1
WITH CLAIRE IN LONDON
Chelsea Festival, June, 2008

Down in Pont Street at St Columba’s Hall, Richard Rodney Bennett and Claire Martin are giving their two-hour show, When Lights Are Low, part of the Chelsea Festival, and the last performance on a short tour which has taken them north to Aylesbury, Newark and Perth and east to Bury St Edmunds. They make an interesting pair: Richard, immaculately smart, at 72 an engagingly avuncular presence at the keyboard, less a hard-bitten jazz pianist than an Oxford don out on a spree; Claire, a stunning blonde in an all-black dress, settled on a high stool in front of the piano. The small stage is otherwise bare, but black drapes at the back are boldly relieved with a thousand shining stars and there’s a real night-club ambience.

Without much preamble they are into their first song, the cheerful ‘Getting Some Fun Out of Life’, a Billie Holiday hit seventy years ago:

It’s a good choice for an opener. No longer well-known, it exemplifies Richard’s missionary zeal, his delight in offering audiences an adventurous, unconventional repertoire. The lyrics, too, are a reminder that Richard sees his jazz-cabaret performances, undertaken around the world for more than thirty years, as ‘play’ rather than ‘work’, something he does purely for pleasure. A good show, he once remarked, is like “going to a party for your best friends, when you know you’re going to have a great time!” His piano-playing has great richness of inventive detail, and is, as one critic once put it, “as smooth and elegant as hollandaise sauce”², the kind of expertise you could only get from someone whose major influences have included Debussy, Miles Davis, Hans Werner Henze, George Gershwin, William Walton and Blossom Dearie. It’s more than just another performance, it’s a masterclass in the highly skilled craft of jazz-cabaret, and all the more delightful and entertaining for the essential reticence and modesty of its presentation.

Richard has always been an eloquent accompanist, his long, impressive list of collaborators stretching from Cleo Laine to Maria Ewing, and he provides an assured platform from which Claire can take bold flight. Their voices complement each other perfectly in their duets. Claire’s is warm, grainy and smokily seductive, her phrasing poised and bold. Richard is equally distinctive, with more than a touch of Mel Tormé, Fred Astaire and Noël Coward. Yet Richard’s handling of ‘World Weary’ (“my absolute favourite Coward song”) is very different from the Master’s. It swings more, and there’s a far greater vocal flexibility, so the lyrics make a bigger impact. Whereas Coward begins with characteristic jauntiness, Richard, taking his cue from ‘When I’m feeling dreary and blue’, introduces a chord which quietly plumbs the depths of weariness. And, as ever, he is constantly on the alert for allusions, mischievously stressing in ‘World Weary’ a phrase from Coward’s ‘Zigeuner’.

Richard and Claire take turns in making the introductions, and sing a number of solos. One of the many highlights is Richard’s version of Harold Arlen’s ‘I Wonder What Became Of Me’. It’s a song from a Broadway show of 1946, which he’s recorded a couple of times, on the earlier occasion introducing it with a solemn blues chorus, understated and exquisite, immediately conjuring up all the sad frustration there’s ever been in the world, all the faded hopes and ambitions of humanity. At Chelsea Richard prefers a different introduction, still moody though much shorter, allowing Johnny Mercer’s lyrics to take centre stage; this, as he’s explained, is the song which changed his life when he first heard it in Paris as a student fifty years ago. Up to that moment he hadn’t realised quite what an impact a lyric could make in a popular song. Then he heard Chris Connor’s version.

The mood is poignant and intense. It’s as if the piano really has been playing all the night. In the central section, which some singers embellish with vocal pyrotechnics, Richard prefers no such distractions:

He is careful to give his audience the time needed to assimilate and explore the simile, before moving on to the final chorus, likewise presented without unnecessary frills:

A few discursive bars lead to a delicately different version of the second half, and then, with a short quotation of the piano’s opening statement, whose hints at desolation we now fully understand, the piece is brought to an elegant, bluesy conclusion. It’s just a simple three-minute song. Yet it’s become a miniature work of art, a succinct and moving statement on obsession and waste, the kind of thing it took Scott Fitzgerald a whole novel to express.

