by Brendan King
This success buoyed her up for the next few days, though she must have been frustrated by the unadventurous caution of her relatives. After she had written enthusiastically to her grandparents about her possible future at the Playhouse, they urged her to be patient and concentrate on her schoolwork. But it was too late for that sort of advice. Beryl had her mind set on her future career (‘I want the theatre, always the Theatre’)42 and she was more determined than ever to leave school (‘I must leave school. I must’).43
One of the few girls Beryl liked at Tring was Jean Aubrey, a dancer also looking to pursue a career in the theatre, and it was during a weekend spent with Jean at her parent’s house in Nottinghamshire that the most immediately fruitful opportunity for gaining some theatrical experience arose. As the two girls passed the Olympia Theatre in Bulwell they saw an advertisement for a talent contest to take place during Easter week. On the spur of the moment they decided to enter, and after talking to the theatre’s owner he booked them for the event there and then. ‘Oh wonderful glorious life,’44 Beryl noted excitedly.
The Olympia Theatre had in fact just opened less than a month previously, after having been closed for eleven years due to subsidence, and the talent show was part of its campaign to attract a new audience. The contest would intersperse performances by established theatre regulars with those of local amateur acts. Each night over the course of the week leading up to Easter one of the hopefuls would win a place in Friday’s final, and the three most popular acts, judged by ‘an applause-measuring machine’,45 stood to win cash prizes of £15, £10 and £5, plus the opportunity to perform in two shows on Saturday.
All this sounded ideal to Beryl and Jean, but less so to their parents, the reason being that the Olympia was a variety theatre, not a repertory theatre. As Winnie snootily put it: ‘We weren’t exactly thrilled when Jean’s Daddy rang up because we are not anxious for you to try Variety. Ian was very indignant when he read what you intended doing because he said they are all too ancient . . .’46
It is easy to put Winnie’s begrudging attitude down to snobbery, which to an extent it was, but there was a certain justification in it. Among the variety acts the Olympia had lined up for the week after the talent contest was Gus Brox and Myrna, ‘musical clowns from Holland’, Billy O’Sullivan ‘the Rogue with a brogue’, the ‘cheeky and charming’ Doris Clifton, and Koppa Goldwyn, ‘a trick xylophonist’.47 Winnie had not spent years encouraging and training her daughter, spending money on elocution lessons and ballet schools, in order for her turn into a variety performer. Nevertheless, Beryl and Jean set about applying pressure, in the form of letters and telephone calls, to persuade their parents to let them perform. Richard’s response was suitably considered: ‘I would sincerely counsel that caution and patience should be exercised,’ he said, adding that he would give the matter his ‘serious and undivided attention’.48
A week later, after discussions between the parents of the two girls, Richard was ready to concede, and somewhat improbably Beryl and Jean got their way.49 During Easter week Beryl went back up to Nottingham. Sandwiched between Dave Kaye, a professional comedian, the Ten Wonder Starlets, a dancing and tumbling act performed by diminutive girls, and Viscount, ‘the radio and film dog, who answers mathematical problems for members of the audience’, Beryl and Jean tried out their hastily improvised routine. First was a joint rendition of Billy Cotton’s ‘Hang on the Bell, Nellie’, a blackly comic song about a girl whose father, in attempting to protect his daughter’s honour, kills her would-be seducer and is sentenced to be hanged. This was followed by a version of ‘Abdul Abulbul Amir’, Beryl’s solo recitation of a monologue,50 and a dance routine as a finale.51
Although the two girls didn’t win, the experience confirmed their desire to work in the theatre. Years later, Beryl would nostalgically recall her first proper live performance on that stage in Bulwell: ‘It was not that I found the applause gratifying or the experience ever less than terrifying, but there was a moment, just before the end of the monologue . . . when fear and embarrassment lifted and I was no longer trapped within myself. For that one moment I floated as free and as aimless as the specks of dust that shimmered like fire-flies above the footlights.’52
At the end of the spring term in April 1949, Beryl left Tring for good. In Formby she passed her time in trips down to the shore or meeting friends in Liverpool and hanging round the docks. It was either here or at a meeting of the Young Communist League (YCL) that she met Les Carr53 (no. 16 on her boyfriend list), a twenty-two-year-old in the Merchant Navy. Carr was intelligent, impulsive and politically committed, and though he was clearly attracted to her he was sensitive enough not to force his attentions. After meeting her a few times he wrote to tell her: ‘For the past few days I have thought of nothing or nobody but you . . . What I am really trying to say is that I miss you very much. This is the first weekend we have been apart since we first met. All my love, Les xxx.’54
But there was a problem: he was not exactly ‘suitable’. He came from a Catholic, working-class family, one of ten children brought up in a small two-up two-down terraced house in Anfield. They both knew that Beryl’s parents wouldn’t agree to them seeing each other. It is easy to overlook the fact that Beryl had a privileged upbringing. The veneer of social respectability may have been thin – too thin for comfort in Winnie’s mind – but it was undeniably there, and when the lines were drawn between ‘us’ and ‘them’, Beryl was clearly in the former camp.
