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Imperial War Museum Wartime Classics
Three Men in New Suits
The friendship of three men is endangered when they return home from the war to the village of Lambury to differing receptions
Paperback
Published May 1, 1985
60 people want to read
About the author
J.B. Priestley
470 books289 followersJohn Boynton Priestley was an English writer. He was the son of a schoolmaster, and after schooling he worked for a time in the local wool trade. Following the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, Priestley joined the British Army, and was sent to France - in 1915 taking part in the Battle of Loos. After being wounded in 1917 Priestley returned to England for six months; then, after going back to the Western Front he suffered the consequences of a German gas attack, and, treated at Rouen, he was declared unfit for active service and was transferred to the Entertainers Section of the British Army.
When Priestley left the army he studied at Cambridge University, where he completed a degree in Modern History and Political Science. Subsequently he found work as theatre reviewer with the Daily News, and also contributed to the Spectator, the Challenge and Nineteenth Century. His earliest books included The English Comic Characters (1925), The English Novel (1927), and English Humour (1928). His breakthrough came with the immensely popular novel The Good Companions, published in 1929, and Angel Pavement followed in 1930. He emerged, too, as a successful dramatist with such plays as Dangerous Corner (1932), Time and the Conways (1937), When We Are Married (1938) and An Inspector Calls (1947).
The publication of English Journey in 1934 emphasised Priestley's concern for social problems and the welfare of ordinary people.
During the Second World War Priestley became a popular and influential broadcaster with his famous Postscripts that followed the nine o'clock news BBC Radio on Sunday evenings. Starting on 5th June 1940, Priestley built up such a following that after a few months it was estimated that around 40 per cent of the adult population in Britain was listening to the programme.
Some members of the Conservative Party, including Winston Churchill, expressed concern that Priestley might be expressing left-wing views on the programme, and, to his dismay, Priestley was dropped after his talk on 20th October 1940.
After the war Priestley continued his writing, and his work invariably provoked thought, and his views were always expressed in his blunt Yorkshire style.
His prolific output continued right up to his final years, and to the end he remained the great literary all-rounder. His favourite among his books was for many years the novel Bright Day, though he later said he had come to prefer The Image Men.
It should not be overlooked that Priestley was an outstanding essayist, and many of his short pieces best capture his passions and his great talent and his mastery of the English language. He set a fine example for any would-be author.
When Priestley left the army he studied at Cambridge University, where he completed a degree in Modern History and Political Science. Subsequently he found work as theatre reviewer with the Daily News, and also contributed to the Spectator, the Challenge and Nineteenth Century. His earliest books included The English Comic Characters (1925), The English Novel (1927), and English Humour (1928). His breakthrough came with the immensely popular novel The Good Companions, published in 1929, and Angel Pavement followed in 1930. He emerged, too, as a successful dramatist with such plays as Dangerous Corner (1932), Time and the Conways (1937), When We Are Married (1938) and An Inspector Calls (1947).
The publication of English Journey in 1934 emphasised Priestley's concern for social problems and the welfare of ordinary people.
During the Second World War Priestley became a popular and influential broadcaster with his famous Postscripts that followed the nine o'clock news BBC Radio on Sunday evenings. Starting on 5th June 1940, Priestley built up such a following that after a few months it was estimated that around 40 per cent of the adult population in Britain was listening to the programme.
Some members of the Conservative Party, including Winston Churchill, expressed concern that Priestley might be expressing left-wing views on the programme, and, to his dismay, Priestley was dropped after his talk on 20th October 1940.
After the war Priestley continued his writing, and his work invariably provoked thought, and his views were always expressed in his blunt Yorkshire style.
His prolific output continued right up to his final years, and to the end he remained the great literary all-rounder. His favourite among his books was for many years the novel Bright Day, though he later said he had come to prefer The Image Men.
It should not be overlooked that Priestley was an outstanding essayist, and many of his short pieces best capture his passions and his great talent and his mastery of the English language. He set a fine example for any would-be author.
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
February 18, 2025
Because I forgot to check goodreads I bought a second copy of this at oxfam. But I'm glad I did as it was a really nice read and I had totally forgotten it.
This was a random find at Any Amount of Books on Charring Cross road. A lovely first edition published in 1945. The effects of the war not just in the story but in the paper itself which was very pulpy with flecks of darker brown.
