Joan Littlewood

by Peter Rankin

  Gerry, who loved Jimmie’s songs and always would, was still at the admiring stage. Joan, feeling slightly guilty, because she was eight years older than him, was beginning to admire Gerry. Nevertheless, she still had the job of reproving him when, one day, he turned up with his mother’s jewels aiming to add some cash to the kitty. Her words worked because those jewels were back in their box before Bertha, his mother, found out. Bertha’s hope for Gerry, in the middle of his alarming political-theatrical activities, was that Joan would improve his speech. Words, when they came, tumbled from his mouth in a muddle. Also his Manchester accent was deliberately stronger than his sister’s and two brothers’. Theirs had been ironed out and, in conversation, they talked about Mummy and Daddy, not to mention Jebs when speaking of Gerry. Joan did not like that.

  His background, then and always, Joan played down. In her diaries, she imagined him, each morning, walking to Manchester Grammar School. In fact, much to his embarrassment, a chauffeur drove him in a posh car and Manchester Grammar School, despite its name, was an independent school. Parents had to pay for their children to go to it. The house he lived in was cheerless, said Joan. Maybe but it was in Higher Crumpsall, an area of the well-to-do. Yes, Manny had started out poor, and yes, he did not lose his accent. In fact his stayed stronger than Gerry’s eventually became but, through his raincoat business and a close connection to the Sieff family of Marks and Spencer, Manny got rich and so was able to give Gerry a comfortable middle-class upbringing.

  What about Gerry, background or no background? Clear as it is, from the Raffles factory coup, that he was the black sheep of the family, what other things could he be? Shy, sad and mopey some of the time but mostly a boyish, make-things-happen, never-does-as-he’s-told young man with a deep, merry laugh. Some fancied the pants off him. Some, faced with his confidence and ability to create comfort, combined with his lack of obedience and knack of getting into scrapes, were annoyed by him.

  In that neither of them was like Gerry, Jimmie and Joan were the same. They were not the same when it came to what they thought of him. Jimmie, according to Joan, was jealous. Joan thought Gerry the most beautiful person she had ever seen, a prince who dined only on the most delicious of food. When Rosalie, who was at university with him – he was studying Politics and Economics – mentioned the business of scrapes, Joan was inclined to overlook it, even though she knew that Gerry had accidentally shot his brother Eric in the bottom with an air gun.

  Even at this early stage, Joan’s admiration for Gerry was already tinged with jealousy. Clare Ffoulkes had golden hair which she wore loose. That’s what she said officially. Unofficially, she said that Clare had a miserable, nasal voice. Her description of Gerry breaking off the affair with Clare exudes a sense of relief.

  The contrast between Gerry and Jimmie was made most obvious, once, away from Lysistrata rehearsals. Jimmie was a keen rambler and proud of the fitness that came from it. Joan, when she wasn’t arguing about which route to take, quite liked it too. What Jimmie couldn’t do was swim. Gerry could, very well, so there came a day for him to pass on his knowledge to Jimmie.

  Standing in the water, wearing his school trunks, the ones with the championship badge on, Gerry put an arm under Jimmie’s thighs and a hand under his chin. This made Jimmie look like a baby as Joan, among others standing on the bank, was able to observe. No sooner was the lesson over, and Jimmie was heading for dry land, than he started to give a lecture on how it was all very simple and just a matter of hydrodynamics, which he then went on to explain. It didn’t work. The others laughed and behind their laughter was the thought: ‘You just couldn’t give it to Gerry, could you?’

  Civil Defence took over 42 Deansgate where Theatre Union usually rehearsed, so when it came to getting Lysistrata on its feet, the company had to look elsewhere. A sympathetic vicar, Etienne Watts, gave them a not very sympathetic space, the crypt underneath his church, All Saints; full of coffins, but it had to do.

