Thou hast embarked, thou hast made the voyage, thou art come to shore; get out.
Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations, Book III.
There was no holiday for Sherriff during Christmas and New Year 1956: he was much too busy for that.
The most important job was the adaptation of HMS Ulysses. Alistair MacLean’s first novel was published, to enormous acclaim, in the autumn of 1955, and Robert Clark quickly snapped up the rights to his fellow Scot’s book for £30,000.1 The story is that of a light cruiser, escort of an arctic convoy headed to Murmansk. En route they encounter the many perils of the crossing, including a fierce storm and enemy ships, U-boats and aircraft. Almost all of the convoy ships are sunk, and HMS Ulysses sacrifices itself attempting to ram a German cruiser. The action in the book is raw and brutal but its authenticity was never in doubt, given MacLean’s wartime service in the Navy.
The project was an important one for Associated British, as can be seen from a report in the Scottish Daily Mail (obviously a puff piece from the studio) on 5 January, which raised it as a potential successor to The Dam Busters. Two weeks later came a publicity still in Today’s Cinema, showing Sherriff and Clark at Elstree, alongside Gotfurt, Bill Whittaker, W. Collins (from the book’s publishers) and Admiral Sir Robert Burnett, who was acting as the film’s naval advisor.
The naval aspects of the film made the going difficult for Sherriff: he could not simply adapt the novel as it stood, but had regularly to conference on the technical details with the film’s advisors and producers. As early as October 1956, he was telling Ayton Whitaker that ‘At present I am being chased about by Associated British Pictures. I have kept them waiting many months while I wrote the television play and I have got to give them everything now and this includes numerous talks with technical advisers on naval affairs.’2 Four months later, he was still complaining: ‘At the moment I am up to my eyes in the screenplay for HMS Ulysses, with all manner of experts and naval specialists sending in advice.’3
One of the problems was that he was still working on The Telescope, trying to recover it from its radio shape, and make it look like a stage play once more. Gladys Day at Curtis Brown had already circulated it to the repertory companies, many of whom were interested, although she complained that, as ever, she did not have enough copies to send out. She encouraged Sherriff to have some photocopies made, but he initially baulked at the cost, suggesting instead that they wait for the script to be published by Elek Books (who had also published The Long Sunset). But that would take months,4 so Sherriff hurried along with his redraft. The main changes were twofold: first, about twenty minutes of acting time had been pruned (although the structure remained the same); second, the final two scenes were now to be played as one, avoiding what would have been a curtain drop followed by a very short last scene. Sherriff explained the cuts to Peter Booth when he sent him a copy of the play, ‘all nicely washed and brushed up for the theatre’.5 He promised him that, while Bryan Bailey at Guildford would have the honour of the first repertory performance, Booth could enjoy the accolade of staging the first amateur production in Brighton, on 26 April.
All the while, Hopkins rumbled on in the background. Although the original thought had been that it might form a six-part series, Sherriff and the BBC (in the form of Ayton Whitaker, script editor Donald Wilson and BBC Head of Drama, Michael Barry) had come to an understanding that it might fit better into two ninetyminute episodes, presented a week apart. That was certainly the understanding as late as November 1956, but just a month later, the plan had changed, and it was now to be produced as a ‘whole play in one evening’.6 Despite the pressures of Ulysses, and his own misgivings about the impact the cuts might have on the continuity and build-up of the piece itself, Sherriff spent several long evenings in December trying to hack the piece into shape. Back it went to the BBC, and by the end of January, Whitaker was able to return it to him as a single, two-hour play, while still suggesting it might be twenty minutes too long.7 Sherriff was not happy and wrote bluntly to Whitaker (which must have been difficult, since he considered him a friend):
I spent weeks of time writing and revising this work, giving it the greatest care, and it will be most disappointing and depressing if the whole of this work now gets thrown down the drain and the play just becomes a slick piece of science fiction in which the characters play second fiddle to the events.8
Curiously, not long after he had fired this broadside off to the BBC’s television department, he received a welcome letter from Val Gielgud, who was in the market for new plays, specifically written for radio. He was very much hoping that Sherriff might be able to offer an idea or two.9
The basic premise was that the play should be completely new (and not an adaptation), between sixty to ninety minutes long, and be of a theme and style that would be appropriate to a BBC Monday night Home Service audience: in return, the BBC would pay a fee of £500 for the rights to three radio broadcasts. All other rights would remain with the author. This all sounded perfect to Sherriff, who was toying with a new idea for a play anyway. His only caveat was that he was unlikely to be able to deliver the play by 30 September, which is what Gielgud had requested. He was very close to finishing his work on Ulysses, but thereafter would start immediately on Requiem for a Wren, which would take him through until August.10 Gielgud was obviously keen to have his old friend involved, airily swatting away concerns about the timing, and offering him a two-month extension, to the end of November. Sherriff ’s recent radio ventures had been very successful, and it would likely add some lustre to the new series if he were to be involved.11
Sherriff ’s resilience has to be admired. Having wrestled with the BBC for months over The Hopkins Manuscript – a book that he was very proud of, and was keen to see adapted, and thus a project to which he was absolutely committed and had given many hours of his time without any financial recompense (beyond the initial fee) – it would have been only natural if he had sent Gielgud away with a flea in his ear. But he was never one to hold a grudge. He did his work, and he did it as well as he could. If people asked for changes (in moving from one medium to another, for example), he would do his best to accommodate them. If writers at other organisations wanted to amend his work, he was not precious or over-protective, although he did like to be given approval, to prevent damage being done to his original concept. But he was generally willing to listen to criticisms, and respond where necessary, and always behave in a professional way. If he had difficulties with one part of the BBC on one project, there was no reason why that should have an impact on his work elsewhere. It was in part his resilience that resulted in a steady flow of work coming his way: if he had been perturbed every time someone requested an alteration with which he disagreed, the number of movie companies with which he might have worked would have dwindled rapidly.
On 1 April he sent off the final scenes of Ulysses to Associated British, but quite what he sent off is unknown: no copy of the script appears to exist. A few months later, having heard nothing from them, he asked his agent what was happening (he had thought it was going to be a ‘big and very expensive picture’,12 after all), but no answer seems to have been forthcoming. Nor was there to be any further public acknowledgement by ABPC until 1959, by which time Robert Clark had been replaced as head of production at Elstree by Bill Whittaker, and the project was listed as one of a number of movies that the company had committed to making that year (indeed, was seen as the most significant of them):
Britain’s film studios are booming back into big business. And last night a new proof came that cinemas are beating the slump. It was from the powerful Associated-British company at Elstree. … Epics include HMS Ulysses scripted by R.C. Sherriff.13
Later that year it would be described in the trade press as ‘one of the largest to be undertaken by the company’.14 Again, though, the publicity proved premature: the film never made it into production, and about a decade later, Associated British sold the rights on. The film has still never been made.15
Barely pausing for breath, Sherriff moved on to Requiem for a Wren, although he had already had a number of conferences with Box and Thomas, and with Joyce Briggs, the story editor. The novel was first published by Heinemann in 1955 and is the story of Alan Duncan, a lawyer returning to his native Australia, to find his parents’ housekeeper has committed suicide. On delving deeper he finds that the woman had been the former girlfriend of his (deceased) brother Bill, a girl for whom Alan had searched after the war. She, tormented by guilt from killings during the war, had come to her dead boyfriend’s parents’ home as some kind of atonement, but hearing that Alan would be returning, and might reveal her secret, she commits suicide. It is far from a happy tale, but vivid, and with plenty of potential cinematic incidents. After beginning work on the script Sherriff had taken advantage of some holiday time to tour locations on the south coast that might be of use in the film. He seemed happy in the work – it was clearly less technical than the Ulysses story, and Shute was an author with whom he obviously had a connection (he had already adapted two of his novels for the screen),16 and it seems that they may have been friendly enough that Shute even invited him to Australia for a six-month tour, although Sherriff declined.17
Sherriff carried on working on Requiem until mid-August, when he delivered the script to Joyce Briggs, along with an accompanying note, which, reading between the lines of a letter to his agent, intimated that he would be willing to undertake revisions, but only for a certain period after delivery of the script (he was keen to avoid, he wrote, ‘a repetition of that awful Dunkirk affair’). Requiem is, however, another of those scripts that no longer appears to exist, and was never made into a movie. But the studio must have liked his work, for he was quickly signed to another contract by Joyce Briggs at Rank – this time for Gold in the Sky, another Max Catto thriller, which he would begin in the New Year.
