver of economic recovery, starting a recruitment campaign to encourage this. The campaign’s coincidence with the middle of a fuel crisis led the Guardian to comment that this was ‘not the happiest moment for this kind of propaganda’.³¹ As part of this campaign, the Coal Board and Ministry of Fuel organised The Miner Comes to Town, held at the COI’s exhibitions centre at London’s Marble Arch in autumn 1947. As well as finding new recruits for mining jobs, the exhibition introduced mines and showed the nation’s well-being as dependent on coal. Signalling its significance to the government’s agenda, the exhibition was opened by no fewer than five senior ministers: Prime Minister Clement Attlee, Minister of Fuel and Power Emanuel Shinwell, Chancellor of the Exchequer Stafford Cripps, Minister of Health Aneurin Bevan and Minister of Labour George Isaacs, with Lord Hyndley, chairman of the Coal Board, and Will Lawther, president of the National Union of Mineworks, in attendance.

The Miner Comes to Town’s large COI design team included many who would go on to become significant architects and designers: architect Peter Moro and Gordon Cullen and designers Robin Day, Ronald Avery, Ian Chapman, Ronald Dickens, Pauline Behr and W. F. Manthorpe. Misha Black was Supervising Designer, with James Holland as Chief Designer, and R. J. Harrison as Chief Architect.³² Robin Day had started his professional career as a furniture-maker’s apprentice, but his practice diversified following studies at London’s Royal College of Art, which included mural painting, publicity design, display and interior design, skills that he drew on heavily in later practice.

Exhibitions were a crucial early training for Robin Day, as Milner Gray explained in a feature about Day for Art and Industry magazine: ‘It is in the field of exhibition design that perhaps the widest variety of design skills are brought together – if the effort is to be successful – into one complete and inseparable whole’, Gray wrote. ‘Planning, structural design, lighting, two-dimensional display and typography, generally the work severally of experts working as a team, are handled personally by Day in his exhibition work, resulting in a particularly well co-ordinated and personal effect’.³³ ‘It is as an exhibition designer that Robin Day first made his mark’, Gray went on, emphasising the role of exhibition design in Day’s development as professional designer.³⁴

Day and architect Peter Moro, who had met whilst working at the Regent Street Polytechnic, would go on to design a series of exhibitions together. Both considered exhibitions to have provided important, interdisciplinary training for their later design careers, something Moro alluded to on various occasions.³⁵ Moro reflected on his experience designing exhibitions, which forced him to experiment with how interest and atmosphere in architecture were generated by means of space, materials and lighting.³⁶ ‘It was really wonderful to be able to design at a time when no buildings went up’; working on ‘propaganda’, ‘information’ and ‘topical’ exhibitions ‘gave you an opportunity to use your design skills and imagination’. Exhibitions were, for Moro, ‘a very good laboratory for trying out architectural devices’.³⁷ They were ‘great fun because it’s immediate, it’s not permanent, and you can experiment … with form and colour, but you can also experiment with leading people without arrows or ropes or barriers, or whatever … a sort of laboratory for architecture’ and ‘psychological aspects’ of architecture.³⁸

The visual highlight of The Miner was its striking entrance – a ‘mine with no coal’ – a pit-head bandstand erected in steel scaffolding in Hyde Park, managed by a miner from a colliery near Manchester, with forty-five miner guides, accompanied by six pit ponies from County Durham that lodged overnight at the Buckingham Palace stables (Figure 8.3).³⁹ Inside, displays were inventive and visually engaging, walls lined with small lozenge-shaped portraits of miners and aerial photographs of coalfields with the exhortation: ‘Our present problem is how to get more coal … Our immediate future depends on more coal … Our whole future depends on coal’.⁴⁰ A relief map showed mining areas, while Day and Moro’s ‘Coal By-products Tree’, with stylised foliage forming a canopy and a multi-coloured trunk, showed by-products of coal in chemical flasks.⁴¹

