Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  MICHAEL HOLROYD

  Porlock Weir, December 1996

  Appendix

  Well, now as to practical matters... Ive used my knowledge of the world to invest my money in ways that other men have overlooked; and whatever else I may be, I’m a safe man from the money point of view.

  Mrs Warren’s Profession

  Shaw’s will, when it was published in March 1951, turned out to be a most unpopular document. ‘Had he deliberately set out to ensure that the least possible profit should accrue to future generations from his wealth,’ commented The Economist, ‘it is hard to see how he could have done better.’ Several newspapers carried a similar incredulous headline: ‘Left a fortune for reform of alphabet.’

  The gross value of his estate amounted to £367,233 (equivalent to £6.2 million in 1997). It was an extraordinary sum for a writer: Thomas Hardy had left £91,000 in 1928; G. K. Chesterton £28,000 in 1936; J. M. Barrie £173,500 in 1937; H. G Wells £60,000 in 1946. In due course an assessment of his copyrights would have to be added to Shaw’s estate, and the total fortune had every chance of rising to a glittering £500,000. But apparently it had been fool’s gold, an old fool’s gold, and was posthumously reverting to base metal.

  The British public had been living through more than a decade of austerity which only now was coming to an end with the final lifting of food rationing and the long-awaited opening of the Festival of Britain. Britain had borrowed over $2,500,000,000 in Marshall aid from the United States, more than any other European country. By the beginning of 1951 her overseas trade enabled her to dispense with further borrowing, yet she appeared to have traded away part of her sovereignty. The cultural, educational and intellectual practices in which Shaw had sought to invest his residual copyright income were to be eroded by the need to make Britain’s academies, galleries and museums part of an expanding entertainment industry. With its thirty acres of pleasure gardens and fun fairs in Battersea, the Festival of Britain would retrospectively look more like a theme park for tourists than a commemoration of the Great Exhibition that in 1851 had converted its profits into funds for scholarships.

  A Shaw Memorial Fund was set up in 1951 to subsidize young authors, dramatists and musicians, encourage the ‘worthy presentation’ of Shaw’s own plays at festivals, and maintain the fabric of Shaw’s Corner which he had given to the National Trust without an endowment. But the public did not see why it should have to pay for all this when there was so much of Shaw’s own money apparently going to waste. The fact that Clement Attlee, the Prime Minister, was associating himself with the fund, and that it was to have the support of the Labour Government, made the venture all the more untimely. That October the General Election swept Attlee from office and returned the Conservatives to power. Within a few days all the Festival of Britain structures except the Concert Hall were dismantled.

  On 23 November, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer R. A. Butler (who that year was elected President of the Royal Society of Literature and later created Baron Butler of Saffron Walden) launched the appeal as ‘a world tribute to Shaw’s memory’. The target was £250,000 and the total eventually reached £416: ‘a complete failure and a disastrous flop,’ lamented Archibald Henderson.

  Yet Shaw’s finances were not quite what the public perceived them to be. The net value of his estate was £301,585 (equivalent to £5.1 million in 1997) on which £180,571 became immediately due in death duties. Nor was this all. Once the copyrights had been valued, seventy per cent of this notional amount would have to be paid in additional death duties. Besides this, there were more than a dozen annuities in Shaw’s will, mostly bequests to those who had worked for him at Ayot and in London, which had to be met each year. Since his royalties were bringing in less than £50,000 a year, and might soon decrease (his earliest plays shortly coming out of copyright in the United States), there seemed a likelihood that the alfabet trusts, which were confined to twenty-one years from his death so as to avoid the legal taint of perpetuity, would be largely washed out. Towards the end of 1951 public attention turned to what The Star called ‘The “Tangled Will” of Mrs Shaw’.

  *

  Charlotte Shaw had bequeathed £94,000 to Ireland for educational purposes. She wanted the money to be used for three objects: bringing masterpieces of fine art, including music and painting, within the reach of all classes of Irish people; teaching Irish people the secrets of self-control, elocution, oratory and deportment; and the endowment of a Chair or Readership at an Irish university for instruction in these matters of fine art and social intercourse. Her wishes were considered so unusual that the National Provincial Bank, as trustee of her estate, brought the matter before the Chancery Division of the High Court in London to determine whether under English law they constituted a valid charitable trust.

