Fully Insured

So what actually happens in Journey’s End? What did the play look like back in 1928 at the Apollo Theatre? The answer is – like nothing before it. A World War One dugout on stage, a small acting area with steps visible up to a trench, a rough timber table, wooden slatted walls, a candle in a bottle and a fug of cigarette smoke, much of it drifting in from the stalls.

We are near St Quentin, twenty-four miles west of Amiens and ninety miles north of Paris, two and a half days before the great German offensive of 21 March 1918. A keen eighteen-year-old ex-public schoolboy, James ‘Jimmy’ Raleigh, joins C Company, fresh from school – ‘they’re the kind that do best’. He is the nephew of a general who has arranged for him to join the company of Captain Dennis Stanhope MC, three years older, a prefect whom he worshipped at school for his sporting prowess.

‘Uncle’ Osborne, a kindly middle-aged, greying ex-schoolmaster and second in command welcomes Raleigh to the trench and warns him that Stanhope has been changed by his years at the front. ‘It tells on a man – rather badly.’ Stanhope does his job well but he drinks constantly and his nerves are shot to pieces. He resents Raleigh’s presence and is cold to him because he holds a candle for Raleigh’s sister Madge and does not want reports of his degradation to filter back. ‘He’ll write to her and tell I reek of whisky all day.’

Stanhope is ordered to arrange a dangerous raid by Headquarters, to snatch a prisoner and gather information about the German attack that they know is imminent. Osborne and Raleigh are chosen as the two officers most likely to succeed on the mission, to go with ten volunteers. Trotter is too fat and Hibbert is not made of the right stuff. Stanhope would go but cannot be spared.

Meanwhile, Hibbert tries to go down the line to see the doctor about his neuralgia. Stanhope thinks he is ‘another worm trying to wriggle home’ to a comfortable nerve hospital. He pulls his revolver and threatens to shoot him if he leaves. Hibbert waits for the shot that never comes and then breaks down. Stanhope comforts him by praising the way he stood his ground and by confessing to his own fears. Grateful, Hibbert asks him not to mention the incident to the others. Stanhope agrees, as long as Hibbert doesn’t ‘tell anyone what a blasted funk I am.’

The raid produces one German prisoner and the Colonel is pleased. However, Osborne has been killed along with some other men and Stanhope is deprived of his closest friend and confessor. That evening he, Trotter and Hibbert binge on champagne and chicken in a pre-arranged but now empty celebration of the raid. Raleigh avoids the drunken dinner as it seems to him heartless in view of Osborne’s death. Stanhope after years in the trenches is bitterly used to concealing his feelings and brutally accuses the boy, unaccustomed to daily tragedy, of being a prig.

The big attack comes at dawn the next day. Shells rain down. Raleigh is hit immediately and his spine broken. He is carried down to the dugout. Stanhope comforts him, hiding from him the seriousness of the injury and they briefly rekindle their old school friendship. Raleigh dies. Stanhope then goes up top to join the men and repel the big attack. A shell hits the vacant dugout roof, entombing Raleigh’s body inside. The play ends with Stanhope and the remaining cast clearly doomed.

That is the outline of the play that would go around the world. Many thought Sherriff wrote the play during the war in which he was killed. But in fact he outlasted The Beatles. So what do we know about him? In old age he was still tall, almost completely bald, not an ounce of fat on him. The last public sighting of him was possibly at the opening of the Thames Ditton branch library in 1971. For a man of his shyness, the event was a nightmare. The District Librarian later wrote about Sherriff’s attempted escape in a local newsletter.

He was so panicky at the thought of meeting the audience afterwards that I actually had to stand in the doorway to block his exit – so that at least we got half-an-hour’s conversation out of him! He bore me no malice and I several times took sherry with him at his house, Rosebriars. The house contained oak cabinets with a complete collection of Roman coins, his ‘portrait gallery of the emperors’, as he would call it. Downstairs we would sit and enjoy his excellent sherry, with me sitting normally in an armchair and him sitting sideways on, dangling his long thin legs. He was full of nervous energy, describing to me such episodes as the time his regiment was posted to Glasgow in anticipation of a ‘red revolt’.1

Sherriff on another occasion gave a local talk about his house, Rosebriars, on Esher Park Avenue (now bulldozed and its large garden developed) and about his interest in archaeology that had led him to dig, with archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler, the Roman villa at Angmering on the Sussex coast, an experience which led to his play about a Roman family in Britain, The Long Sunset (1955). He gave a brief description of how Journey’s End came to be staged in the West End. There are similar short talks he gave in his fluting voice for the BBC in the National Sound Archive. But he left very little trace of himself.

