Like many who worked at Ealing, Maurice Selwyn prided himself on his work ethic. The lad was keen and nearly always the first one back from lunch. This paid dividends once on Champagne Charlie (1944). Back from lunch early, as usual, Maurice was on his own on the set when Stanley Holloway breezed in, saw there was no one else about, sat down and began to recite his famous ‘Brahn Boots’ Cockney monologue for Maurice.
Well, to sit there and have somebody who I knew was very famous reciting something just for me was absolutely wonderful. Gradually the rest of the crew returned from lunch and out of respect for Stanley they all tiptoed in until finally the whole of the crew were sitting silently in awe as Stanley finished his monologue. It’s a memory that has always stayed with me.
For Holloway, Champagne Charlie always remained a very special film: ‘it helped to establish me, as one or two critics kindly wrote, as “in the first flight of British comedy actors”.’ Certainly Tommy Trinder was the bigger star at the time, if the salaries they were paid are anything to go by. Trinder’s rate was £1,000 a week for the ten-week schedule. Holloway received £3,000 for eight weeks’ work. These weren’t huge amounts by Hollywood standards, but Ealing were generous in the money they paid their top actors, less so when it came to supporting players, whose daily rates from this period ranged from £15 to £50.
Maurice worked with Tommy Trinder next on Fiddlers Three (1944), a bizarre little film that saw Trinder and Sonnie Hale as a couple of servicemen on leave who are mysteriously transported back to ancient Rome during a visit to Stonehenge.
Trinder’s co-star was a very pretty blonde actress-cum-singer called Frances Day. As the queen she was required to bathe in asses’ milk in a large pool, and the shooting of this particular scene had been hotly anticipated. ‘I remember she descended by some steps into the pool until she was waist high,’ recalls Maurice. ‘And then she whipped her towel off exposing her boobs, which to a fifteen-year-old was the first time I’d ever seen that part of a woman. Then she flung the towel aside with a sort of coquettish look at everybody and dropped down into the water. But the number of yells and screams and whistles made you realise how many guys were in the gantries, the extras and the maintenance people. It was full of them.’
Ken Westbury also recalls that day clearly, not least the image of Trinder sitting on the edge of the pool tickling Frances’ breasts with his toes. ‘That would be classed as sexual harassment now; but I think she was enjoying it!’
Elizabeth Jane Howard, later a distinguished novelist, was working as an extra on the film as one of many slave girls and later recalled coming upon Tommy Trinder in a dark corner of the studio one day, clad in a very short toga: ‘He was doing a little dance, lifting his toga and muttering, “Now you see it, now you don’t.”’
The director of Fiddlers Three was Harry Watt, an unusual choice since he’d just done a war picture and his background was documentaries. But he’d brought Nine Men in at just £20,000 and it turned out to be very successful at the box office. ‘The money man at Ealing was a sinister chap called Major Baker [Reginald Baker],’ Watt later recalled. ‘And he used to stop me in the corridor, “Harry, can’t you make another Nine Men?”’ Then the idea for Fiddlers Three came up at a meeting and Watt asked, ‘Why can’t I make that?’ There was a brief silence. ‘Alright Harry, do you want to make it?’ ‘Sure I’ll make it.’ Only he hadn’t directed a musical comedy in his life. ‘I had an awful lot of fun making it. We had lashings of girls and all sorts. It wasn’t all that successful, but it didn’t fall flat on its face, either.’
In an unusual move for Ealing, given the meticulous preparation that went into their films in order that as little money as possible was wasted, a large portion of Fiddlers Three was re-shot, according to Ken. When a rough cut was assembled, the opinion was that it just wasn’t working and on Balcon’s orders there was between two and three weeks of extra shooting.
Ealing was quite democratic in gathering the opinions of all the staff in discussing the quality of the work being produced. ‘Balcon talked to everybody,’ states Robert Winter. ‘He got ideas from lots of people. For instance, he used to get some of the staff to sit in on the rushes.’ One of Robert’s early jobs was synching up the rushes and presenting them in the viewing theatre at roughly a quarter to two every day.
And Balcon would say, so what do you think? The director never felt a subordinate because he would have to have an answer for Mick if somebody said – that’s wrong. Also, if a performer was wearing a wristwatch in a period film, or if there was something that wasn’t right with a scene, not the way the actors played it but what they were wearing or something else, you put your hand up. It was very open like that.