Trade journal Printed Advertising commented on the instructional quality of MOI and COI work, ‘exhortatory campaigns are the most difficult of all to assess for impact. They have certainly been the least popular with the public, even in the height of the war when exhortation found a more tolerant audience. As living conditions improve they are likely to become more unpopular still’.⁴² This was another acknowledgement that the effectiveness of these labour-intensive and expensive events was difficult to quantify, with didactic or ‘exhortatory’ displays looking likely to have limited impact after the return to affluence post war. Meanwhile the Guardian newspaper, unconvinced by the impact of The Miner, commented, ‘Persons not schooled in the arts of propaganda may wonder whether the West End is really the best place at this moment for a brand-new 10-ton Meco-Moore cutter-loader, a Joy power-loader, and all these modern mining machines and craftsmen’. The clear incongruity of this spectacle did not deter the government from continuing to use this form of impetus to postwar reconstruction.

8.3 The Miner Comes to Town, organised by the Central Office of Information, designed by Peter Moro and Robin Day. Alfred Cracknell. Image courtesy of Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Collections. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

Driving economic recovery: How Goes Britain, Raising the Standard, Britain Goes Ahead and Britain in the Balance

A series of government exhibitions were focused on materialising the abstractions of British economic recovery. How Goes Britain, organised by the COI at Charing Cross Station in January 1948, was intended to showcase effective recovery from privations, including shortages of food and materials. A painted mural on the outer wall showed ships set in a decorative seascape, with the striking title in bold letters (Figure 8.4). Visually playful devices mapped the situation, incorporating explanations through Isotype (Figures 8.5 and 8.6). Raising the Standard, ‘an economic exhibition’, opened at Charing Cross later that same year, in September 1948. Organised by the COI for the Economic Information Unit, it showed Britain’s buoyant trade through photographic collages and charts. The exhibition repeated the device of tracking one family to show the progress of industry in postwar recovery, charting how this was impacting on the standard of living of different families and showing the role hard-working individuals could play in aiding recovery.

8.4 How Goes Britain, held at Charing Cross Underground Station in January 1948, showcased Britain’s effective recovery from privations. Topical Press. U42045 © TfL from the London Transport Museum collection. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

A collage at the exhibition’s entrance was labelled ‘this was one family’s share of the nation’s imports of food and raw materials in the first four months of 1948’. At each stage the impact on individuals was represented; three photographs of the same family living in different economic circumstances, shown side-by-side, presented the direct impact on each of them with and without Marshall Aid loan and increased exports.⁴³ Also held at Charing Cross, Britain Goes Ahead opened in January 1948 to show evidence of postwar recovery. Details included how industry was innovating to deal with material shortages by producing synthetic materials and laminates, with mounted samples, using striking bold type and signage.⁴⁴ Britain in the Balance, later that year at Charing Cross, highlighted financial recovery, attracting 129,361 visitors over thirteen weeks.⁴⁵ Exhibitions such as these were offered as a focus for visitors to feel reassured by government expertise in overseeing a recovering economy and to witness housing planning and reconstruction, with the huge boom in planning exhibitions after the war aimed at a wide audience including children.⁴⁶

8.5 How Goes Britain, Charing Cross Underground Station in January 1948. Topical Press. U42044 © TfL from the London Transport Museum collection. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

Exhibitions for the early Cold War: the Atom Train

With the US’s detonation of atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945, a new threat had been unleashed on the world: that of a war to end all wars. While the vast majority of Britain’s postwar atomic defence project was developing in secret, Britain’s scientific establishment believed increasingly that the public needed to be educated about the potential of nuclear technology, for both good and ill.⁴⁷ Exhibitions were one element of a widespread nuclear education programme developed by government and others. London’s Science Museum hosted the Atomic Energy and Uranium exhibition in 1946 to explain atomic energy science, while The Daily Express Atomic Age Exhibition held at Dorland Hall in 1947 was focused towards warning about the cultural and social implications of the technologies, signalling the potential for mass destruction of the bomb. It opened with ‘The Science Behind the Atomic Bomb’ and continued to ‘Atomic Bombs in Action’, ‘If Britain Were Atom-Bombed’ and ‘Atomic Energy in Peace’.⁴⁸

