by Wikipedia
Accessed: 3/27/20
J. B. Priestley, OM
J. B. Priestley
Born: John Priestley, 13 September 1894, Manningham, Bradford, West Riding of Yorkshire, England
Died: 14 August 1984 (aged 89), Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England
Occupation: Writer
Nationality: British
Period: 20th century
Spouse: Pat Tempest (1921–1925, her death); Jane Wyndham-Lewis (m. 1925; div. 1953); Jacquetta Hawkes (1953–1984; his death)
Website: http://www.jbpriestley.co.uk
John Boynton Priestley, OM (/ˈpriːstli/; 13 September 1894 – 14 August 1984) was an English novelist, playwright, screenwriter, broadcaster and social commentator.
His Yorkshire background is reflected in much of his fiction, notably in The Good Companions (1929), which first brought him to wide public notice. Many of his plays are structured around a time slip, and he went on to develop a new theory of time, with different dimensions that link past, present, and future.
In 1940, he broadcast a series of short propaganda radio talks that were credited with strengthening civilian morale during the Battle of Britain. In the following years, his left-wing beliefs brought him into conflict with the government and influenced the birth of the welfare state.
Early years
Priestley was born on 13 September 1894 at 34 Mannheim Road, Manningham, which he described as an "extremely respectable" suburb of Bradford.[1] His father Jonathan Priestley (1868–1924) was a headmaster. His mother Emma (nee Holt) (1865–1896) died when he was just two years old, and his father remarried four years later.[2] Priestley was educated at Belle Vue Grammar School, which he left at sixteen to work as a junior clerk at Helm & Co., a wool firm in the Swan Arcade. During his years at Helm & Co. (1910–1914), he started writing at night and had articles published in local and London newspapers. He was to draw on memories of Bradford in many of the works he wrote after he had moved south, including Bright Day and When We Are Married. As an old man, he deplored the destruction by developers of Victorian buildings in Bradford such as the Swan Arcade, where he had his first job.
Priestley served in the British army during the First World War, volunteering to join the 10th Battalion, the Duke of Wellington's Regiment on 7 September 1914, and being posted to France as a Lance-Corporal on 26 August 1915. He was badly wounded in June 1916, when he was buried alive by a trench mortar. He spent many months in military hospitals and convalescent establishments, and on 26 January 1918 was commissioned as an officer in the Devonshire Regiment and posted back to France late summer 1918. As he describes in his literary reminiscences, Margin Released, he suffered from the effects of poison gas, and then supervised German prisoners of war, before being demobilised in early 1919.
After his military service, Priestley received a university education at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. By the age of 30, he had established a reputation as an essayist and critic. His novel Benighted (1927) was adapted into the James Whale film The Old Dark House (1932); the novel has been published under the film's name in the United States.
Career
Priestley's first major success came with a novel, The Good Companions (1929), which earned him the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and made him a national figure. His next novel, Angel Pavement (1930), further established him as a successful novelist. However, some critics were less than complimentary about his work, and Priestley threatened legal action against Graham Greene for what he took to be a defamatory portrait of him in the novel Stamboul Train (1932).
In 1934 he published the travelogue English Journey, an account of what he saw and heard while travelling through the country in the depths of the Great Depression.[3]
Priestley is today seen as having a prejudice against the Irish,[4][5][6] as is shown in his work, English Journey: "A great many speeches have been made and books written on the subject of what England has done to Ireland... I should be interested to hear a speech and read a book or two on the subject of what Ireland has done to England... if we do have an Irish Republic as our neighbour, and it is found possible to return her exiled citizens, what a grand clearance there will be in all the western ports, from the Clyde to Cardiff, what a fine exit of ignorance and dirt and drunkenness and disease." [7]
He moved into a new genre and became equally well known as a dramatist. Dangerous Corner (1932) was the first of many plays that would enthral West End theatre audiences. His best-known play is An Inspector Calls (1945). His plays are more varied in tone than the novels, several being influenced by J. W. Dunne's theory of time, which plays a part in the plots of Dangerous Corner (1932) and Time and the Conways.
