1951 – Celebration

The exchange of products, ideas and words between the French and English has a long and complicated history.  The English have been quick to realise that some French products are exceptional, especially wine, cheeses like camembert and époisses, moules marinière, Cointreau:   You can add your own!  Other elements of French cuisine can be more challenging.  On one visit to France with my parents, friends served us a ‘civet de lievre’, which appeared to be some kind of casserole.  My parents neglected to let me know I was about to eat rabbit, but that was nothing compared to the vast amount of garlic used in this version of a traditional dish.  I think it took about twenty years before I could contemplate garlic again!  When I asked my mother what we had given the French, in return as it were, she promptly answered ‘Yorkshire Pudding and Toad in the Hole’, which are variations on a theme, since Toad in the Hole is Yorkshire Pudding with sausages!  Admiring varieties of French food or drink is relatively easy to understand and do.  However, other exchanges can be more complex, some from the past are lost in time, especially as what looks like admiration was often piracy: we watched each other to steal ideas!

Leaving that insight for the moment, it is time to consider, among the many obscure and strange phrases in the English language, the sometimes slightly agonised announcement, “I need to spend a penny”.  This is not an indication you want to buy some sweets or visit a thrift shop.  Rather, it is a euphemism for a wish to use the toilet.  Where did that curious phrase come from?  Well, not from the French, but thereby hangs a tale which begins with the French, and one of their really good ideas: the 1798 Exposition des produits de l’industrie française (Exhibition of Products of French Industry).  The British understand that it is in the nature of the French to want to promote (boast about?) things French, and the 1798 Exhibition was dedicated to that task.  It took the British another 53 years to cotton on to the idea, but we’ll get to that later.

In the years of the French Revolution and its aftermath, the new Republic’s authorities decided to continue the tradition of medieval fairs that had been common in in the Middle Ages, and staged a series of festivals in Paris, starting with the Festival of the Federation on 14 July 1790 and followed by events including the Festival of Law (1792), Festival of Reason (1793), Festival of the Supreme Being (1794), and Festival of the Foundation of the Republic (1796). These were intended to unite the public, and ensure a general acceptance of the new government.  Were these yet another example of ‘bread and circuses’ to keep the masses happy, as Marx would later observe, while also a rather clever twist on Marie Antoinette’s remark to ‘let them eat cake’?

In the years after the Revolution the country was both engaged in war and trying to settle down a new regime.  While the earlier festivals had been helpful, it was time to celebrate the revolution itself, and to offer something more substantial than another fair.  The proposal for an industrial exposition was first put forward by the Minister of the Interior, who wanted to hold a major public event in Paris, a celebration of French achievements.  The first exposition was planned for 1798, but from the outset it was seen as the precursor of a regular series. Their purpose was “to offer a panorama of the productions of the various branches of industry with a view to emulation”.  As the English would see it, a chance for the French to boast!

The 1798 event was held at the Champs de Mars, the long open space that ran down from the Seine (and eventually the site for the Eiffel Tower), past the Ecole Militaire (the military training school established by Louis XV), and on to the Boulevard de Grenelles.  A circle of display venues was constructed around a ‘Temple of Industry’, which would house products chosen by a jury. The exposition opened on 19 September 1798 and remained open until 1 October 1798.  Given a short time for preparation, there were only a limited number of exhibits.  They included an instrument for cataract operations, paintings made from the plumes of exotic birds, a machine for extracting logs from rivers and a device that demonstrated the new measurement system with metres, grams and litres. The jury was told to favour products that were comparable to (and competitive with) those of British industry, and in the event twelve exhibitors were given honorable distinctions, thirteen received honorable mentions, among which were these four:

  • Breguet’s clock with free escapement – from which one of the great watchmakers grew.
  • Lenoir’s precision metric balance – the basis for similar laboratory scales for decades.
  • Clouet’s process to transform iron into steel – to lead to the later Bessemer process, and
  • Conté’s collection of crayons of various colors – still loved by artists and children!

