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.
The Stage, 25/8/11
The recent fallout at the Poetry Society has brought the whole issue of governance, crucial to any arts organisation’s future, back to the forefront, says Simon Tait
The sudden implosion of the venerable Poetry Society, one of the Arts Council’s favourite clients, has brought back into focus an issue which had shifted from the arts sector’s gaze: governance, and the relationships of board and executive in arts organisations.
And last week Arts Council England’s appointed its first director of organisational leadership and development with a team whose job it will be to give clients like the Poetry Society guidance on how to steer their businesses with excellence and stability. Governance will be a large part of her remit.
Last month a spat escalated and brought the resignation of the Poetry Society’s director. This led to the entire board standing down because they hadn’t seen it coming, they had lost touch with the executive. ACE, which had offered an extra £100,000 funding for next year against the trend of cuts, has temporarily suspended its grant because of what it sees as a spectacular collapse of the organisation’s governance. “We have made it very clear to the society what it needs to do, as a matter of urgency, in order to re-establish compliance with the terms of its current funding agreement – particularly in the areas of governance, management and leadership, reputational risk and reasonable care,” the ACE spokeswoman said.
Governance had been seen as vital to any arts organisation’s future, but as an issue it had been overshadowed by the suddenly more urgent funding crisis. In the 80s, at a time of great change in cultural subsidy when funding was shrinking, arts and heritage organisations were encouraged to find alternative income sources and looked to corporate sponsorship. It was an ethical shock for many of them, but several were successful quite quickly, and to help them many recruited business leaders to their boards, encouraged by Arts & Business.
In the 90s these business appointees began to find themselves at the head of many boards, most of them either charities or companies limited by guarantee – and while some guided their organisations skillfully and harmoniously, others tried to impose their business style on boards unprepared for the City approach. There were some serious fallings out, with the directors of both the National Maritime Museum and the National Gallery moving on after clashes between chairman and CEO. In 2005, the chairman of English National Opera – a financial services millionaire who had personally brought considerable cash to the company – fired the artistic director, the second he had personally sacked, and appointed successors without an interview process, strictly against the rules for a subsidised company. It brought calls for his own resignation from luminaries as varied as the novellist Jeanette Winterson and the singer Philip Langridge, and he duly stood down.
Boards, how they work with the executive and how confrontations between the two can be obviated, became a major issue. It featured in the Arts Council’s own debacle over its 2007-8 investment programme in which it had found governance failings among some regularly funded organisations. Tellingly, ACE’s then new chief executive, Alan Davey, said in an interview: “There are lots of good boards about, but some boards see their job as managing financial risk only and not enabling artistic risk”.
A year later the ACE’s Cultural Leadership Programme took it up and organised a conference on the issue which identified key questions – like should a chairman be a visionary, a facilitator or a leader? how do you overcome board conflict? who owns the company vision, the chief executive or the board?
It became part of the CLP’s Meeting the Challenge programme, which is now to be taken on by the new ACE leadership director, Ginny Spittle, brought in from the private sector to inject an element of business reality into arts board thinking and to “maintain the interactive continuum” within the arts.
Meanwhile, for the last four years the Clore Leadership Programme has been running its own board development advisory service, with training days not just for potential board members but for CEOs and sitting chairs, to help them challenge perceptions and “harness creativity and clarity of thought; and to realise the aspirations for their organisation”. Theirs is a popular programme which is sold out as soon as each new prospectus is announced, and the Clore will be working closely with Ginny Spittle, says its director, Sue Hoyle.
But, she says, it’s going to be harder for boards now to get the balance Davey wants between financial stability and bringing on “the surprising and the new”. The Arts Council’s £40m Catalyst fund has been devised to encourage boards to find other sources of income using the tried, tested and discarded (by politicians) Arts & Business ploy of matching funding.
There may, however, be an object lesson in an organisation that started life as the gleam in the eye of the millionaire toymaker, Sir Torquil Norman, and no subsidy at all, which this summer is celebrating five years since it opened. The Roundhouse’s board is an extraordinary mix of professionals who have in common their devotion to the mission of giving young people from difficult histories the better future they go there to find. Norman was the first chairman, succeeded by Travelex’s Lloyd Dorfman and this year by Chris Satterthwaite, chief executive of Chime Communications.
He was interviewed for the job, as were four others, after having been headhunted by a committee chaired by Nick Allott, the West End producer and long-standing board member, which vets all prospective board members. Others include the ex-UBS chief Alan Hodson; Wayne McGregor, the choreographer; Baroness Ginny McIntosh, ex-RSC/National Theatre; TV Dragon Deborah Meaden; EMI’s UK president Andria Vidler; the former cabinet member and arts minister Estelle Morris.
