He who loves fame considers another man’s activity to be his own good; and he who loves pleasure, his own sensations; but he who has understanding, considers his own acts to be his own good.
Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations, Book VI.
At the beginning of 1950, petrol was still rationed. But the Conservatives campaigned in the February general election to have all rationing restrictions removed, and although they were defeated by the Labour Government, their gains reduced the government’s majority to only five.1 The days of rationing were clearly numbered, which may have been why, just six days after the election (and a week before Home at Seven was due to premiere at Wyndham’s) Sherriff placed a deposit on a new Rolls-Royce. Four months later, with petrol rationing finally ended, he proudly took possession of the new car, and could enjoy his motoring once more.
He had also resumed his rowing coaching, offering his services to his old school. The Kingston Grammar boys were very impressed that such a famous man had come to help them. Derek Finlay would later recall how it started:
We were being watched by a gentleman in an open-top Rolls-Royce wearing a soft grey fedora style hat with the brim turned down. He got out of the car, strode over and asked in a soft voice, ‘Would you like some coaching help? I used to row here myself years ago.’ From then on the Old Kingstonian, wellknown author of Journey’s End and playwright R.C. Sherriff, was increasingly generous of his time and support. He provided us with a new shell eight and was in fact a good coach.2
When the new boat was purchased, in the early summer of 1950, it was christened Home at Seven, and he took the entire First VIII up to Scott’s in the West End for dinner before taking them on to the Wyndham’s, having held the curtain to accommodate their late arrival, so that they could see the play for which their boat had been named. This would be the first of many boats he would buy for the school, and the first of many occasions on which he would treat members of the KGS First VIII to a ‘slap-up feed’ and a show.
Although he chose not to, he could have taken the boys to see another of his screenplays brought to fruition, when Sydney Box’s Trio (containing his adaptation of Maugham’s Sanatorium, as well as The Verger and Mr Know-It-All) came to the screen in August 1950. The Guardian gave it a very positive write-up (‘almost as lucky a dip as Quartet’) and when the movie opened in the United States two months later, Bosley Crowther also gave it an enthusiastic endorsement (‘Another delightful screen potpourri’), noting that Sherriff ’s adaptation was ‘considerably broader in its sweep’ than the other two stories. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he continued, ‘[it] was considered at one time … as the stuff for a full-length picture, and well it might have been. But told as it is in this instance, it is brilliantly concise and emotionally full.’ Of course, a lot of credit had to go to the actors, who were uniformly excellent (but especially Jean Simmons as the young woman who chooses love, whatever the cost to her health), and to Harold French’s ‘smooth, unobtrusive and precise direction, in which not a frame is wasted’.3 All true: Sanatorium is an excellent short film.
Home at Seven carried on at Wyndham’s until New Year’s Eve 1950, for a total of 342 performances, easily outstripping any previous Sherriff play except Journey’s End. Six months after it was taken off, the whole cast was reunited in a BBC radio production on 9 June 1951, playing in the prestigious Saturday Night Theatre slot, to an audience of about 8 million.4 The play had averaged the best part of £150 a week in royalties at Wyndham’s, and over the course of the next couple of years it would yield more than £10,000 in revenues for its author, partly from the sale of the screen rights to Maurice Cowan, whose first producer’s credit this would be. Sherriff felt that Cowan was unlikely to secure stars such as Richardson on his own, and that a better plan would be for him to operate within Korda’s operation5 (by which he meant British Lion Films, which was part-funded by government loans, and in which Korda had taken a major shareholding in 1946),6 which was exactly what happened.
In the meantime, Sherriff continued working on a new play, initially titled The Shade in Laburnum Terrace, or Be Gone and Live, which had been occupying him for the past year. As early as June 1950, he had been discussing a draft with theatre manager Binkie Beaumont, producer Peter Brook,7 and also with Ralph Richardson, who had maintained a keen involvement throughout (‘Every thought I give to your play is an excitement to me,’ he told Sherriff)8; indeed, the part of the main character – Sir John Greenwood – was effectively written for him, and he was keen enough on the part that he acquired the English speaking rights for himself9 (although the downside to that was that any production would have to fit in with his busy schedule, which would inevitably delay things). By September 1951, just before Sherriff went off on another archaeological digging holiday on the south coast, it looked as though a production might be possible in the New Year, but that fell through. Nevertheless, Richardson, writing to Sherriff from Shepperton Studios, where he was making the film of Home at Seven, held out hope for a production in the autumn of 1952, once he was free of his obligations. He told Sherriff that Korda liked the play, and had no objection to him appearing in it in that time frame. Korda had also, it seems, suggested a title: The White Carnation (because of the flower the principal character wears in his buttonhole at the beginning of the play). Sherriff, who had long complained of his inability to think up catchy titles, felt this one was ‘an inspiration’.10
With pressure building on Korda to keep costs contained at British Lion, Home at Seven was something of an experiment – a play that would be rehearsed for three weeks on the set at Shepperton, and then shot within a fortnight – compared with the eight weeks that would normally be taken. Rather than directing it himself, he handed the reins to Richardson, who worked to a script prepared by the very experienced Anatole de Grunwald.11 Alongside Richardson in the cast were two of Korda’s contract players – Margaret Leighton (as Preston’s wife) and Jack Hawkins as Doctor Sparling.12 The film was released in the UK in 1952, and in the US (as Murder on Monday) in 1953, to rather lacklustre reviews (‘static, wordy – in short, “stagy”’).13
Although he had handed the film over to Cowan and Korda, Sherriff had remained on hand for advice (Shepperton could be reached from Rosebriars in just twenty-five minutes in his shiny new Rolls-Royce), so he would likely have felt the dismissive reviews rather personally, not least since much of the complaint was about the structure of the play and its denouement. His mood would not have been helped by the death of one of his greatest supporters, Mollie Cazalet, in January 1952. He had sent her copies of all of his books, and taken her to see his plays and films, and she had reacted almost like a second mother, or at the very least, an indulgent aunt. He wrote a touching tribute in a letter to The Times, acknowledging her ‘genius for helping the shy newcomer to the world of art and literature and music’, and observing that ‘the most cherished memories will not lie in the meeting with great people in her house, but in the sweetness and humanity of Mollie Cazalet herself, and the days one spent with her alone.’14
Towards the end of 1951, with the prospect of a production of The White Carnation pushed at least a year into the future, Sherriff seems to have thought it was time to pick up his screenwriting pencil again. He had not written for the movies since No Highway, partly because he had been busy with his plays, but also because no especially attractive film offer had come his way. As luck would have it, however, a British movie company had just acquired a property that, they felt, with the right script, could be turned into one of the best British war movies of the time.
Robert Clark15 was the director of productions at Associated British Picture Corporation (ABPC), which was one of the biggest players in the British movie industry at that time. Clark was a believer in making movies from existing properties that had already shown themselves to be popular, and at the suggestion of Frederick (Fritz) Gotfurt16 (ABPC’s scenario editor) he bought up the rights to Paul Brickhill’s The Dam Busters,17 a history of the RAF’s 617 Squadron.
The squadron had been formed especially to take part in the 1943 raid on three German dams (the Möhne, the Eder and the Sorpe), and this occupies the first eight chapters (out of thirty-one) of Brickhill’s book. It begins with Barnes Wallis’s work designing new, larger sized ‘earthquake bombs’ designed to attack Germany’s sources of power, including mines and dams, and then goes on to describe the problems he faced in trying to shepherd his ideas through Whitehall’s network of committees. Wallis, who was an important source for Brickhill, felt that he had been obstructed in his efforts to put his theories into practice, but subsequent accounts, based on fuller sources, suggest that Whitehall was not as obstructive as he described.18 But even taking that part of his account with a pinch of salt, it did still take Wallis some time to give his idea practical form, and there were numerous tests to be run regarding the shape, size, launch trajectory and speed of the final bomb. Eventually, he had enough in place to be able to persuade Sir Arthur Harris (‘Bomber’ Harris, Chief of the Air Staff) to give him the goahead.
At that point the book turns to the formation, training and development of 617 Squadron, under its young, but experienced new commander, Guy Gibson. This section is based in part on Guy Gibson’s own memoir, Enemy Coast Ahead19 (especially in some of Gibson’s direct quotes), and recounts the difficulties of bringing together an entire squadron from scratch. In due course, Gibson meets Wallis at his office in Weybridge, where the theory behind the bomb is explained to him (although Wallis does not tell him the targets). On Gibson’s return to his base at RAF Scampton, he is shown models of the dams that he and his men will be attacking. Thereafter, with the deadline for the raid just a few weeks away, each man has his own problems to deal with: Wallis to perfect his bomb, and Gibson to ensure that his men could deliver it in exactly the way that was needed for the dams to be breached. That required, in particular, the ability to fly at very low altitudes over water, and a means of aiming the bombs accurately every time. The problems are eventually overcome, with backroom assistance, and the final three chapters of the first part of Brickhill’s book describe the preparations for the raid, the raid itself and the aftermath, including the successful breaching of the Möhne and the Eder dams. It also reveals the high casualty rate, with eight of the nineteen planes being shot down, fifty-three men killed and three taken prisoner.
