Joan Littlewood

by Peter Rankin

  She did get more work but the short contracts, the constant travelling, the cold hotel bedrooms, the blackout, the knocking out of scripts overnight and the loneliness were, for her, a grind. For someone who knew that radio was going to be their life, it might not have been so. At least you weren’t called up. Joan didn’t see it that way. She wanted something else and, much as she liked to see herself as a loner, mysterious and romantic, she knew that two days of that was quite enough. Grub, home cooked (not by her), and a bit of company was what she needed after that.

  The job that saw her nearly to the end of the war was a series starring one of the most popular voices of the time, Wilfred Pickles. It was called Mixed Pickles. She was brought to it by a North Region producer/presenter, Nan Macdonald. With Nan she got on fine. As well as doing the Pickles series for her, she got to act in her children’s plays and give readings at two guineas a time. The Prince and the Pauper, one of her adaptations, was commissioned by Nan. It would be the Christmas show at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in 1954, another goody stored up for another day.

  Wilfred Pickles she was less keen on. She disliked his taste for double entendres where she could see none, and telling smutty jokes at Rotary clubs. However, he wasn’t the one writing the scripts. That was her job, so she could make Wilf, as he was known, sound more intelligent and better informed than he really was. The series is explained by his own introduction:

  WILF: How do folks? The name is Wilfred Pickles and I’ll be coming to the mike at this time every week. Now I’m what you might call a go-between – a kind of link between the ordinary man and woman and the great body of listeners.

  Like the Kent Stevenson programme it was soft propaganda but this time it was more sculpted. Actors recited poetry. Music wove in and out, as in ‘Bring up Vi and quartet singing The Oak and the Ash,’ Vi being Violet Carson, Ena Sharples in Coronation Street years later. Some weeks, instead of the usual visit, it could be a monologue and even when Wilf went to places to talk to people, you began to wonder. For example, in Come Away to County Durham, he describes what it was like to be travelling there on a train. ‘A girl in khaki was talking politics nineteen to the dozen to a young sailor whose only interest in the world seemed to be swing music.’ Joan would certainly have gone to Durham. She had to – there was all that research to do – but did Wilf? He wasn’t a reporter. He was an actor. Was it not easier for him to stay by a microphone in the studio and use his skill to lift Joan’s script, as radio actors say, off the page?

  So however much she despised Wilfred Pickles, Joan could make the programme more hers and even subtly get a point of view across. This was possible, not by expressing an opinion – the censors would have been on to that – but by selecting facts and putting them together to make a certain impression on the listener. Mostly, it was mild. Even so, quoting a colliery’s motto: ‘United we stand, divided we fall,’ before having a miner say: ‘Russia is out to smash Hitler and we are out for the same thing . . . You see Russia has lost some of her miners to the Fascists . . . Russia supported us in 1926’ [Joan’s script], does make one sit up.

  The script for Hull, The Land of the White Rose, is unusual as it is not uplifting. Joan makes it plain that the women of Hull were hit twice over. If they didn’t lose their men from fishing, they lost them from them being in the navy. There’s even a reference to the comings and goings of naval ships. That, as you would expect, has a pencil line through it. The earlier truth, which you might think of as bad propaganda, doesn’t.

  Apart from Sheffield and Hull, most of the programmes have a rural flavour:

  SHEPHERD: It’s a quiet life but it’s a satisfying one.

  WILF: How’s the hay shaping?

  SHEPHERD: Drouthy.

  Joan enjoyed dialect but never seemed to take it that seriously. Actors who were proud of doing an accurate, thick, regional accent were mocked by her. What was the point, she thought, if no one knew what they were on about.

  Sometimes in her Mixed Pickles scripts, she appeared to be having pure fun as in Canny Cummerlan she had Wilf say: ‘I’d made up my mind to do a bit of climbing so I got myself a good strong pair of boots,’ like Wilf was actually going to go climbing. She herself enjoyed talking about trecuni climbing boots because she liked the word ‘trecuni’. However, was it real climbing or the show of climbing, the shorts, the cleft stick, the Tyrolean hat that she liked? So often with Joan, it was the latter, the show rather than the real thing.

