Introduction
The interwar period was the heyday of British amateur theatre as a popular cultural practice, with an estimated 30,000 performing companies by 1939. Local amateur dramatic societies with regular programmes and festivals were ubiquitous. Many workplaces had drama groups as part of their sports and leisure activities. Playmaking was commonplace in Women’s Institute groups, in adult education schemes, and community development projects. Local newspapers treated amateur drama as a serious contributor to cultural capital, with regular reviews and articles.Footnote 1 Given this presence of amateur theatre in ordinary community life, it would be expected to feature in the major social movements of the time. One example is surely the peace movement in Britain, which also reached unprecedented levels of activity in the 1930s.
This article will demonstrate how diverse positions within the anti-war movement of the time – from the conventional understanding of pacifism to variations of preventing war through collective security and the League of Nations – were expressed and affirmed through amateur theatre. It describes some of the different organizations which were involved in this and why drama was important to them; also some of the international links which were forged. It then examines a range of the plays which were staged and what they intended to communicate, the dramatic techniques employed to do so, and the contexts of performance.
The article extends an existing field. Rebecca D’Monte’s valuable history of modern British theatre discusses the emergence of the anti-war play at this time but largely in terms of the professional stage. The nationwide infrastructure of the amateur sphere ensured that peace drama could reach a much wider audience than the London theatre. Another valuable study, by Heinz Kosok, deals with plays written in reaction to the Great War. He notes that anti-war plays were performed by the amateur sector in the 1930s, and briefly includes two of those discussed here, but digitized newspaper archives were in their infancy during his research, meaning that he could not cover when, where, and in what precise circumstances those plays were performed. Otherwise the production of original plays for the peace movement by the amateur stage has been generally overlooked. The exceptions tend to be where a play (Miracle at Verdun, for example, at Manchester Peace Week) features in the evolution of significant practitioners (in this case Joan Littlewood and Ewan MacColl). While the plays of the left-wing amateur theatre have received attention, those of the peace movement have, as Peter Billingham observes, lacked formal examination.Footnote 2 Thus this article contributes to exploring the territory further.
A Diverse Anti-War Movement
The social movement associated with the 1930s peace plays comprised several different initiatives.Footnote 3 These began with the League of Nations Union (LNU) which from 1919 canvassed support for the League as the international forum to prevent war. The LNU launched the Peace Ballot to counter what it saw as the government’s lukewarm endorsement of the League’s work. Between autumn 1934 and May 1935 half a million volunteer canvassers went door-to-door with the Peace Ballot questionnaire and managed to reach some 38 per cent of the electorate. The results suggested widespread approval for a League-organized multilateral disarmament and curtailment of private arms manufacture, as well as overwhelming support for economic sanctions against aggressor states. As the 1935 general election approached, and in the face of Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia, the British government appeared to accept the findings as its policy, but once its majority was secured its interest faded.
The Women’s Co-operative Guild had provided a significant number of the Peace Ballot canvassers; a working-class organization, the Guild had 87,246 members, in 1,819 branches, by 1939. In 1936 the Guild launched the white poppy appeal as an alternative to what it saw as the militarization of the November remembrance commemoration. By 1936, too, disillusionment with the effectiveness of the League of Nations gave rise to the Peace Pledge Union. Members of the PPU (often motivated by religious witness) renounced all war and pledged to ‘never again, directly or indirectly, support or sanction another’. The PPU had received 120,000 pledges within a year and published its own newspaper, Peace News.
The International Peace Campaign (IPC) was founded following a Brussels conference in 1936, and established branches in several European countries. The objectives of this campaign included internationally agreed multilateral disarmament and the suppression of private arms manufacture, as well as to strengthen the League of Nations by organizing systems of collective security and mutual assistance against aggressors, thereby preventing future wars. The British section encouraged local Peace Councils to form, and by 1937 it was reported that 186 Peace Councils or similar bodies were functioning as the local coordinating body for peace activities along these lines. Almost every city and most towns hosted a Peace Week from the mid-thirties. These events would usually be organized by a committee or Peace Council comprising League of Nations Union branch members, local authorities, schools, churches, and other interested organizations. Peace Weeks featured meetings, pageants, concerts, lectures, and performances; several, for example in South Wales and Scotland, involved thousands of people in their activities. The aim, according to the IPC, was to make the public pro-peace, and not just anti-war, and to promote the idea that defence was best achieved through collective security rather than the armed strength of individual nations.Footnote 4
Martin Ceadel has noted a crucial division between those who refused to support war in absolutely any circumstances – pacifists such as the PPU, Quakers, and the leadership of the Women’s Co-operative Guild – and others who were more pragmatic. This first element could not support the IPC policy of imposing international economic sanctions on aggressor states because they held this to be akin to the use of force.Footnote 5 The others, including much of the labour movement, were those prepared to be more pragmatic. This became acute by the mid-1930s over the issue of ‘collective security’: the aim of a formal agreement between nations for mutual support, including military action if absolutely unavoidable, to counter the threat of aggression by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Pragmatists in the anti-war movement (principally the political left and the LNU) supported this whereas others felt they could not.
Historians such as Jill Liddington therefore acknowledge that although the movement was massive, and had some coordinating bodies, it comprised conflicting strategies and thus lacked real political impact.Footnote 6 To give just one example, a mass anti-war rally in Liverpool in 1936 heard one speaker call on everyone present ‘to pledge [that] never in any circumstances would they fight or harm another human being’, and another to call for a united front against fascism, the major threat to world peace; another speaker justified military action if it preserved the covenants of the League of Nations.Footnote 7 The Women’s Co-operative Guild leaders rejected annual conference calls to support the united front against fascism. These different perspectives in war resistance can be identified in the plays performed in its cause.
