Practise thyself even in the things which thou despairest of accomplishing. For even the left hand, which is ineffectual for all other things for want of practice, holds the bridle more vigorously than the right hand; for it has been practised in this.
Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations, Book XII.
On 26 February 1919, Temporary Captain R.C. Sherriff was gazetted out of the service. His job at the Sun Fire office had been kept for him, but he was unhappy at the thought of going back to work in the City. The Jimmy Lawton Story was clear enough on his dislike of that life, and reading between the lines in letters from his ex-comrades1 it is plain that the war had not made the prospect seem any brighter. Nevertheless, with nearly 3 million men demobilising during the course of 1919, he probably assumed that any job was better than none – even if it was one that he felt he had outgrown. His friend Staddon reminded him how difficult it was to get any decent or well-paid job,2 and so he returned to the office in Oxford Street.
At first he seems to have knuckled down to what was expected of him, but he was sufficiently unfulfilled to consider the Army once more, and during the summer he began to complete the application for a permanent commission. It is surprising, given how badly he had suffered from his nerves in the trenches, that he would even contemplate re-joining the Army. But his good friend Manning-Press had obtained a permanent commission and been sent off to India; there was much about the soldierly life that he enjoyed, and perhaps the two years he had spent away from the Western Front had diminished the memory of how unhappy he had been. Whatever the reasons for his application, and however he justified it to himself, it disappeared into the Army bureaucracy for two and a half years, before it came back marked ‘Not Selected’.3
But by then he had moved on. In fact, he was moving on even as he submitted his application – with his engagement with Kingston Grammar School, with his rowing, and with his writing.
He had almost certainly been writing while in the Army. Two short stories in particular – A Quiet Night and The Cellars of Cité Calonne – bear the hallmarks of recent recollection, although it is more likely they were written in Dover than in France.4 By May 1919, he had clearly decided to publish some account of his wartime experiences, for he wrote to John Lane, publishers of the On Active Service series5 to see whether they would consider publishing his tale.6 The question is: what did Sherriff have it in mind to send?
There are two possibilities: the Jimmy Lawton Story, or his Memories of Active Service. We can be reasonably sure that Jimmy Lawton was begun in the summer of 1917, when Sherriff was lying wounded in Netley Hospital, because an initial fragment (‘Chapter III’) can be found in a letter to his father dated 18 August.7 The text was short, not much more than a page, and does not feature in later drafts of the Jimmy Lawton Story, but the style is similar. The Jimmy Lawton fragments are interesting as some of the earliest versions of Sherriff ’s work, the extended nature of the tale demonstrating how he began to approach structuring a longer story. Many of the elements show quite clearly his knack of picking out the little foibles in everyday behaviour. There is an extended sequence about Jimmy’s train journeys into London that is funny, especially in the dialogue of some of the passengers. His description of training in the Rifles is very detailed, and betrays the cynicism of the ‘old lag’ that he must have considered himself by the time he wrote it. And while there is not, in general, much tension in the story, there are moments – incidents – where a real dramatic flair becomes visible, most notably as Jimmy is preparing to leave for France.
After receiving the encouraging note from John Lane, he probably laid Jimmy Lawton aside and began work on Memories of Active Service: indeed, the title itself rather gives the game away. According to a later interview:
The turning point … was scarlet fever, after the war. For some weeks I lay in bed with nothing to do. In a cupboard nearby were my old war letters, and I began to sort them into chronological order. That was the beginning of a diary I wrote – Memories of Active Service. There were to be several volumes, but only Volume 1 and part of the second got finished.Volume II ended rather limp and got bound in a stamp album. Journey’s End was that diary crystallised.’8
Memories covered his time from the moment he arrived in France until he was posted back to the East Surreys at Christmas 1916. No date is given for when he first began to write it, but Volume 1 contains a dedication to his mother, and to the officers from his regiment who died while he was in France, and is dated January 1922. This is most likely when the whole account was completed, not just the first volume, because he had by then moved on to writing other things. The writing in Memories is clearly more assured than in Jimmy Lawton. Like the earlier story, much of it comes from letters he sent home, and they are comparable, too, in the way that they begin as continuous narratives, but then move towards a diary format towards the end. But the storytelling in Memories has more light and shade, and the comic interludes and asides are more deftly woven into the text. There are more, and longer, dialogue sections, which read very well – confirming Sherriff ’s skill with his characters’ speech patterns – and there are some very fine descriptive sections, which stay in the mind long after they’ve been read.
He is less successful when he moves from a narrative account to a more thematic account of the life of an infantry officer. This is not altogether surprising, since at this point he was only about twenty-four years old, with precious little experience of anything other than his home life and the war. Memories confirms that his strength did not lie in political or philosophical analysis, but in observation, reporting the behaviour and the conversation of the men around him. Memories was never published fully in its final form, but several of its passages made their way into Journey’s End, and sections were reproduced in the Journal of the East Surrey Regiment in the 1930s.9
While busy at work, and with his writing, he was nevertheless keen to return to his rowing. On 29 May 1919, he was part of a very well attended meeting at Kingston Grammar School, which agreed to revive the Old Boys’ Association (which became the Old Kingstonian Association, or OKA), and to ‘promote the movement for a memorial to those old boys who had fallen in the war’.10 In addition, it was agreed to establish an Old Boys’ Rowing Club and Sherriff was appointed its first honorary secretary – who better than the man who bought himself a sculling boat with his war wounds gratuity?11 The club seems to have died a quick death, but Bob and Bundy quickly joined Kingston Rowing Club (KRC), with Sherriff becoming, by his own account, one of the first grammar school boys to be accepted.12 Within a year, Bob had made his way into the KRC crew competing in the Henley Royal Regatta (HRR). He would represent KRC at Henley several times in the 1920s, and the event would remain, for him, an annual highlight throughout his life.13
He seemed to be reconciling himself to his work as well, if we are to judge by his role as a main author of the Christmas 1919 edition of the Oxford Street Times.14 This was a small satirical magazine, full of jokes and office gossip, and written by several of the staff, although Sherriff was its editor.15 The magazine is illustrated with several drawings, some of which are reminiscent of drawings in wartime letters to Bundy, and in other things he had written. In the editorial he thanks those who have made contributions, and a few of the names are familiar from correspondence he had with office staff during the war, including Laurence Woodley, the young man who had written to Sherriff enquiring about the progress of his application for a commission.16 Sherriff seems to have contributed several pieces to the magazine – including a page offering (humorous) advice to (probably fictitious) correspondents, and a slightly longer story detailing the adventures of a young woman in the office. The story has a gently teasing tone, suggesting that Sherriff had begun to reconcile himself to the presence of women at his work, confirmed by him wishing, in his editorial, for every reader ‘an increment in his (or her) salary in the New Year’.
