Edinburgh's Festivals E-Book

David Pollock

• Herausgeber: Luath Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1119

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

In August 1947, an émigré Austrian opera impresario launched the Edinburgh International Festival of Music and Drama to heal the scars of the Second World War through a celebration of the arts. At the same time, a socialist theatre group from Glasgow and other amateur companies protested their exclusion from the festival by performing anyway, inventing the concept of 'fringe' theatre. Now the annual celebration known collectively as the Edinburgh Festival is the largest arts festival in the world, incorporating events dedicated to theatre, film, art, literature, comedy, dance, jazz and even military pageantry. It has launched careers – from Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in Beyond the Fringe to Phoebe Waller-Bridge with Fleabag – mirrored the political and social mood of its times, shaped the city of Edinburgh around it and welcomed a huge all-star cast, including Orson Welles, Grace Kelly, Yehudi Menuhin and Mark E Smith's The Fall and many many more. This is its story.

Leseprobe

DAVID POLLOCK lives in Edinburgh and has written about and reviewed Festival shows for 20 years. He is an arts writer whose work has appeared in The Scotsman, The List, The Guardian, The Independent, The Herald, The Times, The Courier, The Stage and The Big Issue, and in music magazines including Mixmag, Electronic Sound and Record Collector. He is a judge for the Fringe Firsts and the annual Critics Awards for Theatre in Scotland (CATS).

First published 2022 as The Edinburgh Festival: A Biography

This revised and updated edition published 2023

ISBN: 978-1-80425-116-4

The author’s right to be identified as author of this book under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

Typeset in 9.75 point Sabon LT Pro by

Main Point Books, Edinburgh

© David Pollock 2022, 2023

For

Caroline, with love

Henry and Malcolm, who like going to see shows

Mum and Dad

Everyone who has made the Edinburgh Festival what it is, and tried to make it better

Contents

What is the Edinburgh Festival?

Note on the Spotlights

Introduction: The Past

SPOTLIGHTBruno Walter and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra (1947)

1 The Birth of the Edinburgh International Festival

SPOTLIGHTA Satire of the Three Estates (1948–1996)

2 ‘On the Fringe of the Festival…’

SPOTLIGHTThe Edinburgh People’s Festival and Ceilidh (1951–53)

3 The Film Festival, the Military Tattoo and the 1950s

SPOTLIGHTBeyond the Fringe (1960)

4 The Conferences and the Birth of the 1960s

SPOTLIGHTRosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966)

5 The Howff, the Traverse and the Demarco Gallery

SPOTLIGHTStrategy: Get Arts (1970)

6 Changing Landscapes in the 1970s

SPOTLIGHTThe Great Northern Welly Boot Show (1972)

7 The Film Festival Meets the Movie Brats

SPOTLIGHTCambridge Footlights – The Cellar Tapes (1981)

8 The Fringe Gets Serious

SPOTLIGHTMary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (1987)

9 ‘Supervenues’ and the Arrival of the Big Three

SPOTLIGHTI Am Curious, Orange (1988)

10 The Birth of the Jazz and Book Festivals

SPOTLIGHTA One Night Stand with Sean Hughes (1990) Frank Skinner (1991) Steve Coogan in Character with John Thomson (1992)

11 The Rise of the Stand-Up while Edinburgh Rebuilds

SPOTLIGHTThe Bloody Chamber (1997) Gargantua (1998)

12 New Blood for the New Millennium

SPOTLIGHTBlack Watch (2006) The James Plays (2014)

13 Edinburgh Art Festival and the Arrival of Summerhall

SPOTLIGHTThe Scotsman Steps (Work No. 1059, 2011)

14 The 21st Century Festival: Bigger… and Better?

SPOTLIGHTFleabag (2013) The Play That Goes Wrong (2013) Six (2017–18)

15 Edinburgh Without a Festival

Postscript: The Future

Timeline

Appendix 1: Who’s in Charge of the Edinburgh Festival?

Appendix 2: Festival Winners

Edinburgh Comedy Award

So You Think You’re Funny?

Fringe First

Bibliography

Endnotes

Acknowledgements

What is the Edinburgh Festival?

MORE THAN ONCE during research for this book, after mentioning the title to people connected with the running of Edinburgh’s August festivals, they said, ‘you know there’s no such thing as the Edinburgh Festival, don’t you?’

It’s true. The Edinburgh Festival isn’t a single festival, it’s a number of festivals happening within the city at the same time, overlapping with one another and occasionally working in tandem. But to the regular, casual visitor – whether they’re arriving from York or New York, South Korea or South Lanarkshire – the distinction isn’t immediately to the fore in their mind. Telling a story about the Fruitmarket’s successful 2008 Festival exhibition of work by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller – technically part of Edinburgh Art Festival – the gallery’s director Fiona Bradley sums this up:

That show was in various reviews as ‘the best thing you’ll see on the Fringe’, ‘the best thing on the International Festival’… People just don’t make a distinction, and I like that. People are here for the Festival, they just say they’re here ‘for Edinburgh’. They’re doing Edinburgh in August, you know?

That’s why this book refers throughout to the wider Festival as a singular entity. The layperson sees it as all part of the same thing. To returning audiences and visitors, ‘Festival’ is handy shorthand for something they know is far larger and trickier to describe. To those who run and administrate the festivals, the distinction is, of course, an existential matter. The intention here is to at least begin from the simplest, least complicated starting point and unfold the explanation of each festival as we go. To break it down simply, though, a short glossary follows.

A note on the use of the word ‘Festival’

It should be clear which individual festival is being discussed, generally by reference to its full name or acronym. However, often the word ‘Festival’ will be used on its own as a noun; before 1959 and the official arrival of the Festival Fringe Society, this likely refers to the International Festival, by some way the major element of what happened during Edinburgh’s festival weeks up to this point. From ’59 on, however, ‘Festival’ (or ‘Edinburgh Festival’) is shorthand for the combined total of everything that happens in Edinburgh during Festival time.

Edinburgh International Festival

Founded in 1947 as the Edinburgh International Festival of Music and Drama. A high-end selection of international-class orchestral music, opera, dance, drama and other activities, which was the bedrock foundation of the wider Edinburgh Festival. Terms: Edinburgh International Festival, the International Festival, EIF, the Festival (the latter only until the Fringe’s official foundation in 1959).

Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Unofficially in existence since 1947, with the Fringe Society coming into operation in 1959. Originally a group of eight amateur theatre companies staging work at the same time as the first International Festival, the Fringe has grown to vastly outnumber the International Festival. In fact, it’s the largest single arts festival in the world. Open access, in that anyone with a licensed stage to perform on can participate (a small participant’s fee is required to appear in the official catalogue), it encompasses all art forms, but is largely known for theatre – from some of the world’s finest companies to amateur dramatic and student theatre groups – and increasingly for stand-up comedy since the 1980s. Terms: Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the Fringe.

Edinburgh International Film Festival

Founded in 1947 as the Edinburgh Documentary Festival. At the forefront of the international film festival movement, it gained a huge industry reputation for key film premieres and star appearances during the latter part of the 20th century and is the world’s oldest continually-running film festival. In 2008 it moved to a new slot in June. Following COVID-19 the festival returned to August, although in October 2022 its home cinema the Filmhouse and parent charity the Centre for the Moving Image (CMI) went into administration. A scaled-back 2023 event will be held under the wing of Edinburgh International Festival.

Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo

Founded in 1950. Although military-themed displays had been held alongside the Festival since it started in 1947, the first official Edinburgh Tattoo was held on the Castle Esplanade in 1950 and it has continued ever since. Featuring invited military bands and performers from around the world, it was televised internationally for many years and typically welcomes sell-out combined audiences of 220,000 over three weeks of performances. A grand spectacle set against one of Edinburgh’s most famous landmarks, it’s synonymous with the Festival – is the Festival, in fact – to many people in other countries who only know Edinburgh from afar. Although a fully integrated part of the Edinburgh Festivals, however, its nature and origins set it apart from much of the other arts-based Festival activity. Terms: Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo, the Tattoo.

Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival

Founded in 1978, officially named Edinburgh Jazz Festival the following year. Formerly running alongside the Edinburgh Festival, in recent years it has run immediately prior to it in July, serving as a musical appetiser for August’s events. Terms: Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival, the Jazz & Blues Festival, the Jazz Festival, EJF, EJBF.

Edinburgh International Book Festival

Founded in 1983 as the Edinburgh Book Festival. Star authors, discussions with key figures on current and historical affairs and children’s events. On Charlotte Square every year until a move to the grounds of Edinburgh College of Art in 2021, with a further move to the new Edinburgh Futures Institute at Quartermile planned for 2024. Terms: Edinburgh International Book Festival, Edinburgh Book Festival, the Book Festival, EIBF.

Edinburgh Art Festival

Founded in 2004. Although classical and contemporary art has played some part in the Festival since the early days, it only came together in its own official festival in 2004, first as a printed guide collating details of all shows and soon after with an element of curation and commissioning under an artistic director. Terms: Edinburgh Art Festival, EAF.

Edinburgh International Television Festival

Founded in 1976. An industry event, generally held over the final weekend in August. No public tickets are available, but the Television Festival is notable for two reasons: one is the annual James MacTaggart Lecture, traditionally given by a leading figure in the industry and widely reported in the trade and popular press; two, the fact that delegates soak up the other festivals while in Edinburgh, which is a great deal of the reason why hit Fringe stand-ups, actors and playwrights can make a long-lasting television career happen by being talent-spotted during a successful Fringe run. Terms: Edinburgh International Television Festival, the Television Festival.

Other festivals in August

The Edinburgh People’s Festival (1951–1953) was an attempt to coordinate early Fringe activities under a socialist banner, put together by the poet Hamish Henderson and others in the Labour movement. It was short-lived, but it offered much – partly due to the involvement of Henderson and the American musicologist Alan Lomax – in terms of the beginnings of the Fringe spirit and the Scottish folk revival.

Edinburgh Mela (1995–present) is a community event founded by Edinburgh communities with roots across Asia. Although efforts were previously made to integrate it into the Festival as a programmed world dance and arts event, these have fallen away in recent years.

Fringe of Colour (2018–present) is an umbrella organisation which promotes shows by Fringe performers of colour and offers free Fringe tickets to young people of colour. During the COVID-19 pandemic it rebranded as an online film festival in 2020 and ’21 and after taking a year out in 2022, is set to return in June 2023.

Since the late 1990s there have also been variously successful attempts to introduce a contemporary music strand to the Festival, under banners including Flux, Planet Pop, T on the Fringe, the Edge and Summer Sessions at the Ross Bandstand in West Princes Street Gardens.

Other festivals outside August

Edinburgh Science Festival (1989–present) is the largest science festival in the UK, taking place across the city in April.

Edinburgh International Children’s Festival (1990–present) takes place across the city in May.

Edinburgh International Storytelling Festival (1989–present) is the only festival of its kind in the UK. It happens in October around the city and is based out of the Scottish Storytelling Centre on the Royal Mile.

Edinburgh’s Hogmanay (1993–present) is the only event in Edinburgh to equal the major August events in terms of international recognition. The centrepiece is a concert by a major artist at the Ross Bandstand around the ‘Bells’ – the chimes of midnight that signal New Year – with a huge firework display on the stroke of 12. Various official fringe events happen between 30 December and 1 January, and the city centre also hosts a German market, big wheel, skating rink and various other performances from late November.

Edinburgh International Magic Festival (2010–present) has taken place at various times of the year, but never in August.

Note on the Spotlights

BETWEEN THE CHRONOLOGICAL chapters, several key shows are profiled in their own ‘Spotlight’ sections – a drop in the ocean, in terms of the many thousands seen in August, but a key group of 21 events which have seen global careers made, the landscape of Edinburgh or its Festival permanently changed, or wider entangled stories about, for example, Scottish theatre or British comedy decisively developed on Edinburgh’s stages.

INTRODUCTION

The Past

EDINBURGH IS A village. That’s what people who live in the city say. The able-bodied visitor arriving by the high-speed East Coast Main Line from London can get from a platform at the central Waverley Station to the outer edges of the city centre quickly by foot. Seventeen minutes west along the park-lined central avenue, Princes Street, is the current home of new playwriting and sometime radical 1960s arts hub, the Traverse Theatre. Twenty-one minutes away across the Royal Mile – Edinburgh Castle at one end, Palace of Holyroodhouse at the other – and the Meadows is the arts complex and former Victorian veterinary school Summerhall, where the city bleeds into the suburban Southside.

Just ten minutes to the north on George Street are the 18th century Assembly Rooms, where Sir Walter Scott introduced King George IV at the Peers Ball of 1822, the first visit by a British monarch to Scotland in two centuries. Here, Scott himself was revealed as the author of the popular Waverley novels five years later. This is the city of the Scottish Enlightenment, the 17th and 18th century boom in humanist and rational thought which bled out into the world alongside the migrating Scottish people, taking with it the philosophies of David Hume; the economics of Adam Smith; the literature of James Boswell, Robert Fergusson and eventually Robert Burns; and world-leading developments in medicine, geology, mathematics and physics.

