My Fair Lady began its record-breaking run at London’s Drury Lane Theatre in the spring of 1958. By the autumn James Pitman had inserted a two-page advertisement of the proposed alfabet into the programme sponsored by the silversmiths Mappin & Webb. Many of Shaw’s ideas ‘were so novel and penetrating that they were rejected by his contemporaries,’ he wrote, ‘ – and this particular idea was so novel, and so demanding in its need to think freshly, that very few people have yet understood it’. He requested members of the audience to ‘keep a space in your bookshelf for the bi-alphabetic Androcles. Designs for the new alfabet were coming in from all parts of the world, and when eventually it was established we could look forward to savings in paper, ink, machine-time, storage and transport ‘of £3,000,000 or $10,000,000 a day’.
By the end of 1958, 467 valid entries for the contest had been received by the Public Trustee. More than half of them came from the United Kingdom, but there were 60 from the United States, 40 from Canada, 11 from India, 10 from Germany, 6 from Ireland and several from Africa, South America and Eastern Europe. ‘We were astonished by the merit and quantity of the work produced,’ remarked James Pitman a year later. It had taken him and Peter MacCarthy the whole of 1959 to find a winner and even then they had failed to do so, coming up instead with four ‘semi-winners’. Dr S. L. Pugmire, a psychiatrist working with mentally handicapped children at the Whittingham Hospital near Preston, had produced a geometric design; Mr Kingsley Read, the author of Quickscript, who had designed everything from pavilions for trade fairs to suits of armour for pageants, submitted a cursive system; and there were script or ‘current’ alfabets from Mrs Pauline Bassett from Nova Scotia and Mr J. F. Magrath, an insurance broker, who had worked out his design on daily train journeys between London and Kent. All of them received cheques for £125 and the Public Trustee announced that the four winning alphabets would be co-ordinated to produce a final design for use in implementing Shaw’s wishes. ‘We are launching a ship,’ declared Mr Baulkwill, ‘and we don’t know where it’s going.’
It did not look to Barbara Smoker as if this vessel would get far beyond the launching slip. She regretted Shaw’s failure to tie up his trusts with infant literacy. Had he nominated Enid Blyton’s Noddy instead of his own Androcles the Chancery Court decision would have ‘undoubtedly gone the other way’. She also deplored the absence of any expert calligrapher or educational psychologist among the assessors, and pointed out that any fusion between the four winning designs was impossible. James Pitman however felt exuberant. The final alfabet was an improved version of Kingsley Read’s aesthetically pleasing forty-eight letter ‘sound-writing’ system. It contained little reference to the other three versions but was ‘better than most other alphabets,’ conceded Barbara Smoker who was to be employed as specialist editor on the new Androcles.
In February 1961 The Times announced that this special edition of Androcles ‘is likely to be on the bookstalls by early autumn’. By December the Public Trustee, now Sir Reginald Baulkwill, forecast publication early in the New Year. On 26 February 1962 the Daily Mail unveiled a scoop:
‘The secret publishers of the weird, phonetic version of Androcles and the Lion which George Bernard Shaw provided for in his will, have been unmasked.
And it turns out that this is another scoop for Sir Allen Lane and his Penguins, who published Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the money-spinner of 1961.’ The delay had been largely caused by contradictory instructions from Pitman, Penguin, the expert Phonetician and the Public Trustee. Eventually Barbara Smoker ‘walked out in a huff leaving Hans Schmoller, the publisher’s master typographer, floundering among the hieroglyphics of ‘the world’s strangest type-face’.
