ABSTRACT
CEMA and the Arts Council existed for purposes that had two consistent elements, to make the arts more accessible and to encourage higher standards: that is, a social and an aesthetic justification. Both come together in education, the deeper purpose that Keynes accepted as much as Jones. That position was reached in early 1940. In December 1939, CEMA had defined its aims as being to give assistance to ‘music, drama, the arts and handicrafts generally, as distinct from other activities … on the fringe of adult education’.1 Towards the end of January 1940, they were restated in more broadly social terms, ‘to rescue those cultural activities and interests which are threatened with extinction by wartime conditions’.2 Even as this was written, however, there were two possible futures. One was a few months of ‘salvage’ among voluntary organizations until the Carnegie UK Trust resumed its programmes, at which point CEMA would be dissolved; the other to aim for a longer-term programme that would include working with professional orchestras, drama companies and artists. Given the ambitions harboured by its founders, the committee, naturally, chose longevity, preferably with the Carnegie UK Trust’s assistance. (When that hope faded in June, CEMA had received its Treasury grant and was able to continue at least for the year ahead.) The choice required a reconsideration of its purpose, and that emerged in CEMA’s first systematic policy statement, of March 1940, which set out four aims: 1) to preserve the highest standards possible, qualified by the phrase, ‘in wartime’; 2) to spread access to the arts more widely; 3) to encourage amateur music and drama; and 4) to assist musicians and actors whose employment had suffered because of the war.3
