THE ARTS

HL Deb 11 March 1963 vol 247 cc623-88

2.36 p.m.

LORD AUCKLAND rose to call attention to the Report of the Arts Council 1961–62, A Brighter Prospect, and to the support by Her Majesty's Government of the arts; and to move for Papers. The noble Lord said: My Lords, I beg leave to move the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper. The last occasion upon which the Arts Council was debated in your Lordships' House was in November, 1958, when the noble Lord, Lord Silkin, initiated what proved to be a most stimulating debate. To-day the noble Lord is not able to take part because he is not fully recovered from his recent illness. I am quite certain that I speak for noble Lords on all sides of the House when I say that it is the wish of us all that he will soon be restored to complete health, so that he can take part in the many contentious debates which face Parliament between now and the Summer Recess.

I should like first to thank my noble friend Lord Cottesloe for indicating his intention to take part in this debate. He is the Chairman of the Arts Council, and doubtless he will be able to go more into the technicalities of this organisation than I shall. For my own part, my speech will necessarily be in something of the form of a catalogue, because I propose to deal with the theatre, the concert hall and opera. I shall deal for only a short time with the visual arts because my noble friends Lord Eccles and Lord Croft will, no doubt, from their experience, be able to give a better exposition than I on these arts.

I think it is fair to say that the Arts Council has been going from strength to strength. The Government grant has recently been increased, and for the next financial year it will reach the sum of £1,900,000. I get these figures from the Daily Telegraph, and any figure which I quote inaccurately will no doubt be put right by my noble friend Lord Cottesloe. Of this figure, Covent Garden will get £830,000; and in the course of my speech I shall have something to say about Covent Garden. Speaking for myself, I have no financial or business interest in the arts to declare, so I can speak from a dispassionate point of view and as one who, for most of his life, has been a lover of the concert hall, the theatre and the opera house. I have also been particularly fond of going round art galleries; but I do not get much time to do it now, and I am certainly the world's worst painter. So, as I said earlier, I shall not speak for long on that subject.

First, may I say a word about the early days of the Arts Council? During the last war an organisation known as CEMA, the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, was formed and, on a limited grant, gave concerts and other forms of cultural entertainment in canteens and at pitheads, in service camps and a number of other organisations. Such famous pianists as Dame Myra Hess, and other artistes well known in the world of culture, gave pleasure to many millions in those dark days. In 1945, the Arts Council was formed and its grant then was a small one, but it has been gradually built up. I have not come here to-day necessarily to plead for a larger grant for the Arts Council, because the National Exchequer has many commitments in the Health Service, the social services, roads, defence; and we must, I think, get this thing into perspective. If I may coin a phrase, we must think in terms of penicillin before Puccini. Penicillin is a drug which has saved many millions of lives. Puccini was a composer who has given pleasure and perhaps solace to many millions of people. So I think that we, as a nation, should realise that the arts must play a great part in our lives.

There are many people who say that those who earn their livelihood in the theatre are of the long-haired, intellectual type—beatniks, or whatever ghastly expression one likes to use. This is nonsense; not only nonsense, but libellous. Those who work in the theatre work very hard. They exist, in many cases, on a hand-to-mouth basis, but they give pleasure to many millions of people. The same can be said of those who play in our leading orchestras, our leading opera companies and other forms of entertainment. Those who serve in an advisory capacity on the Arts Council are largely those who have had experience, sometimes of many years' standing, in the world of the theatre, the concert hall and other forms of cultural entertainment. For example, serving on the Theatre Panel of the Arts Council are such gifted actors and actresses as Mr. Leo McKern and Miss Yvonne Mitchell. The same can be said of the visual arts.

Young people, it is said, have no love of serious entertainment. This is arrant rubbish. One has only to visit the Royal Festival Hall or the Royal Albert Hall, particularly during the Promenade Concert season—and this does not apply to only the first night and the last night of the Proms—to see the many young people who have perhaps saved up a lot of money to go to these concerts. Of course, our young people have their favourite popular singers, as indeed did their fathers and their fathers' fathers before them in those golden days of music hall; but many of those who perhaps crowd their local Locarno ballroom also go to hear Sir Malcolm Sargent and Mr. Colin Davis, and go to the opera or to the local theatre for entertainment as well. I think it should be said from this House to-day that many young people do appreciate the serious arts as well as those represented in the local dance halls.

I should like to turn to the theatre. One of the biggest bones of contention is the National Theatre. When we debated the Report of the Arts Council' for 1957–58, discussion of the National Theatre was in its embryo stage. Now the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Selwyn Lloyd, has given the "go ahead" for the National Theatre to be formed and to be built. This is going to be built, as your Lordships know, on the South Bank of the Thames. The London County Council have promised £1,300,000 towards its building, and, as I understand it, there is a Government subsidy of something like £300,000 per year going towards it. I am not against a national theatre, but I have some reservations on this. In the first place, the repertory theatres of this country are in some cases nearing financial starvation point. My own local repertory theatre at Leatherhead gets an annual grant of £3,000 a year. It is a very hard-working company; it puts on shows of the highest quality; and only two years ago an actor of the calibre of Sir Donald Wolfit came to take part in a production. It is possible to pay the leading actor of this company only £16 per week during actual performance; during rehearsals he is paid £6 per week. And when the company closes down for the summer break, from June to August, the actors and actresses get nothing at all. This really is a rather sorry state of affairs—and that is putting it mildly. Some of our country's greatest actors have through the ages graduated through the repertory companies.

I should like at this juncture to ask my noble friend Lord Derwent, who is to reply to this debate, one question of which I have given him notice. That is, whether the Government could give some kind of financial aid to theatre companies who wish to set up in business. During the last debate the noble Lord, Lord Silkin, pleaded for new theatres to be set up in the New Towns. How heartily I agree with his sentiments! There are now two New Towns to be built at Dawley and Skelmersdale, and there will be others to follow. Many young people will move to these places. These will not all be young people who flock to the local dance hall or local juke-box hall every night. They will be people who have a love of the theatre, of the concert hall, and of the opera house. I therefore hope that the Government will give sympathetic consideration to the idea of giving help for theatres—small theatres perhaps—to be set up in these centres. It is a deplorable state of affairs when a place like Plymouth has no living theatre. Exeter has only recently had a new, small theatre opened. The Theatre Royal, which I knew during the war, when I was at school near there, has closed down. Exeter is one of the most culture-minded cities in this country, and it is sad beyond words that this state of affairs exists.

May I turn now to the concert hall? I shall come back to the theatre later, but I wish to say just a few words about concerts in this country. The building of the Royal Festival Hall has meant that many young and old people can now hear some of the world's best symphony orchestras, and that is all to the good. But some of these orchestras are in a very bad financial position, particularly if they want to tour. Last year the London Symphony Orchestra went to Israel, but financially they were not at all well looked after. In April they are to go to Japan. When an orchestra or a company goes abroad the responsibility is shifted from the Arts Council to the British Council, as your Lordships doubtless know. But the British Council, too, are in difficulties here, in that they are frequently starved of funds for these purposes. When orchestras come over to this country they frequently come from the Continent, from relatively small towns. Let me quote an example. The Bamberg Symphony Orchestra comes from quite a small German town. How many small towns, or even cities, in this country can afford to send their orchestras abroad for prestige value, and for cultural value as well?

My Lords, sending our orchestras and our theatre companies to foreign countries is not always just an interchange of musical views and musical talent: it has far-reaching diplomatic implications. The arts are a very effective medium for promoting not only cultural but other relations between other countries. Early this year the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra visited Warsaw, and then went on to Russia. They travelled and they played in appalling weather conditions. In Warsaw they were playing at a time when outside temperatures were well below zero. In that part of the world, of course, that is not unknown; but the tour went on, and it has probably done an immense amount of good to Anglo-Polish and Anglo-Russian relations. I feel that we should be more conversant with this matter.

May I turn now for a few moments to opera? As I said, Covent Garden is to receive an increased subsidy this year. But Covent Garden is one of the centres of opera in the world, and those of your Lordships who have been to the building will know just how much structural alteration is needed there. This cannot be provided solely out of Arts Council grants. For ordinary improvements a grant can be given from central funds; but if repairs are needed this cannot be done. That seems to me an extraordinary state of affairs. Covent Garden, of course, attracts singers of international fame—Tito Gobbi, Maria Callas, to name only two. This means that they command high fees, and if we are not prepared to pay those fees, they will go to Rome, to Buenos Aires or to countries which will pay them. It is fair to say that the present grant which Covent Garden receives cannot attract enough of these top-rate singers.

I return for a moment to the theatre. The closing down of many theatres gives rise to a great deal of anxiety; and too many theatres are closing down. They are being turned into bingo palaces, dance halls and so on. The reason is that they just cannot carry on financially, and yet a theatre such as Sadler's Wells is to be transferred to the South Bank of the Thames. Saddler's Wells was built in the 1930s. It has recently been considerably renovated. It attracts primarily British singers, with a large preponderance of Welsh singers, and the standard, both of singing and of enterprise, is extremely high.

Recently, Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex was put on there, under the direction of one of our leading conductors, Mr. Colin Davis. Sadler's Wells covers an audience area stretching for many miles. If it is moved to the South Bank, it will mean that people living North of the Thames will have to make a long journey right to South-East London to see opera. It is also going to mean that on the South Bank we shall have a whole mass of concert halls and opera houses. We shall have the Royal Festival Hall, the new Sadler's Wells Theatre and the National Theatre, and it will completely centralise the whole cultural field of London. It seems to me that, so far as Sadler's Wells is concerned, they should let well alone. Let it stay where it is! It is not, as I have said, an old, rambling theatre; it is a relatively new theatre which caters for many thousands of people.

My Lords, the repertory theatres, to which I again return, are playing to houses greater than ever before. At Leatherhead, the average attendance, apart from the severe weather, was 85 per cent. On many nights, and also at the matinées, the theatre was full. But due to the financial stringencies only one major production—that is, with a cast of more than twelve—can be put on per year, and yet they have actors, stage managers and designers who are quite capable of putting on larger productions if only they had the money. It is not only the Government who have a responsibility here; it is the local authorities. I know that the new rating assessments are causing very much concern in this country and that to ask a local council to add a penny or twopence on the rates for art would probably cause a furore at the present time. But, my Lords, many councils already do that. Bournemouth has done it, and the surrounding towns; and to-day the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra is one of the finest in the country. The only pity is that its resident conductor should have to be a Roumanian—most of its players are English—but he has built up this orchestra from a relatively small, local one to a really first-class symphony orchestra.

As I have said, many of our concert halls and opera houses are old buildings. May I just instance the Edinburgh Festival for a moment? Here is an example of one of the finest cultural enterprises in the world, but many of the companies who go there have to play in halls and buildings which are well below the standard in which they should play. Tourists from all over the world go to Edinburgh in increasing numbers. It should be realised that it is not only London which attracts these tourists; Edinburgh, Pitlochry, Perth, Cardiff and many of our provincial towns and cities hold festivals to which people from all over Europe and the Commonwealth flock.

May I say just a word about the visual arts? Years ago the Tate Gallery put on an exhibition of Picasso's paintings, and it was possible for the Arts Council to make a profit from that. They deserved a much larger profit, but of course the overheads are extremely high. They include hanging costs, insurance, the cost of keeping the pictures clean, and all kinds of other commitments. A number of tours are made with pictures by famous masters, but too often, due to financial difficulties, it is not possible to get the genuine picture into the smaller towns, which are just as interested as are cities such as London to see it. I hope that it will be possible for the Arts Council, with their increased grants, to do something about this.

As I have said before, one of the problems which face art to-day is the shorttage of buildings, and the Provinces badly need new concert halls. I was talking recently to a famous British conductor, who told me that there were very few cities in this country outside London which had a concert hall where artistes could change and feed in comfort and have other creature comforts. The same is true of the audience. The trouble here is this. Foreign orchestras come over and play in these halls, and in their own small cities and towns, perhaps, they have been used to relatively modern concert halls. They come here and find conditions which are pretty disgraceful. It is not only London which has orchestras of calibre. Scotland has the Scottish National Orchestra; and they, too, have been playing to audiences of ever increasing numbers. In Dundee in 1959–60 the average capacity was 77 per cent.; in 1961–62, 86 per cent.; and nearly 200 concerts were given during that time. In London, leading orchestras give concerts not only in the evenings but on Saturday mornings, and under the Robert Mayer scheme they give concerts for children. These are always sold out, and this is something for which we can be very grateful.

May I just return to Covent Garden? As I have said, the grant for the current year is going up to something like £800,000. What are Covent Garden's commitments? The orchestra, 100 players; chief technical staff, 15. This is quite apart from stage hands, designers, wardrobe masters, and so on. They have no rehearsal facilities for their ballet companies; they have to go several miles away, to Baron's Court. Also, in the next two years between £300,000 and £500,000 is going to be spent on renovation. The grant which they get at present cannot possibly cover more than a fraction of this expenditure. It also means that in the theatre, the concert hall and the opera house very few actors or musicians can get pensions. Many of them have given a lifetime's work and they get nothing, apart from what charity gives them, when they retire.