‘Peace Propaganda Must Be Attractive’
During the 1920s, when the League of Nations Union was arguably the principal anti-war organization, its local branches were using drama as a propaganda tool, as entertainment at social gatherings, and to make meetings more attractive. In 1927, for example, it was reported that in ‘the winter months many branches find that a meeting preceded or followed by a dramatic entertainment draws a big crowd. There are several plays which deal with the League and peace, and which might well be performed on such occasions.’Footnote 8 This continued until the outbreak of the Second World War.
Members of the British Commission of the IPC had met in 1936 to discuss how the artistic professions could support the cause. This meeting suggested ‘the holding of a peace week, once a year, in every part of the country’ whose activities should include ‘the production of a peace play’. Such productions became the norm: either a single performance or programme, one play repeated throughout the week, or a different one each night. It later advised that ‘peace propaganda must be attractive, and that every device must be used to portray, in an effective manner, the possibilities of social progress in a world assured of peace’. Playwright Shirland Quin agreed. She told the audience at one of her performances that ‘drama was so often the means of piercing apathy that the more presentations of anti-war plays the better it would be for the world’.Footnote 9 Drama was clearly one of these devices, with a Peace journal editorial hoping that ‘groups all over the country will produce peace plays this autumn and winter; for, if they are good plays well-acted, they are certainly an excellent method of propaganda and one that will reach an audience to which it might be difficult to introduce the ideas of pacifism’. This was endorsed by at least one theatregoer after a performance: ‘Many people who would not think of attending a peace meeting readily attend such performances. The value of such services cannot be measured.’Footnote 10
Aside from its value in making peace campaign activities more interesting and more likely to involve the uncommitted, there were more subtle reasons for using drama in this way, related to the very nature of the art form. This was articulated by R. H. (Richard Heron) Ward, an experienced amateur theatre actor and producer who was active in the PPU and a prime mover in the Adelphi Players during the Second World War. For him effective drama – only good plays, he stressed – created a co-operative rapport between performers and audience. It was within this space that minds could be open to receive pacifist ideas.Footnote 11 The PPU Headquarters Drama group performed one-act plays at meetings in the London area, and Ward had further aspirations that PPU headquarters could act as an advisory resource for groups planning a production where possible. He published a series of long articles between October and November 1937 in Peace News offering detailed guidance on every aspect of theatrical production for amateur groups: choice of plays, casting, acting, stage management, production, and properties.Footnote 12
Local branches of the LNU and the PPU were encouraged to perform plays and to establish good relations with their local amateur dramatic societies. Both of these bodies offered lists of suitable plays for performance, and published scripts were made available on loan. The British Drama League (BDL), the umbrella organization for amateur theatre groups, loaned texts from its library and described ‘a steady demand for anti-war plays’. This was just one report that prompted a local press drama critic to announce: ‘There is a big move at the moment to use the amateur stage as a means of peace propaganda.’Footnote 13
International Links
The Pax Players were an international network of amateur playmakers supporting peace movements and a British section was formed in 1925. Local companies of Pax Players were drawn from the different amateur societies, and they performed and toured (for their expenses only) at the different Peace Weeks, League of Nations Union, Peace Pledge Union, and other public meetings. The Scottish Pax Players toured fourteen different venues in 1937. The Players held an annual national conference with training sessions and speakers on drama and peace from different countries.Footnote 14
There were links with the Federal Theatre Project in the United States,Footnote 15 an important cultural dimension to the Works Progress Administration before it was subjected to budget cuts and the hostility of the House of Un-American Activities Committee. Many Federal Theatre Project (FTP) activists were particularly concerned with drama of social significance. Thus the Project circulated lists of peace plays recommended for performance by ‘amateur drama groups, religious and peace organizations, schools, civic groups, and women’s clubs’. They were compiled with the co-operation of peace activists and anti-war organizations, apparently the result of having ‘viewed every conceivable type of anti-war drama written for the use of non-professional groups’.Footnote 16 The list included some of the works to be discussed here – Dragon’s Teeth, And So To War, and Ashes of Victory, for example. The FTP circulated another list of peace plays, which included Moloch as well as work by Auden and Isherwood, as ‘the best English and American material of its kind available’. What all on the lists had in common was ‘that each registers in its own way a protest against the imbecility and brutality of war’. The lists were also presented in the hope that they would stimulate the production of more anti-war plays ‘at a time when, more than ever before, the world is sorely in need of the lessons they teach’.Footnote 17 The productions during Peace Weeks, League of Nations meetings, and amateur drama festivals in Britain were part of an international peace play movement, and their value was recognized by it.
The plays this article will now examine were all performed by amateur companies as direct contributions to peace movement activities at meetings of organizations, as entries in festivals and competitions, and as part of local societies’ regular programmes. They are all little-known works, but as Simon Shepherd has observed of theatre history in general, little-known works can reveal something important about the period in question.Footnote 18 In this example they are historical source material in their own right, chosen for articulating different themes within peace movement politics and providing evidence of the culture of that movement.
Women, and Invoking Moloch
Moloch is the mythological deity that can avert crises for the state but only if appeased by the selective sacrifice of a nation’s youth. For some this was an obvious metaphor for the Great War. It was also the title of a play by Winifred and (her husband) John L. Carter, both of whom had had some success as popular novelists and playwrights. The play was a three-act piece first produced at a London membership theatre in 1930. The transfer to the West End was not a commercial success but Moloch was popular with both critics and audiences at peace movement events when it was released for amateur performance (Figure 1).
Programme for Moloch, Strand Theatre, London, 1930. (Author’s collection).
