The Man Who Invented the Daleks

by Alwyn Turner

  In due course, a new generation of hero emerged from the pens of Sapper and others. Wealthy young men of action, they mostly operated in the high society of London in the inter-war years, though they were happy enough to step outside society’s conventions of behaviour when justice demanded it. Stories featuring some of this new breed – Leslie Charteris’s Simon Templar, aka the Saint, and John Creasey’s Baron – were later to be adapted for television by Nation, but there always seemed to be a place in his heart for the previous generation, whose attitudes survived in the stories found in the boys’ weekly magazines of the 1930s, the likes of Wizard, Champion and Hotspur. Here the Wild West still loomed larger than the Western Front, and the only acknowledgement of the recent war came in tales not of the trenches, but of the much more glamorous exploits of the Royal Flying Corps (Nation was a big fan of W.E. Johns’s books about the air ace Biggles). The core of such magazines were detective stories, tales of exploration, and colourful adventures that featured variants on stock characters such as Tarzan and Robin Hood; there was little that couldn’t have been found in the Edwardian era, save for the emergence, towards the end of the 1930s, of some science fiction, primarily concerned with space travel, Martians and death rays.

  This adventure tradition, both in novels and magazines, dominated the reading of boys in the 1930s, and Nation’s love of it runs through his own writing. Its celebration of the spirit of adventure, of improvised resourcefulness, of the qualities of leadership, were to form the backbone to much of his own work, finding their happiest incarnation in the character of Jimmy Garland in Survivors, a joyously triumphant throwback to the world of Buchan. ‘He’s acting like a character from a boy’s own adventure story,’ snorts one of Garland’s enemies. Indeed he was, and no one was more aware of it than Nation, whose writing resonated with echoes of this world.

  Given his voracious reading (‘I read everything that was available to me’), it wasn’t long before Nation was making up his own stories, ‘mostly with me as the hero’. Such a quality was not always appreciated in a society dominated by the very literal values of the church. ‘I was always believed to be a terrible liar,’ he said in later life. ‘Nowadays they would say, “He’s got a wonderful imagination,” but in those days I was just “that liar”.’ On one occasion in school, the class was set the standard writing assignment of ‘What I did on my holidays’. Having done nothing much, he wrote instead a fictional tale of a holiday on a barge. ‘The teacher looked at me and said, “Were you on a barge, Nation?” I said, “No,” and he said, “This is all bloody rubbish then, isn’t it?”’ The lack of encouragement seems to have done little to dissuade him. A friend, Harry Greene, who met him in 1945, recalls him telling stories that were ‘often stretched beyond what was credible’, as when he deliberately set out to scare Elsie White, wife of the verger Bob, with a tale about seeing a ghost through the window of Llandaff Cathedral.

  His view of the schooling he received was to be seen in a passage from his original script for ‘The Daleks’ (though it was cut from the final version), in which the Doctor berates his companion, Ian Chesterton, for failing to understand the significance of the metal floors in the Dalek city: ‘Chesterton, your total lack of imagination appals me. When I remember that you were a schoolmaster, it makes me glad that you are now here, and can no longer influence the minds of those poor unsuspecting children who were once your pupils.’

  Nation’s childhood absorption of influences was to change markedly following the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor and America’s subsequent entry into the war. However remote those events may have appeared, it wasn’t long before GIs were arriving in Britain, and with them came a new note in the cultural life of the country. Signs of an interest in American culture had already been apparent when the BBC Forces Programme began to air bought-in comedy shows such as The Jack Benny Half Hour, The Bob Hope Programme and The Charlie McCarthy Show, but the real breakthrough was the appearance of the American Forces Network (AFN), which started broadcasting from London on 4 July 1943 and was relayed around the country. ‘They did transmissions of all the American shows,’ remembered Nation, ‘and I’d hear Bob Hope, Jack Benny and all the big stars of that time. I loved the American sound, the jokes, the feel.’

