Subject: RE: 2007 Ewan MacColl Bio - Class Act
From:
Jim Carroll
Date: 07 Dec 19 - 10:24 AM
Oh dear !!!
Jim Carroll
Prosppero and Ariel – The rise and fall of Radio. Personal recollections(extracts) G D Bridson, Gollantz, (1971)
Ewan MacColl and Joan Littlewood
(1934)
Harding had invited me to try my hand at a programme about May Day. Briefly, the idea was to contrast the old bucolic three- times-round-thc-maypole tradition with the new conception of May Day as the day for social protest. Here at least was a theme which offered me possibilities. I built up a pleasantly varied mosaic in which Robin Hood plays and the May Day games gave way to the May Day rioting against imported Flemish labour under Henry VIII. May Day had soon become a cause of contention between the Puritans and the people: the Strand lost its maypole. Herrick and others restored the May Day jollity. But dancing Jennies gave way to the spinning Jenny: the Industrial Revolution began to pave the way for another. As for the nineteenth century, that gave me the chance really to try for a little fun! Tennyson, in the role of an increasingly hysterical Queen of the May, found himself cross-cut against a rising tide of industrial militancy, peter¬ing out in a final despairing squeak before the advance of or¬ganised labour. From there, of course, was a short step to the Hunger Marches, machine-guns in the Berlin streets, and the Internationale blared out over the loud-hailers in the Red Square. The programme ended on a quiet but equally ominous note in a poem of mine read by Robin Whitworth:
Cause enough, then, for their spending
One day in the old fashion—
All under way and the land mending . . .
Winter over with its winter ration—
Salt meat, dried fruit and the rest:
May gave them milk again and churns to freshen.
Yes . . . And the Spring, then, and the men out.
Spring again—and the men 'out’ still. . .
May Day, then, and a new order of things . . .
May Day, yes . . . And a new order of things . . .
This was sounding rather a new note in British Broadcasting— or so Archie Harding decided. But the newest note of all came in the reading of a couple of stanzas from my Song for the Three Million, the number of the Unemployed in Britain at the time.
The stanzas were snarled out in seething anger by a vigorously proletarian voice that must have rattled the coffee-cups in sitting- rooms all over the country:
Cut the cost somehow, keep the balance whole;
Men are in the making, marching for the Dole.
Payday and May Day drawing to the poll,—
There’s a time to truckle—and to take toll.
Time to take toll—so watch where you tread:
The lesson in the bleeding is not to be the bled.
Bats are from the baking, cooling on the slab:
The duster at the knuckle, waiting for a dab.
Shout for your chauffeur or call for your cab:
Our kind of scathing is difficult to scab!
And stooping to the tramline, you can hear the tread
Of the done-brown damnfools—the living and the dead.
The voice was a new one on the air, the voice of Ewan MacColl, but there was no mistaking the message of the tramping feet behind it.
Ewan MacColl was himself a victim of the Depression. The son of an unemployed Glasgow steelworker, who had moved to Salford in search of work during the twenties, he had suffered every privation and humiliation that poverty could contrive for him from the age of ten. His memories of his early years are still bitter like his recollection of how to kill aimless time in a world where there was nothing else to do: “You go in the Public Library. And the old men are there standing against the pipes to get warm, all the newspaper parts are occupied, and you pick a book up. I can remember then that you got the smell of the unemployed, a kind of sour or bitter-sweet smell, mixed in with the smell of old books, dust, leather and the rest of it. So now if I pick up, say, a Dostoievsky—immediately with the first page, there’s that smell of poverty in 1931.”