As the play opens,Footnote 19 it is Armistice Day and Mrs Morris has been on her annual visit to the grave of the Unknown Warrior to honour her son Ted, killed in the Great War. Her daughter-in-law Mary, Ted’s widow, is being courted by William; Mary is responsive but believes a remarriage would be too soon and disrespectful to her dead husband. William tells her that this is just her mother’s influence: ‘she’s tied you down to the dead’ (p. 13). This is a theme in the play: one woman is cemented in grief while another is beginning to move on from it. Dick, the surviving Morris son, works in a local factory with Professor Zeigher, commissioned to develop poison gas to exterminate London’s rats. Echoing real contemporary fears, the Professor tells people it’s certain there’ll be another war because every country is setting its chemists on to see who can invent the worst gas; his ambition is to invent one that kills instantly. Mrs Morris is worried by the talk of rearmament because if there’s another war, then Ted and his mates will have died for nothing. She feels that there ‘ought to be something we women could do to save our sons’, but her friend and neighbour doesn’t believe anyone ‘is going to listen to what any woman thinks’ (p. 23).
At the same time she comes to accept the engagement of William and Mary and that her self-absorption had prevented her from realizing Mary’s need to move on. However, come the day of the wedding, she pleads illness and does not attend it. She falls asleep and the lights fade; when they come on again, the room is in the past, during the war. Dreaming, Mrs Morris relives Ted’s last leave, when he arrived home for the marriage arrangements with Mary. His mother can see through his efforts to present a positive front, and eventually he breaks down, revealing the realities of life in the trenches, including his lack of hatred for the enemy, who are young men like himself: ‘It’s not our war at all … We’re just cannon fodder, like beasts being driven to the slaughterhouse’ (p. 44). At least his brother Dick is too young and so ‘cannot be taken’ (p. 43). Mrs Morris wakes as the wedding party returns and is bewildered to see that it’s actually William whom Mary has married.
In the last act there are the occasional off-stage sounds of a military band and parade ground drilling to indicate that preparations for another war are underway. Dick is safe in a reserved occupation working with the Professor. He reveals that he overheard Ted’s speech on his last leave. He won’t join up; he isn’t afraid of death but he is afraid of the horrors of war: ‘it’s working on the gas that makes me know just what it means – no escape for any of us!’ (p. 53) His fiancée Lily is stung by comments at the factory about Dick shirking the war and believes he should join up. Dick’s mother retorts: ‘It’s easy enough to be patriotic about other women’s sons. Wait till you’ve got one of your own’ (p. 53). But Lily (‘I’ve been courted by a blasted coward’) responds with a white feather and breaks the engagement (p. 54). In the final scene a jovial family gathering comes to an end when Dick and Lily return, now reconciled, following his succumbing to various pressures and joining up, thus saving his engagement in the process. As the humorous banter round the table deteriorates, his mother slips Dick a poison she has obtained under a pretext from the Professor. As he dies his mother sounds triumphant: ‘Do what you like. Dick’s safe. Ted’s safe. Both my sons are safe!’ (p. 62).
Apart from the Professor, all the characters are ordinary people, neither affluent nor highly educated, and the play intersperses politics with domestic life and tea-table conversation and banter. This intersperses humour with the tragic themes. According to some reviews, this was ‘a war play with a difference’, and ‘the most affecting of the war plays London has yet seen’ on account of its theme of the effects of the Great War on women who had lost someone. The quality of the acting, particularly the female parts, was widely praised, and the humorous scenes were said to mitigate a tendency towards melodrama. At the same time, in some quarters, the ‘propaganda theme’ was felt to be ‘over-emphasized’ and ‘crude but earnest’.Footnote 20 The equal number of male and female parts, and the opportunities for strong acting in the female roles, would have recommended Moloch to the amateur sector with its the large numbers of women participants. In addition it was easy to stage, because the action takes place in one room with no set changes. It appeared at Peace Weeks in Sunderland, Oldham, and Macclesfield in the north of England, and in Hendon, London, in 1936 and 1937, for example, sometimes with daily performances during the week. In Scotland during Airdrie Peace Week in 1937 it was reported to have exerted ‘a firm grip on the attention of the large audience’, and in Hendon it was pronounced ‘a huge success’, both financially and as peace propaganda.Footnote 21
Frederic Evans and Walter McLeod (Evans was a former army officer and education official in Wales) authored several plays for the amateur theatre at this time. One, Ashes of Victory – effectively a one-act play because its three ‘acts’ are short enough to be scenes – was a popular piece, again explicit with the theme of sacrifice to Moloch (Figure 2).Footnote 22 The opening scene is set in Ancient Carthage, where a family waits to hear if their son will be one of those chosen to be sacrificed to the god Moloch. Carthage is threatened by enemy armies and it is believed that the sacrifices will ensure the safety and prosperity of the city.
Programme for Ashes of Victory, Nelson Peace Week (November, 1937). Reproduced with permission from Lancashire Archives.
Figure 2. Long description
The document is a printed page numbered 15 at the bottom.
At the top, a header reads NELSON PEACE WEEK followed by a series of dots and the date November 7th to 13th, 1937.
Below the header is the announcement for a PEACE PLAY titled Ashes of Victory by Frederic Evans and Walter McLeod, scheduled for Tuesday Evening at Salem School. It is described as A Play in Three Acts. The character list includes:
* The Mother - Miss N. PARKER, B. A.
* The Father - Mr. W. E. JACKSON, B. Sc.
* The Uncle - Mr. CLIFFORD CARTMELL
* The Herald - Mr. ALAN WELLOCK
* The Professor - Mr. HENRY IRVING
* The Spokesman - Mr. ALAN WELLOCK
Produced by Miss CLIFF, B. A.
