My mum was a character

Written as part of Amy Johnson Crow’s “52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks” challenge. This week’s topic: Character

My mum was a character.  Larger than life, people either adored her or tolerated her – I was going to say ‘hated’ but I don’t know of anyone who disliked her that much.  Irritated by her, yes, despised her to a degree, but she was a hard person to dislike that intently.  

Wherever she went she would be the center of attention before long.  Self-educated, erudite, she was extremely well informed in public affairs globally.  At any talk or presentation those who knew her, and there were many, would wait and wonder when Joan would ask her question.  Her questions were never just that.  They tended to be a brief and insightful discourse on the topic the lecturer – be it Prime Minister, CEO or Joe Blow – least wanted but most needed to be questioned on.  

“Speaking truth to power” is a mantra that could have been invented for her.  She never hid from controversy but was always friendly and charming in her approach.  She was not easy to live with, to have as a mother - or grandmother - but there was much to admire.  However, when I reflect on her as a “character” I like to dwell on another part of her history altogether.  For mother came by her public speaking ability in her youth.

At the tender age of thirteen Joan won a scholarship to the ­Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) where she was enrolled in 1930. She claimed to have been the youngest person to win a full scholarship to RADA, which may or may not have been the case. Child actors had been all the rage, in theater and on screen, in the 1920s.  

The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Malet Street entrance

According to Joan applying to RADA was her mother’s idea.  “I finished schooling before I was 14” she wrote to me, “as my mother had ambitions of a stage and film career for me.” Bessie Harley was not a ‘stage struck mother’; rather her motives were financial, for she was looking to Joan to supplement the family income.  While this may seem extraordinary today, there was a pattern of young women earning money for their families in the theater at this time, during the great Depression.  

Noel Streatfield's novel, Ballet Shoes: a story of three children on the stage, is a children's novel published in 1936.  Three adopted girls, Pauline, Petrova and Posy, aged 6, 8 and 10, were enrolled at the Children's Academy of Dancing and Stage Training and “put on the stage” in order to bring some money into the family.  

Dramatist Noel Coward had something to say on the subject, too, in his all too cruel poem: "Don't put your daughter on the stage, Mrs. Worthington." 

She's a bit of an ugly duckling,

You must honestly confess,

And the width of her seat

Would surely defeat

Her chances of success.

Though they said at the school of acting

She was lovely as Peer Gynt,

I fear on the whole

An ingénue role

Would emphasize her squint.

By no means an ugly duckling

Joan, always spoke proudly of her time at RADA. “In 1930 I was a very young teenager,” she wrote, “learning about life while working with bright young people who aspired to achieve success on the stage.”  At the better stage schools, and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art is generally regarded as the most prestigious drama school in Britain, education was not limited to preparation for the stage.  The curriculum also guaranteed to give a good all-round education.   Joan said she had gained “deep understanding” from writers like Shakespeare, Galsworthy, Moliere, Chekov and others.  Her studies included music and dance as well as Shakespeare and modern drama, and a broad selection of non-dramatic literature. Elocution, dialects, movement, impersonation and audition technique, too, were all part of the drama school curriculum. There were student performances, and some might be lucky enough to get parts in professional plays.  

Little came of Joan’s time at RADA. When she completed her studies she was too young to act professionally, for in 1933 Parliament passed The Children and Young Persons Act, restricting the hours, and particularly the evening and weekend hours, that school-aged children could work.  Since the film industry operated during the daytime she was able to get some work at Pinewood Studios as an extra.   But eventually she drifted away from acting.  

I never heard her express any regrets so perhaps it was truly not her chosen path, or, like Ellen Terry, she discovered that a stage career was not “all beer and skittles.”  

Joan in 1934

I have only two photos of Joan in roles she played on the stage.  In one she is in costume for the part of the Lady in “The Man with a Load of Mischief”, a play by Ashley Dukes later turned into a Broadway musical.  

In the other, taken in 1938, she is on stage as Abby in The Late Christopher Bean based on the play Prenez garde à la peinture by Rene Fauchois (France, 1932).  Abby, the lead role, is a maid who had secretly married the deceased painter before he died.  Others who played this role include Lillian Gish, Helen Hayes and Thelma Ritter.  It is a comedy role, and Joan used to love to recite the line:  “Owh m’um, the milkman’s bin an’ gon an’ never coom.”   

Joan, second from right, as Abby, in “The Late Christopher Bean”.

The costume drama we would have expected of her, but I was surprised to discover that she had played comedy.  I think she might have made a fabulous character actor after all.