  He wasn’t the only one to fall under the spell, for a whole generation of future writers was to find its tastes affected. ‘We listened closely to American comedy shows transmitted on the American Forces Network in Europe,’ remembered Frank Muir, one of the first new comedy writers to emerge after the war. ‘We had a lot to learn from American radio comedy in those days.’ Another of the coming men, Bob Monkhouse, would later talk about ‘our personal pantheon of comedy gods like Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Jack Benny and Phil Silvers’, and the Welsh comedian Wyn Calvin similarly recognised the impact made by AFN: ‘Youngsters with an ambition to be amusing were glued to those programmes. It gave them a new comedy, away from the variety programmes.’

  The memory of those shows was to remain with Nation all his life, long after their direct influence had evaporated. Well into the late 1980s he was still jokingly claiming to be thirty-nine years old, a running gag in Jack Benny’s routines that he had first encountered in his childhood. But even more important was the stationing of large numbers of American troops in Cardiff. ‘Suddenly there they were,’ he recalled, ‘with their ice cream, their chocolate and their comic books. Those wonderful American comic books became an influence, too. Superman, maybe Batman too. They were a great breath of fresh air after the Dandy and the Beano.’ For the first time, the transient images of America that had illuminated the cinemas for the last decade and more were acquiring a tangible, physical presence; now there were holy relics of the promised land that could be handled and taken home, cherished and consumed.

  The luxury of those items, the lavish size and quality of the comics in particular, was almost unimaginable to a child living in a country that had by now survived the worst of the Blitz, but was still struggling through on ration books and the occasional foray into the black economy. The publisher D.C. Thomson had begun something of a revolution in British comics in 1937 with the launch of the Dandy, followed swiftly by the Beano and by Magic, all of them cheerier and cheekier than their predecessors, but they faced a major setback with the outbreak of war. Paper in Britain was made primarily from wood pulp shipped from Scandinavia and, with the growing threat of U-boat attacks, such supplies were hard to come by. Newspapers voluntarily reduced their size by around fifty per cent in an attempt to preserve paper stocks, and children’s comics were similarly hard hit; Magic disappeared entirely, and the Beano and Dandy switched from weekly to fortnightly publication, alternating with each other, while they too shrank in size. Other titles, popular with boys as well as adults, also went out of existence, including Detective Weekly, home of Sexton Blake, and The Thriller, which had nurtured gentlemen outlaws of the 1930s like the Saint, the Toff and Norman Conquest. In March 1940, just before the fall of Norway made the position even more precarious, the formal rationing of paper was introduced by the government.

  By 1944 book production was at less than half its pre-war level, and educationalists were warning of a serious crisis as textbooks became ever more difficult to obtain. The situation had been exacerbated by the actions of the Luftwaffe, with an estimated 20 million volumes destroyed as a result of the bombing of Britain. Demand for books remained high, partly – it was argued – because of the need for escapism, and partly because the absence of so many goods from the shops meant that people had a higher disposable income than before the war, but there was a desperate shortage of supply. In this context, an American Superman comic would fall into the hands of a 13-year-old boy like Terry Nation as though it were manna from heaven. The child psychologist P.M. Pickard campaigned in the 1950s against the influence of the American comics, but even she recognised their appeal: ‘The glossy paper, the brilliant colours and the clear type far outshone anything the war-surrounded children remembered ever se
eing.’ The contrast between the real experience of Britain and the fantasy imagery of America instilled a fascination with that country that was to dominate the post-war era, for Nation as for so many others.

  Paper shortages continued after the end of the war. It wasn’t until 1949 that Harold Wilson, then president of the Board of Trade, was able to announce that the rationing of paper was to end, by which time the damage had, for many, already been done. Strand magazine, where the likes of Sherlock Holmes and A.J. Raffles had made their first appearances, announced that year that it could no longer afford to continue, though the Beano and the Dandy had survived and were able to return to weekly publication. In the interim, the departure of the GIs had left a generation bereft, and the publishers of American comics, having discovered that there was a voracious appetite in Britain, responded by flooding the country with imported material, to the immense annoyance of their rationed competitors; in the immediate post-war years, the entire British publishing trade was restricted to around 2,000 tons of paper per month, the same quantity that was being shipped in every year in the form of comics. For Nation, who remained an avid reader of the imports, the gulf between the American and British productions was now even more marked, with a clear age divide having opened up; it was not until 1950 and the launch of the Eagle that comic publishers at home recognised that there was a demand to be met not simply among children but among adolescents as well. And by then, although he was fond of the Eagle, it was really too late for him.