A month before he had finished work on Ulysses, and picked up his pencil on Requiem, Sherriff had written to Peter Booth in Brighton, telling him that the plans of Guildford Rep to stage The Telescope in April had become ‘somewhat ambitious’, and that, knowing it would by now be too late for him to change his plans, would he mind not advertising it too widely: ‘If, for instance, you were to give a story to a London paper it would take the edge off the repertory production, and as they have to earn a living under precarious conditions, I would like to let them have this little extra fillip in calling it the “premiere”.’18 Booth was happy to oblige, and nothing seems to have made its way to the London press, despite the fact that, according to Sherriff, the St Peter’s Players ‘made a fine job of the play, and I was very glad to see you get an immediate response with a full house on Saturday night [the second and final night of performances].’19
The main event, of course, was still to come, for the play opened in Guildford on 13 May as part of an interesting experiment, part funded by the Arts Council. Four repertory companies were involved, each performing one play for a week at the home of each repertory company. Guildford Rep would thus play The Telescope first in their home theatre for a week, and then for a week at three venues in Canterbury, Hornchurch and Salisbury.20 Shortly afterwards, the BBC co-operated with the festival by giving the radio play another outing on the Home Service on 8 June.
The reviews for the play, in Guildford and beyond, were generally very positive, balancing criticism of the obvious radio origins of the first two acts, with strong praise for the power of the final act:
The climax … is fine theatre, and not the less so when Mr Sherriff in the end leaves the vicar in the air, without an answer to his accuser, without even the curtain line to himself. Sheer sincerity here turns what is provisional to good effect. The play comes alive because the author at last speaks up frankly.21
The Birmingham Post22 called the last act ‘truthful and fine, and “uncompromising” theatre into the bargain’. J.C. Trewin23 noted that Sherriff ’s ‘sincerity, vigour, shrewdness and theatrical command are all present here’, while The Daily Telegraph24 reviewer found the play ‘a deeply absorbing discussion of Christian values in a commercial society … [arising] neatly out of a strong and moving little story’. The most deeply gratifying review came in The Manchester Guardian:
Having given us two acts of mild domestic drama … [Sherriff] suddenly changes pace. The third act has the savagery and brute force of A View from the Bridge. And when the curtain rings down on its tragic, yet inevitable ending, Mr Sherriff has achieved the catharsis we have come to expect from Mr Arthur Miller.25
Sherriff was not the only one singled out for praise, however. There was unanimity about the quality of Bryan Bailey’s production: ‘Excellent’, wrote The Telegraph, while Tynan (who, unusually, preferred the first two acts to the third, which he called ‘vinegar-sour’) felt it had a ‘polished oaken gleam’ throughout.26 The acting was generally held to be first-rate as well, especially Edward Woodward as Mayfield, the vicar, and Melvyn Hayes as Joe. The Guardian, in passing, pointed out one additional benefit that accrued to the Guildford production, which was that, because the theatre operated as a club theatre, it ‘remained outside the strictures of the Lord Chamberlain’ – which meant that the language in the last act (Joe: ‘They always said you’d let me down, you bastard. You dirty bastard.’) did not need to be censored for the performance.
After the play had completed its run at Guildford, Bryan Bailey wrote to let Sherriff know that it had produced the best box office they’d ever had in May, and also the best box office of any new play,27 so very quickly he tried to capitalise on the play’s success by alerting his film industry contacts.28 He also wrote to Michael Barry at the BBC, noting that ‘If you were thinking about a television performance with this company, then it would have my full support,’ although ‘the only provision I would make is that it would be a normal ninety-minute broadcast.’29
As the summer wore on, Sherriff kept trying to develop opportunities for The Telescope, and worked steadily on Requiem, which he finished by mid-August. But throughout the period, The Hopkins Manuscript was never far away from his thoughts.
For a year he had been in discussions with George Kamm at Pan Books about a reprint of the book. Originally, the idea had been a straightforward reprint, but Sherriff had become convinced that, with the upsurge in interest in space, it might be better to rework the book, ‘shortening and streamlining’30 it, and bringing it into a size more suitable for a Pan publication. Even before he was fully engaged in his revisions, however, he received word from Donald Wilson at the BBC that they had yet to finalise the script for the two-hour version of Hopkins, promising something as soon as possible, but alerting him to the fact that the production date might well be pushed back further.31 There was then silence for a few weeks until, on 16 August, Wilson wrote apologetically to Sherriff ’s agent, Bob Fenn, saying that, despite his best efforts, and those of his staff, he had been reluctantly forced to cancel the project.32
Fenn passed Wilson’s letter on to Sherriff with a note saying that he felt they had no redress under the contract, which clearly stated that ‘after the initial payment to you there would be no further financial obligation.’33 Shortly afterwards, Michael Barry sent his own letter to Sherriff, apologising for the cancellation of the adaptation, and trying to explain what had gone wrong. Sherriff replied to Barry that it may simply have been that everyone had been ‘thinking in too ambitious a way’, and hoped it might be done in a simpler way, but it was not to be.
Sherriff had always known that he was taking a risk with the work he put into the BBC version, but he did it because of his commitment to the story – one of his favourites that he always felt could be well dramatised, on TV or on film – and because he felt that a successful dramatisation would open the way up to more book sales, and possibly the sale of the film rights. He could not understand why they had changed their minds: ‘It still puzzles me, because in all our talks, extending over a year, I was continually assured that they definitely meant to do it, and that was why I went on working at it, giving so much of my time.’35
Swallowing his disappointment, he turned to the redrafting of the original book and quickly made progress, reporting to George Kamm by the end of September that he had removed about thirty pages from the first seventy. By early in October, he had finished his editing on the book, now entitled The Cataclysm, trimming, by his count, some sixty pages. Most of the cuts were just in detail – side events, for example, which illuminated the rather petty and pompous nature of Edgar’s character, or much of the early scene-setting material. One noteworthy exclusion is the Foreword from the Addis Ababa research institution, which makes the extent of the ‘Cataclysm’ a little less instantly obvious: it was a nice touch in the original book. Generally, the cut-down version, although it fitted more neatly within the covers of a Pan book, has the feel of being slightly chopped up, a little less smoothly flowing than the original, which is undoubtedly the better book. It would be published a year later, on 8 November 1958, to critical indifference, but at least, from Sherriff ’s perspective, it would finally be back in print.
Having finished his editing work, Sherriff ’s resilience made him return to the fray with Michael Barry, whom he informed about the new book, prefacing his remarks with a wonderfully passive-aggressive (and funny) question:
Apropos the Hopkins script that you sent me the other day, who is the ardent young critic who has sprinkled my carefully composed intentions with rude epithets? … In this particular case he has missed the purpose of the lines so entirely that I’m sure his appeal to Jesus would fall upon deaf ears.36
Clearly Sherriff was still aggrieved at the treatment of his work by the BBC, but he was nevertheless willing to try again:
The news of the past week [the launch of Sputnik] has given so much topical interest to it that it seems well worth going on with. … I am sure that the ideas we recently discussed are not beyond reach of a competent writer, and if you can let one of your people do it, I will gladly give all the help I can.
