At home? Discoursing on the Commonwealth at the 1965 Commonwealth Arts Festival

Abstract

The Commonwealth Arts Festival was staged in Britain in 1965. With the working title of “The Commonwealth At Home”, the Festival was designed, ostensibly, to bring together far flung lands, connected by the legacy of empire, to establish goodwill through culture and the arts. This paper explores the cultural work to which the 1965 Festival was put by advocates and detractors. Looking at archival sources from proposed plans for the London events, committee minutes, festival programmes, and letters, to the staging of the “Verse and Voice” festival of Commonwealth Poetry at the Royal Court Theatre in London, the paper fleshes out some of the rationales and motivations for the event, examines tropes and metaphors used, and also situates the events within the context of recently passed British anti-immigration laws. The paper argues that who the Commonwealth was for — its locus and its meaning — can be excavated from the geo-political tropic deployment of space in its discoursing. In particular, the depiction of what was imagined as being at home and what was represented as distant lands tells revealing stories of disavowal for an empire (and a colonial legacy) that occurred somewhere else and to someone else; in this manner, Britain’s “fit of absence of mind” also became a way of disposing of unwanted histories.

In a clip of British Pathé newsreel of the 1965 Commonwealth Arts Festival at Trafalgar Square, “Sierre Leone Entertains at Commonwealth Festival 1965”, a dancer from the John Akar-led Sierra Leone National Dance Troupe is performing rhythmic steps in an elaborate costume of long grass. On a stage erected at the base of Nelson’s column in Trafalgar Square and surrounded by drummers, and to the obvious delight of a packed and enthusiastic London crowd, the dancer leaps vertically in the air. Behind the dancers and on a series of graded steps are journalists and photographers; they click their cameras as the dancer executes his gravity-defying jumps (British Pathé, 1965). These open air performances must have offered a striking and vibrant spectacle, positioned as they were against a familiar grey and overcast London cityscape surrounded by neo-classical and imperial architecture around Trafalgar square. The Pathé clips also include crowd scenes, notably of spectators dressed in woollens, coats, jackets, and ties, whose sartorial differences only emphasize the exoticism of these theatrical shows, seemingly out of place and so evocative of cultures in faraway places. But perhaps what stands out most, when the camera moves near ― or amongst ― the crowd to better capture their reactions, are the marked close ups of the faces of black Londoners, dressed in everyday work clothes and suits; here, the cameraman lingers momentarily on selected black individuals who by a slight incline of the head, or a small smile, register the gaze of the camera trained on them.

The origins of the Festival lay in a privately circulated 1957 leaflet which proposed a triennial festival of the arts across the Commonwealth; the inaugural celebrations, tentatively titled “The British Commonwealth at Home”, were to take place in Britain. ¹ The Festival was designed, ostensibly, to bring together far flung lands, connected by the legacy of empire, to establish goodwill through culture and the arts. Despite failing to make the final programme brochures, this working title appears in committee notes. As late as the first full meeting of the Festival Advisory committee meeting at Buckingham Palace in February of 1964, Sir Ian Hunter, as Director General, wrote, “We also hope that in following the theme of ‘The Commonwealth At Home’ they will show in their festivals the various aspects of civic life in which they excel [sic]”. ² This working title, at home, while not officially adopted, hints at some of the ways in which the Commonwealth, at once so far removed, might be rendered familiar through the presence of Festival performers who also served as cultural ambassadors. The two-day show in Trafalgar Square was conceived precisely to achieve these ends. Despite the Ministry of Public Building and Works’ reservations about the staging of such an event in a public place, Sir Ian argued that such methods of outreach were needed to connect with the man in the street; a letter from the Commonwealth Relations Office (CRO) to the Ministry of Public Building and Works emphasized the desire that the festival “should not be confined to the relatively few people who always follow cultural events but that it should have wide public impact”. ³ The Commonwealth at home also, of course, suggested an imperial connection in so far as these visitors were not ordinary strangers but Commonwealth citizens whose recent histories were intimately linked with Britain. Yet the semantic promise of arrivals suggested by the festival’s working title did not hold true for all its Commonwealth citizens. If welcome was extended to the Festival’s transitory visitors, it did not always apply to those of the new Commonwealth who had in the most literal senses arrived home, settling “in de mother lan” and “colonizin Englan in Reverse” (Bennett, 1996: 179).