MacColl had been out busking for pennies by the Manchester theatres and cinemas. The songs he sang were unusual, Scots songs, Gaelic songs he had learnt from his mother, border ballads and folk-songs. One night while queueing up for the three-and- sixpennics, Kenneth Adam had heard him singing outside the Manchester Paramount. He was suitably impressed. Not only did he give MacColl a handout; he also advised him to go and audi¬tion for Archie Harding at the BBC studios in Manchester’s Piccadilly. This MacColl duly did. May Day in England was being cast at the time, and though it had no part for a singer, it certainly had for a good, tough, angry Voice of the People. Ewan MacColl became the Voice, a role which he has continued to fill on stage, on the air, and on a couple of hundred L.P. discs ever since.
Shortly after May Day in England went out, a letter appeared in the correspondence column of the Radio Times over the signa¬ture of one George Potter. It gave high praise to the programme and ended: Broadcasting produces, or displays, a creative writer of real force, and the critics continue to retail nothing but the latest band-room and bar-room gossip. It is high time this par¬ticular temple is cleansed. I was surprised, when I met him a year later, to find that George Potter had been a discreet pseudonym for Laurence Gilliam, who had just moved over from the Radio Times to become a London feature producer himself. We were to see a great deal more of each other…..
pp. 35/36
That same summer of 1934, Northern radio made one truly unique recruit. While in London, Harding had acted as an adjudi-cator at R.A.D.A., where he had been asked to award the first gold medal for microphone technique. The girl who won it had a warmly engaging voice, excellent diction, and absolutely no fashionable affectation of accent whatever. She was not remark¬able at R.A.D.A. for that alone: she also happened to be a girl from a working-class home in the East End. As it transpired, she heartily detested R.A.D.A., for which she had won a scholarship, and equally detested the genteel mediocrity of the West End theatre of the time. Harding had been impressed with her, and had asked her to come and see him at Broadcasting House. She pre¬ferred to hock her medal, and go over to Paris for the Stavisky riots. By the time her money had run out, and she was back in London needing work, Harding had been transferred to Man¬chester. As he had promised to find her whatever radio work he could, she decided to follow him North. But where most girls would have borrowed the train fare, Joan Littlewood preferred to cover the hundred and eighty miles on foot. This she did with a small rucksack.
Sleeping under hedges, living on raw potatoes and turnips dug up out of the fields, hitching lifts and all that went to the usual picaresque tradition brought her finally to the Potteries. There she rested up in communal quarters with a group of families fighting a running battle against eviction from their homes. Perhaps it was the loss of the battle which eventually brought her on to Man¬chester. True to his word, Harding at once put her on the air; her story was also taken up by the Manchester papers. Beds were laid on for her in flats around the city, and Joan became a part of the Northern way of life. As she chose to put it herself: “I was a bum, but I was adopted for the first time in my life, as part of the whole humming scene. I was adopted by the autonomous republic.”
I sometimes wonder whether I ever met in anyone quite the same warmth and charm and utter sincerity with which Joan made the North her own. Over the next few years, I was to watch her captivate hundreds of people in every sector of Nor¬thern life. Her sense of fun was highly infectious; but only her power to deflate the pretentious was really dangerous. For her, the people who mattered were those who knew they had some¬thing they must create; the people she despised were those who had never found it necessary. She had no real ambition to act herself: her burning urge was to gather together a body of people equally devoted, who could be taught to act and react instinc¬tively as a group. There was something of Stanislavsky about it, but very much more of Joan Littlewood. In a way, it was almost exasperating that being such a natural actress herself, she pre¬ferred to try and coax good acting out of material far less talented. So far as the stage was concerned, perhaps she felt that appearances were against her: she looked too full of fun, and her gap-toothed grin was too engaging to carry conviction in very much more than comedy. As for her acting for the BBC, this she could never take seriously as more than a comic interlude. The BBC as a whole she found as absurd as it mostly was, and her parody of the BBC manner could embarrass even a BBC announcer. Harding and I and the rest had to endure her mockery, which was salutary for all of us. But despite her derision of the BBC, Joan was to play a very important part in making the sort of radio that I wanted. We worked at it happily together over the next few years.
