JAMES GRASBY: Welcome to the National Trust podcast.
I'm James Grasby and I'm a curator with the National Trust
with a portfolio of houses in Herefordshire and
Worcestershire. And the Daily life of a curator is looking
after things as diverse as library ladders and portraits.
These places are knowledgeable witnesses if you like to things
that have been seen and heard by them.
And in this group of podcasts, we'll be delving into the
stories, plays, books and characters that make each of
these places so special.
So join me on this journey and immerse yourself in the wonders
of the National Trust.
I'm headed towards the home of one of the most famous, most
photographed and most quoted men in the world. A man who's hard
to categorize a politician, a philosopher and most notably, a
playwright ranked second only to Shakespeare.
There's even an expression'Shavian' to describe
Shaw's attitude to so many things. Socialism, feminism,
pacifism, intellectual life, the value of culture, which is a
real indicator and index of his contribution.
And here set in the tranquil greenery of Hertfordshire sits
the old rectory where he spent the last 40 years of his life.
In this episode, we'll be exploring this beautiful arts
and crafts home and learning about the man and his
masterpieces through the spaces, books and objects that he
surrounded himself with.
Walking down this lane towards Shaw's Corner. I'm not at all
surprised that the Shaws chose this place as their escape from
London. It is tranquil and beautiful. I mean, it's a
particularly sunny morning and already the holly berries have
turned red and gorgeous. It's a sensational place with a wrought
iron gate with the word Shaw's Corner in large letters.
Before moving here, Shaw was living a busy life in London.
He'd established himself as one of the most celebrated writers
and he was an active Fabian politician.
To get a sense of his life before moving here, here's Fiona
Hall, the visitor experience manager at Shaw's Corner
together with Michael friend, a theatre producer who works with
the trust to give a quick rundown of Shaw's life before
Shaw's Corner.
FIONA HALL: George Bernard Shaw is a playwright. He's a very
famous playwright at the start of the 20th century. He was born
in the 19th century, but he's most well known for his plays in
between the war years.
MICHAEL FRIEND: He'd been living in Dublin, come over from
Ireland when he was 20 and struggled to make a living.
He knew he wanted to write and then he started being offered
things "like come and write a music criticism for a small
magazine."
And it grew from that. He then because of his interest in
theatre and what theatre could tell you about society. He
decided plays were going to be his scene. [Sound of theatrical
performance]
FIONA HALL: And his plays have a- have an interesting kind of
historical socialist, political background to them. So he was
often trying to make a larger point with his plays.
MICHAEL FRIEND: I think the breakthrough came when he had a
play which was on, put on in London and the king came to see
it.
And the king enjoyed it so much and of course, that once people
heard all about that, they started, you know, coming to
Shaw's plays. He really became a mega personality.
FIONA HALL: He's kind of like the Stephen fry of his day. So
he was a person that was commenting on lots of things. If
he'd had Twitter in his day, he probably would have been
tweeting. He was often on the radio. He did quite a lot of
world tours.
MICHAEL FRIEND: He lived into his nineties and never stopped
writing. But of course, the plays were only one aspect.
FIONA HALL: He was hugely influential in quite a number of
ways people would hear him speaking about things of the day
making challenging, provocative comments about things.
MICHAEL FRIEND: He was- once he became famous, looked upon as
the expert on anything. So he really was a colossus.
JAMES GRASBY: I'm walking up the gravel drive towards the house
under a canopy of copper Beech and Yew and here is a really
very pretty brick built arts and crafts house, quite a modest
affair really, two stories and with a magnificent climbing
Hydrangea on this elevation.
It's the house of a man who wrote what 60 plus plays,
250,000 letters or something originated a lot of them within
this place.
Before I visited actually, I went on to the National Trust
website and saw a very interesting bit of film from
1946 I think, black and white film, Pathé newsreel, of Shaw
here and seeing this place again, I feel the ghost of him.
I can, I can see him here.
Hello, welcome. How do you do? I'm James Grasby.
SUE MORGAN: Hello, I'm Sue Morgan House manager here.
JAMES GRASBY: Sue, I'm very pleased to meet you.
SUE MORGAN: Would you like a cup of tea?