In 1940, Priestley wrote an essay for Horizon magazine, where he criticised George Bernard Shaw for his support of Stalin: "Shaw presumes that his friend Stalin has everything under control. Well, Stalin may have made special arrangements to see that Shaw comes to no harm, but the rest of us in Western Europe do not feel quite so sure of our fate, especially those of us who do not share Shaw's curious admiration for dictators."[8]
The Webbs
by George Bernard Shaw
The Webbs, Sidney and Beatrice, officially The Right Honourable the Baron and Lady Passfield, are a superextraordinary pair. I have never met anyone like them, either separately or in their most fortunate conjunction. Each of them is an English force; and their marriage was an irresistible reinforcement. Only England could have produced them. It is true that France produced the Curies, a pair equally happily matched; but in physics they found an established science and left it so, enriched as it was by their labors; but the Webbs found British Constitutional politics something which nobody had yet dreamt of calling a science or thinking of as such.
When they began, they were face to face with Capitalism and Marxism. Marxism, though it claims to be scientific, and has proved itself a mighty force in the modern world, was then a philosophy propounded by a foreigner without administrative experience, who gathered his facts in the Reading Room of the British Museum, and generalized the human race under the two heads of bourgeoisie and proletariat apparently without having ever come into business contact with a living human being.
The Quarrel with Capitalism
Capitalism was and is a paper Utopia, the most unreal product of wishful thinking of all the Utopias. By pure logic, without a moment's reference to the facts, it demonstrated that you had only to enforce private contracts and let everybody buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest to produce automatically a condition in which there would be no unemployment, and every honest and industrious person would enjoy a sufficient wage to maintain himself and his wife and reproduce his kind, whilst an enriched superior class would have leisure and means to preserve and develop the nation's culture and civilization, and, by receiving more of the national income than they could possibly consume, save all the capital needed to make prosperity increase by leaps and bounds.
What Karl Marx Did
Karl Marx's philosophy had no effect on public opinion here or elsewhere; but when he published the facts as to the condition to which Capitalism had reduced the masses, it was like lifting the lid off hell. Capitalism has not yet recovered from the shock of that revelation, and never will.
Sixty years ago, the Marxian shock was only beginning to operate in England. I had to read Das Kapital in a French translation, there being no English version as yet. A new champion of the people, Henry Mayers Hyndman, had met and talked with Karl Marx. They quarrelled, as their habit was, but not before Hyndman had been completely converted by Marx; so his Democratic Federation presently became a Social-Democratic Federation. Socialism, in abeyance since the slaughter of the Paris Commune in 1871, suddenly revived; but Marx, its leader and prophet, died at that moment and left the movement to what leadership it could get.
Socialism was not a new thing peculiar to Marx. John Stuart Mill, himself a convert, had converted others, among them one very remarkable young man and an already famous elderly one. The elderly one was the great poet and craftsman William Morris, who, on reading Mill's early somewhat halfhearted condemnation of communism, at once declared that Mill's verdict was against the evidence, and that people who lived on unearned incomes were plainly "damned thieves." He joined Hyndman, and when the inevitable quarrel ensued, founded The Socialist League.
Sidney Webb, the Prodigy
The younger disciple had followed Mill's conversion and shared it. His name was Sidney Webb. He was an entirely unassuming young Londoner of no extraordinary stature, guiltless of any sort of swank, and so naively convinced that he was an ordinary mortal and everybody else as gifted as himself that he did not suffer fools gladly, and was occasionally ungracious to the poor things.
The unassuming young cockney was in fact a prodigy. He could read a book as fast as he could turn the leaves, and remember everything worth remembering in it. Whatever country he was in, he spoke the language with perfect facility, though always in the English manner. He had gone through his teens gathering scholarships and exhibitions as a child gathers daisies, and had landed at last in the upper division of the civil service as resident clerk in the Colonial Office. He had acquired both scholarship and administrative experience, and knew not only why reforms were desirable but how they were put into practice under our queer political system.
Hyndman and his Democratic Federation were no use to him, Morris and his Socialist League only an infant school. There was no organization fit for him except the Liberal Party, already moribund, but still holding a front bench position under the leadership of Gladstone. All Webb could do was something that he was forbidden to do as a civil servant: that is, issue pamphlets warning the Liberal Party that they were falling behind the times and even behind the Conservatives. Nevertheless he issued the pamphlets calmly. Nobody dared to remonstrate.
