March 1, 2015

Finest Hour 157, Winter 2012-13

Page 21


The Times, London, 15 February 1936 (Cohen G446)

11 Morpeth Mansions

Sir, I was discouraged from going to see St. Helena at the “Old Vic” by some unappreciative descriptions which I had read in various newspapers. However, upon the advice of Mr. Edward Marsh, a high connoisseur and keen supporter of the living stage, I went last night to see this remarkable play. In my humble judgement as a life-long but still voracious reader of Napoleonic literature, it is a work of art of a very high order. Moreover it is an entertainment which throughout rivets the attention of the audience. Nor need the sense of inexorable decline and doom sadden unduly those who have marvelled at Napoleon’s prodigious career. There is a grandeur and human kindliness about the great Emperor in the toils which make a conquering appeal.1 If it be the function of the playwright as of the historian “to make the past the present, to bring the distant near, to place the reader in the society of a famous man, or on the eminence overlooking a great battle,” this is certainly discharged. I was I think among the very first to acclaim the quality of [R.C. Sherriff’s play] Journey’s End. Here is the end of the most astonishing journey ever made by mortal man.2 I am, etc., Winston S. Churchill3

Notes by Martin Gilbert

1. In the Old Vic production, Napoleon was played by Kenneth Kent.  Other actors included Leo Genn as General Count Montholon, Anthony Quayle as St. Denis, and Glynis Johns (aged 12, in her second stage appearance) as Hortense Bertrand.

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2. In his memoirs, No Leading Lady (1968), R. C. Sheriff wrote: “The takings on the night before this letter was published added up to £17 12s 6d, which means about sixty people in a theatre that could seat a thousand. For the performance on the night following the letter more than 500 people came, and on the next evening, the Saturday, the theatre was packed. Every seat sold, with people standing at the back of the pit and gallery. It must have been the most complete turnaround that had ever happened to a play before: all in a couple of nights. When I read the letter I got the car out and drove up to the theatre. I wanted to be around to see what happened, but I never expected things to happen as they did. When I got there at about ten o’clock there was already a trickle of people coming in to the box office. This in itself was an event, because until that morning there hadn’t been anybody at all. By lunchtime it had turned into a stream. There was a queue as people came across the bridge to book seats in their lunch hour….”

3. Eric Wynn-Owen, who played the Marine, writes: “We were playing to all-but-empty houses until the publication of Churchill’s letter. The result was magical. The box-office was inundated as from that same day and houses so full from then on that the play had to be transferred to the West End, the last play at the old daly’s Theatre, now replaced by the Warner Cinema, in leicester Square.” (letter to Martin Gilbert, 16 January 1982.)


From Martin Gilbert, ed., Winston S. Churchill, Companion Volume V, Part 3, 1936-1939 (london: Heinemann, 1982), 42 (Churchill Papers CHUR 1/284).

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