The land around Castle Rock and the other seven hills of Edinburgh1 has been inhibited since at least the Bronze Age. The Romans had a camp at Cramond on the shores of the Firth of Forth, now a quiet suburb to the north-west of the city. Founded as a royal burgh by King David I in the 12th century, by the late 17th century the city had seen much political upheaval, including the 16th century Scottish Reformation, when the Presbyterian Church of Scotland broke with the Catholic Church in Rome; the Act of Union between Scotland and England in 1707; and occupation by both Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army and the Highland Jacobites in the decades which immediately followed.

In 1583 Tounis College was established, later the University of Edinburgh, the sixth-oldest university in the English-speaking world.2 By the 18th century, the high-rise tenements within the city walls had created a primitively futuristic landscape in which 11-storey residential towers were occupied by progressively wealthier inhabitants as they rose, with poor workers housed near the ground and merchants on the upper floors. In this JG Ballard future city, which existed 200 years before the writer was born, overcrowding and squalor were rife. Slops and human waste were thrown from tenement windows at 10pm every night, their odour earning them the sarcastic nickname ‘The Flowers of Edinburgh’. Drunks weaving their way home as the city’s many bars closed had to have their wits about them. Despite its Presbyterian reputation, the city was notorious for a hard-drinking culture in which all classes mixed in the many taverns. Meanwhile, exclusive after-hours drinking clubs and societies flourished.

Daniel Defoe came to live in Edinburgh soon after the Act of Union of 1707 and Edinburgh’s most powerful lords were split between those who stuck to their sense of Scottishness and those who embraced London’s influence, as apparent in their continued use of the Scots dialect or their preference for a more supposedly cultured southern form of English. These questions of identity have remained to the fore in Scottish culture for more than 300 years. Meanwhile, the great figures of the Scottish Enlightenment – all male, of course – met and discussed at the Select Society, the Speculative Society and the Poker Club, held at the old Advocate’s Library on Parliament Square, at John Row’s nearby coffee house and in other central locations.

Another club was the Crochallan Fencibles, founded by the printer William Smellie, who later helped establish the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the city and published the Edinburgh editions of Robert Burns’ work. Between the 18th and 19th century the Scottish Enlightenment gave birth to a new Edinburgh, as printers, newspapers and the highly-regarded Scottish Review boomed amid the city’s lively intellectual life. Architect James Craig’s New Town sprawl of plush, one-family apartments extended to the north of the city, across the Nor’ Loch in the gap between the Old Town and what’s now Princes Street, which was drained in the 1800s and filled in by Waverley Station and Princes Street Gardens.

After the city’s version of the Enlightenment was over, its impact lay within the changed structure and physical appearance of Edinburgh, all sandstone columns from nearby Lothian quarries to emphasise the Athenian ambitions of its great minds – these buildings and the city’s seven central hills and nearby port of Leith are among the reasons Edinburgh is known as the ‘Athens of the North’, although the playwright Tom Stoppard once suggested its climate should make it more of a ‘Reykjavik of the South’. The ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment travelled around the world thanks to the spread of the British Empire and the United States of America’s founding.

The influence of post-Reformation Presbyterianism contributed to Edinburgh growing with no great history of music, opera or theatre, although the landscape wasn’t barren. St Cecilia’s Hall, the first bespoke concert hall in Scotland, was built on the Cowgate in 1763 and hosted regular concerts, until the Assembly Rooms on George Street opened in 1787 and took over as the city’s premier music venue. The first Edinburgh Music Festival – no relation to the current Festival, but widely acknowledged as its first predecessor – was held in 1815 and consisted of three daytime concerts at Parliament House and three evening performances at the intimate Corri’s Concert Hall on Broughton Street.3

The works of Haydn, Beethoven and Mozart were performed at this Edinburgh Music Festival and Handel, Beethoven and Mozart’s music all featured at the second edition in 1819. This time it was held at the Theatre Royal at Shakespeare Square in the east end of Princes Street, a rough and disreputable neck of the woods in the early 19th century; the theatre once saw a riot when the audience refused to stand for the British national anthem at a concert which Walter Scott had been attending.4 Later Edinburgh Music Festivals were held in 1824 and 1843.

Before the Theatre Royal and despite the strong disapproval of the church at the time, the Canongate Theatre had been founded in the city in 1747, which is where actor and theatre manager West Digges arranged for the production of Douglas in 1756, a new play by East Lothian minister of the Church of Scotland John Home. Although the verse tragedy was a big hit in Edinburgh and later in London, the Church forced Home to resign as a result and various prosecutions were threatened. Its public acclaim, however, contributed to the eventual official licensing of the Theatre Royal, the successor to the technically illegal Canongate.

Edinburgh’s literary culture bubbled at a simmer until the early 20th century, with Scott himself, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle and JM Barrie each claiming birth or residence in the city where Tobias Smollett and the author of The Beggar’s Opera John Gay had also once lived. The great First World War poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon both recovered from shell-shock at Craiglockhart War Hospital in 1917. Nicknamed Dottyville by Sassoon, this was where Owen wrote his famous poems ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ and ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’.

By the 1920s, a new wave of writing from the country was resurgent, primarily in the work of Dumfriesshire poet Christopher M Grieve, who used the alias Hugh MacDiarmid. This period was known as the Scottish Renaissance and it reacted against the sentimental love-of-country active in the previous century’s Victorian-era Kailyard school of writing. Through MacDiarmid’s 2,685-line narrative poem A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle in 1926 and the work of contemporaries and followers of his including Edwin Muir, Sydney Goodsir Smith and Robert Garioch, the Renaissance writers tackled themes of Scots identity and cultural resurgence once more.

MacDiarmid formulated his own version of the Scots dialect named ‘Lallans’ and in 1927 co-founded the Scottish Centre of the organisation PEN in Edinburgh, alongside novelist Neil Gunn and Professor Herbert Grierson of the University of Edinburgh. PEN, which stood for ‘Poets, Essayists, Novelists’,5 was founded in 1921 in London by a group headed by the writer Catherine Amy Dawson Scott, which included Joseph Conrad, George Bernard Shaw and HG Wells. Its purpose was to foster international co-operation between writers and to defend literature from the threats it might face around the world. In 1934 the 12th International PEN Congress came to Edinburgh, where the organisation formally pledged to defend free expression.