The Exposition was, quite simply, a brilliant idea, and the public loved it.  In 1801 a second exhibition was held.  This was seen as far more successful than the first, with more competitors and higher quality exhibits..  Some 220 exhibitors took part; 19  gold medals were awarded.  As before, many of the exhibits were the fore-runners of later major industry developments.  I was delighted to see one was the ‘revolutionary Jacquard Loom’ driven by punch cards, an innovation to have a major impact on the development of computers over the next 150 years. Apparently the jury’s report noted that it “replaces a worker in the weaving of brocades”. It took several years before it was realized that rather than replacing weavers, this loom made higher volumes of production and sales possible, and eventually led to employing many more workers. [i]

From then, there was no looking back, with further expositions in 1802 and 1804.  The Republic was replaced by the First Empire, under Bonaparte, and then the monarchy was restored in 1815, after a brief reversal in the middle of that year. The 5th exposition took place in 1819, and the series continued until 1844 with the 10th.  That drew my attention, as one of the Gold Medals awarded that year was to Charles Xavier Thomas of Colmar, who presented his arithmometer.  No, this wasn’t the original version of the alethiometer, but it was the first digital mechanical calculator, reliable enough to be used daily in an office environment. It could be used to add and subtract two numbers directly and also perform multiplication and division.  Patented back in 1820, it was manufactured from 1851 to 1915. [ii]  From such small beginnings …

Meanwhile, as they say, over in the UK, the British had woken up.  The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, or The Great Exhibition (later better known as the Crystal Palace Exhibition, from the name of the exhibition space that was constructed) took place in London’s Hyde Park.  Determined to go one better than the French, this was the first in what was later to become a series of World Fairs.  It ran from 1 May to 15 October 1851. Although the Great Exhibition was a platform on which countries from around the world could display their achievements, Britain sought to prove its own superiority (yes, they wanted to boast, too). The British exhibits at the Great Exhibition “held the lead in almost every field where strength, durability, utility and quality were concerned, whether in iron and steel, machinery or textiles.” [iii]  Britain also believed the Exhibition would provide the world with the hope of a better future. Europe had just struggled through “two difficult decades of political and social upheaval,” and now Britain hoped to show that technology, especially its own, was the key to a better world.

Sophie Forgan says of the Exhibition that “Large, piled-up ‘trophy’ exhibits in the central avenue revealed the organisers’ priorities; they generally put art or colonial raw materials in the most prestigious place. Technology and moving machinery were popular, especially working exhibits where visitors could watch cotton production, for example, from spinning to finished cloth. Scientific instruments were found in class X, and included electric telegraphs, microscopes, air pumps and barometers, as well as musical, horological and surgical instruments.” [iv]  But it wasn’t just the exhibits.  The Crystal Palace was a massive glass house, 1848 feet long by 454 feet wide (about 563 metres by 138 metres).  Inside, the building, it’s size was emphasized with trees and statues; these served, “not only to add beauty to the spectacle, but also to demonstrate man’s triumph over nature.  The Crystal Palace was an enormous success, considered an architectural marvel, but also an engineering triumph demonstrating the importance of the Exhibition itself.”  [v]  The building was later moved and re-erected in 1854 in South London, in an area that was renamed Crystal Palace.  Sadly, it was destroyed in a fire on 30 November 1936.

Six million people—equivalent to a third of the entire population of Britain at the time—visited the Great Exhibition.  The official illustrated catalogue of the event lists exhibitors not only from throughout Britain but also from its ‘Colonies and Dependencies’ and 44 ‘Foreign States’ in Europe and the Americas. With more than 13,000 exhibits, highlights included: two famous diamonds, the Koh-i-Noor, the ‘Mountain of Light’, the world’s largest known diamond in 1851, and the Daria-i-Noor, one of the rarest pale pink diamonds in the world; evidence of new technologies including a precursor to today’s fax machine, what may have been the world’s first voting machine, and ‘The Trophy Telescope’, so called because it was considered the ‘trophy’ of the exhibition, with a main lens of 11 inches (280mm) aperture and 16 feet (4.9m) focal length.  The America’s Cup yachting challenge was initiated, the first race held at the time of the Great Exhibition.  Finally, and you knew we would get there, the first pay toilets were installed, visitors paying a penny to use them, and thereby ‘spending a penny’ entered common use.

Once started, World Fairs became matters of national pride.  Following the British Great Exhibition, the French held the next in 1855, only to be followed by a second British one in 1862, and another French one in 1867.  For the next seventy years, World Expos, as they became known, were held all over the world, of which one of the most famous was the New York World’s Fair in 1939. [vi] This was specifically on the theme of ‘Building the World of Tomorrow’, encouraging future World Expos to take on a visionary (and often very technological) focus.