The standard of Covent Garden, I can say from my own experience, having been there two or three times recently, has improved tremendously. Much of the credit for this is due to Mr. Georg Solti, the new resident conductor. I saw recently a production of Cavalleria Rusticana and I Pagliacci which would have been creditable by New York or Rome standards. Fifty per cent. of the principals were British artistes. I think that is something which needs to be said, because too many people say that all our famous singers come from Italy, all our famous painters from Italy, Germany or France and all our famous actors also from the Continent. It is hardly necessary for me to say that Shakespeare was English; Congreve and Sheridan were English; William Byrd and Thomas Tallis, who lived years before Elgar and Vaughan Williams, were English. Many of our leading actors and musicians are British. So I think it is time that we gave more thought to our own culture.

Finally, my Lords, may I just deal with one or two of the smaller groups? The "Opera for All" groups number two. These are principally composed of singers who are, so to speak, on the way up. They are young, and they tour, almost literally, from Land's End to John O'Groats, with a pianist, and they get a small grant from the Arts Council. During 1962 they gave 80 concerts in such far-apart places as Kirkwall, in the Orkneys, and Redruth, in Cornwall; and, as I say, the quality is extremely high.

The Arts Council have done a fine job, but they are not above criticism. I have always maintained, being a countryman myself, that the Provinces get a thin slice of the cake; but having regard to the grant which the Council are given, perhaps that is unavoidable. Under the new scheme, however, they are to get a triennial grant; in other words, the grant will be able to cover three years, instead of being confined to one year, and the Council will be able to use money for future projects. Their main problem up to now has been that they have been unable to budget for more than the current year. My Lords, institutions like Covent Garden and Sadler's Wells, our repertory companies, the Tate Gallery, and our provincial theatres and companies, are a precious national heritage, and they must remain so. I hope, and I think your Lordships will hope, that the Arts Council will go from strength to strength. I beg to move for Papers.

3.19 p.m.

LORD COTTESLOE

My Lords, we must all be very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Auckland, for having put this Motion on the Order Paper and for the most interesting and thoughtful speech he has given us to open this discussion. The modern world in which we live is a world whose primary preoccupation is with science and technology; beside which the arts—and more particularly the living arts, with which the Arts Council are chiefly concerned—are something of a poor relation. This preoccupation with science and technology is something that pervades the whole fabric of our world at every level, from the children playing at spacemen, instead of Red Indians, upwards—or perhaps I should say "downwards". For sometimes it seems to me that as we grow older we grow not more but less wise; our senses less sensitive and our perception more dim. The world of science opens up wonderful and exciting possibilities for the future of mankind, not only in the possibility of more rapid travel and communication on this globe and to outer space, too—possibilities that would have seemed mere fantasy a few years ago—but of a continually increasing standard of living and increasing leisure for the great mass of mankind. If mankind is to take the fullest advantage from those opportunities, we must provide better uses for that leisure than the football pool, the Hollywood film and the television—the television, I hasten to add, not as it can be used, with careful selection, but, as it almost universally is, used continuously and indiscriminately, a drug and a soporific.

But this world of science and technology, although it holds out golden prospects, if mankind can take the fullest advantage from them, is inevitably a world of specialisation, of more and more scientists devoting themselves to narrower and narrower fields. And if any of your Lordships doubts this, let him consider the almost alarming proliferation of professors in our universities. When I was young, professors were very rare birds, greatly revered; now they are three a penny. A single school of the University of London, the British Postgraduate Medical Federation, has more than 40 professors: and that, I think, is many more than the whole of the University of Cambridge had when I was an undergraduate.

A year or two ago, at one of those admirable dinners that are given at degree ceremonies in the University of London, a distinguished guest was taken ill and carried from the room. After a few moments, Lord Birkett, who was in the chair, sent someone out to inquire about him. The messenger found the sick man laid out on the marble floor of the hall outside, and kneeling around him no fewer than three professors of medicine, men of the utmost distinction. When he asked, "Well, how is he?" the three professors replied, with one voice, "Oh, it's all right, we have sent for a doctor." After a few minutes an old-fashioned doctor appeared, little black bag and all, and the great man was carried off, and duly recovered. But he did not owe his recovery to the professors.

That is a true story. It illustrates the degree of detachment from the world of human needs to which the inevitable specialisation of to-day has brought even the most humane of the sciences. It will carry us a good deal further along the same road. If we are not careful, it may well take us ultimately into something very like the terrifying and inhuman world of George Orwell's 1984, unless we set ourselves to establish a balance between between the sciences and the arts. We need the arts not only as something good in themselves; we need them also as a humanising influence, if the humanities are not to disappear beneath the inhumanity of robot science, if the wonderful advances of science are to contribute, as contribute they should, to a fully balanced and civilised community. We need the arts, if the great increases in leisure that science can give us in future are not to be thrown away on superficial and synthetic entertainments, the whole purpose of which is to get through that leisure somehow—in fact, to waste it. Leisure can be used to better purpose than that, and it is for the arts to show us how.

This emergence of a need for the arts to fill the growing vacuum that is otherwise created by increasing leisure coincides with the ending of the princely and private patronage on which the arts have flourished through the civilised ages. Without patronage they cannot exist, any more than Selfridge's or Harrod's can exist without customers. But the springs of princely patronage that fostered the music of Bach and the paintings of Leonardo are now, notwithstanding the occasional enlightened millionaire, dried up, killed by the redistribution of wealth and by the pressures of modern taxation.

At the same time there has developed a vastly greater and more widespread interest in the arts, especially among the rising generation. It is one of the most heart-warming features of this often anxious and depressing world we live in to-day. It springs from a variety of sources. One is the increase in leisure itself and the wider spread of wealth. Another is the now general teaching of the appreciation of art in the schools. The gramophone and the B.B.C., which it was widely supposed in their early days would have the effect of killing the audience for live performances in the concert hall, have had precisely the opposite effect. They have enabled great numbers of people who in the old days could never have had an opportunity of hearing and developing a taste for opera, or for orchestral or chamber music, to get to know and appreciate such things; and the concert hall audience has been enormously enlarged.

Whether, in the long run, the television will have a similar reaction on the theatre is something that remains to be seen. It is one of the curious paradoxes of the present day that millions of people watch plays without ever going inside a theatre; and the television draws away from the live theatre not only the audiences but also the actors. But the television screen has, and I think must always have, limitations of range and of scope: it can never give its audience the peculiar thrill of the live theatre, the thrill of a packed house swept by a common emotion as the audience watch great acting on the stage. But it may be that, in the long run, the television will enlarge the audience for the live theatre, just as the sound broadcast has enlarged that for the concert hall.

It is to the young that we have to look for the future. It is a wonderful and a very moving thing to experience, at one of those concerts organised for children by Sir Robert Mayer, of which the noble Lord, Lord Auckland, spoke, or at one of the opera nights which Sir Robert arranges every year at Sadler's Wells, the rapture and enthusiasm of a house packed with young people, young people discovering a new world. The Picasso Exhibition of 1960 drew nearly half a million people to the Tate Gallery— 463,000 people in two and a half months. And none of them went there to get out of the rain; or even to sit down and rest on a hot day, as might have been the case if the exhibition had been held in Trafalgar Square. At that Exhibition, it was extraordinary to see crowds of young people enjoying and understanding the work of Picasso—swallowing it whole— while many of their elders were interested, indeed, but still puzzled.

Throughout the ages the great creative spirits have been misunderstood and abused by the more elderly of their contemporaries. Turner's contemporaries, when he produced in his last years those wonderful evocations of light and movement which we now find so beautiful and thrilling, thought that he had gone mad. In Beethoven's time, it was written of the Leonora Overture, No. 3, that All impartial experts and music lovers have unanimously been of the opinion that never has such incoherent, shrill, confused, ear-shocking music been written. The most cutting dissonances follow each other in really horrible harmony. Even the divine Mozart, whom it is difficult to conceive of not giving pleasure to everyone, did not escape. Of him was written: Music is bound to go to the dogs when such barbarians take it into their heads to compose. Mozart, who does not know D sharp from E flat, must have ears cased in iron. Art is in a very real sense a living organism, that like other living organisms has to grow and to develop or to die. It is difficult to see where the art of to-day is going, and the path is confused and complicated by the ease with which abstract art lends itself to charlatanism. There is no doubt that the rising generation, who have been brought up with the idiom of modern art, can understand it in a way in which my generation, brought up with a different idiom, are never likely to understand it. We may, by long and sometimes painful endeavour, succeed in getting on terms with it, or in thinking that we do, but most of us will never wholly succeed in getting inside it as these young people can.

At all events, while there has grown in recent years, and is still rapidly growing, a vastly greater public for the arts, especially among the young, and while it is beyond question that in the modern world of science and technology the humanising influence of the arts is needed far more than ever in the past, the old springs of patronage, without which they cannot flourish, have dried to a trickle and new sources have to be found and to be fostered. The new sources of patronage to which we can look in the modern world are really three. They are, first, the State; secondly, municipal authorities; and thirdly, big business. Each of those three has much to learn before it can be held to be adequately fulfilling its responsibilities.

If I may take them in the reverse order, big business is the most backward of the three. That is perhaps natural enough, in view of the difficult moral questions that are posed by directors' responsibilities to the shareholders for the use of their money. Spedan Lewis, that extraordinary man who died last week, and who gave enlightened support to Glyndebourne in the early days—and without his help it is doubtful whether that remarkable triumph of perfectionism would have survived the first few weeks at all—was a pioneer in this field; and the John Lewis partnership, whose form of organisation, with no individual shareholders, enables them to engage in such activities under the cloak of democracy, have ever since been leaders in the patronage of the arts.

The Independent Television companies, who have a direct interest in the live theatre, on which they draw so heavily, might well, I think, out of their perfectly enormous profits plough back into the theatre very much more than they do now. They do quite a bit, in one way and another, but, in my view, not nearly as much as they might be expected to do; and I hope that those of your Lordships who have influence in that strange world of I.T.V. will encourage them in well-doing. In general, there is among the big firms a great field for the development of the patronage of the arts, although a few are enlightened enough to be giving the rest some sort of lead.

The local authorities do more, but it is no more than a small fraction of what they might do. They are empowered to spend in England and Wales a 6d. rate, and in Scotland a little less, on the arts. That would amount in total under the new rating valuations to something like £50 million a year. In fact, they spend about £250,000, perhaps one-two-hundredth part of what they are empowered to spend. A few of our cities and towns are giving a help and an encouragement of which they may feel proud, but a great many ought to feel thoroughly ashamed of themselves. There are two aspects of this that I should like your Lordships particularly to consider. The first is that local activities should, in my view, be supported in the main by local enterprise. But if the Arts Council were to say, as they may well be under the necessity of saying sooner or later—and perhaps sooner—that they will not put into a local activity more than is put in from the local resources, then many admirable activities all over the country would be found to be in sorry straits. I shall deal in a few moments with the common misconception that the Arts Council grant gives too much to metropolitan and too little to local activities; but those who are tempted to think so might consider the figures I have just given.

Secondly, I think the local authorities have a particular responsibility for the provision of accommodation for the arts in their areas—theatres and concert halls, as well as art galleries. A few cities show a deep consciousness of this responsibility, but many could, and I think should, do a great deal more. The London County Council give the rest a splendid lead in such matters. Not only do they set aside £20,000 a year for commissioning works of art to embellish the schools, the housing estates and the parks; not only do they run the Royal Festival Hall at a cost to the Council of many thousands of pounds a year; not only do they give substantial subsidies to Sadler's Wells and to some other musical enterprises, but they have themselves built the Royal Festival Hall and are in process of building on the South Bank, at a further cost of upwards of £2½ million, additions and improvements to that Hall, with a smaller concert hall in a separate building and a set of exhibition galleries for loan exhibitions of the arts on the largest scale. In addition to all this, they have promised to provide on the South Bank sites for the National Theatre and for a new opera house for Sadler's Wells, and to find the sum of £1.3 million towards the cost of the buildings on those sites.

I am happy to have the opportunity of paying tribute to the enlightened actions of the L.C.C. in these matters. Their concept of a great Metropolitan and Commonwealth centre of the arts on the South Bank is a splendid one, and it is to the vision of that remarkable man, Sir Isaac Hayward, the leader of the L.C.C., that we owe the prospect of its realisation. I wish we could feel that all local authorities were equally enlightened. It is a matter of concern to all those who are interested in these matters that the great work that the L.C.C. have initiated should be continued, whatever the changes in the structure of London local government. I hope that the Minister, when he comes to reply to this debate, may be able to give us a firm assurance, not only that the existing commitments of the L.C.C. will be duly honoured, but also that the responsibility for continuing all these enterprises will remain undivided and be placed firmly on the shoulders of the Greater London Council. It would be a tragedy if they were to be divided up among the boroughs and so perhaps to dwindle away.

The L.C.C. is the great exception to the general rule that in matters of helping the arts from public funds the local authorities are laggards. There are in other places signs of encouraging enterprise—the municipal theatre that is at this moment being built in Nottingham, the theatre to be built in Birmingham, the formation of the North-Eastern Association for the Arts, and a number of other enterprises elsewhere—but, in general, the local authorities are far from shouldering their responsibilities. If they gave pound for pound with the Arts Council, that would be some eight times what they now provide. But it would still be only one-twenty-fifth of what they are empowered to provide, and I hope that those of your Lordships who have influence in such quarters may exert it to encourage them to make good this deplorable defect.

As to the State, the first of the three modern sources of patronage of which have spoken, it should be a matter of shame to all of us that out of fourteen European countries for which the figures for opera and the theatre are available, Great Britain comes tenth in the total of subsidy given, and in the subsidy per head of the population we are at the very bottom of the league. Czechoslovakia and West Germany each spend in total ten times as much as we do, and Austria and Greece each spend more than Great Britain.

