When war was declared, the West End went dark. Fearing air raids, the government shut down public places of entertainment and overnight 90% of the British film and theatre industry were out of a job.1 Thankfully this only lasted for a few weeks, but the damage had been done and people were reluctant to go back to theatres during the opening months of the war. Large numbers of stagehands, make-up artists, actors, and musicians faced an uncertain future.
Image: Entertainment National Service Association poster. (source: IWM)
Whilst the theatres were closed, on Monday 11 September 1939, the NAAFI took tenancy of Theatre Royal, Drury Lane as the headquarters of ENSA – the Entertainment National Services Association. ENSA is a very much maligned and misunderstood organisation that aimed to raise morale of the troops and factory workers through entertainment. Its’ Director, Basil Dean, had been the Theatre Royal’s managing director in the 1920s, where he revitalised it commercially. He was a man of big ideas and wanted to make the Theatre Royal into Britain’s National Theatre. State subsidy of the Arts was something only fascist and communist states did and so was rejected by the government at the time.
Behind the Pillars of Drury Lane, there was a hive of activity during the war. Everyone thinks of the stars like Vera Lynn, George Formby, and Gracie Fields singing to audiences, but ENSA organised a wide range of entertainment beyond music hall acts. It ran cinemas, played records to audiences using mobile rediffusion vans, provided BBC radio shows, orchestras, operas, and even ballet. By the end of the war, ENSA played to a total audience of 500 million people across 2.5 million performances and employed 80% of Britain’s show-business industry. Theatre Royal, Drury Lane was the nerve centre of this international operation and hundreds of people worked in cramped conditions within this building. The stalls bar was converted into a broadcasting studio, from which numerous broadcasts were transmitted. Shows were produced and rehearsed here before going on tour, costumes and scenery made in workshops, projectors were fixed by electricians, the logistics of touring performers were coordinated across a network of hostels and billets that stretched from Scapa Flow to Rangoon. As the emphasis on overseas entertainment grew after 1943, ENSA’s operations spread to adjacent buildings in Drury Lane, as well as local production centres in Naples, Cairo, and Calcutta. Before going abroad, performers would come to Drury Lane to be given their jabs, travel documents, uniforms, and rail and boat tickets.
The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, did not escape the attentions of the Luftwaffe. It was frequently hit by incendiary bombs, but the theatre’s own ARP unit dealt with all these quickly. On 15 October 1940 at 11.55 p.m. a German bomber scored a direct hit on the theatre with a delayed-action bomb. It broke through the roof went through the gallery, through the Ghost Walk in the Upper Circle, through the Grand Circle and exploded at the rear of the pit. The bomb’s nosecap went through the pit floor into the stalls bar below where 7 staff members were sleeping. Luckily, the iron stage safety curtain withstood the blast and prevented more severe damage to the backstage area of the theatre. And the sleeping men miraculously escaped injury. Following the theatre-land motto ‘The Show Must Go On’, a photo of the aftermath of the bomb in Basil Dean’s collection proudly claims in the citation, ‘But the work of ENSA was not stopped for an hour.’
Image: Members of the staff who were sleeping in the stalls bar when the bomb fell [on Theatre Royal, Drury Lane] and who escaped injury although the nose cap weighing over one hundred weight fell right amongst them. (source: IWM HU90859).
The Sir John Falstaff, now the Nell of Old Drury Lane, was where ENSA’s workers and performers went for a pint of mild-and-bit at the end of a long day. It was mentioned several times by ENSA’s Chief Welfare Officer, Virginia Vernon – or Madam V as she was called, during her time in London.
1 Eric Taylor, Showbiz Goes to War (Hale, 1992), p. 17.