Taking up this duty of public education, the government Ministry of Supply, working with the new Atomic Scientists Association (ASA), set up an Exhibition Committee chaired by Prime Minister Clement Attlee. Together, they commissioned an ambitious, touring exhibition to share key facts and practical applications of atomic energy across medicine, industry and agriculture with the public.⁴⁹ Exhibitions that were both reproducible and mobile had been shown to work well in the context of Britain’s war.⁵⁰ This was the chosen format for Atom Train: The Travelling Exhibition on Atomic Energy, which toured Britain for six months aboard two converted train carriages (Figure 8.7).⁵¹

8.6 How Goes Britain, Charing Cross Underground Station in January 1948. Topical Press. U42048 © TfL from the London Transport Museum collection. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

Physicist Dr Joseph Rotblat developed Atom Train’s concept. Born in 1908 in Warsaw, part of the Russian Empire, Rotblat had arrived in Britain on the eve of the Second World War, taking up a research position at Liverpool University and becoming a stalwart of the ASA. Rotblat’s work on splitting the atom had led him to the conclusion that it was possible to produce an atomic bomb and in 1943 he was given permission to withdraw from the Manhattan Project, fearing its consequences.⁵² When invited by Rotblat to open the Atom Train exhibition, in the interests of maintaining secrecy, Attlee pleaded other pressing engagements, his advisers saying it was better ‘in the present international situation’ for the Prime Minister not to visit it publicly and considering the exhibition ‘not so very remarkable’.⁵³ Instead it was opened by physicist Sir James Chadwick, who gave a sobering speech about people needing to understand atomic energy as ‘on the side of human survival’, lest it lead to the disappearance of ‘the civilised world’.⁵⁴

8.7 Catalogue of Atom Train. The Papers of Professor Sir Joseph Rotblat, Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge. RTBT 10/17/4/13. Image courtesy of Churchill Archives Centre. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

Atom Train was designed by architect Peter Moro and interior and furniture designer Robin Day, showing ‘delicate instruments’, with a script by Adrian Thomas and typography by Charles Hasler who applied ‘gold lettering’ to the ‘smart black coaches’ of the train on which it travelled.⁵⁵ An advertisement for the exhibition, showing an eager-looking mother and child, hinted at the target audience and explained that Atom Train ‘is to show you the vast possibilities of atomic energy for good and evil’ (Figure 8.8).

The Daily Mirror explained the attraction of the exhibition: ‘In two railway carriages brightly decorated in what might be called the modern teashop-cum-cocktail-bar style, you can, if you pay a shilling, see The Atom Train Exhibition’.⁵⁶ The ambiguous nature of nuclear technologies was overtly acknowledged in the exhibition: designer Peter Moro explained that the train showed both ‘the good uses’ of the atom and ‘the destructive uses’, ‘in photographs and pictures and diagrams … in a graphic way’, including ‘skeletons’.⁵⁷ Its catalogue explained, ‘Everyone knows that this new power can be used for destruction; much less is known as yet of its possibilities for good’.⁵⁸ The catalogue concluded that atomic energy has ‘vast possibilities’ for ‘good and evil’: ‘there is no secret about it’.⁵⁹

A balance sheet approach, showing nuclear science’s potential for ‘good’ or ‘evil’, created the exhibition’s structuring tension. Climbing aboard the Atom Train, visitors were immediately confronted by an image entitled ‘Atomic Energy for Good or Evil’, with human and skeleton hands pointing towards each other, a ringed atom in between. The potential for ‘good’ was taken up in Gordon Bowyer’s colourful mural ‘The Brighter Side’, indicating ‘the benefits mankind might, if he chose, gain from atomic energy’, showing a picnic rug sitting comfortably in a landscape (Figure 8.9).⁶⁰ To add to the potential ‘evil’, the exhibition cautioned by including blackened roof tiles from Hiroshima and photographs of the decimation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; a piece of molten, radioactive sand from New Mexico; and a chart showing what would happen if an atomic bomb dropped on central Manchester or London, based on evidence from Japan.⁶¹ In keeping with this, ceilings and walls in this section were black. The Guardian described the apparently harmless specimens of radioactive minerals shown in the exhibition ‘winking in lovely iridescent hues in their case’, suggesting they looked beguilingly ‘a great deal less lethal’ than ‘the pebble which slew Goliath’.⁶² To counter this benign appearance, visitors were provided with Geiger counters allowing them to test for themselves that fragments were still radioactive.

