The Man Who Invented the Daleks Read online

  In the midst of the decline came the events of 1926, when miners throughout the country went on strike, resisting the mine-owners’ attempt to protect profits by cutting wages and increasing working hours. Under the slogan ‘not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day’, the conflict dragged on for several months, despite a general strike that was called in solidarity but collapsed after just nine days. It was – in terms of working days lost – the most severe industrial dispute Britain had ever witnessed, and it ended with complete victory for the employers. Memories of the bitterness of the time remained for years to come, exacerbated by the ensuing depression and by the desperation of the miners’ hunger march that left Cardiff in 1931, the year that annual coal production in Britain fell below a thousand million tons for the first time in the century. Decades later, when the novelist John Summers, who had known Terry Nation in Cardiff, wrote his classic Edge of Violence, a thinly fictionalised retelling of the 1966 Aberfan disaster, he placed that tragedy in the context of a long history of neglect and oppression, looking back to the 1930s when ‘foraging parties of starved miners started raiding the farms over the mountain to dig up hardening beets and swedes out of the ground and bring them home to their children small-faced with hunger’. Born in Rhymney in 1928, Summers remembered his childhood ‘as a time of soup made from a single slice of bacon and water and salt and an onion’.

  Terry Nation, with a self-employed furniture restorer and salesman as a father and with a house-proud mother (‘stiff and starchy’, as one friend described her), was at one stage removed from those events. The fact that his birth was announced in a paid notice in the South Wales Echo, as well as his time in a private school, suggests that this was a family with social aspirations pointing firmly away from the mining villages of the valleys. Similarly the area they lived in was relatively affluent. ‘Llandaff,’ remembered a resident of the working-class Grangetown district in the early 1940s, ‘was a different planet. I could not believe the size of the houses and gardens, but the area did seem dull compared with the clamour and bustle of Lower Grange.’ Nonetheless, it would have been difficult for an imaginative child to live in Cardiff through those times without being affected by the hardship and anger that was everywhere evident, and Nation was to talk in later life of ‘the far-left socialism of his youth’.

  It was an era that he memorably evoked in ‘The Assistant’, a 1963 episode of the television series Hancock, with a character named Owen Bowen (played by the Welsh actor Kenneth Griffith) recalling the deprivation of the time: ‘Unemployment. Men standing brooding on street corners. Sad-eyed women, too proud to beg, laying empty tables.’ Despite being ostensibly a comedy, the show also featured a long monologue from Owen recalling the miners’ defiance, with not a joke in sight: ‘We were striking for a living wage, and they tried to force us into submission through starvation. But we wouldn’t bend. So what did they do? They sent in the army. Armed troops against women and children! So what did we do? We formed a solid line, Welshman arm-in-arm with Welshman, a thin line of courage against the might of the English army …’

  Nothing else in Nation’s work came close to this explicit account of the society he was born into, but traces of his hatred of injustice and social oppression run through much of his best writing and surely have their roots here. It’s also noticeable that more than once in his comedy-writing days he uses a joke about a character being able to trace their ancestry all the way back to their parents. Mixing in the Oxbridge circles that dominated the BBC in the 1950s and 1960s, he was conscious that he was not from that world.

  Meanwhile, popular culture in Cardiff was split between two competing factions. On the one hand, there was the entertainment found in the pubs, clubs and picture-houses through the working week; on the other, religion in church and chapel on Sundays. There were, for example, already fourteen cinemas in the town at the time of his birth, most having made the transition from silent movies to talkies (though some silents were still being shown), but just as significant was the space allocated every week by the South Wales Echo for semi-display adverts touting the forthcoming attractions on the Sabbath. It was normal for forty or fifty religious services to be thus promoted, advertising a range of sects that centred on the mainstream world of low church Protestantism – Baptists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Wesleyans – while allowing a little room on the fringes for groups such as the Christian Scientists, Spiritualists and Salvation Army.

  The divide between the two cultures was such that, on a Sunday, pubs were legally prevented from opening and cinemas were not permitted to show films, regulations that didn’t apply twenty-five miles to the east, over the Severn Estuary and into England. It was not until 1952 that it became permissible to screen a movie on the Sabbath, and only in 1961 were local authorities allowed to poll their electorates on whether the bar on pub opening should continue (not all took advantage of the opportunity). But there were, of course, ways around the rules. Private members’ clubs – where alcohol could be sold – enjoyed a thriving trade on Sundays, while the cinemas responded to the ban by putting on shows featuring dance bands and comedians, though there were restrictions even on those performances. There were all sorts of strange rules and regulations,’ remembered Stan Stennett, the city’s leading post-war comedian, who lived a couple of streets away from the Nations. ‘You could do a show on a Sunday but you weren’t allowed to be a double-act or talk to anyone onstage. There was no cross-patter on a Sunday, because of the licence.’

