Alexander Mackendrick, Tony Hancock and Rhinoceros

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One of the many unmade Alexander Mackendrick film projects detailed in Philip Kemp's biography Lethal Innocence is an adaptation of Eugène Ionesco's play Rhinoceros.

An international success, the play was set in a French provincial town where, one by one, the inhabitants were turning into rhinos. It was a political allegory, based on the Romanian writer's pre-war memories of the way his friends gradually joined the fascist Iron Guard.

And the person who Mackendrick wanted to play the hero Bérenger, the only character who doesn't become a rhino, was Tony Hancock.

According to Kemp, Mackendrick said: 

"He was so right. He had this hunted look of a person who knew that everybody was turning into a rhinoceros."

As David Cairns says on his Shadowplay blog, that's "a very precise trait, not easy to find".

But then Mackendrick had a weakness for actors who looked hunted. Remember his slightly worrying comment on the casting of Fergus McClelland to play the lead in Sammy Going South:

He was a lean, hard, little boy. Tough as old nails ... a really strong character. He had the hunted look of an abused child, which in some ways he was. He came from a disturbed home; his parents were getting divorced and there were problems. So he was the perfect casting.

Anyway, Tony Hancock eventually pulled out of the possible film, just as Peter Sellers did the second time it came close to being made.

But if Mackendrick was so keen to film a rhino, he could have shot this scene from W.H. Canaway's original novel Sammy Going South:

Sammy heard a whiffling of breath behind him, and turned to confront a rhinoceros, which had been waiting behind the thorns before returning to scatter its dung.

Up till that moment the thought of danger from animals had scarcely entered Sammy's mind; he had spent the previous night in his tree because of some atavistic instinct, and not because of any conscious desire to safeguard himself against predatory creatures. Now, he stared at the rhino with sick horror, giving a low moan of fear. He had never realized that a rhino was so big. This one was a huge shape of dirty grey, almost six feet tall at the shoulder and almost twelve feet long; its horn was five feet of polished murderous fibre. The rhino was downwind of Sammy, and had picked up his scent at once.

There were birds sitting on its back, Sammy noticed.

The rhino was perhaps a hundred feet away, at the far left-hand end of the thorns. It snorted again, shook its head once, and then lowered it, charging; the birds flapped on its body. It moved with surprising speed, picking up and setting down its feet with delicate precision, while Sammy turned and began to run, hopelessly.

I do like the placing of that adverb.

Whether Sammy Going South was ever a set text for the examination boards I don't know, but it would have made a change from Lord of the bloody Flies.

Why stage plays need a character that screenplays don't

Alexander Mackendrick didn't just direct The Man in the White Suit: he wrote the first draft of the screenplay.

In his book Lethal Innocence: The Cinema of Alexander Mackendrick, Philip Kemp quotes Mackendrick on the genesis of that screenplay. It began life as an unperformed theatre play by his cousin Roger MacDougall:

"I did something really wicked: I took Roger's hero and gave him a minor role, and pivoted the whole story around a secondary character, the one played in the film by Alec Guinness, to make a new story entirely. And Balcon liked it, and approved it. When I showed it to Roger he got very indignant, and said, 'My God, you might as well have cut the hero out altogether!', and I said, 'Yes, well, I did actually think of doing that.'"

Having got over his initial pique, MacDougall went along with the further disruption of his play, and with the total elimination of his hero. "Something I discovered then," he recalls, "is that there's a character you need in a play, but you don't need in a film, because the camera takes over from him. It's Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra, it's Horatio in Hamlet. The camera becomes that character who holds it all together – the viewpoint character, if you like. You don't need a person to do it for you."

Next time I watch an old British film that's too obviously been adapted from a stage play, I shall try to work out which character should have been left out.

Plans to bring Leicester's Il Rondo back to life

The Leicester Mercury has a story, but doesn't know the half of it:

New live music venue hopes for former board game cafe in Leicester city centre

An empty unit in Leicester city centre could be given a new lease of life as a late-night entertainment venue.

