Where's the article?British 'Culture' Secretary Oliver Cowen unaware that the Bayeux Tapestry is located in a museum in, wait for it, Bayeux, Normandy, and has done for 800 years. The culture of the pig ignorant grows again once more.
Made in England, to be shown in a cathedral in Normandy.
www.thetimes.co.uk
Cheers. It's an utterly facile comparison.Made in England, to be shown in a cathedral in Normandy.
Here's the very dull article, complete with oversize picture of the queen and completely normal cushions.
Oliver Dowden: ‘Return the Marbles, then what . . . demand the Bayeux Tapestry?’
British museums show historic treasures from around the world to the world and won’t be giving them up, the culture secretary tells David Sanderson
Oliver Dowden: ‘Return the Marbles, then what . . . demand the Bayeux Tapestry?’
British museums show historic treasures from around the world to the world and won’t be giving them up, the culture secretary tells David Sanderson
Oliver Dowden has told heritage and museum bosses to defend the country’s culture and history from a “noisy minority of activists” TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER JACK HILL
David Sanderson, Arts Correspondent
Saturday March 27 2021, 12.01am, The Times
Perhaps wearing fancy dress on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile trying to sell tickets for a Victorian melodrama you are performing in should be a rite of passage for every culture secretary.
Oliver Dowden did it. “It was not high culture,” he admits of his Watford youth theatre group’s production of Murder in the Red Barn at the Fringe. “A few of my more sophisticated friends came up and were slightly aghast. It was am-dram but very well costumed. And performed.”
There has been much critiquing of his latest role — directing this time — in a turbulent 13-month-long production that some feared might prove to be the final act for British culture. Appointed to the cabinet in February last year with responsibility for digital, culture, media and sport, Dowden, 42, has had a more dramatic tenure than any of his predecessors. A pricey one too. Many in the arts gasped last July when he emerged from the Treasury with a £1.57 billion rescue package he hoped would be enough to save the “crown jewels” and local pillars of British culture and heritage in the face of the financially devastating pandemic.
A recent National Audit Office report revealed that the official pitch to the Treasury last summer was that under the worst-case Covid-19 scenario, which has now been exceeded, 75 per cent of arts and heritage organisations could survive with support within that range. There had been “protracted” negotiations with the Treasury, Dowden said.
The fund, which Dowden’s department says has already “protected” 4,000 organisations, was given a £300 million top-up in the recent budget. So are three quarters of Britain’s great cathedrals, art galleries, ancient ruins, theatrical titans, creative workshops, orchestras, festivals, comedy clubs, music venues, dance studios, independent cinemas and film producers going to survive?
“We should get more than that surviving,” Dowden says. “I think barring some further catastrophe with Covid, if things reopen on 21st of June we will at least start from a position where most of our cultural and artistic heritage and institutions will have been preserved, which was unimaginable when I was first getting the briefings this time last year.”
The son of a “dad who worked in a factory in Watford and a mum at a chemist’s in St Albans” says he was “acutely aware” of the challenges faced by tens of thousands of freelancers and others.
“One of my formative cultural memories was getting on a school minibus and going to see the West End shows,” says Dowden
TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER JACK HILL
The colossi of British culture, from the holders of the national collections such as the Victoria and Albert Museum and Tate, to the performing arts powerhouses of the Royal Shakespeare Company, National Theatre and Royal Opera House, are having to make tens of millions of pounds of cuts.
Reserves are, Dowden says, down to the bones and debt is being stacked up. “But I think overall I tried to keep the basic infrastructure so there is something to rebuild from. If we had lost chunks of that it would have taken a generation to rebuild. And it is not just the Royal Albert Hall. It is the Walsall Art Gallery, the Watford Palace Theatre that I grew up going to. Once they are gone, particularly those regional theatres and art venues, they are gone for good.”
He is keen for the cultural world to reopen — and big players such as Tate, the National Theatre, the South Bank Centre and Royal Opera House have announced plans for May onwards — but stresses that the “aim with our road map is to take a cautious approach . . . as the prime minister said, this year we want a one-way road to freedom”.
Gnarled veterans of art funding battles, even those with left-leaning talons, have in general praised Dowden’s actions during the pandemic. If civil servants could be frustrating, “at least Dowden gets it” more than one has said. There is a lot to “get” in a brief encompassing sport, broadcasting, tourism, heritage, digital strategy as well as the arts and museum sectors. He even decides if the Union Jack should be flown over government buildings.
In the normal run of events he would have been, well, the minister for fun. Remember David Mellor? Dowden is candid enough to admit that he would “have loved to have had access to see some high culture that is quite hard to see”, not to mention Lord’s for the cricket and Wimbledon for the tennis.
