The Times Great Women's Lives

by Sue Corbett

  By her last days, she was almost completely blind. This did not prevent her from enjoying being entertained at luncheons in London. “Read me the menu, dear, but don’t tell me the prices,” she would say. Tribune remained one of her great interests. It brought back memories of her first lover, Will Mellor, and her first triumphs. Recently she attended a lunch — at the Gay Hussar, inevitably — to produce ideas for invigorating the paper. Her idea was for a greater role for herself. She never underrated her worth. But blindness meant that she could never play the active role she wanted again.

  In her last days she would refer often to her husband Ted. She had had other lovers, and so had he. But this apparently open marriage did not seem to diminish their relationship. When they entertained she insisted on giving Ted his role as the head of the household. “Of course Ted will carve” was her introduction to many a meal.

  For a woman so conscious of her appearance, her blindness must have had an added terror. But to the end she was never less than beautifully dressed.

  She is survived by her nephews and nieces, to whom she was devoted.

  Baroness Castle of Blackburn, former Labour Government Minister, was born on October 6, 1910. She died on May 3, 2002, aged 91

  JOAN LITTLEWOOD

  * * *

  LIFELONG REBEL WHO TRANSFORMED BRITISH THEATRE WITH HER COMMITMENT TO POLITICAL DRAMA AND WORKING-CLASS WRITERS AND PERFORMERS

  SEPTEMBER 23, 2002

  The British theatre revolution of the 1950s took place at opposite ends of London. George Devine ruled at the Royal Court in Sloane Square with the help of Tony Richardson, John Osborne and others. At the Theatre Royal, Stratford, E15, Joan Littlewood was running a totally different operation, with the almost single-handed support of her partner, Gerry Raffles.

  Littlewood professed to have little time for the Court, declaring it to be soft-centred and middle-class. Her favourite writer of the period, Brendan Behan, added more fuel to the flames by describing Osborne as being “about as angry as Mrs Dale”. But then Littlewood attacked most of those connected with the theatrical establishment. Olivier, Hall, even Peter Brook received her vituperation, often in unprintable terms, although several at the top of the profession were generous about her. Her special invective, though, was reserved, to the end of her life, for the gentlemen of the Arts Council, who at one time had refused even to pay the gas bill at the Theatre Royal.

  Joan Littlewood believed in the class struggle and she preferred to engage working-class actors, many of whom had little education. Her familiar peaked cap, worn jauntily on the back of her head to keep her unruly hair in place, was a throwback to Bertolt Brecht.

  She had put on the first British performance of his Mother Courage, playing the title role herself when needs be. But Brecht was no hero — Joan did not have heroes — and she complained when he sent in his “Gauleiters” to ensure that his work was being properly interpreted. Littlewood believed that art should emerge from life and to this end she sent her actors out to discover it in the local cafés and pubs.

  There were plenty of both in Stratford, and some of her greatest successes grew out of straightforward East End language and attitudes. Among them were Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be, fairly early on, and Oh What a Lovely War, the biggest hit of all, which was translated into numerous languages and closed the Littlewood régime at E15.

  Scripts were of little importance and often considered to be simply the basis for company improvisation. Brendan Behan’s play The Quare Fellow comprised a few scraps of paper before Littlewood got to work. Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey was little more than the experience of one teenage girl until more characters were fed into it. A Littlewood production generally contained a great deal of Littlewood script, although she rarely took any credit in the programme.

  The Theatre Royal stands as Joan Littlewood’s monument in a street now renamed Gerry Raffles Square. But she claimed never to have liked it. It was, she said, the only theatre they could get in 1953 at a rent of £20 a week, payable six and a half weeks in advance. It was decrepit and smelly, but Raffles and Littlewood restored it to a kind of Edwardian plush dowdiness, making sure that the huge stalls bar provided a music-hall atmosphere. There was no sentimentality on Littlewood’s part. When she left Stratford in 1963, not yet 50 and at the height of her fame, it was without regrets.