Generic Leisure Ltd has lodged an application seeking a licence for indoor sports events, plays, films, and live and recorded music at the site at 22 Silver Street.

Former board game cafe be damned. This was once Il Rondo, where some of the top Sixties bands played, naming it as their favourite venue in the city. 

It's the large red-brick building in the thumbnail above – play the video to hear more about its history. 

For many years it housed a branch of the Italian restaurant chain Prezzo. That occupied the ground floor: I'm told the stage and dancefloor are still in place upstairs.

The Malcolm Arcade stands on the site of what was once The Royal Opera House, Leicester.

Ian Holm as Richard III in the BBC's Wars of the Roses from 1965

First, Fergus McClelland led us to Brecht on television. Now, bless his little khaki shorts, he's led us to Shakespeare.

Ravensbourne University London explains the origins of the BBC's Wars of the Roses:

This production had had a highly acclaimed run on the RSC stage in 1963 and was directed for BBC Television in 1965 by Robin Midgley and Michael Hayes. It was filmed on the stage at Stratford-On-Avon using a multi-camera set up, resulting in a much more fluid filmic result with a greater variety of shots and even the use of hand-held cameras for the battle scenes. 

In this respect the production was a forerunner of today’s recorded theatre productions which are regularly streamed to cinemas and homes throughout the world.

The Wars of the Roses was an abridgement of four Shakespeare plays – the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III – into three plays: Henry VI, Edward IV, and Richard III.

You can find an extract from the third of these above. McClelland is playing Edward V, the elder of the Princes in the Tower, having played the similarly ill-fated Edmund, Duke of Rutland, earlier in the production.

But the real interest is Ian Holm's Richard III, who here appears not as a monster but very much the younger brother to the charismatic Edward IV that he was.

This recording is of some importance to theatrical history, because Holm was struck down with stage fright in the Seventies and thereafter chose to concentrate on film and television work.

The rigged system Freda Jackson overcame to become an actress in the 1930s

I wrote about the actress Freda Jackson's background on Central Bylines:

Jackson was born in Nottingham in 1907, the daughter of a railway porter. She was educated at High Pavement School and the city’s University College. In 1933 she was teaching English and Drama at Haywood School, Sherwood, and spending her evenings acting with a local theatre group, when a letter to the director of its repertory company won her an audition at Northampton’s Theatre Royal.

Yesterday's purchase Repertory at The Royal: Sixty-Five Years of Theatre in Northampton 1922–92 tells us what happened after that successful audition:

Miss Jackson's status for her first five months in Northampton was that of pupil, which meant that she received no salary. She had originally applied to Herbert Prentice, by then at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, but, since the pupil system did not operate there, he advised her to try Northampton. The pupil arrangement was confined to actresses, young actors being in such short supply that they could command a salary from the outset.

The dedication of the pupil actress extended not only to support herself without salary, but also to providing an adequate personal wardrobe for modern plays, a much more onerous requirement than for her male colleagues.

Were young male actors really in such short supply, or was it simple sexism that saw them paid from the outset when young actresses weren't.

Whatever the reason, this arrangement made it next to impossible for a young working-class woman to embark on a theatrical career. It explains why maids in Thirties films, of which there were many, were usually played by upper-class girls with unconvincing cockney accents.

We are seeing a return to such an arrangement in Britain today: every well-endowed private school has its own theatre, but the public facilities open to youngsters from poorer homes are under increasing financial pressure.It's no wonder we see the same limited group of privately educated actors snaffling the star roles in British films. And narrowing the pipeline of talent entering the acting profession can only result in a reduction in quality.

Anyway, you can see Freda Jackson above as Mistress Quickly in Laurence Olivier's 1944 film of Henry V.

The other actors in the scene are Robert Newton as Pistol and two who were to be dead within months of shooting it: Frederick Cooper (with the nose) as Nym and Roy Emerton as Bardolph. The boy is unmistakably a young George Cole.

