Eccles Born Harold Brighouse, whose most famous play Hobson’s Choice is currently being performed at the Oldham Coliseum, is one of the region’s unsung heroes and the last of the Manchester School. About Manchester takes a look at his life and career.
When Harold Brighouse died in 1958 a few days before his seventy sixth birthday, he was cremated in Golder’s Green, along way from his birthplace with only a few of his friends from Manchester present.Born in 1882, his mother a teacher, his father in the cotton business, he was educated at Manchester Grammar School but would turn his back on academia, joining a textile merchants at the age of seventeen.
Working in the centre of Manchester at the turn of the 20th century, he discovered that there were ten music halls and theatres close to his workplace and quickly became obsessed with the entertainment business.
This was the Manchester of Miss AE Horniman who brought repertory to the city and by her sponsorship of Lancashire drama set up the Manchester school of Dramatists in the years before the First World war. Brighouse would be inspired by Horniman’s Gaiety theatre and its producer Ben Iden Payne’s productions of Shaw’s realistic comedies and realised that there was plenty of material in the day to day lives of those around him for material to be set in Lancashire.His fellow Manchester school member Stanley Houghton’s success with The Hindle Wakes along with dissatisfaction with his career inspired him to start writing.
He had moved to London in 1902 with his firm, and immersed himself in the West End.He would also meet his future wife, bringing her back to Manchester to be married. He wrote his first play Lomesome Like before the war which would eventually clock up over three thousand performances at the Gaiety theatre.
It would be followed by the Game, set in the muddy world of the business of association football and the Northerners, set at the time of the Ludditte revolts a century earlier.
Hobson’s Choice was written in 1916, and had its origins in an idea in notebooks of Stanley Houghton who had died in 1913 after falling ill in Venice and was nurtured as Brighouse made his way to France to fight the following year as part of the newly formed Air Force.It was set in 1880 Salford, the year of his oarent’s marriage and his memories of a cobbler’s shop where his mother had taken him to buy boots.He had decided to write a play that would represent all that was admiral and humane in the Lancashire character.
The play deals with the changing balance of power within the patriarchal Salford Household of Hobson, with a lowly but talented boot maker eventually taking over the business and transformed during the performance from a startled rabbit in the headlights to a confident tradesman.
It first opened in Atlantic City due to Ben Iden Payne having left the Gaiety and settling in New York and its success would mean that Brighouse could devote all his time to writing. it was in the opening repertoire of the National Theatre, Olivier would take it to Russia, Charles Laughton played Will Mossop in the film version and Wilfred Pickles played the same part in a five teen week run in Blackpool.It would feature on Broadway and in 1989 a ballet version would also be produced.
Brighouse, though would never achieve the success again of Hobson’s Choice.He moved to London not long after the war but would return for tramping holidays in the Lake District and would not sever his ties completely, being a regular contributor to the Manchester Guardian.
On his death, one critic said that he was not one to write any fancy stuff, instead he wrote of the place, the people and the economic ups and downs which he saw all around him
To be concerned with shops and trades and markets was a valuable innovation at a time when the British theatre was so preoccupied with conventional romance and comedy.
