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By Root 1300 0

made, see tea being packed, pottery fired and steel cut with a flame. In a Pageant of Empire, to a specially composed theme by the ageing Edward Elgar, Wolfe’s victory on the Plains of Abraham and the conquest of New Zealand were re-enacted and ‘settlers’ sank wells, apparently turning bare earth into orchards and vineyards. A dozen girls gave twice-daily fashion parades showing off fabrics made in Bradford. In the Palace of Beauty there were more live models, posing as some of the most striking women in history, from Helen of Troy to ‘Miss 1924’. At the Australian pavilion you could – inevitably – watch sheep being sheared. The highlight of the Palace of Engineering (the largest concrete building in the world) was a collection of locomotives and carriages and a display of imperial railway routes across the empire. The Ministry of Agriculture had a machine which showed the effects of ploughing and harrowing. The Ministry of Health exhibited a model sewage plant. A Burmese display featured a pagoda in Mandalay. The west African pavilion had a model of a Nigerian walled city. And from Sarawak had come a 30-foot stuffed python, with the outline of the pig it had swallowed moments before death clearly visible inside.

The style of the exhibition says much about the monochrome pleasures 1920s officialdom imagined would satisfy the masses: in the way of ‘improving’ displays, it was rather less fun than it pretended. Twenty-seven million visitors were lured through the Empire Exhibition turnstiles, though it is unclear whether this figure includes the Indians, Singhalese, Malays, Burmese, West Indians, Hong Kong Chinese, west Africans and three Palestinians described by the Official Guide as ‘races in residence’, their function being to stand around looking colourfully native while demonstrating local crafts. But there are only so many demonstrations of well-sinking a person can take, and the organizers sighed with frustration as they watched the crowds inexorably drift away from the sewage farm to converge on the Giant Switchback, amusement park and dance hall. Highbrows, meanwhile, disdained the whole thing and formed the WGTW (Won’t Go To Wembley) Society. And when Bertie Wooster found himself dragged off to the Empire Exhibition in ‘The Rummy Affair of Old Biffy’, the only congenial place he discovered was the comparatively modest pavilion of the West Indies, a place clearly ‘in certain fundamentals of life streets ahead of our European civilisation’. For it contained a Planter’s Bar, where ‘as kindly a bloke as ever I wish to meet’ mixed Green Swizzle cocktails. ‘If ever I marry and have a son,’ Wooster remarked, ‘Green Swizzle Wooster is the name that will go down on the register, in memory of the day his father’s life was saved at Wembley.’*

It is hard to believe that visiting the exhibition changed anyone’s life. Indeed, the plodding ambition of the thing had been made clear in King George V’s speech as he opened it that April. ‘We believe’, he said, ‘that this Exhibition will bring the peoples of the Empire to a better knowledge of how to meet their reciprocal wants and aspirations.’ And, just as George had none of Victoria’s sheen, so the 1924 show had none of the pizzazz of the 1851 Great Exhibition. That had been about flaunting Britain’s genius to the world and had seemed to promise a future in which science might solve most of mankind’s problems. The Empire Exhibition was the Great and Good talking to hoi polloi about something they weren’t especially interested in. ‘I brought ’em ’ere to see the glories of the empire,’ says the father in Noël Coward’s This Happy Breed, as he watches his children head for the amusements at Wembley, ‘and all they think about is going on the dodgems.’ The empire had lost whatever sheen it once had – even the steady stream of emigrants setting off from British shores to build Cecil Rhodes’s dream of a worldwide Anglo-Nation had by now fallen away to the point where there were more migrants arriving in the British Isles than there were people leaving. There was nowhere much left to colonize,