Professor Joad sees his play at the Theatre Royal, Northampton

I braved the heat today, went into town and called at the market. I came a way with a book called Repertory at The Royal: Sixty-Five Years of Theatre in Northampton 1922–92. As you would hope, there's plenty about this blog's heroine Freda Jackson, but this post is about C.E.M. Joad.

Joad was once a substantial public figure, chiefly as a member of the panel of the wildly popular radio programme The Brain's Trust. There he allowed himself to be called "Professor Joad" when he was no such thing, which riled his fellow philosophers. They also, whether from jealousy of his fame or impartial study, regarded his writing as either eccentric or plagiarised.

According to hero of the blog Bryan Magee:

He was an engaging but essentially fraudulent character. His popular books on philosophy thick-skinnedly recycled Russell’s work without acknowledgement; asked once to write a recommendation of a book by Joad, Russell replied: 'Modesty forbids.'"

While Ludwig Wittgenstein once said, in a meeting where Joad had delivered a paper criticising the form of analytical philosophy popular at Cambridge, that "naturally a slum landlord would object to slum clearance". In other words new thinking was clearing away the sort of stuff that Joad still came out with. 

The Magee quote is from an article by Richard Symonds that tries to rescue Joad's reputation as a philosopher, while the Wittgenstein quote is from Wikipedia entry on him.

Reading that Wikipedia article on Joad, you get the impression that he embraced just about every nutty theory going in the first half of the 20th century. He was a thumping sexist, though some of his braver views on social issues are now widely accepted. You may think the law of averages means he was bound to be prescient sometimes.

Anyway here's the story about Joad from my book on the Theatre Royal, Northampton. There it is credited to a manuscript in the county record office written by a theatre manager called Stephen Sylvester – presumably this Stephen Sylvester – and Alex Reeve was also on the management side of the theatre.

Northampton stuck to its commitment to new plays. In March 1946 Crackling of Thorns by C.E.M. Joad the philosopher and radio Brains Trust personality attracted widespread interest for its first professional production.

The substantive scenes, for which locations included a youth hostel and a national school, advanced the author's ideas on the reduction of the nation's population. These were interspersed with duologues between Mr .Playwrite and The Critic (Mr James Aggravate – alias for James Agate) discussing the craft of play writing.

Joad attended the first night, but although he had lent Alex Reeve, making one of his rare stage appearances as Mr. Playwrite, one of his suits he was less than enthusiastic about the identification of the character with himself:

Being the same size as Joad he [Reeve] was able to make himself up to resemble him, beard and all, and when he imitated Joe's squeaky voice the impersonation was very funny. Jude was a famous public figure ... and the audience quickly recognised the character and fell about. 

When Joad came to see the show his lack of amusement was positively Queen Victorian. In the bar afterwards he told Reeve, "I'm sure I don't speak in that squeaky voice." He said this in such a squeaky voice that we thought he was being funny, and laughed. But he wasn't, and in his subsequent radio broadcasts it was noticeable that his voice had gone down quite a few semitones.

You can hear Joad in the video clip above. If you watch the whole thing on YouTube you may form the opinion that he was a bit of a poseur. And an article on Herestical will give you the reason for the sudden end to his radio career,

Still, such was him fame that he got a mention in Shirley Bassey's first recording, which was banned by the BBC for being too sexy. Do watch it if you've not seen it before: she's wonderful. 

Sparrows Can’t Sing Q&A with Barbara Windsor and Murray Melvin

Joan Littlewood directed only one film, Sparrows Can't Sing. It was based on the play Sparrers Can't Sing, which was written by Stephen Lewis (better known later as Blakey off of On the Buses) and staged by her at Stratford East.

Here two cast members, Barbara Windsor and Murray Melvin, remember the making of the film and Littlewood's approach in general. Barbara Windsor is in sparkling form.

As I posted this video on Liberal England about 10 years ago, I'm adding another one with Murray Melvin . It's very good, but I'll admit it's here mainly because of the still photo of Joan Littlewood and Stephen Lewis that appears early on.