Clark began thinking of making the film in October 1951, buying up the rights to Brickhill’s book, with the intention of using it as a vehicle for Richard Todd, at that time on contract to Associated British.20 That same month he met ‘high officials of the Air Ministry for general discussion of projected film’, according to the diary of A.W. (Bill) Whittaker, a production supervisor at ABPC’s Elstree Studios in North London.21 Whittaker and script editor Walter Mycroft then produced a suggested treatment of the story, which could be used to brief the screenwriter, once one had been chosen. That particular decision took a couple of production meetings, with various names being bandied about, including Terence Rattigan, Emlyn Williams and C.S. Forester, but in January of 1952, Clark settled on Sherriff.
Brickhill and Mycroft’s treatment22 notes at the beginning that it is ‘an attempt to explore one possible line of adaptation, i.e. with the flyers as the main thread’, and it ‘takes the story as far as the successful test of the full-sized bomb, which was the immediate prelude to the raid itself.’ But, it cautions: ‘As the Wallis bomb is still secret it evidently cannot be shown, any more than it is described in the book,’ and also that ‘the frustrations of Barnes Wallis have been condensed in this version because it might be against public policy … to suggest that a brilliant war shortening invention could be held back by lack of imagination on the part of Authority.’
The surprise in their approach is that it turns Brickhill’s previous narrative approach on its head: in both his book and a radio dramatisation he wrote for the BBC23 (broadcast on 8 May 1951), the narrative had begun with Wallis, and only when he had taken the bomb far enough to persuade Harris did it switch to the formation of the squadron. But the new treatment focuses on Gibson until he meets Wallis, whereupon Wallis’s own struggles are depicted in a sort of montage flashback. It is in this treatment that the (mistaken) suggestion is first made that the idea came from watching spotlights in a show, rather than (as Brickhill wrote) from the Ministry of Aircraft production.24 Thereafter it follows the book quite closely, until the successful test at Reculver a couple of weeks later, whereupon the treatment ends, with the words ‘There follows the sequences dealing with the hurry and tension of the last days of final preparation and then the great drama of the raid itself.’
Some three months after completing the briefing treatment, Whittaker offered a further elaboration in the form of a script,25 but by that time, Sherriff had begun to read his way into the job.
According to Whittaker’s diary,26 Sherriff attended an initial script meeting on 7 March, with Clark ‘presiding’, in which he outlined his ideas for the treatment of the story. ‘He feels that it should be told simply and naturally, with no recourse to tricks of any sort. … It was also agreed that there should be no effort to introduce a feminine influence.’ This was an interesting decision, because it cut away two romantic sub-plots that had featured in the book. It may be that Sherriff felt that the martial atmosphere might be enhanced in the absence of women (as in Journey’s End), but, of course, the airmen were not at the front, and women were part of their daily lives, so excluding women seems a less obvious choice to make than in a Western Front setting. Since the flyers involved in those sub-plots (Shannon and Maltby) came home, there would not have been the deeper sadness that might have come from seeing a wife or girlfriend mourn their loved one. On the other hand, it may simply have been that Sherriff felt that there was more than enough to shoehorn into the script without adding a love interest.
After the meeting, Sherriff visited Wallis at his home in Effingham,27 once on his own, and once in the company of Brickhill, Mycroft and Whittaker, the latter of whom recorded:
Mr Wallis has set up the catapult, water tub etc. with which he did his original experiments. Mr Wallis proudly conducted us to them and said, ‘It’s just as it was at the time. Now I’ll show you how it works.’ It didn’t.28
With the information from Wallis, and his experiments, in hand, Sherriff set about preparing his own treatment.29 It is twenty-three pages long, and departs radically from the briefing treatment, returning instead to the book’s original structure. It begins by showing Wallis’s back-garden experiments, which had only been alluded to by Brickhill. The fact that Sherriff could begin with the experiment suggests that there had been a noticeable easing in security restrictions, as does the presence in his files of a ‘TOP SECRET’ memo written by Wallis on the ‘Spherical Bomb’30 (or ‘Surface torpedo’). The diminished secrecy clearly meant that Wallis’s part of the story could be played up, and that was what Sherriff ’s treatment set about doing, for the first eleven of its twenty-three pages. The next three pages begin Gibson’s story, and thereafter we are in familiar territory as the stories are intercut as each tries to solve his own specific problems. The treatment ends with a short description of the way in which the raid will be treated, although at that point a detailed scene sequence could not be compiled because ‘much of this is technical and dependent upon facilities as yet unidentified.’
Several points are worth noting about Sherriff ’s treatment:
First, it does, indeed, completely exclude the ‘feminine influence’. It omits Gibson’s humiliating dressing-down of those who breached security regulations, presumably because it might look like bullying;
It includes several short scenes (almost in montage fashion) that show the manufacture of the bomb, and the modification of the Lancasters to take the bomb;
It includes Wallis’s Chesil Beach test, but only as seen through the reaction of onlookers: there would be ‘no authentic shots of the falling bomb … nor anything else that might infringe security’;
It continues to suggest that the spotlight idea came from an airman watching a show – only this time it’s Gibson himself, in a West End theatre.
As David Cottis points out,31 Sherriff ’s treatment is highly innovative – essentially shifting the focus of the movie one-third of the way in, when we leave the story of one hero and begin following that of another; eventually the two storylines are woven together. The problem Sherriff faced was how to dramatise a story that elapsed over several years (which involved a good deal of scientific experimentation, and is hardly filmic at the best of times), and in which a second major protagonist does not appear until towards the very end. Brickhill’s book actually begins Wallis’s story in 1939, just before the outbreak of the war; Gibson, by contrast, does not feature until Harris orders the formation of what would become 617 Squadron on 15 March 1943. That is a lot of elapsed time to show in flashback, as the earlier treatment did, and it would seriously impede any forward narrative impulse. At least Sherriff ’s construction has the benefit of narrative progression, even if it takes a big risk in making us suddenly transfer our interest from one hero to an entirely different one. But the producers at Associated British seemed happy with Sherriff ’s new approach.
Whittaker records that the ‘Final complete script’ was delivered on 15 July, and that, at meetings held from 12–14 August, a cast of characters from ABPC (including Clark, Gotfurt, Whittaker, Mycroft and Brickhill) read it through and discussed it: ‘The script met with universal approval, but suggestions and discussion took place on a large number of points of detail.’32 Although the original script is no longer to be found, a subsequent version, dated 24 October, can be examined in Sherriff ’s papers.33 There are a number of changes from his own initial treatment:
A suggested shot of the bomb being placed in position under the Wellington bomber before the test run is deleted in the later script;
In Brickhill’s book, Wallis was given a dressing-down by the managing director at Vickers (who reported that Whitehall felt he had been making a nuisance of himself), prompting him to resign. This scene was no longer included;
An important change was the omission of scenes showing the bomb being manufactured, and the Lancasters retrofitted to take the missile. Whether this was due to security concerns or just time constraints is not clear;
Gibson and Hay’s crash, in a light aircraft, when returning from Reculver, described in Brickhill’s book, is omitted entirely.
Several other scenes are trimmed and cut here or there, presumably to speed the action along, but the overall impression, especially given Sherriff ’s experiences in most of his other films, is that his original vision for the movie was broadly maintained throughout the script development process.
The script contains a few sightings of Sherriff ’s trademark humour. One of the better ones is when Wallis is asking for a Wellington bomber for his trials, and the civil servant asks him what argument he can advance to secure the use of one, and Wallis replies, ‘If you tell them I invented it … don’t you think that might help?’ Another joke that survived the script process is the one where Wallis (after the final successful test at Reculver) credits the idea of the bouncing bomb to Nelson, who, at the Battle of the Nile, ‘dismissed the French flagship with a yorker’.34 The irate chicken farmer writing to complain about low flying is another obvious Sherriff touch (only he would have thought to make it chickens, rather than any other farm animal).
But there is not much use for humour in the script as a whole, since the overall tone is serious and restrained (in fact, Laurence Thompson, in the News Chronicle, described it as ‘a little reverent, an Albert memorial rather than a transcription of life’).35 It was almost bound to be so, given how recently the raid had taken place, and the presence of so many survivors. But probably no one did restraint better than Sherriff. He had shown as much in Journey’s End: in the scene where Trotter hears about the raid, for example, he remarks, ‘What a damn nuisance!’, to which Osborne replies, phlegmatically, ‘It is, rather.’36 The echo can be clearly heard some twenty-five years later, in Wallis and Gibson’s exchange after the second unsuccessful test at Reculver: Gibson: ‘It’s the devil, isn’t it?’; Wallis: ‘Yes. It is rather.’