  Joan Maud Littlewood was born to be a rebel. She was the illegitimate daughter of a Cockney maidservant. Her grandfather, who laid cables for the GPO and remained illiterate to the end of his life, according to Joan, tracked down the man responsible and made him pay six shillings a week upkeep for his child until she reached 16. Joan grew up in Stockwell with three legitimate stepbrothers and sisters, but soon showed her independence. She started going to the Old Vic, not far away; was befriended by a female art teacher and shown Paris for the first time; and she won a scholarship as a teenager to RADA. She stayed there just long enough to have George Bernard Shaw tell her how to play Ellie in Heartbreak House, before deciding to seek her fame and fortune in America by way of hitch-hiking to Liverpool.

  She did not even get as far as the Mersey. She was taken beneath the wing of a producer for BBC Manchester and found herself, still well under 20, as part of Mancunian literary life with a strong left-wing flavour. She met a young writer and poet called Jimmie Miller, who had just returned from Germany, completely under the influence of Brecht and the agit-prop theatre. Miller was applying to the North West the lessons he had learnt in Europe, performing plays and sketches with a political message for the workers of the area’s factories and mills.

  Joan was quickly roped in to Miller’s company, which by the end of 1933 was calling itself Theatre of Action. Its manifesto was uncompromising: “The Theatre of Action realises that the very class which plays the chief part in contemporary history — the class upon which the prevention of war and the defeat of reaction solely depends — is debarred from expression in the present day theatre. This theatre will perform, mainly in working-class districts, plays which express the life and struggles of the workers. Politics, in its fullest sense, means the affairs of the people. In this sense the plays done will be political.”

  That, more or less, was Littlewood’s credo for the rest of her career. Another constant would be the mix of directness and sophistication already evident in Theatre of Action’s work. Littlewood liked amateur performers, free of the mannerisms that may come with a drama-school training. She would always encourage her actors to retain their regional accents, and she would show, time and again, that working-class people and working-class speech had a place on the serious stage.

  But if the political message was simple, the dramatic methods showed a familiarity with theatrical traditions from Commedia dell’arte to Jacobean drama and Chinese theatre, not to mention the well-assimilated influences of Meyerhold, Brecht, Piscator, Laban and the rest of the international avant garde. Miller and Littlewood were in 1934 even offered scholarships by the Soviet Academy of Theatre and Cinema to study in Moscow, but they ran out of funds while waiting for their visas to come through.

  Theatre of Action and its equally short-lived successor Theatre Union drew some of their material, in the “living newspaper” tradition, directly from the lives of those to whom performances were addressed. (During the run of one of these topical shows, Last Edition, staged in Manchester just after the start of the Second World War, Miller and Littlewood were arrested, fined £20 each for disturbing the peace, and bound over for two years.) But the repertoire also embraced Hans Schlumberg’s ambitious anti-war play Miracle at Verdun (with a cast of eighty), Lope de Vega’s Fuente Ovejuna, staged as a fundraiser for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War, and the first European production of Waiting for Lefty by Clifford Odets. Formally innovative, the company aimed always, so Miller would recall, “to find a theatrical language and style that people understood, which would move them, but not talk down to them”.

  Littlewood and Miller were marr
ied, but the partnership did not last. There was another member of the group, three years younger than Littlewood, who had taken her eye: Gerry Raffles. His dark wavy hair and delight in singing ballads suggested that he was an Irish rover, an image he did nothing to dispel. In fact he was a Manchester Grammar School boy, who had run away from his Jewish home to join the theatre. Jimmie Miller was to become better known as the folk-singer Ewan MacColl. Littlewood, in later life, remembered him less than fondly: “He became boring. He went down the drain. He was a snob, Jimmie, a great talent but always plugging the same thing. That beard, it was very bad.”

