'A Propertyless Theatre for the Propertyless Class', in Raphael Samuel, Ewan MacColl and Stuart Cosgrove (eds), Theatres of the Left 1880-1935: Workers' Theatre Movements in Britain and America, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul (1985), pp. 77–98.

I was born on 18 June 1902 in Gayhurst Road, Dalston, East London, a road which was a typical mix of comfortable respectability and hand-to-mouth poverty. My father was a basketmaker, a very ancient craft: he told me that my brother and I were the first males in the family who had not followed the trade. He was a staunch trade unionist but politically he was a Liberal. The only political words I ever heard from him were when he recounted how a work-mate had been so bitterly disappointed at the failure of the German workers to oppose the Kaiser's government on the question of war. After all their undertakings at conferences to have a General Strike, there was nothing. My father was quite happy about that because it showed that his work-mate, who was a keen socialist, was wrong.