Fringe by the Sea: Richard Demarco

Political éminence Brian Taylor is at FBTS this year with a quartet of ‘Lunchtime Blethers’ with prominent Scots. Wednesday was Richard Demarco, who explained the initiation and intentions of Edinburgh’s first Festival in 1947. Taylor is deft at adapting his style to his guest; here he used the lightest of touches and mostly let things unfold.  

“National treasure” Demarco has been intimately involved with this Festival all its life, and all his adult life: since the teenage Richard, ripe for real education beyond the confines of home, emerged blinking from high school, and the Festival emerged out of the grim jingoism and xenophobia of war. In those days Edinburgh was “not part of the wider world”; it was inward-looking, joyless, and did not speak to strangers. There were none of the promised bluebirds over Britain, no sign nor sense of victory. Stalin still ruled, it was Russia who had won, and rationing seemed here to stay. 

Demarco impressed on us, the audience, how the International Festival was envisaged: never as a commercial enterprise but, through great and, crucially, international art, to “overcome the darkness and bring light to a (divided) post-War world”.  The idea was floated in 1946 at a London luncheon with the Director of the Glyndebourne Opera and bestowed the following year on the city with the best-looking castle: us.  Heaven had made a marriage for 17-year-old Richard. Immediately he got involved (sorting the Camera Obscura). Meanwhile the City tackled the mammoth tasks of putting up a programme– and putting up visitors, for there were no hotels and little food. In those earliest years the town enlisted the citizenry for accommodating their great new initiative. 

Delightfully, our audience concealed another eyewitness. Ninety-six-year-old George Finlayson vividly recalls being there in the Usher Hall for the first Festival’s opening concert – Bruno Walter conducting, after almost a decade, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. And he recounts how at the end, the whole audience rose to its feet in tears. 

 At 91, Demarco could have been forgiven for dwelling on past achievements, but those were not really the topic. He has always been focussed on looking forward: next idea, project, campaign.  He has sometimes been sniffed at by the burghers of Edin as “great at the self-promotion”. Not really: it’s always the promotion of Edinburgh, of Art and artistic initiatives. It’s just that you can’t help noticing Richard along the way.   

And at 91, like it or not, he is still focussed on the future. “You cannot retire from life!”  He expressed anxiety for the futures of live performance, and of true Art. He sees the Festival swamped with unenlightened masses munching bread and seeking circuses and telly comics; he wants more than ever to enlighten them all, to turn everybody on to real artistic experiences that change lives.  

Demarco is nonetheless conscious of living “not just on extra, but on penalty time.” He is looking for people to spread the word. Any takers?