  Littlewood joined the payroll of the BBC. Her programmes there included The Classic Soil, a 1939 radio documentary on social conditions in Manchester which took its cue from Friedrich Engels’s famous survey of nearly 100 years before. But she was dismissed during the war because of her left-wing connections. A similar stance was taken by ENSA and both facts are gleefully recorded in Littlewood’s Who’s Who entry. At the end of the war members of Theatre of Action regrouped under the title of Theatre Workshop, with Manchester still as its base. It was funded mainly by the demobilisation grants of its members. Productions on a shoestring were taken up the mill valleys and Miller, writing as James T. Miller, had a success with a version of Lysistrata and his own original Uranium 235. Both were directed by Littlewood and both were seen in London, with Uranium 235 transferring to the Comedy Theatre.

  Theatre Workshop became known as an impeccably left-wing company, winning the support of politicians such as Nye Bevan and, most particularly, Tom Driberg. The Arts Council, however, was suspicious and unenthusiastic. A long war between Littlewood and the men from the Council began. Raffles had been made company manager and it was his energy, coupled with a readiness to travel with little cash in hand and even fewer foreign words at his command, that got Workshop its first overseas engagements.

  There was a triumphant visit to Czechoslovakia and more success in Stockholm. But at home the company worked from a dilapidated truck, not unlike Mother Courage’s canteen.

  Both Raffles and Littlewood saw that this itinerant existence could not go on for ever and they looked for a permanent home, with its attendant permanent audience. The only place on offer at the right rent was the Theatre Royal, Stratford. Littlewood was not enthusiastic and declared roundly — and accurately — that “it stank”. It was not even on the main road, but was conveniently close to the Tube station. Raffles and Littlewood set about cleaning it up themselves. The tradition continued: years later, when Barbara Windsor came to audition, she was greeted by a woman with a duster whom she took to be the char, but who was, of course, Littlewood.

  Theatre Workshop began with their normal repertory, which mixed Jonson and Marlowe with politically committed contemporaries such as Sartre and Hasek. The locals were friendly enough, but slow to buy tickets. Littlewood was keen to find new plays — Miller had long since gone off to devote himself to folk-songs. In 1956 a bundle of 17 beer-stained pages arrived, which turned out to be the beginnings of Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow. Raffles sent the price of an air fare to the author in Dublin, asking him to come over and work on the play. Behan promptly drank the cash, so Raffles then posted the air ticket itself, non-convertible into Guinness. The Quare Fellow became Theatre Workshop’s first big success, not without trouble from Littlewood’s new enemy the Lord Chamberlain, and transferred to the West End. Behan became a familiar figure in the Stratford pubs and followed up with The Hostage.

  Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey was turned into something actable, also transferring “up West” (in the Stratford argot) as well as being filmed. Littlewood was none too pleased when Delaney took her next play to the Royal Court, but cheered up a little when it turned out a failure. Joan had gathered around her a proper company of regular collaborators which included Victor Spinetti, Howard Goorney, Murray Melvin and James (David) Booth. She disliked calling them actors. “It’s an insult to them. I called them nuts, crackpots, tossers… I love them, the bastards. I never told them so.” A Stratford style was emerging based on improvisation, ensemble and sheer exuberance. There was no hanging about in a Littlewood production: if things started to become boring, then a song and dance livened them up.

  Nothing exemplified Joan Littlewood’s ability to transmute the skimpiest of material into gold than Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be. Frank Norman’s original script was wafer-thin and rested heavily on its use of then unfamiliar East End slang. Some of Lionel Bart’s songs were all too familiar. But Fings took off, another Stratford money-spinner.

  Any cash from transfers to the West End was carefully ploughed back into the Theatre Royal. But Littlewood almost resented her success and did not care for her dealings with theatre impresarios. She became restless and at one point walked out on the company to set up a film in Nigeria based on a story by Wole Soyinka. The project turned into a disaster. Back in London she did succeed in filming Sparrers Can’t Sing, which was not one of Stratford’s better plays. The camera crew was mildly surprised about the ripeness of language that flowed from the lips of the film’s director (who knew nothing about cinema technique). But at least it survives, and with it one of the few mementoes of the Stratford style.

  The idea of Stratford’s last and greatest success, Oh What a Lovely War, came to Gerry Raffles through a long-running radio programme by Charles Chilton based on the songs of the First World War. Littlewood pieced them together, showing false optimism changing into the enforced contemplation of mass death.