The story was about three men who'd been in the war returning home and trying to readjust to life. There was a posh man, a farmer and a worker whose wife had been a prostitute to the American soliders while he was away, after their baby died. The posh man was trying to cope with his former Bright Young Thing style life of the thirties, drinking too much and flirting, though that had all become quite empty. It was very much a political piece wondering now how things could improve after the war and how not to just fall into the same trap of life before and letting the wrong people run things. One thing I learned from it was that there was a lot of talk about emigration out of the UK at the end of the war. It was a fear that too many people would leave the country which was something I'd never heard before and found quite fascinating. A very interesting find.
This was a random find at Any Amount of Books on Charring Cross road. A lovely first edition published in 1945. The effects of the war not just in the story but in the paper itself which was very pulpy with flecks of darker brown.
The story was about three men who'd been in the war returning home and trying to readjust to life. There was a posh man, a farmer and a worker whose wife had been a prostitute to the American soliders while he was away, after their baby died. The posh man was trying to cope with his former Bright Young Thing style life of the thirties, drinking too much and flirting, though that had all become quite empty. It was very much a political piece wondering now how things could improve after the war and how not to just fall into the same trap of life before and letting the wrong people run things. One thing I learned from it was that there was a lot of talk about emigration out of the UK at the end of the war. It was a fear that too many people would leave the country which was something I'd never heard before and found quite fascinating. A very interesting find.
February 19, 2019
This book was written in 1945 just as soldiers were being demobbed from the army after the end of WW2. Each soldier received a new suit with which to face life in Civvy Street. It took more than a new suit for soldiers to adapt to their new lives as civilians in a Britain which had changed greatly from the one they had left when they enlisted at the beginning of the war.
J.B. Priestley was a very fine writer. I had read most of his novels when I was in my teens and I have decided to re-read them now. He deserves to be known today for far more than his popular play "An Inspector Calls".
J.B. Priestley was a very fine writer. I had read most of his novels when I was in my teens and I have decided to re-read them now. He deserves to be known today for far more than his popular play "An Inspector Calls".
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August 11, 2025A call for change.
Three soldiers return from WW2 expecting a better life, but finding they have changed while the people they left behind have not, or have changed in ways that they do not understand. So much to say about class.
“We don’t want the same kind of men looking after our affairs.”
Three soldiers return from WW2 expecting a better life, but finding they have changed while the people they left behind have not, or have changed in ways that they do not understand. So much to say about class.
“We don’t want the same kind of men looking after our affairs.”
August 4, 2021
3.5 stars.
Another good Priestley book, set at the end of the war.
It follows the destinies of three soldiers returning to Civvy Street, (each in a new suit supplied courtesy of the government.)
They are Alan, who is from an old well to do family living at an old manor house, Herbert, son of a successful farmer and Eddie, a hot-headed lad who worked in a quarry, and the most working class of the three.
These three chaps return to civilian life, but don't find it easy to comfortably settle down, they each have their own reason for finding the return to their families and the world they left behind not so easy and pleasant as originally envisaged.
This may sound like an old story line now, but Priestley keeps one entertained in this short book that can be read in a day or two.
The first half of the book is the best, in my view, as we look at each character's fate upon their return home. Priestley also has a dig at numerous things - including a swipe at the glamorous way Hollywood movies portrayed life for soldiers and nurses in times of war - sanitized heavily- no sight of blood stained bandages and bed pans. It was just one passage of good writing to be found in the book.
But Priestley doesn't just intend to entertain, he also has a message to convey; war has changed everything, we can't go back to our old selfish ways, we must unite together and work to create a new better society for all, and so on. He has a tendency to ram the message home, the characters sprout long dialogues that one feels is the the author's voice speaking, more than the characters themselves. This seems more evident in the book's second half.
Perhaps this slight fault stops me from giving the book four or more stars.
But overall it's a good book; very much a book of its time, and it's short, so it doesn't wear out its welcome. Priestley doesn't fail to entertain, and makes a good point here and there.
Another good Priestley book, set at the end of the war.
It follows the destinies of three soldiers returning to Civvy Street, (each in a new suit supplied courtesy of the government.)
They are Alan, who is from an old well to do family living at an old manor house, Herbert, son of a successful farmer and Eddie, a hot-headed lad who worked in a quarry, and the most working class of the three.
These three chaps return to civilian life, but don't find it easy to comfortably settle down, they each have their own reason for finding the return to their families and the world they left behind not so easy and pleasant as originally envisaged.
This may sound like an old story line now, but Priestley keeps one entertained in this short book that can be read in a day or two.
