Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties

by Rachel Cooke

  Sydney Box was a journalist and aspiring playwright whose roots were even humbler than Muriel’s. Aged seven, he had helped to supplement the income of his seamstress mother with two paper rounds while his father, a sometime florist, fought in the trenches; he and his four siblings might have starved otherwise, especially after his pa came home wounded. ‘I still shudder at the memory of one period of two weeks when our diet consisted solely of porridge, boiled swedes and cocoa,’ he would recall later. ‘I have never been able to eat swedes since.’ Having begun his working life as a cub reporter on the Kentish Times, he was by the early Thirties a Fleet Street freelance; among many other things, he put in shifts as a weekend sub-editor at the Christian Herald. But he still lived in Beckenham, his home town, where he wrote and produced plays for the local dramatic society. He was shy, balding, generous, easygoing, flirtatious, a wheeler-dealer, energetic, full of ideas, lame in one leg, and married.*

  He had been involved in a desultory correspondence with Muriel since the summer of 1932, when his one-act play Murder Trial had won a prize at the Welwyn’s annual drama festival (hearing of its brilliance from her friends there, Muriel wrote to him asking if she might have a copy). But in 1933 things changed between them. Sydney was invited to dinner at the attic, ostensibly so they might discuss their respective work (Muriel was now in continuity at Gaumont-British at Shepherd’s Bush; she’d also had a stab at writing a play of her own, a comedy called Better Halves). However, they seem to have spent most of the evening exchanging confidences. Muriel told Sydney all about Stanley, and he told her about his four-year marriage. Perhaps not everything, though, for the next day she received a long letter from her dinner guest in which he attempted to tie up what he called the ‘loose ends’ of their conversation. His marriage, he said, had been a mistake; he and his wife had not slept together for years; he was pleased to be able to say that she had now found, as he put it, some other box – ha ha – on which to ‘strike her match’. He was, he insisted, ‘released from all obligations’ save for the financial.

  The tone of his note, jokey and a touch unctuous, suggests that he worried he was being premature. But for Muriel his missive came as a relief: he was free. In the course of a single evening, it seems, she had fallen in love. Within a month she and Sydney were sleeping together. By the autumn, they had found three small rooms to rent in a house opposite a fried-fish shop off Russell Square in Bloomsbury. They were, she quickly discovered, well suited, the one an incurable optimist (him), the other an incurable pessimist (her). But she also had to admit that she liked the idea of living in sin. She felt adventurous, bold, sophisticated. And what a dynamo this man was! ‘Since meeting Sydney I realise what I’ve been missing all my life and each day I offer up a blessing for the magical good fortune that brought us together,’ she wrote in her diary in August 1933. ‘I have a feeling our relationship will prove fruitful. Already he is working with zest and mapping out his future with a thoroughness I admire.’

  She was not wrong about this. Sydney’s big problem in life was that he tended to do too much, not too little. One day, soon after they’d shacked up, he arrived home with an even bigger grin than usual on his face. It had occurred to him that while the majority of Britain’s amateur actors were women, most of the plays that were written with drama societies in mind had more parts for men, and on a sudden impulse he had walked into Harraps, the publishers, to tell them so (there were then some twenty thousand amateur dramatic societies in Britain, with approximately a million members; this was a lucrative market). He had walked out again with a contract to produce a book of six one-act plays with all-women casts. In just three months’ time.

  And so it was that he and Muriel first began working together – a collaboration that would last, one way or another, for the next three decades. Every evening she would settle down to work on the first draft of a play they had already roughed out over supper, or even in bed. She would then pass it to Sydney to polish. And on and on, until the work was done. The result, Ladies Only, and its follow-up, Petticoat Plays, were an instant success, and over the course of the following six years they would publish upwards of fifty further such dramas. No West End producer would have known either one of their names, but Muriel and Sydney Box were soon the most performed playwrights in Britain.

  It was thanks to one of these plays that they married. A newspaper had described Not This Man, which won the top award at the National Drama Festival at the Old Vic in 1935, as blasphemous. When Sydney decided to sue his lawyer advised him that his domestic arrangements, were they to be revealed in court, might prejudice his case. So he and Muriel decided to get hitched (she would otherwise have been perfectly content for them to go on as they were). The wedding took place at Holborn Register Office on 23 May 1935, with two office cleaners hastily enlisted as witnesses. Afterwards they had a cup of coffee at a nearby Lyons Corner House and then they each went straight to their offices; there was no honeymoon. Somewhat predictably, Sydney lost his court case. But he didn’t regret having brought it: the publicity was worth a hundred times what he had spent on legal fees. And now that they were married they could have a baby without worrying about anyone’s disapproval. Their daughter Leonora arrived the following year.

  For a while, life was good. But with the outbreak of war in 1939 the lights went out at Britain’s amateur dramatic societies – a situation that presented Muriel and Sydney with something of a problem. Muriel had left her continuity job when she fell pregnant; Sydney had been fired by a documentary company for whom he had lately been writing scripts. Their plays were their only source of income, and who was going to want those now? Again, it was Sydney who had the bright idea. The blackout, it was clear, was going to drive people half crazy, so what about a compendium of puzzles, games, jokes, poems and prayers to get families through the long, dark nights? The Black-Out Book was published in November 1939 under the pseudonym Evelyn August. It was so successful that on the back of its royalties Sydney was able to establish his own documentary company. Within two years Verity Films would be the biggest producer of government-sponsored propaganda in the country. (Thanks to his disability, Sydney was not called upon to fight.)