But panto, for this father of two who is married to Blythe, a teacher, still beats opera. “I do love a show,” he says. “No business like showbusiness. One of my formative cultural memories was getting on a school minibus and going to see the West End shows. I do love West End commercial theatre. I love the chorus line and the great George Gershwin hits. I was lucky enough to perform in the Edinburgh Festival once.”
Although Murder in the Red Barn sank without trace, Dowden did not. Born in St Albans and educated at the local comprehensive, he secured a place at Cambridge to read law before joining the Conservative Research Department.
He rose swiftly under David Cameron, becoming his deputy chief of staff and, in his own words, spent much of his time on crisis management. He also garnered the nickname Olive after a Guardian typo while Cameron named him “the undertaker” because “he frequently brought me the bad news”.
In 2011, four years before even becoming an MP, he was tipped by The Spectator as a future cabinet minister and in 2013 made the Conservative Party’s longlist for Croydon South. The following year he secured the nomination for Hertsmere, beating a candidate the Borehamwood Times described as the “businessman Rishi Sunak”, and in the 2015 general election increased the Conservative majority in the seat close to his childhood home.
Even though a Remainer, he supported Boris Johnson in his aborted 2016 campaign to become party leader but Theresa May, at least by 2018, appeared to have forgiven him and put him on the lower ministerial rungs.
Following her 2019 resignation, according to a Conservative Home profile last year, Dowden along with Sunak and Robert Jenrick interviewed Johnson for an hour before jointly writing an article saying: “The Tories are in deep peril. Only Boris Johnson can save us.”
There seems little doubt that Dowden and Johnson share similar views. Take the cultural treasures held by Britain’s museums such as the Elgin Marbles and Benin Bronzes. Johnson told a Greek newspaper this month that the government’s “firm longstanding position on the [Parthenon] sculptures is that they were legally acquired by Lord Elgin under the appropriate laws of the time”.
Dowden goes further: “Once you start pulling on this thread where do you actually end up? Would we insist on having the Bayeux Tapestry back? American institutions are packed full of British artefacts. Japan has loads of Chinese and Korean artefacts. There is an exceptionally high bar for this . . . because I just don’t see where it ends. You go down a rabbit hole and tie up our institutions. I think it is just impossible to go back and disentangle all these things.
Ministers have no intention of returning the Benin Bronzes
“The British Museum is a majestic cultural institution where I think you are enriched by being able to see the Rosetta Stone, magnificent Egyptian sarcophagi, the Benin Bronzes, which are a wonderful piece of global cultural heritage that have influenced Picasso and others. And it is not just for the British people. It is a museum of the world for the world and I know it has a lot of important partnerships. They are working with their counterparts in Nigeria on the archaeology of the Kingdom of Benin for example.”
Dowden said that while he loved the Benin Bronzes, he had “never related that much to the Parthenon Sculptures” until the museum’s director, Hartwig Fischer, “showed me around and told me the story in wonderful depth, revealing a whole different level of the artistry which I found really inspiring”. He adds: “Would they have survived the Nazis rampaging through Athens during World War II. It is a slightly trite argument but there is a truth. Would the Benin Bronzes have survived various international conflicts?”
He has told heritage and museum bosses to defend the country’s culture and history from a “noisy minority of activists” and has been critical of the National Trust’s focus on Winston Churchill in its slavery and colonialism report. This week he ordered that the Union Jack be flown from government buildings.
There does seem an obvious relish for his brief although he, like so many, is weary of the need to do everything digitally. Yes, digital innovations will “turbocharge the creative industries” but after seven-day weeks of work video calls he is “zoomed out”.
He adds: “Yes I do [have digital fatigue]. I have really hated this lockdown in a way I haven’t hated previous ones. There is no novelty to a conversation like this. No novelty to sorting out your garden. It is just a slog and it has genuinely taken a real toll on people’s mental health. We have got to get the joy back into people’s lives through arts and culture: there is a joy in seeing wonderful paintings, seeing great entertaining shows, hearing marvellous orchestras perform, going to festivals. “I really want to get some of the joy back this summer and I think we can do it.”
CURRICULUM VITAE
Born 1978 in St Albans
Education Parmiter’s comprehensive school, Watford, and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he studied law
Career Joined the Conservative Research Department in 2004 before returning to Tory HQ in 2009 as deputy chief of staff to David Cameron. Elected MP for Hertsmere in 2015. Boris Johnson appointed him cabinet office minister in 2019 and culture secretary in February 2020
Family Lives with his wife and two children
QUICKFIRE
Opera or Pantomime? Panto
Shakespeare or Beckett? Shakespeare
Lords or Wembley? Lords (but I spend a lot of my time on football and want to ensure fans come first as we recover)
The Crown or Line of Duty? Line of Duty
Beethoven or Beyoncé? Beethoven
Sturgeon or Starmer? Starmer — union before party politics
National Trust or National Theatre? National Trust
Share
Save
Made in England, to be shown in a cathedral in Normandy.