Sherriff grew up in suburban obscurity in a detached house in Hampton Wick, just over the river from Kingston upon Thames, then a tiny village on a tram route. The house (2 Seymour Road) has recently been demolished for redevelopment, Sherriff’s name of insufficient note to save it. He was the son of Herbert Hankin Sherriff, an insurance clerk who married Constance Winder, the daughter of an architect from Iver, Buckinghamshire, in 1893. ‘Connie’ was nineteen when they married.

Herbert and Connie Sherriff produced three children: Beryl was born in 1893, Robert on 6 June 1896, and Cecil (known as ‘Bundy’) in 1899. Robert’s great-grandfather and his ancestors were governors of Aylesbury Gaol, a post that seems to have been hereditary. When the prison passed into military control so ended one hundred years of prison service from the Sherriff family. That meant a dip in the family’s social standing in the late Victorian era.

The reason Robert went into insurance is that his father and grandfather were both insurance men. Being ‘in the Sun’ was secure but very, very dull. Sherriff hated it and so did his father. Herbert Sherriff – a rather Pooterish man who always wanted to be an explorer – spent almost fifty years behind a desk shuffling claim forms. Robert noted that his father started as junior clerk in one corner of the office and forty-five years later ended up in the opposite corner as senior clerk, an average move, he computed, of five inches a year.

For the eccentric Sherriff Snr no amount of fresh air was ever enough. Robert noted in a draft chapter of his father’s unpublished autobiography a passion for detail. Nothing was too minute to record. Robert on reading it wrote:

And so it goes through the years – from Gladstone and Bismarck to Stanley Baldwin and Hitler. On the spare pages at the end of each diary appears a neat summary of his year’s achievements. I quote the results of 1912:

Bicycled 3276 miles.

Sculled 35 times on river.

Watched 29 cricket matches.

Caught 48 mice.

Stamp collection 2218 – increase in year 143.

Birds eggs 49.

3 colds.

Late at office 7 times (4 times owing to fog).

In 1929 Sherriff’s father wrote in his unputdownable diary:

Since 1876 I have bicycled 152,729 miles – equally 19 times round the world and over half way to the moon. Had enough of it. Sold bicycle this evening to Brooks in High Street for 35/– and gave bicycle clips to the boy next door.2

Of Robert’s mother I have found out very little except that he wrote his most revealing letters from the Western Front to her. In middle-age she was snowy-haired, sharp as a pin, and had a love affair with her dentist, according to her physiotherapist. Mrs Sherriff, bored with her husband’s hobbies and craving escape from his physical demands, sounds like a good candidate for one of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads monologues. She worked in a local hospital for much of the First World War. When her boy became famous she would accompany him to California where she cooked him roast Sunday lunches in the blazing sunshine.

Beryl, Robert’s sister, appeared on stage in two of his amateur plays written in the Twenties. She married a man called Tudor-Mash. His brother Bundy’s life remains similarly obscure except for the existence of a short war diary he started in September 1917. He had initially joined the Royal Flying Corps but was rejected as unfit for flying and ended up in the Royal Berkshire regiment, serving in France without incident. Nobody now alive knew Robert well. His eulogy in 1975 was given by his Esher GP, Dr Dixon, who knew him only superficially and in later years.

Before World War One the Sherriffs were the classic, self-improving, hobby-loving, card-playing, patriotic family of Edwardian middle-England. They kept chickens, took the tram to the shops, ate fried sole once a week, and every year Robert reread The Diary of a Nobody – a book close to home in its gentle mockery of suburban life. The annual holiday was in Bognor Regis, a ritual that was unvarying. In 1931 Sherriff published an internationally bestselling novel, The Fortnight in September. It’s about the yearly ritual of the Stevens family of 22 Corunna Road, Dulwich. The family go to the seaside and after all sorts of deeply minor incidents they come home again. It is a superb evocation of the utterly ordinary and it was a huge bestseller in its day.

The modest but respectable circumstances of the Sherriffs were curiously similar to those of the Coward family living just a mile away in Teddington where Noël was born in 1899 when Robert was three. Their lives were oddly parallel. Robert and Noël went into the same officer training camp. They had West End hits at exactly the same time. Coward’s spiritual home was the West End theatre and the Savoy Grill, whereas Sherriff was happy to stay put among the trimmed privet of outer London.

