World War I
World War I known as the First World War or the Great War, was a global war originating in Europe that lasted from 28 July 1914 to 11 November 1918. Contemporaneously described as "the war to end all wars", it led to the mobilisation of more than 70 million military personnel, including 60 million Europeans, making it one of the largest wars in history, it is one of the deadliest conflicts in history, with an estimated nine million combatants and seven million civilian deaths as a direct result of the war, while resulting genocides and the 1918 influenza pandemic caused another 50 to 100 million deaths worldwide. On 28 June 1914, Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb Yugoslav nationalist, assassinated the Austro-Hungarian heir Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, leading to the July Crisis. In response, on 23 July Austria-Hungary issued an ultimatum to Serbia. Serbia's reply failed to satisfy the Austrians, the two moved to a war footing. A network of interlocking alliances enlarged the crisis from a bilateral issue in the Balkans to one involving most of Europe.
By July 1914, the great powers of Europe were divided into two coalitions: the Triple Entente—consisting of France and Britain—and the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy. Russia felt it necessary to back Serbia and, after Austria-Hungary shelled the Serbian capital of Belgrade on the 28th, partial mobilisation was approved. General Russian mobilisation was announced on the evening of 30 July; when Russia failed to comply, Germany declared war on 1 August in support of Austria-Hungary, with Austria-Hungary following suit on 6th. German strategy for a war on two fronts against France and Russia was to concentrate the bulk of its army in the West to defeat France within four weeks shift forces to the East before Russia could mobilise. On 2 August, Germany demanded free passage through Belgium, an essential element in achieving a quick victory over France; when this was refused, German forces invaded Belgium on 3 August and declared war on France the same day. On 12 August and France declared war on Austria-Hungary.
In November 1914, the Ottoman Empire entered the war on the side of the Alliance, opening fronts in the Caucasus and the Sinai Peninsula. The war was fought in and drew upon each power's colonial empire as well, spreading the conflict to Africa and across the globe; the Entente and its allies would become known as the Allied Powers, while the grouping of Austria-Hungary and their allies would become known as the Central Powers. The German advance into France was halted at the Battle of the Marne and by the end of 1914, the Western Front settled into a battle of attrition, marked by a long series of trench lines that changed little until 1917. In 1915, Italy opened a front in the Alps. Bulgaria joined the Central Powers in 1915 and Greece joined the Allies in 1917, expanding the war in the Balkans; the United States remained neutral, although by doing nothing to prevent the Allies from procuring American supplies whilst the Allied blockade prevented the Germans from doing the same the U. S. became an important supplier of war material to the Allies.
After the sinking of American merchant ships by German submarines, the revelation that the Germans were trying to incite Mexico to make war on the United States, the U. S. declared war on Germany on 6 April 1917. Trained American forces would not begin arriving at the front in large numbers until mid-1918, but the American Expeditionary Force would reach some two million troops. Though Serbia was defeated in 1915, Romania joined the Allied Powers in 1916 only to be defeated in 1917, none of the great powers were knocked out of the war until 1918; the 1917 February Revolution in Russia replaced the Tsarist autocracy with the Provisional Government, but continuing discontent at the cost of the war led to the October Revolution, the creation of the Soviet Socialist Republic, the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk by the new government in March 1918, ending Russia's involvement in the war. This allowed the transfer of large numbers of German troops from the East to the Western Front, resulting in the German March 1918 Offensive.