The Festival was staged between 16 September and 2 October, 1965, in the cities of Liverpool, Glasgow, Cardiff, and London, places designated as “national centres”. Highlights of the two weeks included London-based events such as the “Verse and Voice” celebration of Commonwealth poetry at the Royal Court Theatre (held in conjunction with the Poetry Book Society); the Great Dance Gala at the Royal Albert Hall that included performers from Trinidad, Canada, Uganda, Sierra Leone; orchestra and ballet concerts; open air lunch-time displays of music and dance in Trafalgar Square; the “Treasures of the Commonwealth” exhibition at the Royal Academy; and a production of Wole Soyinka’s The Road at the Theatre Royal. Not all events centred on London; films were also shown in Cardiff as well as the National Theatre in London; Cardiff also had its own poetry festival. With performers travelling between locations, there was also plenty to enjoy in Liverpool and Glasgow.

Contemporary critics might all too easily dismiss the 1965 Festival as a passing historical irrelevance. Even though there were other arts festivals in the Commonwealth, the dream of a regular triennial event floundered on the debts the Festival chalked up. However, the 1965 Festival became the occasion for a plethora of local and national magazine publications on Commonwealth Literature in 1965, printed, for example, in the New Statesman, English, the Times Literary Supplement, the London Magazine. Young Commonwealth Poets ’65, a commemorative anthology of verse, and Verse and Voice, a souvenir booklet with specially commissioned poems, were issued. In the same year, edited scholarly papers from the inaugural Leeds conference of Commonwealth Literature also appeared in a volume of the same title. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature also made its first appearance in 1965. While the rush of publications might constitute opportunism, the Festival’s genesis, staging, significance and, more importantly, the cultural work it was put to (including the discourses it spawned), offer useful insights into how Britain imagined and managed its colonial past and legacy.

In an introduction to their edited collection of essays, At Home with the Empire, Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose observe that questions about how empire was “lived” across a range of everyday practices or “narrated in histories” is possible in hindsight because “we are no longer ‘at home’ with an empire” (2007: 3). In recent years, postcolonial and general historians and geographers have started a crucial debate about the importance of the Commonwealth as a signifier, its political and cultural appeal for those who used it, and the contexts of such usage. Wendy Webster’s exploration of Englishness at the end of Empire (2005: 7), for example, charts the historical progression from postwar discourses depicting the Commonwealth as a “people’s empire”, emphasizing “the common people and unity across differences of class and gender” in much the same terms as the “people’s war”. The Queen’s Coronation tour of 1953 developed and sustained such representation, with national newspapers such as the Sunday Times proclaiming a “strange unity-in-diversity” and “family oneness […] scattered across the globe”. Especially in the Coronation year of 1953, the Commonwealth was depicted as one of “a multiracial community of equal nations”, founded on democratic principles that would transform and modernize Britain’s imperial legacy (Webster, 2005: 104). However, such high ideals were soon to founder on the anxieties generated by postwar immigration when the “people’s empire” came to acquire, via a “chain of connections that linked ‘Commonwealth’, ‘immigrant’, ‘coloured’, and ‘domestic problem’”, a much darker meaning (Webster, 2005: 179, 149). Given the new appetite for joining Europe and the Common Market in the early sixties, and the racializing of the discourse on immigration as a problem of colour, national identity in general and Englishness in particular, were portrayed as “quiet, private, domestic and white”; discourses promoting the Commonwealth as modern and democratic clashed with those depicting a nation under threat “by empire, by Commonwealth, and by their legacies ― not only in empire, but at home” (Webster, 2005: 181). Ruth Craggs (2007) has argued for a consideration of the Commonwealth in relation to present postcolonial discussions about hospitality and cosmopolitanism, providing two striking examples of how architecture, material culture, and the representation of Commonwealth were made to “tell stories about empire” its legacy. She has offered some useful examples; for instance, in the postwar period, meetings of leaders at the Royal Commonwealth Society at Marlborough House and the photo opportunities they represented, however staged, were striking in the context of fraught race relations at home. The House itself also provided one of the few “formal social spaces of this type in central London in which it was possible to bring non-white guests without fear of discrimination” (Craggs, 2007). In the transformation of the Imperial Institute into the architecturally modern Commonwealth Institute, the latter erected at a London site near areas of West Indian settlement, Craggs finds not only older “imperial ways of seeing distant territories” from the centre, but also possibilities for modern and more democratic relations between nations (Craggs, 2011: 255). Thus, in a somewhat revisionist reading of how to read the legacy of Empire that is the Commonwealth, she asserts that there are “narratives, forms and landscapes associated with the Commonwealth idea that are relevant to present-day visions of the city as cosmopolitan and postcolonial metropolis” (Craggs, 2011: 248).

