Harold Pinter Archive Blog

Peggy and the WAGS

Peggy did not always get on well with writers’ wives. As Colin Chambers remarks in his biography, Peggy believed that it was the duty of writers’ wives to put their husbands’ talent before their own needs. She corresponded with quite a few of the wives and girlfriends (and gay lovers – in Kenneth Halliwell’s case). Sometimes this correspondence was strictly focused on her clients’ writing, but with others she provided emotional support and professional advice.

 

Surviving letters in the archive show professional relationships with Edward Bond’s wife Elisabeth and John Arden’s wife Margaretta D’Arcy. Several other wives are also mentioned in a professional capacity: Sandra Rudkin as script editor for BBC Birmingham and Robin Chapman’s wife Boo as a translator.

 

A letter to Jo Bolt, on the breakdown of her marriage to Robert Bolt, shows a more compassionate side to Peggy. Peggy had also known the Bolts’ children and had had their daughter to stay for a weekend. When Bolt remarried, Peggy went out of her way to further the career of second wife, actor Sarah Miles. She did however warn Bolt that his insistence on writing a part for his wife into his own screenwriting contracts would look as if Miles couldn’t get by on her own talent. By helping out her clients’ partners, Peggy undoubtedly had half an eye to how this would benefit her writers and their output. It would be unfair though, in my opinion, to suggest that this was her only motive. Her letters to women do convey warmth and empathy, even if they don’t reach the fervid pitch of her correspondence with male clients!

A network of writers

As I work my way through Peggy’s client files I’m realising that the archive brilliantly captures the network of relationships that grew up around Margaret Ramsay Ltd. It’s been really interesting to see which writers got on well together and which fell into opposing camps. One example that brings this to life is the furore caused by John Arden and Margaretta D’Arcy’s frequent disputes with the theatre establishment. When Arden and D’Arcy picketed the RSC protesting about authors’ rights, Peggy received a flurry of letters from her other clients. Opinion was split: Robert Bolt defended Arden; John Bowen didn’t feel he could lend his support to the campaign; and David Hare and John McGrath were motivated to form a new writers’ union. There are many other occasions when clients wrote to Peggy about other playwrights. Some wrote in praise of other’s work, some gave accounts of meetings with other writers or passed on knowledge of contacts or opportunities which might benefit others. It’s particularly interesting to see what the old guard thought of the new generation of playwrights and there are plenty of mentions of Joe Orton, perhaps because Peggy made it clear to her clients how excited she was about her new find.

 

Wracking my brain for specific examples, I found it difficult to remember exactly where I’d found these titbits. So often the mention of other clients is tucked away in post scripts and asides to the main business. A catalogue can only give a partial sense of the relationships between clients: names of correspondents will be key-word searchable; subjects will be indexed and our new cataloguing system allows us to make links between related items. Mapping the influence that clients had on each other will not be straight-forward but hopefully the catalogue will help researchers who want to uncover these connections.    

National Theatre podcast

Listen to David Hare, Simon Callow and Colin Chambers talking about Peggy Ramsay on this National Theatre podcast. I especially like David Hare's recital of a typically forthright letter from Peggy.

A method in the madness

Organising the archive of a woman who, according to her biographer, was prone to flinging papers in the air in fits of exasperation is not easy. My first task was to survey the archive, listing the contents of each box in the hope of discovering some semblance of what we archivists call ‘original order’.

 

Background research is also helpful. From looking at the Library’s records and contacting people involved in the acquisition, I pieced together the custodial history of the archive from its first home in Peggy’s offices to the premises of her lawyer, where it was independently valued before coming to the Library. During the packing process some of the papers had been put into new folders and relabelled. This was not done by Peggy’s staff which explains why the titles sometimes bear scant relation to their contents! This was a useful discovery because I’m aiming to describe the papers as they were created and used and therefore labels that are not contemporaneous aren’t significant.