For another appreciation of Joan Littlweood, try Sheila Hancock.

No Carry Ons: Kenneth Williams's other films

This is fun. A compilation of 11 short clips of Kenneth Williams in films that aren't Carry Ons.

Williams, as he frequently pointed out on Round the Horne when he wasn't being properly serviced, was classically trained. When he was young he was highly regarded as an actor, and Maggie Smith acknowledged him as an influence on her own work.

Mel and Sue and Akbar Shamji

From the latest Popbitch email:

Patrick Radden Keefe’s new book, London Falling, is the buzziest read of the summer so far.

(In case you've missed all the column inches, it’s the one about the mysterious death of a 19-year-old whose pretence of being the son of an oligarch entangled him in a dangerous underworld.)

Akbar Shamji, the baddie on the run who might know what happened to Zac Brettler, has another claim to fame, we're told.

He starred in panto at Cambridge Footlights with Mel and Sue, of Great British Bake Off fame.

My advice to the police, if they want a Footlights alumnus to help them with their enquiries, is to keep a close watch on conventions of TV quiz hosts and celebrity children's authors. He's bound to turn up at one or the other before long.

Remembering the wonderful Flick Rea

I was very sad to hear of the death of Flick Rea today. Flick was was leader of the Liberal and then Liberal Democrat group on Camden Council from 1986-2005 and 2014-2020. She was awarded an MBE in 2013 for her services to the borough.

After Flick retired she was made an honorary alderman, and you can see the speech she gave on that occasion in the video above.

Her Wikipedia entry reveals that Flick was a direct descendant of Sir Robert Peel and that she joined the Liberal Party in 1970. She fought her first election in her beloved Fortune Green ward in 1980, coming third in a by-election, and was first elected to the council in 1986.

Flick was also a great friend of Liberator and the Liberal Revue.

That Wikipedia entry talks about Flick's career in the theatre before she discovered politics, Flick trained at RADA, leaving in 1958, and worked in repertory theatre Salisbury and Oldham. By the early Sixties she was using the stage name Felicity Peel.

On the screen, she appeared in an episode of The Avengers and the film A Kind of Loving.

I once talked to Flick about her time at RADA and remember her mentioning two of her fellow students. One was Susannah York, and the other was a young man from a prosperous family who proved not to have the talent for a stage career and, after a couple of terms, went back to work in the family business in Liverpool.

His name was Brian Epstein.

Alan Bennett on Northern culture and his creative process

Three years ago Alan Bennett visited the BFI Southbank to discuss the influence of his northern roots in a conversation that formed part of the BFI's Northern Voices season.

The blurb on YouTube says:

Few writers have successfully mined Northern culture and specific northern speech patterns as Alan Bennett. Growing up in Leeds, he listened in on the chatter of his relatives, absorbing the patter of domestic conversation, which would emerge across a glittering and much-loved range of plays, particularly those written for television. Here, Bennett explores the way Northern culture is so integral to his creative process.

The rise and fall and (slight) rise of Lionel Bart

By my calculation, this edition of The South Bank Show dates from 1994. As much of my politics come from reading Oliver Twist too young, and as Oliver! is the great British musical. I had to watch it.

And there is much to enjoy, beginning with Lionel Bart's adventures in the new world of pop music with Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard.

Then there's Oliver!, whose first night was just as triumphant as Bart makes it sound. On to the film, where I note that Mark Lester was still giving the impression that he sang in it. He didn't.

The disaster of Twang!! caused the crash of Bart's career, but maybe the warning signs were there with his musical Blitz!, which Noel Coward claimed was "twice as loud and twice as long as the real thing".

Note the presence of Mark Steyn, who had yet to reinvent himself as a commentator on geopolitics. As I wrote of him in 2008:

Steyn is a good film critic, able to write intelligently about unintelligent films. But the fact that for several years his was the predominant voice on foreign affairs in the British Conservative press was simply bizarre.

