It’s 75 years since the Festival of Britain, and there’s been quite a lot of coverage of this anniversary. Even those who were primary school children at the time are now in their eighties, so it’s one of those national moments where first-hand memories are becoming more rare and more treasured.
But with all the focus on the South Bank festival site – the Festival Hall, the famous Skylon – it tends to get forgotten that there was also a nation-wide celebration with activities in a number of ‘provincial’ towns and cities. Bath was one of these.
I’ve got a copy of the Festival souvenir programme that I found in a charity shop, 1951 price 2/6d – two shillings and sixpence, 12.5p. Descriptions of the provincial places largely draw attention to their familiar tourism features and in the case of Bath, “this gracious city”, inevitably this is the Royal Crescent, Assembly Rooms, Georgian architecture, and so forth. The focus is on The Bath Assembly 20 May-2 June (in 1951, only in its third year of operation): this became the Bath Music Festival and is now Bath Festival. There were also literary events and a performance by Ballet Rambert which included a specially-commissioned ballet for Bath.
The Festival of Britain wanted to “represent the aims and activities of young people”, and in Bath this included an international festival of films for children, and shows by the Lanchester Marionettes. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find out what films were shown, but 1951 was the year that the Children’s Film Foundation was set up to produce wholesome British product and stem the tide of American releases that children saw at Saturday morning pictures. The CFF films were, let’s say, dull, in comparison. Harold Willis (15 year-old apprentice projectionist in Penzance at the time) says “They were terrible. They were absolutely terrible”. The Lanchester Marionette Theatre was a professional puppet show by Waldo Lanchester and his wife Muriel Bell; you can watch a little example here and the puppets look fantastic.
The souvenir programme also announces a “Pageant of Bath” to be performed by youth groups. I wondered why I’d never heard of this, but it turns out it was cancelled before it began due to wrangling between Bath City Council and The Bath Assembly over how much it would cost. The Council refused to guarantee a £500 deficit, and the Assembly wouldn’t take it on either (it’s a certainty that this projected deficit would have spiralled inexorably upwards – £500 is over £20,000 today). Finding a suitable venue was also problematic and, crucially, there wasn’t much interest in participating from local young people. In 1951 we haven’t yet got ‘youth culture’ or ‘teenagers’, but perhaps no-one in authority at the Council thought to ask those aged 8 to 15 what they wanted …
Ann Cullis, Volunteer and Trustee
July 2026
Sources:
Festival of Britain souvenir programme 1951
Ballet Rambert Performance Database here
Alexander Hutton The ‘Quite Ordinary Man’ at the Pageant: History, Community and Local Identity in the 1951 Festival of Britain (2020) published on Project Muse
Harold Willis interview 2026 with Museum of Bath at Work