How JB Priestley’s Inspector first called on the USSR

Priestley’s first postwar play, An Inspector Calls, was premiered not in London but in Leningrad. Seventy years on, and in the runup to both the revival of Stephen Daldry’s classic production on stage and a new BBC film version, the playwright’s Russian journey seems more extraordinary than ever

Judy Parfitt and Kenneth Cranham in Stephen Daldry’s 1993 production of An Inspector Calls

Valerie Grove

^‘They simply adore Daddy here”... “Daddy was recognised everywhere ... his books sell like hot cakes … ” “Daddy made a speech, terrific applause, packed theatre stood and shouted.” “People kept coming up and saying ‘What a mind!’ ‘What a man!’”

This was JB Priestley’s wife Jane, in September 1945, writing home to their six children from Russia, where they had been invited for the world premiere of An Inspector Calls. It opened first in Leningrad as “This You Will Not Forget”, then in Moscow where it was retitled “He Came”: the new titles were needed because in Russia an inspector is a government official (as in Gogol).

An Inspector Calls, set in 1912 in the household of a prosperous northern manufacturer, Arthur Birling, had been germinating in Priestley’s mind since before the war. A mysterious stranger arrives during a family dinner and insists on interrogating each of the diners about the suicide of a young girl. Guilty secrets are revealed, and a heavy moral message is conveyed about communal responsibility. Priestley finished the play in the winter of 1944-5.

It was bold of him to have his first postwar play premiered in Russia as he was already considered a dangerous leftie in some quarters. In his wartime Postscripts for the BBC, hadn’t he used the line “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” when calling for a better postwar world? The gleeful Tory rumour was that his new play had been rejected, but the truth was no suitable London theatre was available. His Russian translator approached Russian theatres, and it was snapped up.

So in September, Priestley and Jane travelled to Moscow from Berlin in a Red Army Dakota piloted by a cheerful woman, without seats or seatbelts but with a metal bench, their luggage piled in the middle. “Everybody smoked; piano-accordions were brought out and played and sung to; bottles circulated; and there was a birthday-party atmosphere, very Russian and very genial,” wrote Priestley.

Jane’s letters were more specific. “No comfort, no lav, no sleep, no food,” she wrote, and when they touched down at Minsk, “lav a wooden hut, so filthy as to seat, I had to do what others had done and use the floor!”

But they were royally welcomed by the Writers’ Group of the Society for Cultural Relations with USSR, who included Alexei Tolstoy and Boris Pasternak. On Priestley’s 51st birthday, 13 September, he finally saw his play in the Kamerny theatre, seated in a box. After the standing ovations the Priestleys dined with the company and were showered with gifts of champagne, chocolates and enough tobacco to last Jack till Christmas.

Jane, Priestley’s second wife, was nothing like his more famous third wife, Jacquetta Hawkes. Jane was lively, half-Welsh, a graduate in French and Italian of Bedford College London, but also emotional and motherly, which was lucky as Priestley left the upbringing of the six children entirely to her.

 She had one daughter from her earlier marriage to Bevan Wyndham-Lewis; took on the two daughters of Priestley’s first marriage; had one daughter by Priestley before their marriage and then another after. (Awkwardly, two of the five girls were called Barbara, so one had to become Angela.) The marriage was threatened for a time when the incorrigible Priestley became besotted by the 23-year-old actor Peggy Ashcroft. But after that affair ended, his reconciliation with Jane produced their only son, Tom, in 1932.

Two years after their return Priestley met the daunting, toweringly intellectual Hawkes. Jane took to her bed; the pair barely spoke; Tom acted as go-between. Priestley’s dramatic output began to lose favour (like Rattigan’s) as the era of Beckett and Osborne approached; Jacquetta had a big success with her book A Land. By July 1953 she was the new Mrs JB Priestley. Happily, Jane eventually remarried too, to an ornithologist, David Bannerman, with whom she travelled the world for many years.
The 1930s had been the pinnacle of Priestley’s success as novelist and social commentator. He bought the seven-bedroom 17th-century house in The Grove, Highgate, where Coleridge had died. In Coleridge’s study Priestley wrote his first play, Dangerous Corner, and embarked on his classic English Journey. He worked at a frantic pace, 18 hours a day, and was “simply magnificent” in the view of the loyal Jane. She not only supervised their two households, ran his finances, travelled with him to Egypt and the US and was a diligent materfamilias (and governess), but she also published bird anthologies, volunteered as a probation officer and organised children’s nurseries for the

Worldwide Veterinary Service.
On 5 June 1940, her husband became the voice of the people. His Sunday evening radio Postscripts after the news bulletins, starting on Dunkirk day, rivalled Churchill’s speeches for morale raising. Inspiring, anecdotal, his plain sentiments and comfortable Yorkshire voice drew 16 million listeners. After this war is over, he declared, we must care for the less fortunate, discard old class assumptions, build “a land fit for heroes” as was promised, and then betrayed, after the first war. Churchill’s sour reaction (“Mr Priestley’s war aims are not my war aims”) helped silence Priestley’s broadcasts after nine weeks.
But they gave a new significance to a key moment in An Inspector Calls, when the Inspector – who has already been dismissed as “a socialist or some sort of crank” – addresses the complacent Birlings, warning them that there are many people like the dead girl, “all intertwined with our lives … We don’t live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other. And I tell you that the time will soon come when, if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish.”