The State exercises its patronage of the living arts (apart that is, from the permanent collections in the galleries and museums) through the medium of the Arts Council, of which at the present time I have the honour to be the chairman. That Council is really, as the noble Lord, Lord Auckland, said, the product of the war-time Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, CEMA. CEMA took art exhibitions, music and drama out into the country to cheer and comfort a scattered population depressed by the evacuation and the blackout of the war. It was immensely successful, and after the war the Arts Council was built upon that foundation, with the Royal Charter which states its purposes as: To spread the knowledge of the fine arts exclusively in Great Britain and to raise the standards of their performance. In case any of your Lordships may fall into what I find to be the surprisingly common misconception, I would say it is not to be confused—although it very often is—with the British Council, responsible for exporting British culture or with the Royal Fine Art Commission, which is responsible for advising on the design of skyscrapers and lamp-posts; or with such bodies as the Historic Buildings Council, responsible for helping to preserve the best of our architectural heritage.

The Arts Council receives a grant from the Government that in the current year totals £2.19 million. That is what we get from the Treasury for the living arts; and it is, of course, tempting to compare that figure, a little more than £2 million, with the figure of £634 million, which the noble Viscount who leads the House was telling us the other day is spent on scientific research and development. That is not of course a perfectly fair comparison, but even if we bring in the galleries, museums and the Historic Building Council, the total is, I think, still less than £10 million. The arts are still very much the poor relation.

Such comparisons are not, however, very profitable. The Arts Council grant has been more than doubled in the last five years and, as the First Secretary announced in another place a day or two ago, it will in the coming financial year, 1963–64, be increased by a further £540,000 to £2.73 million. The noble Lord, Lord Auckland, thought that the figure of £1,900,000, which the First Secretary used in another place, included Covent Garden. It is in addition to the Covent Garden grant of £830,000. We might make very good use of a larger sum, but we cannot regard the Arts Council as having been unsympathetically treated by the Treasury in recent years. On the whole, against the background of the national economic situation in the last year or two, they have treated us with a good deal of sympathy.

These allocations are based on specific estimates of requirements submitted by the Departments, carefully scrutinised in detail by the Council and, of course, subsequently pruned in the light of the total which the Chancellor of the Exchequer feels able to make available. The total figure may seem small in relation to some other heads of national expenditure, but it is money required—and I think we should always have this in mind —to prime the pump of artistic activity rather than to attempt to finance that activity in total or to cover total deficits. The Arts Council's difficulty has been rather that on the basis of year-to-year finance, under which we have hitherto had to work, we have lived from hand-to-mouth and have had no opportunity to plan forward and no room for manœuvre. I therefore welcome very warmly the Treasury's decision to make allocations for the future on a triennial basis. I think it should be very helpful.

Considering the scale of the grant, we in fact manage to do quite a lot with it. Without the Arts Council grant, Covent Garden opera would not exist; Sadler's Wells and the Old Vic—which is now to be absorbed into the National Theatre Organisation—would not be able to carry on; the great provincial orchestras, the Hallé, the Liverpool Philharmonic, the City of Birmingham Orchestra, the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and the Scottish National Orchestra—all would probably be in liquidation. Endless artistic activities up and down the country, art clubs and art centres, music clubs and festivals, repertory companies and touring ballet companies would be dead or dying. People in Orkney would never have had the opportunity of hearing that great master of the oboe, Leon Goossens; Stornoway would never have seen a ballet.

In the visual arts the Council not only arrange important art exhibitions in the London galleries, Picasso, Epstein and Kokoschka at the Tate, the Italian bronzes at the Victoria and Albert, the Bührle Collection at the National Gallery, and all the rest. They provide a constant flow of exhibitions, great and small, but always of high quality all over the country, I think to an extent that is not always generally realised. Last year the Arts Council exhibitions totalled 346 separate showings.

Complaint has been made, and was echoed by the noble Lord. Lord Auckland, that we spend too much on metropolitan, and too little on provincial, activities. I do not think that complaint will bear much examination. The diagrams that are given in the Report which is the subject of this Motion, show that half the money goes to activities outside London—a good deal more than two-thirds if Covent Garden (which, properly, is not a metropolitan but a national enterprise) is left out of the account. When your Lordships consider that fact in conjunction with what I have said about the rôle and the inadequacy of the local authoriites, I hope that you may feel that the complaint is not well founded.

I do not think I need go into any great detail about the Council's activities, which are clearly set out in the Report itself. But, in passing, perhaps I should correct a misconception that was voiced by the noble Lord, Lord Auckland. He spoke of the National Theatre Government grant as being £300,000 a year. In fact, for the first three years of the National Theatre's existence (the coming financial year being the first of them), the grant is not £300,000 a year but £130,000; and in considering that the provincial theatre should have had the first count, I think that the noble Lord was perhaps not aware that the late Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Selwyn Lloyd, before he announced the arrangements for aid for the National Theatre, stated that he had made available for the provincial theatre an additional £150,000 per year, a sum that was available for the first time, not in the next financial year, but in the current financial year. So the provincial theatre got in before the National Theatre, and, in fact, received a larger subvention than the National Theatre is going to receive.

There is one further matter to which perhaps I should refer, and that is the publication Government and the Arts, which I daresay most of your Lordships have seen and which was issued over the names of four Members of another place last December. It is a pamphlet that is very evidently informed by sympathetic interests in the arts and a desire to help them, and it gives a clear and useful summary of the existing position; but I believe its main recommendations to be utterly misguided. So far as the Arts Council itself is concerned, the suggestion is made that the Art Department is starved because it receives a much smaller sum than the Music and Drama Departments, and that the Poetry Department should be expanded to form a Literature Department covering the whole field of creative writing. There is, of course, no reason whatever why there should not be a wide disparity between the size of the subventions given to different fields of activity, and, in fact, all the subventions are based on specific and detailed estimates of actual requirements. While no department receives as much as it would like to have, the suggestion that the Art Department is starved by omnivorous Music and Drama Departments is entirely without foundation. Nor do I find the suggestion of a full-blown Literature Department attractive. The fact is that the field of literature generally is not in need of subvention from public funds, beyond the very large subvention that it receives in practice through the medium of the public libraries.

But the most important of the recommendations made in this publication is that the care of the Arts Council, with the national museums and galleries, and the Historic Buildings Council, should be removed from the Treasury and placed in a new Department of the Ministry of Public Building and Works, with a Parliamentary Secretary for the Arts to look after it. I believe such a change could do nothing but harm. It would be the first step, and a very considerable one, towards a Ministry of the Fine Arts and a degree of Government control over the arts in detail that I think everyone who has had any firsthand experience of administering creative artistic activities knows would be a most deplorable mistake.

The noble Lord, Lord Bridges, with his great experience on both sides of the fence, so to speak, is quoted in the pamphlet as saying of the present system of administration direct under the Treasury that: Its great advantage is that it lends itself more readily than others to free and unfettered administration by an independent body. I should be very sorry to see that go. That is what the noble Lord, Lord Bridges, said; and he was absolutely right. He made, indeed, a suggestion of a system analogous to the University Grants Committee, with the idea of safeguarding that independence and at the same time giving greater opportunity for forward planning; and the new triennial basis of allocations goes, I think, as far in that direction as seems suitable in all the circumstances.

The proposal for a Parliamentary Secretary in the Ministry of Public Building and Works throws away the essential freedom and independence, of which the noble Lord, Lord Bridges, spoke, for the sake of administrative tidiness. The creative arts are essentially individual and untidy; and an attempt to administer them with an administrative tidiness might indeed be successful in accomplishing that object, but in so far as it was successful it would tend to sterilise the creative germ, to foster whose growth is their raison d'être.

A Parliamentary Secretary for the Arts would inevitably find it necessary, if he were to justify his existence and occupy his time, to interfere in the detail of the administrative organizations for which he was responsible, which is just what those of us who are concerned with such organisations would wish at all costs to avoid. And perhaps I may add that in the assignments that have fallen to me at one time or another—as Chairman of the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art, of the Tate Gallery and of the Arts Council—I would infinitely sooner be able to make my own case direct to the Chancellor of the Exchequer or the Chief Secretary than have it made for me at second or third hand by a Parliamentary Secretary in the Ministry of Public Building and Works. My Lords, I hope we may hear no more of this misguided proposal.

Before I sit down I should like to say one thing more. I think the public are quite unaware, though some of your Lordships may know about it, of the debt that the public owe to the present Secretary-General of the Arts Council, Sir William Emrys Williams. Sir William was first a member of CEMA and then an original member of the Arts Council itself until twelve years ago when he became its Secretary-General. He has played throughout the whole period of its existence a major part in promoting the Council's activities and in shaping its policies. He retires at the end of this month and the Council will miss very greatly his wise and imaginative handling of its affairs and, incidentally, the remarkable and stimulating series of Annual Reports that he has written, of which that for last year is the subject for our debate to-day.

3.58 p.m.

LORD AMULREE

My Lords, we are very lucky in this debate to-day to have had the benefit of the views of the noble Lord, Lord Cottesloe, who is Chairman of the Arts Council, a post which he has held for quite a long time; and it has been our good fortune, too, that he could express his views at an early stage in the debate. There is another thing about this debate which is fortunate: that, practically unique in the history of debates, the Report of the Arts Council shows that they are to be given more money than before, not merely for the current year but for the next three years until 1965–66. I wonder whether that very good project of giving Government monies for a somewhat longer period of time than is done at the present moment, which is normally for one year, could not be extended to other branches of work to which we know the Government do give large sums of money each year. It would be an enormous advantage if that could be done.

There are just one or two points that I wish to take up from the Report of the Arts Council. The first is that I am pleased to see that the idea of building an art gallery on the South Bank site is going ahead. At the present time the Arts Council have been put into a position of some embarrassment because a large number of their good exhibitions have been held at the Tate Gallery, with the result that, I fear, in the eyes of many people these exhibitions have been provided by the Tate Gallery and not by the Arts Council. That has been unfair upon the Arts Council, because I am quite sure that the Tate Gallery could never have provided exhibitions of such quality as the Arts Council have done up to the present time. The second advantage will be that the Tate Gallery, will not be asked to lend their galleries, as they are now, and will not in future be forced to remove pictures of their own from the walls but will be able to show as much of their collection as they can. Therefore, I think one can say that the gallery on the South Bank will be a very great advantage to all.

I should like, in passing, to say what an enormous amount of pleasure to a very large number of people some of the big international exhibitions organised by the Arts Council have been. I particularly refer to some of those which have moved from Edinburgh to London, which have been exhibitions of very great importance and excellence. I would include, ton, the rather minor exhibitions they have given of some of the works of British painters. I think of people like Ward, George Morland and the present exhibition of John Opie. I do not want to say for a moment that I consider these are great painters, as painters in this world go, but it is important and interesting to see collections of their works brought together, where one has been able to form a much better idea of what they were like as painters than just going to see one or two of their works in various public galleries in the country.

There is one thing I am sad about indeed—and on this I share the views of the noble Lord, Lord Auckland; that we are to see the passing of the theatre at Sadler's Wells. That, I think, has done a great deal of good work over a long time. They tell me that the theatre itself is not very convenient from the singers' and artistes' point of view, so possibly we must accept its disappearance with kind feelings from that point of view. But it certainly seems sad from my own personal point of view. It has been, too, a place where one could park a car, which is rare in the theatre world to-day, and it seems to me sad that the one theatre where one could be certain of being able to park a car easily is to disappear.

I think the policy of the Arts Council for opera has been a very good one, because they have gone out of their way to give quite a lot of subsidy to young and new companies who were not merely playing the same old works we have heard many times but were giving performances of entirely new works which have never been performed before, or works which were popular in the past and have lost their popularity but not their historical interest. There are two places where I particularly come across these works. One is at the Musical Society at University College, London, where I think a subvention of the Arts Council is given to their annual performance of opera, and one is in the Borough Council at St. Pancras, where the Arts Council make a subsidy to the extensive festival which that borough has been running for nine or ten years. It is one of the finest examples of municipal enterprise I know, and it gives great pleasure to a large number of people.

It is encouraging to me, too, that the people are beginning to go back to the theatre again, and that there is still some place for the repertory companies in some of our bigger towns. I think we must be very careful to see that the theatres which are going to be built are not too large. I am convinced that the days of the rather big theatres of the past are finished we have to build much smaller, comfortable, more intimate theatres, where it will be possible for performances to be staged without such enormous expense as was necessary in the past. I believe that one of the forms of subsidy adopted by the Arts Council is to make it possible for the theatres to bring people from the provinces to the theatre, from the outside villages. They provide a not very big subsidy to make transport available. That seems to me one of the most encouraging ways in which subsidy could be applied. So far as I can see from the figures given in the Report it has been very successful in a large number of places.

It was sad when one saw that it might be no longer possible for the railways to provide that very good service they used to give on Sundays for transporting of theatrical properties and the theatrical staff itself. It merely means more and more traffic on the roads. If you are going to move theatrical properties, quite a number of fairly substantial-sized vans will be required, which is the last thing we want to encourage on the roads; on Sundays of all days. In passing, I would say that I think the question of subsidising theatres in the provinces is a very important one, though in my view the first move must come from the town itself which wants the theatre. I think it would be wrong for the Government to start theatres, or establish theatres, in various provincial towns; but where a theatre has been got going and people show that they wish to contribute largely to its running, then I think it is quite proper for the Arts Council to provide some kind of subsidy for it.

