Terry Nation moved to London in January 1955 at the age of twenty-four, intending, in his words, ‘to be an actor or comedian or something – I wasn’t very sure what’. The city that he found was just emerging, somewhat to its own surprise, into the dawn of an extraordinary period in British cultural history. The previous July had seen the celebration of Derationing Day, when bacon and meat finally came off the ration, marking an end to all wartime restrictions on food and other goods. Although the city was still pockmarked with bombsites left over from the Blitz, even in such affluent areas as Oxford Street, there was a sense of having left behind the long, wearying struggle of the Second World War and the ensuing period of Austerity.
In their place came the first stirrings of a new consumer-based society. The year of Nation’s arrival was to see key events that would transform the country’s identity: the launch of independent television, providing a second channel to break the BBC’s previous monopoly; the opening of Mary Quant’s Bazaar, the first of the London boutiques that would become world famous over the next decade; and the arrival from America of rock and roll in the shape of the hit single ‘Rock Around the Clock’ by Bill Haley and his Comets, together with the British response, Lonnie Donegan’s ‘Rock Island Line’, the record that launched the skiffle craze. The following year built on these foundations, with the emergence of Elvis Presley and the coming of the Angry Young Men, the latter announcing themselves in the shape of John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger and Colin Wilson’s book The Outsider. There was also the first sighting of pop art in the exhibition This Is Tomorrow, featuring Richard Hamilton’s collage ‘Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?’, a celebration of the American dream as revealed through advertising.
Meanwhile the world of comedy, in which Nation hoped to make his mark, was in the grip of the revolutionary radio series The Goon Show, though a newly launched radio sitcom, Hancock’s Half Hour, was fast emerging as an even more influential and popular rival.
But if it were bliss to be alive in those days, no one had told the establishment, which remained largely unaware of this groundswell of innovation, these early manifestations of a youth culture that would soon sweep the country and then much of the rest of the world. The radicalism of the late 1940s had faded from British political life, and when Nation arrived in London, the prime minister was still 80-year-old Winston Churchill, kept in power more by sentiment than sense. Although he was soon to be replaced by the comparatively youthful Anthony Eden (born as recently as 1897), the opposition leaders in the 1955 General Election – Clement Attlee of Labour and Clement Davies of the Liberals – were both in their seventies.
Even these staid circles, however, were soon to be disrupted, first by the humiliation of the Suez Crisis, when it became apparent that British foreign policy could no longer be determined without reference to the USA, and then by the noisy arrival of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, bringing a sense that a younger generation wanted to have a say in building a new country. In the meantime, hopeful young men and women flocked to London from the provinces, determined – like Nation – to make their mark, to embrace the new cultural opportunities that were opening up.
Terence Joseph Nation was born in Llandaff, Cardiff in 1930, the only child of Bert and Sue, as Gilbert Joseph Nation and Susan Nation (née Norris) were generally known. It was not an auspicious time or place. Cardiff was the largest city in Wales, with a population of just over a quarter of a million, but it was already in serious decline, the splendour of its civic buildings looking back to past glories in the late nineteenth century, with little sense of hope for the future. In its heyday it had provided the focal point for the South Wales collieries in the valleys that stretched northwards and westwards from the city; its docks shipped coal to all corners of the world, and attracted labour from similarly far-flung places. Continuing expansion had seemed inevitable and inexorable in the years up to the First World War, but in the 1920s demand for coal began to fall. Shipping turned increasingly to oil for its primary fuel, the international markets struggled to recover from the post-war slump, and production costs rose, the more accessible seams having been worked out. Further losses were sustained as British industry went into recession at the end of the decade; coal production fell to half its level at the turn of the century and, in the words of one contemporary account, ‘unemployment descended on the valleys like a deadly and malignant disease’. More than a third of miners in the South Wales coalfields were out of work by the early 1930s and Cardiff, so dependent on that industry, was registering unemployment levels of over twenty per cent.