If you enjoy this, it gives me the excuse to give another plug for the superlative South Bank Show on the London production of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd. 

My latest article for Central Bylines: Freda Jackson and Henry Bird

"There has never been anybody like her. To say that she loved acting just would not be enough. We realised only recently when we were looking at some old clippings that newspaper banner headlines had called her London’s greatest actress."

This is the Northampton-born artist Henry Bird paying tribute to his wife Freda Jackson when she died in 1990.

My latest article for Central Bylines pays tribute to them: Northampton's arts power couple.

The long, long apprenticeship of Sir Nigel Hawthorne

Before Yes Minister made him famous in 1980, Nigel Hawthorne served a long apprenticeship in the acting profession. But I had not grasped till recently just how long that apprenticeship had been.

If you click on the arrow above, you will see him in a scene from Going Straight, the short-lived sitcom that followed Norman Stanley Fletcher after his release from the Slade Prison of Porridge.

That scene dates from 1978, but he had a bit part in an episode of Dad's Army as early as 1969. I recall a story that someone had gone to David Croft on Hawthorne's behalf, saying he was a very good actor who was getting many parts and asking if Croft could offer him something. Croft did, though as I recall Hawthorne doesn't really convince as a lorry driver.

But I've now know that Hawthorne's apprenticeship stretched right back to the start of the Fifties, and two of this blog's heroines helped me discover this.

Here's Sheila Hancock writing in The Two of Us: My Life with John Thaw:

I was thrilled to be so near London where someone might see me. I was playing quite a good role but whenever I was in danger of getting a laugh, Frank would intervene with, "No, don't laugh – poor soul – she went to the RADA, you know" (pronounced radar by Frank). "No perlease, perlease have some respect."

Nigel Hawthorne and I watched in awe as he jettisoned the script and went off into wild fantasies of his own It was one of Frank's frequent periods in the theatrical wilderness and no one important came near us, but supporting this anguished man gave us a friend for life.

With the help of the British Newspaper Archive I can tell you that this all took place in 1956.

Two years earlier, Hawthorne had been in the supporting cast when Freda Jackson returned to her alma mater, the Theatre Royal, Northampton, to play Marguerite Gautier in The Lady of the Camelias. He was in the repertory company there in 1954 and 1955.

He was acting with the company at the Pavilion Gardens, Buxton, as early as 1951. Hawthorne had first gone on the stage in South Africa in 1950, and was to alternate between Britain and South Africa for a few years without finding much in success in either.

And we have a part for a third heroine of the blog. Because, just as Sheila Hancock does, Hawthorne said he owed his career to Joan Littlewood.

Here's Markland Taylor reviewing Hawthorne's Straight Face, The Autobiography, which was published just after his death, in Variety:

Hawthorne’s luck changed magnificently when he downed six bottles of Guinness before auditioning for a role in a production of Littlewood’s hit

Oh! What a Lovely War planned for a tour of England and Europe, and was cast.

This led to his invaluable relationship with Littlewood and his career blossomed, leading to highly rewarding work on stage, screen and television.

This was in 1964, so Hawthorne still had 16 years to wait before be became famous overnight. This is a story about talent and persistence, but it may ultimately be one about having the right mentor.

A BFI Q&A with members of the cast of Oliver! (1968)

This session was recorded in 2012, three years before Ron Moody died. As well as Moody, who played Fagin in the 1968 film of Oliver! having first created the role on stage, it features Kenneth Cranham, who was Noah Claypole, and Mark Lester, who was Oliver himself.

As Kenneth Cranham says, it was Moody's reinvention of Fagin that made the film's worldwide success possible by moving the story away from the medieval antisemitism that Dickens drew upon. I wrote about this aspect of the novel in a book chapter a few years ago - there a short extract in another post on this blog.

But then Dickens long ago lost control of Oliver Twist. Such is the power of the novel that it has entered folklore and, like a folk tale, it now changes with every telling of its story. I wrote more about this in 2015 when Ron Moody died.

