Mr. Chairman, My Lord Mayor, Your Excellency, Ladies and Gentlemen.
It is really a very great pleasure to be here today to open this Fair, even though if you get among any Minister of the Crown you promptly start to drop broad hints about what we ought to do next about relieving tax for the particular occasion which one is attending. It is really a very special occasion today. It's an opportunity to celebrate what I hope will be a very successful marriage between the Antique Dealer's Fair and the Burlington Fine Arts Fair and I really am very pleased that after a year of uncertainty about the future of the Antique Dealer's Fair this very happy arrangement has come about. I know that we very much regret that for a time we were without one and we regretted very much what was called industrial action, which was really industrial inaction, that brought about the loss of this Fair, and the loss of it meant so much to so many of you and to us. I am delighted you have made such a splendid recovery and have come to such a beautiful place to hold the first Burlington Fair. Here we have the very best antiques, the very best porcelain, the very best jewellery, the very best furniture, the very best art and it is a source of very great pride to us in this country that we can say that London has become a market for the best. Indeed really in this country we've got a very special talent for creating markets of many kinds, commodity markets, capital markets, agricultural markets, import and export markets and arts markets. It's an international Fair and the import and export of works of art have over the centuries played a major part in the development of this nation's artistic achievement. For example if you think back, it was the culture of the Renaissance in Italy which came to us largely through the import of works of art by those who recognised their very great merit. So we have all of us profited by the import of arts from other countries, as [end p1] some of them have profited from the export from this country of our great artistic products to them. But in this country we have beautiful objects of all kinds. You see them about you. Objects that show elegance of design, great skill and pride in craftsmanship, treasures that will endure and will remind us of achievements of past ages. And people buy them because they recognise those things and because they really want a kind of antidote to the plastic and silicon chip age. We ourselves have gained very much by importing; we really would like to be certain that we can keep some of our very best treasures in this country and I think that the system we have to protect some things from being exported works well and reasonably, both for those who wish to buy and those who wish to sell. But really the very best way to protect our heritage here is to have the purchasing power in this country to hold it. And that's why you talk about Harold Macmillan. In my Government, we did try to cut income tax and we have tried to make special arrangements with regard to covenants to charities so that we here would have the purchasing power to hold our own treasures in Great Britain.
I am often castigated Mr. Chairman about the disadvantages of a high exchange rate for industry. But in fact a high exchange rate for antiques has meant that we keep more of our own things here as other countries have to put a higher value on our products and it therefore costs more to buy them.
Now, Mr. Chairman, I have just had a glimpse of what is here and many of us will gaze as I did rather wistfully if we see the things we see here and then have to go away and rummage in less distinguished markets and shops. I remember my own first venture into buying what I am happily pleased to call antiques came because not long after I was married I lost a brooch. Fortunately it was insured and I was determined to buy something with the insurance money that couldn't be lost in the same way. So I went out and bought a rather beautiful cupboard on a stand which is walnut and also has some lacquer on it and beautiful mirrored doors. [end p2]
I don't think I could have afforded to have bought it at its value today. But if only I'd had more brooches to lose! Then I got a taste. I promptly went out and bought a rather lovely display cabinet. Some men would call it feminine logic that I had bought a display cabinet before I had any porcelain to display. I called it looking ahead. And it has stood me in good stead. … . sent me out looking for smaller bits of porcelain which were a little bit more within my means. But looking around here I'm not quite sure I could still say that. … . It stood me in very good stead because when I went to No. 10 Downing Street I found that miraculously they too had a lot of display cabinets but a paucity of objects to display which really was very far sighted on my part. I bought the display cabinet early in my interest in antiques and then had to buy some of the things to display. But people will always want to live with something whose beauty exceeds its utilitarian value. So many people in this country possess something—sometimes it is something they have have rummaged for, searched for, that has given them many happy memories when eventually they have found something that is dear to them. Sometimes it is something inherited from grandparents or even before that. Sometimes it is something they go out to purchase. But they want to start their own children off with something so that their children too can feel continuity that is Britain and get some of the sense that we all need: the sense of belonging to a continuous culture, and the sense of having to achieve in the future things as great as our forebearers achieved in the past. Because, beautiful as the things are here, we cannot exist by buying and selling the treasures of the past. I never doubt it, that those same talents that created those treasures, those same creative talents, the integrity, the pride, the individualism, the taste that originated the pieces we see here today, are still present in the British ability and that we can, in fact, produce more in the future. Indeed, I cannot go round enough factories, glass factories, and see some of the designs still being done today, every bit as well as they were [end p3] in the past. And as I go round, the craftsmen say to me: Mrs. Thatcher, times are difficult, do you think there will be a market for this kind of thing for very much longer? And my reply is always the same: there will always be a market for the best. And I hope that in Britain we shall always produce the best.
Mr. Chairman, it was Ruskin who said: fine art is that in which the hand, head and heart of man go together. The fine art that you see before you today should be an inspiration and delight to us all. Some will look at it; some, I hope, will buy it. We shall all take very great pleasure and we all wish you very great success. And I am happy and honoured to declare open the first Burlington House Fair.