MI5 surveillance of Joan Littlewood during war led to two-year BBC ban

* Richard Norton-Taylor
* The Guardian,
* Tuesday March 4 2008

MI5 closely monitored the activities of Joan Littlewood, the theatre director who was later to produce Oh! What a Lovely War, among other hits, and her husband Jimmy Miller, better known as the folk singer Ewan MacColl, and urged the BBC to blacklist them, classified files released yesterday show.

MI5 placed the couple under surveillance early in 1939 when the then chief constable of Lancashire warned that "the left point of view is well represented in the personnel of the BBC both locally and nationally". Littlewood is described in the files as "highly intellectual and a keen communist" who took part in BBC radio's Children's Hour programme.



Littlewood's home in Hyde, Cheshire, where she lived with Miller, was regularly watched. "A number of young men who have the appearance of communist Jews are known to visit Oak Cottage. It is thought they come from Manchester," MI5 was warned in April 1939.

The BBC assured MI5 that all programme scripts were "very carefully censored". In 1940, Lancashire's chief constable told Maj Gen Sir Vernon Kell, the head of MI5, that Last Edition, a play performed in Manchester by Littlewood's company, Theatre Union, amounted to "thinly-veiled communist propaganda" portraying "the workers' struggles in Britain, Spain and the empire".

The following year, 1941, the BBC banned Littlewood from broadcasting. "Clearly I could not allow people like this to have the use of the microphone or be prominently identified with the BBC," the corporation's then regional director for the north, John Coatman, wrote. He added: "It must be remembered that Miss Littlewood and her husband were concerned chiefly with programmes in which they were brought into continuous and intimate contact with large numbers of working class people all over the North region."

The BBC lifted the ban two years later when MI5 said she had broken off her association with the Communist party. However, MI5 continued to keep her under surveillance even after her Theatre Workshop became the resident company at the Theatre Royal in Stratford, east London, in the early 1950s.

Among her pioneering work was the UK premiere of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children; Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey; and Oh! What a Lovely War, the musical satire inspired in part by The Donkeys, the stinging attack on British generals in the first world war written by Alan Clark, the military historian who later became a Conservative MP in the Thatcher government. Littlewood died in 2002.


* guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008