BBC PIctures/Ola Grochowska
The Passing Bells WWI drama echoes Journey's End by RC Sherriff
A century on from the horrors of the Great War, one iconic play still stands apart as a melancholy memorial to the past. Caitriona Marron reflects on Surrey playwright RC Sherriff and his masterpiece
It’s 25 years since Captain Edmund Blackadder and Private Baldrick had the nation in fits, stumbling through the battle-scarred landscape of World War One, hatching one hopeless “cunning plan” after another to desert their battalion.
Beyond the satire, however, Blackadder Goes Forth was tinged with sorrow at the bewildering enormity of loss. During the closing moments of Goodbyeee, the final episode, Blackadder and co finally go over the top, the months of futile scheming swallowed up in imminent death. It was a sombre scene; a respectful nod to the fallen of Flanders and beyond.
For all its virtues, however, the iconic TV series was actually something of an echo. The template had been laid down 60 years earlier by one of Surrey’s own: Kingston Grammar School boy – and, in later life, Esher resident – RC Sherriff, whose landmark play Journey's End was based on his time in the trenches.
“Blackadder Goes Forth,” co-writer Richard Curtis once acknowledged, “probably came from me watching the play Journey's End at school.”
When it debuted in 1928, an unknown Laurence Olivier in the lead role, Sherriff’s raw masterpiece initially received a lukewarm response. Upon transfer to the Savoy Theatre, however, it caused an instant sensation, leaving the audience in muted shock at the final curtain. When the silence was finally broken, it gave way to an acclamatory roar, heralding a theatrical triumph.
What chord had Sherriff struck? The answers lie, in part, at the Surrey History Centre in Woking, home to the Lottery funded project To Journey’s End and Beyond: the Life and Legacy of RC Sherriff. The wide-ranging enterprise includes the cataloguing of the writer’s letters and papers for online publication later this year.
"His dialogue was fantastic,” enthuses Sherriff expert Roland Wales, whose own play, How Like it All is, explores the genesis of Journey’s End in Sherriff’s service with the East Surrey Regiment.
"As George Bernard Shaw put it, the play was ‘a slice of life – horribly abnormal life’. It was real. Sherriff was one of the great observers; he wrote what he saw."
And he wrote a lot. Ask Zoe Karans, an archivist on the Woking project, who has the arduous task of cataloguing more than 100 boxes of the playwright's correspondence.
"Sherriff's literary legacy is multidimensional,” she explains. “People don't realise that he wrote novels and film scripts too. He was still at it in the early 70s, almost up until his death in 1975.”
After studying history at Oxford in the early 1930s, Sherriff turned his hand to film scripts, both in England and for Hollywood. Nominated for an Academy Award for Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939), he later notched two BAFTA nominations for The Dambusters and The Night My Number Came Up.
RC Sherriff
According to Roland Wales, Sherriff's salary peaked at a staggering $30,000 per week – the highest for any English scriptwriter in Hollywood.
The allure of Tinseltown was muffled, however, for the gentle, shy, self-conscious Sherriff.
"He didn't have much social confidence," says Zoe Karans, “and the trauma of war didn’t help at all.”
A lifelong bachelor, Sherriff spent most of his later years at Rosebriars, his Esher home, and remained extremely close to his mother until her death in 1965. In one of his letters to her from the front, he betrays both terror and a sense of shame at his recoiling from the horrors of war.
“I expect you think me a funny sort of soldier to be frightened of every shell that comes our way,” he wrote.
The mental trauma sustained during active service is clearly traceable in the letters, says Zoe. And Roland Wales feels certain that, in later years, Sherriff suffered from what we would now regard as post-traumatic stress disorder.
It was this unresolved trauma, perhaps, that prompted Sherriff to start work on a sequel to Journey’s End, deaing with the after-effects of war on surviving soldiers. Untitled and unfinished, the play opens with Stanhope and Trotter – surviving characters from the original – parting ways at the docks.
The project, however, was doomed. Universal Pictures wanted it for the screen, but – with true Hollywood flourish – as a prisoner of war tale. Sherriff’s vision for a more insightful, psychologically astute work faded quietly into oblivion.
Well, not quite. Decades after the abortive script was binned, Roland Wales found a way of breathing new life into what he affectionately terms Journey's Other End.
"Sherriff was a benefactor of Kingston Grammar School, to which he left the majority of his personal effects,” he explains. “For the past six years we’ve been holding annual Sherriff nights to raise money for the rowing club, so we’ve remastered some of his works – including the unfinished sequel.”
A quiet, introverted man, crippled by the demons of self-doubt, Robert Cedric Sherriff became one of the great communicators on the subject of WWI. Journey’s End wasn’t just a theatrical sensation: it helped to make the social weather, as the postwar generation began to question the monumental sacrifices of a decade before.
It was a trend which would reach its dissenting zenith in the 1960s, with the advent of Joan Littlewood’s Oh, What a Lovely War! And then, a quarter of a century later, Blackadder went forth.
The fascination with WWI shows no sign of reaching its journey’s end.
For more information on the records of RC Sherriff, or researching into your own family genaelogy, contact: Surrey History Centre (01483) 518737; @SurreyHeritage
For more information about the RC Sherriff Trust and its programme of events nad bursaries, visit: rcsherrifftrust.org.uk
