166. The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell

There is no pier at Wigan, of course: Wigan is inland. The original ‘pier’ was a small staithe for discharging coal into barges on the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, and was made famous long before Orwell’s time in a music hall joke by George Formby senior (the joke ran something like this: some miners are on their way to Southport for a day out, but their train is delayed when the tracks are flooded: they ask where they are and the signalman says ‘Wigan Pier’). Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier mentions the pier briefly only once, in the form of a regret that he couldn’t find it — unsurprising since it had been demolished around 1929, several years before he wrote the book.

The staithe today has been reconstructed as part of a ‘Wigan Pier experience’ project, including a museum and pub — named, inevitably, ‘The Orwell’.

Consulted:
Wigan Heritage Services: phone 01942 828020 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              01942 828020      end_of_the_skype_highlighting

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165. Peter Pan by JM Barrie

It is well known that Peter Pan was named after Peter Llewellyn-Davies, one of the five sons of Arthur and Sylvia Llewellyn-Davies, friends of Barrie’s and the models for Mr and Mrs Darling: ‘Pan’ came from the Greek god. What is perhaps less well known is that Peter Llewellyn-Davies was named after another fictional character, Peter Ibbetson, the eponymous hero of George Du Maurier’s popular novel of 1891 (Du Maurier was Peter’s grandfather). Peter, then, was sandwiched between two well-known fictional creations, a burden for later life to rival Christopher Robin Milne’s (the original of Winnie-the-Pooh's Christopher Robin) or Alice Liddell’s (of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland). He threw himself under a train in 1960: by then he had survived the Somme and the violent deaths of two of his brothers, and so had plenty of reasons for his fragile mental state — but the papers still insisted on reporting it as ‘Peter Pan's Death Leap’.

Consulted:
Birkin, Andrew: J. M. Barrie & the Lost Boys‎ (1979)

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164. The Browning Version by Terence Rattigan

The Browning Version – familiar to many from the film of 1951 starring Michael Redgrave, but originally a stage-play of 1948 - was inspired by the playwright, Terence Rattigan’s, experiences at Harrow from 1925 to 1930. The emotionally-entombed classics master Andrew Crocker-Harris (‘the Crock’) was based on one JW Coke Norris, a classics master, whose moribund manner was much at variance with the passionate nature of the texts he was supposed to be teaching. Coke Norris, like ‘the Crock’, was also in charge of the school timetables, and retired during Rattigan’s time at the school. The ‘Browning version’ of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon — mirrored in the relationship between Crocker-Harris and his wife Millie (a modern Clytemnestra) — was Rattigan’s own passionate reading-matter during this time; and the basis of the relationship between Taplow and ‘the Crock’ was Rattigan’s homosexual crush on another master at the school.

Consulted:
Wansell, Geoffrey: Terence Rattigan‎ (1995)

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Brief hiatus

To all Titleists, I'm off on holiday for a fortnight. Check back again around the 17th December - there are plenty more title stories to come.

Bye for now
Gary

163. Oh! Calcutta! by Kenneth Tynan and others

The title Oh! Calcutta! was inspired by a painting by the Surrealist Clovis Trouille (1889-1975) called Oh! Calcutta! Calcutta!; it depicts a reclining woman draped in rich fabrics and revealing a pair of plump buttocks decorated with tattooed fleur-de-lis. The choice came about in 1966. Ken Tynan’s wife Kathleen was writing an article on Trouille, and knew that Ken admired the derrière in question: when she suggested it as the title of his play he accepted with alacrity. What neither Katherine nor Ken knew, however — until later — was that the title Oh! Calcutta! Calcutta! was a pun. Calcutta stands in for ‘Quel cul t’as!’, or ‘What an arse you’ve got!’ Similar punning potentialities were of course exploited by Marcel Duchamp in his famous study of a moustachioed Mona Lisa, L.H.O.O.Q. (‘Elle a chaud au cul’, or, ‘She’s got a hot arse’).

Consulted
Tynan, Kathleen: The Life of Kenneth Tynan (1987)

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