There is also a resonant echo from Sherriff ’s past in the final scene between Gibson and Wallis. Wallis is upset at the loss of fifty-six men and tells Gibson, ‘If I’d known it would be like this, I would never have started it,’ to which Gibson replies:
You mustn’t think that way. If all these fellows had known from the beginning that they wouldn’t be coming back, they’d have gone for it just the same. There isn’t a single one would have dropped out. I know them all and I know that’s the truth.
Gibson’s sentiment is very similar to what Sherriff had written to Pips all those years before:
It is no good dwelling on the awfulness of it all, for you know it only too well – the men who go up for a tour of duty in the trenches go up absolutely resigned … they go because they must – and although they are always cheerful, they go with that thought that, although there is every possibility of them coming back safely, someone isn’t.37
The final scenes in the script are delicate and sombre, and deeply touching. We watch the pilots as they prepare in their rooms before the raid. Afterwards we see the same rooms, now largely empty, as the announcement of the raid comes over the wireless. The heroism of the men is reinforced by the exchange between Wallis and Gibson, and is brilliantly underscored in Gibson’s last line, when Wallis asks: ‘Aren’t you going to turn in?’, and he replies, ‘I’ve got to write some letters first.’ That line, and the salute that he shortly thereafter returns to a young airman, perfectly symbolises Gibson’s code of duty and takes us straight back to the ‘uncomplaining’ duty that Sherriff first described in the trenches in France.
The bulk of Sherriff ’s work on The Dam Busters probably ended with the production of the October 1952 script, although given his commitment to the project he was probably happy to remain available for script conferences and advice. His third (and final) payment (of £1,250) came through in August 1952, after which there would be no further payments until after the film was released (suggesting that his contract had been structured such that he was paid a slightly smaller amount than normal for the preparation of the script, but with a further final payment when the film was eventually released).38
In August 1952, just as Sherriff was working through The Dam Busters script redrafts, word came through that Peter Brook was unlikely to be able to take the reins on The White Carnation, but within a month they had found a replacement in Noel Willman, an experienced actor who had been directing for about ten years, and who clearly impressed Sherriff:
I think he would make a very good stage director for Carnation. He has a clear understanding of the play and his criticisms are sensible and constructive. I was in fact stimulated by his enthusiasm and shall feel quite happy if you decide to engage him.39
Sherriff immediately set to work on further revisions to the play, promising to have a final version delivered by the time Richardson had finished a very difficult season in Stratford.40 By the end of November, rehearsals were underway, in preparation for an opening in Brighton on 5 January.
The White Carnation is a ghost story. During the war, at the end of his Christmas party, Sir John Greenwood, a wealthy stockbroker, gets locked out of his house. He knocks on the door but there is no answer, so he climbs in through a window, only to find that there is no one there and the house is dilapidated. His entrance has been noted by a policeman who comes to investigate: Greenwood protests that the house is his, but the policeman, doubting his claims, fetches his sergeant, whom Greenwood claims to know. When the sergeant arrives he is horrified to see Greenwood, whom he knows to have died in a flying bomb strike seven years before. The policeman calls the local coroner and a doctor to examine Greenwood and they come to the conclusion that he is a ghost – though Greenwood does not support their diagnosis. The problem then becomes how to remove him from the house, which is due to be demolished by the council to make way for a block of flats. There will have to be discussions with the town clerk and other officials, but in the meantime Greenwood is given some of his furniture (which has been in storage), and a policeman on guard provides conversation, as does Lydia, the niece of the town clerk who has an interest in ghosts, and talks Greenwood through the delicacy of his position.
As the second act begins, Greenwood has resolved to make the most of the eternity available to him. During his life he was a businessman, obsessed with finance, and had no time for higher culture; now is his chance to put that right, and he asks Lydia if she will help him. He is peeved when he finds that the classic books brought from his library are not in the pristine condition he imagined, but had already been read by his wife, a woman he had thought very far from his intellectual equal (although socially she ranked above him). Conversations with the vicar and an elderly neighbour make him realise that perhaps he had been unfair to his wife while alive. Greenwood struggles with this idea, just as he struggles with his selfimprovement scheme, soon preferring the financial pages to the great books. All the while the functionaries are trying to remove him from the house, even seeking the assistance of a senior official at the Home Office. In the end the council plans to demolish the house at midnight on Christmas Eve, but just before the appointed hour Greenwood’s loneliness, and his desire to make amends to his wife, take his spirit back to the Christmas party from which it had left, leaving him and his wife together as the flying bomb falls.
The rollout format, which had worked so well for Miss Mabel and Home at Seven, was used again for The White Carnation. It opened at the Theatre Royal, Brighton, on 5 January 1953, and played there for two weeks, to very good houses. Thereafter it made its way around the country, calling in to eight other locations,41 on each occasion grossing over £2,000 a week. Sherriff (and Richardson, who was invested in the production) probably had high hopes for its reception in London, where it arrived, at The Globe Theatre, on 20 March. Unfortunately, the reviews were rather mixed. The Tatler felt that ‘Mr Sherriff is himself puzzled with what to do with the ghost. He never really makes up his mind whether to be frivolous, fantastic or philosophical,’42 while Harold Hobson, influential critic at The Sunday Times, felt that the dialectical battle between ghost and humanity was never effectively argued, although he did note that the play did well in showing the growth of Greenwood, ‘not spiritually or intellectually, but humanly. … The ending of the play is, in fact, quite extraordinarily moving and beautiful.’43 Even his old friend Bill Darlington was unsure what to make of the play: ‘Mr Sherriff hardly seems to have made up his mind what kind of play he has set out to write. At one moment he is verging on farce; at the next he is writing quite serious scenes.’44 All the same, he observed, ‘the play holds one’s attention throughout.’
While the play may have been regarded with some misgivings, the acting was generally very highly commended, especially Richardson’s Greenwood, as Hobson proclaimed: ‘Sir Ralph is on the stage almost the whole evening and his performance is magnificent. There is no other player who can touch the ordinary qualities of ordinary people with such a radiance, nor so marry the commonplace with the sublime.’ He also singled out Meriel Forbes, who was ‘altogether delightful as a breath of fresh air from the public libraries’. Even Kenneth Tynan, the enfant terrible of theatre criticism, was impressed by Richardson, praising him (although not the play) as a ‘4D character in a 3D world’ and noting how he ‘guides the play through its shallows with a touch of a master helmsman’.45
The reviews were sufficiently lukewarm that the play struggled from the beginning. In its best week it just scraped over the £2,000 mark – below every single week in the provinces – and by the end of April it was down to receipts of just over £1,600. At that point Sherriff agreed to forego his royalties, but the play gradually wound down, and ended its run (after ninety performances) on 6 June – a very unwelcome 57th birthday present.46
It is difficult to explain quite why the play failed to catch the public’s imagination. It is very funny, in particular in the way in which it takes an extraordinary occurrence and examines it from the most banal of perspectives. Nevertheless, the reviewers were correct in asserting that the play seemed caught between several stools. Was it simply a comedy of frustrated officialdom? Was it a meditation on spirituality and humanity? Or was it an examination of a man’s capacity for emotional improvement? Certainly Sherriff achieves the latter, because while we view Greenwood with distaste initially (brusque, self-satisfied and narrow-minded), we warm to him as he grapples with the functionaries, and then we applaud how he reacts to the difficult lessons he learns from those who help him examine his life. By the end he wins us over, and we thrill to his reconnection with his wife.
In Lydia Truscott we have one of the strongest female roles that Sherriff ever wrote. She is brave and smart, and is willing to stand up to Greenwood even when he attempts to bully her. She is the voice of reason in the play, negotiating between the two sides, intermediating between the individual and the public spheres. As a librarian she is also representative of culture, the element that was most missing from Greenwood’s life, and as a woman she makes him aware of how he had (albeit inadvertently) mistreated his wife. He gets a glimpse from the vicar and the neighbour as well, but it is Lydia who suggests why he is here, and what he needs to do to be gone. She is easily the strongest female character in any of his plays since he first invented Joan Winter, the developer’s daughter in Mr Birdie’s Finger.
Perhaps the lack of success was simply a variant on the old issue that once a playwright has established a style, the audience will come to expect the same in the future. Sherriff ’s two recent successes had been whodunits of a sort, and it may have been that a ‘mystery play’ was what the audience now expected of him.