 

There is a delicate balance to be struck between preserving the original structure of an archive and producing a logical arrangement. Peggy was a great fan of alphabetical filing, everything went in together – client files and general correspondence. I have altered the arrangement slightly, separating client files from correspondence as these are clearly two separate series. Preserving original order isn’t purely about keeping physical arrangement intact, it is about discerning the different activities and functions that Peggy undertook.

 

I am currently working on cataloguing the series of client files. These vary wildly in size and structure depending on how prolific a writer was and to what degree Peggy intervened in their life. Most client files contain correspondence arranged in a vaguely chronologically manner and divided between personal correspondence, stage work, tv and radio, film, publication and individual files for key productions. Rarely are these in perfect order and the survey list helps me to identify the many misfiled papers.

 

Having started at the beginning of the alphabet I have worked my way from John Arden and Alan Ayckbourn through to Robert Bolt and am now moving on to Edward Bond and Howard Brenton. The archive sheds light on the networks that grew up between Peggy’s clients but more about this next week.

 

 

Not just a playwrights' agent

The archive reflects writers’ work for television, radio and film as well as the stage. Peggy Ramsay also dealt with stage and screen rights for novelists Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark and Jean Rhys.

Peggy did not confine herself to representing writers. Her client list also includes director Lindsay Anderson, designers Tim O’Brien, Tazeena Firth, Alan Tagg, Robert Harris, Reece Pemberton and John Byrne and composers Carl Davis, Ron Grainer and Nick Bicat.

Download Peggy Ramsay client list

An Introduction to the Peggy Ramsay Archive

The Peggy Ramsay Archive - or rather, the archive of Margaret Ramsay Ltd, play agent – is a unique record of the workings of a post-war theatrical literary agency. Acquired by the British Library in 1997, Peggy Ramsay’s archive gives us an insight into the careers of over 200 of her clients. There are many famous names among the list including David Hare, Joe Orton, Eugene Ionesco, Alan Ayckbourn, Edward Bond, Caryl Churchill and Howard Brenton to name just a few. The records of the agency shed fresh light on the working lives of the playwrights, directors, designers and novelists among the client list. Not only that, they also give us a sense of the formidable force that was Peggy Ramsay.

From 1954 to 1991 Peggy Ramsay was a highly influential figure in the theatrical world. Priding herself on being able to judge a play from a first reading of the text, Peggy had a knack of spotting young talent. She intervened in her clients’ personal and professional lives, striving always to keep her writers focussed on the development of their talent and away from the ‘dangers’ of commercial success. She herself admitted that 'most people breathe a sigh of relief after a couple of hours in my company’.

Client files and correspondence make up the bulk of the archive. Among the administrative papers there are also records of unsolicited scripts received by the agency, gifts from writers, accounts ledgers, scrapbooks and a small collection of photographs. Some of the themes running through the archive include: censorship and attitudes to the depiction of homosexuality onstage; the debate over the presentation of British playwrights’ work in South Africa during Apartheid; and the increasing dominance of directors and star actors in contrast to the declining influence of playwrights and commercial theatre managers.

Over the next year I will be cataloguing the archive and sharing my discoveries on this blog and via my new Twitter feed. I hope to give you a sense of the breadth of this archive and the complicated process of arranging and listing the papers.  The archive of Margaret Ramsay Ltd will be available for research at the British Library from autumn 2010.

John Osborne: Silly Young Man?

Following my post a few weeks ago on the early John Osborne plays I edited, both staged before Look Back in Anger, Chris Duff – the son of producer Patrick Desmond who put both of the Osborne plays on - has emailed me to pass on a fascinating letter from a friend of his father.  Edward Granville and his mother, Ursula Granville, worked with Chris’s father in the '50s and '60s in touring repertory and also in seasonal repertory.  Ursula Granville was in the production of Personal Enemy at Harrogate in 1955 which Patrick Desmond directed, and played the key character of Mrs Constant. Chris and Edward are happy for Edward's fascinating recollections to be included in our blog, and I paste them below:

My mother was Ursula Granville.  She passed away in 1992.  I am in my sixties and I live just outside Hobart, Tasmania, Australia with my wife.

