A new play suggests John Amery rebelled against his father's concealment of his Jewishness
The Oscar-winning writer Ronald Harwood is to re-examine a wartime story of treachery at the heart of the British establishment. Using fresh documentary evidence, his play will tell of the fate of the privileged Nazi sympathiser John Amery, the son of a Tory cabinet minister, who was hanged for treason in 1945.
Harwood, who won a Bafta last weekend for his Oscar-nominated screenplay The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, has tried to solve the puzzle at the centre of the Amery case - a mystery that had troubled the playwright for decades.
An English Tragedy, which opens tomorrow night, recounts the series of treasonable crimes that eventually brought Amery, the eccentric son of senior Tory politician Leo Amery and the brother of the late Tory MP Julian Amery, to the hangman's noose.
'I first read about this remarkable case in the 1960s,' said Harwood, 73. 'I grew up in South Africa and so came to Amery's story through Rebecca West's marvellous book The Meaning of Treason. I once asked her why she thought Amery had pleaded guilty at his trial. She said it was to spare his family embarrassment, but this didn't seem right to me. He'd embarrassed them all through the war. His father was a cabinet minister and he was broadcasting from Germany. I have wanted to try to explain it since then.'
Amery gave countless pro-German broadcasts during the war and openly promoted fascism throughout Europe. He was hanged in Wandsworth prison in December 1945 by Albert Pierrepoint, the chief executioner. Harwood, who is Jewish and won his first Oscar for the screenplay of Roman Polanski's epic account of the Holocaust, The Pianist, believes he found the key to Amery's behaviour when new government papers came to light. They revealed that the traitor's own politician father had denied his Jewish identity.
Leo Amery, who was known in Parliament as 'the pocket Hercules', was a member of Churchill's war cabinet and had hidden details of his background because he felt it would impede his political ascent. Contemporaries often joked that, had Leo Amery been a head taller or his speeches half an hour shorter, he would have become Prime Minister. In a period when anti-Semitism was widespread, the fact he was half Jewish would certainly not have helped.
Harwood believes this family deception provides the key to John Amery's disturbed and rebellious personality. The son, educated at Harrow, was a dashing, affectedly charismatic figure who carried around a teddy bear as a young man, but he was also in trouble with authority from an early age. 'Of all the boys whom I have known,' said Sir Cyril Norwood, Amery's former headmaster, 'John Amery was the most abnormal.'
Expelled from several expensive schools, Amery eventually settled in France, where he became a follower of the French fascist Jacques Doriot. During the war, Amery regularly broadcast propaganda from Berlin.
Partisans captured Amery in Italy, where he had been promoting Benito Mussolini on Radio Rome, and he was taken into custody.
At the Old Bailey, aged 33, he pleaded guilty to indictments 'alleging high treason and treachery' and was sentenced to death within just eight minutes of entering the dock. The Times reported that during the proceedings Amery appeared to have a half-smile on his face. On 28 November 1945, Justice Humphreys sentenced Amery, saying: 'You now stand a self-confessed traitor to your King and country and you have forfeited your right to live.'
On the day of the hanging, the condemned man met his execution with a cool wit. 'Mr Pierrepoint,' he said. 'I have always wanted to meet you, although not, of course, under these circumstances.' These lines will be spoken at the close of Harwood's play by actor Richard Goulding, who is fresh from an RSC tour in Trevor Nunn's production of The Seagull. 'I had not read a new play script before and it seemed incredible I was being offered this part,' Goulding said this weekend. 'In a way, it was a bit alarming that they had thought of me for the role of an unhinged fascist.'
Brigid Larmour, the artistic director of the Watford Palace Theatre, where the play opens tomorrow, said she would have put on the play whoever had written it. 'Amery was a fascinating, mercurial character. This is a very intelligent play but also very amusing.' It is hoped the play will transfer to the West End.
Vanessa Thorpe, arts and media correspondent
Sunday February 17, 2008
The Observer
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