G. B. S. [George Bernard Shaw] Meets the Man he Sought
This was the situation when I picked him up at a debating society which I had joined to qualify myself as a public speaker. It was the year 1879, when I was 23 and he a year or two younger. I at once recognized and appreciated in him all the qualifications in which I was myself pitiably deficient. He was clearly the man for me to work with. I forced my acquaintance on him; and it soon ripened into an enduring friendship. This was by far the wisest step I ever took. The combination worked perfectly.
We were both in the same predicament in having no organization with which we could work. Our job was to get Socialism into some sort of working shape; and we knew that this brainwork must be done by groups of Socialists whose minds operated at the same speed on a foundation of the same culture and habits. We were not snobs; but neither were we mere reactionists against snobbery to such an extent as to believe that we could work in double harness with the working men of the Federation and the League, who deeply and wisely mistrusted us as "bourgeois," and who would inevitably waste our time in trying to clear up hopeless misunderstandings. Morris was soon completely beaten by his proletarian comrades: he had to drop the League, which immediately perished. The agony of the Social-Democratic Federation was longer drawn out; but it contributed nothing to the theory or practice of Socialism, and hardly even pretended to survive the death of Hyndman.
The Fabian Society's Rise to Power
One day I came upon a tract entitled Why Are The Many Poor? issued by a body of whom I had never heard, entitled The Fabian Society. The name struck me as an inspiration. I looked the Society up, and found a little group of educated middle class persons who, having come together to study philosophy, had finally resolved to take to active politics as Socialists. It was just what we needed. When I had sized it up, Webb joined, and with him Sydney Olivier, his fellow resident clerk at the Colonial Office. Webb swept everything before him; and the history of the Fabian Society began as the public knows it today. Barricades manned by Anarchists, and Utopian colonies, vanished from the Socialist program; and Socialism became constitutional, respectable, and practical. This was the work of Webb far more than of any other single person.
Marriage to Beatrice Potter
He was still a single person in another sense when the Fabian job was done. He was young enough to be unmarried when a young lady as rarely qualified as himself decided that he was old enough to be married. She had arrived at Socialism not by way of Karl Marx or John Stuart Mill, but by her own reasoning and observation. She was not a British Museum theorizer and bookworm; she was a born firsthand investigator. She had left the West End, where she was a society lady of the political plutocracy, for the East End, where she disguised herself to work in sweaters' dens and investigate the condition of the submerged tenth just discovered by Charles Booth and the Salvation Army. The sweaters found her an indifferent needlewoman, but chose her as an ideal bride for Ikey Mo: a generic name for their rising sons. They were so pressing that she had to bring her investigation to a hasty end, and seek the comparatively aristocratic society of the trade union secretaries, with whom she hobnobbed as comfortably as if she had been born in their houses. She had written descriptions of the dens for Booth's first famous Enquiry, and a history of Cooperation which helped powerfully to shift its vogue from producers' cooperation to consumers' cooperation. Before her lay the whole world of proletarian organization to investigate.
It was too big a job for one worker. She resolved to take a partner. She took a glance at the Fabian Society, now two thousand strong, and at once dismissed nineteen hundred and ninety-six of them as negligible sheep; but it was evident that they were not sheep without a shepherd. There were in fact some half-dozen shepherds. She investigated them personally one after the other, and with unerring judgment selected Sidney Webb, and gathered him without the least difficulty, as he had left himself defenseless by falling in love with her head over ears.
Their Literary Partnership
And so the famous partnership began. He took to her investigation business like a duck to water. They started with a history of trade unionism so complete and intimate in its information that it reduced all previous books on the subject to waste paper, and made organized labor in England class-conscious for the first time. It travelled beyond England and was translated by Lenin. Then came the volume on Industrial Democracy which took trade unionism out of its groove and made it politically conscious of its destiny. There followed a monumental history of Local Government which ran into many volumes, and involved such a program of investigations on the spot all over the country, and reading through local archives, as had never before been attempted. Under such handling not only Socialism but political sociology in general became scientific, leaving Marx and Lassalle almost as far behind in that respect as they had left Robert Owen. The labor of it was prodigious; but it was necessary. And it left the Webbs no time for argybargy as between Marx's Hegelian metaphysics and Max Eastman's Cartesian materialism. The question whether Socialism is a soulless Conditioned Reflex a la Pavlov or the latest phase of The Light of the World announced by St. John, did not delay them: they kept to the facts and the methods suggested by the facts.