It seems, however, that Sherriff was not destined to see eye to eye with Mr Barry, for at the same time as he was again trying to promote Hopkins to him, he was tussling on another front: the television adaptation of The Telescope, which was due to be broadcast on 5 November. Sherriff had made his opinion on the broadcast very clear, when writing to Bryan Bailey in June:
I hope the television production will be done, with all the company who have played through the festival. There should not be much problem in preparing a television version because it could follow very closely upon the one used in sound radio, which was a ninety-minute production.37
Ayton Whitaker was in touch with both Sherriff and Bailey in cutting the script during the summer, but by the end of September, having cut the play to seventynine minutes, Sherriff was questioning the wisdom of cutting the play further, having already cut it ‘to the bone’.38
If my cutting was so massive as to bring it down to seventy-nine minutes, then I achieved more than I expected, but if an attempt is made to cut four more minutes, then I think the thing will draw perilously near the point of disintegrating into a series of mutilated scenes.
When a letter from Barry made it clear he wouldn’t budge39, Sherriff reluctantly acquiesced:
Concerning The Telescope, I have agreed, with considerable foreboding, to granting a licence for a seventy-five minute production, when, strictly speaking, it ought to receive the normal ninety minutes to give it a proper chance. But had I withheld the licence, it would have been a great disappointment to the Guildford Theatre Company, and after all, as they gave such a good stage performance, I think they deserve the opportunity to appear in it on television.40
The reviews were again generally favourable, but the cuts were noticed (‘That the play had been ruthlessly slashed was glaringly obvious’),41 as was the fact that it had originally been devised for radio, ‘so there was little for the actors to do in the way of action.’42 Nevertheless, it was seen as ‘eminently viewable’,43 and generating a ‘true tension’.44 After being briefed by the BBC, Sherriff seemed very happy with the whole affair, as he told Peter Booth:
The Telescope seems to have had a very big audience and the results were most interesting. Some people thought it was a bore and a waste of time, saying they have had enough of Teddy Boys in the documentaries (this was regardless of the fact that every attempt was made to show that Joe was not a Teddy Boy!). There were some letters from clergymen who were indignant at the suggestion that the Church was not all that it should be in the East End, but I think we had a good majority in our favour. Joyce wrote a most enthusiastic letter about it. He had a large audience of his delinquent boys looking in with him at the Cotswold School, and Joyce tells me that their unanimous verdict was that Joe deserved all he got!45
The TV production neatly dovetailed with the publication of the play in the Elek Books Plays of the Year volume; Samuel French were rushing through a version that the amateurs and the reps could use; and Sherriff was still trying to hawk the play round the film companies. But the most curious development of all came when he was approached by Peter Powell, who had produced the play in Birmingham, and was interested in producing a musical version: he had already succeeded in interesting The Players Theatre in the idea, and also the composer Antony Hopkins in writing the music. Sherriff wrote to Gladys Day, slightly bemused at the idea:
It all sounds very odd, but the last thing I ever want to do is to discourage anybody from doing something they are enthusiastic about, and I have told him to go ahead with the best of luck and see what happens.46
Over the following months there would be various contractual details to iron out, but to all intents and purposes, Powell had been given the green light, and a musical version of The Telescope would soon be in the works.
Even while he was editing The Telescope and The Cataclysm,47 Sherriff had been working hard on the radio play, now called Cards With Uncle Tom,48 which he had promised Val Gielgud back in the spring. He had sent a first draft to the BBC at the end of September, but as it was a legal drama, they would have to take advice from their lawyers. Almost inevitably, given the pattern of the rest of his dealings with the BBC during the year, he was also advised that it was too long, which alarmed him, because ‘I was patting myself on the back about the close cutting and pruning I had done for the final version.’49
A five-page report came back from the corporation’s solicitor, and Gielgud sent it on with word that they had timed the play, and it needed to be cut by at least ten minutes, and probably a little more, to allow a margin of safety.50 On the suggestion of the solicitor, Sherriff went along to see Mr J.P. Eddy, a barrister who was accustomed to giving advice on plays and films, and was relieved to find that there were no overwhelming problems, and to receive some very helpful suggestions on the language that might be used by the judges and barristers in the play. On 12 December, not long after his meeting with Eddy, he was told that the production date had been set for 2 February. Setting to work quickly on his final revisions,51 he was able to put the final script into Gielgud’s hands by 4 January.
Sherriff set out the first part of the plot very cogently, in an earlier letter to Eddy:
A young man named Edward Bradley is suspected of a murder and is questioned by the police. He did not, in fact, commit the murder and is in no real danger of arrest because he has a cast-iron alibi. He was actually playing cards with his uncle, and two of his uncle’s friends, when the murder happened. Two servants in his uncle’s house also saw him there at the time in question. There are therefore five people who can speak on his behalf. He only has to inform the police of this to clear himself.
But he happens to be a freelance journalist by trade and it occurs to him that he can provide himself with an excellent (and financially valuable) story if he allows himself to be arrested, tried and convicted of the crime. He can do this by refusing to give any account of his whereabouts at the time of the murder, and by arranging with his uncle, and the other witnesses, not to come forward with proof of his innocence until after he has been convicted.52
Bradley arranges that the others will make depositions testifying to the fact that they were with him at the time of the murder, and then, when he is nearing the date of his execution, the statements can be brought forth, exonerating him, and providing him with the material for a best-selling book. Unfortunately for him, things take an entirely different turn from what he has planned. A week before his scheduled execution, he tells the police he did not do the crime, and that his uncle, and his friends and servants, can verify his account, and have already done so in legally binding documents. But when the police approach his uncle, he maintains that Edward was not with him on the night; his friends also say they were not there; and his servants have left the country and cannot be contacted. Edward pleads with his uncle, who replies that Edward must be delusional to think such things. In the absence of any corroboration, Edward is executed, leaving Uncle Tom to receive a sizeable inheritance that had been held in trust for Edward, some of which he shares with his two card-playing friends.
Sherriff was pleased by the reaction of the public: ‘[The play] appears to have been well received over sound radio the other night, judging from the number of letters which have come in,’53 although there were also quite a number who had written ‘rather indignant that the old uncle got away with it’.54 He was straightaway in contact with Curtis Brown to see whether there might be interest in foreign broadcasts, or in the film rights. But he did not simply wish to part with the play for a fee: ‘I have got a lot of ideas about the story, and would not want to sell it unless I can hold some rights in it myself, including the screenplay.’55 Fenn advised him that, given the state of the British movie industry, none of the big players were likely to be interested, so the best he might hope for was a small budget producer, or perhaps television.56 A few weeks later, the BBC duly expressed interest in a TV adaptation, which Sherriff was content to authorise, but ‘I would ask that it is a ninety-minute version because I don’t think the story could be cut down so drastically to seventy-five minutes without damage.’57 Alas, he would be disappointed once again.
On 1 January, Sherriff had started his adaptation of Gold in the Sky for Pinewood Studios, a story about the attempt by a professor, his daughter and a mining engineer to salvage the eponymous airliner from a swamp in the Congo, and float it downriver to Tanganyika.
On 17 January, he wrote to Teddy Baird, the film’s producer, commenting:
The story is original and exciting, and full of opportunity. The whole enterprise of salvaging the aircraft from the swamp, and the sequence of events upon the river, right through to the final achievement, makes an odyssey that could scarcely be bettered for the screen.58
But the characters (and there were only three significant ones) were unbelievable, and no decent reason was given why they were in the jungle in the first place, nor why they would embark on such a massive enterprise. To compound matters, their constant bickering (especially between the daughter and the mining engineer) was tedious. But Sherriff had a solution, which was to keep the basic story of the aircraft being floated downriver, but to widen the cast of characters by making several passengers in the stricken aircraft part of an archaeological expedition to find a lost city in the jungle. By this means he could populate the film with a number of quite different individuals, each with a particular talent that would be important in the enterprise. ‘The interplay of the various characters would provide the light and shade to the story. Divided counsels may bring them near disaster and add to the natural difficulties of the enterprise.’
After about six weeks, Sherriff reported to Joyce Briggs that things were going well with the script, but the initial deadline (21 April) was looking tight: ‘As you know, I am having to construct an almost entirely new story around the central idea, with new characters and a new development, which means … that the screenplay is taking rather longer than usual.’ Could he have a three-week extension? Briggs agreed; the delivery date was pushed back to 21 May.
