Right, well, my name is Peter Copley and I’m English. I’m now 86 and when the war broke out in 1939, I was 24. I came from a family mainly artistic, my parents were artists, my grandfather was a scientist. They were really all very talented and I’ve been struggling to catch up with them ever since. But I have enjoyed my life, I have not retired, I still work when anybody employs me.

So what happened, what happened during the war? Well, the war crept up on us really out of the… I suppose really, the miseries of the thirties. Unemployment, suffering, threats from countries that were becoming Nazi, Fascistic and so on. But if we go to shall we say 1938, that was the time which was quite important for us in England because it looked as if war was possibly starting and our Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain went to meet Hitler in Munich at a time when Hitler had invaded Czechoslovakia when England should have been there to support Czechoslovakia and we were bloody well excusing ourselves for not doing so. So the way he did it, and Hitler was quite clever, he made an agreement, Hitler says "Don’t worry I won’t go anywhere else, don’t worry, it’ll all be peaceful, it’ll all be quiet now, everything’ll be quiet". So Neville Chamberlain comes back with what he calls a little piece of paper, which was literally a little piece of paper waving like that and said "There is peace in our time" and everybody was very relieved. And they stopped digging, making shelters and so on. But it was a very, very false dawn. But it meant an awful lot to people at the time. I was playing in a play at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London, Goodbye Mr Chips, and the leading actor in it was an actor called Leslie Banks. And on the day of Chamberlain’s arrival and his announcement in Parliament that he had this agreement with Hitler, it seemed so important and everybody was so concerned. It was a matinee day and at the end of the matinee, Leslie Banks stepped forward and said "I’m sure we shall all wish to know that Mr Chamberlain has returned, he has an agreement with Hitler, and our fears are removed and we will all be happy". And there was a great sort of sentimental applause, which in hindsight and in fact at the time, to a lot of people, it was a sickening sentimentality. "Oh isn’t it wonderful, no trouble any more, Hitler can do what he bloody well likes, march over Europe anywhere he likes." Bastard.

Anyhow the play ran till the end of that year, and in January of ’39 I got a job at the Gate Theatre in Dublin in Ireland to play a season there and it was like a new world to me, it was a country….it seemed a foreign land, remote from England, they lived a life of their own. It was very peaceful, it was very lovely, but I felt almost a stranger, almost an alien. I had a car there with a GB on it and I thought "I suppose it’s alright, nobody’s going to bash it up are they". But it was a lovely life there, very pleasant, very easy, there seemed no anxiety about anything. After I’d been there about three months we had a break and I came home to England, beginning of April ‘38 (‘39), I was staggered to see that England was in a state of high tension. It was clear that this famous agreement with Hitler – Peace in Our Time - just was not working and everyone was just desperately anxious as to what was going to happen next. It was like there was a jangling all round in the air. Went back to Dublin, finished the season, came back to England and in, I suppose it was August, I went for a holiday in Europe. It was very nice, with a very lovely Irish girl who was in the company with me, and we went off for a little tour of France. But towards the end of it, we were suddenly aware that all the dangers of war were coming up again and we’d better get back to England and we were all warned, "English people get back to England as quickly as possible". And we had a terrible job getting the car onto a boat back to England…we got back to England.

We got to the point where it was clear that war was going to break out. And it was a very strange time because the day, it was September 3^rd 1939, a beautiful autumn day, and it was known that Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister was going to make an announcement in the House of Commons. The only means of communication to the whole country at that time obviously was radio. So every single person that could, got into a building, by a radio to hear this. The streets therefore were empty, they were empty and silent and everybody was waiting. And at eleven o’clock, there was the sound of the clocks, the church clocks chiming (we had a church next to us): eleven o’clock and an announcer saying, "The Right Honourable Neville Chamberlain, our Prime Minister" (They were very respectful in those days). And then you heard Neville Chamberlain say, "I have to tell you that from this moment, this country is at war with Germany." And there was a sort of silence. You hear that and how do you react? So much was spinning, there was a total silence in the room, nothing in the street….the whole of England was silent for a second. And then the sirens went off, an Air Raid Warning. And suddenly the thought changed "Is this Armageddon? Is this the total catastrophe? Had the German bombers been hanging about over the North Sea waiting for this moment of eleven o’clock when they can legally drop bombs? What’s going to happen? Are we all going to blow up?" Suddenly, all these thoughts happened, but in silence still, there was still total silence. And then because we lived near the top of Hampstead Heath there was a great road sloping up to the top. Suddenly we heard this sound of a policeman’s whistle, that’s what it sounded like, and out of the window we saw this one man in these empty streets from the top of the road, an Air Raid Warden, in his helmet and with his gas mask and everything, running down the road blowing his whistle to remind us that the Air Raid Warning had gone off. And there was something so, almost grotesque about that, that was the first almost, as it were, joke that broke the silence.

