Category: People

Featured

Ben Travers

Unlike some of the stars of the interwar silver screen, such as Madeleine Carroll and Ivor Novello, those working behind the scenes can often be a lot less well-remembered. This is certainly true for playwright Ben Travers, whose biggest professional success came during the 1920s and 1930s. He started out in theatre, writing many of the immensely popular Aldwych farces, a cycle of 12 popular plays staged between 1923 and 1933. When some of the farces were adapted for film, Travers also worked on the screenplay adaptations.

Ben Travers was born in 1886 in London. He initially started work in the family business, in the City of London. In Travers’ own words, taken from his autobiography: ‘I was to be sent to the City. Being sent to the City was then the inevitable lot of a youth who didn’t have the aptitude to do any good for himself by being sent anywhere else.’[1] Because the family business had branches all over the empire, Travers ended up travelling widely for his job, spending time in Singapore and Malaysia.

Alongside his day job, Travers was an avid theatre-goer, especially enjoying comedy plays. It was not long before he moved back to Britain, got a job in publishing, and started writing his own plays during the evenings.[2] He was following the advice espoused in the many writing handbooks of the time, and trying to build a writing career in his spare hours. However, commercial success as a writer remained elusive, and at the outbreak of the First World War Travers signed up and served in the Royal Naval Air Service.[3] At the end of the war, his original job was no longer available – Travers took this opportunity to ‘have a go’ at writing.[4] On the advice of those in the theatre industry, he wrote a farce, The Dippers. The text made its way through various theatre contacts and was eventually staged in London in the early 1920s.

The money that The Dippers earned Travers allowed him to keep writing, and he started turning out farces at greater speed. He wrote both A Cuckoo in the Nest and Rookery Nook immediately after The Dippers, and it were these plays that would link him to the Aldwych theatre. A Cuckoo in the Nest was initially considered by acting great Gerald du Maurier, but when this fell through, it was picked up by Tom Walls at the Aldwych. Walls, his co-star Ralph Lynn, and a group of other comic actors, had recently had great commercial successes with the plays Tons of Money and It Pays to Advertise. By 1925, they needed another hit, and opted to perform A Cuckoo in the Nest.[5] In Travers’ words ‘the farce was a definite success’, and it cemented a creative partnership that would last throughout the rest of the interwar period.[6]

The nine plays Travers wrote for the Aldwych company played almost continuously from 1925 through to early 1933. The longest-running play was Rookery Nook, which played 409 performances before it closed; it was followed by Thark which played 401 performances. From the early 1930s, when sound film was introduced in Britain, the company transferred their most popular plays to film. This was partially driven by the restless entrepreneurism of Tom Walls, who increasingly took on a director/manager role in addition to his acting. The first film they made was Rookery Nook. Although it was a commercial success, Travers later claimed that for him it was a ‘painful, distorted version of the genuine article’, as the film medium demanded a completely different approach to gags and timing.[7] Nonetheless, eventually eight out of the nine plays were turned into films, and Travers wrote another 12 film scripts in the 1930s, each of which were produced with some of the original Aldwych farce cast. Contractual obligations and developing personal relationships meant that Ralph Lynn and Tom Walls increasingly appeared separately, although they were often playing opposite other original Aldwych cast members. For example, in 1934 Travers wrote the script for Lady in Dangerstarring Tom Walls and Yvonne Arnaud, the latter of which had played in the stage version of A Cuckoo in the Nest back in 1925.

Travers wrote a few more film scripts in the 1940s and 1950s, and worked in theatre until his death in 1980. The most famous of is later works is the 1975 play The Bed Before Yesterday, which ran for 500 performances in the West End and starred a young Helen Mirren in the original cast. Yet the interwar period represented the undisputed peak of his career. Travers’ farcical comedies, poking fun at the middle classes without threatening to cause any real social disruption, were perfectly suited to a Britain where increasing numbers of white-collar workers had the money and leisure time to be entertained. In the Aldwych farces, he created a brand of humour that both tapped into historical stage traditions and simultaneously spoke to the social and cultural circumstances of the time in which it was made. By being able to transition to popular film at the exact time when the introduction of sound film created a demand for verbal (as opposed to physical) comedy, Travers ensured that his work was captured for posterity.

[1] Ben Travers, A-Sitting on a Gate (London: W.H. Allen, 1978), p. 22

[2] Ibid., pp. 37-39

[3] Ibid., p. 47

[4] Ibid., p. 61

[5] Leslie Smith, ‘Ben Travers and the Aldwych Farces’ , in Modern British Farce, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989), pp. 50-69

[6] Travers, A-sitting on a Gate, p. 92

[7] Ibid., p. 110

Madeleine Carroll

FeaturedMadeleine Carroll

Madeleine Carroll is known as the original ‘Hitchcock blonde.’ She blazed a trail for British female actors into Hollywood, where she had a successful career from the mid-1930s. Prior to her move, though, she made over twenty films in Britain. Carroll starred in some major titles opposite the likes of Brian Aherne, Miles Mander, and Ivor Novello. She was one of the most popular British film stars of the period.[1] This film success led to her being the world’s highest-paid actress by the end of the 1930s.