Androcles and the Lion, An Old Fable Renovated by Bernard Shaw with a Parallel Text in Shaw’s Alphabet to be Read in Conjunction Showing its Economies in Writing and Reading was finally published on 22 November 1962. The Public Trustee’s issue comprised 13,000 copies of which 12,680 were presented free to libraries, 1,900 within the United Kingdom, 1,230 around the Commonwealth, 8,690 to the United States, 710 to Canada and throughout South America and 150 to ‘National Libraries of the World’. Approximately 34,000 copies of an ordinary issue costing 3s. 6d. were on sale to the public, an indeterminate number being exported to the United States from the second English impression. Within each copy a white Guide Card was inserted on which two keys to the alphabet (one arranged phonetically for writers, the other graphically for readers) were duplicated from the last pages of the book. There were also some ‘Suggestions for Writing’ supplied by Kingsley Read, some ‘Notes on the Spelling’ from Peter MacCarthy and a Foreword by the new Public Trustee C. R. Sopwith (Sir Reginald Baulkwill having retired to Devon). The book was dedicated to James Pitman (now Sir James Pitman KBE).
It was a kind of triumph. The poetry lay in its algebra and arithmetic, and the mysterious dream encoded by these symbols and ciphers. In a disarming Introduction James Pitman sought to advise readers on the choreography of its use. ‘Open the book and hold it upside down in front of a mirror,’ he instructed. ‘...Keep the back of the book pressed against your lips, and advance towards the mirror until you are able to see individual characters clearly enough to be able to copy them.’ Before long, he promised, users would be able to speed up such exercises and for those who attained gymnastic facility ‘reading may be 50–75 per cent, and writing 80–100 per cent faster, and even 200–300 per cent, by using simple abbreviations’. He urged owners of this wonderful book to make their friends buy copies so that they could all correspond with one another in the new script. The following year he offered to form circles of five or six of these correspondents who, ‘drawn together in friendship by Shaw’s alphabet, will all circulate their own letters to which each in turn will add’. But these dancing circles never joined and multiplied as he hoped. He was disappointed too by the conservatism of the Ministry of Education which was offered Shaw’s alfabet in principle, in draft and upon completion, and turned it down at all three stages. But Shaw’s trusts did assist in the temporary success of Pitman’s Initial Teaching Alphabet for children, and encouraged him to go on and on battering at the walls of prejudice until his death in 1985.
Barbara Smoker still campaigns. From time to time, when not producing strings of verse with which to tie up the deity, conducting gay and lesbian weddings, speaking from the public gallery of the House of Commons against the Vietnam War or, with her Free Speech banner, being molested by crowds of Muslims calling for the death of Salman Rushdie, she has returned to her alphabetic high ground to see if the walls have yet come tumbling down. ‘History is certainly on the side of a new alphabet,’ she believes. ‘...It is absurd that in the twentieth century we should still be using what is basically the ancient Phoenician alphabet, with its cumbersome letters and its bad phonetics... If Shaw’s dream comes true – a dream shared by men of vision for nearly five centuries – who knows what miracles of human progress it may bring in its wake?’
The interest in Shaw’s Alphabet rose with the renovated Androcles and then waned. There were few funds left for the clinical survey. Peter MacCarthy handed this over to one of his students, Gordon Walsh, who went off to conduct his investigations from the University of Ife in Nigeria. The first part of his paper was completed in September 1967. But since ‘Shavian is not available in Nigeria,’ Gordon Walsh concluded, it was ‘necessary for tests to be conducted in Britain’. A year later The Times announced that the report was finished and that there would ‘shortly be an exploratory meeting’ to discuss whether it should be published. In January 1970 The Scotsman revealed that the results would soon be made known. When questioned about the findings in March 1970, the Public Trustee, Mr Brian Davies (Sir Charles Sopwith, as he now was, having gone to the Inland Revenue), replied: ‘It’s not very urgent, and I’m very busy.’ Though he had forecast early publication, there was no more money left (equivalent to nothing in 1997). So the impression of a full report was conveyed, and an appearance of
publication given sometime in the 1970s. The conclusions ‘hardly caused a ripple of public interest,’ Barbara Smoker vaguely recalled. In any event, as Peter MacCarthy made plain, all that had been attempted was the technical discharge of the Public Trustee’s obligations. Sometimes he wondered if it had all been a Shavian joke.
