The Yorkshire Arts Association – Foundations – Part 1 – Structure
In 1970, the Yorkshire Arts Association (YAA) produced a film called Spacemen Have Landed In Leeds. This documentary signalled the first time a Regional Arts Association (RAA) supported filmmaking practice in Yorkshire.
Foundations will discuss the emerging ways in which the logistics of production, distribution, exhibition began to shape a regional moving image culture, by revealing the protagonists, institutions, funding mechanisms, and of course the films themselves during this time. The broad period covered here will begin with the establishment of the YAA in 1969 and close in 1979 as the first Sheffield Independent Film Week had just finished, a new Conservative government arrived at power, and the fast growth in alternative media production of the early 1980s was beginning to take root.
Structure and Association
The first official address for the organisation was Glyde House in Glydegate, Bradford. Formerly the headquarters of the National and Local Government Officers' Association (NALGO), those who worked there for the YAA during its tenure remember the space as being in some disrepair; there was ‘a derelict badminton court, once a union recreational facility, on the ground floor. The walls grew things, it rained inside and if you worked overlooking Queen Victoria’s statue there was often electrical fires.’[1] Despite these less than salubrious surroundings, the YAA would use Glyde House as a base for the next ten years.
Glyde House, 2024 (c/o https://hellorayo.co.uk/greatest-hits/west-yorkshire/news/listed-building-bradford/)
The YAA’s Annual Reports filed from Glyde House disclose expenditure, income, and accounts[2] and are useful in comprehending the financial infrastructure of the YAA, and particularly the unique set of funding arrangements that served moving image provision. While the patterns of funding changed over time, the following serves as a good model for understanding how film was supported.
The Arts Council of Great Britain (ACGB) contributed the major funding source of overall YAA income.[3] Before 1972 (the year the British Film Institute began to subsidise RAAs), this would be further supplemented by grants from charitable patrons such as the Gulbenkian Foundation, private donations from businesses and individuals, and matched funding from Local Authority (LA) contributions. In the case of the LAs, the Metropolitan Counties of South and West Yorkshire were also joined by their local Metropolitan Districts (Sheffield, Leeds, Bradford etc.), while the Non-Metropolitan Counties of Humberside, and North Yorkshire also contributed money. This overall received income[4] then fed into a program of expenditure which included costs (running of Glyde House, promotions, marketing, salary etc.) and the giving of grant-aid funds to individuals, groups, and arts organisations. The grant-aid structure was then broken down and money assigned accordingly to separate panels (the names of which fluctuate over time) including Literature, Music, Drama, Visual Arts, Experimental Arts, Community Arts, Dance, Crafts, and Film & TV.
The designation of funds within the YAA differs again for moving image provision, as the BFI forms a central pivot in the structure. The history of post-war regional film policy is defined by an intricate network of interconnected relationships between the RAAs, the ACGB, and the BFI (in the 1980s, Channel 4 changes the landscape once more). At its foundation in 1933, the original brief of the BFI was not to provide production assistance. However, in 1951 this changed with the Experimental Film Fund set up by Michael Balcon as a reaction to the Eady Levy.[5] This, in essence, ‘was the initiation of the modern independent sector … the first autonomous state agency which did not itself make or commission film projects but funded them by selection from applicants.’[6] The Experimental Film Fund, then, came as tonic to the early independent sector, and was re-constituted as the BFI Production board in 1966. Despite this, the board held an ambiguous stance on regional provision that would later be challenged throughout the 1970s culminating in the campaign to establish a Regional Production Fund in the 1980s. In 1968 the BFI first began to issue regional subsidies to the RAAs, giving £1500 to the Northern Arts board, and in 1972/3, the YAA received its first money from the BFI. This same time also saw the ACGB establish a sub-committee designed to fund small individual film projects in alliance with the RAAs, thereby providing another possible funding stream, yet the BFI remained the principal source of money. In early 1973 Stanley Reed, former director of the BFI and co-founder of the Experimental Film Board/ BFI Production Fund, visited the YAA Film and TV panel to formally open the relationship between the BFI and Glyde House. Reed was now the BFI Regional Councillor, with a remit to connect the regional film theatre network, and upon his meeting with the YAA promised to also oversee the expansion of film activity in the regions and the possibility of increased finance.[7] The meeting between Reed and the YAA represents the beginnings of a communicative yet sometimes strained relationship between Glyde House and the BFI.
