Harold Pinter’s archive had British Library stumped – until it turned to Wisden

Playwright's previously unpublished letters unearthed

Previously unpublished letters written by a young Harold Pinter showing the depth of his personal ambition and early devotion to Samuel Beckett have come to light – but could only be dated thanks to his detailed accounts of county cricket matches.

The British Library announced that it had acquired more than 100 of Pinter’s letters, written between the ages of 18 and 30. They were written to Henry Woolf and Mick Goldstein, members of Pinter’s “Hackney gang”, who met at school and remained friends until the playwright’s death in 2008 at the age of 78.

One light-hearted note details a night out on the town with the gang, where one member of the group was “pissed as 10 newts” and was chucked out of two pubs before he “insulted a party of coppers”.

In another correspondence, Pinter talks earnestly of forming a theatre company with the Hackney gang, asserting with characteristic confidence: “It will be a great success and it will give us something to live on. The theatre is one of the good things of civilisation.”

He would go on to become one of the most influential British dramatists in history, praised for his work including The Birthday Party and The Homecoming, and winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005.

Pinter’s love of the work of fellow late-modernist playwright Beckett is well known, but the breathless manner in which he praises his hero’s novel Molloy gives new and “very good insights into Beckett’s influence on Pinter”, according to Rachel Foss, the institution’s modern literary manuscript curator.

“It is a work of dread and confusion, and I am branded by it… I am changed by Molloy,” Pinter wrote in one letter, while elsewhere in the collection he writes: “The intellectual climate has been typhooned by Mr Samuel Beckett.”

Harold Pinter’s archive was acquired by the British Library in 2007, but it contained very little material relating to the years covered in these newly unearthed letters. Even Pinter biographer Michael Billington admitted he had not known about them.

For all these literary references, however, the experts revealed they had needed an unusual source to accurately work out when the letters were written: the cricketing almanac Wisden.

Few of the letters had accurate dates, so his details about county cricket matches prompted the experts to turn to Wisden as well as online resource Cricinfo and other cricket databases to work out their chronology.

“In the letters there are quite detailed comments about cricket and important players, it’s a running thread, it was a very useful way of dating them,” Ms Foss said.

A reference to the Yorkshire batsman Doug Padgett scoring a century against Warickshire at Edgbaston in 1955 helped the Pinter enthusiasts. “We shall certainly hear more of Padgett,” Pinter proclaimed, before writing excitedly of the “unique happening” of another player “being called back to continue his innings”. He added: “A unique happening. You heard of it?” He added: “I have five bob on Yorkshire catching, and beating Surrey.”

Ms Foss said: “They are very vivid letters. We haven’t seen that closeness and the intimacy and the voice he uses in writing to his childhood friends. They have the kind of intimacy you don’t see normally.”