This offensive was successful, but the Allies rallied and drove the Germans back in their Hundred Days Offensive. Bulgaria was the first Central Power to sign an armistice—the Armistice of Salonica on 29 September 1918. On 30 October, the Ottoman Empire capitulated. On 4 November, the Austro-Hungarian empire agreed to the Armistice of Villa Giusti after being decisively defeated by Italy in the Battle of Vittorio Veneto. With its allies defeated, revolution at home, the military no longer willing to fight, Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated on 9 November and Germany signed an armistice on 11 November 1918. World War I was a significant turning point in the political, cultural and social climate of the world; the war and its immediate aftermath sparked numerous uprisings. The Big Four (Britain, the United States, It
Tenant farmer
A tenant farmer is one who resides on land owned by a landlord. Tenant farming is an agricultural production system in which landowners contribute their land and a measure of operating capital and management, while tenant farmers contribute their labor along with at times varying amounts of capital and management. Depending on the contract, tenants can make payments to the owner either of a fixed portion of the product, in cash or in a combination; the rights the tenant has over the land, the form, measure of the payment varies across systems. In some systems, the tenant could be evicted at whim. In most developed countries today, at least some restrictions are placed on the rights of landlords to evict tenants under normal circumstances. Rural society utilised a three tier structure of landowners, tenant farmers, farmworkers. Tenant farmers were known as peasants. Under Anglo-Norman law all tenants were bonded to the land, were therefore villeins, but after the labour shortage occasioned by the Black Death in the mid 14th century, the number of free tenants increased.
Many tenant farmers became affluent and well connected, employed a substantial number of labourers and managed more than one farm. Tenancy rotated by the owners. Cottiers held much less land; the 17th century to the early 19th century witnessed the growth of large estates, the opportunity for a farmer to hold land other than by tenancy was reduced, with the result that by the 19th century about 90% of agricultural land area and holdings were tenanted, although these figures declined markedly after World War II, to around 60% in 1950, only 35% of agricultural land area in 1994. High rates of inheritance taxes in the postwar period led to the breakup or reduction of many large estates, allowing many tenants to buy their holdings at favourable prices; the landmark 1948 Act was enacted at a time when war-time food rationing was still in force and sought to encourage long-term investment by tenants by granting them lifetime security of tenure. Under the Agriculture Act 1976 security was extended to spouses and relatives of tenants for two successions, providing that they had been earning the majority of their income from the holding for five years.
Succession rights were however withdrawn for new tenancies in 1984 and this was consolidated in the Agricultural Holdings Act 1986. These two statutes laid down rules for the determination of rents by the arbitration process; the 1986 statute covered tenancies over agricultural land where the land was used for a trade or business and the definition of "agriculture" in section 96 was wide enough to include various uses that in themselves were not agricultural but were deemed so if ancillary to agriculture. The essence of the code was to establish complex constraints on the landlord's ability to give the notice to quit, whilst converting fixed term tenancies into yearly tenancies at the conclusion of the fixed term. In addition, there was a uniform rent ascertainment scheme contained in section 12, it became difficult to obtain new tenancies as a result of landlords' reluctance to have a tenant protected by the 1986 Act and in 1995 the government of the day, with the support of industry organizations, enacted a new market-oriented code in the form of the Agricultural Tenancies Act 1995.
The protection of the 1986 Act remains in respect of tenancies created prior to the existence of the 1995 Act, for those tenancies falling within section 4 of the 1995 Act. For all other tenancies granted on or after 1 September 1995 their regulation is within the 1995 Act framework; that Act was altered with effect from 18 October 2006 by the Regulatory Reform Order 2006 SI 2006/2805, which contains changes to the 1986 Act. Tenancies granted after 18 October 2006 over agricultural land used for a trade or business will fall within the limited protection of the 1995 Act so as to enjoy a mandatory minimum twelve months written notice to quit, including in respect of fixed terms. There is for all tenancies within the scope of the Act a mandatory tenants' right to remove fixtures and buildings together with compensation for improvements; the rent review provisions in Part II may be the subject of choice to a much greater extent than previously. Disputes under the Act are by the terms of Part IV, the subject of statutory arbitration controlled by the framework of the Arbitration Act 1996.