  Altogether, Joan’s programmes with Wilfred Pickles were designed to apply a balm to the jagged nerves of those serving far away. This doesn’t sound madly exciting, but it taught her lessons. They taught her about Britain. They taught her – in her own words – not to impose and they taught her professionalism which only comes from doing a job over and over again. Gerry Raffles thirty years later, said that Joan could, merely by holding a script in the palm of her hand, tell you how long it would be.

  During those radio years, Joan was Theatre Union’s only professional who was doing the job they were supposed to be doing and being paid for it. Neither Jimmie nor Gerry could do that.

  Jimmie could not appear in public and could not earn. He stayed at home writing plays, hewing out a kind of language that he thought would be right. To sell them, Joan would do anything, like sending them to Bernard Shaw or Donald Wolfit or, if that didn’t work, to West End agents and Hugh Beaumont of HM Tennent, people she would normally have nothing to do with. When asked who this young playwright was, she would write that he had travelled widely and served in the army for years. She didn’t care what she said. She was just trying to make money. It didn’t work. Despite her spirited covering letters, the scripts came back, which led her to reflect that Jimmie’s quickly knocked-out sketches written before the war, material that served an immediate purpose, had more life in them than all this careful crafting he was up to. It made quite a contrast to what she was doing, endlessly writing, always to a deadline but, at the same time, always having her words spoken. She did write one thing that came to nothing, a screenplay on a day in the life of a newspaper, but at least she was paid. Curiously, it was based around the Daily Express’ branch in Ancoats and, in those days, the Daily Express was known as ‘The Tart’s Gazette’. She really would do anything.

  Young Gerry was not quite in the same situation as Jimmie. His life’s work hadn’t started yet. Even so, he must have thought it was going to be something to do with Joan because, after being thrown out of the air force, he didn’t make a big career choice. He took jobs that would get him by. He just made sure that they were tough, so that he could align himself with the working class. A friend said he swore a lot at the time, which was not characteristic of him at all. He found work in a fizzy drinks factory, driving a horse-drawn dray whilst resting his feet on the horse’s rump, and finally getting work down a mine in Pendleton, where, lying on his back on a bogey, whizzing along, he bashed his knee on the roof of a low tunnel. Together with getting into scrapes, he was accident prone.

  It is when Joan, in her diaries, refers to Jimmie as Edith, as in ‘Edith went to the hairdressers’ when she meant ‘Jimmie had a haircut’ (in case the police read her diary), that it seems like the two most important men in her life had, for the duration of the war, been turned into eunuchs. They were not, like her, working at drama and being paid, nor were they in the forces, deadly as they were, which everybody else was. Joan’s ability to earn from drama, on the one hand and, on the other, plan for the future, like keeping tabs on Pearl Turner, was the only motor that was keeping the show on the road. No wonder she felt lonely.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THEATRE WORKSHOP SETS OFF

  Joan, convinced the war was going to end in 1943, was utterly fed up when it didn’t. ‘Open a second front, now!’ was the cry in the streets but that wasn’t to happen until 6 June 1944, D-Day. When it did, Joan, ever the optimist, was so excited that, as far as she was concerned, the war was over. In her head, the plan to start a compan
y, one that did nothing but theatre, gathered speed.

  While in Kendal writing a BBC script, she wrote to John Trevelyan, Westmoreland’s Director of Education. ‘I’d like to meet and talk to you about making Kendal a base for local touring.’

  Trevelyan was another on-the-way-up Establishment figure of the kind Joan would call on over the years as a potential ally. 1958 would see him become Secretary to the Board of British Film Censors.

  On 18 August 1944, he wrote back: ‘I like the Kendal idea but there’s this Margaret Littlewood who wants to get into radio. Will you and Nan Macdonald see her?’ which sounds like: ‘You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.’

