Someone from the Past, by Margot Bennett

Nancy Graham, 26 year-old magazine writer and the narrator of this novel, is out for dinner with her fiancee Donald when they bump into Susan Lampson. Nancy used to share a flat and work with Susan but they’ve not seen each other in a while. To complicate matters, Donald used to go out with Susan and when she left him tried to shoot himself.

Now Susan is marrying someone else — but, she tells Nancy, she’s received a threatening note from an ex. Susan wants Nancy, who kept notes in shorthand on Susan’s love-life when they lived together, to seek out her exes and find out who is making trouble. It might be the convicted thief Peter or the poet Laurence or the vain actor Mike… Nancy is sure it can’t be Donald.

When Susan is murdered, Nancy’s first thought is to ensure that the police don’t suspect her fiancee. But in tidying up the crime scene to protect Donald, she incriminates herself…

This is a fantastic return to form by Margot Bennett after the disappointment of Farewell Crown and Good-bye King. It’s at least as good as The Widow of Bath and probably better, my favourite of her books that I have read so far. I can see why it won the Crime Writers’ Association ‘Crossed Red Herrings’ award — since renamed the Gold Dagger (and presented to Bennett by JB Priestley) — and why Bennett was, in 1959, elected to the Detection Club. Fast-moving, twisty and suspenseful, this keeps us guessing to the end. Even the very last paragraph takes an unexpected turn.

In his introduction, Martin Edwards quotes Bennett herself on what made this and The Man Who Didn’t Fly “my best books”. The latter,

“had an unusual plot and a set of people I believed in. In the same way, Someone from the Past had five characters I might have met anywhere. The best of all my people was the girl Nancy. She was kind and cruel, and loyal and bitchy. She was a ready liar, with a sharp tongue, but she was brave and real. All through my books, the best I have done is to make the people real.” (pp. 9-10, citing John M Reilly (ed.), Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers)

Nancy is a compelling protagonist. We never know what she might do next. She is observant and reckless, intelligent and yet capable of extraordinary folly. Sometimes she tries to fix things in ways we can see (and want to shout) will only make things worse. But we are with her all the way as she faces multiple dangers.

As so often with Margot Bennett, characters attracted to one another bicker and fight, but here the stakes are raised because any one of these men Nancy is winding up could be the murderer. Whether or not they did for Susan, they can be violent with Nancy, or treat her appallingly in other ways. In fact, she is not the only woman here who puts up with variously crap men.

This British Library Crime Classic edition, first published in 2023, is subtitled “a London mystery” and it boasts a few good descriptions of places such as Soho. More than that, it offers an extraordinary snapshot of the mores of 1958, the year the novel was originally published. As well as a lot of smoking and drinking, there’s a surprising nonchalance about drugs. Tired and wound-up after a row with Donald, Nancy tells us:

“I knew I should take a couple of strong sleeping-pills. They would give me four hours’ sleep, and a heavily-doped morning that would make work impossible, unless I took a stimulant. After that, a couple of tranquilizing tablets would level me up for the day.” (p. 37)

She has all of these to hand as, a few pages later, she offers them and “a confidence drug” to her fiancee, who tells her he’s already taken “knockout pills” (p. 45). These, we learn, are “blue things, sodium amytal” (p. 47). Elsewhere, Nancy seems familiar with benzedrine. The drug-taking is part of the plot (one suspect was apparently doped and unconscious at the time of the murder) but also part of everyday life. 

I’m intrigued by elements of the novel that Bennett may have drawn from her own (fascinating) life, such as her years as a writer for the magazine Lilliput (while her husband Richard Bennett was editor).

“From the moment that I got the job on the Diagonal Press and scrawled out my first paid illiteracies I saw myself as a great writer, one who kept notebooks and would soon be guest of honour at literary luncheons.” (p. 27)

Again, the notebooks are part of the plot but I wonder how much this attitude — to her earlier work and to her career — matched Bennett’s own. When the murder case bears down on Nancy, the publisher she works for offers her a chance to get away with a job in Spain (p. 248). Is that a nod to Bennett’s own history, as she served as a nurse (and publicist) in Spain during the civil war?

Then there is what the novel says about Television, which in those days still had a capital T. Bennett had already made her debut as a TV writer: her one-off drama The Sun Divorce (dir. Philip Savile) was shown as part of London Playhouse on the ITV network Associated-Redifussion on Thursday 26 January 1956, just four months after the launch of ITV. Writing of Someone from the Past must have overlapped with the agreement of rights for a TV adaptation one of her earlier novels: The Man Who Didn’t Fly, starring William Shatner and Jonathan Harris, was adapted by Jerome Coopersmith and broadcast by NBC in Canada on 16 July 1958.

Since it was made and broadcast in Canada, Bennett probably had little involvement in this and she may never have seen it. But, excitingly, we can watch that production of The Man Who Didn’t Fly on YouTube. It even enjoys a bit of a following because it stars both William Shatner and Jonathan Harris, later stars of Star Trek and Lost in Space respectively. 

Margot Bennett was soon writing for TV herself, with work on ATV soap opera Emergency-Ward 10, perhaps making use of her own nursing experience. IMDB credits her on 15 episodes of the soap, broadcast between Tuesday 23 September 1958 and Friday 22 May 1959. The implication is that she moved into soap opera soon after completing work on this novel.

By the time she finished on Emergency-ward 10, Bennett had made the switch to BBC — and more prestigious drama — with her six-part adaption of her novel The Widow of Bath, which began transmission on 1 June 1959. But Someone from the Past suggests she was already familiar with the mechanics of BBC television more than a year before that.

In the novel, actor Mike Fenby, presumably used to late nights on stage followed by late mornings (as described in Exit Through the Fireplace), complains of the “brutal creatures” of “Terrivision” who have him up at “ten o’clock” in the morning for rehearsals in Shepherds Bush — which is where the BBC was based. 

“And you should see, I really wish you could see, the producer. Temperament! He thinks out the sets with a kind of telescope, and when he wants to concentrate, he blows bubbles. … He has a tin. He shakes the bubbles off with a bit of wire. They help him to relax. When they burst, they cover the floor with slime, like invisible banana skins. There’s practically no one in the cast who hasn’t a sprained ankle or a broken neck. You ought to see us, skidding about the place.” (pp. 39-40). 

That “telescope” was a director’s viewfinder, enabling the director to see how much of the actors and set would be visible through different diameter lenses, and to plan and block their shots ahead of studio recording. Viewfinders had been in use since at least 1938: the Tech Ops site boasts a clipping from Radio Times that year, a photo of one in use and some other details. But this is not the sort of thing people outside the world of TV were likely to know about,.

Actor Mike can escape from rehearsals for lunch with Nancy at one o’clock, suggesting “a pub called the Blue Unicorn”, which is surely a play on the real-life White Horse at 31 Uxbridge Road, where I’ve also sometimes met up with actors. (For those with an interest in the drinking habits of old TV people, the late Alvin Rakoff says in his memoir of working for the BBC in the 1950s that after recording at Lime Grove he’d take the crew for a pint at the end of the road, in the British Prince at 77 Goldhawk Road.)

Later, Mike can’t believe Nancy didn’t see his TV performance go out.

“‘I thought you might have been interested enough to watch me on the new medium.’

‘It’s a fairly old medium by now, isn’t it?’

‘But Nancy, this was terrific. I’m a brain surgeon, you see, who takes to drink, and just when I’m having a terrible fit of the stagers, my former loved one is wheeled in with her brains dashed out. I’m supposed to shake so much, the forceps clash together like a steel band as I approach the operating table. The trouble was that I really was shaking so much I dropped the whole kit of instruments on her face. It was Sylvia, you know, she’s got a shocking temper, I cracked the porcelain jacket on one of her front teeth, she’s going to sue me. If I hadn’t got between her and the cameras and ad-libbed, the viewers would have heard every word she said. You certainly missed something. It will be in all the papers tomorrow.” (p. 95)

There’s a lot of interest here (to me): Television no longer a novelty, favouring melodramatic productions in which the viewer might enjoy the emotional crisis of characters in close-up, all within the lively, stressy chaos of live broadcast. The depiction is a bit pointed, even satirical — as is Mike buying up all the papers to bask in the contradictory reviews — but the details are all right, and so surely based on direct observation.

Did Margot Bennett have first-hand experience of BBC drama production when she wrote Someone from the Past, more than a year before her first writing credits at the BBC? Her husband had worked in BBC radio since the war and also sometimes wrote for listings magazine Radio Times, such as his interview with Jimmy Wheeler ahead of a TV comedy show in May 1956. Yet it seems unlikely that Margot tours of TV rehearsals through that connection. 