According to the editor Peter Tanner, at the final-cut stage Balcon used to call all the other producers and directors in to take a look at the film and write their comments. It was a practice that Tanner didn’t think altogether worked. ‘They were congratulating their colleagues to their face but saying a terrible picture behind their backs very often.’
Continuing to work as a clapper loader, Maurice was put to work next on Johnny Frenchman (1945), which told the story of rival fishermen in a Cornish village and a French port who band together to thwart the German menace. Scripted by Tibby Clarke and directed by Charles Frend, the film was developed as a starring vehicle for the grand dame of French cinema, Françoise Rosay. The actress had managed to get out of occupied France and make her way to North Africa, where she ‘thumbed a lift’ in a bomber to England and stayed until the end of the war.
Shot in Mevagissey in Cornwall, Tibby Clarke observed how quickly the locals got the hang of film-making. Given the task of researching information about pilchards, Clarke came across one old fisherman who dismissed his questions out of hand: ‘Don’t know, m’dear. But I’ll take ’ee out in my boat and show ’ee a handsome bit o’ coast for your back projection.’
The unit had hoped to film the local fishermen catching grey mullet, which appear in large shoals near Land’s End only a few times a year, convinced it would make for an exciting sequence. A couple of locals were put on the payroll to inform the director the moment any grey mullets were sighted. Nothing happened for weeks, until one morning Clarke took a stroll down by the harbour and witnessed a catch of grey mullet being landed. Frend was livid and wanted to know why he hadn’t been informed. Apparently the fishermen were so overcome with excitement they plain forgot. A week later there was another large catch of grey mullet and again the film crew were not alerted. This time the excuse was that it all happened in the middle of the night. Frend still wanted to capture this sequence and when location work was completed, left a cameraman behind. This fella stayed in Mevagissey for a month, had a lovely holiday, but didn’t see one blasted grey mullet. In the end they had to make do with filming pilchards being caught, not quite the same thing. Months later Clarke, was at Ealing Studios getting ready to leave for the Leicester Square cinema for the West End premiere of Johnny Frenchman when a telegram arrived for him. He opened it and saw it was from one of the Mevagissey fishermen. It read: ‘mullet sighted’.
Maurice always enjoyed going out on location. A crew of some fifteen people would descend on a village or a town, with the director and the main artists claiming the best rooms in the local four-star hotel. ‘The men used to thoroughly enjoy themselves in every sense of the word being let off the leash.’ The idea of working to a designated schedule was pretty much abandoned when you were on location. The crew would arrive on site early and from then on it was largely dependent on the weather.
On many, many occasions the cameraman would look at the sun behind a cloud and say, ‘We’ve got about twenty seconds to go before it comes out but it’s only going to last for around a minute.’ So everybody would rush around, the camera and sound would start running, the sun would come out, the director would shout ‘Action’, and hopefully you’d get the shot before the sun went in again.
Maurice remembers one incident from the Johnny Frenchman shoot. The camera was set up on a tripod on a cliff top overlooking the harbour to shoot a sailing boat going out to sea.
The poor camera assistant came along and tilted the camera down to see what it was like through the view-finder and the bloody thing just slid off the head and went straight onto the rocks. It couldn’t have been fastened on properly to the tripod. Ghastly moment, particularly since the idea of having spare cameras back in those days never existed. We had to wait for another camera to be rushed up from Ealing.
The assistant responsible was rushed the other way in disgrace.
It was while they were shooting in Mevagissey harbour, remembers Ken Westbury, that news reached the unit of the liberation of Paris. ‘Françoise Rosay and the other French actors began singing the “La Marseillaise” on the quayside. That was a special moment.’ The war, however, was still a very real threat in Britain as that summer the flying bombs had begun to be sent over the channel. A month earlier, Ken had seen one of the first of them to come over London.
The air-raid siren had gone at Ealing and we went to the shelters but I hovered by the door with a few other people and we saw this plane going across towards Acton. As the ack-ack guns went after it, the thing went down and there was an explosion and everyone shouted, ‘We’ve got it.’ Nobody knew it was a flying bomb. It wasn’t until much later on that it came out what they were.
By the time the crew went out on location to Cornwall, the threat facing London from these flying bombs had become so real that Balcon personally saw to it that his workers were both protected and put at ease. ‘Balcon was pretty good on that film,’ says Ken. ‘If electricians or camera people had wives and families back in London and they were worried about leaving them exposed to the flying bombs, Ealing paid for them to come down to stay with their husbands in Cornwall.’