But he no longer needed to worry about what the audience wanted. Because of his screenwriting work he could focus on just the types of stories that gave him pleasure to write. One such story was occupying him in the summer of 1953 – the boys’ adventure story that he had been promising to Dwye Evans these past two years. Before The White Carnation had finished its run he had sent Evans a completed draft of the book, now entitled King John’s Treasure, and in an exchange of correspondence, secured Evans’s promise to see that the book was well illustrated, in exchange for taking a ‘pretty modest’ royalty.47 As he observed: ‘I am sure a wellillustrated boys’ book has a much better chance of re-printing than a cheap affair, so that in the long run I think we shall gain by accepting a lower royalty.’48
At that point he could afford to be generous where his royalties on the book were concerned, for children’s books were seldom huge sellers, and any slight reduction in the agreed rate of royalties would be unlikely to have much effect on his income. In fact, his boys’ book would net him less than £200 over the following five years, whereas at precisely that moment he was receiving the second of three payments of £1,500 for a script that he had agreed to write for Warwick Films49: an adaptation of Prize of Gold, a thriller, written by Max Catto, about a heist that goes badly wrong. He completed the script in August, and as late as December (when it was submitted to the PCA), his was still the only name on the script. At some point thereafter, however, the producers took the story in a different direction, and when the film was released in 1955,50 to generally poor reviews, there was no word of Sherriff ’s involvement.
Having despatched the draft of Prize of Gold, and while waiting for the proofs of King John’s Treasure, Sherriff began to turn his attention to a new play – one that had been in his mind for some time. It was unlike anything he had attempted before: a story about a Romano-British family at exactly the point in history where the last Romans left the British Isles (about AD 410). He sent early drafts of the first act to Mortimer Wheeler, who liked it very much, and to Ralph Richardson, who replied:
I think you have made a wonderful start, and I send to you all congratulations and my prayers that you may be guided by your genius, to the terribly difficult stage that lies ahead – to gain the summit of the conclusion. Everest is not to be compared with the feat!51
On 15 March 1954, in the midst of his exertions on the new play, Sherriff ’s boys’ book was published – an exciting tale of two young schoolboys who go in search of the treasure that King John was reputed to have lost in the marshes at the mouth of the Wash. The boys hear the tale from their history master, and Peter, the book’s narrator, is so enthralled that he persuades his friend Simon to accompany him to the marshes to begin their search. But the area is now very built up, and just as they despair they come across an old lady who tells them a tale that suggests that the treasure was never lost, but instead was stolen by one of King John’s courtiers. Following one clue after another, they eventually come to the home of the family descended from the courtier. Sneaking secretly into the grounds, they observe the trappings of a court, and a young boy (Michael), about their age, who is treated as the rightful king, crown jewels and all. When they tell the boy that his family’s wealth is built on treason, he agrees to abdicate and return to London with them, and in the end the story is resolved happily: the treasure is returned to its owners, the crown jewels to the nation, and Michael lives with Simon’s family and discovers the joys of being a normal boy.
The story brings together Sherriff ’s love of history and archaeology, and is absorbing throughout, if not as action packed as some adventure stories. There is no great character development, but the locations they visit – especially the Fens and the Peak District – are evocatively drawn, and the individuals they encounter on their quest are very well sketched. The critics liked it too: ‘The blend of fact and fantasy is convincing and the characterisation excellent,’52 wrote The Birmingham Post; ‘a most readable book’, noted the Surrey Comet, ‘for Mr Sherriff writes for young readers without writing down to them,’53 while Housewife magazine felt he wrote ‘with … gusto and confidence’.54 The Times Literary Supplement accredited it the best of the history fiction books it was reviewing, and clearly felt it was appropriate for adults (apart from the ‘Ruritanian’ ending).55
Sherriff had sent copies of the book out to a number of people, including various colleagues from archaeological digs, as well as old friends such as Gerald Ellison, Geoffrey Dearmer and G.B. Stern. Mortimer Wheeler wrote to him that he envied him ‘the easy swing which carries your reader on with irresistible momentum’56; he also told him that he would be reading it to his step-daughter, whom he was sure would enjoy it as well (thus rather backing up the reviewer for BBC Children’s Hour who felt that although the book was described on its dust jacket as a book for boys, most girls would enjoy it too!)57
About a month after the publication of King John’s Treasure, location shooting finally began on The Dam Busters, almost eighteen months after Sherriff had completed his script. Part of the delay was due to the need to secure the full co-operation of the Air Ministry, which offered access to RAF facilities and crews, as well as help in ‘overcoming vested interests within the government that wanted to stop or to limit the project on security grounds.’58 But the extra time also allowed for the preparation of special effects, and for the script to be sent far and wide for comment and approval, including to survivors and next of kin. The script was also sent to ‘Bomber’ Harris, who complained that it made him look like an ‘irascible, unapproachable moron’,59 which prompted Walter Mycroft to rewrite the sequence in which Wallis first visits Harris. But Mycroft’s cuts may have been less about Harris’s complaint than about the need to reduce running time: in fact, between the December 1953 script (an updated version of Sherriff ’s October 1952 version) and the film itself, a total of twenty-five scenes would be excised.60
Sherriff meanwhile was busily working on the draft of the ‘Romano-British’ play as well as a new commission from Michael Balcon, at Ealing Studios. His cash books refer to the film as the ‘Dakota Story’,61 but it would eventually become The Night My Number Came Up. Three payments, in May and June, suggest when the script was written, but it is impossible to be sure since, aside from a passing reference in a letter to Ayton Whitaker,62 there is nothing about the movie in his correspondence files whatsoever. The cash book suggests he received his first two payments for the work on an outline story, with the further (larger) payment for a subsequent screenplay.
The film was based on a short story in the Saturday Evening Post in 1951,63 which in turn was based on an event in the life of Air Vice Marshal Sir Victor Goddard. Just after the war, at a cocktail party in Shanghai, he encountered a Royal Navy officer who’d had a vivid dream about Goddard’s death, along with three British civilians (a woman and two men), in the crash of a Dakota airplane along a rocky shoreline. Later that night, Goddard learned that his military flight the next day would (unusually) take three civilian passengers (one woman, two men) and would be made in a Dakota. The flight unfolded exactly as the officer had foreseen in his dream, except that it ended only in a crash landing, not in the air vice-marshal’s death. The film was to be directed by Leslie Norman, his first film as director, after fifteen years as an editor and producer. In an interview in October 1992, he noted that he had come across the story and thought it would make a good film, but Balcon would not let him write the screenplay.64
No version of the original script exists in Sherriff ’s files, so we have to examine the film itself for evidence of how Sherriff may have developed the basic story. The broad outline is much the same – a man is trapped in an airplane apparently living out someone else’s dream, which will end in his death. The film begins with the dinner party at which the dream is retold, amidst much discussion of oriental-style superstition, leaving the air marshal with a lingering unease. Thereafter, a series of random events gradually presents us with the same set of circumstances as those in the dream. For example, towards the beginning of the movie it looks as though the air marshal will be travelling on a Liberator airplane; but at the last moment, problems with the plane mean that a Dakota must be substituted instead. Then it appears that the number of people on the plane does not match the number in the dream, but at the last minute, some additional passengers are taken on board. Just as it appears that the plane will take a route avoiding a rocky shore, a storm conspires to throw it off course. Bit by bit, the circumstances of the dream are gradually put in place, until it seems inevitable that it must come true. The tension is ratcheted up steadily as the film proceeds, so that the initial idea is developed in a very original way.
The story is fleshed out by a much wider cast of characters than in the original short story, and from a diverse set of backgrounds. To what extent they were drawn from Sherriff ’s pen is difficult to know, but it is hard to look at the awful businessman, Mr Rose, and not see echoes of earlier variants in Sherriff ’s books and plays (think of Mr Montgomery in The Fortnight in September, for example, or Maraway in Cornlow-in-the-Downs). Just as the tension rises as each piece of the dream falls into place, so the characters gradually become aware of the dream and its implications, and much of the complexity of the movie is derived from their respective attitudes to the dream itself, and whether it can be forestalled by action on their parts. Movies in which individuals react differently to some imminent peril are not at all unusual, but what makes this one different, and much more interesting, is that it deals with the characters’ attitudes to a potential peril, one that they may or may not be convinced of, depending on their backgrounds and attitudes. It is a cleverly constructed piece of work.
Sherriff most likely finished his work on the ‘Dakota’ film during the summer of 1954, and thereafter his priority was the new play. After returning from a trip to Hadrian’s Wall he sent a copy of the latest version to Kitty Black, in the play department of Curtis Brown. She read it immediately and replied enthusiastically:
I love the new version – you really are as clever as paint to have done it so beautifully, and it hangs together and moves along in the most promising manner. I love all the new bits, and suddenly saw that you had written in the loveliest possible title. What do you think of ‘The Long Sunset’? It sounds absolutely perfect and I do hope you will like it.65
He did, so that was what it became.
The play was sent to Binkie Beaumont, at H.M. Tennent, with the suggestion that he might want to try it at the Lyric, Hammersmith (traditionally a more adventurous venue than the normal West End theatres), but he did not. Black wrote to him that ‘It is so different from your usual style that I think they are rather afraid of departing radically from the usual.’66 But all was not lost: ‘I wonder whether it wouldn’t be more sensible to let the script go to Ayton Whitaker immediately,’ she mused. ‘Doing a play on the air can never prejudice its chances in the theatre, and in the case of several scripts I know, the stage production has resulted directly from the interest caused by the radio transmission.’ Sherriff immediately wrote to Whitaker, to see if he might be interested.
