‘There’ll always be wars as long as men are such fools as to want to go to them.’
(Frank, the ex-soldier, in This Happy Breed, Act 1, Scene 1)
‘This Happy Breed’ is a play by Noël Coward. It was written in 1939 but, because of the outbreak of World War II, not staged until 1942. He wrote it at the same time as another of his best works, ‘Blithe Spirit’, also put on hold because of the war. Coward suspended writing for the stage the duration of the war and many critics think that, when he resumed, his writing never regained its charge and brilliancy. So, the argument goes, these two plays, ‘Breed’ and ‘Blithe’, represent the peak of his achievement.
Title
The play’s title is a phrase from John of Gaunt’s famous speech in Act 2, Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s play ‘Richard II’ where he gives a lyrical description of the England of his youth:
This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England…
But in the play, all this stirring patriotic imagery is just the preliminary to Gaunt going on to lament that this wonderful England had in fact declined into a state of decay and mismanagement under the disastrous king Richard II, who had exiled Gaunt’s son, Henry Bolingbroke. Understandably, patriotic writers like Coward leave that bit out, but anyone who knows the play knows that these fine words are an exaggerated and rose-tinted view of the past of a country which has now fallen into decay and decline. How much of this heavy irony Coward intended to hang over his play is not clear.
Class
‘This Happy Breed’ is one of the few Coward plays not to be set among the affluent middle or upper middle class. Its consciously lower-middle class milieu recalls just a handful of other works in the same setting, namely ‘Cavalcade’ (1931) and the short play ‘Fumed Oak’ from ‘Tonight at 8.30’ (1936). But he does it well, persuasively. His mum kept a boarding house and his family was often on the verge of poverty. He captures the speech rhythms and in particular the clichés of the class. You can almost hear the shrill voices of the women working class characters as you hear them in movies from the period.
- I’m not going to stand here catching me death.
- Well, I like that I must say.
- It doesn’t matter, I’m sure.
- I don’t know what you mean, I’m sure.
- A nice way to behave, upsetting me like this.
- These boots are giving me what for.
And Frank’s recurring catchphrase, ”Op it’, which I’ve been trying out on the wife, daughter and cat, with varying degrees of success.
Synopsis
The play is made of three acts, each containing three scenes, which cover exactly 20 years, starting in June 1919 and ending in June 1939. They are all set in the same location, the front room of the Gibbons family in Clapham.
Act 1
Scene 1: June 1919
It’s seven months after the end of the Great War and the Gibbons family is just moving into 17 Sycamore Road in Clapham, South London (an area Coward knew well, having lived in various houses around the area in his boyhood). They lived for the four war years with her mother, Mrs Flint, in a shabby house in Battersea.
The room is mostly empty of furniture with packing cases scattered about.
Ethel Gibbons manages her grumpy mother, Mrs Flint, while Frank fixes up the curtains. Mrs Flint doesn’t like Sylvia, Frank’s sister, who Ethel asked to move in after her fiancée Bertie was killed in the war. Frank comes down and puts his arms round Ethel, they stare into the garden (which needs work) and she tells him how relieved she is that he returned safe from the war, unlike so many of the men they knew.
They’re just having a connubial kiss when the next door neighbour, Bob Mitchell, startles them by knocking on the window. Turns out he used to be an old army colleague of Frank’s and they reminisce about the war, and then details of each other’s kids.
Scene 2: December 1925
Christmas 1925 and the kids are all about 18. The grown-ups (Frank and Ethel, Ethel’s mother (Mrs Flint) and Frank’s sister, the permanently unwell Sylvia) have gone into the front room leaving the young people to clear the table, being Frank and Ethel’s children (Vi, 20, Queenie, 21, Reg, 18). Reg hero worships his friend Sam who proposes a toast but Queenie interrupts and mocks him which triggers him to an earnest speech against capitalism and injustice, anticipating the great day of the revolution:
SAM: She is only one of the millions who, when the great days comes, will be swept out of existence like so much chaff on the wind…
The others carry on mocking so he and Reg go up to Reg’s room. The young women are tidying up when there’s a knock at the window and it’s Bob Mitchell’s son Billy from next door. The others leave him with Queenie who he’s sweet on. He’s a sailor and he asks whether, in a few years, they might get married. But Queenie tells him she hates suburban life, she wouldn’t make him a good wife and rushes out.