The first half of the book is the best, in my view, as we look at each character's fate upon their return home. Priestley also has a dig at numerous things - including a swipe at the glamorous way Hollywood movies portrayed life for soldiers and nurses in times of war - sanitized heavily- no sight of blood stained bandages and bed pans. It was just one passage of good writing to be found in the book.
But Priestley doesn't just intend to entertain, he also has a message to convey; war has changed everything, we can't go back to our old selfish ways, we must unite together and work to create a new better society for all, and so on. He has a tendency to ram the message home, the characters sprout long dialogues that one feels is the the author's voice speaking, more than the characters themselves. This seems more evident in the book's second half.
Perhaps this slight fault stops me from giving the book four or more stars.
But overall it's a good book; very much a book of its time, and it's short, so it doesn't wear out its welcome. Priestley doesn't fail to entertain, and makes a good point here and there.
October 23, 2014
Excellent read. Great writer,as fresh today as when it was written.
July 8, 2022
Solid 3.5 stars. It got a little preachy at the end and repetitive in the messaging (well, not just the message being hammered in, but the exact phrasing -- probably intentional, what with the message hammering and all, but a few swipes from an editor might have cleared it up), but I thought it was a pretty good message.
This is a book preoccupied with people coming together and pulling apart.
It's also very expository: this is a story of the returned soldiers not fitting into their homes, and their struggle is identifying why their people around them feel wrong, coupled with wondering what they should do with themselves now that they're back. The book culminates in them being able to put their finger on the problem, but as one man's sister points out (and I love that she was included here; and bless the character of Doris as well), they still don't have a real plan of action. And thus the novel ends with at least a plan to go make tea and sandwiches for dinner, but strong resolve to not allow themselves to get complacent.
My favorite moments in old books is reading bits that resonate today -- today being a general term, but especially now with covid having similarly rocked the world in a way akin to how WW2 rocked the world this book was written in -- and this had a few good ones.
People come together. And then the infighting starts, or the greed, and the novelty of whatever pulled us together wears off and people just want to get haircuts and not wear masks again.
Words from the hopeful, the fighters:
Words from the resigned:
And on urban/rural divides:
This is a book preoccupied with people coming together and pulling apart.
It's also very expository: this is a story of the returned soldiers not fitting into their homes, and their struggle is identifying why their people around them feel wrong, coupled with wondering what they should do with themselves now that they're back. The book culminates in them being able to put their finger on the problem, but as one man's sister points out (and I love that she was included here; and bless the character of Doris as well), they still don't have a real plan of action. And thus the novel ends with at least a plan to go make tea and sandwiches for dinner, but strong resolve to not allow themselves to get complacent.
My favorite moments in old books is reading bits that resonate today -- today being a general term, but especially now with covid having similarly rocked the world in a way akin to how WW2 rocked the world this book was written in -- and this had a few good ones.
People come together. And then the infighting starts, or the greed, and the novelty of whatever pulled us together wears off and people just want to get haircuts and not wear masks again.
Words from the hopeful, the fighters:
“But when the feeling of danger that brought them together had gone, they began to separate themselves again, and perhaps pulled a bit harder away just because they had had to keep in line for time. They’re not very different now from what they were before the war. But you are—and that’s the point. And you were expecting something that isn’t there.”
“—all that damned stupid greedy selfishness that’s starting all over again. I tell you, the minute the real danger passed, and people felt safe again, out it came. Nothing’s happened to them inside. They haven’t changed. They haven’t learnt anything—except how to make bigger and better bombs and hate like hell.”
Words from the resigned:
“And the fact remains that the world worth living in is finished—can’t be brought back. I can’t grumble, for I’ve had my share. But all you’ve done, my boy, is to catch a last glimpse of it. That’s why I’m so sorry for you.”
“We can live – and live well—while some of ‘em are looking starvation in the face and beginning to come to their senses. And, don’t make any mistake, that’s the way to see it. … A lot of these chaps you came back with, Herbert,” said his father, “think they’re going to ask for this and that –fancy houses, nice easy jobs, plenty of holidays with pay, and so forth – and get ‘em served on a plate. But in a few years some of ‘em’ll be asking where they can emigrate to, never mind whether they get fancy houses and nice easy jobs at the other end or not. When we start facing facts, all this silly talk we’ve heard will look sillier still.”