Early in January 1955, while awaiting Whitaker’s reply, he received an invitation to lunch with Frederick Gotfurt, at Associated British. The company was obviously pleased with the job that Sherriff had done on The Dam Busters (which would be coming to the screen in just a few months), and wondered if he might be interested in writing a script on Mary, Queen of Scots. He was indeed, and after some initial discussions hoped he might be able to begin in February, but things were delayed by three weeks’ additional script doctoring work (at the tidy sum of £500 a week) for Dino De Laurentiis on the movie War and Peace.67 He eventually signed the contract on 22 March, with the promised end date set for 28 July, a little later than originally envisaged, but for good reason: he had finally heard back from Ayton Whitaker, who, having taken Sherriff ’s proposal to his department heads (one of whom was Sherriff ’s old friend Val Gielgud), reported that they would be keen to see the play broadcast in the Saturday Night Theatre slot on the Home Service on St George’s Day, 23 April 1955.68 Sherriff was very excited: he had enjoyed several radio broadcasts of his plays in the past, but this would be the first occasion on which a new play of his was given its first ever performance on the radio. He was particularly pleased, as he told Kitty Black, that the BBC ‘will do it in a really top class way.’69 Admittedly, the need to reshape the play for radio transmission would take up a little of the initial time he had envisaged spending on Mary, but that was a small price to pay for something as exciting as a genuine broadcasting first for him. Sherriff was now set for almost an exact repeat of the glorious experience he had enjoyed in 1939. Back then, a launch of a piece of his own work (The Hopkins Manuscript) had been sandwiched between the launches of two films, The Four Feathers and Goodbye, Mr Chips; this time it would be The Long Sunset between two aircraft movies – one featuring a Dakota, and the other an entire squadron of Lancasters.
First on the launch pad on this occasion was The Night My Number Came Up, which featured Michael Redgrave as the air marshal, with Alexander Knox as the consul, Denholm Elliott as the air marshal’s aide, Michael Hordern as the officer who has the unfortunate dream, and a cast of other British regulars (including Nigel Stock, Sheila Sim and Alfie Bass) alongside them.
The film was never intended as a prestige project in the way that The Dam Busters had become for Associated British, but Balcon would have been happy with the reception of the film nonetheless. It was seen as enjoyable and well crafted, although Sherriff ’s script was generally seen only as ‘functional’70 (which seems harsh, given the ingenuity in the film’s construction). Nevertheless, while ‘it lacks the supreme excitement of complete uncertainty … there is enough shock and ticklish detail in it to set the average attendant’s nerves on edge.’71 Redgrave himself was rather dismissive of the film in his memoir, but the general reception would have done Sherriff no harm whatsoever: indeed, Gotfurt congratulated him on his success. Ealing were happy enough with his work that they were already looking to commission him for another film. They would be successful in the end, but for now he had all the work he could handle, preparing for the launch of the new play.
Shortly before the St George’s Day broadcast, Sherriff explained the play, rather evocatively, to readers of Radio Times:
What did these Romans do to meet their own disaster, and how did they face the end? Nothing is known. When the last of the legions sailed out of the British harbours, the history of the island went with them. When light returned two centuries later, the homes of the Roman settlers were in ruins and a new people occupied their land. In The Long Sunset I have tried to follow one of these Roman families into the darkness.
Sherriff ’s Roman family, wealthy landowners in the Kent downs, comprises Julian and his wife Serena, and their two late-teen children, Otho and Paula. At the beginning of the play they watch as their friend Marcus leads the last of the Roman legions to the coast, leaving the inhabitants at the mercy of foreign invaders. Julian tries to organise the defence of his part of the island with the help of a mercenary Brittonic soldier, named Arthur, and his men. Arthur helps to organise defences and train Julian’s men, but eventually moves on to his headquarters at Winchester, accompanied by Julian’s children: Otho wants to fight by Arthur’s side, and Paula is sweet on Arthur’s nephew, Gawaine. Julian continues to try to organise the defences, with the help of his friends, local landowners Lucian and Portius, but the former is murdered by his slaves, and the latter opts to leave. Just after Portius announces he’s leaving, Julian’s chief slave, Lugar, tells him that he and the rest of the Caledonian servants have been called north by their new king. As the sun falls, Julian and his wife leave their house as they await the arrival of the Saxons, but before doing so, Julian becomes a Christian, like his wife, so they can be together forever.
The play is undoubtedly one of Sherriff ’s best, a labour of love that combined his deep historical knowledge of the period, and his playwriting ‘genius’, as Richardson put it. It was also his own personal favourite.72 The structure is reminiscent of Journey’s End, with Julian and his neighbours preparing for the onslaught (by, coincidentally, Germans), which they know is coming (it may be recalled that Sherriff had contemplated calling the earlier play Waiting); the play’s tone, by contrast, harks back rather more to St Helena, owing to the sense of elegiac decline that suffuses the play – the memory of happier days contrasted with the sunset of the empire.
An important character in the play is Arthur, who is portrayed as a red-haired, West Country native who, with his ‘band of adventurers’73 (a couple of hundred strong), had already helped Romans in the Severn Valley organise themselves, and was now being looked to more widely to keep invaders at bay. In advance of the play being broadcast, in discussion about casting options, Sherriff explained the character of Arthur, and the relationship between him and Julian:
He is a fascinating character because he is so elusive, but I think we have come as close to the truth as anybody about what Arthur really was … [he] should be rather slow and deliberate in his delivery. We want to convey a sincere, honest man with no background or education to help him. If you can play him in this way, it will be a good contrast with Julian, who has the vigorous assurance of a man of good position and education. … In his scenes with Arthur one should feel that Arthur is rather on the defensive from the intellectual point of view. He has a sort of feeling that Julian is laughing at him because he is little more than a barbarian. But in their hearts there is mutual respect.74
Bill Darlington felt the theme was ‘fine … extraordinarily modern in some of its implications and echoes’, and he regarded the linking of Roman history with ancient British myth (the legend of Arthur) as a ‘bold and happy stroke’.75 But it was more than that. The entire play is a very patriotic one, in which Sherriff very clearly identifies with both the Romano-Britons, and those Britons relatively untouched by Roman influence, against the threat of the invader. Julian is given several speeches in which to plead the glory and nobility of his way of life, and the words cannot help but recall the speeches in Sherriff ’s wartime movies. In fact, there is one passage, in which Julian attempts to persuade Arthur to make use of Romano-British boys, where his words echo Joan Fontaine’s speech in This Above All:
If I did [say why Arthur needs Romans] then you’d laugh at me and say I’m using fine words again. They are fine words, but you don’t hear very much of them today. Ideals: loyalty: devotion to great purposes that make a man stand by his leader in defeat as well as victory.76
The arguments he puts at Julian’s disposal may have been influenced in part by his digs at Angmering and by his instinctive empathy (as Vernon Bartlett remarked)77 with ordinary people, but the anxieties of 1939–40 may not have been far from his mind either.
While the play is very good, it is not flawless. One major criticism (which was made by Richardson after he had read the early draft)78 is that it lacks theatrical power and character development. There is a momentum to the play, an inevitability of progression from Marcus’s initial departure, but the action – such as it is – is always subdued: it is difficult to believe that the Romano-Britons would have been quite as calm about their fate. In fact, the only moment of high drama takes place offstage, when Arthur and his men (including Otho and Julian) confront a small group of invading Saxons. It is almost as though Sherriff conceived of his main characters as too civilised to have turbulent emotions (even the ‘barbarian’ Arthur). There is no emotional upheaval (not even when the two children depart with Arthur), no voices raised, no sense of panic: the lights never go out completely, they just slowly dim. Perhaps, as a result, Sherriff was wise (or lucky) to have had the play performed first on radio, rather than on the stage, where more challenge and emotion might have been demanded.
The other major criticism of the play, and it was made by the reviewer in The Times after the initial broadcast, was the language that he deployed – not in the speeches, but in the ordinary conversations. Particularly grating is the brief exchange after the Britons return from repelling the initial Saxon invasion:
‘Well, Gawaine, are you all right?’
‘Yes, great show, wasn’t it?’
‘How may one suggest so mysterious a past,’ asks the reviewer, ‘in language so barely modern?’
Sherriff, as ever, was happy to respond to criticism, and when the play was performed on stage later that summer he counselled the producer that ‘There are not many of these [lines] but wherever they occur, then by all means cut them.’79 There is no doubt that some of them do sound unhappily modern (or, to our ears now, rather dated), but it is difficult to know how else the dramatist should tackle the problem. The rather pompous circumlocution that tends to be used in more modern films is neither more nor less authentic than Sherriff ’s dialogue, but at the very least the ability to differentiate between characters from different social strata would be a good start. Some years before, Sidney Gilliat80 had criticised Sherriff for having characters who all spoke in the same way, and that is probably the more pertinent criticism in this case.