Finally came the work in which those who believe in Divine Providence may like to see its finger. The depth and genuineness of our Socialism found its crucial test in the Russian revolution which changed crude Tsarism into Red Communism. After the treaty of Brest Litovsk, Hyndman, our arch-Marxist, denounced it more fiercely than Winston Churchill. The history of Communist Russia for the past twenty years in the British and American Press is a record in recklessly prejudiced mendacity. The Webbs waited until the wreckage and ruin of the change was ended, its mistakes remedied, and the Communist State fairly launched. Then they went and investigated it In their last two volumes they give us the first really scientific analysis of the Soviet State, and of its developments of our political and social experiments and institutions, including trade unionism and cooperation, which we thought they had abolished. No Russian could have done this all-important job for us. The Webbs knew England, and knew what they were talking about. No one else did.
They unhesitatingly gave the Soviet system their support, and announced it definitely as a New Civilization.
It has been a wonderful life's work. Its mere incidental by-blows included Webb's chairmanship of the London County Council's Technical Education Committee which abolished the old Schoolboard, the creation of the London School of Economics, the Minority Report which dealt a death blow to the iniquitous Poor Law, and such comparative trifles as the conversion of bigoted Conservative constituencies into safe Labor seats, and a few years spent by Webb in the two Houses of Parliament. They were the only years he ever wasted. He was actually compelled by the Labor Government to accept a peerage; but nothing could induce Beatrice to change the name she had made renowned throughout Europe for the title of Lady Passfield, who might be any nobody.
For the private life of the Webbs, I know all about it, and can assure you that it is utterly void of those scandalous adventures which make private lives readable. Mr. Webb and Miss Potter are now Darby and Joan: that is all.
-- The Truth About Soviet Russia, by Sidney and Beatrice Webb
During the Second World War, he was a regular broadcaster on the BBC. The Postscript, broadcast on Sunday night through 1940 and again in 1941, drew peak audiences of 16 million; only Churchill was more popular with listeners. Graham Greene wrote that Priestley "became in the months after Dunkirk a leader second only in importance to Mr. Churchill. And he gave us what our other leaders have always failed to give us -– an ideology."[9] But his talks were cancelled.[10] It was thought that this was the effect of complaints from Churchill that they were too left-wing; however, in 2015 Priestley's son said in a talk on the latest book being published about his father's life that it was in fact Churchill's Cabinet that brought about the cancellation by supplying negative reports on the broadcasts to Churchill.[11][12]
Priestley chaired the 1941 Committee, and in 1942 he was a co-founder of the socialist Common Wealth Party. The political content of his broadcasts and his hopes of a new and different Britain after the war influenced the politics of the period and helped the Labour Party gain its landslide victory in the 1945 general election. Priestley himself, however, was distrustful of the state and dogma, though he did stand for the Cambridge University constituency in 1945.
Priestley's name was on Orwell's list, a list of people which George Orwell prepared in March 1949 for the Information Research Department (IRD), a propaganda unit set up at the Foreign Office by the Labour government. Orwell considered or suspected these people to have pro-communist leanings and therefore to be unsuitable to write for the IRD.[13]
He was a founding member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1958.
In 1960, Priestley published Literature and Western Man, a 500-page survey of Western literature in all its genres from the second half of the 15th century to the present (the last author discussed is Thomas Wolfe).
His interest in the problem of time led him to publish an extended essay in 1964 under the title of Man and Time (Aldus published this as a companion to Carl Jung's Man and His Symbols). In this book he explored in depth various theories and beliefs about time as well as his own research and unique conclusions, including an analysis of the phenomenon of precognitive dreaming, based in part on a broad sampling of experiences gathered from the British public, who responded enthusiastically to a televised appeal he made while being interviewed in 1963 on the BBC programme, Monitor.