That presented another problem, however, which was that it now overlapped with the start date on another screenplay that he was taking on for producer David Henley, on behalf of British Lion, namely, the story of William the Conqueror. He had already spent six weeks at the end of 1957 on a treatment for the play, and after some discussion the basic structure had been agreed, allowing him to begin work on the full screenplay on 1 May. That same day he reassured Bob Fenn that the overlap looked worse than it was: in fact, he was only correcting the final draft of Gold in the Sky, ‘and work on The Conqueror can go right ahead.’59 In practice, the delivery time slipped a few weeks further still, so that it was eventually dated 13 June.
The final script of Gold in the Sky60 would have made a first-rate adventure movie, although thanks to all of Sherriff ’s invention, it had moved some considerable distance from the book. But it was another that disappeared into the film company’s files, never to make it into production. When, at the end of 1957, the film was announced as part of the Pinewood slate for 1958, it was noted that ‘there is a large schedule out of which twenty films will finally be set for … production.’61 Since it would probably have been one of the most expensive, it might have been felt prudent to direct resources elsewhere, but it is impossible to know.
The producer of the film at British Lion was to be Steven Pallos, a Budapest-born émigré with an undistinguished track record, and Henley told Sherriff that Pallos and British Lion were happy with the treatment, although they hoped that ‘the historical aspect will be the background and the people will dominate the scenes’.62 This, of course, was a concern familiar to Sherriff from some of his previous movies (he may have recalled Zanuck and Litvak’s concerns about This Above All being a movie about two people in England, not England with two people in it), but he reassured Henley that he would write the ‘whole story in terms of human endeavour’, although he was worried that ‘some people may exert pressure upon you, and upon me, to cut down everything of the historical background to make room for flirtations of unimportant characters.’63
After some further discussion, Sherriff eventually started work on the screenplay on 1 May, and during the following months produced a script64 that is lively and engaging, with a number of highly cinematic scenes hung around a fairly straightforward account of William’s life. It begins when his father has to secure the services of a tanner’s daughter to provide him with a bastard heir, moving through the many revolts he faced initially (in part because of his lack of royal blood), his subsequent mastery of Normandy, and finally his invasion of England. It is altogether too respectful of its principal characters (who are generally portrayed as thoughtful and considerate, although William does show the odd display of temper), and the narrative is linear and largely unabsorbing (we know from the outset that it will end with William’s victory at Hastings). Nevertheless, there are some very well-executed scenes: his brutality at Alençon, for example, when he cut off, and then catapulted into the town, the hands and feet of those who had tried to resist him; his destruction of the army of the French king’s brother by the use of massed archers; his whipping of Matilda of Flanders, the woman he had intended for his wife; and the preparations for the invasion of England and its subsequent successful resolution. The script provides quite detailed accounts of the mundane details attached to preparations for battle or invasion, and he exhibits a relish in his knowledge of the detail of mediaeval warfare and provisioning. Historical detail clearly always fascinated him, and would be put to good use some years later, in a boys’ book about a mediaeval siege.65
One rather personal element jumps out from the script, where he considers William’s apparent disinterest in girls. There is no suggestion that he is gay, just that, to a certain point, he had been interested in other pursuits (soldiering, or hunting, for example), and could not share the interest for women that he observed among his young friends. He has a short speech with Lanfranc, a famously devout and celibate cleric, where he laments their lack of passion:
What’s wrong with us, Lanfranc? – with all of us who have been dukes of Normandy? – Most of us have had the vigour of a dozen men – and passion, too: passion for war and hunting and drink and gambling … but for women? … it seems as if some curse has been put upon us that drains away our passions to these other things: that leaves us cold and dead to the one desire that most men call the supreme happiness of all.
For William, the passion surges shortly afterwards when he meets Matilda of Flanders, who will become his wife. But for Sherriff, the passionless condition, which he described with such understanding, would never change.
As ever, the writing process took him longer than he had originally envisaged, and he had to ask the studio for an extension from the original end of August deadline. Towards the end of September, he was reassuring Henley that it would be with him in a couple of weeks, but Henley was urging him to move quicker, since a competing project had sprung up in Hollywood. He finally delivered the script on 23 October, and Henley wrote back quickly saying he liked it, and that the challenge now was to find the appropriate director. Thereafter, Sherriff could only wait to hear how Henley’s efforts were going, and he would have been pleased to see some press interest early in 1959, when Pallos announced that they were seeking American partners:
We had to get an American company interested because of the high cost. If it were only £500,000, we could do it easily on our own, but it will cost one and a half million. R.C. Sherriff has written a wonderful script.66
A few months later, Henley said that he and Sydney Box had been to New York to sign a contract to have the film made for an American company, so it looked as though progress was being made.67 But six months later, Henley was reporting that the American company had merged with MGM, so no longer had their own slate, and he was in the process of trying to buy back the rights to the film.68 At that point, the mists envelop the movie and it slowly disappears without trace.
Sherriff had been glad to polish off The Conqueror script, for he was keen to get to work on a new stage play, and he only had a small window of opportunity, for another screenplay was beckoning in the new year – an adaptation of Mika Waltari’s The Dark Angel, which had been offered to him by Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis (with whom he had briefly worked on War and Peace). He also had a rather loose commitment to write a play for Bernard Miles, who was on the verge of launching The Mermaid theatre in the City of London.
Miles and Sherriff had been in contact since the beginning of the year, when Sherriff had first visited the building site that would become The Mermaid (which still stands in Puddle Dock in the City today). Miles was searching for a play that might get the theatre off to a flying start, and they discussed constructing an episodic structure around the basic story of a school in the City that develops through the ages. This appealed greatly to Sherriff, but as he was swamped with other work, he put it on the back burner, promising to read around the subject before putting pencil to paper. He progressed far enough that he was able to offer a scene to Miles by the end of 1958 (which he liked very much), but thereafter counselled that, with his forthcoming work for De Laurentiis, progress would be slow for a while. He wouldn’t be putting the play ‘up on the shelf ’; it wasn’t the kind of play he could ‘sit down and work on night by night like an ordinary play, because every scene needs an awful lot of thinking out and reading up before it is written.’69 Of course, if he didn’t sit down and write it night by night, it might never be fully written, which seems to have happened, since it exists in Sherriff ’s papers only as an incomplete version of a play, and as a novel, entitled The School.70
He made more progress with the other play, which was of a much more conventional type, and by the end of the year he had finished the first two acts, although it remained untitled. At that point he reported to John Barber, in the drama department at Curtis Brown, that he would have to put the play aside for a little, for his ‘holiday from screenwriting’71 had ended, and he was about to embark on the treatment of Dark Angel for De Laurentiis. The last act would not take him long, he felt, for it was already fairly clear in his mind,72 but in the meantime he would take the chance to obtain some advice about the behaviour of the solicitor in the first two acts: ‘I have trained up my own lawyer, Kenneth Ewart, to advise me on these things.’73 As well as roping in Barber as a critic, he also sent a copy to Archie Batty, who had been so helpful with advice on his late 1940s–early ’50s plays, and he was delighted (and relieved, he told Batty)74 when both he and Barber told him how much they liked it.
On 1 January 1959, Sherriff began work on The Dark Angel, a historical novel by Mika Waltari, set during the siege of Constantinople in 1453. The novel is in the form of a diary, written by the hero, John Angelos (in Waltari’s original Finnish, the title is Johannes Angelos), and it combines a detailed and dramatic account of the city’s fall, and a love story between the mysterious Angelos and Anna Notaras, daughter of Lukas Notaras, the Lord High Admiral of the city. The novel is very complex, especially because the character of Angelos himself is so slippery – his background is very mysterious, and it is never clear which side he is really on – but the love story is at the very heart of the characters’ motivations and beliefs, and thus of the book itself.
