Priestley values

The J.B. Priestley flame is kept alive today by his son Tom, who resides in the same Notting Hill flat he has lived in for more than 50 years. His father — novelist, dramatist, scribe, broadcaster, socialist (who died in 1984) — was glad that Tom, now 79, hadn’t chosen the same life. ‘The only time he came here to the flat he said, “Don’t be a writer. Dreadful business.”’

Tom is a retired film editor who manages the literary estate. He is the offspring of J.B.’s second marriage to Jane Bannerman, the divorced wife of the humorist writer Bevan Wyndham Lewis. There was one more Mrs Priestley after her — Jacquetta Hawkes, the distinguished but flinty archaeologist. Tom grew up in homes in the Isle of Wight and London — where his father kept two adjacent ‘sets’ in Albany — with his four sisters. He is reserved, totally dispassionate about his famous papa and certainly no chip off the bluff Yorkshire block known to the Evelyn Waugh set as the ‘Bradford tyke’.

‘We weren’t particularly close but there was never any bad feeling either.’ Was J.B. really the great ladies’ man of reputation? ‘It mattered to him that he had the wife and the family, but as and when he took advantage, I think.’ Notably with the equally highly sexed Peggy Ashcroft, who called him Mr Beastly during their brief fling.

Apart from the women, there was his amazing output. Priestley acknowledged at the end of his life that he had written far too much. But J.B.’s work for the theatre, Tom reckons, is doing rather well of late. His great comedy When We Are Married was recently in the West End for the umpteenth time. Now there is the return of Eden End, first staged in 1934 when Tom was two.