John
Boynton Priestley was born in Bradford
in 1894. On the outbreak of the First World War
Priestley immediately joined the British
Army. He was sent to France and in September 1915 took part in
the Battle of Loos. After being wounded in 1917 Priestley sent back
to England for six months. Soon after returning to the Western
Front he endured a German gas attack. Treated at Rouen he was
classified by the Medical Board as unfit for active service and was
transferred to the Entertainers Section of the British Army.
When Priestley left the army he became a student at Trinity Hall,
Cambridge. At university Priestley he
gained valuable experience by writing for the Cambridge
Review. After completing a degree in Modern History and
Political Science, Priestley found work as theatre reviewer with the
Daily News. He also contributed articles
to the Spectator, the Challenge
and Nineteenth Century. Priestly also began writing
books and his early critical writings such as The
English Comic Characters (1925), The
English Novel (1927), English
Humour (1928) established his reputation as an important
commentator on literature.
Priestley also wrote popular novels such as The
Good Companions (1929), Angel
Pavement (1930) and over fifty plays; the most notable
being Dangerous Corner (1932),
Time and the Conways (1937), When
We Are Married (1938) and
An Inspector Calls (1947).
In the 1930s Priestley became increasing concerned about social problems.
This is reflected in English Journey
(1934), an account of his travels through England.
During
the Second World War Priestley became the presenter
of Postscripts, a BBC
Radio radio programme that followed the nine o'clock news on Sunday
evenings. Starting on 5th June 1940, Priestley built up such a following
that after a few months it was estimated that around 40 per cent of
the adult population in Britain was listening to the programme.
Some
members of the Conservative Party
complained about Priestley expressing left-wing views on his radio
programme. As a result Priestley made his last talk on 20th October
1940. These were later published in book form as Britain
Speaks (1940).
Priestley
and a group of friends now established the 1941
Committee. One of its members, Tom
Hopkinson, later claimed that the motive force was the
belief that if the Second World War was to be
won "a much more coordinated effort would be needed, with stricter
planning of the economy and greater use of scientific know-how, particularly
in the field of war production."
Priestley
became the chairman of the committee and other members included Edward
G. Hulton,
Kingsley Martin,
Richard
Acland,
Michael Foot, Peter
Thorneycroft, Thomas Balogh, Richie
Calder, Tom
Winteringham, Vernon Bartlett,
Violet Bonham Carter, Konni
Zilliacus, Victor Gollancz, Storm
Jameson and David Low.
In December
1941 the committee published a report that called for public control
of the railways, mines and docks and a national wages policy. A further
report in May 1942 argued for works councils and the publication of
"post-war plans for the provision of full and free education,
employment and a civilized standard of living for everyone."
On
26th July 1941 Priestley, Richard Acland
and other members of the 1941 Committee
established the socialist Common Wealth
Party. The party advocated the three principles of Common Ownership,
Vital Democracy and Morality in Politics. The party favoured public
ownership of land and Acland gave away his Devon family estate of
19,000 acres (8,097 hectares) to the National Trust.
Priestley
was chairman of the new party but after a dispute with Acland he resigned
on 28th September. The C went on to win by-elections against Conservatives
at Eddisbury, Skipton and Chelmsford. However, in the 1945
General Election only one of its twenty-three candidates was successful
- at Chelmsford, where there was no Labour contestant. The Common
Wealth Party was dissolved in 1945 and most members joined the Labour
Party.
Some
members of the Labour Party disapproved
of the electoral truce between the main political parties during the
Second World War and in 1942 Priestley and Richard
Acland formed the socialist Common
Wealth Party. The party advocated the three principles of Common
Ownership, Vital Democracy and Morality in Politics. The party favoured
public ownership of land and Acland gave away his Devon family estate
of 19,000 acres (8,097 hectares) to the National Trust.
The
party won by-elections against Conservatives
at Eddisbury, Skipton and Chelmsford. However, in the 1945
General Election only one of its twenty-three candidates was successful
- at Chelmsford, where there was no Labour contestant. The Common
Wealth Party was dissolved in 1945 and most members joined the Labour
Party.
After
the war Priestley continued to wrote on politics and literature. He
wrote an article for the New Statesman
entitled Russia, the Atom and the West, where he attacked the
decision by Aneurin Bevan to abandon his
policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament (2nd November, 1957). The
article resulted in a large number of people writing letters to the
journal supporting Priestley's views. Kingsley
Martin, the editor of the New Statesman,
organised a meeting of people inspired by Priestley and as result
they formed the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
(CND). Early members of this group included Priestley, Bertrand
Russell, Fenner Brockway, Victor
Gollancz, Canon John Collins and Michael
Foot .
In his later years Priestley wrote two volumes of autobiography: Margin
Released (1962) and Instead of
the Trees (1977). John Boynton Priestley died on 14th August,
1984.
(1)
In his book Margin Released, J.