In the midst of the decline came the events of 1926, when miners throughout the country went on strike, resisting the mine-owners’ attempt to protect profits by cutting wages and increasing working hours. Under the slogan ‘not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day’, the conflict dragged on for several months, despite a general strike that was called in solidarity but collapsed after just nine days. It was – in terms of working days lost – the most severe industrial dispute Britain had ever witnessed, and it ended with complete victory for the employers. Memories of the bitterness of the time remained for years to come, exacerbated by the ensuing depression and by the desperation of the miners’ hunger march that left Cardiff in 1931, the year that annual coal production in Britain fell below a thousand million tons for the first time in the century. Decades later, when the novelist John Summers, who had known Terry Nation in Cardiff, wrote his classic Edge of Violence, a thinly fictionalised retelling of the 1966 Aberfan disaster, he placed that tragedy in the context of a long history of neglect and oppression, looking back to the 1930s when ‘foraging parties of starved miners started raiding the farms over the mountain to dig up hardening beets and swedes out of the ground and bring them home to their children small-faced with hunger’. Born in Rhymney in 1928, Summers remembered his childhood ‘as a time of soup made from a single slice of bacon and water and salt and an onion’.
Terry Nation, with a self-employed furniture restorer and salesman as a father and with a house-proud mother (‘stiff and starchy’, as one friend described her), was at one stage removed from those events. The fact that his birth was announced in a paid notice in the South Wales Echo, as well as his time in a private school, suggests that this was a family with social aspirations pointing firmly away from the mining villages of the valleys. Similarly the area they lived in was relatively affluent. ‘Llandaff,’ remembered a resident of the working-class Grangetown district in the early 1940s, ‘was a different planet. I could not believe the size of the houses and gardens, but the area did seem dull compared with the clamour and bustle of Lower Grange.’ Nonetheless, it would have been difficult for an imaginative child to live in Cardiff through those times without being affected by the hardship and anger that was everywhere evident, and Nation was to talk in later life of ‘the far-left socialism of his youth’.
It was an era that he memorably evoked in ‘The Assistant’, a 1963 episode of the television series Hancock, with a character named Owen Bowen (played by the Welsh actor Kenneth Griffith) recalling the deprivation of the time: ‘Unemployment. Men standing brooding on street corners. Sad-eyed women, too proud to beg, laying empty tables.’ Despite being ostensibly a comedy, the show also featured a long monologue from Owen recalling the miners’ defiance, with not a joke in sight: ‘We were striking for a living wage, and they tried to force us into submission through starvation. But we wouldn’t bend. So what did they do? They sent in the army. Armed troops against women and children! So what did we do? We formed a solid line, Welshman arm-in-arm with Welshman, a thin line of courage against the might of the English army …’
Nothing else in Nation’s work came close to this explicit account of the society he was born into, but traces of his hatred of injustice and social oppression run through much of his best writing and surely have their roots here. It’s also noticeable that more than once in his comedy-writing days he uses a joke about a character being able to trace their ancestry all the way back to their parents. Mixing in the Oxbridge circles that dominated the BBC in the 1950s and 1960s, he was conscious that he was not from that world.
Meanwhile, popular culture in Cardiff was split between two competing factions. On the one hand, there was the entertainment found in the pubs, clubs and picture-houses through the working week; on the other, religion in church and chapel on Sundays. There were, for example, already fourteen cinemas in the town at the time of his birth, most having made the transition from silent movies to talkies (though some silents were still being shown), but just as significant was the space allocated every week by the South Wales Echo for semi-display adverts touting the forthcoming attractions on the Sabbath. It was normal for forty or fifty religious services to be thus promoted, advertising a range of sects that centred on the mainstream world of low church Protestantism – Baptists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Wesleyans – while allowing a little room on the fringes for groups such as the Christian Scientists, Spiritualists and Salvation Army.
The divide between the two cultures was such that, on a Sunday, pubs were legally prevented from opening and cinemas were not permitted to show films, regulations that didn’t apply twenty-five miles to the east, over the Severn Estuary and into England. It was not until 1952 that it became permissible to screen a movie on the Sabbath, and only in 1961 were local authorities allowed to poll their electorates on whether the bar on pub opening should continue (not all took advantage of the opportunity). But there were, of course, ways around the rules. Private members’ clubs – where alcohol could be sold – enjoyed a thriving trade on Sundays, while the cinemas responded to the ban by putting on shows featuring dance bands and comedians, though there were restrictions even on those performances. There were all sorts of strange rules and regulations,’ remembered Stan Stennett, the city’s leading post-war comedian, who lived a couple of streets away from the Nations. ‘You could do a show on a Sunday but you weren’t allowed to be a double-act or talk to anyone onstage. There was no cross-patter on a Sunday, because of the licence.’
Of these rival claims for his affections, there was little doubt that for Nation the cinema won hands down over church. There was a religious influence on his upbringing – apart from formal church-going, he spent a great deal of time at the house of his father’s friend, Bob White, the Anglican verger of Llandaff Cathedral – and the influence of the work ethic fostered by religion was evident throughout his life. ‘I’m a prolific writer because I’m always uneasy,’ he was to reflect. ‘Maybe it’s my Welsh guilt that I can’t really sit around and not do anything. I feel very guilty if I’m in a room and not actually working at the table.’
