The English Workhouse system dated back in a recognisable form to the seventeenth century, but is probably most associated with the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries, including through Dickens' critical portrayal in Oliver Twist (serial 1837-8, novel 1839). However, though modified the workhouse system in many respects was still in being during the first three decades of… Continue reading New Article: Walter Greenwood’s Workhouse Memories (1933-1967)
Blog Posts
New Article: One of Our Portraits is Missing: Drusilla Wills as Mrs Jike, by James Ardern Grant (1938)
Sadly, this painting is currently AWOL, but we can reconstruct a great deal about it from press-coverage and contemporary interest in the work of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, as well as theatre reviews of Drusilla Wills' forty-five year career as a specialist 'character actor'. See: One of Our Portraits is Missing: Drusilla Wills… Continue reading New Article: One of Our Portraits is Missing: Drusilla Wills as Mrs Jike, by James Ardern Grant (1938)
New Article: Love on the Dole and a Case of Theatrical Fraud: Feltham Police Court and the Old Bailey, November 1935 – February 1936.
A story of a man, Mr Arthur Brookes, who offered an investor, Mr John Evered, a chance to make substantial money from funding a production of Love on the Dole at the Lyceum Theatre London. Evered handed over £2050, and even got engaged to Brookes' daughter Joan (or was she?) before discovering that there was… Continue reading New Article: Love on the Dole and a Case of Theatrical Fraud: Feltham Police Court and the Old Bailey, November 1935 – February 1936.
New Article: William Alwyn’s ‘The Cure for Love Waltz’ in Robert Donat & Walter Greenwood’s film The Cure for Love (1949/50)
I have been looking for about a decade for the sheet-music for William Alwyn's waltz which he composed for Donat and Greenwood's postwar film about Jack Hardacre, a sergeant in the Eighth Army who returns home to Lancaster for his first home leave in three years. Hardacre knows very well that he has left some… Continue reading New Article: William Alwyn’s ‘The Cure for Love Waltz’ in Robert Donat & Walter Greenwood’s film The Cure for Love (1949/50)
New Article: Doleful Humour: Laughing Off Unemployment Between the Wars?
Over the last few years while searching for Love on the Dole material, I chanced upon what seemed to me a surprising number of comic (or would-be comic?) texts about unemployment and the dole. This seemed so odd (in that I couldn't see that the dole was likely to be in any way a humorous… Continue reading New Article: Doleful Humour: Laughing Off Unemployment Between the Wars?
Walter Greenwood: Not Just Love on the Dole 