[BITList] usty, if not scandalous

[John Feltham]

To read this Life of the Day complete with a picture of the subject,
visit http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/lotw/2015-09-27



Miles,  Bernard James, Baron Miles  (1907-1991), actor and theatre manager, was born on 27 September 1907 at 1 Poplar Terrace, New Road, Hillingdon, Uxbridge, Middlesex, the son of Edwin James Miles, market gardener, and his wife, Barbara Hooper, nee Fletcher, a Scottish cook. Brought up in a strict Baptist household, he learned from his parents the value of thrift and hard work, as well as a wealth of ancient countryside lore which he later used in a triumphant series of music-hall monologues about life on a farm.

Educated at Uxbridge county school, Miles won a scholarship to Pembroke College, Oxford, and worked briefly as a schoolmaster in Yorkshire. He abandoned this career in 1930 when he made his stage debut as the Second Messenger in a Baliol Holloway revival of Shakespeare's Richard III. In 1931 he married the actress Josephine Wilson (d. 1990), who gave him unstinting support. They had two daughters and a son. The carpentry Miles had learned from his father came in useful during several subsequent years travelling the country with repertory companies, when his responsibilities ranged from building scenery to playing small parts. Towards the end of the 1930s he began to make a name in London, in music-halls and late-night cabaret theatres, where he perfected his comic monologues in Late Joys (1939) and three Herbert Farjeon revues.

During the war Miles found film fame in Noel Coward's In Which We Serve (1942) but also frequently toured with the Old Vic as Iago and directed John Mills in Men in Shadow (1942), later following Mills in the leading role. As the war ended he was back with the Old Vic company at the New Theatre for the 1947-8 season, playing the Inquisitor in Saint Joan and Christopher Sly in The Taming of the Shrew.

From the late 1940s Miles's energies were focused on building the first Mermaid Theatre in his own garden in St John's Wood, a wooden playhouse faithfully replicating Shakespeare's Globe long before the birth of Sam Wanamaker's similar project. In its first (1951) season he played Caliban in The Tempest and, as producer and director, persuaded Kirsten Flagstad and Maggie Teyte to sing Purcell's Dido and Aeneas. The Mermaid then found a temporary home at the Royal Exchange in the City, before Miles and his equally tireless wife finally settled it in Puddle Dock, the first theatre to have been opened in the City for 300 years. They spent six years building the new Mermaid and it eventually opened in May 1959 with a triumphant Lionel Bart musical, Lock up your Daughters, based somewhat loosely on Henry Fielding's Rape upon Rape. Though he was to suffer all the architectural and financial problems only too familiar to anyone trying to build a theatre in Britain, or merely to keep one open, Miles's years at the Mermaid saw triumphant revivals of Treasure Island (in which he was always a definitive Long John Silver) and long-running musical celebrations of the songs of Noel Coward and Cole Porter. The Mermaid also gave birth to Side by Side by Sondheim in the late 1970s, and more classically was the venue for many notable Bernard Shaw and Shakespeare revivals, some of the latter in relatively modern dress. For his services to the theatre Miles was appointed CBE in 1953, knighted in 1969, and given a life peerage as Baron Miles of Blackfriars in 1979.

Miles was an old-fashioned actor, and was often out of tune also with modern directing techniques, but his ability to keep the Mermaid going on knife-edge finance, and frequently to retrieve it from the jaws of bankruptcy, was always admirable. If he sometimes cast himself in wildly unsuitable roles (Oedipus, for instance, or John Gabriel Borkman) he was nevertheless a memorable Schweyk in Schweyk in the Second World War (1963) and a formidable Falstaff in both parts of Henry IV (1970).

Like Joan Littlewood at the Theatre Royal a little further beyond the City in Stratford East, Miles worked with very slender resources and often scant critical acclaim; sadly, what should have been a triumphant rebuilding project when the Mermaid moved a few hundred yards inland in 1981 ended in bankruptcy, and in Miles's forced resignation as artistic director of the theatre he had built and still so loved. He and his wife had invested all their own money in the rebuilding project, and were forced to sell their London home to meet their debts. Following the death of his wife in 1990, Miles was moved into a nursing home with nothing more than his state pension, though funds were raised for him by an all-star Bernard Miles Celebration at the Mermaid on 3 March 1991, at which he made his last public appearance in a wheelchair, having recently fallen and broken a leg. He died at the Thistle Hill Nursing Home, Knaresborough, Yorkshire, on 14 June 1991. He was survived by his son and one daughter, his other daughter, Sally (who had joined her parents in the management of the Mermaid Theatre), having died of motor neurone disease.

Miles can still be seen in such major movies as Noel Coward's In Which We Serve (1942), Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), John Huston's Moby Dick (1956), Basil Dearden's The Smallest Show on Earth (1957), and Charles Crichton's Battle of the Sexes (1960). He was a pioneer of the 'talking' gramophone record in the 1940s; his Over the Gate monologues, of a mythical Buckinghamshire farmer, were released on several bestselling 78 r.p.m. discs (and he would also occasionally perform them live in the dying days of the music-hall). These were, for their time, if not scandalous then at least lusty, and during his management of the Mermaid Theatre in a still repressive theatrical era (when the lord chamberlain had to approve all scripts) he did his best to move the barriers of sexual tolerance slightly forward, in an always Falstaffian manner. He was also known to television audiences for a lengthy series of commercials on behalf of the Egg Marketing Board. Nevertheless his real legacy was the Mermaid Theatre. Though still standing just north of its original Puddle Dock site, the Mermaid enjoyed little success after he left it, and endured several periods of prolonged closure.

Sheridan Morley 

Sources  B. Miles and J. Wilson, The Mermaid Theatre (1951) + G. Frow, The Mermaid 10: a review of the theatre, 1959-1969 (1969) + The Times (15 June 1991) + The Independent (15 June 1991) + The Independent (20 June 1991) + The Independent (25 June 1991) + The Independent (1 July 1991) + WWW, 1991-5 + b. cert. + d. cert.
Archives GL, corresp. and publishers | BFI, corresp. with Ivor Montagu + NL Wales, letters to G. E. Evans
Likenesses  D. Levine, pen drawing, 1967, NPG · R. Noakes, bronze head, 1969, NPG · photograph, 1971, Hult. Arch. [see illus.] · photograph, repro. in The Times · photograph, repro. in The Independent (15 June 1991)
Wealth at death  under £125,000: probate, 8 Oct 1991, CGPLA Eng. & Wales



========================================================================
©    Oxford     University    Press,    2004.    See     legal    notice:
http://www.oup.com/oxforddnb/legal/

We hope you have enjoyed this Life of The Day, but if you do wish to stop
receiving   these   messages,   please   EITHER   send   a   message   to
LISTSERV at WEBBER.UK.HUB.OUP.COM with

signoff ODNBLIFEOFTHEDAY-L

in the body (not the subject line) of the message

OR

send an  email to  epm-oxforddnb at oup.com, asking us  to stop  sending you
these messages.