More probable, I think, is this came through her own efforts. Was she meeting with BBC people about writing for TV, and getting tours of production, long before her first screen credit there? Or perhaps, like Nancy, Margot Bennett simply met an actor friend for lunch while they were in rehearsals…

Whatever the case, and for all Bennett might have mocked TV drama, something extraordinary happened after the publication of Someone from the Past. Despite the accolades it won, she never published another crime novel. According to her family (and detailed in the introduction to the British Library edition of The Man Who Didn’t Fly), she didn’t earn enough from novels to continue; crime didn’t pay. Instead, she spent the next decade writing prolifically for TV.

More investigation to follow...

Novels by Margot Bennett:

• Time to Change Hats (1945); Away Went the Little Fish (1946); The Golden Pebble (1948); The Widow of Bath (1952); Farewell Crown and Good-bye King (1953); The Long Way Back (1954); The Man Who Didn’t Fly (1955); Someone from the Past (1958); That Summer’s Earthquake (1964); The Furious Masters (1968)

Non-fiction by Margot Bennett:

• The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Atomic Radiation (1964) 

Truth & Dare, by So Mayer

“The funny thing is that getting the morning-after pill the first day of a zombie apocalypse is really no easier or harder than on a previously average day. No bigger a deal, the obstacles are just… different. More slow-moving, brain-eating hordes, sure, but fewer overtly religiose or obstructive pharmacists. The baseball bat I brought to use in case of the former was also effective on the triple-lock cabinets erected by the latter.” (p. 224)

This is a rich, intoxicating anthology of 19 short stories and musings. Several of the stories are set in the near future, such as the one in which the invention of new kinds of artificial dick leads, through one thing and another, to the collapse of capitalism. Other stories spiral backward — to the pogrom in York in 1190, to The Black Cap gay pub, to the narrator’s own history. There are ghost stories and ghostly stories, and a lot of it is strange and unsettling.

The last story, Dune Elegies, is one of several set in a bleak near-future, a world just beyond our current grasp. The narrator, “terfed off” their own radio show, takes up residence in a lighthouse near the stone mirrors at Denge and continues to transmit a podcast, but with a pervasive sense of lost connection. The narrator is unable to recall the names of Conrad Veidt and Derek Jarman while detailing their importance in queer history — we fill in the blanks as readers. Then there’s a response from listeners to the podcast, transmission of which triggers something in stones taken from the area, wherever they might be now. It’s such an odd, beguiling idea, the sort of story that sits with you long afterwards.

As well as what’s happening, there’s the way these stories are told, dense with allusion and word play, poetry and punning. There are references to films and TV shows, novels and academic texts — I’d have quite liked a bibliography and/or end notes for further reading. It’s not just that stuff is referenced; it is toyed with and spun. For example, one passage about the lives of particular pirates includes the phrase “our flag means life” (p. 229) reversing the title of the 2022-23 TV series while at the same time making a connection to its own exploration of sexuality and identity.

We frequently explore derivation and etymology, how meaning is constructed, generating history and identity. With that in mind, I think the cut-up technique of quotations and references may be a way of shaking things up to create new meanings and ideas. That took me back into my own past when, as a university student some three decades ago, I got hooked on linguistic relativity and the so-called “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis” that language shapes or even determines our thoughts and perceptions.

(In fact, it’s an axiom, not a hypothesis, and not one put forward by the linguists Sapir and Whorf as such, who never wrote together. But perhaps that makes it more fitting as a label, evidence that we need a name, any name, to be able to remonstrate with an idea.)

It’s not just about words in the stories here: in dreams of being Joan of Arc and her insistence on wearing trousers, or in detailing why Artemis wore a short skirt, we’re exploring the construction of gendered and non-gendered identities.

By chance, I was reading this as I saw the new documentary From Roger Moore With Love, which details how movie-star “Roger Moore” was an invented persona; Moore learned to play this persona and then, from The Spy Who Loved Me, applied that to his role as James Bond. At one point, Moore’s friend Christopher Walken says this shouldn’t be a surprise because we’re all self-invented people — there’s a point in our lives, perhaps more than one, where we choose who we are. How fascinating to see archive interviews with Moore uncomfortable with the violence and misogyny of Bond or — in an episode of Hardtalk which so yielded something new from its subjects — voicing concern about the “heroic” image of his Bond wielding a gun. I’m not sure I’d have picked up on that if I’d not been reading this book…

Like the world of James Bond, the stories in this book are frequently lusty, even graphic. But Bond is about gratified desire, sex just part of the mix with exotic locations, stylish clothes, fancy food and gadgets. In the book, desire is, I think, less external but bubbling up from within. There’s a lot here on the bloody, visceral heft of bodies — of ourselves not just as contracted identities but as physical things.

“What it means to be in a body, differently, is what the Crusades take aim against,” (p. 61).

So much of this book is exploring that haunting idea, the half of the sentence before “is” and the sentence as a whole.

You can buy Truth & Dare by So Mayer direct from Cipher Press.

Farewell Crown and Good-bye King, by Margot Bennett

After so enjoying Margot Bennett’s 1952 crime novel The Widow of Bath, I plunged into her next novel, a thriller first published in 1953. It’s not nearly as good, yet full of things of interest.

The plot is quite involved so I’ll endeavour to explain the set-up. In the first chapter, we meet wealthy Barry and Vanessa Bone as they return home late from a posh party, arguing about the cheque for £2,000 that Barry has just given Roger Maple. The money, insists Barry, is as an investment in a new railway in an eastern European country called Ardania, where copper has been found; Maple is a friend of the local king.

A young woman called Kate Browning returns home from the same party and admits to her sober, level-headed sister Julia that she overheard Maple and the Bones, got mixed up in their conversation after she claimed to know the king as a friend of a friend, and has herself invested £100 in the scheme. Yet Kate believes that the money is an investment in a deal to distribute Ardanian oil.

Vincent and Frances Roydon were also at the party. Vincent is features editor of the Vigilant newspaper, which is ironic as he, too, has been hoodwinked by Maple, investing £250 that he can ill-afford in what he thinks is a paper-making scheme to exploit Ardania’s plentiful soft woodlands.

In the second chapter, we meet Maple himself, calling in on his old friend Duncan Stewart, an impoverished documentary film-maker who finds £250 to invest in what Maple describes as a scheme to dam Ardania’s Lixaman Falls and supply hydroelectric power across the border. 

By now the reader is sure of what Duncan only suspects: that all of this is a scam. Maple conspicuously leaves the remains of a letter from a mystery woman, Elvira, in Duncan’s wastepaper bin and then heads off to meet his wife, Jenny Maple, so they can leave the country.

He promptly disappears. Jenny tells Duncan that her husband stood her up but she refuses to go to the police, even as days turn to weeks without word from him. Duncan instead meets the other hoodwinked investors and together they investigate what has been going on. Their first move is to try and meet up with Ardania’s former king, now living in London under the name Mr Forster and busy trying to agree the sale of his unrivalled collection of paintings by Vermeer…

That is just the start. This is all fiendishly complicated and yet the mystery at the heart of it I very quickly guessed, not least because the fictional, mittel-European country of Ardania put me in mind of The Prisoner of Zenda. As with The Widow of Bath (and the Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of Silver Blaze), the behaviour of a dog is an important clue — in this case, the telling feature is that the dog does bark. But I think the whole thing might have been more effective if the dead body found in water late on in the novel happened much earlier on, with these people then all involved in solving a murder, not just trying to retrieve their investments.

Even so, the novel is full of brilliant details and Bennett shows her usual sharply observational eye. Roger Maple, before he disappears, is a beguiling rogue with a neat line in tradecraft. For example, he advises Duncan Stewart not to buy beer on credit from his local shop:

“It gives you a reputation of being hard up, and in your own street, too.” (p. 22)

It doesn’t matter that Duncan is hard up; the important thing is appearance. Maple instead recommends being bold and try cashing a cheque for £100 in the same establishment to give a contrary impression. Then there’s the artful way Maple gives the names of his other investors — Bone, Browning and Roydon — to sufficiently impress Duncan that he wants to put in money himself, while thinking this is his own idea (p. 28). In doing so, the author also provides Duncan with leads to follow when Maple disappears, bringing the different investors together to compare stories and so form a bond. That is elegantly, effectively done.

