Oh! What a Lovely War: An interview with Murray Melvin

Back to Stratford East. Murray Melvin, who died in 2023, shares his memories of the original Theatre Workshop production of Oh! What a Lovely War and describes Joan Littlewood’s working methods.

Joan Littlewood on Brian Murphy's This is Your Life

I've written several times about Joan Littlewood and her extraordinary influence on British theatre. Here is a short clip of her, recorded for Brian Murphy's This is Your Life.

In the run up to it, you hear what an extraordinary struggle it was for someone from the working class, like Murphy, to get training as an actor.

And after it, there's confirmation that Joan Littlewood didn't just have connections with ITV comedy (half the cast of On the Buses came from her Stratford East company), she had them with BBC comedy too.

I've written about the 30 years of slog Nigel Hawthorne experienced before he became famous overnight in Yes Minister. As I say in that post, he once said he owed his career to Joan Littlewood – she had cast him as Field Marshall Haig in a touring production of Oh! What a Lovely War.

I'd also read that Jimmy Perry, one of the writers of Dad's Army, had spent time at Stratford East, and here he is confirming it.

The uncanny on the western front in the first world war

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Malcolm Gaskill reviews A Supernatural War: Magic, Divination and Faith during the First World War by Owen Davies in the London Review of Books (4 July 2019):

It’s a well-known story that British soldiers at Mons claimed they really did see angels – but that story, too, turns out to be unfounded. In September 1914 the Welsh writer Arthur Machen published a story called The Bowmen in the London Evening News. In it, spectral archers from the Battle of Agincourt come to the aid of the British Expeditionary Force at Mons. 

To his dismay the story was widely taken as truth, and a "snowball of rumour" hardened into "the solidest of facts". "If I had failed in the art of letters," Machen wrote later, "I had succeeded, unwittingly, in the art of deceit."

It’s ironic that the Great War’s most famous supernatural story was the creation of Arthur Machen when there were so many real reports of supernatural phenomena on the front line. In A Supernatural War, Owen Davies leads us from the conflict into a haunted world filled with magical thinking and uncanny experiences.

And the angels of Mons were only one of many encounters with the uncanny during the war:

From the outbreak of war, tales of the uncanny abounded. French Catholic troops at the Battle of the Marne and Russian Orthodox troops at the Battle of Augustov reported seeing the Virgin Mary. "Sport is more in my line than Spiritualism," a British officer wounded at Mons remarked, "but when you have experiences brought under your very nose again and again, you cannot help thinking that there must be something in such things."

Battlefield apparitions were nothing new: Roman legionaries saw Castor and Pollux; troops fighting in the Crimean War saw saints. Walter Scott thought this perfectly natural: "One warrior catches the idea from another; all are alike eager to acknowledge the present miracle, and the battle is won before the mistake is discovered." What made the First World War different was not just its mechanised slaughter, but the way it slammed together old and new habits of thought.

Nascent disciplines like psychology, sociology and social anthropology were quick to identify atavistic traits in 20th-century people. Granville Stanley Hall, the first president of the American Psychological Association, thought the Angels of Mons a fascinating expression of societal stress. "No war," he said, "was ever so hard on the nerves." 

The French historian Marc Bloch was thrilled to observe in the trenches "a wonderful renewal of oral tradition". Men moving up and down the line would exchange a few words, often passing on rumours that were groundless but hugely significant for the hearers.

There's more about the angels of Mons in an article by Dr Miriam Bibby on Historic UK.

Victorian schoolboys were not at all Victorian

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Here's more grist for my theory that the Victorians were far less Victorian than we imagine.

In Uppingham the other week I picked up a copy of Gillian Avery's Victorian People. Here she is on the Victorian schoolboy:

Much was to be written of godliness and manliness in reference to the education of Victorian boys. But manliness as understood by the early and mid-Victorians did not include reserve and a stiff upper lip. This was a much later development. Both in reality and in fiction, there were frequent, unashamed displays of emotion in boys' schools. 

Boys wept and flung their arms around each other as they protested eternal friendship; they threw themselves on the ground and clasped their masters' knees as they expressed their penitence, the schoolboys at Wellington wept as they heard their headmaster's last sermon. Master and pupil would kneel together to pray for guidance, a headmaster and his staff sometimes wept during staff meetings if there was a difference of opinion, friendships between boys between master and pupil were of an intensity that would now be considered dangerous.

This must be borne in mind by the modern reader of Tom Brown and Eric. The scenes where the dying Arthur persuades Tom to give up the use of cribs in preparing his Latin; or where Eric, on his knees, "his blue eyes drowned with tears," implores the headmaster to show leniency towards his friend, are not extravagant inventions of the writers concerned, but were perfectly possible in the emotional climate of the mid-19th century.