Unusually and controversially for some who think this practice is a blurring of distinction between policy-making and strategy (and has to have the Charity Commission’s approval), the Roundhouse’s chief executive and artistic director, Marcus Davey, is a full member of the board, not merely there to report and be given the board’s decisions.
“We’re made to feel a genuine part of the place and its spirit,” Estelle Morris says. “There are big bands in the main space, but in the little theatre there are teenage bands just starting off, the same age as the audience. I went to listen, and there was Torquil – I was 30 years older than rest of them, he was 50 years older, and nobody thought it was strange.”
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“To be successful, organisations need a combination of effective executive leadership and good governance: that’s why I view board development as a vital part of our work in strengthening leadership in the cultural sector.”
Sir John Tusa, Chair, Clore Leadership Programme.
[Box 2]
The 2009 Cultural Leadership Programme’s key questions about governance:
Who owns the vision, the board or CEO?
How can the board remain informed and keep an independence of mind?
Should the chair be a visionary, a facilitator or a leader?
How do you overcome conflict at board level?
The Times, 20/8/2011
By Simon Tait
The fall in the number of courses for the young has caused dismay
Some astute property management by the wife of a medieval goldsmith is helping to ensure the future of his craft, more than six centuries after his death.
Robert Harding, or Hardyng, had a long and prosperous life, living to be almost 80 mixing his craft as a goldsmith with property dealing, and holding property in Surrey and Essex, and possibly Kent, Norfolk and Buckinghamshire, as well as in the City. In 1489 he was Prime Warden of the Goldsmiths’ Company, and in 1498 he was elected a Sheriff of the City. He died in 1503.
Agas, or Agnes, Harding was his widow and in her will of 1514 she left a small bequest to the Company in her husband’s memory, a plot of land between Shoe Lane and Fetter Lane, just north of Fleet Street. Leaseholders developed the land, putting tenements and gardens on it in the mid-17th century when New Street was created.
After the Great Fire of 1666 the neighbourhood became a lively trading area and in the 19th century printers, publishers and newspapers settled around the Harding bequest. Now it is called New Street Square, 700,000 square feet of office and retail space in five buildings, worth £17.5m.
This is the source of the funding that is creating the Goldsmiths’ Centre and Institute, that will open not far away in Clerkenwell in October. A charitable enterprise, it is the company’s biggest single investment in its 700 year history and its most important educational initiative since it founded Goldsmiths’ College in New Cross in 1891. “The company has watched with dismay the rapid reduction in the number of courses available to young people wanting to make a career in the sector,” said Martin Drury, chairman of the new centre’s trustees, a former director general of the National Trust and a recent Prime Warden of the Goldsmiths. ”The vocational courses the polytechnics offered have closed and no pre-apprenticeship courses in silversmithing and jewellery are now offered in the London metropolitan area.”
The centre’s director, Peter Taylor – an enamellist by training who set up the Jewellery Industry Innovation Centre in his home city of Birmingham ten years ago – is determined to reverse the trend, with layers of operations on the five floors.
The centre, partly in a listed Victorian board school, Eagle Court, and partly on the site a 1960s cookery school, is in a district that had become a Dickensian slum at the time newspapers were beginning to populate Robert Harding’s bequest. The land, behind Farringdon Station, is owned by the London Development Agency which is anxious to revive the area. The Goldsmiths have a 125 year lease with an option on the freehold, and the new centre will open in October.
Standing on the edge of the Hatton Garden jewellery quarter and in the traditional watchmaking neighbourhood of London, the institute within the centre will provide pre-apprenticeship training in silversmithing, jewellery-making and design in fully-equipped workshops. Eight to ten young people aged between 16 and 19 will be employed for a year, and the course will act as a feeder for the Goldsmiths’ own apprenticeship scheme.
It will also offer an intense one or two year course in professional design for post-graduates, as well as short courses for established goldsmiths. Other workshops will be available for hire at affordable rents by craftspeople just setting up business. Too many fail in their early years because of the cost of rents in suitable centres the idea is that that the proximity of commercial and educative operations would be mutually beneficial. “We will get them involved in the educational aspects by offering them rebates on their rents if they help with the teaching,” Taylor said, “so that we will create a community, not just a facility”.
The centre will also have exhibition space and conference facilities available for hire, and a publicly accessible café, raising revenue which will be ploughed back into the fully independent centre.
The initiative is a radical departure for the Goldsmiths who have preserved a non-interventionist policy, said Peter Taylor, until the growing paucity of properly trained jewellery and precious metal craftspeople demanded a more direct response.