  For the first months of the war Muriel stayed in London. But once the bombing began – a house in the Highgate street where they were now living received a direct hit – it was decided that she and Leonora would have to be evacuated. She dreaded this. She didn’t want to leave Sydney; their goodbye in the sepulchral gloom of King’s Cross, to the sound of heavy ack-ack fire, filled her with foreboding. But you sense, too, that she feared missing out. ‘It was obvious,’ she said later, ‘that attitudes to everything were changing, mine included.’ When she arrived in Dumfries after a fourteen-hour train journey she felt she had landed in another world. The Scots were suspicious, unwelcoming – something she found odd, given that they were fighting the same enemy as the English. It was impossible to make telephone calls or to send telegrams – the lines between London and Scotland were permanently jammed – and the post arrived too late to be reassuring (by the time a letter arrived its sender could very easily be lying underneath a pile of rubble). The only consolation was that she had her sister-in-law for company (she and Betty, along with Sydney’s mother, occupied two rooms in the home of a shoe salesman and his family): ‘A petite, very pretty blonde, with an engaging manner which effectively disguised a remarkably keen brain. In a great many ways, she resembled Sydney, being possessed of artistic flair and considerable organising ability.’ They became friends, though rivalry would always simmer beneath the surface of their relationship. Nevertheless, Muriel’s evacuation did not last long. When Sydney suggested that she might come to London to help him with a ninety-minute documentary, The Soldier’s Food – Ralph Richardson was to be seconded from the Fleet Air Arm to star in it – she did not hesitate. Leaving Leonora with her mother-in-law, she hot-footed it back to London.

  Making this little film about messing committees, hay-box cooking and
the importance of fresh greens took longer than expected: location work at Richmond Park was hampered by Messerschmitts dive-bombing the parade ground, and studio shots were held up by the screeching of sirens and the sound of shrapnel on the roof. Yet the experience only increased Muriel’s determination to work for what remained of the war. She packed Leonora off to a boarding school in Buckinghamshire, a liberal establishment recommended to Muriel by Jill Craigie* (the children learned carpentry, and grew all their own food), and then it was back to London again. Betty, a trained commercial artist with an accountancy qualification, followed swiftly on her heels; Sydney had persuaded her to join Verity Films as a production assistant.

  In 1941 Sydney made his wife the director of a documentary for the British Council, The English Inn. Thanks to the war, directors were thin on the ground and no doubt she had been begging him to let her have a go. But these weren’t his only reasons. Sydney believed in her, something he would prove over and over in the future. Muriel may have lacked his enterprise and cunning, but she was a fast learner – ‘I took to [directing] like a duck to water’ – and after this epic of horse brasses and foaming ale he enthusiastically assigned her to several Ministry of Information films. Only when the Ministry decreed that Road Safety for Children was not a suitable project for a woman did this run end; Sydney’s business was not so successful that he was willing to risk falling out with his biggest client. But in any case, he needed Muriel elsewhere, for he was branching into features, leaving Verity in the capable hands of Betty. In swift succession he now produced On Approval, a comedy with Googie Withers, for English Pictures, and The Flemish Farm (a war movie), French Without Tears (by Terence Rattigan) and Don’t Take It To Heart! (another comedy) for Two Cities Films. Muriel advised on continuity and editing. In 1943, considering his apprenticeship as a producer complete, Sydney acquired a lease on Riverside Studios and he and Muriel began working on the screenplay of what they hoped would be their first independent production, an adaptation of the stage comedy29 Acacia Avenue.

  All this went on, of course, against the backdrop of the continuing war. It must have been odd, even surreal, to be making movies – and quite a silly one, in the case of 29 Acacia Avenue* – at a time of national crisis, for all that cinema audiences continued to be remarkably buoyant, for all that the pictures were so important for morale. (Cinema audiences reached their peak during the war. In 1945 there were 1,585,000,000 admissions; by 1956 this would fall to 1,101,000,000. Picture houses had notices advising audiences that the programme would continue during air raids – which was lucky, since most people remained in their seats when the sirens sounded). But it was amazing how work could cause even the most dramatic and terrible events to fade to grey. In 1944, for instance, London was constantly under attack from the VIS, the devastating bombs known as doodlebugs. In her diary, Muriel pasted a Giles cartoon featuring civilians with giant ears, which had a caption that read: ‘It’s ridiculous to say these flying bombs have affected people in any way!’ Beneath it, she wrote, ‘Whenever we are out now, we begin to feel like those in the cartoon above.’ (People would strain to hear the dull rattle of the VIS, knowing that when they fell silent an explosion was imminent.) She was exhausted; it was impossible to sleep. On fire-watch duty she had counted thirty flying bombs in a single evening. The Warner Brothers studio at Teddington had received a direct hit. In Norwood, two of Sydney’s relatives had been killed when a V2 – the doodlebug’s successor – landed on their house. And yet, as she also noted, the greater part of her was preoccupied with the fate of 29 Acacia Avenue, which J. Arthur Rank was refusing to distribute (audience laughter at a screening had convinced him, a strict Methodist, that it was ‘immoral’).*