8.8 Atom Train advertisement. The Papers of Professor Sir Joseph Rotblat, Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge. RTBT 10/17/4/10. Image courtesy of Churchill Archives Centre. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

Atom Train’s argument was developed through scriptwriter Adrian Thomas’s narrative, which visitors followed as they progressed round, anticipating the highly directional route set out at the South Bank site of the Festival of Britain a few months later, through which visitors were invited to enact the ‘story’ of Britain.⁶³ Describing his approach to scripting exhibitions, Thomas explained the interplay between scriptwriter and designer in a specimen script to show how visual and textual elements worked together, as interdependent.⁶⁴ Explaining his approach as close to writing for other commercial forms, ‘the exhibition script writer must’, he said, ‘have the feature writer’s capacity for research, the scenarist’s ability to visualise the dramatic possibilities of the story he is telling and the advertising copywriter’s ruthlessness when it comes to the condensation and editing of his text’.⁶⁵ Words took space in exhibitions as explanations, exhortations, narratives and labels.

8.9 Atom Train: Gordon Bowyer’s colourful mural ‘The Brighter Side’ indicated the benefits that atomic power might bring. The Papers of Professor Sir Joseph Rotblat, Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge. RTBT 10/17/4/10. Image courtesy of Churchill Archives Centre. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

Visitors about to disembark from Atom Train were faced with a photographic mural entitled ‘The Choice’, which used a mechanised display (described as a ‘ghost change’) to show the choice between construction – a bright atomic future (a photograph of happy children playing) – and nuclear obliteration (a photograph of a crying baby amongst the ruins of Hiroshima) with the text ‘the choice: destruction – construction’.⁶⁶

Atom Train visited many sites around Britain including Whitehaven in Cumbria, a town situated close to Sellafield. This was a large-scale nuclear site, which had opened a few months earlier for the production of radioactive plutonium, to be used in Britain’s nuclear bomb. By visiting Sellafield, the exhibition was intended to educate the local population about this new industry. The Sellafield site was in transition: in the early 1950s it would be redesigned to become the world’s first commercial-sized nuclear power station. After its tour of Britain, Atom Train travelled further afield; from 1948 to 1949 it toured the Middle East, visiting Beirut and Cairo, with parts going to Scandinavia.⁶⁷ The Daily Mirror’s ‘Cassandra’ columnist quipped wryly that this was ‘a cheerful collection of working models and pedagogic diagrams’ showing how ‘the world can almost certainly blow itself to bits unless we all go mad and use the atom for sensible purposes’, which had been created in order to rid atomic scientists of their moral responsibilities.⁶⁸

Atom Train’s focus on Britain’s nuclear programme was echoed in the themes and designs of the later Festival of Britain 1951. The Festival’s major Exhibition of Science at South Kensington was conceptualised and organised by Polish British mathematician and philosopher Jacob Bronowski. Previously Scientific Deputy to the British Chiefs of Staff Mission to Japan in 1945, Bronowski had written the influential report The Effects of the Atomic Bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His 1951 book The Common Sense of Science, a philosophical discussion of the potential of science to benefit nations and, at the same time, to be used for malign purposes by its politicians, was produced in the same year as his work on the Festival of Britain opened to the public.⁶⁹ The connection between Britain’s atomic programme and the national culture of official exhibitions was underlined by the transformation of the ship that carried the Festival of Britain’s Sea Travelling Exhibition – HMS Campania – for use, after the Festival closed, to carry scientists and members of the navy to Montebello in Australia for the first British nuclear test, codenamed Operation Hurricane, in October 1952.