The language problems notwithstanding, The Times’ reviewer thought well of the play (‘it contains one or two happier moments one would not have missed’),81 and his views were shared by listeners. Sherriff wrote excitedly to Curtis Brown:
All my other plays have been done after their London run and didn’t produce more than a dozen letters between them. But The Long Sunset has produced stacks of them from all kinds and conditions of people from every corner of Britain and Ireland. It seems to have appealed more than I really thought and I hope that it will become a valuable play in repertory and amateur circles.82
Within a month, Barry Jackson (who had been one of the only two theatre managers to attend the first performance of Journey’s End at the Apollo Theatre) had contracted to present the play at the Birmingham Rep for four weeks from 30 August, under the directorship of Bernard Hepton.83
Before the play enjoyed its stage premiere in Birmingham, the BBC gave it another outing, on 8 August (as he wrote to Gladys Day at Curtis Brown, ‘a second performance of the play so soon after the original one suggests that it met with popular approval’).84 And that approval was endorsed by the critics who made the trip to Birmingham. ‘The Long Sunset is more theatrical but less theatrically effective than Journey’s End,’ wrote the Daily Mail, ‘but it comes nearer to that play than anything Mr Sherriff has written in the interim.’ The Illustrated London News was a fan too: ‘Here is a play entirely without fuss and parade. … It is a valiant, lucid play. Sherriff has never over-written.’85 J.C. Trewin wrote of how the play ‘lights the mind’, and that it ‘strongly challenges the imagination’. Stage magazine, meanwhile, reckoned that ‘It is not so much the matter [but] … the manner of its telling that gives an impressive air to [Sherriff ’s] speculations on the last of Roman Britain.’86 Not everyone was so happy, however. The reviewer in The Guardian wrote:
It looks an excellent idea taking a blank of history and filling it with plausible invention, though the result is disappointing. It gathers no real tension, though it achieves a number of affecting moments and some theatrical power right at the end.87
Moreover, Kenneth Tynan, while commending Sherriff ’s conception as the most original for many years, regretted that Sherriff ’s ‘verbal gift cannot take the strain. … One laments a chance missed, and wishes that this great outline had been filled in by another pen.’88 The same largely linguistic criticisms were directed at the play when it was revived by Bernard Miles at The Mermaid theatre in 1961 (‘The dialogue is relentlessly drawing-room’),89 although Bernard Levin, who was also free in his criticism of that aspect of the play, felt it was more than outweighed by Sherriff ’s ‘astonishing creative leap of the imagination’, and by the play’s construction, which was ‘an object lesson in playwriting’.90
The Long Sunset’s opening night in Birmingham was still a good three months away when Sherriff savoured the splendours of his third launch of the year, and this one was on a different scale to anything he had enjoyed since The Four Feathers (if even then). It premiered at The Empire in Leicester Square, in the presence of Princess Margaret, and massed ranks of luminaries from the movie world and the RAF, as well as the survivors of the original Dam Busters raid, and next of kin of those who had been shot down. A thick commemorative programme remembered the fallen, celebrated the skill and courage of the men who had been involved in the operation, and set out in detail the process by which they had been immortalised on screen.91
The film was directed by Michael Anderson, who was relatively inexperienced, having only half a dozen films to his credit, but for whom this film would establish his reputation. Richard Todd was, of course, a compelling Gibson, prompting a congratulatory letter from Gibson’s father,which was included in the commemorative programme.92 Michael Redgrave, having delivered one Sherriff script so recently, now delivered another even more proficiently, while both Ursula Jeans (as Wallis’s wife) and Nigel Stock (as Gibson’s bomb aimer) made the jump from the earlier film as well. The rest of the cast were the sort of reliable senior officer types familiar from so many other recent British war movies, but with a sprinkling of new faces among the young aircrew, including Robert Shaw (as Gibson’s engineer) and George Baker as Maltby. (Patrick McGoohan also popped up in a brief, uncredited role.)
The press could not have been more positive, both about the film and its script. ‘Princess Margaret saw a great film last night,’ announced the Evening News,93 adding that ‘the human, exciting and admirably explanatory screenplay of R.C. Sherriff matches in excellence the firm direction of Michael Anderson.’ The Guardian argued that the film exhibited the virtues of typical British war films, noting that ‘the difference this time is that they are to be found, so unalloyed, in such a long film.’ It continued: ‘R.C. Sherriff wrote the script, thus (incidentally) achieving the distinction of having found the right dramatic dialogue for the men of 1939–45 as well as those of 1914–18. The script was, surely, the foundation of the film’s fineness.’94 The Star also put the ‘magnificent script’95 as number one in its reasons for the film’s success (with, for those who are keeping score, Redgrave and Todd at joint second, and Anderson next), and The Times called it ‘faultless’.96 The Daily Telegraph credited the film’s success (‘despite its length and tempo’) in part to the epic subject, but also to ‘skilful treatment’, and commended Sherriff ’s script for avoiding ‘outmoded slang’ and for its dry English humour (singling out Wallis’s comment on Nelson’s yorker).97 The Financial Times was less enthusiastic about the overall impact of the film than some papers (‘it hardly seems that this is the deeply memorable war film we may have expected’), but was nevertheless very positive about the script, which had a ‘veracity which makes the stiff-upper-lippery of some recent war films seem very artificial indeed’.98 Dilys Powell, the doyenne of British film critics then, and for many years after, was the only critic to comment on the genius of Sherriff ’s ending, the ‘hush’, as she called it, of an ‘ending which leaves mourning to the imagination. … The very last sentence leaves grief hanging in mid-air, and there is no neat securing of the emotions with tears or triumph.’99 It is, indeed, a very powerful ending, one that Sherriff had crafted from the beginning, and she was right to highlight it.
After Britain, the film would show in the United States, but not in the same cut as had just been seen. Associated British was part owned by the American studio Warner Brothers, with British films being distributed through Warners’ US cinemas (and vice versa). The Distribution Agreement for The Dam Busters gave Warners the right to distribute in the US and Canada, but it also gave them the right to make cuts and changes to the movie.100 Consequently, in April 1955, ABPC had sent copies of the film and soundtrack to Warners for them to amend as they saw fit.101 A number of changes were made to the print, notably the inclusion of a foreword setting the raid in context (which Jack Warner himself had requested), and a number of other cuts to speed the movie along. There was also one other major difference between the two versions: the name of Gibson’s dog.
Gibson’s dog was called Nigger. There was no pejorative implication; it was simply the fact that he was a black Labrador retriever, and at that time (and for many years afterwards in Britain) the word was in common use as an adjective to qualify a colour such as brown or black. The dog’s name presented no issues to any of the people involved in writing or producing the film in the UK – in fact, it is used very freely in the final version of the film – nor did it crop up as an issue in any of the reviews. But the sensitivities to the word were obviously much greater in the US, so the film was overdubbed to change the dog’s name, to Trigger. Indeed, the sensitivities were such that they even extended to the publicity material prepared for the film. In a section of the PR hand-out that discussed how the welfare of the dog had been handled on set, a draft section was amended to exclude the dog’s name and replace it with the formulation ‘the canine actor’.102
The film was released in the US in July, inevitably to relatively muted applause. In the UK, by contrast, the film remained a great success, topping the box-office charts for 1955, and over the years, establishing itself as one of the great British war films of all time. As for Sherriff, it took him ‘to the top of the world with the film studios’. From then on, he wrote, ‘in those golden years, I could write anything I wanted to.’103 Unfortunately, none of those subsequent scripts would ever be produced, meaning that, at the very height of his powers, he had just attended the premiere of one of his own new films for the very last time.104
Sherriff had started preparations on the Mary, Queen of Scots film (or Mary Stuart,105 as it was subsequently titled) in a very similar way to his work on St Helena – simply reading through biographies and plays about the subject,106 and setting down a ‘series of events in chronological order which will form the basis of a structure’.107 Within a few weeks he and Gotfurt had embarked on a series of meetings that would continue from June all the way through until the beginning of November,108 during which time Sherriff produced, in late July, a ‘Scenario’ (although it looks much more like a screenplay), and then a final completed script on 17 November.109
The early sections of the script are excellent, presenting a wonderfully vivid account of Mary – pretty, smart, talented and strong-minded. She is shown as loving her young French husband, and reinforcing him in his kingly duties, and she herself is seen as embracing the duties and status of her role with some relish. The early scenes are by far the most engaging, because by the mid-point of the script (which, at 240 pages, is on the long side) it begins to get lost in the weeds of Scottish politics. Nevertheless, there are some excellent character portraits: Bothwell, in particular, is a magnetic presence on the page. Mary’s half-brother James, and Darnley, are much less sympathetic, but still very well-written characters whom it is easy to picture on screen.110
Sadly, however, their characters would never make it off the page, and Sherriff grew increasingly puzzled about the lack of action on the studio’s part. In September 1957, he asked his agent, Bob Fenn, to make discreet enquiries. The studio had been enthusiastic about the final screenplay, he noted, but there had been dead silence ever since. ‘It is very depressing to do such work under these conditions,’ he grumbled. No satisfactory answer seems to have been forthcoming. He would probably have grumbled even more if he had known that Robert Clark, a strong supporter of the project, would, in January 1958, be replaced as executive in charge of production at Elstree (although moving to a different role in the company), having upset Jack Warner with what were perceived to be his anti-American sympathies.111 In due course, the studio sold off the rights to Sherriff ’s screenplay112 for just £2,000, considerably less than the £5,000 they had paid him for writing it.113
Before finishing on Mary Stuart, Sherriff had picked up another commission from Michael Balcon. His Ealing Studios had found some success in the late 1940s and early 1950s (especially for the comedies to which its name is now indelibly attached), but had been rather adrift ever since. Now Balcon announced a major tie-up with MGM in which MGM would provide worldwide distribution, and the major portion of the finance, and also the studios in London where the films would be shot. One of the films that was front and centre when the new tie-up was announced was Dunkirk, to be written by Sherriff. He was a very obvious choice for the job. He had the success of The Dam Busters behind him, he was on very good terms with Michael Balcon, and the director of the film would be Leslie Norman, the man with whom had worked on The Night My Number Came Up. The contract was signed in early October, and the screenplay was to be completed by the beginning of March.
