| Activity | The Arts Enquiry was initiated by Arts administrator Christopher Martin, and sponsored by the Dartington Hall Trustees. It arose out of the work that was being done for the Nuffield College Social Reconstruction Survey, for the Devon County Committee for Music and Drama, and for CEMA. In starting the Arts Enquiry, Martin was also considering the future of the Dartington Arts Department, and the part it should play during and after the World War II.
Martin saw the need to collect and assess accurate information about contemporary conditions existing in the arts, in order to consider the place of the arts in a post-war society. Accordingly, an Arts Enquiry Committee was established by the Trustees, holding its first meeting on 6 Nov 1941. Committee members included F A S Gwatkin (Chair), A P Cox (Secretary), with Miss M C Glasgow (CEMA), G D H Cole (Nuffield College), Mrs M A Hamilton (Reconstruction Secretariat), A D K (David) Owen (Political and Economic Planning), Ifor Williams (British Council), Dorothy Elmhirst (Dartington Hall Trustees), J Wilkie (Carnegie Trust), E W White (National Council of Social Service), and Dr Julian Huxley, although they sat in a private capacity rather than an offical one. The Enquiry conducted surveys and visited theatres, galleries and museums. Major arts subjects included the visual arts, industrial design, music, and drama. Factual film was added later.
The main conclusion the Enquiry came to was that a permanent Arts Council should be set up within Britain and it also recommended that a permanent Design Council be established. The scope and depth of the enquiry itself however, alongside the loss of Christopher Martin, delayed the printing of each of the individual reports, so that by the time the final report was published in 1945, the recommendation was out of date as the Arts Council and the Council of Industrial Design had already been created. |