R. C. Sherriff

R. C. Sherriff (1896-1975), English playwright, best known for his tragic play, Journey’s End, about the emotional damage wreaked by war, based on his own experiences serving during World War I. Set in a trench at St Quentin, France, in 1918, Journey's End portrays three days in the lives of a group of five British officers some 50 metres from the enemy line as they wait to face a major German offensive. Without recourse to sentimentality, and with no little humour, the play conveys the fear, tension, and boredom of men living under the perpetual shadow of death.

One of the soldiers, Raleigh, a young lieutenant, is delighted to have been assigned to serve under his old school friend whom he still hero-worships, Captain Stanhope, only to discover that the perpetually drunk Stanhope’s nerves have been ravaged by the mental strain of three years at the Front. Alongside Stanhope and Raleigh are the humane former schoolmaster Osborne, the cowardly Hibbert, and the relentlessly cheerful Trotter. Sherriff wrote the play in 1928 and it was first performed in December of that year at the Apollo Theatre, London, in a production directed by James Whale, starring a young Laurence Olivier as Stanhope; it then transferred to the Savoy Theatre, where it ran from 1929 to 1930 for 594 performances. It was also made into a film by Whale in 1930.

Robert Cedric Sherriff was born in Kingston upon Thames, on June 6, 1896, and educated at Kingston Grammar School and New College, Oxford. Having worked as an insurance clerk in the same firm as his father, at the outbreak of World War I he enlisted and served as an infantry captain with the 9th East Surrey Regiment. After the war he returned to the insurance business and spent the next decade working as a loss adjuster.

Following the success of Journey’s End, which was hugely popular in both Europe and the United States, Sherriff worked in Hollywood as a screenwriter on Whale’s The Invisible Man (1933) for Universal Pictures. He also wrote or co-wrote screenplays for several other films including The Four Feathers (1939), Goodbye Mr Chips (1939), Lady Hamilton (1941), Odd Man Out (1947), Quartet (1948), and The Dam Busters (1954).

His other plays included Badger's Green (1930); Windfall (1933); St Helena (1935), about Napoleon, co-written with Jeanne de Casalis; Miss Mabel (1948); Home at Seven (1950); The White Carnation (1953) and The Long Sunset (1955), about the Romans in Britain. He also wrote an autobiography, No Leading Lady (1968). He died on November 13, 1975.