Narrowing scholarly interest to literary fields, my earlier paper explores the conflicting ways in which the appellation “Commonwealth” was employed: from a descriptive geographical marker, designating the wider political alliances of the emerging nations within which postcolonial Anglophone writers might be identified, to a signifier of cultural, aesthetic, and ancestral links where arboreal or familial tropes were employed to emphasize the commonness of culture, language, and a shared heritage (Low, 2004). Norman “Derry” Jeffares, an early advocate of the study of Commonwealth Literature, and a founding member of the Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Study (ACLALS), stressed the primacy of English language and literature as “parent stock” from which other newer literatures spring; the English literary tradition constituted the roots or the trunk and all newer “ancillary” forms came “from and continue[d] English ways of living”, developed from “accidents of geography or politics, or racial blending, or social philosophies” (Jeffares, 1957). However, as my earlier paper argues, the appellation “Commonwealth Literature” in the sixties actually showed more contestation even amongst proponents than is perhaps currently assumed. John McLeod (2000: 12–15) has similarly asserted that Commonwealth literature as a field of comparative study in the 1960s registered contradictory pulls: signifying a shared and valuable literary and aesthetic inheritance that transcended local contexts and a more polarizing and politicized expression of nationalist sentiments. In addition, Nathan Suhr-Sytsma (2012) has argued persuasively that the routes offered up by the recognition of something called Commonwealth poetry “effectively undid the London literary world’s conception of contemporary poetry as only British or American”. The concomitant effects of these discourses are, of course, contradictory; for example, the assertion of literary origins might be seen as restating the centrality of Britain via Englishness as cultural capital or (ironically) as cultural compensation for postwar shrinkage.

In this paper, I want to add to and recast these recent debates by addressing the cultural work that the 1965 Commonwealth Arts Festival was put to by advocates and detractors. My paper is divided into three main sections. The first part explores plans for the London events, examining committee minutes, festival programmes, and letters in order to investigate some of the rationales and motivations for the event, and also to examine tropes and metaphors used. The second section turns its attention to the “Verse and Voice” festival of Commonwealth Poetry at the Royal Court Theatre in London, exploring its presentation of Britain’s colonial legacy. The argument then moves onto responses from two Anglophone Caribbean writers, Derek Walcott and Martin Carter, who sought to situate the Festival in the context of the anti-immigration laws. In doing so, both insist on a revaluation of the meaning of the Commonwealth, represented on the one hand as a familial tie, and on the other, a denial of the political and cultural realities of such relationships. My paper as a whole argues that who the Commonwealth was for ― its locus and its meaning ― can be excavated from the geo-political tropic deployment of space in its discoursing. In particular, the depiction of what was imagined as being at home and what was represented as distant lands tells revealing stories of disavowal for an empire (and a colonial legacy) that occurred somewhere else and to someone else; in this manner, Britain’s “fit of absence of mind” also became a way of disposing of unwanted histories.

Planning and organization

On the 11th of November 1963, a government telegram from the Commonwealth Relations Office to the High Commissions in Ottowa, Canberra, Wellington, Delhi, Karachi, Colombo, Accra, Kuala Lumpur, Lagos, Dar Es Salaam, Kingston, Port of Spain, and Kampala among others gave advance warning of an imminent press release from Malborough House, the then location of the Commonwealth Centre. The communiqué announced government support, in principle, for a Commonwealth Arts Festival to be staged in London, Cardiff, Glasgow, and Liverpool. Sir Ian Hunter, the director general of the non-profit Festival society would soon be canvassing respective Commonwealth governments for artistic contributions. ⁴ Lord Balfour of Inchyre’s official press announcement, made 17 days later, set out some of the impetus behind this celebration of the arts. Echoing the liberal principals behind the founding of the modern commonwealth in the London Declaration of 1949, which declared that the British Commonwealth was to no more be the British Commonwealth but a Commonwealth of nations, Balfour stressed that the Commonwealth represented “the greatest single unit of moral power” “for the freedom of man”, promoting “things that are right and good as against suppression of man’s freedom”. The Commonwealth “unity of spirit and purpose” was to be found in collegiate organizations that worked together in areas such as “education, science, commerce and sport”, and that were “unaffected by political, economic and military considerations” for which differences existed. The 1965 planned Arts Festival would take place in port cities that had witnessed much “two-way Commonwealth traffic”, being “main ports” for migration of “individuals and families [who] leave this country to make new lives in the Commonwealth, and […] [incoming] Commonwealth citizens engaged in activities such as tourism, education, business, or who have come to settle”. Significantly, Lord Balfour’s speech looked resolutely forward and only contained asides to the history and legacy of Empire, for example, his brief references to Macmillan’s “wind of change” or his mention of old imperial links soon to be “severed by evolution”. The festival of arts would help “forge new links”; for the arts would show “no differences of colour, creed, race or political views” but instead offer “positive, exciting and striking forms” of diverse, contrasting, and convivial cultural exchange. ⁵