“We shall of course proceed to destroy each other. That is inevitable because there is no longer anything to bind us together. […] Your common interests are worth nothing. [..] What men remember now is what divides them, not what unites them. One group stands in the way of a larger stronger group, and so it is destroyed. But then within this group, divisions occur, more challenges, more destruction. Finally we come to individuals –”
And on urban/rural divides:
“Well, it’s something I never felt before I joined up,” he said, returning to his slow careful manner. “But coming back this time, I’ve felt it all right. [Farming] seems to cut you off too much. After a time, if you don’t look out, you don’t seem to care what’s happening to other people. You aren’t part of anything. You’re out for yourself – and just your family. Mind you, it’s easy to feel like that – because you have to work hard and it takes nearly all your time—and you don’t meet many people who are doing different jobs, the way you do in towns. But it’s not right somehow. It shouldn’t be like that. We’ve had enough of that.”
October 28, 2025
This is rather special.
For once the cover illustration sets the scene perfectly (IWM Edition). To cut a long review very short: if you like vintage English stories set in small villages and dealing with the concerns of ordinary people, and you also like the more thought provoking stories set in and around World War Two, then the chances are that you will love this.
It's about three men, recently demobbed, returning to the lives they left when they went to war, and the changes (in those past lives and also in their own wants and needs) which have happened. For each of them, in three different ways, nothing can ever be the same again.
Intrigued? Get a copy.
For once the cover illustration sets the scene perfectly (IWM Edition). To cut a long review very short: if you like vintage English stories set in small villages and dealing with the concerns of ordinary people, and you also like the more thought provoking stories set in and around World War Two, then the chances are that you will love this.
It's about three men, recently demobbed, returning to the lives they left when they went to war, and the changes (in those past lives and also in their own wants and needs) which have happened. For each of them, in three different ways, nothing can ever be the same again.
Intrigued? Get a copy.
August 8, 2017
I read this book out of desperation. The book-club book (Reading in the Dark) was dreary and uninteresting, so I badly needed a change or I'd just have fallen asleep. Three Men is of course slight (runs to 164 pp) and somewhat dated but it held my attention and was even thought provoking.
Written at the end of WWII (first published in 1945), it deals with the dilemmas three soldier friends face as they return home. Priestley has chosen his characters well: each has a different set of problems and the circumstances are well described. What is unexpected is the author's firm belief that after the war people can't just go back to the selfish way of life they had before the war: they have to think of others and continue to function as a community.
I really liked Priestley's linear story-telling and relished in the fact that he allowed his characters to enjoy long silences. Good to be reminded of a different era; this is why I like reading classics once in a while.
Written at the end of WWII (first published in 1945), it deals with the dilemmas three soldier friends face as they return home. Priestley has chosen his characters well: each has a different set of problems and the circumstances are well described. What is unexpected is the author's firm belief that after the war people can't just go back to the selfish way of life they had before the war: they have to think of others and continue to function as a community.
I really liked Priestley's linear story-telling and relished in the fact that he allowed his characters to enjoy long silences. Good to be reminded of a different era; this is why I like reading classics once in a while.
June 19, 2025
This book reads a little like propaganda but the debate is still current. I simplify it by saying present-day Americans have one of two different attitudes. One is “I’ve got mine so screw everyone who doesn’t.” The other attitude is “Hey, we’re all in this together.” If human nature is naturally selfish, then the first attitude is understandable, but with any kind of prolonged rational thought the second attitude is clearly the one that will produce the best outcome. Since it requires a strong moral resolve to act against one’s natural selfishness, I challenge all those who claim to support fairness, justice and goodwill to step up and do what is right and best for all of us, together.
The arguments are on target but the writing seems a little stiff. More like an essay than a novel. The dialogue does not seem quite natural either. Four stars for a less than significant literary work but it’s nonetheless worth reading.
The arguments are on target but the writing seems a little stiff. More like an essay than a novel. The dialogue does not seem quite natural either. Four stars for a less than significant literary work but it’s nonetheless worth reading.
October 23, 2025
One of my favourite old family photos is a picture of my father and his two brothers from around the time of the end of the Second World War. The three of them have recently been “de-mobbed” from military service. They’re in their early twenties and wearing astonishingly swirly ties, curiously baggy suits and very big smiles.
The photo’s in black and white but according to family legend the suits were very loud indeed. Particularly my Uncle David’s. He was extraordinarily proud of his bright-green check which he particularly liked to wear with a mustard-yellow shirt and lilac socks. Startling fashion certainly didn’t begin only in the Swinging 60s.
