Civvy Street
One explanation for the play’s extraordinary success is that women loved it and they made up a good deal of its audience. Soon after it opened, the Daily Mail, ever sensitive to its female readers, ran a piece headlined ‘Women Thrilled By Dug Out Dramas’ by James Dunn, a war veteran. ‘What a lot we talked about food... This talk of food interests the women in the audience. They see men keeping house, and they smile at the well-meant efforts of the mess cook, the tragedy of no pepper, the importance of tinned pineapple over tinned apricots, and the pervading influence of onions on tea’.40
Sherriff also explained how the show seemed to have a magnetic pull. ‘Women recognized their sons, their brothers or their husbands, many of whom had not returned. The play made it possible for them to journey into the trenches and share the lives that their men had led. For this I could claim no personal credit. I wrote the play the way it came, and it just happened by chance that the way I wrote it was the way people wanted it.’41
The only person I interviewed who saw the show in 1929 was Rosemary Price, mother of the late Jill Fraser who ran the Watermill Theatre in Berkshire. ‘I was nineteen and it was the first serious show I had been taken to,’ she said. ‘People were still very emotional about the war. They saw an aspect they hadn’t seen before which was the life in the trenches, it was very shocking to see the conditions under which they had to live. It must have been the first time most people realised what a horrible situation the men were in. I remember it was sordid. I also heard a lot of sniffing – the whole theatre was in tears. I fell in love with Colin Clive – I think a lot of us did!’
The author Rebecca West was one of the few women to have written about the play at the time. She saw it four times before deciding she didn’t like it. She saw it as a play very like Young Woodley and Prisoners of War in being full of young men having schoolgirl crushes – or ‘raves’ as she called them. ‘They all have this obsession with immaturity,’42 she wrote. The play reminded her just how young the soldiers were. When Stanhope and Raleigh arrived at the front they were eighteen. Sherriff gave us the two extremes of survival at the front – Raleigh lasted less than a week, Stanhope three years. Journey’s End became a West End memorial for all those boys who hadn’t returned as well as a point of reunion for those that had. It also gained from one simple fact: after the war there were no war graves in Britain to visit and tend. This was due to the amazingly progressive decision that the dead would all remain in France and Flanders whatever their families’ wishes in the matter. The Imperial War Graves Commission also democratically mixed all ranks together.
The cemeteries – several were designed by Gertrude Jekyll who set their homely pattern – are to this day exquisitely kept with English flowers and shrubs in the flowerbeds. The silence in them is deafening. Kipling came up with the simple words carved on each of the headstones of the unidentified: ‘A Soldier of the Great War – Known Unto God.’ This is in stark contrast to the French war graves where the missing get a nasty concrete cross with a metal plaque with one word – inconnu.
Sherriff returned to the Front as a visitor in the early Twenties. He brought into his play the idea of some sort of dramatic communion with the war dead – and he did it while largely avoiding charges of writing emotional dope. His play, like the cemeteries, became a focal point for veterans and war widows. On the night before Armistice Day 1929 the show was staged exclusively for holders of the Victoria Cross (628 were won in the war, one man winning it twice) and their wives. The evening was a great success although one sergeant overdid it in the bar before the play and stood to attention every time the Colonel made an appearance on stage. On Armistice Day itself Journey’s End was broadcast by the BBC despite opposition from Lord Reith who thought the play had too many bangs in it. The Radio Times ran a dull full-page appreciation of the play by Charles Morgan. The Savoy Theatre became a place of where the war could be relived with just enough laughter to undercut the solemnity of the subject. The play told it like it was without upsetting the applecart with any complicated cynicism.
The success of the show was less explicable to those untouched by the war. A couple of months after it opened, the producer Harry M. Tennent had a champagne lunch with the young Binkie Beaumont, to become his legendary associate. Their conversation included two great theatre mysteries of the day: why the sinister Charles Laughton had ever been cast as the jovial Mr Pickwick and how Journey’s End was still playing to capacity at the Savoy. ‘I just can’t understand it. Not a woman in sight and who wants to remember the war?’ said Binkie.43
He was right to be puzzled. It’s true, by and large nobody wanted to remember the war, not even the survivors. The Depression gave officers and men a sort of grim equality. There are many stories of demobbed colonels repairing prams, majors selling door to door, never mind the vast legion of exprivates in far more dire circumstances. Employers were sick of hearing about war service and, in the case of officers, their man management skills learned in the trenches. Veterans were despised.
Half of the officers in 9/East Surrey would be dead by the mid-1930s, their ends probably hastened by their wounds. The survivors of the war, however, were a huge problem that wouldn’t go away. In 1928-29, the year of the play, some 65,000 veterans were still shaking in mental hospitals. Men had returned home with altered personalities – sullen or facetious – often unrecognisable to their families. Most were prone to sudden tears. Down on the Embankment you could find no shortage of Stanhopes and Raleighs who had long since climbed inside a bottle, their medals pawned and war gratuities blown. There’s a piercing description by historian Hugh Cecil of an imaginary group of ex-officers hanging around in the bar of a peeling South Kensington hotel, drinking gin-and-it with vague dreams of starting a casino or a nightclub. ‘Untrained save for giving orders, killing and being killed, they were an embarrassment that most people preferred to forget’.44
The war had not been successfully swept under the carpet by the hectic gaiety of the Twenties because the carpet wasn’t anything like big enough. The theatre profession was a haven for ex-soldiers. Sherriff never detailed his cast’s collective military past but it was quite astonishing. The original Journey’s End team had more real-life battle experience than any other play before or since. George Zucco (playing Osborne) was in the West Yorkshire regiment and wounded in a raid at St Quentin where the play is set. The chunky Melville Cooper (Trotter) was with the Seaforth Highlanders and had also been taken prisoner of war. James Whale, the director, was captured when as an officer he led an assault on an enemy pillbox and walked into a German trap. David Horne (Captain Hardy) had been a captain in the Grenadier Guards and was wounded in battle. Alexander Field (Mason, the cook) wore the same puttees on stage as he had worn in the trenches. H. G. Stoker (a relative of Dracula author Bram Stoker) played the Colonel. Stoker got the DSO as commander of the first submarine to get through the Dardanelles. He was attacked by an Ottoman torpedo boat, scuttled his vessel and was taken to a prison camp where, like Whale, he devised shows for the chaps. By 1928 these men were jobbing actors glad of a total of £5, which is what the Stage Society paid them for three weeks’ work. It’s a safe bet that one or two of these war veterans knew what it was like to go hungry between acting jobs.
What did the cast secretly think of their producer who emerged from the war unscathed? One wonders. Sherriff was always polite about his producer to whom on one level he was deeply grateful for turning his play into an international smash. But he must have been struck by the irony of having his war play produced by a conscientious objector who had stayed safely in America for the duration. ‘One would have thought, in the circumstances, that he would have had a violent revulsion against a war play, in which no word of condemnation was uttered by any of its characters,’ mused Sherriff.45
40 Daily Mail 19 February 1929
41 R.C.S., No Leading Lady, p.109
42 Rebecca West, Ending in Earnest, p.49
43 Richard J. Huggett, Binkie Beaumont, p.88
44 Hugh Cecil, The Flower of Battle, p.269
45 R.C.S., No Leading Lady, pp.72-73