  The bombs continued, right up until Easter 1945. So did the crushing shortages: it had now been several years since she had been able to get her hands on a bottle of cooking oil. Ditto lipstick, shampoo and stockings. She told her diary that she longed for fruit, for liver, even for suet. But she couldn’t feel too glum. She and Sydney had written a melodrama about a suicidal pianist called The Seventh Veil, and it had now gone into production, starring Ann Todd, Herbert Lom and James Mason. This was thrilling; the screenplay was entirely original, and they had always dreamed it would be a vehicle for Todd.* On balance, she would probably take the movie over a pair of nylons. A few weeks later, the news came that Germans had begun to disintegrate. Muriel was overjoyed, of course,† but she couldn’t help noticing that VE day would also bring with it forty-eight hours’ holiday, time she and Sydney could usefully devote to finishing their next screenplay, The Years Between, an adaptation of the play by Daphne du Maurier.

  Ann Todd in The Seventh Veil

  (ITV Global/The Kobal Collection.)

  The Seventh Veil opened on 22 October 1945 at the Leicester Square Theatre; its title and the names of its stars could be written in lights, thanks to the end of the black out. Muriel, ever the pessimist, did not have high hopes for the film. She doesn’t explain the source of this gloom in her memoir, or in any subsequent interview, but perhaps it was its ending that made her nervous: after receiving psychiatric treatment, the film’s heroine, Francesca (Todd), realises that the love of her life is her crippled and Svengali-like guardian Nicholas (James Mason), a romantic revelation mottled with incestuous and masochistic undertones. Even with Mason in the role – he had been Britain’s most popular box-office star in 1944 – this was risky. But whatever the cause of her anxiety, she was quite wrong to doubt it. The film, which won the Oscar for best original screenplay in 1946, was loved by the critics and public alike; as Muriel would put it in Odd Woman Out, ‘with almost monotonous yet very comforting regularity, it broke every known record’.*

  It had cost only £92,000 to make.

  No wonder Arthur Rank now asked Sydney to take charge of production at Gainsborough Studios.

  It was Noël Coward who – following their takeover at Gainsborough – described the Boxes as ‘the Brontës of Shepherd’s Bush’. But while this was both delightful and very neat, it was not entirely accurate. Betty Box, the member of the family for whom the Gainsborough years would prove to be most successful, worked not in Shepherd’s Bush but at the studio’s Islington outpost, where Sydney had appointed her the studio head.

  This was a shrewd move. Rank had contracted him to make ten to twelve pictures a year, with budgets of between £150,000 and £200,000 apiece; Islington’s output would need to comprise roughly a quarter of this total if he was to meet these obligations. He needed to be sure its stages were productive, and what better way of doing so than by putting his own sister in charge? At Verity, Betty had made over two hundred short films (her favourite of these, she liked to joke, was called: How to Use Dried Egg Powder for a Tasty Meal), and she had proved that she was hard working, tough, pragmatic and good with budgets. She was, it was generally agreed, the absolute mistress of the cheap special effect. Night-time shots being much improved by damp slates, which reflected the light, she had been known to call out the fire brigade to spray the roofs of buildings on her locations. The only member of the Gainsborough board to object to her appointment was Michael Balcon, who insisted that it smacked of nepotism. Betty, of course, didn’t buy this for a minute. ‘I believe that had I not been a woman, there would have been no objection at all,’ she wrote in her memoir Lifting the Lid.

  Overnight, then, Betty Box became Britain’s leading female film producer – its only female producer – and at the age of just thirty-one. It was a giant leap, and the transition would have crushed a lesser woman. ‘I quickly learnt what a very different world I was entering,’ she wrote in Lifting the Lid. ‘At Verity, I could say to the army, “I’ll need three hundred private soldiers with their officers, a dozen tanks, a column of vehicles,” and they were all delivered without any charge (providing, of course, they weren’t otherwise occupied dealing with Mssrs Hitler and Mussolini). But now came big deals with stars, top technicians, composers, designers for huge sets and for film stars�
� clothes – a very much tougher proposition. All of them had high-powered agents whose livelihood depended on doing bigger and tougher deals for the people whose careers they guided.’

  But while the personnel were more glamorous, the studio was straight out of the dark ages: ‘It was a filthy place. Next door to a glue factory, which stank. Very dirty and grubby, and so antiquated it was unbelievable.’ There were two stages, but they were built one on top of the other, with only a tiny lift to connect them. This arrangement necessitated careful planning. Only interiors could be shot upstairs; anything of any size had to be filmed on the ground floor. Speed was also of the essence. Pictures had to be made in ten weeks at the outside; most were completed in just six. A set used for one film on a Friday often had to be revamped over the weekend so it could be used for a new movie on Monday morning.