"Pretty bloody wonderful in an imperfect world" - our NHS

Paul’s play The Promise is in Chichester’s Minerva Theatre from Friday, July 19-Saturday, August 17. It is 1945. In a country exhausted and crippled by debt after six years of war, time is up for Winston Churchill’s Tories. With a rallying cry for change, Labour wins an astonishing, landslide election victory. Three years later they launched the NHS – a story Paul now tells in our own summer of change.

“I would love to say that I am the master of the zeitgeist with this play but actually I first wrote this play about four or five years ago, commissioned by the London Old Vic. It was programmed to go on there when Covid struck but it's great that it is happening now. It's a play about how the NHS came about but it's not a plod through the actual politics of the actual NHS. It is more about the government and the people that created it.

“I discovered a remarkable character who sat right at the end of the photograph on the day that the Clement Attlee government was formed, the sole woman in the photograph. I did the research and this turned out to be Ellen Wilkinson (1891-1947) who was a Labour politician in the 20s and 30s and in 1945 happened to be the chairman of the Labour Party. At the 1945 party conference she had urged the conference to break away from Churchill's government (of national unity), and the conference agreed to that. In truth old hands thought they were right at the heart of the national unity government and thought that they could never win but Ellen pushed very hard and got the election to happen sensing the country was in need of massive change.”

The election was won and Clement Attlee became prime minister, with a cabinet of competing heavyweights – from the loyal Ernest Bevin to scheming Herbert Morrison – arguing furiously about how to realise their manifesto: to make a welfare state, build millions of homes, reorganise dilapidated schools, and most dramatically, create a National Health Service that is free at the point of need.

“The play is the story of a group of people that came out of the very real trauma of war. They all had very, very specific traumatic stories and events. They could see that there was still a million soldiers fighting overseas and while the Blitz had not been anywhere near as bad as had happened in Germany, pretty much 30 per cent of urban housing stock was damaged. The country was massively in debt and Europe was in tatters.”

But driven by the passionate and courageous radical Ellen Wilkinson, and the visionary firebrand Nye Bevan, a very British revolution was in the air. In the face of bitter opposition, they made an audacious pledge.

“The play is called The Promise and it is about the promise that they made to the country, this great gift that they gave to us but it is also about the cost. Ellen never lived to see the NHS and yet the NHS became this thing that we still treasure and that we still worry about. There was a sense that what they were doing as well as being wonderful was also impossible. There were lots of arguments where some of the people on the right of the party were saying we simply couldn't afford it, that it was a fantasy, that it was a utopian idea. And the play tells that story but it is not a dry political play. It is much more about this group of people jockeying and struggling at a very specific moment in British history to redefine what it means to be British. I'm hoping that people will come away from the play having really enjoyed getting to know these people, how hard they had to fight and what it meant to them to create this thing that sometimes we take for granted. Perhaps the play will mean that people won't take it for granted. I don't think the NHS is perfect by any stretch of the imagination but I don't think it could be perfect. But what I do think is that this government created something that was pretty bloody wonderful in an imperfect world.”