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Career
On leaving school Priestley worked in the wool trade of his native city, but had ambitions to become a writer. He draws on memories of Bradford in many of the works he was to write after he had moved South. As an old man he deplored the destruction by developers of Victorian buildings such as the Swan Arcade in Bradford where he had his first job.
Priestley served during the First World War in the 10th battalion, the Duke of Wellington's Regiment. He was wounded in 1916 by mortar fire. Priestley received a university education at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and by the age of thirty had established a reputation as a humorous writer and critic. His first major success came with a novel, The Good Companions (1929). His novel Angel Pavement (1930) further established him as a successful popular novelist, but he became better-known as a dramatist. Without doubt, his best-known play is An Inspector Calls (1946). This was later made into a film starring Alastair Sim in 1954. His plays are more varied in tone than the novels, several being influenced by J.W. Dunne's theory of time, which plays a part in the plots of Dangerous Corner (1932) and Time and the Conways (1937). During this period, he wrote the travelogue An English Journey in 1934, which is an account of what he saw and heard while travelling through the country in the autumn of the previous year.
He co-wrote some minor works with his third wife, the archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes. During World War II he was a regular broadcaster on the BBC but his talks were cancelled, apparently as a result of complaints that they were too left wing. He chaired the 1941 Committee and, in 1942, he was a co-founder of the socialist Common Wealth Party. He was also a founding member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1958.
His political views were very important in his work. For example, An Inspector Calls had many references to socialism - the inspector was arguably a puppet via which Priestley could get his views across.