I have written quite a few posts about the Festival of Britain, and as this year is the 75th anniversary of the festival, I want to look at another aspect of the festival – the people behind the festival, those who created the overall theme, architects, individual pavilions, the written commentary in each pavilion etc.

The 1951 festival was a snapshot of Britain at a key point in history. The Second World War was just six years before the festival, and decades of significant change were in the future.

The South Bank exhibition site was the centre piece of the festival, and was split in two areas.

Between County Hall and Hungerford Railway Bridge was the upstream circuit, the focus was on “The Land”, and looked at the land of Britain, the natural scene, the country, minerals of the island, power and production (mainly driven by what was mined from the land), sea and ships, and transport.

The downstream circuit was between Hungerford Railway and Waterloo Bridges, and the focus of this section of the festival was on “The People”, and looked at the people of Britain, homes and gardens, schools, health, sport, and the seaside.

Responsibility for developing what was on display throughout the festival was through several key roles.

Individuals were responsible for developing the overall theme, architectural design and display design. This started at the highest level with the overall concept of the festival, and then dropped down to those responsible for the same role for individual pavilions and display areas.

The following image is the first page from the South Bank festival guide for the downstream circuit on the people, and the People of Britain pavilion:

At the top are the names of those who had overall responsibility for this section of the festival, and under the title “The People of Britain” are the names of those responsible for the pavilion and displays on the people of britain.

I have underlined one name in red – Jacquetta Hawkes – the Theme Convener, the subject matter expert who was responsible for bringing a consistent theme to the pavilion.

Jacquetta Hawkes was born on the 5th of August 1910 in Cambridge. Her father was Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins, who won the Nobel prize in 1929, along with Christiaan Eijkman, for their discovery of vitamins. Her mother, Jessie Ann Stevens was the daughter of a ship’s fitter from Ramsgate.

Jacquetta developed an interest in archaeology from a very early age, and would go on to establish a considerable career in what was at the time a very male dominated profession.

As evidence of her ground-breaking role as a woman in archaeology, in 1929 she was the first woman to take the Archaeology and Anthropology degree at Newnham College, Cambridge.

After graduating, she travelled to Palestine to work on excavations, and on her return, she married the archaeologist Christopher Hawkes , who she had met earlier at Cambridge.

Jacquetta Hawkes was a prolific author, with her first book, “The Archaeology of Jersey”, being published in 1938.

I have a couple of her books. The first is “A Guide to the Prehistoric and Roman Monuments in England and Wales”:

The book, as the name suggests, is a comprehensive guide to Prehistoric and Roman monuments, and includes background information, such as the types of monuments to be found, a chronology, a lengthy gazetteer of sites, and, something modern books seem to have lost, a large fold out map.

The book obviously reflects the state of knowledge at the time (1951), but it is still a remarkably useful book for cataloguing and examining so many sites.

Chapter One is titled “The Land of Britain”, and this seems to be a theme that can be found in much of Jacquetta’s work, including the Festival of Britain. Her view of how the land of Britain and the evolution of life on the land are intertwined, and the first couple of paragraphs from the opening chapter sum up this approach:

“If it can be claimed that the whole of our country and not only its surviving antiquities should be seen as the creation of past generations, it is legitimate to go much further, to penetrate below the surface of pasture, arable, woodland and waste and to see the whole substance of the island as one continuous creation. Through milliards of years it has been built and shaped; sometimes lying as a part of a vast continent embracing what is now the Atlantic and North America, sometimes part of the sea-bed of equally vast oceans. tropical, desert, and artic climates have played over it.

So, side by side with the evolution of life, the land of Britain was brought into being; the remodelling of its surface by man belongs to this continuous and still rapidly developing process.”

Whilst the guide to Prehistoric and Roman monuments is at its heart a guide, Jacquetta takes the approach summed up in the two paragraphs above, and expands it considerably in, probably her best known book, “A Land”:

A Land was also published in 1951, I have the 1978 edition (some sources give the original publication year as 1953, however my 1978 edition has 1951 as the original date, and Jacquetta’s introduction is dated 1950).

A Land is not a text book, or single subject book on geology, climate, archaeology, the evolution of life, history etc. but takes all these subjects to construct a story of how the land of Britain has developed, and both the impact on, and the use of the land, by the emergence and evolution of life.

The book links the formation of rocks, minerals and resources to how they were and are used by humans. Granite, Portland Stone, Chalk, Coal etc. all have their origins shown as part of the geological development of the land linked to their future use by people for homes, buildings, industry.