JAMES GRASBY: We've walked into the kitchen which is a little
bit of time travel. A two colour scheme, a cream and a sort of
warm earthy brown with a fire going, a coal burning grate with
a great big oven and a water boiler and some hot plates on
top.
Was George Bernard Shaw hands on with a pan?
SUE MORGAN: First of all, i'll stop you with the George Ok?
Because he didn't call himself George Bernard Shaw, he called
himself Bernard Shaw. So you'll see in his signature, the G is
dropped. But here when they moved into Shaw's Corner, they
had a housekeeper, a couple, a housekeeper, her husband who was
like gardener and then driver handyman and things.
Mr and Mrs Hicks. Obviously, this is a kitchen where his
vegetarian food would have been prepped.
JAMES GRASBY: He was a vegetarian?
SUE MORGAN: He was indeed a very early vegetarian. He felt as
though the energy from eating live food from the garden was
much more nourishing than eating dead corpses. His words.
JAMES GRASBY: So why did Shaw choose this house, this village
in particular?
SUE MORGAN: Well, he'd been living in Hertfordshire, renting
another house and found this area particularly convenient for
getting in and out of London because of course, he still kept
a flat in the theatre land in London. And why this house?
Well, it really amused him that him, the renowned atheist was
going to move into the rectory.
So neither of them were very, you know, enamoured of the
house, but that's not what they were looking for. They were
looking for just somewhere where they could have tranquillity for
him to write and just generally get on with their lives really.
As you come in, perhaps you didn't see this wonderful piece
of William Morris fabric.
William Morris, who was the writer, craftsman, developer of
all the beautiful designs that many of us, you know, still
surround ourselves with. Shaw said that it was through William
Morris that he got started. So he'd been writing novels but
they hadn't been published.
But he managed to get one, called an unsocial socialist
published in serial form. And William Morris read it and got
in touch with him and invited him to join in the Hammersmith
Socialist League and the Pre Raphaelites, the arts and crafts
movement that was meeting there.
So Shaw immediately is launched into this amazing group of
writers, artists, crafts people.
So this curtain here really symbolizes for Shaw, you know,
his start with William Morris.
And the piano was designed by Walter Cave who is Secretary of
the Arts And Crafts Workers Union.
And Shaw was self taught on the piano was a real source of
nourishment throughout his life. And several visitors would
comment on the fact that he would, you know, sing the ring
cycle from one end to the other singing all the parts playing
along and you know what a merry sort of house it was, full of
music.
So this is the dining room.
JAMES GRASBY: It's not grand, it's very simple. An oak table
and four very straightforward chairs, a radio, a gramophone, a
little sofa, a few pictures, but it was an absolute hothouse for
fun and frivolity and discussion.
SUE MORGAN: Yes, ideas, concepts, plans projects.
So it's easy to imagine here, Lawrence Of Arabia sitting at
the table and Apsley Cherry-Garrard who went to the
pole with Scott sitting around talking about artic exploration,
you know, so many different things. But you can imagine the
kind of atmosphere that there was in this room.
You can see that we've got some very interesting characters on
the mantelpiece, Gandhi there at the beginning who sets a good
tone because of course he was like peaceful resistance. The
next is Tuschinski, one of the earliest revolutionaries who
ends up with a very unsavoury job as chief of police in the
Soviet Union. Lenin and then Stalin.
Shaw truly believed in socialism as the way to make the world a
better place as did many of the intellectual elite at the time.
On the right is his birthplace in Sing Street in Dublin.
And you'll recognize with whiskers on the right is Will
Gibson. Shaw championed Gibson's work because he was the first
writer who put the personal on the stage and the whole issue of
the new women and women's rights.
That Shaw was, that's what he was writing about in Pygma-
Well, in all his plays, but Pygmalion perhaps the most well
known.
Pygmalion was about the flower girl who was selling flowers
outside Covent Garden.
She was there when the opera turned out and the very rich
Gentry were waiting for taxis to go home.
When the professor of phonetics, Higgins, overhears her and
thinks her accent wonderful and makes his notes about it and
then realizes that there's another phonetics expert
standing right next to him and they have the bet that they will
pass her off as a duchess.
Yeah, within six months, it's absolutely hilarious.
