Joyful for a Season

On May Day, 1851, in a glistening palace of glass and iron the like of which the world had never seen before, Queen Victoria opened London's Great Exhibition, in the hope that its example might "unite the industry of all the nations of the earth." Britannia rode the crest of the wave. As cannons roared a royal salute, thousands of visitors thronged the Crystal Palace to gape at its wonders--the industrial triumphs of the steam age, as well as a champagne made from rhubarb, a knife with 300 blades, and the original Turkish towel (which so pleased Britain's Queen that she ordered six dozen).

"God bless my dearest country," wrote Victoria in her diary that night, "which has shown itself so great today."

Last week, a fateful century later, Britain opened another exhibition. Britain's greatness had become constricted; her riches were dwindling; her military and commercial power, like the steam that drove her once-commanding machines, had been fearsomely diminished. Her sense of high adventure was no more. Yet in the Festival of Britain she was, in the words of the Archbishop of Canterbury, "determined to be joyful for a season."

The Festival opened amid ancient pageantry that had not changed since long before Victoria's day. A huge bonfire blazed in London, to signal the lighting of 2,000 others throughout Britain. A crowd of 3,000 spectators jammed the new $6,000,000 Thames-side Royal Festival Hall to get the party going. Other Londoners by the thousands mingled with visitors from overseas to throng the huge, futuristic main exhibition site at South Bank, northwest of dingy Waterloo Station. There, where bombed-out slums once sprawled, they could goggle at the vast "Dome of Discovery," with its 74-inch-lens telescope, at the "Telekinema" with its three-dimensional sound pictures, and the "Eccentrics' Corner" featuring, among other achievements, a hammer guaranteed not to hit the user's thumb. Still in store for visitors this summer: a series of industrial exhibitions, midways, art exhibits, concerts, carnivals and conventions in more than 1,700 British cities and towns.

"All of us," said King George as he opened the Festival, "can paint the contrast between the calm security of the Victorian age and the hard experience of our own. [Yet] I see this Festival as a symbol of Britain's abiding courage and vitality."

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