  During rehearsals, Joan did what she always did at rehearsals and, for that matter, in everyday life. She asked for something difficult. As her demands were mostly difficult-interesting, as opposed to difficult-boring, someone, somewhere would take up the challenge. On this occasion, she asked for the sound of a door opening and closing but not an ordinary one. It had to be specific; if anything, unsettling. Who went off and came back with a wooden ratchet device he’d sawed and nailed together? Gerry. What the effect sounded like Joan didn’t say but Gerry’s effort touched her. She wouldn’t have remembered it otherwise. As for Gerry, it was just the start of him picking up the challenges Joan threw down for him.

  Once London had been bombed – that was the Blitz – it was on the cards that Manchester would be hit too. A couple of months later, it was.

  Joan, having to find paid work, Lysistrata or no, was asked by Bob Reid of the Manchester Evening News, to write a report on a family that had been buried alive in Salford. She did, but when she handed in her copy, Bob asked her to build up the tension and the horror. As she thought the facts were strong enough on their own, this only served to reinforce her suspicion of journalism. However, needs must, and the end result was good enough for Bob to give her several more stories. Joan’s communism did not bother him.

  The threat of bombs falling as soon as darkness came made people leave work as early as possible. Joan was doing just that after a Lysistrata rehearsal when a blast from behind threw her and two girls in the company against a wall. No sooner had they counted their fingers and toes than they thought of the crypt. Some of the company were still down there. Back they ran. All Saints had received a direct hit. Fire engines drew up but the firemen didn’t dig. They thought the church had been empty and, as for the crypt, they didn’t think about it at all. Etienne Watts, who had summoned them, was putting them wise when a figure covered in dust emerged from the vestry, or rather where the vestry used to be. It was Gerry. He turned round to help the others as all of them, thank goodness, staggered out. The church had been very well built.

  Lysistrata opened at the Milton Hall on Deansgate in central Manchester and toured various towns round about. Its programme note read: ‘As the war intensifies, the work of the theatre becomes more important. This is your theatre.’ Brave words when the company was thinking: ‘How long can we keep this up?’

  They kept it up for a show called Classic Soil, which was not Joan’s radio feature, though it was like a radio feature. Less specific than Last Edition, it was more poetic. The first half was taken from Jimmie’s history of Chartism – weavers in cottages forced into factories – the one he had written for the BBC. The second half was a general attack on the waste of war. The Chartism half, though a story that has to be remembered, is dour. The converted would nod away while everyone else would stay away.

  To counteract this, Joan did her usual. She beguiled the audience with movement, rhythm and sheer beauty. For one scene, a convention, she drew tiny sketches. They are a lesson in how a talent develops. What jumps from them, firstly, is The Green Table, Kurt Jooss’s ballet. He created it in 1932 as a reaction to the peace talks of the time, and peace talks in general – the ones that go round and round and only end in death. It used Labanotation, Rudolf Laban’s system of writing down choreography.

  In the centre of her drawings, as in the Jooss ballet, is a large table almost like a billiard table. Along its sides and at the head, are characters at different angles to it, and, again as in the ballet, all are standing. You can see the main appeal to Joan. No chairs.

  Above and below the drawings are minutely detailed stage directions. In later years, Joan, on being handed a new script would, chiming with Shakespeare texts, cross out the stage directions. That way the actors found the action in the words. At 26, Joan was learning. By reading books and looking at paintings, she was putting information into her head which she could try out in rehearsals. The drawings and written instructions, an intermediate stage, acted as memos to herself. With the passage of time, they would be ab
sorbed and so no longer necessary. They would be at her fingertips.

  The instructions for the Chartist convention are a kind of choreography. Joan makes energy expended by one character pop up in the reaction of another. ‘Graham turns vehemently to Chairman who is perplexed between the two groups – Gerry R catches the movement from Graham and counterpoints it by a downward movement – down in his heels – and hand downthrust in his pockets.’ There’s one thing about that which stayed the same in all Joan’s scripts: the mixing of actors’ names and characters.

  ‘As the war intensifies. . .’ yes, well it did. Classic Soil was Theatre Union’s last show before it had to stop altogether. The tin lid, as expected, was call-up.