  The English bank questioned the will, and an Irish bank defended it. The Attorney-General supported it and was himself supported by the Public Trustee on behalf of Bernard Shaw’s estate. But lawyers representing Charlotte’s next-of-kin challenged the trusts as being void by reason of remoteness and uncertainty.

  A murmur of approval went round the court when the judge described Charlotte’s will as ‘a very interesting document revealing a mind of a very high quality and a lady with every wish to do right’. It was at Chancery because ‘the lady seems to have got tangled up in a web of her own verbosity and it makes it very difficult to untangle her’. No one recognized the unconscious pun relating to Sidney Webb who had helped to draft the will. The document seemed oddly lacking in the good manners it sought to promote. There was laughter when Sir Charles Russell, a King’s Counsel instructed by the National City Bank (an Irish bank appointed as the ultimate trustee under Charlotte’s will), replied: ‘Quite frankly, my lord, we are prepared to accept these insults.’

  Charlotte had bequeathed her niece Cecily Colthurst £20,000 which was paid to her in 1944. But if the court declared a partial intestacy and Charlotte’s wishes were blocked, then Mrs Colthurst would inherit the extra £94,000. Here was a case that needed to be presented with delicacy if it were not to appear grasping. But Pascoe Hayward KC, representing Mrs Colthurst, was not delicate. While Sir Charles Russell politely referred to Charlotte as a ‘serious-minded lady dealing with a serious subject’, Mr Pascoe Hayward called her a ‘cranky’ person whose fortune was in danger of being lamentably ‘frittered away’ by a lot of other ‘cranky people’. It would be open to her trustees, he protested, to encourage social intercourse by giving ‘a series of cocktail parties’. Were he himself a trustee, he persisted, he would instil self-control by building plenty of good strong nourishing prisons and seeing ‘that people who do not control themselves go there’. These trusts were ‘doomed to failure,’ he concluded. There was no precedent for them. But refusing to test the validity of the trusts by presupposing perverse ways of applying them, Mr Justice Vaisey (otherwise Sir Harry Vaisey) decided that under English law Charlotte had kept herself within the necessary limits ‘by a rather narrow margin’.

  So the money passed out of England into Ireland. ‘How the people of Ireland will react to such intensive treatment as Mrs Shaw appears to envisage,’ Mr Justice Vaisey remarked, ‘I ought not to speculate.’ But a ripple of delirious speculation was already passing over the twenty-six counties of the Republic. Before long almost a hundred applications had been prepared by universities, cultural groups, local authorities and some enterprising individuals demanding art galleries, gramophone records, endowments for lectures, subsidies for theatres. ‘£94,000 sounds a lot of money,’ parried an official at the National City Bank in Dublin, ‘and many of the applicants seem to have dreams of building palaces.’ £94,000 was a lot of money in 1952, equivalent to little over £1.4 million in the late 1990s. But the bands got no new instruments, and no foundations for new libraries were laid. After a year, cultural life in Ireland seemed unchanged; and after two years it was still further unchanged. ‘Where is the £94,000?’ the News Chronicle demanded.

 
; The first results of Charlotte’s bequest were witnessed in the summer of 1954 at a hostel in Termonfeckin, County Louth, where forty students assembled for a week of instruction by artists, linguists, and the director of a mannequin agency. The successful applicant had been Forás Eireann, an omnium gatherum of native ‘sons of the soil’ formed in 1949 to plant village halls in rural communities. Forás Eireann ‘hopes to be able to lend itself further to the purposes of the bequest,’ reported the Irish Independent.

  In the 1990s Forás Eireann continues to distribute Charlotte’s money as part of its policy for developing rural Ireland in accordance with ‘Christian and national ways of life’. No Chair or Readership has been established at any Irish university. After more than forty years of capitalist expansion and inflation Charlotte’s money would have risen to some two million pounds if it had been well invested. ‘Each year we spend, roughly, about £2,500 to £3,000 under the heading of Art,’ writes the Trust organizer at Forás Eireann, ‘and this is used to support smaller ventures throughout the twenty-six counties.’ It is a curiously small sum.