Here's the very dull article, complete with oversize picture of the queen and completely normal cushions.
Oliver Dowden: ‘Return the Marbles, then what . . . demand the Bayeux Tapestry?’
British museums show historic treasures from around the world to the world and won’t be giving them up, the culture secretary tells David Sanderson
Oliver Dowden: ‘Return the Marbles, then what . . . demand the Bayeux Tapestry?’
British museums show historic treasures from around the world to the world and won’t be giving them up, the culture secretary tells David Sanderson
Oliver Dowden has told heritage and museum bosses to defend the country’s culture and history from a “noisy minority of activists” TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER JACK HILL
David Sanderson, Arts Correspondent
Saturday March 27 2021, 12.01am, The Times
Perhaps wearing fancy dress on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile trying to sell tickets for a Victorian melodrama you are performing in should be a rite of passage for every culture secretary.
Oliver Dowden did it. “It was not high culture,” he admits of his Watford youth theatre group’s production of Murder in the Red Barn at the Fringe. “A few of my more sophisticated friends came up and were slightly aghast. It was am-dram but very well costumed. And performed.”
There has been much critiquing of his latest role — directing this time — in a turbulent 13-month-long production that some feared might prove to be the final act for British culture. Appointed to the cabinet in February last year with responsibility for digital, culture, media and sport, Dowden, 42, has had a more dramatic tenure than any of his predecessors. A pricey one too. Many in the arts gasped last July when he emerged from the Treasury with a £1.57 billion rescue package he hoped would be enough to save the “crown jewels” and local pillars of British culture and heritage in the face of the financially devastating pandemic.
A recent National Audit Office report revealed that the official pitch to the Treasury last summer was that under the worst-case Covid-19 scenario, which has now been exceeded, 75 per cent of arts and heritage organisations could survive with support within that range. There had been “protracted” negotiations with the Treasury, Dowden said.
The fund, which Dowden’s department says has already “protected” 4,000 organisations, was given a £300 million top-up in the recent budget. So are three quarters of Britain’s great cathedrals, art galleries, ancient ruins, theatrical titans, creative workshops, orchestras, festivals, comedy clubs, music venues, dance studios, independent cinemas and film producers going to survive?
“We should get more than that surviving,” Dowden says. “I think barring some further catastrophe with Covid, if things reopen on 21st of June we will at least start from a position where most of our cultural and artistic heritage and institutions will have been preserved, which was unimaginable when I was first getting the briefings this time last year.”
The son of a “dad who worked in a factory in Watford and a mum at a chemist’s in St Albans” says he was “acutely aware” of the challenges faced by tens of thousands of freelancers and others.
“One of my formative cultural memories was getting on a school minibus and going to see the West End shows,” says Dowden
TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER JACK HILL
The colossi of British culture, from the holders of the national collections such as the Victoria and Albert Museum and Tate, to the performing arts powerhouses of the Royal Shakespeare Company, National Theatre and Royal Opera House, are having to make tens of millions of pounds of cuts.
Reserves are, Dowden says, down to the bones and debt is being stacked up. “But I think overall I tried to keep the basic infrastructure so there is something to rebuild from. If we had lost chunks of that it would have taken a generation to rebuild. And it is not just the Royal Albert Hall. It is the Walsall Art Gallery, the Watford Palace Theatre that I grew up going to. Once they are gone, particularly those regional theatres and art venues, they are gone for good.”
He is keen for the cultural world to reopen — and big players such as Tate, the National Theatre, the South Bank Centre and Royal Opera House have announced plans for May onwards — but stresses that the “aim with our road map is to take a cautious approach . . . as the prime minister said, this year we want a one-way road to freedom”.
Gnarled veterans of art funding battles, even those with left-leaning talons, have in general praised Dowden’s actions during the pandemic. If civil servants could be frustrating, “at least Dowden gets it” more than one has said. There is a lot to “get” in a brief encompassing sport, broadcasting, tourism, heritage, digital strategy as well as the arts and museum sectors. He even decides if the Union Jack should be flown over government buildings.
In the normal run of events he would have been, well, the minister for fun. Remember David Mellor? Dowden is candid enough to admit that he would “have loved to have had access to see some high culture that is quite hard to see”, not to mention Lord’s for the cricket and Wimbledon for the tennis.
But panto, for this father of two who is married to Blythe, a teacher, still beats opera. “I do love a show,” he says. “No business like showbusiness. One of my formative cultural memories was getting on a school minibus and going to see the West End shows. I do love West End commercial theatre. I love the chorus line and the great George Gershwin hits. I was lucky enough to perform in the Edinburgh Festival once.”