  It makes one realise that, at this stage, Joan was on her own when it came to writing the obligatory letters to big names like, in her case, Bernard Shaw, Donald Wolfit and JB Priestley. That’s because she was the only member of Theatre Union, and of whatever company that was to come, that these people had heard of. Her work at the BBC had done that. So, it was up to her to cope with the problem of Margaret Littlewood. She made a token effort but Margaret Littlewood irritated her. Still, it was enough for Trevelyan eight days later, to write: ‘It will be grand if we can make Kendal a real drama centre.’

  Not that Joan left it to him alone. When excitement grabbed her, she would talk to anyone. There may have been Trevelyan up in his important post but, on the ground was Fred Wilson. Fred she’d already met.

  He’d sung in a choir for a BBC programme and got chatting to her. You can imagine him, an amateur, desperate to get into radio, desperate to get into any kind of drama. How often have professionals been polite to people like that before making their escape? However, this one with his writing paper headed ‘Titus Wilson and Son, Printers, Kendal,’ had, for obvious reasons, his uses. He knew Kendal inside out and so Joan allowed the correspondence to go on.

  ‘Before the war,’ she wrote, ‘we were a carefully modelled group like the Compagnie des Quinze,’ as if Fred would know what that was, but it sounded imposing. ‘I’ve all sorts of ambitions for our theatre and never want it to be an ordinary little touring repertory company,’ which Fred would probably have been perfectly happy with. However, those words of Joan’s, drew him into a magic circle. They gave him hope that, with a little fixing from her, he could get his adaptation of Robert the Devil on the radio. She sent it, unfixed, straight to Nan Macdonald who rejected it. Did Fred drop away? No. The theatre bug bites deep.

  He told Joan to get in touch with John Trevelyan. Thus it becomes unclear whether Joan knew Trevelyan before or whether it was Fred who made the introduction. Next, Fred recommended Howie’s Rooms as a base. Joan liked the sound of those but then, in other correspondence of hers, it became Trevelyan who recommended them. It’s true he did mention them in other letters but only after Fred had talked them up.

  On a piece of paper among this correspondence between Joan and Fred, she wrote ‘CONTACT MADE BBC M/C. AWFUL SYCOPHANT SCARED OF OUR POLITICS.’ She added, quoting Trevelyan: ‘Fred Wilson is a mug and artists should take advantage of businessmen.’

  She was ambivalent about Trevelyan too. He had a link with the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), the forerunner of the Arts Council, and that sounded really useful. He could also raise an education grant. Joan, in a letter to Rosalie Williams, wrote, bubbling over with excitement about this, but, in her diary, wrote that she was not a teacher. Instructing the people of Westmoreland in drama was not what she wanted. As actors would testify – and Lionel Bart too – Joan was indeed a teacher, a great one, but it wasn’t a job she wanted to commit herself to.

  As so often with Joan, this was not all that was going on. Straight after VE Day, 8 May 1945, Nan Macdonald wrote to her suggesting she dig out an old script she’d written, as it would be perfect for the re-establishing of BBC Home Service North Region. Joan was very much back in there.

  Without really knowing what was going to happen on the Kendal front, she wrote to Howard Goorney who was still in the forces, serving in Belgium. Get out, she told him, we’re starting, and so Howard, by dint of lighting candles and chanting prayers a little too fervently, got out – because there he was in his demob suit.

  Also there was Jimmie, only now with a beard and a different name. He wanted people to call him Ewan MacColl. It brought him closer to the Scottishness he so longed for. Being born in Salford had always been a sore point.

  Joan’s feelings about his desertion were mixed. She knew that if he’d stuck it out in the army he could have been dead but, forever afterwards, she would say: ‘He could never look you in the eye.’ She once said: ‘Maybe it would have been better if he had stuck it out.’ Others, from then on, called him Ewan. Joan continued to call him Jimmie and, when his first two children were given Scottish names, she called Hamish, his son, Mishka and said that Kirsty, his daughter, was named after a Swede. This Swede was an actress soon to join the company. Joan called her Kerstin. Everybody else called her Kristin. Nomenclature was important to Joan. She would have people the way she wanted them.

  Anyway, that was the company: Jimmie/Ewan, Joan, Gerry, Rosalie and Howard. It wasn’t very big. Auditions would have to be held.

