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)
Blog Posts
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?
New Article: Walter Greenwood’s First Press Interview: ‘Idle Days Turned to Money’! (Manchester Evening News, 1933)
This is surely the most unflattering headline Greenwood ever appeared under - and the sub-headline was not much better: 'Unemployed Man Writes Book'. However, the article gets better as it goes on, and Greenwood was allowed to tell his own story as an unemployed man who had become a writer in his own words. It… Continue reading New Article: Walter Greenwood’s First Press Interview: ‘Idle Days Turned to Money’! (Manchester Evening News, 1933)
Walter Greenwood: Not Just Love on the Dole 