But the cinema loomed far larger. He became addicted to the magic of the picture-houses, the dark crowded theatres, thick with clouds of cigarette and pipe smoke through which the imagery of Hollywood could be seen flickering on a screen, briefly transporting a huddled, rain-sodden mass to a far-off land of glamour and wealth. Nation found his escape from everyday reality in that dream of America, as did so much of the country in the years of depression, those slightly older than him fuelling their fantasies with mass-produced clothes bought on hire purchase. ‘You may have three halfpence in your pocket and not a prospect in the world,’ wrote George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), ‘but in your new clothes you can stand on the street corner, indulging in a private daydream of yourself as Clark Gable or Greta Garbo, which compensates you for a great deal.’
Nation may have been too young to express his dreams quite so overtly, but he would have understood the sentiment and for him, fantasy was always liable to take precedence over the mundane reality of education. ‘He played truant for one whole term,’ recounted his wife, Kate. ‘He got found out because he’d been given these cheques for his school fees and finally the headmaster rang his mother and asked where the money was. And it was still in his pocket. He’d been to the movies every afternoon.’ As he remembered, ‘I grew up in the front row of the local Odeon.’
The nature of the films that Nation encountered, however, was not quite as wide-ranging as he perhaps would have wished. Desperately few science fiction movies were available in the late 1930s and 1940s, with the exception of single-reel serials like Flash Gordon, nor was the cinema able to satisfy his childhood taste for horror stories. (‘I read a lot of horror fiction,’ he was to reflect; ‘gave myself the scares in the dark’.) There had been a spate of impressive and successful horror movies coming over from America but, in an early panic about the influence of cinema, their popularity had prompted British film censors to introduce in 1937 a new ‘H’ certificate, restricting the viewing of such material to those aged sixteen or over. A few years later, a decision was made in official circles that fictional horror was not conducive to civilian morale during wartime, and between 1942 and 1945 ‘H’ certificate films were banned altogether; just at the age when an adolescent, particularly one as tall as Nation, should have been trying to sneak in to see a movie for adults, the opportunity was snatched away.
The only home-grown rival to the dominance of the cinema was BBC radio, the first truly national cultural phenomenon that the country had known. The British Broadcasting Company had begun transmissions in 1922, at which stage there were just 35,000 licences in the country, permitting the bearers to receive the early broadcasts. By the time of Nation’s birth, that figure had risen to three million and it was to treble in the following decade, while the BBC had been transformed into the British Broadcasting Corporation, established under a royal charter as the monopoly provider of services: the first nationalised industry. It was not, though, without rivals, particularly at the weekend, when the entertainment on offer left a great deal to be desired. For John Reith, the first director general of the corporation, shared with the Welsh establishment a determination that Sundays should be ‘quiet islands on the tossing sea of life’, and that the programmes broadcast on that day should therefore ensure that ‘the lamps are lit before the Lord and the message and music of eternity move through the infinities of the ether’.
As the social clubs and cinemas of Wales had demonstrated, however, a resourceful people could always find an alternative to the sober fare that resulted from such attitudes, and a number of foreign-based stations soon emerged, aiming their transmitters at Britain and broadcasting in English in the expectation of picking up advertising revenue (the BBC was, of course, a non-profit making enterprise that didn’t air commercials). Among these foreign rivals were Radio Lyons, Radio Normandy, Radio Toulouse and, most famously, Radio Luxembourg, which started in 1933 and was within a few months broadcasting from noon to midnight. With the most powerful transmitter in Europe and the most expensive advertising space in the world, Luxembourg was seen as a threat by both the BBC and Fleet Street and was met with a complete news blackout in Britain: its schedules weren’t included in the radio listings, and its existence was simply ignored. Nonetheless it soon attracted some five million listeners, proving particularly popular on the Sabbath; the BBC lost half its Sunday audience, and a survey showed that sixty per cent of listeners had acquired the habit of tuning into the continental stations.
The departure of Reith in 1938 allowed some relaxation of his rigorous standards – ‘I do not pretend to give the public what it wants,’ he had once proclaimed – but it was not until the outbreak of war in September 1939 that there was a genuine move to respond to the wishes and demands of the new mass audience. A second national channel was launched, aimed at those in uniform and known as the Forces Programme, with the existing channel being renamed the Home Service. Considerably lighter in tone than the BBC had previously allowed itself to be (the first show, on Sunday 7 January 1940, was a half-hour broadcast by Gracie Fields), the Forces Programme heralded a new era, with the radio becoming ever more influential.