I should like to touch for one moment on the work of the Old Vic. I think I am right in saying that when Miss Cons and Miss Bayliss purchased that theatre (it was some time before the first war, I think) with the object that the plays should be given there extremely cheaply and that the cost should be kept as low as possible. I remember that when I first came to London in 1923 it was possible to go to the gallery of the Old Vic and pay 4d. for a seat. I am not going to say that 4d. would be a fair price now, but I wonder whether prices now are not more advanced than if we made in 1963 a charge comparable to 4d. in 1923. I admit that the seat was extremely uncomfortable, but one could see a good performance of Shakespeare for 4d. I doubt if one can at the present time.

I am quite sure, having read the Report and having heard what other noble Lords have said, that the Arts Council do spend their money very well, and one is pleased to find that the subsidy has been increased. I am sure that the subsidy given at the start was a very small one. I am pleased to see the Arts Council are supporting the Commonwealth Festival of Arts which I think is to take place in London in 1965. It seems to me a most important move at the present time to encourage a great festival of this kind, at which people from the countries of the Commonwealth can come and show their painting, their music, their singing, or whatever they wish to do in London. That seems to me greatly to be encouraged, and I am pleased to find the Arts Council giving it their support at the present time.

4.10 p.m.

LORD ECCLES

I join with the noble Lord, Lord Amulree, in thanking both the noble Lord, Lord Auckland, for calling attention to the Report of the Arts Council and the noble Lord, Lord Cottesloe, for the wonderful work which is described in that Report and for the contribution which my noble friend has made himself in leadership of the Council. Many times I have enjoyed exhibitions and performances that have been arranged with the help of the Council, and if, in the course of my remarks, I say something a little critical of one aspect of the Council's policy I shall not forget the pleasure which public funds, administered from St. James's Square, have brought me so often.

I think we should consider carefully the relation between the artist and his patron to which the noble Lord, Lord Cottesloe, referred, because this has a most important bearing on public policy in the field of the arts. In the Report itself there is a reference to this—I think it is at page 17—where the Secretary-General writes that in almost every country the private patron is rarer and poorer than he was even thirty years ago. That, of course, is what my noble friend has just said, and the assumption is made in the Report that this is true of Great Britain, and on it is built the case for larger grants. But is it a fact that private patrons, in a wide sense, are fewer in number and less well off than they were? More important still, is it not possible that we might stimulate a much wider private patronage than is being mobilised at the present time?

The House will find that I am not at all attacking larger grants for the Arts Council—far from that; I should like to see them increased every year. But I am going to suggest that there are things which are not now being done which should be done, and probably because of a loss of faith in the private patron rather greater than it should be. The first question is: are private patrons rarer and poorer? The public in general is much richer. Tens of thousands more people pay surtax, and when they die many more leave fortunes of considerable value. Then, is it true that, although we are obviously much richer, we are spending much less on the arts? Not at all. Anyone who follows the auction records or the prices of works of art in the shops knows that there is much more British money about for the purchase of fine things than there was, say, ten, or thirty, years ago. That applies not only to antiques and old masters. The number of art galleries which deal in contemporary art and which hold successful exhibitions of young artists increases all the time—and not only in London. I am glad to say that new galleries have been opened in provincial cities. It would be most interesting to have the figures over the past few years of the sales of contemporary art—paintings, drawings, Pottery, sculpture and other objects; to know how many recordings were being made of classical music and of the opera, and also how many books on art were being bought or borrowed. It is a safe guess that if we had these figures they would reveal a staggering increase over the last thirty years.

The patronage of music and the drama is no exception. The Report rightly says that the radio and television have become the natural agents of distribution of these arts. Of course they have. But why say only of distribution? The B.B.C. and the television companies are now the greatest producers of music and drama that the world has ever known. If we could add up all that they spend between them on the making of music and the performing of drama I imagine that the budget of the Arts Council would look small. I do not think one should say in the same context that a private individual ceases to be a patron because, having laid out his money on a radio and a TV set and paid his licence fee, he chooses to listen to a concert on the Third Programme or to watch a play on television.

I agree entirely with my noble friend Lord Cottesloe that these great agencies for the production of the arts, the new media of communication, ought to contribute a great deal more to the nurseries of the artistes on whom they live—the live theatre in particular. I have often thought that it was a shocking thing that the live theatre should not receive ample help from the B.B.C. and the television companies. That would be private patronage because public funds would not be involved. There is no occasion to mention the ballet, because obviously the patrons of the ballet are more numerous and more ready to pay than they were before the war.

We know something else about private patrons—namely, when they already think they are going to like some display of art, or when that has been well advertised, they turn up and they pay. Mention has already been made of the Picasso exhibition, which was a great triumph for the Arts Council. There was also an exhibition, held by the kindness of the Trustees, in the Victoria and Albert Museum, of a loan collection of works of art brought together by the British section of the International Art Dealers' Association. For this, too, an entrance fee—half a crown, if I remember aright—was charged. Both of these exhibitions were an enormous success, and at certain hours of the day the crowds were so great that people with money in their hands were turned away or, rather, gave up the struggle.

This question of advertising art is something to which the Arts Council should pay great attention. Your Lordships may remember that a few years ago a second-rate Temple of Mithras was unearthed in the City of London, and I believe that more than 20,000 people over a short space of time queued to see these battered fragments—and all because Sir Mortimer Wheeler, with his unrivalled charm on the television, excited their curiosity. I might tell your Lordships this small incident connected with that episode, which shows what advertising will do. The queue shuffled slowly along a corrugated iron fence, and a small boy, aged about 10, got behind that fence and discovered in it a reasonably-sized hole. He placed his back against that hole and, in a treble voice, said he would offer a view for the price of sixpence. He allowed each viewer only a few seconds, and his takings were enormous. I should think that boy is now a Young Conservative. There is a lesson here for regional broadcasting and for the Arts Council: that in modern times advertising is a large part of the battle in drawing in private patrons.

If I understood my noble friend aright, he was giving to the term "private patrons" the narrow definition of those individuals or groups of friends who are able and willing to place a commission for a work of art—that is to say, to give a contract and guarantee cash to the painter, the composer or the author in advance of his producing the work. I can quite well see that such persons are now under a certain handicap that did not exist formerly. In one respect the modern artist does not want a commission; he is not in so much need of a commission as formerly. The reason for that is that any painter or musician with talent can now get a post teaching part-time in a school or a technical college. Hundreds of them are teaching now compared to very few before the war. Teaching does not make them rich, but it does keep the patron from the door if the artist does not take kindly to the private commission.

This is the trouble. At a time when a great many more people are anxious to come into closer contact with artists, contemporary art does not lend itself to the private commission. The modern artist so often insists on being left entirely alone to express his innermost sensations, without prior thought or regard for a patron or the public. It is extraordinary to what extent some of them cultivate this passion for isolation. I heard a young painter, quite a promising young painter, say the other day in a gallery in St. Ives in Cornwall that he did not care a damn if not one single person ever liked or even looked at his pictures. He said he would feel ashamed if his work concerned anybody but himself. Defiance or a certain bravado about being misunderstood is very common—it always has been and always will be—among artists. But now, I think it rather more than a sign of youth, it is rather more than a fashion, and there is a danger that the division between the artist and his public could be made greater if grants from the public purse were used to relieve the artist of what he considers to be the degrading necessity to please a patron or attract an admiring audience.

I do not believe that a serious shortage of patrons or of private money need exist, but there does exist a real shortage of understanding between the modern artist and his public. I want to be assured that the Government are aware of this and are firmly convinced that the encouragement of private patronage is more important than the substitution of themselves for the private patron. It is so easy to say that the man in Whitehall knows best what the public should like and therefore the public should be given this through taxation.

How can the audience for the arts be enlarged and private patronage stimulated? I am very glad to see in the Report that the Council is giving some help to the theatre to collect a better audience. The experiment in subsidising transport has been found to make money for the box office. That is very encouraging. It cannot be satisfactory to send expensive companies to play to half empty theatres, but it needs a bit of courage to insist that some of the money would be better spent on providing transport, parking facilities and perhaps a restaurant to bring in the audiences. People are not going to leave their comfortable homes and their television sets unless there are decent arrangements for them at the place of entertainment. I am not at all sure that the allocation of funds for this purpose bears the right proportion to the total which is available for helping the arts.

Much the same is true of our national museums and galleries. It is very questionable if these galleries ought to ask for very large sums of money to buy additional single objects for their collections when they do not have the money to show properly the collections which they already possess. It is public money, and now that the public is so much more interested in the arts—and I might add that there is one vote, one head, at the age of 21, male or female—the public ought to be treated as generously and as carefully as the scholars and the curators. I am not asking that we should neglect scholarship but that we should do a little more for the general public who pay the piper.

In thinking of ways in which a larger audience might be stimulated, there arises an important problem in the organisation of the Council itself. There must be inside the Council, as there is inside all similar institutions, some conflict between the specialist approach—that is, treating each art as a separate department—and the regional approach which seeks to cater adequately for a range of activities in each area. To my mind, the Council has not got quite right the balance between the functional, art by art, approach and the geographical approach, though there are welcome signs in the Report of a growing emphasis on the needs of the regions.

I want to try to illustrate what I mean from experience with the Youth Service. Up to the time of the Albemarle Report, it was commonly said, exactly as it is now being said about the arts, that the Youth Service was pining away for want of more public funds. There was some truth in that, but few people realised that there was a handicap of equal importance in the lack of regional planning within the service. A large number of national voluntary organisations were all striving to extend their different activities with very little coordination and often with downright rivalry between each other, and still more between themselves and the local authorities. In fact, the local authorities were often more to blame. In one area there was wasteful competition; in another area an all-round and desperate shortage of clubs, societies, recreational facilities and so on.

I came to the conclusion, following the Albemarle Report, that we should never have a good Youth Service that met the needs of the young unless the basic planning was done by large cities or by regions. It could not be left to be piped down over closed circuits from London by specialist organisations. It seems to me that there is some relevance here for the various arts which are no doubt all doing their best to find audiences in different parts of the country. I do not know how much the panels in the Council should be compared to the voluntary youth organisations, each having, so to speak, their own chums in the different areas, who look more towards St. James's Square than across to the other arts in their neighbourhood. But I do know what the public wants. The public wants a balanced provision of the arts and, I would add, of museums, libraries, and facilities for physical recreation—all these within travelling distance of their own homes.

I know that such a balanced provision—and that is what we should aim at—could not be planned or provided from London. Local people in each area, perhaps with some outside advice, have to come together and determine their own basic requirements and be prepared to contribute largely to the cost of their provision, because good living is a local plant which has to grow out of the neighbourhood's own decisions, and it cannot be imported ready-made from somewhere else. So I was delighted to see the strictures in the Report on the laggard behaviour of the local authorities and to note the promise of better things held out by the formation of the North Eastern Association for the Arts. The passage on page 4 which extols that new Association is quite excellent, and if I did not wish to end soon I would quote it to your Lordships.

What I should like to know from the noble Lord who is to reply is just how much effort and encouragement the Government are prepared to put into the formation and the work of such regional organisations. Would the Government favour the suggestion thrown out by my noble friend behind me of a pound for pound grant up to a generous limit to match the money that can be raised locally? My Lords, if you share the desire to see a balanced provision comprising further education, the arts and physical recreation in all the areas of the United Kingdom, you will, I think, be drawn to the conclusion that so great a development in our national life would have to put under the responsibility of a Minister. It is very hard to see how the necessary finance could be arranged, and, perhaps still more, how the necessary coordination between these various leisure activities and between the regions could be effective if it were not the responsibility of a Government Department with a voice in the Cabinet.

I shall have to stop here or I shall shock my noble friend, Lord Cottesloe. I do not agree with him, in fact, that something of the kind of a Ministry of Fine Arts extended in this way would damage what I might call the freedom of the arts. It does not do so in France or Italy, and some people would say that the much greater care taken of the arts in those countries is largely due to the fact of some Minister's credit being bound up with their provision. I hope that the House will press the Government—and this is the whole point of my speech—not to look on themselves as ever more necessary and powerful substitutes for the private patron, but rather to devote a higher proportion of the funds available to stimulate the interest and support of private persons whose individual pleasure must always form the indispensable link between the artist and his fellow men.

4.34 p.m.

LORD CHORLEY

My Lords, I felt that I should like to say a few words in this debate, if only to express my own deep personal gratitude to the Arts Council and those who are responsible for running it for all the great pleasure which they have been giving to me—as I am sure they have to almost every other Member of your Lordships' House—over these last ten or twelve years. I am only sorry that I have to run away to another engagement which I cannot escape, so I shall only have a few minutes to take part in the discussion. I hope that the Minister who is to reply, and the noble Lords who will speak after me, will accept my apologies for not waiting to listen to them.

I would associate myself with what the noble Lord who has just resumed his seat has said in gratitude to the noble Lord, Lord Cottesloe, who for a number of years now has been Chairman of the Arts Council, as we know, and to whom we all ought to be grateful for the tremendous amount of work which he has done here and in many other directions in connection with the artistic heritage of this country. I should like to cross swords with him, just as the noble Lord who has just resumed his seat has done, as I feel that he was altogether too dogmatic on the subject of a Ministry of Fine Arts, or something of that kind. Valuable as the work of the Arts Council is, there are some aspects of it which are a little amateurish. I think the noble Lord, Lord Eccles, was quite right when he instanced France, which is very much an exemplar of the other method of doing things, and where, undoubtedly, from the point of view of galleries of pictures, exhibitions and that sort of thing, they are far ahead of us. We like to follow our own lines in this country, and I am not suggesting that we should imitate the French, but I am not at all satisfied that our present set-up is completely right.