The lyrics, of course, could have a special subtext for those high-minded critics who once suggested that Richard Rodney Bennett had betrayed the ideals of his youth, spent earnestly exploring the post-Webern avant-garde; and that his long involvement in jazz and films had been at the expense of his serious self. What had become of the young man who had studied at the feet of Pierre Boulez, and who now dilly-dallied so self-indulgently with popular song? How could a serious composer write a challenging symphony one moment and a lavish film score the next? A demanding twelve-tone opera and a concert work for jazz band? A powerful string quartet and incidental music for Doctor Who? Could a classical composer really be taken seriously when, along the way, he had lit his cigarettes with Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer’s dollar bills?

It is understandably confusing when people live more than the usual single life, thereby defying the comforts of neat categorisation, but, even so, it is extraordinary that in some quarters it has been as much a topic for regret as admiration that Richard has experienced three very different and equally fulfilling musical lives: as a composer of ‘serious’ classical music, his life’s work, a remarkably catholic mix of several hundred pieces; as a writer of film and television scores, which paid for his life’s work and ensured he became a household name; and as a performer of cabaret jazz, his hobby, emanating from an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Great American Songbook (with its English appendix).

He himself has always stressed the separate nature of these three identities. But any exploration of his music cannot go far before it has to acknowledge the important cross-fertilisation of the popular and the serious, particularly as it has affected his own ‘classical’ voice. Indeed, it is possible that he would not have overcome the difficulties of his times, beset by such heavy avant-garde dogma, had the Songbook not been in the background, subconsciously informing all he has written. Thanks to the lyricism of the nightingale in Berkeley Square, the philosophy of life as a Bowl of Cherries and the never-changing importance of the Folks who Live on the Hill, Richard’s intellectually taut, serial music has been able to transcend the impenetrable density and cerebral introversion which has marred so much work of his contemporaries. Richard, by contrast, has enjoyed the best of all possible worlds, deriving much benefit from his avant-garde, serial training – an assured technique to create the forms on which the natural lyricism and sense of colour have gone to work, with the end result of an immense catalogue of remarkably diverse and beautifully crafted ‘serious’ music, always reaching out towards audiences, often challenging, but never confounding.

Now that the chaos and confusion which engulfed classical music in the second half of the twentieth century have begun to subside, revealing the era for what it was – a troubled period when the bogus and bizarre flourished alongside the valid and truly inspirational – the life and works of Richard Rodney Bennett seem ripe for re-evaluation. In those notorious Sixties and Seventies, when the ludicrous syndrome of the Emperor’s New Clothes widely flourished, he quietly took stock, disregarded prevailing orthodoxies and determinedly charted his own independent course. Some remarkable achievements resulted.

2
RODNEY AND JOAN
Family fortunes, 1890–1936

Richard Rodney Bennett was born in Broadstairs, Kent, on 29 March 1936. His parents lived in London but were affluent enough to subscribe to the belief of the time that the best place to have a baby was in a private nursing home at a fashionable seaside resort. Broadstairs was an ideal choice because their respective sisters, Jessie Bennett and Madge Spink, owned a hotel there, looking out to sea on the Western Esplanade. Richard’s Aunts Jessie and Madge were a redoubtable pair, and the Castlemere Hotel which they ran for many years was to be one of the most stable and important institutions in his early life.

Richard inherited his musical talent from both sides of his family. His mother, 35-year-old Joan Bennett, was a pianist and composer with perfect pitch. His father, 46-year-old Harry Rodney Bennett, had once been a singing teacher and also appeared professionally on the operatic stage, though he currently worked as a children’s writer and expert on amateur drama. Richard was barely to know his enterprising father, who died when he was only twelve, whereas his mother lived on into her eighties, and was often a prominent figure at prestigious musical occasions – “discreetly in the background, yet somehow always nearby me” – and so her influence has been the much more widely acknowledged.