Among the beliefs that I shared with Orage and Ezra Pound, was a firm assurance of the need for some sort of monetary re¬form. Various economic panaceas have been suggested. Once there was technocracy and today there is fluidity, but in 1934 there was Social Credit. And whatever one thought of that, the world-wide recession of trade at the time was more than enough to prove the need of an urgent shot in the economic arm. By way of publicising the need, I had just written a verse play called Prometheus the Engineer. It was written in the form of classical tragedy, and set in what I described as the Workshop of the World. Its hero, the Engineer, was vainly attempting to hold a balance between the factory floor and management. As was to be ex¬pected, he ended up as a victim of neo-luddite violence: the workers threw him to the machines.
Despite its anti-Marxist economics, Harding liked the play and accptd it; in due course it was cast and billed and went into rehearsal. Once again, Ewan MacColl was given a major part to play; there couldn’t have been a better choice for the militant leader of the workers. Robin Whitworth and I were billed as co-producers, he looking after the technical aspects at the control panel and I the speaking of the verse dialogue and the various choruses.
pp.37-39
Since the death of Frank Nicholls, I had been looking around for someone who could take his place in a new series of Northern actuality shows. My choice fell on Joan Littlewood, whose charm and sincerity would have won the confidence of an anchorite. No persona was needed for her: she was everything in herself and be¬came almost as popular in the North as Harry Hopeful had been before her. After covering the Isle of Man, further country shows took us to Furness Fells and the Cheviots.
But it was in the trio of major industrial features that we did together that Joan achieved her greatest success in actuality radio. By 1938, the worst of the Depression was over, but unemploy¬ment was still at a desperately high level in many of the Northern towns. For our production Cotton People we went to Oldham to find the group of spinners and weavers that we needed. In the Oldham area there were more than three hundred mills: the week in which the programme was broadcast, only four of them were working full time.
Yet it was far from a depressing occasion when fifty Oldham operatives took to the air. Lancashire was my home county: I knew exactly the stuff that went to make up the Lancashire character. Once again, we relied upon careful scripting and home rehearsal to set the people on their mettle. Once again the method paid off handsomely, for the lively humour and sheer vitality of the mill folk whipped up over the air like an autumn gale on Blackpool promenade. This was Lancashire telling the world, and telling it inimitably. It was all I had hoped to do on radio with ordinary people telling about their ordinary lives—but facing up to living with quite extraordinary self-possession.
After Lancashire it was the turn of Yorkshire, but the broad¬cast that hit the air with most impact of all was the one we did with the Durham miners. Ever since the General Strike twelve years before, the plight of the miners had been deplorable. The towns that most of them lived in were little short of a national disgrace: their work was backbreaking and dangerous, the con¬ditions in which they worked were primitive and intolerable. Seams only eighteen inches deep were not uncommon in Durham; the workings were generally damp, and pithead baths were still to come.
A month’s work went to making the programme, during which time Joan and I familiarised ourselves with every aspect of the miner’s life. We went on shift with the men by night and morn¬ing; we helped with the hewing, loading and putting; we got the dirt engrained into our scalps and every pore of our bodies. Joan lived with a miner’s family—the son had been killed in the pit— while I put up in no greater comfort at the local miners’ pub. By the time that Coal came on the air, there wasn’t a miner at the pit who didn’t know us and treat us as one of themselves.
In Durham again, of course, there was a high rate of unemploy¬ment: many men had been out of a job for the main part of their working lives. One of the most moving stories in the broadcast was that of the hewer who had been out of work for so long, that when a job was found for him at last, his body had gone too soft for him to be able to hold it down. The sob in his voice as he told the story was hard to get out of one s mind.
On this occasion, response to the broadcast was more than a matter of critical bouquets: money poured in from all sides, with requests that it should be passed to to the miner in question. He was the lucky one: I wished there had been enough to have helped the ones who had not been mentioned. But one of the letters gave me particular pleasure. Enclosing his own contribu¬tion, the writer told me that the broadcast had given him a new pride in his office. It was signed by the Lord Lieutenant of County Durham.
