Here is a picture of an event that took place in London seventy years ago. What is it?
This is the first meeting of the United Nations, as depicted by Feliks Topolski. It took place in Methodist Central Hall in January 1946. The UN Charter had been signed in San Francisco in October 1945 by fifty countries. London was chosen for the inaugural meeting to acknowledge the role Britain played defying tyranny and to show what terrible damage had been inflicted on London in the war.
As so often happens, history was repeating itself. The League of Nations had been founded at the end of the First World War to avert any such catastrophe recurring. It was the first international effort to attain world peace through arbitration and negotiation. Its sentiments were noble but it was not able to impose its ideals on recalcitrant powers. In the 1930s Germany, Spain, Italy and Japan simply resigned.
Is the UN any more effective? It is good at intervening in small-scale disputes and wars but it would be powerless to prevent hostilities between its super-power members. That we have not had a Third World War I ascribe to the statesmanship of politicians like Krushchev, Gorbachev, Nixon and Kissinger to name but a few. St. Paul in his Epistle to the Philippians put his finger on it when he wrote of “the peace of God which passeth all understanding”.
Feliks Topolski was an official war artist and afterwards remained in London recording people and events. One of his most famous works is a frieze at Buckingham Palace, commissioned by Prince Philip, depicting the Coronation. I think I recognise Garter (my great-uncle George Bellew) lurking behind the Duke of Norfolk in this detail.
His studio, under a railway arch near Waterloo, is open as a cafe and music venue with some examples of his work on show. He published fortnightly Chronicles with drawings of events and people. The one I have is of a royal visit to the US and Canada in 1957.