The caste of mind we think of as Victorian did not flourish until the later years of the queen's reign and it reached its fullest development well into the 20th century. I suspect the British stiff upper lip reached peak rigidity as a reaction to the unthinkable losses of the First World War.

And if private schools were designed to produce men fitted to keeping up the British Empire, they went on doing so for years after than empire had ceased to exist.

Victoria reigned for almost 64 years, so applying her name as an adjective to describe a rapidly changing society across that period is a foolish thing to do. It's almost as silly as using the term "Elizabethan" to describe British society between 1952 and 2022 would be.

For World Monkey Day: The death of King Alexander of Greece

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Today is World Monkey Day and to mark it here's the sad story of King Alexander of Greece.

Alexander came to the throne in 1917 after his father (Constantine I) and elder brother (Crown Prince George) were deposed by the Entente Powers and the Liberal statesman Eleftherios Venizelos. Alexander became a puppet king under the control of Venizelos, and Greece continued to fight the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria.

In 1919 Alexander married Aspasia Manos, a commoner. This became a major scandal. and the couple were forced to leave Greece for several months. 

Soon after their return to Greece, Alexander tried to separate his dog from a tame Barbary macaque with which it was scuffling. In the process, he was bitten by the monkey and died of sepsis a few days later aged 27.

Wikipedia spells out what his death led to:

Under the restored King Constantine I, whose return was endorsed overwhelmingly in a referendum, Greece went on to lose the Greco–Turkish War with heavy military and civilian casualties. The territory gained on the Turkish mainland during Alexander's reign was lost. 

Alexander's death in the midst of an election campaign helped destabilize the Venizelos regime, and the resultant loss of Allied support contributed to the failure of Greece's territorial ambitions. Winston Churchill wrote, "it is perhaps no exaggeration to remark that a quarter of a million persons died of this monkey's bite".

The Rest is History podcast once chose the greatest 10 monkeys in history and unaccountably left this one out. I have never quite trusted it since.

Charles Masterman on how it feels as a world war approaches

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I don't want to alarm anyone, but here's an extract from an article looking back on the coming of the first world war that Charles Masterman wrote for the Daily Chronicle in 1915:

It was a company of tired men who for twelve hot summer nights, without rest or relaxation, had devoted their energies to avert this thing which had now come inevitably to pass. No one who has been through the experience of those twelve days will ever be quite the same again. 

It is difficult to find a right simile for that experience. It was like a company of observers watching a little cloud in the east, appearing out of a blue sky, seeing it grow, day by day, until all the brightness had vanished and the sun itself has become obscured. 

It was like the victim of the old mediaeval torture enclosed in a chamber in which the walls, moved by some unseen mechanism, steadily closed on him day by day, until at the end he was crushed to death. 

It was most like perhaps those persons who have walked on the solid ground and seen slight cracks and fissures appear, and these enlarge and run together and swell in size hour by hour until yawning apertures revealed the boiling up beneath them of the earth's central fires, destined to sweep away the forests and vineyards of its surfaces and all the kindly habitations of man.

And all this experience - the development of a situation heading straight to misery and ruin without precedent - was continued in the midst of a world where the happy, abundant life of the people flowed on unconcerned and all thoughts were turned towards the approaching holidays and the glories of triumphant summer days.

The Joy of Six 1287

"Kemi maintained her attack on the machine. Everything was their fault. The previous Conservative government was entirely blameless. Especially her. In her own mind she was the saviour of the post office operatives. Though judging by the laughs from the back of the room, they don’t see it in quite the same way." John Crace says Kemi Badenoch was seen at her brittle, narcissistic worst while giving evidence to the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry today.

Alwyn Turner tells a story that has dropped out of remembrance of the first world war: "On 19 July 1919 - declared by the government to be Peace Day - parades were staged all over the country to mark the signing of the Versailles Treaty, and at many of those parades there were demonstrations and protests. A banner in Glasgow sarcastically announced: '400,000 unemployed ex-servicemen. A grateful country will never forget you'."

Patrick Howse asks if Labour will restore the BBC to the national broadcaster we need it to be or believe it can benefit from a subservient corporation afraid to hold power to account.

"Many of the jokes, besides being hilarious, are jaw-dropping in their audacity. And there is sex, too: masses of it, sometimes erotic, sometimes shocking, but always - like the rest of the book – profoundly truthful. Fundamentally is certainly a wild ride, but besides being one of the most entertaining novels I’ve read in a long while, it will also leave you deeply moved and (incidentally) much better informed than you were before about one of the key political crises of our time." Jonathan Coe chooses five favourite recent political novels.

