Why Priestley was simply beastly!

He made a fortune from his plays but constantly moaned about money, turned off his secretary’s heating in winter, begrudged her even a single day’s holiday and made lewd comments about her thighs . . .

J. B. PRIESTLEY, who died in 1984 at the age of nearly 90, lived like a film star. There was a huge country pile near Stratford-uponAvon called Kissing Tree House, with a long drive, wrought-iron gates and doorkeeper lodges.

There were two London apartments in the exclusive Albany block off Piccadilly.

Priestley was driven about by a chauffeur and, when he travelled (Sri Lanka, New Zealand or even just to Guildford), he expected the British Council to lay on a reception committee, a fee-paying lecture and attentive local guides to steer him towards the best restaurants.

Variously described in this book as ‘ a round barrel of a man’, a ‘ rather oversized imp’ or a ‘contented toad’, with the jowly and inscrutable face of ‘a Chinese murderer’, Priestley was fond of rich food, drink and cigars. As an author, he was the exact opposite of one of those penniless bohemians starving in a garret.

The ‘big palace of a house’ in Warwickshire, acquired in 1959, was run by a domestic staff — parlour maids, gardeners, cooks and Rosalie Batten, the secretary, who arrived in 1968, when Priestley was 74. ‘Mr Priestley is used to having someone here when he needs them,’ the new employee was told by Mrs Priestley, the archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes.

Rosalie found herself organising Priestley’s travel arrangements, hotel reservations, first- class flights and business appointments. She picked up the phone and typed the letters. She deflected interview requests, public speaking requests and requests from newspaper editors wanting articles.

RoSALIEreplied to dinner invitations and handled the foreign publishers enquiring about translation rights. She bought Priestley’s gout tablets, shaving soap, and Steradent for his false teeth.

No author remotely lives like this today. I weed my own geranium pots, dine off oven chips and travel by bus. Yet Priestley thought he was hard done by because he possessed no yacht or private plane.

Indeed, a running theme in Rosalie’s memoir is Priestley’s complaints about money. He endlessly grumbles about inflation, tax demands, electricity bills and the cost of postage stamps.

He hated Christmas because it meant buying presents. ‘The Priestleys never sent Christmas cards.’ He kept his phone bills to a minimum by getting Rosalie to call first and ask if they wouldn’t mind calling Priestley back during the afternoon — the ploy always worked.

Priestley, born in Bradford in 1894, must have been conscious that he was playing the role of stage Yorkshireman, hardnosed and gruffly sentimental about poverty. In the old days, he tells Rosalie, ‘people didn’t expect so much and weren’t so greedy. Wages were low, but they seemed to buy more and people were grateful for what they had’.

Were they really? I’m simply reminded of the Monty Python sketch about the four Yorkshiremen boasting about deprivation (‘We lived in a shoebox in t’middle of t’road’ . . . ‘ Luxury!’) and Priestley was certainly a miserly taskmaster with his secretary, who was begrudged time off as the great man didn’t approve of leisure. ‘There’s far too much free time nowadays,’ he asserted. ‘People don’t need it.’

When Rosalie was ill with flu, she was told: ‘It’s your subconscious. You don’t really want to work for us.’

When she expected a lunch break, Priestley said: ‘I wish you were as keen on my affairs as you are about eating.’

He was peevish when she went to a funeral: ‘What do you mean by taking the day off to attend the funeral of some distant relative?’

It’s not as if he made it up to Rosalie with any thoughtful gift. All she received down the years were a few stale chocolates and some ‘dried-out’ tubes of oil paint.

In winter, there was no heating in her office. There were also approaches that,

from the viewpoint of 2018, now read very awkwardly. It’s embarrassing to hear how Priestley kept trying to talk to his young secretary about firm thighs and smooth skin.

‘You’ve got very nice knees,’ he told her, when Mrs Priestley was away for a few weeks. ‘When I was a lad, I used to be a success with the girls,’ he said, throwing an obvious pass.

He also talked about Edwardian house parties, when guests were ‘ hopping about from bedroom to bedroom’. Rosalie blushed.

Meanwhile, Priestley was raking it in. An Inspector Calls, the play about the unnervingly omniscient policeman investigating the death of an innocent girl, was, and remains, a perennial. The Good Companions, a novel about a theatrical troupe, was adapted as a musical starring Judi Dench. The National Theatre, under Olivier, staged When We Are Married and Eden End. Priestley also adapted Iris Murdoch’s novel A Severed Head, which enjoyed a long West End run.

Priestley was so wealthy, in fact, that when it came to his non-fiction, he paid relays of underlings to do the donkey work. Illustrated tomes about the Prince Regent, the Victorians and Edwardians came about thanks to the anonymous and badly treated researchers who went through the material, made notes and provided Priestley with digests. He was in no doubt about his abilities, however, and was very pleased with what he’d achieved.

‘ My plays are very well constructed. That’s why they’ve endured,’ he told Rosalie repeatedly. ‘They’re performed all over the world, as you’ll have seen from the royalty statements.’

Priestley turned down a knighthood, rejected a peerage and declined appointment as a Companion of Honour, but accepted the Order of Merit because it was offered personally by the Queen. Nevertheless, he’d still whine: ‘I’m a forgotten man. Nobody wants to know. Nobody thinks of me.’

He was perhaps correct to perceive that, in the Swinging Sixties and beyond, he was a dinosaur. The broad, pipe-smoking, no-nonsense Englishness was a thing of the past.

AlMOSTto symbolise this, the grandeur of Priestley’s 19thcentury Bradford was demolished. The city Angela Carter had said ‘looked more like Tolkien’s Mordor than anywhere else’ was wantonly flattened. The beautiful Italianate Swan Arcade, where the young Priestley had worked as a clerk in the wool trade, was torn down in 1962. The winding cobbled streets, lit by atmospheric gas lamps, the mills, chimneys, gothic arches and chapels were replaced by plate glass and concrete.

Though Priestley would advise young authors to ‘go back to your roots’, his own had been eradicated — topographically, architecturally, demographically, spiritually and in terms of the people he’d known.

Rosalie writes very well of the trauma of World War I when, of the 2,000 Bradford Pals who enlisted, 1,770 were killed in the first hour of the Battle of the Somme.

Priestley’s ‘world was smashed by the war’. As a soldier, he lost many of his friends — fellow junior officers in the West Riding Regiment who were mown down. Priestley himself was gassed in 1918.

In World War II, he visited and made broadcasts about dockyards and munitions factories. His unflustered Yorkshire tones on the radio were reassuring and popular. He kept up morale as much as Churchill did in his speeches.

Apart from a brief period in his teens, when he was in the wool office, Priestley always worked as a freelance writer. ‘I wrote myself out of my misery and followed a trail of thought and words into daylight’ is how he phrased it.

I do that, too, of course, except my trail leads only deeper into my overdraft.