“The unique nature of our membership combined with our history and financial resources means that we are the only organisation that is in the position to make this bold step,” he said. “We believe that the Goldsmiths’ Institute will be uniquely equipped to take on this challenge and to respond to the serious issues faced within craft and design education for our sector.”
The Stage, 14/7/2011
As new ways of funding the arts are explored, Simon Tait explains the concept and impact of venture philanthropy and the financial advantages of such an approach
Fiery Dragons, the new West End producer, is being seen as the embodiment of a mysterious new funding model, venture philanthropy. Led by a high octane triumvirate of producers and entrepreneurs, Luke Johnson, Raymond Gubbay and Edward Snape, it corrals theatre angels who, historically, almost never see a return on their investments but happily lay out for the joy of making theatre happen, and most of their ventures fail. These dragons will add their investment expertise and producing nous to the mix, and the proof might be in its first production, The Ladykillers, in November.
But is it venture philanthropy?
The ungainly phrase – it could be worse, it is also known as “philanthrocapitalism” – was born in the United States in the mid-90s and is becoming more familiar here, through the charity sector. It is has begun to emerge in cultural circles thanks to Arts & Business and its chief executive Colin Tweedy who have been quietly promoting it.
Its meaning in the arts is obscure, though, and is not measurable yet. At first, it seems to be no more than a new portmanteau for a number of familiar sponsorship nuances. It might mean giving to a cause to enable it to become more self-supporting; or investing in a charitable concern that has resonances in one’s own business; it might be personal, collective or even corporate giving as long as there is no immediate benefit to the philanthropist; perhaps it is giving no money at all, just one’s skills that have a particular relevance to the beneficiary.
Confusing, but it becomes a more definable when you go back to its non-cultural origins.
The Nationalist Venture Capital Association, based in Arlington, Virginia, says venture philanthropy “focuses on leadership, bold ideas, developing strong teams, active board involvement, and long-term investment”, but on behalf of not-for-profit organisations. In this country, the banner has been flourished by the Impetus Trust, founded eight years ago and entirely self-financing.
Amy Stillman, Impetus’s director of communications and development, said the trust has a three-component model: core funding s; hands-on management support; and pro-bono expertise below board level. “What we haven’t done,” Stillman told The Stage, “is to address the arts and culture – yet”.
Theatre’s angels and dragons stand on a different plinth, as Paul Taiano, chairman of the Central School of Speech and Drama and an accountant who specialises in the theatre, explains. Attempts have been made for years to concentrate individual investment in productions, and Sally Greene’s Old Vic Productions has over 100 productions under its belt in its 18 years, including Billy Elliot the Musical.
But, says Taiano, it hasn’t had the success it might have had, and might yet have. Because Fiery Dragons has been born to take advantage of the new Enterprise Investment Scheme rules that came into force in April: investors paying tax at 50% can claim 30% a year, up from 20%, back on investments of up to £500,000.
“The concept of the angels still exists, but you get minimal relief for any losses,” Taiano says. EIS is safer, and even with a flop you need lose only 35p in the pound. It takes three years for a company – or production – to qualify for EIS status so considerable advance judgement comes into play, yet more producers are looking at the possibility and Taiano himself is working with ACT Productions on a portfolio of four EIS shows. It maybe venture, he says, but the endgame is profit, so it is not philanthropy.
For Colin Tweedy, the advance of venture philanthropy has been a creeping progression which began with A&B posting volunteer business people on arts boards, and it has progressed so that, for instance, Paul Ruddock has taken his acumen as a hedge fund financier to the chairmanship of the V&A, and several million pounds. Or Michael Hintze, another hedge fund magnate, who among things rescued Wandsworth Museum and recast its business plan as well as giving £2m.
There paradigms emerging of venture philanthropy in the arts that fit the Impetus criteria, though they probably would not recognize the label.
Sky Arts launched its Ignition programme in April, worth more than £1m over three years in which the channel will collaborate with six organisations to create new works of visual art, with how best to broadcast the arts a major part of the programme. With it, the Sky Arts Ignition Future Fund will offer five individuals bursaries of £30,000 each to help them move from art college to becoming full-time artists.
John Cassy, who was the Sky Arts director until recently moving on to head up Sky’s 3D operation, launched Ignition. “The arts are thriving creatively in the UK but money is tight, so if we can do our bit to help create new works and give them a platform, we’ll be happy,” he said.
For Tweedy, however, the thinking is being put into practice by arts foundations and charities like Hamlyn, Jerwood, Sainsbury, and particularly the Gulbenkian Foundation which last month launched its performance participation scheme. This offers £175,000, the biggest single arts award in the world, to “help artists develop the gleams in their eyes and bring them to reality”, in the words of the director, Andrew Barnett.