I very much have in mind this delightful family photo as a quirky alternative front cover for this novel. I suspect the “de-mob” suits self-consciously worn by JB Priestley’s three young ex-soldiers - badly cut in grey, blue and brown - may actually have been slightly less conspicuous than my Uncle David’s sprightly green one!
But even if the colours of their suits were different, I suspect that the experiences these suits came to represent for men returning home after years at war - feeling strange and as ill fitting as their suits - were the same for my father and uncles as they are for the fictional Alan Strete, Herbert Kenford and Eddie Mold. And indeed for a whole generation struggling to return to so-called peacetime “normal”.
And this is the genius of JB Priestley: his ability to tap into the zeitgeist, to capture the feel of things that affect a whole generation in a way that’s close-up and personal to each individual involved.
Take the opening scene of the novel, for example. A typical Priestley curtain-raiser - a scene bursting with the magic of the sheer ordinary. It’s a pretty standard old-fashioned British boozer in an unremarkable town square in the 1940s. Girls in slacks, bright scarves and “too much dark red lipstick” drink gin-and-lime and smoke Players. Men drink halves of pale ale, read newspapers, chat desultorily, and kill time. And the barmaid calls “Time now, please, gentlemen. Time!” (p8).
But the barmaid’s bitter and fed up, the beaky young man’s highly strung, and the brassy factory girl’s tetchy. This is cosy with a slightly sour feeling to it. Everything’s worn out and stale, just like the pub’s shabby paintwork. Welcome home, boys.
Men returning from war and being processed back into “Civvy Street” were given new suits but not counselling. The novel is open and sympathetic about men’s mental health issues in a way that would have been strikingly unusual eighty years ago.
Returning soldiers weren’t encouraged to talk about their experiences of war - often brutal and traumatic. It was a time for moving on - literally rebuilding a bombed and exhausted nation - not for raking the past and indulging in therapy.
The men in their new suits struggle with a wide range of mental health-related issues:
- Alan’s occasional inarticulateness: “Life’s not a walking-stick or something - that you can drop or pick up. My life’s been going on - inside me … “ (p22).
- His bipolar tendencies: “He was in the mood when at any moment life would seem either radiant with promise or almost unendurable” (p81); and “behind this elation was a sad darkness of the spirit, a threat of sickness and misery, like a rain-heavy night surrounding some fireworks and only waiting to extinguish them” (p91).
- Herbert trying to explain to his mother why he’s changed: “I’m a few years older, and I’ve been as far as Africa and back, and seen a lot of coming and going, and - well, I’ve seen things and done things I didn’t expect to see and do” (p33).
- With his family all around him Herbert feels that he “was somehow not quite there. It was as if part of him was in some lonely mid-air” (p43).
- His unprocessed grief as he realises that “there were at least fifty dead, buried in the desert, in France, in Germany, to whom he felt closer now than he did to his own people … “ (p47).
- Eddie isn’t able to come to terms with the death of his baby girl while he was away at war (p49).
- His dreams and illusions are shattered: “Here he was, where he’d wanted to be for years, and yet so far he didn’t feel he was here” (p54).
- His inarticulate struggle to process his anger: “Sometimes he was all bewilderment … sometimes he was all anger, one man against a vast conspiracy” (p58).
- Eddie’s black place where “in the dark he felt loaded down with misery, hating himself … all different, and all wrong. And steadily getting worse” (p61).
- And the trauma of war: “I’m just an ordinary chap come back from a lot o’ muck an’ blood an’ flamin’ murder. I’ve seen places so flattened out yer wouldn’t know if you was lookin’ at the Town ‘All or a pig stye. I’ve seen blokes burnt alive. It didn’t ought to ‘ave ‘appened … “ (p121).
And it’s not easy for women, either. With their menfolk away for years at a time, they’ve had to adapt to all kinds of change, both good and bad, on the “home front”. This has involved:
- New labour arrangements meaning that “you can’t expect ‘em to be nice little quiet girls if you shove ‘em into uniform and keep ‘em driving lorries and sorting ammunition” (p31).
- The pain and sorrow of war (for example, Alan’s sister Diana is “bitter and on edge” (p11), repressing her grief for her husband Derek, killed at war; and listless Mrs Roseberry wanting detail from Eddie about the death of her husband Fred who “had been only about ten yards away when a mortar shell had finished him” p52).
- Romantic encounters and sexual adventures while husbands and boyfriends are away (“Some women just can’t stand the dreariness and loneliness after a year or two - they’ve got to have something happening” p107).
- Liberated women mocked for “sitting there varnishing their fingernails and getting twelve quid a week for doing it” (p5).