I should also like to associate myself with what the noble Lord, Lord Cottesloe, himself said in tribute to Sir Emrys Williams, who, as he mentioned, is vacating his position as Secretary of the Arts Council. Sir Emrys Williams has been a fine public servant over these past years. I remember him, first of all, when he was very actively engaged in the adult education movement, where he did a very fine job. I think he has been one of our great educationists of this generation in a wide sense of that term. I am sure it is that devotion to education which has always marked his work, which has imaginatively stimulated him to the fine effort which he has made with the Arts Council over these years. One could say a great deal more about what he has done. I am sure it has been his work, very largely, which has brought the Arts Council before the public. I, for one, have been grateful for the Annual Reports, which he has not only produced with great ability but which he has seen that we all have. They are very attractively done. This particular one is brightly done, and no doubt next year it would have been brighter still, in view of the additional finance which we have just heard is to be forthcoming.

There has been a remarkable renaissance over the whole field of the arts in this country during the years since the war. The Second Elizabethan Age may well go down in our history as parallel with the First Elizabethan Age, and I am sure the Arts Council has played a very important part in this regard. It has been most encouraging. I shall never forget the time when I went down from your Lordships' House to see the Van Gogh Exhibition at the Tate and found the back of the queue not very far beyond the roundabout. It must have been the first occasion on which a queue of that length ever assembled outside an art gallery in this country. It was a very fine exhibition, and was, I am sure, the beginning of new things.

All over the country this is so. Some of your Lordships may have had the pleasure of listening-in last night to a charming little concert which was broadcast on the Home Programme from Rose-hill, which in fact is the Bishop's Palace at Carlisle. It came over very well; and naturally, as a native of that part of the world, I was very gratified. But this is symptomatic of what is going on all over Great Britain, and it is a most valuable thing. A little further South at Levens, in my own county of Westmorland, exactly similar concerts are given all the time. That is so all over the country, and the Arts Council have been encouraging and stimulating many of these efforts by providing some financial assistance.

Now that they have more money I hope they will devote a little more to this sort of thing, because I know it has been very difficult for quite a number of the organisers of these efforts, who are perhaps given £10 or £25 and told to go to the local council who will help them. But as the noble Lord, Lord Cottesloe, said, the local councils are not very ready to help them, and if the Arts Council cannot do a little better many of these ventures will come to an end. Many of these little, local artistic organisations, whether for music, painting or sculpture, are doing good work. It is not second-rate or third-rate work. Great artists such as Lon Goossens, to whom the noble Lord, Lord Cottesloe, referred, are to be found at their performances, and in this way the people in the country are given an opportunity of hearing some of our greatest artists.

In conclusion, I would make one further reference to the speech made by the noble Lord, Lord Cottesloe. He referred to some criticism of what is spent on literature and said that this criticism was not well directed. I really must cross swords with him over that. If your Lordships will look at the diagram which has been referred to by more than one speaker on the opposite side, under Item No. 7 you will see that poetry received £4,500. Now the noble Lord, Lord Cottesloe, is of course quite right in saying that poetry is not like the ballet or opera or art of that kind; but, on the other hand, if the English people have one contribution to the arts of which they are entitled to be proud, it is their poetry. Our greatest poets are certainly as great as, if not greater than, the greatest poets of the world. Shakespeare, on whom we pride ourselves as a very great dramatist, was great even more because of his wonderful poetry than because of his mastership of the dramatic art.

Anybody who knows anything about this subject knows that the young poets find it almost impossible, without some sort of subvention or subsidy, to get their poetry published. I know a number of these young men, and unless their relatives or friends or somebody can help them, their poetry is not published. Obviously, £4,500 is a minute contribution to deal with a problem of this kind. I am sure that it would pay the Arts Council, as it would pay poetry in England, if more help could be given on these lines. When I was young there was a poetry bookshop which, in a very small way, did a fine job of work. Undoubtedly the Arts Council could do a great deal more on these lines than they do, and I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Cottesloe, will be good enough to take that point away and have another look at it.

House adjourned during pleasure and resumed by the Lord Chancellor.

4.43 p.m.

THE EARL OF HADDINGTON

My Lords, like other noble Lords I wish to add my thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Auckland, for putting down this Motion for debate. I think he has done a great service to the House and to the country, because in my view another arts debate has been long overdue. He is right to focus attention on the handbook of the Council, A Brighter Prospect, because I do not think we all realise what a tremendous job the Arts Council do, and what a tremendous responsibility they have in allocating these Treasury grants all through the various branches of the arts. I think they do it extremely well. I am sorry that I must oppose some- body with so much Parliamentary experience as the noble Lord, Lord Eccles, but I must align myself with the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Cottesloe, in deploring this suggestion that the Minister of Public Building and Works should become responsible for the State provision of art, as is laid out in the pamphlet that has been referred to. It seems to me that it would be almost bound to create an impossible situation if every allocation which the Arts Council made was subject to questions in Parliament. I think that the present system works very well at the moment, and that the majority of the people are satisfied with it.

The Report of the Council deserves its title, A Brighter Prospect, I believe, because it opens on a very heartening note with the increased grant. I think we all agree, too, with the policy which it expounds, of raising or spreading, with the Arts Council coming firmly down on the side of raising. We must keep up the standards: high standards must be maintained, and ever higher standards aimed at. That is the most important thing of all, I think. While I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Cottesloe, that television and sound radio lack the atmosphere of the concert hall or the theatre (it is obviously impossible to get quite the same atmosphere), yet they do supply good music and good drama to an enormous number of people—sick people; old people; people far away from repertory theatres, even—who would otherwise be debarred from these pleasures. I agree, too, that local authorities should step up their contributions, which at present seem to be miserably low. As an example, there is a suggestion quoted in this handbook which I think has been carried out in Wales, where several local authorities have joined together. I think there is a case of ten local authorities in Wales joining together to promote and finance orchestras, whereas a single local authority would probably be far too small, and would find it far too big a burden on the rates, to do it alone. I think that is a good suggestion.

I wish to devote my few remarks—and they will be very few—mainly to the arts in Scotland, because they have been mentioned both by the noble Lord, Lord Auckland, and by the noble Lord, Lord Amulree. But before I say anything more about Scotland I think it is fitting to pay a tribute to the memory of the late Sir John McEwen, whose tragic death last year was such a very great loss to the Scottish Committee. Himself a fine poet and writer, a man of great culture and intelligence, he served the Scottish Committee very well for a long period, and he will be sorely missed.

I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Cottesloe, has left his place, because what I want to say concerns him to a certain extent. I think that the Scottish Committee and the Arts Council have always worked harmoniously together, and I do not want to say anything that might in the least interfere with that harmony, but it is rather disturbing to note that while the grants to both England and Scotland have in the past five years been steadily increasing, yet the percentage that Scotland has been receiving has, in relation to England, been steadily falling. There is some good reason for this, I understand, and I know that conversations are at present in progress. But we hope that the rather low percentage to which it has fallen, 9.6, will before long be restored to nearer the figure of 12 which is what it was five years ago and, of course, is roughly what the Goschen formula provides.

My Lords, there is one suggestion that I should like to put forward for consideration. Scotland, as noble Lords have said, stages an international Festival of the very highest order; and has been doing so for fifteen years. Is it not now time for this Festival to be treated as a national undertaking for the purposes of prestige, and, like Covent Garden, be dealt with separately for purposes of grant, as is clearly shown in the diagram in the book, "How the cake cuts up in 1961–62"? I believe that it would not only benefit the Festival itself if it were put on a more definite basis but it would also indirectly benefit, so far as I can see, the orchestras, exhibitions, repertory theatres and the diversity of arts in Scotland which is stimulated by the Scottish Council.

The Edinburgh Festival has had no small impact on Scottish art. There is no doubt that Scottish art is on the upgrade—and I have high authority for making that remark. One proof of this is that the English critics are now paying more attention to the annual exhibitions in the Royal Scottish Academy than they did before. This, then, is the time to give Scottish art all the encouragement we can. There still exists the impression, in some quarters, I am afraid, that there is no art North of the Border. This must be corrected, because the facts are exactly otherwise. I think that if those who concern themselves with planning exhibitions abroad (though this has nothing to do with the Arts Council) would in future pay a little more attention to Scotland it would be a very great incentive to Scottish artists.

My Lords, I have nothing more to say. I think we have had, are having, and doubtless are going to have more of, a most interesting debate. If I add a plea for more money for the arts it is only because I know that they can never have as much as they need. Last week your Lordships had a debate on starvation—bodily starvation—which is a terrible thing. Let us not forget there is also such a thing as being spiritually starved by want or lack of art. If this debate has reminded us of no more than that, then I think it has been well worth while.

4.51 p.m.

LORD ABERDARE

My Lords, this debate has ranged widely over many of the arts and almost all the activities of the Arts Council. I wish to confine my few remarks entirely to that section of the Council's Report which concerns Wales and the activities of the Welsh Committee of the Arts Council. Before I begin to drive my own lonely furrow, I should like to follow other noble Lords who spoke in thanking my noble friend Lord Auckland for having given us the opportunity of having this debate on the Arts Council Report, and also in paying tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Cottesloe, not only for his most thoughtful and interesting speech this afternoon but also for the wise guidance he has given as Chairman of the Arts Council over the past few years.

In Wales the situation with regard to the Arts, speaking particularly of the dramatic arts, is quite different from that in England. This is partly for reasons of history, but mainly for reasons of geography. Whereas in England there is a whole network of repertory theatres up and down the country, in Wales these theatres are practically non-existent—in fact, there are only two, one in Swansea and one in Colwyn Bay. If we contrast the position of the two capital cities, the difference is even more startling. Your Lordships are familiar with the situation in London and the wealth of theatres, not only in the West End but reaching out into the suburbs. Compare that with Cardiff, where hardly a theatre is left! The Prince of Wales theatre is mainly a cinema, and the so-called New Theatre, which has long since outgrown that name, has recently been bought by Mecca Limited, and is threatened with becoming a bingo hall. I am glad to say that the Cardiff City Council have been wise enough to enter into negotiations with Mecca Limited, to preserve the New Theatre under lease, at any rate for a few years, so that the Welsh National Opera Company—one of Wales's most outstanding artistic achievements—will at least have a stage in Cardiff.

Your Lordships will agree that this is a very serious situation. The Welsh Committee of the Arts Council have done their best over the past few years by arranging spring and autumn tours by professional companies, but even this has been greatly hampered by the lack of suitable facilities. Even the most skilled professional actors and actresses cannot be expected to give of their best in a series of one-night stands in draughty halls without adequate facilities for make-up or dressing rooms. The situation is even more serious, because the fact is that there is no lack of interest in serious drama in Wales. The amateur theatre flourishes, and in that part of Wales which I know best, the mining valleys, there are innumerable amateur dramatic societies and choirs.

I have mentioned to your Lordships the Welsh National Opera Company which has made a tremendous reputation for itself, not only in Wales, where performances are fully booked, but also in London and elsewhere in England. The Old Vic, on its visits to Cardiff, are always playing to packed houses, and there is a galaxy of Welsh professional acting ability appearing outside Wales on the stage and on the screen. The sad thing about the present situation is that budding Welsh artistes have no opportunity of making their way in their native land. They have to come to London to seek fame and fortune. I need only mention such distinguished Welsh artistes outside Wales as Emlyn Williams, Richard Burton, Harry Secombe, Geraint Evans, Hugh Griffith, Sir Lewis Casson, Stanley Baker, Donald Houston, Clifford Evans, and also such actresses as Rachel Roberts, Gwen Ffrancon-Davies, Sian Phillipps, as well as a number of outstanding playwrights. All have had to leave Wales to establish their reputation.

What is the answer? In 1957, the Arts Council set up a committee of inquiry on "Housing the Arts". They entrusted to their Welsh Committee a similar review of the situation in Wales. The Welsh Committee reported on January 1, 1959, and I should like, with your Lordships' permission, to quote a few paragraphs from their Report. These all mention what are, in my view, the most important recommendations: 1. That a National Theatre Building is a fundamental need in the cultural life of Wales. 2. That the theatre should be located in an area of large population accessible to all parts of the country and one likely to provide a potential audience. 3. That the theatre should be the home of a bi-lingual company which would also tour the country. 4. That the theatre should be the centre of encouragement to amateur groups which, under agreed conditions, would seek to present their plays in the National Theatre. I should like to add a fifth paragraph to that: That the theatre should be a workshop for training in all the dramatic skills, not only acting, but writing, lighting, make-up, music and all the other ancillary dramatic arts.

The Committee also recommended that steps should be taken to provide a suitable home for the Welsh National Opera Company. That Report was published on January 1, 1959, four years ago, but so far nothing has happened. In my opinion, it is vital that a Welsh National Theatre should be built at the earliest opportunity. Perhaps I ought to declare an interest, although it is not a financial one. I happen to be Chairman of the St. David's Theatre Trust, which exists to stimulate action in Wales to build a national theatre and home for the National Opera Company.

