The Role of International Exhibitions in Britain, 1850–1910: Perc ...

Although the technical educationists were able to advance their cause as a result of the Great Exhibition, this was regarded as a Pyrrhic victory by some historians. They have concluded that this was a temporary success that led to a series a costly oversights rather than triumph, because the political and industrial elite were reluctant to fully embrace the ideas held by Playfair and his colleagues. Correlli Barnett is one of the most vociferous supporters of this viewpoint. In The Audit of War, he reflects on what he regarded as the failure of the greatest industrial nation in the world to fully nurture the capability of its people.⁵⁹ He alludes to this as the British diseases. Barnett justified this characterization by referring to the crushing inferiority in education and training that existed between England and other European nations just before the start of the Second World War. He lamented the fact that at such a precipitous moment in time, a hundred years of warning about the dangers posed by a failure to embrace technical and scientific education had not been fully heeded. He notes that “private individuals and official bodies had attempted to convince public opinion and government that the battle for export markets was being lost in the school yards and quadrangles of Britain.”⁶⁰

Yet by comparison with most of the nations that had already addressed this issue, the British still emerged from the conflagration victorious and intact. This incongruity cast enough doubt on the views of the technical educationists to bring their analysis of the situation into doubt. Further questions are prompted by this anomaly. Were the British right to assume that comparison with other nations, particularly through exhibitions, was a useful measure of their own social and industrial health? Is it legitimate to claim that opportunities had been missed? Did industrialists, as Weiner has suggested, lose their taste for their inheritance by adopting the mores and practices of the aristocracy?⁶¹ Has the debate been oversimplified by assuming that the fundamental relationship between technical education and wealth generation was incontrovertible and that it could be easily manipulated? Roderick and Stephens, in their thorough investigations into this subject, acknowledge that British industrial supremacy in the midcentury resulted from a confluence of accidental factors rather than from some planned policy or human design.⁶²