Unlike most other major stars of the period, and indeed, unlike most of the British population at the time, Madeleine Carroll attended university and obtained a bachelor’s degree in French from the University of Birmingham in 1926. Her mother was French, and after completing her degree Madeleine worked as a French teacher in Hove, on the English south coast. A career in school teaching was an extremely common route for women graduates in the interwar period.[2] However, during her time in Birmingham, Carroll had also engaged in the university’s drama club.

Shortly after graduating, she gave up the teaching job and pursued an acting career, starting off in a touring company and landing a first film role shortly thereafter. Her first proper leading role in a film was in the 1928 feature The First Born, directed by Miles Mander who also played the male lead. Carroll was cast as the female lead, playing wife to Mander’s character Sir Hugo Boycott. The script was co-written by Alma Reville, Alfred Hitchcock’s wife.

The First Born is a melodrama that provided a meaty role for Carroll. It is a marital drama about betrayal, illegitimate children, and deception. It opened the doors for other leading roles, such as in the 1929 film Atlantic. This was one of the earliest film adaptations of the Titanic disaster, and released as a very early sound film with French and German versions released simultaneously. It includes a particularly haunting scene at the very end of the film, when the audience can hear (but not see) the drowning of the hundreds of second- and third-class passengers who did not make it into the lifeboats.

After these two heavy, dramatic roles, Carroll starred in a Victor Saville-directed spy film, The W Plan, in which Brian Aherne played the lead. She followed this up with a supporting role in the Basil Dean-directed moral drama Escape!, a part in the Maurice Elvey-directed comedy School for Scandal and the female lead part in the drama The Kissing Cup Race, directed by Castleton Knight. As is clear from this list, Carroll was in constant demand during the late 1920s and early 1930s, and she was able to work with some of the biggest British directors of the period and work in a range of film genres.

She worked with Miles Mander again in 1931’s Fascination, this time playing the ‘other woman’ who tries to break up a happy couple. In 1933, she made another war film with Victor Saville, I Was a Spy, in which she played a nurse at the front who finds herself emotionally compromised whilst passing information back to the British authorities. Her co-star was Conrad Veidt, one of the biggest stars in British and German cinema of the time. In 1935 Saville directed her again, this time in the costume drama The Dictator. Set in 18th-century Denmark, Carroll plays Queen Caroline Mathilde, with Emlyn Williams starring as her husband, the King. It dealt with the real-life scandal of an affair between the Queen and the royal doctor, a story which was given an outing on the big screen as recently as 2012.

After The Dictator, Carroll made the film for which she is probably still most famous, and the one that launched her into international stardom: The 39 Steps, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Playing opposite Robert Donat as Hannay, Carroll stars as Pamela. Hannay is the classic Hitchcock hero – a man falsely accused who must simultaneously go on the run and try to clear his name. He meets Pamela on the train up to Scotland as he is fleeing London, and immediately coerces her into helping him. Although initially unwilling, Pamela eventually believes Hannay’s claims to innocence.

Although her part in The 39 Steps is the one for which Carroll is most likely to be remembered, she was already a fully established film star when she made the film. It was Donat who was the less experienced, with only 5 film credits to his name prior to The 39 Steps. The film was well-received upon its release and also marked the start of a first career peak for Hitchcock, who went on to direct The Lady Vanishes and Rebecca in the following few years.

After The 39 Steps, Carroll moved to Hollywood and worked for Paramount studios. She continued to make films at the same rate, starring in 10 films before the outbreak of the Second World War – the last of which, My Son, My Son! again saw her star opposite Brian Aherne. During the war she used her language skills to facilitate between the US Army and the French Resistance. After her sister was killed in the London Blitz, Carroll stopped acting and worked as a war nurse in Italy during the later stages of the war. After the war, she only returned to the screen a handful of times, after which Madeleine Carroll opted for an early retirement and spent most of her time with her family in the south of Europe.

[1] Jeffrey Richards (ed.), The Unknown 1930s: An alternative history of the British cinema, 1929-1939 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1998), p. 18

[2] Mo Moulton, The Mutual Appreciation Society: How Dorothy L. Sayers and her Oxford circle remade the world for women (London: Corsair, 2020), p. 70

Merle Oberon

FeaturedMerle Oberon

When Michelle Yeoh was nominated in the ‘Best Actress in a Leading Role’ category at the 95th Academy Awards, some news outlets reported that she was the first actress from Asian descent to be nominated in this category. In the way of internet culture, this was followed by a slew of articles pointing out that Yeoh was, in fact, the second actress with Asian roots to be nominated. In 1936, actress Merle Oberon had been nominated in the same category for her performance in The Dark Angel. Coining Yeoh ‘the first’ was not necessarily simply an oversight, however, as Oberon hid her Asian heritage and passed as white throughout her decade-long film career.

Yeoh’s Oscar nomination thus brought brief pop-culture attention to an actress who had otherwise largely sunk out of the public consciousness. Merle Oberon was born Estelle Merle O’Brien Thompson in 1911. Her later stage name took the Irish ‘O’Brien’ and turned it into something more glamorous. When Oberon moved to Britain as a teenager with a view to start a film career, she told everyone that she had been born in Tasmania and lived in India as a child. This was to be the story of her family background and upbringing, which she maintained for her entire life.

