These figures may be relevant to the discussion of subsidies:

Government subsidy to Arts Council England for 2007/08: £412 million
Government defence budget for 2007/08: £38.5 billion

Arnold perhaps, but do you think Walton or (especially) Tippett had the type of following as did RVW or Britten?

In terms of the other claims:

Almost certainly true in terms of the population as a whole (I can't prove that, but I'd be happy to bet money on it).

Interesting - I'd like to know more about this if it is true. I suspect this was likely only to be true for a relatively small clique as well. I bet more people were up with what was being played at the Hammersmith Palais, or the equivalent in other locations.

Depends which ones - certainly there were some, but by no means all or even most, certainly in Britain.

That bit is certainly nonsense both then and now - plenty of tonal composers were commissioned and performed. Truly atonal music has never truly held the reins in Britain.

I'd say that's equally true of Stockhausen or Xenakis or countless others, though a lot of the ways it is taught and promulgated and written about would give a different impression.

That's a bit unfair on the Queen.

That bit makes me want to throw up, but that is a subjective view.

There I couldn't disagree more.

Absolutely. The need to turn Marxism into some type of theology seems highly counter-productive, not least because Marx's writings are not necessarily consistent through his life. A big tangent (which maybe should have another thread?), but I've recently been reading some fascinating stuff in David Cannadine's extremely good book Class in Britain, concerning how Marx, upon first arriving in London in 1850, believed that in the industrially advanced country of Britain, the bourgeoisie had practically vanquished the aristocracy, but not that long afterwards both he and Engels were coming round to a different view of how the British bourgeoisie served to effect a continuation of feudal values. That sort of contradiction in British society, whereby industrialisation had progressed as much as in any country, yet without any revolutionary overthrow of feudalism (unless you count 1688 - there is an argument that maintains that the aristocracy never had true power either from this point or from quite early in the 18th century, certainly compared to in various other European countries, and that's not an argument I would wholly dismiss), is something I'm not sure if Marx and Engels ever managed to thoroughly account for (England, as the 'rock against which every revolutionary wave breaks', seems to have been a continuous sticking-point for Marx).

Perhaps we would have been dead?

Something I'm always looking out for is a comprehensive comparative study of musical subsidy in different Western countries - especially one that examines this over a reasonably wide historical period - anyone know of such a thing, with figures?

I would like to think that the public as a whole would have equal problems with defence spending, but remembering the ways in which defence was used as a vote-winner for the Tories (and to discredit Old Labour) in various past elections, I'm doubtful.

It's likely to be at least half-true. The Greensleeves Fantasia was still a regular fixture on Childrens' Favourites in the fifties: it was played every other week, just about. Even in the early sixties, papers such as the Express and Mail were still carrying reviews of major classical concerts, though possibly the Sketch didn't. The War Requiem's première (1962) was covered pretty extensively almost everywhere, perhaps the last time a classical work would be so treated in the British press: I still have a sheaf of cuttings, somewhere. In the thirties and forties, when there was no television and rather more limited radio (regional variants rather than many stations) classical music was much more to the fore, and certainly more newsworthy. Music was far more part of education too: doubtless some would have come to know the RVW's name through learning his songs at school, possibly his hymns from the English Hymnal at assembly, as we did at Grammar School in the sixties. His was a name also well-known to those who frequented the cinema: not only he but Walton, Bax and Bliss wrote scores for major commercial films.

In one sense, Pollard does have it right: whether or not it's actually connected with RVW's death (and I don't believe for one moment it is), a seismic shift occurred in the standing of classical music around the late fifties and early sixties, and the period during which contemporary music had been able to speak to a sizeable portion of the population came to an end.  

Outside of the UK they had; in the UK, Birtwistle had written Refrains and Choruses one year previously, Maxwell Davies the Trumpet Sonata three years before, and Cardew his three piano sonatas and the Two Books of Study for Pianists (not to mention various earlier works of Lutyens); for all the undoubted merits of these works, I find it hard to see that some sort of meaningful musical modernism had yet really made its mark in Britain by 1958.

You think so? I really couldn't say for sure but I would have said the opposite was true (especially given that RVW's musical style had been formed more like fifty years before Britten's).