News / Tom Stoppard
Remembering when Tom Stoppard was a journalist in Bristol
Before he wrote Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Shakespeare in Love, playwright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard, who has died at the age of 88, was a journalist in Bristol.
Stoppard quit school at 17 and started his career as a reporter on the Western Daily Press in 1954.
“I was anxious to start earning my own living,” Stoppard said in 2008. He added: “I don’t regret being a journalist; I think I got a lot from it.”
From the Western Daily Press, he moved to the former Bristol Evening World as a feature writer and columnist, also writing theatre reviews.
Stoppard enjoyed hanging out at the Bristol Old Vic, where he became friendly with Peter O’Toole who was then starting his career as an actor.
Bristol’s cultural scene was much poorer when Stoppard lived and worked in our city.
Writing in Our Project Was the City: Bristol Ideas 1992-2024, ACH Smith remembers working with Stoppard at the Western Daily Press.
“In one of our special single-issue pages, Stoppard and I surveyed the city’s meagre provision for the arts (which entailed less outlay than was spent on the upkeep of the Lord Mayor’s ceremonial horses) and proposed the formation of a Bristol Arts Trust.
“To our surprise we fluttered the civic dovecots. Overnight, three committees – academics, businesspeople and trades unionists – came into being to promote the idea.
“That every regional centre should run its own arts budget is a case I have been arguing ever since. That is how it’s done in France and Germany, and it is what the Arts Council, before it became a canting bureaucracy, had in mind when Stoppard and I ran with it.
“Then, there was such a swell of support for it in Bristol that it became a Lord Mayor’s motion (a rare thing, by tradition unopposed).
“It was referred to the finance committee for implementation. They dug a hole and buried it. Hawkins [Richard Hawkins, managing editor at the Bristol United Press] told me that the ground of disagreement was that Labour councillors did not like the seating arrangement at the crucial committee meeting.
“Thirty years later, the City Council came up with a proposal to support the arts: form a Bristol Arts Trust. It got nowhere.
“But something was stirring in the city. To the mood music of the Swinging Sixties, Jeremy Rees opened the Arnolfini in The Triangle; the Arts Centre (now The Cube) was created in King Square by the Workers’ Educational Association (shepherded by the developer Billy Poeton); and at the University of Bristol, where playwright John Arden was the resident Fellow in Drama, the academic George Brandt turned the drama department’s little theatre into an avant-garde studio.
“This is where Pinter and Stoppard were clapped by their first ever live audiences, and Alan Dossor, later director of the Liverpool Everyman, learned his craft.”
Main photo: University of Oxford
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