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JB Priestley with his wife, Jane

At 21, Priestley had been wounded and buried alive twice in the trenches, and had seen the first world war as a class-driven catastrophe which saw his generation “sliced into sausage meat by idiots”. He felt it had all happened again. Society must fundamentally change. His words undoubtedly influenced the Labour election victory in 1945 (when, oddly, he campaigned for Labour but stood as an Independent candidate in Cambridge and was wiped out by the sitting Tory MP).

That summer, Jane had been learning Russian, and her subsequent article in John Bull magazine rang with optimism (“there is a free, happy atmosphere ... ” “this Russian journey leaves a glow in the mind and heart”) reminiscent of Priestley’s own Russian Journey. Her letters to the children are more candid, and it is she who notes the plugholes without plugs, the gargantuan lunches of “death-dealing” portions – fried eggs, vodka, cherry brandy, blinis and sour cream, pickled eggs, smoked fish, caviare, more vodka. Both were astonished to be allowed to stroll about unaccompanied – up and down Gorky Street they wandered, discovering “a sort of Fortnum & Mason extra high price shop” piled with caviar and chocolate.

But the inequality – the extra rations and perks for privileged generals and highly valued teachers, the discrimination against lowly office workers on overcrowded trams – was a real surprise. “In Britain everyone gets the same. We are far more equalitarian [sic] than they are,” wrote Priestley. Jane noted the ragged and burdened elderly, “dead on their feet”, women of 40 looking 70. “As for the sanitary conditions in their one-room flats,” wrote Jane, “why they aren’t all dead of dysentery is a wonder.”

They saw some terrible theatre, but among the best was at the Moscow Arts Theatre adaptation of Gogol’s Dead Souls, “a sort of Russian Pickwick ... Daddy laughed until he was nearly under his seat & tears rolled down his cheeks.” Jane was the archetypal good companion, visiting collective farms and writers’ cabins in pinewood forests (“indigestible lunch washed down with vodka. Not my idea of a day in the country”).

She loved Tolstoy’s simple Moscow house, kept by his granddaughter, but hated the new Bolshoi building ( “too gilt, too much, too glaring”). They were driven by some show-off drivers, Cossack in spirit, who scattered flocks of goats and made old women with market baskets jump for their lives. They flew across the stormy Caucasus, a landscape of destruction, of blown up, burnt out Nazi planes and tanks, cars and trees, destroyed mills and factories.

They travelled for three days by train to Ukraine, kept awake by Red Army soldiers’ footsteps on the train’s roof. “There was nothing but ruin in all that journey,” wrote Jane. Finally crossing the Dnieper River they came to Kiev before dawn, where blind beggars crouched outside garishly decorated baroque churches (“Daddy simply loathed it”).

On the plane every­body smoked, piano-accordions were brought out, bottles were circulated

At their farewell dinner Ivan Maisky, who had been ambassador in London in 1940, recalled how England stood alone “and how much Daddy’s postscripts did to hearten everyone,” Jane records. “We left in a blaze of glory.” As soon as they’d departed, Jane told the children she already missed the warmth and friendliness. “Query: how much does being clean matter? Dirt & indigestible food in Caucasus, continual upsets due to bad hygiene were very tiresome at the time but I shall always remember tremendous kindness & really overwhelming welcome.”

The Russian people are the kind of people I like,” Priestley wrote afterwards, “and we got on famously.” He was later criticised by the Daily Express for not denouncing the Stalinist regime. He felt Marxism was too narrow a philosophy for “the expansive but brooding Russian soul” yet he found the writers and intellectuals he met quite unfettered, “more inclined to pity than to envy their colleagues in capitalist countries”. He saw the young – unsullied by “over-stimulation of sex” – united by “a passionate desire to learn, to read and discuss, to enjoy great drama and music”.

What was uppermost in both Priestleys’ minds was what the indomitable Russians had suffered, and the effort to rebuild life from the ruins. Priestley concluded: “I returned from their country far more hopeful and confident about the future of mankind.” In this last letter to the children, daddy adds a single line: “Hold everything for arrival of great travellers bearing strange gifts.” Tom, who had started at Bryanston school in his parents’ absence, was given a Russian h


























































at.
Tom,

























































youngest of the three surviving offspring, is now 83, busy keeper of the Priestley flame, and as unlike his jowly, pipe-smoking father as can be. He is gay (which his father apparently found “difficult”), teetotal, read English at Cambridge (not at his father’s college, Trinity Hall, but at King’s), and became the distinguished editor of many classic films, including John Boorman’s Deliverance, The Great Gatsby, and Michael Radford’s White Mischief. In 1984, just before his father died, he made an affectionate TV film, Time and the Priestleys.

An Inspector Calls is his father’s most performed play. The irony is that, while the Russians loved it (Literaturnaya Gazeta likened it to “traditional, realistic Soviet art”), it was far less appreciated at its London opening the following year. It starred Ralph Richardson, for whom the role of Inspector Goole had been written, and Alec Guinness. But on its 70th anniversary, An Inspector Calls is having a big revival. The BBC has made a new film version with David Thewlis as the Inspector and Ken Stott as Arthur Birley. And its most memorable stage incarnation, Stephen Daldry’s 1992 National Theatre production with the amazing collapsing set, embarks on a UK tour next week. “There is still a sort of leftover snobbery,” Tom says, “that he was not really one of us, because he was so popular. But his plays are always on somewhere.”
• An Inspector Calls, directed by Stephen Daldry, is touring from 5 September until the spring, and the BBC film will be broadcast on TV in September. aninspectorcalls.com