J. B. Priestley: “A Voice Of Our Times”

It is interesting how John Boynton Priestley (13 Sept 1894 – 14 Aug 1984) an English novelist, playwright and broadcaster, whose works I have admired/enjoyed, has become “a voice of our times”.

Writes Benedict Nightingale in The Times: “Whether Priestley was writing tragedies, comedies or a mix of both, he was scathing about hypocrisy, pomposity, callousness, selfishness, cynicism, idleness and avarice.

“When the title character of An Inspector Calls accuses a rich, smug family of complicity in the suicide of a poor girl, his targets are as universal as those of a medieval morality play, even if they’re transposed to the northern town he variously called Brumley and Burnanley.

“But when he’s attacking what he saw as the neurotically obsessive greed of money-men interested only in making yet more money, as he did again and again, he seems topical too: which may be why he’s so firmly back on the theatrical map.

“It would be nice to see a revival of Priestley’s cheerfully scurrilous Laburnum Grove, in which a boring suburbanite is revealed as a master forger, who mildly explains that he’s helping the country through economic depression by remedying the ‘unhappy fact there isn’t enough money in circulation’. Change his name from Redfern to Brown, and he’d be a new Labour hero.

“Priestley wasn’t a subtle writer. His characters are often attitudes, sometimes even caricatures. He ruefully mocked his own dialogue as ‘that familiar flat idiom’.

“Yet his work is impressively various. There’s the thriller Dangerous Corner and the ‘tragic farce’ Bees on a Boat Deck, in which representatives of big business, communism, fascism, pure science and hedonism assemble on a doomed ship symbolising England.” More here…

“During World War II, he was a regular broadcaster on the BBC. The Postscript broadcast on Sunday night, through 1940 and again in 1941, drew peak audiences of 16 million; only Churchill was more popular with listeners. But his talks were cancelled.

“It was thought that this was the effect of complaints from Churchill that they were too left-wing; however, Priestley’s son has recently revealed in a talk on the latest book being published about his father’s life that it was in fact Churchill’s Cabinet that brought about the cancellation by supplying negative reports on the broadcasts to Churchill.

“He was a founding member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1958.” More here…

Priestley refused both a knighthood and a peerage, but he accepted the Order of Merit in 1977. (See here…)