In May 1921, Sherriff returned to France and Belgium, but this time in the company of his father, on a bicycle tour. His father wrote an account of the trip, illustrated with photographs and postcards of the time, showing the ruined villages pockmarking the area.17 The account is rather dry, although there are some nice details, such as the care that had to be taken in importing one’s own bicycle into France – taxes paid, and certificates issued for no obvious reasons other than those of bureaucracy. He itemises the hotels he stayed in and the meals he took, which provides an insight into the difficulties in reconstructing an area devastated by war. But there is none of the observation that distinguished his son’s letters just a few years earlier.
Sherriff ’s photographs are bleakly interesting; shards of metal amongst tufts of wild grass; jagged, overgrown trenches; treeless roads; stockpiles of rusting ammunition; and, everywhere, buildings in ruins. His father shows him to be keen to explore his old stamping grounds, but there is no suggestion of melancholy, not even when he is photographing the graves of three former colleagues.18 The trip was thorough, taking in all the places featured in Memories: Ersatz Crater and the front line at Vimy Ridge; Estrée Cauchie, where he rested afterwards; the craters of Hulluch, where he worked with the tunnelling corps; Cité Calonne, with its basement dugouts; Bully-Grenay; and finally, the place where he took part in the Third Battle of Ypres – a visit that might have been expected to be full of emotion, but which his father describes in a rather flat and unengaged fashion (perhaps unsurprisingly from a rather Victorian figure): ‘It was in this battle – about the 1st or 2nd day – that my eldest son, Captain R.C. Sherriff of the 3rd East Surreys [sic], was wounded and sent home to England, where he remained until the end of the war.’
They left for England the following day, with Sherriff ’s father noting that ‘the explosion of ammunition dumps were so frequent yesterday that one could almost imagine the war was still on and Ypres being bombarded.’
Before the trip, Sherriff wrote to Godfrey Warre-Dymond to tell him he was planning to make a journey to France and Flanders – ‘not a kind of holiday to cheer one up perhaps,’ but one that he had long had an ambition to make. The letter mentions the ‘kind of diary’ he is in the process of pulling together, and he obviously hopes that this trip will help in that regard, but there also seemed to be some unfinished business, as he confesses that, after his wounding at Klein Zillebeke:
I never went out again: the morning I got my blighty in [that] trench was the last morning I spent in the front line – not a very brilliant end up. … Probably you are far too busy a man now to think of these things, but really I must say I often go over it again.19
There is an elegantly written piece in the December 1921 issue of The Kingstonian magazine, describing a trip the author had recently made to the battlefields, and listing many of the places that Sherriff and his father visited. It is unsigned, but almost certainly by his pen (making it his first ever piece of published work): the writing is very reminiscent of what appears in Sherriff ’s letters and his memoir – simple and unstuffy, but very immediate – and references to the Romans and to chickens are also quite typical.
If it is by him, then what does it tell us? Not too much. Like most of his writing about the war, it is not about anything in particular; there is no literary fingerjabbing going on here. Instead it is a gentle, rather elegiac piece, about what once was, and what it has now become. The overwhelming impression is of a landscape being reclaimed by nature, but also at the mercy of the forces of progress, about which he is uneasy: ‘dingy wooden huts’ and ‘vulgar wooden houses’ are growing up in the ruins of Ypres ‘like fungus on an old tree … and you feel a sudden shock when you see a glaring red villa on the spot where the Chateau of Hooge once stood.’ He misses ‘the great semi-circle of Very lights that used to fall and rise round the city’. He never liked change anyway, but perhaps he felt that the changes that had already come to the battlefields – and that were sure to continue – were disrespectful to the memories of those who had served and died there. Many years later, he wrote a short story20 about Trotter returning to the battlefields with his wife and two sons, and if we can learn anything from this article it is that, like Trotter, he does not view the war in a negative light. ‘One day,’ he writes, ‘perhaps, men will go and dig for relics in those old grass grown mounds. Pieces of the old front line will be preserved with religious care, as Hadrian’s Wall on the moors of Northumberland is preserved.’ Perhaps Journey’s End would represent his attempt to dig for those lost relics.
Through his active membership of Kingston Rowing Club, and his involvement with the Old Kingstonian Association, Sherriff came into contact with the people who would join together with him to form the amateur dramatic group that would perform his first five plays. The group was initially called The Adventurers (but would become the Cymba Dramatic Club in 1923) and their first performance was on 18 November 1921, when they acted Sherriff ’s very first play – A Hitch in the Proceedings.
Sherriff tells the story22 that the purpose of their first theatrical performance was to raise money for Kingston Rowing Club, but the programme for the evening tells a different story: in fact, it was in aid of the Restoration Fund for Kingston Grammar School’s Lovekyn Chapel – an early mediaeval chapel that is still used by the school today.23 Sherriff recalled the evening as a series of variety turns, followed by his short play; but, in fact, the evening consisted of two one-act plays separated by a short concert, consisting mainly of songs.24 The first short play had only five characters, three of whom were played by the mainstays of the organisation: Sherriff himself, his old friend Cyril Manning-Press and W.R. Warner,25 who was secretary of Kingston Grammar School, as well as its rowing master and a member of KRC. Those same three were closely involved with all subsequent Adventurers/Cymba performances.
