One unseasonably cool and damp spring evening in May 1961, Alan Bennett walked onto the stage at Brighton’s Theatre Royal. His particular stiff-legged gait would have been familiar to anyone in the audience who had seen Kenneth More in the popular filmReach for the Sky, released five years previously in 1956. This was a biopic of the RAF pilot Group Captain Douglas Bader, who had lost both legs in a flying accident in 1931, yet had gone on to fly in the Battle of Britain, being credited with at least twenty-two victories before being shot down over France and imprisoned in various prisoner-of-war (POW) camps, from which he went on to make numerous escape attempts. Bennett’s character, like Bader, had been one of ‘the few’, the RAF pilots who defended Britain from the Luftwaffe’s attacks in the aftermath of the 1940 fall of France. By 1960, and with the aid of More’s sympathetic portrayal, Bader had come to exemplify the best of Britain’s Second World War, almost singlehandedly symbolising British stoicism, determination and quiet heroism. Bennett’s character reminisced:
I had a pretty quiet war really. I was one of ‘the few’. We were stationed down at Biggin Hill. One Sunday, we got word Jerry was coming in, over Hastings I think. I got up first because I could, and everything was very calm and peaceful. England lay like a green carpet below. The war seemed worlds away. I could see Tunbridge Wells, the sun glinting on the river. I remembered that last weekend I spent there with Celia, that summer of ’39. Suddenly, Jerry was coming at me out of a bank of cloud, I let him have it and I, well, I think I must have got him in the wing, because he spiralled past me out of control. As he did so, I always remember this, I caught a glimpse of his face, and do you know, he smiled. Funny thing, war.1
It’s fair to say that Bennett’s gentle and affectionate observations of a particular kind of British war hero did not go down well that evening. Audience members booed and jeered, affronted by this perceived insult to a British war hero by a man far too young to have fought in the war himself.* In a foreshadowing of the as-yet-unseen social changes waiting just over the horizon of the 1960s, a generation gap between those who had experienced the war as adults, and had learned to pleasurably relive aspects of it through the many war films of the 1950s, and those who had been children during the war years or had been born in its aftermath was very apparent that evening.
Bennett’s monologue was part of a much longer sketch called ‘The Aftermyth of War’, written and performed as part of the satirical revue showBeyond the Fringe, which had received rave reviews in the 1960 Edinburgh Festival and was now touring the provinces in preparation for a transfer to London’s West End later that month.Beyond the Fringe was a new kind of comedy revue, which delighted in surreal sketches that satirised British society, identifying and poking fun at the British establishment, authority figures and social structures. Peter Cook, the revue’s driving force and key writer, told journalists that the show would be ‘anti-establishment, anti-capital punishment, anti-colour bar and anti-1960. But it will all be very serious stuff. Sharp, bitter and to the point.’2 With Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore, Bennett dissected the collective memory of the war years as a story of ‘plucky Brits’ banding together, against the odds, to beat the Germans. Best known for the sketch in which Cook’s upper-class RAF officer tells Miller’s junior (but still upper-class) pilot, ‘Perkins, I want you to lay down your life. We need a fu