Harry Rodney Bennett grew up at St Mary’s, Reading, the son of an insurance clerk⁴ and the youngest of a large family crammed so tightly and noisily into a small terraced house that he would sometimes sit in one of the bottom cupboards of the kitchen dresser to read in peace. He was scholarly, artistic and extremely ambitious. Making his first amateur concert appearance at the age of six, as an unimportant elf, he was supposed to be dancing inconspicuously in the back row but somehow, by the end of the number, had eased his way downstage to the very centre.⁵ Similar determination allowed him to overcome very serious illness (rheumatic fever leaving him with a weak heart which for ever debarred further dancing) and to avoid being apprenticed to a tailor at the age of 13. By doggedly making money through various menial jobs, he not only passed through secondary school but achieved both a BA and MA at Reading’s University College.⁶

While at university, conscious of his working-class background in a strongly middle-class environment, Harry discarded his first name. Rodney Bennett sounded more artistic, particularly when he participated in college concerts as a fine bass-baritone. He also sang for his local Congregational Church⁷, competing at the Crystal Palace in 1913, when his choir defeated 280 others from all over Britain and he himself triumphed as a soloist, winning first prize amongst the basses. It was an impressive event, culminating in a mass choir of over 4,000 voices. Rodney, it seems, was a natural performer who rose to big occasions.

That year he began his first teaching job at a small church school in a squalid, condemned building in London’s East End.⁸ During the First World War, for which his weak heart debarred enlistment, he worked in several schools in the elementary system, yet always feeling the complete outsider who, unlike other young men in their mid-twenties, was not in uniform. As the casualties and bitterness grew, all he could do was to push himself harder, developing a remarkable work ethic which would never leave him.

Rodney became an inspirational English teacher, not least in championing drama at a time when it was rarely found either in or outside the curriculum. The problems to be overcome were quite considerable:

Play production appealed to his compulsion towards self-improvement, answering the need to be constantly developing new areas of expertise, a characteristic Richard would inherit. Rodney taught himself, for example, to be good at make-up:

And it was not long before he was an expert in incidental music:

Such was his enthusiasm that it is perhaps surprising that he gave up teaching so early, at around the age of thirty. Family legend has it that he lost patience after a disagreement with the headmaster of an unruly boys’ school in the East End. Rodney, it is said, was endeavouring to prove that Shakespeare, if acted out, could be effective even in the toughest of schools, but unfortunately his headmaster came into his classroom just as the battle of Agincourt was reaching its climax. He was sacked on the spot.

It is likely, however, that the move out of the classroom owed less to an over-zealous response to “Once more into the breach, dear friends” than a deepening desire to exploit his own excellent voice. He sang Mephistopheles in Gounod’s Faust, and also appeared professionally in comic opera, but this new career would seem to have collapsed within a year because of his heart problems, though an over-ambitious Italian teacher may also have damaged his voice.

Fortunately, however, it was never Rodney’s way to rely on a single source of income. He was also operating as a private singing teacher and organiser of public concerts, “ostensibly to afford my pupils practice, but really quite as much to gratify my enduring taste for this sort of activity!”¹² Soon, too, the young entrepreneur started writing regular articles on education and music, and, in 1923, he began five years as a visiting singing teacher two days a week at Morley College, the long-established adult education centre in Lambeth.

By then, however, he had achieved the first of many successes in a completely new venture, the writing of lyrics for drawing-room ballads. He had always been confident in his ability to write poetry. Rhyme and metre came easily to him. And when he persuaded the distinguished song-writer Haydn Wood to use one of his lyrics, a big hit resulted. ‘A Brown Bird Singing’ immediately sold in huge numbers after its publication in 1922, was quickly recorded by two of the most popular tenors of the day, John McCormack and Webster Booth, and has been regularly recorded ever since.

