A Paper Inheritance

by Dymphna Stella Rees

  Naturally I wanted to get back to journalistic work. But Fleet Street appeared to be hermetically sealed. I had met the genial boys of the Australian Press Association (APA). No work there what with every journalist from Australia clamouring at them for help as a natural right and the Depression hard-hitting the whole of Fleet Street. I learned that 600 qualified pressmen were out of jobs in London. The cold cruelty of life in this city was to shoot its barbs deeper and deeper into my flesh.

  One incident sheeted home to me the merciless conditions for journalists and others. I had been given a letter of introduction to the news editor of a London daily. The letter was from an APA journalist, a friend of the news editor and was complimentary about me. I got as far as the lift in the building. The lift man asked me what I wanted. I told him I had letter for the news editor. The lift man stood in front of me, blocking my path and saying bluntly that he’d take it up himself. In five minutes he brought it back. ‘Very sorry, there is no opening …’ et cetera. Not even to be able to speak to the man face-to-face. That left me gaping.

  Neither of us had up to this time sold a single item to a London newspaper. The walls seemed like battlements. Usually London dailies published only one magazine article a day beyond staff material. They were supplied by an unending stream of freelancing specialists. Book reviews were written by noted authors. London editors looked blankly at our particular field of knowledge. Australia was foreign to them and of no particular interest.

  Someone told me that the only hope for the outsider to sell an article was to seize on a current topic about which one could mug up plenty of facts or give an angle based on experience. If you could sell one article to one paper it would be a contact for the future. A foot in the door, a job maybe. You had to be persistent. I decided to try this technique. I had nothing to lose. Article in pocket, I’d march down Fleet Street until the dome of St Paul’s swung into view. Then I was in the thick of Newspaper Land. I’d enter the spick and span new Daily Telegraph building, enquire at the counter, send the article up to Literary Editor or News Editor and wait below on the marble bench.

  After ten minutes down it would come by a boy. ‘The Literary Editor is sorry …’ et cetera.

  Dashed but by no means depressed, as there were plenty of other papers, I’d leave the fabled dignity of The Telegraph for the black mirror glass of The Daily Express. Another ten minute wait below and with the same result. So, down to Bouverie Street and the slummy New Chronicle building where Charles Dickens checked leaders a hundred years earlier and the place looked as if it hadn’t been painted since. Here a very grubby boy took my copy upstairs, only to bring it back minus the envelope, dog-eared and with black finger daubs on the first page. A cold fatalism would set into veins where hours before optimism had flowed.

  At The Daily Mail a tall uniformed bulldog would at once make sure I had legitimate business. Another fellow was stamping all communications that were to go upstairs. A big heavy stamp that penetrated two or three pages. When my article came back, I would have to tear off as much of the stamp as I could before offering it further. By the time I’d passed on towards the evening papers, that once immaculate article would be in a very secondhand condition. I’d never sell it now. No editor would look at it with its history of rejection written in thumb marks.

  No luck this day – even though it was quite a good article. No encouragement anywhere, even from the commissionaires. In sinking desperation, a suicidal anger of heart, I’d wend my way home. But you must be able to take hard knocks. Actually once or twice over a period of two months I did sell a short piece. A Daily Telegraph editor surprised me by coming all the way downstairs – no doubt to prevent me from coming upstairs but nonetheless surprising – and crossly examined me on the source of my article ‘School Children and the Cinema’. He then said: ‘I think we’ll be able to use it though I can’t be sure’. To my amazement and delight it appeared the next morning, truncated but on the leader page. The cheque for two guineas arrived six weeks later.

  I went to see a London agent whose business was to gather leader-page articles of 1200 words for provincial dailies. Yes, he would be glad to receive material but assured me the standard was high. I said my standard was high too and offered four subjects about Australia. He accepted three: Flying Doctors, Gold Mining and Immigration. He offered one guinea each for one publication. I felt duped when I discovered that the articles were used in half a dozen papers – I’d only been paid for one.