In the Secretary-General's report, which is contained in the Arts Council Report that we are considering, there are two passages which I think are relevant to the situation in Wales. In passing, may I add my tribute to the Secretary-General of the Arts Council, who I am glad to say is a Welshman, Sir William Emrhys Williams? He is retiring this month, and, in my opinion, and in the opinion of many others in Wales who know of his work, he has contributed an enormous amount to the success of the Arts Council in the years while he has been Secretary-General. He writes in the Report of these years these two paragraphs: The essence of Arts Council policy nowadays is to sustain the best possible standard of performance at a limited number of permanent institutions. Again: During the next few years the Arts Council will be very much occupied with its efforts to provide the arts with homes worthy of their standards of performance. A Welsh National Theatre would satisfy these two requirements. It would also provide an invaluable means for future Welsh talent to make its own name in Wales rather than to travel to London to do so. A young Welsh actor or actress could attain national eminence in a Welsh company based on a Welsh theatre. This is particularly true to-day with the advent of television, and television is in a very healthy state in Wales. A young actor or actress could earn a living with the Welsh national company and, at the same time, fill in and earn something more on the side with television appearances, for either the B.B.C. or I.T.V. He or she could go further than this and, having made a reputation in Wales, spread out over the whole country, because television programmes are often networked and in future commercial programmes, at any rate, will be networked to an increasing degree, taking contributions from Wales as well as from other smaller stations. A Welsh national theatre company might also expect to be able to exchange visits with other national theatres that are coming into being, such as that on the South Bank, already mentioned; and I believe that there are plans for others in Scotland and elsewhere.

So I believe that now is the right time, when the possibilities of television and the emergence of national theatres could be made use of, to establish a Welsh National Theatre and to provide the possibility of a professional stage career in Wales for Welsh actors and actresses, and not only for actors and actresses, but for all the ancillary artists: writers, designers, musicians, make-up artists and so on. The St. David's Trust has been actively working for such a theatre.

My noble friend Lord Cottesloe mentioned the need for local authorities to play a leading part in local enterprises. I am happy to say that we have had the full co-operation of the Cardiff City Council. They have earmarked a possible site for our theatre, subject to certain conditions, most of which we are now finding ourselves able to meet. We have also been conducting most helpful discussions with the Welsh Committee of the Arts Council and we hope to be able to persuade them that our plans are practicable and suitable to the needs of Wales.

Like my noble friend Lord Cottesloe, we are also hoping to have the support of Welsh industry, which has grown substantially in recent years, especially in South Wales. "Man cannot live by bread alone," and there is a great field in Welsh industry, where it has already been stimulated by television, for the encouragement of interest in the dramatic arts. I very much hope that, when we are able to build our theatre, the Welsh Committee of the Arts Council will be able to help us with a theatre transport subsidy, which would be of importance to us for bringing workers from up and down the area of Wales to the National Theatre.

Finally, if I may, I would refer briefly to the recent Report Developments and Government Action in Wales and Monmouthshire, 1962, which brings the picture of the activities of the Welsh Committee up to date. I should like to quote one sentence from their Report. They note the forming of a professional theatre company and write: If the Welsh Theatre Company is to prosper, it must have a home base—a theatre with adequate rehearsal rooms, workshops and other facilities. It is only then that members of the company can feel that they belong to an organisation with permanence and purpose. This is exactly what I had in mind in putting forward the suggestion for a Welsh National Theatre. What we feel is necessary for Wales is a theatre which will present all that is best in drama to the people of Wales, a theatre which will give a permanent outlet to native Welsh talent and attract the best in opera, ballet and the theatre to Wales. I hope that we shall have the support not only of the Welsh people and organisations in Wales, but also of the Minister for Welsh Affairs and of the Government.

5.8 p.m.

LORD CROFT

My Lords, I welcome this seventeenth Annual Report of the Arts Council, with its encouraging record of achievement in diverse fields and its note of qualified optimism for the future. I should also like to associate myself with those noble Lords who have said something about the retiring Secretary-General. It may justly be said that no small share of the credit for the success of the Arts Council is due to the retiring Secretary-General, Sir William Emrys Williams, whose great powers of persuasion and wise guidance have been exercised continuously in the service of the arts since 1939.

Particularly satisfactory, I think, is the way that the Arts Council has contrived to spread its expenditure between London and the Provinces, as it would be somewhat impoverishing if the arts became too exclusively metropolitan. Encouraging also is the evidence of an increased sense of responsibility towards the arts among some local authorities. There has been an extraordinary inequality in the extent to which local authorities have taken advantage of their powers under the Local Government Act, 1948, to levy a 6d. rate in support of the arts. And it is only reasonable and common sense that the Arts Council should, in the words of the Report, on page 17, … seek a clear cut formula for sharing the cost of the am between central and local funds". Like other noble Lords, I would comment briefly on the distribution of grants to the various arts made by the Arts Council in 1961–62, which is clearly set out on pages 8 and 9 of the Report. This shows, if my addition is correct, that opera had £740,000, drama £256,000, music £247,000, ballet £230,000 and the visual arts £81,000. This "visual arts" figure of £81,000 includes the net cost to the Arts Council of its exhibitions, which was £68,000. These figures lead one to the reflection that expenditure on the visual arts is disproportionately small as compared with that on the other arts. I am afraid that here I must differ from what my noble friend Lord Cottesloe said.

There is no doubt that the international exhibitions arranged by the Arts Council are of the utmost educational value, as also are their touring exhibitions of the works of well-know British artists. Also admirable is the collection of paintings and sculpture made by the Arts Council, which from time to time is exhibited in London and the Provinces. But one wonders whether something more should not be done in direct support of English art, whether sculpture or painting. Good as it is, as far as it goes, the present effort to encourage the visual arts in this country seems somewhat negative, temporary and transient.

The Arts Council claim to have taken over the patronage formerly exercised by a wealthy aristocracy. Could they not commit themselves even further by encouraging large-scale commissions for sculpture and for mural paintings by some system of direct grants to public or quasi-public bodies who may be prepared to co-operate in encouraging our artists? One would imagine that if, say, a university could obtain a 50 per cent. grant towards the cost of some major commission of sculpture by applying to the Arts Council, there would be a greater inducement for such large-scale commissions, which would eventually result in more permanent reminders of the art of our age than that provided by touring exhibitions. It would also be a great encouragement to the ten or so internationally known English sculptors, who in large part still rely on their sales to foreign countries for a living. One would imagine that with some £20,000 or £30,000 a year in addition to what is already spent on works of art rather than exhibitions of art, a far greater impetus could be given to the visual arts of this country than is given at the present time.

Turning now from the Arts Council, but still under the heading of Government support for the arts, I should like to mention a matter which for some time has given cause for concern among those interested; that is, the weakness in our national collections of modern and contemporary drawings, water colours and prints. The weakness is two-fold. First, the collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist graphic works is completely inadequate, and owing to prohibitive prices the leeway is not likely to be made up from public funds. All the experts I have talked to agree that this is the result of the time-lag in British appreciation of the Impressionists and their successors in art, which extended over about thirty years and in which nothing, or very little, was ever bought which was remotely contemporary. This position has now changed, and the expertise now exists to cope with all developments in modern art.

Secondly, there is a grave inadequacy in the public funds at present devoted to the purposes of purchasing contemporary graphic art and in filling the gaps of the years of neglect. Indeed, filling these gaps tends to use up what money there is and thus perpetuates the trouble. To take only a few examples of gaps and shortages in the national collections, neither the Tate Gallery, the British Museum nor the Victoria and Albert Museum have drawings by Sisley, Renoir, Monet or Bonnard. There is only one Manet drawing, and that is in the British Museum. There are only three Cezanne drawings, one in the Tate and two in the British Museum. There are only three Van Gogh drawings, in the Tate, and only two Gauguin, which were presented by the Contemporary Arts Society in 1925 to the British Museum. Of the more famous Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists, none is represented by more than five drawings, and the majority by less. The most famous contemporary living artist, Picasso, is represented by only one water colour in the Tate Gallery, and one drawing in the British Museum presented by the Contemporary Arts Society in 1926.

The responsibility for purchase is divided between the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum, but the amount of funds made available every year to the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum is, I am informed, so ludicrously small that no serious or systematic attempt can be made to collect contemporary graphic work. The actual amount made available to the Department is not made public; and though the new acquisitions are listed, the prices paid are not given.

In these straitened circumstances, the Department has of recent years wisely limited itself to filling gaps in its collection of old master drawings, assisted from time to time by grants from the National Arts Collection Fund.

The Victoria and Albert Museum has for the last three years pursued an enlightened policy and devoted up to about one-tenth of its funds to the acquisition of modern and contemporary graphic art, including prints. That £4,000 is no great sum for this purpose is shown by the fact that a recent acquisition, a coloured woodcut called Moonlight, dating from 1896, by the Norwegian, Edward Munch, who died in 1944, was bought for £745. Another coloured woodcut, The Kiss, by the same artist, dating from 1902, cost £500; and a coloured woodcut by the German, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, who died in 1938, a self-portrait with wife, cost £640. Prices ranging from £50 to £220 each have been paid for the 42 etchings by Picasso held by the Museum. An actual drawing by Picasso would cost the museum anything between £1,500 and £3,000.

It may be asked where the Tate Gallery comes into the picture. The answer is that the Tate has a certain number of drawings and water colours, as I have already mentioned, but as a matter of policy does not normally or systematically buy them, as it has no print room and there is a grave shortage of exhibition space. There has been no addition to the exhibition space in the Tate Gallery since the Sculpture Hall was completed in 1937, and since that date the main collections have increased by more than 50 per cent. The piecemeal collection of contemporary graphic art by these three national institutions leads one to reflect that there might be something to be said for the concentration of modern and contemporary art in a newly created museum of modern art, which would include oil paintings, sculpture, drawings, water colours and prints, and leaving the Tate Gallery still with the important responsibility of its historic collection of British old masters and the Turner bequest.

But in the absence of such an ideal solution, the answer, in my humble opinion, lies in an agreed division of function in purchasing policy between the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. It should be realised that there is already a basis for a fine collection of contemporary drawings in the British Museum, and that in 1948, thanks to the munificent gift of a former Keeper of the Museum, Mr. Campbell Dodgson, a very large number of contemporary drawings and water colours were added to the collection. But if the British Museum is to resume buying contemporary art for the nation, as one hopes it will, the Department of Prints and Drawings will require a considerable additional income every year to be allocated for this specific purpose. I submit that the matter is worthy of consideration and review by Her Majesty's Government and by the Museums concerned. In conclusion, I should like to thank my noble friend Lord Auckland for introducing this debate.

5.23 p.m.

LORD WALSTON

My Lords, I should like at the outset from these Benches to thank the noble Lord, Lord Auckland, for having initiated this extremely interesting and useful debate, and also for the kind remarks which he made about my noble friend Lord Silkin, remarks which I, personally, in a particular way, echo because had he been here himself to-day, I should not have been in this position at this moment. In fact, some of your Lordships may be wondering why I am here at all. As one of my more irreverent colleagues said to me this afternoon, in asking why I was to talk on this subject, "What has agriculture to do with culture?" I do not suppose it has much to do with it, and it is certainly not for that reason that I am daring to say any words at all on this matter. For those of your Lordships who believe in any way in the principles of heredity—and I think possibly some of you do—I may say that my father was for many years a director of a museum and professor of art. So it may be that I have imbibed, albeit in a very amateurish way, some of the views and appreciations which he held.

From the point of view of those on this side of the House, this as a particularly cheerful form of debate, because we have on this occasion relatively little criticism to make of Her Majesty's Government. In fact, such criticism as we have is tempered with gratitude because, after all, the Government have now decided, very rightly and properly, to increase by quite a substantial amount the sum which the country is to pay for art in all its senses. At the same time, perhaps even more important than the actual sum, they have made it on a fairly long-term basis, for three years ahead, which is of enormous value. For that, we are extremely grateful, and I think the whole country is grateful.

But lest it be thought that we are now doing all that should be done in this respect, I think it is worth while looking across the Channel, not very far away, to see how we compare with other countries. I do not want to enter into the discussion as to whether we should have, as some of the European countries have, a Minister of Fine Arts. That seems to be one of the few things on which there has been disagreement to-day. But I would disagree with my noble friend Lord Chorley, who said (I think it was he) that the existence of a Ministry of Pine Arts in France showed the superiority of their scheme—and I do not think I am misquoting him—over the system we have here. While undoubtedly the French capital has museums and exhibitions which rival in every respect those that we have in this country, I would not say that they are clearly in advance of such museums, picture galleries and special exhibitions as we have here. I would certainly say that many of our provincial centres have art galleries and museums, and, on the musical side, concerts and drama, which are undoubtedly superior to those which you find in the majority of French provincial centres.

Having said that, I still think it is valuable for us to take a glance at some of the other countries of Europe to see just what they are doing for art. For instance, although in this country the largest amount we pay out through the Arts Council is to opera and ballet—close on £1 million this current year—in Italy over £3,100,000 is paid for the same things. To return to the rather smaller provincial aspect of it, if you go to Austria, you will find that the Opera House in Gratz receives a grant of £320,000, which is far in excess of anything that we pay to any provincial theatre, concert hall or opera house (if there were such a thing) in this country. To compare the amount of money that we in this country devote to the arts with the amount we devote to other things, the total value of this year's grant to the Arts Council would build just about seven miles of the M.1. That fact, I think, puts this matter a little in proportion. We do not want to allow ourselves, in this gratitude we feel towards the Government for their access of generosity towards the arts, to forget that, compared both with other countries and with many activities in our own country, the arts still lag quite a long way behind.