There seems to have been considerably more purpose around the founding of The Adventurers than simply an ad hoc desire to fundraise. Sherriff had been writing since he came back from the war, and was obviously intent on being published in some way, and in Manning-Press he had found someone who enjoyed amateur dramatics as much as he did.26 There seems little doubt that Sherriff was a prime mover in The Adventurers, and that, from the outset, the intention was for him to write plays that they would perform. He remarked himself that ‘the two basic things you need for a play are a good story and a company to produce it when it’s written.’27 In 1925, after the performance of his fifth play, Sherriff was interviewed by the Surrey Comet:
This much may be said with certainty, that even if [Sherriff ’s] ordinary vocation leads him into different paths, the theatre is his chosen route, and to that end he studies consistently, reads voraciously, thinks more than a little, and eventually produces something which is well worth acting, and in which it is the delight of his brother members of the Kingston Rowing Club to appear. Largely through Mr Sherriff ’s enthusiasm, and ably supported by members of Kingston RC, there was founded some three years ago the Cymba Dramatic Club. A committee came into being, made, inspired and ruled by youth, for none was over thirty, and it was decided to produce a play. So Mr Sherriff wrote one.28
The interview speaks eloquently both to Sherriff ’s enthusiasm for drama, and his willingness to work at his craft.
The seriousness of The Adventurers’ purpose is also evident in the theatre where they held their performances. The Gables Theatre was a small private theatre, sitting in the garden of a grand house in Surbiton (also named The Gables) owned by the Boret family. Sherriff writes that someone in KRC ‘discovered an old house with a small theatre in its grounds’29: it seems reasonable to presume that the ‘someone’ was one of the two Boret boys, who were at that time rowing with KRC!30 The house had originally been built in 1877 for Wilberforce Bryant (of match manufacturers Bryant & May), and in 1884 he constructed the theatre in his garden, which ‘any useful or religious body’ could use for free.31 Ownership transferred to the Cooper family by 1891, and during the Boer War they allowed it to be used as an army hospital.32 In 1905 it was bought by Herbert Boret, a shipbroker, who retained ownership until 1925, when it became a college for working women, known as Hillcroft College, which it has remained ever since.33 But in 1921 it was still very much a theatre to be used by all – and one suspects that The Adventurers were granted its use for free, since they acknowledge Mrs Boret’s assistance in their programmes.
A Hitch in the Proceedings has a very simple structure. Groups of people arrive at a ‘charabanc’, which they believe is bound for an excursion to Brighton. They ask a man whom they (mistakenly) believe is the conductor if this is the bus to Brighton and he confirms that it is. They pay him their money and get on the bus. At the last moment the ‘conductor’ departs, and the real driver arrives to ask why they are on the bus, which – as he had explained to a young man standing nearby (the fake conductor) – is broken down and awaiting repair. ‘The curtain falls amidst the outrage of the cheated passengers.’34
The characters come from a wide range of social types: he has two elderly ladies (played by men in the performance); five young women who are described as ‘government officials’; two ‘beanfeasters’ (i.e. drunks); a ‘man of some position’ and his fiancée; an old man and his granddaughter; a small boy and his mother; and a rather timid minister (the Reverend Teddington Locke, named for the closest lock on the river downstream from the Kingston Rowing Club) and his cousin. The government officials are not given much to do, but the interplay of the rest of the characters is very funny, mostly resulting from malapropisms, misunderstandings, the puncturing of pomposity (usually, in all innocence, by the small boy) and a sprinkling of music hall humour (‘Why does Lloyd George wear red braces? Why – to keep his trousers up of course!’). Sherriff felt the play did not capture the audience until the arrival onstage of the beanfeasters, but this was not the experience of the Kingston Grammar School rowers who acted the play in 2010 (the only time that it has ever been revived), who found that the laughs came fairly steadily throughout. Even the rather corny old jokes went down well – the same kind of jokes that would be sprinkled throughout his early plays, to good effect.
The whole evening merited a brief review in the Surrey Comet,35 which described The Adventurers as ‘an accomplished group of artists’, but said little about Hitch, other than that ‘full justice was done to the play by the company engaged in its performance.’ There was, however, a much fuller review in The Kingstonian in December 1921. It began by acknowledging how unusual it was to review an ‘Entertainment’ that was not a school function – but since it was raising money for the Lovekyn Chapel, and since so many masters were involved, ‘we cannot allow it to pass unnoticed.’ The reviewer scored it a ‘complete success’, adding that ‘Mr James36 and Mr Giffard37 must have studied the ways of the Old Kent Road and its denizens many an evening to produce so life-like an effect.’ Mr Lodge (who played one of the old ladies) and Mr Sanders38 (stage manager) were also commended, as was young Jack Moriarty, a KGS pupil who played the small boy.39 Manning-Press also merited a mention (as an Old Kingstonian), but not Bundy – although he was a stalwart of the KGSOB Hockey Club. It must have slipped the reviewer’s mind, but at least he was able to applaud The Adventurers for having raised ‘no less than £20 for the Fund through this effort’.
‘Rowing and writing went well together,’ wrote Sherriff,40 and for him they certainly did. Over the next four years he had four new plays performed by The Adventurers/ Cymba, and became an important figure in both the Kingston Rowing Club and the Old Kingstonian Association.
Shortly after the success of Hitch he embarked upon a new piece – a one-act play entitled The Woods of Meadowside,41 which was performed, again at The Gables, for two nights beginning on 2 April 1922. In No Leading Lady Sherriff recalled that there were three plays on the programme this time, and that, for his cast, he had to take those left over from the other two plays. But his memory was again faulty. In practice, the evening’s entertainment followed the previous style: two one-act plays, one of them an older established piece,42 and the other written by Sherriff, with a short musical interlude between the two. Nor was he left with the dregs of the cast members – there was some overlap between the two casts, and many of those in his play had acted in The Adventurers’ first outing.43
The play is about three racecourse ne’er-do-wells who attempt to escape from the law by disguising themselves in other people’s clothes. While disguised they encounter a group of picnickers (a colonel and his wife, their two daughters with two friends,44 and the local minister). The leader of the crooks is at heart a decent chap, led astray by gambling. He recognises Joy, one of the colonel’s daughters, as a girl on whom he had a crush some time before. Still sweet on her, he confesses his crime, and thus reconciled, is willing to give himself up when the police come to arrest them.
There was no review in The Kingstonian on this occasion, but some pictures exist45 (as evidence, perhaps, of the seriousness of their purpose as a dramatic club), and the Surrey Comet was on hand to note that ‘those accomplished entertainers, “The Adventurers”, made a welcome reappearance at The Gables Theatre,’ before singling out Sherriff ’s play as its ‘chief interest’, describing it as ‘an amusing oneset comedy’ (which it is, owing to Sherriff ’s trademark music hall style banter).