B. Priestley described his training as a young British soldier
at the beginning of the First World War.
It is not true, as some critics of the First
War British high command have suggested, that Kitchener's army consisted
of brave but half-trained amateurs, so much pitiful cannon-fodder.
In the earlier divisions like ours, the troops had months and months
of severe intensive training. Our average programme was ten hours
a day, and nobody grumbled more than the old regulars who had never
been compelled before to do so much and for so long.
(2)
J. B. Priestley met Lord
Kitchener in 1915.
I had a close view, finding him older and
greyer than the familiar pictures of him. The image I retained was
of a rather bloated purplish face and glaring but somehow jellied
eyes. A year later, when we heard he had been drowned, I felt no grief,
for it did not seem to me that a man had lost his life: I saw only
a heavy shape, its face now an idol's going down and down into the
northern sea. yet it was he - and he alone - who had raised us new
soldiers out of the ground.
(3)
J. B. Priestley, letter to his
father, Jonathan Priestley (27th September, 1915)
In the last four days in the trenches I
don't think I'd eight hours sleep altogether. It is frightfully difficult
to walk in the trenches owing to the slippery nature of things, the
most appalling thing is to see the stretcher bearers trying to get
the wounded men up to the Field Dressing station. On Saturday morning
we were subjected to a fearful bombardment by the German artillery;
they simply rained shells. One shell burst right in our trench - and
it was a miracle that so few - only four - were injured. I escaped
with a little piece of flesh torn out of my thumb. But poor Murphy
got a shrapnel wound in the head - a horrible great hole - and the
other two were the same. They were removed soon after and I don't
know how they are going on.
(4)
J. B. Priestley, letter to his
father, Jonathan Priestley (26th October, 1915)
We have been digging trenches since we have
been here; it is very hard work, as the soil is extremely heavy, the
heaviest clay I have ever dug and I've as much experience in digging
as most navvies. You may gather the speed we work when a man has to
do a 'task' - 6 ft long, 4 ft broad and 2 ft 6 ins deep in an afternoon.
Yesterday afternoon I had got right down to the bottom of the trench,
and consequently every blooming shovelful of clay I got I had to throw
a height of 12 ft to get it out of the back and over the parapet.
(5)
J. B. Priestley, letter to his
father, Jonathan Priestley (December, 1915)
The communication trenches are simply canals,
up to the waist in some parts, the rest up to the knees. There are
only a few dug-outs and those are full of water or falling in. Three
men were killed this wee from falling dugouts I haven't had a wash
since we came into these trenches and we are all mud from head to
foot.
(6)
J. B. Priestley, Postscripts,
radio broadcast (5th June, 1940)
I wonder how many of you feel as I do about
this great Battle and evacuation
of Dunkirk. The news of it came as a series of surprises and shocks,
followed by equally astonishing new waves of hope. What strikes me
about it is how typically English it is. Nothing, I feel, could be
more English both in its beginning and its end, its folly and its
grandeur. We have gone sadly wrong like this before, and here and
now we must resolve never, never to do it again. What began as a miserable
blunder, a catalogue of misfortunes ended as an epic of gallantry.
We have a queer habit - and you can see it running through our history
- of conjuring up such transformations. And to my mind what was most
characteristically English about it was the part played not by the
warships but by the little pleasure-steamers. We've known them and
laughed at them, these fussy little steamers, all our lives. These
'Brighton Belles' and 'Brighton Queens' left that innocent foolish
world of theirs to sail into the inferno, to defy bombs, shells, magnetic
mines, torpedoes, machine-gun fire - to rescue our soldiers.
(7)
J. B. Priestley, Postscripts,
radio broadcast (21st July, 1940)
We cannot go forward and build up this new
world order, and this is
our war aim, unless we begin to think differently one must stop thinking
in terms of property and power and begin thinking in terms of community
and creation. Take the change from property to community. Property
is the old-fashioned way of thinking of a country as a thing, and
a collection of things in that thing, all owned by certain people
and constituting property; instead of thinking of a country as the
home of a living society with the community itself as the first test.
(8)
J. B. Priestley, Britain Speaks
(1940)
It so happens that this war, whether those at present in
authority like it or not, has to be fought as a citizen's war. There
is no way out of that because an order to defend and protect this
island, not only against possible invasion but also against all the
disasters of aerial bombardment, it has been found necessary to bring
into existence a new network of voluntary associations such as the
Home Guard, the Observer Corps, all the A.R.P. and fire-fighting services,
and the like ... They are a new type, what might be called the organized
militant citizen. And the whole circumstances of their wartime life
favour a sharply democratic outlook. Men and women with a gift for
leadership now turn up in unexpected places. The new ordeals blast
away the old shams. Britain, which in the years immediately before
this war was rapidly losing such democratic virtues as it possessed,
is now being bombed and burned into democracy.