Only after her death in 1979 did a biography reveal the real story: Oberon was born to an Irish father and a Sri-Lankan mother in India and had no connection to Australia at all. It is not hard to understand why Oberon sought to obscure her racial background: mixed-race families were treated with disdain and suspicion in interwar Britain, and in Hollywood the Production Code (which was in place from 1934) explicitly banned depiction of inter-racial relationships.[1] Although Oberon’s looks were frequently called ‘exotic’ in the press, she was able to pass as white throughout her career.

One assumes that Oberon picked Tasmania as her purported birth location due to its remoteness; it was about as far away as one could go from Britain whilst still remaining in the British Empire. Curiously, as late as at least the 2000s stories circulated in Tasmania and the rest of Australia that claimed that Oberon had in fact been born there and was the daughter of a local Australian-Chinese woman named Lottie Chintock.[2] There is no historical archival material to support this claim, whereas Oberon’s biographers were able to trace her birth certificate in India.

Oberon’s upbringing in India was impoverished, although she would later claim that she had lived with aristocratic relatives.[3] As a teenager, she started using creams to lighten her skin. After being bullied out of a prestigious all-girls school in Calcutta due to her mixed-race background, Oberon moved to Europe in the late 1920s. Between 1928 and 1933 she had bit-parts in about a dozen British films, mostly uncredited. She did, however, catch the eye of director/producer Alexander Korda, who cast her in Service for Ladies (1932), Men of Tomorrow (1932) and Strange Evidence (1933) before offering her break-through role as Anne Boleyn in his wildly successful The Private Life of Henry VIII. Oberon and Korda were married from 1939 to 1945.

Oberon as Anne Boleyn in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933)

The Private Life of Henry VIII was a huge success on both sides of the Atlantic and allowed Oberon to transition into a Hollywood career. For the remainder of the 1930s, she made films in both Britain and the US. Korda cast her again in his 1934 epic The Private Life of Don Juan, and a year later Oberon landed the lead role in the US production The Dark Angel, for which she would receive her Oscar nomination. In 1937 she was cast as the female lead in I, Claudius, opposite British acting legend Charles Laughton (who had also played Henry VIII) and Emlyn Williams. This film was directed by Josef von Sternberg, who had launched Marlene Dietrich’s career; and produced by Korda. Unfortunately, Oberon suffered injuries in a car crash during production and Korda halted the project; it remained unfinished.

From the end of the 1930s, Oberon transitioned more fully to Hollywood, with The Divorce of Lady X one of her last significant British productions. Throughout her career, press reports labelled her ‘exotic’, and ‘un-British’, and from time to time she played Asian characters on screen, but always under the pretence that she was a white woman playing an Asian character. There were very few successful non-white actors during the 1920s and 1930s, and those that did manage to build a career, such as Anna May Wong and Paul Robeson, continuously contended with racism. People with mixed-race heritage, who could be referred to as ‘half-caste’, were often treated even worse than those of full Asian or African backgrounds.

Oberon kept her racial identity hidden her entire life, including towards her children and four husbands. In 1978, a year before she died, she even went as far as attending a ‘welcome home’ event in Tasmania, a country with which she had no familial connection and which she had probably never visited.[4] The persistent labelling of her looks as ‘exotic’ and the reasonably swift reveal of her true background, four years after her death, suggests that during her lifetime audiences and journalists may have suspected that she had a mixed-race background. The conventions and prejudices of the period prevented them from raising these openly, preferring to sustain the myth Oberon had created around herself.

[1] Babli Sinha, ‘“A Strangely Un-English Actress”: Race, legibility and the films of Merle Oberon’, in Journal of Popular Film and Television, vol. 44, no. 4, 2016, 220-226 (223)

[2] Maree Delofski, ‘Place, race and stardom: Becoming Merle Oberon’ in Continuum, vol. 26, no. 6, 2012, 803-814 (805)

[3] Ibid., p. 804

[4] Ibid.

Featured

Victor Gollancz

Practically all of the notable interwar people covered by this blog to date have been artists, performers and people whose professions otherwise put them firmly in the limelight. This post covers someone whose job was by definition more ‘back office’, although he was quite adept at publicity: publisher and activist Victor Gollancz.

Anyone with only a passing interest in British interwar literature is sure to come across Gollancz name sooner rather than later. Born in London to Jewish parents in 1893, Oxford-educated Gollancz initially worked as a schoolteacher. After the First World War he worked for a publishing house before setting up his own company, which carried his name, in 1927.

Gollancz connections in the publishing world and his explicit left-wing political stance quickly ensured that he signed a number of high-profile authors, including George Orwell (until around 1937); Daphne du Maurier, Vera Brittain, and Ford Madox Ford. He was also very active in the publishing of crime fiction. Dorothy L. Sayers had initially been signed by the publishing house for which Gollancz worked until 1927. From Strong Poison (1930) onwards, she published all her Wimsey novels with Gollancz.