The structure of the audience also changed. In the early days, listening to the radio had been primarily a communal, friends-and-family affair, so that the broadcast of George V’s speech opening the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924 had been heard by six million people, many times more than the number of receivers in the country; it was the first time in British history that a substantial section of the population had been able to hear their monarch’s voice and, apart from anything else, there was considerable interest in what he actually sounded like. But conditions were different now: most households boasted their own radio set, millions of men were away from home in the forces, and the continental competition had been snuffed out. (Luxembourg ceased broadcasting immediately after war was declared, making a return only when its facilities were taken over by the Germans and used to broadcast the propaganda of William Lord ‘Haw Haw’ Joyce.) In this world, the BBC acquired a new role, linking atomised households and individuals, making them feel part of a whole, and bringing them together under a common national banner; even the new king, George VI, and his family were reported to be fans of the country’s biggest comedy shows, Band Waggon and ITMA. This was still a shared experience – particularly in those factories where radio was ever-present – but domestically its nature was evolving. The old image of a family congregated around a wireless set had, to some extent, been replaced by the solitary listener at home, conscious of the fact that he or she was a member of an audience comprising anonymous millions of others.
This was especially true of Nation and his contemporaries, the first generation to grow up with radio as a soundtrack to their lives. And of particular significance for this generation were two drama series, Saturday Night Theatre and Appointment with Fear (the latter memorably hosted by Valentine Dyall, the Man in Black), that started in 1943 and brought tales of mystery, detection and suspense to a cult audience. Together with occasional shows like The Saint (1940), adapted from the stories by Leslie Charteris, these were the first examples of broadcast drama to make a major impact. ‘They were very influential,’ reflected Brian Clemens. 'I used to listen to them in the Blitz, because I lived in Croydon, which was heavily bombed, and I spent most of my sleeping time in an Anderson shelter or a Morrison shelter.’
Nation too lived in the shadow of the Blitz, with the first big air raid on Cardiff coming in January 1941, at the cost of more than 150 lives. ‘For over five hours German planes, sweeping over the city, dropped thousands of incendiaries and numerous high explosive bombs,’ reported the local paper, while the account in The Times said the intensity of the firebombing was such ‘that it was possible to read a newspaper in the street’. Although the Luftwaffe saw the docks as its primary target, areas further inland were also hit: Llandaff Cathedral, a few hundred yards from the Nations’ home, was damaged so badly it was obliged to close its doors for fifteen months. The imagery of the Second World War and of the Nazis was to recur through much of Nation’s adult work, to such an extent that it was sometimes mocked by critics (‘a common Nation trait’, notes one guide to The Avengers), though it would perhaps have been more surprising if it hadn’t been present. ‘I was a wartime child,’ he reflected. ‘My dad went off to the army and my mother was an ARP, an air-raid warden. I was an only child and I used to spend nights alone in an air-raid shelter. And I would make up stories for myself – I was entertaining me in those days. There was no television, of course, but I used to listen to the radio, and I also read a great deal.’
It was that reading, intensified by the experience of the bombing, that did most to shape Nation’s future writing. The range was diverse: there was some science fiction, primarily H.G. Wells and Jules Verne; there were detective stories, still dominated by Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales of Sherlock Holmes, though augmented in the early 1940s by the sensational arrival of Raymond Chandler; there was horror literature, particularly the great myths of the late Victorians, Dracula and Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde, as well as the Edwardian ghost stories of M.R. James and W.W. Jacobs; and above all there was a rich vein of adventure stories that reached back to the likes of H. Rider Haggard and G.A. Henty and continued forward to John Buchan and C.S. Forester, as well as a host of their imitators.
This latter was a deep and exciting tradition for a boy in the 1930s and 1940s, celebrating quests to distant, exotic lands, and telling tales of tunnels and treasure maps, jungles and journeys, war and discovery. It had no interest in the bureaucratic administrators of later colonial fiction, looking rather to the glory days of frontier imperialism, when the world still lay spread out for the taking, if one only had the good fortune to be born British, with a streak of derring-do and a taste for pushing oneself to one’s limits. Set in a world populated almost exclusively by men, though often with a boy at the centre of the narrative, these novels made it clear that true romance lay in loyalty and honour, rather than in love and women. The spirit of the knight errant was reborn on the African veldt, in the jungles and remote mountains of Asia, and on the high seas.