Living apart, sometimes for years, many couples re-united after the war only to discover the disillusionment, even misery, of finding themselves with someone they no longer loved or even felt they knew any longer.
Of course, in a novel written eighty years ago there are attitudes of that time that may make us feel uncomfortable today. For example, people don’t hold back from expressing strong views we’d now describe as patronising, stereotyping or even negative “othering”:
- The upper classes judge ordinary folk harshly (posh Uncle Rodney condemns the “new race of bloody mechanics and chauffeurs we’re breeding now” p26; and angry Diana castigates “these people who just jolly well let themselves go the minute they have money to spend - drink, football pools, dogs, any rubbishy thing they fancy … absolutely feckless” p68)
- The middling classes “know their place” and don’t encourage mixing with anyone else: “Eddie Mold - Mr Strete - neither of ‘em’s your sort here. Never was, never will be” (p32).
- Men are censorious about women (Herbert is riled by the “cheeky challenging girl in the pub” p31; Eddie’s disgusted by women throwing themselves at the “Yanks. If they couldn’t get it for nothing, then it was a quid for the whites an’ two quid for the blacks” p62).
- And women can be pretty hard on their own sex too: the barmaid at The Crown finds herself “feeling old, resentful, sour” (p2) as she watches girls picking up men; Mrs Kenford is disgusted by women “smoking an’ drinking an’ swearing an’ carrying on” (p31); and Diana is “sickened” by her sister-in-law’s sex drive, saying “she’s not really much better than all these village sluts around here who’ve been going with Americans and Italian prisoners while their husbands have been away” (p16).
But the novel isn’t just heavy-weight gloom. There are some wonderful Priestley-esque observations like:
- Herbert, subjected to his family’s pressing matrimonial plans over a vast supper, feels “he was being helped to pork, ham and Edna” - Edna who was “a solid weight of female flesh, a rich harvest of pink-and-white girlhood, a huge extra course of jam pudding and cream” (p40).
- “His wife - this fella’s mother- she was a daughter of old Lord Glandestry - had an extraordinary passion for guardsmen- pick ‘em up and smuggle ’em in at all hours” (p137).
- The description of Mrs Penterland, the “large, blonde and very elaborate” guest at Lord Darrold’s dinner party, who’s “like an historic handsome building or monument … she made you feel she ought to be open to visitors from ten in the morning to dusk on weekdays …” (p80).
The end of the novel involves a lot of earnest speechifying. Our bemused men in new suits end up smoking pipes and airing lofty views on how to attain Utopia (apparently a kind of beer and sandwiches cooperative). It seems a million miles from their more pressing personal problems of broken marriages, inefficient farming and the toffs being taxed out of existence. But I guess this was very much part of past-war life - the chattering classes doing a great deal of chattering.
And so “Three Men in New Suits” washed over me in a flood of nostalgia, as I read about Alan, Herbert and Eddie and thought about all their contemporaries in my father’s generation. But for a novel written eighty years ago, it still strikes a contemporary chord. I was reading only this morning about the high rates of mental heath issues among our armed forces. And the theme of veterans struggling to find homes, jobs and a place in the community still seems as relevant today as it did after the Second World War …
The photo’s in black and white but according to family legend the suits were very loud indeed. Particularly my Uncle David’s. He was extraordinarily proud of his bright-green check which he particularly liked to wear with a mustard-yellow shirt and lilac socks. Startling fashion certainly didn’t begin only in the Swinging 60s.
I very much have in mind this delightful family photo as a quirky alternative front cover for this novel. I suspect the “de-mob” suits self-consciously worn by JB Priestley’s three young ex-soldiers - badly cut in grey, blue and brown - may actually have been slightly less conspicuous than my Uncle David’s sprightly green one!
But even if the colours of their suits were different, I suspect that the experiences these suits came to represent for men returning home after years at war - feeling strange and as ill fitting as their suits - were the same for my father and uncles as they are for the fictional Alan Strete, Herbert Kenford and Eddie Mold. And indeed for a whole generation struggling to return to so-called peacetime “normal”.
And this is the genius of JB Priestley: his ability to tap into the zeitgeist, to capture the feel of things that affect a whole generation in a way that’s close-up and personal to each individual involved.
Take the opening scene of the novel, for example. A typical Priestley curtain-raiser - a scene bursting with the magic of the sheer ordinary. It’s a pretty standard old-fashioned British boozer in an unremarkable town square in the 1940s. Girls in slacks, bright scarves and “too much dark red lipstick” drink gin-and-lime and smoke Players. Men drink halves of pale ale, read newspapers, chat desultorily, and kill time. And the barmaid calls “Time now, please, gentlemen. Time!” (p8).