Les felt that the distance between them was insurmountable, and in one of Beryl’s school exercise books he wrote out his feelings of frustration, imagining what might have happened if she’d been born into another, less well-off, family: ‘Wish she had been born as Andy Howard’s daughter, things might have been different. I must be going nuts. She’s not Andy Howard’s daughter and things are no different. She’s Berry Bainbridge of Formby who has never had to worry her pretty little head about anything in her life, nice, kind, respectable pampered middle class, doesn’t know what work, struggle, fight, love, and hate means.’55
On their next meeting they went to hear Paul Robeson sing and give a speech against racial discrimination outside St George’s Hall. As if to justify her parents’ fears, at the end of the rally there were scuffles and truncheon-wielding police waded in, during which Beryl was struck on the elbow. Beryl’s pithy comment in her diary – ‘Awful lot of trouble’56 – referred not only to the melée itself but to the aftermath at home: when her father found out he banned her from attending any more meetings, putting a peremptory end to her political activism.
Despite the parental restrictions, Beryl continued to see Les several times over the next month or so, often down by the docks, where they took expeditions together out in boats. Almost imperceptibly, the relationship settled down into something more intimate, especially as far as Les was concerned, and he referred to her familiarly as ‘Babs’ and sent her mildly suggestive letters: ‘It’s two oclock in the afternoon. I’m lying on my bed naked – try it sometime – when I’m around . . . My centre piece is dead centre neither to the right nor the left but dead centre – if you know what I mean, just like the man on the cliffs.’57
As the summer progressed, Beryl began to realize she was becoming attached to him: ‘I met Les this afternoon and he looked bitter, and when he lay back he looked uplifted. The sky was very blue and I didn’t want it spoilt. He lay very close to me and put my nipple in his mouth. Funny tight burning sensation. He also asked me did I really feel anything for him. I said “Yes”. When he was away I came the nearest I ever was to loving him.’58
But something held her back. Whether it was the perceived class differences between them, her own confused emotional state, or simply that navy life was not conducive to a proper relationship, the writing seemed to be on the wall: ‘I think it all over now, and I begin to despise his speech and cheeky chappie Liverpool face. I’m such a contradictory muddle . . . Shall I tell him? Of course not.’
&nb
sp; Adding to the muddle were her still not quite resolved feelings for Harry, to whom Beryl had recently written what he called ‘a very affectionate letter’. His reply had given her another cause for anxiety: his plans to return to England seemed to be progressing and his desire for her appeared as ardent as ever: ‘Now I begin to economize already for the train-journey to Hambourg and for the ship-journey then to Hull . . . What is for me Germany, though my parents are here and my relations and I have my job, if my love-roses bloom in England? . . . If it is possible, perhaps we can your seventeenth birthday celebrate together. That were a joy!’59
This letter and her responsibilities to Harry played on her mind and she wrote in her diary: ‘He is coming to England and wants me to love him always. He says if I break from him, his life will be finished.’60 When Beryl next saw Les she ‘felt ashamed’,61 not just because Harry would be upset about her going out with someone else, but also because Les had declared his feelings for her, telling her that she was his whole world, and she knew that she would end up hurting him, too. Although she was ‘fond of him . . . almost against my will’,62 she wasn’t in love with him, and she began to feel increasingly guilty about having effectively led him on.