All his life Rodney knew how to present himself to best advantage. At university he had killed off Harry Bennett when the need arose, and so now, as part of that exclusive band of lyricists creating the country’s latest drawing-room songs, he became ‘Royden Barrie’, an anagram of Rodney plus the surname of a playwright he had long admired. The cult of Victorian and Edwardian ballads still flourished strongly in the early 1920s. In a time of increasing social mobility, to have a piano or pianola around to accompany singing in the evenings was a token of affluence and achievement, so Royden Barrie’s words and Haydn Wood’s elegant tune were to be heard in enthusiastic renditions up and down the country:

The lyrics may now seem almost embarrassingly simplistic, but nobody mocked in 1922, for they perfectly responded to the mood of the moment, a deep nostalgia in a war-weary country for gentler times. For many women, of course, the mothers and sweethearts of the mass-slaughtered, such a love song could never go a-winging to its destination, and in writing of “the hush of the darkness and the dew” Rodney was deliberately stirring echoes of one of the most well-known songs of the Great War, Haydn Wood’s great tear-jerker:

The success of ‘A Brown Bird Singing’ was followed, the next year, with two further Royden Barrie hits, one of them, ‘I Heard You Singing’, his first collaboration with Eric Coates. These triumphs – and they were little less – dramatically changed Rodney’s life, partly in the way they focused his future energies completely on writing and partly in turning his thoughts to marriage.

For several years he had quietly paid court to Joan Esther Burr Spink, a young lady eleven years his junior who lived in Eversley Crescent¹⁴, Isleworth, a road of tall, detached villas, proudly late Victorian. Joan’s father, William Charles Spink, who set off to work each day in the back of his chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce, was a successful master butcher, just as his father had been before him, owning a chain of shops with prestigious headquarters in Sloane Street.

Joan, the youngest of his five daughters, had done well at St Paul’s School for Girls, winning a succession of prizes for the piano and musical composition. Gustav Holst, head of the music department, had just written his St Paul’s Suite to celebrate the opening of the school’s new music wing and was currently engaging help from within the department in the copying out of the full score of The Planets. The school witnessed several exciting performances of the two-piano version (a work which Richard was to record some sixty years later), and when, in 1918, The Planets was finally given its first professional performance, conducted by Adrian Boult at the Queen’s Hall, Joan participated as a sixth-form member of the St Paul’s School chorus.

It was on Holst’s advice that, a year after obtaining her Advanced Grade Certificate in 1919, Joan joined the Royal College of Music, where she became one of his composition pupils. There she wrote several chamber and choral works, one of which Holst included in a published collection of pieces by his most promising students. Rodney, who himself was renting rooms in Isleworth, could not but have been impressed by her exploits of conducting college choirs and madrigal groups, and her stories of Holst (urging her to practise improvisations with frequent key changes), her piano professor Harold Samuel¹⁵, John Ireland, Constant Lambert and her fellow-student Edmund Rubbra (who was for ever making cheeky advances). Under Joan’s influence, Rodney arranged some French folk songs for publication, collected by a friend.¹⁶

This placid and rather formal friendship endured for several years without ever arousing Grandfather Spink’s anxieties. He knew Rodney well, for he was a member of the same bowls club. Rodney, meanwhile, who by his own admission “didn’t know much about girls”¹⁷, was concealing his growing feelings for Joan, channelling some of them into the writing of short lyrics, sincere if quaintly old-fashioned expressions of love, which helpfully could serve a dual purpose as lucrative ballads, if set to music. ‘Secrets’ was typical:

One day in early 1923, unable to contain himself any longer, Rodney declared his love to Joan, very clumsily, forgetting his carefully prepared words in a nervousness he had never known in his many theatrical ventures. Joan heard him through and then sent him gently back to his lodgings, his situation tantalisingly unresolved. Back at his rooms¹⁸, unable to sleep, Rodney wrote and rewrote a lengthy letter explaining the background to his proposal and begging her to stop calling him ‘uncle’. He wished to be something rather more, basing his hopes on the fact that, if she cared for him only as a friend, she would surely not have been so incredibly generous in giving him such quantities of her time, particularly as she seemed to like so few people… He tried to rationalise his prospects. He was not particularly clever, he wrote, nor had he yet achieved a hundredth of what he intended. He was not very wealthy either:

For Grandfather Spink, Joan represented the last chance of an advantageous marriage following a series of disappointments with her elder sisters, not least his favourite, Madge, who after a disastrous society wedding had seemed to have given up on men, becoming a nutrition expert and going into the hotel business in Broadstairs. If Joan were to marry Rodney, a man with a weak heart and no steady position, Madge’s odd relationship with Rodney’s sister Jessie would only be further strengthened. The match could not be countenanced, and so he told Joan that, were she to marry Rodney, he and her mother would have nothing more to do with her.