Bearing that in mind, it is not entirely surprising that the project would become one of the most difficult that Sherriff had ever undertaken: it was absolutely ripe for a conflict between a highly cultured producer who wanted to use the love story to explore important philosophical and religious issues, and a writer who was much more fascinated by the historical and mechanical details of a mediaeval siege.
It all started off well enough. Just after Christmas, De Laurentiis sent Sherriff a long memo outlining his ideas about the picture, and above all letting him know that he would like to be sympathetic to the Turkish besiegers, and not just because he was hoping to have the co-operation of the Turkish army and navy.75 Sherriff replied, agreeing that this was not a struggle between Christian and ‘infidel’, or right against wrong: ‘I would, in fact, prefer to leave religion entirely out of it so far as it concerns a conflict between different faiths. This story is a conflict between men rather than between rival theologies.’76 He also suggested that, while the love story was absolutely integral to the book, it could not occupy as much space on the screen, because he also wanted to ‘capture the mystery and romance surrounding a great city besieged’.
He finished his initial treatment at the end of February, and a couple of weeks later received a four-page memo in return: he cannot have been optimistic when, from the very first paragraph, De Laurentiis made it clear that he had found the screenplay lacking in drama from the very beginning. His particular complaint was that the string of events portrayed in the screenplay completely missed out on converting the dark and tragic atmosphere that had influenced him to make a picture of the book in the first place.77 A further letter a few days later asked him to think hard about the three-cornered relationship between John, Anna and Anna’s father, and although he apologised for upending Sherriff ’s carefully constructed treatment, he suggested that it might give him the chance to improve it.78
At this point, Sherriff was not quite sure how to proceed. The contract had three stages: treatment, first draft screenplay, and final screenplay, and Sherriff suggested that, if they could not hash out their ideas in face-to-face conferences, perhaps it would be better if the initial draft were written in Italy (where De Laurentiis was based), with an Italian writer he trusted. Sherriff could then come in at a later stage, when the framework was in place. De Laurentiis declined the offer, instead sending Ivo Perilli to London to act as his representative in discussions with Sherriff. The conferences seemed to go well and soon enough Sherriff was able to begin on the screenplay, finishing the first half by mid-June, and the whole thing by the end of August.79 He sent it off quite confidently, feeling that it embodied all the earlier criticisms, and fully reflected everything that had come up in discussion with Perilli (in fact, perhaps too fully, because, at 206 pages, it was really much too long).
He would have been unpleasantly surprised when, a month later, De Laurentiis wrote to him telling him just how much he disliked the screenplay. He saw no way in which it could possibly be livened up, the main problem being that he had spent too much time on the setting, the history, and the clash of civilisations, and not nearly enough time on the love story between Anna and Angelos. He seemed to think that Sherriff had put in the foreground the conditions of the time, relegating the love story to the background, although that was what most people would be interested in. His first draft was a very long way from what was wanted.80
There was no way back from this, and Sherriff tried politely to bow out. There was clearly no point in him preparing a final screenplay, when the draft was so unloved, so he suggested that they now view the contract as complete, and De Laurentiis pay him solely for the treatment and first draft screenplay. In a spirit of co-operation, however, he also offered to look over any subsequent drafts that De Laurentiis might commission from other writers, and even ‘bring the dialogue into shape for the English or American actors who will play the parts.’81 De Laurentiis was not inclined to be co-operative, however, telling Sherriff that he did not see any way in which the screenplay might be amended or used as the basis for another screenplay, and hinting that Sherriff had not lived up to the terms of the contract.82 But Sherriff was not having it. He had produced the treatment and screenplay, after extensive discussion, and if it turned out that it was not what was wanted, that was unfortunate, but not his fault. He had lived up to his part of the deal, and De Laurentiis should do likewise, and he was willing to take legal action if that was necessary.83 Whether he did or not is unclear, but he received a final settlement payment of £1,000 in March 1960, bringing the whole saga – which he had found very unpleasant – to a welcome end.84
Back in March, when he had just sent Dark Angel over to Italy, he had taken the chance to start work on the final act of the untitled play that he had sent to Barber and Batty for comment. By the end of the month, he despatched the last act and Archie Batty responded immediately:
I think the third act is STUPENDOUS! I may say I took a dose of digitalis before reading it [he had a heart condition] and very nearly had to take another when I came to the curtain. … I could hardly breathe when I came to the end, but then I am probably not a very good example, because I find difficulty in breathing in any case.85
Even as he began working on the Dark Angel screenplay again, he kept working on the play, and was happily able to send a fully revised version to Curtis Brown on 1 May. By now it finally had a title: The Strip of Steel (although by the time it was first performed, that had been changed to A Shred of Evidence). As soon as Curtis Brown got hold of the script they sent it to Paul Clift, who instantly expressed an interest in producing it, but although he had been fairly confident that he could put the production in place quite quickly, it took him longer to find the right people than he had expected, and so for a while things went quiet on that front.
That was just as well, because as well as grappling with De Laurentiis, Sherriff was engaged in another no-holds-barred bout with the BBC, over the fate of the televised version of Cards with Uncle Tom. After leaving the play in the corporation’s hands in April 1958, he had kept well away, until approached for his comments, later in the summer, by Donald Bull, the scriptwriter attached to the project. Sherriff was not happy with the changes Bull had made, and proposed various alternatives, resulting in a series of discussions lasting all the way through to November, when Sherriff, feeling that his views had been incorporated, left it to Bull to wrap things up. They renewed their exchange in March 1959, and when Sherriff saw the latest version of the script he was again unhappy, and decided to pull the plug entirely. He told Bull that he had been thinking of preparing a short series of television plays,86 and that he now intended to include Uncle Tom as one of them, but ‘I will tell my agents that, as the BBC were first to ask for the story, they shall have first refusal of my script.’87
He had probably been hard at work on the adaptation already (notwithstanding the demands of Dark Angel), because just two weeks later he was writing to his agent enclosing a copy, and asking him to let the BBC have first refusal.88 He quickly received word from Donald Wilson that he and Michael Barry very much liked it and wanted to buy it. Sherriff was happy to sell it to them as long as the contract specifically stated that the script was subject to his approval. This they were happy to do. The biggest difference relative to the radio version was at the end, where, to prevent Uncle Tom getting away with it, there is a denouement in which the governor of the prison tricks him into giving himself away, shortly after he has visited Edward in his cell. That would at least prevent the kind of letters they had received in protest on the previous occasion.
Uncle Tom was broadcast on 8 September, with an impressive cast, including Eric Porter as Bradley, and Ronald Leigh-Hunt as the detective superintendent. It earned some very good reviews: the Liverpool Post called Sherriff a ‘thriller writer of considerable ingenuity’,89 while The Listener called it ‘an expertly carpentered thriller’.90 The Yorkshire Post, although disappointed in the twist at the end, felt it ‘provided a first-class model for a production designed to hold an audience to the very end’,91 much the same sentiment as The Sheffield Star (‘[it] immediately captured enough interest to banish any thought of switching over.’)92 Like several of his plays before, however, the reception in the provinces was much more favourable than in London, where some of the papers were not impressed, calling it ‘unconvincing and old-fashioned’,93 and, even worse, a thriller that didn’t thrill.94
Sherriff ’s last few years had largely been disappointing. Not a single movie script – of which there had been several, some of high status, and many of good quality – had made it into production since The Dam Busters. It was not his fault, of course, that the British film industry was in some disarray, with revenues down and fierce competition from the two national TV networks. But even though Sherriff would have been aware of the economic woes of the industry, it must still have been galling to spend so much time and effort, just to see the results disappear high upon a shelf. At least, since the troubles with Ealing, the people with whom he had been dealing in the British film industry – especially those at Rank and Associated British – had been congenial colleagues, with whom he had been able to work productively and well. The same could not be said, of course, of De Laurentiis, and whether because of that experience, or just because he was becoming a little bit old fashioned and out of touch (many of his contacts moving on or retiring), it would be three years before he would script another movie.
His experiences with the BBC had also been mixed, with enjoyment on the radio side, which had now broadcast three premieres of his plays, balanced by some difficult experiences on the TV side, especially the whole unrewarding saga of The Hopkins Manuscript.
