1903 Henry Harvey Wood’s remarkable career probably couldn’t happen today. It took easier access to university employment, a more relaxed approach to academic specialism, plus a world war, to bring his talents into full play. Born on this day in Edinburgh, Harvey Wood sailed through the Royal High School and the Edinburgh College of Art, where he won a prize for his draughtsmanship, before entering Edinburgh University to study English literature. Following more prizes and a first-class honours degree, he joined the faculty as a lecturer. In those more innocent times his promise was enough; no publications, not even a research degree were required.
At the outset of the Second World War he tried to enlist, but was turned down on medical grounds. Still wishing to serve, he joined the British Council, which was looking to set up an Edinburgh branch. In the national emergency, cultural diplomacy was needed at home more than abroad, as thousands of Allied servicemen – Americans, Poles, Czechs and Norwegians – not to mention refugees from the various theatres of war, fetched up in Scotland. Wood catered for them all, with activities ranging from basic English classes to readings and performances given by poets, musicians and artists brought to Edinburgh, and culminating in a series of exhibitions of ‘The Art of our Allies’ in the National Gallery of Scotland.
When he heard that the opera impresario Rudolph Bing, a refugee from Nazi Germany, was thinking of setting up a music festival in Britain, Harvey Wood persuaded him that Edinburgh had the resident audience and local backing to underpin the event. When politicians and bureaucrats dragged their feet, Wood’s tact, experience and persistent lobbying carried the scheme through, and in August 1947 the first Edinburgh International Festival was launched. From the start, Wood intended that it be a festival of the written and spoken word as well as music, and one of his first projects was to revive the mid-Scots morality play, Ane Pleasant Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis (1540), an earthy survey of Edinburgh society, politics and the law.
Also present from the beginning was what later came to be called the ‘Fringe’. While the official festival kept to formal theatre and opera, dance and concert music – whether classical or modern – the fringe went in for small, often experimental theatrical productions (including musicals), satire and stand-up comedy, dance and children’s shows. Then as now, performance in the official festival was by invitation only, whereas the Fringe is open to anyone who pays the exhibition fee.
From Harvey Wood’s modest start, the Edinburgh Festival has now grown into the largest arts festival in the world, with funding (in 2009) approaching £10 million. As an index of its range of support, half that sum is raised by ticket sales, sponsorship and donations, and half by grants from central government and other public-sector grants.