Broadcasts such as Coal gave millions of listeners a new realisa¬tion of the true dignity and importance of men and women like themselves. Such broadcasts proved that everyone had something to tell his fellow-men, and a point of view that deserved a hearing. They also proved that everyone was capable of putting his point of view across, often far more pungently than those who were paid to do it for him. And that, let me emphasise again, was something new in the land.
Frank Nicholls and Joan Littlewood were soon to be joined by Wilfred Pickles, for whom I created the character of Bitty Welcome shortly after the start of the war. Between them, that remarkable trio probably did more to help the country to find its voice than anybody had done before. Within a matter of ten years they had won an appreciative audience for the man in the street. Since nothing succeeds so well as a good example, hearing one s neigh¬bour sounding off is the shortest way of becoming vocal oneself.
By the time that the war was over, and Have a Go was able at last to bring unscripted spontaneity to the air, people were no longer afraid of standing up to a microphone. The boiled-shirt image of the BBC as us’ had been swept away for good; and the free-for-all which followed had left ‘them’ with important parts to play in radio and television. The age of the Common Man had actually arrived; and that he could often be so superbly un¬common, Frank Nicholls, Joan Littlewood and Wilfred Pickles must all be thanked for helping to prove.
Perhaps it was no coincidence that a vital new theatre move¬ment was born in Manchester at the time when Cotton People and Coal were giving new vitality to radio. For it was there that Joan Littlewood first gathered together the group that was later to form the nucleus of Theatre Workshop. Known at the time as Theatre Union, that body of young enthusiasts had something they wanted to express in movement no less than in voice. Ewan MacColl was one of them, for in those days Joan and he were married: they had first met up in my broadcast Tunnel. Others were recruited by Joan from among the hundreds we got to know in all parts of the North.
I asked her in a broadcast recently what the North had meant to the movement she had founded there in pre-war days. She admitted it had meant everything—that what she had been able to start in Manchester could not have been started then in London. As the seed was later to bear such splendid fruit, I like to remember where the seed was first nurtured. So does Joan Littlewood.
69 -71
One of my first pleasures in my new capacity was to write and produce for the Home Service in 1959 a ballad opera called My People and Your People. This told the story of a group of West Indian immigrants in London, and the love affair between one of them and a young Scots skiffler. The girl was played by Nadia Cattouse and the Scot by Ewan MacColl, the other leading parts being taken by Cy Grant and Edric Connor. The action of the story moved from the warmth and gaiety of the Caribbean to the squalor and wretchedness of life in Rachmann’s London, rising to its inevitable climax in the Notting Hill race riots. I have the deepest affection for my West Indian friends, and perhaps no show that I wrote for radio in the fifties gave me more pleasure to mount or seemed to me more worthwhile. The music, arranged for me by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, was lively and magnificent, the contrast between its Scots and West Indian rhythms being no less intriguing than the contrast between the two idioms and accents. The authenticity of the latter, I might add, was notably helped by the collaboration of Andrew Salkey, whose ear for the richness of West Indian speech is far more accurate than mine.
pp. 254-255
I was to fly from Iceland to Greenland in search of the story behind the discovery of the settlement of Eirik the Red at Brattahlid, from which Leif Eiriksson had sailed away to discover Vinland the Good. The laying bare of their skeletons after nearly a thousand years, tucked away under the Greenland ice-cap, was one of the most romantic pieces of archaeology that I ever recorded. As with the story of the Dead Sea Scrolls, I was gratified to find the shows so well received by the listeners.