Sherriff was obviously proud enough of his second play to do three things with it: first, have it properly bound; second, have it registered with the Lord Chamberlain’s Department (which was a requirement if any professional management were to take it on and produce it); and third, submit it to an agent for consideration. Sherriff says he picked out Curtis Brown because they had an:
unpretentious name … they didn’t promise anything, and didn’t publish a list of their successes. They merely gave their name and address and said ‘no reading fees’. Most of the others wanted a guinea and I hadn’t got a guinea to spare.46
Whatever the reason for picking them, he sent them a typewritten, bound manuscript early in June, and received the slightly discouraging reply three weeks later from Mr G. Patching (Head of Drama) that they felt it would be impossible to do anything with the script because the cast was too big for a professional company to use in just a one-act play. But at least they had not simply dismissed it on grounds of its dramatic quality.47
After Curtis Brown’s dismissal of The Woods of Meadowside, he probably thought it was time to move on to longer plays if he wanted to see them performed beyond the amateur stage. One-act plays were not much in demand in the West End, and if he wanted to be produced he would need to write something more commercial. So The Adventurers moved on to new ground – a programme featuring a single three-act play. As Sherriff explained, this put a lot of pressure on them:
No great harm was done if a one-act play misfired. People would tolerate being bored for half-an-hour when there were other items in the programme to rinse the taste away, but a three-act fiasco that went on the whole evening would have killed The Adventurers stone dead.49
The play went through several drafts, but was complete before the end of 1922, and to make sure the performance went well, the directorial duties were handed (for a six guinea fee) to Frank G. Randell, a veteran of Mrs Patrick Campbell’s theatre company.50 The performance would again be at The Gables (‘by courtesy’, as the programme noted, ‘of Mrs Boret’). Flyers were printed advertising the performances on 10 and 11 January 1923, with tickets priced at 3s 6d (about £9 in today’s money) – which was a pretty hefty price for an amateur production – 2s 6d for reserved seats and 1s 3d unreserved (which looked a much better deal).
The play follows the progress of William Jottings, who, just before the war, is promoted from foreman to manager, and is eager to make the most of his improved circumstances. He wants to trade up from his house in Paradise Street, Hackney, and for his children (Dick and Betty) to go to better schools, but his family is unconvinced. During the war he makes a great success in business, and is knighted, and he now lives in a fancy house in Curzon Street, Mayfair. But he is upset because he feels he is not welcomed into high society, except by the kindly and down-toearth baronet Sir Peter Brunt.51 His son and daughter are happy, however, for they have made friends with the Fothergill children, brother and sister Gerald52 and Norah. In fact, they are friendly enough that Gerald and Dick each agree to propose to the other’s sister, and while Betty feels she is not well bred enough to warrant Gerald’s attentions, she acquiesces in the engagement.
When Jottings’ investments suddenly turn sour, everything is called off, and he and his family return to Paradise Street. But, at the urging of Sir Peter, the Fothergill children arrive, eager to resume their friendship, and the play ends with fences mended, and engagements resumed, while Jottings is reunited with his old Hackney friends.
The Surrey Comet53 gave a very flattering review to both the play and the participants. ‘The author’s aim has evidently been to present a play with entertaining qualities,’ it wrote. ‘Though the theme may be of familiar texture, Mr Sherriff has clothed his play with incident and dialogue of real merit, blending with considerable talent “the sublime and the grotesque, the pathetic and the ludicrous”.’ As for the acting, it noted that:
the reception given to Profit & Loss was undeniably flattering as each member of the cast did well. … Mr Sherriff was modest and refined as Gerald … and Sir Peter Brunt, in the hands of Mr C.A. Manning-Press, appeared to be a kindly-disposed baronet whose wise words ‘carried’ to the end of the hall more distinctly than those of some members of the company.
As his first full-length effort, the play is different in scope and ambition from the previous two, which were largely humorous in tone. Although Profit and Loss was leavened with humour,54 it focused on a serious topic that would occupy him in his future work – the relationship between money, breeding and class. Mr Jottings is a decent man who takes the opportunity of an improvement in his circumstances to seek to raise his station in life – and, more importantly, that of his children. Sherriff does not lampoon Jottings (as he does his Hackney friends), but he is punished for his overweening ambition by losing everything in his financial dealings – a warning, perhaps, that he would have been better to remain in his initial position, where he might well have been happier.55 But at least his children can aspire to something better.
The person who comes out best from it all is Sir Peter Brunt – the epitome of the well-bred upper class – who is welcoming to the Jottings family, who has seen his sons die in the war, yet bears the sacrifice with stoicism, and who even cares enough to track down the Jottings to their Hackney home to see that the children are reunited with their suitors. As in almost all of Sherriff ’s works – and especially the earlier plays – the old-fashioned upper class are the epitome of the very best in attitude and bearing; something that would allow him to feel comfortable in their company once he had gained his success. And the distinction between old money and new money is always important: time and again, Sherriff shows us those who have been catapulted into financial success floundering with their lower-class manners among those who have been bred to their station in life. At this point, of course, Sherriff was still lower middle class and no more than comfortably off – but in later works it is ironic to observe him chastise those who have acquired wealth suddenly, without the taste or breeding to put it to good use.
Shortly after the successful performance, Sherriff sent the play off to another local amateur ensemble, and to Curtis Brown, for their consideration. A few weeks later, he had an encouraging reply from Patching, who considered that the play had ‘excellent characterisation’, and ‘some really good dialogue’. Unfortunately, he did not deem it strong enough for the West End – the provinces perhaps, but they could not help place it there.56 Almost immediately afterwards he received a similarly mixed response from the local drama group, whose committee had considered the play and found it ‘interesting … but on rather conventional lines’. They sweetened the pill, however, by noting that they would be honoured if he ‘would allow us the privilege of reading the future and better plays which must come from his pen.’57
Time and again in the future, Sherriff would endure criticism of his work, or would suffer very public failures when his work was rejected by the public or the critics. But he seldom seemed to take offence, as others might do. Instead he listened to the criticisms that were being made, and where he thought they were apposite, he incorporated them in his work (although he could be combative when he felt the criticisms unjust). His resilience would lead him to return to his writing desk in the wake of disappointments, only for him to score a ‘bullseye’ (as he would put it)58 with his next piece of work. And so it was when he received the mixed reviews of Profit and Loss – he returned to work almost immediately, producing another threeact play that would be performed before the year was out. This time, though, the play would not be performed by The Adventurers, but by the newly formed Cymba Dramatic Club.