  ‘It is the policy of the Bank,’ writes the Bank of Ireland, ‘for confidentiality reasons, not to reveal any details about the financial aspect of the Trust.’

  *

  On 15 March 1956 a spectacular musical adaptation of Shaw’s phonetic romance Pygmalion opened at the Mark Hellinger Theater on Broadway. My Fair Lady contained fifteen numbers composed by Frederick Loewe with lyrics by Alan J. Lerner, and it was directed by Moss Hart. Yet the production was in many ways a very English affair. Stanley Holloway played the undeserving dustman Doolittle in a broad style that derived from the old music-hall tradition (‘With a Little Bit of Luck’, ‘Get me to the Church on Time’). He incorporated the same ironic cheerfulness he had earlier brought to the grave-digger in Hamlet. Stella Campbell’s part as the flower girl was taken by the twenty-one-year-old Julie Andrews. Known mostly as a pantomime performer in Britain, she had won a devoted American following in The Boy Friend and was to complete her conquest of New York by singing and dancing Eliza’s new role (‘Wouldn’t it be Loverly’, ‘I could have danced all Night’). Rex Harrison brought off a histrionic triumph by turning his lack of singing voice into the half-rasping, half-caressing baritone patter of Henry Higgins’s ‘I’m an Ordinary Man’ and ‘Why Can’t the English’. Cecil Beaton’s rich costumes, which ranged from a street crowd of raffish cockney buskers to the wheel hats and feathered parasols of Mrs Higgins’s fashionable tea-party and the mock-stately black, white and grey pageant of the ‘Ascot Gavotte’, were to be taken up by New York couturiers and judged to be more effective than the posters of the British Tourist Board. My Fair Lady seemed one of those rare theatrical collaborations in which everyone, working on top form, came harmoniously together. Like the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, like The Merry Widow, Oklahoma!, Annie Get Your Gun and Me and My Girl (which also derives from Shaw’s Pygmalion), this new musical exerted a lasting attraction. Moss Hart’s production was to run on Broadway for 2,717 performances over six and a half years, by which time $55,000,000 had already been made from performances round the world, plus another $10,000,000 from recordings and film rights, breaking all financial records.

  Even at the previews in New Haven it was obvious that My Fair Lady was destined to be a vast success. This prospect, together with a rise in the international performances of Shaw’s plays, suddenly brought his six-year-old will into new focus.

  *

  The Official Trustee Act introduced by the Liberal Government in 1906 had created an official whose advantage over private and commercial trustees was to lie in the certainty that trust funds which he administered would never be embezzled, lost in speculation, or misdirected. Shaw had appointed the Public Trustee as his executor in a will he made in 1913 and in all subsequent wills. ‘I was a strong advocate of a Public Trustee long before 1906,’ he wrote.

  Referring to Shaw’s last will, the Public Trustee Wyndham Hirst (later Sir Wyndham Hirst) had stated in 1951 that his ‘primary duty’ was to satisfy all legatees and annuitants. Research into the proposed new alfabet was to remain ‘a secondary matter’ and could be considered ‘only if anything is left over’. Owing to the ‘very material increases in death duties’, there did not appear much danger of serious money being left over. ‘It may be several months, or even years, before we can submit all the valuations necessary for a final assessment,’ an official in his department hazarded. For five and a half years the Public Trustee sat negotiating with the Estate Duty Office. Then, in the spring of 1956, he agreed on the figure of £433,500. It was a handsome amount, indeed unprecedented, bringing the net value of Shaw’s estate nicely beyond £700,000 (equivalent to £9.5 million in 1997) and raising the final death duties to a magnificent pinnacle of £524,000 (£7.1 million in 1997). More than half this sum was due at once and might possibly be swelled by a generous accretion of interest. Nevertheless, it would still not be a substantial enough obstacle to keep the fearful alfabet long entombed. As the alfabet’s custodian, there was only one judicious course of action open to the Public Trustee, and that was to bring the whole matter to Chancery where it would be placed under the scrutiny of the High Court. On 26 March 1956, eleven days after the successful opening of My Fair Lady on Broadway, The Times announced in London that the British Museum was to challenge the validity of these alphabet trusts.