Statue outside the National Media Museum
The University of Bradford awarded Priestley the title of honorary Doctor of Letters in 1970, and he was awarded the Freedom of the City of Bradford in 1973. His connections with the city were also marked by the naming of the J. B. Priestley Library at the University of Bradford, which he officially opened in 1975,[14] and by the larger-than-life statue of him, commissioned by the Bradford City Council after his death, and which now stands in front of the National Media Museum.[15]
Personal life
Priestley had a deep love for classical music, especially chamber music. This love is reflected in a number of Priestley's works, notably his own favourite novel Bright Day (Heinemann, 1946). His book Trumpets Over the Sea is subtitled "a rambling and egotistical account of the London Symphony Orchestra's engagement at Daytona Beach, Florida, in July–August 1967".[16]
In 1941 he played an important part in organising and supporting a fund-raising campaign on behalf of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, which was struggling to establish itself as a self-governing body after the withdrawal of Sir Thomas Beecham. In 1949 the opera The Olympians by Arthur Bliss, to a libretto by Priestley, was premiered.
Priestley snubbed the chance to become a life peer in 1965 and also declined appointment as a Companion of Honour in 1969.[17] But he did become a member of the Order of Merit in 1977. He also served as a British delegate to UNESCO conferences.
Married life
Priestley was married three times. Priestley also had a number of affairs, including a serious relationship with the actress Peggy Ashcroft. Writing in 1972, Priestley described himself as 'lusty' and as one who has 'enjoyed the physical relations with the sexes … without the feelings of guilt which seems to disturb some of my distinguished colleagues'.[18]
In 1921 Priestley married Emily "Pat" Tempest, a music-loving Bradford librarian. Two daughters were born, Barbara (later known as the architect Barbara Wykeham[19]) in 1923 and Sylvia (a designer known as Sylvia Goaman following her marriage to Michael Goaman[20]) in 1924, but in 1925 his wife died of cancer.[21]
In September 1926, Priestley married Jane Wyndham-Lewis (ex-wife of the one-time 'Beachcomber' columnist D. B. Wyndham-Lewis, no relation to the artist Wyndham Lewis); they had two daughters (including music therapist Mary Priestley, conceived while Jane was still married to D. B. Wyndham-Lewis) and one son.[18] During the Second World War, Jane ran several residential nurseries for evacuated mothers and their children, many of whom had come from poor districts.[22]
In 1953, Priestley divorced his second wife then married the archaeologist and writer Jacquetta Hawkes, with whom he collaborated on the play Dragon's Mouth.[23] The couple lived at Alveston, Warwickshire, near Stratford-upon-Avon later in his life.
Priestley's ashes were buried at St Michael and All Angels' Church in Hubberholme in the Yorkshire Dales National Park.
Death
Priestley died of pneumonia on 14 August 1984.
His ashes were buried in Hubberholme Churchyard, at the head of Wharfedale in Yorkshire.[24] The exact location of his ashes has never been made public and was only known to the three people present. A plaque in the church just states that his ashes are buried 'nearby'. Three photographs exist, showing the ashes being interred, and were taken by Dr. Brian Hoyle Thompson who, along with his wife, were two of the three people present. The brass plate on the box containing the ashes reads J. B. Priestley and can be seen clearly in one of the pictures.
Archive
Priestley began placing his papers at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin in 1960, with additions being made throughout his lifetime. The Center has continued to add to the collection through gifts and purchases when possible. The collection currently amounts to roughly 23 boxes, and includes original manuscripts for many of his works and an extensive series of correspondence.[25]
Bibliography
Novels
• Adam in Moonshine (1927)
• Benighted (1927) (filmed as The Old Dark House)
• The Good Companions (1929)
• Angel Pavement (1930)
• Faraway (1932)
• Wonder Hero (1933)
• Albert Goes Through (1933)
• They Walk in the City (1936)
• The Doomsday Men (1937)
• Let the People Sing (1939)
• Blackout in Gretley (1942)
• Daylight on Saturday (1943)