Speaking of bonds, I wondered at first why Duncan was so easily taken in by Maple, given he’s such an evident rogue. How did these two so very different men ever become friends? Just as I wondered this, the answer came: on p. 34 we’re told that they were in the army together. The implication is that this formed an unshakeable bond between two people otherwise from completely different worlds. Now I wonder how relatable that would have been to readers of the time, so soon after the end of the war and with National Service ongoing. I’m aware that the services threw together people from different backgrounds and classes who might never otherwise have met. But I’d never thought of the lasting relationships so created, akin to friends made on holiday that you can’t then shake, but with a stronger, faced-death-together connection.

Another contemporary insight is Duncan’s own frustrations. As a filmmaker, he’s keen to find truth, avoid cliche and to document ordinary, real life. There's a sequence late on where he’s being briefed on an advert for serial. When he offers his view on how to lift this above cliche, he is told “This is meant to be an advertising, not an art film” (p. 166) — though the implication is that his suggestions will be taken on and will prove effective.

This and the sequence where Roydon is faced with the sack, apparently on the whim of the publisher, may reveal something of the real-life experience of the author, or her husband who was editor of Lilliput between 1943 and 1950, when Margot wrote regularly for it. How much could the Bennetts do what Roydon does here, his threat to take a scoop to a rival publication earnings him promotion and a raise? My guess is that this was wish fulfilment, even revenge for real life.

On another occasion, Duncan rails against the nannying welfare state, in much the way as might the protagonist of novels from the same year such as Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale or Nevil Shute’s time-travelling In the Wet.

“‘I can’t leave the country, drive a car, open a shop, buy a pound of butter, not without permission. There are places where I can’t cross the road until a policeman lets me. I know I’m a man and not a unit,’ he said satirically, ‘because I’m allowed to register a vote for Holborn Borough Councillors. I’d like to do something more. I’d like to find Roger and not just run bleating to the police. I’d like to be a man on my own.” (pp. 62-63)

But Duncan isn’t alone; the whole wheeze of the book is that it’s an investigation by a group of amateur detectives, all from different backgrounds but linked by common cause. Though Duncan crave adventure of a John Buchan/Richard Hannay sort, it is Roydon who enjoys racy antics abroad.

There are lots of fun supporting characters, best of all Derek Vaughn, the burglar battling with his own conscience. Here’s a typical monologue from him, all sex and violence and comedy:

“When I was a lad, I was one of the roughest types on God’s earth. I’ve done five years for rapping a harmless old woman on the head. But I used my time to educate myself, and before the end I was the prison librarian. Some of the least educated men used to be great readers They’d get me to mark off the dirty bits for them, and even if it was just the lights going out or a description of a woman’s brassiere they’d read it till the page dropped off. That way, sir, I gradually got a lot of them interest in literature for its own sake.” (pp. 73-74)

Something of this echoes in a later sex scene just kindling as a chapter ends:

“She drew his hard, reluctant body closer to her and held his head against her soft, generous breasts. She soothed him with her loving, expressive hands until he was utterly relaxed in the ambience of her kindness. He was weak, and knew for the first time the peace that comes from abandoning the painful disguise of strength.” (p. 217)

How different, I thought, to the gruff, masculine perspective of bonking in Fleming or Shute, sex as surrender rather than attack. And yet, this sex is also victory, an accomplishment and something got away with for the lover who is married to someone else. 

That is more interesting than the way the novel ends for Duncan, rejected by one woman so he immediately proposes to another. We leave him and his fiancee on an ostensibly happy note, but the cold exchange of one woman for another simply doesn’t sit right. The Widow of Bath neatly tied up all the threads of its plot and added an unsettling coda to haunt us after the close of the book. The ending here is is unsettling because it is unsatisfactory, not quite tying things up. The basic trick behind this novel isn’t as clever or as satisfying as her last book, and it’s not quite so well done.

Bennett followed Farewell Crown and Good-bye King with two novels both published in 1955 which I’ve already read: unconventional mystery The Man Who Didn’t Fly and the science-fictional The Long Way Back; my friend Matthew Sweet calls the latter her masterpiece. I’ll be back to read what’s considered the best as well as the last of her detective novels, Someone From the Past (1958).

Missing Believed Wiped 2024

I had a lovely day out on Saturday at the BFI’s Missing Believed Wiped event(s), where we got to see an assortment of old telly that had been thought lost. These events are always a thrillingly eclectic mix, some items really good and some plain boggling. Usually, it’s made up of stuff that has been returned to the archives over the preceding year but here that rule had been a little extended to include some special items.

Session 1, which was dedicated to the memory of Rory Clark, began with Jo Griffin telling us about the restoration work done on LWT comedy series The Complete and Utter History of Britain (1969). Two episodes of this were previously known to exist, then last year the whole lot was suddenly up on Britbox, to the amazement of my archive telly pals. It turns out that the other episodes had been misfiled, all as “episode 2”.

We watched episode 6 of 8, originally transmitted on 16 February 1969. Colin Gordon is the straightman, a sort of news anchor bridging comic skits based on historical moments, all in chronological order. In this case, we covered from Guy Fawkes (here lighting a fireworks display of Catherine Wheels) to Oliver Cromwell (being interviewed on a chat show, insisting he is popular while the audience throws things).

It was often very funny, such as the expert historian describing the execution of Charles I who ends up killing a member of the audience, or Michael Palin’s impression of David Frost as he interviews Terry Jones as Cromwell... as Edward Heath. Best of all, the episode ended with a sort of trailer for the next one, with a load of quick-fire visual gags. It was also often very well staged and shot, notably in the fun sequence of a witch (Jones) getting her spells wrong.

(ETA: I misunderstood some of what we were told. Seven episodes were made of the series but the first two episodes were then edited together, making a broadcast series of six. We saw the final, sixth episode, the closing sequence therefore trailing an unmade second series to come. The six broadcast episodes survive, as do the first two episodes in their original form before they were cut down, making a total of eight surviving episodes.)

Afterwards, Michael Palin and producer Humphrey Barclay were interviewed on stage. Palin seemed gratified by the response — not least because, on broadcast, John Cleese rang him up to say the series wasn’t very good. Instead, Cleese invited Palin and Jones to collaborate on something else, which of course ended up being Monty Python. Palin was funny about this and the context in which the programme was made, and classy in acknowledging the excellent job done on restoration by Jo Griffin and her team.

Next up was a compilation provided by my mate Ed Stradling from TV Ark of some otherwise missing telly he’s found by looking through old VHS tapes. This included Andrew Sachs as Manuel from Fawlty Towers chaotically cooking paella on Pebble Mill At One, and a bit of a New Year’s Eve programme from the late 1970s, with two comedians dragged up as Scottish policewomen trading bawdy jokes in front of a police box that then dematerialises.

(ETA: The comedians were apparently Jack Milroy and Rikki Fulton, at the time known for playing teddy-boys Francie and Josie; the policewomen in the sketch were Nancy and Rosie. This all went over my head.)

This was followed by an episode of trendy magazine programme A Whole Scene Going from 16 February 1966, in which a documentary crew visited three contrasting parties — one very posh and staid, another more down at heel — followed by a studio interview with the hosts, one of them a young Annie Nightingale. They discussed what made a good atmosphere and how to cope with people being drunk and sick. It was a fascinating snapshot of the time, loaded with assumptions about class and status, and all achingly awkward. 

So was an interview with Dudley Moore and Shirley Anne Field, who answered “Agony Aunt” style questions about dating, such as whether it was all right to kiss at the end of a first date. Marianne Faithful was filmed at home and then live in the studio, responding to fans’ repeated displeasure that she’d got married and had a baby. Presenters, guests and audience were all so oddly nervy, none of them knowing quite how to be in front of a camera, the way people now take for granted. The sense was of precocious, well-spoken children, squirming in their seats while nervously seeking approval.

We finished the first session with an episode of Six More Faces of Jim, in this case The Face of Fatherhood from 15 November 1962. The wheeze of the series (and the preceding Six Faces of Jim) was that each episode featured Jimmy Edwards as a different role and situation — effectively a series of sitcom pilots. This episode was a bit different: a TV version of the radio skit The Glums from the 1950s, with Mr Glum (Edwards) seeking to thwart the engagement of his son Ron (Ronnie Barker) to Eth (June Whitfield). It was fun, though I felt that it maybe under-served Edwards by having him play so closely to type.

Eth is a spirited character, laying down the law to Ron and snapping back at selfish Mr Glum. That, I think, was particularly notable after the lack of speaking women’s roles in The Complete and Utter History and the rather demure women in Scene (at one point, an audience member complained that Marianne Faithful’s marriage meant he could no longer consider her angelic, and she nodded along rather than punching him).