Both International and Scottish PEN continue to this day. So too, in a different fashion, does the other major organisation MacDiarmid co-founded, the National Party of Scotland, the first Scottish nationalist party, which emerged in 1928. In 1934 the left-wing National Party joined with the recently-formed Scottish Party to form the Scottish National Party, which has in the present, after a near-90-year journey, become the leading force in Scottish politics. By ’34, however, MacDiarmid had already been expelled from the National Party for his Communist views, part of a tension between the two perspectives which also landed him in trouble with the Communist Party for his nationalist interests.

MacDiarmid only lived in Edinburgh for three years between 1908 and 1911, while he finished his studies at Broughton Junior Student Centre and worked briefly as a trainee journalist on the Edinburgh Evening Dispatch at the age of 18. Yet in his later years, he was often found holding court in the literary pubs of the central New Town, at places like Milne’s, the Abbotsford and the Café Royal, which all still exist in their classic, wood-panelled, weathered glory today.

The beauty of MacDiarmid’s writing and the defiance of his assertion of Scots identity made him one of the key figures – perhaps the most significant of all – in Scotland’s cultural and political life of the 20th century, even as controversy followed him around his enduring support for the Communist Soviet Union and his often quite apparent Anglophobia. Edinburgh was his eventual place of death in 1978, aged 86, although until then he appears as both antagonist and protagonist in the story of the Edinburgh Festival.

In 1935, the Orkney-born, Hampstead-based poet, writer and contemporary of MacDiarmid’s Edwin Muir began his Scottish Journey in Edinburgh, searching for the heart and soul of then-contemporary Scotland and finding a city in many ways unrecognisable from the present. He wrote of the Old Town that

one feels that these house-shapes are outcroppings of the rocky ridge on which they are planted, methodical geological formations in which, as an afterthought, people have taken to living… The smoke rising from innumerable chimneys produces the same half delightful, half nightmare sense of overcrowding that one finds in mountain villages in Southern Europe…6

In those days, the main shopping thoroughfare Princes Street represented the height of middle-class, Old Town opulence – its tea houses ‘more strange than a dream’, filled with stifling amounts of the ‘floating sexual desire’ Muir felt on the busy streets of the city. The Canongate, on what’s now the tourist-trap Royal Mile, was a ‘mouldering and obnoxious ruin’ where unemployed young men waited and drank eternity away on the street and in doorways. The only place where most citizens let their hair down was in the pubs, where women were forbidden.7

Some things haven’t changed, meanwhile. Muir imagined a dividing barrier between the east end of Princes Street and Leith Walk, the latter an avenue of a different class entirely, filled with ‘ice-cream and fish and chip bars and pubs’. The Walk has gone up in the world somewhat, but you can still find all of the above in an area that continues to stand apart. In both worlds, Muir noted, drunkenness abounds, yet only on public display in the poorer parts of the city.

In Muir’s eyes, Edinburgh was a soulless and past-obsessed place at heart. Born in Orkney in 1887 and subject to hard and poverty-stricken teenage years in Glasgow following the death of his parents, his relationship with Scotland was uneasy and he had been living in London for a decade and a half by the time of his journey through Scotland. A socialist and a nationalist by instinct, Muir was a key figure in Scottish PEN and argued successfully at the PEN Congress of 1932 in Budapest that the Scottish organisation should not be treated as a subset of English PEN.

At the PEN Congress of 1934 in Edinburgh, he presented a discussion at the Church of Scotland’s Assembly Hall on the Mound and then travelled to Orkney to meet his wife and son, the latter recovering from a road accident which left him with permanent injuries. He had considered the capital city’s character and described Edinburgh – despite all its recognised positive features – as an ‘Anglicised and Americanised’ city striking an uneasy balance between ‘its legendary past and its tawdry present’.

Muir’s chronicle of Edinburgh in the 1930s was among the very best accounts of the city’s life immediately prior to the Second World War. The other wasn’t published until 1961, the work of an author who was born in the city’s well-off inner suburb Bruntsfield in 1918, educated at the old James Gillespie’s School for Girls on Bruntsfield Links,8 but living in a bedsit in Camberwell, south London, around the time her most famous book was written. The first draft, however, was completed in a four-week flurry in her parents’ Edinburgh home over Christmas 1960.

Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was based on the author’s own schooldays in the early 1930s and its fictionalised title character borrowed elements of her own teachers, although Jean Brodie might well have been an allegorical satire of 20th century Edinburgh itself. Concerned with ‘art and religion first, then philosophy; lastly science’, she declared herself to be in her prime, yet teased and ultimately lost her admiring suitors, even as she sought to live vicariously on the youthful energy of the female students in her care. Her politics were conservative, to say the least.

Yet, in chronicling this pining for past glories, the writing of both Muir and Spark suggested potential waiting to flower, of stems pushing up through the gaps in the well-worn paving stones and cobbled setts of the city’s streets. Muir related the experience of a ceilidh after a formal Edinburgh function:

They are free without the affectation of Bohemianism. If one’s sole acquaintance with Scotland were through them, one would be forced to believe that Scotsmen and Scotswomen were the most charming and light-hearted people in the world… at certain happy moments, in the first relief after a hardship passed, there are companies in Scotland which can strike this perfect balance between nature and art.9

The world was waiting to arrive in Edinburgh. Spark’s protagonist and former student at the fictional Marcia Blaine School for Girls, Sandy Stranger, is asked many years after the novel’s key events, in the first days of the 1960s, to remember her old tutor with the question, ‘Who was Miss Brodie?’ She responds: ‘A teacher of mine, she was full of culture. She was an Edinburgh festival all on her own.’

***

When we consider the city of Edinburgh’s last 500 years of history, significant eras present themselves. It’s the city of the Reformation, the city of the Scottish Enlightenment and when future historians look back on this time, it will surely be remembered for generations to come as the city of the Edinburgh Festival too. While other cities had hosted festivals before 1947 and many more have taken up the mantle since, Edinburgh’s international fame is founded on its originality, its enduringly monumental scale and its versatility across multiple art forms at once.

In many regards, the city did many things first – the concept of a fringe festival was unknown until 1947 – and it continues to do things bigger than anywhere else. In the pre-COVID year of 2019, the Fringe alone saw 3,012,490 tickets sold for 3,841 individual shows across 323 venues, most giving approximately one performance a day for three weeks. Among these shows, 154 nationalities were represented onstage and in audiences, with 1,661 international producers, programmers, talent agencies and festivals either presenting work or looking to find new talent to take to a worldwide audience. It’s estimated this Fringe alone generated more than £1 billion for Scotland’s economy. Such a sense of overwhelming volume, as we’ll see, isn’t always appreciated.