The scenes are listed as:
* Act I. The interior of a house in Carthage in the Fourth Century B. C.
* Act II. A drawing room in a house in London in June, 1914.
* Act III. Same as in Act II, but in May, 1918.
The bottom half of the page details a Peace Poster Competition divided into three classes:
* CLASS A. Ages from 6 to 12 inclusive.
* CLASS B. Age 13 to 16 inclusive.
* CLASS C. Ages from 17 upwards.
Instructions specify that posters should be in Water Colour, Poster Paint, Indian Ink, or Cut Paper, but NOT in Charcoal or Pastel. Size is limited to Imperial (22in. x 32in.). Prizes of 10/-, 5/-, and 2/6 are mentioned for various categories. Contact information is provided for the Secretary, J. CALLAND, 363 Leeds Road, Nelson.
The father was initially reluctant, but didn’t speak in the marketplace against the idea of human sacrifice: ‘They would have laughed me to scorn; they would have given me a white feather for my son to wear; they would have stoned me and persecuted me.’ The uncle agrees that ‘In her supreme hour of peril with the armies of our enemies challenging the very existence of this great empire, Carthage has the need … nay, the right to demand the lives of her sons and daughters’ (p. 7). In contrast, the mother is the sole opponent:
Always it is someone else for the sacrifice. Were it not so then such as thou might easily find the honour of Carthage a poor consolation for death upon the altar. Always it is the young … the defenceless. The old men see visions and the young men die ten thousand deaths. (p. 8)
According to the men, this is dangerous blasphemy and shows that the importance of all this is beyond the understanding of women. They receive news that the boy has been sacrificed, ‘happy to be numbered with the saviours of his country’(p. 11). The family are presented with a memorial tablet in honour of their son’s courage and service. The mother alone is inconsolable; the men agree that it is ‘too hard for women to understand these matters’ (p. 13).
The second act is set in the living room of a middle-class London family in June 1914. The grandfather is a Professor of Archaeology recently returned from a dig at the site of Carthage. He presents them with an artefact he has unearthed there – in fact the memorial tablet we have previously seen. As it is placed on the mantelpiece, they discuss its meaning, and the reasoning behind the ritual sacrifice of youth – something at which the modern mother is particularly horrified. The final scene is set in May 1918, and the young son of the family has been killed while serving with the Royal Flying Corps. In response to unreflective patriotism – the uncle states that were he ten years younger he’d be in the trenches himself, and glory in it – and pride in the son’s sacrifice, it is the mother again who protests. She sees the crash that killed her son as his funeral pyre, and a sacrifice of youth comparable to the atrocities of the ancient world: ‘Our statesmen talk of honour, prestige, while a generation dies on the battlefield… . We worship today gods as false as any worshipped in pagan days – honour, glory, patriotism’ (p. 23). She believes that the mothers and fathers, most especially the mothers, of Europe must ‘speak from the housetops’ that this sacrifice of youth must stop. The uncle is appalled at such ‘claptrap’ – the ‘vilest pacifism’, which, if overheard could damage his military career. The father too is concerned about possible repercussions if his wife’s views become public. Both men agree that female emotionalism makes it too difficult for them to understand the issues. Finally a local society visits the family to present them with a memorial certificate in honour of their son’s service. It is placed on the mantelpiece alongside the tablet from Carthage.
Ashes of Victory, published in 1933, was performed to good effect during Peace Weeks in Lancashire, in London (as part of efforts to recruit volunteers for the Peace Ballot), and at the annual general meetings of League of Nations Union branches all around the country.Footnote 23 Both of these plays invoke the myth of Moloch to represent what was seen as the sacrifice of youth during the Great War, and each refers to the public pressures exerted on the resisters to that conflict. Both centre on the responses of grieving mothers – fierce opponents to the idea of war as a solution, but who are dismissed as simply emotional. As women they have no agency in the plays, no power to influence events or prevent war itself. This was perhaps a message to the women who were involved in the peace movement in large numbers, urging them to activism. Winifred Carter stated that she certainly did not want mothers to kill their sons, but she ‘hoped the play would make women do something to stop the next war’.Footnote 24 She herself assisted the Pax Players with drama workshops at their annual conferences and wrote a one-act play for the movement.Footnote 25
‘Show Them a Brave Pacifist’
A one-act play used by the movement for ‘agitprop’ purposes was the Quaker Olive Popplewell’s The Pacifist, an item in the repertoire of the Peace Pledge Union Headquarters Drama Group.Footnote 26 The play is set in a pleasant well-furnished sitting room in a country house outside a small town. There is an all-female cast of eight. The main action concerns a Women’s Institute committee meeting in the home of Mrs Cromland, a widow of the Great War, and her daughter Mavis. All of these are comfortably middle-class except for a ‘village woman’, Mrs Thrumbald, and all are highly conventional (if also stereotypical), and these character types provide the comic element. Mavis is engaged to John the vicar’s son and he resents her admiration for a pacifist leader, Mr Grandison, and his ‘splendid courage in speaking the truth – an ideal leader, honest and fearless’ (p. 14).