Joan’s lifelong determination to do exactly what she wanted now came into its own, helped on by a piece of shrewd opportunism by Rodney, who, sensing an unlikely victory, seems to have won his bride by boldly acquiring (perhaps with a heavy mortgage) a splendid house very close to Bedford Park, the world’s first garden suburb, created by Norman Shaw in the 1880’s. It was the kind of wedding present no spirited young girl of moderate ambition could easily reject. The Studio, 20 Woodstock Road, with its decorative red hanging tiles, its Arts and Crafts ambience and its bold Victorian Queen Anne style, was a perfect expression of upper-middle-class good taste. It was far enough away from Isleworth for independence, but close enough for hopes of an eventual rapprochement. Rodney and Joan were duly married, very quietly (without Joan’s parents), at a Brentford Registry office in April 1924.

En route to a honeymoon on the Isle of Wight, they stopped at Arundel. Rodney’s emotional life, however, was rarely untroubled, and some crisis led to his dashing back from the Norfolk Arms Hotel to the new house in Bedford Park in the early hours of their first morning as a married couple. But he was in good spirits as, in his usual careful hand, he wrote from The Studio:

Whatever crisis drew him back, it was most probably connected with his work, currently centred on the writing of lyrics. These, while often limited to the more obvious manifestations of nature, were exhibiting a serenity reflecting his altered state.

In another age Joan might have taken up a musical career. Instead, however, she was scornful of professional women and was happy to devote her energies to supporting Rodney, whom she had been gently influencing since the moment when, in all probability, she led him to the decision to give up school teaching. For she was the dominant partner, and such was her ability to bend others to her will without any apparent confrontation that her involvement cannot be discounted in some key decisions: the creation of Royden Barrie; the attempt at an operatic career; and the approach to Gustav Holst, director of music at Morley College for the job as a singer teacher. Joan’s influence over Rodney around the time of their marriage ranged from the straightening of his buck teeth to collaborations on music reviews and articles on leading musical figures like Philip Heseltine (Peter Warlock) and E. J. Moeran.¹⁹ With Joan beside him, prompting and assisting, Rodney became formidably ambitious.

His immediate target was to consolidate his position as an important lyricist. With his strong self-discipline, his confidence to sell himself to the country’s leading composers and his ability to do a quick, workmanlike job at all times, Royden Barrie’s continued prominence in the country’s drawing-rooms followed as a matter of course. Privately printed booklets of Barrie’s latest lyrics were sent round to leading composers from The Studio, Bedford Park: “If you wish to reserve any of the enclosed Lyrics, please communicate early.” In 1925, the first full year of marriage, he achieved at least seven successes. In 1926 he not only did well out of ‘Poor Man’s Garden’ and ‘While You’re Away’ but produced one of the best-known ballads of all time, ‘Bird Songs at Eventide’, another of his many collaborations with Eric Coates. The lyric, as usual, presents love in the very simplest of terms:

It was an ideal anodyne for the middle classes, a perfect piece of escapism in the age of general strikes, bright young things, unemployment marches, airships, art deco, Jacob Epstein and the first Labour Government; it offered the same kind of nostalgia for a safe, idealised past as Vaughan Williams’ A Pastoral Symphony. Rodney’s lyric is cleverly appealing in its sheer lack of specifics; it is a song for all lovers of all ages in all places. As soon as it came out, John McCormack took it into his repertoire and recorded it (one of his six Royden Barrie recordings). Its future was at once assured; so too Rodney’s and Joan’s.