In some respects, the Edinburgh Festival has led the culture. In others, it’s summarised and reflected what’s happening around the world, within the heart of its village – actually a rapidly-growing conurbation and port city of a little over half a million people. The development of British comedy of the late 20th century, in particular, has its roots in Edinburgh, from the Satire Boom of Beyond the Fringe and the 1960s, to the explosion of stand-up comedy two decades later and its leading lights’ subsequent takeover of UK television and beyond. Like the roots of two trees growing together, modern British theatre’s main branch is in London, but its development and many of its seminal moments have happened in the superheated three-week laboratory atmosphere provided by the Edinburgh Festival.

Despite criticism that the Festival sits apart from Edinburgh as an act of artistic colonisation rather than a natural expression of the city’s own year-round cultural life, its existence is firmly connected to, and influential upon, Scotland’s culture and politics of the past 75 years. A biography of the Edinburgh Festival has to also be, in large part, a summary of Scotland’s cultural and political life in the latter half of the 20th century and the beginning years of the 21st.

This book is an exercise in writing about place, about the development and shifting landscape of Scotland’s capital city in the decades since the conclusion of the Second World War. As with any biography, it introduces a wide cast of individuals who have influenced its subject’s life. Between the chronological chapters, several key shows are profiled – a drop in the ocean, in terms of the many thousands seen in August, but a key group of 21 events which have seen global careers made, the landscape of Edinburgh or its Festival permanently changed, or wider entangled stories about, for example, Scottish theatre or British comedy decisively developed on Edinburgh’s stages.

As anyone – performer, audience member, one of thousands of staff, technicians, members of the media, or citizen of Edinburgh – who has experienced the Edinburgh Festival for three days, three weeks, or every year for three decades knows, it’s a dizzying immersion in art and other perspectives. As the last of Scotland’s mild weather and late, bright northerly nights bleed away with the summer, bespoke theatres, lively late-night bars, hot church halls and hotel meeting rooms all buzz until the early hours of the morning, filled with voices and views from across the globe.

It’s a great thing, one of the finest creations of a country which hasn’t been short of great inventions and new philosophies over the centuries. It’s fair to say the Festival is also an imperfect thing at times, but reports of local dislike of it are greatly exaggerated, the statistics show. As the current director of the Edinburgh Fringe, Shona McCarthy, points out with reference to her previous career in arts administration in Northern Ireland, what Edinburgh has – its mix of festivals and the unique geography and official will to make them such a roaring success – is the jealous envy of cities across the world, many of which have tried and failed to replicate its success.

In 2019, in my position as a freelancer reviewer for The Scotsman and others, I saw 139 separate events during August, a personal record in nearly two decades of attending professionally. The next two years of pandemic-induced cancellation and disruption left a sense of loss on the city’s streets, and as the Edinburgh International Festival, Edinburgh Festival Fringe and Edinburgh International Film Festival approached the 75th anniversaries of their founding in 2022, the feeling was that something special, something irreplaceable had been missing.

The Edinburgh witnessed by Edwin Muir was one steeped in its own institutions, but uncertain of its place in the world of the 20th century. A decade later, after war had passed, the Edinburgh Festival gave it global identity and purpose. For all the hopes that the Festival can be streamlined and improved, the original International Festival spirit of 1947 is exactly what’s required once more. After an international catastrophe that first Festival’s purpose was healing, understanding and togetherness, with the Fringe soon forcing its way into being to ensure democracy and diversity were also represented.

SPOTLIGHT

Bruno Walter and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra (1947)

ON THE EVENING of Monday 8 September 1947, as the famous Berlin-born conductor Bruno Walter lifted the baton to lead the 87 members of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra seated onstage at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall, performing history formed around him.

For Edinburgh, this was its Festival’s first true international blockbuster concert, as the debut year’s programme delivered on its promise and set up many more major events to come. Walter was days away from his 71st birthday when he arrived in the city and an orchestral superstar. Born in Berlin’s Alexanderplatz in 1876, the youthful musical prodigy first played piano with the Berlin Philharmonic at the age of 13. He became an apprentice to Gustav Mahler at the then Vienna Court Opera and when Mahler left the city under a cloud in 1907, chased out by rivals and antisemitic detractors, he wrote to the young Walter and told him he felt a special understanding with him.

Four years later in 1911, 34-year-old Walter was by Mahler’s deathbed. Later that year in Munich, one of the crowning moments of Walter’s personal and professional life arrived as he was selected to conduct the premiere of Mahler’s unheard work Das Lied von der Erde (‘The Song of the Earth’). The great composer had written it with his unhappy departure from Vienna, the death of his eldest daughter Maria in childhood and the discovery of the heart defect which would soon take his own life in mind.

By 1947, Walter had built a 40-year reputation as one of the world’s finest conductors, from high-profile operatic directorships in Bavaria, Berlin and Leipzig to close orchestral associations with London and America, where he was now settled in California. So exciting was Walter’s presence in Edinburgh, in fact, that his hotel had to detail a member of staff to guard the door of his room, to turn away resourceful fans and autograph hunters.

Yet, as the Edinburgh Festival’s first director Rudolf Bing was well aware, the reunion of this particular conductor with the Vienna Philharmonic had far greater meaning beyond the simply musical. Both men were European Jews whose high standing within the operatic arts on the continent had been brought to an abrupt halt by the Nazis’ rise to power. While each was living in Berlin in 1933, it was separately made clear upon Hitler’s arrival that the paramilitary SA (the Sturmabteilung) would target their shows for disruption, so both left Germany and settled elsewhere. Walter had even been denounced personally in Hitler’s speeches.

Bing went to work at 1934’s inaugural Glyndebourne Opera Festival in England, while between 1933 and 1938, Walter’s name became synonymous with Vienna, where he first came to prominence. Never a political artist, despite the Nazis’ incorrect suspicion he was a Communist, Walter chose not to use his frequent conducting engagements across Europe and in America to denounce what was happening in his homeland, but rather to spread the sense of inspirational enlightenment and tolerance which he felt music fostered.

Appreciating the bulwark position taken against the Third Reich by Austria’s government prior to the Anschluss of 1938, Walter took on Mahler’s old role as director of what was now the Vienna State Opera in 1936 and shared conducting duties at the Vienna Philharmonic with his rival Wilhelm Furtwängler. This was a golden period for the Philharmonic, during which Walter conducted a recording of Wagner’s Die Walküre and the first ever recording of Mahler’s Symphony No.9.