The new club was an attempt to formalise The Adventurers’ arrangements. Qualification for membership was membership of the Kingston Rowing Club (KRC) for male members, and for lady members it was that they be relatives or friends of members of the KRC. Cyril Manning-Press was the treasurer. Casting was to be done by a special sub-committee, and membership subscriptions varied according to whether members were acting or non-acting. While the individuals involved hardly changed, it is clear that Sherriff, Manning-Press, Warner and the others were becoming confident enough in their programme and abilities that they wanted to establish a more formal identity, one which would mark them out among the other dramatic clubs in the area. According to the interview Sherriff gave to the Surrey Comet in 1925,60 the club’s ambition even extended far enough to see themselves in their own theatre at some point in the future.
The Cymba Dramatic Club’s first performance was a play extolling the virtues of tradition. It is set in the sleepy village of Cornlow-in-the-Downs, a village that has been immune to the scourge of progress for centuries, and whose most important inhabitants – the Reverend Burnley and Colonel Peterson – do their best to prevent newcomers arriving, trailing modernity in their wake. But the arrival of Mr Maraway, a successful businessman despatched to the village by his nerve doctor as part of a rest cure, threatens to tear the village’s sleepy fabric. In particular he tempts the vicar’s son, Leslie, with promises of business success if he will leave the village with him, and also persuades his sister Daphne – to whom Maraway has been making romantic overtures – to do likewise. To complicate matters still further, it emerges that the vicar’s wife, Mary, was previously engaged to Maraway, and it was Daphne’s resemblance to her mother that had first subconsciously attracted him.
Early in the second act, Maraway receives a telegram informing him that the moment is right for him to strike against two former competitors, whom he now has it in his power to ruin. Maraway exults at the prospect, clearly discomfiting Leslie. When he next encourages Daphne to leave with him, she says she would be happier if Maraway stayed in the village with her instead. He tries to persuade her by telling her how exciting the world of business can be, but, like her mother before her, she rejects his entreaties, telling him that the best way she can help him is by saying ‘goodbye’. So Maraway leaves, and the village continues on its way, undisturbed.
Cornlow-in-the-Downs is Sherriff ’s version of Shangri-La – James Hilton’s mythical place of peace and harmony, far from the perils of progress and the modern world.61 And it is not so surprising that he should indulge such pastoral fancies: his letters home from the Army were full of references to the desirability of owning a farm, or moving to the country – and his happiest childhood moments include those spent on the beaches at Selsey. Several of his subsequent works extol bucolic virtues, either in themselves, or in contrast to the dangers of development.62 But his defence of the undeveloped in this case is rather tongue-in-cheek, and a little condescending. Leslie reveals, for example, that the villagers mislead the vicar about their simpleness – that they are much less so when chatting to each other in the pub or visiting neighbouring villages. Furthermore, the pursuits to which the vicar (another in the line of bumbling vicars in his early plays) and the colonel devote themselves – croquet on the lawn, fishing for a giant carp in the local pond, ripening a single tomato – are spiced with slapstick, as though inviting us to find their efforts endearing, but perhaps rather simple and pointless. Leslie and Daphne, and the vicar’s wife, are all much more knowing in their appreciation of the village way of life – aware of the compromises they are inevitably making to enjoy their rural isolation. Sherriff clearly sympathises with the village and its inhabitants against the likes of Maraway, and it is his dislike of the thrusting businessman that shines through most vividly.
The play was first performed on 10 December 1923, yet again at The Gables theatre, with Sherriff ’s friend Giff as the vicar (‘once again responsible for an excellent piece of work’, according to the Surrey Comet),63 and Cyril Manning-Press who produced ‘a very familiar stage colonel, full of muted oaths and loud laughs’. Sherriff ’s sister Beryl also popped up briefly as the maid. The play was ‘enthusiastically received by a crowded house’, the review began, noting also that ‘in response to an enthusiastic call, the author appeared before the curtain at the end and thanked the audience for the warm reception they had given his work.’ While he may have been gratified by the curtain call, he was surely less pleased with the review’s criticisms of the play:
The theme is an excellent one, but the play drags occasionally, although there is a great wind of refreshingly breezy humour running through the dialogue, and the second scene in the second act might, without any disadvantage to the action of the play which it only serves to retard, be altogether deleted. It is merely an interpolation of pure unadulterated slapstick farce.
Resilient as ever, he took the criticisms to heart and reworked the play. The next performance, on 26 March 1924 in the Teddington Parish Hall, featured a broadly similar cast (including Beryl), but a reworked script, which was still not entirely satisfactory. So he had another go, this time producing a script64 that works much better dramatically: much (though by no means all) of the slapstick humour remains, but the overall tempo of the act is much improved.
There is one major change between the earlier and later versions that is worth commenting on – a scene in which Maraway confronts Mary, his former fiancée. In the first version of the play the exchange between them is quite bitter in its tone. She resents his earlier commitment to his business; he resents her decision to leave him. She begins by trying to hurt him and he fires back. The exchange is conducted in fairly general terms, focusing on his character faults, and her decision to settle for a ‘futile’ life in the country, rather than to live the London life she would have enjoyed, and for which she was meant. But in the redrafted version we see an exchange on what it means to be a wife. Mary’s misgivings at being marooned in the country are elided, and instead she emphasises her role in support of the vicar. ‘You were born to crash through life in front of everyone else,’ she tells Maraway. ‘It’s so much easier to crash through alone. Hubert Burnley was born to drift through life. It’s easier to drift with another boat alongside. … Wives are at their best with men who fail sometimes,’ she says. Urging him to go back to his business, she says, ‘You can alter a business – build it up and extend it – it grows big as the man grows big – but you can’t alter a wife: she’s always a little well-meaning person who grows tinier and tinier as the man’s success grows bigger.’
