Beryl Bainbridge

by Brendan King

  36 Trevor Baines, interview with author, 6 January 2016.

  37 Beryl’s cousin Hilary spent a lot of time with Ian and his girlfriend, Janet, during this period and was sceptical about both claims.

  38 ‘Beryl Bainbridge talks to Yolanta May’, New Review, December 1976.

  39 ‘Ghosts of Christmas past’, undated article.

  40 ‘A good death’, BBC, March 2009.

  41 This and subsequent quotes from ‘Yolanta May talks to Beryl Bainbridge’, New Review, December 1976.

  42 Forever England, Duckworth, 1987, p. 42.

  43 The song was made popular by the Three Flames, but there was also a slightly bawdier version by Walter Brown and the Tiny Grimes Sextet.

  44 Although there are many photographs showing Richard at Chirbury looking relaxed and participating in the fun, Beryl implied that he often drove the family down and then left them there, taking advantage of the fact that the hotel faced directly onto the road: ‘This was handy for my father, who on numerous occasions, spotting his detested father-in-law in the doorway, hand raised in welcome, would bring the car screeching to a halt within a yard of our destination . . . and when at last we were all out . . . he would fling himself back into the driving seat and reversing, roar off . . . like a man leaving a sinking ship.’ Forever England, Duckworth, 1987, p. 140.

  45 Hilary Abbott, interview with author, 13 May 2015.

  46 Obituary of George Lyward, The Times, 28 June 1973.

  47 Letter from Terry Alderman, 10 August 1946.

  48 Letter from Terry Alderman, 9 August 1946.

  49 According to Hilary Abbott her name was Helen Brown.

  50 Forever England, Duckworth, 1987, p. 142.

  51 Despite spending as much time in Chirbury as Beryl, Hilary Baines had no recollection of the ladder incident.

  52 Authors’ Lives, British Library sound recording (Track 2, December 2008).

  53 Diary entry for 19 February 1946. BL MS 83817.

  54 Hilary Abbott, interview with author, 13 May 2015.

  55 Diary entry for 11 January 1949. BL MS 83818.

  56 Authors’ Lives, British Library sound recording (Track 2, December 2008).

  57 ‘What I know about men’, interview by Nicki Spritz, Observer, 15 January 2006.

  58 Mary Kenny, Catholic Herald, 20 August 2004.

  CHAPTER 3

  1 ‘A treatise on justification’, in ‘Fragments 1951–53’. BL MS 83745.

  2 Advertisement in Seed’s Directory for Southport, 1924.

  3 Advertisement in Manchester Courier, 6 July 1906. The exam boards included London Matriculation, Oxford Locals and Cambridge Higher. By the late 1930s the college was in decline, most of the original founders had already died, and the two remaining Misses Gill were both in their seventies. Alice Gill died in 1939, and the college closed down shortly after Beryl left in 1942.

  4 Information from Formby Civic Society website.

  5 ‘Basher’s progress’, interview in Evening Standard, 8 May 1967.

  6 ‘I never thought I was worth anything as a writer’, interview with Graham Turner, Daily Telegraph, 18 August 2001.

  7 Diary entry for 10 March 1944. BL MS 83816.

  8 Diary entry for 3 April 1944. BL MS 83816.

  9 Recounted in an email to author by Anita Barry, 7 June 2013.

  10 Fifty Years 1900–1950: A History of S. Faith’s Crosby, compiled by G. W. Houldin, 1950.

  11 Perhaps the teacher Beryl had most trouble with, and who represented the opposite of Miss Peck’s more tolerant and encouraging approach, was Miss Williamson, the maths teacher. Beryl recalled being ‘absolutely hopeless at maths’ at school, and described ‘Willie’, as the pupils nicknamed her, as ‘a horror, a real cross patch, always snappy and a fiend not just to me but to everybody’. This assessment is borne out by Beryl’s fellow pupils – the most frequent epithet applied to Miss Williamson in their letters is ‘bitch’. See ‘My best teacher’, interview with Pamela Coleman, The Times Educational Supplement, 29 January 1999.

  12 Diary entries for 1944. BL MS 83816.

  13 Diary entries for 1946. BL MS 83817.

  14 Diary entry for 21 February 1944. BL MS 83816.

  15 Beryl’s later statement that she went to Mrs Ackerley twice a week for several years was a typical exaggeration.

  16 Margaret Parsons, interview with author, 14 March 2014.

  17 Diary entry for 19 June 1944. BL MS 83816.

  18 In the introduction to a volume of her theatre criticism Beryl wrote: ‘At the age of five I became a member of the Thelma Bickerstaff tap-dancing troupe’, inventing a suitably comical and northern-sounding name, though in fact the principal of the Ainsdale School was Helen Jackson.