Shortly afterwards she wrote Les what amounted to a ‘Dear John’ letter. He protested that he wasn’t hurt and that he understood: ‘I don’t think you would hurt me intentionally . . . besides there’s no one knows better than I do that things will never work out the way I want them too in regard to our future.’ In spite of his disappointment, he couldn’t help being struck by her vivid style, like many of her correspondents: ‘If ever in later life you get tired of the stage take up a pen – you can write, anyhow.’63
Although Beryl would never quite lose contact with him, Les and the events of that summer were quickly overshadowed by other developments. Her favourable meeting with Maud Carpenter at the Playhouse in February led to further interviews in May, and finally in the first week of June 1949 a definite decision was taken: ‘Today I got a letter . . . and was told I was to start under Hugh Goldie on July 28th at the Playhouse . . . I don’t know whether to be excited or not about the Playhouse, because I am very frightened.’64
Having to start work at such short notice meant there was little chance to take a proper family holiday. Instead, in July, she went with Winnie to Blackpool, and spent a week taking in all the big shows.
On her return Beryl began her long-anticipated life in the theatre.
SEVEN
The Playhouse
At sixteen I was again at home and went to work in the repertory theatre, and met a great number of people who profoundly influenced me. From one I became obsessed with beauty of face and soul, so that life became an unending search for harmony and suffering and sadness. From another I achieved power because for the first time I realised in an unbudded way I held a great many qualities deemed strange and fine . . .1
The Liverpool Playhouse is situated in Williamson Square, at the very heart of the city. It was established in 1911 when the recently incorporated Liverpool Repertory Theatre Ltd. bought the struggling Star Theatre, raising capital for the venture through a share issue, and in the process becoming the first Rep to own the freehold of a theatre. Its subsequent reputation as one of the most important provincial theatres was forged principally through the combined effort of two people: William Armstrong, the director and producer at the Playhouse from 1922 to 1944, and Maud Carpenter, who served as its general manager for nearly forty years until her retirement in 1962.
For such an influential figure, remarkably little has been written about Maud Carpenter, who was born in 1892,2 the daughter of a bricklayer in Toxteth Park. She began her working career in her late teens as a box office clerk at the Liverpool Rep prior to its takeover of the Star Theatre,3 and in the years that followed she worked her way up to become a business manager and administrator par excellence. It was Maud who looked after the day-to-day running of the theatre, sorting out everything from hiring staff, setting salaries and drawing up contracts, down to bar arrangements and the rights to sell refreshments.
The 1949 Playhouse season was directed by Gerald Cross, a handsome but temperamentally erratic actor looking to move into producing and directing. As an actor at Dundee Rep a few years before, he had directed some successful productions, and after joining Liverpool Playhouse in 1947 and working under the director John Fernald he had carried out directorial duties on a couple of occasions. When Fernald moved to London at the end of the 1948 season, Cross jumped at the chance to take over. Alongside Cross, the Playhouse company featured a number of actors who were well-known figures around Liverpool, such as Cyril Luckham, John Warner and Peggy Mount.
Beryl was still two months short of her seventeenth birthday4 when she started as a student actress at the Playhouse. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she was completely swept up by the strange new world that opened out before her. She was immediately attracted by the cosmopolitanism of the theatre’s personnel who, in comparison to herself, seemed exotic, cultured and experienced in the ways of life. Her desire to belong to this grown-up artistic company is reflected by the fact that when her name didn’t appear in the programme she would write it in herself, adding her job title, ‘Prompt’ or ‘Assistant Electrician and Call Boy’, for good measure.
