In 1968 television dramatist Dennis Potter, who was already a controversial figure in his native Forest of Dean when, for his next play, he took as inspiration the notorious local event, the killing of the bears. Such was the potency of this dark moment in Forest history that reaction against Potter’s choice of subject prompted a slew of letters in our local newspapers even before filming had started. This correspondence provides a fascinating insight into the Forest community’s relationship with the events of eighty years before, but even more so with Potter himself.

Dennis was born in Joyford near Berry Hill. His father Walter was a Forest collier, his mother Margaret nee Wale was a Londoner whose mother had left the Forest to ‘go into service’ there. Dennis and younger sister June went the village primary school at Christchurch and attended Berry Hill’s Salem chapel. As a child he played in Berry Hill Band and later played rugby for the village team. After starting at Bells Grammar School in Coleford, Dennis completed his secondary education at St Clement Danes School in Fulham. For his compulsory National Service Dennis worked as a Russian translator in the Army Intelligence Corps. He spent a brief stint working in Cinderford’s Carters biscuit factory before in 1955 entering New College Oxford on a scholarship to study Politics, Philosophy and Economics.

After graduating from Oxford in 1959 Potter began work as a BBC trainee. This included working on the weekly current affairs television programme Panorama. One edition entitled The Closure of Pits in the Forest of Dean was criticised in the Dean Forest Mercury by the Executive Committee of the Development Association of the Royal Forest of Dean for presenting an “unnecessarily gloomy picture”.

This was only a foretaste of what was to come after the broadcast of his documentary in 1960 about class, culture and identity, Between Two Rivers. Filmed in Forest of Dean, including Cinderford, Coleford and Berry Hill, it included footage of his family home and that of his neighbours, as well as interviews with local people including family friends. In the programme Potter examined his desperate need to escape the confines of his culturally, socially and physically cramped life in the Forest and his subsequent liberation at Oxford.

Excoriating letters – that included such terms as “disgusting film”, “a diabolical disgrace” and “deplorable piece of unfair publicity” – appeared in the Forest newspapers following the broadcast (as well as a few in praise of the programme). Potter responded point-by-point. Such was the strength of local reaction against the film he recalled years later to John Cook: “Christ, I thought they were going to lynch me”. He later admitted that the film was a mistake and, when pressed, that with it he had in effect betrayed his parents.

A Beast with Two Backs

Potter’s next television programme to feature the Forest of Dean would be his drama inspired by the killing of the bears, A Beast with Two Backs.

The attack in the Forest of Dean in 1889 on four Frenchmen and the killing of their two dancing bears became a sensational story in the national press at the time. Reference to it quickly became used by people outside of the Forest of Dean as a means to ridicule Foresters. Residents of Cinderford and Ruardean argued over who was responsible for the death of the bears. Asking “Who killed the bears?” became an invitation to a fight.

A Beast with Two Backs is not a retelling of what happened. In the drama, Joe, an Italian, arrives in the Forest with his dancing bear, Gina. They are briefly welcomed but then abused as a foreigner. Meanwhile, local miner Mickey, unwilling to leave his wife, attacked and seemingly murdered his mistress, Rebecca, who had just informed him she was pregnant. When her dead body is discovered, Mickey succeeds in pinning blame for the killing onto the bear, aided by a wilfully misinterpreted sermon from the local fire and brimstone preacher Ebenezer. Joe and Gina are cornered in a local quarry and Gina is beaten and stoned to death by Mickey and his associates.

On 1 March 1968 the Dean Forest Mercury announced that Dennis Potter had written “some new lines on the bear story”. Filming would include bringing “a fully grown Russian bear, Gina” to the Forest.

Large parts of the play were filmed on location in Lydbrook and local people, including fifteen children from Lydbrook School were recruited as extras. Other locations included Goodrich Castle where Berry Hill Silver Band, suitably attired in period uniforms performed. The final grim scene depicting the killing of Gina was filmed at Oak Quarry (today the recycling centre), arranged via the then Deputy Gaveller.

The producers became aware of how controversial the bear story was locally, as correspondence regarding arrangements for siting Gina’s bus makes clear:

“It seems that our filming this story has genuinely stirred up considerable agitation in various quarters … we would hate to expose you to any unpleasantness.”

Emily Moore of Cinderford described Potter’s choice of underlying story as “deplorable and quite unworthy of a local playwright” and in contrast to the “good, clean Forest humour, written by Cinderford playwrights”. She was amazed that Potter should choose to live in Lydney then Ross-On-Wye. Potter’s response opens in a humorous and razor-sharp tone:

“But where on earth does Mrs Moore think Lydney and Ross-on-Wye are, for goodness sake? I live a mere ten or eleven miles from where I was born and the Forest rears up in front of our windows like a great green giant. It’s all the same patch of ground to me.”

“The letter to you, [the newspaper] however, was not the only one Mrs Moore wrote last week. She also sent one to me, very different in tone, and it arrived safely all the way here to Ross with absolutely no trouble at the frontier posts.”

Potter pointed out that the play is not a retelling of what had happened in 1889:

“It is, for me, a story about suspicion, fear, poisonous rumour, deep hostility to the stranger and, in an odd sort of way, a parable about crime and punishments”.