With barely enough time to wolf down a burrito, we hurried back in for Session 2, this time comprised of material recovered by Film is Fabulous. I’ve long been in awe of this project, which is really focused on ensuring that film collectors leave provision so that their collections don’t end up as landfill. But that has in turn led to a scheme to catalogue the contents of a number of collections, which has led to the discoveries of some otherwise missing telly. 

John Franklin and Simon Nicholls from Film is Fabulous gave us some background and announced some new finds: a Jackanory-style programme called Storyteller from September 1956 presented by Elizabeth Beresford years before she created the Wombles and illustrated by Tony Hart; and three episodes of Douglas Fair Banks Junior Presents, also from the late 1950s.

We were then treated to something called Disc Jockey from 1960 or 1961: a series of filmed performances of pop songs, all in very good quality. Jimmy Lloyd performed “I Double Dare You” on a set that looked like a New York apartment, with well dressed young people smouldering at one another, including a black man and white woman. Another song saw Frank Ifield getting very close to a young woman in a coffee bar. Later, a young woman at the window of her house in America sang about liking the young man loitering outside though her parents wouldn’t approve. For all the lightness of the pop song, behind her there was a rifle on the wall suggesting the risk posed to the would-be amore. The whole lot felt potent and rich, and I’d love to know more about this programme.

This was followed by a series of clips from found programmes, including a thrilling sequence from Mogul: Is That Tiger, Man? (30 April 1966) in which Tiger (Michael Coles) dons scuba gear to fix an oil-pipe in shark-infested waters while being taunted by gruff bully Peter Thornton (Ray Barrett) and cooed over by Steve Thornton (Justine Lord). When the sharks come close, Tiger surfaces too quickly and gets the bends; Thornton coldly insists he be thrown back into the water to recover. This and the scene of Alec Stewart (Robert Hardy) was all of the cross business-tycoon type that I remember once being so much part of TV drama until it was basically killed off by parody in A Bit of Fry and Laurie’s John and Peter (“Dammit John!”) — but what we saw here looked great.

We then got an episode of Tom Jones! (with exclamation mark) from 3 April 1967, comprising songs sharing a given theme, in this case Work. This ranged from a daft sequence of professional dancers fooling about in a kitchen to Jones as a miner, or working on a chain gang, or driving a truck while singing “Hard Day’s Night”. Yet when guest Maxine Brown sang about a woman’s (domestic) work, the gag was that Jones was doing the dishes, coming on with a tea towel which Brown handed back to him at the end of their flirty duet.

Finally, there was an episode of The Basil Brush Show from 20 November 1970, the CSO effects evidence that it was originally made in colour, for all it survives in black and white. The oddest thing about this, I thought, was how poorly it was pitched to the live audience of children (in their school and cub scout uniforms, all dressed up to be on TV). As Mr Derek (Fowlds) struggled not to corpse, Basil rattled off quips at the expense of women, trades union and foreigners. For example, when told he talks too much, he says it’s an inherited trait because his father was an auctioneer, his mother a woman. “Fucking hell,” responded the bloke just in front of me.

Some of the jokes earned a laugh, from the audience on screen and at the BFI, but it was notable how much less a response it got than The Complete and Utter History earlier that same afternoon. Discussing this afterwards in the bar, I wondered how much it was following the conventions of stand-up, taking as read How Jokes Are Done. So often, what makes old telly so extraordinary is the way it reveals these kinds of now-lost convention, things once taken for granted, perhaps not even thought of, that now seem so peculiar. Puzzling over these things is what makes an event like this so compelling. Television is such an intimate, immediate form, we have a particularly vivid means of travelling back in time.

Thanks to Robert Dick and Ian Farrington for catching some of what I missed, and to Dick Fiddy and the team at the BFI.

See also:

• Me on Missing Believed Wiped 2007
• Me on Missing Believed Wiped 2010
• My current work-in-progress: an episode guide to mostly missing BBC adventure series Garry Halliday (1959-62)

Karla’s Choice - a John le Carré novel, by Nick Harkaway

“In the early spring of nineteen sixty-three, there was a rumour — unconfirmed and a little scandalous — that George Smiley might almost be happy.” (p. 26)

I was going to ask for this for Christmas and then couldn’t wait: a new le Carré novel despite the author no longer being in the field, and a new adventure for spymaster George Smiley, for all he long ago retired.

Whereas Silverview (2022) was written by le Carré and finished after his death by his son, the novelist Nick Harkaway, this is an entirely new novel by Harkaway. Or rather, it isn’t, because it’s been devised to fit neatly between two of the old classics, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974). As well as owlish George Smiley, it features lots of familiar characters from both those books — such as Control, Toby Esterhase, Peter Guillam, Bill Haydon, Alec Leamas, Connie Sachs and Ann Smiley — and makes subtle play with the fact we know what is to be befall some of them in events to come.

Of course, this isn’t a new phenomenon. People other than Arthur Conan-Doyle were writing Sherlock Holme stories while Doyle was still alive. Kingsley Amis wrote Colonel Sun (1968) four years after the death of James Bond creator Ian Fleming. New stories continue to be written about Bond and Holmes and whoever else, some continuing their adventures into the present day, other working as period pieces, looking back to the time when the original adventures were set. (See, to choose an example entirely at random, Sherlock Holmes and the Great War.)

That’s the big point of difference here: le Carré was grappling with the contemporary world, all gritty, cynical realism. Karla’s Choice is a historical novel, conjured as much from depictions of the previous books on TV and in film. It is a pastiche.

I think it’s a good one: it feels authentic and I suspect would work well if you (re)read the Smiley novels in order, inserting this one into place. The familiar characters are well captured, Harkaway acknowledging in his both author’s note and acknowledgements the debt he owes to the various actors who’ve realised the characters on screen. At the same time, new characters, whose fates we can’t be sure of, are also nicely delineated and feel in-keeping.

In the opening pages, Harkaway accepts that the very idea of a new Smiley novel not written by his dad will be unthinkable to some. He then invites us to see, with him, how well he’s achieved his aim. That’s clever: co-opting us, perhaps even seducing us despite ourselves. We become part of the game.

And that matches the plot. Susanna Gero, a Hungarian refugee with a new life in London working for a literary agent, answers the door of her office to a strange man — who has orders to kill her boss. Susanna’s quick-thinking and brave response leads to attention from the Circus, and soon she’s embroiled in the secret world. George Smiley should not be involved as he recently retired, following the events of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. But he and Susanna find that once ensnared with the ‘grey mistress’ of the service, it is all-but impossible to escape…

As well as authentic, it’s an enjoyable, engaging story — and, in its last section, extremely tense. The period setting with Smiley in his prime works better, I think, than seeing the character living on agelessly into the modern age, almost but not quite giving his view on Brexit, as per le Carré’s A Legacy of Spies (2017). 

But at the same time something is lost in making Smiley a figure from history. There’s no longer that tantalising sense of this all being real and now and incredibly relevant, of le Carré using a fictional spy story to raise the curtain a bit on what's really going on. 

There’s one moment where we come close, an echo of today in this echo of the past. As the stakes get ever higher, Smiley considers what difference it will make to the wider world if he is successful in besting his opposite number, the Russia spymaster known as Karla. 

“Would Moscow abruptly suffer a shortage of brutal and brutalised men, thinking to make good whatever sinkholes were in them by destroying the West? By finally achieving Peter the Great’s ambitions and standing Russia at the pinnacle of the world? Would the Cold War, with all its terrible arsenals and its power to compress and unshaped ordinary lives, come to an end? Would the nuclear demon go back to hell, and the fear of a Russian land invasion sweeping everything before it, not stopping until it reached Normandy and Lagos and Palermo, fade into history because Karla fell to Smiley’s unknightly lance?” (p. 220)

And then, in the end, there is the choice Karla makes that gives the book its title. It is not what Karla does but the thought of how Smiley will need to respond that is what resonates.

See also me on:

• Titanium Noir (2023) by Nick Harkaway
• Silverview (2021) by John le Carré and Nick Harkaway 
• A Legacy of Spies (2017) by John le Carré
• The Mission Song (2006) by John le Carré
• The Constant Gardener (2005 film version of 2001 novel by John le Carré) 
• The Secret Pilgrim (1990) by John le Carré
• Smiley’s People (1979) by John le Carré
• Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy (1974) by John le Carré
• The Honourable Schoolboy (1977) by John le Carré
• The Looking-Glass War (1965) by John le Carré

George Markstein and the Prisoner, ed. Roger Goodman

George Markstein (1926 — but perhaps 1929 — to 1987) was a journalist and writer, probably best known as script editor of the first 13 episodes of The Prisoner (1967-68). He also appears in the title sequence, as the bald bureaucrat at whom Patrick McGoohan crossly resigns. Ironically, it was Markstein who crossly left the series.