Hannah Long believes that Night of the Hunter is a Christmas film. Hear her: "This promise - that evil is powerful, but ultimately ridiculous and defeatable - carries us into the final hope of the last scene, set at Christmastime. It says, in the least sentimental way possible, that it’s possible to move beyond abuse."

"‘The Whiting’ is an absent-minded vicar so passionate about entomology that he forgets everything in pursuit of an elusive Wood White or a Purple Emperor. Then there’s old Smokoe Joe, a gruff charcoal-burner with a gargantuan nose who lives in the Chase; and the boys’ nemesis, the ponderous local bobby, Sergeant Bunting." Helena Drysdale celebrates Brendon Chase by BB (Denys Watkins-Pitchford).

Robert Harris's Precipice, Asquith and Venetia Stanley

Billericay Dickie had a love affair with Nina in the back of his Cortina. Mr Asquith, it seems, had one with the socialite Venetia Stanley in the back of his prime-ministerial 1908 Napier.

Today's Observer has an article on Precipice, Robert Harris's forthcoming novel about the summer of 1914 and Britain's entry into the First World War.

Asquith wrote to Venetia Stanley three times a day, and those letters have been central to Harris's research for his new novel:

“I became fascinated by this aspect of Asquith’s story," said Harris. "We can account for so much of his time in the run-up to the first world war, but this enabled me to tell that story day by day through the 560 letters Venetia kept."

In his last days in No 10, having resigned and invited the Conservatives to form a coalition government after a fateful weekend in 1915 when he was unable to reach Stanley, Asquith is believed to have disposed of her letters. "He had a huge bonfire, but I could put together her replies, I realised, from what he had said and from the bits he quoted."

The claim that the physical element of the affair has been underestimated, Harris believes, is supported by the fittings of the PM’s car: "It was not how we might imagine now. It was totally sealed, like a bedroom on wheels, with blinds on the windows and only a push-button intercom to speak to the driver."

But sex is not the only missing component. Stanley and Asquith also discussed everything. "He enjoyed talking to her because she was clever and not trying to get a job or anything," said [Harris] ....  "So I feel that Venetia, like so many significant women behind the scenes, has been somewhat excised from history. If nothing else, I hope my novel will help give her the place she deserves."

Lord Bonkers, no doubt, will be consulting his lawyers, but I shall leave you with Charles Masterman's account of those summer days before Britain declared war:

It was a company of tired men who for twelve hot summer nights, without rest or relaxation, had devoted their energies to avert this thing which had now come inevitably to pass. No one who has been through the experience of those twelve days will ever be quite the same again. 

It is difficult to find a right simile for that experience. It was like a company of observers watching a little cloud in the east, appearing out of a blue sky, seeing it grow, day by day, until all the brightness had vanished and the sun itself has become obscured. 

It was like the victim of the old mediaeval torture enclosed in a chamber in which the walls, moved by some unseen mechanism, steadily closed on him day by day, until at the end he was crushed to death. 

It was most like perhaps those persons who have walked on the solid ground and seen slight cracks and fissures appear, and these enlarge and run together and swell in size hour by hour until yawning apertures revealed the boiling up beneath them of the earth's central fires, destined to sweep away the forests and vineyards of its surfaces and all the kindly habitations of man.

And all this experience - the development of a situation heading straight to misery and ruin without precedent - was continued in the midst of a world where the happy, abundant life of the people flowed on unconcerned and all thoughts were turned towards the approaching holidays and the glories of triumphant summer days.

Halford: Across the river from Craven Arms

So I went to Halford. This was an agricultural village centuries before there was even an inn at Craven Arms. So much so that the church, St Thomas's, which was almost entirely rebuilt in the 19th century, has a Norman doorway. But I did not spot this and was not lucky enough to photograph it by chance, so I can pretend I did.

What I did appreciate was the World War I memorial lychgate, which records all the men from the village who gave their lives. It includes one who died from wounds in 1920 - a reminder that the Armistice did not bring an end to suffering for some.

There is also a plaque to William Biggs inside the church, erected by "The Officers, N.C.O.'s and Men of the 32nd Railway Operating Company, Royal Engineers." Presumably, in peacetime he had been a railwayman, working across the river in Craven Arms.

I photographed some of the impressive buildings in the village, which had a school as well as a church before Craven Arms was born in the 1850s. I think that school is shown in the final photograph here.