I was extremely glad, during the course of the debate, to hear so many noble Lords refer to the importance of what one can loosely call provincial activities, the activities outside of the capital. I do not want to be thought to say that we are spending too much money on art in all its senses in London, and that we should take some away from here and give it to the Provinces. That I do not think would be right. But I should like to see quite a lot more money being made available to art outside the capital and, not only that, also outside the large centres of population. I do not want to bring an economic aspect into this more lofty debate which we are having, but on the occasions when your Lordships have discussed the importance of industry in the North-East and the means of attracting people to work in such areas, mention has from time to time been made of the importance of amenities in those areas. I feel, therefore, that there might be some rather closer connection between the Department of the noble Lord, Lord Derwent, and the Arts Council in encouraging art in the areas from which so many people are now moving simply because they do not find them attractive places in which to live.

I personally am a great believer in the value of live art, whether it be music or drama, or the visual arts. I think that it is far better for the small market towns and the small industrial towns of this country to have the opportunity of seeing real theatre, listening to real music and seeing real pictures, albeit not of the very first quality—not of the Covent Garden or Hallé Orchestra standard, perhaps, but none the less very good in themselves; the best of the second-class; and real and genuine—rather than having to rely on visits to the great centres or the television, radio and the cinema, which give them all the best performance but not in the flesh. The work the Arts Council are doing in this respect is of enormous importance and deserves real gratitude from us and great encouragement for an extension in the future. In that connection I would say that I think the transport subsidies to repertory companies are absolutely first-class. Whether or not they are needed, particularly in Wales, as the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, said, I do not know. The list he read out to us of the galaxy of people who have emerged from Wales, in spite of the absence: of any assistance, makes us wonder whether, in fact, Wales needs any assistance at all, for they can do so well without it.

LORD ABERDARE

My Lords, may I interrupt the noble Lord? My point was that this galaxy of talent appears in London, but there is no opportunity of its being seen in Wales because there is no suitable theatre. That is why I was pleading for a Welsh National Theatre.

LORD WALSTON

I will not cross swords with the noble Lord on that. I was merely trying to point out, in what I hoped was a complimentary way, that Wales, without assistance, makes a very large contribution to the cultural life of the British Isles.

EARL ALEXANDER OF HILLSBOROUGH

Native ability!

LORD WALSTON

Native ability, not only of the arts but in politics and many other respects also.

On the particular subject of moving from the centre to the Provinces, in drama in particular, I should like to point out to your Lordships that the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, which does very valuable work in enabling the plays of Shakespeare to be seen throughout the whole country, and is put to very great expense in having to travel to many different parts of the United Kingdom, has this year received a grant of only £40,000. That is a relatively low sum, especially as I understand that their request was for rather more than double that figure. While I know that it is not for us, sitting on the sidelines, to interfere with the decisions of the Arts Council, I cannot help feeling that the activities of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre are such that it should be given every encouragement possible.

I was particularly glad, in listening to the remarkably interesting speech of the noble Lord, Lord Cottesloe, with which I think I agree in almost every respect, to hear what he said about the local authorities. If we wish to have the arts throughout the whole country it is no good relying entirely upon one central authority: there must be a large element of self-help. As the noble Lord pointed out, the local authorities have the power to help themselves, if they so wish. At the present moment, of course, it is rather a delicate point to mention rates, but under the Local Government Act, 1948, introduced by Aneurin Bevan, the local authorities were empowered to spend up to a 6d. rate on this work. I do not know if the proportion works out, as the noble Lord, Lord Cottesloe, gave slightly different figures, but I understand that throughout the whole country local authorities, on an average, spend, in fact, only one-tenth of a penny by way of rates to assist in the arts. Therefore there is scope for more room for local authority action in this sphere; and one cannot expect the Arts Council or the Central Government to provide everything.

I was also very happy to hear the kind words of the noble Lord, Lord Cottesloe, concerning the L.C.C., who have undoubtedly given a very impressive lead in the spreading of the arts throughout their own area. I only wish that other local authorities who do not have the advantages of being in close access to the capital itself would follow their example with equal vigour. There are many who do, but there are far more who do not. There are some who are able to do this without even any recourse at all to the Arts Council. Norwich, for instance, a city of very great cultural traditions, and with a very live theatre in Madder Market, has received no grant from the Arts Council presumably because she is well able to take care of herself and do what is necessary without. And it is obviously very much better if that can be done. Glancing through the same list I am interested to see that Cambridge was able to get by with a grant of £1,100, whereas, for some reason, the Oxford Meadow Players received £13,000. I do not know if there is far less self-help forthcoming in Oxford than in Cambridge or what the explanation may be.

LORD LINDGREN

They need it more.

LORD WALSTON

They certainly need it a great deal more—that is undoubted.

I think it was the noble Lord, Lord Cottesloe, who mentioned the fact that sometimes we are inclined, in our self-deprecatory way, to forget that we in this country are great lovers of art. And certainly it is fantastic when the opportunity is given, to see the masses of people who will flock to almost any concert or art exhibition or good theatre, when it arrives in their locality—and I am not referring now solely to the Picasso Exhibition or to the Tate, or to events which make the headlines in the national newspapers, but to the far more modest exhibitions frequently arranged by the Arts Council in small provincial towns where the attendance is an extremely good one. Of course such exhibitions are of very great value not only to the viewers of art—to people who go simply in order to look or to listen—but also to the young people who themselves hope to become, or are in process of becoming, artists in one way or another. For the young art student to be able to go to an Exhibition and see the works of the great masters; for the young musician to be able to go and listen to the live music, chamber music, symphony music, concerts, whatever you like; even for the young actor to be able to go and see the great players of the stage on the stage itself is of enormous cultural value and a great national investment, because it is from those same young people that the future expression of art in this country will come.

The noble Lord, Lord Eccles, among others, mentioned also the question of patronage in art. He said, quite rightly, that we in this country have a great heritage of private patronage. In the whole world, art has, in the main, been built up by private patronage; and it has been stated by many people that it is the disappearance of that patronage under present economic conditions that is causing a decline in art. The noble Lord, Lord Eccles was perfectly right in querying whether, in fact; there is a decline in art—which I do not think many of us here would accept—and also whether there is a decline in patronage. I should not like to say whether there is a decline in patronage. But I would say, very firmly, that, whether there is or is not a decline, there is to-day, with the great wealth that this country still enjoys, ample scope for increased patronage from many different types of sources.

On the purely private side we find these enormous prices being paid for works of art at public auctions and in the galleries. I have no objection to that, but I should feel happier if some of these people who are prepared to spend £50,000 on a Renoir were prepared to back their own judgment of art, instead of their own judgment of what one might almost call stock market values, with the possibility of appreciation, and pay out some of that money for the works of unknown artists, new artists, of different kinds and in different media; taking a leaf, as it were, out of the books of their predecessors of the Renaissance and the eighteenth century, who were the patrons of live artists as well as, to a lesser extent, of dead artists. To find some of that money being spent not on dead masters but on living students would, I believe, be of very great help to our artistic development in this country.

But apart from individual patrons of art there are many other sources. We have heard from noble Lords who have spoken of the help which has been given by the B.B.C. and by the Independent Television companies to the arts, particularly drama and music; and that help is of enormous value. Private companies and public companies, to a certain extent, do the same. The Daily Mirror, for instance, has sponsored with enormous success and importance the Youth Orchestra. The Shell advertisements which we look at frequently are a form of patronage to the younger and less well-known artists and are of value, as well as being extremely attractive. But I feel that there is still scope for a great deal more than is now done. Why cannot we play, either live or over the radio, an I.C.I. Sonata to be the modern equivalent of the Waldstein Sonata, which I like to think was dedicated to a forbear of mine? Why cannot we see the Unilever Murals, to replace, or as a modern equivalent of, the Sistine Chapel? Why cannot we have a Beaverbrook travelling theatre as the modern counterpart of the Elizabethan travelling troupes? I am quite certain, as the noble Lord, Lord Cottesloe, rightly said, that there is still a great deal that could be done, if not by the old-fashioned private patrons of art, at least by their modern counterparts:, the great commercial and business houses of this country, which would go very much further than anything the Arts Council can do, in spite of the very great work and help they are giving.

I should like again to thank the noble Lord, Lord Auckland, for having initiated this debate. I would also thank the Arts Council itself for the work that it has done, remembering that it was set up by our old late friend Lord Dalton. Then I would thank the Government for the support they have given, for the increase they have given—and I hope that it will not be overtaken by an inflationary rise in costs but will be a real and continuing increase.

5.45 p.m.

THE MINISTER OF STATE, BOARD OF TRADE (LORD DERWENT)

My Lords, I hope your Lordships will be able to hear what I say; I have a very heavy cold, what I believe is; sometimes called—outside your Lordships' House, of course—a "stinker". What I intend to do in speaking to this debate is not to try to speak to all the points raised, but to deal mainly with those matters with which the Government are concerned, and many of the points that have been raised have been points purely for the Arts Council. I think I shall say, first of all, what I had intended to say and then go on to any questions that I have left out. I will, in fact, be answering questions in the course of my speech in the ordinary way.

I thank my noble friend Lord Auckland not only for initiating this debate but for giving me the chance of saying certain things on behalf of Her Majesty's Government which I think ought to be said. I shall start by drawing your Lordships' attention to a booklet which I am sure many of you know. Unfortunately, it has much the same name as the booklet to which we have already been referred and about which there has been some criticism—Government and the Arts. I would refer your Lordships, to start with, to this green book which was published in 1958 by the Treasury and is called Government and the Arts in Britain. This deals, as I want to deal to commence with, with the whole field of the arts supported by the State, and not only with the Arts Council and the grants made to it. I think it is right that we should get a picture of what is going on in the financial line in the way of State support.

The field of State financial assistance to the arts ranges from the national museums and galleries, which are financed entirely by the Exchequer, with their own Votes, and are in many ways, if not all, subject to the same sort of Treasury control as Government Departments. Then there is assistance to the Arts Council about which we have heard a great deal to-day. This is again entirely Exchequer financed, but the Arts Council is a grant-aided body which has almost entire freedom in the way it spends its money. Then, on the other extreme, we have entirely independent bodies such as the Royal Music Colleges, which receive a fixed annual grant from the Government, and this represents only a portion of their total income. There is also in the field of arts—and I think we should do well to remember it—considerable expenditure by the Ministry of Public Building and Works on the preservation of historic-buildings and ancient monuments and again on the acquisition, through the National Land Fund, of historic houses and their contents, and, on occasions, of pre-eminent works of art offered instead of estate duty. That is all State assistance to the arts.

Just to show how this expenditure on the arts generally has increased in recent years, I would point out that just before the war and immediately after the war Exchequer expenditure over the whole of this field was less than £1 million a year. By 1958–59, which was the year this green pamphlet was published, it had risen to between £6 million and £7 million. The comparable total in the current year, 1962–63, is £9½ million, and next year it is likely to rise to somewhere about £11 million. When we are discussing these other figures of the Arts Council do not let it be said that, comparing things with other countries, the State is doing nothing to help the arts. I shall have something further to say about the foreign contribution and their methods of doing it later.

Coming on to the Arts Council itself I would mention that its first full year of operation was 1946–47, and in that year the Council received a grant of £320,000. By 1962–63 this had risen to £2,190,000, representing, as the introduction to this Report gratefully acknowledges, an increase of nearly half-a-million pounds—£445,000—over the previous year's figure. The provision in the new Estimates for 1963–64 is £2,730,000, which is a further increase of £540,000. So in the two years there has been an increase of roughly an extra £1 million.

Here I want to say a word about Covent Garden, because it is treated (because it is Covent Garden and because of certain difficulties) as something separate from the ordinary grant made to the Arts Council, and it is not a matter in which the Arts Council have the final say as to how the money should be spent. It is a separate thing. Of this total for the Arts Council of £2,730,000 which I have already mentioned, £830,000 is earmarked for Covent Garden. The needs of Covent Garden are regulated by a special formula which was agreed last year between the Treasury, the Arts Council and Covent Garden. It appears to be working well, and the formula has been repeated this year. The £830,000 we are talking about includes an Exchequer contribution towards some further necessary capital expenditure which I think my noble friend Lord Auckland mentioned. Of that £830,000 there is, I repeat, a contribution towards capital expenditure which, as he said, is most necessary. Other than Covent Garden—I think I should repeat some of the figures which your Lordships have heard; we must get them right for the Record, because there have been some mistakes—there is £1,900,000 as compared with £1,500,000 last year.

Included in this figure is the provision made for grant to the newly-created National Theatre. The actual subsidy has been fixed at £130,000 for a period of four years. That, I think, was the figure that my noble friend got wrong. In fixing this grant for 1963–64, the Government have looked further ahead. It seemed to them that it would be helpful to the Arts Council in preparing their plans, and would also be in accordance with current thinking about long-term control of Government expenditure arising out of the recommendations of the Plowden Report, if the Arts Council grants were to be fixed for a period of three years at a time, and I am glad to have from all sides of the House a welcome for that. Accordingly, the £1,900,000 for 1963–64 will be increased to £2,100,000 in 1964–65, and to £2,325,000 in 1965–66. This gives an annual increase of approximately 10 per cent. and of course is designed to allow for reasonable expansion of Arts Council activities, including new activities within the Council's normal scope, but not at present undertaken, together with any increase in costs. That is the 10 per cent.