  It was not easy for interested members of the public to find their way to the case when it opened in January 1957. On the Warned List it had appeared somewhat eccentrically as Public Trustee v. Day and Others, Fred Day being Shaw’s chauffeur whose annuity (with that of his wife) was to be reviewed during the first morning. Several wandering Shavians were mistakenly conducted to the more glamorous business of Diana Dors, the blonde bombshell who was petitioning for divorce in a court nearby. Extricating themselves from the crowd, they finally settled into the more reposeful atmosphere of the Lord Chancellor’s Court and, during the afternoon, heard the legal distinction between ‘benevolent’ and ‘philanthropic’ begin to drift backwards and forwards.

  ‘The Lord Chancellor’s Court is Gothic in more than architecture,’ observed the Manchester Guardian.

  ‘Mr Justice Harman’s face in repose – elongated and narrow-eyed, with the light falling on it from above – might at times have been that of a medieval king in effigy. The lethargy that sometimes overtook the spectators as precedents were unrolled might have put them in mind of something very old and long lasting – the case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, say –rather than the quick by-play of the court scenes in “The Devil’s Disciple”.’

  Shaw had believed that the need for alphabetical reform arose from the fact that there were more sounds in the English language than there were letters in its Latin alphabet. Some letters were therefore used to signify more than one sound and the language was choked with illogical two-letter combinations, such as sh, th and ng. This notorious orthography was partly responsible for the number of semi-literates in Britain and had retarded the spread of English as an international language. English usage was overloaded with unnecessary grammar and tedious penwork.

  All this Shaw had argued in his lifetime. But he advanced the economic case for a reform in his will. ‘Write up in letters of gold around your office,’ he had written to James Pitman in 1947, ‘England Knows Nothing of Phonetics, Hates Education, But Will Do Anything For Money.’ Having found no public department or learned society to nominate as the executant of his easy alfabet, he had been obliged to create two private trusts. The first was designed to find out, by means of statistical inquiry, how much time could be saved by people who spoke the English language and wrote it using the proposed alfabet, thereby showing the extent of time and labour wasted by the use of the present alphabet, and then, if possible, to make a calculation of this waste in terms of loss of money. The second trust was to transliterate Androcles and the Lion into the phonetic alfabet, assuming a given pronunciation of English, to publish
and advertise this transliteration in a special bi-alphabetic edition with the existing alphabet on one side and the proposed alfabet on the other, and so by the dissemination of copies in public libraries and by the general debate this would give rise to, persuade the English-speaking world to adopt it.

  The legal machinery used by the Chancery Division of the High Court of Justice to test the validity of Shaw’s trusts was the Preamble to a Statute of Queen Elizabeth I. Of the five categories of charity there enumerated, two appeared prima facie applicable to this case: education and public utility.

  There were four parties represented in court. The Attorney-General was in it parens patriae, as the official protector of charities. His counsel, Mr E. Milner Holland QC (later Sir Edward Milner Holland) contended that the trusts were legal charities and could not be invalidated for unenforceability or uncertainty since the Charity Commissioners might modify them if necessary to see that the testator’s wishes were carried out in spirit even if they could not be carried out to the letter. The Public Trustee was in it as Shaw’s executor. Though unable to conceal his personal opinion that these alfabetical matters were a lot of poppycock, he argued through his counsel, Mr Robert Lazarus, that even if the trusts were not charitable, he should be allowed to carry out the provisions of Shaw’s bequest. The British Museum and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art were in it as ultimate residuary legatees and had instructed Sir Charles Russell QC – the same Charles Russell who had successfully fought for Charlotte’s Irish trust over five years earlier – to contest the validity of these alfabetical trusts. The third residuary legatee, the National Gallery of Ireland, had engaged Mr K. Elphinstone, not to contest the validity of the trusts. ‘Is that in order to put the Court in a greater difficulty by having no help from you, or what?’ enquired Mr Justice Harman. To which Mr Elphinstone replied that the Governor and Guardians of the National Gallery of Ireland ‘did not want to put forward any argument to defeat the intention of a very distinguished fellow-Irishman in a matter very dear to his heart’. He did not explain that, Irish charity laws being stricter than English, his participation might imperil the contestants’ claim.