Anthony Berkeley, who generally published his works with Collins, went to Gollancz for the first two books he wrote under the pseudonym Francis Iles, Malice Aforethought (1931) and Before the Fact (1932). It made sense for Berkeley to pick a different publisher for his Francis Iles venture, as he intended to keep his real identity firmly hidden. Under his real name, Berkeley was not associated with Gollancz. According to crime fiction historian Martin Edwards the venture was also beneficial for Gollancz, who was able to use his marketing nous to increase sales when Before the Fact was published: ‘Gollancz seized his chance with gusto. ‘Who is Iles?’ demanded the dust jacket, which listed twenty candidates put forward in ‘the public prints.’’[1]

Victor Gollancz did not just publish crime fiction: he also drew inspiration from the Collins Crime Club, a book club set up in 1930, to co-found the Left Book Club in 1936.[2] Subscribers to the club were sent one book a month, mostly on political topics. At this point, and until 1939, Gollancz was closely aligned with the Communist Party, which influenced the monthly book choices: many were written by members of the Communist Party and the Party vetted the book choices in the early days of the club.

The Club was successful and influential, gaining 40,000 members within its first year. There was also overlap between the club and Gollancz activities in crime fiction publishing: in 1937 the club picked two books written by G.D.H. Cole (one of which co-authored by his wife M.I. Cole). The Coles had been members of the Detection Club of crime fiction writers since its foundation in 1930 and co-wrote detective fiction as well as works of political non-fiction.

Victor Gollancz was also politically active outside of the Left Book Club. In 1934, after the controversial British Union of Fascists rally at Kensington Olympia, during which many members of the public were attacked and beaten up by BUF members, Gollancz published the pamphlet Fascists at Olympia: A record of eye-witnesses and victims. As the title implies, this was a collection of statements of people who had been present in the Hall, which explicitly accused the BUF of unfounded and severe violence. This pamphlet, which was distributed free of charge to raise awareness of the BUFs tactics, was sufficiently influential to spur the BUF to publish their own pamphlet in return, contracting the claims of violence.

During the Second World War, Gollancz was a prominent voice drawing attention to the plight of Jews in Nazi-occupied territories. After the war, he campaigned for humanitarian treatment for German citizens, insisting that they were not responsible for Nazi atrocities. In the 1950s, Gollancz became a prominent campaigner for the abolition of capital punishment in Britain after the controversial execution of Ruth Ellis, a woman who had killed her abusive partner and the last woman to be hanged in Britain. [3] Gollancz lived to see the death penalty suspended in 1965, a legal move which effectively ended capital punishment in Britain although it was not officially abolished until 1969, two years after Gollancz’ death.

Victor Gollancz was an influential figure in interwar Britain, both through his political activities and as a publisher of some of the most successful and popular crime fiction authors of the period. The publishing house bearing his name lives on as an imprint of Orion Publishing Group.

[1] Martin Edwards, The Golden Age of Murder (London: Collins Crime Club, 2015), p. 136

[2] Ibid., p. 310

[3] Lizzie Seal, Capital Punishment in Twentieth-Century Britain: Audience, Justice, Memory (London: Routledge, 2014), p. 24

Stanley Lupino

FeaturedStanley Lupino

As the recent social media noise around ‘nepo babies’ highlighted, there are many instances of intergenerational celebrity today. There were also cases of this in interwar Britain, although it was less widespread. Actor Stanley Lupino, for example, was the son of actor George Lupino. Two of George’s brothers were music hall performers; one of them played Nana the Dog for the premiere of Peter Pan in 1904. Stanley and his brother Barry were both actors too. One generation down, Stanley’s daughter Ida Lupino became a famous Hollywood actor, writer and producer. One of Stanley’s nephews, Henry, took on the stage name Lupino Lane and developed a successful stage and film career, which included the introduction of the popular song and dance, the ‘Lambeth Walk.’

Stanley’s career stayed firmly in Britain; he was born in London in 1893 and died there in 1942. Like many other actors discussed in the pages of these blogs, he started his career on stage and only transitioned to films in the 1930s, when the introduction of sound film made the medium suitable for his comedy work. He started his pre-War stage career as an acrobat, then played pantomime and music hall. From the 1920s, he got involved with writing and producing musical comedy shows, being particularly connected with the Drury Lane theatre. He also extensively performed on radio after the founding of the BBC in 1922.

Lupino’s film career has by some scholars been regarded as exemplary of the general poor state of British films in the 1930s.[1] Whereas George Formby, Gracie Fields and even the Aldwych farces have received plenty of critical attention, until Stanley Lupino’s films were re-issued on DVD in the 2010s they were largely ignored. Yet, Lupino’s singing, dancing and comedy timing make his film work still eminently watchable. Over the course of the 1930s he acted in 13 films, of which he (co)wrote 12 of them. His considerable star power on the stage allowed him to script films which suited his comic talents.

The storylines of Lupino’s films are thin, aiming to provide predictable feel-good entertainment to a mass audience. (Indeed, one author has called them ‘absurd, naïve and unoriginal’[2]). In Facing the Music (1933) for example, Lupino aims to impress an aspiring opera singer by staging a fake jewel robbery during a performance. Of course, this goes wrong and the jewels are really stolen, requiring Lupino to recover them. In Cheer Up! (1936) Lupino is one half of an out-of-work song writing duo who are trying to obtain financial backing for their next venture. When their prospective funder turns out to also have no money, misunderstandings and comedy ensue.

Clip from Cheer Up! (1936)

Unlike Formby and Fields, Lupino did not play characters called ‘Stanley’ or other variations on his name. Instead, his characters have completely separate names and personality traits each film, widening the distance between the man and the character. Yet each of the fictional characters he portrays are charming, funny men looking to win the heart of a female love interest.