Frank enters and cheers up a disconsolate Billy. The latter asks if Frank will put in a good word for him with Queenie and Frank kindly agrees to. Billy leaves and Ethel comes in. Sylvia’s started singing in the living room and they’re both relieved to avoid her.
Scene 3: May 1926
Set during the ten days of the General Strike of 1926. Frank is up in town breaking the strike as a volunteer bus driver, along with Bob from next door. Meanwhile young Reg had a blazing row with his dad about the strike and stormed out a few days earlier.
We learn all this because Ethel is beside herself with worry for both of them. Her nerves are on edge and she gets into an argument with tearful Aunt Sylvia, herself continually picked on by nasty old Mrs Flint.
In the middle of this bad-tempered bickering Frank and Bob arrive home a bit tipsy from the drinks they’ve had on the way back from their shift. Barely has Ethel tutted over them and told him, no, he can’t have another drink, than the front doorbell goes and it’s Sam and Reg.
Reg has been absent since he ran away a few days earlier and Ethel has been worried sick. His head is bandaged with where someone threw a stone at it. Vi confronts Sam for leading Reg astray and throws him out.
Left alone together, Frank doesn’t tell Reg off as the latter was expecting. He says everyone’s entitled to their own opinions. But he criticises Reg for falling for other people’s slogans and language. Also points out that the idea that society is unfair is very old. And thinks where Reg goes wrong is blaming it on government and systems whereas he, Frank, thinks it runs deeper than that, it has its origins in ‘good old human nature’.
After sharing a drink and having this little man-to-man chat they bid each other goodnight and go off to their separate bedrooms. I wish my Dad had been that understanding or articulate.
Act 2
Scene 1: October 1931
It is Reg’s wedding day. The scene opens with Frank having a nice cup of tea after breakfast while all the women in the house run round in a panic, getting ready, fussing about dresses, their hair etc. The family servant or maid, Edie, tells him about her own son, Ernie, who’s just started shaving and cut himself.
Bob pops round for a chat and a smoke. His wife isn’t doing too well since her miscarriage six years ago. God, the great abortionist.
We learn that Reg has abandoned all his socialism, in fact was critical of the last Labour government, has settled down and got a job. His firebrand pal, Sam, has settled down and married Vi.
In comes Reg and Bob leaves allowing Frank to give some fatherly advice. This is to always put your wife first but then, rather surprisingly, to tell Reg it’s alright to have a bit on the side, just make sure nobody finds out and nothing causes upset to your wife and family. Reg is embarrassed, father and son share a little hug, then Frank exits.
Billy from next door comes in, wearing a naval Petty Officer’s outfit. He’s going to be Reg’s best man. Some banter which establishes Billy as a jolly, flippant fellow, before Reg leaves, bumping into Queenie in her bridesmaid’s dress. Remember he had a pash for her? He still does. In fact it turns out that last night he proposed to her and she said no. He asks if she’s in love with someone else and it comes out that yes she is, and he’s a married man. What a fool.
Billy exists and Frank and Ethel come in, dressed for the wedding. Their conversation with Queenie develops into an argument (but then all conversations in Coward tend towards argument), with Queenie eventually saying she thinks her family are common, and hates their narrow horizons and she wants to make something of herself. ‘I’m sick of this house and everybody in it’ etc. She fears being seen by the girls in the posh shop she works in. She flounces out and Frank and Ethel have a parently post-mortem on where they went wrong bringing her up.
Then Reg and Billy come bounding in and his mother bursts into tears and says it seems only yesterday he was a wee baby boy etc, Billy drags Reg out the front door to get into the fancy wedding car to take them to church. Enter grumpy old Mrs Flint and sickly Aunt Sylvia. Then Vi and Sam enter, Sam looking smart and respectable. In effect, we are reviewing the entire cast of characters at this pivotal moment. Even more pile in until there are about 8 characters all talking and fussing onstage. The most striking one is old Mrs Flint complaining about everything but whose conversation is dominated by her own ailments and stories about lots of other old women falling ill or dying. It all leads up to a blazing clash between Mrs Flint and Sylvia and the classic Coward situation of everyone telling everyone else to shut up. ‘Shut up’ must the commonest phrase in Noel Coward’s lexicon (see below).
