Sir – Your many readers who left shell-shocked after watching Journey’s End at the Oxford Playhouse last week may like to know that the stunning final curtain was not (as many national critics assumed) the work of director David Grindley.

It was a variation on the coup de theatre the late John Gordon Ash devised for his revival of the play for Horsham Rep in 1950. That transferred to the Westminster Theatre, where the author, R. C. Sherriff, Churchill and Montgomery were among a string of VIPs who saw it.

A repeat, with Frank Shelley giving one of his best performances as Captain Stanhope and Ronnie Barker bringing his incomparable mastery of comedy and pathos to the role of 2nd Lieut Trotter, was Ash’s penultimate production at the Oxford Playhouse in 1954.

In his memoirs Ronnie described the Last Post at the end as ‘I think the most moving [moment] of any I have been involved in on the stage.’

Don Chapman, Eynsham