Just as he was beginning work on the new script, however, he received a surprising message from Val Gielgud at the BBC, asking what he thought of the BBC hosting a Sherriff festival on the radio, in the same way as they had previously hosted festivals for two other prominent writers – Somerset Maugham and J.B. Priestley. This would be quite an honour, marking, as Sherriff later noted, the ‘high tide’ of his playwriting.
The Priestley festival had included six radio dramas, as well as an eight-part serial based on one of his books (Angel Pavement). For Sherriff ’s festival they envisaged new (radio) productions of five of his existing plays: Journey’s End, Badger’s Green, Miss Mabel, The White Carnation, and Home at Seven.114 In addition, Gielgud expressed the BBC’s hope that he would be willing to write a brand new radio play, which would be prominently featured as the highlight of the whole affair.115
Sherriff was delighted, but also a little overwhelmed, as he tried to sketch out for Gielgud what his next few months would look like:
What I plan to do is this. I am under contract to write the story of Dunkirk for Ealing Studios, and this will take me to the beginning of March. I shall then accept no further assignments so that I can give all my time to the new play, and anything else which you want me to do for the festival, such as adaptations etc.116
They must have been difficult words to write, because he had also been sounded out by Betty Box117 and Ralph Thomas, working for Rank at Pinewood Studios, about preparing the screenplay for another Nevil Shute novel, Requiem for a Wren. He told Nevil Shute at lunch that he would love to do it, but only if they could wait. As luck would have it, they could.
Just when it appeared that his cup was already running over, it was topped up by the BBC yet again – this time on the television side. Shortly before Christmas they approached him with the suggestion that they broadcast The Hopkins Manuscript on television the following year, in six episodes of thirty minutes each. They were prepared to pay a fee of £250 for the permission to broadcast, and for Sherriff ’s help in adapting the book. This was nothing compared to the money he could obtain from a screenplay, but he was keen to see the book adapted: ‘Ever since you made the radio version with Eric Portman I have thought what a good television play it ought to make,’ he told Ayton Whitaker.118
Over Christmas 1955, and into the early part of 1956, Sherriff ’s main focus was Dunkirk. This was not a simple adaptation, for he was challenged with devising a storyline from the various accounts that were already available.119 The difficulty he faced was how to dramatise an event that was relatively short (lasting a couple of weeks at its peak), but featured a variety of different military forces, and resulted from a number of complex political and military factors. Early on in the process he sketched out a possible treatment, focusing on four men: Viscount Gort (the commander-in-chief at the time); a colonel of an infantry regiment; a lance corporal separated, with four of his men, from his own regiment; and the owner of a small cabin cruiser who sails to France to help pick the men up. His aim was to ‘hold an even balance between the strategic side of the campaign and the human side.’120
By mid-February he was writing to H.E. Alexander (literary editor at Ealing), explaining that he was anticipating delivery around early March, as the contract had envisaged.121 He was uneasy, because, in contrast with the close way in which he had worked with Gotfurt on the Mary Stuart story, he was operating in something of a vacuum, since Michael Balcon was in America for part of the time, and Leslie Norman in Australia.122 Nevertheless, he finished the first draft of the Dunkirk script at the beginning of March, as he had promised.123 It was broadly in line with his earlier treatment, except that Gort was no longer featured, the story now focusing on the three other men; it did an impressive job of conveying the events that led up to the evacuation at Dunkirk, as well as the organisation behind taking the men off the beaches.
After receiving the script, Balcon wrote a memo to Norman with a number of criticisms, most of which can be boiled down to the view that the script took too long to get going (much of the early part explored the strategic build-up to the conflict); that characterisation was too limited, and left too late (for example, much time is spent at the beginning with the colonel, who then does not feature until towards the very end); and that there was an absence of any significant Belgian or French perspective. He also felt that the owner of the cabin cruiser (Thompson) was initially shown as too smug and complacent, when ‘at the time of Dunkirk there was a realisation of the position and one felt the first real stirring of the soul of the nation.’124 The script contained only two female characters, neither of whom had much to do, but Balcon was not troubled by that: ‘There are no women characters of any importance,’ he noted, ‘and in my view the women of the period should be symbolised.’
Sherriff responded to the criticisms that had been made of the script by writing some notes explaining his approach, choosing (intriguingly, given Laurence Thompson’s critique of The Dam Busters script) to assert that the last thing he wanted was ‘an Albert Memorial with the characters placed around it as symbolic statues’.125 He took on the criticisms one by one and made a stout defence of his script, while remaining open to ways in which it could be improved. Overall he set out not just a cogent case for the screenplay he had written, but almost a manual of his approach to screenwriting, and it is well worth reading in that context.
At that point the discussion between Sherriff and the producers came to a halt, at least for a couple of months, since everything went quiet at the Ealing end. At the end of July, Sherriff seems to have written to Ealing summarising his position regarding the script. Having heard nothing from them since he sent them his notes in May, he would now see his job as largely complete, except that he would be happy to do further work on the script if required, provided it could be fitted around his existing work. He received a reply from H.E. Alexander, reminding him that his contract committed him to be available for revisions and further work, and then informing him that the studio were now hiring David Divine (who had already written a book on Dunkirk) to help write another draft, and that ‘when this is ready we would like to send it to you for your comments and any additional scenes and dialogue that may be required.’126 Sherriff ’s agent, Bob Fenn, was not impressed, finding it ‘most unreasonable’ that they should expect him to work on someone else’s draft script, which might bear no resemblance to his original:
We should point out that as the circumstances which prevented you from completing the screenplay at the time were not of your making, you can only be called upon to ‘make such minor alterations and additions as they may reasonably require’ as per your contract.127
Two weeks later, Fenn told Sherriff that Ealing were ‘disturbed by your reaction not to do further work’, but he felt that they were now prepared to be more reasonable, and it might be worth his while agreeing to do some work on the new script, if only to maintain his relationship with Michael Balcon.128
At that point, Sherriff was on holiday, staying at the Royal Crescent Hotel in Brighton, which had become a favoured destination for him since he had sold his Bognor home, Sandmartin, at the beginning of 1955.129 The advantage of staying in Brighton was that the journey back to Esher was easy and short, and when he closeted himself there (usually to concentrate on his writing), he could make occasional trips home to deal with his correspondence. On this occasion he returned to find Fenn’s letter waiting for him. He was extremely unhappy with Ealing, feeling that he had delivered the script as promised, and that it was not his fault if it had taken them months to decide it was not what they wanted, by which time he had moved on to other work. He felt they were being extremely unreasonable in expecting him to drop everything at their command.
I can’t write [the letter] for you to show the Ealing Studio at the moment because it needs some thought, and certainly some restraint because I am very angry at the way this thing has been handled by Ealing and some of the things are quite unforgivable.130
A month later, he was no nearer the emollient letter Fenn was after:
I will write you a letter to give to Ealing when I have time, but I am terribly busy just now. I ought to warn you that it won’t be a pleasant letter because I will have to say exactly what I think. The whole thing was the most disappointing and unpleasant experience I have had in all these years of screen writing.131
Dunkirk eventually went ahead without any further involvement from Sherriff. The film was released in 1958, to good box-office and favourable reviews. It starred John Mills as Binns (Sherriff ’s lance corporal character, although designated a corporal in the film), and Richard Attenborough as one of the small boat skippers (although not the same character as Sherriff had delineated, and curiously, one who was even less committed to the war effort than the Thompson character that Balcon had criticised). Interestingly, the film was much more negative about the failures that lay behind the disaster than Sherriff had been, and omitted most of the positive examples that Sherriff had included to demonstrate the Navy’s organisation behind the small flotillas. Despite having criticised Sherriff for not including the Belgian and French perspectives, the film largely skipped over them as well.