This was the heritage, the mythology that still loomed large, even though by the time of Nation’s own childhood it seemed as though there was precious little left of such pioneering aspirations, particularly in the aftermath of the war that was supposed to end all wars, and that certainly – for a while at least – had ended the fictional romance of war. It was a long way from the heroic death of General Gordon, standing proud in the face of the Mahdi masses in faraway Khartoum, to the anonymous slaughter at Passchendaele, and as society struggled to adjust to that change, it seemed far less amenable to the old breed of hero. John Buchan’s novel, The Island off Sheep (1936), the last to feature his secret agent Richard Hannay, begins with our hero on a suburban train in southern England, reminiscing about the great days at the turn of the century when ‘the afterglow of Cecil Rhodes’s spell still lay on Africa, and men could dream dreams’. As he looks round the compartment at the ‘flabby eupeptic faces’ of commuters returning home from the City, he reflects melancholically on the realities of modern Britain: ‘Brains and high ambition had perished, and the world was for the comfortable folk like the man opposite me.’
In due course, a new generation of hero emerged from the pens of Sapper and others. Wealthy young men of action, they mostly operated in the high society of London in the inter-war years, though they were happy enough to step outside society’s conventions of behaviour when justice demanded it. Stories featuring some of this new breed – Leslie Charteris’s Simon Templar, aka the Saint, and John Creasey’s Baron – were later to be adapted for television by Nation, but there always seemed to be a place in his heart for the previous generation, whose attitudes survived in the stories found in the boys’ weekly magazines of the 1930s, the likes of Wizard, Champion and Hotspur. Here the Wild West still loomed larger than the Western Front, and the only acknowledgement of the recent war came in tales not of the trenches, but of the much more glamorous exploits of the Royal Flying Corps (Nation was a big fan of W.E. Johns’s books about the air ace Biggles). The core of such magazines were detective stories, tales of exploration, and colourful adventures that featured variants on stock characters such as Tarzan and Robin Hood; there was little that couldn’t have been found in the Edwardian era, save for the emergence, towards the end of the 1930s, of some science fiction, primarily concerned with space travel, Martians and death rays.
This adventure tradition, both in novels and magazines, dominated the reading of boys in the 1930s, and Nation’s love of it runs through his own writing. Its celebration of the spirit of adventure, of improvised resourcefulness, of the qualities of leadership, were to form the backbone to much of his own work, finding their happiest incarnation in the character of Jimmy Garland in Survivors, a joyously triumphant throwback to the world of Buchan. ‘He’s acting like a character from a boy’s own adventure story,’ snorts one of Garland’s enemies. Indeed he was, and no one was more aware of it than Nation, whose writing resonated with echoes of this world.
Given his voracious reading (‘I read everything that was available to me’), it wasn’t long before Nation was making up his own stories, ‘mostly with me as the hero’. Such a quality was not always appreciated in a society dominated by the very literal values of the church. ‘I was always believed to be a terrible liar,’ he said in later life. ‘Nowadays they would say, “He’s got a wonderful imagination,” but in those days I was just “that liar”.’ On one occasion in school, the class was set the standard writing assignment of ‘What I did on my holidays’. Having done nothing much, he wrote instead a fictional tale of a holiday on a barge. ‘The teacher looked at me and said, “Were you on a barge, Nation?” I said, “No,” and he said, “This is all bloody rubbish then, isn’t it?”’ The lack of encouragement seems to have done little to dissuade him. A friend, Harry Greene, who met him in 1945, recalls him telling stories that were ‘often stretched beyond what was credible’, as when he deliberately set out to scare Elsie White, wife of the verger Bob, with a tale about seeing a ghost through the window of Llandaff Cathedral.
His view of the schooling he received was to be seen in a passage from his original script for ‘The Daleks’ (though it was cut from the final version), in which the Doctor berates his companion, Ian Chesterton, for failing to understand the significance of the metal floors in the Dalek city: ‘Chesterton, your total lack of imagination appals me. When I remember that you were a schoolmaster, it makes me glad that you are now here, and can no longer influence the minds of those poor unsuspecting children who were once your pupils.’