Potter goes on to explain that though these themes are common to mankind everywhere – “we are sometimes like Gods, sometimes like beasts, more often somewhere between the two”.

He hoped that local people:“Will see an attempt made by a Forest of Dean writer to convey the unique light-and-shade of our Forest of fascinating ‘land on its own’ mentality, its astonishing contrasts, its mixtures of breathtaking beauty and sudden sour squalor, huge generosity and shrunken narrow-mindedness, warm native wit and cold native suspicions, intense independence and magnificent pride of spirit occasionally corroded by gossipy back-biting jealousy. We Foresters know all about this, surely: it is what makes us the beings we are, which I wouldn’t swap for anything.”

Meanwhile an endorsement for the play came from Ken Sollars of Lydbrook:“The story outline is strong. The use of the ‘murder of a bear’ with the ‘murder of a man’, in addition to the eternal triangle is classical. I think that the author has done well considering he has had a number of plays screened on television; after all he is still ‘only a bit of a boychap’.”

A week later, entirely in dialect with a letter starting ‘Zurr’ [Sir], Frank Yemm of Newnham manages to weave the bears into that perennial Forest issue, free roaming sheep: “Wy doan un leave tha bairs abide, umm be jud now let um be, an as vert tha zhip…”

A Beast with Two Backs was broadcast as part of the BBC’s Wednesday Play strand on 20 November 1968, and with Forest residents now having finally seen it, the letters flew into the Dean Forest Mercury. Under the headline “Mr. Potter’s ‘Beast’ gets hounded and commended” an editorial described it as “a brutal piece of drama” that was “a ghastly experience” to watch but also “a clever bit of drama” that one was compelled to see through to the end.

A letter, signed from the entire Christian family of Tuffley and a Mrs Dawson nee Christian of Cinderford criticised the play’s seemingly negative portrayal of religion – Potter using it as the ‘whipping boy’ – they also criticised its quality, writing that: “The general standard of acting was poor. It was a hack production”.

Evelyn Davis of Worrall Hill was even more forthright: “We did not know Lydbrook was going to be degraded but Dennis Potter’s portrayal of the Forest of Dean in the play ‘The bear with two backs’ has certainly devalued it. An utter load of rubbish.”

A letter in praise of the play from YR Yarworth of Lydney used it as an opportunity to take a pot shot at Forests as a whole: “Seldom have I observed such an accurate portrayal of people and personality than that related to the residents of the Forest of Dean.

Mr Potter is to be congratulated on his unerring attention to detail: it was all there – the bigotry, the malicious gossip, the evil informer, the scandalous indiscretion, the total intolerance; it could only be based on absolute fact.”

Much of the criticism of the play, the Panorama feature, and Potter’s 1960 documentary had focused on the absence in the footage of the Forest’s more picturesque locations. Looking back on the A Beast with Two Backs’ production, in 1993 Potter recalled that he had wanted to “explore the claustrophobic setting of the forest … the sense of isolation and inturnedness”. It is a darkly themed play and it is hard to imagine it working at all well if it had been filmed at the more idyllic landscape spots in the Forest.

Local writer, Cinderford’s Harry Beddington, wrote a wonderfully evocative piece in the Dean Forest Mercury: “Having watched, enjoyed and admired Dennis Potter’s play on Wednesday night I was not surprised next morning to find in Cinderford how deeply feelings had been stirred.

“The small group which meets regularly at the corner of the new shops was faced with the general question “What dids’t thou think o’ thic play o’ Potter’s?”

“There seemed to be a general indignation that the play had ignored the beauty of the Forest – “Thou’st ‘ave thought thou wast in the slate quarries o’ Festiniog” and had missed completely the innate kindness of many Foresters - “We b’yunt all as bad as ‘im made out – our feyther’s weren’t neither.”

“What a pity too that no room had been found in his grim story for some of the dignified kind old folk one has always been able to meet in any part of the Forest.

“I hope that some day soon, Dennis Potter will apply his great genius to the writing of a play which will draw on the wealth of beauty of his native soil and will portray the kind good humour and sound sense of his own folk.”

A decade later Pennies from Heaven (1978) also filmed in the Forest of Dean, provoked more letters to the Dean Forest Mercury.

Reflecting on A Beast with Two Backs, many years later, Potter conceded that some of the local criticism regarding its portrayal of its Forest of Dean setting was justified:

“Unfortunately I don’t think it actually did show the true nature of the Forest, rising in layers between two rivers – green, black, green, black, huddled, interned. Some of it didn’t get across.”

The writers clearly cared deeply about how their Forest of Dean was portrayed. They were critically engaged too with television drama as an artform.

Watching the play today is to watch an historical record: of late 1960s television drama production techniques; of Dennis Potter’s continuing development as a dramatist; and of parts of Lower Lydbrook now long-since demolished.

As for the story of the killing of the bears and that slur, this reaction from a Drybrook resident at the 2015 Lydbrook screening of A Beast with Two Backs gives a lovely insight into its perceived status today:

“I’ve always felt the bears was a secret…that actually now you can go into pubs in Ruardean and not be beaten up, and I think that’s a bit of a shame.“

If you have a local history story you think would be good for a future edition of the New Regard please contact the editor, Nigel Costley at [email protected]