It is hard to locate the real R.C. Sherriff, for throughout his life he took great pains to hide his true nature. The story he told in No Leading Lady was much the same as the story he had told throughout his entire life: a young writer who chanced upon a play that made him a household name, and who ever after was expected to live up to that success, but was often thought to have failed. He ends his autobiography with this exchange:
The other day I went to give the prizes away at a nearby school. Afterwards there was a little reception, with coffee and cakes. An old lady who brought me a cup of coffee said: ‘I did enjoy Journey’s End, Mr Sherriff. Why don’t you write something else?’
If that old lady existed, and it is highly doubtful that she did, she must have led a very sheltered life. From Journey’s End in 1929 to The Dam Busters in 1955, no one could fail to hear when Sherriff had written something new: it was not so much that his writing was always compared with Journey’s End (although that did happen), it was simply that the fame from Journey’s End never left, burnished as it was by further successes: well-regarded plays; highly praised novels that shone a revealing light on the lives and attitudes of his social class in the 1920s and 30s; and a clutch of classic movies. Not bad for someone who felt that his headmaster had ‘written me off as a flop’.1
Of course, he had many setbacks as well, as the blurb for No Leading Lady acknowledged:
His autobiography makes an engrossing tale all the more human because it is not a story of unalloyed triumph … his career as playwright, novelist and screenwriter, like that of most writers, has been a series of ups and downs, of agonising waits for first night notices, and for box-office queues which might, or might not, materialise.
But in the end, his persistence pulled him through. This is not something he dwelt upon in his own account of his life, because it rather contradicts the picture he portrays of the lucky writer stumbling across success in a series of happy accidents. But the real Sherriff was someone who decided when he left the Army (or, possibly, before) that he was going to become a writer; who then worked for several years to perfect his craft; who thereafter worked to master different mediums; and who, whenever he failed at something he had written, would either attempt to improve it, or discard it, move on and try again.
The most obvious example of his persistence is in the saga of the West End production of Journey’s End. From the play’s dismissal by the first two people who read it, through its travails with the Incorporated Stage Society Committee, his willingness to take a chance and send it to George Bernard Shaw, his pursuit of Basil Dean the morning after its success at the Apollo, and his willingness to grasp at the straw provided by Maurice Browne: these were the actions of a man who was willing to do whatever it took to have his work performed. Similarly, at the other end of his career, when he was lucky enough to have the resources to write what pleased him, rather than what he thought audiences might want, he was willing to make the compromises necessary (foregoing royalties, for example, or cutting deeply into his text) to have his work shown on stage, or screen (whether television or cinema). When his work could not find a home in the West End theatre because it was dismissed as old-fashioned, he took it around the provinces, or on to television, or into books. He never stopped writing, and never stopped trying to find ways of bringing that writing to the public’s attention.
The source of his resilience is not easy to find, because he was not confident as a child, or a young adult. His letters home, from army training camp, and then from France, are riddled with his insecurities – especially intellectual, but also social, and even sporting (despite his obvious prowess in that regard). Those same insecurities – the fear of not being good enough, of letting people down – may also have been the main source of his nervousness in the trenches: ‘Like everyone else I can admit that there were times when I was afraid – but more afraid of being afraid than of the actual danger.’2 But somewhere over the next few years – perhaps in the context of his growing success with his theatre groups (at first The Adventurers, and then Cymba) – he seems to have acquired an inner confidence that would allow him to continue his work whatever the reaction. As he put it himself, in a newspaper article in 1930:
The modest, sensitive child has the hardest battle to fight: the fear of others’ laughter eats into his simplicity and, unless as time goes by, he develops sufficient courage and sense of humour to face the issue – to say: ‘This is the real me and be hanged to you!’ – he will lose his simplicity beyond recovery in later years. It is possible to go on presenting an artificial character to the world until we begin to believe it is actually our own.3
The other source of his confidence may have been his mother, who obviously had great belief in her son’s abilities: she expected much from him, felt that he could make a great success as a writer, and went out of her way to support him at every step in his career. Probably the only first night she ever missed was on Broadway, and she never made that mistake again. Nor did she make the mistake of allowing him to be distracted, accompanying him on every extended trip he ever made. Their exceptionally close relationship is probably also the best explanation for why he remained free from romantic encounters throughout his life: he was perfectly able to forge good working relationships with women, but that was as close as his mother ever allowed.
One thing that hardly changed was his writing style. It is possible to go back to his earliest work of fiction, the Jimmy Lawton Story, and find passages that would fit into his final adult novel, The Wells of St Mary’s. He was admired for never ‘overwriting’, but at the same time it was that simplicity that gave some critics the chance to dismiss his work as cold, or lacking in drama. Stanhope’s outbursts in Journey’s End are unusual in his own work (rather than his adaptations), which is generally free from melodrama and histrionics. It is true that he tended not to favour deeper philosophical or political issues, but his work serves as a window into the lives and attitudes of the people that he knew best – the middle-class people of his time, the ‘little people’, as Vernon Bartlett put it, with whom he was able to empathise better than anyone. Journey’s End was praised for its authenticity at the time, but all of his works – right up to The Dam Busters and beyond – share that same characteristic.
Charles Morgan, The Times critic who felt that Sherriff ’s great play would exhibit no ‘endurance’, would be surprised, no doubt, to see how it has become the most common drama-based interpretation of the First World War: it has been regularly revived in the commercial theatre (most recently in David Grindley’s production, which began in the West End in 2004, before touring widely); it immediately became a staple of schools and village halls, making the low-roofed Western Front dugout symbolic of the First World War experience; and it now influences new generations of British schoolchildren through its inclusion in the GCSE syllabus (and, though to a much lesser extent, through its parodic version in Blackadder Goes Forth).
And yet, Sherriff ’s name remains relatively unknown today, a victim, to some extent, of the public’s tendency to be relatively unacquainted with the names of the screenwriters of their favourite movies. While writing this book I have often been asked about whom I am writing, and the stares remain blank until I mention the movies: The Dam Busters usually produces the first nod of recognition, but other favourites from long ago – Goodbye, Mr Chips, The Four Feathers, Odd Man Out, Quartet – transform the nod into a smile. Through his generosity he is remembered at Kingston Grammar School, and in his home Borough of Elmbridge, where the R.C. Sherriff Trust, funded by another of his bequests, has long supported the arts and continues to do so. If this biography succeeds in widening the recognition of his name and his achievements, it will have done its job.