  Before going, Graham Banks, papers in hand, proposed to Rosalie Williams, much to the annoyance of Jimmie, who was having an affair with her. Not annoyed by this, even though she knew of it, was Joan, probably because she was having an affair too, with Philo Hauser, an unsuitable Austrian refugee. It would not last long. About Graham’s going, she was very annoyed, Bill Sharples too, except annoyed was not the right word. She was fearful. Graham was going to be air crew and pacifist Bill, the prop-maker, who had gone earlier, had been given non-combatant duties on an oil tanker. Air crew was dangerous. The oil tanker was a sitting duck.

  Then Jimmie was called up. He went but two days later, hopped it. The talk that could knock you down masked a spirit that was not so tough. Howard Goorney was next. He joined the infantry. As for Gerry, he was too young to go right away but it was only a matter of time before he had to join up as well. Like Graham, he joined the airforce, where he made himself popular by introducing wine to the mess. Beer, he hated as, by coincidence, did Joan. And Joan herself?

  The full BBC instruction, at her barring, was that she could still work on an ad hoc basis in musical and dramatic performances, i.e. she was not totally out of radio. She was freelance which meant that, like any other freelance, she was working but had to scramble for whatever she could get. It started with her being summoned to the BBC in London by a drama and features producer, Marjorie Banks, who sympathised with her politics. Joan was not keen to go because she saw herself heading into the brick wall of the ban. As John Coatman had done before, Marjorie Banks invited her to a restaurant away from the BBC. She had something up her sleeve. As long as Joan’s name was not on the script, she could carry on writing and she, Marjorie, had just the job for her, a soap opera called Front Line Family. They could write it together. Joan accepted the job, so when, in the early 1950s, she discovered that blacklisted Hollywood writers of the McCarthy era were up to something similar, she would have been able to think: ‘Here we go again.’

  At the time, she did the job conscientiously, writing the scripts in Manchester and sending them on the overnight train to London, but afterwards she was dismissive. ‘The good thing about writing a wartime soap is that when you get bored with a character, you can always drop a bomb on them.’ One actress in it went on to a long career, first in films, and then on television: Jean Anderson.

  Marjorie Banks couldn’t get Joan reinstated, though she tried, but she could put her name about as available for freelance work. As a result, something did crop up. Tunnel, the programme which Joan had heard Jimmie’s voice on when she first arrived in Manchester, had been written by a poet called DG Bridson. Since then, Geoffrey Bridson, pronounced Bride-son (he came from the Isle of Man, as Joan loved to point out), had become a producer of features. This had brought him into contact with her, but he’d gone a bit quiet after she was barred. With Marjorie’s prodding, he thought of something.

  When Joan was dropped from the staff, it meant specifically the staff of the Home Service North Region. Today, being dropped from Radio 4 would be the equivalent, except it would be a Radio 4 that had special programmes for the north. What we don’t have nowadays but what they did then was Empire Radio, BBC programmes which were broadcast to Canada, South Africa and Australia. Nobody said Joan couldn’t work for that as long as it was on a short contract. Bridson sent her one.

  Having said ‘It doesn’t qualify you for a pension,’ it went on to offer: ‘£10 a week, to research, write and produce a series entitled A Visit To . . .’ Substitute the dots with any town in the UK you care to think of.

  To avoid the ‘Herry and Jeck’ vowels of the usual announcers, Joan found a Canadian, Kent Stevenson, to present the programme, so it would start: ‘Each week, Kent Stevenson takes you to one of the famous places in Great Britain where men and women who love peace are living a wartime life.’

  Joan’s job was to travel to the town in question, find some interesting people, question them, write a script and, a day later, record them reading the script with Kent Stevenson putting the questions, also scripted. As with the radio features before the war, everything had to be on paper first. On the covers of scripts, it said: ‘Approved for Policy BBC Department. . . Approved for Security Censorship Unit’ with spaces left for ticks. You would then read:

  A Visit to Blackpool. Friday 10.7.42. 15 minutes.

  After Kent Stevenson had explained to the far-flung listeners that Blackpool was England’s Coney Island, this would happen:

  FRED FAIRCLOUGH:

  Where are you going wi’ that thing, lad? If you don’t mind my butting in, like. What is it, a microphone?

  KENT: Yeah, it won’t bite.