It explains how in the following six months of that winter of ‘39/’40, when the war was…it was the phoney war, hardly anything was happening, apparently very little fighting, then the great advance in the summer. The Germans advanced into France, the fall of France, catastrophe. The escape of the British army to Dunkirk, the grave fear in the summer of 40 that we were going to be invaded, suddenly everything was changed. Throughout the whole of that, there was still this memory of this slightly sort of joke about the whole thing. And if you look at the old copies of Punch, they have these endless little jokes about – don’t ask me now to think of anything - but the same sort of domestic humour was reflected in the Punch drawings and the Punch jokes, and we were about to be annihilated apparently. And I suppose it is said that this was one of the things that kept people going, you know. I don’t think it kept them going as well as the press liked to tell us, but anyhow it sort of kept us going.

It’s just worth mentioning perhaps that there was a very strong feeling, in this country certainly, that it might well be that some deal – before the war actually started, and then again during that period of the phoney war - that some deal would be struck up between the allies (particularly the English and perhaps the French) with the Germans that the war need not the fought in this way and that there would be a deflection towards Russia. You know the real….to most people in Western Europe, Russia represented something demonic and terrible. And to some extent that explains why the Russians, realising that this was a serious possibility, though it was not openly ever talked about in the press much, that they might have the whole lot turning on them. And so one understands the making of the Soviet–German pact, by which they decided not to attack each other. Which many people thought was a disgraceful thing for the Russians to do, but one understands that they were in a desperate sort of situation.

I remember one of my best friends in Hampstead where we lived was an actor called Walter Hudd, who was a very, very good actor, very good light comedian, very distinguished, very cultured, delightful. But he was also a keen member of the Communist Party, which had done a great deal to help Jewish people escape from Germany in the 30s to this country. And he was firmly convinced that the British government would never fight a war against Hitler, and that they’d do some deal and twist it to an attack on Russia. So much so that when we were all instructed at the beginning of the war and just before it, to put strips of paper across our windows, so stop the glass, so that when it shattered it wouldn’t fly and do such damage – you know various things like that. He came round to our house once and saw us doing this and said "You’re wasting your time, there’s going to be no war. It’s not going to happen." In a curious way one felt diminished, at the same time understanding at the same time that there was some element of truth in what he was saying. Later on, during the war Churchill used to make occasional big radio speeches to the country and they were pillars of… moments of feeling... getting the country to feel that "OK we were fighting, all was well, would be well" and so on. He gave a tremendous performance. My mother adored listening to these, she always used to feel better afterwards, it had absolutely the desired effect, though it wasn’t always absolutely the reason for them, but they did, they had a wonderful effect and she loved it. And I remember Walter Hudd coming round to visit us one evening. Churchill was doing one of his speeches and my mother was listening to it, and he said, "You’re wasting you time listening to that. Pointless. It’s rubbish. It’s lies. It’s nothing to do with what’s actually happening in the world". And it was one of the few occasions when I’ve seen my father, who was a very gentle man, quite angry, and he said to Walter Hudd, who we knew as Dicky, he said, "Dicky, we like to listen to Churchill, it is a comfort for us and it is part of what we are living through. If you are going to take that attitude, we are going to have to ask you not to come to the house". It was a terrible thing to say to a friend, but it was that serious.

So we get on now. I was an actor. I was called up. As a young man, I’d always wanted to join the Navy and then… I had flat feet so they wouldn’t take me when I was 13 at Dartmouth, said you can join when you’re 19, but in the intervening time I decided I wanted to be an actor. But I thought, "Well if I’m called up I’ll try and get into the Navy", but you had to be physically A1 for the Navy. I had been quite ill with various internal stomach things and had had operations and I wasn’t really all that well when I was called up. However I went for a medical, and the doctor looked at me and examined me and looked at me and he said "Well", he said "There’s nothing much the matter with you is there. One of your testicles is a bit small, hasn’t descended in a way, but that’s quite common, that won’t bother you. Can you walk four miles?" I said, "Yes, of course I can walk four miles" "Well", he said "that’s good then, that’s good OK". So I was passed A1 and went into the Navy. But I was really ill so I had a very boring few months at a training camp and then at Chatham Dockyard and then they got rid of me because people who were sick like that was just a nuisance.