  Nation celebrated his fifteenth birthday on the day that the Soviet Union declared war on Japan, the event that precipitated that country’s surrender and finally brought the Second World War to a close. The previous month a General Election had swept out of power the Conservative administration of Winston Churchill and replaced it with a Labour government headed by Clement Attlee. Among its reforms were the creation of the National Health Service, under the guidance of South Wales’s most famous politician, Aneurin Bevan, and the nationalisation of the mining industry; on New Year’s Day 1947 notices appeared right across the country’s coalfields proclaiming: ‘This colliery is now managed by the National Coal Board on behalf of the people.’ If that was to prove a little optimistic, it did at least reflect a desire that the hardship of the depression should never be allowed to happen again, and a similar feeling on the part of the five million men and women who had served in the armed forces that their sacrifices should lead to a more just society. When Spike Milligan, serving in the Italian campaign in 1943, believed that his death was imminent, he wrote himself an epitaph: ‘I died for the England I dreamed of, not for the England I know.’ Now was the time to build that new country.

  The political mood for change was mirrored, though it was not as immediately apparent, by a determination on the part of the returning servicemen that culturally their voices should be heard, and it was on the radio, and particularly in comedy, that the resulting loose-knit movement was first to make its mark. In Wales it produced the revival of Welsh Rarebit, a radio series that had proved more popular in the principality even than Tommy Handley’s ITMA during the war, and which was reborn in 1949 as an hour-long variety show. With its theme song of ‘We’ll Keep a Welcome in the Hillsides’ – written by the show’s producer, Mai Jones – Welsh Rarebit went out on the Light Programme (as the Forces Programme had now been renamed) and became principally known as a showcase for new Welsh comedians including Harry Secombe, Stan Stennett and Wyn Calvin. ‘Up until the advent of radio,’ noted the latter, ‘Wales had no reputation for comedy.’ That was slightly overstating the case, but certainly the success of Welsh Rarebit – it even enjoyed a brief transfer to television in the 1950s – helped fuel the ambitions of those in South Wales with aspirations towards becoming entertainers, among them Terry Nation: ‘I wanted to be a comedian. I wanted to be a stand-up.’

  On leaving school Nation had joined his father’s furniture business, working – not very well, he was later to admit – as a salesman. One of the few benefits of this position was that he had a justification for fussing over his wardrobe, in which pride of place went to a leather-buttoned, Harris tweed jacket. ‘He was always dressed beautifully,’ remembered his friend Harry Greene (who worked as an unpaid assistant on Welsh Rarebit). ‘I don’t know if it was hand-me-downs from his dad, because Bert was a good dresser as well. I think that was part of his front for selling.’ The work meant that he had money in his pocket, but Nation was already preoccupied with dreams of performance. He remained passionate about film, becoming a member of the Cardiff Amateur Cine Society, while engaging in amateur dramatics with the left-wing Unity Theatre, based at the local YMCA, and other groups. He was also a regular visitor to the New Theatre, where Greene sometimes worked backstage and could get him free tickets to shows featuring the cream of British comedy at the time, including Arthur Askey, Nat Jackley and Norman Evans.

  Through Greene too, he was to meet the future novelist John Summers, who had similar experiences of the limited horizons offered by a South Wales education. In schools whose ‘job was to turn out more cogs for the industrial machine’, wrote Summers in his semi-autobiographical book The Raging Summer, a child who showed too much imagination ‘was to be quickly hammered and stamped back into regular shape before he could get out and become dangerously loose in the world’. ‘There was an instant recognition of brotherhood’, remembered Greene; the two men ‘had similar interests, were about the same age and got on very well, often walking off into the castle grounds to talk, where we’d lose them for hours’.