  Richard Attenborough later filmed it, but this was a starry and inflated version of what struck home harder at the Theatre Royal.

  Littlewood knew that the Stratford days were almost over. She was bored with the theatre and had not succeeded with film. Efforts to combine with Lionel Bart on a Robin Hood musical, Twang!, turned into one of the West End’s biggest flops of the decade. So she devoted her energies to trying to create a Fun Palace, a Utopian 20th-century equivalent of the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, where children and adults alike could have a good time. Foreign governments offered her the sites and the money, but the project came to nothing.

  Then in 1975 Gerry Raffles died suddenly, mainly as a result of consistent overwork. Littlewood, who throughout her life had despised all sentimentality, became a changed woman. She left Britain and set up her home in the small French town of Vienne, where Raffles had his final illness. She formed an unlikely friendship with Baron Philippe de Rothschild, which began as a literary correspondence. She called him “Guv”. Together they collaborated on a book, Milady Vine. She wrote her own autobiography, Joan’s Book, an honest, rambling and lengthy account of her life. But its 800 pages stop short of Gerry’s death.

  In her eightieth year she came back to London to promote the book, allowing some of the interviews she had given so reluctantly in the past. (“I hate the bloody book. It’s not much good,” she said.) She also, for the first time in 20 years, revisited the scene of her earlier success. She had vowed not to return to Stratford after Raffles died, but the death of one of her protégés, the writer and director Ken Hill, made her change her mind, and when the musical Hill had been rehearsing went on at the Theatre Royal, she was in the audience for the first night. To the end, the Bert Brecht cap still sat askew on auburn frizzy hair, the features were those of a perky pug, she was combative, ungrateful, rude — and still tossing obscenities at the Arts Council. The old rebel had not changed.

  She had no children.

  Joan Littlewood, theatre director and writer, was born on October 6, 1914. She died on September 20, 2002, aged 87

  ELIZABETH, COUNTESS OF LONGFORD

  * * *

  BIOGRAPHER, HISTORIAN AND THE INDOMITABLE MATRIARCH OF A LEFT-LEANING DYNASTY OF WRITERS

  OCTOBER 24, 2002

  Elizabeth Longford was matriarch of the most powerful and well-connected literary dynasty in the land — that of the Pakenhams, Frasers, Pinters and Billingtons — and her life was spent among intellec
tuals for whom the production of books of all kinds was at least as natural as the production of children. Her own historical writings combined erudition and thorough research with wide appeal. As Countess of Longford, wife of the 7th Earl (Frank Pakenham), she was a notable crusader in society and in Labour politics for many a losing cause.

  It was a grand and indomitable life, which has already been the subject of a biography. In her early years she occasionally overlapped with the Bloomsbury Group, and her own clan has some of the same fascination. Like them, the Longford family are pillars of the left wing of the Establishment, and sure enough, Elizabeth Longford kept a diary and encouraged all her children to do the same. Longford thinking was progressive, though always sensibly, never militantly so, yet their life perfectly represented the conservatism of comfort, divided as it was between Chelsea in the week and an 18th-century house at Hurst Green, East Sussex, at weekends.

  Elizabeth was the daughter of N. B. Harman, a Unitarian Harley Street ophthalmic surgeon, and Katherine Chamberlain, a niece of Joseph Chamberlain; she was thus a second cousin of Austen and Neville. She was educated at Headington School, Oxford, where her main talent was thought to be drawing, though she wrote a Gothic novel at 13 and dreamt of becoming an actress. But her mother was a determined proponent of proper education for girls, so she applied to Oxford. Rejection stiffened her resolve: she took coaching for a year and applied again, winning a place at Lady Margaret Hall.

  There she was regarded as one of the cleverest and most attractive women undergraduates of the day. She became a friend of W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, John Betjeman and David Cecil — and Quintin Hogg later said: “There was not an undergraduate in Oxford who wouldn’t have considered it a privilege to hold an umbrella over her head.”