ACH Smith I cherish the Bristolian sense of humour – it’s so dry
Eugene Byrne talks to veteran playwright and author and ardent Bristolian ACH Smith
PLAYWRIGHT, academic, novelist and TV presenter ACH Smith will be 87 this year, and though I didn’t mean it to sound the wrong way, I told him that I wanted to interview him for BT partly because he’s an unofficial “civic treasure”, a compliment he accepted gracefully.
But then he is a local ornament, and has been in one way or another since 1960, when he arrived in Bristol in pursuit of a girl (she dumped him after a few months), got a job at the Post, before moving over to the Western Daily Press where, among other things, he edited a weekly arts page.
(I could tell you more of what he has to say about this, but the firm probably wouldn’t appreciate Smith’s tales of the expletive-laden disdain with which the arts page was looked upon by a certain senior manager at the paper.)
In 1964, he and his wife Alison were the centrepiece of The Newcomers, a ground-breaking TV documentary made by John Boorman, soon to become a very famous film director (see panel) and has had a number of literary and theatrical successes ever since, not the least of them the triumphant spectacle of dock life, Up the Feeder, Down the Mouth, most memorably staged at the Industrial Museum in 2001.
His autobiography, WordSmith: A Memoir, published by Redcliffe Press 10 years ago, opens with him musing that he might have subtitled it “How I have spent my life as a writer and yet managed to pay the gas bills.”
As anyone in the know will tell you, paying the bills as a writer is quite an achievement, unless your name is JK Rowling.
But he’s successfully managed it for more than 60 years, lives with his wife in a nice house in Redland where, of course, he has a booklined study, one desk for work, another desk for the admin, and he keeps busy.
His latest published work is Only the Dance a novel set in Bristol, produced during the pandemic.
“It wasn’t a conscious decision, to write it, it’s just the way things fell out. I spent most of the last 30 years of the 20th century writing fiction, but ended up with Up the Feeder, which gave me a real taste for theatre work, but when Covid hit, it was obvious that the theatres were not going to be working for a while.”
Lead character, happy-go-lucky Charley, leads a hand-to-mouth existence doing various odd jobs. He and his best mate Mike are both into horse-racing and a chance encounter at Chepstow leads Charley into what he thinks is some easy casual work delivering high-end luxury goods to wealthy clients around the west country, but which turns into something much more sinister.
Charley and Mike featured in two previous books of Smith’s. “I thought I’ll revive them … they have a nice line in banter which I invented 40 years ago and it was easy to get that back.
“And then there was the question of a plot … I’d got as far as thinking what was my milieu going to be? It has to have a criminal element to it, and I thought well, the thing I know absolutely nothing about, but I can read plenty about, is the drug scene, which seems to be enormous now.
“So I did a little of what authors arrogantly call “research” – you don’t go and sit in the British Library in London for six months, swotting it up – it’s not like that. A lot of it is serendipity, something you happen to come across, or find something in a footnote and follow it up. So I found out as much as I thought I needed to know.”
Anthony Charles Smith – the H is for Hockley, his mother’s maiden name, added later to distinguish him from other Smiths – was born in London in 1935. His mother died when he was three.
His father, a clerk at a brewery in Putney, was one of the unlucky few who had to serve in both world wars. Going off to do his bit in 1939 (much of which involved dropping propaganda leaflets over enemy lines from balloons), he left his only child in the care of his brother-inlaw and wife in Ilford.
So much of Smith’s childhood was with an uncle and aunt and, some of the time, an older cousin. It wasn’t an unhappy time, and no less strange probably than the childhood of many of his contemporaries.
He studied French and Spanish at Cambridge after the obligatory spell of National Service. “I was grossly under-worked, as was everyone around me. RAF Bicester in Oxfordshire, which was headquarters of RAF Maintenance Command, had enough work for those of us in the offices to occupy about 10 per cent of our time, so I took the time to get quite serious about reading, and trying to write poetry.”
After Cambridge, he lived for a while in France on a small scholarship and returned when the money ran out.