So I went back to being an actor and I worked at the Oxford Playhouse in Oxford. At the beginning of the war, the theatres in London closed because they thought goodness knows what was going to happen, but gradually as things settled down they reopened but very hesitantly. And though they reopened it was a very strange situation because as the war went on, more and more troops used to come on weekend leave to London and would, you know, London was filled of people needing entertainment. The theatres never opened on Sunday. They never had, they never would. And they never actually did. And I think it’s one of the sad things. And there were certainly a lot of actors who regarded Sunday as sacrosanct. That was the day you spent with your family and your children and you went to church and you didn’t want to do anything like having to go and work. But anyhow, it created quite a stir.

But some of the really good people…there was a wonderful actor called Donald Wolfit, who was a great Shakespearean actor, a very eccentric character. He was full of enterprise always. It was he who first took classical theatre, English companies doing classical theatre, on tours of Europe in the thirties, and tours of South America. I went with him on a tour to South America. The standard of performance was not high. He had very little money and he played all the leading parts and his wife played all the female leading parts and it really wasn’t very good, but what enterprise! And he was the first person to open a theatre. He took over the Queen’s Theatre…no, the Strand Theatre. And he did lunchtime Shakespeare. He and his wife just did scenes from Shakespeare at lunchtime. People poured in. They served sandwiches, and that was the beginning of it. He was a fine and enterprising person.

It was quite strange though in the theatre because inevitably as the bombing…and there was bombing in other cities, and theatres were open at that time…And there were those times when…the quiet time in a play and there would suddenly be the sound nearby of a vast bomb explosion. And the wonderful thing really was both that the actors kept going with their quiet little scene and the audience very rarely were disturbed or wanted to get out. You know they just sat there. We did a play once at the Lyric Hammersmith which was very near a vast Underground interchange, most of which is on the surface so from the theatre you could always hear the trains going in and out of Hammersmith Station and they used to put a note in the programme saying, "You are asked not to confuse the sound of trains passing through Hammersmith with that of enemy action", which was quite sweet. They were strange times in the theatre. One company I was in, one of the actors when I joined appeared to be a middle-aged army officer wearing uniform. And he was – a middle-aged army officer wearing uniform. He was a very sweet man. He had had something wrong with him. He’d been in the army all his life, he’d served in the First World War and he clearly was not very bright, and I think the Army had taken the opportunity to give him extended leave, because he was really more nuisance than help. And he apparently wanted to be an actor so he got this job because there was a shortage of men, but he had to retain his status as an Army officer, a serving Army officer. So he used to play all the lawyers and doctors and uncles and things, and he always rehearsed in full uniform with a Sam Browne belt and everything. Curious little oddities.

The actual experience of bombing…I think the one that I always found worst was the doodlebugs, which came towards the end of the war. I and my wife lived in Soho, we lived in Soho Square, and they caused a lot of havoc. And part of the havoc was, not very surprisingly, rats everywhere. The rats just used to move around, and every morning you got up – we, in the end, had to have endless rattraps in the flat – and every morning, first thing, you went round the flat to see if there were any rats caught in traps, and there were every single morning. It was like killing wasps, you know, and all that was going on. But these V1s, the doodlebugs which came over – dadadadadadadada – and at the moment the engine cut out, that was the moment they dropped. If you felt it was overhead, you ran. And I know my wife and I went out from the flat in Soho Square into Frith Street to go to a restaurant to have lunch. And we got to the corner, the corner of the Square and Frith Street, where Twentieth Century Fox then had their London offices. And at that moment we heard dadadadadadada and it stopped. Most unheroically, I ran in one direction, and Pam my wife ran in the other direction. I did nothing to help her at all, I ran for my life and she ran for her life. The bomb dropped not very far away in Charlotte Street with devastating results: hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people were killed. It was really very near, but we were OK, and we were slightly mortified. And it was the one time…if you think of Soho as a very lively place, there was always some sort of pulse going on, dangerous maybe, at any time. And all that afternoon, it was sort of quiet because so many people had so many friends who had been killed, and it had been so near. It was very strange, very disturbing… hated it. Not nice at all.