(9)
Sir Richard Maconachie, head of BBC
radio talks, letter to A. P. Ryan (6th September 1940)
Priestley
has definite social and political views which he puts over in his
broadcasts and through these broadcasts is, I think, exercising an
important influence on what people are thinking. These views may be
admirable or otherwise, but the question which I wish to raise is
whether any single person should be given the opportunity of acquiring
such an influence to the exclusion of others who differ from him merely
on the grounds of his merits as a broadcaster,
which are, of course, very great.
(10)
Graham Greene,
The Spectator (13th
December 1940)
Priestley became in
the months after Dunkirk a leader second only in importance to Mr
Churchill. And he gave us what our other leaders have always failed
to give us - an ideology.
(11)
Richard
Acland, letter to his son (1977)
In 1941 J. B. Priestley
was responsible for sustaining the morale of the people through the
worst months of the war. His thinking, though not identical to mine,
was often parrallel to it.
(12)
Margaret
Thatcher, The Path of Power
(1995)
The command economy required
in wartime conditions had habituated many people to an essentially
socialist mentality. Within the Armed Forces it was common knowledge
that left-wing intellectuals had exerted a powerful influence through
the Army Education Corps, which as Nigel Birch observed was 'the only
regiment with a general election among its battle honours'. At home,
broadcasters like J.B. Priestley gave a comfortable yet idealistic
gloss to social progress in a left-wing direction. It is also true
that Conservatives, with Churchill in the lead, were so preoccupied
with the urgent imperatives of war that much domestic policy, and
in particular the drawing-up of the agenda for peace, fell largely
to the socialists in the Coalition Government. Churchill himself would
have liked to continue the National Government at least until Japan
had been beaten and, in the light of the fast-growing threat from
the Soviet Union, perhaps beyond then. But the Labour Party had other
thoughts and understandably wished to come into its own collectivist
inheritance.
In I945 therefore, we
Conservatives found ourselves confronting two serious and, as it turned
out, insuperable problems. First, the Labour Party had us fighting
on their ground and were always able to outbid us. Churchill had been
talking about post-war 'reconstruction' for some two years, and as
part of that programme Rab Butler's Education Act was on the Statute
Book. Further, our manifesto committed us to the so-called 'full employment'
policy of the 1944 Employment White Paper, a massive house-building
programme, most of the proposals for National Insurance benefits made
by the great Liberal social reformer Lord Beveridge and a comprehensive
National Health Service. Moreover, we were not able effectively to
take the credit (so far as this was in any case appropriate to the
Conservative Party) for victory, let alone to castigate Labour for
its irresponsibility and extremism, because Attlee and his colleagues
had worked cheek by jowl with the Conservatives in government since
1940. In any event, the war effort had involved the whole population.
(13)
In his autobiography, Margin Released,
J. B. Priestley explained why he was taken off the BBC
during the Second World War (1962)
I received two letters - I kept them for
years but may have lost them
now - one was from the Ministry of Information, telling me that the
BBC was responsible for the decision to take me off the air, and the
other was from the BBC, saying that a directive had come from the
Ministry of Information to end my broadcasts.
(14)
J. B. Priestley, New
Statesman
(2nd November, 1957)
In plain words: now that Britain has told the world that
she has the H-Bomb she should announce as early as possible that she
has done with it, that she proposes to reject in all circumstances
nuclear warfare.
We ended
the war high in the world's regard. We could have taken over its moral
leadership, spoken and acted for what remained of its conscience,
but we chose to act otherwise. The melancholy consequences were that
abroad we cut a shabby figure in power politics and at home we shrug
it all away or go to the theatre to applaud the latest jeers and sneers
at Britannia.
Alone
we defied Hitler: and alone we can defy this nuclear madness there
may be other chain-reactions besides those leading to destruction:
and we might start one. The British of these times, so frequently
hiding their decent kind faces behind masks of sullen apathy or some
cheap cynicism, often seem to be waiting for something better than
party squabbles and appeals to their narrowest self-interest, something
great and noble in its intention that would make them feel good again.
And this might well be a declaration to the world that after a certain
date one power able to engage in nuclear warfare will reject the evil
thing for ever.
(15)
Diana Collins, interview with Vincent Brome (26th June, 1986)
He (J. B. Priestley) was a lovely man. He believed and
practised some of the best virtues:
integrity; honesty; loyalty to his old friends. He was kind, generous,
immensely understanding and I never heard him flatter anybody. He
was a wonderful giver but not a good receiver because he didn't want
to be beholden to anybody. Behind the big public figure he was really
a shy man who believed in old-fashioned courtesy. And what a lovely
father figure he made. Deeply aware? Of course he was deeply aware.
Sometimes in the afternoons I noticed a great melancholy overtaking
him. He would talk then of the individual being a bubble on the stream
of life which quietly burst when its day was done and disappeared
downstream, but he stopped short of the idea of complete annihilation.
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