Britain was still recovering from the aftermath of war then the 1950’s began.  Rationing lingered on, rebuilding was slow.  The Olympics had helped restore some pride, but the Government was losing support, and began to consider celebrating the centennial of the Great Exhibition of 1851.  Rather than another World Fair, the 1951 Festival of Britain focused entirely on the UK and its achievements.  Largely funded by the government, the goal of the festival was to give the people a feeling of successful recovery from the war, rebuilding national confidence as well as promoting British science, technology, industrial design, architecture and the arts.  With my parents I joined the millions of visitors in the summer.  I can’t remember much, just the Battersea Pleasure Gardens and my dad pointing out various bits of exciting technology.  I know it was a success, and “people flocked to the South Bank site, to wander around the Dome of Discovery,  gaze at theSkylon, and generally enjoy a festival of national celebration. Up and down the land, lesser festivals enlisted much civic and voluntary enthusiasm. A people curbed by years of total war and half-crushed by austerity and gloom, showed that it had not lost the capacity for enjoying itself….Above all, the Festival made a spectacular setting as a showpiece for the inventiveness and genius of British scientists and technologists.” [vii]  Tucked away with all the other things I’ve kept, I still have a set of ‘first day of issue’ stamps from the event.

What does a Festival like this achieve?  Visually, the image that lingered on was that of the Skylon, an unusual cigar-shaped aluminium-clad steel tower supported by cables. The base was nearly 15 metres (50 feet) from the ground, with the top nearly 90 metres (300 feet) high.  Looking back now, a little cynically, the setup does remind me of the Trylon and Perisphere at the New York World’s Fair of 1939.  No matter, it was an extraordinary construction, although one that led to the comment that, ‘like the British economy of 1951, “It had no visible means of support”’!  Far more significant in the longer term was the Royal Festival Hall.  Designed by a team led by Leslie Martin, the structure was an ‘egg in a box’, describing the separation of the curved auditorium space from the surrounding building and the noise and vibration of the adjacent railway viaduct.  A visually stunning interior, it was an immediate success, except, as is the fate of most concert halls, there were some criticisms of its acoustics.  In a second renovation, between 2007 and 2009, this was finally resolved (although there will always be critics); the Hall’s 7866 pipe, 103 stop organ was successfully restored and re-installed in 2014.

It would be wrong to suggest buildings were the core of the Festival.  Rather, two other aspects were to have long-term benefits.  The first was a boost for the arts.  A South Bank Exhibition celebrated the work of many contemporary artists: Victor Pasmore, Feliks Topoloski, Barbara Jones and John Piper, and sculptors Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Lynn Chadwick and Jacob Epstein. Music and theatre was promoted in festivals across the country.  Cinema was also on show, especially the Telecinema in a new building on the South Bank where you could see a 3-D film.  I kept my carboard glasses, one lens a red transparency, the other green, for years.

The other was science.  The Science Museum built a new wing to hold an Exhibition of Science.  In three areas, one was a display of the physical and chemical nature of matter and the behaviour of elements and molecules; one, “The Structure of Living Things”, on plants and animals; and one, “Stop Press”, showed some of the latest topics of research in science and how they related to the ideas illustrated in the earlier sections of the exhibition, including “the penetrating rays which reach us from outer space, what goes on in space and in the stars, and a range of subjects from the electronic brain to the processes and structures on which life is based”. [viii]  I still have my copy of The Structure of Living Things; without doubt, that’s a reason for my celebration!

[i] From Wikipedia: Catalogue de produits industriels qui ont été exposés au Champ de Mars au Champs de Mars pendant les trois derneirs jours compléde l’an VI, Page 21,

[ii] Stephen Johnston, ‘Making the arithmometer count’, Bulletin of the Scientific Instrument Society, 52 (1997) 12-21, found at www.mhs.ox.ac.uk. Retrieved 2017-08-16

[iii] Cited in Wikipedia, from Yvonne Ffrench, The Great Exhibition; 1851. London: Harvill Press, 1950.

[iv] Forgan, Sophie (10 February 2000), “A compendium of Victorian culture”, Nature, 403 (6880): 596

[v] Yvonne French, op cit

[vi] See: https://aeon.co/videos/the-future-was-now-at-the-1939-worlds-fair-and-it-is-still-awesome?

[vii] From Wikipedia: Eric Nahm, Britain Since 1945, OUP, 1992, page 111

[viii] 1951 Exhibition of Science, South Kensington, HMSO, 1951, quote in Wikipedia’s review of the Festival.

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