Grandison is booked to address a local meeting on disarmament; it is clear that ‘unilateral’ disarmament is the theme of the meeting. The committee has heard a rumour that a young local woman will speak from the platform with him: ‘Just an attention-seeker. No nice girl would do such a thing’ (p. 9). The vicar has tried in vain to have the meeting cancelled, and so the committee is discussing a proposal that they try to disrupt it. Mavis – a pacifist much influenced by her father’s death – has to listen to the committee disparaging Grandison, whose ‘extreme views’ are such that ‘firm measures should be taken to prevent their dissemination among the young people of the town’ (p. 12). She supports him, but the committee assumes that she must have fallen for Grandison (‘that vulgar fanatic’), not that she believes in his ideas (p. 14). They are indignant when she announces that actually she ‘is the minx that wants to make herself conspicuous’, adding that she is prepared to release John from the engagement, given that their views are incompatible. This is dismissed as youthful emotionalism which she will regret ‘when this fit of hysteria has passed’; she is also told that ‘all this exaggerated, unregulated pacifism probably has Bolshevik propaganda behind it’. But Mavis is adamant that urgent action is needed ‘to save children and helpless people from horrors you can’t even imagine – horrors to which those of the last war will seem a picnic’ (p. 16). The committee leaves in disgust.
There is then a short but probing conversation between Mavis and her mother, Mrs Cromland, who now reveals her own anti-war views, only backing the committee to preserve Mavis and John’s relationship. But Mavis thinks she just wanted to dodge an awkward situation, backing away when things were likely to get difficult, claiming that ‘no one will listen to pacifists who shirk fear and pain and ridicule’ (p. 19). A telegram now informs them that John has ended the engagement. In discussion, Mavis realizes that her mother, although not motivated to campaign against war, following her husband’s death, simply expresses her anti-war sentiments differently.
Mavis is appalled to discover that Grandison has pulled out of addressing the meeting because of the potentially hostile element in the audience. She resolves to speak herself; as her mother says, ‘Well, after this man’s object lesson, if you want to make the town believe in a brave pacifist you’ll have to show them one’ (p. 22). Mrs Cromland then enlists local Quakers of her acquaintance to take the platform in support. She tells them, ‘Who will be in the chair? Oh, I will be in the chair’ (p. 24).
Central to the play is the issue of a young woman struggling to be taken seriously – not to be dismissed as too emotional when taking a stand. Popplewell herself was a well- known figure on the amateur circuit, and The Pacifist (‘a propaganda pill served with the jam of humour’)Footnote 27 was performed at mainstream amateur drama festivals as well as meetings. The all-women cast made it particularly suitable for Women’s Institute and Townswomen’s Guild drama groups for their Festivals.Footnote 28
‘Too Serious a Subject to be Dealt with as Comedy’?
Several commentators recommended that events such as Peace Weeks combine one-act comedies or lighter pieces with the more tragic ones. Nevertheless at the Stroud Peace Week in Gloucestershire in 1938 the chair of the evening introduced the performances with the admonition that, ‘The programme was the dramatists’ attempts to portray some of the tragedies of war. They must not expect comedies, for it was too serious a subject to be dealt with as a comedy.’Footnote 29 This was not a typical view because several comedies were performed at such events and were well received.
One was the satire The Pen Is Mightier by Robert Victor.Footnote 30 Here a general and his opponent agree to stage advances and counter advances by their armies, but only on the map. They supply made-up casualty lists and reports to meet their respective governments’ propaganda needs while avoiding actual bloodshed: ‘We didn’t have to move much. In the last war people spent six months going backward and forward over the same ground’ (p. 101). The generals believe that when the truth is revealed after an armistice the idea of war will be so ridiculed that no more could be fought. However, a disgusted minister threatens to expose them; his death at the front is therefore arranged to protect the arrangement and the greater good. The play was performed at drama competitions in Liverpool and the Midlands during 1938 and 1939. Away from the competition circuit, it was staged by several other amateur societies and League of Nations Youth Groups during much of the same period.Footnote 31
Another one-act play in the same vein was And So To War by the Scottish ex-miner Joe Corrie.Footnote 32 The play is set in a radio station in Disneyana, a country led by the dictator Fanacci. Disneyana is facing a crisis with its neighbour Lilliput, and so Fanacci has summoned the key figures of the nation to the studio to discuss a crucial announcement: the Archbishop of Bray; Grace Manful of the Mothers’ Union; Sir Percy Holdall, the leading banker; Viscount Vester of the manufacturing industry; the press baron Lord Otterburn; and the Right Honourable Ben Bolt of the trades union movement. Each is a caricature (‘honest Ben Bolt, who, as a nipper, worked in Holsworth Colliery – rose from the depths to the heights, see!’), and all of them are opposed to the idea of another war (p. 175); the press baron, for example, comments that the country is still bleeding from the last one (p. 173). Despite this, examples emerge of how the attitudes of each to the first conflict shifted at the time to suit their own interests or positions: the archbishop ‘blessing the troops before battle and offering up prayers for the enemy’s destruction’ (p. 175); the press obediently following the government line; the unions making no effort to stop war, instead earning overtime making munitions; women’s organizations distributing white feathers. However, the industrialist convinces them all that a war to seize the oilfields of Lilliput is essential for national prosperity, full employment, and national unity. Each of these representatives is bribed or otherwise induced to support that aim – the trades union leader, for example, whose members could stop war production, is offered a seat in the House of Lords. Only Grace Manful holds out, but she is swiftly removed to an insane asylum. There is an unexpected comic twist when Fanacci himself (clearly modelled on contemporary European dictators) appears, indeed declares war, but then decrees that only affluent men aged over fifty will be sent to fight in it. The young generation remain at home while those who have been calling for war are required to do the fighting themselves.
