J B Priestley, The Pride Of Yorkshire, Proud To Be A Tyke

Andrew Liddle considers the achievements of the Bradford-born literary colossus who died 40 years ago today.

Who is the greatest living Yorkshireman?

This was the slightly loaded question put to the Huddersfield-born Harold Wilson in the late 1960s towards the end of his first spell as British Prime Minister.

When a smile played upon Wilson’s lips it was almost suspected that the politician who made much of his own Yorkshire roots and was not known for conspicuous modesty might be about to name himself with tongue in cheek. Unhesitatingly, however, he replied: Freddie Trueman.

Most people in the media took it as a wily answer, calculated to bathe him in some reflected glory from the great sporting fame of England’s cricketing hero - who against Australia in 1964, became the first bowler to capture 300 Test wickets.

It both amused and made perfect sense, however, to most ordinary people that one famously plain-speaking, pipe-smoking man pre-eminent in his own field should nominate another with similar characteristics.

A few eyebrows on high brows, as you might say, were raised because a third pipe-smoking eminence who also took fierce pride in being a Yorkshireman was alive, well and, indeed, known to be writing a further volume of autobiography. J.B. Priestley had by no means gone into retirement and as his biographer John Braine, the novelist and fellow Bradfordian, remarked: “In his old age, he was still more productive than most writers in their youth.”

A strong case could be made that Priestley was one of the greatest Yorkshiremen in history. As the author of nigh on 40 plays, 30 novels and hundreds of essays and pamphlets, to say nothing, of his monumental, highly readable, 650-page critical study, Literature and Western Man, he is indisputably one of the most influential men of letters of his times. Not only was he among the finest, most entertaining and popular storytellers, he was one of the most perceptive social commentators with a radical message, in wonderfully lucid prose, for how society and the lives of ordinary citizens could be improved.

He personified many of the traditional Yorkshire virtues, shrewdly summing up character, always calling a spade a spade, understating emotions rather than making a parade of them. He despised the pretentious with a passion, preferring to send it up with dry wit wherever he encountered it. Where that proved ineffective, he could be brusque, occasionally aggressive.

But he was also, to borrow a cricketing term, a great all-rounder with widespread interests and activities beyond writing and the theatre. Certainly, his stirring wartime broadcasts, delivered in a strongly resonant northern accent had not been forgotten and were said to be second only to Churchill’s in raising morale. His first talk, on 5th June, I940, shortly after ‘an epic of gallantry’, the evacuation of Dunkirk, set the cautiously reassuring tone of the rest of the series. The BBC immediately recognised a born broadcaster able to reach out to the hearts and minds of ordinary people and set him to work. He drew peak audiences of 16 million.

A still earlier generation remembered the 1930s, when Priestley was arguably the best-known writer in the country. The Good Companions, published in 1929, was a literary sensation. Overnight Jess Oakroyd, an unemployed joiner from ‘Bruddersford’ , and his travelling companions, Inigo Jollifant, Morton Mitcham and Elizabeth Trant, collectively the Dinky Doos, became household names as they took to the king’s highway to entertain audiences along the way. “The nation went Good Companions crazy,” as Bradford journalist, Peter Holdsworth, put it, while recalling the fashion of the hour to caption all pictures of social gatherings with the book’s title.

The rollicking adventures of the strangely-named troupe well and truly caught the public’s imagination not long after the Great Depression had cast a pall over the country - and suddenly local thespians everywhere were forming Dinky Doos’ societies. The book’s following swelled after stage and film versions quickly followed and it enjoyed a great popularity for the next 40 or so years, filmed again in 1957.

Shortly after the success of his first play, Dangerous Corner, which ran for six months in the West End, Priestley himself would take to the road to research a timeless classic of travel writing – and social commentary - English Journey, informatively subtitled ‘a Rambling but Truthful Account of What One Man Saw and Heard and Felt and Thought During a Journey Through England During the Autumn of the Year 1933.’

It undoubtedly prompted a whole school of writers to attempt the same, although few could match his compassion for the common man. One who undoubtedly did was George Orwell who confessed to having taken inspiration from Priestley for his Road to Wigan Pier, penned three years later.

