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‘Village Hall Work Can Never Be “Theatre”’: Amateur Theatre and the Arts Council of Great Britain, 1945–56

In 1945 the landslide election victory by the Labour Party was to result in a series of profound reforms to the British state. With the promise of a ‘free, democratic, efficient, progressive, public-spirited’ and socialist Britain, Labour pledged to give its citizens full employment, good wages, a social service, and invest in schooling, housing, and health care. In the immediate years after the Second World War, a series of parliamentary acts were passed to create the ‘Welfare State’: the National Insurance Act of 1946 introduced a state pension, maternity benefit, unemployment benefit, and sickness benefit, and in 1948 the state began to fund free health care through the National Health Service. Prime Minister Clement Attlee’s administration believed that access to culture and cultural improvement were to be key factors in the ethics of the new Welfare State, and this was to be reflected in the mission of a new state funded, but independent organisation – the Arts Council of Great Britain (ACGB). In 1946, a Royal Charter defined the aims of the ACGB: to foster ‘a greater knowledge, understanding and practice of the fine arts [...] and in particular to increase the accessibility of the fine arts to the public’. To achieve these aims the Arts Council introduced policies that were to have complex implications for amateur theatre-making. In July 1945, economist John Maynard Keynes, policy adviser to the Labour administration and first Chairman of the ACGB, set out his vision for the Arts Council as: