Reassessing the British Empire Exhibition

In recent decades, an ‘imperial turn’ in modern British history has seen a wholescale reappraisal of the role of imperial relationships and rhetoric in the fashioning of modern British national character and sense of citizenship. This analysis initially concentrated on the ‘high imperialism’ of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. Although the First World War has often been seen as the turning point in the failure of imperialism as an ‘intellectual construct’, as early as 1986 John MacKenzie pointed towards the retention in the 1920s and 1930s of ‘a world view embracing unique imperial status, cultural and racial superiority, and a common ground of national conceit on which most could agree … [a] generalised imperial vision rather than any sophisticated concept of Empire’.Footnote ³ This vision, MacKenzie noted, went beyond party-political differences, with the Labour Party developing an ‘equivocal approach to Empire’ as they rose in political stature.Footnote ⁴ It is only in the last 15 years or so, however, that political histories of the period have begun to combine analysis of domestic and imperial issues as a matter of course. This is partly due to a broadening of what is considered the political field, with party histories now situated within a larger network of institutions and in relation to wider themes rather than being studied in isolation.Footnote ⁵ An upsurge in interest in associational cultures has led to work that recognizes how different identities – class, gender, local, national, racial and imperial, among others – were negotiated within discourses of citizenship or ‘civic-mindedness’.Footnote ⁶

Analysis of the British Empire Exhibition needs to be placed within this wider historiographical context. The BEE, as Sarah Britton rightly notes, was ‘the biggest, most popular, lavish and expensive imperial exhibition ever staged in Britain’, costing around £20 million, a massive sum for the time.Footnote ⁷ First conceived around 1913, it was later given impetus by concerns that the imperial citizen both ‘home’ and ‘abroad’ needed reminding of the economic and cultural ‘benefits’ of being part of the Empire after the First World War. Its 300 acres were crammed with spectacular pavilions and displays representing every British dominion, colony, dependency and mandate, bar two.Footnote ⁸ Alongside these representations were major displays of British industry and innovation, with palaces of industry, engineering and the arts. The Empire Stadium (later known as Wembley Stadium) was built for the occasion and hosted mass historical pageants as well as popular sporting events. While history played a central role in the exhibitions, the BEE also showcased the latest in modern advertising techniques. The site was littered with concessions and mascots, and was catered for by an extensive network of restaurants run by Lyons.Footnote ⁹ Attracting around 27 million visitors over two summer seasons in 1924 and 1925, the BEE was a landmark event in promoting a new phase of colonial enterprise and in constructing both imperial and national identities.

Yet, despite its size and popularity, many commentators quickly relegated the BEE to being little more than an extremely expensive (and unprofitable) theme park. In Robert Graves’ and Alan Hodge’s influential contemporary history The Long Week-End, for instance, despite a mention that the Empire Pageant ‘sometimes drew 25,000 people at a time’, the authors highlighted the king’s laughter at a tiny jar of Colman’s Mustard in the Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House and ‘all the latest American Luna Park thrills’.Footnote ¹⁰ This focus on amusement has persisted in the historiography, but with different emphases placed on its significance. For John MacKenzie, the idea that the Exhibition was ‘treated [as] no more than a fun-fair by the general populace’ was the product of the derision of elite intellectuals and satirists.Footnote ¹¹ For MacKenzie, it is precisely the Exhibition’s permeation of popular culture that makes it worthy of note: ‘More significant than any of the intellectual and satirical strictures on Wembley is the fact that it was featured, admiringly, in almost every children’s annual for 1924 and the weekly comics.’Footnote ¹² Bernard Porter, by contrast, suggests that this material is evidence of little more than the Exhibition having been ‘a good day out’ and that, while working-class visitors may have consumed the imperial propaganda that accompanied the rides, it did not follow that it had any lasting impact upon them.Footnote ¹³ These arguments on the impact of the BEE are of a piece with their wider positions on the depth of enthusiasm for imperialism on the part of the general British public. The argument is essentially irreconcilable: for MacKenzie the ubiquity of imperial ideology in ephemeral popular culture is a sign of its strength, for Porter its lack of depth.

However, as Priya Satia has proposed, ‘Porter is essentially arguing against a straw man; few historians on the other side of the debate would claim that press coverage alone indicates total cultural enthralment to empire.’Footnote ¹⁴ Taking Satia’s point further, instead of how far the reaction to the British Empire Exhibition showed deep emotional engagement with imperial ideology on the part of the British public, the question becomes a more subtle one of how and when it became meaningful, to whom and for what purposes. This approach to the BEE is typified by the important work of Sarah Britton who claims that the exhibition was a site of contestation where different groups, including the British government, dominion and colonial representatives and opposition movements, struggled for position in the aftermath of the First World War. Britton claims that ‘[u]nderlying the exhibition was a basic incongruity between the forces of change on one hand and the desire for continuity on the other’.Footnote ¹⁵ It matters less whether the BEE was a ‘success’, then, and more what it represented to those who interacted with it, from the high commissioner of Australia to the West African student protesting against the ‘Native Village’ or even the sender or recipient of the picture postcard who may not even have visited the Exhibition themselves.

This approach has led to more recent diverse academic interest in the BEE. It has focused largely on the politics of display in the various pavilions of dominions, colonies, dependent territories and protectorates at a time of rising national consciousness and fragile relations between metropole and colony, as well as between colonial elites and their wider constituencies.Footnote ¹⁶ The British exhibits and their design have also been seen ‘as a unique window into the “New Imperialism”’, to use Jiyi Ryu’s phrase.Footnote ¹⁷ Ryu’s close reading of the extraordinary Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House, designed for the exhibition by Edward Lutyens, reveals the ambiguous relationship between metropole and colony – a quintessential English country house filled with objects of Empire – in microcosm.Footnote ¹⁸ Recent work by architectural historian Neal Shashore also makes convincing claims for the role of the great palaces of industry and engineering in a ‘paradigmic’ interwar shift in the culture of architectural practice and its relationship to advertising and publicity, as the BEE was the ‘most significant exposition of imperial trade and commerce in the early twentieth century’.Footnote ¹⁹ Thus the BEE has been recognized as a key event where both imperial and national identities intersected with visual culture and the development of industrial design.

In the large and competing range of interests that were represented in the Exhibition, little attention has been given to the display of provincial civic cultures. In comparison to the spectacular imperial pavilions and national palaces of the BEE, the Civic Hall, essentially a rentable exhibition space for British cities and towns for a few weeks at time, was admittedly a relatively modest affair (Figure 1). Yet, at nearly 10,000 square feet with ‘office accommodation for the use of Civic Authorities’, it was intended to portray ‘by means of short exhibitions, the municipal history and enterprise of some of the principal cities of the United Kingdom’.Footnote ²⁰ In the spring and summer of 1924, the exhibitors at the Civic Hall were Bristol, Derby, Hull, Cardiff, Salford and Liverpool.Footnote ²¹ Urban historians Charlotte Wildman and Tom Hulme have referenced these exhibitions as examples of modern civic promotion and pageantry, challenging the notion that there was a decline in urban civic culture in the interwar period.Footnote ²² However, there has been little in-depth analysis of how these exhibitions can be seen as microcosms of local, national and international networks at a time of intense transition in the 1920s.

Figure 1.

‘The Civic Hall, Wembley’. Clipping in Derby Mayor’s notebook: Councillor Fred H. Porter, 1923–1924, Derby Local Studies and Family History Library, BA352, unpaginated. With permission, Derby Local Studies and Family History Library.

Even in the varied list of Civic Hall exhibitors, Derby sticks out as an anomaly: it was the only exhibitor that was not a port (Salford having become so with the opening of the Manchester Ship Canal in 1894).Footnote ²³ On the surface, its prominent place in the schedule, second only to Bristol, appears strange. Yet Derby’s role can be explained by the prominence of and relationships between its political representatives at a crucial time for both national and international balances of power. Derby was indeed ‘quite unique’ in its political prominence in the early 1920s. Andrew Thorpe’s excellent article on J.H. Thomas and the rise of Labour in Derby aside, there is scant academic work on the political, social and cultural history of twentieth-century Derby. This is despite – as its display at the British Empire Exhibition shows – Derby’s parliamentary representatives being deeply embedded in both national and imperial politics, and the town itself being notable for its large, and relatively well-paid, working-class population in the early twentieth century.Footnote ²⁴ Derby is an exemplar of how engaging with local case studies highlights the importance of specific moments, places and personalities in connecting civic, national and global politics.Footnote ²⁵

‘Derby distinction’: common heritage and the politics of continuity

In the 80 years before its display at the BEE, Derby had experienced two major phases of industrial development, best symbolized by the decision of the Midland Railway to make the town its headquarters in the 1840s, Rolls Royce moving its operations there in 1906 and the founding of British Celanese in 1916. Despite the potential draw of large-scale employment in these companies, as Andrew Thorpe has noted, while Derby’s population increased, its growth was stable, with reasonably low mortality rates and ‘unspectacular’ migration levels.Footnote ²⁶ Wages for skilled labourers were high and relationships between trades unions and employers were generally driven by pragmatism rather than ideology, drawing on a tradition of industrial paternalism.Footnote ²⁷ Trade union membership was spread across three different major unions and there was no dominant religious denomination, with ‘ecumenical non-conformity’ the underlying characteristic of Derby Liberalism, which was supplanted by Labour in the early 1900s.Footnote ²⁸ The relative heterogeneity of working-class allegiances, characterized by toleration rather than division, alongside a small middle class led to a solid base of support for Labour reformism and cooperation.

This spirit of cross-class cooperation and shared interest was not new. In many ways, it recalled the earlier response of the landed rural nobility of Derbyshire to the rising urban elite of Derby in the eighteenth century. As Matt Winfield has shown, although Derby was ‘ringed by the estates of nobility’ they maintained influence largely through working with townsmen on issues in which they had a common economic interest.Footnote ²⁹ This created a symbiotic relationship, whereby the urban elite gained status through their association with their ‘social betters’ as they ‘worked with the rural nobility, aped them in some respects and then organically supplanted them’.Footnote ³⁰ As Winfield further demonstrates, ‘the social barriers between the rural nobility, the urban gentry and the middling sorts were permeable’ and meant that even though the nobility were less physically present in the town, they maintained influence as ‘they and the urban gentry and middling sorts still cooperated on issues facing Derby’.Footnote ³¹ As George Revill has also observed, a ‘distinct political culture’ emerged in Derby, best illustrated by the example of the Cavendish family (the Dukes of Devonshire), the Whig noble family who had the most influence in the county town. They maintained it through an alliance with radical liberal industrialists like the Strutt family, with whom they shared the town’s two borough parliamentary seats until the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote ³²

It is therefore not surprising that, as the formal political power of the Cavendish family in the town waned, their place in the alliance with the Liberal elite and middle orders was eventually taken by a reformist Labour Party, who represented a broad-based, unionized, skilled and well-paid ‘labour aristocracy’ of sorts.Footnote ³³ Derby was the second place in Britain to elect a Labour MP in 1900, alongside the election of Keir Hardie at Merthyr Tydfil.Footnote ³⁴ The MP Richard Bell was general secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, the founding of which Derby’s Liberals had been central to. His election was the product of a pact with the Liberals in this two-member constituency and Bell voted with the Liberals in Parliament, resigning the Labour Whip in 1904 and thereafter sitting as a Liberal.Footnote ³⁵ He was replaced as MP by James Henry Thomas (generally known as J.H. Thomas or informally as Jimmy Thomas) in 1910 and a pact with the Liberals to share the seats remained intact until 1914.Footnote ³⁶ Thomas, the assistant general secretary of the National Union of Railwaymen (general secretary from 1917), was a centrist and pragmatic in temperament and was not only willing but eager to work within a broader coalition.

Although now less familiar than many inter-war political figures, J.H. Thomas was one of the Labour Party’s most prominent politicians in the early 1920s. His rise reflected the broader political culture that had emerged in Derby since the late nineteenth century.Footnote ³⁷ Thomas’s willingness to work across political and social divides often attracted criticism from the Left, including in his own party, and his ease within elite social circles was widely remarked upon by contemporaries.Footnote ³⁸ The combination of Thomas’s centrist politics and his exuberant personality made him a figure that a wide spectrum of Derby’s population was peculiarly receptive to. Indeed, Derby’s working classes were also unusual in their strength of deference towards the monarchy and aristocracy, combined with ‘imperial patriotism’, despite having strong unions and the widespread influence of the co-operative movement.Footnote ³⁹ Thomas was able to play up to these influences while remaining a ‘Labour man’, at least until his departure for the National Government in 1931.Footnote ⁴⁰ A cutting of a newspaper photograph of Thomas and his family taking tea in evening dress from the Daily Mail (Figure 2), preserved by Mayor Fred Porter in his scrapbook, illustrates his playfulness in illustrating his rise from railwayman to colonial secretary. Thomas was not ashamed to be associated with the aristocracy: rather he – and his constituents – saw his ability to enter into their spaces as social mobility in action. As colonial secretary in 1924, Thomas embodied the possibility that imperial responsibility could be exercised by representatives of organized labour as well as the traditional governing elites.

Figure 2.

‘The Colonial Secretary at Home’. Clipping in Derby Mayor’s notebook: Councillor Fred H. Porter, 1923–1924, Derby Local Studies and Family History Library, BA352, unpaginated. With permission, Derby Local Studies and Family History Library.

The priorities of the aristocracy themselves had also changed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Derbyshire, although they remained prominent figures locally, their main interests lay elsewhere. Lord George Nathaniel Curzon (later Marquess Curzon of Kedleston) was famously viceroy of India from 1899 to 1905. While the Cavendish family had historically been Whig/Liberal, the 9th Duke of Devonshire Victor Cavendish was a Conservative politician, like Curzon. As well as political interests, Cavendish’s financial interests shifted from overwhelming dependence on Derbyshire assets to overseas stocks and shares.Footnote ⁴¹ Both Cavendish and Curzon were included in Bonar-Law’s cabinet, Cavendish as colonial secretary and Curzon as foreign secretary, representatives of the ‘stubborn persistence of gentry and aristocracy at this higher level’.Footnote ⁴² Their interests were national and international, their local influence now largely lying in their ability to provide clout and connections to Derby, having ceded their direct control over its politics.Footnote ⁴³

Despite how well-known – and generally liked – J.H. Thomas was in Derby across the political spectrum, there was still definite unease from some quarters about Labour governing the nation when they took office in January 1924, especially from business and trade associations.Footnote ⁴⁴ A report on the annual meeting of the Derby Chamber of Trades, which represented independent traders, in the Derby Daily Telegraph on 4 March, was cautiously optimistic, despite suggesting that ‘the possibility of a Labour government had, perhaps, been somewhat of a nightmare for many traders’. However, it continued, ‘the moderation in tone and matter of the speeches of the Prime Minister and members of his Cabinet had been in sharp contrast with their election speeches and addresses … Labour, having been placed in power, was entitled to demonstrate its ability to govern in the best interests of the whole community, and would not meet with merely captious and destructive criticism from traders’.Footnote ⁴⁵ A week or so later Mr C.A. Newton, president of the Derby Chamber of Commerce representing the larger industrial employers, warned of the danger of ‘sly socialism’ being camouflaged within particular Cabinet portfolios. However, there was some optimism to be found in turning to the Empire ‘as the only hope for trade expansion’:

Although J.H. Thomas was not explicitly referred to, as secretary of state of the colonies as well as Derby MP he could arguably both temper the ‘socialistic tendencies’ of the Cabinet and advocate for imperial trade.

Thomas’s experience and demeanour, and his difference from other members of the new government, were constantly reinforced in the pages of the Derby Daily Telegraph, traditionally a Liberal paper. Another report in the same 12 March edition from the Derby Daily Telegraph’s own Westminster correspondent criticized the government’s performance in the House of Commons. It claimed that ‘neither collectively or individually are they impressing anybody with a capacity or even desire to take the business of Parliament as seriously as they should’, disregarding parliamentary routine and failing to answer or ‘mumbling’ in response to questions. There were, however, some notable exceptions including, alongside the prime minister, Derby’s own MP, as a subheading made clear: ‘MR THOMAS AN EXCEPTION’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Thomas was presented as a bulwark of common sense, experience and respectability in contrast to many of his Cabinet colleagues. Immediately below this report, in the same column, was the letter from Mayor Fred H. Porter (also vice-president of the Derby Chamber of Trade) inviting citizens of Derby to see Thomas in action, alongside the Duke of Devonshire, in a public meeting ‘dealing with the British Empire and its possibilities in the future, and particularly the British Empire Exhibition to be opened at Wembley, London, next month’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Both Thomas and the Empire attracted support in Derby beyond political affiliation and – at least partially – across classes.

This cross-party consensus on the topic of Empire was emphasized at the public meeting, on which the Derby Daily Telegraph reported at length under the headline ‘EMPIRE ENTENTE’.Footnote ⁴⁹ After the meeting was opened by the mayor, Cavendish spoke before Thomas, stressing the convergence of their views:

Thomas echoed this language strongly in his speech and stressed the role of imperialism in uniting the ‘British people’ around a ‘belief’:

As Thomas alluded to, although the general topic of the meeting was the British Empire in general, its more specific aim was to drum up interest in the British Empire Exhibition, opening the following month. Although not explicitly referred to, the mayor and senior borough council officials had already been in touch with senior BEE officials with a view to renting the Civic Hall for a two-week period.Footnote ⁵² The local ability to organize around a ‘common heritage’ privileging convergence and co-operation over difference and divergence was crucial to displaying ‘Derby Distinction’ on the national and imperial stage.

‘Our proudest possession’: performing the modern ‘ancient’ town

Uniting around what the citizens of Derby had ‘in common’ was central to the Borough Corporation’s subsequent organization of the display at the Civic Hall from the very beginning of preparations, which took place over a very busy three-month period. Following the mayor and town clerk’s first meeting with BEE officials, the Special Purposes Committee recorded that ‘all three parties’ as well as the Chamber of Commerce and Chamber of Trade would form part of a committee working under the Borough Development Committee.Footnote ⁵³ A meeting of the full council was convened for 24 March and the proposal put forward by William Raynes was carried almost unanimously, save for Councillor Clifford Newbold, an independent Unionist who had stood against Raynes and Thomas in the recent general election and was caricatured for his opposition on this matter.Footnote ⁵⁴ Though there was discussion of ‘difference of opinion on the wisdom of the Derby Town Council’ in the Derby Daily Telegraph over the next few days, most of those canvassed were broadly supportive of the scheme, despite some grumbles about priorities in the face of high rates and housing shortages.Footnote ⁵⁵ Alderman Albert Green, a Conservative who had served as the second Derby MP alongside J.H. Thomas between 1918 and 1922, was presented as ‘one of Derby’s largest ratepayers’. He explained that Newbold’s views were ‘too narrow and selfish’:

This language of mutualism and communalism is striking and Green explained his support for Derby’s participation in the Empire Exhibition as ‘a unique opportunity for the people of Great Britain to acquaint themselves with the possibilities of the Empire, and as a firm believer in Old England. I should be prepared to pay my share of any increased rate that might result from this effort’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Future prosperity seemed to rest on combining the pedigree and confidence of ‘Old England’ with the modern anxiety that it was the ‘the vastness of the Empire on which we will have to depend sooner or later as a manufacturing nation’.Footnote ⁵⁸

The contribution of both ‘Old Derby’ and its modern development to the past, present and future prosperity of ‘Old England’ was visually, physically and haptically asserted in its plans for the Civic Hall.Footnote ⁵⁹ The ordered and gradual emergence of Derby as an urban industrial centre from an ‘ancient’ market town became the narrative around which the visitor’s physical passage through the exhibit was organized. As seen in the plan of the Civic Hall reproduced in Figure 3, the main interior was spilt into a ‘North Hall’ and a ‘South Hall’, with a narrower ‘Central Hall’ connecting the two. By the last week of March 1924, the Borough Development Committee had already decided to organize a chronological walk through the centuries, allowing for the display of both continuity and change. Derby’s gradual, unspectacular and multi-stage economic and urban development was seen as a virtue, especially when compared with the ‘shock cities’ of the North that had seen dramatic expansions related to particular industries and sectors in the nineteenth century and just as dramatic declines in the first decades of the twentieth.Footnote ⁶⁰ Whether based in fact or not, Derby claimed for itself a more grounded and stable history than the other cities and towns exhibiting at the Civic Hall, as reported by the Derby Daily Telegraph:

Figure 3.

‘A Plan of the Civic Hall at Wembley’. Clipping in Derby Mayor’s notebook: Councillor Fred H. Porter, 1923–1924, Derby Local Studies and Family History Library, BA352, unpaginated. With permission, Derby Local Studies and Family History Library.

Figure 3. Long description

The plan is organized around three large rectangular spaces aligned vertically.

* At the top is the North Hall, which contains three vertical rectangular dashed outlines labeled Roof Lights Over.

* In the middle is the Central Hall, a horizontal rectangular space defined by six large black square structural pillars.

* At the bottom is the South Hall, mirroring the North Hall’s dimensions with three vertical rectangular dashed outlines.

To the West (left) of the main halls:

* A vertical Corridor separates the North Hall from a suite of rooms.

* At the top left is the L D Mayor’s Parlour and an Ante R M.

* Below these are a W C, a Lavatory, and two general Rooms.

* At the bottom left corner is the Entrance Hall, which opens out to a vertical Roadway.

To the East (right) of the main halls:

* A large rectangular area is labeled Covered Way, extending from the side of the North Hall.

Structural details include thick black lines for walls, solid black squares for pillars, and double-swing door symbols connecting the Corridor to the North Hall and the Entrance Hall to the Central Hall.

To illustrate Derby’s ‘glorious’ and seemingly unhalting progression, it was decided that the display would be split into the ‘Derby of Yesterday’ in the North Hall and ‘Derby of Today’ in the South Hall. In the Central Hall, a model of an early railway carriage was displayed next to a modern L.M. & S (London, Midland and Scotland Railway) ‘sleeping saloon’, providing both a physical and temporal connection between ‘yesterday’ and ‘today’.Footnote ⁶²

Both in its overall design and individual elements, Derby’s concept for the Civic Hall closely resembled the historical pageants that were so popular in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. As recent work has shown, this continued to be so throughout the interwar period.Footnote ⁶³ As Paul Readman has suggested, while the historical nature of these pageants was distinctly modern, they ‘gloried in the history or traditions of a particular town or city … the civic narratives to which they proudly gave voice were intimately connected to a grander nationalist narrative, and deliberately so’.Footnote ⁶⁴ This can be seen in the mural or ‘frieze’ of scenes from Derby’s history on the walls, painted by its most celebrated artist of the time, Ernest Townsend, alongside Mr W.H. Stevens and students from the Derby School of Art (Figure 4). From its foundation by the Romans as Derventio and the survival of the community through the ‘dark plague’, these scenes followed a loose chronology. They combined views of the town at various stages of development, copied from paintings in the corporation art gallery, key industrial sites and depictions of events where Derby’s local history was intertwined with and pivotal to the wider defence of the nation.Footnote ⁶⁵ This is particularly obvious in the panels depicting ‘Ethelfleda and her Saxon Army driving the Danes out of Derby early in the 10th century’ and ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie retreating from Derby in 1745’. These scenes suggest a form of English, rather than British, nationalism, and the chronology of the frieze, ending in the mid-eighteenth century, echoes Readman’s observation that ‘few pageants dealt with British history proper’, stopping short of 1801.Footnote ⁶⁶ Moreover, the frieze concentrated on the unity of the people of Derby and their ability to repel threats from outside, whether Jacobites, diseases or Danes. There was no room in this pageant of ‘progress’ for periods of class division, such as the protests against the sale and enclosure of Nun’s Green Common in 1768 and 1791, about which hundreds of ballads and pamphlets were written, or the activities of the Derbyshire Luddites, the Pentrich Uprising of 1817 or the Silk Mill Lockout of 1833–4, a key landmark in early trades union history.Footnote ⁶⁷ The role of this history was to construct a selective ‘common heritage’ rather than a contentious one.

Figure 4.

Ethel Crowther’s cuttings interleaved into Borough Development Committee, ‘Derby: Its Industries & Commerce’, 20–1, Derby Local Studies and Family History Library. With permission, Derby Local Studies and Family History Library.

Figure 4. Long description

The clipping is organized as follows.

* Header: The top text reads PICTORIAL HISTORY OF DERBY AT THE CIVIC HALL, WEMBLEY.

* Top Panel: A wide panoramic landscape titled 1 A PICTURE OF OLD DERBY showing a riverfront with a bridge and church spires in the distance.

* Second Row: Two panels. On the left, 2 THE ROMAN CAMP OF DERVENTIO, LITTLE CHESTER depicts a man by a boat. On the right, 3 THE HEADLESS CROSS shows figures and a horse near a stone monument.

* Third Row: Two panels. On the left, 4 ETHELFLEDA AND HER SAXON ARMY shows soldiers on horseback and foot. On the right, 5 OLD CHINA WORKS, Nottingham Road, Derby shows an industrial landscape with smoking chimneys.

* Fourth Row: Two panels. On the left, 6 BONNIE PRINCE CHARLIE shows a group of soldiers retreating. On the right, 7 THE FIRST SILK MILL IN ENGLAND shows a large building by a waterway.

* Bottom Section: A separate vertical portrait of a man in a suit and bowtie. The caption below identifies him as MR. ERNEST TOWNSEND, the eminent local artist, who painted the above friezes.

The harmonious coming together of past and present was also evident in the style of Ernest Townsend’s paintings, which were somewhat reminiscent of what Michael Saler has dubbed ‘medieval modernism’. Saler points to the existence of largely provincial interwar designers who refused the distinction between art and craft and brought a medieval sensibility to their work. Rather than rejecting capitalism and the modern world, however, Saler claims that ‘the interwar medieval modernists did not spurn modernity as they embraced the medieval ideal. Rather, they sought to spiritualize capitalism, infuse mass commodities with soul and reshape an increasingly fragmented and secular culture into an organically integrated community of the faithful.’Footnote ⁶⁸ While Townsend could not be called a modernist painter in the narrow sense of the term, and was much in demand for conventional civic portraits, his style is looser and more graphic than usual, albeit he was obviously working at a much faster pace (Figure 5). Each of the scenes is rendered somewhat ‘out of time’ and organically related to one another rather than to the historical period they supposedly depict. As a collection of paintings, they underlined that the strength of Derby was underpinned by the industry of its people.

Figure 5.

Ernest Townsend sketching out the ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ scene of the historic frieze in Ethel Crowther’s cuttings interleaved into Borough Development Committee, ‘Derby: Its Industries & Commerce’, 20–1, Derby Local Studies and Family History Library. With permission, Derby Local Studies and Family History Library.

That this atmosphere of industry was enabled by social mobility rather than social upheaval was symbolized by a series of crests of Derbyshire’s ‘great houses’. Painted on wooden boards by students from the Derby School of Art, they formed a border around the historical frieze (Figure 6).Footnote ⁶⁹ The families chosen were perfectly balanced to show gradual change over time, including as they did not only the landed nobility but also minor gentry, families with civic roles lasting over generations and wealthy industrialists that, once involved in politics, had been elevated to the peerage. For some of these families, the power was largely historic, for others it was extremely current and for some it had ebbed and flowed over centuries. The Ferrars and the Curzons (originally the undernobles of the Ferrars) were the oldest, having moved to Derbyshire as part of the Norman Conquest, followed by the Fitzherberts and Cavendishes. More unusually perhaps, these families were joined by the Hopes, a minor gentry family who had provided a succession of town mayors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and were friends of the artist Joseph Wright. Finally was the crest of the Strutts, mill owners who were central to the industrial development of the Derwent Valley, who had helped to build many of the town’s civic institutions and had become over successive generations prominent in both local and national politics. These families were, it was claimed, ‘intimately connected with the history and concerns of the town’.Footnote ⁷⁰ However, they were also quite different, sometimes considerably so, despite their elevated social status. This reflected not simply deference towards privilege, but that one could achieve privilege through industry and civic contribution, by recognizing and navigating existing hierarchies rather than overturning them. In this respect, the exhibition’s historical narrative provided a framework within which figures such as J.H. Thomas could be understood. Like the industrial families incorporated into Derby’s civic story, Thomas’s rise from railway trade unionist to colonial secretary could be presented as evidence of how political and social change could be absorbed into established traditions.

Figure 6.

‘Students of the School of Art at Work on Heraldic Coats of Arms’ in Ethel Crowther’s cuttings interleaved into Borough Development Committee, ‘Derby: Its Industries & Commerce’, 20–1, Derby Local Studies and Family History Library. With permission, Derby Local Studies and Family History Library.

Figure 6. Long description

The photo shows two large vertical panels, each 8 feet high by 5 feet wide, being painted by students in smocks.

* On the left, Mr. H. Gentle is seen from the back, kneeling while painting the Arms of Strutt. The shield features a chevron pattern with a cross at the top, surmounted by a crest showing a hand holding a scroll amidst ornate foliage. A banner at the bottom of the panel reads STRUTT.

* On the right, Mr. H. Hopewell stands in profile, working on the Arms of Cavendish. This shield features three stag heads and is topped by a helmet and a crest depicting a coiled snake. A banner at the bottom of this panel reads CAVENDISH.

Below the photo, printed text provides context about the artists and the dimensions of the panels.

The art that was produced specifically for the exhibition was also accompanied by selected pieces from the collection of the Corporation’s Museum and Art Gallery that suggested Derby’s ‘rise and progress’ was forged out of a collision of art, science and industry. The centrepiece was Joseph Wright of Derby’s masterpiece in oils, ‘A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery’. As Alice Insley has shown, Wright’s reputation had fluctuated since his death, but in the 1880s – the years immediately following the opening of its civic museum and art gallery – ‘Derby’s invocation of Wright as part of its cultural capital reached its peak – the town explicitly and deliberately sought to raise both Wright and its own profile’.Footnote ⁷¹ In 1884, the Corporation bought ‘The Orrery’ through subscription, including from several representatives of the ‘great houses’ whose crests were depicted on the exhibition wall, such as the 8th Duke of Devonshire as well as families who had reached civic prominence via industrial success like Bemrose.Footnote ⁷² Other objects chosen included a bust of Derby-born philosopher and Social Darwinist Herbert Spencer, in the early 1920s still considered a mainstream figure but whose pseudoscientific evolutionary theories of race were congruent with the wider racist hierarchies embedded into the overall design and layout of the BEE.Footnote ⁷³ A bust of Florence Nightingale who was born in Derbyshire was also chosen, alongside two oil portraits of Bonnie Prince Charlie and his apparent mistress ‘Miss Walkinshaw’, some ‘Jacobite swords’ and around a hundred pieces of the museum’s collection of Derby china.Footnote ⁷⁴ Together these objects reinforced the eighteenth-century heyday of the ‘Derby philosophers’ and the melding together of science, industry and craft that was seen as their legacy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Perhaps the most striking element of Derby’s display was its ‘living’ historical recreations of traditional craft industries, such as printing, leatherworking, silk-spinning, clockmaking and pottery (Figure 7). These were not just demonstrations of practices but performances, with the re-creation of period costume (whether accurate or not), use of original technology and the reconstruction of spaces such as workshops and shops. As Kate Hill has shown, this was a common genre in exhibitions from the late nineteenth century, especially when depicting urban environments, as a ‘new concern with the experiential, affective and haptic, stemming from modernity, was added to existing popular interests in the past’.Footnote ⁷⁵ Derby’s craft performances were on a much smaller scale than the 1880s ‘Old Manchester and Salford’ and ‘Old London’ reconstructions that Hill explores, which built whole streets in replica. However, they offered similar opportunities for visitors to share intimate experiences with the craftspeople at work. Crucially, the staff interacting with visitors were not actors or people specially employed for the exhibition but were workers from trades in Derby, most of which were businesses that had been in existence for over at least a hundred years and continued to trade in the town.

Figure 7.

Various images of the historic displays cut and collated in Ethel Crowther’s cuttings interleaved into Borough Development Committee, ‘Derby: Its Industries & Commerce’, 20–1, Derby Local Studies and Family History Library. With permission, Derby Local Studies and Family History Library.

Figure 7. Long description

The collage consists of seven black and white photographs with captions.

* Top Left: A group of people in formal attire and historical costumes. J. H. Thomas, the Colonial Secretary, stands on the right addressing the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire.

* Top Right: Two men in historical dress walk forward. One carries large clock hands from 1650, part of John Smith’s exhibits.

* Middle Left: A man in a waistcoat leans over an ancient bookbinding machine from Bemrose and Sons, Ltd.

* Middle Center: W. E. Lomas operates a 150-year-old lathe at a table filled with Blue John vases and ornaments.

* Middle Right: A man operates a replica of an elastic-maker machine that was in use 350 years ago.

* Bottom Left: An interior view of a clockmaking center showing a modern clock next to a large turret clock dating from 1800.

* Bottom Right: A group of men stand behind a display of ceramics in a model of the Old Crown Derby factory. From right to left are the Mayor of Derby Councillor F. Porter, Town Clerk Mr. Trevelyan Lee, the Duke of Devonshire, Chief Constable Capt. H. M. Haywood, and Alderman Raynes, M. P.

The participation of traders with a long and continuing history in Derby reinforced the celebration of continuity over generations of gradual development. Their displays were historical reconstruction but also focused on the more recent past and current technology. For instance, the display of Smith’s Clockmakers juxtaposed the oldest and newest clock made in Derby side by side.Footnote ⁷⁶ Elsewhere, Bemrose & Sons printers built a shop front supposedly depicting its first shop in Derby ‘around 100 years ago’ (Bemrose was founded in 1826) but in a style suggesting a much earlier time and with eighteenth-century prints in the window (Figure 8).Footnote ⁷⁷ Antique printing presses printed both facsimiles of an eighteenth-century edition of the Derby Mercury and a ‘historical gazette’ to explain the scenes of the Exhibition’s historical frieze. Alongside this, however, printers also demonstrated Bemrose’s more recent ‘Derby Print Process’ for producing screenless offset colour lithographs. In bringing together imagery and technology, both original and facsimile, from such a range of historical periods, Bemrose printers made themselves appear timeless.

Figure 8.

‘Messrs Bemrose & Sons, Ltd. Exhibit’ in Ethel Crowther’s cuttings interleaved into Borough Development Committee, ‘Derby: Its Industries & Commerce’, 20–1, Derby Local Studies and Family History Library. With permission, Derby Local Studies and Family History Library.

This timelessness, while gesturing towards vaguely defined ‘ancientness’, was further reinforced by the Borough Development Committee’s handsome catalogue. Published by Bemrose and Sons, it was titled Derby: Its Industries & Commerce; An Account of Derby and its History; Also Shewing the Great Facilities for Trading and Manufacturing. From the use of the archaic spelling ‘shewing’ in the title to the illuminated manuscript-style initial letters at the beginning of each section, this catalogue was framed as a historical document, despite the modern advertisements for the manufacturing exhibitors of the South Hall throughout. Essays were included on the ‘Ancient Trades of Derby’ alongside those of today, with illustrations of bottle kilns and old printing presses next to trains, planes and automobiles, presenting the long durée of Derby’s manufacturing history for the benefit of Derbeians unable to attend as well as to visitors from elsewhere.Footnote ⁷⁸

Those able to travel to Wembley for the opening ceremony did so in a special saloon carriage to St Pancras, reflecting the importance attached to Derby’s civic presentation on the national and imperial stages. Guests included councillors and civic dignitaries, representatives of exhibiting companies and managers of key companies such as the newly amalgamated London, Midland and Scotland Railway who remained headquartered in the town. Beyond this, invitations were extended to BEE staff, civil servants and government officials, and representatives of the dominions and colonies. Invitations were sent to all high commissioners (or agents general), from a list the town clerk explicitly asked Exhibition authorities to provide; those who accepted the invitation included the high commissioner of Australia. Representatives of the national press, as well as the Derby and Nottingham papers, and news agencies such as the Central News Agency had been invited to a private press view the day before. The opening ceremony programme resembled that of the meeting about the ‘British Empire’ held at the Drill Hall a few months earlier, with speeches by Mayor Fred Porter, the Duke of Devonshire and J.H. Thomas. Their words and tone were similar and focused on Derby’s history, with the Duke of Devonshire claiming that Derby’s exhibition ‘typified the industrial and social development of the country, and proved that pride in our civic institutions was being well and worthily maintained’.Footnote ⁷⁹ This was reinforced by a vote of thanks to the mayor by the recently elected junior Labour MP and Alderman William Raynes:

While Raynes’s comments were clearly humorous, there was genuine awareness that even if only in this moment Derby’s exhibition was indeed a node, connecting local, national and imperial networks.

Although the opening ceremony may have seemed little more than a heightened civic ceremony, as might take place in Derby itself, the closing day of Derby’s exhibition brought a greater breadth of international visitors to the Civic Hall to what was advertised as a conference of dominion representatives. This was not, the mayor insisted, ‘only so that they might see what Derby had done and was capable of doing, but that the Dominions might make themselves known to Derby men, and that the mutual exchange of commerce might result to common advantage’.Footnote ⁸¹ The organization of this conference was particularly praised by the Exhibition authorities, several of whom attended. Major Belcher claimed that, while the wider Empire Exhibition had generally promoted a ‘much more cordial feeling throughout the great population … and the beginning of a much greater move towards consolidation’, Derby’s conference would be the important ‘forerunner of many more to come’.Footnote ⁸² Speeches were given by representatives of Canada, South Africa, Ceylon, Burma, Bermuda and the Gold Coast.

These representatives were, of course, not drawn from the general population of these dominions and colonies, but their bureaucratic elites. As such, their speeches tended to echo the varied pavilions surrounding the Civic Hall in asserting the unique value of their countries in both economic and cultural terms while reinforcing or advancing their position within imperial hierarchies. This was reflected in the order in which they spoke. While the gathering had been called a conference of the dominions, Mr J.S. MacKinnon, representing Canada, rose first and ‘accentuated the position of Canada as a Dominion as distinct from a Colony’, while welcoming the ‘opportunity of meeting with the other Dominions and Colonies within the British Empire, so that each might gain considerably more knowledge of the other’.Footnote ⁸³ The colonial ‘other’, as distinct from the dominion, was implicitly defined in racial terms. More explicitly, South Africa’s representative, Mr G.W. Klerck, reported as ‘speaking for South Africa’, made it very clear that he was representing white South Africans, as he stressed that he was descended from Dutch South Africans and told those assembled that ‘although their white population was only 1 ½ millions, while they had a coloured population of six millions, yet their trade was very large’. The exhibition, he claimed, had impressed on him ‘the greatness and size of the British Empire, and [he] said how anxious his own country was to take its true status therein’.Footnote ⁸⁴ The inference was clear: while the majority of South Africa’s white population might not be descended from Britons, their ‘true status’ lay in their shared ‘whiteness’.

However, those present at the conference who questioned the racial hierarchies of Empire nonetheless claimed equivalence through appeals to culture, often expressed in terms of heritage. For instance, Dr C.A. Howavitarne, speaking for Ceylon immediately after the South African representative, issued a strong challenge to crude racial prejudice, declaring that he ‘especially welcomed this gathering because he felt the British peoples were inclined to look more to colour than to culture as a definition of status and responsibilities of a people’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Yet it is important not to consider this statement an anti-imperialist one, with Howavitarne immediately after suggesting that ‘we are on the eve of great things and a much better understanding of one another’ and ‘wound up by expressing profound appreciation of the conference idea with a view to a much greater knitting together of the various peoples of the Empire’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Representatives from Burma and the Gold Coast stressed the reciprocal nature of trade between their countries and Britain, as places of consumption and enterprise, but still as ‘peoples of the British Empire’.

The use of history and heritage to make a claim for equal status within the Empire, as studies of the dominion and colonial pavilions have highlighted, was a very common technique across the whole of the Exhibition.Footnote ⁸⁷ Sarah Longair’s examination of the Zanzibar pavilion, for instance, highlights the way its use of history promoted how ‘ideas of commonalities between the elite communities, whose origins lay overseas, coexisted with the longstanding indigenous perception, accepted and promoted by the British and Arab population, of racial difference between the people of Zanzibar and the Swahili coast and those of the African interior’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Hence a particular narrative was constructed to unify various groups in Zanzibar around what they had had in common in order to claim their difference – and indeed superiority – over other African nations. Similarly, the Maltese pavilion linked recent prehistorical archaeological discoveries to create a case ‘for a new and largely mythological primordial ancestry for the modern Maltese population’ which was positioned as ‘civilized’ and European, rather than African, having been granted self-government in 1921.Footnote ⁸⁹ Narratives of deep time, history and heritage framed many of the colonial pavilions but, as Grima argues, in the context of the wider exhibition, their ‘exotic architecture statements … a medley of minarets, domes, battlements and pagodas’ contrasted with the classical design of those of the dominions and even more with the images of ‘old England’, such as the recreation of Old London Bridge, which ‘was clearly located in a lost past, subtly but firmly distinguished from the exotic representations of colonies as their present state’.Footnote ⁹⁰ As much as colonies constructed their own particular narratives of ‘civilization’ in their individual displays, the overall design and layout of the Exhibition immediately placed them within wider imperial hierarchies.

Derby’s Borough Corporation’s recreations of clockworks and china workshops in the Civic Hall were modest performances compared to those of the colonial committees, but their vague yet repeated and confident claims to ‘ancientness’ also belong in this wider context. Paul Readman has argued that ‘[g]enerally speaking, historical pageants celebrated the continuities of a locally grounded English nationhood with the empire left out’. In the Civic Hall, however, empire was just outside and in the closing conference literally invited in.Footnote ⁹¹ Derby’s display suggests that the use of heritage to signify belonging was common across Wembley. Derby, Malta and Zanzibar drew on very different histories, but all used the past to make claims about their place in the present.

Conclusion: common heritage and imperial citizenship

Perhaps because it took place elsewhere, once the Civic Hall exhibition was dismantled its memory quickly disappeared in Derby. Despite some immediate calls for the exhibition to be re-created in the town itself, there is no evidence that this was realized. However, this article has argued that the significance of this exhibition did not lie in its success or legacy. Looking at the Civic Hall suggests a different way of approaching the British Empire Exhibition. Rather than asking whether imperial messages were enthusiastically embraced or merely consumed as spectacle, Derby’s exhibition is an example of the importance of local settings in making imperial identities meaningful.

Seen from this perspective, Derby’s display shared much with the dominion and colonial exhibits that surrounded it. Like them, it created a narrative of history and continuity to make claims about status and belonging within the imperial community. Yet it also demonstrates that such claims were also important within Britain itself, where local histories offered a means of reconciling modern political change with established traditions of public life. In this respect, Derby’s exhibition reflected the wider interwar search for what Jon Lawrence has memorably described as a ‘peaceable kingdom’, privileging moderation, co-operation and continuity over conflict and division.Footnote ⁹² It was an example of Conservative and Labour politicians at the highest levels – the former and present colonial secretaries – forming a ‘concordat’ during the national transition of power that wrapped local, national and imperial concerns into the rhetoric of a ‘common heritage’. This rhetoric appealed to civic leaders and institutions, businesses and cultural elites who, in recreating a living ‘old Derby’ at the largest Empire exhibition ever staged, saw themselves as contributing to one ‘common object’: the transformation of their civic story into a demonstration of imperial citizenship.