• Three Men in New Suits (1945)
• Bright Day (1946)
• Jenny Villiers (1947)
• Festival at Farbridge (1951)
• Low Notes on a High Level (1954)
• The Magicians (1954)
• Saturn over the Water (1961)
• The Thirty-First of June (1961)
• Salt Is Leaving (1961)
• The Shapes of Sleep (1962)
• Sir Michael and Sir George (1964)
• Lost Empires (1965)
• It's an Old Country (1967)
• The Image Men Vol. 1: Out of Town (1968)
• The Image Men Vol. 2: London End (1968)
• Found, Lost, Found (1976)
Other fiction
• Farthing Hall (1929) (Novel written in collaboration with Hugh Walpole)
• The Town Major of Miraucourt (1930) (Short story published in a limited edition of 525 copies)
• I'll Tell You Everything (1932) (Novel written in collaboration with Gerald Bullett)
• Albert Goes Through (1933) (Novelette)
• The Other Place (1952) (Short Stories)
• Snoggle (1971) (Novel for children)
• The Carfitt Crisis (1975) (Two novellas and a short story)
Novelizations by Ruth Mitchell (author of the wartime novel The Lost Generation and Priestley's sister-in-law by way of his second marriage):
• Dangerous Corner (1933), based on the later Broadway draft of the play, with a foreword by Priestley (paperback)
• Laburnum Grove (1936), based on the play and subsequent screenplay, published as a hardcover tie-in edition to the film
Selected plays
See also: J. B. Priestley's Time Plays
• The Good Companions (1931)
• Dangerous Corner (1932)
• Laburnum Grove (1933)
• Eden End (1934)
• Cornelius (1935)
• People at Sea (1936)
• Bees on the Boat Deck (1936)
• Time and the Conways (1937)
• I Have Been Here Before (1937)
• When We Are Married (1938)
• Johnson Over Jordan (1939)
• The Long Mirror (1940)
• They Came to a City (1943)
• An Inspector Calls (1945)
• Ever Since Paradise (1946)
• The Linden Tree (1947)
• Summer Day's Dream (1949)
• Mother's Day (1950)
• The White Countess (1954)
• Mr. Kettle and Mrs. Moon (1955)
• The Glass Cage (1957)
• The Thirty-first of June: A Tale of True Love, Enterprise and Progress in the Arthurian and AD-Atomic Ages
o Novel. December 1961: hardback; ISBN 0-434-60326-0 / ISBN 978-0-434-60326-8 (UK edition); William Heinemann Ltd
o BBC radio dramatisation; one and a half hours
o Novel. 1996: paperback; ISBN 0-7493-2281-0 / ISBN 978-0-7493-2281-6 (UK edition); Mandarin
o 31 June (1978) (TV) Soviet film; aka 31 июня
• Benighted (2016, adapted from his 1928 novel by Duncan Gates)
• The Roundabout (1931)
Films
• Sing As We Go (1934)
• The Princess Comes Across (1936)
• Jamaica Inn (1939)
• Britain at Bay (1940, Short)
• The Foreman Went to France (1942)
• Last Holiday (1950, wrote story, screenplay and produced the film)
Television work
• You Know What People Are (1955)
• Armchair Theatre: Now Let Him Go (ABC – 15 September 1957)
• Doomsday for Dyson (Granada – 10 March 1958)
• Out of the Unknown: Level Seven (BBC2 – 27 October 1966, adaptation of a story by Mordecai Roshwald)
• Shadows: The Other Window (Thames – 15 October 1975, co-written with Jacquetta Hawkes)
Literary criticism
• The English Comic Characters (1925)
• The English Novel (1927)
• Literature and Western Man (1960)
• Charles Dickens and his world (1969)
Social and political works
• English Journey (1934)
• Out of the people (1941)
• The Secret Dream: an essay on Britain, America and Russia (1946)
• The Arts under Socialism (1947)
• The Prince of Pleasure and his Regency (1969)
• The Edwardians (1970)
• Victoria's Heyday (1972)
• The English (1973)
• A Visit to New Zealand (1974)
Autobiography and essays
• Essays of To-day and Yesterday (1926)
• Apes and Angels (1928)
• The Balconinny (1931)
• Midnight on the Desert (1937)
• Rain Upon Godshill: A Further Chapter of Autobiography (1939)
• Postscripts (1940)
• Delight (1949)
• Journey Down a Rainbow (co-authored with Jacquetta Hawkes, 1955)
• Margin Released (1962)
• Man and Time (1964)
• The Moments and Other Pieces (1966)
• Over the Long High Wall (1972)
• The Happy Dream (Limited edition, 1976)
• Instead of the Trees (1977)
Notes
1. Cook, Judith (1997). "Beginnings and Childhood". Priestley. London: Bloomsbury. p. 5. ISBN 0-7475-3508-6.
2. Lincoln Konkle, J. B. Priestley, in British Playwrights, 1880–1956: A Research and Production Sourcebook, by William W. Demastes, Katherine E. Kelly; Greenwood Press, 1996
3. Marr, Andrew (2008). A History of Modern Britain. Macmillan. p. xxii. ISBN 978-0-330-43983-1.
4. "Irish butt of English racism for more than eight centuries".