Such excursions into the past were far more to my liking than excursions into the current. But the main emphasis of my work was still upon creative radio—my own or other people’s. In 1959 I had written what proved to be the last of my creative docu-mentaries for the Home Service. This was Hazard at Quebec, in which I was able to reflect the latest historical estimate of Wolfe’s near-disaster on the St. Lawrence. My knowledge of the Cana¬dian scene, a love of Canadian wild-life which I shared with Audubon, the colourful presence of the Algonquins, and the ebb and flow of the action itself gave me a chance to write verse narration once more for Stephen Murray. Ewan MacColl was again on hand to sing the songs that the campaign had given to history, and John Hotchkiss provided a suitably evocative score, which followed the fighting to its triumphant close. All in all, Hazard at Quebec was the sort of show that I had enjoyed writing for something like twenty-five years, and I was glad to find that the romantic formula still worked.
pp. 279-280
Alan Lomax
(1943)
I got back to the States in time for Independence Day, which the American end of Transatlantic Call was celebrating from Philadelphia, and this I was invited to attend. After his first three shows, Norman Corwin had fallen sick and been forced to retire from the series. His place had been difficult to fill, and with their new insistence on nothing but actuality, CBS were hard put to find any producer with the right experience.
By the time the show reached Philadelphia, they had found him—one of the few people in America who had spent his life recording actuality speakers (or rather singers) all over the States. This was Alan Lomax, whose collection of American folk-songs—recorded along with his father John A. Lomax—had formed the basis of the famous Library of Congress archives in Washington. Their work in the field has been honoured by every folk-singer since, from Ewan MacColl to Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan.
Alan Lomax was a Texan, a large, powerfully built man with a great zest for living and for his work. He was very much a singer in his own right, apart from the folk-songs he had collected, and a compulsive mixer. In the first of his Transatlantic Call produc-tions, American actuality came alive: he spoke the same language and sang the same songs as Americans everywhere. More to the point, he was able to help them speak that language into a micro¬phone, and to get the full flavour of their characters across. The shows that he handled came over with the same American im¬press as the prose of Thomas Wolfe or the poetry of Whitman. He could interpret America because he was so American himself. My meeting with him in Philadelphia was a lively and hila¬rious experience: it was also the start of a long and valued friend¬ship. I never knew any American who more fully embodied the virtues—and the more engaging vices—of all his country¬men.
Alan Lomax soon introduced me to the sort of young Americans I had always wanted to know—the young liberals who stood for Roosevelt, the W. P. A. and the New Deal. Apart from Alan’s own family, there was Nicholas Ray, then working for the Office of War Information with Louis Untermeyer as a documentary radio producer. Nick was keenly interested in my own methods of actuality production, and he soon became one of my favourite drinking cronies until he went out to join John Houseman in Hollywood. There he quickly established himself as one of their most gifted directors with an avid post-war following among the nouvelle vague in France. Burl Ives was another of our circle, then making his name on CBS as the Wayfaring Stranger-—-an enor¬mous twenty-stone bull of a man with a nature as gentle as a girl’s and a tenor voicc as pure and sweet as a choir-boy’s. Otherwise, he was Gargantua—eating his pounds of steer at a meal and drink¬ing his wine by the quart flagon: my only drinking boast was to match him one evening, level-pegging on bourbon. Over the years, both in the States and around the British Isles, I was to work with him on some of my j oiliest shows.
With Alan and Burl, I soon made many friends among the Negro folk-singers then to be found in New York. There was the almost legendary Leadbelly—Hudy Leadbetter—whom Lomax’s father had found singing in a Southern penitentiary after killing a man in a brawl. He was then singing at the Village Vanguard, where he had come to rest after killing another man who had annoyed him. Luckily for me, I never did—and the songs which he recorded for me were a quite inimitable delight. At Downtown Café Society, I also grew friendly with Josh White—already well to the fore in the long struggle for Negro integration. Josh was a fighter for whom I had great respect, a man with a sense of humour who could still be as tough and mean as he sometimes had to be.