Nation’s childhood absorption of influences was to change markedly following the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor and America’s subsequent entry into the war. However remote those events may have appeared, it wasn’t long before GIs were arriving in Britain, and with them came a new note in the cultural life of the country. Signs of an interest in American culture had already been apparent when the BBC Forces Programme began to air bought-in comedy shows such as The Jack Benny Half Hour, The Bob Hope Programme and The Charlie McCarthy Show, but the real breakthrough was the appearance of the American Forces Network (AFN), which started broadcasting from London on 4 July 1943 and was relayed around the country. ‘They did transmissions of all the American shows,’ remembered Nation, ‘and I’d hear Bob Hope, Jack Benny and all the big stars of that time. I loved the American sound, the jokes, the feel.’
He wasn’t the only one to fall under the spell, for a whole generation of future writers was to find its tastes affected. ‘We listened closely to American comedy shows transmitted on the American Forces Network in Europe,’ remembered Frank Muir, one of the first new comedy writers to emerge after the war. ‘We had a lot to learn from American radio comedy in those days.’ Another of the coming men, Bob Monkhouse, would later talk about ‘our personal pantheon of comedy gods like Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Jack Benny and Phil Silvers’, and the Welsh comedian Wyn Calvin similarly recognised the impact made by AFN: ‘Youngsters with an ambition to be amusing were glued to those programmes. It gave them a new comedy, away from the variety programmes.’
The memory of those shows was to remain with Nation all his life, long after their direct influence had evaporated. Well into the late 1980s he was still jokingly claiming to be thirty-nine years old, a running gag in Jack Benny’s routines that he had first encountered in his childhood. But even more important was the stationing of large numbers of American troops in Cardiff. ‘Suddenly there they were,’ he recalled, ‘with their ice cream, their chocolate and their comic books. Those wonderful American comic books became an influence, too. Superman, maybe Batman too. They were a great breath of fresh air after the Dandy and the Beano.’ For the first time, the transient images of America that had illuminated the cinemas for the last decade and more were acquiring a tangible, physical presence; now there were holy relics of the promised land that could be handled and taken home, cherished and consumed.
The luxury of those items, the lavish size and quality of the comics in particular, was almost unimaginable to a child living in a country that had by now survived the worst of the Blitz, but was still struggling through on ration books and the occasional foray into the black economy. The publisher D.C. Thomson had begun something of a revolution in British comics in 1937 with the launch of the Dandy, followed swiftly by the Beano and by Magic, all of them cheerier and cheekier than their predecessors, but they faced a major setback with the outbreak of war. Paper in Britain was made primarily from wood pulp shipped from Scandinavia and, with the growing threat of U-boat attacks, such supplies were hard to come by. Newspapers voluntarily reduced their size by around fifty per cent in an attempt to preserve paper stocks, and children’s comics were similarly hard hit; Magic disappeared entirely, and the Beano and Dandy switched from weekly to fortnightly publication, alternating with each other, while they too shrank in size. Other titles, popular with boys as well as adults, also went out of existence, including Detective Weekly, home of Sexton Blake, and The Thriller, which had nurtured gentlemen outlaws of the 1930s like the Saint, the Toff and Norman Conquest. In March 1940, just before the fall of Norway made the position even more precarious, the formal rationing of paper was introduced by the government.
By 1944 book production was at less than half its pre-war level, and educationalists were warning of a serious crisis as textbooks became ever more difficult to obtain. The situation had been exacerbated by the actions of the Luftwaffe, with an estimated 20 million volumes destroyed as a result of the bombing of Britain. Demand for books remained high, partly – it was argued – because of the need for escapism, and partly because the absence of so many goods from the shops meant that people had a higher disposable income than before the war, but there was a desperate shortage of supply. In this context, an American Superman comic would fall into the hands of a 13-year-old boy like Terry Nation as though it were manna from heaven. The child psychologist P.M. Pickard campaigned in the 1950s against the influence of the American comics, but even she recognised their appeal: ‘The glossy paper, the brilliant colours and the clear type far outshone anything the war-surrounded children remembered ever seeing.’ The contrast between the real experience of Britain and the fantasy imagery of America instilled a fascination with that country that was to dominate the post-war era, for Nation as for so many others.
Paper shortages continued after the end of the war. It wasn’t until 1949 that Harold Wilson, then president of the Board of Trade, was able to announce that the rationing of paper was to end, by which time the damage had, for many, already been done. Strand magazine, where the likes of Sherlock Holmes and A.J. Raffles had made their first appearances, announced that year that it could no longer afford to continue, though the Beano and the Dandy had survived and were able to return to weekly publication. In the interim, the departure of the GIs had left a generation bereft, and the publishers of American comics, having discovered that there was a voracious appetite in Britain, responded by flooding the country with imported material, to the immense annoyance of their rationed competitors; in the immediate post-war years, the entire British publishing trade was restricted to around 2,000 tons of paper per month, the same quantity that was being shipped in every year in the form of comics. For Nation, who remained an avid reader of the imports, the gulf between the American and British productions was now even more marked, with a clear age divide having opened up; it was not until 1950 and the launch of the Eagle that comic publishers at home recognised that there was a demand to be met not simply among children but among adolescents as well. And by then, although he was fond of the Eagle, it was really too late for him.