For a writer who chose public schoolboys as his subject, it comes as a surprise to find Sherriff didn’t go to one. His father could not afford public school fees but he managed the ten pounds a term needed for Kingston Grammar School, founded in 1561 (though its roots go back to the 13th century). Its famous old boys include the historian Edward Gibbon and playwright Michael Frayn. The school back in 1900 had just sixty pupils and no playing fields of its own. It aspired, though, to the public school idea of ‘muscular Christianity’, an ideal epitomised by Rugby School and its Victorian headmaster Thomas Arnold, who while no sports maniac himself, invented an educational system that taught that Jesus was a virile team captain and God existed somewhere in the scrummage. It was a source of family pride that the Sherriffs were, according to a family history drawn up by a relative, descended from the Elizabethan grocer Lawrence Sheriff [sic] who founded Rugby School. Rugby (the setting of Tom Brown’s Schooldays) was Sherriff’s ideal. In Journey’s End it becomes the fictional Barford where Raleigh and Stanhope were at school together.

There was no question of university. His father hadn’t the money. Robert left school at seventeen and joined his father’s world of insurance. It involved wearing a high stiff collar, a commute to Trafalgar Square on the train and then eight hours of filing and writing ‘paid’ against names in heavy ledgers. It was a career that should have ended in the late 1950s with a modest pension and a watch. When the war came, the eighteen year old saw it as his heaven-sent ticket out – along with half the country bored to death by their stultifying jobs.

Between August 1914 and December 1915, two and a half million men enlisted. It was the largest volunteer army ever seen and initially it took its officers from an approved list of public schools. Sherriff naturally wanted to be an officer. ‘An officer, I realised, had to be a bit above the others, but I had had some experience of responsibility. I had been captain of games at school. I was fit and strong. I was surely one of the “suitable young men” they were calling for.’3

He was wrong. At his army interview the boy in front of him was from Winchester College. He was immediately accepted. Fully expecting the same treatment, Sherriff announced his school. The adjutant scanned the list. ‘I’m sorry’, he said. ‘But our instructions are that all applicants for commissions must be selected from the recognised public schools, and yours is not among them.’ And that was that.

The interview Sherriff described has been quoted in studies of the British army and its fast-changing sociology as it massively expanded. As the public schoolboys were wiped out (more officers were killed in the first few months of the war than in the previous 100 years put together) the army widened the net. Sherriff’s rejection was illogical. In many ways he had the right education in that grammar schools were carbon copies of the public schools; lots of sport, Classics, prefect privileges, and a house system to encourage loyalty. As his own school was centuries older than many of the public schools on the army list, he had extra reason to be resentful.

Sherriff didn’t leave his humiliating interview in a fury. That was not his style. He rationalised his rejection and was even, decades later, able to stick up for the army’s logic in choosing officers the way it did. Looking back, he wrote: ‘For the most part they came from modest homes, the sons of local lawyers, doctors, or schoolmasters... Pride in their schools would easily translate into pride for a regiment. Above all, without conceit or snobbery, they were conscious of a personal superiority that placed on their shoulders an obligation towards those less privileged than themselves.’⁴ According to Sherriff the ranks liked them because these officers were ‘young swells, and with few exceptions young swells delivered the goods.’⁵ These were the sporty, modest, unswanking school types he would immortalise in his play.

In June 1915, Sherriff requested that Sun Insurance let him go. He was desperate to get into uniform. The company was already depleted and did not want to keep his place open, let alone pay his salary while he was at the Front. His boss commended his patriotic instinct but said no. So Sherriff left without permission.

In November 1915 he enlisted with the Artists Rifles, one of twenty-eight volunteer battalions that had combined to form the London Regiment before the war. The romantic-sounding outfit was formed in 1859 by painters, engravers and artists with Lord Leighton and John Millais leading the pack. Its headquarters were in Dukes Road, Bloomsbury and it recruited mostly graduates with a high number of musicians, actors, architects and newspapermen. By the time war broke out, the Artists had become an officer training corps and clearing house. Its men would be commissioned into other regiments. It had a terrible casualty rate. 6,000 of the 15,000 serving Artists would be killed, wounded or posted missing or captured. The Artists was Sherriff’s first proper taste of military life.

1    Esher District Local History Society Newsletter, Winter 2005

2    Surrey History Centre, ref 2332

3    R.C.S., Promise of Greatness, p.136

4    Ibid., p.135

5    Ibid., p.154