I’ve been interested in Markstein since reading about his falling out with fellow writer David Whitaker when the latter was sent to Moscow in July 1969 on behalf of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain to protest the treatment of Solzhenitsyn. At the guild’s AGM on 31 May the following year, Markstein made a number of claims about what had happened in Moscow, despite not having been there. On at least one point he had to apologise because the source of his claims, writer Lewis Greifer, was there to rebut them. See pp. 333-334 of my book for more.

Greifer also crops up in this slim volume, available to buy from Portmeirion (where The Prisoner was filmed), which sketches a fascinating portrait of Markstein — or rather, of what we don’t know about him. 

“It escapes me why GM’s birthdate should have come so contentious in website discussions,” says his friend Sidney Allinson in the introduction (p. 4). “In fact, he was born in 1926” — though no source is given for this fact — “which would make him about 21 years of age in 1947, which was when I knew him. We both worked as reporters with The Southport Guardian newspaper [in Merseyside.] At the time, for reasons best known to himself, he presented himself as being an American, complete with an authentic-sounding accent.”

We can understand why, in the years immediately after the Second World War, a German-born young man would want to hide his real accent and identity. In what follows, we learn Markstein also presented himself as Canadian though it’s thought he was actually born in Berlin and moved to England with his Jewish mother before the outbreak of war. 

In her contribution to this book, “A Cooler Shade of George Markstein” (pp. 10-17) Catherine Nemeth Frumerman says mother and son moved to London in 1935 when George was about nine, adding that he was born Gustav Georg to actress Grete Maria Markstein — who in turn claimed to be the daughter of Albert Einstein. The source for this is apparently Michele Zackheim's Einstein's Daughter: The Search for Lieserl, which it says here was published by Riverhead Books in 2000. Frumerman says this information may have come from Markstein’s business partner Jacqui Lyons, who is thanked but not directly quoted by Zackheim.

But Ricky Davy in “So Who Was George Markstein?” (pp. 20-52) says Zackheim’s book was published in 1999 and is more sceptical about what is claimed.

“The book is an account of the life [of] a German woman named Grete Markstein, who believed herself to be the daughter of Einstein. Her son, Gustav Georg Markstein, it is claimed, later became George Markstein (via a name change to Herschdoerfer following Greta’s 1935 marriage). Knowledge in the book of this man ends in 1947 in Cheshire, several years after Grete passed away, and no tangible proof is given that George and Georg are the same person, although the tale does have some plausibility.” (p. 22)

Cheshire borders Merseyside, where Allinson worked with Markstein in 1947. So maybe, maybe, he was the same person as Georg. But was he really Einstein's grandson? In fact, Einstein's daughter Lieserl, is thought to have been born in 1902 but to have died the following year. 

This is just one example of competing claims in the book. Central to this is Markstein’s repeated claim to have conceived The Prisoner, based on his knowledge of the real-life Inverlair Lodge, which was from 1941 No. 6 Special Workshop School of the Special Operations Executive (SOE). In contrast, star Patrick McGoohan claimed to have conceived the initial idea as well as to have dictated much of what made it to the screen. 

“Creator of the Whole Fantasy — A Correspondence Between George Markstein & Roger Goodman” (pp. 54-67) details Markstein’s various claims and reproduces several of his letters (and Christmas cards).  “When The Secret Agent Is Whisked Away” (pp. 78-95) is a transcript of Goodman’s interview with Markstein on 19 April 1980 at the ICA in London following a screening of The Prisoner episode Checkmate. Repeatedly, Markstein speaks of television as a collaborative enterprise with no single author  — while reiterating that The Prisoner was his idea. But note the manner in which he doesn’t answer some questions, leaving us to fill in the blanks.

“Q: Mr Markstein, you said earlier on that you felt that the concept of the Village was not as far-fetched as it may have seemed at the time, certainly not today. Do you have any evidence of that?

George: Yes.

Q: You do?

George: Yes.

Q: You are not going to elaborate?

George: I cannot. I am not prepared to discuss certain things, because I cannot.” (p. 94)

It’s a very odd interview, Markstein railing variously against computers and CCTV, the “era of experts” and the state of television at the time, but denying that television has any power to influence the thinking of the viewer. “Never have we had less freedom,” he declares at one point (p. 86), on the basis that we must empty our pockets before getting on a plane and that the Mall in London is closed to traffic.

“Is it because it is a Sunday and the Queen wants to sleep late? The Queen isn’t even in London, she is in Windsor. That’s why I’m against technology. You might ask what has the Queen and Buckingham Palace got to do with technology, but it all ties in. I am against progress.” (p. 86)

Dave Barrie’s “Who Is Number One?” (pp. 75-77) sifts such evidence but favours McGoohan as “the driving force [behind The Prisoner]from very early on” (p. 77). James Follett’s “There's No Mystery” (p. 97) counters that “Patrick McGoohan was not a story man.” The book ends with a quotation from Joan Drummond McGoohan underlining her late husband's central role — cited here under the title “Who knows?” (p. 98)

To be honest, I think identifying who came up with the initial idea is less interesting a question than how it then developed into what we saw on screen week after week, and why Markstein and McGoohan were both so proprietorial about this particular series. The idea that it’s down to a single person seems oddly reductive, making it somehow less. 

As for Markstein, we are told that he was and remains a “sphinx”. Having read this book, I think he’s less enigma as unreliable source. 

The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Atomic Radiation, by Margot Bennett

“Informed public opinion is infectious, even to governments.” (p. 149)

Thursday, 30 July 1964 saw publication of two paperback “Penguin Specials” from Penguin Books both looking at the same subject. At four shillings, Nuclear Disaster by Tom Stonier,

“was based on his 1961 report to the New York Academy of Sciences which dealt with the biological and environmental effects of dropping a 20-megaton bomb on Manhattan”. Geoffrey Goodman, “Obituary — Tom Stonier”, Guardian, 28 June 1999.

Alongside this, at a slightly cheaper three shillings and sixpence, Margot Bennett’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Atomic Radiation is, according to the back-cover blurb, a “first reader in the most uncomfortable subject in the world”. 

The title is surely a riff on The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism by George Bernard Shaw, first published by Constable & Co in 1928 and republished in 1937 as an inexpensive two-volume paperback — the first Pelican Book — under the revised title The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism & Fascism. 

Of course, that was timely given the ongoing civil war between Republicans and Fascists in Spain, and the growing power of the Nazis in Germany. I’d be surprised if Margot Bennett wasn’t aware of the book, given that in 1937 she was in Spain. It was the year that Margot Mitchell (sometimes known as Margot Miller) married English journalist Richard Bennett while both were working for the Government — that is, Republican — radio station. Bennett, who also worked as a nurse, had been machine-gunned in the legs the previous year and at the time of her engagement had recently broken her arm when the ambulance she was in crashed under shellfire.

There’s nothing very militant in her book on atomic radiation, written 27 years later. “Politics is not the concern of this book,” she tells us in her introduction (p. 10). The focus is instead on the cause and effects fallout,

“addressed more to women than to men [because] the mother is far more intimately concerned with the health of the family than the father. It is the mother who sees that the children have green vegetables and milk, and who nurses then when they have measles.” (p. 11)

This still holds, she says, even if the mother has a career; a woman with no family, “still has a tenderness to children that is different in quality from the feelings of a man.”

It’s not exactly the most feminist stance but this is a politically active woman writing in the mid-1960s for a small-C conservative readership, the emphasis on presenting just the facts rather than on what we should think. The book concludes on a broad political note:

“Science affects us all; so far, overwhelmingly to our advantage. If there are times when we feel this is not so, as members of a democracy we have some kind of duty to find out what is happening.” (p. 154)

But there’s no sense of a particular party or ideology being favoured. We’re left to make up our own minds.

The domestic perspective — the way radiation affects milk and green vegetables, and our children — might imply this is rather lightweight or condescending to the ordinary housewife. Nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed one contemporary review thought it was, 

“little more than another text book, and heavy going at that.” (Robin Turner, “Nuclear penguins and others”, Birmingham Post, 8 August 1964, p. 5.)

A more generous review found it,

“Thought provoking … easily read but thorough” (John Berrie, “Woman’s angle”, Nottingham Evening Post and News, 7 August 1964, p. 10.)

It’s certainly thorough, covering the ground in detail in just 154 pages (not including appendices, glossary and index). After the introduction, the first three chapters give us a grounding in the physics involved in atomic radiation — “Inside the Atom”, “Neutrons and Nuclear Energy" and “Fission, Fusion, and Fallout”. We then switch to biology for “The Message in Our Cells”.