Perhaps I should say that in 1944 - the autumn of 44 to August 45 - I was running at a theatre at Worthing on the south coast. And because it was a town on the south coast and a rather dreary town anyhow, and rather bleak, there were very very very very few people left there. And so we used to have quite a difficulty getting an audience to come to the theatre, enough people, rather sad elderly people. And it so happened that while we were there…I must explain this… as the Russians advanced…no, earlier in the war, the Germans advancing on Russia captured vast numbers of Russian troops, and a lot of them, towards the end of the war when the German Army was very debilitated and short of people, they roped a lot of these Russian prisoners of war in and made them function as a sort of Pioneer Corps, army slaves in German uniform and I think a lot of Russians hardly knew what was happening to them. They then subsequently, as the Germans got defeated by the English and the French and the Allies, got captured by the English and a lot of them came to England. So they were Russians who had been in the Russian Army, conscripted then into the German Army against their will or in confusion and ignorance, captured by the English…what status had they? The English, I think quite rightly, restored to them the right to wear a uniform with Russian insignia on them – they were allowed to wear their Russian badges of rank and so on. And so they were Allies, but they were carefully watched. Several hundred of them were billeted in a hotel, at Warne’s Hotel in Worthing, and they had nothing to do. They were allowed to go out. They weren’t allowed to go into pubs so a lot of the time they just sat on the beach. You used to see them marching through the town sometimes singing, just singing Russian songs. And that was wonderful. It was the liveliest thing that’s happened in Worthing. And I thought, crazily, that maybe it would be an attraction, if we could persuade them to come to the theatre and, after the show in the theatre, sing for us. So I went and chatted to them on the beach, or tried to find out someone who spoke any English, which was very difficult. Most of them were Mongolian. Anyway finally I found someone who said he would take me to one of their officers and I was taken into a big room in Warne’s Hotel, which was filled with Russian officers, and really, almost jokily, most of them seemed to have balalaikas, they were all playing balalaikas, I don’t know why. I explained that my scheme would be to invite a hundred Russians, every Monday night, to come to the show, and if they would, at the end of the show, to sing as we hear them singing in the street. "Yes," he said, "That’s a very good idea". I said, "I’ll give you a synopsis of the play, so that you can tell roughly what the story is". And so we’d do that, that was a very good idea. And then I thought, "My God, have I done the right thing? There must be some British officer in command." So I found there was, and I went to see the British officer who gave me a great ticking off, he said, "You had no right to approach a Soviet officer direct, you should have come to me. Nevertheless…it’s OK". So…by this time it was winter and it was really almost a caricature, this quiet little theatre, and this really quiet little town, bitter cold, snow pouring down. And people coming into the theatre getting to their seats, and suddenly the stamp of a hundred soldiers’ boots marching straight into the theatre, being led down to some seats there. It was an extraordinary sort of experience, literally, Russian soldiers with snow on their feet. And they sang after the show. Only trouble was they wouldn’t stop. They sang and sang and sang. And all the Worthing worthies were, "Oh we must get home…bus…catch the bus". So it was a great difficulty persuading them to stop, but it was a wonderful experience. I loved it. I reckon that, as we learned later what happened to Russians who were captured by the Germans and then captured by the Allies, and then had to be returned to Russia at the end of the war, I would say it’s almost certain that every single one of them was shot when they went home.

