Book description
Roger Matthews is the Vicar of picturesque village, Little Stanton. He
happily tends to his friendly flock and is almost ready to retire but
his spirit is restless . . . Roger is pulled towards the slums of
London, determined to help the poor and depraved, and arrives in
fog-drenched Woodbank. But the people are as unfriendly as the weather,
greeting him with slammed doors and suspicious eyes.
After months of being ignored, a chance drunken encounter and an
abandoned Boat House finally offer hope. Perhaps Roger can tempt the
boys out of the pub - allowing them to dream of a better future and
changing Woodbank forever. Then, in a bizarre twist of fate, he is
whisked to Hollywood and given the opportunity of a lifetime! Roger’s
faith faces its toughest test yet . . . On his return from the First
World War, R C Sherriff settled in London, working as an insurance agent
and writing plays in the evening. Journey’s End
, inspired by Sherriff’s own experience of fighting, was his sixth play
but the first to be given a professional production. It was an
immediate, outstanding and phenomenal success. Thirty one separate
productions ran concurrently around the world and it was translated into
twenty six languages. Its success, however, was both a boon and a burden
- while it allowed him to give up the day job and devote himself
full-time to writing, it often overshadowed his later work or was used
as the yardstick against which it was measured unfavourably.
Fortunately for Sherriff he was not only a playwright but also a
novelist and a screenwriter. He wrote a best-selling novel, A
Fortnight In September
in 1931, and the screenplays for The Invisible Man
(1933), The Four Feathers
(1939) and classic films such as Goodbye Mr Chips
(1939), for which he received an Oscar nomination, and The Dambusters
(1955).
Although Sherriff was occupied as a playwright and screenwriter he did
not lose his urge to write novels and he followed the success of his
first novel with The Hopkins Manuscript
, Chedworth
, Another Year
and others. Now, while Journey’s End
continues to define Sherriff’s reputation, much of his work remains
ripe for rediscovery.
