D’ Company

Examiner of Plays' Summary:

A well-written and (I think) very accurate study of a phase of soldiering there is no ‘plot’: it is simply a slice of daily life. The scene is in a men’s mess room in barracks at Malta at the beginning of the war and the men are Territorials, nicely distinguished from soldiers in the old army as showing more of their different civilian types. Two young cockneys have a quarrel; the corporal scolds them and is chaffed about his age - he is really 50; one young private turns out to be a gentleman, fresh from Cambridge. One of the young cockneys get a newspaper and letters, and learns from the former that his brother has been killed. He gets the Cambridge boy to read his letters for him and then persuades him to read one he (the Cambridge boy) has been writing to his girl. The scene closes on the general arrival of letters and papers and the putting out of the lights. There is of course no woman in the cast. The boys talk frankly of their views of the war and so forth, and there is no attempt to idealize in the popular way either their lives or themselves. But they are all good fellows in their different ways, and no intelligent spectators could fail to have an increased sympathy and pride in them and their like. Recommended for license, G. S. Street

Researcher's Summary:

In the preface to the printed text of ‘D Company’ dated September 1916 Malleson explained that he wrote it ‘towards the close of 1914, while I was a private in a Territorial battalion at Malta. It is, in one sense, real: there is scarcely a sentence in it that I did not hear, or an episode I did not witness … Some slight foot trouble was responsible for my being invalided home and out of the Army. That was in January, 1915. Since then my view of this colossal catastrophe of the war has changed. “Black ‘Ell” has been just recently written’. The intended performance of ‘D Company’ at the Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, on Saturday 17 June 1916 did not take place. That would have been at the end of the first of a four week season at the theatre by a company led by Esmé Percy and Kirsteen Graeme who performed a variety of plays during their stay but not 'D Company'. In the event Percy was responsible for the play being performed in Oxford in February 1917. By then Malleson and ‘D Company’ were caught up in controversy. On 26 October 1916 copies of the printed volume containing ‘D Company’ and ‘Black ‘Ell’ were seized from the publisher, Hendersons of London, by the Government (The Globe, 28 October 1916). The volume is not listed in the British Library catalogue; a copy which survived the cull is available online at https://archive.org/details/dcompanyblackell00malliala/mode/2up; and other copies occasionally appear in secondhand book catalogues. A Minister said that the book contravened the Defence of the Realm Regulations, in particular that it was ‘a deliberate calumny on the British soldier’ (extracts from Hansard 31 October and 7 November 1916 quoted in Malleson’s preface to the 1925 edition of the plays). Certainly one of the soldiers in ‘D Company’ admits that he is not ‘burning with an eagerness to get into the firing line’ and worries about killing a German who shares his political beliefs and love of Wagner or ‘who simply loathes fighting as much as I do’. But the Government may have found ‘Black ‘Ell’ more provocative. Its central character is a soldier who, home on leave having been awarded a medal for gallantry, breaks down as he tells his sweetheart how he killed a German soldier whose last thoughts were of his own sweetheart. He identifies with German soldiers who are fighting for their country as much as British soldiers are fighting for theirs; denounces the statesmen, newspaper men, parsons and clever writers of all countries who keep the war going; and vows that he will not go back and fight again. Certainly reviews in the Labour Leader (2 November 1916) and Freedom, A Journal of Anarchist Communism (1 January 1917) implied that it was ‘Black ‘Ell’ that provoked the Government. A review in Forward (Glasgow), 11 November 1916, doubted that theatre managers would want to stage it. By contrast, ‘D Company’ was both licensed and performed during the war. Unlike ‘D Company’, ‘Black ‘Ell’ was written after Malleson’s espousal of pacifism which he was to set out in ‘Cranks and Commonsense’ (1916) and ‘Second Thoughts’ (1917). When Black ‘Ell was finally approved in 1926 Examiner of Plays Street acknowledged that it could not have been licensed in 1916, when it was written, as it would have tended to discourage recruiting, thereby acknowledging the Lord Chamberlain’s Office’s rôle in ensuring compliance with not only its own rules but also Regulation 27 of the Defence of the Realm Act (Steve Nicholson, The Censorship Of British Drama 1900-1968. Volume I: 1900-1932 (University of Exeter Press: 2014), p.131). Both plays were published again by Hendersons in 1925. In a new preface dated December 1924 Malleson wrote of ‘the sense of utter impotence’ that he felt when the plays were suppressed. ‘To write “a deliberate calumny on the British soldier” was the last thing I wanted to do … There was no way of making answer. Now after eight years it is possible to reprint. The plays must speak for themselves’.