He wrote that play here after Shaw had died, that was made
into the musical My Fair Lady, which still is still performed
all over the world today.
And in this box over here, if you would like to put some
gloves on, you can unwrap this for us.
JAMES GRASBY: My goodness. An Oscar!
SUE MORGAN: For writing screenplay of Pygmalion
JAMES GRASBY: And it looks quite worn as if it was... [Laughter]
SUE MORGAN: Well, he used it as a doorstop! Of course, Shaw had
little time for such nonsense. Yes. Yes.
Let's go upstairs and have a look at his bedroom.
JAMES GRASBY: Ok. What we have here is Shaw's bedroom and
here's Charlotte's bedroom next door. I mean, that does say
something about their married life and their relationship.
SUE MORGAN: Certainly suggested that the marriage wasn't
consummated. It was more about work and about the joining
together of two energies to create something really big and
important that would change the world.
JAMES GRASBY: Where Charlotte was a suffragist, a great
benefactor and supporter of the arts and was a very talented and
busy and gifted woman in her, in her own right.
SUE MORGAN: Yes, absolutely she was.
The Shaw library at London School Of Economics, for
example, a Charlotte Shaw's library. It's not Bernard
Shaw's. So we can see her influence all over the place.
But yes, she very much was the gatekeeper in a sense while she
was here to keep people away from Shaw, looking at who was
getting close to him.
And then she also looked at writing out and typing up some
of his scripts, helping with his office work and things like
that. But they spoke a lot, you know, they were very close. You
can see that.
Ok so we're now in the store room and here we've got this
wonderful birthday book which contains handwrit messages to
Shaw. I'm looking for Einstein. He's in here somewhere.
JAMES GRASBY: It's an inch and a half thick with letters from
some of the great, I mean, some of the truly great people, not
only of the era but of- but of the modern period really. I
mean, culminating with one from Albert Einstein!
SUE MORGAN: He had a huge influence.
JAMES GRASBY: You've opened up a beautiful, I think it's a
Solander Box and there we have it a sort of false calf sized
leather bound book with the initials B. S. in the front,
beautifully tooled blue leather with gold on it. My goodness,
you've opened it George Bernard Shaw 1925. There it is, the
Nobel Prize for Literature.
SUE MORGAN: This was for his huge body of work. It says in
there that it has great humanity, but also it's infused
throughout with great poetic beauty.
JAMES GRASBY: Oh, what a wonderful tour of the house. And
we've come out through a sort of back door from the kitchen onto
a lawn.
SUE MORGAN: Shaw wanted to his house to be left as a living
shrine. And one of the ways we do that is through having
outdoor theatre here.
So in the background, you can hear the actors prepping to give
their performance. [
GENERIC: Sound of Rehearsal] Right down to the keep If you
like! That will be a declaration of independence with a
vengeance!
JONAS CEMM: I'm Jonas, Jonas Cemm. I perform at Shaw's Corner
every year for the past 10 years. [
GENERIC: Sound of Rehearsal] You stand in my father's place. By
his own wish. Nobody could say a word against our traveling
together.
LAINEY SHAW: Hi, I'm Lainey Shaw. I'm an actor.
JAMES GRASBY: How lovely to have two actors here performing at
Shaw's Corner. The place where he wrote a lot of these words.
What's it, what does it feel like for you?
LAINEY SHAW: It's lovely. It's really, it's such a beautiful
place and to read his words and to- to know that this is where
he created them coming.
JONAS CEMM: On stage through the porch here onto the terrace when
you're performing in a play is always quite daunting because
Gandhi and all manner of people have walked through that door
there.
So you're following the footsteps of giants and then
you're coming on to perform the lines that he wrote upstairs or
in there and you often feel like his spirit might be watching it.
So you really feel the pressure to have a good performance when
you're performing at Shaw's Corner.
JAMES GRASBY: It's a big responsibility you have as an
actor in getting into the character. How do you go about
doing that with Shaw? What's peculiar to Shaw's characters
that you found?
LAINEY SHAW: Oh, they're so varied and, and I think that's
what's wonderful. Also, Shaw often will give you a massive
description of physical description-
JAMES GRASBY: Really?