5. Roger Fagge (15 December 2011). The Vision of J.B. Priestley. A&C Black. pp. 29–. ISBN 978-1-4411-0480-9.
6. Colin Holmes (16 October 2015). John Bull's Island: Immigration and British Society, 1871-1971. Routledge. pp. 149–. ISBN 978-1-317-38273-7.
7. J. B. Priestley, English Journey (London: William Heinemann, 1934), pp. 248-9
8. J. B. Priestley, "The War – And After", in Horizon, January 1940. Reprinted in Andrew Sinclair, War Decade: An Anthology of the 1940s, Hamish Hamilton, 1989. ISBN 0241125677 (p. 19).
9. Cited in Addison, Paul (2011). The Road To 1945: British Politics and the Second World War. Random House. ISBN 9781446424216.
10. Page, Robert M. (2007). Revisiting the Welfare State. Introducing Social Policy. McGraw-Hill Education (UK). p. 10. ISBN 9780335234981.
11. "?". Archived from the original on 15 September 2008.
12. "Priestley war letters published". BBC News website. 6 October 2008. Retrieved 10 June 2008.
13. Ezard, John (21 June 2003). "Blair's babe Did love turn Orwell into a government stooge?". The Guardian. Retrieved 30 December 2008.
14. J. B. Priestley Archive. University of Bradford. Retrieved 16 February 2016.
15. A "sentimental journey"? Priestley's Lost City. bbc.co.uk (26 September 2008). Retrieved 2 May 2012.
16. Fagge, Roger (2011). The Vision of J.B. Priestley. Bloomsbury Publishing. Note 9 to Chapter 6. ISBN 9781441163790.
17. "Individuals, now deceased, who refused honours between 1951 and 1999" (PDF) (Press release). Cabinet Office. 25 January 2012. Archived from the original (PDF) on 4 April 2012. Retrieved 27 January 2012.
18. Priestley, John Boynton (1894–1984), writer | Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press. 2004. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/31565.
19. "Barbara Wykeham". Retrieved 15 August 2018.
20. "Sylvia Goaman". Retrieved 15 August 2018.
21. JB Priestley (estate). Unitedagents.co.uk. Retrieved 2 May 2012.
22. Women’s Group on Public Welfare. The Neglected Child and His Family. Oxford University Press: London, 1948, p. x.
23. "Biography". J. B. Priestley website. Archived from the original on 2 July 2007. Retrieved 28 July 2007.
24. "Hubberholme Church". http://www.yorkshire-dales.com. Retrieved 6 July 2019.
25. "J. B. Priestley: An Inventory of His Collection at the Harry Ransom Center". norman.hrc.utexas.edu. Retrieved 3 November 2017.
References
• Brome, Vincent (1988). J.B. Priestley. ISBN 0-241-12560-X
• Bright Day: A special collectors' edition, by J.B. Priestley
• Works by or about J. B. Priestley at Internet Archive
External links
• The Official J. B. Priestley website
• The J. B. Priestley Society
• J. B. Priestley Papers at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin
• J. B. Priestley biography at Spartacus Educational
• J. B. Priestley Archive at the University of Bradford
• Priestley in the Theatre Collection, University of Bristol
• John Angerson's English Journey. Photographer Angerson retraces J.B. Priestley's footsteps 75 years after publication of Priestley's seminal travelog, English Journey. Article by Graham Harrison for the Photo Histories web site.
• 1944 film of Priestley at work at British Pathé
• Works by J. B. Priestley at Project Gutenberg
• J. B. Priestley at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• J. B. Priestley on IMDb
• J. B. Priestley at Library of Congress Authorities, with 338 catalogue records
• Newspaper clippings about J. B. Priestley in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW
• BBC Archives – J. B. Priestley's 'Postscript' – radio broadcast from 5 June 1940
• Wolfe, Graham (2019). Theatre-Fiction in Britain from Henry James to Doris Lessing: Writing in the Wings. Routledge. ISBN 9781000124361.