For two weeks only, a children's exhibition was held at the huge Olympia hall – home to exhibitions and grand theatrical performances.

This exhibition was meant to have been unprecedented in terms of its aims and preliminary plans. It was called the ‘Children's Welfare Exhibition’. It was to be an encyclopaedic compendium of everything directly and indirectly related to a child's life and welfare. The idea for such an exhibition could only have been conceived in a country where family values and love of children are paramount, the country of Charles Dickens.

As the first experiment of its kind, the exhibition could not possibly have lived up to all the exalted hopes placed upon it. The famous ‘Children's Floor’ that so much had been written about and that was supposed to present a number of model nurseries (a boy's room, a girl's room, a classroom, etc.) turned out to be a display of the products of some furniture company, like those that can be seen in City shop windows. There was nothing new in the way of nursery furnishings, apart perhaps from the fact that a comfortable nursery could be fitted out without much luxury or pretentiousness, using chintz curtains, unpainted furniture, and so on.

One circumstance was a disappointment (especially for us Russians): the clearly commercial nature of the exhibition. Every lecture given there, every bit of children's entertainment carried a separate fee, the traditional ‘sixpence’ (24 kopecks).

One Russian lady, a graduate of the Bestuzhev Courses and a teacher, wrote an impassioned letter to the exhibition organisers, offering her services gratis and her support for the beautiful and lofty cause. The organisers wrote back expressing their sincerest gratitude, although in the tone of the letter one could discern a certain puzzlement at the Russian lady's selflessness and idealism.

Be that as it may, no parent left the exhibition without absorbing some new detail of nursery decoration, some new ideas about child upbringing, whether concerned with gymnastics, music or children's dances. Children's creative work and amateur dramatics were superbly represented at the exhibition.