Regarding John Osborne, I can remember my mother saying that he was a silly young man and that she didn't think much of him. They were all at the White Rose Players in Harrogate. I was there with my mother and went to school there for the 1955 season.  I am not sure if John Osborne was there, except that I have my mother's opinion of him, so I imagine he was.  I remember her talking about how the play ("Personal Enemy") was so badly cut it didn't make sense. My mother, myself and Pat toured occasionally and, later, when I was older Pat remembered me as a child on the Sunday train calls (when you go to the next town). I went to many schools, as I toured with my mother whenever she had a job.
 
With what I tell you about Pat you must understand that I thought he was one of the most important influences on me of anyone I met, but he was at times the maddest, baddest person you could meet!  I loved him dearly, as he taught me so much about the entertainment industry.  He taught many people, including Cameron Mackintosh of 'Cats' fame.
 
You must excuse me as my memory is not as good as it was and I can't tell you dates, etc., but I worked with Pat touring the Agatha Christie plays "Black Coffee", "Murder at the Vicarage" and I think
another one which I can't remember ["Love from a Stranger"]. We also toured "Rebecca" by Daphne du Maurier. My mother was in some of them and my girlfriend, Vanessa Riches, was also in them. I started as an actor, then a stage manager and I think for "Murder at the Vicarage" I was company manager as well.  For "Rebecca" I was definitely stage and company manager and Pat also credited me as assistant director. The assistant director role shows his kindness because, as stage manager, when the director isn't there you take the rehearsal. One morning he couldn't turn up  so I took the rehearsal, which was very daunting as I was directing my mother and many experienced actors and I was only in my very early twenties. When the posters and programmes came out I got the credit and a percentage of the takings of each show which I believe came out of Pat's share. He did this without telling me and I was stunned, as there was no need at all for him to do this for a young stage manager.
 
We toured most of England and Scotland and as I remember the tours were 13 weeks each.  Cameron Mackintosh was the producer whom we rarely saw, but he provided the money for the production. The shows were generally not a great success and Pat would get me on Wednesdays to phone Cameron and shout at him to send money so we could get paid. Pat never did things in a quiet way; there was always much shouting and lots of swearing and I would be on the phone as he shouted at me the things he wanted to tell Cameron, who I imagine could hear everything he was saying. Anyway, I would be in the middle trying to not upset either party as they were both my bosses. It was a strange experience at the time.
 
On the subject of Pat's swearing, he called a spade a spade and usually very loudly. During "Murder..." (somewhere in Wales), he was playing the vicar and wasn't onstage during either the second or third act, so we would have meetings because I would have the figures for the night and he would want to see how we were going.  Incidentally, he could count the people in the house while he was giving his performance and if, when I gave him the figures and they didn't match,  I was sent off to have it out with the theatre manager. Many places tried to rip you off in those days. We used to have these meetings in the Public house across the road, so you would have me in a dinner suit and Pat dressed as a vicar, with Pat drinking and swearing and cursing very loudly about everything. I really don't know what the customers made of this strange vicar.
 
He was the prime mover in a play about Winston Churchill once ["A Man and his Wife" by Guy Bolton], and for some reason that escapes me he was in London and the play was opening in Birmingham.  He phoned to ask me to go up and see it, and to see if I could sort out any problems with it and report back to him. The play was very good and was meant to go on to the West End, but I don't think it ever did. I don't know why I went and he didn't either, but I suppose looking back it means that he must have valued my opinion, which is good!
 
