Victor Canning Beggar’s Bush 1940
A play in three acts produced by the White Rose Company in Harrogate during the week beginning Monday 22 April 1940. A proposed London run never took place. The play was never published. A copy of the script was located in November 2007 in the Lord Chamberlain’s Archive at the British Library where it had been submitted for censorship. A revival is scheduled for October 2011. As with the play The Beggars Bush by Fletcher and Massinger the eponymous place is just that, and no more. It appears to have been an attractive name, but no more.Text
Steve Tell us about yourself.
Burke That I will, if you’ll first tell me who Blind Parker was?
Steve He was a foul-smelling miser who traded upon Charlie’s generosity to the extent of owing four months’ room rent and then left us without so much as a by-your-leave. He was a blind match-box and boot-lace man—that’s why he never did well.
Professor That’s true. Parker never deserved the companionship to be found here at Beggar’s Bush.
Burke Beggar’s Bush?
Professor It is a name we have for the place. In the old days the places where beggars met in the country and exchanged news were known as bushes.
Beggar’s Bush
The play belongs in a tradition of plays describing free spirits being tamed by middle class morality, and their eventual reversion to their original condition. It is based around Beggar’s Bush, a rundown London house where a group of professional beggars meet. These include The Professor whose speciality is writing begging letters to the heirs of people in obituaries pretending to have known the deceased, the enigmatic Charlie who is a pavement artist and supplies racing tips to city businessmen, Burke a young Irish lad, and the ambitious Steve. Steve follows Charlie one evening and discovers he has a normal bourgeois home. Steve’s involvement with Charlie has upsetting results for Steve’s bohemian girlfriend Lydia and Charlie’s bourgeois daughter Carol.
Victor Canning
Victor Canning (1911-1986) was the son of a coach builder. He attended the Oxford Central School, where he was encouraged to apply for a place at Oxford University, but the family could not afford it. At the age of 16 he went to work as a clerk in the education office, first in Oxford, later in Weston-super-Mare.
He began writing to earn money, believing he could write better stories than those he read in magazines. Within three years Canning had started selling short stories regularly to boys magazines and newspapers. His first novel Mr. Finchley Discovers his England (1934) was a runaway best seller. He gave up his job and started writing full time, producing thirteen more novels in the next six years under three different names. Lord Rothermere engaged him to write for the Daily Mail. His travel articles were collected as a book under the title Everyman’s England in 1936. He married a girl from a theatrical family whom he met while she was working with a touring vaudeville production at Weston-super-Mare. In 1940 he enlisted in the Army, and was sent for training with the Royal Artillery, where he met Eric Ambler, with whom he would go to the theatre and cinema. After the war Canning established himself as a writer in the suspense genre, selling books on both sides of the Atlantic and in many cases getting them filmed. Some of these films were produced in Hollywood; The Golden Salamander starred Trevor Howard, who had appeared in Beggars Bush. Later Canning wrote short stories for the pulp fiction magazines and television scripts. In the 1970s he launched into two new genres, children’s stories and historical romances.
Usage
The precise source of the theme and name are unknown. It is curious that after many years of disuse both Canning and W. H Auden both used the phrase in 1940. Canning may simply have encountered the phrase in standard reference book, such as Brewer’s, or come across the place name. In the early 1930s Canning worked for the education office in Weston-super-Mare, so it is possible he knew of site at Failand south of Bristol, used as playing fields. There is nothing in the text that suggests Canning was familiar with Fletcher & Massinger’s play. In that the nobles disguised as beggars revert to type but the beggars themselves choose to retain their freedom from convention.
Canning may have found a source in Thomas Harman’s A Caveat for Common Cursitors (1561) in which he describes the unmasking of the ‘counterfeit crank’ Nicholas Jennings, who begs by day displaying his false sores, while returning at night to a comfortable home with a housekeeper. A closer source may have been Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story The Man with the Twisted Lip, first published in the Strand Magazine in December 1891. In this a businessman is discovered to be a beggar, finding begging more profitable than working in the City of London.
Further Reading
Thomas Harman’s A Caveat for Common Cursitors (1814 reprint of 1573? edition)
Also in A V Judges The Elizabethan Underworld in 1930.
Acknowledgements
For all the information about Victor Cannning and his work I am indebted to John Higgins who has created the Victor Canning website.
Posted: April 10th, 2011 | Filed under: Writers | Tags: James Joyce, Literary, The Play, Victor Canning, W H Auden | No Comments »
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