Ken Loach was Kenneth Williams' understudy in a West End revue

In 1961 Sheila Hancock was appearing in the West End revue One Over the Eight. In her memoir The Two of Us: My Life with John Thaw she writes:

The chief joy of One Over the Eight for me was meeting and becoming friends with the writer of the show, Peter Cook, and Kenneth [Williams], the maverick star.

But she didn't feel London was really swinging yet and neither did Kenneth Williams:

One night after the show, when I gave him a lift back to his chaste flat on the back of my Lambretta, he waved his furled umbrella at Eros as we circled Piccadilly Circus crying "Where is it? Where is it all happening? Where are all these orgies? Why haven't we been asked?"

Peter Cook wasn't the only writer who contributed to One Over the Eight: The Stage lists John Mortimer, Lionel Bart, N.F. Simpson and John Bird among the other contributors.

But the reason for this post is that Sheila Hancock reveals that Kenneth Williams' understudy was Ken Loach and so gives us our Trivial Fact of the Day.

In this era, Loach was also involved with Leicester's The Living Theatre. His first screen credits as a director came on television in 1964.

Britain's two most famous TV policemen on screen together in 1964

Between 1962, when he first appeared as Charlie Barlow in Z-Cars, and 1976, when he played the character for the last time in Second Verdict, Britain's most famous television policeman was Stratford Johns.

That baton was then taken on by John Thaw, who had begun playing Jack Regan in The Sweeney in 1975. He continued in that role until 1978 and then played Inspector Morse between 1987 and 2000. (I don't remember their being any clear holder of the crown during that interregnum.)

And here they are together in a Z-Cars episode from 1964.

Trivia fans will be pleased that Sheila Hancock, who was married to John Thaw, played Miss Hannigan opposite Stratford Johns' Daddy Warbucks in the original London production of Annie.

John Osborne, Desert Island Discs and No Room at the Inn

I couldn't find room for it in my Lion & Unicorn article about the film No Room at the Inn, but I did blog here about my discovery that the Joan Temple play on which it was based gave John Osborne his first break in the theatre:

After No Room at the Inn had cleaned up in the West End, it went on a national tour, though without its star, the awe-inspiring Freda Jackson.

As there were so many children in the cast, the company needed a tutor for them to make up for the schooling they were missing. 

That role was taken by a young man keen on a career in the theatre - he even fancied writing plays. And he used it as a route to becoming an assistant stage manager and then a member of the cast.

His name? John Osborne. He was the archetypal Angry Young Man of the Fifties and the author of the epoch-making play Look Back in Anger.

I was scrolling through the vintage editions of Desert Island Discs on the BBC website and found that Osborne was the castaway in one of them. Only six minutes remain of his 1959 appearance (he was on the programme again in 1982), but during them he confirms this story about No Room at the Inn.

After reading this column you will never think of Barbara Cartland in the same way again

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Another of my columns for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy. 

Barbara Cartland has her own label on this column, and I think all this material had appeared on Liberal England before, but I suspect it is not common knowledge among radical mental health professionals.

Barbara Cartland as a political activist

The writer Damian Le Bas once interviewed a man whose mother, a Conservative county councillor, had fought for travelling families to have somewhere to live and for their children to be educated. 

"People offer all sorts of reasons why they don’t want a Gypsy site near them,” said Le Bas. "You’ve referred to it as old-fashioned racism, and your mother compared it with the situation in the South of the United States of America."

The man replied: “It was definitely prejudice. It was really, really nasty. My mother had a lot of hate mail and people were rude to her, but she persevered. She was not one to be deterred, my mother, in any way. She stuck to her guns."

Her name? Barbara Cartland.

When I told someone who I was writing this column about, they dredged up Clive James’s description of her on television in old age:

Twin miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff.

But then if Barbara Cartland is remembered at all today, it is for this late eccentricity of appearance. 

