SUNDAY SUPPLEMENT: Born in South Croydon in 1888, actor and playwright Miles Malleson’s work drew plaudits from Olivier, Thorndike and Gielgud. DAVID MORGAN recalls the life, career and campaigning of a well-recognised but often overlooked talent
Character actor, and so much more: Croydon-born Miles Malleson
Alice Malleson, one of Croydon’s generous Victorian philanthropists, is remembered with a plaque on the north wall of Croydon Minster. When she died, in September 1901, she left the lease of her home on Park Lane to Myrrha, the wife of her nephew, Edmund.
Myrrah and Edmund, who was described as a manufacturing chemist, were married in 1887 and initially lived at Roslyn, Avondale Road in South Croydon (no record seems to exist to indicate which house number Roslyn relates to today; unless, of course, any of our readers can assist).
Myrrha and Edmund had two children: a son, William Miles Malleson, was born in May 1888, and a daughter, named Alice, followed in 1890.
Miles Malleson grew up to be one of the great British actors, screenwriters and playwrights of the 20th century, described as the finest Shakespearean clown of his generation.
Even if you’ve never heard of him before, if you’ve watched any British-made films of the 1930s through to the 1960s, you will have seen Miles Malleson. You will have recognised him. You probably even chuckled a little at his frequent cameo appearances, providing an essential pivot to any scene in which he appeared. He was regularly cast as a dotty vicar or bumbling bishop.
Scene-stealer: Miles Malleson often played clergy, as in the 1959 Hammer horror version of The Hound of the Baskervilles, which also featured Peter Cushing as Sherlock Holmes and, pictured here with ‘Bishop Frankland’, Christopher Lee as Sir Henry Baskerville
Malleson was a scene-stealer, such as in the 1956 war film The Man Who Never Was, based on Operation Mincemeat, where he plays a typically eccentric boffin in the Royal Navy’s scientific department, shown in the video above.
Or there was his role as the Sultan in The Thief of Bagdad, the hangman in Kind Hearts and Coronets with Alec Guinness, as the tailor in the 1951 film The Man in the White Suit, and as Dr Chasuble in The Importance of Being Earnest alongside Edith Evans and Margaret Rutherford. His performance credits, as listed by Wikipedia, runs to almost 120 movies between 1921 and 1965
Malleson was capable of excellent classical performances on stage, too. Sir John Gielgud, who starred in and directed in a 1934 production of Hamlet, noted that Malleson was “splendid” as Polonius, the best he had ever worked with.
Malleson was still appearing on the West End stage when he was in his seventies. In 1964, at the age of 76, he played the part of Merlyn in the Lerner and Loewe musical Camelot at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.
As a playwright, Malleson wrote more than 25 plays for the stage and, in the 1920s and ’30s, for the burgeoning new medium of the wireless. He was celebrated for his adaptations of Molière plays. His translation of The Misanthrope, entitled The Slave of Truth, was first performed at the Bristol Old Vic in the 1960s.
As a boy, Malleson was packed off to school at Brighton College, where he was head boy and captain of cricket, before studying history at Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
It was at Cambridge that Malleson discovered his acting talent. He first appeared on stage in November 1909 at the New Theatre in Cambridge where he was the slave, Sosias, in Aristophane’s play The Wasps. His opening line was, “Why Xanthias, what are you doing wretched man?”
Once seen, never forgotten: Miles Malleson as the Sultan in Michael Powell’s Technicolor fantasy, The Thief of Baghdad
But he used his acting abilities to far greater impact at the Cambridge Union debating society.
When George Haddock, a Conservative MP, failed to turn up for a society dinner, Malleson arrived in his place (at the Union’s president’s request) and pulled off this prank so well that his own college master didn’t recognise him.
Malleson continued the deception by giving a speech on the subject of votes for women, speaking against the motion, completely against his own views. Even the local reporters who covered the event failed to see through Malleson’s disguise, which included an impressive white beard.
The MP’s agent wanted to involve the police when the deception became public but when Haddock heard about what had happened, he decided not to press charges.
Malleson went from Cambridge to Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s Academy of Dramatic Art, which later became RADA. It was there in 1913 that he met Lady Constance Annesley, daughter of Earl Annersley.
In her memoirs, she wrote: “He was the only student at Tree’s who came anywhere near genius. He acted, wrote plays, composed music and played the fiddle, and had an unerring instinct for the production side of the theatre. He looked exactly like a hobgoblin with his humorous intelligent eyes peering whimsically from behind rimless pince-nez.”
The two of them, she said, didn’t fall in love but slipped into it, getting on well with each other and agreeing on so many important issues.
War came in 1914. Malleson signed up in September 1914 and was immediately sent to Malta. An issue with his feet meant that he was sent home, arriving in January 1915 and discharged.
He and Constance were secretly married in Bloomsbury registry office in the spring of that year. When Constance’s aristocratic family discovered what had happened, they were outraged. One month later, after the engagement had been formally announced in The Times, the couple had another marriage ceremony, this time in a church with Constance’s godfather, Rev Charles D’Arcy, the Anglican Primate of All Ireland, officiating.
Not long after the wedding, Constance’s sister, Lady Clare, gave the newlyweds tickets to an Independent Labour Party meeting, held as a tribute to Keir Hardy.
High esteem: a death notice for Miles Malleson in 1969
There, they met Clifford Allen who had been at Cambridge with Malleson. Allen influenced the couple into taking a pacifist stance regarding war.
Malleson wrote two plays about that time, D Company and Black ‘Ell. The former was based on his experiences with the Army while he was in Malta and the latter was about a soldier, decorated for gallantry, but who broke down in front of his sweetheart telling her about the German he killed who, in his dying moments, talked about his own young lady and how wretched it made him feel.
In October 1916, copies of both plays were seized by the government from the publishers, Henderson’s of London, on the grounds that the books contravened the Defence of the Realm regulations. They were described as “a deliberate calumny on the British soldier”.
It wasn’t until 1926 that Black ‘Ell was finally licensed for performance on the stage.
Having become a conscientious objector, Malleson appeared before a tribunal in Holborn Town Hall when he refused to return to any Army duties. The chair of the tribunal held the view that as Malleson had already served in the Army he couldn’t change his mind and “that he could have no conscience”.
The matter was resolved when the military representative on the tribunal pointed out that all men invalided home from abroad in 1914 were regarded as exempt. Thus, Malleson escaped any further attempts to conscript him.
Malleson was a supporter of the Bolshevik Revolution and a founder member of the socialist 1917 Club in Soho.
The Mallesons had an open marriage. Lady Constance became involved with Bertrand Russell and her husband had other relationships, too. They divorced in 1923 so that he could marry Joan Bilson.
Another Malleson play Paddly Pools, a children’s piece with a socialist message, was frequently performed by amateur dramatic groups in the period after the war.
Malleson became director of the Arts Guild of the Independent Labour Party in the 1920s, helping to establish many amateur dramatic societies up and down the country. The Arts Guild also helped stage plays by George Bernard Shaw, John Galsworthy and Laurence Housman.
In 1934, Malleson completed a play entitled Six Men of Dorset about the Tolpuddle Martyrs at the request of the Trades Union Congress. The story was originally written by a Dorset railwayman, Harvey Brooks, and Malleson was asked to turn it into a dramatic form. The play was performed when the TUC celebrated the centenary of the Tolpuddle Martyrs that year at their conference in Weymouth.
Malleson’s film career lasted for more than 40 years, including in later life several Hammer horrors. Among his last films First Men in the Moon in 1964 playing the role of the Dymchurch Registrar, and then being a salesman in You Must be Joking the following year.
Malleson’s eyesight had begun to fail in his later years, which forced him to stop working. He died after complications following a cataract operation in March 1969, aged 80.
A memorial service was held for him at St. Martins-in-the-Field where no less than Sybil Thorndike and Laurence Olivier gave readings. It was a testimony to the esteem in which Malleson was held by his fellow actors.
Malleson’s plays continue to be aired, sometimes in the most unlikely places. As recently as 2023, his play Yours Unfaithfully was produced for the very first time, some 90 years after it was written, at the Jermyn Street Theatre in London.
Unlike his great aunt, Miles Malleson didn’t need a memorial plaque. His work is still all around us, another Croydon boy who did very well for himself.
David Morgan, pictured right, is a former Croydon headteacher, now the volunteer education officer at Croydon Minster who offers tours or illustrated talks on the history around the Minster for local community groups
If you would like a group tour of Croydon Minster or want to book a school visit, then ring the Minster Office on 020 688 8104 or go to the website on www.croydonminster.org and use the contact page
Some previous articles by David Morgan:
- YouTuber Swallow is taking us on a Croydon walk through time
- Champion Ivy Russell’s weighty influence on women’s sport
- Witherby’s life’s work gave migrations of birds a ring of proof
- The church fire that consumed a thousand years of history
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In the 1892 Croydon street directory, Roslyn is the second house in Avondale Rd, on the left from Haling Park Rd, and Edmund Taylor Malleson is living there (Avondale Rd didn’t go to St. Augustine’s Ave in 1892).
In the 1907 directory (by which time Avondale Rd does go from Haling Park Rd to St. Augustine’s Ave), Roslyn is numbered 27, as part of the first five houses from 1892 which are all numbered 25 to 33, but no. 27 it is occupied by a Thomas Kiff. There are no Mallesons in Park Lane in 1907; the only one in Croydon is Godfrey Ken Malleson at Arracan, which is 2 Warminster Rd, South Norwood.
My only memory of him was playing the old buffer type charachter in British post war films, but clearly we have been enlightened regarding this man’s illustrous talents that require such a record of memory. Interesting that in this small area of Croydon that David Lean was also born and June Brown lived for many years. A real gold seam of the dramatic arts.
Not to mention (Dame) Peggy Ashcroft (1907-91),as in the former Ashcroft Theatre, which used to be next door to the Fairfield Halls. She was born in Croydon and initially lived in Tirlemont Rd, off St. Augustine’s Ave, another one in the fertile breeding ground of this part of South Croydon for thespians !
Loved Miles Malleson as the disappointed servile hangman in Kind Hearts and Coronets. Didn’t know until now that he was a Croydon man