Arthur Marshall (broadcaster) - Life and Career

Life and Career

Charles Arthur Bertram Marshall was the son of Charles Marshall, an electrical engineer from Colchester and Dorothy, née Lee, from Manchester. He was enrolled at the kindergarten section of the Froebel Institute in Hammersmith in 1916, for two years, and then went to Ranelagh House, a co-educational school overlooking Barnes Common. In the summer of 1920 his father moved the family to Newbury in Berkshire and Arthur was sent away to a preparatory boarding school, Stirling Court, on the Hampshire coast where his brother was already a pupil. He described it later as a 'traumatic experience'. He was educated at Oundle School 1924-1928, and Christ's College, Cambridge from 1928 to 1931, where he studied Modern Languages, became President of the Cambridge University Amateur Dramatic Club, and wanted to be an actor. His obsession with the theatre had begun at the age of four when he had been taken to see Peter Pan, played by Madge Titheradge, at the Kings Theatre, Hammersmith. At Cambridge he appeared as Elizabeth in Somerset Maugham's The Circle in 1929 and his performance was praised by George Rylands. The last play in which he appeared for the ADC was directed by Rylands, a production of George Bernard Shaw's Captain Brassbound's Conversion, starring Michael Redgrave in the title role and who was, according to Noel Annan, 'acted off the stage by Arthur Marshall as Lady Cicely.' As he could not find enough acting work, or convince his parents that they should support his desire to pursue a career in the theatre, in 1931 he became a school teacher (modern languages), again at Oundle School.

His first work in entertainment was writing scripts for three-minute radio sketches. In 1934 a BBC producer asked him to appear on Charlot's Hour, a late-night revue on the Home Service. He signed a contract in 1935 with Columbia and made five gramophone records featuring sketches involving headmistresses and schoolgirls - he was an avid reader of books for girls from childhood and had been performing skits from the early thirties for his friends. He began reviewing for the New Statesman in 1935 too at the invitation of the literary editor Raymond Mortimer who admired his skits. He was asked to contribute an artice each Christmas on the best books for girls published during the year - Angela Brazil was nearing the end of her career but Winifred Darch, May Wynne and Dorita Fairlie Bruce were still very productive. The war interrupted this reviewing of books for girls.

During the war Marshall's knowledge of French and German led to his being enrolled in the Intelligence Corps, and he was soon sent as part of the British Expeditionary Force (World War II) to northern France. After the rapid German advance he soon became a part of the Dunkirk evacuation. He wrote in his autobiography; "Absence of food, coupled with exhaustion, made the nights seem unusually cold and there is little of comfort, save protection of a sort, to be found in a sand dune. One's childhood love of sand and beaches disappeared in a trice." Back in England he spent three months with a security section on the Cumbrian coast before being sent to Lisburn in Northern Ireland. In April 1942 he was transferred to the London headquarters of Combined Operations in Richmond Terrace, off Whitehall. He was appointed a Security Officer and by the end of 1943 was transferred to Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force HQ in Bushy Park, Twickenham. On June 6, 1944 the invasion of Europe began and the SHAEF HQ followed it. In 1945 Marshall was in Flensburg and lodged on Hitler's yacht at the time that Alfred Jodl and Wilhelm Keitel were being interrogated. At the end of the war, with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel, and an MBE, he returned to Oundle School as a Housemaster.

During this period, Marshall had some success on radio and the stage. His wartime radio programme A Date with Nurse Dugdale was popular, and he wrote numerous revue sketches for performers such as Hermione Gingold. He appeared on radio and TV occasionally and published books of humorous pieces among other writings. The most widely known of these were his skits on the life and antics of public schoolgirls. From a relatively early age he had been an ardent admirer of the girls' school stories of Angela Brazil. He found them hilarious, although he noted "Miss Brazil had, of course, no comic intention when she started, in 1906, to write her books."

In 1954 he left Oundle and, after being private secretary to Victor, Lord Rothschild, worked for the London theatrical firm H. M. Tennent. In the 1950s, he began work in the theatre in London as a scriptwriter and also began having his humorous books published. He adapted the novel Every Third Thought by American writer Dorothea Malm into the play Season of Goodwill. This starred Sybil Thorndike and Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, but was not a success. He also wrote the British version of the French play Fleur de Cactus which had been adapted for the American stage by Abe Burrows as Cactus Flower. This starred Margaret Leighton and Tony Britton and was a hit on the West End stage, until Leighton left to go to Broadway.

As he became better known he appeared on radio and television (although his first radio broadcast had been in 1934), and then in 1979 began his time as a regular team captain on Call My Bluff, which continued until shortly before his death. Marshall took over from Patrick Campbell. They had been friends for many years, ever since they both used to write, from around 1948 onwards, for Lilliput.

Marshall was also a newspaper and magazine columnist, writing for The Sunday Telegraph in the 1970s and 1980s, and enjoying an association with the New Statesman that began in 1935 when he wrote his first of many Christmas reviews of books for girls, and ended in 1981 when he was sacked from its "First Person" column by editor Bruce Page, - and which he had been writing since January 1976, having been asked by then editor Anthony Howard to replace Auberon Waugh who had gone to the The Spectator - allegedly for being overtly sympathetic to Margaret Thatcher.

Having retired to Devon in 1970 he lived in Christow for the last fifteen years of his life, where he shared a cottage with Peter Kelland, a former schoolmaster. Their home, Pound Cottage, was the 'Myrtlebank' from which he sent dispatches to the New Statesman and Sunday Telegraph. Marshall suffered a minor heart attack in 1988; he began writing the second part of his autobiography, but died shortly after a more serious illness.