All these companies tour in Britain, and some of them make extended tours abroad. The Ballet Rambert, for instance, has made a tour of Australia and New Zealand, which lasted a year and a half, a record for that area.
The Sadler’s Wells Ballet has made long and highly successful tours of the European continent. Its first visit to America occurred in the autumn of 1949, when the Covent Garden Opera Trust, in association with the Arts Council and the British Council, presented the group at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City, and in various other centres in the United States and Canada, under my management. A second and much longer visit took place in 1950-1951, with which visits this chapter is primarily concerned.
Sadler’s Wells has a ballet school of something more than two hundred students, including the general education of boys and girls from ten to sixteen. Scholarships are increasing in number; some of these are offered by various County Councils and other local authorities, and a number by the Royal Academy of Dancing.
In addition to the Arts Council, I have mentioned the British Council, and no account of Britain’s cultural activities could make any pretensions to being intelligible without something more than a mention of it. It should be pointed out that the major part of the British Council’s work is done abroad.
Established in 1934, the British Council is Britain’s chief agent for strengthening cultural relations with the rest of the British Commonwealth, Europe, the Middle East, the Far East, the United States, and Latin America. It is responsible for helping to make British cultural achievements known and understood abroad, and for bringing to the British, in turn, a closer knowledge of foreign countries.
Like many other British cultural bodies, the British Council derives its main financial support from the Government (through grants from the Foreign Office, plus certain sums on the Colonial and Commonwealth votes), and is a body corporate, not a Government organization. Its staff are not civil servants and its work is entirely divorced from politics, though the Council has a certain amount of State control because nine of the Executive Committee (fifteen to thirty in number) are nominated by Government departments.
The British Council’s chief activities concern educational exchanges with foreign countries of students, teachers, and technicians, including arranging facilities for these visitors in Britain; they include supporting libraries and information services abroad where British books and other reading materials are readily available, and further include the financing of tours of British lecturers and exhibitions, and of theatrical, musical, and ballet troupes abroad. Sadler’s Wells Ballet has toured to Brussels, Prague, Warsaw, Poznau, Malmö, Oslo, Lisbon, Berlin, and the United States and Canada under British Council auspices with great success. The Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet has toured the United States and Canada, under my management, with equal success, and is soon to visit Africa, including Kenya Colony. The Old Vic Company, the Boyd Neel String Orchestra, and the Ballet Rambert toured Australia and New Zealand, and the Old Vic has toured Canada. John Gielgud’s theatre company has visited Canada. In addition, the British Council has sponsored visits abroad of such distinguished musicians as Sir Adrian Boult, Sir John Barbirolli, Sir Malcolm Sargent, and Maggie Teyte.
One of the British Council’s important trusts is the responsibility for the special gramophone recordings of distinguished musical works and of the spoken word. This promotion is adding notably to record libraries, and is helping to make the best music available to listeners all over the world. It is also the Government’s principal agent for carrying out the cultural conventions agreed upon with other members of the United Nations. These provide, in general, for encouraging mutual knowledge and appreciation of each other’s culture through interchanging teachers, offering student scholarships, and exchanging books, films, lectures, concerts, plays, exhibitions, and musical scores.
The relationship between the British Council and the Arts Council is necessarily one of careful collaboration. In the time of C. E. M. A. many tasks were accomplished in common, such as looking after foreign residents in Great Britain. Now the division of labor of the two Councils is well defined, with clear-cut agreement on their respective responsibilities for the various entertainment groups that come to or go from Britain. The British Council helps British artists and works of art to go ahead; the Arts Council assists artistic activities in Britain, including any that may come from abroad. Both bodies have a number of committee members in common, and the feeling between the groups is close and friendly.
It is, I feel, characteristic of the British that, without a definite, planned, long-term programme for expanding its patronage of the arts, the British Government has nevertheless come to give financial aid to almost every branch of the art world. This has developed over a period of years, with accumulated speed in the last twelve because of the war, because the days of wide patronage from large private incomes are disappearing if not altogether disappeared, and also perhaps because of an increasing general realization of the people’s greater need for leisure-time occupation.