“And then my father, a very kind and gentle man, put his hand on my shoulder and pointed out that by then he had, for 23 years, paid for me to eat, and though I had a state scholarship which paid most of the costs of Cambridge, he had had to make a contribution, and could I perhaps start to begin to give him a hand?
“That was more or less the way he put it, and of course he was my dad, and so I was shot through with a pang of conscience and started thinking, well what am I going to do?”
At the time he was chasing after a girl in Bristol and one thing led to another and he found himself arriving here in 1960 to take up a job at the Post at its offices down on Silver Street.
He was moved over to the Western Daily Press some months later when the Post took it over. Among other jobs he was assigned to produce new weekly page devoted to the arts.
He was asked to give some work to a young writer named Tom Stoppard, whom he had met once and taken an instant dislike to (“I
thought who is this greasy provincial hack?”) but found that Stoppard’s first contribution, a piece on the new French nouvelle vague cinema of the time was immaculately written. The two have remained very close friends ever since.
While he may have come here in 1960 to work on newspapers, he could, like so many of his artistic and media friends and acquaintances, have followed the conventional career route (back) to London. But no, he and his wife have lived in the same house in Redland for well over 50 years.
“I love Bristol. It’s a wonderful place to live, and inevitably being here as long as I have you make friends.
“What is slightly sad for me is that all three of our kids all moved to London, which I fled 60 years ago. I’m not sure why they did, I suppose it’s because it’s still the happening place, the hip place to be.
“But they’ve all now raised their own children, we have eight grandchildren, and I think there may be a feeling among our three kids, the grandchildrens’ parents, that they could now sell their houses in London for probably like 25 billion pounds and get somewhere very nice in Bristol, and it’d be no trouble for their kids to come and see them in Bristol.”
Why does he love Bristol?
“To start with to look at. There are the Downs, green spaces and parks, but I think the deepest answer is the Bristolian sense of humour. I discovered it early on and I still cherish it and it’s epitomised for me in a story Norman Walters, who used to be a journalist at Silver Street 60 years ago.
“He said he was sitting on a bus and there were two blokes sitting behind him and one says to the other, ‘I’m going to watch the City for Lent.’”
“And I bet he said it with a straight face, and perhaps he didn’t even intend it to be funny, but it’s so dry.”
The thing he’s probably best known for in Bristol is Up the Feeder, Down the Mouth, the spectacular show about working life in the City Docks. So would he be happy to be principally remembered for this?
“I think I might be, for two reasons, really. The first and lesser is that it was successful, though all the credit for that goes to Andy Hay
(the artistic director at the Bristol Old Vic), who didn’t get enough credit at the time, but he did a great job.
“The other reason why I’d be pleased for it to be on my tombstone is because it contained so much of that Bristol sense of humour.”
Writing/researching it involved interviewing dozens of retired dockers and their wives, plus a handful of former merchant seamen, resulting in hours and hours of tape and about 100 pages of single-spaced typed text.
“Andy drove me through 13 drafts of that play and at the time I groaned and swore, but he was right, and he got out of it a thing that the Observer theatre critic
called the highlight of the year.
“I hope it really got to the nub of working life in Bristol, ordinary dockers and ordinary seamen.” One wonders if a future playwright could ever come up with a similar production about present-day office workers in Bristol?
“I doubt it. It was good theatre because it had a big cast of actors, the dockers,
500 of them on a busy day down the middle of the city.
“It was an intensely social atmosphere, the men were making jokes to each other all the time, and there’s a lot of that in the show. If you can get a drop of that cordial when interviewing them you can get out of it something that sounds and smells like Bristol. But can you do that with people designing websites? I don’t know.”
» Only the Dance: A Bristol Thriller by ACH Smith is published by Tangent Books, price £10 paperback. See tinyurl.com/5n8bjn6f
» ACH Smith’s autobiography, Wordsmith: A Memoir was published by Redcliffe Press, price £9.75 paperback. See tinyurl.com/sjn94tcc