Both plays offer a satirical variation on the theme of revulsion for the Great War, whether recalling the disproportionately huge bloodshed involved when small areas of ground were changing hands (Victor’s The Pen Is Mightier), or contrasting the sacrifice of a young generation against a scenario in which the demographic and vested interests pursuing war end up required to fight it themselves (Corrie’s And So to War). The latter envisages an outbreak of a second world war and, as Linda MacKenney observes, warns of similar vested interests prepared to sacrifice the lives of others for financial gain, with a trades union leader bribed into compliance.Footnote 33 The Glasgow Corporation Transport Players won the Scottish Community Drama Association Festival with the play in 1936, in a non-naturalistic production where the caricatures stepped forward to a microphone to address the audience. Amateur performances of the play continued all over the country, and as the decade wore on it could be ‘watched with mixed emotions by an audience mindful of recent events’.Footnote 34 This probably referred to the Munich Crisis, after which, having agreed to the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, British Prime Minister Chamberlain returned from a meeting with Hitler to proclaim ‘peace in our time’.
In 1934 Walter McLeod, co-author of Ashes of Victory, contributed a one-act comedy of his own: Gas Masque. Footnote 35 As its title suggests, this was a burlesque on gas mask drills and air attack precautions, but was published several years before government policies on these issues were announced. In an English village the imperious Mrs Wimple, a woman of the gentry, is drilling the local children with home-made gas masks. She has also had a makeshift bomb shelter dug in the middle of her lawn, to the horror of her long-suffering gardener. The play juxtaposes the humour of Mrs Wimple’s self-importance and farcical activity with some of the pro-rearmament arguments circulating at the time. She believes ‘in being so well armed that no one will dare to attack us. That way peace lies and that way only. We want peace’ (p. 10). She dismisses as flippant the observation that those who are arming themselves to the teeth are unconvincing when they talk of peace. Points also arise from the dialogue between a cynical local reporter and Mrs Wimple’s sardonic butler, who attributes ‘the mental state of my mistress to a romantic temperament plus an unfortunate choice of newspapers’, and agrees with the reporter that economic circumstances make hypocrites of a lot of people – they both need their jobs (p. 12).
In the end the infuriated gardener floods the ‘shelter’, declaring that ‘we don’t need people playing soldiers. We want a policeman – one big police force for the whole world – to keep folks like you in order’ (p. 22). As the drill collapses into chaos and the children run, her butler reminds Mrs Wimple that the parade is not dismissed until she blows her whistle. Gas Masque was performed at annual general meetings of League of Nations branches, sometimes by local members, as well as at some Peace Weeks and mainstream drama festivals.Footnote 36 The gardener’s stated wish for ‘one big police force for the whole world’ echoed the LNU’s own policy that the League of Nations itself should contain the actions of rogue states through sanctions, or even force as a final resort.
‘War Clouds and War Prophecies’
Shirland Quin (real name Enid Guest) was a playwright and novelist who had lived near London’s Woolwich Arsenal during the years of the Great War. This experience is said to have inspired her anti-war play Dragon’s Teeth, which draws on the myth of the slain dragon whose teeth, when sown, grow into armed men.Footnote 37 It was produced in California during the 1920s, but not in London – due, it was claimed, to hostility from theatre managers.Footnote 38 Nevertheless, it was highly regarded on the British amateur drama circuit and by the peace movement (Figure 3).
Advertisement for Dragon’s Teeth, in Peace, April 1933. Reproduced with permission from the National Library of Scotland under Creative Commons Attribution.
Figure 3. Long description
The advertisement is enclosed in a double-line rectangular border.
At the top, the headline reads: A Brave Indictment of War.
Below this is the author's name: SHIRLAND QUIN'S, followed by the title in large, bold serif font: Dragon's Teeth.
A descriptive paragraph in italics states: This three-act play, by a young English playwright and actress, was written after a visit to Woolwich Arsenal. For years no producer or publisher would accept it owing to its pacifist theme.
Four testimonials follow:
1. Most interesting—really a very fine play that most certainly ought to be produced. —DAME SYBIL THORNDIKE.
2. I have read it with great interest. —PROF. GILBERT MURRAY.
3. The author . . . nimbly juggles with a great conflict, topical yet universal, and by far the most important issue before the world to-day—between the panic of fear, as represented by the engines of destruction, and the changed heart and the understanding mind which alone can now save humanity from annihilation. A brave and virile work. —Scots Observer.
4. Her play should grace the stage, inspire a film, and provide a text for many a sermon. —Western Mail.
At the bottom, the purchasing information reads: From booksellers (5s. net, postage 4d.) or write to HARRAP, 39 PARKER STREET, LONDON, W.C.2.
The first act introduces a military family living near a large military base and arsenal. Two older sons have been killed in the Great War (‘You mustn’t think I regret losing my sons. I don’t. They died for their country. Nothing they might have achieved could have given me greater pride’) while the remaining son, Darrell, is working on a new remote-controlled weapons system, quite prescient of modern warfare: ‘To think that anyone can direct a whole flight of planes by just sitting in front of a little instrument miles away! Isn’t it amazing!’ (p. 50 and 37). The family consensus is that the best way to prevent war is to be better armed than any potential enemy. Darrell is deeply in love and intends to marry Lydia, an artist whose social attitudes are becoming a concern to her future mother-in-law. Lydia exhibits disquiet over war planning, particularly after a tour of the local arsenal that apparently echoed the author’s own experience years before. There is a tension now between Darrell and Lydia: while he takes great satisfaction in his innovative work, she is increasingly disturbed by his involvement in war planning and believes he should use his genius for the common good. ‘You say there’s always been war,’ she says. ‘Not the kind there will be. It’s become degraded’ (p. 61).