Chapter 5, “The Subtle Enemy”, then applies the physics to the biology to explain the damage atomic radiation can do to us and to future generations. The next chapter, “The Influential Friend”, puts a counter case, outlining all the beneficial ways atomic radiation can be applied. “Pollution and Protection” addresses what can be done to mitigate potential fallout. Bennett then provides a conclusion, making the case that even statistically “negligible” numbers of people wounded or killed would still be tragic for those concerned.

A lot of this is very technical. Promotion for the book at the time said that Bennett wrote in “plain English” (for example, “For Your Bookshelf”, Halifax Daily Courier and Guardian, 31 July 1964, p. 4). Even so, I found it quite hard going and made slow progress. 

Two things really bring it alive. First, Bennett peppers her book with vivid real-world examples of the way radiation can affect people’s lives. Hauntingly, she details the stages of radiation sickness suffered by early pioneers, from skin rashes and hair loss through anaemia, sterility and useless, deformed fingers to the fatal cancers (pp. 96-97). Or there’s the awful story of the Radium Girls (pp. 100-101). 

I’d be interested to know more about the Russian scientist who claimed to be able to cure the effects of radiation on DNA via a simple pill (p. 114), or about the Scottish boy discovered playing in a “pile of radioactive dust” and the factory making luminous dials that proved so radioactive that the Radiological Protection Service had the whole site buried (both stories p. 146). Frustratingly, there are no notes or bibliography to guide us to more information.

Secondly, throughout the book Bennett uses relatable, often domestic analogies to explain the complex ideas. She likens electrical charges — the way positive and negative attract one another but two positives or two negatives repel — to attraction between people, where a talker will fall for a listener (p. 17). She describes atoms of different elements as being like different breeds of dog (p. 22). Compounds and molecules are likened to marriages (p. 24).

Sometimes those analogies show how far we have come. On page 83, she refers to the cumulative effect of exposure to radiation over “the long days of our lives — 20,000 days if we live to be about sixty”, which doesn’t seem very long at all. (Bennett lived to 68).

But on the whole the effect is to make a complex, technical subject more tangible. The central, political idea here is the responsibility to be better informed: nuclear weapons are devastatingly powerful, but knowledge is also power — one to hold the arms race at bay.

*

Obligatory Doctor Who bit

Since the book was published at the end of July 1964, Bennett must have delivered the manuscript no later than, I’d guess, the end of May. Given the technical detail, it can’t have been a quick book to write. As well as the time taken to research it, a note just ahead of the introduction tells us that, 

“Everything factual has been checked by scientists whose knowledge is far more than equal to the task” (p. 7).

We’re not told who these scientists were or what the editorial process involved, but writing and editing surely took some months, which means work on the book overlapped with Bennett’s conversation(s) with BBC story editor David Whitaker about potentially writing for Doctor Who. As detailed in my post on Bennett’s novel The Furious Masters, that seems to have happened in late February 1964. She was being considered to write a story comprising four 25-minute episodes as a potential replacement for what became Planet of Giants — but nothing further is known about what her story might have entailed, or whether she even submitted an idea.

I partly read this book in the faint hope of finding some clue as to what she might have discussed with or submitted to Whitaker. The short biography of Bennett on the opening page is suggestive:

“She likes variety in writing and is now doing something in Science Fiction,” (p. 1) 

That “something” may have been The Furious Masters, published four years later. Or Bennett may have completed work on her study of atomic radiation and then turned to Doctor Who, only to discover that she was now too late and Planet of Giants was going ahead after all…

Then there’s one of the allusions she uses. At the end of her introduction, Bennett says that there’s no point wishing that the atom had never been cracked open.

“Man can’t afford to retreat; it is by discovery and invention, from fire and flint axe onwards, that he has survived. The axe is dangerously sharp, and the fire has grown as hot as the sun.” (p. 13)

Unlike most of the analogies she uses, this isn’t contemporary or domestic — it’s making a link between modern technology and the ancient past. 

The first ever Doctor Who story, broadcast 23 November to 14 December 1963, involves a tribe of cave people where authority is dependent on the ability to make fire (I think this owes a debt to The Inheritors by William Golding). “Fire will kill us all in the end,” opines the Old Mother of the tribe.

In the next story, we see something of this prophecy come to pass when the TARDIS materialises in a petrified forest that Barbara initially thinks is the result of a “forest fire”. It turns out that the devastation is the result of a neutron bomb, leaving the ground and atmosphere “polluted with a very high level of fallout”. Beings called Daleks are among the survivors.

I’m not the first to suggest that the Doctor Who production team deliberately juxtaposed the role of fire in the prehistoric tribe and the role of nuclear weapons on this futuristic world as part of a wider ambition to have the time travellers witness key moments of societal change. And it’s exactly the same connection made by Margot Bennett.

Did she and David Whitaker discuss it? And who exactly informed whom?

Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

LXXI

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,

Nor all they Tears wash out a Word of it. (p. 92)

Or, to put it another way, you can’t rewrite history — not one line.

In 1859, a reclusive, privately wealthy scholar called Edward Fitzgerald anonymously published 250 copies of a pamphlet containing his translation in English of 75 four-line rhyming poems, a form known as “rubāʿī”, attributed to a Persian poet, Omar Khayyám, in the 11th century. No one paid much attention to this pamphlet until, in 1861, the lawyer and literary scholar Whitley Stokes happened across a stack of copies at a bookstall near Leicester Square, where the original price of five shillings had been reduced to a penny. 

Having bought one, Stokes showed it to his friends, including the poets Algernon Charles Swinburne and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who duly bought their own copies. Swinburne’s account of what then happened (apparently from p. 188, vol 6, of The Swinburne Letters) is quoted in my copy of the Rubáiyát:

“Next day we thought we might get some more for presents among our friends, but the man at the stall asked twopence! Rossetti expostulated with him in terms of such humorously indignant remonstrance as none but he could ever have commanded. We took a few, and left him. In a week or two, if I am not much mistaken, the remaining copies were sold at a guinea.” (p. x)

Word gradually caught on. Fitzgerald produced an expanded, second edition containing 110 of the four-line poems in 1868, and further revised editions, each of 101 of these quatrains, in 1872, 1879 and 1889 — the latter published after Fitzgerald’s death.

By the end of the 19th century, “more than two millions copies have been sold [of the Rubaiyat] in over two hundred editions” (according to a facsimile of the first edition published c. 1900). It became “one of the most admired works of Victorian literature” and “in the first half of the 20th century was arguably the most influential [long poem] in the English language”, according to Melvyn Bragg, introducing a 2014 episode of In Our Time on The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. 

Hector Hugh Munro adopted the pen-name “Saki” after the cup-bearer in the Rubaiyat. Various dining clubs were established in honour of Khayyam: writers JM Barrie, Arthur Conan-Doyle, Thomas Hardy and AE Housman were all members of one. Housman’s friend, the mathematician John Edensor Littlewood bought a slim, pocket-sized volume containing both the first and forth editions as a present for my great aunt on her 11th birthday in 1938, which is the copy I’ve just read.

In 1961, David Whitaker drew from this book when he wrote the BBC children’s serial Garry Halliday and the Secret of Omar Khayyam, broadcast at Saturday teatimes over seven weeks in early 1962. I’ll dig into that more when I write up my notes for the corresponding entry in my Garry Halliday episode guide. But for now, it’s enough to recognise that this little book was still resonant a hundred years after Whitley Stokes first discovered it on that bookstall. 

But why was this slim book of poems such a massive hit in the late 19th and early 20th century? 

It’s effectively a day in the life; the opening rubāʿī describes the start of new day in the early part of the year, the dawn sun touching the Sultan’s Turret in an unnamed Persian town, a cock crowing and — in subsequent quatrains — a group of people waiting eagerly for the tavern to open. The poet wanders this town, enjoying a cup of wine and musing on the nature of existence. 

XLVII

And if the Wine you drink, the Lip you press,

End in the Nothing all Things end in—Yes—

Then fancy while Thou art, Thou art but what

Thou shalt be—Nothing—Thou shalt not be less.

(First edition, p. 56)

XXIV

Ah, make the most of what ye may spend,

Before we too into the Dust descend;

Dust into Dust, and under Dust to lie

Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and—sans End!

(Fourth edition, p, 76)

There was, at the time Fitzgerald published his first edition, a long-standing interest in Persian culture and the wider Orient, not least because of British imperial interests across the east and into India. The Persian language was used by the East India Company in provincial governments and courts until the 1830s. Sir William Jones’s various translations and his A grammar of the Persian language (1771) influenced the generations that followed. For example, the Jones translation of the 8th century Mu’allaqat inspired Alfred Tennyson to write his Locksley Hall (1835). Tennyson was, in turn, a friend of Edward Fitzgerald.