While Sherriff ’s lifelong devotion to his mother and absence of any romantic entanglements clearly suggest at the very least a certain wariness towards women, his attitude to marriage is less clear. Even if he had been a closet homosexual (and the jury is very much out on that), it is possible that, in the manner of, for example, Siegfried Sassoon, he might have been inclined to be married for the appreciation of the institution itself, and the benefits (outside the physical) that it might convey. His parents’ marriage appears to have been solid and stable while he was young, although they enjoyed different interests, and probably had separate bedrooms.65 Holidays appear, on occasions, to have been taken at different times, and as we have already seen, correspondence was separate, likewise visits to their son while he was in the Artists’ Rifles. No photograph of the two together exists after the family portrait of about 1906 (see Plate 2). It is, of course, impossible to know whether they remained happy in their relatively separate existence, or whether there was a froideur between them as a result, but the few clues we have suggest they remained on good terms: from Sherriff ’s letters we see a picture of the family in their living room in the evenings, each engaged on their separate tasks; from The Fortnight in September we see them happy in their annual holiday together; and when Sherriff and his mother headed to Hollywood for the first time in 1932, we see Connie write warmly to her husband at home. But, of course, there would also have been strong societal pressures to remain together, and avoid the shame of divorce.66
Nearly all of Sherriff ’s early plays feature a young couple destined to be together. In The Woods of Meadowside, Percy declares his long-standing love for Joy, and even as he is carted off by the police we suspect they will marry when he is released. In Profit and Loss, the Jottings children are betrothed to the Fothergill children, who pursue the romance even after Mr Jottings’ financial disaster has returned the family to Hackney. Once more in the village of Cornlow, Daphne rejects Maraway’s advances to return to her long-time admirer, Jack Lomax, a young and responsible farmer. Other than Journey’s End, it is almost67 impossible to find an original work by Sherriff (outside of the cinema) in which marriage does not play a significant role – problems may assail married couples, but they are resolved within the bounds of their relationships. It is hard not to conclude that Sherriff was a fan of the institution in theory, even if he never had the opportunity to test it in practice.
After much revision, Sherriff despatched his manuscript to Curtis Brown, and Patching initially replied that ‘we will read [it] with great pleasure. We certainly remember reading Profit & Loss.’68 A few months later he wrote again,69 to say that the play had interested them ‘quite considerably’, and that ‘beautifully cast and produced … it has quite a good chance of success.’ Noting that they had already offered it to one or two managements (to no avail), he suggested that perhaps it might be possible to arrange a performance by ‘one of the best private producing societies. … Such Sunday night special performances very often led to production of a play for a run, that possibly otherwise would never have been produced at all.’ Unfortunately, there was to be no West End performance for the play, although Sherriff ’s hopes were briefly raised early in 1925 when he received word from Curtis Brown that the RADA70 players were interested in producing the play if certain changes were made. A subsequent letter from the players themselves conveyed the disappointing news that they had opted for another play, but that some of their members were still keen to perform the play if suitably amended (a list of potential alterations being helpfully appended). But in the end nothing came of it. Nevertheless, with only his second three-act play he had come close to achieving his goal of a West End production, and, suitably encouraged, he set to completing the play he had been working on during 1924, in the hopes that this might be the one that brought the success he desired.
Shortly before the second outing of Cornlow-in-the-Downs, the Strolling Players performed Profit and Loss at the Little Theatre in Teddington, the first time that a Sherriff play had been performed by anyone other than The Adventurers/ Cymba. Sherriff had already been vice captain of the Kingston Rowing Club for a year, and working closely with the captain, E.A.S. (Gerry) Oldham. Perhaps in recognition of his extra responsibilities he had dialled back his involvement with the Old Kingstonians, leaving the committee, although some of his friends remained involved, and he was sufficiently well thought of to be invited to speak at their major functions. But he continued with his rowing as enthusiastically as ever – his name appeared in the Kingston crews at a number of regattas (including Henley) during the spring and summer – although without his brother alongside, since Bundy had departed for India the previous September, to take up a job as an insurance clerk.
Throughout the spring and early summer he continued to work on his new play, The Feudal System,71 finishing it in August. Whether because he was especially pleased with the results, or because he was growing in confidence, he actually submitted the play to Curtis Brown before it had its first outing in a theatre. Mr Patching was very positive, reporting that they liked it, and thought it had a good chance of success, and consequently had sent it to Mr Harrison at the Haymarket theatre.72
So – what was in the play that Patching liked so much? The Feudal System is about the mutual obligations owed by master and servant, and returns to Sherriff ’s concern with class and breeding. A prologue shows us Peter Grenville, master of the great house of Merehayes, at his wit’s end because he has run out of money. In despair, he shoots himself, leaving his son, Derek, in the care of his faithful, longstanding butler, Mr Jonson. Peter’s cousin, Henry Mordaunt, is furious, feeling it is inappropriate that the boy be left in the care of a servant, but Jonson is happy to oblige, noting that the Grenvilles and the Jonsons have looked after each other for hundreds of years. Admittedly, the boy will not now go to Winchester, but Jonson believes that he can nevertheless provide more for the boy than a mere school could. The house is taken over by a ghastly nouveau riche businessman named Squdge (who is inevitably the butt of some of Sherriff ’s better barbs) and Derek moves to Streatham with Mr Jonson and his wife.
Seven years later, we are in the Jonsons’ tidy drawing room in Streatham. Derek is taking night classes in estate management, and is sweet on Bessie, Mrs Jonson’s niece, who also stays with them. But Mr Jonson disapproves of their nascent relationship, feeling that Derek should marry into his own class (the landed gentry). Derek has a chance to enter that world again when he attends the twenty-first birthday party of his cousin (Mordaunt’s son), which is held at Mordaunt’s stately home. Although nervous initially, he quickly fits in, and spends the evening with Laura, to whom he had been very attached when they were both in their early teens, just before his father’s suicide. Laura encourages him to look beyond Streatham, to fight to return to Merehayes, where he belongs.
In the final act we discover that Jonson has quietly made a success of himself in business, owning a string of properties, all of which he has now sold, to fund the purchase of Merehayes. He gives the deeds of the estate to Derek as a twenty-first birthday present, on the condition that he can return to the house with him, and act once more as his butler. Mrs Jonson strongly disapproves, but the transaction goes ahead nonetheless, and the play’s final scene, set some nine months later, shows Derek on the eve of his marriage to Laura, alongside his uncle, cousin and friends, and with even the Jonsons now reconciled.