Justifying empire: the Colonial Exhibition

The British government continued to use exhibitions and displays as one of many devices through which to legitimise its mastery over its rapidly fragmenting empire. Cultural historian Raphael Samuel has conceptualised why they might have relied on such devices, describing how ‘economically, and politically, Britain’s dire circumstances at the end of the war put a premium on the success of … schemes of colonial development’.⁷⁰ Exhibitions enabled the government to show people in Britain an image of life and work in British colonies, at the very moment when Britain was being forced to retreat from Burma, Ceylon and India.⁷¹ Through the late 1940s, the COI’s Photographs Division continued creating visual stories about the British colonies for display at home and abroad. These photographic ‘Picture Sets’, as they called them, attempted to describe in twenty photographs and six hundred words ‘the whole shape and appearance and life of a Colony – its people, its land, its products, its climate’ or else to tell ‘in twelve modestly captioned pictures the story of those battles against superstition, poverty and disease which constitute the finest pages of British Colonial history’. Examples included displays about Britain’s colonial education policy under the title ‘Colonial Empire: Battle against Ignorance’ or images of a civil servant and his family in their modern house at Accra within a display on ‘Introducing West Africa’.⁷²

In 1948, the Colonial Office started a campaign to arouse greater interest in British Territories by means of lectures and films, resulting in Britain’s inaugural ‘Colonial Month’ in London of 1949, a series of exhibitions and displays designed to ‘convey … knowledge of colonial life and problems and progress’ and to counter the ‘gross ignorance about the great estate’ for which Britain was responsible. One resulting event was the Colonial Exhibition, held at Marble Arch to ‘expose the visitor to the temperature and oppressive greenery of a West African forest’ and intended ‘to jerk him into an appreciation of some of the difficulties of life in Africa’. The Guardian opined that it was important not to give a misleadingly ‘melodramatic’ or ‘picturesque’ impression of the ‘millions of peaceful farmers and herdsmen who constitute the great majority of colonial peoples’, concluding there was ‘solid information’ on the ‘manifold civilising tasks which Britain is carrying out in her dependencies’.⁷³

At the London opening of the Colonial Exhibition, King George VI spoke to a hall filled with representatives from thirty colonies, a speech broadcast to the world by Pathé News.⁷⁴ He thanked these ‘fellow citizens’ for their loyalty during the war and contribution to victory, saying he ‘wished them to feel at home here’, ‘to profit by their stays amongst us’ and praised ‘societies and private persons’ who had shown ‘kindness’ and hospitality ‘to our colonial guests’, learning more about these fellow members of the Commonwealth and giving visitors knowledge of British ‘manners and customs’.⁷⁵ Other broadcasters promoted ‘Colonial Month’ events. The BBC’s ‘Art of the Colonies’, a television programme showing a selection of exhibits from an Exhibition of Colonial Art held at the Royal Anthropological Institute, reinforced the exhibition’s message about Britain’s close relationship with its colonies. Many newspapers celebrated the links forged through the exhibition.⁷⁶ Not everyone was so celebratory: it was a visit to the Colonial Exhibition that provoked Milton Brown, a Nigerian living and working in London, to protest, by writing the article ‘An African at the Colonial Exhibition’ in the Daily Worker, pointing out the inconsistencies between the Africa presented in the exhibition and the realities of life on the continent.⁷⁷ Empire was not a subject tackled at the major nationwide exhibitions of the Festival of Britain held a few years later in 1951. As Jo Littler argues, this was not because Empire was not thought about but more because Empire was a subject of tense consideration and negotiation within the Festival.⁷⁸

Exhibitions as political statements in the early Cold War: The Mirror and the Square

The last exhibition I discuss in this book was not mounted to present new government policy or to justify strategy. Instead, my focus moves to the final major exhibition of the AIA before its dissolution as a political organisation. This was The Mirror and Square held at London’s New Burlington Galleries in 1952. The arguments around the exhibition allow insights into the increasingly divided political loyalties and artistic ferment of early Cold War Britain. The AIA’s founding ideals of 1933, to fight fascism and imperialism and to support anti-war causes by activating viewers to a shared political position, were increasingly hard to translate into a cohesive agenda in the postwar world. With the stepping back of prominent AIA founding members, the previous political bonds between these erstwhile artist-activists were splintering. By the late 1940s, AIA exhibitions became more loosely used as the justification of an emerging social contract.⁷⁹ Whilst some members remained committed to campaigning for peace, others were more preoccupied with building professional networks and selling work. The AIA continued to hold exhibitions with a broad range of styles and approaches, including traditionally social realist subjects. Members publicly aligned themselves with political causes at home and abroad, visiting new socialist states such as Yugoslavia in 1947, to see at close quarters how the new country was developing, but their previously clear commonalities were becoming less tangible.⁸⁰