That context is useful but doesn’t explain the particular appeal of the Rubaiyat. What made this text stand out?

Note that in the two quatrains quoted above there’s no mention of an afterlife. The In Our Time episode on the Rubaiyat and Sadeq Saba in his 2010 documentary The Genius of Omar Khayyam explore this issue of godlessness. Fitzgerald published his first edition in 1859, the same year that Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, at a time when there was already much interest in “long time” — ancient, geological history stretching back millions and billions of years, far further than accounted for by a literal reading of the Bible. These ideas were controversial. On In Our Time, the suggestion is made that Fitzgerald couldn’t have published a work of his own (supposed) agnostic, perhaps even atheistic, musings without inviting scandal; Khayyam enabled him to do so at a safe remove. Readers could also engage in such ideas without breaking from the Church.

I can see, too, that there’s an appeal in the world conjured here: a rich culture different from that of the late Victorians, and seemingly more free. The In Our Time episode talks about the wider allure of Orientalism to the late Victorians, notably in the sensuous hedonism of the harem. I don’t think there’s much licentiousness in the Rubaiyat, beyond the idea that the poet says to drink and enjoy wine while we can. But there’s an allure in any different, rich culture in which we can escape and be immersed — like the appeal of Middle Earth or sci-fi or Regency novels. Once entranced, there’s always more to steep yourself in: the history and rules, the minutiae, the power politics in wrangling among other true believers. (The same might be true of the football terrace, too.)

There are often good reasons why someone actively seeks such escape. In Our Time cites Fitzgerald’s close friendship with Professor Edward Byles Cowell; the first edition is in part a translation of the Persian quatrains Cowell found while in Calcutta and sent to Fitzgerald, their correspondence apparently suggestive of how keenly the two men felt their separation. We can read something into this, just as readers of the Rubaiyat could read their own hopes and desires into the tantalising world it conjured. It’s a frame in which things are possible that would not be dared outside.

But maybe the appeal isn’t nearly so immersive. This kind of “enjoy life while you can” stuff is not a world away from “live, laugh love”. That such aphorisms here derive from some ancient, eastern scholar confers authenticity and value to what a cynic might otherwise see as greetings-card wisdom. And there’s also something haunting in this voice from what’s now almost a thousand years ago exhorting us to enjoy our existence and to live while we can.

In fact, we’re not sure Omar Khayyam really said the things attributed to him. It’s not just that many of the surviving quatrains in Persian give no indication of author, but Fitzgerald took a very free hand in translating the texts he had to hand, reordering and rewording them, grafting in bits that sound like the Book of Common Prayer (compare the last quatrain I quoted to the famous “dust to dust...”) and Shakespeare. That might not resonate so much with us now as it did with late Victorian readers. Moulded in their own language, no wonder they felt that this text out of the long past spoke to them so directly.

The real Omar Khayyam — full name Ghiyāth al-Dīn Abū al-Fatḥ ʿUmar ibn Ibrāhīm Nīsābūrī — is no less fascinating than this mythic version. 

“Better known for his poetry, it often surprises many to learn that Omar Khayyam (1048-1131) was one of the greatest of all medieval mathematicians,” says Jim Al-Khalili in his book Pathfinders — The Golden Age of Arabic Science (2010). He cites Khayyam’s work on cubic equations in Treatise on Demonstration of Problems of Algebra, including “both algebraic and geometric methods for solving them systematically and elegantly, using the method of conical sections (which involves slicing through a cone at different angles to produce different types of curves such as circles, ellipses, parabolas and hyperbolas)” (p. 122).

I’m familiar with conic sections being used to make sense or orbits, whether those of celestial bodies or the rockets and craft trying to reach them, and wonder how much of Khayyam survives in the mechanics of the space age.

Khayyam was also part of a team that, with cutting-edge technology such as the astrolabe, calculated the length of the year with much greater accuracy than the contemporary Gregorian model; indeed, the Jalali calendar devised by Khayyam and his colleagues was still in use into the 20th century. In addition, Al-Khalili quotes a long passage from one of Khayyam’s other surviving works, more reliably attributed to him than his poetry, extolling the virtues of seeking the truth — and acknowledging that people will mock you for doing so. It’s quoted at length because it expresses a sentiment that Al-Khalili recognises now, the voice of the exasperated scientist ringing down to us through the ages.

I can see why this little book of poetry, written by an influential mathematician, would have appealed to JE Littlewood, and why he chose it as a gift for an 11 year-old. It bears a simple, four-word inscription, “Ann, from Uncle John”, and the date. But what he was giving her was a guide to life, and a frame in which unconventional ideas and conversations are possible. And that was important because, as the inscription shows, he’d not yet admitted what was known within the family: that Ann was his daughter.

But perhaps I’m just the latest in a long line to read into this little book what I want to see. 

Exit Through the Fireplace, by Kate Dunn

First published in 1998, this is an oral history of repertory theatre - which is where the same group of actors star in play after play, usually on stage with one while rehearsing the next. The book is based on interviews with more than 200 actors, directors and stage managers, the youngest of them a 27 year-old David Tennant, here in the company of such luminaries as Lionel Jeffries and Phyllida Law, Harriet Walter and Derek Jacobi.

Names big and small share first-hand experience and also tales they were handed down. At times, this can get a bit repetitive — we get multiple stories about problems with on-set doors and actors having to make entrances or pass props through the fireplace. Quite often, the author summarises what a person is going to say before quoting them saying it. And I suspect that some of these stories have been embellished in the telling, either by the people quoted here or by whoever told them.

It’s not always clear when these stories took place, and I can’t believe that rep was the same in the 1930s and ‘50s and ‘80s. I found myself looking up the birthdates of the people spoken to so that I could put their accounts in chronological context (and work out which were contemporaries of David Whitaker, about whom more in mo…)

There’s also a surprising moment in the plate section, where one photograph from a production of Charley’s Aunt in Buxton in 1952 includes “Prudence Williams (the author’s mother), Gwynn Whitby (the author’s grandmother)” and “Nigel Arkwright (the author’s uncle)” — as well as a very young Nigel Hawthorne. I’d have liked more on this personal connection, the legacy of rep. The photo is followed by two more from productions of Charley’s Aunt, in Ipswich in 1984 and in Bexhill in 1960. Again, I’d have liked more on the choice of plays in rep, making sense of why some production played for just one week in one location and others ran and ran. 

Even so, this is a treasure trove full of insight and detail. Bits of it are extraordinary. Derek Jacobi recounts having smallpox while in Birmingham (p. 190), considered serious enough that he didn’t have to go on stage, while others with gastric flu soldiered on (buckets kept handily just off-stage). Or there’s the reference to Anthony Oakley, who accidentally killed the actor he was duelling with in a production of Macbeth (p. 187). 

Then there’s the sense of tradition, reaching back in time.

“Elizabeth Counsell … worked in a company with an elderly actor, who told her that as a boy he had been in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream playing one of the Mechanicals. During rehearsals an elderly actor in that company had given him the business associated with his character, which had been handed down over hundreds of years from Will Kempe, the actor who played the comic roles in Shakespeare’s own company.” (p. 70) 

Nicely, this is then followed by Alan Ayckbourn being sceptical about this kind of claim — whether its really credible that such knowledge is passed down intact, and whether its useful anyway. That means we get Counsell’s awe-striking anecdote and also probe at it a bit, too.

A lot of it is very funny, such as the amazing image conjured by Brian Cox’s story about the day of his wedding to Caroline Burt in 1968. He was at Birmingham Rep at the time, appearing as Iago in Othello, alongside a blacked-up Michael Gambon in the title role. The reception was held in the morning and then the groom and other cast members were expected back on stage for their afternoon performance.

“I was the only one who was sober… I was sharing a dressing room with Mike. … He finally got all his clothes on [for the performance] and we were ready and ‘Beginners’ was called, then I looked at Mike and I realised he didn’t have any make-up on. And he was playing Othello! I said, ‘Mike, you haven’t got any make-up on,’ and he looked at his sticks of make-up and said, ‘That’s all right,’ and he gathered up the make-up and held the sticks under the lightbulb until they went soft and then rubbed them all over his face.” (p. 69)

Barbara Leslie married Shaun Sutton in 1948 while they were both in the cast of Jane Eyre — “I was playing Adele, aged eight, and Shaun was playing eighty” (p. 69) — and they held a party after the show, which then went on all night. Two weeks later, says Leslie, another colleague in the same company, Joan Sanderson, married Gregory Moseley and they held a party in the middle of the day, before taking to the stage for a performance of You Can’t Take It With You in which “half the cast were drunk”. One older actress was so incapable that a 17 year-old assistant stage manager (ASM) had to be quickly aged up by dousing her in talcum powder so she could take over.