In the second act Lydia has become increasingly distant from the other women over their support of rearmament. Darrell cannot get her to understand that he loves the research and technical exercises involved purely for their own sake – ‘years of love, thought, and ecstasy are in this’ (p. 87). His device is central to a large-scale weapons-testing exercise that has recently been taking place. It has been a complete success, but Darrell returns from it very uneasy, walking away from the celebrations at the arsenal, having watched what his research will mean in practice. His father, an army colonel, and other senior officers return to find that Darrell has burnt all copies of his device’s blueprints and refuses to give them the prototype machine itself, despite the certainty of arrest, the end of his career, and the horror of his mother. His father protests that war is in our natures and that without it we would soften into decay, but Darrell is adamant: ‘Is that worse than dying like trapped rats? For that’s what future war will be – a conflict of the laboratories ending in a hideous and overwhelming massacre … I’ve realized that to invent methods of warfare is a profession of the damned’ (p. 102–5).
Despite this, Lydia believes their relationship cannot continue: they are too far apart on too much. The final act is very long, and (as written) potentially demands a cast of anything up to eighty, although in performance this was achieved by systematic doubling. Lydia has a dream in which both she and Darrell appear as visionary figures, and both past and future intermingle. A child, Europa, is trying to make a flower chain binding the flags of different nations together, but she is not allowed to finish it. She is removed to make way for ‘five pompous gentlemen with share lists and money bags’: these top-hatted and masked men are ‘The Ring’, chanting their hopes of profit from a war, pushing for it, knowing that Darrell’s invention gives their military the edge. The ‘Golden Fleece Trading Company’ gets its way despite Europa’s cries that that her flowers of youth should be spared. Newspapers incite patriotism, as do the Christians, while engineers and chemists boast of their roles with armaments. Silent men in khaki march across projections of the map of Europe; shadows and skeletons appear; representations of mothers through the ages raise their voices in ancient laments. After victory and the warriors’ return, a historical pageant unfolds of wretched, ragged men wearing medals and singing the dirge of the workless. Lydia is approached by a skull-like figure (representing Darrell as the god of war), and a priest asks, ‘Do you take this man to be your lawful wedded husband?’ (p. 156). In distress, she wakes; Darrell has renounced both his invention and his work, and so they are reconciled.
This play therefore, first, presents a set of personal ethical dilemmas over involvement with armament industries and the rhetoric of arms accumulation to maintain peace. It then introduces the forces and vested interests of power and profit that promote international conflict for their own gain. But while this representation of social forces requires an adaptation of avant-garde techniques, the earlier, personal issues are expressed within conventional dramatic methods.
As a press reviewer of the published text observed of the last act, ‘the lighting and sound effects will require professional skill and the advantages of a well-equipped stage’.Footnote 39 Amateur companies were nevertheless ambitious enough to produce it, Questors Society in Ealing, London, making it their debut performance.Footnote 40 Some local critics judged it ‘an interesting play despite some crude touches’, and performances for peace meetings by the Pax Players and Co-operative Drama Societies were praised for their acting, and how ‘the phantasmagoria of the dream was a very effective way of driving a point home’.Footnote 41
The playwright Frank Farnin was an unemployed bricklayer and student at the Harkness House adult education project in Scotland. One of his one-act plays for the project’s drama group in 1937 was The War Memorial, which opens with an ex-serviceman sitting by his town’s war memorial, a statue of a soldier. It is Christmas Eve, and on this one night of the year the statue can speak, channelling the spirit of the dead sculptor and the scenes he witnessed in the trenches. The veteran, who is unemployed, observes to a passing town councillor that ‘it’s nice enough to see that the town hasn’t forgotten it’s dead, although it does seem absent-minded about the living’ (p. 5), and is assured that recovery is around the corner: a munitions factory could be built soon. The statue’s sarcastic response to this causes the councillor to run away in a panic when he realizes the stone can speak. Different groups of young people now pass by, reacting in different ways to the newspaper headlines of what the statue calls ‘war clouds and war prophecies’ (p. 7), and the play ends with the statue declaring that in this atmosphere of distrust and rearmament, ‘the world needs to cultivate a peace mind’ (p. 8). The play articulates an ambivalence over the function of the war memorial, in line with the changing attitudes to remembrance ceremonies which had developed since the 1920s: because the respect shown for the fallen was not matched by respect for unemployed veterans, nor matched by the same concern over the rising threat of another conflict even worse than the last. The need to ‘cultivate a peace mind’ in the face of rearmament was an approach emphasized primarily by the PPU. Nevertheless, despite differences in perspective between the two organizations, the play was memorably performed at an LNU meeting in 1938 when the audience of two thousand, according to one review, were ‘carried away by the high quality of the acting and the gripping theme of the play’.Footnote 42
The Insect Play
In Dragon’s Teeth, Quin drew on avant-garde methods associated with contemporary European theatre, and another example used by the peace movement was The Insect Play, by Josef and Karel Čapek, originally written in Czech in 1921 (and translated and produced for the London stage two years later). In further illustration of the fluidity between the professional and the amateur stages between the wars, Nancy Price, the lead actress in the original production of Moloch, took the initiative to return The Insect Play to the West End in 1936. She subsequently arranged for the sets and costumes to be loaned to the Bury Peace Committee in Lancashire for performances in the days preceding Bury Peace Week in 1937 (Figure 4).
Scene from a performance of The Insect Play, Bury Peace Week (1937). Reproduced with permission from Bury Archives.
Figure 4. Long description
The photo captures three performers in elaborate costumes against a backdrop of painted curtains depicting trees and foliage.
On the left, a man stands with one foot raised on a wooden crate. He wears a dark tuxedo, a top hat, a monocle, and a long, pointed prosthetic nose. He holds a thin object aloft in his right hand while his left hand is raised with fingers splayed.
In the center, a woman sits on the same crate. She wears a long dress with a thick, textured ruff around her neck and a matching textured muff in her lap. She has a similar pointed nose and a feathered headpiece, looking downward with a somber expression.