At the height of the argument the wedding car arrives and they all have to fix their hats and bustle out the room to go to the wedding.
Scene 2: November 1931, midnight
It’s midnight when Bob and Frank tiptoe through the french windows into the living room. They’re both a bit tiddly having attended their regimental reunions and joke and banter and raid the pantry for snacks (fishpaste on Huntley and Palmer crackers with a dash of AI sauce). Through them we catch up on news of the other characters: Billy the sailor is in Malta; Reg and Phyllis are settling into marriage; Vi and Sam have had a baby, making Frank a grandfather.
They drunkenly discuss whether they’ll see another war: not in their time, thinks Bob, but Frank, the more realistic and cynical character, says Don’t bet on it. What about the threat from Japan? They need to keep the Navy up to scratch.
Then, in trying to prevent him pouring him another bog Scotch, Bob grabs Frank’s arm and makes him drop the bottle with a crash. This brings Ethel downstairs in her curlers. She sees Bob off the premises and is just launching in on Frank when she sees a letter on the mantlepiece. It was left there at the start of the scene when we saw Queenie, dressed and in a coat and carrying a suitcase, put it there. Obviously she’s done a bunk.
Sure enough, when they open it, the letter tells them Queenie has run off with her married man because his wife won’t divorce him. She doesn’t say where. This triggers an argument between Frank and Ethel, both claiming the other one spoiled Queenie. Ethel is the harshest. When Frank says he’ll track her down and bring her back, Ethel says she doesn’t want Queenie back. She’ll never forgive her till her dying day. Frank is taken aback at her vehemence.
Scene 3: May 1932
Six months later. Mrs Flint and Sylvia aren’t arguing so much. Mrs F credits it to the new job Sylvia’s got at the library, thanks to a Mrs Wilmot. The regular hours and company have done her good. Frank gets cross with Sylvia for bringing a spray of may into the house and putting it in a vase: bad luck. When he exits, Sylvia remarks that he’s been more short-tempered since Queenie ran away.
They’re in the middle of more bickering and low-level resentments when the front doorbell rings, Vi comes running in with the appalling news that Reg and Phyll have been in a car accident and are both dead. God, how brutal.
Act 3
Scene 1: December 1936
The play really asserts its continuity with ‘Cavalcade’. That play followed a family through major historical incidents from 1900 to 1930. This one has been more domestic but still features contemporary historical events. We’ve had the 1926 General Strike and this scene focuses on the ex-king Edward VIII’s abdication broadcast on the radio. (He abdicated because the Establishment wouldn’t allow him to be king and marry his true love, Mrs Wallis Simpson, who was divorced from her first husband and in the process of divorcing her second.) The scene begins just after the king’s historic broadcast has concluded.
Frank and Ethel have aged since their son’s death. Sylvia, by contrast, looks older. She has adopted the Christian Science faith and its confidence obviously agrees with her. In fact she has an argument with Sam about it, in which she infuriatingly refuses to lose her temper,
We learn that in the past four years Mrs Flint has passed away and the servant Edie has left and not been replaced. Bob next door, his wife Nora has died, after being ill for year.
After some nattering there’s a knock at the french windows and Billy comes in. He’s now an experienced and impressive Royal Navy Warrant Officer.
He has some staggering news. He’s seen Queenie. Ethel bridles because that name has been banned in the house for five years. But Billy quickly gives a recap of Queenie’s adventures, how the married man she ran off with dropped her after a year and her struggles to earn a living, then a case of appendicitis, then taking up with another Brit she met in hospital to set up a tea room in the South of France, and that’s where he met her and…
All in a rush he tells Frank and Ethel that he’s married Queenie. He always said he’s wait for her and he did and she finally accepted him, and she’s next door. Frank shakes Billy by the hand then runs out the french windows and moments later reappears with Queenie. Ethel breaks down in tears etc and there is an awkward but loving reconciliation between her and Ethel. To be honest, I had tears in my eyes when I read it. God, what a world.