1926 was not just memorable for ‘Bird Songs at Eventide’ but the birth of their first child Anne, who at once had a large impact on her father’s working life, his extra responsibilities leading him to a considerable diversification of output. He now began writing plays for children, many of them musicals. Joan herself supplied the music for Shepherds on Wires, ‘a human marionette play’, one of many to be published by Curwen, but he tended to use seasoned professionals, like Gerrard Williams (some of whose piano pieces Richard was later to record). Their greatest success was Charming Chloe, an operetta broadcast by the BBC in 1928. The Whispering Wood, a three-act version of the story of Snow White, had some fine music by Martin Shaw and was another example of the high quality of Rodney’s collaborators.²¹

The most distinguished, of all, however, was Roger Quilter, who in 1928 had heard Charming Chloe on the radio, liked the lyrics, and got in touch. Then in his early fifties and with most of his finest works behind him, Quilter was looking for someone to help him produce a successor to Where The Rainbow Ends, his regularly revived musical play for children. In 1929 Quilter invited Rodney and Joan to stay with him for a working holiday on the French Riviera, at the Riviera Palace Hotel, Menton. The holiday consolidated an important friendship which was to last the rest of Rodney’s life.

The collaboration began with a light opera, The Blue Boar, set in the mid-eighteenth century and inspired by a portrait of Madame de Pompadour. Rodney clearly valued the friendship – he carefully kept all Quilter’s letters – and seems not to have been worried by Quilter’s unconventional sexual preferences and growing eccentricities. From time to time he would stay overnight in Quilter’s London home after meeting up for discussions, followed by dinner and the theatre (as often as not Gilbert and Sullivan). It was four years before, in 1933, The Blue Boar was completed and broadcast by the BBC.

Although in all other respects an opportunist, Rodney was over-influenced by Roger Quilter and seemingly oblivious to how passé operetta had become. This was the era of bright new musicals like No No Nanette! (with Binnie Hale’s shapely legs dancing the Charleston) and the brash revues of C.B Cochran (with chic songs like ‘World Weary’ and ‘Dance, Little Lady’). Audiences wanted the kind of sophisticated material offered by Noël Coward and Beatrice Lillie, Gwen Farrar and Norah Blaney, and if there was a little ambiguous sexuality, so much the better. It was the time for glamour, glitz and jazz, but Rodney and Quilter resolutely refused to compromise their ideals. Early on in their relationship Quilter had written to Rodney:

It should have been clear to them as early as 1930, when Quilter tried out an early version of their Pompadour operetta on the leading theatrical impresario C.B. Cochran, that their product was too old-fashioned:

It didn’t really matter too much to Rodney that his Quilter musicals were making such little progress, because he was busy with any number of other new, successful initiatives as he continued to diversify. He had, for example, already produced a book based on his youthful experiences as a school teacher, Play-production for Amateurs, for which he had persuaded the well-known playwright St John Irvine to write him a glowing endorsement by way of a Preface. As a proven expert, he now became a British Drama League advisor and adjudicator.²³

As his Drama League responsibilities centred on Berkshire, he and Joan left Bedford Park for a large, detached house²⁴ in one of the more desirable parts of Reading, where his elderly parents were still living, and where a second daughter, Margaret (always known as Meg) was born, quickly acquiring Roger Quilter as her godfather. This sudden doubling of Rodney’s paternal responsibilities coincided with a further diversification – to speech training²⁵, the subject of several books offering imaginative strategies towards ‘good’ English, with the emphasis, as ever, on making the process easy and amusing. Once he had found a good theme, Rodney was always able to weave any number of skilful variations. First came The Play Way of Speech Training and Practical Speech Training For Schools, and thousands of little Eliza Doolittles found themselves reciting his helpful jingles:

Then came a large series of little Speech Training books under the general title of Adventures in Words, each containing verses, games, dialogues and more jingles. Schools all over the country bought them in large quantities for the next twenty to thirty years. The royalties were excellent.

