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Abstract
Largely undocumented in the published accounts of cultural policy history in the UK, the Arts Enquiry was a privately funded survey of the arts in wartime England. It was launched in 1941 as an initiative of the Arts Department at Dartington Hall and funded by the trustees of Dartington Hall, who spent £19,000 on the study over its six-year history. The Enquiry brought together artists, intellectuals, philanthropists and arts professionals in specialist committees to examine the visual arts, music, drama and documentary film. Three book-length studies were published: The Visual Arts (1946), The Factual Film (1947) and Music (1949). This article examines the history of the Arts Enquiry, its entanglement in the cultural politics of the period and what it reveals about policy formation in the UK, as well as the historiography of cultural policy.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Yvonne Widger, archivist at Dartington Hall, for her assistance with my archival research during my thesis and later when I visited Dartington. For welcoming me on my first visit to Totnes, I thank Peter and Cathy Kiddle for their warmth and enthusiasm, and Adam Strickson for his memories and reflections about Dartington and Totnes. The School of Performance and Cultural Industries at the University of Leeds has provided funding to support my research into the Arts Enquiry, and I thank Professor Mick Wallis at PCI for helpful conversations about Dartington and Professor Jonathan Pitches for his suggestions and comments on an early draft of this article. Finally, I thank two anonymous reviewers, as well as Jo Caust, all of whom made helpful suggestions that improved this final version.
Notes
1. See Young (Citation1982), The Elmhirsts of Dartington, for a detailed discussion of their lives, marriage and development of Dartington Hall, written by a student of the boarding school and close friend of the family.
2. PEP stands for Political and Economic Planning, one of the two organizations that later combined to form the influential Policy Studies Institute.
3. Cox, in The Arts at Dartington (Citation2005, p. 24), omits Beales and Wilkie and includes Ivor Browne, the theatre critic. However, Browne is not mentioned in Central Group minutes.
4. Dartington Hall Trust Archive. T/AAE/1/A/2 Minutes 4 November 1942 Arts Enquiry Group.
5. Dartington Hall Trust Archive. T/AAE/1/A/1, The Arts Enquiry, p. 2.
6. Dartington Hall Trust Archive. T/AAE/1/A/6, Minutes of the 4 February 1943 Arts Enquiry Group (Executive), p. 4, minute (6b) Recommendations.
7. Dartington Hall Trust Archive. T/AAE/1/B/15, Minutes of the 30 May 1944 Arts Enquiry.
8. Ibid., 2, minute 4.
9. Ibid.
10. Dartington Hall Trust Archive. T/AAE/1/B/5 Notes from Discussion between Miss Glasgow & Peter Cox.
11. Dartington Hall Trust Archive. T/AAE/1/B/15, Minutes of the 30 May 1944 Arts Enquiry.
12. Dartington Hall archive. See LKE/General 21, file G, Correspondence with Keynes includes letters 1932–1945.
13. This section is largely taken from Upchurch (Citation2008).
14. Dartington Hall Trust Archive. T/AAE/2/C1/3 Minutes of the Visual Arts Group, 18 November 1942.
15. Dartington Hall Trust Archive. T/AAE/2 Visual Arts. See files B, C1, C2, D1 and D2 for minutes of the groups meetings.
16. See Woodham (Citation1996) for a discussion of the membership of the early Council and its concerns with aesthetic judgement.
17. Dartington Hall Trust Archive. T/AAE/1/B/18 Letter from P. Cox to L.K. Elmhirst, 4 July 1946.
18. See Jeremiah (Citation2006) Dartington Hall: a landscape of an experiment in rural reconstruction in The English Countryside Between the Wars for an analysis of the Elmhirsts development of the estate in its first decade.
19. The Carnegie Trust UK is mentioned to clarify the agreement struck with CEMA that Carnegie would focus on supporting amateur music while CEMA supported professional orchestras and musicians. The authors believe that the amateur arts require a separate study.
20. This is a comparatively large body of work in the UK. Similar examples of insider accounts are more scarce in Canada and the USA.