Turn thy thoughts now to the consideration of thy life, thy life as a child, as a youth, thy manhood, thy old age, for in these also every change was a death. Is this anything to fear?
Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations, Book IX.
Since 1980, the parent support organisation for rowing at Kingston Grammar School has been named the Sherriff Club, because he was a generous benefactor to the school while he lived, and still is, because half of all his royalties go to the school (the other half to the The Scouts).
My sons attended the school, and both were keen rowers, so in 2008 I became Chair of the Sherriff Club, still only dimly aware of the achievements of the man for whom the club had been named. I knew, of course, about Journey’s End – who could not? It had been a staple of school halls and local theatres for many years, and even ventured into the West End from time to time. But, having grown up at the time when the First World War was crudely summarised as ‘Lions Led by Donkeys’, or by the scathing satire of Joan Littlewood’s Oh, What a Lovely War (a film that had a tremendous impact on my 10-year-old self when I saw it in Glasgow on its release), Journey’s End seemed utterly out of touch – featuring characters one could never believe had existed, speaking words that surely no one could ever have uttered. But it was I who was out of touch, for it was the play’s claim to authenticity that had made it such a phenomenal success when it was first performed: it was based, after all, on the author’s own experiences as a soldier on the Western Front, and was instantly hailed as a classic and truthful account.
Feeling duty bound to find out more about Sherriff, I quickly discovered that he was not a one-play wonder: he had written many plays in his life, although none displayed the resilience of Journey’s End: in fact, very few have been revived in the commercial theatre since 1960. Much the same was true for his books: he had written several novels, but none were (at that time) in print. But his films were a completely different matter. Even a cursory investigation turned up films that had been among my favourites as a boy: Goodbye, Mr Chips; The Four Feathers; Quartet; The Invisible Man; and, of course – on every schoolboy’s list of great movies, then and now – The Dam Busters. I was beginning to warm to Mr Sherriff.
Like all school parent organisations, the primary goal of the Sherriff Club is to raise money to support the rowers’ endeavours. One way to do so was to organise a theatrical night in which the rowers would perform, thus ensuring the attendance of their parents in the paying audience. The more rowers, the more parents, we reasoned, so rather than have one play featuring a handful of students, we would have extracts from many plays, featuring many students. And where better to find source material than in Sherriff ’s own works. So, in November 2008, the first Kingston Grammar School Sherriff Night was born, featuring extracts from his plays: Journey’s End (of course), The White Carnation, St Helena, and The Long Sunset; and also from his films: Goodbye, Mr Chips; The Four Feathers; and Lady Hamilton.
The evening was a huge success, so a repeat the following year seemed only sensible: in fact, the Sherriff Nights would continue for seven years, during which time the rowers of Kingston Grammar School performed extracts from almost every published Sherriff play. Some of his unpublished writing was performed as well: his first ever play, A Hitch in the Proceedings (ironically written for a fundraising venture not unlike our own) was seen on stage for the first time in ninety years; and his Sequel to Journey’s End was performed for the first time ever. Nor were his movies forgotten: extracts from the most popular were performed, including, on one notable occasion, an all-girl version of The Dam Busters. One wonders what Sherriff would have made of that, and also of the fact that his boys’ grammar school had become co-educational.
As the Sherriff Nights proceeded, the need to discover more about Sherriff himself became more pressing. Unfortunately, no biography of Sherriff had ever been written. This seemed at the very least surprising, because, in his day, Sherriff had been a famous and well-regarded literary figure. He had enjoyed huge worldwide success with Journey’s End in 1929–30 (the closest analogy today would be the Harry Potter series), and although he was never ranked among the literary titans, he wrote about ordinary people and their everyday lives with great empathy and compassion. His dramas may have lacked the breadth and psychological depth of some, but they were seen as perceptive and truthful (and never over-written); his three 1930s novels won sweeping praise for their honest examination of the lives of the English middle class; and his name on a film script was seen as an absolute guarantee of quality.
One account of his life did exist, however – no longer in print, but still obtainable: his autobiography, No Leading Lady.1 It is a wonderfully written book, an admirable showcase for Sherriff ’s storytelling abilities. But it is, at best, a partial account, omitting almost all of his wartime experiences (which is curious, to say the least, because his army years are those of most interest, given the avowedly autobiographical nature of Journey’s End), and skirting over most of the post-1945 years. But there is an even bigger problem with No Leading Lady, which is its unreliability.
When Sherriff bequeathed his royalties, in part, to Kingston Grammar School, he also bequeathed his papers, over a hundred boxes of letters, scripts, diaries and ephemera, reaching back to the second half of the nineteenth century. In their wisdom, the school governors deposited the papers at the Surrey History Centre, conscious that their archivists were in a much better position to look after Sherriff ’s vast collection of writings. With the aid of a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the papers were completely re-examined and catalogued, revealing much about Sherriff that was unknown, or had been forgotten, and laying bare the inconsistencies in Sherriff ’s memoir. For although there is a thread of truth that runs through the narrative of his memoir, in many of its details it is misleading, or just plain wrong. Quite why he should have had such disregard for the truth is not clear, but throughout his life Sherriff was a very private individual (becoming more so as time went on), and it may have suited him to construct a particular persona, to keep people at arm’s length from the real Sherriff. He was also a natural storyteller, so must have been sorely tempted to embellish more mundane accounts, if only to please his audience. Even in the early years of his fame he left a trail of false impressions, and the embellishments grew with the writing of his autobiography.
His collected papers give a much more complete picture of the real Sherriff, especially when supplemented by the autobiographical details that suffuse his writing. A fictional account of a young soldier, Jimmy Lawton, bears such a resemblance to Sherriff that we can better understand his thoughts and moods through his fictional alter ego. The family in his first novel, The Fortnight in September, mimics Sherriff ’s own family in so many ways that we learn more about his early years from its pages than we do from No Leading Lady. Most famously, Journey’s End reveals the boredom and anxieties that afflicted the young Sherriff in the trenches, as we can see from both his letters home and his subsequently written ‘Diary’ of some of those terrifying months.
The first Sherriff Night came shortly after the hugely successful David Grindley revival of Journey’s End in the West End and Broadway, and over the past few years The White Carnation has been revived as well, while Persephone Press have successfully reprinted three of his books, so the time seems to be ripe for a reappraisal of his life and career. There have been books published recently that skilfully examine aspects of Sherriff ’s life – focusing on his East Surrey battalion2 during the war, for example, or on his ‘classic war play’3 – but no comprehensive account yet exists. That is what the following pages are intended to provide.
Roland Wales
August 2016