A year later, back in London, he joined Donald Wolfit’s Shakespearean company during its first West End wartime season, playing Fenton and Bardolph in The Merry Wives of Windsor (Strand) and touring as Dewhurst in The Scarlet Pimpernel. As London endured the Blitz, his West End roles included Laertes in Hamlet and Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Strand). After his Mosca to Wolfit’s Volpone had been well received at the St James’s, John Gielgud engaged him for two small parts in his revival of Macbeth (Piccadilly, 1942); and he took over as Cpl Jones in the West End run of Rattigan’s Flare Path (Apollo, also 1942).