  FRED: Why don’t you come with us, lad? You’d have a reet good time.

  [Joan’s script]

  Actually, Fred Fairclough was an actor. Joan had known him for quite a while. He was a supporter of hers. These programmes were invariably a mix of the real and the artificial.

  In an excerpt from A Visit to Chichester, England, 17th July 1942,

  Kent Stevenson talks to the genuine article:

  KENT: I want you to meet the very pretty owner of the voice you have been hearing during the broadcast. She’s standing beside me now – Miss Pearl Turner. Young lady, you cost me my beauty sleep last night. I had to get up at half past four this morning to find you – and where did I find you?

  PEARL: Milking the cows, of course.

  Short as this contribution of Pearl Turner’s may have been, it’s worth mentioning because her singing voice so impressed Joan that she remembered both it and Pearl for better times.

  Even before Gerry Raffles’ call-up, he and Joan had been falling in love. Sitting together on a bench in Manchester’s Piccadilly while Joan waited for her bus to Hyde, he had kissed her and, after that, they’d met for the occasional rendezvous; tea at Woolworth’s, coffee at the Kardomah Coffee House and privacy at his cheerless but, at least, empty house in Higher Crumpsall. An especially romantic meeting happened one Sunday while Joan was sitting in bed with a high temperature – ill again – writing the script for A Visit to Salisbury. Gerry, in his blue RAF greatcoat, burst in. His presence, both youthful and solid, was just the tonic she needed. She didn’t know that it was one of Gerry’s scrapes. He was AWOL.

  Soon after that, he was kicked out of the RAF. The official explanation was ‘Averse to discipline’. ‘For reasons of love and politics’ is what Gerry himself said. The love was Joan. Last Edition’s final speech: ‘Who is the enemy? . . . I tell you the enemy is at home,’ was the politics. He didn’t hold back. He also ordered The Daily Worker, the organ of the Communist Party. These boyish passions saved his life. Graham Banks, who had trained to be air crew, was dead, and most of Gerry’s RAF contemporaries who had trained with him to be pilots, were killed weeks after he left the service.

  Although Joan was impatient with the war – large, boring object standing in her way as it was – she did, while it went along, learn new stuff that would be useful for the time when she could take the dream that was always in her head and do something with it. Recordings, in those days, were not edited. The first programme Kent Stevenson did for Joan was him interviewing non-stop for an hour. He was shattered. Afterwards, he explained to Joan that tape could be cut. You record. You stop. You start again.
You then take the tapes back to the BBC and make the programme by editing. Joan liked that. However, Kent Stevenson, after recording several episodes of A Visit to . . . found it too tame. His ambition was to broadcast from a plane during a raid. He got his way, eventually, but, in replacing another reporter at the last minute, was killed. The reporter who was supposed to have flown on that mission was Richard Dimbleby.

  Joan never stopped writing to the BBC, usually in London. She was either sending adaptations on spec or she was asking for the ban to be lifted. She dreaded having to join the services. At least that’s what she put in these letters. Lance Sieveking and Laurence Gilliam, the producers she sent her letters to, are names that remain big in broadcasting today. Their answers were always polite but always guarded. Some of her letters worked. Some didn’t. What she didn’t put in them was her true situation. The money she was earning had to support, not just herself, but others, one of whom she absolutely could not mention. In all, there were five.

  Her grandparents, Robert Francis and Caroline Em, stuck under the Blitz, had troubled her, so she’d asked them to come and live in Hyde. Already at the house but, by then, in need of support, were Joan’s mother-in-law, Betsy, and her father-in-law, Bill. Last, but far from least, was the supposedly miles away Jimmie Miller. That’s when he wasn’t being hidden by Bill Sharples’ pacifist parents who, as Joan had feared, did lose their son. There was one more hiding place he had. It was Rosalie Williams’ home. His affair with Rosalie was still on the go, she having turned down Graham Banks not long before he was killed. It was all so exhausting and made worse by Caroline Em and Robert Francis fading away rapidly. They had been happier in their own home under the Blitz. Joan had made a mistake, and she knew it.