On the far right, a younger person sits on the floor. They are dressed in a segmented, padded costume resembling a caterpillar or larva, topped with a wide-brimmed hat. They have dark braids and heavy makeup, looking toward the central figure.
In the play, an unemployed ex-soldier meditates on what insect life shares with mankind: greed, parasitism, exploitation – and also war, when two ant colonies fight over rights of way between two blades of grass. Nevertheless, a chrysalis opens to new life and hope. It was performed in Bury by members drawn from across the local amateur dramatic societies. As one of several good local reviews reported: ‘The production as a whole was remarkably free from those rough edges which might have been expected to make themselves manifest.’Footnote 43 Price financed another West End run in 1938, with discounted tickets for parties of ten or more Peace Pledge Union members.Footnote 44
The Aims of a Peace Play
When the IPC advocated material that demonstrated ‘the possibilities of social progress in a world assured of peace’, it was suggesting more than simply anti-war plays. This was a parallel with its argument that ‘peace’ was to be based on a reformed international system rather than the absence of war. The shortcomings of some anti-war plays were recognized by the peace movement. R. C. Sherriff’s Journey’s End, for example, is now regarded, for all its authenticity, as actually ambivalent about the Great War, and this was noted at the time. Army veteran Vernon Bartlett believed that its themes of service and comradeship could actually appeal to young men seeking alternatives to material values.Footnote 45 He had also complained in another review of Channing Pollock’s play The Enemy that ‘the play contains no hint of how the desire for no more war is to be realized. If there is to be no more war, the goal will be reached by way of the League of Nations.’Footnote 46 This issue of articulating peace politics was moot ten years later in 1938 when Barbara Nixon attacked what she called ‘negative pacifism’ in peace drama:
Six years ago it was valuable to point out the horror and futility of war … but … with the prospect of a major European war as predictable as bad weather in winter, a constructive plan for avoiding the danger is essential, and anything short of this can be not only ineffective but dangerous.Footnote 47
One issue here is the appropriate dramatic form with which to explore the politics in question. One-act plays were popular with the amateur players of the peace movement, just as they were with the British amateur theatre movement in general. Such shorter performances were the required format of the ubiquitous drama festivals and competitions organized by the British Drama League. Thus, the amateur movement was credited with the revival and spread of the one-act play as a form, with at least 300 new works published in acting editions between 1937 and 1938.Footnote 48 A one-act play could easily be combined with a meeting or similar event, adding to the interest of the proceedings, and providing discussion points. This play structure required a political message to be put over within a tight format but still be plausible as drama, appearing as a natural part of the story. The one-act plays covered here achieved this but perhaps the form limited how far their themes could be explored.
The two full-length plays stress the fears, prevalent at the time and reinforced by popular culture, about the scale of death and destruction in a future world war brought by new weaponry and poison gas. A theme there too, shared by Ashes of Victory, is individual responsibility, conscience, and the courage and commitment needed to make a stand against war. This underlines the individual statements made to become a PPU member: a reminder, with the example of Great War conscientious objectors before them, of what would be demanded in the event of war to resist the moral pressures of public and family opinion. This could be achieved by explanations through the dialogue and characterization of conventional drama.
If a traditional dramatic approach could deal with issues of personal dilemmas and individual responsibilities, other forms were needed to explain the forces at work to foment war. Thus Quin provides an overlooked example of British avant-garde theatre. Yet despite presenting the aggressive economic forces propelling war, and the powerful interests placed to gain from it, she does not present any message of collective war resistance but highlights the individual stand. In contrast, and as has been thoroughly explored elsewhere,Footnote 49 at the end of the decade the left amateur theatre staged the ‘constructive plan for avoiding the danger’ of war that Barbara Nixon had called for. London Unity Theatre’s living newspaper, Crisis, was staged at the time of Munich in 1938, with the pantomime Babes in the Wood following shortly thereafter. Crisis used documentary material and BBC broadcasts, poetry, a narrator’s voice and dramatized domestic scenes of ordinary people. Unity’s status as a membership theatre (thus avoiding censorship) allowed the prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, to be impersonated in the pantomime and the politics he represented famously satirized. Both productions explored international relations and urged war resistance through the unity of the Labour movement and all progressive forces against fascism, allied with progressive movements abroad. In a symptom of a divided movement, Peace News admired Babes in the Wood but admitted that, on international affairs, ‘it contains a large number of inferences with which a pacifist cannot agree’.Footnote 50
Conclusion
Diverse anti-war organizations in 1930s Britain made full use of the popular activity of amateur drama to further their cause. Plays which articulated the different – and sometimes contradictory – positions put forward by the peace movement were performed at meetings, at festivals and as part of regular programmes. One-act or short plays were central, given that they were within the scope of amateurs, were of a suitable length to combine with a meeting and were the required format for many drama festivals. However, full-length plays were staged and at least two (the expressionistic Dragon’s Teeth and The Insect Play) posed ambitious challenges, successfully met.
The issues covered in anti-war drama included the likely devastating nature of future conflict, given modern weaponry and gas, and the need for women in particular to make their voices heard against it. Powerful forces with a vested interest in promoting conflicts were identified, there was sufficient distance from the Great War for it to be satirized, and the subsequent unemployment highlighted as an outcome of it. Some plays emphasized the importance of a principled, individual stand against war, and the courage that would be required for it, whereas others stressed the need for co-operative international efforts to thwart rogue states. By the end of the decade constructive ways to resist war and fascism were imaginatively staged by the left-leaning theatre. All would have been topics for discussion at meetings after performance.
War resistance in the 1930s obviously failed in its objective, and these plays associated with it are very much of their time. Nevertheless, in terms of British theatre history they confirm the important place of amateur drama in a major social movement, and provide a notable example of the use of theatre in contested politics.