Although Murder in the Red Barn sank without trace, Dowden did not. Born in St Albans and educated at the local comprehensive, he secured a place at Cambridge to read law before joining the Conservative Research Department.
He rose swiftly under David Cameron, becoming his deputy chief of staff and, in his own words, spent much of his time on crisis management. He also garnered the nickname Olive after a Guardian typo while Cameron named him “the undertaker” because “he frequently brought me the bad news”.
In 2011, four years before even becoming an MP, he was tipped by The Spectator as a future cabinet minister and in 2013 made the Conservative Party’s longlist for Croydon South. The following year he secured the nomination for Hertsmere, beating a candidate the Borehamwood Times described as the “businessman Rishi Sunak”, and in the 2015 general election increased the Conservative majority in the seat close to his childhood home.
Even though a Remainer, he supported Boris Johnson in his aborted 2016 campaign to become party leader but Theresa May, at least by 2018, appeared to have forgiven him and put him on the lower ministerial rungs.
Following her 2019 resignation, according to a Conservative Home profile last year, Dowden along with Sunak and Robert Jenrick interviewed Johnson for an hour before jointly writing an article saying: “The Tories are in deep peril. Only Boris Johnson can save us.”
There seems little doubt that Dowden and Johnson share similar views. Take the cultural treasures held by Britain’s museums such as the Elgin Marbles and Benin Bronzes. Johnson told a Greek newspaper this month that the government’s “firm longstanding position on the [Parthenon] sculptures is that they were legally acquired by Lord Elgin under the appropriate laws of the time”.
Dowden goes further: “Once you start pulling on this thread where do you actually end up? Would we insist on having the Bayeux Tapestry back? American institutions are packed full of British artefacts. Japan has loads of Chinese and Korean artefacts. There is an exceptionally high bar for this . . . because I just don’t see where it ends. You go down a rabbit hole and tie up our institutions. I think it is just impossible to go back and disentangle all these things.
Ministers have no intention of returning the Benin Bronzes
“The British Museum is a majestic cultural institution where I think you are enriched by being able to see the Rosetta Stone, magnificent Egyptian sarcophagi, the Benin Bronzes, which are a wonderful piece of global cultural heritage that have influenced Picasso and others. And it is not just for the British people. It is a museum of the world for the world and I know it has a lot of important partnerships. They are working with their counterparts in Nigeria on the archaeology of the Kingdom of Benin for example.”
Dowden said that while he loved the Benin Bronzes, he had “never related that much to the Parthenon Sculptures” until the museum’s director, Hartwig Fischer, “showed me around and told me the story in wonderful depth, revealing a whole different level of the artistry which I found really inspiring”. He adds: “Would they have survived the Nazis rampaging through Athens during World War II. It is a slightly trite argument but there is a truth. Would the Benin Bronzes have survived various international conflicts?”
He has told heritage and museum bosses to defend the country’s culture and history from a “noisy minority of activists” and has been critical of the National Trust’s focus on Winston Churchill in its slavery and colonialism report. This week he ordered that the Union Jack be flown from government buildings.
There does seem an obvious relish for his brief although he, like so many, is weary of the need to do everything digitally. Yes, digital innovations will “turbocharge the creative industries” but after seven-day weeks of work video calls he is “zoomed out”.
He adds: “Yes I do [have digital fatigue]. I have really hated this lockdown in a way I haven’t hated previous ones. There is no novelty to a conversation like this. No novelty to sorting out your garden. It is just a slog and it has genuinely taken a real toll on people’s mental health. We have got to get the joy back into people’s lives through arts and culture: there is a joy in seeing wonderful paintings, seeing great entertaining shows, hearing marvellous orchestras perform, going to festivals. “I really want to get some of the joy back this summer and I think we can do it.”
CURRICULUM VITAE
Born 1978 in St Albans
Education Parmiter’s comprehensive school, Watford, and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he studied law
Career Joined the Conservative Research Department in 2004 before returning to Tory HQ in 2009 as deputy chief of staff to David Cameron. Elected MP for Hertsmere in 2015. Boris Johnson appointed him cabinet office minister in 2019 and culture secretary in February 2020
Family Lives with his wife and two children
QUICKFIRE
Opera or Pantomime? Panto
Shakespeare or Beckett? Shakespeare
Lords or Wembley? Lords (but I spend a lot of my time on football and want to ensure fans come first as we recover)
The Crown or Line of Duty? Line of Duty
Beethoven or Beyoncé? Beethoven
Sturgeon or Starmer? Starmer — union before party politics
National Trust or National Theatre? National Trust
Share
Save
Never had a proper job in his life...
Aye, but someone keeps voting the corrupt shameless gits back in.