*
Public interest quickly veered off from the letters to the figures, following the trail of money to the three residuary legatees. There had been rumours that Shaw’s bequest to the British Museum was enabling the Government to cut back its normal subsidy. When reminded by James Pitman that Shaw’s bequest to the Trustees of the British Museum had been ‘in acknowledgement of the incalculable value to me of my daily resort to the Reading Room of that institution’, Sir Edward Boyle, Financial Secretary to the Treasury, revealed that over the two years money had been coming in from Shaw’s royalties £163,924 had been received by the museum, and up to £85,000 was owing to it in repayments of tax levied on the income of the estate prior to the settlement of the court action (the total equivalent to over £3 million in 1997). The terms of the bequest were legally ‘unrestricted’ in the sense that the trustees of the museum were free to do what they liked with this money and all further income over the next forty years. But since the income would virtually cease after the year 2000, when the main copyrights lapsed,* a capital fund had been set up. And so that ‘no act of discourtesy was done to the dead,’ explained Sir Edward Boyle, the trustees of the British Museum had decided that income from this capital sum ‘should in due course be used primarily for the benefit of the library’.
Two years later the museum’s assistant secretary reported that most of the money received had been invested by a firm of merchant bankers ‘on the best terms the market will offer’. In answer to a question from the Fabian Member of Parliament John Parker, the Under-Secretary of State at the Department of Education and Science, Jennie Lee (later Baroness Lee of Asheridge), stated that £646,417 4s. 3d. (equivalent to over £7 million in 1997) had come to the British Museum as its share in Bernard Shaw’s estate by the end of 1965.
‘Sir David Wilson and the trustees are to be congratulated on the funds they have raised to improve the display of the collections,’ wrote Lord Annan in 1991. During the previous fifteen years the royalty income of the Shaw Estate had settled down to between £275,000 and £500,000 a year. ‘I conclude that in the fullness of time the whole library department of the Museum will benefit,’ a Sunday Times journalist had predicted. But when the library department separated from the Museum in 1973, no reference was officially made to a Shaw capital fund to be used ‘primarily for the benefit of the library’.
Donations from the Shaw Fund towards heritage purchases by the British Museum Manuscripts Department and the British Library between 1960 and 1990 amounted to approximately £400,000 – or a little over £13,000 a year on average. Such donations were given as ‘a matter of grace’ on the part of the British Museum Trustees, and since the British Library executive was never shown the accounts of the Trust it could not know how small a proportion of the Shaw Fund’s expenditure it received – less than one tenth of its growing income. So the very ‘act of discourtesy... to the dead’ that Sir Edward Boyle assured the House of Commons in 1959 would not be committed actually was committed. In an attempt to clarify matters, the Shadow Minister for the Arts, Mark Fisher, asked some questions similar to those put by James Pitman and John Parker in the House of Commons in 1959 and 1965: what in effect was the total sum that had accrued to the British Museum by the end of 1990 and what was properly due to the British Library? But the Minister with responsibility for Arts and Libraries, Tim Renton, answered that this was ‘not a subject on which I have any specific responsibility’. On the advice of the Director of the British Museum, Sir David Wilson, the Trustees had decided not to disclose the figure to anyone because they were ‘the Trustees’ private monies’ and public disclosure would enable Treasury officials to take the Shaw income into account when determining the British Museum’s annual grant. The annual amounts from the Shaw bequest were audited by the Comptroller and Auditor-General, but expenditure was not scrutinized by the Public Accounts Committee or the Treasury.
It was open for Sir David Wilson and his trustees to transfer this problem on to the shoulders of the British Library, along with the money Shaw had plainly intended to be used for library purposes. But short of such an act of integrity, the British Museum’s secrecy was pragmatic in view of what happened to another of Shaw’s residuary legatees, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
*
Shaw had been fond of RADA. He gave lectures to its students, served as a member of its Council from 1911 to 1941 (coming to 102 of its 141 meetings in that period), and contributed £5,000 towards its new building in Gower Street in the 1920s (equivalent to £123,000 in 1997). His bequest was to change the status of the Academy. By the mid-1960s it had acquired the status of an independent charity and accumulated capital of £750,000 (equivalent to around £8.5 million in 1997). The Shaw bequest was producing a yearly income exceeding £30,000 (around £340,000 in 1997). This fortune, which transformed RADA from an orphan to an heiress, was to produce a watershed in the Academy’s affairs as it moved from the amateur world towards modern marketing.