In the early 1950s, the AIA focused on international co-operation, connecting with the emerging United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).⁸¹ As the peace movement gained momentum in Britain, following the outbreak of the Korean War, AIA artists engaged closely with it. A letter to the Manchester Guardian in May 1951 signed by Victor Pasmore, John Berger, Leslie Hurry and Patrick Carpenter announced that the AIA was to hold a ‘peace exhibition’.⁸² Artists for Peace, a group made up almost entirely from the membership of the AIA, was formed in 1951, with independent Marxist art critic John Berger prominent.⁸³ The group mounted three art exhibitions in London – in 1951, 1952 and 1953 – to assert and represent their anti-war position.⁸⁴

The particular splintering that would become evident in 1952 through the AIA’s Mirror and the Square exhibition was already apparent at the group’s regular meetings several months earlier, in discussions over how to respond to the gathering storm-clouds of the early Cold War. At a meeting in early 1950, painter Patrick Carpenter gave an impassioned speech about the armaments race, the danger of a Third World War and the need to abolish the atom bomb, proposing a motion to all members present that the AIA should actively support the activities of the British Peace Committee. Painter Victor Pasmore seconded the motion.⁸⁵ Painter Beryl Sinclair, the AIA’s Chair, strongly opposed it, however. Sinclair spoke out, criticising the Peace Committee’s political dishonesty, her position supported by prominent members of the AIA’s advisory committee. Carpenter’s proposal went to a vote, resulting in an almost even split in the room for and against his proposition – to support the Peace Committee – a split exposing the ideological gulf at the heart of the AIA.

One thing members did agree upon, however, was that they should mount an exhibition in the cause of peace, an idea that eventually took form as The Mirror and the Square. Artist-member Stephen Bone, part of the conservative wing of the AIA keen to downplay the organisation’s Leftist past, led on the exhibition’s concept as an ‘Abstract versus Representational Art’ exhibition, as he described it, with all works ‘graded … according to the degree of abstraction or realism’.⁸⁶ This idea, with its intention of teaching the public to appreciate modern art, was unanimously agreed.⁸⁷

The Mirror and the Square was held at London’s New Burlington Galleries in December 1952, with 290 artworks, attracting contributions from a wide range of artists, from very established to newly emerging artists, working across a range of visual forms and styles in painting and sculpture. The venue had long been a hub of London’s avant-garde, hosting a series of landmark exhibitions including the work of International Surrealists in 1936, Picasso’s Guernica during its tour of Britain in 1938 and the Modern Architectural Research Group or MARS’s manifesto exhibition of new architecture in 1938 (as discussed in Chapters 3 and 5).

The works in The Mirror and the Square were organised across two large galleries and a lobby at New Burlington Galleries. The overwhelming majority were paintings, with thirty-five sculptures and some mobiles. The huge show drew works from established painters such as Augustus John, Matthew Smith and Stanley Spencer, as well as the up-and-coming generation: Patrick Heron, Roger Hilton and Terry Frost. In terms of style, there was a great plethora of forms. Many works of social realism focused on industrial Britain, a number with mining themes (such as Josef Herman’s Miners and Derek Chittock’s The Price of Coal). There were abstract reliefs (by Mary Martin), representational works (by Michael Ayrton), semi-abstract works (by Victor Pasmore), Surrealist works (by Eileen Agar and Ithell Colquhoun) and paintings in the Neo-Romantic tradition (by Cecil Collins and Daphne Hardy-Henrion).

The catalogue to The Mirror and the Square opened with an explanation of the exhibition’s rationale, as follows:

The exhibition’s aspiration to show the range of art, as if on a spectrum, from the mirror (as figurative work) to the square (as abstraction) was echoed in F. H. K. Henrion’s catalogue and poster designs, showing an eighteenth-century etched portrait overlaid with red and white squares (Figure 8.10). The catalogue essay suggested that all of contemporary art existed between these two poles – from social realist art (or ‘the mirror’) to abstraction (or ‘the square’) – and that by learning to understand and appreciate the formal qualities of all of the gradations on this scale, observers would have some kind of mastery over contemporary art. What was obscured and obfuscated in this narrative of British contemporary art were the ideas, ideologies and motivations behind these works. This seemingly straightforward, educative presentation masked the emerging political differences of the group behind the exhibition: the politically motivated AIA.