The book is “off its time” – a phrase that implicitly means that almost everything we publish today, will, in the next 50, 100 and more years, also be regarded as containing inaccuracies, not reflect the latest scientific understanding, will have unacceptable views, but as with the story told in “A Land”, human knowledge and culture is on a conveyor belt of continuous change, and the present is just a snapshot in time of both knowledge and culture.

As an indication of how archaeological and scientific advances can impact a book, the introduction to the 1978 edition of “A Land” lists several updates to the 1951 edition.

A Land has been described as being a sentimental and romantic book, and there is a degree of truth to these descriptions, but what I find important about the book is that it presents a way of looking at the country, an intertwined story of continuous evolution – an obvious example being the geological and climate conditions that led to the formation of coal, which was the key source of energy for the industrial revolution, from the start of steam power with Thomas Newcomen’s and James Watt’s engines in the 18th century.

When she wrote “A Land”, Jacquetta lived in Fitzroy Road, just to the east of Primrose Hill, and she references the hill in the opening paragraphs of the book:

“When I have been working late on a summer night, I like to go out and lie on the patch of grass in our back garden. This garden is a square of about twenty feet, so that to lie on it is like exposing oneself in an open box or tray. Not far below the topsoil is the London Clay which, as Primrose Hill bumps up conspicuously at the end of the road. the humus, formed by the accumulation first of forest and then of meadow land, must once have been fertile enough, but nearly a century in a back garden has exhausted it.”

Her mind then begins to wander:

“As I lie looking at the stars with that blend of wonder and familiarity they alone can suggest, a barge turning the bend in Regent’s Park Canal hoots, a soft wedge of sound in the darkness that is cut across by the long rumble of a train drawing out of Euston Station.

The people sitting in those lighted carriages, even the bargee leaning sleepily on his long tiller, are not individuals going to board meetings in Manchester or bringing in coal for London furnaces. For the instant they are figures moved about the map by unknown forces, as helpless as the shapes of history that can be found behind them, all irresistibly impelled to the achievements of this moment.”

And then begins the story of millions of years of the history of Britain.

The Land also shows how in 1950 when the book was written, Britain was still a country with strong regional and local differences.

This was not just with the people, but also how the country was built, with towns and villages often being distinctive by their industries and agriculture and their local building materials, and designs.

This localism was also a thread running through parts of the Festival of Britain, and one of the very many publications associated with the festival, was the following map, published by the oil company Esso, with the title “What do they talk about”:

Published by Esso, no doubt as an incentive to get people out driving and buying petrol to explore the country, if did show a country where many areas were still very distinctive.

Compare that with today, where local areas are much less diverse. Buildings are generally built to very similar designs and off remotely rather than locally made materials, nearly all the industries shown on the map have disappeared, and those that remain are in continual decline (for example in the midlands, a kiln can be seen with the word “Pots”. The midlands pottery industry continues to shrink, with the latest casualty being the Denby factory which shut down their kilns a couple of months ago).

A theme to the festival seems to have been to encourage people to get out and explore their country. As well as the map shown above, there were other festival events across the country, and also a series of “About Britain” guides were published, each with the festival emblem on the front cover.

Each guide covered a specific area of the country and provided a detailed guide, recommended routes and places to see:

Returning to the People of Britain pavilion, of which Jacquetta was the theme convener, the journey through the pavilion was laid out in a chronological sequence, with some of the displays set up as an archaeological dig. Starting from the entrance, the displays covered The Relics Of Our Ancestors, How They Came Here, How They Lived, The Romans In Britain, Men of the Iron Age, The Anglo Saxons, The British Today.

The People of Britain pavilion route from the guide is shown below:

The final paragraph in the festival guide section on the People of Britain reflects on how migration and integration has been part of the development of Britain:

“But though the ancient dead are buried, it is the very blood they brought here that runs in us – yet, whether they came as conquerors or men of peace, all of them suffered a sea change on the way. They were absorbed into the life that was here before them, and themselves became islanders of a land that moulded the thoughts, the feelings, and the behaviour of them all into a whole which is our British way of life and our tradition”.

The above paragraph is another example of why I find the Festival of Britain so useful as a reference point for so much about the country at the time.

The paragraph talks about the absorption of those who migrated to the country in the past, and how all islanders moulded the British way of life. In the decades to come, this would change to a more multi-cultural approach, with issues about absorption, or integration as we would now describe the process.

The Festival of Britain guide names all those who had a role in the creation and design of the festival, with Jacquetta Hawkes being the theme convenor for the People of Britain pavilion.

Reading through the names of those responsible for all the other exhibits and pavilions across the festival, she was one of very few women who had a key role in the creation of the festival.

There is far more to her life than archaeology and the Festival of Britain.

During her marriage to Christopher Hawkes, she had a son, Nicolas who was born in 1938.

