For those wondering if Bradford writers J B Priestley and John Braine ever met and talked, for public consumption, the answer is they did.

Menston-based author Duncan Hamilton was looking through a heap of Encounter magazines in a Harrogate bookshop when he came across the edition for June 1958. Among the items billed on the front page was this: John Braine – Lunch with J B Priestley.

It’s worth saying that Encounter was a heavyweight Anglo-American cultural journal from 1953 to 1991, covertly funded by the US Central Intelligence Agency; it was this issue which brought about the magazine’s demise with the end of the Cold War.

Priestley was the older man, enormously successful with novels, plays, essays, journalism and radio broadcasts. Braine’s first novel Room At The Top, published in March 1957, was on its way to notching up 35,000 hardback sales. They met in Priestley’s London apartment at the Albany and, after a very good lunch, talked turkey.

Braine opens by asking JB why he had never written directly about his experiences in the First World War. Bradford, he says, never recovered from the Battle of the Somme.

“I’m not conscious of having deliberately avoided writing about the 1914 war. Probably during the earlier Twenties I wanted to forget about it and anyhow I wasn’t writing fiction then.

“Later, when I had the necessary experience as a novelist, a number of very good books had made their appearance, many of them saying just what I would have said,” J B replies, and then adds: “Incidentally, I wonder if you remember my account of the battalion reunion in English Journey? If you don’t know the book, you might take a look at that chapter sometime. You’ll find your War there.”

Braine ducks this verbal counter-punch by changing the subject, asking the author of The Good Companions, which sold at the startling rate of 5,000 copies a day in 1929, if he had ever suffered from the kind of literary snobbery that separates serious books from best-sellers.

“Yes. Best-seller is a trade term and should not be used by critics as if it had some literary significance. Some bad books have been best-sellers, but then so have all the world’s best books too… “I like writing what I want to write, without much concern either for the trade of the building up of a literary reputation. If I’m left out of those solemn lists and assessments of contemporary English authors, it serves me right, partly for doing so many different things and also for not caring a damn.”

As though to establish his bone fides as a serious man of letters, Braine asserts that Bright Day is J B’s “very best novel”. Priestley retorts: “Well, that’s what you say. Somebody else would say Angel Pavement… I’ve been told so often that only some particular book or play has justified my existence, that I’ve lost interest in the subject.”

Braine concludes his article by saying that he had, to his own satisfaction, exploded the legend of Priestley – “Jolly Jack, the Hard Headed Yorkshireman”.

J B’s reputation in England as a serious writer was undeservedly far below what it ought to be.