Rodney M. Bennett years as Senior English Producer in Ethiopia with the Lutheran church international Radio ETLF and a year in the African English service of West German overseas broadcasting. Through the 1980s he freelanced for BBC, in particular on the BBC World Service, and published a book "The Archer-Shees Against the Admiralty" which was a factual account of the Archer-Shee case upon which Terence Rattigan based his play "The Winslow Boy". His research unearthed the original five-shilling postal order which caused the problem. He also contributed many articles to the classical magazine Music and Musicians. Then in the 1980s he was a
Terence Rattigan "Aunt Edna" inspired Joe Orton to create "Edna Welthorpe", a mischievous alter ego stirring up controversy about his own plays. Rattigan was gay, with numerous lovers but no long-term partners, a possible exception being his "congenial companion ... and occasional friend" Michael Franklin. It has been claimed his work is essentially autobiographical, containing coded references to his sexuality, which he kept secret from all but his closest friends. There is some truth in this, but it risks being crudely reductive; for example, the repeated claim that Rattigan originally wrote "The Deep Blue Sea" as a play about male lovers, turned