Which year saw the very first Edinburgh Festival?
Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society Edinburgh 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
Edinburgh Festival Fringe as such, this was the first Edinburgh Festival Fringe. This meant that two defining features of the future Fringe were established at the very beginning – the lack of official invitations to perform and the use of unconventional venues. Originally, these groups referred to themselves as the "Festival Adjuncts" and were also referred to as the "semi-official" festival. It was not until the following year, 1948, that Robert Kemp, a Scottish playwright and journalist, is credited with coining the title "Fringe" when he wrote during the second Edinburgh International Festival: Round the fringe of official Festival drama, there seems to