The Second World War, Kenneth Morgan suggests, proffered a release from that ‘class-bound straight-jacket’ which handicapped the arts in Britain before 1939: the ‘people's war was generating a new people's culture, with clear radical implications’. Whatever view one takes of recent criticisms against the emergence of a popularist social radicalism generally in wartime Britain, Morgan's comments undoubtedly capture the hopes of those influential left-of-centre educational improvers seeking to transform popular cultural practice during and after the war. Nor contemporaneously was the circulation of such ideas restricted only to an inner sanctum of the chattering classes. Picture Post – perhaps the most influential popularizer of progressive opinion – regularly ran features celebrating an apparent social diffusion of the arts as it campaigned for cultural reconstruction. Beside Priestley's 1941 notorious condemnation of ‘silly, passive style’ popular amusements ran one such muscular call to battle. ‘The soul’, he prescribed, ‘demands the arts as the body demands exercise . . . . In the [new] Britain we want to build, then, there will be plenty of art of every kind’, for ‘the enjoyment of good art demands some active co-operation on the part of the audience’, and ‘plenty of opportunity’, not just for the few but also for the ‘ordinary chap’.

Two years later, in asking, ‘Are we building a new culture?’, Picture Post declared that in ‘millions of men and women a new understanding and appreciation for the arts has grown up’, part of the ‘greatest movement ever known in adult education’. As W. E. Williams (Director, Army Bureau of Current Affairs) explained, the state-sponsored Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) had ‘on an annual budget which just about buys a couple of bombers . . . instigated a wide and catholic foretaste for the arts’. Yet were Williams's and Priestley's hopes realized? Had cultures transcended class boundaries in the melting pot of war or were contemporary claims – subsequently endorsed by historians – for a newly discovered mass audience for the arts wildly exaggerated, essentially one further myth née propagandist line laid bare by wartime reality and post-war experience? Indeed, do CEMA's wartime activities warrant the label of ‘exemplary success’ still being attached to them?