Awarded to National Theatre Wales just this month – Gulbenkian won’t tolerate words like “win” because, they say, there is no competition – after a painstaking process of recommendation by experts around the country, sifting, whittling and reassessing, NTW will get £75,000 to research and develop a street theatre project with Cardiff Bay Somali poets and musicians, and another £100,000 to put it on in 2013. They plan another four such grants in the succeeding years, and at least one of those considered this time will be nurtured by the foundation for a possible future grant.
“We were keen to do something that covers the social and cultural breadth of the foundation and at the same time supports and works with arts organisations to stretch their practice in new ways that could inform the way in which the arts are practiced in the UK,” Barnett said. “We wanted to take an approach that was innovative, moving beyond the mere transaction of writing a cheque but working with them from the beginning to explore different practices. But key is the insistence on uncompromisingly high artistic standards.”
That, says Colin Tweedy, is venture philanthropy, and if its real nature is obscured by other initiatives, it can only grow. “It is,” Tweedy says, “simply unstoppable”.
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THE IMPETUS MODEL
1. Strategic funding Long-term core funding to allow beneficiaries build their capacity, which can be used as leverage or additional funding from co-investors.
2. Hands-on management support An investment team with consulting, financial and voluntary-sector experience goes hands-on to support the beneficiary’s CEO.
3. Specialist expertise Experts volunteer their skills to specific, agreed, requirements in the beneficiary organization – senior management team coaching, for instance, or financial planning.
From a shortlist that includes car-tinkering Shetlanders, Somali poets and a mass cycle ride, the first winner will be unveiled in June
By Simon Tait
Independent on Sunday, 8 May 2011
The biggest art prize in the world is launched tomorrow, with a shortlist of potential winners that is almost certain to cause controversy. Called simply the Gulbenkian, the £175,000 award is worth more than four times the Turner Prize and outstrips the US-based ArtPrize, previously the world’s largest, at $250,000 (£153,000).
Announcing the award exclusively in this newspaper, Andrew Barnett, the UK director of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, said: “We want to help artists develop the gleams in their eyes.” But the award is likely to excite much comment. Entrants shortlisted for the first award include a bonfire night spectacle involving street drinkers; a surreal world in which humans and animals change place; young Somalis in a poetry drama on Cardiff’s dockside; an interactive virtual version of a Brecht/Weill opera; Shetlanders tinkering with cars; and a London indoor and outdoor mass cycle ride.
The winner will have two years to develop their idea before it is presented in 2013. And while the chosen works are unusual, the aim of the prize is to produce high-quality arts projects that involve the public, its organisers say. They cite La Machine, the giant robotic spider that crawled all over the hearts and imaginations of Liverpool in its year as European Capital of Culture in 2008, or One and Other, Antony Gormley’s cross between sculpture and theatre on Trafalgar Square’s empty Fourth Plinth in the summer of 2009.
Set up in 1956 by the energy baron Calouste Gulbenkian, the foundation promotes culture and education throughout Europe, so the six shortlisted works also need to have a social purpose and pioneer new ways of reaching the disadvantaged. “It sounds very worthy,” said Simon Mellor, general director of the Manchester International Festival and one of the award’s advisers, “but what we’re looking for is something spectacular that will have real resonance”.
Perhaps the most controversial is Duckie, an anarchic theatre group based in the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, just over the Thames from Tate Britain, which wants to work with Graham House, a “wet hostel” for street drinkers, to create a choreographed performance around a Guy Fawkes bonfire. The work would address addiction, homelessness and desperation in front of an audience of around 4,000.
The Truro company Wildworks – in the news at Easter when it worked with National Theatre Wales to present The Passion in Port Talbot, South Wales, with the actor Michael Sheen – is proposing what its artistic director Bill Mitchell calls “a surreal mythic world” bringing together rural and urban communities in Cornwall and London.
NTW is also shortlisted, with a proposal aimed at giving the young poets and playmakers of the long-established Somalis of Butetown, once Cardiff’s Tiger Bay, their moment.
National Theatre Scotland’s entry reflects on the irony of Shetland once being rich in air-poisoning oil. Graham Vick and his Birmingham Opera want to turn Brecht and Weill’s political satire Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny into a multi-participant online production examining the survival of the soul in a virtual world. The Young Vic will fill its neighbourhood, near Waterloo station in London, with enthusiastic cyclists recreating the Chinese film Beijing Bicycle.
The prize’s first recipient will be announced early in June. “We want to take an approach that’s innovative,” Mr Barnett said, “moving beyond the mere transaction of writing a cheque and working with them from the beginning to explore different practices.”
He added that he hoped the Gulbenkian will inform the Arts Council, as it rethinks how it will spend the extra £50m a year expected via the Government’s rejigging of the National Lottery in favour of good causes.
