In a side road behind a suburban railway station, where Surrey begins its slow elision into the western fringes of London, is a large circular depression. It sits at the bottom of a once grand garden, surrounded by banks topped with mouldering rhododendrons, a natural if secretive arena. On a damp day in November 2025, all it contains is a distinctly unremarkable block of 1930s flats. But just over a century ago, this was the site of a tiny, private playhouse called the Gables, where one of British theatre’s most unjustly forgotten writers leapt from the blocks.
Today, ask someone if they know who Robert Cedric Sherriff was and you’ll likely be on the receiving end of a blank stare. Which is a shame. From 1928, when Journey’s End, his slice-of-life play evoking the dugouts of the First World War, first opened, to the mid-1950s, when he wrote the script of the film The Dam Busters, R. C. Sherriff was one of the most hard-working and highly rated scriptwriters in the business. He had a hand in any number of memorable films, including James Whale’s The Invisible Man, Goodbye Mr Chips, The Four Feathers, Mrs Miniver and That Hamilton Woman; he wrote seventeen stage plays, including a drama about Napoleon on St Helena; and he published a small library’s worth of novels, including one, The Fortnight in September, that became an enduring bestseller.
Of all this endeavour, only Journey’s End is likely now to ring a bell. A set text in British schools for the past quarter-century, it remains an undyingly popular choice for school plays, while the emotional impact of its story of loyalty, bravery and loss earns it at least one West End or Broadway production a decade. Don’t want to wait for the next one? Try James Whale’s film version from 1930, starring a saturnine
Subscribe or sign in to read the full article
The full version of this article is only available to subscribers to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly. To continue reading, please sign in or take out a subscription to the quarterly magazine for yourself or as a gift for a fellow booklover. Both gift givers and gift recipients receive access to the full online archive of articles along with many other benefits, such as preferential prices for all books and goods in our online shop and offers from a number of like-minded organizations. Find out more on our subscriptions page.
Subscribe now or Sign inIn a side road behind a suburban railway station, where Surrey begins its slow elision into the western fringes of London, is a large circular depression. It sits at the bottom of a once grand garden, surrounded by banks topped with mouldering rhododendrons, a natural if secretive arena. On a damp day in November 2025, all it contains is a distinctly unremarkable block of 1930s flats. But just over a century ago, this was the site of a tiny, private playhouse called the Gables, where one of British theatre’s most unjustly forgotten writers leapt from the blocks.
Today, ask someone if they know who Robert Cedric Sherriff was and you’ll likely be on the receiving end of a blank stare. Which is a shame. From 1928, when Journey’s End, his slice-of-life play evoking the dugouts of the First World War, first opened, to the mid-1950s, when he wrote the script of the film The Dam Busters, R. C. Sherriff was one of the most hard-working and highly rated scriptwriters in the business. He had a hand in any number of memorable films, including James Whale’s The Invisible Man, Goodbye Mr Chips, The Four Feathers, Mrs Miniver and That Hamilton Woman; he wrote seventeen stage plays, including a drama about Napoleon on St Helena; and he published a small library’s worth of novels, including one, The Fortnight in September, that became an enduring bestseller. Of all this endeavour, only Journey’s End is likely now to ring a bell. A set text in British schools for the past quarter-century, it remains an undyingly popular choice for school plays, while the emotional impact of its story of loyalty, bravery and loss earns it at least one West End or Broadway production a decade. Don’t want to wait for the next one? Try James Whale’s film version from 1930, starring a saturnine, tortured Colin Clive. Largely faithful to the stage script, it’s intense and full of tenderness; you can understand why the original, with its pitiless account of her compatriots’ lives and deaths, inspired Vera Brittain to write Testament of Youth. Or, equally, how the appalling pointlessness of much of its heroism led directly to Joan Littlewood’s fury in Oh, What a Lovely War! and, decades later, the poignant satire of Blackadder Goes Forth. Critically and financially a hit from the minute the curtain went up, Journey’s End is one of those works of art that, like a comet, both blazed bright and had a long tail. Its brightness threw a shadow, though: Sherriff spent the rest of his life trying to prove to himself, as much as to anybody else, that he wasn’t a one-hit wonder. No Leading Lady (1968), the memoir he wrote as his career finally sputtered out, is full of this tension: he seems to believe he is no great talent, yet he works himself to the bone producing success after success. The book’s very structure is his wry acknowledgement of how posterity will view him: it begins with him sweating in panic on the eve of the first night of Journey’s End and ends forty years later with an archetypal little old lady asking, ‘I did enjoy Journey’s End, Mr Sherriff. Why don’t you write something else?’ It’s as if everything that came between was just ephemera. Which is, of course, a nonsense. No Leading Lady displays a life packed with anecdote and drama, from Winston Churchill taking time out from the Treasury to give the benefit of his thoughts on plot inconsistencies, through provincial American audiences whistling their disapproval at pre-Broadway runs, to Sherriff and his mother becoming stranded in Montreal at the outbreak of the Second World War with only $50 between them and no safe passage home. Along the way, Sherriff introduces us to West End impresarios in teddy coats and gold earrings, cigar-waving Hollywood moguls, dusty Oxford dons, wise London salonistas and – memorably – Charlie Chaplin doing an impression of a Japanese wrestler. By turns amusing, nail-biting and insightful – it’s particularly fascinating for any- one interested in the mechanics and economics of early twentieth- century showbiz – No Leading Lady tells a tale every bit as narratively gripping as any of its author’s films or plays. There is, though, at least one glaring plot-hole. Despite the fact that Sherriff’s success was founded on the First World War, his memoir barely mentions it. It’s a curious omission. The bare facts are these: Sherriff enlisted in November 1915, aged 19. He trained as a junior