  19 Forever England, Duckworth, 1987, p. 40.

  20 Margaret Parsons, interview with author, 14 March 2014.

  21 Liverpool Echo, 31 July 1945.

  22 This and other early photographs show the extent to which Beryl’s hair was permed, something carried out under the instigation of her mother and that she repeatedly claimed to detest, but which undoubtedly contributed to making her look much older than her years. ‘From the age of six I always had a permanent wave,’ she told one interviewer (‘Spot the author’, interview with Serena Allott, Weekend Telegraph, 11 April 1987); to another, she remarked that ‘Perms in those days were fantastic. You came out looking like a Zulu’ (‘Basher’s progress’, Evening Standard, 8 May 1967).

  23 Letter from John James and Janet Baines, 1 August 1945.

  24 Beryl’s published account of her experiences working on Children’s Hour are somewhat misleading. She didn’t, as she claimed, travel ‘during the war . . . to act on the wireless’, nor did she spend ‘the next two years . . . performing in various dramas’. See Front Row: Evenings at the Theatre, Bloomsbury Continuum, 2005, p. 2.

  25 See diary entries for 15 and 25 August, and 2, 11 and 17 September 1944, for example. BL MS 83816.

  26 ‘I Remember Peace Day’, BL MS 83734.

  27 A similar sense of embarrassment about her body, and a corresponding unease about the male gaze, features in a story she would write a few years later, in which the female narrator is handed a bouquet of flowers by a young man as a love token: ‘I was very uncomfortable because even though it was extremely hot I was ashamed of my forming breasts and wore a thick cardigan to help disguise the fact that my summer frock was unwarrantably tight.’ ‘The Laird’s Afternoon’ in ‘Fragments 1951–53’. BL MS 83745.

  28 The Magazine, Merchant Taylors’ School for Girls, 1944. Beryl would later say that the talk she remembered best was one about sewage, given by a man from the Water Board, but this is probably another piece of myth-making as she also mentions in the same article that Rex Harrison was among the school’s guest speakers – he was not. See ‘Waiting for stragglers’, The Listener, 23 and 30 December 1982.

  29 Forever England, Duckworth, 1987, p. 66.

  30 Letter from Winnie Bainbridge, 29 February 1948.

  31 Letter from Richard Malthouse, 24 October 1948.

  32 Diary entry for 23 January 1949. BL MS 83818.

  33 Diary entry for 8 April 1944. BL MS 83816.

  34 ‘Ghosts of Christmas past’, Image, December 1986.

  35 Letter from Richard Bainbridge, 22 January 1948.

  36 Diary entries for 1946. BL MS 83817.

  37 Diary entry for 9 February 1946. BL MS 83817.

  38 Diary entry for 24 February 1946. BL MS 83817.

  CHAPTER 4

  1 ‘Fragments 1951–53’. BL MS 83745.

  2 Formby Times, 4 August 1945. Even this early newspaper report is erroneous in its dating of events. Beryl began at Mrs Ackerley’s at the start of 1944, when she was eleven, not ten, and she completed her gold medal in the space of a year, not two as stated. The Liverpool Echo, 31 July 1945, noted that Beryl’s skill in composition was evidenced by ‘a number of remarkably well-constructed and promising poems’.

  3 ‘The Medvale Bombshell’ is the
earliest surviving example of Beryl’s fiction, though one must assume there were earlier attempts that were subsequently lost or destroyed. The earliest reference to such work is in a section called ‘More memories’ in ‘Fragments 1951–53’: ‘When I was nine or ten, perhaps younger I began to write a story in a red cash book. It was called “The Magic Carpet”. I cannot remember much else about it.’ In the introduction to Filthy Lucre, Beryl added that it was after seeing The Thief of Bagdad – which famously included scenes of a flying magic carpet – that she was inspired to write the story. The film was released late in 1940 and shown in the UK during 1941, when Beryl was between eight and nine. However, the other details about her early writings in the Filthy Lucre introduction seem more suspect, or at the very least erroneously dated.

  4 The novel’s hero lives in a house on Colgarth Road, which sounds very similar to Talgarth Road, where the LAMDA building was situated.

  5 ‘The Medvale Bombshell’. BL MS 83738. All subsequent quotes are from the manuscript.

  6 This is the title given in the manuscript, though at the top of the first chapter this has been overwritten at a later date with the title ‘The Tragedy of Andrew Ledwhistle and Richard Soleways’.

  7 ‘The Tragedy of Andrew Ledwhistle and Martin Andromiky’. BL MS 83740. When it was reproduced in Filthy Lucre, Beryl made a number of small and unnecessary changes to this paragraph, which reads better in the manuscript than in the published version. All subsequent quotes are from the ms version.