But the barmaid’s bitter and fed up, the beaky young man’s highly strung, and the brassy factory girl’s tetchy. This is cosy with a slightly sour feeling to it. Everything’s worn out and stale, just like the pub’s shabby paintwork. Welcome home, boys.
Men returning from war and being processed back into “Civvy Street” were given new suits but not counselling. The novel is open and sympathetic about men’s mental health issues in a way that would have been strikingly unusual eighty years ago.
Returning soldiers weren’t encouraged to talk about their experiences of war - often brutal and traumatic. It was a time for moving on - literally rebuilding a bombed and exhausted nation - not for raking the past and indulging in therapy.
The men in their new suits struggle with a wide range of mental health-related issues:
- Alan’s occasional inarticulateness: “Life’s not a walking-stick or something - that you can drop or pick up. My life’s been going on - inside me … “ (p22).
- His bipolar tendencies: “He was in the mood when at any moment life would seem either radiant with promise or almost unendurable” (p81); and “behind this elation was a sad darkness of the spirit, a threat of sickness and misery, like a rain-heavy night surrounding some fireworks and only waiting to extinguish them” (p91).
- Herbert trying to explain to his mother why he’s changed: “I’m a few years older, and I’ve been as far as Africa and back, and seen a lot of coming and going, and - well, I’ve seen things and done things I didn’t expect to see and do” (p33).
- With his family all around him Herbert feels that he “was somehow not quite there. It was as if part of him was in some lonely mid-air” (p43).
- His unprocessed grief as he realises that “there were at least fifty dead, buried in the desert, in France, in Germany, to whom he felt closer now than he did to his own people … “ (p47).
- Eddie isn’t able to come to terms with the death of his baby girl while he was away at war (p49).
- His dreams and illusions are shattered: “Here he was, where he’d wanted to be for years, and yet so far he didn’t feel he was here” (p54).
- His inarticulate struggle to process his anger: “Sometimes he was all bewilderment … sometimes he was all anger, one man against a vast conspiracy” (p58).
- Eddie’s black place where “in the dark he felt loaded down with misery, hating himself … all different, and all wrong. And steadily getting worse” (p61).
- And the trauma of war: “I’m just an ordinary chap come back from a lot o’ muck an’ blood an’ flamin’ murder. I’ve seen places so flattened out yer wouldn’t know if you was lookin’ at the Town ‘All or a pig stye. I’ve seen blokes burnt alive. It didn’t ought to ‘ave ‘appened … “ (p121).
And it’s not easy for women, either. With their menfolk away for years at a time, they’ve had to adapt to all kinds of change, both good and bad, on the “home front”. This has involved:
- New labour arrangements meaning that “you can’t expect ‘em to be nice little quiet girls if you shove ‘em into uniform and keep ‘em driving lorries and sorting ammunition” (p31).
- The pain and sorrow of war (for example, Alan’s sister Diana is “bitter and on edge” (p11), repressing her grief for her husband Derek, killed at war; and listless Mrs Roseberry wanting detail from Eddie about the death of her husband Fred who “had been only about ten yards away when a mortar shell had finished him” p52).
- Romantic encounters and sexual adventures while husbands and boyfriends are away (“Some women just can’t stand the dreariness and loneliness after a year or two - they’ve got to have something happening” p107).
- Liberated women mocked for “sitting there varnishing their fingernails and getting twelve quid a week for doing it” (p5).
Living apart, sometimes for years, many couples re-united after the war only to discover the disillusionment, even misery, of finding themselves with someone they no longer loved or even felt they knew any longer.
Of course, in a novel written eighty years ago there are attitudes of that time that may make us feel uncomfortable today. For example, people don’t hold back from expressing strong views we’d now describe as patronising, stereotyping or even negative “othering”:
- The upper classes judge ordinary folk harshly (posh Uncle Rodney condemns the “new race of bloody mechanics and chauffeurs we’re breeding now” p26; and angry Diana castigates “these people who just jolly well let themselves go the minute they have money to spend - drink, football pools, dogs, any rubbishy thing they fancy … absolutely feckless” p68)
- The middling classes “know their place” and don’t encourage mixing with anyone else: “Eddie Mold - Mr Strete - neither of ‘em’s your sort here. Never was, never will be” (p32).