As Festival director general, Sir Ian Hunter shared the platform with Lord Balfour, reiterating many of the latter’s themes in an expansive speech that also offered a more concrete outline and plan of the celebrations. Sir Ian’s speech extended Balfour’s allusion to WWII, notably the latter’s references to the defence of freedom amidst stark moral polarities; however, his yoking of the Commonwealth to the wartime unity of purpose was more explicit. He reminded his listeners that he himself had participated in the war effort based on “clear-cut” partnerships and “common aims” between diverse Commonwealth nations; such unity would help forge lasting relationships if familiarity and “a basic mutual respect between its members” were fostered through “a greater knowledge of the various countries’ arts and artists”. The governing principle of the Festival was that of “contrasts”. Events were to be aimed not at the “sophisticated few” but at the general public and also at the young. Music, dance, theatre, and architectural exhibition and exchange were to be highlighted; fireworks, a street parade and “floating pavilions” on the Thames showcasing the “arts and crafts and ‘way of life’ in the Commonwealth” would also be displayed. ⁶ Despite its well-meaning ideals, Sir Ian’s ideas for the Commonwealth Festival appear dangerously close to the tradition of anthropological displays or “habitat dioramas”, spatializing and temporizing difference/distance within an imperial theatrical and exhibitionary tradition (Mehuron, 1995: 219).

Sir Ian’s tour to sample, report on, and solicit artistic contributions from Commonwealth countries was covered extensively in the UK as well as in the local national presses. In the main, these reported Sir Ian’s stated objectives of generating lasting goodwill through culture and art. In Festival leaflets, the contrasting of diverse cultures and arts of the “same human emotions, events and ideas” would enable the Festival to foreground both diversity and the commonality of human experience. Commonality, however, took on different shades of meaning. For some, it marked less the fundamental unity of mankind and more the expediency of keeping political alliances alive after the wind of change; for example, a memo by E.N. Gummer of the British Council indicated that the festival’s dual purpose was not only celebrating “the past and present achievements of the arts of the Commonwealth as a whole” but functioning notionally as a glue to bind the centrifugal forces of decolonization through the strengthening of “cultural and political ties”. ⁷ In this spirit, the British Council would offer to provide local contacts and independent advice to help Sir Ian as he embarked on his globe-trotting tour.

While the Festival was planned by a charitable organization independent of the government, the nature of the work, the networks of patronage it accessed, and the Committee’s close relations with the Commonwealth Relations Office and the British Council meant that there was a close working relationship between these organizations. Unsurprisingly, politics was much at the forefront of some of the tensions that arose during the selection process and the potential diplomatic conflicts regarding the political units in the Commonwealth as older colonial entities broke up. When the Central African Federation was dissolved with the creation of Zambia and Malawi as political states, there was anxiety over whether Southern Rhodesia should be invited to join the table as an entity in its own right. South Africa remained a problem for the Festival Committee because it was, of course, no longer part of the Commonwealth, having been pulled out of the organization by its then apartheid government in 1961. South African material before the breakaway did, however, find its way into the “Verse and Voice” festival. Moments of conflict, however, were not restricted to the British; Malaysia objected to the Singapore Chinese Lion dancers being at the Festival as culturally representative of their region. Visa problems for the sometimes large contingent of artists and performers were also a strain and as travel costs to Britain were met mostly by the Commonwealth countries, economic considerations could complicate existing problems.

How to balance direction from the centre with that of individual Commonwealth nations created potential conflict. What was deemed aesthetically valuable by the organizers or by the British Council advisory staff was at times at odds with what was recommended by individual countries. Some old imperial ideas about the relationship between Britain and the Commonwealth were much in evidence. Authenticity, the distinctiveness and purity of folk forms and crafts that were not westernized, became one of the recurring themes across the volume of correspondence between organizers and overseas staff advising on the choice of performers from Africa or India. An internal committee memo declared quite explicitly: “there will be an emphasis upon indigenous art as opposed to the more Europeanized arts of the Commonwealth”. A British council regional staff member, Robert Taylor, prefaced his remarks with the caveat that the “main argument for selection” was their “appeal for a western audience”; he went on to write:

[F]or pure drama we can think of none in South India that is anywhere near the professional level; the acting here is pure ham amateur. Unfortunately, this comment applies to almost every other aspect except the classical dance and classical music; there are no outstanding sculptors or painters in South India who we would suggest for the festival. ⁸

In another confidential memo, Sir Ian complained that the Nigerians were less open to suggestion and guidance than some of the other committees: “They […] took the attitude that they should decide what was going to be sent, and whilst cooperation was proposed by one member and accepted […] I have certainly found the Nigerians less pliant to our overall plans than other committees”. ⁹ This resistance to what was thought of as outside interference boiled over when the Nigerian selectors later threatened to pull out after it emerged that Sir Ian had accepted a production of Soyinka’s Lion and the Jewel even before the local open competitions used to select performances by the Nigerian administration for the Festival were completed. ¹⁰ If there was understandable irritation at what might be taken to be a reinstatement of metropolitan control, what best exemplified the Commonwealth as a direct descendent of Empire was the absence of any mechanism for intra-Commonwealth cultural and artistic exchanges outside of Britain. Despite the committee’s desire to see the Festival leave a lasting legacy between nations, a civil servant pointed out that any exhibition or performance wishing to tour would have to have made new “bi-lateral” agreements. ¹¹

Commonwealth poetry: Verse and voice

One could argue that forms such as dance and music might lend themselves more easily to the spatializing and temporizing of cultural difference that structured the Festival’s deliberate contrasting and exoticized display of cultures. Such strategies signal both an avowal and a disavowal of shared colonial history, acknowledging, on the one hand, a homecoming of Commonwealth nations to effect a different future, and on the other, a forgetting of that recent history by representing art and culture as if they had no connection with colonial history. Despite the fact that poetry in the English language is based, at its most basic, on a shared linguistic (if not literary) affiliation that was the direct consequence of colonialism, the Anglophone poetry festivities replicated the same contradictory processes at work in the Festival’s presentation of the expressive and performative arts. There were two major celebrations of verse: the London “Verse and Voice” and the Cardiff Poetry Festivals held between 16 September and 2 October. “Verse and Voice” comprised two connected week-long thematic programmes: “From Empire to Commonwealth”, and “Commonwealth Poetry”. The former was conceived of as reflecting “the origins and the growth of the Empire and the Commonwealth” in verse, ballads, and songs, and the latter, undertaken in conjunction with the Poetry Book Society, was conceived of as a celebration of modern and contemporary poetry from Britain, Canada, the Caribbean, New Zealand, Australia, India, Pakistan, the Far East, West and East Africa. The second week of “Verse and Voice” included specially commissioned verse on “the landscape or the way of life of a particular [Commonwealth] country” (Cleverdon, 1965: 11; 12).

“Verse and Voice” was directed by Douglas Cleverdon, who worked at the BBC producing radio broadcasts for the Third Programme; Cleverdon worked closely with academics such as Bonamy Dobrée, a well-known academic and the then chair of the Poetry Book Society, Jeffares, who had recently presided over the Leeds international conference that was to lead to the creation of ACLALS, and A.L. Lloyd, an ethnomusicologist and broadcaster who advised on folk songs. Cleverdon, Jeffares, and Lloyd together with Douglas Grant, another Leeds academic, contributed prefaces to the souvenir booklet. In one of his trademark speeches, Jeffares emphasized unity in diversity: “writing which stems from the long tradition of English poetry”, as well as “local experience to express” new “changes, tensions and challenges” (Jeffares, 1965: 20). Lloyd offered a quasi ethnomusicological case against “European deafness” to the different kinds of folk songs that were taken by settlers to distant lands or those “native to the territories” or a hybrid mixture, “part-indigenous, part received from outside” (Lloyd, 1965: 12). Grant, meanwhile, emphasized a commonality of tradition.

Cleverdon emphasized a historical approach that was embedded in the structuring of the first week, “From Empire to Commonwealth”. In his Forward to the “Verse and Voice” souvenir booklet, Cleverdon remarked that “the quality of the earlier poets […] varied enormously in different countries; in some cases […] poetry was practically non-existent”; because of this, Cleverdon went on to write, “lively ballads and enchanting folk songs” that have “survived” might “legitimately” fall within the scope of the festival (Cleverdon, 1965:11). In his notes, “Empire to Commonwealth” was to reflect “growth and development”, emphasizing in particular, the heroic nature of the “Island Race”, ¹² explorers, mariners, and adventurers who fought “battles on land and sea”, “who carried our English tongue to distant lands”, and whose “colonial spirit, trade, slavery”, including “the rise of the independent American spirit in revolt” brought the modern world into being. The emphasis on the epic and heroic nature of the mercantile and colonial enterprise seems a throwback to an earlier, more bellicose and assertive celebration of British imperialism that sat somewhat uneasily with the political reality of decolonization. It was also a world away from the postwar political discourses of partnership that cohered around the idea of the people’s empire.

