Folklore: Joan Littlewood

Subject: Folklore: Joan Littlewood
From: Fiolar
Date: 04 Mar 08 - 08:08 AM

'Catters may be interested in the following item from The Guardian newspaper of March 4th. The bit which which caught my eye was the mention of Ewan MacColl.

"MI5 closely monitored the activities of Joan Littlewood, the theatre director who was later to produce "Oh! What a Lovely War", among other hits, and her husband Jimmy Miller, better known as the folk singer Ewan MacColl, and urged the BBC to blacklist them, classified files released yesterday show.

MI5 placed the couple under surveillance early in 1939 when the then chief constable of Lancashire warned that "the left point of view is well represented in the personnel of the BBC both locally and nationally". Littlewood is described in the files as "highly intellectual and a keen communist" who took part in BBC radio's Children's Hour programme.

Littlewood's home in Hyde, Cheshire, where she lived with Miller, was regularly watched. "A number of young men who have the appearance of communist Jews are known to visit Oak Cottage. It is thought they come from Manchester," MI5 was warned in April 1939.

The BBC assured MI5 that all programme scripts were "very carefully censored". In 1940, Lancashire's chief constable told Maj Gen Sir Vernon Kell, the head of MI5, that Last Edition, a play performed in Manchester by Littlewood's company, Theatre Union, amounted to "thinly-veiled communist propaganda" portraying "the workers' struggles in Britain, Spain and the empire".

The following year, 1941, the BBC banned Littlewood from broadcasting. "Clearly I could not allow people like this to have the use of the microphone or be prominently identified with the BBC," the corporation's then regional director for the north, John Coatman, wrote. He added: "It must be remembered that Miss Littlewood and her husband were concerned chiefly with programmes in which they were brought into continuous and intimate contact with large numbers of working class people all over the North region."

The BBC lifted the ban two years later when MI5 said she had broken off her association with the Communist party. However, MI5 continued to keep her under surveillance even after her Theatre Workshop became the resident company at the Theatre Royal in Stratford, east London, in the early 1950s."

Subject: RE: Folklore: Joan Littlewood
From: Ythanside
Date: 04 Mar 08 - 09:22 AM

So now we know how Philby, Burgess, McLean, Blunt et al managed to go unnoticed for so long. They kept quiet. If only those cunning swine had made their political sympathies public then the spooks could have been onto them in a flash, dammit.


Does the M in MI5 stand for Mickey, as in Mickey Mouse?

If not, it bloody well ought to.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Joan Littlewood
From: Desert Dancer
Date: 04 Mar 08 - 02:25 PM

"Clearly I could not allow people like this to have the use of the microphone or be prominently identified with the BBC," the corporation's then regional director for the north, John Coatman, wrote. He added: "It must be remembered that Miss Littlewood and her husband were concerned chiefly with programmes in which they were brought into continuous and intimate contact with large numbers of working class people all over the North region."

Yow. Contact with working class people. Scary.

Is it worse that they were northern?

Subject: RE: Folklore: Joan Littlewood
From: GUEST,Observer
Date: 04 Mar 08 - 02:47 PM

Please note that until May 1941 Soviet Russia was The Enemy.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Joan Littlewood
From: Les in Chorlton
Date: 04 Mar 08 - 04:35 PM

Please note that until May 1941 Soviet Russia was The Enemy.

But not the biggest one?

Subject: RE: Folklore: Joan Littlewood
From: astro
Date: 04 Mar 08 - 06:19 PM

What's scary is that many neighbors, friends, family members, and colleagues became stooges for the governments of the time (both eastern and western)to spy and inform on any activities that didn't conform to the expected line. Just about like that in the past few years after 9/11. You have to be "patriotic", or you are a sympathizer to the "enemy".

The notation of the "working class" people of the north certainly implies that the government was concerned about their loyalties.

Astro

Subject: RE: Folklore: Joan Littlewood
From: Les in Chorlton
Date: 05 Mar 08 - 04:57 AM

The government of the day had every right to fear them. The Tory dominated war cabinet etc. was chucked out by the mass votes of working people in 1945 inspite of their respect for Churchill.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Joan Littlewood
From: GUEST, Sminky
Date: 05 Mar 08 - 06:29 AM

young men who have the appearance of communist Jews

Did they not think to disguise themselves as 'ordinary' Jews to fool the authorities?

Subject: RE: Folklore: Joan Littlewood
From: Les in Chorlton
Date: 05 Mar 08 - 11:17 AM

I seem to remember that Benny Rothman and others got in trouble on the Mass trespass, 1932, for looking a bit too Jewish / dark/ foreign. I guess that kind of prejudice was much more common in northern Europe then