Richard Pulford
Obituaries, The Times, 26/8/11
High-flying civil servant who switched careers to make an enduring contribution to he arts in London
Richard Pulford, who has died after a long battle with pulmonary disease, twice made telling career leaps, first from a turbo-charged civil service career to arts management, and then from the subsidised to the private sectors, in all of which he showed a formidable capacity for assessing complex situations and seeing solutions. He brought this talent to bear most tellingly at the South Bank Centre and the confusion after the Great London Council (GLC), which ran it, was abolished. Most recently, as the chief executive of the Society of London Theatre, he was tackling the problems of post-9/11 tourism blight, ticketing anomalies and the decrepit state of some of our most beautiful theatres.
Born in the North East of England the son of a polytechnic principal, Pulford won a sholarship from the Royal Grammar School, Newcastle, to read law at Oxford, and after a year’s voluntary service in Africa (he was an enthusiastic traveller all his life) he joined the “fast track” of the civil service. In his 12-year Whitehall career he went from assistant principal to assistant secretary in the Education Department – at 33 the youngest to achieve the grade – with an intervening couple of years at the Treasury, and had in prospect the highest echelons when, at the age of 35, he left to become deputy to the secretary general of the Arts Council of Great Britain, Roy Shaw. His brief was to use his knowledge of the Education Department – then the funding ministry for the arts – to negotiate a better grant, but together they watched horrified as arts funding was shrunk by the Thatcher government. Shaw was a proponent of the partnership between education and the arts – “so long as educational inequalities exist, there is a case for especially encouraging those parts of our artistic and educational efforts which speak to the actual conditions of the potential audience,” he said – and was impressed by the like-minded young education bureaucrat with a passion for music (he was a keen pianist) and particularly for opera.
In 1984 the GLC was abolished, orphaning the Royal Festival Hall, the Queen Elizabeth Hall, the Hayward Gallery and the Purcell Rooms. Combined as the South Bank Centre, they were transferred to a new board of governors under an executive chairman, Ronald Grierson, with Arts Council funding. It was decided to appoint two executive chiefs, Pulford as general director (administration) and Nicholas Snowman as general director (arts).
“It was complete chaos,” Snowman recalls. “All the different elements of the South Bank Centre had been run by different boards and Richard had to try to bring all the strands together in as contented a manner as possible, and he did it brilliantly”. True to beliefs nurtured in Whitehall and at the Arts Council, Pulford established an in-house education department at the South Bank, one of the first arts centres to do so.
In 1992 it was decided to change the governance of the South Bank with a single chief executive, Snowman, which gave Pulford the opportunity to pursue interests abroad. He became a cultural consultant to the governments of Bulgaria and Hungary of the post-communist era, as well as to the British Council, the Royal Opera House, the Wales Millennium Centre and the Arts Council itself.
The leap between the subsidised to the commercial arts sectors came in 2001 when he succeeded Rupert Rhymes as chief executive of the Society of London Theatre, and with it the Theatre Management Association which represents regional theatres, both membership organisations. High on his agenda for London were the state of the buildings and their surroundings, and of ticketing anomalies.
“The key issues are certainly how we can do something about the building stock, and how we can help to restore the image of the West End, both the theatrical image and the perceived nature of the West End as a place to be for agreeable social purposes,” he said in 2008. “Some people find it a bit intimidating, a bit scruffy”. He had to use his negotiating skills with both local and central government as well as theatre owners in London.
In 2004 a report from the Theatres Trust (of which Rhymes was by then chairman) had shown that the West End theatres needed at least £250m spent on them, well beyond the means of the owners, and together Pilfoird and Rhymes were proceeding towards bringing the Department for Culture Media and Sport to a pragmatic funding partnership. This was scuppered when the DCMS’s lottery income was diverted to the 2012 Olympic Games, “a baleful impact” Pulford said.
He confronted the complex problems of ticketing presented by computerised systems and touting partly by enhancing the activity of the Leicester Square cut-price ticket booth, renaming it TKTS, and opening a second in the suburbs at the Brent Cross Shipping Centre, turning them into legitimate agencies to complete with less accountable ones. Pulford mobilised an effective publicity campaign to beat an illicit ticket market.
Westminster Council was often an adversary on particular issues, such as the proposal to scrap free evening parking which he argued would be a “huge blow to the night-time economy”, and persuading the council to relax its ban on smoking on stage, which he argued was inappropriate artistic interference. He retired in 2010, but still chaired the opera panel of judges for SOLT’s Olivier Awards this year.
For four years until 2009 he was also president of the Performing Arts Employers League Europe, a forum representing 3,500 theatrical and production employers, and travelled regularly to campaign on such issues as visas and temporary work permits for theatre workers.
“He had silky skills of negotiation which meant it was impossible not to get on with him,” said the West End producer Nica Burns, president of SOLT for Pulford’s last three years there. “There were a lot of younger producers coming into the West End who didn’t know the rules, and Richard always knew the right moment for a judicious lunch. There were many industrial negotiations to be done between managements and unions such as Equity, the Musicians Union and BECTU, and Richard was brilliant at bringing sides together without taking any side himself.”
He is survived by his brother, Frank, and sister, Jane Allison.
Richard Pulford, civil servant and arts administrator, was born on July 14, 1944. He died of pulmonary disease on August 7, 2011, aged 67.
