1988 In Britain, literary festivals tended, until the late 20th century, to be both local and parochial – the kinds of things that took place in church halls. By the turn of the century, they had become big business, with between 150 and 200 major events attracting tens of thousands of visitors, commercial sponsorship, and strong interest from the book trade.
The Cheltenham Literary Festival began, in a small way, in 1949, as the offshoot of a longer-running (since 1926) arts festival. It claims to be the ‘longest running festival of its kind’ in the world. Cheltenham, a favoured spa resort, has a proud literary heritage (there are plaques to the two laureates, Tennyson and Cecil Day-Lewis, and other notables visible on the town’s fine 18th-century architecture).
Hay-on-Wye (Y Gelli Gandryll) is a much less obvious site for a major literary festival. The village is perched, uneasily, on the English–Welsh border, a universe away from the London literary world. Hay lost its railway connection in 1963, dooming it to Brigadoon status. The population is under 2,000.
Nonetheless, in the early 1970s, Hay became the world’s first ‘book town’. This was largely the initiative of the bibliophile Richard Booth, who had retired to Hay in 1961 to open a second-hand bookshop – more in the nature of a warehouse, as it turned out. Booth’s store was advertised as the largest of its kind anywhere, and attracted a stream of book-lovers to Hay. Booth’s motto was: ‘You buy books from all over the world and your customers come from all over the world.’ Some 40 other bookshops (one for every 30-odd residents) sprang up to cater for these customers.
On 1 April 1977, Booth declared Hay an ‘independent kingdom’ and appointed himself its monarch. As intended, the stunt attracted huge publicity. In 1988 two locals, Norman Florence and his son Peter Florence, launched Hay’s literary festival. They did so with the £23,000 winnings that Norman had picked up playing poker.
The first Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival ran from 28–31 May. There were 35 events. Around 1,200 people (many village people) attended. Highlights were a one-man show on Wilfred Owen by Peter Florence (then an actor) and readings by Carol Ann Duffy and Arnold Wesker. Payments at Hay, for all but stellar performers, have traditionally been in kind – usually wine, donated by some well-intentioned local merchant.
The essence of the festival from the beginning was to bring writers and their public together. Over the years, Peter Florence took over as director. Attendance had swelled to an estimated 80,000 (with 120,000 ticket sales) by the 20th anniversary festival in 2007.
It had, by this point, become a powerful engine to sell books as much as to cultivate the intimacies of literary community. At the 2007 event, Bill Clinton (no passed-on bottle of plonk for him, but a reputed £100,000) called the Hay Festival a ‘Woodstock for the mind’. He was there, tramping through the mud, to promote his (allegedly ghosted) autobiography.
Margaret Drabble – who had been one of the pioneer visitors in 1988 – complained to one of the festival sponsors, the Independent newspaper, vowing that 2007 would be her ‘last Hay’:
It’s a pity. The whole thing has become a celebrity festival, not an author’s festival. Of course there are some very fine writers there this year. But the whole thing of festivals has become about book sales and marketing, nothing to do with meeting readers. They argue that if they’re selling your book then you don’t get a fee. But I like to get a fee unless I choose to be a patron or a friend which I am to one or two small festivals. I don’t want £100K and I don’t see why Bill Clinton did, and he’s not an author.
Back to the church hall, in other words.