More than Just Mozart

Foreword by Professor Mark Haggard My father Stephen and I never saw each other, although a late letter from him records that my mother at the beginning of 1943 is pleased with me as a new arrival. He had thought he would prefer a girl, but also pronounced himself happy when I turned out to be a boy. One of the two boys he had packed off to the USA with my mother in 1940 (ie before I was born), died there of diphtheria, and she and the remaining elder brother re-crossed the Atlantic in a convoy that picked up survivors from a ship sunk by U-boats, she to play her modest part on the Home Front. I have accepted that Stephen’s 1940 ‘Farewell’ Testament (I’ll go to Bed at Noon) does, indirectly, apply to me too, and I have largely kept to his recommendations. Such details as lethal diphtheria and not foreknowing a child’s gender show what different times those were. Stephen died in early 1943 in Egypt, when the outcome of World War 2 was still very uncertain. Hitler had just been denied the nearby Suez Canal by Montgomery’s repulse of Rommel at El Alamein in November 1942, so it and Malta could contribute their great contributions towards saving the world from Fascism. But it was over 6 months before the definitive turning point at Stalingrad, and 18 before the Allies’ Normandy Landings – all momentous backdrops to losing a father. In my childhood there were many mementos and tributes from family friends, all praising Stephen’s acting skill, charisma, and insight, but knowingly hinting at his mercurial qualities. To an extent, my older brother Piers followed in our father’s footsteps, becoming a successful television drama director and the much appreciated founder and leader of the Directors’ Guild -- to encourage best practice and to safeguard the contracts and intellectual property of directors’ (stage, television, and film) . Although a good Scottish education led me to become a lover of good written and performed drama, I chose not to follow a course in the Arts myself. Accordingly I did not, while growing up, read closely, nor study systematically all the work Stephen had produced, nor much of what had been written about him. Learning the essentials of Stephen Haggard’s life has recently been made much more easy by the appearance of a second biography (Last Train from Jerusalem, by Ross Davies, Liverpool University Press, 2025). With the last illness and recent decease of my brother, it now falls to me, having latterly liaised with the author, to receive the originals and copies of the material which we had provided, also what Ross Davies had further tracked down. Of course this has required concerted recent (re-)reading of Stephen’s works, other family memoirs and now all the material (letters, documents, press reviews etc). Thus, a whole 80+ years later, I do now know a lot about Stephen’s life and work, enough to feel qualified in commenting on him or on further works about him. As I continue the indexing of the material for archiving, I can hope that a good Master’s thesis in the near future might probe further into aspects not fully covered in the biographies, and particularly that the Second World War poets collectively, including Stephen, would achieve greater recognition for some very good poetry, overshadowed by the lasting fame of the First War poets. There were complexities in Stephen beyond the evident charm and the skilled acting, and these have contributed to making the poetry well worth revisiting now, rather far from its time. Those complexities have emerged only slightly in the new biography, and even less in the first, The Timeless Quest by Christopher Hassall (1947). For this reason, I have been especially interested to read this new play by Faith Jacobs about him. It captures very well his tendency to philosophise and to feel it necessary to express his passionately political views at some length. Without pressing forward to a conclusion (an impossibility), Faith gives the interviewer foil character (Edith) a line which suggests that not everything may have been straightforward in my parents’ marriage; this then produces an elliptical style of response that would have been very typical of Stephen. The dialogue then leads on into a nuanced but revealing discussion of his mental state at an earlier time. That may in turn may have implications for his mental state in the 2 months before his death in 1943, when he was known to be exhausted from over-work in the Allied cause. It is no secret that the official verdict was suicide, but there was some degree of uncertainty around this, and spies and enemy agents and spies were known to be active within the British-held Middle East at the time. I have become accustomed to saying we will probably now never know the absolute truth on this question. The probing of the personality and the history in the play is done with considerable delicacy, much skill in making the dialogue serve the dramatic purposes of the play, and great authenticity, due to Ms Jacobs’ exhaustive researching into the works of Stephen as a main character and of the surrounding writings and events of the period. I hope that the play has many listeners and readers, and eventually also viewers. Though in dramatic form, it is also a piece of historical fiction that well complements the biography in adding to our understanding of the man in his times.