Right at the end of the war, a company was set up, an Old Vic company – the Old Vic you know famous for classical Shakespearean theatre – with great actors of the time, Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson, to present Shakespeare again in London. It was a big event. The opening season they did… Olivier played Richard III and Richardson play Peer Gynt and they did also one or two other plays. I joined them in the middle. I joined them first, because I used to be a fencer and I used to arrange fights for the theatre, and I arranged the Richard III fight with Richmond, which Olivier and Richardson fought. Olivier was a wonderful fighter; Richardson was a terrible fighter, dreadful. And in rehearsal – they were very, very old friends – Richardson used to say, "Laurence, old chap, there’s no need to go so fast. Don’t go so fast, please". And that was really his approach to it. Anyhow, towards the end of the season, I actually joined them, took over some parts in the company, it was arranged that we would go on an ENSA tour of Europe. We would go to Brussels, Holland, to Germany and then to Paris. As a sort of goodwill, inter-Ally thing. After it had been arranged, the war actually finished and we were due to leave really literally two or three weeks after the end of the war. So it seemed that one of the main objectives would be hundreds of thousands of soldiers who suddenly had nothing to do. So it was decided that we would go to Hamburg, a city where there were all these British troops with nothing to do, where there was half a theatre left. The rest of the city was a devastation of such horror…you learned what true devastation was. It was horrible and it smelt and it stank and people just lived among stones and rubble and ruin. But…and we stayed in some tiny little hotel. I remember we didn’t have beds, we had bunks, there were bunks everywhere, because I remember Olivier – it was coming up to the time of the General Election, the General Election when in fact Churchill was defeated and a Labour Government was elected. Big sensational thing. And I remember another actor and I trying to persuade – we were lying in our bunks, Olivier was lying in one bunk, and Sidney Taffler and I were there – and we were trying to persuade him to vote Labour. And he was very doubtful about all this, very uncertain. And we worked on him very hard and we had postal votes and things. Two or three days later, he came to see us and he said, he said "You boys, you’re wrong," he said, "I’ve been having a talk to the general, the British commander in Hamburg, and he’s put me right on all this. I shall vote Conservative." And we thought, "Oh well, if he’s been talking to the British Army commander of Hamburg…". The other extraordinary thing was, in this devastation, this horror, with the poverty, we weren’t allowed out except accompanied by an armed soldier. And the Afrika Corps, disarmed of course, were billeted in some building next door to where we were, and there they were in their black uniforms squatting on the pavement, every day just squatting, watching us walk by…Quite weird, quite weird. Because we obviously thought of them quite rightly as one of the most potent troops that Hitler had. But we were all invited by the Army to an entertainment, a lunch gathering, just a lunch. And we went into this room, and piled up high was a buffet service of such richness, I can’t tell you. There was lobster, there was salmon, there was everything under the sun. It was quite nauseating, I found it…a lot of us found it nauseating. How could you do this, simply because you’re conquerors, with people dying of starvation all around? This ostentation is not needed. It was horrible. But then you realised that war does terrible things, and most people had fought for six years in the war. Some of us were taken out in a car one day, in an Army car, to take us all round north of Hamburg - wonderful country round there, and the forests and the plains – and we were going, driving along the side of a forest. There was Sybil Thorndike, great actress of the time, I can’t remember who else, Sidney Taffler, me , and a couple of Army officers and a driver. And we passed an enormous hay wain, a wagon piled high with hay drawn by six horses. It was a wonderful sight. And the farmer was perched on top with a lot of other chaps up there. And there was Sybil Thorndike looking at this as we went by "Oh it’s so beautiful, that is the true life, the life of the earth, people working the earth, taking their food from the earth, living in simplicity and truth and beauty", and so on. She made a very lovely speech about it and it was very applicable. That evening she was …an Army security officer came to see her and said, " I am given to understand that you have spoken in favourable terms of the ex-enemy. And I must point out to you that this is criminal offence, and I must ask you never to do it again." And, you could follow the logic of it, but it was… you thought, "Now where is the hope, where is the hope for the future with this terrible, terrible war, in which multi-millions of people have died? Where do we hang on, you know?" Because his attitude was understandable, but awful, and Sybil’s was understandable but possibly a little over-the-top, but necessary. Anyhow, we then… they wanted to take us back to Brussels, which was the headquarters of ENSA, because we were a prestige company. And Olivier and Richardson quite rightly said, "That’s idiotic, idiotic. What do we go to Brussels for? There’s entertainment of every kind in Brussels. Here it’s needed. Every night the theatre is filled with soldiers, and they listen with great attention", so we stayed an extra week there before we had to go to Paris. In Paris we played at the Comedie Francaise, it was the first time that any English company had ever played at the Comedie Francaise. Individual actors had, like Charles Laughton had, but never a company. So we all had these dressing rooms, which were normally used by the Societaires of the theatre and the Societaires, because they spent their life there, their dressing rooms were fairly large and they furnished them like flats, they made them their own homes. Olivier had the dressing room of one of the leading ladies, which apparently was immensely frilly, and he said, "Oh my God," he said, "I shall just go on and camp my way about the stage if I come out of a dressing room like this." He could hardly bear it. Ralph Richardson had, very appropriately, a very dignified dressing room with a lot of lovely leather chairs in it, and beautiful old prints on the wall. And it’s only if you went very close, you saw that all the prints were 18^th century pornographic scenes. But you had to get very close to realise this. My dressing room was entirely decorated with signs of the zodiac, gold and silver and blue, on the ceiling and everywhere. It was weird. And tiger skin rugs and things. And I found, in one of the drawers, things he’d left. A list which he’d written out, a list a French people and he said, "qui sont des juifs et merites la mort". He actually said these are people which should be killed because they’re Jews. You thought, "Well, a fascist actor there, it’s understandable. We would have had plenty in England too." One of the problems of society.

The big success at the Comedie Francaise was Richard III. In Richard III at the end of the duel he is killed, and Olivier did an incredible death, a writhing ghastly sort of…and finally he was dead. On his death normally Richmond steps forward, puts his foot on the body and says, "God be praised, the bloody dog is dead" – that’s Ralph Richardson as Richmond. On the opening night in Paris, at the end of his death, the applause broke out, loud applause, they wanted him to do it again. And Richardson had come forward, started to put his foot on the body and started to say, "God be praised…" heard this rousing applause… "God be praised….oh fuck." And he was furious. Well, it stopped in the end and they finished the play. It was very exciting. There that’s it.