Matthew Sweet, who is writing her biography, has observed that, though you would expect her romantic novels, of which there were hundreds, dictated from a chaise-longue to relays of secretaries, to be a staple of charity shops, but they have not lasted. Not lasted physically, that is: they were cheaply produced and fell apart in the hands of a vigorous reader.

So, though Barbaraville Camp, a permanent site for Gypsies on the outskirts of Hatfield named in her honour, is still open, we have to look further back to pay Barbara Cartland her due.

******

The hero of The Glamour Boys, Chris Bryant’s study of the group of gay – if that’s not an anachronism – MPs who opposed appeasement in the run up to World War II, was meant to be Major Ronald Cartland, who died at Dunkirk aged 33. But doesn’t his sister keep breaking into the story?

Their father’s death had left Barbara and her two brothers in straitened circumstances, but they weren’t for long once she started writing. First there was a racy High Society novel with a fair amount of sexual innuendo, Jig-saw (1923), then a column for the Daily Express and risqué plays, one of which was initially banned by the Lord Chamberlain.

Bryant writes:

Barbara was no prude. She wrote wry and naughty copy for Bystander under the pseudonyms Miss Hamilton or Caviare, she turned out gossipy pieces for Tatler as Miss Scott and passed on titbits of society news as Miss Tudor in the Daily Mail. The copy she filed was invariably bubbly and enthusiastic, with no hint of the prim coyness that was so common at the time. Her advice to young women in her book of modern morals, Touch the Stars: A clue to happiness, was remarkable: 

Remember that you are not a miserable sinner… nor were you born in original sin; the sex instinct is one of the most beautiful things in the world. It is sent to inspire us, and help us understand Nature and the workings of the Divine. It is the nearest approach we get to the beauty, the intensity and the power of Life.

And in between all this writing, she found time to be the darling of the fast set at Brooklands motor racing circuit and a pioneer of gliding.

******

What first made me take Barbara Cartland seriously were her wartime memoirs, The Years of Opportunity, as they showed her to be a notably sensible voice in welfare work.

She defended servicewomen, saying the remarkable thing was how few unwanted babies there had been, given wartime conditions. And when women did become pregnant:

It was nearly always a case of being brought up in ignorance, of being given a new and exciting freedom in the Services, and often of being “stood a drink” for the first time in their lives! Many of them didn't know what was wrong with them, and when the Medical Officer told them they were going to have a baby they were stunned and astonished.

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Not that the men were much better informed:

I know one RAF padre who had a straight talk with every man on his station who came to him wanting to get married or in domestic trouble. He said the abysmal ignorance of the average man about women and love was appalling.

She also wrote with understanding and compassion about the needs of children, particularly those in public care. In 1945, the death of Dennis O’Neill, a 12-year-old foster child, on a farm in Shropshire had scandalised the nation:

How many Dennis O’Neills who don’t actually die are living a life of cruelty and torture, of privation and utter hopeless misery? How many little boys and girls are existing in filth and degradation in Public Institutions without any knowledge that there is love and kindness in a world which to them is only harsh and horrible?

She remembered a little boy who had come from a public institution to live in the cottage next to hers:

He was three years old, but he had never seen a toy of any sort, and when my boys gave him some of theirs, he didn’t know what to do with them. 

One of those boys was Ian McCorquodale, who was interviewed by Damian Le Bas.

And Cartland writes of her friend Lady Allen of Hurtwood, who deserves a column of her own: 

As chairman of the Nursing School Association she visited homes and institutions and what she found was appalling.

It wasn’t all words either. In this volume of memoirs Cartland describes bursting into a stranger's hotel room to stop a little girl being beaten.

******

The moral of this story is that someone who ends their days on television in a pink chiffon ballgown and caked with make-up – as I fully intend to do – can still be worthy of your respect.

Showtime! Adapting and Acting in Charles Dickens's Stories

Here's a short video from the Charles Dickens Museum with some interesting talking heads, some of them descended from the great man.

There are particular mentions for Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby and A Christmas Carol.