Scene 2: September 1938
More of the ‘Cavalcade’ mentality in that the next scene is based round yet another major historical event, this time Neville Chamberlain’s return from Munich and the famous piece of paper he waved around in the hope that it would assure peace in our time.
Developments in the Gibbons household include that Billy and Queenie have had a baby son, currently four months old. Queenie is ill, still recovering from the birth which was difficult.
Sylvia never believed there would be a war and the smug superiority of her Christian Science belief triggers an angry response from Vi, as it did from Sam in the previous scene.
Ethel tells Frank Queenie’s had a letter from Billy asking her to go out and stay with him in Singapore. If she goes she’ll leave the baby with them to look after. For maybe a year.
Bob pops in. Years after his wife died, he’s taken the plunge, is selling up and moving to the country. They’ll miss him. Ethel gives him an embarrassed kiss.
Bob says goodbye to Frank. They reminisce about all the things they’ve seen in the past 20 years and Frank wonders what happens to rooms and houses which have been lived in so intensely by people who then move away. Does a little part of them stay behind…? They drink a toast to happy days.
Scene 3: June 1939
Symmetry. Just as in the first scene, the room is mostly emptied with everything packed up into crates, because Frank and Ethel are moving out. They’re moving to a flat with a fine view of Clapham Common and running hot water.
We learn that Queenie has gone off to Singapore, leaving their baby, who I think is called Frank, with them. It irritates Frank who calls it ‘his lordship.’
Frank and Ethel share a sentimental moment, looking out over the garden as they did in the first scene, before Ethel bustles off in her busy way. This leaves Frank with the baby in a pram and Coward has him deliver a page-and-a-half monologue. This consists of Frank’s cynical view about ‘peace’ i.e. it’ll never happen. He expands the idea he’s mentioned briefly once or twice earlier, that there’ll never be peace because of human nature.
The trouble with the world, Frankie, is there’s too much idealism and too little horse sense. We’re human beings, we are, all of us – and that’s what people are liable to forget. Human beings don’t like peace and good will and everybody loving everybody else. However much they may think they do, they don’t really because they’re not made like that. Human beings like eating and drinking and loving and loving and hating. They also like showing off, grabbing all they can, fighting for their rights and bossing anybody who’ll give ’em half a chance.
Which segues into a passage more specifically about British politics. Frank admits that just recently Britain has allowed itself to be bullied by noisy foreigners and has let other people down.
But don’t worry, that won’t last. The people themselves, the ordinary people like you and me, know something better than all the fussy politicians put together – we know what we belong to, where we come from and where we’re going. We may not know it with our brains, but we know it with our roots.
He ends with defiance of our enemies, based on the optimistic notion that we (the ordinary British people) have fought for human decency for ourselves and won’t let it go lightly.
We ‘aven’t lived and died and struggled all these hundreds of years to get decency and justice and freedom for ourselves without being prepared to fight fifty wars if need be, to keep ’em.
Ethel comes in and finds him delivering this great speech and wonders what on earth he’s doing. When he explains ‘talking to the baby’ she tells him to close the french windows and come along for supper. Loudmouth men, practical women. Reassuring stereotypes to the end.
Thoughts
As you can see it’s not really a play with a dramatic narrative which tells a long complicated story or addresses distinct themes. It’s more like a kind of diary of a family. Or snapshots in a family album, very like Cavalcade. A continuation of Cavalcade but in another class.
Bickering
As you know, as I’ve read my way through Noel Coward’s plays I’ve been surprised at the absence of his supposed wit and the prominence, the ubiquity, of bickering and arguing. The core of all his famous plays is people snapping at each other, bad-tempered squabbling which frequently rises to real abuse and shouting matches. That’s what I associate Coward with.
To take it a bit further, all his characters – whether posh Mayfair types or lower class types as in this work – despite all their superficial differences, all have one basic function or activity, which is to try and shut down other people, and make their version of events or opinions prevail. His plays are battlefields, not of ideas because there are few if any ideas in his plays, but battlefields of will.
