Thursday, June 11, 2009

Dennis O'Neill and Peter Grimes

I have written before about the death of Dennis O'Neill at a farm in Shropshire in January 1945, which was one of the reasons for the passing of the 1948 Children Act.

In one post I pointed out the case led directly to Agatha Christie writing The Mousetrap and examined a parallel between the case and a book by my favourite writer as a child, Malcolm Saville.

Writing in the Independent last month, Anna Picard suggested that the case would also have been in the minds of the first-night audience of Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes at Sadler's Wells in June 1945.

1 comment:

Alec said...

An interesting blog. I'd known about Bonkers, but didn't realize he knew anyone with one of these infernal Babbage machines. On the subject of forgotten watershed moments after the mistreatment of a minor, what about that raised by David Robertson whilst he was MP for when I bide.