This, I think, must be remembered. It is an inherent factor in any such arrangement as this that the grants, once fixed, must not be altered on either side except in the most exceptional circumstances. There will be no more from the Treasury and there will be no cut by the Treasury except in the most extraordinary circumstances, which I do not visualise, particularly if this Government is re-elected. I would just add that the provision for Covent Garden will continue to be dealt with separately and additionally. That is a separate matter throughout.

May I say just one word—because I think there is some doubt about it, possibly outside the House—on what is the actual position of the Arts Council? The Council is appointed by the Chancellor of the Exchequer after consultation with the Minister of Education and the Secretary of State for Scotland; its membership comprises a Chairman and no more than fifteen members. But the distribution of the grant is the decision of the Arts Council and not of Her Majesty's Government. That was why the Arts Council was set up. As I said, the Treasury are directly concerned with the grant to Covent Garden for the simple reason that the scope of the Covent Garden requirements make it a special case. Over the whole of the rest of the field the allocation of the money available to it is entirely a matter within the discretion of the Arts Council. A Treasury assessor attends all the meetings of the Council in order that the Treasury may be kept fully in the picture, which is of advantage to all concerned. As I think the noble Lord, Lord Cottesloe, said, direct communication with the Treasury is of great help to the Council. But the Council has a free hand within the quite general lines laid down in the Charter, both in determining its general policy and in dealing with individual applications for financial assistance.

We then come on to page 15 of the Report which deals with the question of local authorities. There is a rather revealing table on that page. Box office receipts cover rather less than two-thirds of the total. For the rest, which has to be met by subsidy, Arts Council grants account for 80 per cent. of the balance; the remaining 20 per cent. comes from local authorities and other bodies, such as I.T.V. and charitable trusts. The 1961–62 Report, as in previous years, says that this local contribution is not enough and that much more should be done by the local authorities and by local initiative. It is right that the Arts Council should work in partnership with local effort, but the partnership should be less unequal than it is at present. Her Majesty's Government agree with every word of that. It is really quite staggering, when one sees what the London Comity Council is doing and compares it with what certain other local authorities are doing. I will not mention any names, but there is one I can think of, a big local authority which is rich and which does virtually nothing to help the arts. It is really quite extraordinary.

One point was raised, I think by my noble friend Lord Cottesloe, about industry being a patron. I know that there is the question of shareholders and of what you can do with shareholders' money, but I think it is perfectly arguable in certain localities—I do not say in London—particularly where there are one or two big factories, that industry in that case should be able to help the local arts in some form for the benefit of their employees. I should have thought it would not require great strength of conscience in those circumstances for industry to help.

I turn now to the ending of the introduction to the Report—the remark that although the prospects for the arts in Britain are brighter than in recent years, the scale of subsidy is still unrealistically small. This, of course, is a matter of opinion, and the opinion just expressed is that of an enthusiast for the arts. There are other people in this country, however, who would say that we spend, not too little, but too much public money on the arts. Just how much is to be spent is a matter of opinion, of judgment, and it is difficult to say, but in view of what we have done in the last two years I do not think it would be fair to accuse the present Government of being ungenerous or unsympathetic to the needs of the Arts Council.

There has been mention of the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. There have been a number of publications on the National Theatre, and I am not going to say anything about it because I think probably your Lordships will know all about it. I would only say that the Government subsidy towards running the National Theatre Company, payable through the Arts Council, has been fixed at £130,000 a year for a period of four years. This excludes any touring costs which will be dealt with separately.

I should, however, like to say a word about the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. There was a suggestion that they should go in with the National Theatre and, as it were, all be one body. They withdrew, probably for perfectly valid reasons of their own. They had a tremendous appeal, in consequence, for new funds, and I believe and hope they are doing quite well. The position is that the company's operations at Stratford have always been such an attraction that they never needed an Arts Council subsidy until they ventured into the London theatres, the Aldwych and the Arts. They did not get their money back as quickly as they thought they would, the whole thing being more expensive than they expected, and they are in some financial difficulties. The Arts Council, as has been stated by the noble Lord, Lord Walston, have decided to set aside £47,000 by way of grant and guarantee for 1963–64. This was nothing like the amount they asked for, but was a figure which the Arts Council thought reasonable. I cannot say more from this Dispatch Box, except that it was carefully considered and that was what the Arts Council thought reasonable.

I should like to say one word to my noble friend Lord Auckland about theatres in New Towns. This was referred to last year by the noble Lord, Lord Silkin, who asked whether there could be a special grant for the New Towns, and so on. This matter has been very carefully considered. The Government take the view that a separate subsidy for this purpose would not be appropriate. The provision of theatres in New Towns is primarily a matter for the authorities of those towns and for local initiative. The Arts Council are certainly very anxious to encourage such initiative, and have held discussions with the authorities in various places. The Arts Council cannot give subsidies to the authorities unless there is a theatre or company in existence to subsidise. That is the position there.

There is, of course, the consideration that a town needs to be of a certain size before it is capable of sustaining a regular theatre. A theatre cannot flourish unless there are enough people sufficiently interested to form the audience. At any rate, it is not a thing for the Arts Council until and unless a theatre company or a theatre is started. Then they can go to the Arts Council to see what can be done for them. Her Majesty's Government are very anxious not to do all this sort of work through the Arts Council, and there is no real reason why they should produce it for New Towns rather than others. If I may comment about other old-standing towns which have no theatres, regretfully, of course, this is nearly always due to lack of local interest. They had theatres, but they have been closed. One must remember this fact.

Mention was made by the noble Lord, Lord Amulree, of the Commonwealth Arts Festival. I am afraid I cannot tell him anything because tentative approaches were made to Treasury Ministers over a year ago. No specific application for Exchequer contribution has been made either by the Commonwealth Relations Office or by the Arts Council. If and when such application is received, it will be carefully considered. One cannot say more than that at this moment. I would add that the Commonwealth Arts Festival is planned for 1965, so far as we are aware, but it should not be confused (and I should like to get this clear for both their sakes) with the Shakespeare Festival 1964, which is the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth and for which the Arts Council, in cooperation with the various authorities up and down the country, are busily preparing. They are making provision for that in the year 1963–64. That is the Shakespeare Festival, and the other one may or may not happen.

LORD AMULREE

I should like to thank the noble Lord for that very clear explanation.

LORD DERWENT

I should now like to come to specific questions that were asked, with which I may not have dealt already. Lord Auckland suggested that the National Theatre was an expensive thing and that, in consequence, local repertory theatres were being done out of some money. I am putting it a little crudely. I do not believe that to be the case. There is no intention that the creation of a National Theatre should prejudice the position of small repertory companies. On the contrary, one of the arguments for the National Theatre is that it should stimulate drama throughout the country. The decision to go ahead with the National Theatre was accompanied by an increase of £150,000 in the amount of money made available through the Arts Council for repertory theatres. They got the extra £150,000 because of the National Theatre.

I should like to say one word about something which has not in fact been mentioned: that is, drama training. My noble friend gave warning that he was going to raise it. He did not do so, but I should like to raise it myself. There was a question of Government assistance to theatre schools. The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art receives a direct grant from the Exchequer—not from the Arts Council. It is a recognition grant of £2,000 only, because RADA, owing to the benefits it receives under Bernard Shaw's will, is not in need of much Government assistance. Some other drama schools receive assistance from local education authorities as places of further education, and students at independent training schools are eligible for grants and scholarships. Help is given through the Arts Council to post-graduate training schemes for young professionals: for example, young actors training as producers.

After listening to my noble friend Lord Cottesloe, I am glad I am not a professor, or I should have dared to answer him. But he used one phrase I should like to take up, and that is the question of Harrod's and Selfridge's not being able to carry on without customers. I entirely agree with him, and I should like to leave in your Lordships' minds the consideration that the same thing applies to local theatres. As regards the London County Council and the Bill which is now being debated in another place, the responsibilities of the L.C.C in relation to the Royal Festival Hall and other buildings on the South Bank will be taken over by the proposed Greater London Council.

My noble friend Lord Eccles told me that he was going away. He is studying line and form: I understand he has gone to buy some cattle. He raised two questions principally, I think. He asked whether the Government favoured the development of local activities rather than central activities. The answer is, "Yes" every time. We think that all these activities should start locally. They may have to come to the Arts Council in the centre if they want help; but they should start locally, and not the other way about. Then I understood him to ask whether Her Majesty's Government would consider a pound for pound basis with local authorities. He cannot expect me to answer that one, I think. I doubt whether they would consider it, or whether the Arts Council would consider it. It is a matter for them. I agree with him that the time may well come when they may have to be a bit tough with some of these local authorities.

The noble Lord, Lord Amulree, raised the question of Sadler's Wells. There is, of course, some regret at the departure of Sadler's Wells from where it is. It has become part of the London cultural scene as we know it, in spite of the fact it is only thirty years old. We know it had good parking, but Sadler's Wells themselves are very anxious to go elsewhere, somewhere more central. The Arts Council support them in their wish. A survey of audiences showed that it is not true that most of the patrons now come from North London. I know this is of the greatest importance to Lord Amulree: there will be very good car parking facilities on the South Bank. The noble Earl, Lord Haddington, was, I think, really talking about an injustice to Scotland. But may I refer him to the Arts Council?—because in this case it is not the responsibility of Her Majesty's Government.

THE EARL OF HADDINGTON

I appreciate that.

LORD DERWENT

I thought that the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, was going to start by saying that they were not getting any help. But I am delighted to hear, if I understood him aright, that they have started on the right lines. They are doing something locally, and they will eventually come along and say: "We have now got this scheme going for a National Theatre. We want some more help." That, of course, is the proper way of doing it. What help they will get we cannot tell until they ask for it. I am very glad that this is going very well in Wales. I went down to South Wales the other day, on quite different matters for the Board of Trade. I felt that there was a wonderful feeling of wanting to get on with things in that part of the world, and I am glad to see that that applies also to the theatre.

As regards the points raised by my noble friend Lord Croft, I do not think he will expect me to answer them. But he will expect me to say what is perfectly true: that they were very carefully noted. Some of the cases were parochial, and some of the cases will need more Government money. I think the noble Lord also wants a new British Museum. But all of his points will be noted.

LORD CROFT

And a museum of modern art.

LORD DERWENT

And another one for modern art. As regards my noble friend Lord Walston (may I call him my noble friend, because he is on my side this time?), I must say that I find it very encouraging to have his support and to hear him saying what good boys we have been. Of course we have not given enough—there is never enough. But I think we have been fairly good. I have answered all his questions. He was talking about patronage, about which so many other noble Lords have spoken, and was asking if people or local authorities—whichever it might be—could support the young, unknown modern artist or craftsman, and so on.

LORD WALSTON

My Lords, may I interrupt? It was not that the local authorities should support the young people—on the whole, I think they do that very well—but the people who spend £50,000 on a Renoir, and that sort of thing.

LORD DERWENT

For every one who spends £50,000 on a Renoir, there are tens of thousands of people who are now collectors in their small way; and this number is increasing, I am glad to see. They go into picture galleries, into antique shops; and they back their own judgment. It may be for only a "tenner", but whereas before the war those people could be counted in their thousands, they are now in their tens of thousands. I think that is very encouraging. It is very noticeable that when a new building is put up in the West End of London the only people who seem able to afford the new shops are the antique dealers.

I hope that I have answered most of the questions your Lordships have raised. May I say again how grateful we are to my noble friend for initiating this debate? So far as the Treasury are concerned, we are beginning to wonder whether in fact we are doing our job properly, because people have said so many nice things about us.

6.14 p.m.

LORD AUCKLAND

My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate. It has been a stimulating debate and has, I think, covered every aspect of art—visual and otherwise. I should like to pay my own tribute to the Director of the Arts Council. I did not have the pleasure of meeting him when I made my own visit there, but I saw his deputy, who was most helpful, and I think the tributes paid both to him and to the Director were very well merited. I should also like to thank Sir David Webster, the head of Covent Garden, who was of tremendous assistance to me during the course of preparation for this debate.

I did not want to give the impression that I expected every town to be given a Government subsidy if they wanted to set up a theatre. The point I was trying to make was that local councils already give help to their local theatre, but that the theatre concerned would benefit if more were done centrally. My noble friend Lord Derwent was, I thought, a little incorrect in what he said about Sadler's Wells. As I understand it (and I have the documents here from the Chief Producer of Sadler's Wells), there is a great deal of concern about its closure. This is not a question of whether or not the people north of the Thames will be deprived of opera; it is a question of a relatively new building being closed down when there is a great deal of pressure against it. I would ask my noble friend to consult with the Sadler's Wells Company as to what are the facts surrounding this. It is, of course, true to say that theatres cannot survive without customers, but most of these repertory theatres and these provincial theatres are getting customers. But overheads continue all the time to increase, and I would ask the Treasury to bear that in mind.

I am very grateful to my noble friend Lord Derwent, especially in view of his very heavy cold, for having given us at least some encouragement. I should also particularly like to thank the noble Lord, Lord Cottesloe, not only for taking part in this debate, but for the very fine work which he has done. Finally, I would repeat my thanks to all noble Lords for their contributions, which will be of great encouragement to all the arts concerned. I beg leave to withdraw my Motion.

Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.