And ‘This Happy Breed’ is no different. In Act 2, scene 1, just before Reg’s wedding, there’s a huge argument in which about half a dozen characters are all trying to talk over each other, shut up and silence the others, in order to impose their version, to control the narrative.
MRS FLINT: I’ll thank you not to call me names, Sylvia Gibbons.
SYLVIA: You make me tired.
ETHEL: Don’t answer back, Sylvia, it’ll only mean a row.
SYLVIA: I’m sure I don’t want to say anything to anybody, but really–
MRS FLINT: Pity you don’t keep quiet then!
SYLVIA: Who are you to talk to me like that – I’ve had about enough of your nagging –
FRANK: Shut UP, Sylvia!
Or the passage in Act 2 scene 3 where Ethel tells Mrs Flint (her mother) to just hold her tongue, in response to which Mrs Flint huffily says ‘the less I open my mouth the better’. Once you notice it, you see it everywhere; on almost every pages characters tell other ones to shut up or they don’t like how they talk.
- FRANK: I do wish you wouldn’t talk like that Sylvia.
- QUEENIE: I wish you wouldn’t say things like that, Dad.
- ETHEL: It’s not a fit subject to talk about.
- ETHE: How often have I told you I won’t have you talking like that, Frank.
- ETHEL: Don’t let’s talk about it, shall we?
- ETHEL: Don’t talk so silly.
- ETHEL: Don’t snap at your father, Queenie.
They even disapprove of the king speaking, in the scene following the abdication speech:
FRANK: Well I suppose he ‘ad to make it but I somehow wish he hadn’t.
There’s another way of looking at it. Philip Hoare writes that Coward knew – like presumably most playwrights – that the essence of drama is conflict. But other playwrights use clashes of ideas, or really the different points of view of vividly conceived characters. Take Virginia Woolf’s favourite play, Antigone, which has at its core the completely irreconcilable positions of Creon and Antigone. Or take any of Ibsen’s mature plays, which dramatise real clashes of deeply portrayed and profoundly conflicting characters.
There’s nothing like that depth anywhere in Coward. A regular complaint is that his characters are generally too alike. In a play like ‘Design for Living’ it’s difficult to tell Otto and Leo apart, just as it’s challenging to tell the two women in ‘Fallen Angels’ apart. They’re basically the same characters given more or less the same qualities, but just set against each other over fairly superficial issues – in both plays squabbling over a shared love object (Gilda in ‘Design for Living’, Maurice in ‘Fallen Angels’).
What I’m driving at is that there’s conflict in Coward plays, alright, but it doesn’t arise from profound differences in character and point of view, as in the ancient Greeks, or Shakespeare, or Ibsen or Shaw. They’re just very similar types of people having an argument. Squabbling. Bickering. Often over absolute trivia. Their arguments don’t shed light on any great issue or illumine deep and interesting characters. They just yell at each other to shut up.
And it’s this which accounts for the regular criticism that Coward’s plays are ‘thin’. They are. The arguing and bickering may well work onstage, by raising the temperature and giving the impression that there’s dramatic action going on. But the superficiality of their bickers and arguments explains why, a few hours later, you can hardly remember what the play was even about. Like the proverbial Chinese dinner. Full of vivid, palate-pleasing flavours at the time. A few hours later you’re hungry again.
Caveat
I wrote that before I read the final scenes in which irritating Aunt Sylvia blossoms into a devout believer in Christian Science. This is an ideology or belief and it does give rise to something like actual debate between the characters as others, like Sam and then Vi, simply refuse to accept her outlandish beliefs (there is no such thing as evil, therefore there is no such thing as pain) and both end up raising their voices.
This is a debate about ideas, I suppose. But it’s not what the play is about. It’s a minor side issue, peripheral to the main narrative. And even here my rule applies, that the characters don’t really debate, none of them are educated or intelligent enough; instead they bicker in order to gain control of the field of discourse and shut each other down.
FRANK: Now listen ‘ere Sylvia, don’t you talk to me like that because I won’t ‘ave it, see.