The move to Reading prospered, but Rodney always needed further challenges, and in 1933 he was offered new areas in which to spread his messianic message as a drama advisor and adjudicator, requiring a return to London. As luck would have it, an impressively large house²⁶ next door to the Spinks in Isleworth had come up for sale, conveniently close to the recently opened, art deco Osterley Station and the newly created Great West Road. The move was at once celebrated by Grandfather Spink linking the two fine back gardens with an arch, creating a wonderful play area for the children.

Inevitably, with a new home came a new skill. Back in Isleworth, Rodney ventured forth as a writer of children’s fiction and scored an immediate success with The Adventures of Hoppity Bobtail, first published in 1934, marketed as a ‘supplementary readers for juniors’ and still being reprinted and read in schools over thirty years later. The Marvellous Adventures of Percy Pig quickly followed together with The Adventures of Spot, and, just in case the royalties didn’t come in fast enough from these new excitements, he wrote a large series of condensations of other writers’ stories under the general heading of Romance in Reading.

Rodney was so busy, indeed, that he began using the help of a full-time secretary. One of the first was Christopher Fry, whom Rodney had met when lecturing at the Prep School where Fry was teaching. The young future playwright became very interested in Rodney’s current musical initiatives – a cantata pageant, Robin Hood, and a comic operetta for boys, Once Aboard the Lugger, both with music by Anne’s godfather, Alec Rowley – and he started writing lyrics and music himself at this period, successfully too, and through Rodney’s help some of it was performed on the London stage. It was clearly a warm relationship. When Fry moved on from Eversley Crescent he was allowed to keep the sturdy old typewriter which Rodney had given him. It was subsequently used to produce the hugely popular A Phoenix Too Frequent and The Lady’s Not For Burning and Fry kept it for the rest of his life.

Another of Rodney’s diversifications was to turn himself into every child’s favourite uncle (not his most obvious role), a benign and omniscient source of fun and knowledge. ‘Let’s Do A Play!’ and ‘What Can We Do Now?’ are books cleverly designated “for anyone over the age of thirteen” and of enormous appeal to doting middle-class parents anxious for their children to fill their leisure hours productively. ‘Let’s Do A Play!’, first published in September 1933, was to go into many reprints and be “the most successful book of its kind ever published”.²⁷ It was full of good advice for would-be actors and directors, and its last section, ‘Recitations, Sketches and Plays,’ helpfully offered work by well-known writers like Drinkwater, Thackeray, Lewis Carroll and Rodney Bennett. Despite its determinedly jocular tone, ‘Let’s Do A Play’ shows that Rodney’s knowledge of the professional stage had deepened, a reflection, perhaps, of his current connections with one of London’s most forward-looking theatres, the Embassy at Swiss Cottage.

The companion volume, ‘What Can We Do Now?’, addressing the use of leisure in a broader way, offers an amazingly long list of things to do. There are 300 pages of useful ideas: from making bamboo musical pipes to decorating lampshades; from preserving autumn leaves to organising blindfold obstacle races; and from devising anagrams and double acrostics to making toffee-apples… The list is awesome, the tone relentlessly jolly and condescending. Yet ‘What Can We Do Now?’, dedicated “to my wife and a crowd of other frivolous friends” and owing much to the impish charm of Joyce Dennys’ illustrations, was a terrific success.

In 1931 Rodney tried a new venture, turning himself into A.A. Milne. The 1924 Milne best-seller, When We Were Very Young, was a book of 44 poems for young children, published just four years after the birth of Christopher Robin. Rodney’s Whither Shall We Wander? was a book of 40 poems written five years after the birth of Anne. It is a quite unscrupulous copy of another writer’s idea, even down to the alliteration and use of ‘we’ in the title. Although he does not involve Anne and Meg in the book in the way Milne involves Christopher Robin, it is nonetheless dedicated to them and contains a long personal address to Anne as he explains how the book came into being:

But having set out to use Anne as the central figure in his new version of When We Were Very Young, Rodney, most tellingly, suddenly diverts attention from her to himself: