British comedy seemed obsessed with hospitals during the 1960s and 1970s, from films like Carry on Matron to the TV Series, Only When I Laugh. What was it about hospital wards that appealed to our sense of humour then? Perhaps one of the origins of this genre of comedy was hospital entertainment during the Second World War. Military authorities recognised the value of providing shows to troops recuperating in hospitals to raise their morale and speed their recovery right from the beginning of the war. To illustrate this, the War Office proposed reducing spending on professional entertainment for the Army by 50% in the second half of 1940, the Army Council insisted that hospital entertainment should be exempt from the cut.[1] Hospital entertainment was seen as much a part of welfare and mental well-being as recreation, with performers boosting patients’ spirits by performing their acts, but also by engaging in conversation, reading newspapers and even writing letters home for those too ill to do it themselves.[2] This article examines hospital entertainment during the Italian campaign and what lessons it provided for troop welfare in other theatres.
Why was hospital entertainment needed? You may be surprised to hear that soldiers fighting in Italy during 1944 were more likely to be in a hospital due to disease than battle or accidental injury.[3] Malaria, dysentery, jaundice, venereal disease and scabies were all common conditions for patients being treated in Italian wards. To a lesser extent, there were patients presenting with psychiatric disorders and soldiers with self-inflicted wounds (a bullet to the heel or toe, usually) that needed medical attention.[4] Of course, there were also men suffering from injuries sustained during fighting in the harsh mountains or suffering exposure from the bitter cold as well. Fennell uses rates of sickness and battle exhaustion as indicators of poor morale in his excellent book, Fighting the People’s War.[5] It is safe to say, then, that by the time most of these men had reached a hospital bed, their morale was rock bottom.
So what would cheer them up? Well, how about a joke? Here’s one:
Two soldiers found themselves in hospital beds next to each other. ‘Hello, Bill’, said one. ‘Come in here to die?’ ‘No,’ said the other, ‘I came in yesterdie.’[6]
Didn’t like that? Well, how about this one from Joyce Grenfell in her memoir, Requests the Pleasure:
It was known that we were on a hospital tour, but we were a little surprised to hear ourselves announced as ‘two well-known artistes who have been flown out from home to entertain men in bed’. A man standing behind Viola said: ‘Cor, so they’ve laid that on now,’ but on the whole the introduction, though fully registered, was tactfully ignored and we thought it best to pretend we hadn’t heard it.[7]
Well, suit yourself, humour is, after all, subjective. If you have had your nerves shattered by a German mortar stonk or were recovering from a dose of V.D. in a hospital ward, you might not want to hear material you last heard on Blackpool pier before the war.
The content and the way entertainment was delivered to hospital patients evolved during the Italian Campaign. In late 1943, Waldini and his Gypsy Band visited 57th General Hospital and performed on an open lorry as a stage. An audience of 1000 patients went outside to see them, and Wally Bishop describes how “stretcher cases lay in rows in front of us.”[8] I am not sure the Matron would have entirely approved of this treatment of the “stretcher cases”! Patricia Burke and Gabrielle Brune adopted more of a blitzkrieg approach when it came to hospitals, providing twelve 15-minute sing-alongs in a day for Eighth Army wards in forward areas.[9] Naomi Jacob describes how ENSA artists, who were waiting in Naples to join the next touring party, would be packed off to hospitals as a Ward Party.[10] They could all learn a thing or two from Joyce Grenfell, though.
Few artists came close to Grenfell in terms of hospital entertainment. She tailored her act—a mix of songs, piano solos, and monologues—to the patients’ conditions in the hospital ward. Visiting a British hospital full of casualties from bitter fighting at Monte Cassino, she provided what the troops wanted most, a mother figure:
I sang, in the smallest voice I could find, gentle songs, familiar songs they might have known when they were children, and they asked for more. A very young boy with pale gold hair and a Devonshire accent lay very flat and still in his bed. He beckoned me over: ‘Could you please sing a song about a mother?’ I did not know one. Then I thought of a lullaby, ‘Sweetest little feller’, and I sang that for him. It proved to be the right choice, and after that, I kept it in the repertoire. You learn as you go… And you stop being afraid of sentiment.[11]
In other hospital wards, she asked the patients where they were from and sang songs from those parts of the British Isles to remind them of home. Another singer who used this technique was Judy Ray. Eric Taylor writes about her visit to the 65th British General Hospital in Naples:
singing ‘South of the Border’. She brought to it all the nostalgia that troops liked with their songs, it was a tune from their teens. And then with hardly a pause, she switched to other ballads, ‘The Rose of Tralee’, ‘We’ll gather Lilacs’, ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkley Square’ and, of course, ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’.
Grenfell and Ray leaned into sentimentality, wanting to remind the men of home, raise their morale, and give them a reason to hasten their recovery. Advising Basil Dean in June 1944 of the sort of material that worked well in hospitals, Grenfell wrote:
Lots of sentiment because that is what they want. Funnily enough, the idler they are, the more homesick, and the more sentimental they become.
In other words, remind them of home to motivate them to recover and return to their loved ones.
After her first tour of North Africa and Italy in May 1944, Grenfell wrote a letter outlining her recommendations for hospital entertainment to ENSA.[12] She emphasises the need to avoid rushing and would spend three days at a single hospital, providing three one-hour shows each day. The shows would be followed by talking and spending time with the patients on the ward. Grenfell empathised with her audience and urged other performers to be mindful of the human side of welfare. She recommended always speaking to the Matron of the ward first, who would be able to provide a summary of the general condition of the patients and who needed special attention. Understanding that her act might not be every patient’s cup of tea, but being stuck in bed provided a captive audience, Grenfell began her performance with this announcement:
Here is the programme and if it pleases you – fine. If you do not feel like it just turn your face to the wall.
It was important not to expect anything from the audience. A comedian in a Garrison Theatre would be mortified if the crowd did not laugh at any of his jokes, but Grenfell explains, “You’ve got to be prepared to do the programme to complete silence.” For this reason, it was better to have dedicated hospital parties composed of solo or two-handed acts, rather than sending artists who were merely filling time before their tour began. And finally, adapting the act to the audience is crucial. For instance, patients who were convalescing were more likely to want a sing-along, whereas seriously ill men preferred gentle music. These words of wisdom, based on her hard-won experiences, would provide ENSA with a blueprint for the rest of the war in Northwest Europe and the Far East.
Morale is difficult to measure, and it is impossible to judge the effectiveness of hospital entertainment during the Second World War. What we do know is that the military authorities realised the importance of its impact on welfare for their men and encouraged performances in their hospitals. Joyce Grenfell, with her intelligent and empathetic routine, and other performers provided more than just a moment of light-hearted entertainment for patients in the hospital.
Does it hurt? Only when I laugh!
[1] Brigadier M.C. Morgan, C.B.E., M.C., p.s.c., ‘WO 277/4 Army Welfare 1939-1945’, TNA [The National Archives], The War Office, 1953, p. 44, WO 277/4: Army Welfare 1939-1945, 1953.
[2] Professor Edgar Jones, ‘Morale, Psychological Wellbeing of UK Armed Forces and Entertainment: A Report for The British Forces Foundation’, King’s Centre for Military Health Research, Kings College London, January 2012 <https://bff.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Morale_Report_BFF_screen.pdf> [accessed 16 April 2024].
[3] Diana Butler, ‘CAB 101/224: The British Soldier in Italy, September 1943-June 1944’, TNA [The National Archives], 1967, p. 8, CAB 101/224: The British Soldier in Italy, September 1943-June 1944, by Butler, D.F., 1967.
[4] Rick Atkinson, The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944, The Liberation Trilogy, Volume 2, 1st ed (Henry Holt, 2007), p. 492,509.
[5] Jonathan Fennell, Fighting the People’s War: The British and Commonwealth Armies and the Second World War, Armies of the Second World War (Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 355.
[6] Richard Fawkes, Fighting for a Laugh: Entertaining the British and American Armed Forces, 1939-1946 (Macdonald and Jane’s, 1978), p. 144.
[7] Joyce Grenfell, Joyce Grenfell Requests the Pleasure, First (Macmillan London Limited, 1976), p. 189.
[8] Wally A. Bishop, Front Line Theatre - Waldini (Priory Press Ltd, 1946), p. 55.
[9] Basil Dean, The Theatre at War (George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd, 1956), p. 465.
[10] Naomi Jacob, Me Over There, First Edition (Hutchinson & Co, 1946), p. 105.
[11] Grenfell, Joyce Grenfell Requests the Pleasure, p. 204.
[12] ‘IWM Documents.7473: Virginia Vernon Diaries’, IWM [Imperial War Museum], n.d., sect. 2, Documents.7473: Virginia Vernon Diaries.