  Nation became part of the student-dominated social scene that congregated upstairs at the Khardomah café on Saturday mornings, and the fact that he was happily mixing with such a group, many of whom were a significant couple of years older than him and had served in uniform, was an indication both of his ‘affable nature and of the fact that he was the epitome of self-confidence’. Although not a student himself, he participated in many social events, helping to organise the first Cardiff Arts Ball (inspired by the Chelsea Arts Balls) in 1949, and forming part of the team that created a sketch called ‘The Poor Man’s Picasso’ for the 1948 rag week. The idea for the sketch was that the performers would draw objects on a white flat screen and that the drawings would then become functional, so that a hatstand would be drawn and a coat then hung upon it, a picture of cupboard doors would be opened, and so on. The main practical difficulty was to find a drawing implement big enough to be seen from the back of the theatre, a problem to which Nation, displaying an inventive resourcefulness that would become characteristic of his fictional heroes, found the solution: a condom with a rolled-up piece of carpet stuffed inside and filled with purple ink, the whole thing being bound with elastic bands to form a prototype marker pen. The performance at the Capital Cinema was filmed by members of the Cine Society and eventually reached the attention of a television producer; consequently, in 1955, Harry Greene and another student, Ivor Olsen, appeared on the BBC show Quite Contrary under the names Pedro and Pinky with a revived version of the routine, almost certainly the first time that a condom had been seen on British television.

  By the end of the 1940s, Nation was also beginning to develop his solo comedy act, which he was to take around the circuit of pubs and social clubs in the area, already home to Stan Stennett and Wyn Calvin and soon to be illuminated by a teenage singing prodigy from Cardiff named Shirley Bassey. The highlight of his routine was a series of funny walks, mostly exploiting his gangly physique, though one variation saw him walking on his knees, with his trousers rolled up and shoes acting as knee-pads, in the manner perfected by José Ferrer when playing Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in the 1952 film Moulin Rouge. Again it was an aspect of his early life to which he would return when writing scripts for the 1963 Hancock series. In the episode ‘The Writer’, Tony Hancock tries to convince a professional comedian named Jerry Spring that every comic needs a funny walk, and proceeds to do an impression of Groucho Marx’s stooping prowl and Stan Laurel’s loose
-limbed lollop, before giving his own suggestion that Spring should imitate a penguin. Similarly, one of the jokes that Hancock tries to foist upon Spring has all the hallmarks of coming from the repertoire of an inexperienced stand-up in South Wales. A man walks into a cottage in the Rhondda Valley, covered head to foot in coal dust, and when his wife exclaims at the state of him, he asks why, after twenty years of him coming home from work every day in this condition, she’s still surprised. ‘Well, after all, Dai,’ she replies, ‘you are a milkman!’

  ‘I thought myself a rather good comedian at the time, and used to get laughs around the pub,’ reflected Nation in later life. ‘But if you’re paying for the drinks, people will laugh.’ More significant, in terms of his later career, was his discovery that other comedians, particularly those who were starting to find broadcast work, would pay for jokes. ‘I used to be a member of the Overseas Club, in Park Place, right next to the BBC, in those days. I actually sold my very first scripts to an up-and-coming young comic I met there – Stan Stennett.’ Stennett, who was beginning to make his name on radio shows including Variety Bandbox and Workers’ Playtime as well as Welsh Rarebit, needed a supply of fresh material; although such work was entirely uncredited and none is known to have survived, it was at least a suggestion of an alternative future. It also gave Nation a chance to work with his first partner, another Cardiff-born writer, Dick Barry, and to try to put into practice the American style of gag-telling that he had heard on AFN. ‘Terry was doing the more upbeat, up-to-date, quick-fire sort of comedy,’ remembered Stennett.