The sums dispensed were minuscule — £2,000 for an orchestra — and the manner informal. John Denison, the council's director of music from 1948 to 1965, would get a call at times from David Webster, the Covent Garden manager, asking him to drop by after dinner for a chat. On a fine night, the pair would take a stroll down Weymouth Street and Webster would confess that the box-office was a bit low: "I don't know if we can pay the wages next week," he'd mutter. Next morning, Denison would send him an Arts Council cheque for £1,000 as an advance on the next year's grant. "That's how it was done," he told me. "No forms to fill, no fuss." 

Autres temps, autres moeurs. Public administration has moved on. Today, a senior official biking round an unvetted advance would have the fraud squad on his doorstep before the banks opened. The original cash dispensers, many of whom I met in the 1990s while writing a book on Covent Garden, applied the make-do culture they had picked up in the war and were rewarded, if successful, with a promotion from supply side to demand. Denison, a former horn player in the London orchestras, went on to become an excellent general manager of the three South Bank concert halls. 

Success in the arts fuelled ambition, yielding increased investment. Over 65 years, an experimental grant of £235,000 (£9.4m in 2010 values) ballooned fifty-fold into a £450 million annual settlement by 2010. The arts depended on subsidy and the Arts Council functioned as a government inspectorate, its arms-length independence shortened to a fingernail. Establishments seldom plan for the unexpected. When the banking crisis hit in 2007, the council had just commissioned a ten-year strategy plan. The process sailed on regardless and the paper mountain was finally produced in November 2010, apparently unaffected by recent reversals, such was the stasis and confusion into which the core function of arts funding had descended.

The axe fell upon the arts in October 2010 in two unequal blows of unprecedented ferocity. At the high noon of the long knives of the Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, the museum and gallery sector got off relatively lightly with a 15 per cent trim over four years, a reduction that most directors felt could be absorbed within general efficiencies and without damage to major departments or exhibitions. The British Museum, the Tate franchise, the V&A, National Gallery and other grand edifices quietly congratulated each other on having mobilised board members with political connections to explain their cause to ministers. Visual arts were the big winners in Osborne's demolition derby.

By contrast, the Arts Council (shrunk to Arts Council England) behaved like a kitten chased by city urchins: it scuttled up a tree and refused to come down until the park was empty. Theatres, orchestras and the opera houses emulated the museums and rallied business allies. The ACE chair Liz Forgan, a former media executive who headed the Guardian Media Group and Heritage Lottery Fund, maintained radio silence and her chief executive, Alan Davey, was unable to remember key facts and figures under cross-examination by MPs. When the Osborne decree was announced, the ACE was singled out for humiliation. Not only did the Chancellor slash its funds by 29.6 per cent, twice the museums' cut, he also limited the impact on "frontline" companies such as the ROH and National Theatre to 15 per cent and ordered the ACE to halve admin costs. The Arts Council stood before the bar of Parliament as one of the least efficient public bodies. But instead of showing contrition and offering resignations, Forgan and Davey fought on, trying to protect its programmes and jobs at the expense of grants to arts bodies. More than a quarter of its spending was still reserved for non-arts activities. Despite paying lip-service to the need for more private sponsorship, the lobby group Arts and Business had its ACE subsidy removed. The flagship had lost radio contact with the fleet. "What's wrong with the Arts Council?" was the first question I was asked when testifying on arts funding before the House of Commons select committee on culture, media and sport.