The play is another encapsulation of Sherriff ’s attitude to class and breeding – people have an appropriate station in life, and they should stick to it. Perhaps Mrs Jonson best sums up Sherriff ’s attitude to the upper class: talking to her niece, Bessie, she remarks that ‘Uncle George … thinks there’s only one class in the whole world that matters and that’s people like the Grenvilles – the old English gentry. He’d die for any of those people if they wanted him to.’ That Sherriff approved of the link between master and servant is confirmed by the quote on the front of the programme: ‘And the English folk received protection from their Norman masters, giving in return their services when their masters were in need.’73 Of course, the upper class are not allowed off scot-free: Grenville’s cousin, Mordaunt, is an example of someone who fails to appreciate that the privileges and obligations of his class: he rebuffs Peter’s request for financial help, and attempts to intercede on numerous occasions in ways that would be detrimental to his nephew, but he comes round in the end. Sherriff ’s most scathing barbs, of course, are reserved for the Squdges. Sherriff also has fun at the expense of Mr Jonson’s friends in Streatham, but only as far as using them as his usual lower-class comic relief: they know their station, and are content within it, so they are treated gently. Mrs Jonson would be treated likewise, except that she wants to see young Derek remain in Streatham, a place to which, given his breeding, he is evidently unsuited, and so she is portrayed unsympathetically.
The play was given its first outing on 27 February 1925, and it received a very positive review in the Surrey Comet74:
Mr R.C. Sherriff ’s … two previous essays in playwriting have not been wanting in originality – and … although he had in his latest play a sermon to preach, or something very near it, the play was relieved of boredom and made interesting because he had brought to its conception a fine idea neatly worked out, interludes of his usual boisterous humour, some very admirable characterisation, and not a few most pungent lines.
The reviewer noted that the text of Sherriff ’s ‘sermon’ would not find favour with everyone (socialists, in particular would find it ‘anathema’), but that ‘those who have pride in traditions’ would enjoy it, since ‘duty and pride of race is the text.’ With a cast of twenty-seven, nearly all the usual Cymba players were in evidence – Manning-Press as the unpleasant Mordaunt, Sherriff as the tragic Grenville, and even W.R. Warner stepping back on to the boards in a bit part. Only Giff was missing, having left for a post in the United States a few months earlier.75
A further review in the March 1925 edition of The Kingstonian was less effusive. Though unsigned, it was written by C.A. Howse, headmaster of Kingston Grammar School.76 While commending Sherriff ’s characterisation and dialogue he clearly felt it rather too long: ‘if Mr Sherriff would take to himself an alter ego, who would trim and prune, we feel convinced that a London theatre would not be too high an ambition.’ In his letter to Sherriff he also added that ‘it struck me that you fell between two stools – a desire for realism and a secret craving after farce,’ although, on the positive side, ‘there was a trace of Galsworthy’s modern problems,’ (an observation that must have pleased Sherriff immensely).
The pattern throughout 1925 was much the same as in the previous year – taken up largely by rowing and writing. He remained as vice captain of KRC, preparing for the step up to captain the following year, earning the gratitude of Oldham, who wrote to Sherriff that ‘I could not leave [the club] in better hands, nor could I have had a better lieutenant.’77 He also maintained his involvement with the OKA, laying a wreath on the memorial tablet on behalf of the Old Boys, and giving the occasional toast at their function. Curiously, Sherriff would often confess to a dislike for public speaking in his later years, but there was ample evidence from reviews of these early occasions that he was rather good at it.78
Sherriff ’s eye was still firmly set on the stage. He began by paying heed to the suggestions offered by Joan Temple of the RADA players, for improving Cornlowin-the-Downs, obviously hoping that he still had a chance of having it played in the West End.80 But at the same time he started working on something new – a comedy about the efforts of a small village to resist the attentions of a wealthy developer.
Mr Birdie’s Finger is set in the village of Tinker’s Dell, and contains just seven characters (in sharp contrast to his previous play): the two most important inhabitants of the village, namely the doctor and the major; Mr Birdie (the parish clerk); the doctor’s son, Dickie; the developer, Mr Winter, and his assistant (and daughter) Joan; and the maid, Mary. The tale is a simple one. The three main men of the village hear that a developer is interested in buying and developing some land nearby. They are appalled at the prospect, but nevertheless agree to a meeting with him. Joan talks to Dickie at length about her father’s plans, and he explains why the village should be left unchanged, citing in support the needs of the three ‘topping old Englishmen’. The next day, when Mr Winter has come to visit, he disarms them one by one by promising them that the development will include something dear to them, over which they can exercise some control: a new hospital for the doctor; a grand new sports club for the major; and a natural history museum for Mr Birdie, a passionate collector of butterflies. Winter has, of course, obtained the necessary intelligence on the three men from Joan’s conversation with Dickie, who is, in turn, incensed at Winter’s pitch to the men’s self-interest. He argues against it, and as the men begin to have their doubts over their own newfound zeal, Dickie allows them to back out of their support by suggesting they had merely been stringing Mr Winter along the whole time. Mr Winter tells them that he has a meeting in London the following evening, at which he will give the go-ahead for the plans, whether or not they agree.
Next day, Joan tries to persuade Dickie to agree to the development, and it is obvious they are attracted to each other. A cricket match is about to take place against Tinker’s Dell’s great rivals, Ragholt, and the doctor and major are preparing for it when Mr Birdie – their star bowler – arrives with his arm in a sling, having been injured in a carpentry accident. Dickie, having heard from Joan about Winter’s cricketing ability, realises that, by using him in the team, they can both win the match and save the village by delaying his departure for his meeting. Using the same tricks and flattery that Winter had earlier deployed on them, the three men and Dickie persuade him to appear in the cricket match. The final scene, like all the others, takes place in the doctor’s study, but with a cricket match being played offstage and Mr Birdie running in and out with a running commentary. Inevitably, Winter bowls out half of the other team and scores the winning runs, but too late for him to leave for London. The play ends with the village saved and Dickie pledging his love for Joan.