Workers
The initial YAA workforce was very small. Alongside Chairman Feversham, there was the music officer Richard Phillips, Vice-chair Jessie Smith, and the newly appointed Director, Michael Dawson. Both he and Feversham were fundamental in guiding the organisation through the next decade, and beyond, into some of its highest profile projects.[8] Moreover, the pair seemed to be at-one in their ideals of how an arts association should run. Speaking retrospectively, Dawson suggested that Feversham ‘share[d] my own antipathy towards constricting red tape. He ha[d] innate sympathy for the creative person as opposed to the administrator and in finding the radical solution to a bureaucratic problem’.[9] It is this dichotomy between art and admin at the heart of YAA policy that was contested throughout the 70s and 80s, especially by those sitting on the Film & TV panel. As a result of this approach, with Dawson the sole gatekeeper to funds, the early YAA structure became bloated by rising appeals for funding without the administrative resources to manage the process. At this stage it was Dawson’s responsibility to oversee the applications, fielding requests from all the different strands of arts activity in the region; it was time-consuming work. As Barry Callaghan suggested in an early panel meeting, this was even more laborious in Film & TV, as the need to assign funding toward equipment, crew, locations, and the other practical logistics of the film-making process was far greater than the requirements of an individual visual arts practitioner.[10]
Again it highlights the imperative nature and necessity of organisational frameworks; the YAA simply had to devolve the assignment of funding to others, it could no longer continue with Dawson as caretaker in charge of all artforms. The Association therefore made the decision to create panels to oversee each discipline, and subsequently appointed specialist officers. In the early stages (1969-73), administrative decisions for the moving image were subsumed into the ‘Visual Arts’ board which also represented photography, painting and sculpture. Even at this nascent stage it is perhaps indicative of the wider RAA/ACGB project, and the traditional arts it gave great credence to, that throughout this period the semantics of the ‘moving image’ panel changes designation many times (see: film, film and video, film and TV, media, time-based media). During this history, the art of the moving image was often treated like the misunderstood ‘other’ in the ACGB’s vision. This is evidenced in the low numbers of ACGB money given to Film & TV. In 1981, for example, the overall subsidy for film ‘whether production, administration or educational, still gives a figure of only about £10m a year - about 12 per cent of the annual budget.’[11]
The key decisions in the new YAA infrastructure, then, revolved around the formation of the arts panels: who sat on them, who was the Film Officer, how they assigned money, and what outputs were supported. They were first set up to include appointed specialists and experts drawn largely from a body of practising artists, arts administrators, promoters and educationalists, with members also co-opted from the business community, politics, trade unions, and the local media employed on a voluntary basis.[12] The make-up of the Film & TV panel in Yorkshire would fluctuate throughout the 1970s and 80s. This local membership was one of the important features of the new regime, and unlike previous sources of centralised funding, gave rise to an assortment of voices and ideas selected from a relatively small pool of individuals based within the Yorkshire region. Whether this had any tangible impact on the types of production endorsed will be subject to discussion through this research. It is also important to emphasise that the YAA Film & TV panel at this stage was not a production company, it merely provided grants and advice towards production and exhibition needs, yet those individuals on the panel remained integral to the grants aid process.