As noted above, in Cheer Up! Lupino plays one of a duo, alongside comedy actor Roddy Hughes. The pair weren’t a regular double-act, however. In Over She Goes (1937), Lupino appears alongside another comedy actor, Laddie Cliff in what would be the latter’s final film appearance. The plot of Over She Goes is classic Lupino fare: when Lupino’s character Tommy Teacher inherits an aristocratic title and moves himself and his friend into the accompanying stately home. Whilst the pair are trying to woo two young women, one of Tommy’s previous girlfriends appears who attempts to capitalise on his new wealth.

Over She Goes started its life as a stage production, penned by Lupino himself. The play’s success made it an attractive candidate for film adaptation for the Associated British Picture Corporation at Elstree Studios. The film was directed by Graham Cutts, who was also at the helm for other comedy pictures that decade like Gracie Field’s Looking on the Bright Side, and an adaptation of the enormously popular Jerome K. Jerome short story Three Men in a Boat.

Over She Goes contains some catchy song-and-dance numbers, transferred over from the stage show, which were able to be marketed and sold separately as records. The combination of male comic actors, attractive young women, and a high-society backdrop including large houses and hunting parties, makes the film great escapist entertainment in the vein of big Hollywood productions, whilst also retaining a specific British context which domestic audiences could relate to.

The finale song of Over She Goes

Stanley Lupino died relatively young, five days before his 49th birthday, during the Second World War. The was had put an end to his film production in any case, making his total film output a reflecting of the 1930s, from 1931 through to 1939. He is a good example of a ‘mid-tier’ film star of the period – less recognisable and lasting as Gracie Fields or George Formby, but successful enough to be able to steer and influence his career.

[1] Richard Dacre, ‘Traditions of British Comedy’, in The British Cinema Book, ed. Robert Murphy (London: BFI, 2009), p. 106

[2] Adrian Wright, Cheer Up! British Musical Films, 1929-1945 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2000), p. 152

Dorothy L. Sayers

Dorothy L. Sayers

Agatha Christie is undoubtedly the most famous author of the ‘Golden Age of Crime Fiction’ (or indeed the most famous crime author of all time). She did not stand alone, however, but rather was part of a closely connected network of crime writers who worked in Britain and the rest of the Empire between the two wars. Some of the more illustrious authors organised themselves in the Detection Club, a group which was founded in the 1930s and still exists today. One of the founding members of the Detection Club was Dorothy L. Sayers, another female crime fiction writer who obtained widespread recognition during the 1920s and 1930s.

Sayers was born in 1893 in Oxford to a well-to-do couple; her father was a reverend and chaplain to Christ Church Cathedral in the city. Sayers herself studied at Somerville, the all-female College of the University of Oxford. She was there from 1912 to 1915, leaving before the arrival of Vera Brittain and, later, Winifred Holtby.[1] At Sommerville Sayers would also meet Muriel Jaeger, who eventually established her own literary career. Sayers would later draw heavily on her experiences at Somerville for the crime novel Gaudy Night, which appeared in 1935.[2]

After completing her degree, Sayers moved to London and briefly took up a teaching post: teaching was one of the career paths young women were strongly encouraged to enter into, with its associations of helping, caring and other supposedly typical feminine traits.[3] After the teaching stint, she briefly returned to Oxford and then travelled to France, only to eventually return again to London and take up a job as a copywriter.[4] She never lost sight of her literary ambitions and some time in 1920 she started to come up with the amateur detective who would become her most famous character: Lord Peter Wimsey.

Eventually, Sayers published eleven Wimsey novels as well as a series of short stories in which he featured. It can be argued that in Wimsey, Sayers created an ideal man, and part of the fun of the Wimsey stories lies in the interplay between their plots and Sayers’ private life. Wimsey is an aristocrat, the second son of the Dowager Duchess of Denver. He has a private income, a very steady butler named Bunter, an MA from Oxford and an interest in collecting rare books. He also appears to work for the British government on occasion, as he is sent across Europe to undertake diplomatic missions to try and avoid war. He is close friends with detective Charles Parker of the Metropolitan Police, who later in the series marries Wimsey’s sister. Wimsey’s intellect, financial independence, links with the police and elevated status in society make him the ideal amateur sleuth, as he has the means and ability to enter almost any situation.

In Strong Poison, the fifth Wimsey novel, Sayers started to really draw on her own life for the book’s plot. Although all the Wimsey novels contain intricately plotted crime puzzles which adhere to the rules of ‘fair play’, its in the interpersonal relationships of the characters where the clues are to Sayers’ private life. In the early 1920s, Sayers had a relationship with fellow writer John Cournos, which came to an end when Cournos wanted to sleep together outside of the marriage, which Sayers did not want.[5] In Strong Poison, Sayers introduces Harriet Vane, a clear alter-ego for herself. Vane is a crime fiction author who is on trial for the murder of her partner; in this fictional relationship the question of sex outside of marriage was also paramount. The victim in Strong Poison is clearly meant to be a stand-in for Cournos, and Sayers no doubt got great satisfaction from giving the character an extremely painful death from arsenic poisoning.