Much in demand were Priestley’s good-natured comedies, featuring ordinary people in domestic settings. There are laughs galore in When We Are Married, the theatrical hit of 1938, still a firm favourite of local thespians, staged times without number in the Bradford Civic Playhouse that Priestley helped to found in 1932. One of the funniest social satires ever written, it’s a tale of three Clecklewyke couples, pillars of church and community, whose silver wedding celebrations turn catastrophic when their marriages might be invalidated by a technicality!

Priestley also experimented with deeper psychological dramas playing around with concepts of time and these days is best remembered for one of these, An Inspector Calls, written in the closing stages of the war. It’s a compelling and haunting thriller, a gripping mystery which springs to life when an engagement party thrown by a complacent mill-owner for his spoiled daughter is interrupted by a strangely knowing detective investigating a murder. Inspector Goole’s startling revelations shake the very foundations of the lives of everyone on stage and challenge them to examine their consciences.

By the end of the play it’s clear Goole isn’t actually a policeman. So who is he - the conscience of the audience, perhaps?

Although clearly having Socialist leanings, Priestley never joined a political group and was known to dislike party politics. Indeed, he stood unsuccessfully, as an Independent in the 1945 General Election, not long after putting his hopes for a better future into his play They Came to a City, which holds out the hope a much fairer post-war society could be achieved if people from all walks of life could only come together.

He rejected the offer both of a knighthood and life peerage but gladly accepted the Order of Merit as the gift of the Crown, without political connection.

The boy born in the Manningham area of Bradford on 13th September, 1894, to Jonathan and Emma Priestley, was christened John but was always known as Jack. In adulthood, he would take a middle name he evidently thought gave an impressive ring. His father was a schoolmaster who instilled the virtues of hard work. His mother, a millworker, died of ovarian cancer when he was barely two years old, leaving him in the care of his grandmother.

After leaving Bradford’s Belle Vue High School two months short of 16 he spent four years as a clerk in a firm of wool merchants. His leisure hours he devoted to walking the moors, attending plays and concerts and experimenting with different kinds of writing, including a regular column in a local Labour Party periodical, the Bradford Pioneer. He broadened his horizons by visiting the Netherlands before setting off to Cologne on a walking tour of the Rhine shortly before the outbreak of the Great War.

When that came, he enlisted with the local Duke of Wellington's West Riding Regiment, seeing service on the Western Front. After being buried by a collapsing dugout, he came home to convalesce before accepting a commission and serving with the Devonshire Regiment. Having survived the conflict, he took advantage of a grant scheme for ex-officers, to go Trinity College, Cambridge, and graduated in 1922 with a B.A. in History and Political Science which he switched to in preference to English literature.

After a remarkably long and productive lifetime, the Grand Old Man of English letters, J.B.Priestley OM, died on August 14th, 1984, shortly before his 90th birthday. His ashes were buried at his request at St Michael and All Angels, Hubberholme. Nestled by the River Wharfe at the foot of Langstrothdale, it is a church he much admired, set in part of his beloved Dales he’d painted in gouache many times.

His plays are still performed all over the world, more than ever since Stephen Daldry’s production of An Inspector Calls proved the most popular in the National Theatre’s history. It’s now more than 30-years since its debut and to date it’s garnered 20 major awards and played to more than 5 million theatre-goers worldwide. Many of Priestley’s novels and essays have in recent years been reprinted by Great Northern Books and other publishers and the revival of interest continues.

The larger-than-life bronze statue of the literary colossus stands in an elevated position looking over his native city. Unveiled on 31 October 1986 by his third wife, Jacquetta Hawkes, and the work of the sculptor, Ian Judd, it captures the craggy features to perfection and seems to have him bracing himself defiantly against a strong wind. He was certainly one of the stoutest oaks of his generation. Nine feet tall and standing on a granite plinth not much shorter, he strikes an indomitable pose, yet smiling enigmatically.

Just as the Inspector seems to know what characters will say before they do, Priestley could be reading our thoughts!