The current regime under the 1995 Act for regulating tenancies known as Farm Business Tenancies, permits the creation of a and terminable interest, whether by a periodic tenancy or a fixed term. In the cycle of animal husbandry and land use and improvement, the long-term effect of the Farm Business Tenancy on the landscape of Britain is not yet proven, it was predicted by landowners and other industry spokesmen that the 1995 Act would create opportunities for new tenants by allowing large areas of new lettings but this has not happened in practice as most landowners have continued to favour share farming or management agreements over formal tenancies and the majority of new lettings under the Act have been to existing farmers owner-occupiers taking on extra land at higher rents than could be afforded by a traditional tenant. Tenant farming immigrants came to Canada not just from the British Isles but the Uni
Val Biro
Balint Stephen Biro was a children's author and illustrator. He received his education in London, his studio was located in Amersham in Buckinghamshire. From an interview in the early 1970s: "My writing is concerned with my vintage car "Gumdrop." It was four years ago that my publishers suggested that it was about time that I wrote a book for children and not illustrate one. "I write so as to give my alter-ego a good chance for drawing pictures, though I find that the story I invent tends to run away with itself, leaving me, the illustrator, behind! Each story tends to be based on personal experience and each tends to grow out of that into the imagination; each book seems to take a few months to gestate, I write it in one long day." In the 1950s and 1960s Biro illustrated many book covers for famous authors such as Nigel Tranter and Nevil Shute. For C. S. Forester, publishing with Michael Joseph, Biro made cover illustrations of several first editions: Mr. Midshipman Hornblower, Lieutenant Hornblower and the Atropos, Hornblower in the West Indies and Randall and the River of Time.
In 1965 for Hamish Hamilton he illustrated the first edition of Angler's Moon by Leo Walmsley. He illustrated covers for Radio Times. Gumdrop is the name of an Austin Clifton Heavy Twelve-Four of 1926, the title character of a series of books authored by Val Biro, who owned an example; the stories revolve around the car and his owner the younger Bill McArran, but for most of the series, the more senior Mr Oldcastle. The plots involve the search for replacement parts for Gumdrop. Biro wrote the stories from the late 1960s to the 1980s; the main series of books, all illustrated in colour by Biro, ran to at least seventeen titles, with a further twelve "Gumdrop Little Books" published in the 1980s. Whilst Gumdrop's adventures are fictional, the car is not. Biro and Gumdrop were frequent visitors to car shows and other events in Sussex and surrounding area. Biro was seen driving Gumdrop in the television documentary 100 Year Old Drivers, broadcast on ITV on 13 August 2014, shortly after Biro's death.
Yellow Boots Commire, Anne, 1971: Something About the Author, Volume 1. Gale Research Gumdrop's official website Val Biro at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
Penguin Books
Penguin Books is a British publishing house. It was co-founded in 1935 by Sir Allen Lane, his brothers Richard and John, as a line of the publishers The Bodley Head, only becoming a separate company the following year. Penguin revolutionised publishing in the 1930s through its inexpensive paperbacks, sold through Woolworths and other high street stores for sixpence, bringing high-quality paperback fiction and non-fiction to the mass market. Penguin's success demonstrated. Penguin had a significant impact on public debate in Britain, through its books on British culture, the arts, science. Penguin Books is now an imprint of the worldwide Penguin Random House, an emerging conglomerate, formed in 2013 by the merger with American publisher Random House. Penguin Group was wholly owned by British Pearson PLC, the global media company which owned the Financial Times, but in the new umbrella company it retains only a minority holding of 25% of the stock against Random House owner, German media company Bertelsmann, which controls the majority stake.
It is one of the largest English-language publishers known as the "Big Six", now the "Big Five", along with Holtzbrinck/Macmillan, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster. The first Penguin paperbacks were published in 1935, but at first only as an imprint of The Bodley Head with the books distributed from the crypt of Holy Trinity Church Marylebone. Only paperback editions were published until the "King Penguin" series debuted in 1939, latterly the Pelican History of Art was undertaken: these were unsuitable as paperbacks because of the length and copious illustrations on art paper so cloth bindings were chosen instead. Penguin Books has its registered office in the City of Westminster, England. Anecdotally, Lane recounted how it was his experience with the poor quality of reading material on offer at Exeter train station that inspired him to create cheap, well designed quality books for the mass market; however the question of how publishers could reach a larger public had been the subject of a conference at Rippon Hall, Oxford in 1934 which Lane had attended.