Serious archaeology was not possible during the Second World War, so in 1941 she took on the role of Assistant Principal of the Post-War Reconstruction Secretariat, later moving to the Ministry of Education, and then became a Principal and Secretary of the UK National Committee for Unesco, a role she held until the start of her involvement with the Festival of Britain.

The war also marked a change in her personal life, as she fell in live with, and had an affair with the poet Walter J. Turner, and she was devastated when he died of a brain haemorrhage in December 1946.

In 1947, she met the writer J.B. Priestley at a Unesco conference in Mexico, and they fell in love, although unable to marry until 1953, by when they had both been divorced.

J.B. Priestley had written English Journey, which was published in 1934, another useful snapshot of the country as the book covered Priestley’s travels around England.

After her marriage to Priestley, Jacquetta continued to write. She was a governor of the British Film Institute and in 1971 she was a vice-president of the Council for British Archaeology.

Following a short spell on the Isle of Wight, they moved to Alveston in Warwickshire, where she became president of the Warwickshire branch of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England. With Priestley, she was one of the co-founders of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Following J.B. Priestley’s death in 1982, she moved to Chipping Camden, where she pursued an interest in the old buildings and historic churches of the area.

Her last book, published in 1982, and written with archaeologist Paul Bahn was the “The Shell Guide to British Archaeology“, one of a series of Shell guides, which also includes guides to many of the counties of the country.

Jacquetta wrote and contributed to multiple journal and magazine articles, as well as radio and TV.

Jacquetta was involved in one of the more unusual TV programmes of the 1960s when in 1962 she wrote the script for part of a programme in the BBC Monitor series titled “The Lonely Shore”, with the segment being on “What Was Britain Like Before the Apocalypse?”.

This segment sees archaeologists from the future returning to the site of a lost previous expedition, who had placed their finds on the beach waiting for collection by a future team.

It is brilliant as it highlights the difficulty with interpreting the use and meaning of artifacts from long lost peoples and civilisations. It is almost a parody of the archaeological profession that Jacquetta was for so long, a prominent member.

There is a brilliant bit starting at 8 minutes, 22 seconds where a collecting box for the PDSA (People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals) is interpreted as an altar set-up for the dog cult:

Jacquetta Hawkes died on the 18th of March 1996, and her ashes were buried with those of J.B. Priestley in the grounds of the church in Hubberholm in North Yorkshire.

Archaeology had started with the gentleman amateur, and during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, had transformed into professional academic excavation and study of the past.

From the 1950s onwards, archaeology became more scientific, and Jacquetta criticised the reductionist approach that she saw as growing in importance in the profession, rather than the importance of constructing the human past.

She wrote an article for the journal Antiquity in 1967, from which the following abstract is taken:

“Archaeology in is danger of becoming so ruled by its technological and scientific servants that its proper goal of reconstructing the human past is being overlooked. The ingenious new equipment of archaeology attracts to itself a major share of not only money but intellectual effort; the result is that, while historical writing of the quality formerly seen is nowhere emergent, enormous quantities of undigested facts, graphs and tables litter our ever more expensive reports. The time needed to compile these analyses keeps other workers too long uninformed; the excavator may not even live to complete his scientifically showy report. As for controversies in interpretation, pages of correspondence solve nothing that time and new discoveries will not. Meantime, art criticism and studies of religion are neglected because they cannot be tabulated; even the remote stages of the Palaeolithic might be made to reveal more than statistics. A proper balance between science and history, a blend of old and new ideals, must be found if we are to maintain popular interest in archaeology and attract recruits with historical imagination.”

Personally, I believe that the approach criticised by Jacquetta, and her own approach, are both equally valid and important.

The technical and scientific approach, where facts, graphs and tables provide a detailed understanding of a site, city, population and culture, and the approach supported by Jacquetta expands on these individual details, and puts an individual site, facts, graphs and tables within the wider context of both the land and human history.

Jacquetta Hawkes was a fascinating woman, who achieved so much in a male dominated profession, and her book “A Land” is still an inspiration to look at history in a different way – a way in which geology, climate, life and human evolution, industry, agriculture, buildings etc. can all be understood as an intertwined story.

What is missing from this post is a photo of Jacquetta Hawkes. All those I have found online are copyright, or appear to have been taken from a copyrighted source, so here is a link to a photo of her in 1955 at the National Portrait Gallery – a remarkable woman:

https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw56556/Jacquetta-Hawkes?_gl=11a7d30k_upMQ.._gaOTE3MDgxNDI4LjE3ODQ5OTExNDU._ga_3D53N72CHJ*czE3ODQ5OTExNDQkbzEkZzAkdDE3ODQ5OTExNDQkajYwJGwwJGgw