Nina Hibbin
The first Film Officer appointed by Dawson was Nina Hibbin, who requires special note here. Hibbin arrived in the region with a highly respected and varied career behind her. She was an early protagonist in the Second World War Mass Observation Movement (where she also worked in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force), before joining academia in Dartington college. She subsequently became a radical Left film critic at the Daily Worker and founder of the London Workers’ Film Society. It was at the Morning Star (previously Daily Worker) newspaper where Hibbin developed networks amongst the cognoscenti of London’s Fleet Street film critics such as The Sunday Times’ Dylis Powell.[13] Although the Morning Star was a limited circulation paper, it was still a national daily and so afforded Hibbin access to previews, first nights, film festivals and Hollywood stars. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given her newspapers’ politics, she was a rare champion of Eastern European cinema. Her husband Eric was a circulation manager at the Morning Star and in the early 1970s the pair moved out of London to Yorkshire, straight into jobs at the YAA. Although she was among those actively campaigning to persuade the Rank Organisation to release Ken Loach’s Yorkshire-based film (penned by Barnsley writer, Barry Hines) Kes in 1969, she had no formal roots in the region and the exact reasons behind their relocation are unknown.[14] Nonetheless, as the BFI was now an established channel funding the RAA network, Hibbin was known to them as an experienced London cinema personality and was given the YAA Film Officer role. In the early years, Hibbin’s main remit (acting on the Visual Arts Panel) was the funding and overseeing of film societies, not film production, and in the year ending 1974 she was allotted £10,000 from the BFI[15] to assist the Regional Film Theatre (RFT) network and to support local Film Societies. It is my understanding that her primary interests were providing access to European cinema and classic Hollywood product in these areas. The very conception of regional ‘independent cinema’ production was only in embryonic form, and as central (BFI) policy was driving the importance of the RFT network, Hibbin directed most YAA energy into this access provision – she was principally an advocate for film-going rather than production. This was most likely because there simply wasn’t the wealth of local talent and the production culture of later years to call on, thus attention was diverted to centralised London strategy in pushing national and international cinema to the RFTs. Nonetheless, under her guidance the YAA sponsored a batch of early film projects that will be discussed in the next post.
Film-maker Peter Samson recalls Hibbin in the same positive terms of many of her peers. After graduation at the Royal College of Art, he returned to Yorkshire and began making abstract films. He sent the YAA ‘a cryptic and peculiar film treatment’ which was turned down, but much to his surprise Hibbin turned up outside Doncaster Art College (where he was teaching), ‘clad in leather, on her motorbike, she’d decided to come and see me! Although she said the script lacked focus, she still encouraged me, can you imagine that happening now!?’[16] This testimony typifies the personal impact Hibbin had on the growing film culture in the region, and although she was at the YAA only for a few years (and focused on exhibition), her importance in developing a confidence in that community must not be undervalued. Unbowed by the rejection, Peter Samson returned to the YAA application circuit in the 1980s and his work will be discussed in future essays.
Footnotes
[1] There's a Lot More Where That Came From: The Arts in Yorkshire 1969-1990 - Pam Nichol.
[2] Annual Reports, 1970s
[3]As an example in 1981, RAAS receive their major funding from the ACGB (79%), but they are also supported by the BFI (4.5%), the Crafts Council (1.5%), and by their constituent local authorities (13%) - in England's Regional Arts Associations -. Council of Regional Arts Associations. X.429/16339 1983.
[4] At this stage the YAA had little means of self-funding activities.
[5] A levy imposed on box-office receipts, intended to foster uniquely British film production, established in 1950 (http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/1011995/, Accessed June 2016).
[6] Subversion: The Definitive History of Underground Cinema - Duncan Reekie, p100.
[7] http://www.independent.co.uk/incoming/obituary-stanley-reed-5615958.html
[8] Examples include Michael Dawson’s championing of the Ilklely literature festival and Lord Feversham’s support of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/5101126/Lord-Feversham.html
[9] Ibid.
[10] Minutes of the meeting of the Film and TV panel held at YTV, Leeds on Monday 12th November 1973 at 4.30 PM
[11] Auty Chris. Monthly Film Bulletin London Vol. 50 Iss. 3 Summer 1981 p154.
[12] England's Regional Arts Associations -. Council of Regional Arts Associations.X.429/1633/ 1983.
[13] Jim Pearse interview - 2018
[14] During the Jim Pearse interview, he suggested to me, speculatively, that the pair may have fallen out with the Communist party.
[15] Yorkshire Arts Reports - 74/5
[16] Peter Samson interview - 2018
