Skylon: British Maypole for a Brave New World?

I haven’t thought about the Skylon for decades. That is until a picture postcard depicting the Sussex village of my infancy fell from a stack of books I was on the point of clearing from the loft.

The photo depicts infant maypole dancers on the village green and I suddenly remembered the last time I too danced there with ribbons on my shoes: the Festival of Britain, May 1951.

Of course, many now will have forgotten the austere centre piece and symbol of this Centennial Festival: the Constructivist ‘floating’ column that was raised on cables at its base nearly 15 metres (50 feet) from the ground, with its highest point nearly 90 metres (300 feet) high. With its cladding of aluminium louvres, its frame was lit from within at night, a towering shaft of light reflected in the Thames between Westminster Bridge and Hungerford Bridge on London’s South Bank. 

Symbol of Peace or Passivism?

Was it due to the Skylon’s retaining cables – held taut and radiating from this festive totem – that the ‘maypole’ metaphor at once sprang to mind or, when viewed at night, did its pillar of light denote the birth of a new Zion from which a battle-scarred nation would re-proclaim her Pax Brittanica?

No. This insight of mine has a different animus so blindingly obvious that I can only assume that the glare of its truth must have struck me blind. Until now.

Consider this:  

May 1st 1707. The Act of Union came into effect, joining the kingdoms of England and Scotland and the principality of Wales to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain.

May 1st 1851. The Great Exhibition is launched in London as an imperial celebration of modern industrial technology and design, under the patronage of Prince Albert, consort of Queen Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and Empress of the British Empire.

May 1st 1951. Under a Labour government, the Festival of Britain opens on the centenary of the Great Exhibition of 1851, and opens on a date recognised since 1891 as  International Workers’ Day, also known as Labour Day in most countries . . . and celebrated by all of them as May Day.

How ironic, then, that the propagandistic ethos that underpinned Soviet Constructivism – the Constructivist Movement, after all, was conceived as an extension of Russian Futurism to ideologically promote communist social purpose – would be seen to support the short-lived legacy of a socialist government about to topple, because the dismantling of the Skylon was swiftly to follow the election in 1951 of a Conservative and Unionist government with Winston Churchill as Prime Minister, the prophet of the Cold War and Coiner-of-the-Phrase, ‘The Iron Curtain’.

As it was, the Skylon was demolished on the orders of  Churchill, who saw this Futurist spire as a symbol of the previous Labour Government’s vision of a new socialist Britain. It would be an understatement to declare here he had an axe to grind.

Unforgotten: the Virtue of Bearing a Grudge

The very configuration of the Skylon must have been a personal affront to Churchill. In the heart of London, the target of V-2 rockets that – barely five years earlier – had killed and maimed over 9,000 Londoners, was erected a mockery of a ballistic missile, since surely the Skylon was a sly counter-cultural spoof of an intercontinental rocket with nose-cones fore and aft, held in equipoise with no visible means of support nor visible thrust chamber for lift-off. In short, a transfigured V-2 as token of World Peace.

 

In the 1950s, the Soviet R-7 long-range
intercontinental ballistic missile research was derived
from captured German missiles such as the V-2.

 

Let us remember the words of Churchill from May 1936: ‘The use of recriminating about the past is to enforce effective action at the present.’  These words were prominently quoted as the epigraph to Guilty Men (1940), the notorious exposé of Britain’s ineffectual rearmament policies and attempted appeasement of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the policies of ‘Ostrichism’ the guilt for which the book laid in greater part at the door of Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald.

 

While we, the British in the 1930s had succumbed to ‘Ostrichism, Hitler’s Germany had its own Operation Österreich in pursuit of a martial dream to see the annexation of an Eastern Realm

Of course, ambiguities abound: Michael Foot, Labour Party leader in the early 1980s, was co-author – under a pseudonym, Cato – of this polemic against his own party’s inaction in the face of Hitler’s transformation of ‘all Germany into one gigantic arsenal’ while Great Britain dozed. Michael Foot would later become (in 1957) a founder member of CND, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

 

My grandfather’s copy of Guilty Men (1940) with its epigraph
a quotation from Churchill, 1936. (The flyleaf is dated
August 21st 1940, ‘His Book’, and records with signatures
that the book had been passed for reading to four friends.)

 

In the echo chamber of history, last March (2021), the UK’s Five-Year Defence Review announced that Britain’s army, navy and air force would all be cut back, with the size of the Army set to be its smallest since 1714 .

 

So, are we any clearer in choosing the truest defensive positions when today, from each side of the Iron Curtain, ideologies are in disarray and corruption and mendacity eat away at the certainties of rival world powers?

A New Ostrichism?

Only this week (March 2022), political scientist Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History and the Last Man (1992) stated on a British radio newscast: ‘I’ve believed right from the beginning there is no automatic mechanism that produces good stable prosperous democracy . . .’

 

September 11th Memorial Tribute in
Light, New York City. (Anthony Quintano.)

 

Well, never mind Liberal Democracy, equally, it appears, the Constructivists failed to leave a convincing memorial to the Great Illusion of a Workers’ Utopia they envisioned in their futurist blueprints of the 1920s. Somehow, unless we’re kidding ourselves as victims of a New Ostrichism, one hundred years later we must prepare for our tenuous grasp on peace and freedom to be fittingly represented by Conceptual Art, a despairing evanescence reflective of the moral relativity that recognises only the Great Uncertainty stretched out before us and its product, Solipsistic Materialism.

The Skylon . . . Forgotten, Dust-coated and Dumped in the Yard.

On May 1st 1951 there was erected on our village green not only a maypole but also a marvellous Skylon to call our own (on a somewhat reduced scale) fashioned from a telegraph pole, reshaped and coated in shiny metallic paint. A week later our Skylon reappeared, cast aside in the local coal yard. There it remained for some years, half-buried in one of the loading bays, gathering dust.
 

Now nothing remains of that colossal wreck but my memory of it and my own remorse.

 

Our local coal merchant was named Scutt. A scut is the hindmost extremity of a frightened rabbit seen when it runs away. 

 

Halcyon days. Village maypole 1934.
(Francis Poirier)

Peace . . .  a Polemical Rose.

Nor, in our brooding on imponderables, should we forget the polemical rose. A hybrid cultivar bred in Vichy France, the celebrated ‘Peace Rose’ has all the makings of a pathetic fallacy forestalled.

 

The defining features of this ephemeral symbol? Rather rhetorically overblown and slightly flushed at the edges. 

 

The polemical Peace Rose. ‘Rather rhetorically
overblown and slightly flushed at the edges.’

 

Field Marshal Alan Brooke – the British Army’s Inspector of Artillery in the mid-1930s and Chief of the Imperial General Staff during WW2 – was invited to have this symbol named after him. An officer no stranger to illusions that had been early bred out of him, he politely declined this supposed honour.

 

Skylon . . .  threatening to export the nationalisation of assets overseas?

‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’, or other correspondents of that ilk on the letters pages of our national newspapers, blamed the Skylon for a contagion of hostile nationalisation infecting Britain’s former overseas assets . . . in particular, it seems, the nationalisation of the BP controlled Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) and the expulsion of Western companies from oil refineries in the city of Abadan, Iran. See this news item in the Croydon Advertiser, circa 1951:

The Abadan crisis was caused by the Festival of Britain, claimed Sir Herbert Williams, Conservative candidate for Croydon East. (This England 1952, published by The New Statesman and Nation, 1952.)