Keynes & the Arts Council on Radio 3

I was delighted to share my research into the economist John Maynard Keynes’s work for the early Arts Council in an upcoming episode of BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking. The programme will be aired at 10pm on Tuesday 22 March and will be available via the BBC website/BBC Sounds afterwards. It features an interview and discussion with Robert Hudson, co-author of Hall of Mirrors, a musical based on Keynes’s experience at the 1919 Paris Conference, as well as the historian Adam Tooze and the writer Zachary D. Carter.

Keynes had an extraordinary influence on the formation of the Arts Council immediately following the Second World War. From 1942 he worked as Chairman of the Arts Council’s predecessor, the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA); he was the first Chair of the Arts Council when he died on Easter Sunday 1946. In the programme, I discuss how Keynes’s personal preferences and tastes shaped CEMA and later the Arts Council, moving them away from amateur participation and towards collaboration with professional companies. As the art historian and broadcaster Kenneth Clark later remarked, Keynes ‘was not the man for wandering minstrels and amateur theatricals. He believed in excellence.’^[i]

I also spend some time discussing Keynes’s relationship with CEMA/the Arts Council’s Secretary General, Mary Glasgow. Glasgow was a fascinating figure – a former schools inspector turned arts administrator who did most of the work behind the scenes at both organisations. She’s one of the main characters in Art for the People; I hope to share an ‘Advocates for the Arts’ post on her soon. Glasgow’s memoir is a great read in its own right, but it’s an especially good source for anyone interested in Keynes, and what he was like to work for.

One way in which radio is different to academic writing is that citations and references are not encouraged! So here’s a few sources which I’ve found useful in my research on CEMA & the Arts Council, and which fed into the Free Thinking discussion:

• Arts Council of Great Britain Records at the V&A (I was lucky enough to do my research before the V&A’s archives closed to the public until 2024!)
• The Arts Council’s website has copies of annual reports from 1945 onwards which you can download – see, e.g. 1945
• Kenneth Clark, The Other Half: A Self-Portrait (London: John Murray, 1977)
• Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes (London: William Collins, 2015)
• Mary Glasgow, The Nineteen Hundreds: A Diary in Retrospect (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986)
• Robert Hewison, Culture & Consensus: England, art and politics since 1940 (London: Methuen, 1995)
• F. M. Leventhal, ‘“The Best for the Most”’: CEMA and State Sponsorship of the Arts in Wartime, 1939-1945’, Twentieth Century British History, 1.3 (1990), 289-317
• Andrew Sinclair, Arts and Cultures: The History of the 50 Years of The Arts Council of Great Britain (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995)
• Anna Upchurch, The Origins of the Arts Council Movement: Philanthropy and Policy (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)
• Anna Upchurch, ‘John Maynard Keynes, the Bloomsbury group and the origins of the arts council movement’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 10.2 (2004), 203-217
• Jörn Weingärtner, The Arts as a Weapon of War: Britain and the Shaping of National Morale in the Second World War (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006)
• Richard Witts, Artist Unknown: An Alternative History of the Arts Council (London: Warner Books, 1998)

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^[i] Kenneth Clark, The Other Half: A Self-Portrait (London: John Murray, 1977), 26.