But the plays had done well. The festival in 1956 had been a great success, and the transfer of The Telescope to the stage had been better than he might have hoped. There were no film offers in the wings for any of his new plays, nor were there likely to be given the problems in the industry, but he could count himself satisfied that the past few years had reaffirmed his credentials as a dramatist. Hopefully, 1960 would do the same, because in the early months of the year there were to be three high-profile Sherriff productions.
The first was a TV revival of Journey’s End, on 6 March. Next would come the premiere of the musical version of The Telescope (now named Johnny the Priest), which would premiere at the Wimbledon Theatre on 25 March, before moving on to The Princes Theatre on 19 April. Finally, and probably the most important from Sherriff ’s point of view, would come the rollout of the new play, starting in Brighton on 28 March, and taking in Bournemouth, Oxford and Blackpool before its West End debut at the Duchess Theatre on 27 April. This was another of those periods when everything seemed to be coming up Sherriff.
On 6 March 1960, the BBC Sunday Night play was Journey’s End, featuring Richard Johnson as Stanhope, Joseph O’Conor as Osborne, Derrick Sherwin as Raleigh, and Peter Sallis as Hardy. The play went down well, as always, with George Bishop noting that the presentation ‘showed how little his 30-year-old play … has dated.’95 Johnny the Priest, however, was conspicuously not a success. There was little coverage of its try-out fortnight in Wimbledon, but the critics were out in force at the Princes Theatre, and tore into it like a pack of hungry wolves. Its biggest flaw, it would appear, was that it was not West Side Story, for which the blame was laid at composer Antony Hopkins’ feet, Sherriff ’s basic story being seen as strong enough to sustain a musical adaptation. Reynolds castigated Hopkins for not including a ‘single hummable tune’, but it is much too unfair: the soundtrack still exists, and is markedly better than the critics suggested, even if it is not quite in the same league as Bernstein’s classic. There was praise from one or two quarters – The Sunday Times in particular, which called the play ‘remarkable’96 and the ending ‘very fine’, while also commending Jeremy Brett as the clergyman and Stephanie Voss as his wife. But the consensus of the critics was so damning that the show shut down on 30 April, after a run of just eleven days, costing its backers some £25,000.97
Three days after Johnny opened in Wimbledon, Sherriff ’s new play arrived in Brighton for its opening night. It is the story of Richard Medway, a successful middle-aged businessman who fears that, driving home drunk from a rugby club dinner, he may have knocked a man off his bicycle and killed him.
The play is of the mystery-thriller type,98 as Sherriff would call it. Medway is shown in the first act as happy and successful, with a younger son (whom we never see) at prep school, and a daughter who is keen to go to Oxford to study to be an archaeologist. A prospective promotion permits him to pay for her course, and sign his son up for Winchester. All is looking good, until he hears a news report that a man had been killed by a car early that morning – coincidentally, on a stretch of road that he may have used, and at a time when he may have been using it.
Medway knows he drove home drunk, but remembers little of the drive home. As circumstantial evidence mounts, appearing to implicate him, he takes action to dispose of what might be incriminating evidence, and to seek the assurance of the two people he had driven home that they will say nothing of his inebriation, which he fears would be taken as an indicator of guilt by the police, since he already had two drink-driving convictions on his record. One of the passengers, Captain Foster, was a good friend, and assures him he will say nothing incriminating; but he barely knows the other man, Bennett, and when it appears possible that Medway might have been involved in the crash, Bennett and his domineering wife seek to blackmail him to ensure their silence. On the advice of a solicitor friend he refuses to pay, so they take their suspicions to the police. In doing so, however, they make the mistake of taking with them a strip of steel that had fallen from Medway’s car when he collided with a lamp post outside their house – the very strip that Medway had noticed was missing, and which he feared he might have left at the scene of the collision with the bicycle, if he had been involved – thus effectively allaying his fears. When the police inspector passes the strip of steel to him he also confirms that the crash had involved another car, and he is exonerated. He decides to take his wife and daughter to the local restaurant to celebrate, but in opting to take his car, he suggests he might not yet fully have absorbed the lesson about drink-driving.
The tour reviews were generally positive but those in the West End were more mixed, with a clear division emerging between those who appreciated the olderfashioned dramas, and those in the more modern camp. J.C. Trewin was clearly one of the former, comparing the play with two other newcomers (Ionesco’s Rhinoceros (with Laurence Olivier) and Pinter’s The Caretaker) and finding firmly in favour of Shred (‘exciting and touching’).99 Irving Wardle in The Observer100 acknowledged that the characters were cardboard, and had his complaints about the daughter especially, but ‘once under way the plot exerts a fair grip.’ The Star101 found Sherriff ’s second West End first night in eight days ‘exciting’, while Paul Rogers is ‘brilliant, as the man tormented by fear. … Round the shred of evidence has been woven an exciting play.’ To the News Chronicle it was ‘neat, quiet and absorbing’102; The Manchester Guardian103 found it ‘entertainment of quite good value, wellconstructed, well-timed, holding its punches nicely’; and Bill Darlington, while unhappy with ‘a certain dryness in the working out of the earlier parts of the play’, found that ‘the all-important last act comes fully to life.’104
Against these generally favourable reviews can be set a few stinkers, mainly reflecting a change in the view of what made good drama. Drama magazine felt it old-fashioned:
Very likely, back in 1930, this harmless little play might have been thought an excellent discussion of an urgent moral problem. In 1960, however, its cosy evasiveness, the absolute certainty of a happy ending, its twists of plot which take the place of exploration of character, leave us cold.105
Unlike Trewin, The Sunday Times felt that the comparison with more modern plays did Sherriff few favours: ‘After the fantasies of Ionesco and Pinter, R.C. Sherriff ’s doggedly realistic little play impresses, if at all, only by its total lack of connection with reality.’106 The Daily Mail took much the same view, although was a bit more entertaining in getting there:
Ideas? Characters? Not for one moment. … Cardboard! … There is so much interminable waffle about the roads to and from Guildford, Effingham, Bookham, Ripley and Godalming that anyone still not discouraged from seeing this play is well advised to bring a set of road maps. … PS While this dodo was being offered for inspection, another new play, Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker, was being presented for the first time at the Arts Theatre.107
The play stayed at the Duchess for four weeks, before transferring to the Fortune Theatre, where the Daily Express reported that ‘business was good. Except possibly in the bar. … During the play’s one-month run at the Duchess it was noted that the bar business during the intervals declined’108 (all that drink-drive discussion, they surmised). Maybe it was the shortage of bar takings, but the play only lasted two more weeks before it slipped from the West End altogether. But that was far from the end of it. Just as had happened with some of Sherriff ’s previous plays (especially The White Carnation), it went on to great success throughout the rest of the country. From July 1960 to October 1961 (with a short gap over Christmas and New Year), the play was performed in sixty separate venues, usually for a week at a time, but sometimes for longer, raking in over £2,000 in royalties for Sherriff – including £190 royalties from several weeks worth of performances in Butlin’s camps. It might not have been the play of tomorrow (or even, for some critics, of today), but it was certainly the type of play that was popular with the public and would remain popular with the reps and amateurs for some time to come.
While Shred of Evidence was touring the country, Sherriff was busy with other work – so busy, in fact, that he even turned down a request from the BBC for a specially commissioned radio piece: ‘I would like to write another original play for sound broadcast … but I am rather tied up at the moment, finishing off a novel, and I’ve got to get on with a play for the theatre which I am behind with.’109 The novel would eventually become The Wells of St Mary’s, and would be published in 1962. The play was most probably The Siege of Ogburn Manor, which he started thinking about before the year was out, but which would be in development for some time, and would never make it to stage or screen.
As his new work was proceeding, he was also tied up with prospective productions of his previous plays, and two in particular: a newly revised Badger’s Green at the Wimbledon Theatre and The Long Sunset at The Mermaid. The latter would involve less of his time, since Miles would make most of the changes himself, but the production of Badger’s Green gave him the chance to take another go at the play, which was something he had been wanting to do for some time.