Nation celebrated his fifteenth birthday on the day that the Soviet Union declared war on Japan, the event that precipitated that country’s surrender and finally brought the Second World War to a close. The previous month a General Election had swept out of power the Conservative administration of Winston Churchill and replaced it with a Labour government headed by Clement Attlee. Among its reforms were the creation of the National Health Service, under the guidance of South Wales’s most famous politician, Aneurin Bevan, and the nationalisation of the mining industry; on New Year’s Day 1947 notices appeared right across the country’s coalfields proclaiming: ‘This colliery is now managed by the National Coal Board on behalf of the people.’ If that was to prove a little optimistic, it did at least reflect a desire that the hardship of the depression should never be allowed to happen again, and a similar feeling on the part of the five million men and women who had served in the armed forces that their sacrifices should lead to a more just society. When Spike Milligan, serving in the Italian campaign in 1943, believed that his death was imminent, he wrote himself an epitaph: ‘I died for the England I dreamed of, not for the England I know.’ Now was the time to build that new country.
The political mood for change was mirrored, though it was not as immediately apparent, by a determination on the part of the returning servicemen that culturally their voices should be heard, and it was on the radio, and particularly in comedy, that the resulting loose-knit movement was first to make its mark. In Wales it produced the revival of Welsh Rarebit, a radio series that had proved more popular in the principality even than Tommy Handley’s ITMA during the war, and which was reborn in 1949 as an hour-long variety show. With its theme song of ‘We’ll Keep a Welcome in the Hillsides’ – written by the show’s producer, Mai Jones – Welsh Rarebit went out on the Light Programme (as the Forces Programme had now been renamed) and became principally known as a showcase for new Welsh comedians including Harry Secombe, Stan Stennett and Wyn Calvin. ‘Up until the advent of radio,’ noted the latter, ‘Wales had no reputation for comedy.’ That was slightly overstating the case, but certainly the success of Welsh Rarebit – it even enjoyed a brief transfer to television in the 1950s – helped fuel the ambitions of those in South Wales with aspirations towards becoming entertainers, among them Terry Nation: ‘I wanted to be a comedian. I wanted to be a stand-up.’
On leaving school Nation had joined his father’s furniture business, working – not very well, he was later to admit – as a salesman. One of the few benefits of this position was that he had a justification for fussing over his wardrobe, in which pride of place went to a leather-buttoned, Harris tweed jacket. ‘He was always dressed beautifully,’ remembered his friend Harry Greene (who worked as an unpaid assistant on Welsh Rarebit). ‘I don’t know if it was hand-me-downs from his dad, because Bert was a good dresser as well. I think that was part of his front for selling.’ The work meant that he had money in his pocket, but Nation was already preoccupied with dreams of performance. He remained passionate about film, becoming a member of the Cardiff Amateur Cine Society, while engaging in amateur dramatics with the left-wing Unity Theatre, based at the local YMCA, and other groups. He was also a regular visitor to the New Theatre, where Greene sometimes worked backstage and could get him free tickets to shows featuring the cream of British comedy at the time, including Arthur Askey, Nat Jackley and Norman Evans.
Through Greene too, he was to meet the future novelist John Summers, who had similar experiences of the limited horizons offered by a South Wales education. In schools whose ‘job was to turn out more cogs for the industrial machine’, wrote Summers in his semi-autobiographical book The Raging Summer, a child who showed too much imagination ‘was to be quickly hammered and stamped back into regular shape before he could get out and become dangerously loose in the world’. ‘There was an instant recognition of brotherhood’, remembered Greene; the two men ‘had similar interests, were about the same age and got on very well, often walking off into the castle grounds to talk, where we’d lose them for hours’.
