We enjoyed one of our more remarkable Ramsay Garden seminars last month with Richard Demarco – a life force in the Scottish arts scene for many decades. As someone who has attended every Edinburgh International Festival since the first in 1947, he chose to reflect on the true value of the Festival and how both to recall and to rediscover its essential spirit for the 21st century.

As is his wont, Demarco delivered less a talk than a performance, striding about the stage of the John Duncan room, taking Duncan’s magnificent murals on the walls around him as his set. Some of them depict the legend of King Arthur. Entirely fitting, he pointed out, as we gathered in the shadow of Arthur’s Seat, home of the once and future king, the magic mountain (albeit, he added, with a Scottish Parliament building resembling a Spanish resort hotel at its foot. “All it needs is a swimming pool”).

Ricky told a riveting tale of the early years of the Festival - “when I was 17 years old, and the world was not yet pear-shaped”. He spoke of the determination to restore civilisation in the aftermath of the ‘nightmare’ of the 1930s and the second world war. The attraction of Edinburgh as one of the great European cities - not a capital, but a place of pilgrimage: Venice not Rome, Salzburg not Vienna. The good luck that the Earl of Rosebery’s horse won the derby at just the moment Edinburgh Council turned down his wife’s bid for £10,000 to do a feasibility study to establish a festival.

“The story should be told” – Ricky urged – “we are dealing with miracles here. Who knows the name of the jockey? Where are we going to place a statue in Edinburgh to that horse?” He urged us to believe in miracles: “I have never yet found anything happen in my life which was not first prompted by the possibility of Divine intervention in our lives, mainly through the language of the arts”.

Part of the spirit of the Festival in those early days was about welcoming “some of the finest human beings” to Edinburgh. The locals were hosts – yet today many leave the City to ‘escape’ the Festival in the summer. Demarco founded the Traverse Theatre in 1963 and later his own Demarco Gallery very much on the basis that conviviality and good conversation lie at the heart of any experience of the arts. The Traverse was “a first class restaurant, a place to drink, a place to meet and talk with friends, a club”. Just like the Festival itself.

That spirit has gone, Ricky claimed – along with the Festival Club – because the leaders are “playing the numbers game”. In the early years the Festival put Edinburgh on the map, established it for the first time since the Enlightenment as a place to be taken seriously. It was as much about science and new ideas as about art, as much about painting, writing and craft as about performance.

Since then the Fringe has outgrown the Festival, and no longer wholly coincides with it (“you cannot have a ‘fringe’ without the curtain”). Edinburgh has become known as a gathering of stand-up comics. Yet the whole essence of great art is the presence of two masks: “one of laughter and the other of tears. That is built into Beethoven, into Shakespeare”.

Ricky has recorded the whole history of the Festival, now kept in the Demarco archive. It needs to find a home. That history and the spirit it captures should be evident in the city throughout the year: “so that we dare not ever put on a Festival without knowledge of its foundations. We need to plan a future that honours that history and the thousands of people who have contributed to it - a future that can restore Edinburgh to its former, rightful place, taken seriously again”.

Challenged during the discussion that followed, Ricky insisted that he is not a nostalgic. He spoke of the role of the arts in “waking us up”, forcing us to rethink and realign. He is not yearning for a bygone age, but for the Festival to rediscover its historic depth and significance. “Governments associate the arts with leisure! Good God – it is a matter of life and death”. “We are complacent – resting on laurels we have not earned” he said. The Festival becomes dangerous if it “stops telling the truth”: about ourselves and the condition of the world.

“Have I wasted my time being on duty for 65 years a centurion at the gates of a crumbling empire?” This was his heartfelt plea, which will surely stir to action at least some of those souls lucky enough to hear it on this extraordinary, dare I say ‘miraculous’, occasion.

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edinburgh demarco culture festival art

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