Initially her tasks were somewhat prosaic and included numerous jobs usually undertaken by an assistant stage manager, though she was never officially credited as an ASM in programmes.5 Her first production – technically speaking the last production of the previous season, which ran from September 1948 to August 1949 – was George Bernard Shaw’s You Never Can Tell, with stage direction by Hugh Goldie and sets designed and painted by Paul Mayo. Beryl’s job seems to have been limited to that of prompt, though she may have had a minor walk-on part, or more precisely a dance-on part, as Jacques, her French penfriend, lamented the fact that he couldn’t be in Liverpool to see her dance onstage, and assured her she must have looked pretty in her blue and red costume.6 However menial or inconsequential such jobs might have seemed at the time, observing actors at first hand and learning the nuts and bolts of stagecraft was vital training for her subsequent career in the theatre.
But there were other things an actress as young – and attractive – as Beryl had to learn, foremost of which was to negotiate the attentions of male actors, and in this she wasn’t always so successful. The Irish actor Tom St John Barry (later a broadcaster for ITN) would put her across his knee and spank her with a rolled-up newspaper whenever she came into his dressing room to call ‘overture and beginners’.7
The emotional ferment of the theatre – a self-contained and pressurized environment that seems especially designed to produce short-lived and unstable unions – was an aspect that Beryl found compelling. Far from being immune to such emotional volatility she quickly and inevitably succumbed. After the successful first night of Eve Morgante’s Westward Journey, which opened in the first week of September 1949, Beryl confided in her diary:
I am nearly seventeen, and I think I am in love with Hugh Goldie. In years to come or perhaps even tomorrow this will sound schoolgirlish and very silly, and I shall want to laugh. But tonight I mean it. Afterwards Miss Eve Morgante came and thanked us, and Gerald Cross said ‘Well done Children’, to us. That to me was very happiness. We went into the room upstairs and had a sherry and Hugh made me sit by him.8
Beryl’s crush on Goldie was understandable. Thirteen years her senior, Goldie cut a dashing figure: not just professionally – he was an actor who had made his debut as a director earlier in the year with a production of Hobson’s Choice at the Sheffield Playhouse, starring Paul Eddington and Patrick McGoohan – but physically, too. Tall, thin, and with a shock of blond hair falling over his lean, angular face, he looked every inch the ex-RAF pilot he was; he had been decorated on several occasions for his war service.
Although the two hit it off immediately, Goldie had a serious drawback as a romantic possibility: he was married –
to a Viennese refugee with whom he now had a two-year-old son. Consequently, Beryl took to her diary again shortly afterwards to record a change in her emotional attachments:
I am no longer in love with Hugh. I am very fond of him and he is very fond of me, but I love Paul Mayo. Every night I pray ‘Please God make Paul Mayo love me.’ Everybody in this place is so unhappy and Nuroctic . . . with such a lost sick look in their eyes. Why does everything have to be so sad? I’m so lonely. I’m so desperately lonely. Everyone is. They wander around, with their hands cold, and want something that only one in a thousand shall ever get. Must I get lost too?9
Although she’d had a lot of boyfriends, none of them had developed into a serious, lasting relationship – and given the combination of differences in age, nationality and social situation, none of them had much prospect of developing into one either. At seventeen Beryl had an idealized view of love, but had never met anyone who fulfilled that ideal. She liked the boys she had met, but apart from her youthful idealization of Harry Franz she had never actually fallen in love. Harry had discerned this, as Beryl noted in her diary after sending him a photograph of herself: ‘Funny thing. I feel I know such an awful lot about men and love and yet Harry said my eyes in the photo held no experience of love.’10
Consequently, she wasn’t prepared for the unsettling sensations that love provoked:
The very mention of the designer’s name caused me to break into a fit of trembling, and if I actually came face to face with him, which I did four or five times a day, I had the curious feeling that my feet and my teeth and my nose had enlarged out of all proportion. When he spoke to me I could never hear what he said for the thudding of my heart and the chattering of my out-sized teeth. In spite of this I hung about the paint frame whenever I could, hoping to be noticed.11