  Pity the poor freelance journalist! I vowed that if I ever filled any sort of editorial post myself I would do all in my power to alleviate the wretched conditions of the freelancing writer. Later I had my chance, not in a newspaper office and not in London but in a long career in Australia that gave me the opportunity to do just that and to fulfil my vow.

  Coral and I were reaching a point of desperation and thought our only option was to take up our free return passages to Western Australia, caving in on our dreams of establishing ourselves as writers in London. When the shipping agent offered a three month reprieve before the terms of our scholarships expired, we determined on a fresh assault on Fleet Street.

  I had long harboured the desire to work as a dramatic critic but knew only too well that this sort of post was eagerly sought by scores of well-connected Honours graduates coming down from Oxford. What chance did I have, a wild colonial from faraway Western Australia? My experience had shown me that merely to apply for such a job would be hopeless, useless, even laughable. I needed to take a different approach so I hit on the idea of writing to well-known critics to say that I had admired their work and would like the opportunity of meeting them. I thought that if this ploy was successful, I would at least establish some personal contacts.

  Amazingly Ivor Brown, then chief dramatic critic of the Sunday Observer, invited me for a conversation at his flat in Bloomsbury. I started by making it clear to Mr Brown that it was my ambition to be a critic in his own worthy tradition. He was formal but courteous and suggested I write an article for the New York Theatre Arts Monthly. But he could not offer any hope of progress in London. The critic from The Daily Telegraph invited me to the staff canteen to meet him. He gave me buttered toast and tea and then asked ‘How old are you?’. When I admitted to twenty-five, he said: ‘No one can be a critic till at least thirty. I wrote stuff when I was in my twenties and now realise it was complete rubbish.’

  The feeling of ‘What’s the use?’ had just settled on my soul once more when the mail brought a cutting: one of my London Lights articles had been published in an Australian paper. Not only that, the headline promised more: this was ‘one of a series’. With a bit of luck I’d keep this going a long time. I yanked the portable typewriter onto the washstand and whipped up another London Lights, getting it into the post that afternoon.

  Spurred on by Coral, herself churning out applications with assiduity, I resumed my attack on the dramatic critics. I wrote to George W. Bishop, editor of The Era, a weekly devoted to reviews of theatre, films, variety and music. Bishop replied saying he was very busy but could spare me a few minutes. When I arrived at The Era office on the corner of Soho Square I found that Bishop had suddenly resigned and a new man, Burnup from Fleet Street, was in charge. Burnup might well have refused to see me but from the start he appeared quite interested in what I had to say about myself. After about ten minutes, he picked up three pairs of theatre tickets. ‘Would you like to review these shows?’ Would I like to? I learned that The Era’s main theatre critic had also just resigned, deciding it was now or never to write that novel.

  So here was a London editor actually in need of staff. I could not believe my good fortune. I had sailed in on the very day that gave me a chance. A day later it might have been given to someone else. I saw the plays, wrote the notices and dropped them into the office. Two days elapsed and the new issue was published. I found that Burnup had accepted two out of three of my notices. Jubilantly racing home t
o our moth-eaten premises I collided with a messenger who had a letter for me from Burnup. In it he congratulated me on what I had written and included more tickets for that very night. So here was my breakthrough. I was on The Era’s freelance staff.

  The paper had a long history going back a hundred years. It had been known for decades as ‘The Actor’s Bible’ from the fact that it traditionally reviewed every play and ran many columns on actor’s ‘cards’ or personal advertisements. Many eminent people had written for it. Charles Dickens wrote in 1867: The perusal of The Era is one of my greatest enjoyments … It gives profuse and erudite criticism of plays. It attacks in fiery terms any short-sighted stiff-necked (theatrical) bigotry.

  Just before I came to write for it the paper underwent a modernising treatment. Its nineteenth century microscopic typefaces were enlarged. Block advertisements were introduced. The take-your-time wordiness of the older journalism gave way to modern brevity, liveliness and layout. More attention was given to ‘talkies’ – talking films then only a year or two old.

