A brief history of festivals at Edinburgh
One of the strongest advocates of holding a festival in the Scottish capital was Rudolf Bing (1902-1997), then the general manager of the Glyndebourne Opera Company: in 1939, he suggested that Edinburgh had potential “as a British equivalent of Salzburg”. He stuck to his campaign and in 1947, after the support of H. Harvey Wood (representative of the British Council in Edinburgh), the first International Festival was held in Edinburgh — one has been held annually ever since.
That's not to say that the locals didn't need some persuasion to allow their city to be given over to massive hordes of people arriving for six weeks or so — nevertheless, Bing persisted in his argument that a festival of the (then mainly musical) arts would bring harmony to the years following the war, as well as to enable a “flowering of the human spirit”.
The Festival Fringe sprang up with the first International Festival. However, it was at that time very much an ad-hoc affair: eight theatre groups turned up uninvited. They found that they couldn't stay and perform with the official groups, so they checked in at venues away from the big public stages. The term Fringe was used the following year in 1948, when Robert Kemp, writing in the Evening News, said that “Round the fringe of the official Festival drama there seems to be more private enterprise than before… I'm afraid some of us are not going to be often at home during the evenings.”
The Fringe began to become rather more organised in 1955, when a central box office and café were set up for the Fringe events. In 1958, the Festival Fringe Society was formed, which produced a brochure, provided information, and sold tickets for unofficial Festival events.
For further information, a very interesting article appears in Insight Guides' Edinburgh (available from Amazon.co.uk). Also, the official Edinburgh Festival Fringe website has a timeline of developments at the Fringe.