Some of the uneasiness could be smoothed over by taking a long view of history and also by incorporating a comparative element. Folk-songs and ballads of the “bush-rangers, the convicts, the cattle-drovers” from Australia and New Zealand were selected to emphasize a British lineage via emigrants who carried these “living tradition[s]” within them; these were juxtaposed with traditional songs from Africa. In an essay written for programme notes, Cleverdon justified his use of ballads and songs as “a fruitful source of poetic creativity” in the settler nations to highlight how, by the processes of diffusion, these “developed variously in different climates”; he goes on to assert,

[B]efore the twentieth century, there is relatively little tolerable verse that has any close link with the Empire. But there are plenty of folk-songs and ballads to draw upon; and these could be leavened by occasional descriptive passages in prose, from letters, journals, dialogues, orations etc. ¹³

Audiences were thus treated to authentic folk forms “reflecting” the “early development of the countries of the commonwealth”, or poetry performed to music and drumming which made them seem traditional folk forms rather than poetry. ¹⁴ In structuring the Festival theme of contrasts as he did, and suggesting hierarchical and temporized parallels between these forms and Britain at a later stage of development, he effected exactly what Johannes Fabian (1983) has called a “denial of coevalness”, in which nations and cultures are not seen as temporally commensurate. Akin to the folk arts and dances, Cleverdon’s structure works at best to conceptually imagine the Commonwealth as having little direct consequence for postwar Britain, and at worst of belonging to somewhere and someone else.

In relation to India and the Far East, following the advice of Francis Watson who devised this section, Cleverdon offered his audiences “the enchantment of India”, by which was meant “the stimulus which the East has given to the English poetic imagination”, and its influence in turn on Indian poetry. Watson’s letter to Cleverdon early in 1965 shows that the Orientalist agenda for this section was really his; on the subject of cross-fertilization, Watson’s responses indicate a flippancy which perhaps reveals much about his response to modern Anglophone poetry in India: “If we are to adapt Indian contributions to the pattern, should we try to choose the most English examples […] There are some, by happy exiles such as Manmohan Ghose in the last century […] or Zulfiqar Ghose, in a different way today. This would revolve around the Indian use of English verbiage and prosody for Hindu exercises, both good and less good (‘Matthew Arnold in a sari’)”. ¹⁵ Indian voices were disproportionately outweighed by Orientalist voices, forming only one section out of an evening of seven sections on the 24th of September 1965.

A range of contemporary poetry including work by Earle Birney, Lenrie Peters, Fleur Adcock, C.K. Stead, Vivian Virtue, John Figueroa, Louise Bennett, Derek Walcott, Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo, and Dom Moraes was included in the second week’s programme, “Commonwealth Poetry today”, with specific subsections on Canada, Caribbean, Africa, South and South East Asia, Australia, and New Zealand selected and presented by well-known writers from these regions, for example, George Lamming for the West Indies or C.K. Stead for New Zealand. In the main, poets were labelled by their geographic affiliations except when the title of the session made the reference of such ties redundant. British poets (including Rudyard Kipling) had a much more substantive presence. Internal memos indicate that the organizers were mindful of the contemporary political climate of decolonization but sought to minimize it. Cleverdon suggested that the commissioned poems be “presented in a historical context”; poetry selected might be “exempt from political pressures” as organizers chose material “in accordance with its poetic and historical significance”. ¹⁶ In general, verse selection was to be guided by the poet’s appreciation of landscape or “the way of life of their fellow-men”. ¹⁷ The overall effect was to turn the poetry festival into a celebration of geographical and cultural diversity with little concern for the history of colonial power that made for such a multitudinous gathering. Suhr-Sytsma makes a similar point in relation to Patric Dickinson’s Third Programme radio broadcast of the commissioned verse from the Festival, “Some Commonwealth Poets”. In this programme, the variations and vernacularizations of English in Commonwealth poetry celebrated but also “euphemized away” as “the colonial imposition of English” is “glossed over”. (Suhr-Sytsma, 2012).

Commonwealth at home?