Though the publication of literature in paperback was associated with poor quality lurid fiction, the Penguin brand owed something to the short-lived Albatross imprint of British and American reprints that traded in 1932. Inexpensive paperbacks did not appear viable to Bodley Head, since the deliberately low price of 6d. Made profitability seem unlikely; this helped Allen Lane purchase publication rights for some works more cheaply than he otherwise might have done since other publishers were convinced of the short term prospects of the business. In the face of resistance from the traditional book trade it was the purchase of 63,000 books by Woolworths Group that paid for the project outright, confirmed its worth and allowed Lane to establish Penguin as a separate business in 1936. By March 1936, ten months after the company's launch on 30 July 1935, one million Penguin books had been printed; this early flush of success brought expansion and the appointment of Eunice Frost, first as a secretary as editor and as a director, to have a pivotal influence in shaping the company.
It was Frost who in 1945 was entrusted with the reconstruction of Penguin Inc after the departure of its first managing director Ian Ballantine. Penguin Inc had been incorporated in 1939 in order to satisfy US copyright law, had enjoyed some success under its vice president Kurt Enoch with such titles as What Plane Is That and The New Soldier Handbook despite being a late entrant into an well established paperback market. From the outset, design was essential to the success of the Penguin brand. Avoiding the illustrated gaudiness of other paperback publishers, Penguin opted for the simple appearance of three horizontal bands, the upper and lower of which were colour-coded according to which series the title belonged to. In the central white panel, the author and title were printed in Gill Sans and in the upper band was a cartouche with the legend "Penguin Books"; the initial design was created by the 21-year-old office junior Edward Young, who drew the first version of the Penguin logo. Series such as Penguin Specials and The Penguin Shakespeare had individual designs.
The colour schemes included: orange and white for general fiction and white for crime fiction and white for travel and adventure, dark blue and white for biographies and white for miscellaneous and white for drama. Lane resisted the introduction of cover images for several years; some recent publications of literature from that time have duplicated the original look. From 1937 and on, the headquarters of Penguin Books was at Harmondsworth west of London and so it remained until the 1990s when a merge with Viking involved the head office moving to London; the Second World War saw the company established as a national institution, though it had no formal role, Penguin was integral to the war effort thanks in no small part to the publication of such bestselling manuals as Keeping Poultry and Rabbits on Scraps and Aircraft Recognition and supplying books for the services and British POWs. Penguin printed some 600 titles and started nineteen new series in the six years of the war and a time of enormous increase in the demand for books Penguin enjoyed a privileged place among its peers.
Paper rationing was the besetting problem of publishers during wartime, with the fall of France cutting off supp
Apollo Theatre
The Apollo Theatre is a Grade II listed West End theatre, on Shaftesbury Avenue in the City of Westminster, in central London. Designed by the architect Lewin Sharp for owner Henry Lowenfeld, it became the fourth legitimate theatre to be constructed on the street when it opened its doors on 21 February 1901, with the American musical comedy The Belle of Bohemia. Henry Lowenfeld had bought land on the newly created Shaftesbury Avenue at the turn of the 20th century—next door to the Lyric Theatre, which opened in 1888—and as a consequence the Apollo is one of the few theatres in London to be freehold; the only complete theatre design of architect Lewin Sharp, the Apollo was designed for musical theatre and named after the Greek god of the arts and leader of the muses. It was constructed by builder Walter Wallis of plain London brick in keeping with the neighbouring streets; the structure encloses a four-level auditorium, with three cantilevered balconies and a first-floor central loggia, decorated in the Louis XIV Style by Hubert van Hooydonk.
In keeping with European style, each level has its own foyer and promenade. Owing to the death of Queen Victoria the previous month, it became the first London theatre to be completed in the Edwardian period; the capacity on the opening night, 21 February 1901, was 893, with a proscenium of 9.14 metres wide and 8.89 metres deep. The capacity today is 775 seats, with the balcony on the 3rd tier considered the steepest in London. Owing to a unsuccessful opening, impresario Tom B. Davis took a lease on the building, hence management of operations, from 1902; the theatre was renovated by Ernest Schaufelberg in 1932, with a private foyer and anteroom installed to the Royal Box. Prince Littler took control of the theatre in 1944. Stoll Moss Group purchased the theatre in 1975, selling it to Andrew Lloyd Webber's Really Useful Group and Bridgepoint Capital in 2000. Nica Burns and Max Weitzenhoffer purchased the theatre and several others in 2005, creating Nimax Theatres, which still owns the theatre.
