The first affiliation meeting between the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain and the Writers Guild of America – New York City 1962 From left to right: Leigh Vance (WGGB), James Webb (WGA), unidentified (WGA), Evelyn Burkey (WGA), John Lemont (WGGB), unidentified (WGA), Denis Norden (WGGB)
The coming of the Guild
Nick Yapp, who has written a history of the Writers' Guild of Great Britain, looks back at the union's pre-history.
Creationists may be delighted to hear that a fixed date can be given for the birth of the Guild – 13th May 1959. But joy may turn to consternation when they learn that the Guild also has a lengthy pre-history of evolution.
It all began in 1936, when a group of screenwriters met at London's Café Royal. The initiative came largely from A.P. Herbert and Frank Launder, and the pioneer group included Jim Williams, Sidney Gilliatt, Bill Lipscombe, Leslie Arliss, Roger Burford and J.B. Priestley.
They had come together to form the Screen Writers’ Association (SWA), and to fight the proposed Cinematograph Films Bill of 1937. The Bill was the work of Neville Chamberlain's National Government, an attempt to appease (in true Chamberlain style) those British film distributors and cinema proprietors who wished to lower the quota of home-produced films.
Though most of the founding figures of the SWA were members of the Society of Authors, they were regarded by the Society's Secretary, a London barrister named Denys Kilham Roberts, as a semi-autonomous group within the Society – a group with special needs in that they operated in a very different milieu from that of book-publishing.
It was an uneasy co-habitation that couldn't last.
The SWA battled on through the Second World War, the late 1940s and the early 1950s. By the mid 1950s, television had developed into a considerably larger market place for writers than the film industry, and in 1955 the SWA changed its name to the British Screen and Television Writers' Association (BSTWA).
On 14 September 1955, just eight days before ITV transmitted its first programmes, the BSTWA held an Emergency General Meeting, at which it was almost unanimously decided that the Association should become a trade union. The next logical step was to form some kind of alliance or merger with the Radio and Television Writers’ Association (RTWA), a poor relation of the Society of Authors.
Accounts differ dramatically as to what happened next. There were those who claim that the Society was only too glad to sell its radio and television writers for a small fee, as a job lot. And there were others, among them Patrick Campbell, who described the settlement as being achieved with “considerable goodwill and compromise by both parties.”
Zita Dundas was at the time in the unique position of being the only writer on the Executive Councils of both the BSTWA and the RTWA. She subsequently described the idea of so much as discussing the amalgamation as being “distasteful to the Society of Authors in that they considered the BSTWA a ‘rough lot’… for instance, John Lemont and Dudley Leslie (of the BSTWA) had been known to ‘thump the table at meetings.’”
Certainly, there was opposition from the Society, with delaying tactics and ‘machinations’ to negate the decision to merge taken by the writers themselves. It took two hours of Lemont's time, spent (“more in sorrow than in anger”) at a dinner table with Elizabeth Barber, another barrister who had succeeded Roberts as Secretary of the Society, before the Society's opposition was withdrawn.
The agreement was signed, and on 13th May 1959 the Television and Screen Writers' Guild (TSWA) was formed. On paper, the TSWA had over 800 members – 480 from the BSTWA, and 360 from the Radio and Television Writers' Guild. In reality, the true membership was way below that number, partly through the natural wastage of lapsed membership, and partly because some members of the old RTWA did not wish to leave the Society of Authors.
An Executive Council of eight members was formed – four from the old RTWA and four from the SWA. Ted Willis was elected the first Chair of the new body, with S.E. ‘Kim’ Honess as full-time General Secretary and Bryan Forbes as Treasurer.
The new Association continued to meet in the BSTWA's old haunt, the basement of an abortion clinic in Harley Street. There were plans, dreams, to buy a permanent home. The Ways and Means Sub-Committee appreciated such a plan “may seem too ambitious, or even utopian, yet it is by no means impossible to realise…”
Not impossible, no. But as the Guild prepares for yet another move, 50 years later, one can't help thinking how wonderful it would be if the dream, at last, came true.
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