Wimsey falls in love with Harriet Vane in Strong Poison, and throughout the remainder of the Wimsey series their relationship takes on increased importance until, in the aforementioned Gaudy Night, Harriet feels that Peter is ready to enter into marriage on equal terms. In Sayers’ real life, no such happy ending was forthcoming. Shortly after the end of her relationship with Cournos, she met Bill White, a man who later turned out to be already married. By the time Sayers found that out, however, she had already agreed to a sexual relationship with him and she found herself pregnant in 1923. Sayers never even told her parents about her pregnancy, so convinced was she that they would not be able to accept it. Amazingly, though, Bill White’s wife came to her aid. Sayers gave birth to her son, John Anthony, in complete secret during a brief leave of absence from her copywriting job. Bill White’s wife, Beatrice, made arrangements for the birth. John Anthony grew up in a foster home run by Sayers’ cousin; during her lifetime Sayers only revealed his existence to five people and never told her parents they had a grandchild.[6]  

Aside from the Wimsey novels and stories, Sayers was a prolific reviewer of crime fiction and also contributed to several volumes written by a group of Detection Club members. The last full Wimsey novel, Busman’s Honeymoon, appeared in 1937. After this, Sayers mostly turned her attention to religious work, such as a translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. [7] She remained a key member of the Detection Club until her death in 1957.[8] Her books remain in print and have been adapted for the screen several times.

[1] Francesca Wade, Square Haunting (London: Faber & Faber, 2020), pp. 96-101

[2] Mo Moulton, The Mutual Admiration Society: ow Dorothy L. Sayers and Her Oxford Circle Remade the World for Women (New York: Basic Books, 2019)

[3] Wade, Square Haunting, p. 107

[4] Martin Edwards, The Golden Age of Murder, (London: Collins Crime Club, 2016), p. 18

[5] Ibid., pp. 19-20

[6] Wade, Square Haunting, pp. 128-132

[7] Edwards, The Golden Age of Murder, p. 404

[8] Ibid., p. 410

Radclyffe Hall

Radclyffe Hall

Radclyffe Hall – which, really, was her given name (in full, Marguerite Antonia Radclyffe Hall) – is probably one of interwar Britain’s most famous LGBTQI+ people. She took the name John later in life, but her novels were published under the name ‘Radclyffe Hall’, which is how she remains best known.

Hall’s most famous work is the 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness, which was subjected to an obscenity trial in the UK after vigorous campaigning by the Sunday Express. As was fairly common at the time, English copies of the Well of Loneliness were subsequently printed in Paris; increased mobility between the two capitals including via airplanes ensured that some copies of the work continued in circulation in Britain.

Hall was also born in a family of means, with both her parents inheriting money from their parents. Hall’s father set her up with an independent income which allowed Hall to shun the conventional route of work and marriage and allowed her to develop her literary ambitions. She initially published poetry – five volumes between 1906 and 1915. From an early age Hall adopted a masculine style of dress, including wearing trousers, tailored jackets, and hats.

During a part of the 1920s, Hall lived in Kensington with her partner, Una, Lady Troubridge. They were together from 1916 until Hall’s death. London’s somewhat unruly nightlife during the interwar period allowed for the existence of LGBT-friendly spaces. From the mid-1920s Hall started to publish works of fiction. Her third book, Adam’s Breed, which was written in the Kensington flat, became a prize-winning bestseller. The commercial success of Adam’s Breed arguably partially caused the vocal backlash to Hall’s next work, The Well of Loneliness. Had she been less famous, there would have perhaps been less concern about the content of the work.

The plot of The Well of Loneliness centres on Stephen Gordon, an upper-class English woman who considers herself a ‘sexual invert’ (ie. she is a lesbian). The book chronicles Stephen’s childhood, an early love affair with an older woman, Stephen’s career as a novelist in both London and Paris, and her experiences as an ambulance driver in World War One. During the war, she meets and falls in love with fellow ambulance driver Mary, and the pair set up a household together after the war.

Although the book is far from sexually explicit, there is one reference to Stephen and Mary going to bed together; and throughout, Stephen insists that ‘sexual inversion’ is not unnatural. Stephen’s (and by extension, Hall’s) views on lesbianism closely echo those of 19th-century lesbian Anne Lister, by some considered to one of Britain’s first ‘modern lesbians.’

Due to the success of Adam’s Breed, The Well of Loneliness was reviewed by journalists upon its publication; early reviews were measured.[1] However, James Douglas, the editor of the Sunday Express who earlier in the decade had found much fault with convicted murderer Edith Thompson, took it upon himself to publish a front-page take-down of the book on 19 August 1928. His editorial included the statement that ‘he would rather give “a healthy boy or a healthy girl” poison than let them read The Well of Loneliness.’[2]

Hall’s publisher protested that the intervention of the Sunday Express gave the book more publicity and sensationalised it, and many other journalists and writers defended the work. Nevertheless, an obscenity trial started on 9 November 1928 and included expert witness testimony to confirm that one could not ‘become gay’ by reading a book about a gay relationship. The magistrate, Sir Chartres Biron, concluded that the novel’s literary merit counted against it: ‘the more palatable the poison the more insidious’.[3] He ordered that all copies of the book were destroyed, and The Well of Loneliness was not published again in Britain until 1959.