  It wasn’t long before I was making overtures for a regular job. The editor was in favour but he apparently had to consult an enormous man upstairs who was, it turned out, co-editor. But after many delays, I was engaged at £5 per week. My job was to review not only plays but new films pre-shown specially for the cinema renting trade. I was also required to give a hand with sub-editing and headlining the copy that flowed in from a number of freelance contributors on amateur drama and provincial performances.

  These arrangements suited me well. During parts of four weekdays I worked in the office. On Tuesdays the editing staff adjourned to Fleet Street and the Argus Press, a major printery handling big newspapers such as The Observer as well as our weekly. In rough annexes two or three of us sub-editors licked late American cables and local copy into shape. Then with the help of approved compositors (‘comps’) and with the reek of printer’s ink in our nostrils, we made up our pages on ‘the stone’. It was a hectic day but by waiting till late we could take a fresh-smelling copy of The Era away with us.

  I moved from being an expert on cheap admission prices, vantage points and the discomforts of gallery seats to being admitted to the stalls or dress circle on free tickets. Instead of queuing for an hour or two in biting winds, I arrived at the front entrance of the theatre five minutes before curtain up and was given my complimentary programme by the management. It was an incredible feeling: the theatre was my love and here I was being paid for enjoying her favours. Now at last I was to learn what a West End first night was really like.

  At this stage I was merely a junior critic but it sometimes happened that there were first night clashes: occasionally there might be as many as four productions beginning on the same night. In the thirties, evening dress was worn in stalls and circle. There were two theatres for which the tickets actually said: ‘Evening Dress Obligatory’. I have always abhorred evening dress at the theatre, believing it adds to the sense of social discrimination and so prevents the theatre from enlarging its audiences. But as a young critic in London I was in no position to upset entrenched sartorial laws. In fact, such traditions had one specific advantage for me. My dark lounge suit was falling off me: shiny on the seat, old fashioned on the shoulders, beginning to shred at the cuffs. Fortunately I did have a dinner suit which I had brought from Perth and which had been gathering dust ever since. The dinner jacket came into its own.

  I quickly acquired the feeling of being part of the theatre organism. I was an anonymous newcomer, no doubt – but I was writing a review. Reviews taken as a whole, the corpus of printed opinion, could have either a drastic or a highly beneficial effect on the box office fortunes of that particular playhouse and on all involved in the performance. Therefore the critic had every right to protect an image of himself as functionally involved in guiding the public interest in theatre, pointing out faults, recording merits, helping to shape an ethos of the theatre and doing this with as much sincerity and valuable sense of purpose as did the dramatist, the actor, the producer and the entrepreneur. Taking such an attitude was possibly sheer impudence on my part but I felt sure of my ground.

  Few of the critics had space or inclination to state a theory of their job. We were all evaluators, assessors, acting as guides to our own special public. A practical ad hoc approach to criticism was the thing: a broad tolerance for a variety of forms of theatre art and entertainment was implied and plays were judged essentially as they came to us in performance, not in the written or printed word. Sound criticism could be described as the sum of these: quality writing, subject knowledge, a range of comparative examples, acute perception and a balance between technical terminology and graceful reporting.

  Despite the Depression, there was much of interest happening in the theatre world. Actors like Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, Robert Donat and Jack Hawkins were making their mark alongside Vivien Leigh, Peggy Ashcroft and Flora Robson. John Gielgud was already an idol of The Old Vic. Bernard Shaw and Somerset Maugham were occasionally offering a new play. Noel Coward was at the head of the daring young wits with a succession of revues and light comedies of the town. Most playwrights of the Thirties tended to deal with the lives of middle class or professional people, the very sort who were facing the actors from the stalls or circle. However, the approach of young playwrights to cushioned middle class values and people was by no means escapist but often realistic and probing.

