Never Tell Them

Past productions

A play by

Never Tell Them was written in 2008 as response to the continued neglect of returning soldiers and their families. It was heavily influenced by Jay Winter’s superb study on the aftermath of World War One entitled ‘Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning’ (1995), and his chapter on the rise of spiritualism. Looking back now with almost a century between us, it is easy to find humour in the popularity of such movements, but we must remember that Britain had just emerged from a four-year conflict which had claimed the lives (worldwide) of 16m people, with 21m injured, and for such a small nation she had herself lost almost 1m of her citizens, with 1.6m wounded. Moreover, at the time of the play – November 1920 – at least 50m had died worldwide (possibly double that amount) of the Spanish Flu epidemic. To search for meaning and consolation at such times was only natural.

The play takes its title from a popular soldiers’ song of the war that parodied Jerome Kern’s ‘They Wouldn’t Believe Me’:

And when they ask us, how dangerous it was?
Oh we’ll never tell them, no we’ll never tell them.
We spent our pay in some cafe, and pawed wild women night and day,
It was the cushiest job we ever had.
And when they ask us, and they’re certainly going to ask us,
The reason why we didn’t win the Croix de Guerre.
Oh we’ll never tell them, no we’ll never tell them.
There was a front but damned if we knew where.

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