When Nazi Germany annexed Austria in May 1938, Walter was performing in Amsterdam and he knew it would be impossible to return home with his wife Elsa. In fact, his daughter Lotte was only able to join them two weeks later after being arrested and released, then crossing the Swiss border on the pretext of a non-existent singing gig. The next August, the Walters’ other daughter Gretel was shot and murdered by her jealous husband while she slept in Zurich. Within three months the heartbroken family left Europe behind for good and set out by sea for America, where Elsa died in 1945.

The Vienna Philharmonic now entered the most contested period of its history, giving concerts at the behest of Joseph Goebbels and expelling Jewish members, seven of whom died during the war; five of them in concentration camps. Although Furtwängler’s name was tarnished by continuing as the orchestra’s main conductor, it’s now known he defied Goebbels’ wishes and attempted to shield Jewish players and their families on numerous occasions.

Bing was starting out with Hugo Heller’s Viennese concert agency in the early 1920s when he first met Walter. Later he took the job of deputy intendant at the Städtische Oper1 immediately after Walter left the post of musical director. Before Edinburgh had even been settled on as a venue for the International Festival of Music and Drama Bing was planning, the reunion of Walter and the Vienna orchestra was the hot-ticket centrepiece he hoped to arrange for it. Walter’s agreement to perform following an impassioned transatlantic letter from the hopeful Bing was the snowball that helped set the avalanche in motion. ‘After that we were on the map,’ Bing wrote in his memoir. ‘Whenever anyone asked me what all this was about, I had merely to say that Bruno Walter was coming and no further questions were asked.’

Bing was aware, in fact, that many were deeply suspicious of the VPO and Austria itself immediately after the war and that Walter’s presence would ‘deNazify’ the orchestra where one of its wartime conductors would virtually guarantee angry protest. Two previously expelled Jewish members had been invited to return to the VPO in 1946, but the violinist Arnold Rosé – Mahler’s brother-in-law, whose daughter Alma had died in a concentration camp – angrily refused, before passing away later that year. The cellist Friedrich Buxbaum, who briefly played with the Glasgow Symphony Orchestra at the end of the 19th century, agreed to perform in Edinburgh, where he was presented with the orchestra’s highest award, the Nicolae Medal, named after its founder.

The VPO arrived in Edinburgh on Thursday 4 September after a 48-hour journey by boat and road, bustling into the Carlyle Hostel in the southern suburb of Mayfield as the first ever Festival rain fell on Edinburgh after 11 days of sun. They were finally reunited with Walter – who had played a rare Schubert recital earlier in the week with singer Elisabeth Schumann – for the first time since before the war, ahead of their first rehearsal at the Usher Hall the next evening. ‘Its members,’ The Scotsman noted soberly, ‘were looking forward to seeing him again after nine years’ separation.’2

Bruno Walter and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra’s first Edinburgh Festival performance paid tribute to Britain’s compositional history with Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis and closed with Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ Symphony No.6 and Symphony No.7. The second performance followed the same programme, and was attended by the Queen, Princess Margaret and the Duchess of Kent. The Scotsman recorded ‘a concert probably unparalleled in the musical annals of the city’, with thundering ovation after ovation from the packed hall greeting the performers at the end of the show. This was followed by a further series of cheers for the Royal party as they left the box.

It was a moment of great celebration, a pressure valve opening for a nation and a continent which had to stoically endure so much with little hint of light for the past decade. The key and most memorable moment of Walter’s week-long stay in Edinburgh, however, came with his return to his old mentor Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde. The work was largely unknown in the UK, but it came alive through the voices of the tenor Peter Pears and the contralto Kathleen Ferrier. Both were recommended by Bing after appearing in Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia at Glyndebourne the year before, which had been written specially for Ferrier.

A village schoolmaster’s daughter from rural Lancashire, Ferrier was a rising star of British opera at this point and Walter was immediately taken with her voice when Bing arranged introductions and auditions at the home of the publisher Hamish Hamilton. Walter said he believed her voice to be one of the greatest he had heard, even though she couldn’t get through Das Lied’s sixth and final movement, ‘Der Abschied’ (‘The Farewell’), due to the emotion of it.

Mysterious and otherworldly, the text in Mahler’s work, written by the German poet Hans Bethge, speaks of weary men heading homeward to sleep, and then rediscovering happiness and youth. These words envisaged the wars which would shatter the continent in the decades after Mahler died, but left with the hopeful image of the earth blossoming in spring and growing once more.

After the final performance on 14 September, the day’s late-added second concert due to ticket demand, The Scotsman’s critic wrote:

One cannot perhaps maintain that the carefree warmth of sentiment runs naturally in the veins even of the Viennese nowadays, for we have all been chastened by bitter experience [but the performance contained] a wistful sighing for past loves and joys… that we can all understand and share.3

Together Walter, the Vienna Philharmonic, Ferrier and Pears had exorcised some of the hurt of recent times, pointed towards a brighter future and put Edinburgh’s International Festival of Music and Drama on the world’s map. Bruno Walter returned to life in California and his 1952 recording of Das Lied von der Erde is now recognised as one of the great operatic recordings. This record featured Kathleen Ferrier’s voice once again, her career having springboarded from the Usher Hall to the great stages of America and Europe.

Ferrier became a regular performer in Edinburgh during August and with Walter returned to the Usher Hall, the scene of their history-making triumph, with the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra for Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder in 1949. The greatest compliment she had ever received, was how Ferrier privately described that first request to sing with Walter, although her and the International Festival’s life together was brief. Breast cancer cruelly ended her life and potential as one of Britain’s operatic greats in October 1953 at the age of 41, the year after she performed Das Lied von der Erde in Edinburgh once more, this time with conductor Eduard van Beinum and the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam.

Walter played in Edinburgh with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra again in 1953, but they didn’t perform Das Lied… without Ferrier. ‘She is one of the few irreplaceable artists,’ remarked Walter at the time. He died from a heart attack at his home in Beverley Hills in 1962, at the age of 85, but in the intervening years he had returned to conduct masterfully on the once-forbidden stages of Berlin, Salzburg and Vienna.

‘I felt that it was an invitation to be obeyed as a kind of command,’ he told an Edinburgh press conference of his swift decision to appear in 1947.