Early in 1990, though still based in Gower Street (which it leased from the University of London), the Academy purchased the freehold of a building nearby at 18 Chenies Street. The cost was £5,250,000. It was financed by a government grant of £500,000, a donation of £1,000,000 from British Telecom, and the sale of investments worth £3,750,000 from the RADA share portfolio. This was supplemented late in 1991 by a grant of £500,000 from the Foundation for Sport and the Arts for conversion costs, and another in 1996 of £22,752,283 from the Arts Council of England’s lottery board towards an ambitious Centenary Project for rebuilding the extension at Gower Street and Chenies Street.
Would RADA have survived without Shaw’s money? The chairman, Sir Richard Attenborough, believed it must have closed. During the Thatcher decade there was no choice for arts organizations but to expel the dilettante and measure efficiency by profit. But some of the dangers of implementing arts-marketing without the introduction of new tax laws had been spelt out a quarter of a century earlier when James Pitman argued in Parliament in favour of special arrangements for legacies to public and charitable institutions wholly or partly supported by government funds. If the Exchequer contribution to such institutions was consequently reduced, he explained, the purpose of the testator would be rendered void to the detriment of the public’s future interests.
In the case of Shaw’s estate, the Exchequer had already imposed death duties of more than £500,000 in the 1950s. Shaw’s intention was not to benefit to any greater extent the generality of taxpayers but to favour two special sections of the public: those who would be using ‘the Reading Room of the British Museum and those would-be actors, actresses and producers who would be thus receiving better training themselves for a part in the dramatic arts’. The Financial Secretary to the Treasury, Sir Edward Boyle (later Baron Boyle of Handsworth), had assured the House of Commons in December 1959 that the Treasury objected strongly to the principle that trustees should use trust funds ‘in a way which would merely reduce their demand on public funds, either to maintain an existing service or to start a new one.
‘The Treasury even in times of great stringency in our national and economic affairs has never sought to argue that the cost of a service should be reduced by a contribution from other resources available to the Trustees, or that public funds should not be provided to improve a service merely because the Trustees could afford to do it themselves... I do not think there has been a convenient occasion for stating the principle, which I think is an important one, that in deciding the expenditure on Vote-borne departments we do not say that the Treasury contribution should be automatically reduced simply because some other source may become available.’
Between principle and pr
actice, private and public money, swirled many confusing cross-currents. In 1967 the Treasury cancelled its grant to RADA. This lesson was not lost on its co-residuary legatee, the British Museum. Until the mid-1960s the Trustees had been happy to make known what money was accruing to the museum from Shaw’s royalties and to explain how it was primarily to be used. But over the next thirty years, as the cumulative under-funding of national arts institutions grew worse, secrecy and guile seemed to be forced upon those trying to represent the best interests of these institutions. Every one of them was in competition with every other one for sponsorship and grants, even complementary bodies such as the British Museum and British Library. It was not difficult in such embattled circumstances to overlook the wishes of the dead.
What were Shaw’s wishes? When he referred to the British Museum in his letters, the context shows that he had in mind the library or manuscripts department of the museum (later the British Library Reference Division). ‘Why do you not get a reader’s ticket at the British Museum,’ he asks his Polish translator Floryan Sobieniowski. ‘I spent every day of my life there for several years.’ His debt to that great institution ‘contracted in the early days when I read and worked for many years in its Reading Room,’ he explained to Edy Craig, ‘is inestimable, and gives it a right to anything of mine that is of sufficient public interest to be worthy of its acceptance.’ What he described in his will as ‘such letters and documents as might be worth preserving in a public collection such as that of the British Museum’, including the drafts of eighteen plays, were handed to the manuscripts department by the Public Trustee and now form the centre of its large Shaw Collection.
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