No Room at the Inn was inspired by the death of Dennis O'Neill

Agatha Christie's record-breaking play The Mousetrap, as a moving BBC Radio documentary reveals, has its roots in the death of the foster child Dennis O'Neill on a farm in the Shropshire hills in 1945.

I once suggested that a play that was a scandalous success the same year and later made into film, No Room at the Inn, was inspired by the same sad incident. And a look at the theatre newspaper, The Stage, shows I was right.

Its 5 July 1945 edition reported:

Anthony Hawtrey is to present a new play, "No Room at the Inn," by Joan Temple, at the Embassy, next Tuesday. It tells of the problems of indiscriminate billeting of children, and a strong parallel is drawn to a recent case.

That sounds like information provided by the play's producers and, together with an episode of cruelty in the play that mirrors what happened to Dennis O'Neill, clinches my case.

No Room at the Inn was something of a succès de scandale. A Guardian article on the actor Julian Bird said:

His mother, Freda Jackson, was an actor, "a name in the 40s, 50s and 60s". She was the lead in the play No Room at the Inn, about the abuse of evacuees during the second world war, which was so scandalous that she needed police protection when it transferred to the West End in 1946. “There were always women at the stage door wanting to kill her.”

It seems the O'Neill case remained alive in the public mind for at least a year even though it was later forgotten.

Anyway, the film of No Room at the Inn has been shown on Talking Pictures TV at least twice and is worth keeping an eye out for.