officer in Essex before being sent to Ypres in September 1916, where he remained for ten months. Though he seems to have been well-respected within his company and formed close friendships with several fellow officers (who later acted as inspiration for characters in Journey’s End), his time on the front line was difficult. He found the shelling unbearable, was constantly worried that he would let his men or himself down, and (probably as a result) was afflicted with agonizing bouts of neuralgia. At Passchendaele in 1917, early in an offensive that would, had he stayed, probably have killed him, he was wounded by multiple shell splinters and sent home for the remainder of the war. In early 1919, he left the service and returned to his earlier job, as a rep for the Sun Insurance Company. No Leading Lady remains almost entirely silent on how Sherriff felt about all this. In Promise of Greatness (1968), a collection of essays marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Armistice, his contribution is clear-eyed about the filth and the hopelessness of it all, the men often old, broken and riddled with lice, the young officers not understanding why their generals gave the orders they did. But equally he confesses he found it at times a magnificent experience, with ‘something grand and awe-inspiring in that tremendous cannonade of guns . . . the whole surrounding country lit with thousands of red stabs of flame’. Journey’s End acts out the fate of two young men, one bitter, shattered, the other idealistic and with a schoolboy crush on the other. Perhaps they are stand-ins for Sherriff’s own unresolved feelings about the war: part of him in love with its sacrifice and male camaraderie, the other terrified, ashamed and full of buried self-hatred. The suburbs do not breed self-confidence. I grew up a couple of miles downstream from Sherriff’s childhood home in Hampton Wick, along that slow, thoughtful and still just-about-tidal stretch of the Thames that runs from Teddington Lock to Brentford, and I know exactly how close and yet how far away the energy and excitement of London must have felt. To live in riverine, once-upon-a-time villages like Surbiton or Thames Ditton is to stand teetering on the threshold of the city, neither in nor properly out; you can catch a train and be in SW1 in less than half an hour; but though the gates at Waterloo Station open with just a ticket, there are other, hidden barriers that are harder to overcome. Sherriff was, at least superficially, as suburban as net curtains. He went to school at Kingston Grammar – still standing in all its red brick solidity – was captain of the local rowing club, housed then on the bird-haunted islet of Raven’s Ait, and, once Journey’s End made him rich, moved to a house in Esher that, though much larger, was all of five miles from his family home. His early plays were first produced in Surbiton, often at the Gables Theatre: the garden folly that preceded those 1930s flats and whose rhododendrons doubled, apparently, as an outdoor box office. He suffered, too, from suburban timidities. Photographs show a fine-featured man, with something inescapably uncertain about the set of his mouth, and his memoir is always careful to avoid any charge of boastfulness or uppity pride. The worst thing you can do, in the suburbs, is be different. Which means that, vastly entertaining though No Leading Lady is, it’s worth remembering two things. First, Sherriff was a professional storyteller, always with an eye on the arc of a plot and the need for a payoff. Second, he was a nervous and deeply private man. There is an archive, and a good one, with many letters, manuscripts and financial papers, and Roland Wales’s biography, From Journey’s End to The Dam Busters (2016), used it to show how often Sherriff prioritized a well told tale over the more revealing, and possibly messier, truth. His origin story for Journey’s End – that, like all his early plays, it was written for fun, with no greater ambition than to raise money for his rowing club – is a fudge: he had always wanted to write, and had, quietly and doggedly, been practising his craft even while still in the army. His family were neither as humble nor as hard-up as he makes out, and the story about pleurisy preventing him from becoming a rowing blue at Oxford appears to be a complete fantasy. The self- portrait he sketches – of an accidental dramatist, one who would have been just as happy to remain an insurance man until he died – is one to inspect with care. Like a painted backcloth, it may be intended to distract us from what lies behind. Which leads us, inevitably, to Constance. You don’t have to be particularly sharp to spot that Sherriff’s relationship with his mother, who looked so ‘lovely’ in her handmade dresses, was unusual. Connie Sherriff – vivacious, a would-be actress, dissatisfied in her marriage to the Pooterish Harold – focused most of her attention on her middle child, and from the 1930s on barely left his side, travelling with him back and forth to Hollywood, attending all but one of his first nights, and, before too long, leaving the marital home to live with him at the big house in Esher. There she stayed until she died; and Sherriff never married. What other relationships he had are a mystery; the archive shows no signs of lovers of either sex. Sherriff may have lived among men, whether in a rowing club, an insurance office or in the army, but he wasn’t inspired by his long collaboration with Whale, one of the first openly gay directors in Hollywood, to make any disclosure about his private life. Maybe his mother left him no room for anyone else; maybe he hid from her what he did have room for. Which makes No Leading Lady’s title – ostensibly a reference to an early complaint about Journey’s End – an intriguing choice. Perhaps when, after so many decades of keeping up appearances, Sherriff decided to give the story of his life that headline, he finally twitched back the curtain. Originals of his memoir are now so rare they sell for at least £100, so a new edition is immensely welcome. Not only because No Leading Lady records, vividly and in detail, a fecund and important period in British and American culture, nor because of the emotional impact of watching, at one remove, a talented man struggle with both his background and, possibly, his nature. But also because, despite its writer’s fears, it will remind posterity that Robert Cedric Sherriff did, actually, write something else. And it was very good.Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 91 © Isabel Lloyd 2026
About the contributor
Isabel Lloyd is a writer, editor and former actress. She grew up in Surbiton and, like Sherriff, used to get the train up to Waterloo at least once a week.
Leave a comment