R.C. Sherriff’s great war play, Journey’s End, helped exorcise war demons
When R.C. Sherriff’s play Journey’s End premiered in 1928 it became a huge success. People were finally ready for stories about the war that had been over for 10 years
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When R.C. Sherriff’s WWI play Journey’s End premiered at the Apollo Theatre in London in December 1928 it struck a chord with the public. Set in a dugout on the Western Front, it looked at the interaction between soldiers on the eve of Germany’s Spring Offensive in 1918. The war had been over for a decade and people were ready to see stories about the conflict. It ran for two years and made Sherriff famous.
He was able to leave his job as a clerk and focus on writing. The play also helped him finally deal with some of what he had experienced during the war. Ninety years on, the work, which has seen several revivals, as well as film and television adaptations, has again been turned into a movie, Journey’s End, opening in Australian cinemas this week. It remains a powerful statement about the immense pressure on soldiers trying to survive on the front lines.
Born Robert Cedric Sherriff on June 6, 1896, in Hampton Wick, England, Sheffiff was the son of an insurance clerk. He studied at Kingston Grammar School where he excelled more at sports than academia, in cricket, rowing, hockey and athletics.
He left school to follow his father into the insurance business but when war broke out in 1914 was determined to join up. He saw an advertisement asking for men between the ages of 17 and 30 to serve as officers and applied.
He later said: “I was excited, enthusiastic. It would be far more interesting to be an officer than a man in the ranks.” But the recruiting officer was not impressed with his grammar school education and he was rejected.
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They weren’t so picky a year later, after the loss of many junior officers at Gallipoli and on the Western Front. There were appeals for more recruits. Sherriff decided to apply again and was accepted, sent for training and commissioned in the East Surry Regiment.
It was not until late in 1916 that he finally made it to the front, seeing action at Estree-Cauchy where he led his men to the front lines. He soon discovered that much of the existence of a soldier was boredom not glory.
He spent the next few months in the area of the Vimy and Messines ridges, where some of the most intense fighting took place. In January 1917 he was wounded but his physical wounds were not bad and he returned to the front in just two weeks, although shell shock continued to trouble him.
In July 1917 he was at the battle of Passchendaele, when after slogging his way with his men through mud to attack German positions, he found himself isolated in a German trench. He was seriously wounded when a shell struck a nearby German pill box.
He was sent home, his wounds and illness keeping him out of the fighting and he spent the remainder of the war training new recruits for the front.
When the war ended in November 1918 he felt guilt that he had survived and so many of his comrades, friends and those he had trained had died. He applied for a permanent commission in the army but was discharged, with the rank of captain, in March 1919 and returned to his job as an insurance clerk.
Through the war he had discovered a love of writing, sending letters, keeping a diary and collecting notes for a war memoir that was never published.
He wrote a play for the Kingston Rowing Club to help raise money for a new boat. It whetted his appetite for more literary ventures and he wrote several plays in the 1920s for the Adventurers Dramatic Society (formed by members of the rowing club) before turning to his war experiences to write Journey’s End.
The play was rejected by several publishers before literary agent Curtis Brown accepted it. But people were still reluctant to produce such a harrowing war story with “no leading lady”.
Two test performances were put on by the Incorporated Stage Society, directed by James Whale with a young Laurence Olivier in the role of commanding officer Captain Stanhope, in December 1928.
Critics were positive and producers picked it up for a run in the West End, with Colin Clive replacing Olivier. It opened in 1929 and ran for 594 performances. A Broadway production opened in March the same year and ran for more than 400 performances. Australia saw its first productions in 1930 and the first film version, starring Clive, opened in 1930.
Sherriff was given time off by his employers to oversee the US production and he never went back to insurance. He continued to write plays, novels and screenplays including The Invisible Man (1933), Goodbye Mister Chips (1939) and The Dambusters (1955). Sherriff died in 1975.