LAINEY SHAW: And yeah-
JONAS CEMM: Stage directions are something to be seen.
LAINEY SHAW: Pages and pages of description.
JONAS CEMM: The audience are very receptive every year I've
been doing it here and they, they love it more and more even
the obscure ones that they've never heard of because he's
always relevant. We did The Millionairess a good few years
ago, right in the middle of the banking crisis.
And one of the lines that opened Act Two, never put your money in
a bank to which the audience laughed for about five minutes.
We had to really wait for them to calm down and that have every
time in a short place, something can be picked at that's relevant
to today.
SUE MORGAN: Ok. Let's walk down to the writing hut then.
This was a space where he'd come to every morning to work every
morning that he was here that is.
Sometimes they'd call it London. So if people came to the house
to talk to him, they could say he was in London.
JAMES GRASBY: Oh, my word. Look at that. Look at that. Very
simple. I mean, it's basically a little potting shed. I mean, it
can only be about 6 ft square painted black with two little
windows in the front and a glazed door.
And inside I can see the most magnificent typewriter.
SUE MORGAN: So it does look very simple, doesn't it? But it's got
a bit of a secret. Perhaps you'd like to push at the end.
JAMES GRASBY: Are you serious?
SUE MORGAN: Oh, I'm serious. Push hard. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
JAMES GRASBY: Oh! It's turning! A pivoted writing hut!
Look at that! So you could line up with the, with the sunshine.
I need one of these! I must have one of these! It's a garden
shed, spinning on a little turntable. That is just
wonderful. Genius!
I can imagine him secreting himself away. And this is where
most of his creative work was done when he was here.
SUE MORGAN: When he died, his ashes were mixed with
Charlotte's and they're scattered all around the garden
around the writing hut.
JAMES GRASBY: So he and his wife have actually become part of
this place?
SUE MORGAN: Yes, they are indeed.
Now, Shaw said, "life's no brief candle for me. It's a sort of
splendid Torch that I've got hold of for the moment and I
want to make it burn as bright as it can for I want to be
thoroughly used up when I die, the harder the work, the more I
live." And he wanted to leave a lasting legacy and he wanted to
change the world.
Many people have spoken and you know, written about the
inequalities of the way the world is. But you know, Shaw
made everybody laugh at the same time.
He was very straight speaking. He said things with humour that
perhaps he would not have got away with if it had been without
humour. [
GENERIC: Sound of theatrical performance] Oh, how wretched. I
am. I know how happy I am. Don't be so selfish! Yes, I deserve
that!
JAMES GRASBY: During his lifetime, he talked with the
National Trust about the possibility- I know he was a
member of the National Trust with Charlotte, but he talked
about the possibility of giving the house after his death to the
trust for, for preservation in perpetuity.
SUE MORGAN: Oh, yes, indeed. In 1943 so seven years before he
died, you know, he approached the trust and, you know, talked
about how it was going to look and what else he would bring up
from London. And, yeah, he was very happy for them to have it.
JAMES GRASBY: What a fabulous day. Found a very cool spot.
It's been unseasonably warm here and just looking back at the
house as the sun goes down.
I mean, this is the house of a self taught, feminist, political
activist, Oscar winning, vegetarian, piano playing, Nobel
Prize winning, intellectual celebrity!
I mean, my goodness and a wordsmith!
What a breadth of experiences and contributions Shaw has made
and the fascinating Charlotte.
It was a good reminder too to meet those stunning actors
performing Shaw's work here in the place where a lot of that
material was written.
I hope you've enjoyed this very special place as much as I have
and I do recommend you visit. It's a sensational experience.
Thanks for listening to this episode of the National Trust
podcast. For more information about Shaw's Corner, you can
visit their website at nationaltrust.org.uk/shaws-corn-
er.
In the next episode, I'll be exploring Wordsworth's Cumbrian
Houses.
That episode will be available in a couple of weeks, but there
will be a mini episode available next week where we'll be hearing
more about how Shaw's literary legacy is celebrated and
preserved at Shaw's Corner through plays and performance on
location.
To make sure you never miss another episode, subscribe on
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You can also email us at podcasts@nationaltrust.org.uk
until the next time from me, James Grasby. Goodbye.