After sending Ealing his notes in May, Sherriff was able to concentrate rather more on the new play (although his work on the TV adaptation of Hopkins was proceeding alongside). The story was one that he seems to have had in mind since 1949, when he had contacted the minister of an East End parish, the Reverend D.H. (Peter) Booth, to ask his help in exploring the juvenile court system. What he seems to have had in mind was a story about a clergyman who intercedes on behalf of a young offender, and thereafter tries to help him see the error of his ways. It had elements of Another Year contained within it, but focusing more on the boy’s path this time. During the months since hearing about the festival he had been researching the story in more detail, with visits to the London Police Court Mission, and to the Approved School it ran, known as the Cotswold School. He also made visits to the juvenile courts near his home to make sure his play was accurate in all its details. This quest for accuracy was very much a part of all of Sherriff ’s writing.
Early in July, despite all the distractions of Hopkins and Dunkirk, the first act of the play was ready to send to Val Gielgud. He cautioned that he was writing it as a stage play, because that was the form that came most naturally to him, but that meant it would probably be about two hours in length, which might be longer than Gielgud wanted. He was also having trouble with the title (he never was good with titles), having rejected The Needle’s Eye as too suggestive of a parable, which was something he was very eager to avoid.132 He also sent a copy to Canon Booth (with whom he had kept in contact, owing to Booth’s interest in the theatre), asking if he would read it over: ‘I needn’t ask you not to pull your punches and would like you to go for it like the sourest dramatic critic.’133
By the time he came back from his holiday in Brighton, the play was nearing completion, although it was not yet finished because Hopkins continued to get in the way. To complicate matters, another previously postponed project was hurtling towards him. Earlier in the year he had agreed to script an adaptation of Alistair MacLean’s first novel, HMS Ulysses, for Associated British. This was set to be a prestige project for the studio, and, when agreeing to the work, the tentative start date had been fixed as 1 July. As work had begun to pile up he had pushed the start date back to 1 September – but he knew that it could be postponed no further: it was likely to be a complex project, and he had to make a start. So now he was juggling three jobs, but the most time critical was the new play, and he was greatly relieved when it was finally done, although it had been a ‘heart-aching job’ to cut it down for broadcast: ‘the BBC are adamant that ninety minutes is the proper length for a play unless it be a Third Programme classic.’134
This play is set, in all three of its acts, in the study of St Mark’s Vicarage, Canbury,136 in London’s Dockland. It is the story of a young clergyman (John Mayfield) who comes to the neglected parish of Canbury in the East End of London, motivated by the desire to atone for the sins of his family, whose activities in trade and commerce had built the area, while exploiting the local inhabitants. Like Roger Matthews, he finds the parish struggling, controlled by a church board run by an objectionable elderly lady (in this case, Miss Fortescue), and he spends some of his time trudging the streets to encourage people to come to the church.
Mayfield is visited by the mother of Joe Palmer, a young hooligan, who asks him to attend the Juvenile Court to speak on behalf of her son, who is accused of stealing a bike. Mayfield is reluctant (he does not know the boy) but is curious, and goes along. The chairman of the magistrates agrees that the boy can avoid being sent to Approved School if Mayfield stands surety for him, which means he has to visit Mayfield on a regular basis. As the weeks go by, Mayfield cannot connect to the boy and begins to feel he has failed, but when Mayfield’s wife lets the boy use a telescope to view the ships on the river, he is transformed. The promise of a berth on a training ship excites him even more, and the vicar and his wife feel they are finally getting through to him.
Everything seems to be going well and Joe is about to leave for the training ship, when a policeman makes an appearance asking Joe’s whereabouts the previous night, when a telescope was stolen from a local junk shop. Joe, who took the telescope, asks the vicar to cover for him, otherwise he will not go to the training ship. But the vicar refuses, insisting that Joe tell the truth, for if he lied his way to the ship, he would just be a phoney. The play ends with Joe taken into custody and railing at the vicar.
The Telescope was first broadcast on 31 October 1956, and the BBC trumpeted it as a ‘world premiere’ (which Sherriff found ‘rather pretentious … could we not just leave it by saying “the first performance of a new play”?’).137 Before that had come five of his previous plays, in chronological order, on successive Wednesdays, beginning with Journey’s End on 26 September.138 Each play (except the latest) was prefaced by a short talk by Sherriff, explaining its background and history, and he also contributed an introductory article to the Radio Times about the need to maintain the theatre, given its role as a testing ground for new playwrights and actors.139 Nor was his fiction neglected, for The Fortnight in September was adapted to be read, aptly enough, in September.
At the end of the festival, Val Gielgud passed him some listener feedback that the BBC had commissioned, and he was very gratified to see that The Telescope had held its own.140 He had been worried that such a difficult subject, with such a downbeat ending (which Peter Booth had described as ‘rather strong meat’),141 would not attract the average listener, and yet the BBC figures showed that the actual audience for the play, at 11 per cent of the adult population of the UK, was higher than for any other in the festival.142
The most popular play of the festival, entirely unsurprisingly, was Journey’s End, but The Telescope was, along with Home at Seven, the second most popular, followed, in sequence, by Miss Mabel, Long Sunset and then Badger’s Green in last place.143 The feedback contained summaries of listener responses that highlighted a wide range of viewpoints. There were some who had found it a damp squib, and were unsure of the author’s intentions, but they were in the minority. Far more had found it absorbing, and also felt that it had tackled a difficult topic very well. But even among those who enjoyed the play there was some dissension, especially about the way in which Sherriff had brought the play to its conclusion.
The dissension was not so much about the quality of the ending, but about whether John Mayfield had done the right thing in handing young Joe over to the police. Sherriff would not have been upset that people took issue with the resolution he had offered, since that is exactly the type of disagreement he would have invited. And besides, the people whose opinions he respected, whose advice he had taken in its construction (like Canon Booth, or Morley Jacob, at the London Police Court Mission) told him that they liked the ending, and that it rang true. He was especially pleased to receive a complimentary letter from C.A. Joyce, the head of the Cotswold School, ‘because of all people, you are the one to judge,’ replied Sherriff. He went on: ‘What you have said encourages me to go right ahead with the plan to extend the story to cover the boy’s experience at an Approved School. I shall be talking to the television people in a few days.’144
If The Long Sunset was Sherriff ’s favourite play, The Telescope is his most committed. He clearly sympathised deeply with boys like Joe, who turn to the bad due to parental neglect. His desire to steer boys on the right path can be seen from the moment he came back to Down House Farm and set up a camp for boys (used, in the first instance, by a reverend at Southwark Cathedral, as it happens),145 which he then wanted to turn into a fully fledged Scout camp. He had first become interested in the subject when writing Another Year, and since then had been thinking about how he might be able to help, even reaching out to the Cotswold School to offer to set up a rowing programme (a scheme that foundered on the rocks of impracticality). The research he had done in the youth courts and at the Cotswold School had obviously struck a chord, and his willingness to write a television series about young Joe at the school was much less about his desire for another commission, than it was to tell the stories of boys like Joe, and the institutions to which they are sent. Nothing came of the plans, unfortunately, for it would have been an interesting programme to watch, but Sherriff was very clear from the moment The Telescope was broadcast that he was going to refashion it as a play, and see it performed on stage. This, at least, was something practical he could do for boys like Joe.
The year 1956 had been glorious for Sherriff. He had seen his two most recent films nominated for BAFTA awards, and although they had lost out to The Ladykillers, The Dam Busters had cemented its reputation as one of the best British war movies of the time. He had written a well received new play and the BBC’s festival of his work represented the absolute pinnacle of his reputation as a dramatist.
The year had not been blemish free, however, and the sting of his disagreement with Balcon at Ealing would linger long enough that he would never work with him again. He had also been working steadily on the script for The Hopkins Manuscript, passing the finished product back to the BBC, only to find they were still dragging their feet about a production date. But he was confident it would come, and in the meantime he had more than enough movie work to be going on with. He was very much in demand, and work on HMS Ulysses was well in hand, while Rank were waiting in the wings with a contract for Requiem for a Wren, whenever he was ready to start.
But there was a worm in the apple of his success, for in May 1956 the staid 1950s theatre world had been rocked by a new play, written by John Osborne, called Look Back in Anger. This would be the first of many plays by a number of new playwrights – the ‘angry young men’ – that would explore themes and individuals very different from those that Sherriff and his contemporaries had portrayed on stage. Sitting in his library at Rosebriars at the end of 1956, revelling in the acclaim that his work had received, and with a schedule full of current and prospective projects, he had no idea of just how much things might change for him in the years ahead.