Horror of war honed JB's pen

3:01pm Thursday 9th October 2008

Comments ()   Have your say »

Tom Priestley asked his famous father the usual question: What did you do in the war daddy? This particular war being the horror that lasted from August 1914 to November 1918.

Actually, he asked his father a series of questions about his time as a volunteer serviceman. The Bradford-born playwright, novelist, essayist and broadcaster – usually pictured puffing on a pipe – gave the following laconic answers.

“I spent four or five years of my life being a soldier, which is something entirely different from what I planned. I didn’t particularly care for the military life very much, but on the other hand I didn’t absolutely rebel against it; I felt I ought to accept it and see what happened.”

What he saw on the Western Front he described in letters home. These sights included “great hills half blown away with enormous shells; villages absolutely razed to the ground; old trenches full of heads, legs and arms.”

Tom Priestley pressed his father to expatiate upon his time in the ranks out in France.

“I’d been wounded. I’d been buried alive…all sorts of stuff. We wore these gilt stripes on our sleeves. There were two kinds – one for service, the other for wounds. I had three…What’s the time?…I think we’ll pack it in for the time being.”

That was all that J B Priestley told his son about his experiences in the ‘war to end wars’.

Later, when Tom Priestley joined the Army, his father swapped stories of service life, but “never about fighting, never about the dreadful experience of the trenches; indeed the only time he wrote about that was when he had rediscovered the box of letters from the Great War, or perhaps decided to face the memories, and wrote about the war in his book of memoirs, Margin Released.

“We have to imagine him crouched in a muddy trench, damp, cold and filthy, desperately scribbling away with a pencil on such paper as he could find. Sometimes the odd word is completely illegible, too deformed by a fold in the paper, and his writing was never easy to read; perhaps this is why he took to the typewriter, hammering away with his two forefingers.

“It is fascinating to compare these early writings by an embryo author (The Good Companions, his first novel, was published in 1929 when J B was 35) communicating directly with his family, with the articles for various papers and journals, and the text of his Second World War broadcasts…which he described as ‘what he had to do’, in other words his public duty, just as his service as a soldier was his duty in the First World War.

“In the 1950s and 1960s, at a time when most men his age might have settled for the pipe and slippers, my father embarked on a final campaign against nuclear weapons and the arms race which, in his view, the acronym of Mutually Assured Destruction admirably summed up. In this, as in so much else in his life, he spoke for the people who had no public voice of their own.”

Historian Neil Hanson, who lives in Ilkley, said the idea for the book came about after Tom Priestley found a box of his father’s letters at the bottom of a wardrobe.

He said: “There were 30 or 40 letters altogether, all from the first couple of years of World War I. Sadly, others that he wrote after 1916 haven’t survived. The ones that have are a light on J B Priestley’s life.”

He said Priestley’s Wars – 384 pages, 46 black and white photographs – was the last unpublished work by the author because the narrative, which goes from the Great War, through the rise of Fascism in the 1930s, World War II to the formation of CND in the 1950s, largely comprises of J B’s own words. Unpublished letters are complimented by transcripts of unpublished Postcript broadcasts which alone attracted regular Sunday evening audiences of 16 million – until the BBC suddenly pulled the plug on them.

Neil Hanson said: “In the Thirties his voice against the rise of Fascism earned him a place on the Nazis’ death list. His broadcasts to the United States played a big part in shifting public opinion in America. They thought we were just trying to defend our Empire and deserved to lose. But Priestley’s unpretentious broadcasts focusing on the small things of British life helped to change that.

“There is no smoking gun, but it’s known that Winston Churchill disapproved and made the director general of the BBC aware of his disapproval. Priestley admired Churchill, but they had different ideas. Priestley said we should have homes fit for heroes. Churchill said ‘We’ll talk about that after we’ve won the war’.

“After the war he was prominent in the founding of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament,” Neil said.

Ilkley and Bradford-based Great Northern Books has revived interest in J B Priestley by republishing his novels The Good Companions and Bright Day. Next year they will be publishing a 75th anniversary edition of English Journey, the writer’s partial trek through England during the height of the Depression.

Will Priestley’s Wars add to his diminished reputation as a serious writer? Probably yes, among the generation familiar with his multi-faceted writing: Tony Benn, Alan Bennett and Michael Foot, for example. Neil Hansen is in no doubt. “He was fantastically gifted, one of the great writers of the 20th century. He was dismissed because he was so prolific. People forget that he was a tremendous journalist as well.”

He estimates that 95 per cent of the book contains material that is out of print. There is also a good deal that has never been used before in book form.

Priestley’s Wars officially comes out on Saturday – five weeks before the 90th anniversary of the November 11 Armistice in 1918 which ended World War I.

Priestley’s Wars, by Neil Hanson with Tom Priestley, is published by Great Northern Books at £18.99.