Pat was very professional and expected people to do their jobs. We got to Torquay one Sunday and as we walked to the theatre he saw that the posters for our show were not up and last week's were still in place. Well, you could hear him shouting from London!  We stormed around the town with him shouting and swearing at the council who should have done this until we found the person in charge of the theatre and made him go out and put the posters up straight away.   I just hung on behind this tornado that was threatening to kill people if he didn’t get his way. But the point is it should have been done and he figured it was costing him money if no one knew the show was on.
 
My mother loved Pat and worked for him on many occasions.  Lots of people did, as he was a pro and that is the best thing you can say about anyone in the theatre business.
 
I hope I haven't painted a bad picture of Pat Desmond - he was a fabulous man as far as I was concerned.

Edward Granville

East London united

  I’m just back from collecting the archive of the writer and critic John Berger. John generously donated his archive to the British Library’s collections, but on the (entirely reasonable, and enjoyable) condition that we come out to pick it up from his Alpine home…and help out on the farming while there. In the end the weather conspired against haymaking, but I spent a very pleasant few days sorting through the archive in preparation for its transport back to the UK, and recording my impressions on audioboo. Although John has lived in the Haute-Savoie for many years now, he hails, like Harold Pinter, from East London, and was born in Stoke Newington, not far from Pinter’s Hackney. I haven’t as yet found any Pinter letters in John’s archive, but John was delighted to know that his papers would rest alongside Harold’s archive: just one of a number of examples of the ways in which real-life relationships extend to posterity in our climate-controlled storage area. 

Pinter and Osborne?

Began to do publicity for my new edition of two unknown, previously unpublished plays by John Osborne.

Despite Look Back in Anger being commonly assumed to be Osborne’s overnight breakthrough debut, he had in fact written seven plays by 1956, two of which –The Devil Inside Him and Personal Enemy - had been previously produced. Although Osborne had thought the plays lost –a supposition reiterated by his official biographer John Heilpern in 2006, I found both texts in the archives of the Lord Chamberlain in the British Library as part of research for our Theatre Archive Project Golden Generation exhibition last year. Oberon are publishing the two texts, with an extended introduction setting the plays in context, on June 20, and the book also includes a foreword by playwright Peter Nichols. Peter acted with Osborne in 1953 in Frinton, and he relates how his intervention saved Osborne from being let go by the company manager. Nichols and Osborne were a number of New Wave writers-in-waiting who served apprenticeships treading the boards in the early 1950s. I have read that Harold Pinter – another rep actor at this time – also acted with Osborne, but I can’t find much evidence in any of the biographies. If anyone has any information on when they might have crossed paths, I’d love to know.

‘Tender the dead, as you yourself would be tendered…’

A few days after Christmas, I gave a paper at the MLA as part of a panel organised by the Harold Pinter Society. Although organised many months ago, news of Harold’s death on Christmas Eve lent the panel a reflective air, which did not stop the papers –in their variety of approaches and subjects- celebrating the life and work of a writer who meant so much to us all in so many ways.

Harold was a great friend of the British Library over many years, and we were very grateful to him for agreeing to talk here last September as part of our Theatre Archive Project conference  (an interview that has been picked up by many commentators in the recent days.

It had been a pleasure and a privilege for me to show Harold his papers in their new ‘home’, and to see the delight he got in looking back over his own past through these documents (including photograph albums). In the face of personal tragedy, consideration of manuscripts and archives seems beside the point … a poor substitute for their living, complex, and multi-facetted creators. Yet, in its own –small- way, the preservation of a writer’s papers, among those of friends and colleagues (and the occasional enemy), is one way of ‘tendering the dead’, and helping to ensure that the works and ideas live on.

I saw No Man’s Land just a few days before news of Harold’s passing, and was already carrying the lines and images around in my head when I read of the use of Hirst’s monologue as part of the funeral. As always with Pinter, there’s a certain ambiguity to Brigg’s swift response ‘They’re blank, mate, blank. The blank dead’. Personally, I’m with Hirst who, after a trademark ‘silence’, ripostes quite simply: ‘Nonsense’.