Peter Haddon was the man in charge of Wimbledon Theatre, and Sherriff had been talking to him since April the previous year, telling him how keen he was to make a new edition of the play. Within a couple of months he had revised most of the play, summarising the changes for Haddon. The doctor was now a man torn by doubt, whereas before he had the same certitude as the major (who was unchanged); the boy and the girl were now given their own points of view, to prevent them being quite so colourless as before; Twigg was now ‘not such a complete simpleton’; and – probably most interestingly – the girl was now Butler’s daughter instead of his secretary, and had a much more active part to play (in fact, in large part, the development becomes her idea). The interesting aspect to the changes is that, in some respects, it moves the play closer to the dynamics of Mr Birdie’s Finger, particularly in what he does with Joan.
By December, Sherriff was again writing to Haddon to let him know his thoughts about the third act. In Mr Birdie the act was played in the doctor’s study; in Badger’s Green it was moved to a marquee; but now he envisaged splitting the stage between the doctor’s study and part of the village green, so that the scoreboard, and scorer’s table and some spectators could now be seen. This seemed an ingenious way of bringing the action onstage to some extent, while minimising the work (and cost) involved in a major scene change.
The first performance of the newly ‘washed and brushed-up’110 Badger’s Green was given on 5 June 1961, and Sherriff was sufficiently enthusiastic about his revision of the play to offer Peter Haddon a share of any royalties (in the end, an equal share) that accrued from the production being picked up by other repertory companies (which it was). He was also enthusiastic about the production, sending a telegram to Haddon (who was then at Weston Super Mare) that ‘Your company at Wimbledon did a beautiful job last night.’111 In subsequent correspondence he lamented that the play, which had gone down very well with the audience, would be unlikely to get an outing in the West End, so ‘I put my faith in the provinces.’112 He also put his faith in the amateurs, and encouraged Samuel French (partly through foregoing some of his royalties) to scrap their copies of the existing version, and replace them with the brand new version (which, because it now involved no change of scenery, he was confident would be much more popular).
Over at The Mermaid, Bernard Miles was making a number of small changes to The Long Sunset, but his primary concern, as he put it to Sherriff, was to ‘detrivialise a couple of hundred expressions in the play, retaining the speeches completely except for paring away these manifestations of the trivial.’113 But there was also one other interesting, and rather significant, change that he wished to make: at the end, when Sherriff has Julian and Serena take their picnic to the woods, to await their inevitable deaths, Miles preferred instead to suggest they might try to make for Winchester so ‘we can … be left at the end with grave doubts, but some hopes.’114 Sherriff ’s reaction was very positive, feeling that it was all of a part with Julian’s character to remain strong to the end. He even compared the ‘hope with grave doubts’ idea to the closing scene of Journey’s End:
The men in the dugout strapped on their equipment and went out into the darkness to meet an overwhelming attack. I don’t know what happened to them and never shall, and this is rather how I feel about Julian and Serena.115
As the production approached, Sherriff made additional changes to the play, mostly of a minor nature, but it is indicative of his willingness to absorb criticism and suggestion, and to revise constantly, that he was willing to put in the time, unpaid of course, to make the changes. Unfortunately, no revised version of the play exists, because it was never a strong enough favourite with the amateurs to make a new version worthwhile. The reviews of the performance were rather more mixed than they had been at Birmingham (the acting was generally not well regarded), and there were still criticisms of some of the dialogue, but on the other hand, some of the speeches (especially Julian’s in praise of Rome) were singled out, deservedly, for special praise, and he would have been content with Bernard Levin’s encapsulation: ‘The Long Sunset is a remarkable piece of work.’116
Sherriff was completing The Wells of St Mary’s around the time that he was revising Badger’s Green, with which it has a few similarities, although it also has echoes of Miss Mabel in its examination of people’s willingness to compromise their principles in the service of an apparently greater good.
The story is told, in a first person narrative, in a manner reminiscent of Edgar Hopkins, although the character of the hero, in this case Peter Joyce, is much more congenial. Peter’s family have long been important in the area, but their landholdings have gradually been trimmed due to economic hardship, but they still retain an old well, which, even in Roman times, had a reputation for healing waters. Peter invites an old friend to stay with him (Colin, now Lord Colindale), a formerly vigorous man, a newspaper magnate who had been a national figure during the war (the parallels with Beaverbrook are obvious), but who was now crippled with rheumatism. While staying with Peter, Colin drinks the water from the well and is miraculously cured.
In due course, his cure becomes known, and there is a surge of interest in the well and the town, which the local mayor (and pub owner) is keen to harness. He organises the town to get together to form a public company, with Peter as chairman, and everyone in the town invests, with the money being used to build up all the facilities, and construct a casino. While everything seems to be progressing, the old man whom Peter had employed to look after the well tells the board that the water had actually dried up long ago, but that he had arranged for a local plumber to pipe water in from the neighbouring duck pond. He tells them that, for a price, he is willing to remain silent.
Shockingly, the old man is murdered, probably by someone on the board, the members of which now face the dilemma of whether to report what they know of the motive for the murder, and whether to declare that the water is from a duck pond, thus potentially ruining everyone in the town who has contributed to the company’s share capital. Each of the members gradually finds a way to come to terms with their connivance in the deception, and the murderer is never officially discovered, although the mayor privately confesses to Peter. The casino is launched and the well is a huge success but Peter ends his narration waiting for some disease to arise from the duck pond water, thus bringing the whole edifice crashing down around him.
Sherriff once again hits a bullseye with his examination of a group of smalltown citizens, examining each member of the board individually to highlight foibles and weaknesses. The plot is straightforward, but much of the last third of the book is taken up less by the hunt for the murderer than by an examination of the motivations of the members of the board, and their interactions with each other. It has its moments of humour, but it is also an examination of conscience, individual and collective, albeit with a light touch.
The reviews were not hugely complimentary. The best The Sunday Telegraph117 could say was that it had a good, strong plot, but it cautioned that ‘the characters are mere puppets’. The Sunday Times described its ‘plain-spoken account of the nasty vapours that rise in a small town when a press baron puts it on the map. He entertains, but too casually.’118 The Birmingham Mail,119 while noting that ‘Sherriff, of course, cannot handle any theme dully, and this story has its moments of high tension’, found itself wondering if the theme was really the right one for ‘the author of those fine plays Journey’s End, The Long Sunset and Badger’s Green?’ The Northern Echo120 countered by noting that ‘Mr Sherriff, who drew so attractively the Englishmen of Badger’s Green, takes his opportunity here and gives us a very entertaining story.’ Perhaps the closest to the mark was John O’London’s Weekly,121 which recognised a satirical mind at work:
The style of the narrative is restrained, unfussy and urbane. Mr Sherriff is an expert in understatement by implication. (The whole thing could just happen. Well, couldn’t it?) In its own quiet, deceptively casual way, The Wells of St Mary’s is sharp satire, packing a potent punch indeed.
When the book was published, Sherriff was sixty-seven, and was still writing, if not quite as much as before. But more and more of the projects on which he was engaged seem to have flown from his pen, but never on to the printed page. The School was one, on which he corresponded with Bernard Miles from time to time. In fact, Miles expressed a renewed interest in it in 1971,122 and Sherriff immediately promised to send him a copy of the narrative on which he had been working: but it remains in his files, intriguing, but unpublished.
Then there was the Ogburn Story – which started life in 1960 as a potential stage play, before becoming a possible TV play – a tale of a landowner driven to declare his estate an independent nation by the constant demands from government. This was another on which he spent a lot of time, and where the BBC all but promised a production, only to pull the plug after some considerable delay. It exists in his files as both a TV play and as an unpublished novel, some nineteen chapters long.
