He ended up in the House of Lords – and in the Guinness Book of Records, as the world’s most prolific TV writer – but when his literary career began, he was living as a tramp. His first writing fee, a cheque for 7s 6d, was addressed to him c/o the Bedford Workhouse.
Ted Willis was born on this date in Tottenham, north London, the son of a bus washer. By the time he left school, aged 14, young Edward had already decided that he was eventually going to be a professional writer. First, though, he had to earn a living.
Various jobs followed – useful to a nascent writer, if not very interesting in themselves – the most promising of which was working as a coach-builder for London Transport. Unfortunately, that one ended up with Ted getting sacked for locking his bullying foreman in a lavatory.
Like many unemployed, restless, young men of that period, Willis became for a while a gentleman-of-the-road, and it was at the urging of a fellow tramp – impressed by Ted’s way with words – that he wrote down his observations of the Yorkshire countryside they were passing through, and sent them to a cycling magazine. It was a modest opening to one of the most extraordinary literary careers, of a kind which will surely never be seen again.
Willis’s rebel nature did not confine itself to trapping overseers in toilets, and by the end of the 1930s he had been elected leader of the Labour League of Youth. His left-wing faction of the League later joined the Communist Party, and Ted became general secretary of the Young Communist League. He worked with the children's food convoys in the Spanish Civil War.
During World War Two, Ted served briefly in the Royal Fusiliers before being assigned to the Army Kinematographic Service, writing propaganda films. At the same time, he was the drama critic for the Daily Worker. He also became a successful dramatist himself during the war, working with the left-wing Unity Theatre. Even in these early days, he was extraordinarily prolific and his output was, as it ever remained, unusually diverse.
His first play so impressed J.B. Priestley that the great man told Willis he’d give him £300, no strings attached, so that he could devote a whole year to full-time writing. The youngster declined; it was important that he made it on his own.
After the war he was offered a safe Labour seat in parliament, but chose to stick with his trade. Ted Willis was a political activist all his life, but always as a volunteer, somehow fitting his activism in around his writing work. He is said to have written (and sold) 40 million words altogether, made up principally of 24 films, 28 stage plays, 15 television plays, 20 television series, and 14 books.
He is undoubtedly best remembered for his BBC TV series, Dixon of Dock Green, which starred Jack Warner as a uniformed London cop. It was a fixture of Saturday night telly from 1955 to 1976, running to 432 episodes. The stories were topped and tailed by the character of Dixon addressing the viewers through the fourth wall, and his catchphrase “Evening, all” is still used today by people far too young to remember Ted Willis, Jack Warner, Sgt Dixon - or, most likely, the concept of Saturday-night TV.
Among professional writers, Ted Willis’s name is revered for another reason: in 1959 he was one of the founding and leading members of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain, the TUC-affiliated trade union which has done so much to improve the lot of the self-employed word-merchant. His cunning as a negotiator and his tireless devotion as an organiser changed the lives and prospects of many writers in many ways – for instance, in winning the first ever pension scheme for TV scriptwriters.
Willis gave an astonishing amount of time and energy (and money) to the Guild during its first two decades, believing above all that, whatever your trade, it is only through acting together in a union that you can gain your just entitlements. In a memoir decades later he expressed his contempt for “a few fat cats, talented and wealthy authors” who wouldn’t raise a finger to help their fellow professionals, because “their creative work is too important to humanity to be interrupted by such trivialities.” (They still exist.) When Ted Willis died in 1992, the union’s newsletter called him “The father of the Guild.”
He became a life peer in 1963, when Labour Party leader Harold Wilson had been invited by the government to appoint six new “working peers,” a polite phrase which essentially means a member of the House of Lords who is still young enough to sit on a committee without falling asleep.
Needless to say, having received his wife’s approval to accept the position, Baron Willis of Chislehurst threw himself into this new job with his usual passion. As well as continuing his campaign for writers’ rights, he became the chief parliamentary champion of Romany people, “The most harassed, neglected, downtrodden, poverty-stricken and persecuted section of our population,” a cause almost as unfashionable in the 1960s as it is today.
But nobody can be an enthusiast for their work all the time. Much earlier in his career, Willis claimed, he was fired as a scriptwriter on Mrs Dale's Diary, a daily radio serial with millions of listeners, after submitting an episode in which all the leading characters tragically died when the car they were in accidentally reversed off the cliff at Beachy Head.
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Sources:
The write stuff a history of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain 1959-2009 by Nick Yapp (WGGB, 2009)
www.heraldscotland.com/news/12589604.lord-ted-willis/
www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-lord-willis-1565335.html