The play is very funny – easily the funniest of his early works – and makes full use of Sherriff ’s humorous characterisations and one-liners. And the banter between Dickie and Joan is nicely judged, allowing for a greater development of the woman’s role than in any of his previous plays (or, indeed, than most of his subsequent plays). Joan is a very strong and capable young woman, clever enough to devise the scheme for seducing the village’s senior inhabitants, and also to discern Dickie’s use of the same techniques to seduce her father. The doctor and major are affectionately drawn, although with a gentle mocking of their pretensions and self-importance (reminiscent of the treatment of the vicar and the colonel in Cornlow); Mr Birdie is in much the same bumbling mould as the line of earlier vicars. Structurally, the play works well in the first two acts, turning the villagers’ disdain for Winters in the first act nicely into enthusiastic support in the second, before turning full circle again. But the elusive meeting on which the finale hinges is a rather weak plot point (could Mr Winters not simply reschedule the meeting for the next day?), while the device of having the cricket match offstage, relayed by constant entrances and exits, is not a successful one.
The play’s inaugural performance was at the Surbiton Assembly Rooms on 25 February 1926. Unusually, it was performed by the Genesta Amateur Dramatic Club (another local drama group, organised and run by friends of Sherriff, including David Hatten and his twin brother Archibald), rather than by Cymba. Why this should have been the case is not altogether clear. The Cymba group was still in operation – in fact, they had performed Cornlow-in-the-Downs (produced by Sherriff himself) at The Assembly Rooms in Surbiton the previous December, and two weeks after the Genesta premiere, had yet another show at The Assembly Rooms – this time a production of John Hastings Turner’s Lilies of the Field, with both Sherriff and his mother in the cast. Perhaps Sherriff was distracted by his elevation to the KRC captaincy, and felt he could not help organise a performance as well as write the play on this occasion. Or maybe he just enjoyed seeing his plays performed by others. Whatever the reason, the Surrey Comet reviewer was as unimpressed by the acting (‘not up to the usual Genesta standard’81), as he was impressed by the play:
we must praise Mr Sherriff, for in his fourth and latest dramatic work he has, at the least, excited to the full what the schoolboy termed ‘our risible faculties’. More also, for the laughs come the readier that we know we are diverted at the frailties and failings of ourselves and of our neighbours. That we realise this argues that the author’s creations are unexaggerated and that caricature has not ousted similitude.
Another reviewer wrote simply that the play ‘pleased the audience, chiefly on account of its humour, which kept them in a continuous roar of laughter.’82
Curiously, despite the glowing reviews, there is no record that the play was sent on to Curtis Brown; perhaps Sherriff felt that a simple comedy would be less likely to meet with the favour of West End producers than would one of his more substantial plays.A further review in The Amateur Stage (dated April 1926, so probably discussing the same production, although perhaps a different performance) observed that ‘If ever a play was endowed with a splendid idea, and a finely convinced set of characters to carry that idea into action, this new comedy enjoyed that good fortune.’ But he chides Sherriff a little for ‘having nothing interesting or witty [to say] on the subject of town-weary England seeking rural retreats.’ But this is a little harsh. We might expect, given Sherriff ’s natural sympathies towards the countryside, that he would see nothing good in the developer’s plans. But he does a fair job of giving Joan some strong arguments. When Dickie protests at one point that the development will bring the wrong sort of people, she replies:
the people who take the houses we build in country villages have worked hard all their lives in dismal towns, scraping their savings together for the great day when they can retire and come and live in the country, and see what a dear place England is. I’m sorry if it offends you, but I’ve made up my mind to give a few more people the joy of living in Tinker’s Dell.
And Sherriff allows that the development may be of high quality, and bring plenty of trade to the villagers, as well as much needed additional facilities. It is hard not to believe that Sherriff was actually a little conflicted on the issue – torn between his instincts towards conservation, and the view that others should be allowed the kind of share in the country that he sought himself. Ten years later, in Greengates, we would see him actually celebrate the same sort of village-based development that the residents of Tinker’s Dell opposed.
After Lilies of the Field there are no more sightings of the Cymba Dramatic Club, although Genesta continued to flourish. There were further performances of Profit and Loss by The Strolling Players (several, in fact, during 1927) but otherwise no more productions of Sherriff ’s plays. Sherriff writes in No Leading Lady that the group folded after the fifth play, which is not quite correct, but he is probably more accurate when he says that it ended because after five years in succession, ‘the novelty had gone’. ‘One by one,’ he wrote, ‘the original members dropped away, and though we recruited new people they were never quite the same. The fires were burning low.’83 But he then writes that he gave up the captaincy at the same time, and in this he is clearly mistaken. He had only just been made captain, and it was a job he took very seriously, as letters in the KRC files indicate. So while he may be correct that the Cymba Group had simply run its course, its demise did not coincide with the end of his captaincy, so much as with its beginning.
Even his own rowing began to take a back seat; after all, he was now thirty years old, and there were lots of keen young members arriving at the club. So 1926 turned out to be his last appearance at Henley Royal Regatta, but at least he went out in style. After winning their contests on 1 and 2 July, the Kingston Eight, with Sherriff in the two seat (the second lightest oarsman in the boat), beat Thames RC on the Saturday morning to book their place in the final later that day. But they had the misfortune to meet an on-form Selwyn College, Cambridge crew, and although they matched them through the early part of the race, the university crew were just strong enough to hold on for a half-length victory. The Surrey Comet reported84 that the result ‘was not in harmony with many predictions, but obviously a welltrained college crew possesses advantages over a club, whose members have to put the claims of business first.’ It went on to note:
The Prime Minister, Mr Stanley Baldwin, was an interested spectator of both Kingston’s races on Saturday, being on board the umpire’s launch which followed the semi-final in which Kingston defeated Thames, and in the judge’s box when Kingston opposed Selwyn college in the final. His opinion was that both races had been very finely contested.
Sherriff must have been thrilled by his crew’s efforts, and by the Prime Minister’s attendance, and possibly just as much by the congratulatory letter he promptly received from his predecessor, Gerry Oldham, who assured him: ‘Good luck Bob – only go on as you have started and the KRC will be beating Leander.’85
Sherriff continued to row, popping up in races from time to time, but not at the Henley level any longer. He became a ‘popular captain of the club’, according to the Surrey Comet,86 and continued in the position for three years – three years during which he would balance his captaincy duties with writing the play that would thrill audiences around the world, and change his life completely.