There were film scripts, too. In December 1961, he had begun discussions with Leonard Key, of the American company Entertainment Industries Ltd, about the possibility of him writing a treatment, and then a screenplay, of Peter Pan, with the intention that it would star Audrey Hepburn. But several months later, after he had completed a seventy-page treatment, the project foundered on the withdrawal of the rights by the lawyers of the children’s hospital that held them. Sherriff was very frustrated, partly because he longed to take on the subject, but also because he had turned down an alternative screenplay offer when he thought he would be tied up with Peter Pan.
There was one other film script, commissioned by his old friend Bill Whittaker at Associated British. The movie was called Eddie’s Acre, and was intended as a vehicle for comedian Charlie Drake. Discussions seem to have begun early in 1963, and the drafting process carried on through that year and into the next, with the contract structured in the way he preferred: treatment followed by draft screenplay and final version. The story has Charlie Drake as Eddy, the ordinary man, but extraordinary grower of roses, who is the only person in the village who refuses to sell up when a developer comes calling. Like so many others, it never made it into production.
By the time he had finished Eddie’s Acre in 1964, his screenwriting income had dwindled to almost nothing (which may be one of the reasons he opted to sell his coin collection). But he continued to enjoy significant royalties from his past works, in the form of payments from amateurs and rep companies, and also from TV companies buying the rights to produce his plays on the small screen. As time wore on he appears to have started thinking about writing the autobiography that he had dismissed on so many previous occasions. Correspondence in 1964 and 1965 with Geoffrey Dearmer and Nobby Clark pointed to the fact that he was beginning to try to marshal his thoughts. He was probably also looking back because, by 1964, his 94-year-old mother was beginning to show signs of infirmity, and had to be provided with nursing care at home. It seems safe to assume that his mother’s illness both distracted him from his writing, but also encouraged him to think back on the time they had spent together. She died on 31 May 1965, and it may be as well to think that she did so in the manner described in No Leading Lady:
For my mother, it was always the garden that counted most, and she grew the more devoted to it as the years went by. One summer evening when she was very old she came for her last walk with me. ‘I’m feeling rather tired,’ she said. ‘I think we will have a rest. We sat by the summerhouse talking of some new planting we would do. I asked her something and she didn’t answer. Her eyes were closed, and I thought at first she was dozing. It had happened very peacefully. Had such things been ours to choose, it was the end she would have asked for, sitting out there in the garden in the sunset.’123
His mother’s death, while a blow, would not have been surprising, especially given her infirmity. But the following year he would likely have been hit hard by the death of his sister Beryl, who died on 18 October, aged seventy-three. We know that they stayed in touch at least throughout the 1950s, when Beryl would sweep into the drive at Rosebriars to visit her mother,124 and, from Bob’s inscription to Tudor, Beryl’s husband, in a copy of No Leading Lady, we can deduce that the relationship had most likely been maintained.
When his autobiography was published in July 1968, it was very well received, and when he was interviewed on the BBC he was asked, ‘Have you still got ideas rattling around in your mind for other plays?’ He replied:
Oh yes – certainly. I think one goes on all the time. I’m writing a book now. I don’t want to tell you what it’s like, or you’ll say it sounds terrible. It’s been my habit all my life. You see, when I was in an insurance office there was no time to write until the evening and it used to become such a looked-forward to thing after your supper to go upstairs and shut the door, turn on the light and begin this little journey into the fantasy. And I’ve never given that up – and to this day I always do that. I don’t think I’ve ever written a word in the daylight.125
The book he said he was writing could have been any of the unpublished stories that can still be found in his files, or it may have been an early draft of the final book he ever published, which, rather fittingly, was a children’s story about a medieval siege. It was published in 1973.
The story is set in the time of King John, when Earl Valmont accuses Lord Swayne of treachery so he can seize his lands on the coast, and obtain the harbour his family has coveted for so long. The book is the tale of how the Earl and his mercenaries mount their attacks, and the ingenious ways in which Swayne defends his home, including, among other things, using boiling oil to repel an attack, bolsters to protect his tower from missiles, and foraging expeditions in the quiet of night to defray impending starvation. The Earl is a nasty piece of work: when his teenage son Godfrey is captured by Swayne’s men, he would be happy to see him killed. Instead, Godfrey is befriended by Swayne’s teenage son Roger, and their conversations tell us much about the Earl, and also about Lord Swayne, who is honest and decent, and loved by his men. Swayne’s ingenuity keeps the Earl’s men at bay for a while, but he is gradually pushed back into his last remaining refuge, with the prospect of imminent starvation, when suddenly the good news arrives that the Earl has died, and the siege with him.
The book exhibits considerable knowledge on Sherriff ’s part of the nature of siege warfare, and is a lively page-turner. There is not much plot: an initial set-up, and then the siege itself. The interest lies in the different ways in which the attackers mount their assaults on the castle, and the ways in which Swayne and his forces repel them. The side plot of the relationship between the two boys is uninvolving, because neither boy is convincing as a character. The same is true of the Earl and Swayne himself – there is so much to describe in the siege that Sherriff is forced to draw with a very broad brush, to the detriment of the story. There are only really three other characters of significance: a friar on Swayne’s side, and two mercenaries on the Earl’s, but they are little more than outlines. Nevertheless, the book has pace and sweeps the reader along with the desire to discover just how Swayne will escape from each of the perils that he faces.
Gollancz managed to place a small piece on the book in The Sunday Times, which noted that Sherriff had ‘been turning his hand to the theme of war again’. Noting (incorrectly) that it was ‘not only his first children’s book, but his first work of fiction since the 1930s’, it then set out his reasons for writing the book:
I wanted to write it for myself; it’s the sort of book I like. I was fascinated by the idea of the day-to-day life of people under sieges and as far as I know, it’s never been treated in the form of a book. … It’s a good adventure story with real people in it. Just the type of book I like to do.127
The reviewers expressed their approval of the book. The Sunday Times itself was the most positive (so much so, in fact, that the extract went on the paperback version of the book published a couple of years later by William Collins): ‘The techniques and tragedies of mediaeval siege can seldom have been described in such a clearcut, practical way; this exciting one-thing-after-another tale should be spread widely among history-lovers.’128 The Tablet agreed: ‘Good on the boiling oil and the battering ram, characterisation a little wooden, exciting plot.’129
But there were criticisms too, notably of the Godfrey/Roger relationship: ‘There is lots of movement, fighting and intrigue … but the language is trite and ungainly … there is no sense of time and place, and therefore no flavour … the friendship between … Roger, and Gregory … carries no conviction,’130 wrote the Times Educational Supplement, and the Times Literary Supplement was similarly sceptical: ‘Sherriff tells a carefully worked-out story of mediaeval siege warfare with much convincing technical detail. … But his boys are the schoolboy contemporaries of the young officers of Journey’s End, with public school inability to show emotion.’131
Writing for children suited Sherriff ’s simple style. His strengths had always lain in description and in dialogue, and his world view was very straightforward. From his very first writings – Jimmy Lawton and his memoir, through to his autobiography, he excelled when reporting and recording, but floundered in deeper philosophical waters. He could have been a very successful latter-day G.A. Henty, writing historical stories involving brave young lads. He had, of course, raised with Dwye Evans the possibility of writing more children’s stories, and it is to be regretted that he did not receive more encouragement.
After his mother died Sherriff was alone in Rosebriars, and seems to have become something of a ‘recluse’, according to his doctor.132 Even when he opened his garden to the public, he would remain upstairs in the house until the guests had gone. ‘Latterly, almost the only strangers he would accept were the youngsters who came and helped him with his garden, and they would return again and again.’
But although he was alone, by his own account he was never lonely. When John Ellison asked him if being a writer was a lonely life, he replied:
Oh no – it’s crowded with people that you’re working with – I mean the characters are all with you, and they’re all alive – and most of them are much more interesting than the people would be if I asked them in to supper.133
Bob died on 13 November 1975, and was cremated at Randalls Crematorium in Oxshott on 20 November. His ashes were interred in a special chamber set in the wall of St Wilfrid Church in his beloved Selsey, next to those of his mother, which seems entirely fitting.