So many times these bad-tempered quarrels end up in the same dead end as characters realise the pointlessness of even trying to have a discussion. What we could call the futility point which so many of these arguments arrive at.
REG: It’s no use talking, Dad, you don’t understand, and you never will.
QUEENIE: If you’re going to turn nasty about it there’s no use saying any more.
ETHEL: What’s the point of arguing with her, Frank? You know it never does any good.
FRANK: If you feel like that it’s not much good talking about it, is it?
VI: There’s no use arguing with her, Dad, she’s getting sillier and sillier every day.
It’s this sense of stasis, this inability to escape the limitations of the characters they’ve been assigned by their creator, which links Coward, despite all the superficial differences, with the plays of Jean-Paul Sartre, whose characters are similarly trapped in roles they can never escape.
So despite the little flurry of what appears to be actual debate about Christian Science (like the little flurry around Sam’s superficial communism in the first scene) it soon sinks under the usual attempts of everyone concerned to shut everyone else down. So I think the fundamental truth of my analysis remains valid.
Patriotism
Although he is a cynic about idealists and socialists like young Sam and the chances of peace – Frank’s final speech is an unalloyed rousing piece of patriotism. Coward was just going into the patriotic phase which would see his great war films, war work, and significantly change his public image. As Philip Hoare puts it in his excellent biography of Coward:
The Second World War came at a good time for Noel Coward. After the madcap Twenties and bleak Thirties, the war redefined Britishness and served as an antidote to the disillusion and decadence of the inter-war period. Its revival of the values of empire and Britain’s greatness was congenial to Coward: the quality of fortitude required (and mythologised) by the war neatly coincided with the fortitude displayed by Noel… the values he espoused dovetailed with the Dunkirk / Blitz / ‘Britain can take it’ spirit and he was able to exploit them fully. Cavalcade had announced his patriotism; the films, plays and concert tours of the early 1940s helped cement his image in the hearts and minds of the British public. (Noel Coward: A Biography by Philip Hoare, p.329)
Movie version
A 1944 film adaptation, with the same title, was directed by David Lean and starred Robert Newton and Celia Johnson. Interesting to see Johnson doing ‘common’ rather the refained middle class in ‘Brief Encounter’. It’s a fantastic performance. Newton looking fresh and young, nothing like the ramshackle twitcher of the Disney version of ‘Treasure Island’, just 6 years later. Apparently this was his breakthrough role, he was 39. And Stanley Holloway looking exactly as middle-aged as he does in ‘My Fair Lady’, 20 years later (1964). He was 54.
Or… is bickering actually a form of love?
Watching the film version made me reconsider a number of things about the play. The film is fuller and more varied than the play could ever be with, for example, more outdoor scenes and settings, and more historical touchpoints.
But the main thing the film made me reconsider was my hobby horse about arguing. Yes, in the film the characters do spend an inordinate amount of time arguing and bickering and telling each other to shut up and declaring there’s no use even talking to each other, in the classic Coward style, reflecting its ubiquity in the text, as I noted.
But in performance, in this wonderful film, you come to wonder whether the incessant arguing of pretty much everyone with everyone else, doesn’t at some deeper level indicate the enduring ties, and a deeper level of love and affection, between the members of this close-knit family of three generations plus in-laws, all living on top of each other.
Being trapped in each other’s presence in a small terraced house for their entire lives, means they not only know each other’s triggers and sore points and how to provoke and exasperate each other – but also, whenever anything really serious happens, they are there to support and sustain each other. Not very far beneath the bickering surface are the unbreakable ties of family.
At the end of watching the film, despite nearly two hours of bickering, squabbling and falling out, your abiding sense is of deep and enduring love, very beautifully and heart-warmingly portrayed.
Philip Hoare’s view
In his excellent biography of Coward, Philip Hoare says of the movie version that it is ‘an affecting tribute to a mythical England; a Cockney neo-romantic townscape, a snapshot of a city and a people that only existed in Noel Coward’s head’ (Noel Coward: A Biography, page 337).
Related links
- This Happy Breed Wikipedia article
- British Film Institute article about the London locations used in ‘This Happy Breed’
- Noel Coward works
Books & Boots 