The war was an interruption of very harmonious personal relationships, and when we met here after this interruption it was really a meeting of old friends who did not know if they were still friends. But they were.4

1

The Birth of the Edinburgh International Festival

ON BUSINESS AT a 1938 drama conference in Prague on behalf of his employer, the Glyndebourne Opera Festival in England, Rudolf Bing took time to visit family in his birth city, Vienna. By a stroke of extreme bad luck, he picked the days before 12 March 1938 to make the journey – the day of the Anschluss, Nazi Germany’s sudden annexation of Austria. Turning around and fleeing his homeland on a train packed with desperate fellow Austrians, Bing watched fearfully as Czech guards made their way through the carriage at the border, roughly ejecting everyone holding an Austrian passport. Bing’s wife, his career, his whole future remained in England. And he was a Jew carrying an Austrian passport.

Bing hid that passport deep in his belongings and as the guard arrived at his seat, he showed a document he was carrying instead. What is this? asked the guard in Bing’s native German. Where’s your passport? Pretending not to understand, Bing’s fluent English and any tips he may have picked up from the actors he observed in his day job were desperately deployed. Can’t you see who I am? Bing asked, pointing to the papers. They said he was the Liberal British MP Hugh Seely, travelling as an honoured guest of the Czech government.

As Bing was leaving England for the conference a few days earlier, a British Government official met him and told him Seely would also be attending. Here’s a diplomatic pass for Seely, so he doesn’t encounter any difficulties, said the official. Would Bing mind giving it to him when he saw him at the airport? As it turned out, Seely had chosen not to take the trip, but Bing was still carrying his pass.

The border guard weighed up the situation and clearly decided it was more than his job was worth to cause trouble for a member of the British Parliament, so he waved Bing on. The hundreds of other desperate Austrian citizens on the train weren’t so lucky. They were told to get off at the last stop before the border.

Bing sat alone and breathless in the empty carriage which carried him back to Prague. It was the last time he would see Vienna for nearly a decade.

***

‘I find a particular fascination in wandering around a strange city, and imagining all the happiness and tragedy, hopes and disappointments, loves and hates that abide behind all these windows,’ reflected Bing in 1972.1 The impresario was looking back to his first arrival in London early in his career, when the 21-year-old’s ambitions in publishing had been waylaid by his secondment to the Viennese bookseller Hugo Heller’s operatic and theatrical agency, but his romanticism for the great cities of Europe was undimmed on his first proper visit to Edinburgh 17 years later.

In 1923, the year of that first London trip, the rakishly slim and dapper young Bing was awestruck by his surroundings as he assisted the tenor Alfred Piccaver while he played two concerts at London’s Albert Hall. In Edinburgh in 1940, he was six years into his employment with the East Sussex-based Glyndebourne Festival Opera, where he’d served since 1936 as General Manager, resourcefully attempting to keep the show on the road as war approached.

Wartime restrictions prohibited the use of night lighting, so as not to allow enemy bombers an easy target, and travel between cities and towns, let alone to and from Glyndebourne’s countryside setting, was difficult enough for British citizens. Bing, however, was a potential ‘enemy alien’, an Austrian citizen who had to receive special dispensation and agree to check in at local police stations before he could tour with shows. Besides, Glyndebourne House had been repurposed as a home for child evacuees from London. For the first time since it staged an inaugural performance of Mozart’s work in 1934, the by-now world-famous annual operatic season at Glyndebourne Opera House – conceived and built alongside the main house by landowner and organ builder John Christie and his wife Audrey Mildmay, the Canadian soprano – wouldn’t be going ahead.

Instead, in 1940 the company’s efforts were redirected into a nationally touring version of The Beggar’s Opera starring Michael Redgrave and directed by John Gielgud. Bing and his wife Nina, a Russian former ballerina, had briefly seen Edinburgh at the end of a family holiday to England’s Lake District some years before, but when the six-week Beggar’s Opera tour arrived in Scotland’s capital late during the first winter of the 1940s, he took in more of the city. This time Bing walked Princes Street and gazed up at Edinburgh Castle, seated on the lip of a sheer face of volcanic rock pitching away from Princes Street Gardens in the heart of the city. The view reminded him of Salzburg, and he remembered the summer music festival in his home country. Started in 1920 as an all-welcoming antidote to Prussian cultural inflexibility, the Salzburg Festival was now closed away on Nazi-occupied mainland Europe.

Bing’s professional eye also liked the King’s Theatre, where The Beggar’s Opera played, and the grand Usher Hall. The hotels weren’t bad either. The Beggar’s Opera transferred to London’s Theatre Royal Haymarket and closed in May, a week before the evacuation of Dunkirk began. With the Phony War over and hostilities about to begin, the wartime prospects of even a highly-regarded opera manager were slim. Thanks to enthusiastic Glyndebourne patron Spedan Lewis, chairman of the department store chain the John Lewis Partnership, Bing spent most of the war years as a manager at the Sloane Square store Peter Jones, where he at least managed to return to his youthful professional interest and start a book section.

During the Blitz, Bing led overnight fire duty at the store, and from the roof of Peter Jones he could see fires strike up across the darkened city as the Luftwaffe’s bombs landed. His store remained miraculously untouched, but one night a block of flats near the store was hit. He and his staff rushed to help, and Bing reached for the hand of a young woman rising from the rubble. The arm lifted away in his grasp, all that was left.

When he was on day shift, the commute from the Bings’ home in Oxford and back made for a 12-hour working day, yet the time to think also sowed the seeds of a major idea Bing was developing to keep the name and reputation of Glyndebourne alive. Perhaps Salzburg was on his mind once more when he wondered to himself… what if a city like Oxford could be the site of a post-war festival of music and drama paying tribute to the sacrifice which the nation, the whole of Europe, had endured?

***

Rudolf ‘Rudi’ Bing was born in Vienna in 1902 and raised in a grand townhouse on Kaiser Josef Strasse in the city’s predominantly Jewish Leopoldstadt district, with a view over Praterstern square. His parents were friends with Richard Strauss’s family and Bing’s middle-class upbringing gave him a youthful appreciation of opera, a taste for painting and singing and a good grasp of English; his family hired English governesses for the Bing children, a worldly decision which helped their son escape from Europe decades later. A difficult school student who grudgingly planned to continue studying only so his mandatory military service would be reduced from three years to one, both the First World War and the Austro-Hungarian monarchy itself ended before he finished school, so he was never called to serve.

In 1927, having served his apprenticeship with Heller’s agency, he left Vienna for a job with an operatic talent company in Berlin, then became assistant Intendant to the renowned actor Carl Ebert at the Hessian State Theatre in Darmstadt. Ebert was a matinee idol, a handsome young leading man, who was making a shift towards a career directing for the stage now he was in his 40s. With little knowledge of the business side of running a theatre, Ebert hired Bing to do it. Under Ebert, the shows staged in this small-town theatre were progressive in spirit and often attracted local controversy.

