Robert Cedric Sherriff, FSA, FRSL (6 June 1896 – 13 November 1975)[1] was an English writer best known for his play Journey's End,[2] which was based on his experiences as an army officer in the First World War.[3] He wrote several plays, many novels, and multiple screenplays, and was nominated for an Academy Award and two BAFTA awards.[4]
Sherriff wrote his first play to help Kingston Rowing Club raise money to buy a new boat.[13] His seventh play, Journey's End, was written in 1928 and published in 1929 and was based on his experiences in the war.[3] It was given a single Sunday performance, on 9 December 1928, by the Incorporated Stage Society at the Apollo Theatre, directed by James Whale and with the 21-year-old Laurence Olivier in the lead role.[14] In the audience was Maurice Browne who produced it at the Savoy Theatre where it was performed for two years from 1929.[15] The play was hugely successful and there was wide press coverage which reveals how audience responses provoked by this play shaped understanding of the First World War in the interwar years. [16]
Sherriff also wrote prose. A novelised version of Journey's End, co-written with Vernon Bartlett, was published in 1930.[17] His 1939 novel, The Hopkins Manuscript is an H. G. Wells-influenced post-apocalyptic story about an earth devastated because of a collision with the Moon.[18] Its sober language and realistic depiction of an average man coming to terms with a ruined England is said[citation needed] to have been an influence on later science fiction authors such as John Wyndham and Brian Aldiss. The Fortnight in September, an earlier novel, published in 1931, is a rather more plausible story about a Bognor holiday enjoyed by a lower-middle-class family from Dulwich.[19] It was nominated by Kazuo Ishiguro as a book to 'inspire, uplift and offer escape' in a list compiled by The Guardian during the COVID-19 pandemic, describing it as "just about the most uplifting, life-affirming novel I can think of right now".[20]
His 1936 novel Greengates is a realistic novel about a middle-aged couple, Tom and Edith Baldwin, moving from an established London suburb into the new suburbs of Metro-land.[21]
The Hopkins Manuscript. Victor Gollancz. 1939. OCLC2212270. (Revised and reissued as a Pan Paperback in 1958 under the title The Cataclysm; Reprinted in 2005 by Persephone Books under its original title.)
^ Sherriff maintained close links with the school for the rest of his life. He sent a copy of Journey's End to the headmaster after the play was first performed in 1928, and was a generous benefactor to the school until his death, paying particularly close attention to the school rowing club, whose supporters' club now bears his name. He financed a number of boats named after his plays (Journey's End, White Carnation, Home at Seven, Long Sunset and Badger's Green). He also purchased a piece of land at the end of Aragon Avenue in Thames Ditton for the purpose of building a school boathouse,[6] which was completed in 1980.
Wales, Roland (2016). From Journey's End to the Dam Busters: The life of R.C. Sherriff, Playwright of the Trenches. Barnsley: Pen & Sword. ISBN978-1473860698.
