Within a month of the play of Love on the Dole opening at the Garrick Theatre in London, Greenwood was interviewed about the origins of the story by the then celebrity journalist and drama critic Hannen Swaffer. Swaffer quite correctly saw the play as an anti-National Government work, but also presented its working-class author (the co-author Ronald Gow is not even mentioned) in ways which stressed his status as a ‘typical’ unemployed man, who had simply ‘recorded’ the life he knew, rather than seeing him as an ‘author’, who had created a new and original work about unemployment and poverty.
See: Walter Greenwood: ‘Tragedy Behind the Play’ Interview (Hannen Swaffer, Daily Herald, 1935)
- Best Chris.
Walter Greenwood: Not Just Love on the Dole 