The people, my dear, the people

[Hedley Malloch]

Can anyone help me track down a quote allegedly uttered by a famous Edwardian theatrical or literary personality who saw service on the Western Front? After the war he was asked for his impressions of life in the trenches. His reply was: "Oh, the noise, the guns, the dirt ... and the people, my dear, the people."

It sounds like Noël Coward, but it is not him

[Simon_Fielding]

I heard this quote as coming from a homosexual Guards officer and directed at Dunkirk...where I read it, I can't recall....will investigate.

Simon

[Simon_Fielding]

Seems this quote was the focus of a debate in the London Review of Books in 1998. I think it's just one of those quotes that will never be definitively pinned down!!

Regards

Simon

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v20/n22/letters.html

From Vol. 20 No. 22

Cover date: 12 November 1998

My dear, the noise

From John Bayley

Apropos George Schlesinger's pertinent query (Letters, 29 October) about the origins of 'My dear, the noise, and the people', I suppose all wars invent stories and myths which are in fact second-hand. In 1943, when I first heard the story, it was quoted as coming out of Dunkirk, but whoever said it (if he did) might well have remembered hearing the Thesiger 1916 story. Or, just conceivably, he might have himself been inspired to make the same comment. Where noise and people are concerned all wars are much alike.

John Bayley

Oxford

From Richard Davenport-Hines

Surely every schoolboy knows - certainly I was told as a schoolboy - that Lord Sefton was the Guards officer who, having escaped from Dunkirk, and being quizzed about his experiences while drinking at his club, replied: 'My dear, the noise, and the people.' Sefton had kept a fixed pose of nonchalance since boyhood, when his sister went mad in front of his eyes in the nursery. George Schlesinger's attribution of the phrase to Ernest Thesiger at the Somme sounds awry. When the First World War broke out, Thesiger fancied himself in a kilt and applied to join a Highland regiment, but as the accent he assumed for the occasion proved unconvincing, he spent much of the hostilities teaching embroidery to disabled ex-servicemen.

Richard Davenport-Hines

Ailhon, France

From John Griffith

I knew the story, located in the Somme, in the middle to late Thirties.

John Griffith

Marlow, Buckinghamshire

From David Tipping

I cannot be exact, but I read it many years ago in the chat column of a newspaper, quoting the response given by a gentleman at a cocktail party to his hostess, on being asked: 'Did you have a good war, General?' I am often reminded of it while travelling on the Underground.

David Tipping

Sherborne, Dorset

[Simon_Fielding]

Original letter:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v20/n21/letters.html

From Vol. 20 No. 21

Cover date: 29 October 1998

My dear, the noise

From George Schlesinger

According to Jack Bevan, to whose authority I submitted on most topics, Ernest Thesiger, having taken his embroidery to work on in the trenches, summed up the Somme experience to a friend as 'my dear, the noise, and the people.' Of late - I think on the say-so of a dictionary of quotations - this comment has been re-assigned to an anonymous officer describing Dunkirk. When this attribution is accepted by John Bayley (LRB, 15 October), it's time to worry. Can anyone shed light?

George Schlesinger

Durham

[Simon_Fielding]

Anyone familiar with the film 'Gods and Monsters' starring Ian McKellern as the director of the original 1930s _Frankenstein_ will know that Whale served in the Royal Warwicks in WW1, and his traumatic experiences form part of the film.

Ernest Thesiger (above) starred in the 1930 film, and this article may be of interest.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style.../jameswhale.htm

Simon F