Time to commit to culture and the arts

‘I remember all the activities beyond the classroom that schools provided: musical shows, serious drama … with pupils and led by enthusiastic teachers.’ Photograph: Alamy

Charlotte Higgins rightly makes a point of the 60th anniversary of Jennie Lee’s famous white paper (‘Worse than the 1980s’ – that’s the arts sector now. It’s not a good look for a Labour government, 1 February). Significantly, Lee was not just the first arts minister but was also in the cabinet and, with Arnold Goodman as chair of the Arts Council, the Labour party was able to oversee an unprecedented expansion of all the arts with new theatres, concert halls and a growth in arts in education. No Arts Council grant came without a provision for work in schools.

I was the grateful recipient of an Arts Council bursary to study arts administration. With new theatres being built from Coventry to Chichester and Birmingham to Bromley, new skills were urgently needed. Leading actors of the stature of Laurence Olivier, Michael Redgrave and John Neville, along with bright young directors such as Giles Havergal, and seasoned hands like Laurier Lister and Hazel Vincent Wallace, were all pushing ahead with permanent repertory companies with burgeoning acting talent of the quality of Jane Asher, Maureen Lipman and a young Judi Dench. And playwrights such as Harold Pinter, John Arden and Arnold Wesker were being performed at theatres up and down the land.