Action list from John Osborne

Found in Christoper Herold’s Mistress to an Age. A Life of Madame de Stael (Hamish Hamilton, London 1959) a list scribbled on the front endpaper. The book came from the library of the playwright John Osborne (1929 - 1994). It has a posthumous book label reading 'From The Library  of the Hurst. The John Osborne Arvon Centre Shropshire.' The Hurst was his final residence - a large country house, now a cultural centre owned by the Arvon foundation. The writings are Osborne’s notes to himself about changes possibly needed (or not) in his life.

Handwritten  notes-to-self are not uncommon in second hand books, although they tend to be in self-improvement or psychological/ spiritual works. In a jot from 2013 we show a copy of  48 Laws of Power with notes by King of Pop Michael Jackson. The connection with Osborne and Madame de Stael is obscure. Osborne appears never to have referred to her in a play.. He has a few notes about her on the rear endpaper: ’How that girl plays at sensibility writing letters from room to room..’ He notes a quotation from Voltaire about Diderot: ‘No one has ever written more amusingly on famine.’

John Osborne observed in 1959

Reading Which of Us Two? The Story of a Love Affair (Viking, London 1990).It is the record of a 'youthful, illicit and intense' relationship between John Tasker (1933 – 1988) the theatre director and Colin Spencer (born 1933) artist and writer. Spencer uses a  collection of letters the lovers wrote to each other (his were returned after John Tasker's death) and considers the relationship and why he 'murdered its future'. Spencer makes acute and amusing comments on literary figures including John Osborne (whose library we bought last year). This entry was starred by Osborne in his copy:

 17.iii. 59. Yesterday I began drawing the great Mr Osborne, tall, thin, spectral: in black skin-tight trousers that showed a cute bottom and a huge lunch. And camp, my dear – not 'arf.  And the musical, my dear, cor that's a queer dish too, everybody changes their sex halfway through and deliciously lovely Adrienne Corri grows hair on her chest. Most peculiar: he was moving about so much, it's only the second week of rehearsals...though I did some lightning things with a brush, it just won't do so I'm going back after Easter and try some more. He has a curiously camp voice and he appears to stare at one with his teeth...

Colin Spencer says of this letter:

The John Osborne musical was of course The World of Paul Slickey, soon to become the only commercial failure of his early years. [We]admired Look Back in Anger, our generation felt that Osborne encapsulated the rage

An Appreciation of a Life

This typed memorial appreciation fell out of a small Book of Common Prayer. It is a model of its kind and worth preserving. The little prayer book was from the library of the playwright John Osborne (1929 - 1994) and probably belonged to the parents of his fourth wife Helen Dawson, who had connections in the Sunderland area. Osborne himself, on the evidence of the books, was a churchgoer in later life and  on at least one occasion read the lesson in his local church. This piece commemorates John Hall Robinson, a businessman and Methodist preacher who was probably born in the 1860s.


Rev. W. Foster Elves,
48, Otto Terrace,
Sunderland.

An appreciation of Mr. J. H. Robinson delivered in Ewesley Road Methodist Church on Wednesday, December 9th 1942.

It is my high privilege, though my sad duty to pay testimony to the life and influence of John Hall Robinson. I must not take up much time, not that his memory does not warrant it but because he himself would not have wished it. That was his way. He did his work with devotion and love and found his satisfaction, not in the praise of men though that was given, but in the memory of a task completed as best he could. 

It is not for me to speak of the uprightness and zeal that he brought to his business life. Men who met him in his office, men who had commercial dealings with him will witness to and remember those qualities. They have said that he was as straight as a dye, honest even to the smallest detail and, only yesterday a traveller said to me, "it was a pleasure to have dealings with him". I do not think any higher tribute could be paid to a man's character than that.