The striking diversity of works in the London show was picked up on by a loud and varied press response. The Times newspaper railed against the exhibition’s didactic qualities, stating the only positive was the chance to see work by established artists, while the right-wing Daily Telegraph reported on the ‘good but unfulfilled idea’ behind the exhibition given that, the newspaper said, ‘British art tends more to personal expression than to concerted movements’, meaning that the attempt to map out art is ‘lost in the clash of individualities’, displaying the newspaper’s fixed preconception of the character of British art.⁸⁸ The right-wing Spectator was dismissive of the exhibition’s educational claim. Meanwhile the centre-left Manchester Guardian complained that the exhibition’s ‘impeccably pacifist catholicity of approach … was bound to defeat its own ends’, simply demonstrating, in the end, that some artists ‘paint in this way and some in that’. The Communist Daily Worker, under the headline ‘Approach to Lunacy’, described the exhibition as a sorry example of the ailments that now prevailed in British art.⁸⁹

The most extensive analysis of The Mirror and the Square came from John Berger in the New Statesman and Nation.⁹⁰ Berger knew the AIA from the inside, having worked and exhibited with them over recent years. In the New Statesman, Berger reported that, on the face of it, he was uninspired by The Mirror and the Square; however, the ‘good intentions of the AIA’, as he described them, made it worthwhile looking further. Rejecting the exhibition’s idea that paintings could be categorised according to their superficial appearance, like the makes of cars, Berger stated: ‘works of art can only be usefully sorted out by assessing their effect on the spectator. It depends on where the car takes you’. Rather than there being merely a series of styles of art, Berger suggested instead three main categories of art: ‘works in the main European tradition which deepen the experience of the spectator’; ‘eccentric “confessional” works which may extend his experience’; and ‘decorations which, if applied in a functional context, can embellish experience’. Berger’s focus on what the works in the exhibition could do to spectators to engage them through deepening, extending and embellishing experience and Berger’s emphasis on the particular impetus behind the works were important. Rather than centring his comments on the work’s formal qualities, as most critics had, allowing the artists to be characterised as merely eccentric outsiders on the fringes of society, Berger was making a bid for artists to be considered important mediators of inner life and of social and political ideas and ideals. This was something AIA members had tried to do through exhibitions over the past twenty years.⁹¹ Berger’s view was that by removing themselves from the cut and thrust of political debate, including in their lack of political engagement through exhibitions in which they focused on matters of form and style, the AIA were fast making themselves irrelevant, remote and removed from society.⁹²

8.10 The Mirror and the Square, 1952, catalogue cover designed by F. H. K. Henrion. F. H. K. Henrion Archive, University of Brighton Design Archives. © Estate of F. H. K. Henrion. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

A smaller selection of eighty works from The Mirror and the Square was sent on a tour round Britain, travelling from the south coast at Worthing and Southsea to the Midlands at Leicester and Nottingham and to the north at Wakefield. The critical reception of the touring exhibition showed both widespread, highly conservative attitudes to contemporary art in postwar Britain and the openness, from some quarters, to being exposed to new ideas and experimental work. But what was conspicuously missing across all coverage was an awareness of or engagement with the thing that had characterised the AIA for the two decades until this point: its prominent politics, which had been vociferously at the forefront of all previous endeavours. This increasingly apolitical identity, whereby the AIA moved from being a group of political activists who saw ‘the dissociation of art from everyday life’ as being a major ill to being just another artists’ exhibiting society, was completed that same year of 1953 when the AIA gave in to the prevailing culture that separated art from politics. The clause in the AIA’s constitution that had required all members to be politically engaged was replaced by a clause ensuring the AIA members’ ‘intellectual freedom’, something made easier by the disorganisation of the Left caused by Stalin’s death earlier that year.⁹³ The Mirror and the Square was the last gasp of the AIA as a politically engaged exhibiting organisation, albeit one already in deep disarray. More importantly, it showed the precarity of exhibitions as a focus for cohesive political arguments and agendas.