The Commonwealth Festival came in the wake of the Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962 and the White Paper on immigration from the Commonwealth in July of 1965 tightening the 1962 Act. In August of the same year, “C” entry vouchers were abolished. Migrants who had not already secured a job prior to entering Britain or who did not possess specialist skills would not be given permission to enter the country (Hansen, 2000: 110). These new immigration laws were widely seen to racialize immigration from the new Commonwealth, denying British accountability for her colonial legacy. In this decade such an anti-immigration stance was to culminate in the Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1968, legislation that sought to exclude any migrant who did not have a British (or British born) parent or a grandparent. In this closing section of the paper, I want briefly to examine responses from Walcott and Carter who were sensitive to the geo-political tropic deployment of proximity and distance, home and abroad, family and strangers, in the rhetoric surrounding the Commonwealth in 1965. The fact that both writers were Caribbean made their interventions all the more necessary; Caribbean migration was, after all, an especial source of anxiety in Britain throughout the sixties.

Walcott met with Sir Ian whom he described as a “cool, modest, articulate Englishman”, on his tour in the West Indies and reported without much further comment on the aims and hopes of the Festival in his column for the local Trinidad Guardian (1964). He was commissioned to write a poem and to read from his work. Although the commissioned poem was not completed in time for the Festival, Walcott contributed a poem, an autobiographic essay, and an introduction to an edited selection of Caribbean poetry for the London Magazine special September issue on Commonwealth literature. However, with the publication of the 1965 White Paper on Immigration from the Commonwealth, he wrote of having to decline his invitation. Walcott’s columns on the 22nd of August and the 29th of September argued that the recent immigration legislation amounted to a “migrant ban” and made a nonsense of Britain’s alleged goodwill towards the Commonwealth that was paraded as the Festival’s raison d’etre. Walcott wrote pointedly to ironize what the Festival sought to accomplish in the context of immigration:

Their [Britain’s] belief in the preservation of the Commonwealth is perhaps even stronger now than ours. Their roles will be uncomfortable. They must act as hosts to guests whom their country does not wish to remain long. The homilies about brotherhood and family will sound very hollow, but they should give some comfort to the perpetrators of the Act. (1965a: 11)

Walcott also pointed out that the “attachment” of West Indians to British culture and institutions was misplaced when the mother country so obviously wanted it to be “over”. In a sharp satire published some weeks later and, crucially, written in the patois to signal his strategic allegiance with ordinary people of the Caribbean, Walcott drove home his point regarding Britain’s disavowal of her relationship with “dok” people:

Well., Mama, I thought our contribution was obvious that the big emphasis was on our multiracial variety and our great affection, and, if you want, mother, gratitude for the sweet democratic principles we still trying down here, not to mention all them kind of things like potry [sic], painting and so on.

Ent it was you when we was round by your knees Mooma, who tell us Art ent have no barriers? Your child getting really confuse. (1965b: 5)

Walcott’s use of the same widespread filial metaphors used to articulate the special relationship between Britain and the Caribbean was meant to remind the former of its colonial relationship. As Bill Schwarz reminds us, West Indians were “juridically British, regarded themselves as British” and were “unusually close” to aspects of British culture and institutions (Schwarz, 2003: 267). Yet the immigration legislation of the sixties was to sunder those imaginative and political connections, and force a rethink.

Martin Carter’s very short evocative essay, “Sambo at large”, written in 1965 but unpublished, also reads the Festival’s mission in the context of recent immigration legislation. Carter describes his journey to the Commonwealth Poetry Festival in Cardiff from a London imagined as “meaningless” and “remorseless” as the unreal city of The Waste Land (Carter, 2006: 227). In this “unlaughing” urbanscape, the narrator sees the “black and the not so black voluntary exiles” amongst “chattering mouths”, “gaunt and overcoated European[s]”; the former, “pallid, down-at-heel” and “unhappy”, are easily the “most depressing sight”. These men have tried to assimilate in order to make London into a home but find themselves estranged, alienated, made friendless in the “cold and alien wind”. Carter spots a lone “West Indian or African” who could have been a “student or immigrant” near a pub “just off Victoria Station”, “isolated and silent, sitting like a statue, like a fugitive from the historical department of the British Museum”. His choice of similes is apt for the explicit disavowals in the Festival discourse set black citizens apart and rewrote colonial history not as the story of enforced familiarity but as a relic from some ancient and forgotten past occurring somewhere else. Carter’s essay makes repeated allusions to the black people he meets or reads about on his journey during the Festival: “Gavor Ullah” the young Pakistani man murdered in London, the black Jamaican porter whom he asks directions of, as well as the lone black man at the pub near Victoria station. All too aware of a pernicious response to “ingratiate […] and win a tap on the shoulder” that is born out of a colonial legacy, Carter identifies with the black people he meets even as he is identified by others outside the confines of the Festival as just “another sambo at large” (Carter, 2006: 229). Significantly, the essay works hard to see both colonials as coeval and caught up in a shared history. Carter’s arrival at the Cardiff hotel where he would soon be feted as Caribbean intellectual, poet, and cultural ambassador becomes the occasion for the final very wry aside; the look of the receptionist, akin to “something closely resembling terror”, is directed at the entire motley crew of cultural and counter-cultural types that will be represented at the Festival: “Africans, Ceylonese, a Malayan, an Indian”, Australian, an American “beat” as well as “long-haired British ‘hipsters’” (Carter, 2006: 229).