- Men are censorious about women (Herbert is riled by the “cheeky challenging girl in the pub” p31; Eddie’s disgusted by women throwing themselves at the “Yanks. If they couldn’t get it for nothing, then it was a quid for the whites an’ two quid for the blacks” p62).
- And women can be pretty hard on their own sex too: the barmaid at The Crown finds herself “feeling old, resentful, sour” (p2) as she watches girls picking up men; Mrs Kenford is disgusted by women “smoking an’ drinking an’ swearing an’ carrying on” (p31); and Diana is “sickened” by her sister-in-law’s sex drive, saying “she’s not really much better than all these village sluts around here who’ve been going with Americans and Italian prisoners while their husbands have been away” (p16).
But the novel isn’t just heavy-weight gloom. There are some wonderful Priestley-esque observations like:
- Herbert, subjected to his family’s pressing matrimonial plans over a vast supper, feels “he was being helped to pork, ham and Edna” - Edna who was “a solid weight of female flesh, a rich harvest of pink-and-white girlhood, a huge extra course of jam pudding and cream” (p40).
- “His wife - this fella’s mother- she was a daughter of old Lord Glandestry - had an extraordinary passion for guardsmen- pick ‘em up and smuggle ’em in at all hours” (p137).
- The description of Mrs Penterland, the “large, blonde and very elaborate” guest at Lord Darrold’s dinner party, who’s “like an historic handsome building or monument … she made you feel she ought to be open to visitors from ten in the morning to dusk on weekdays …” (p80).
The end of the novel involves a lot of earnest speechifying. Our bemused men in new suits end up smoking pipes and airing lofty views on how to attain Utopia (apparently a kind of beer and sandwiches cooperative). It seems a million miles from their more pressing personal problems of broken marriages, inefficient farming and the toffs being taxed out of existence. But I guess this was very much part of past-war life - the chattering classes doing a great deal of chattering.
And so “Three Men in New Suits” washed over me in a flood of nostalgia, as I read about Alan, Herbert and Eddie and thought about all their contemporaries in my father’s generation. But for a novel written eighty years ago, it still strikes a contemporary chord. I was reading only this morning about the high rates of mental heath issues among our armed forces. And the theme of veterans struggling to find homes, jobs and a place in the community still seems as relevant today as it did after the Second World War …
May 12, 2025
The prose is perfectly decent and has occasional meritorious turns. The length is gratifyingly on the shorter end. From a historical perspective the novel is very interesting and worth reading in that it captures a certain reaction to the Second World War many people had at the time as Priestley shows his view that Britain must become more equal and cooperative moving forward if it wants to avoid a third world war. However from a literary perspective the book is weak, the symbolism is blunt, the plot far from riveting and none of the characters are extremely compelling. They aren’t dull or particularly badly written but none jump out to one as particularly interesting, sympathetic or amusing. In typical Priestley fashion the didacticism is so heavy and clumsy that a 5 year old couldn’t miss it.
April 11, 2014
This was interesting from the viewpoint of getting an insight to the reality of life for the demobbed in 1945. It was a period where the optimism of a fresh start was tempered by the austerity of the time and uncertainty about the future. Priestley captures the feelings of confusion and shows how relationships have been affected by the war and the effect of this on three diverse but bound-together individuals.
December 7, 2011
Definitely a novel of its time. Ideas of behaviour and the rather stilted interreaction between the 'classes' makes this quite a strange read
January 23, 2022
I don’t think it translates well to today’s times. Some good moments.
December 5, 2024
Repeatedly hits you over the head with its political views. A real lack of subtlety
March 26, 2025
A short novel written for a specific time and place. The thoughts and feelings of three newly demobbed servicemen after WW2. As a story there's nothing at all to it three men go home then meet up again, that's about it. Priestley has a look at the class system, seeing the war as a catalyst to the breaking down of old mores and morals and creating a new world but not necessarily as each of the characters initially envisioned it.
April 4, 2013
This fine book shows how gullible people are. Three men who have nothing to offer but vague promises of some venture make a bundle, and in the process seduce a lot of gullible women too.
October 6, 2016
Ουμανιστικό αντιπολεμικό έργο, όμορφα στημένη ηθογραφία.
April 29, 2025
Enjoyable book if you want to read a fictional book about the experiences, thoughts, feelings and hopes of men returning to Britain post-ww2.
August 20, 2025
a poignant social commentary of post war Britain, and also a surprisingly emotional and deep story for such a short novel!
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