  8 This and subsequent quotes relating to Christie/Lynda from ‘My Song is Done’. BL MS 83743.

  9 Letter from Lynda South, c. 20 March 1948.

  10 Letter from Lynda South, c. late 1946.

  11 Letter from Lynda South, c. 2 March 1952.

  12 Poem dated Formby 1947. BL MS 83744.

  13 Letter from Lynda South, c. February 1948.

  14 Letter from Lynda South, c. 21 June 1952.

  15 Extract of letter to Lynda South, c. 1952, in ‘Fragments 1951–53’. BL MS 83745.

  16 Note on Beryl’s ammunition box.

  17 This and subsequent quotations, ‘Us Versus Them’. BL MS 83742.

  CHAPTER 5

  1 ‘Fragments 1951–53’. BL MS 83745.

  2 Untitled poem dated 1947. BL MS 83744.

  3 Draft version of ‘The Summer of the Tsar’. BL MS 83761.

  4 ‘The hermit is a learned man’, Formby Times, 26 July 1947.

  5 Little is known of Harry Franz, except that he lived near Kronach and worked for Siemens after the war, though the company no longer has any records relating to him. Beryl referred to him as Harry Arno Franz, though he himself always gave his name as Harry Franz.

  6 Letter to Harry Franz, 21 August 1948.

  7 Letter from Harry Franz, 25 November 1947.

  8 The manuscript is dated 3 January 1949, but Beryl also puts her age as fifteen, which if correct means it must have been written between November 1947 and November 1948. The resulting novel was mixed at best, though it is difficult to judge it because it is impossible to know whether the unnumbered pages that form the current manuscript constitute all of those that were originally written, or indeed if they are in the right order. Nor is it clear whether all the pages belong to the same draft, or whether they represent alternative versions of the same story written at different periods. Beryl herself seems not to have been entirely satisfied with the result, and four years later in 1953 she recopied some or perhaps all of the pages, but the extent to which she may also have revised or rewritten them isn’t clear.

  9 Beryl had no photograph of Harry, but when the Daily Telegraph ran an article about her relationship with him in 2005, they incorrectly printed a photograph of another man she knew at the time called Harry Wesseling, even though his name is signed on the front. Beryl either didn’t notice that this wasn’t the ‘real’ Harry when she sent the photograph, or thought no one would know the difference.

  10 ‘My Song is Done’, 1949. BL MS 83743.

  11 Ibid.

  12 ‘Fragments 1951–53’. BL MS 83745.

  13 ‘My Song is Done’, 1949. BL MS 83743.

  14 Letter from Alan Frost, c. March 1948.

  15 A Quiet Life, Duckworth, 1976, p. 107.

  16 Luke Salkeld, ‘Love across enemy lines’, Daily Mail, 16 August 2007.

  17 ‘Fragments 1951–53’. BL MS 83745.

  18 1947 Notebook.

  19 Letter from Harry Franz, 28 July 1947.

  20 The only Jimmy Clunie listed in birth records for Kinross was born in Cleish in 1915, which would make him thirty-two at the time.

  21 ‘Fragments 1951–53’. BL MS 83745.

  22 Ibid.

  23 Letter from Harry Franz, 5 September 1947.

  24 ‘Fragments 1951–53’. BL MS 83745.

  25 Quoted in letter from Harry Franz, 11 September 1947.

  26 Untitled poem dated Formby, 1947. BL MS 83744. The third and final stanza reads: ‘For one day while walking/To meet you dear/Two loving figures went past/I heard you say, without a care/You are by far, more sweet than her/What a pity it had to end/What a pity it did’nt last.’

  27 Letter from Harry Franz, 18 September 1947.

  28 Quoted in letter from Harry Franz, 10 December 1947.

  29 Quoted in letter from Harry Franz, 30 December 1947.

  30 Quoted in letter from Harry Franz, 29 February 1948.

  31 Quoted in letter from Harry Franz, 3 May 1948.

  32 Quoted in letter from Harry Franz, 25 June 1948.

  33 Letter from Bernard Blundell, c. 15 February 1948.

  34 Letter from Jim Palmer, 17 January 1948.

  35 Untitled poem, c. 1948. BL MS 83734.

  36 Letter to Harry Franz, 21 August 1948.

  37 Quoted in letter from Harry Franz, 15 May 1949.

  38 Entry for 11 February 1949. 1949–53 Journal. BL MS 83818.

  39 Entry for 20 February 1949. 1949–53 Journal. BL MS 83818.

  40 ‘Fragments 1951–53’. BL MS 83745.

  CHAPTER 6

  1 ‘Fragments 1951–53’. BL MS 83745.

  2 Ibid.

  3 Beryl once let slip that the school authorities had told her parents it would be best for all concerned if she left, as there was no hope of her passing the school certificate. See Terry Waite Takes a Different View, Thames, 1986.