  All in all I was now reviewing three or four plays a week. Not all of them were exhilarating but in contrast to the almost complete sense of failure, dejection and bewilderment of a few months previously, I felt that heaven was opening up before me. Winter now had lost its terror. I had saved enough to buy a new lounge suit off the hook. And I had bought a fine black hat – a critic’s hat!

  3. London Literary Life in the 1930s – CCR

  Another winter was upon us. But in our new flat we were sufficiently cosy with a coal fire – except when the bitter east winds, the dread visitors from the North Sea, blasted our windows. ‘Draught excluder’ was the only answer: double strips of felt placed under the doors and in the cracks between the panes, kept there day and night until the winds moderated at which point one strip might be lifted from the windows as a concession to fresh air.

  I was busy with as much journalism as I could comfortably pack into my life. I was now writing for English papers like The Sunday Chronicle and The Family. My main work was as London correspondent for papers in Perth, Melbourne and Sydney. I had my own regular column, my London Woman’s Diary.

  I was meeting celebrities thick and fast. Indeed, between the two of us, we were adding to our bag most of the outstanding authors of a generation as well as notables from other aspects of the Arts. However, it was writers that were our magnet. We never ceased the game of inquiry into how authors got their start in life, what impulses directed their pursuit of writing, what were the practical as well as aesthetic problems of living by the pen, how it feels to be successful and to what degree an author’s home environment harmonises with the personality of the work created. No doubt such a line of investigation reflected our own latent ambition to be authors as well as journalists.

  In the pursuit of topical subjects, l was granted an interview with Lady Hilton Young, a sculptor. She was the widow of ‘Scott of the Antarctic’ who had famously perished with others of his party on their return march from the South Pole in 1912. It was now twenty years later and she had remarried and to a parliamentarian, at the time of our meeting Minister for Health in the British government.

  Lady Hilton had been commissioned to create the bust of Australian poet, Adam Lindsay Gordon, about to be unveiled in Westminster Cathedral’s Poet’s Corner. Gordon was the first overseas writer to break into the hallowed gloom of Literary Greats and so created some fluttering of attention by Australians then in England. Along with us, they attended the Abbey for the unveiling.

  After my meeting w
ith her in her studio, the sculptor confessed that she formed her conception of Gordon largely from his poems. For his appearance, she had little to guide her, only one old daguerreotype and a photo of the recent statue by Paul Montford in Melbourne.

  Lady Hilton had shown me other of her works and told me she had carved a full length statue of her first husband, Scott, which is in Christchurch, New Zealand as a memorial to him. About Scott the explorer she was unwilling to speak personally, but she was enthusiastic to talk of her son, Peter Scott, then emerging as a talented artist of wildfowl in the natural environment. He had just had his second one-man show and was only in his early twenties.

  A favourite novelist of my girlhood had been the Baroness Orczy, author of the Scarlet Pimpernel series. Meeting the Baroness by appointment at a Pall Mall hotel brought the disclosure that, although she wrote in English, she had been unable to speak a word of it until the age of fifteen. Baroness Orczy was born Hungarian, a daughter of the landed aristocracy. Her father was a brilliant musician and their home had been a mecca for composers like Wagner, Gounod, Massenet and Liszt. She had come to England as a girl to be ‘finished’. She studied painting and even exhibited at the Royal Academy but she decided to write a short story and it was published by Pearson’s Magazine.

  I was intrigued to know how she first got the idea for the Pimpernel, that intrepid Englishman who risked death a thousand times to save French aristocrats from the dangerous consequences of The Revolution. ‘It came to me in a flash,’ the plump, bejewelled Baroness told me. ‘Suddenly I saw the figure of Sir Percy Blakeney, complete in every detail: the curled wig, lace at throat and wrists, coat and breeches of the finest cut and quizzing glasses. Oh, I’m a great believer in inspiration. And in character – it’s works of character that last – think of Dickens and Shakespeare. My method is think of the character first and then build a story round it.’