Festival Fringe Society

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society is the organisation that supports the running of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the largest arts festival in the world. The Society was established in 1958 to provide a centralised information and box office service for the Fringe, which had grown in numbers since eight theatre companies had effectively "created" the Fringe by performing uninvited alongside the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947.

The first formal discussions regarding the establishment of a central body for the Fringe took place in 1954. By that year, the Fringe was attracting around a dozen companies, and a meeting was held to discuss creating "a small organisation to act as a brain for the Fringe", or what The Scotsman called an "official unofficial festival".

However, it was not until 1958 when the idea of a Festival Fringe Society was properly established, by Michael Imison, director of Oxford Theatre Group. A constitution was drawn up, in which the policy of not vetting or censoring shows was set out, and the Society was officially launched at the Fringe of 1959.

In 1969, the Society became a limited company and published its constitution. It is also a registered charity

The Society performs no curatorial role for the Fringe. Rather, it formalises the process of event registration, promotion and ticket selling, while also acting in an advisory and advocacy capacity. A founding principle of the Fringe was that no single individual or committee should determine who can appear. It remains an open access arts festival, accommodating anyone with a desire to perform and a venue willing to host them.

The Society therefore has no artistic director, only administrators. For some years the lead (or only) official in the Fringe Society was known as the Fringe Administrator. Only in recent years has the term Chief Executive been used to describe the head of the Fringe Society.

The Society has a Board of Directors, which oversees the core Fringe staff. The first chair of the board was Lord Grant. In 1970, the actor Andrew Cruickshank became chair, to be succeeded in 1983 by Jonathan Miller, and then by Elizabeth Smith, Baroness Smith, widow of former Labour Leader John Smith. The current chair is Professor Sir Timothy O'Shea, who succeeded Baroness Smith in 2012.

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Wikipedia