On 19 December 2013, at about 20:15 GMT, 10 square metres of the auditorium's ornate plasterwork ceiling collapsed around 40 minutes into a performance of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. It brought down a lighting rig and a section of balcony, thereby trapping two people and injuring around 88, including seven seriously. There were 720 people in the audience at the time; the incident was preceded by heavy rain. The emergency services responded with 25 ambulance crews, an air ambulance rapid response team, 8 fire engines with more than 50 firefighters, the Metropolitan Police. Casualties were taken to the foyers of the adjacent Gielgud and Queen's theatres, where the emergency services could triage; the London Ambulance Service stated that they had treated 76 injured people, with 58 taken to four London hospitals, some on commandeered buses. Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust said 34 adults and 5 children were subsequently treated in accident and emergency at St Thomas' Hospital.
The venue reopened on 26 March 2014, with an adaptation of Let the Right One In produced by the National Theatre of Scotland. The owners were able to reopen the theatre by sealing the fourth level and balcony with a temporary floor, which allowed investigators to continue their work in determining the cause of the collapse; the opening caused a public uproar, with a selected audience for the first performance, on Thursday 21 February 1901, the first public performance scheduled for 22 February. The Times refused to review the private opening, instead waiting until the first public production on the following day; the opening production was the American musical comedy The Belle of Bohemia, which survived for 72 performances—17 more than it had accomplished when produced on Broadway. The production was followed by John Martin-Harvey's season, including A Cigarette Maker's Romance and The Only Way, an adaptation of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities. George Edwardes produced a series of successful Edwardian musical comedies, including Kitty Grey, Three Little Maids and The Girl from Kays.
An English version of André Messager's light opera Véronique became a hit in 1904, starring with Ruth Vincent, who starred in Edward German's Tom Jones in 1907 in which Cicely Courtneidge made her London debut. Between 1908 and 1912 the theatre hosted. After this it staged a variety of works, including seasons of plays by Charles Hawtrey in 1913, 1914 and 1924, Harold Brighouse's Hobson's Choice in 1916. Inside the Lines by Earl Derr Biggers ran for 421 performances in 1917. Gilbert Dayle's What Would a Gentleman Do? Played in 1918 and Tilly of Bloomsbury by Ian Hay was the success in 1919. George Grossmith, Jr. and Edward Laurillard managed the theatre from 1920 to 1923, presenting a series of plays and revivals, including Such a Nice Young Man by H. F. Maltby and the stage version of George Du Maurier's novel Trilby, they had produced The Only Girl here in 1916 and Tilly of Bloomsbury in 1919. The Fake was produced in 1924. 1927 saw Abie's Irish Whispering Wires, with Henry Daniel. The next year, Laurence Olivier starred in R. C.
Sherriff's Journey's End. Seán O'Casey's The Silver Tassie and Ivor Novello's A Symphony in Two Flats both played in 1929. Diana Wynyard starred as Charlotte Brontë in Clemence Dane's Wild Decembers in 1932. Marion Lorne was the star of a number of plays by her husband Walter Hackett from 1934 to 1937. Ian Hay's Housemaster had the most successful run in this period with 662 performances from 1936. Raymond Massey starred in Robert Sherwood's Pulitzer Prize-winning Idiot's Delight in 1938. Patr
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Lady Chatterley's Lover is a novel by D. H. Lawrence, first published in 1928 in Italy, in 1929 in France and Australia. An unexpurgated edition was not published in the United Kingdom until 1960, when it was the subject of a watershed obscenity trial against the publisher Penguin Books. Penguin won the case, sold 3 million copies; the book was banned for obscenity in the United States, Australia and Japan. The book soon became notorious for its story of the physical relationship between a working class man and an upper class woman, its explicit descriptions of sex, its use of then-unprintable words; the story is said to have originated from events in Lawrence's own unhappy domestic life, he took inspiration for the settings of the book from Nottinghamshire, where he grew up. According to some critics, the fling of Lady Ottoline Morrell with "Tiger", a young stonemason who came to carve plinths for her garden statues influenced the story. Lawrence at one time considered calling the novel Tenderness and made significant alterations to the text and story in the process of its composition.
It has been published in three versions. The story concerns a young married woman, the former Constance Reid, whose upper class husband, Sir Clifford Chatterley, described as a handsome, well-built man, has been paralysed from the waist down due to a Great War injury. In addition to Clifford's physical limitations, his emotional neglect of Constance forces distance between the couple, her emotional frustration leads her into an affair with Oliver Mellors. The class difference between the couple highlights a major motif of the novel, the unfair dominance of intellectuals over the working class; the novel is about Constance's realization. This realization stems from a heightened sexual experience Constance has only felt with Mellors, suggesting that love can only happen with the element of the body, not the mind. In Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lawrence comes full circle to argue once again for individual regeneration, which can be found only through the relationship between man and woman. Love and personal relationships are the threads.
Lawrence explores a wide range of different types of relationships. The reader sees the brutal, bullying relationship between Mellors and his wife Bertha, who punishes him by preventing his pleasure. There is Tommy Dukes, who has no relationship because he cannot find a woman whom he respects intellectually and, at the same time, finds desirable. There is the perverse, maternal relationship that develops between Clifford and Mrs. Bolton, his caring nurse, after Constance has left. Richard Hoggart argues that the main subject of Lady Chatterley's Lover is not the sexual passages that were the subject of such debate but the search for integrity and wholeness. Key to this integrity is cohesion between the body for "body without mind is brutish. Lady Chatterley's Lover focuses on the incoherence of living a life, "all mind", which Lawrence saw as true among the young members of the aristocratic classes, as in his description of Constance's and her sister Hilda's "tentative love-affairs" in their youth: So they had given the gift of themselves, each to the youth with whom she had the most subtle and intimate arguments.
The arguments, the discussions were the great thing: the love-making and connection were only sort of primitive reversion and a bit of an anti-climax. The contrast between mind and body can be seen in the dissatisfaction each has with their previous relationships: Constance's lack of intimacy with her husband, "all mind" and Mellors's choice to live apart from his wife because of her "brutish" sexual nature; these dissatisfactions lead them into a relationship that builds slowly and is based upon tenderness, physical passion and mutual respect. As the relationship between Lady Chatterley and Mellors develops, they learn more about the interrelation of the mind and the body. Neuro-psychoanalyst Mark Blechner identifies the "Lady Chatterley phenomenon" in which the same sexual act can affect people in different ways at different times, depending on their subjectivity, he bases it on the passage in which Lady Chatterley feels disengaged from Mellors and thinks disparagingly about the sex act: "And this time the sharp ecstasy of her own passion did not overcome her.
Yes, this was love, this ridiculous bouncing of the buttocks, the wilting of the poor insignificant, moist little penis." Shortly thereafter, they make love again, this time, she experiences enormous physical and emotional involvement: "And it seemed she was like the sea, nothing but dark waves rising and heaving, heaving with a great swell, so that her whole darkness was in motion, she was ocean rolling its dark, dumb mass." Lady Chatterley's Lover presents some views on the British social context of the early 20th century. This is most evidently seen in the plot; this is heightened when Mellors adopts the local broad Derbyshire dialect, something he can slip in and out of. Critic and writer Mark Schore
Joseph Losey
Joseph Walton Losey III was an American theatre and film director. Born in Wisconsin, he studied in Germany with Bertolt Brecht and returned to the United States. Blacklisted by Hollywood in the 1950s, he moved to Europe where he made the remainder of his films in the United Kingdom. Among the most critically and commercially successful were three films with screenplays by Harold Pinter, The Servant and The Go-Between. Joseph Walton Losey III was born on January 14, 1909 in La Crosse, where he and Nicholas Ray were high-school classmates, he attended Dartmouth College and Harvard University, beginning as a student of medicine and ending in drama. Losey became a major figure in New York political theatre, first directing the controversial failure Little Old Boy in 1933, he declined to direct a staged version of Dodsworth by Sinclair Lewis, which led Lewis to offer him his first work written for the stage, Jayhawker. Losey directed the show, which had a brief run. Bosley Crowther in The New York Times noted that "The play, being wordy, presents staging problems that Joe Losey's direction does not always solve.
It is hard to tell, responsible for the obscure parts in the story."He visited the Soviet Union for several months in 1935, to study the Russian stage. In Moscow he participated in a seminar on film taught by Sergei Eisenstein, he met Bertolt Brecht and the composer Hanns Eisler, who were visiting Moscow at the time. In 1936, he directed Triple-A Plowed Under on Broadway, a production of the WPA's Federal Theatre Project, he directed the second Living Newspaper presentation, Injunction Granted. From 1946 to 1947, Losey worked with Bertolt Brecht—who was living in exile in Los Angeles—and Charles Laughton on the preparations for the staging of Brecht's play Galileo which he and Brecht co-directed with Laughton in the title role, with music by Eisler; the play premiered on July 1947, at the Coronet Theatre in Beverly Hills. On October 30, 1947 Losey accompanied Brecht to Washington DC for Brecht's appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Brecht left the US the following day.
Losey went on to stage Galileo, again with Laughton in the title role, in New York City where it opened on December 7, 1947 at the Maxine Elliott Theatre. More than 25 years Losey, in exile in England, would direct a film version of Brecht's play Galileo. Losey's first feature film was a political allegory entitled The Boy with Green Hair, starring a young Dean Stockwell as Peter, a war orphan, subject to ridicule after he awakens one morning to find his hair mysteriously turned green. Seymour Nebenzal, the producer of Fritz Lang's classic M, hired Losey to direct a remake set in Los Angeles rather than Berlin. In the new version, released in 1951, the killer's name was changed from Hans Beckert to Martin W. Harrow. Nebenzal's son Harold was associate producer of this version; the HUAC's longstanding interest in Losey was based on extensive—and error-riddled—FBI files. In the 1930s and 1940s, he had had extensive contacts with people on the political left, including radicals and Communists or people who subsequently became such.
He had collaborated with Brecht and had a long association with Hanns Eisler, both targets of HUAC's interest. Losey had written to the Immigration and Naturalization Service in support of a resident's visa for Eisler, who had many radical associations, they had collaborated on a "political cabaret" from 1937 to 1939, Losey had invited Eisler to compose music for a short public relations film he had been commissioned to produce for presentation at the 1939 New York World's Fair, Pete Roleum and His Cousins. Losey had worked on the Federal Theatre Project, long a target of HUAC. Triple-A Plowed Under, on which Losey had worked, had been denounced by HUAC's antecedent, the Dies Committee, as Communist propaganda, his Hollywood collaborators included a long list of other HUAC targets, including Dalton Trumbo and Ring Lardner Jr. Losey's first wife Elizabeth Hawes worked with a wide range of Communists and anti-Communist liberals at the radical newspaper PM. After their divorce in 1944, she wrote about working as a union organizer just after World War II, where "one preferred the Communists to the Red-Baiters".
At some point early in the 1940s, the FBI was maintaining dossiers on both Losey and Hawes. His included charges that he was a Stalinist agent as of 1945. In 1946, Losey joined the Communist Party, he explained to a French interviewer: I had a feeling that I was being useless in Hollywood, that I'd been cut off from New York activity and I felt that my existence was unjustified. It was a kind of Hollywood guilt, and I think that the work that I did on a much freer, more personal and independent basis for the political left in New York, before going to Hollywood, was much more valuable socially. Losey had a long-term contract with Dore Schary at RKO when Howard Hughes purchased the company in 1948 and began purging it of leftists. Losey explained how Hughes tested employees to determine if they had Communist sympathies: I was offered a film called I Married a Communist, which I turned down categorically. I learned that it was a touchstone for establishing, a "red": you offered I Married a Communist to anybody you thought was a Communist, if they turned it down, they were.
Hughes responded by holding Losey to his contract without assigning him any work. In mid-1949, Schary persuaded Hughes to release Losey, who soon began working as an independent on The Lawless for Paramount Pictures. Soon he was working on a three-picture contract with Stanley Kramer, his name was mentioned by two witne