The violence of American life was something I gradually came to accept. I had seen men knocked out in bars, and on Christmas Eve was to watch the police club a Negro through the window of Dempsey’s Restaurant, while the loud-speakers filled Times Square with the strains of Holy Night. In Café Society one night I was eating peacefully with a party of friends and talking to Josh over our steaks. Sitting next to me, Alan Lomax suddenly jumped to his feet, seized the man at the next table and knocked him clean across his supper. Waiters rushed over, but saying nothing to Alan, threw the body into the street. I asked, in some astonish¬ment, what the hell was going on? “He annoyed me,” said Alan, sitting down again. Five minutes later, the man came lurching back, protesting that he wanted to apologise. With a vigilant waiter on either side, he approached our party again and held out his hand: Alan rose, prepared to shake it. “I didn’t mean to offend you,” said the man, “I only said that I didn’t want to sit at the next table to a goddam nigger.” Alan hit him again, be¬fore the waiters could drag him away. But this time, like every¬one else, Josh had heard the remark. He froze in his chair, then slowly rose to his feet as his hand reached for his pocket. Three or four girls at nearby tables rushed to pinion his arms to his side. The body was thrown out again without Josh being able to draw his knife—and the bevy of his admirers subsided back to their suppers again. He was obviously a very popular folk- singer . . .
Perhaps the only song more scarifying than Josh’s own Hard Time Blues was Billie Holliday’s Strange Fruit, then to be heard at tlie Onyx on 52nd Street. But splendid singing and jazz was still to be found all over New York. Down in Greenwich Village, around Times Square or up in Harlem the bars and nightspots were crammed each evening with American servicemen on leave, and the town was there to please them. Ethel Waters, Maxine Sullivan, Hazel Scott, Pearl Bailey and Mary Lou Williams— these were only the best of the women I loved to hear. And the dancing of Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus was equally good to watch. As for the great jazzmen—that was still an age to remember, with Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Art Tatum, Eddie Condon, Sidney Catlett and Red Allen, Lionel Hampton and Red Norvo. All were there to enjoy nightly, often enough for the price of a couple of drinks at a crowded bar.
pp. 101-104
When I got back to my desk I had a great deal of work to cope with, much of it being a hangover from my nine months’ stay in the States. I had left another ballad-opera lined up with Alan and Elizabeth Lomax in New York, a production which I had been loth to relinquish. This was The Martins and the Coys, a family-feuding comedy from the Apallachians in which the Nazis became even more acceptable as a target than everybody’s next- door neighbours. Once again, the cast was outstanding—the roster this time including Burl Ives, the fabulous Woody Guthrie, the young Pete Seeger, Will Geer from Tobacco Road and Lily May Pearson of the Coon Creek Girls. Roy Lockwood, BBC’s resident New York producer, made a lively occasion of it all, which luckily survives in one commercial recording.
pp. 114-115
‘In view of his interest in folk-songs—of which he claimed to know three or four hundred—and as he was shortly going over to New York, I gave him the telephone number of my old friend Alan Lomax. (Robert) Graves had a great admiration for Lomax’s work in the field, and the meeting between them should have been something of an occasion. He rang up soon after he arrived, and was asked along for an evening’s session in Alan’s flat in Greenwich Village. He announced his arrival at the bottom of the stairs by bursting into an Irish song himself, though he may have been shorter of breath by the time he had climbed to the top of the four flights. Unluckily, Alan had damaged his hand in a fight the day before, and he had to apologise for not being able to play his guitar. Urged on to sing without it, he felt himself so handicapped that he began to forget the words of the songs, no doubt because he was writing a book about something else at the time. He was even more embarrassed to find that the drink was running out as well, and in desperation suggested that he take Graves on to a party round the corner to which he had been in¬vited. When he had been corrected after introducing Graves as “The English poet—Robert Bridges,” he decided that it simply wasn’t his night. So apparently did Graves, whose dislike of Bridges’ poetry was intense, apart from the fact that he had been dead for thirty years. I never heard whether he looked in on Alan again, the next time he was in New York . . .
pp. 271-272
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