Next, Bing arrived at Berlin’s Städtische Oper, the ‘Charlottenburg’, following a brief, post-Darmstadt flirtation with the film industry. He was soon reunited with Ebert, when his old boss moved to the same organisation and Ebert once more handled the art while Bing handled the business. Bing’s time at the Charlottenburg was in the latter days of the Weimar Republic era, the halcyon, bohemian artistic interregnum between the wars and before the fall of the fascist boot. This period was one of the most satisfying of his life, perhaps the biggest triumph of which was the production of Verdi’s Macbeth, based on Shakespeare’s ‘Scottish play’.

In 1933 he and Ebert – a Jew and a social democrat, respectively – were summarily dismissed from their roles by the ‘brown pest’, the Nazi SA paramilitaries. Bing made his way home to Vienna, but in 1934 Ebert got in touch once more, this time with an unusual opportunity to assist with talent booking at a new opera festival Ebert was setting up with the conductor Fritz Busch at a rural stately home in England. The opportunity was a good one and Bing took it.

An unlikely but much-loved success story by the end of the 1930s, Glyndebourne was still Bing’s main priority as the war came to an end. The international festival he was thinking of, in fact, was mainly meant to promote Glyndebourne’s name and reputation until it could begin again. Through 1944, while he was still at Peter Jones, Bing was in discussion with Glyndebourne’s founder John Christie and administrator HE Edwards about plans to bring it back to life, even though professional disagreements had forced Ebert and Busch apart. Bing left his brief career in retail and set up a new Glyndebourne office in London in late 1944. Under the company’s name, he produced the Children’s Theatre and a series of new plays at the Lyric in Hammersmith, both of which employed a young Alec Guinness.

Oxford seemed to Bing like the obvious city to stage his international festival, but talks with the University and city officials went nowhere. Glyndebourne also found the new Arts Council of Great Britain unsympathetic to any of their proposals – reputedly due to a dispute between Christie and its chairman, the economist John Maynard Keynes – but the British Council cultural organisation might be able to help. So in late 1944, with Christie and Edwards’ blessing, Bing set up a lunch meeting in London’s Hanover Square with the a few of the Council’s people; among them, their representative in Scotland, Henry Harvey Wood.

What happened next isn’t exactly clear, a Rashomon moment of differing perspectives telling conflicting stories of the same event. Bing’s memoir says he already had the strikingly beautiful Scottish city he visited with The Beggar’s Opera in mind as a location, remembering its resonance with Salzburg. Yet in a 1947 piece for The Scotsman newspaper, Wood said he’d suggested Edinburgh as a location during that lunch meeting in London. Bing’s specifications for a host city fitted perfectly: it should be able to accommodate 50,000 to 150,000 visitors in a month, but not be too big; reasonably well-served by concert halls and hotels; and it should be especially visually appealing. Either way, Wood was incredibly valuable to the birth of the Edinburgh International Festival and extremely enthusiastic about Bing’s idea:

[Bing convinced us] that such an enterprise, successfully conducted, might at this moment of European time, be of more than temporary significance and might establish in Britain a centre of world resort for lovers of music, drama, opera, ballet and the graphic arts…

If, as now seems certain, the Festival succeeds, Edinburgh will not only have scored an artistic triumph but laid the foundations of what may well become a major industry, a new and exciting source of income.2

That the British Council was permitted to operate and grant funding in Scotland but not England was also a factor, apparently. Another was that the centre of Edinburgh had escaped the Luftwaffe mostly unscathed. Even Leith, Edinburgh’s port area, suffered only minor damage compared to other industrial areas across the UK, despite the first air raid on Britain in the Second World War being the ‘Battle of the River Forth’ on 16 October 1939, as British Spitfires defended Rosyth Naval Base in Fife.

The two men were near-contemporaries, Bing the senior by only 20 months, yet Wood’s apparent functionary position in a government organisation didn’t tell the story of a life devoted to the arts. Known to all as ‘Harry’, he was an Edinburgh man himself, cultured, good-humoured and well-connected. He’d been educated at the grand, neoclassical Royal High School on the side of Edinburgh’s Calton Hill, a school with a fine view of the city’s Old Town.

Wood was talented enough as a student at Edinburgh College of Art that his work was shown in the Royal Scottish Academy. Meanwhile, after also graduating in English Literature from the University of Edinburgh, he lectured at the university and wrote books on the poets Robert Henryson and John Marston. A close friend of the writer Edwin Muir, he was employed by the British Council to establish a Scottish office in 1940 and the following year also became a curator with an exhibition of Inter-Allied Art at the National Gallery of Scotland on the Mound. It featured artists from almost all the Allied countries, including the Norwegian Edvard Munch and the Polish war artist Felix Topolski.

Poland’s World War II links with Scotland were strong and the more than 25,000 displaced Polish Army soldiers based near the city gave Edinburgh an unfamiliar cosmopolitan feel when they visited on weekend leave. Wood organised similar exhibitions, talks and lunchtime concerts in the National Gallery and its director Stanley Cursiter proposed him as a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1943. So Wood was naturally very well-inclined toward the kind of festival Bing was proposing and extremely well-placed to get him close to those who held power in the city.

Their job was to convince John Falconer, the then-Lord Provost and head of the Corporation that ran the city,3 and Wood had a strategy to make the best impression possible. First, he set up a meeting with as many eminent city names as he could muster, so Bing could attempt to enlist their support. These included Eva Primrose, the Countess of Rosebery and Midlothian, a patron of the arts and friend of the Queen, who in 1943 had published an idiosyncratic but well-intentioned guide to the feminism of the time named The Ambitious Girl. As she passionately informed any young woman who might want to enter the theatre:

A play is not merely certain personages, words and deeds smoothly presented in a series of acts and scenes. It is a living thing, vibrant with the life and soul of the generation that produced it. The social, political, historical and religious topics of the day all have their part to play in it.4

Also in Wood’s group were James Murray Watson, editor of The Scotsman newspaper, and the physician Dr Osborne Henry Mavor, better known by his playwriting pen-name James Bridie, whose play Tobias and the Angel Bing had recently programmed at the Children’s Theatre. Everyone agreed that Bing’s plan was exactly what Edinburgh needed. What the continent would need, in fact, as the Allies took to the streets of Berlin and the torment of the past six years appeared to be nearly over.