Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Number 2 | Page 18

was not all the Festival was committed to. Tourism served as a driving force
in the festival’s early planning stages. The British Travel Association, the
travel agency Thomas Cook, and the newly created Scottish Tourist Board
were all involved. Indeed, in the lead-up to the first Festival, a writer for a
local newspaper remarked of Edinburgh: “With no cultural aces of her own
to strengthen her hand, she has scooped the pool—become a No. � centre
in a paying commercial line, the commerce of culture” (Evening Dispatch
����). There was a vital economic aspect to the venture; culture was viewed
as a potentially important means of attracting tourists and boosting Britain’s
economy.
Organizers felt that an international festival like that put on in Edinburgh
was sure to attract tourists and, in doing so, make an important contribution
to developing Britain as an international tourist destination.
Furthermore, the arts were positioned as an important ingredient in the
new post-war world as part of the broader welfare state that sought to
provide a better quality of life for the population. In the optimistic flush
of the immediate post-Second World War period, the British Government
had begun to take significant financial responsibility for the arts for the first
time in history. The Arts Council of Great Britain, a body subsidized by the
British Government to provide state support for the arts (albeit at “arm’s
length”), was established in ���� and soon became an important source of
funding for the Edinburgh International Festival.
The Festival also reflected another important development in post-war
Britain—the new alliance between the church and the arts. It has been
argued (Calder ����) that the war had helped to undermine the role of
religion and traditional Christian morality in people’s lives. Each year the
Festival began with a sermon in St. Giles, the “mother kirk” of Scottish
Presbyterianism. The sermons preached each year were different, but
the message was essentially the same: that art was a means of healing the
wounds of war and that the Edinburgh Festival represented a chance for
international visitors to “forget for a while the things that divide them, and to
breathe together a tranquil atmosphere of spiritual unity” (Submission ����).
This last statement was made in a submission on behalf of the Edinburgh
Festival Society for the Nobel Peace Prize in January ����, made on the
basis that it was “a constructive effort on behalf of European civilisation”
(Submission ����). The Festival demonstrated that it was a venture with at
its heart Matthew Arnold’s conception of the role of culture as “a pursuit of
our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which
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