Hall attended the trial, although she was not on the stand as the trial was against her publisher rather than herself as a person. Her masculine appearance, widely reported in the press, ‘crystallised a particular vision of the mannish lesbian’ for the remainder of the interwar period.[4] A similar obscenity trial in the US had the opposite outcome to the British one, ‘finding that discussion of homosexuality was not in itself obscene.’ Hall only published one more novel during her lifetime, The Master of the House, which was poorly received. During the 1930s Hall and Troubridge moved out of London to the coastal town of Rye. Hall was diagnosed with cancer during the Second World War and died in 1943. She is buried in Highgate Cemetery in London, alongside other writers and artists such as George Eliot, Elizabeth Siddal and Anna Mahler.

[1] Christopher Hilliard, ‘“Is It a Book That You Would Even Wish Your Wife or Your Servants to Read?” Obscenity Law and the Politics of Reading in Modern England’, American Historical Review, June 2013, p. 666

[2] Ibid.

[3] Merl Storr, ‘Palatable Poison: Critical Perspectives on The Well of Loneliness’, review, Sexualities, Vol 6, no. 2, 2003, p. 264

[4] Emma Liggins, Odd Women? Spinsters, lesbians and widows in British women’s fiction, 1850s–1930s (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), p. 163

Sonnie Hale

Sonnie Hale

Sonnie Hale was born John Robert Hale-Munro in London in 1902. His father, Robert, was also an actor. After an education at the Roman Catholic Beaumont College, Hale turned to a career in show business. During the interwar years, he was one of the most recognisable comedy stars in British film, often co-starring with Jessie Matthews, who would become his wife in 1931.

Like other interwar comedy stars, such as Gracie Fields, Hale’s career in the 1920s was based on the stage. His brand of comedy was mainly verbal – Hale was great at the quick repartee. The silent films made during this decade demanded a different, more physical type of comedy. During the 1920s, therefore, Hale appeared in revues which allowed him to perfect his singing and dancing skills. Once sound film became an established medium in Britain in the early 1930s, Hale combined his theatre work with film appearances.

Musical comedy was a popular film genre in 1930s Britain, and Hale packed his schedule with film roles in the first half of the decade. He starred in two films each in 1932 and 1933, a whopping four films in 1934, and three in 1935. He then appeared in one film each in 1936, 1938 and 1939. His acting output slowed down in the second half of the decade because he had at that point also turned his hand to writing and directing, directing three films across 1937 and 1938.

Hale’s first feature film role was a leading part opposite star Jack Hulbert. In the musical comedy Happy Ever After, Hulbert and Hale star as two window cleaners, both named Willie, who try and help a young starlet who is hoping to break into Hollywood. Hale’s time on the stage had evidently given him good connections with stars such as Hulbert and Hulbert’s wife Cicely Courtneidge, who also starred in the film.

From 1933, Hale started appearing in films with Jessie Matthews, by that point his real-life wife. From 1926 to 1930 Hale had been married to actress Evelyn Lay. Matthews had been married to her first husband for the same period. The relationship between Matthews and Hale started when he was still married to Lay, and caused much publicity and controversy at the time. Matthews was cited as co-respondent in Hale’s divorce case against Lay and Matthews’ letters to him were read out in court. The press, naturally, lapped it up, and the judge saw it fit to make comments about Matthews’ conduct.

Public sympathy was with Lay, but Hale and Matthews proved to be a successful professional as well as personal couple, and the public did not reject their collaborations. They appeared together in the ensemble piece Friday the Thirteenth (Hale as a comic bus conductor, Matthews as a chorus girl) and Hale played a supporting role in the Matthews’ star vehicles Evergreen, First a Girl and It’s Love Again, all directed by Victor Saville.

In none of these films, however, does Hale play the love interest to Matthews; he lacked the traditional good looks that 1930s British cinema demanded for the part of the romantic lead. Instead, Hale is the funny, supportive sidekick to either Matthews herself, or to the male lead. In It’s Love Again, for example, he plays Freddie Rathbone, who helps his friend and gossip journalist Peter Carlton come up with his gossip column every day. When Peter’s job is on the line, the pair come up with a fictional society figure, Mrs Smythe-Smythe, about whom Peter can make up the most outrageous stories and thus scoop his rivals at other papers. Hale plays Rathbone as a bit of a waster, who mainly enjoys going to society parties for the free food and wine. He is also, however, loyal to Peter and supportive of Peter’s attempt to impress the aspiring actress Elaine Bradford, played by Matthews.

After It’s Love Again, Hale took over from Saville as director. He directed Matthews in three films: Head over Heels, Gangway and Sailing Along. All three are less accomplished than Saville’s turns directing Matthews, and Hale gave up directing after 1938.

He did not, however, give up acting. His next role after It’s Love Again was a move away from musical comedy. Hale starred as petty criminal Sam Hackett in the Edgar Wallace crime thriller The Gaunt Stranger. Although Hale’s performance still has comic touches to it, the film’s overall tone is much darker than his previous work. It was only a brief foray into a different genre – by 1939 Hale was back to comedy, in the Walter Forde-directed Let’s Be Famous.