  4 ‘It was a surprise for me to hear, that you next January go to London in the school.’ Letter from Harry Franz, 6 August 1947.

  5 Letter from Jacques Delebassée, 31 August 1947.

  6 Beryl’s assertion that the mansion was ‘built by Charles II for Nell Gwynn’ isn’t true.

  7 Forever England, Duckworth, 1987, pp. 112–13.

  8 Julie Andrews, Home: A Memoir of My Early Years, Hachette, 2008.

  9 Gillian Lynne, A Dancer in Wartime, Vintage, 2012, pp. 47–8.

  10 Julie Andrews, Home: A Memoir of My Early Years, Hachette, 2008.

  11 Letter from Ian Bainbridge, 18 January 1948 (misdated 1947). BL MS 83730A.

  12 Letter from Ian Bainbridge, 25 January 1948 (misdated 1947). BL MS 83730A.

  13 Letter from Rita Moody, 14 February 1948. BL MS 83730A.

  14 Letter from Albert Riley, 16 January 1948.

  15 Letter from Winnie Bainbridge, c. 29 January 1948. BL MS 83730A.

  16 Letter from Richard Bainbridge, 19 January 1948.

  17 Letter from Richard Bainbridge, 6 February 1949.

  18 Letter from Richard Bainbridge, 15 February 1948. BL MS 83730A.

  19 Letter from Winnie Bainbridge, c. 27 February 1948.

  20 Or as her father put it: ‘My own Darlin Berry, Now I sees by yer letter that yer fast settlin down, and mighty glad it is I find yer so.’ Letter from Richard Bainbridge, 3 February 1948.

  21 Letter from Winnie Bainbridge, 4 February 1948.

  22 Julie Andrews, Home: A Memoir of My Early Years, Hachette, 2008.

  23 Letter to Billy Cousins, 11 March 1948.

  24 Letter from Ian Bainbridge, 15 Fe
bruary 1948. BL MS 83730A.

  25 Letter from Ian Bainbridge, 18 January 1948 (misdated 1947). BL MS 83730A.

  26 Eve Branson, Mum’s the Word: The High-Flying Adventures of Eve Branson. AuthorHouse, 2013, p. 6.

  27 Letter from Ian Bainbridge, 18 January 1948 (misdated 1947). BL MS 83730A.

  28 Letter from Annette Moore, c. 24 January 1948.

  29 Letter from Winnie Bainbridge, 15 February 1948.

  30 Letter from Ian Bainbridge, 11 July 1948. BL MS 83730A.

  31 Letter from Lynda South, c. 11 July 1948.

  32 ‘Formby Forum’, Formby Times, 5 March 1949.

  33 ‘Formby Forum’, Formby Times, 12 March 1949.

  34 ‘Formby Forum’, Formby Times, 19 March 1949.

  35 See also diary entry for 24 January 1949. 1949–53 Journal. BL MS 83818.

  36 Entry for 8 February 1949. 1949–53 Journal. BL MS 83818.

  37 Entry for 1 March 1949. 1949–53 Journal. BL MS 83818.

  38 Entry for 8 February 1949. 1949–53 Journal. BL MS 83818.

  39 Entry for 26 January 1949. 1949–53 Journal. BL MS 83818.

  40 Entry for 14 January 1949. 1949–53 Journal. BL MS 83818.

  41 Entry for 22 February 1949. 1949–53 Journal. BL MS 83818.

  42 Entry for 5 March 1949. 1949–53 Journal. BL MS 83818.

  43 Entry for 9 March 1949. 1949–53 Journal. BL MS 83818.

  44 Entry for 26 March 1949. 1949–53 Journal. BL MS 83818.

  45 Nottingham Evening Post, 12 April 1949.

  46 Letter from Winnie Bainbridge, 20 March 1949.

  47 Nottingham Evening Post, 16 April 1949.

  48 Letter from Richard Bainbridge, 13 March 1949.

  49 Letter from Richard Bainbridge, 20 March 1949.

  50 In English Journey Beryl claimed to have recited a monologue called ‘The Bloke from Birkenhead’, though there seems to be no poem or song with that title.

  51 See letter from Jacques Delebassée, 1 May 1949: ‘I should like to be in Bulwell during the week of Easter to see you on the theatre, and to dance with you.’

  52 English Journey, Duckworth, 1984, p. 79.

  53 In 2004 Beryl scribbled a hasty biographical note about Les Carr for the benefit of the British Library, who had just purchased some of her manuscripts: ‘This was a man (23, 24) I met at the young Communist meetings in Formby. He was very Liverpudlian and I knew my parents would hate him. It was entirely platonic. I was 11.’ Like many later comments about her early life this was factually misleading. Beryl was over sixteen when she met Les and there was a strong physical element to the relationship.