  Joan could do auditions but she didn’t like them. People dropping in to see what was buzzing, joining in and either leaving or staying, was her favourite method of collecting a team.

  For this set of auditions, she listened, not very patiently, to the auditioner’s set piece and then gave him or her a situation inside which to improvise. Most were horrified but a few, the ones with a quick wit and some imagination, enjoyed it. A small number, even on being told that this was a co-operative, dependent on what came in at the box office, threw their lot in with – with what? A new name was needed for this new company. Some long-remembered words from an American agitprop article came into Joan’s head and formed themselves into Theatre Workshop. They joined Theatre Workshop.

  The most important person to come through these auditions was David Scase. Joan had wanted him anyway because he was the best sound effects man at BBC Manchester but, when she described him joining the company, she said he came because he fancied Rosalie. He did fancy Rosalie (he and Rosalie eventually got married) but he did also audition. At first, he was inhibited, understandable considering he hadn’t set out to be an actor. However, as Joan stretched him with different ideas, the very fact that he wasn’t trained freed him to invent. The reason for David being important was that he was an example of a discovery who would stick at it.

  That was not always the case. Joan could discover talent all right. Pearl Turner, the Chichester girl, who had sung so sweetly on the Kent Stevenson show, was going to join the company. More immediately, there was Lillian Booth. Joan picked her out of school, encouraged her to improvise and put her into a radio play. She was a natural, but shortly after being asked to join Theatre Workshop she left, as did, sooner rather than later, Pearl Turner. Annoyingly for Joan, there had to be more than talent in her actors. There had to be a deep down desire to do it and keep doing it, a quality that was of little interest to her.

  There was plenty of excitement in setting up Theatre Workshop. That was one of Joan’s talents – creating excitement – as Fred Wilson was experiencing, but there was uncertainty too. Would Howie’s Rooms really be available? The War Office had not let them go yet. Might Theatre Workshop be forced to run a school and, if it refused, how would it survive? At the BBC were wage clerks, typists and organisers like Nan Macdonald. It’s easier to be part of that and grumble than go it alone.

  For Theatre Workshop, practicality was needed; the ability to explain things to people who were not that bright, all the stuff that bored Joan. Where was that to come from?

  Lying in bed with her during one of their snatched moments together – Joan preferring things that way, what with Jimmie still a bit of an embarrassment and she enjoying the roundabout way in any case – Gerry told her that he would devote all his strength to her.

  It was not
merely love but clear-sightedness that made him see what others in Theatre Union and Theatre Workshop may not have. The talent to watch was Joan’s and that’s what he was backing. He would do everything to look after that talent, well, as long as she used it rightly. If he thought she was using it wrongly or not at all, then he was not behind her. In 1945 that thought was miles away from his head but it would be there in 1961 when he thought she was not using her talent properly.

  Meanwhile, Jimmie was the high priest of Theatre Workshop because he was the one writing the plays or, as Joan put it: ‘Once upon a time Jimmie was the genius and I was the handmaiden at his knee.’

  Joan had sent a list of plays to John Trevelyan. On it were the two which the company were to open with, Johnny Noble and The Flying Doctor.

  Johnny Noble was based on the research Joan had done for the Wilfred Pickles radio programme on Hull, so it had not gone to waste. In her letter to Trevelyan, she described it, to keep things simple, as a documentary play about the fishing industry in Hull. It wasn’t quite that.

  Jimmie’s script, made up of narration, verse and songs, Joan’s conjuring up of places, weather, an air raid and the loading and firing of an anti-aircraft gun, using no scenery and no gun, just movement, dance, lights and sound effects, would best be left to the moment when it was put before an audience.

  Johnny Noble only lasts an hour. That’s why they neeeded the other show, The Flying Doctor. Jimmie’s adaptation, from Molière’s farce, Le Médecin Volant, came from before the war, so little text work was required. For Joan it was like being given a present. Commedia dell’arte, her favourite influence, would suffuse it, and Howard Goorney, as Scagnarelle, the servant who pretends to be two people at once, would bring those Callot engravings to life. It’s what he did best.