The state of the nation in wartime: R.C. Sherriff's three openings for Mrs Miniver

Noel Coward’s 1931 play Cavalcade and its Oscar-winning 1933 film version, directed in the US by Frank Lloyd, are among the most influential texts in the British version of the state of the nation drama, in the theatre, on film, and latterly in television. This is particularly the case in terms of its structure, showing well-chosen events in recent British history through the lives of a specific family. This has remained a structure that British writers have used, in plays as different as Chicken Soup with Barley by Arnold Wesker (1956), Our Friends in the North by Peter Flannery (1982) and Rock ’n’ Roll by Tom Stoppard (2006), as well as in television series like Upstairs, Downstairs (1971-1975, 2010-2012), Downton Abbey (2010-2015, with films in 2019 and 2022), and the 1996 BBC version of Flannery’s play.

In the cinema, the Cavalcade structure became a common template for Hollywood ‘British’ films, especially those made just before and during World War Two, when an emphasis on continuity was important. In the case of Goodbye, Mr. Chips (Sam Wood, US, 1939), the structure was already embedded in the original novel; its author James Hilton even uses many of Coward’s specific historical events (both Coward’s play and Hilton’s novel feature a character sailing on the Titanic). In Mrs. Miniver (William Wyler, US, 1942) and Forever and a Day (Rene Clair/Edmund Goulding/Cedric Hardwicke/Frank

Lloyd/Victor Saville/Robert Stevenson/Herbert Wilcox, US, 1943), both explicitly made as wartime propaganda, the structure is part of the films’ message, emphasizing continuity in a turbulent world.

It’s not a coincidence that the British playwright R.C. Sherriff worked on all three of the last films mentioned: his Hollywood work was almost all on films either set in Britain or based on British literary properties, and his work, going back to his breakthrough play Journey’s End (1928) and forward to his last major success, The Dam Busters (Michael Anderson, UK, 1955) frequently returns to the subject of national identity. The R.C. Sherriff archive in Surrey History Centre holds several drafts of many of his screenplays, including three substantially different versions of the opening for Mrs. Miniver.

My paper would examine these three pieces, looking at the differences between them, what this tells us about Sherriff’s attitude to Britishness, and how this is shown onscreen.