This play was produced by the White Rose company in Harrogate during the week beginning Monday 22 April 1940, prior to a London run which never took place. The script was thought to be lost, but I tracked down a copy in November 2007 in the Lord Chamberlain's Archive at the British Library where it had been submitted for censorship.
A ‘Beggar’s Bush’ is often thought to be a traditional meeting place for mediaeval beggars. There were well known ones in Dublin and near Huntingdon. An alternative explanation of the phrase, put to me by Neil Howlett who has done a great deal of research on the term, is that they are simply pieces of marginal land whose owners could make nothing from them and so would be reduced to beggary. There was a Beggar's Bush in North Somerset south of Bristol, later used for school playing fields. In the early 1930s Canning worked for the education office in Weston-super-Mare, so it is possible he knew of this one or one of several others in Somerset through his work and that it gave him the title and theme of the play.
This is not the first play with this title. There was also a seventeenth century play by Fletcher and Massinger, performed in 1622 and printed in 1647, in which the deposed king of Flanders disguises himself as a beggar.
Canning’s play belongs in a tradition of plays describing working class or Bohemian free spirits being tamed by middle class morality, and their eventual reversion to their original condition. I am reminded of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience and Shaw’s Pygmalion, while Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton embodies something of the same theme in reverse. Another source for the plot might be Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story The Man with the Twisted Lip, in which businessman Neville St Clair is discovered to be the beggar Boone, a role he has adopted as he has found begging in the City to be more profitable than business.
The play begins in a rundown London house where a group of professional beggars meet. These include The Professor whose speciality is writing begging letters to the heirs of people in obituaries pretending to have known the deceased, the enigmatic Charlie who is a pavement artist and supplies racing tips to city businessmen, Burke a young Irish lad who is being taught the trade of begging, and the ambitious Steve. Steve follows Charlie one evening and discovers he has a normal bourgeois home. He tries to force himself into Charlie's family, with upsetting results for his girlfriend Lydia and Charlie's daughter Carol.
The part of Burke was taken by Trevor Howard, then relatively unknown. Ten years later he was to star in the film of Canning's novel The Golden Salamander.