Before the Arts Council

This book explores the hitherto neglected history of the campaign for state funding of the arts. By focusing on the important but forgotten movements for music and drama subsidy before and during WWII, Howard Webber makes an important contribution to the history of arts subsidy.Before the Arts Council rediscovers three forgotten but influential campaigns for state support of the arts in Britain in the 1930s and wartime. Webber’s impressive historical excavation challenges existing scholarship, which argues that arts subsidy was the result of the war, and instead re-situates the campaign’s origins in the pre-war years. Webber does so by drawing on correspondence from influential figures including Ralph Vaughan Williams, John Maynard Keynes and J.B Priestley, along with extensive use of government papers.Before the Arts Council is a lively, compelling and scrupulously researched account of a subject consistently misunderstood and misrepresented. It changes our understanding of an aspect of British cultural history we thought we knew well. It will appeal to students of twentieth century social and political history and to anyone with a general interest in the arts and in this period.

This wonderful book, witty, scholarly, revelatory shows how the arts became the People's Arts and why it was so important they did. It took the visionary arguments and campaigns to lay the groundwork for a reforming government after the Second World War to make the arts belong to all of us., Webber challenges the prevailing view that the idea of government subsidy of the arts emerged only during the war. He reveals the origins of the Arts Council in pre-war campaigns originating in the belief of well-known elite figures that the arts needed rescue from terminal decline due to competition from the ‘mechanized arts’ of film, radio and gramophone records. He shows rather that the arts flourished, helped not hindered by the wider access provided by the BBC and recordings, and that interwar governments were more supportive of funding the arts than previously suggested., Howard Webber shines a fascinating light on an all-but-forgotten period in British cultural history. He tells the story with clarity and humour; and it is inspiring (as well as being extremely relevant) to discover the riches that emerged in our national life from a time of crisis.

Howard Webber has spent his career in Whitehall, in organisations including the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority and the Arts Council. He has degrees from Birmingham and Harvard Universities and an MA and PhD in modern British history from King's College London, UK.