The Second World War caused a hiatus in Hale’s film career, although he was able to pick up his stage career which had languished for most of the 1930s. He briefly returned to film and TV films in the second half of the 1940s – by now divorced from Matthews and married to his third wife, Mary Kelsey. Towards the end of his life, he wrote the comedy play The French Mistress which was a success in the West End and made into a film in 1960. Hale died in London in 1959.

Winifred Holtby

<strong>Winifred Holtby</strong>

Winifred Holtby (1898-1935) was a Yorkshire writer, journalist and activist who remains primarily remembered for her final, posthumous novel South Riding. She is also frequently linked to her closest friend, writer and journalist Vera Brittain, who penned the influential First World War memoir Testament of Youth. Holtby and Brittain studied together at Oxford’s all-female college, Somerville, and subsequently shared households for most of the remainder of Holtby’s life.

Although Brittain remains the better-known of the pair (arguably partially because her life was not cut short like Holtby’s), Winifred Holtby was more than a friend and companion to Brittain. She had her own strong political and feminist views, which were expressed in her journalism and activism. After a visit to South Africa in 1926, Holtby actively supported the Black South African community for the rest of her life.[1]

Winifred Holtby was born in Rudston, a small Yorkshire village between Hull and Scarborough. She came of age during the First World War and briefly served in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) before starting her studies at Somerville in 1919. Here she met Brittain, who was some five years older than her. After the war, Holtby lectured for the League of Nations, the ‘first worldwide intergovernmental organisation whose principal mission was to maintain world peace.’ She also became involved in the Six Point Group, a feminist collective set up by Lady Rhondda. The latter also co-founded Time and Tide, a feminist interwar publication to which both Holtby and Brittain became regular contributors.[2] (E.M. Delafield’s Diary of a Provincial Lady also started as a column in Time and Tide).

Committed feminist as Holtby was, her journalistic writings of the time are striking both because they address some issues that remain unresolved, and because they reveal a sharp sense of humour. The overall tone of Holtby’s writing in this area demonstrates optimism. After the expansion of the vote to all men and women in 1928, interwar feminists seemed to believe that equality between men and women on all fronts was just a matter of time. Nearly a hundred years on, such optimism seems naïve. However, it does mean that Holtby’s writing on inequality remains recognisable and accessible.

In ‘Should a Woman Pay?’, which appeared in the Manchester Guardian in October 1928, she tackles the social dilemma of who should pay the bill when a man and woman go out together. Introducing us to the fictional Jack and Jill, Holtby demonstrates how a clinging to the social custom of the man paying can lead to resentment between modern couples – Jack insists on paying for Jill’s lunch because ‘his masculine honour is affronted’ by the suggestion she pays, or they split the bill. When both return to their respective jobs for the afternoon, they are distracted, make mistakes, and ‘they both hate everything.’

Holtby links this very relatable scenario to ‘the industrial revolution, the introduction of factory labour, the divorce of women from domestic industry’ and the subsequent removal of women from any source of substantial income.[3] A quick internet search reveals that the question ‘Should the woman pay?’ remains unresolved – Harvard Business Review devoted an article to it in April 2021 and a live WikiHow page talks readers through the ‘problem’ (which remains presented in heteronormative terms).

In ‘Counting the Cost’, also published in the Manchester Guardian in the same year, Holtby responds to a letter to the editor submitted by a man who is frustrated that his wife is undertaking too many activities in the community and does not have enough time to manage the household. ‘If I came home from work at six (which I don’t) and had to get my own tea [dinner], things would happen’ fumes the man. Holtby gently pokes fun at the man’s worked-up tone: ‘He really is very cross indeed. He makes you feel that the first of those things which would happen would be a very bad tea. Bad temper never fries good bacon.’[4] She ends the article by acknowledging that whilst some things may be lost when women go out of their home, both economy and society gain much by women actively participating in it.

Holtby herself was one such woman actively participating in public life during the interwar period. Although she never married, she did undertake caring responsibilities for Vera Brittain’s family, whom she lived with for large proportions of her life.[5] Holtby repeatedly referred to herself as ‘50% a politician’ and she tirelessly raised funds to help unionise Black workers in South Africa.[6] Despite only being ‘50% a writer’ in her own perception, Holtby produced seven novels, two volumes of poetry, two short story collections, a play, and four works of non-fiction including a memoir of Virginia Woolf. As a witty and gifted writer and commentator, her work deserves continued recognition.

[1] Testament of a Generation: The journalism of Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby, edited by Paul Berry and Alan Bishop (London: Virago, 1985), pp. 21-23

[2] Marion Shaw, ‘Introduction’, in Winifred Holtby, South Riding (London: Virago, 2011), p. xi

[3] Winifred Holtby, ‘Should a Woman Pay?’, reproduced in Testament of a Generation, pp. 57-60.

[4] Winifred Holtby, ‘Counting the Cost’, reproduced in Testament of a Generation, pp. 54-57

[5] Shirley Williams, ‘Preface’, in Winifred Holtby, South Riding (London: Virago, 2011), p. ix

[6] Marion Shaw, ‘Introduction’, in Winifred Holtby, South Riding (London: Virago, 2011), p. xii; Testament of a Generation: The journalism of Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby, edited by Paul Berry and Alan Bishop (London: Virago, 1985), pp. 22