Philip Voss recalls that “there was a lot of drinking in those days”, and in a production of Death of a Salesman at Colchester, a drunk ASM played the wrong sound effect cue at the dramatic climax — instead of a car crash, the audience heard wedding bells (p. 26).

Even without wedding-related shenanigans, there’s a constant feeling of chaos: missed lines, missed entrances and corpsing on stage, on top of all the privations. It’s sometimes difficult to keep track of the paltry rates of pay because the stories are grouped together by theme rather than chronologically, meaning that two actors citing their appallingly low salaries give wildly different figures. 

But we get a vivid sense of the poverty from descriptions of changing rooms (sometimes just one room for all the actors, a curtain to divide the women from the men), accommodation and toilets. Friendly landladies would come into an actors’ room in the morning while they were still in bed to light the coal fire. Dirk Bogarde, we’re told, started his career as a “pot boy” at the Q Theatre in Hammersmith, sweeping the stage, washing up tea cups and cleaning toilets (p. 8).

In piecing together these stories, we get an evocative history of rep, full of textures and feeling. I was surprised to learn that rep isn’t some ancient tradition going back centuries but a particularly 20th century phenomenon. Dunn explains that the term “repertory theatre” was coined during the 1904-07 season at the Royal Court Theatre in London, where John Vedrenne and Hartley Granville-Barker “emphasised the importance of the play, rather than individual actors” (p. 2). The first repertory company was begun by Annie Horniman in 1908, at the Gaiety Theatre in Manchester. This book, published in 1998, sees rep as now passing from history — or perhaps even already gone.

There are lots of tidbits, too, on the mechanics of rep. It explains, for example, the role of rep in getting past the Catch-22 situation facing new actors: you could only get a professional job if you had an Equity card, but could only get an Equity card if you had a professional job.

“Every repertory company was allowed to give out two cards a year and the competition for them was understandably fierce.” (p. 7)

I knew that actors in rep had to provide their own costumes and make-up but didn’t realise there were set terms. Dunn quotes from the Standard Esher Contract:

“All character and special costumes and wigs shall be provided by the Manager. No Artist shall be required to provide any costume that could not ordinarily be used by him in his private capacity. A male Artist receiving a weekly salary of £8 or less shall not be required to provide more than two ordinary walking suits and one evening suit.” (p. 130)

A dress call held after morning rehearsal on Friday allowed everyone to see what each other was wearing for the new play opening on Monday, with adjustments then made if actors clashed with one another or the set (p. 131). Most actresses took sewing machines with them (p. 132). But a wide range of skills were expected.

The entry-level job was as assistant stage manager, or acting/ASM, where novice actors got small roles on stage but also did anything else needing doing. The idea was that they’d get a broad education on the workings of theatre — the lights in the “flies”, the logistics of building and dressing a set, and all the unexpected, weird stuff. Liza Goddard learned to reupholster sofas and chairs — “I can still do that” (p. 29). ASMs had to find furniture, decor and ornamentation for the sets, often by going begging round the local shops and houses (p. 28); they also had to provide (and cook) any food eaten on stage (p. 29). 

Then there were the sound effects to be played in live. Alec McCowen recalls traditional means, such as peas on a drum to convey rain, and electrical sticks for lightning (p. 26). Phyllida Law was put in charge of a panotrope gramophone and accompanying 78 rpm records.

“I marked these records, would you believe it, with tailor’s chalk, so I knew where to put the needle on to start the supposedly atmospheric music.” (p. 25)

(Not mentioned, but something I’ve been looking at in my wider research, is the records especially pressed for stage productions, with whatever sound effects an individual play required. The Bishop Sound Company, later Bishop Sound & Electrical Company, in London was a pioneer of this — and the British Library holds a collection of Bishop Sound recordings. The same kind of technology was employed on old television, such as in the early years years of Doctor Who, with “grams” played in live to the studio.)

For one production in Oldham, ASM Bernard Cribbins had to source a goat to appear on stage, which he’d bring in each day on the bus.

“The driver used to make me go upstairs [with it]. I’d ask for one and a goat to Rose Bank, which was near the theatre.” (p. 31)

Cribbins also says that he didn’t get days off, as he was required to help on Sundays with striking the set of one production and putting up the next one (p. 32). He doesn’t have quite the nostalgic wistfulness of his contemporaries: “they weren’t good old days when you think about it, it was bloody hard work.” (pp. 33-34) 

For all the hard graft, the toil and sweat, there’s a vivid sense here of the formality of this bygone age: Jennie Goossens says leading men in a company were always addressed by their surname (p. 57). There’s the respectability, too. At Colchester, according to Philip Voss, producer “Bob Digby insisted that we behave well. We weren’t allowed to hold hands in the street” (p. 57).

I’d already read something of the sort in a biography of Yootha Joyce:

“Whatever their background, Harry Hanson was known to pressure his actors to always appear glamorous, on and off stage. This filtered through to the other associated Harry Hanson companies.” (Paul Curran, Dear Yootha... (2014), p. 28)

That was reflected in the kind of material Hanson’s companies staged. Margery Mason, who worked with Hanson for 10 years, recalled his,

“fondness for ‘Anyone for tennis?’ type plays” (Margery Mason, Peaks and Troughs (2005), p. 32)

These memories were of interest to me as I traced David Whitaker’s life and career, because Whitaker made his professional debut as an actor/ASM with Harry Hanson’s Court Players at the Prince’s Theatre in Bradford in 1951, and over the next three years had stints with Hanson’s companies at the Hippodrome in Keighley, the Theatre Royal in Leeds, the Hippodrome in Stockton-on-Tees and the Lyceum in Sheffield. (For more details of his time in Bradford and Leeds, see the free postscript to my biography of David Whitaker; for more on his stage work more generally, see David’s Whitaker’s listing on Theatricalia.)

Harry Hanson (1895-1972) founded his first Court Players repertory company in Hastings in 1932, and soon had companies all over the UK, from Sheffield to Penge. In Exit Through the Fireplace, Peggy Mount — who was 13 years older than Whitaker — says she also started out as an ASM in “Leeds, which was Harry Hanson’s top company” (p. 189), suggesting that when Whitaker moved from ASM at Bradford to juvenile lead at Leeds, it was a significant step up.

[Above: "A definite step up the ladder" — profile of David Whitaker from an unknown newspaper with no date, though his last known performance at Bradford was on 8 March 1952 and he was at Leeds by 21 April; he turned 24 on 18 April that year.]

 

Mount says that Harry Hanson, “was a little, short, fat man and he had three wigs”, and actors learned to be on their guard if it was the blond one, as it meant Hanson was in a bad mood (p. 55). Others testify to Hanson’s temper; Paul Daneman calls him “a bit of an ogre and he had a stranglehold on rep” while Beryl Cooke says he’d sack actors who weren’t “DLP” or dead letter perfect (p. 54).

But Vilma Hollingberry says Hanson was “a marvellous man”, with a “waspish sense of humour and he cared tremendously about the standard of work” (p. 54). She reports, too, that her time with a Hanson company involved two performances a night of the same play, but the afternoon one would be shorter, with cuts made to allow the actors to take a longer tea break between shows. In the second performance, all the cut bits would be reinserted (p. 191). Given the punishing schedule and pressures of weekly rep anyway, this seems something like magic, or something bound to fail. It wouldn’t have helped dispel the air of chaos backstage.

Carmen Silvera also speaks of Hanson’s eye for detail:

“One was that flowers on stage must be right for the season in which the play was set and that every night they must be wrapped up in tissue paper and put in their boxes. All the lampshades that were used on set had to be covered in tissue paper every night, so that when we rehearsed on stage in the morning no dust would get on them and they would not be dirtied. Everything was protected so that his sets always looked good.” (p. 129)

One last intriguing thing. There’s a story from one “MC Hart” (p. 12), who we’re told “started his career with Butlin’s rep and went on to become a television director; among his credits are Waugh on Crime” (p. 260). But the latter seems to refer to a six-episode run of episodes of Thirty-Minute Theatre from 1970-71, half of them directed by Tristan de Vere Cole and the other half by Philip Dudley. Could this be Michael Hart, the director of 1969 Doctor Who story The Space Pirates and of episodes of Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle, and brother of Tony?