Nation became part of the student-dominated social scene that congregated upstairs at the Khardomah café on Saturday mornings, and the fact that he was happily mixing with such a group, many of whom were a significant couple of years older than him and had served in uniform, was an indication both of his ‘affable nature and of the fact that he was the epitome of self-confidence’. Although not a student himself, he participated in many social events, helping to organise the first Cardiff Arts Ball (inspired by the Chelsea Arts Balls) in 1949, and forming part of the team that created a sketch called ‘The Poor Man’s Picasso’ for the 1948 rag week. The idea for the sketch was that the performers would draw objects on a white flat screen and that the drawings would then become functional, so that a hatstand would be drawn and a coat then hung upon it, a picture of cupboard doors would be opened, and so on. The main practical difficulty was to find a drawing implement big enough to be seen from the back of the theatre, a problem to which Nation, displaying an inventive resourcefulness that would become characteristic of his fictional heroes, found the solution: a condom with a rolled-up piece of carpet stuffed inside and filled with purple ink, the whole thing being bound with elastic bands to form a prototype marker pen. The performance at the Capital Cinema was filmed by members of the Cine Society and eventually reached the attention of a television producer; consequently, in 1955, Harry Greene and another student, Ivor Olsen, appeared on the BBC show Quite Contrary under the names Pedro and Pinky with a revived version of the routine, almost certainly the first time that a condom had been seen on British television.
By the end of the 1940s, Nation was also beginning to develop his solo comedy act, which he was to take around the circuit of pubs and social clubs in the area, already home to Stan Stennett and Wyn Calvin and soon to be illuminated by a teenage singing prodigy from Cardiff named Shirley Bassey. The highlight of his routine was a series of funny walks, mostly exploiting his gangly physique, though one variation saw him walking on his knees, with his trousers rolled up and shoes acting as knee-pads, in the manner perfected by José Ferrer when playing Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in the 1952 film Moulin Rouge. Again it was an aspect of his early life to which he would return when writing scripts for the 1963 Hancock series. In the episode ‘The Writer’, Tony Hancock tries to convince a professional comedian named Jerry Spring that every comic needs a funny walk, and proceeds to do an impression of Groucho Marx’s stooping prowl and Stan Laurel’s loose-limbed lollop, before giving his own suggestion that Spring should imitate a penguin. Similarly, one of the jokes that Hancock tries to foist upon Spring has all the hallmarks of coming from the repertoire of an inexperienced stand-up in South Wales. A man walks into a cottage in the Rhondda Valley, covered head to foot in coal dust, and when his wife exclaims at the state of him, he asks why, after twenty years of him coming home from work every day in this condition, she’s still surprised. ‘Well, after all, Dai,’ she replies, ‘you are a milkman!’
‘I thought myself a rather good comedian at the time, and used to get laughs around the pub,’ reflected Nation in later life. ‘But if you’re paying for the drinks, people will laugh.’ More significant, in terms of his later career, was his discovery that other comedians, particularly those who were starting to find broadcast work, would pay for jokes. ‘I used to be a member of the Overseas Club, in Park Place, right next to the BBC, in those days. I actually sold my very first scripts to an up-and-coming young comic I met there – Stan Stennett.’ Stennett, who was beginning to make his name on radio shows including Variety Bandbox and Workers’ Playtime as well as Welsh Rarebit, needed a supply of fresh material; although such work was entirely uncredited and none is known to have survived, it was at least a suggestion of an alternative future. It also gave Nation a chance to work with his first partner, another Cardiff-born writer, Dick Barry, and to try to put into practice the American style of gag-telling that he had heard on AFN. ‘Terry was doing the more upbeat, up-to-date, quick-fire sort of comedy,’ remembered Stennett.
By the early 1950s, however, the Khardomah set that Nation had been part of was starting to break up. In recent years, South Wales had been able to boast a number of famous sons, pursuing a wide range of cultural occupations, from the novelist Howard Spring and the poet Dylan Thomas, through Ray Milland, winner of the 1946 Best Actor Oscar for his role in The Lost Weekend, to the boxer Tommy Farr, who came desperately close to taking the world heavyweight title off Joe Louis in 1937. But all had had to leave home to achieve their success. The truth was that South Wales was still a place of origin rather than a land of opportunity. For those who were troubled by ambition, curiosity or simple impatience, it was primarily somewhere to look back upon from what was then called the refreshment car of the London train.
So it was to prove again. Among Nation’s friends and acquaintances, Harry Greene joined Joan Littlewood’s travelling theatre company as an actor, set designer and general handyman, ending up at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East before embarking on a television career, while John Summers worked his passage around the world, with spells in Canada and Australia, before making his way to Fleet Street. Nation himself was a little way behind them, but in January 1955 he bought a one-way ticket to London, and he too took his leave of Cardiff.