The Commonwealth Arts Festival of 1965 offers a fertile terrain to examine how that special relationship between Britain and the Commonwealth nations was articulated; its manipulations of metaphors of distance and proximity, home and abroad, allow one to examine how those strategic disavowals of colonialism in the postwar period were effected, occurring as they did at a time when Britain was disinvesting in the Commonwealth, turning towards Europe and also forging another special relationship with the US. The Arts Festival did address emigration by way of musical theatre, Jack of Spades, staged in Liverpool; however, the vast majority of the events did not. While I would not want to see the politics and history of the Commonwealth relations read simply as a very British affair, nor would I wish to argue that the Commonwealth and its diasporian communities are one and the same, I think that the Arts Festival can be read in the context of a domestic politics about Commonwealth immigration in a trajectory implicating Britain and Empire that puts both in the same frame and in a mutually informed history. Taking issue with what Stuart Ward has characterized as the “minimal impact” thesis that the end of Empire has “scarcely any impact at all on postwar British society” (Ward, 2001: 2), Hall and Rose have argued eloquently for how everyday practices and social spaces produce and manage our sense of who might be imagined to belong to or remain outside of the national polity. In the context of the discoursing on Empire, Hall and Rose assert, even when “home” might be part of Empire, it was relegated to a “place set apart from it in spite of Britain’s role within it”, thus allowing the continued portrayal of Britain as “an ‘island nation’ mostly untroubled by its imperial project” (2007: 20–1). In same vein, Ashley Dawson has characterized the 1948 Nationality Act as a piece of legislation that revealed the “global apartheid” that was empire; even as it established commonality across the British Empire, “imperial subjects were to be formally equal but geographically separate” (2007: 10). The story of the 1965 Arts Festival shows very similar geo-political discursive strategies at work; its staging on British soil brought such conflicts and contestations to the surface. Reading the representation of the influx of postwar immigrants from the new Commonwealth alongside the representation of festival performers as cultural ambassadors from different times and distant locations enables us to see a strategic disavowal at work in the collision of stories. For despite the representation of geographical and temporal distance, the Commonwealth was not out there but within the British Isles; this shared history was made all too real by the presence of the Commonwealth at home. In my assessment of some of the tropes employed to address the Commonwealth Festival, the all too easy welcome extended to those Commonwealth cultural ambassadors who were transitory cannot be divorced from the hostility toward those who had arrived to settle in Britain.

As the 78-strong delegation from Trinidad and Tobago departed for the Commonwealth Arts Festival in September of 1965, Mr F.O. Darvall, the Director of the British Information Services, wrote to Mr Hughes of the Commonwealth Relations Office about the adverse publicity in Trinidad regarding the recent anti-immigration laws and also about Eric Roach and Derek Walcott’s decision not to attend the Poetry Festival. In the closing paragraph of his letter, Darvall wrote that he was approached by one of the delegates enquiring about the possibility of staying on and finding a job in Britain. Darvall remarked that he explained patiently to the artist that his “entry certificate” only entitled him to stay for a limited period in order to perform at the Festival, and that he must return to Trinidad once the Festival ended. In his concluding paragraph, Darvall added a general cautionary observation:

I fear that there may be others in the Trinidad delegation who may be tempted to look around whilst in Britain for jobs there, and trust very much that if they do this they will conform to the laws and regulations and not seek to take advantage of their temporary admission for the purpose of the Commonwealth Arts Festival. ¹⁸

The close-ups of black faces evident in the Pathé camerawork, which metonymically linked the dark strangers performing and those black Londoners spectating, indicate similar anxieties about the Commonwealth at the British Empire’s demise.