  Of these rival claims for his affections, there was little doubt that for Nation the cinema won hands down over church. There was a religious influence on his upbringing – apart from formal church-going, he spent a great deal of time at the house of his father’s friend, Bob White, the Anglican verger of Llandaff Cathedral – and the influence of the work ethic fostered by religion was evident throughout his life. ‘I’m a prolific writer because I’m always uneasy,’ he was to reflect. ‘Maybe it’s my Welsh guilt that I can’t really sit around and not do anything. I feel very guilty if I’m in a room and not actually working at the table.’

  But the cinema loomed far larger. He became addicted to the magic of the picture-houses, the dark crowded theatres, thick with clouds of cigarette and pipe smoke through which the imagery of Hollywood could be seen flickering on a screen, briefly transporting a huddled, rain-sodden mass to a far-off land of glamour and wealth. Nation found his escape from everyday reality in that dream of America, as did so much of the country in the years of depression, those slightly older than him fuelling their fantasies with mass-produced clothes bought on hire purchase. ‘You may have three halfpence in your pocket and not a prospect in the world,’ wrote George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), ‘but in your new clothes you can stand on the street corner, indulging in a private daydream of yourself as Clark Gable or Greta Garbo, which compensates you for a great deal.’

  Nation may have been too young to express his dreams quite so overtly, but he would have understood the sentiment and for him, fantasy was always liable to take precedence over the mundane reality of education. ‘He played truant for one whole term,’ recounted his wife, Kate. ‘He got found out because he’d been given these cheques for his school fees and finally the headmaster rang his mother and asked where the money was. And it was still in his pocket. He’d been to the movies every afternoon.’ As he remembered, ‘I grew up in the front row of the local Odeon.’

  The nature of the films that Nation encountered, however, was not quite as wide-ranging as he perhaps would have wished. Desperately few science fiction movies were available in the late 1930s and 1940s, with the exception of single-reel serials like Flash Gordon, nor was the cinema able to satisfy his childhood taste for horror stories. (‘I read a lot of horror fiction,’ he was to reflect; ‘gave myself the scares in the dark’.) There had been a spate of impressive and successful horror movies coming over from America but, in an early panic about the influence of cinema, their popularity ha
d prompted British film censors to introduce in 1937 a new ‘H’ certificate, restricting the viewing of such material to those aged sixteen or over. A few years later, a decision was made in official circles that fictional horror was not conducive to civilian morale during wartime, and between 1942 and 1945 ‘H’ certificate films were banned altogether; just at the age when an adolescent, particularly one as tall as Nation, should have been trying to sneak in to see a movie for adults, the opportunity was snatched away.

  The only home-grown rival to the dominance of the cinema was BBC radio, the first truly national cultural phenomenon that the country had known. The British Broadcasting Company had begun transmissions in 1922, at which stage there were just 35,000 licences in the country, permitting the bearers to receive the early broadcasts. By the time of Nation’s birth, that figure had risen to three million and it was to treble in the following decade, while the BBC had been transformed into the British Broadcasting Corporation, established under a royal charter as the monopoly provider of services: the first nationalised industry. It was not, though, without rivals, particularly at the weekend, when the entertainment on offer left a great deal to be desired. For John Reith, the first director general of the corporation, shared with the Welsh establishment a determination that Sundays should be ‘quiet islands on the tossing sea of life’, and that the programmes broadcast on that day should therefore ensure that ‘the lamps are lit before the Lord and the message and music of eternity move through the infinities of the ether’.

  As the social clubs and cinemas of Wales had demonstrated, however, a resourceful people could always find an alternative to the sober fare that resulted from such attitudes, and a number of foreign-based stations soon emerged, aiming their transmitters at Britain and broadcasting in English in the expectation of picking up advertising revenue (the BBC was, of course, a non-profit making enterprise that didn’t air commercials). Among these foreign rivals were Radio Lyons, Radio Normandy, Radio Toulouse and, most famously, Radio Luxembourg, which started in 1933 and was within a few months broadcasting from noon to midnight. With the most powerful transmitter in Europe and the most expensive advertising space in the world, Luxembourg was seen as a threat by both the BBC and Fleet Street and was met with a complete news blackout in Britain: its schedules weren’t included in the radio listings, and its existence was simply ignored. Nonetheless it soon attracted some five million listeners, proving particularly popular on the Sabbath; the BBC lost half its Sunday audience, and a survey showed that sixty per cent of listeners had acquired the habit of tuning into the continental stations.

  The departure of Reith in 1938 allowed some relaxation of his rigorous standards – ‘I do not pretend to give the public what it wants,’ he had once proclaimed – but it was not until the outbreak of war in September 1939 that there was a genuine move to respond to the wishes and demands of the new mass audience. A second national channel was launched, aimed at those in uniform and known as the Forces Programme, with the existing channel being renamed the Home Service. Considerably lighter in tone than the BBC had previously allowed itself to be (the first show, on Sunday 7 January 1940, was a half-hour broadcast by Gracie Fields), the Forces Programme heralded a new era, with the radio becoming ever more influential.

  The structure of the audience also changed. In the early days, listening to the radio had been primarily a communal, friends-and-family affair, so that the broadcast of George V’s speech opening the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924 had been heard by six million people, many times more than the number of receivers in the country; it was the first time in British history that a substantial section of the population had been able to hear their monarch’s voice and, apart from anything else, there was considerable interest in what he actually sounded like. But conditions were different now: most households boasted their own radio set, millions of men were away from home in the forces, and the continental competition had been snuffed out. (Luxembourg ceased broadcasting immediately after war was declared, making a return only when its facilities were taken over by the Germans and used to broadcast the propaganda of William Lord ‘Haw Haw’ Joyce.) In this world, the BBC acquired a new role, linking atomised households and individuals, making them feel part of a whole, and bringing them together under a common national banner; even the new king, George VI, and his family were reported to be fans of the country’s biggest comedy shows, Band Waggon and ITMA. This was still a shared experience – particularly in those factories where radio was ever-present – but domestically its nature was evolving. The old image of a family congregated around a wireless set had, to some extent, been replaced by the solitary listener at home, conscious of the fact that he or she was a member of an audience comprising anonymous millions of others.

  This was especially true of Nation and his contemporaries, the first generation to grow up with radio as a soundtrack to their lives. And of particular significance for this generation were two drama series, Saturday Night Theatre and Appointment with Fear (the latter memorably hosted by Valentine Dyall, the Man in Black), that started in 1943 and brought tales of mystery, detection and suspense to a cult audience. Together with occasional shows like The Saint (1940), adapted from the stories by Leslie Charteris, these were the first examples of broadcast drama to make a major impact. ‘They were very influential,’ reflected Brian Clemens. 'I used to listen to them in the Blitz, because I lived in Croydon, which was heavily bombed, and I spent most of my sleeping time in an Anderson shelter or a Morrison shelter.’

  Nation too lived in the shadow of the Blitz, with the first big air raid on Cardiff coming in January 1941, at the cost of more than 150 lives. ‘For over five hours German planes, sweeping over the city, dropped thousands of incendiaries and numerous high explosive bombs,’ reported the local paper, while the account in The Times said the intensity of the firebombing was such ‘that it was possible to read a newspaper in the street’. Although the Luftwaffe saw the docks as its primary target, areas further inland were also hit: Llandaff Cathedral, a few hundred yards from the Nations’ home, was damaged so badly it was obliged to close its doors for fifteen months. The imagery of the Second World War and of the Nazis was to recur through much of Nation’s adult work, to such an extent that it was sometimes mocked by critics (‘a common Nation trait’, notes one guide to The Avengers), though it would perhaps have been more surprising if it hadn’t been present. ‘I was a wartime child,’ he reflected. ‘My dad went off to the army and my mother was an ARP, an air-raid warden. I was an only child and I used to spend nights alone in an air-raid shelter. And I would make up stories for myself – I was entertaining me in those days. There was no television, of course, but I used to listen to the radio, and I also read a great deal.’

  It was that reading, intensified by the experience of the bombing, that did most to shape Nation’s future writing. The range was diverse: there was some science fiction, primarily H.G. Wells and Jules Verne; there were detective stories, still dominated by Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales of Sherlock Holmes, though augmented in the early 1940s by the sensational arrival of Raymond Chandler; there was horror literature, particularly the great myths of the late Victorians, Dracula and Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde, as well as the Edwardian ghost stories of M.R. James and W.W. Jacobs; and above all there was a rich vein of adventure stories that reached back to the likes of H. Rider Haggard and G.A. Henty and continued forward to John Buchan and C.S. Forester, as well as a host of their imitators.

  This latter was a deep and exciting tradition for a boy in the 1930s and 1940s, celebrating quests to distant, exotic lands, and telling tales of tunnels and treasure maps, jungles and journeys, war and discovery. It had no interest in the bureaucratic administrators of later colonial fiction, looking rather to the glory days of frontier imperialism, when the world still lay spread out for the taking, if one only had the good fortune to be born British, with a streak of derring-do and a taste for pushing oneself to one’s limits. Set in a world populated al
most exclusively by men, though often with a boy at the centre of the narrative, these novels made it clear that true romance lay in loyalty and honour, rather than in love and women. The spirit of the knight errant was reborn on the African veldt, in the jungles and remote mountains of Asia, and on the high seas.

  This was the heritage, the mythology that still loomed large, even though by the time of Nation’s own childhood it seemed as though there was precious little left of such pioneering aspirations, particularly in the aftermath of the war that was supposed to end all wars, and that certainly – for a while at least – had ended the fictional romance of war. It was a long way from the heroic death of General Gordon, standing proud in the face of the Mahdi masses in faraway Khartoum, to the anonymous slaughter at Passchendaele, and as society struggled to adjust to that change, it seemed far less amenable to the old breed of hero. John Buchan’s novel, The Island off Sheep (1936), the last to feature his secret agent Richard Hannay, begins with our hero on a suburban train in southern England, reminiscing about the great days at the turn of the century when ‘the afterglow of Cecil Rhodes’s spell still lay on Africa, and men could dream dreams’. As he looks round the compartment at the ‘flabby eupeptic faces’ of commuters returning home from the City, he reflects melancholically on the realities of modern Britain: ‘Brains and high ambition had perished, and the world was for the comfortable folk like the man opposite me.’