Johnny Frenchman marked the debut of another new recruit to the Ealing staff. Tony Rimmington had just left Ealing Technical College & School of Art with distinctions in both illustration and geometrical drawing, this despite having blown a finger off after mucking about with explosives in Army Cadets. Looking for a career that would best exploit his talent, Rimmington’s father, a policeman, sought out an old friend, Robin Adair, with whom he had served during the First World War. With Adair’s help and influence, Rimmington got an interview with Basil Dearden and Michael Relph. Bringing along his drawings, they were of such outstanding quality that after scanning through them, the film-making pair said, ‘Start Monday.’
Tony was put to work in the art department, and, like Norman Dorme, remembers working above the power house and those generators. ‘The rumbling noise went on all day.’ Beginning as an apprentice junior draughtsman, Tony joined a small permanent staff of around five draughtsmen, among them Norman, Bert Davey, who was to return from Malaya where he had been on Bristol Beaufighters as a navigator, and Len Wills, whose ill health had kept him out of the war. The whole studio, Tony remembers, was full of personalities. One of the set dressers believed he was an illegitimate descendent of Charles I. ‘He was a very good set dresser this chap, but he was a bit odd. He had a picture of Oliver Cromwell in his lavatory and used to throw darts at it.’ Robert Winter recalls another of Ealing’s more colourful characters. ‘One of the make-up men, who was an Australian, always used to walk around with a cowboy hat, a crocodile belt and American boots.’
What impressed Tony the most about Ealing was that it was totally self-sufficient; everything that one would want to employ on a film was right there at a director’s fingertips.
Ealing even had its own plumbing department. If, for example, there was a set of a kitchen, the plumber would come on the studio floor and lay them water or gas, any of that lark. The place was completely self-contained. We also had a model department under Fred Guy who was a beautiful modeller. In his spare time he cut lettering into war memorials. He used to get half a crown a letter, things like ‘to the glorious dead’, all that kind of stuff.
Indeed, Ealing’s crafts people and technicians earned such a reputation that many of them were asked to help with the Festival of Britain in 1951, building models and performing other tasks. ‘They were loaned out for about four weeks,’ confirms Tony.
As a trainee, most of the menial tasks usually ended up being carried out by Tony, such as being sent out to buy cigarettes for senior colleagues or St Bruno flakes for the pipe smokers – with their permission, of course. As a rule, if you wanted to leave the studio gates for whatever reason during the day you had to get your boss to sign a piece of paper giving you permission. And when the staff went off to the canteen for a tea break or morning coffee, it was Tony who stayed behind holding the fort. If there was an important phone call that needed to be answered, a system to alert his colleagues had been devised.
The Art Department was on the first floor opposite the canteen, and an arrangement was made whereby everyone who went down for lunch or a tea break would sit close to the window where I could spot them. If the phone went, ‘Is Mr such and such there?’ I’d say, ‘He’s on a break at the moment.’ ‘Well, can you contact him? It’s very important.’ I’d say, ‘Hold on a minute,’ and open the window, and with a bent paper clip and an elastic band I used to fire at the canteen window. They’d look up and see me holding the phone and come up to answer it. This is what you had to do in the days before mobile phones.
The first of his drawings that Tony saw up on the screen was a London bus that was made into a four-foot model for a shot in the film Dead of Night (1945), where it’s seen travelling down a street past a row of flats, which were also built to corresponding scale on Ealing’s model stage. Understandably, these were the sort of minor tasks Tony was given responsibility for as a trainee, but he was learning all the time and drawing things in the minutest detail that would then be sent down to the workshops and built into three-dimensional forms. There was a lot of research and study involved, too. One had to know about windows, doors, lock rails, French windows, the construction of sash windows, casements, staircases, banisters, also the different forms of construction and the different periods of architecture. Tony’s bible was Sir Banister Fletcher’s A History of Architecture, a work still in print.
As time went on, Tony graduated to drawing up large and complex sets and had a hand in practically every Ealing film that went on the floor, which ranged from simple set dressing to helping design and build Mrs Wilberforce’s house for The Ladykillers on a bomb site near King’s Cross. Another unique job for Tony on that film was designing the railway signal arm that knocks out Alec Guinness’s Professor Marcus and sends him to his death. ‘I got covered in soot measuring the blooming thing and then later rag-bolting it to the bridge. And because it dropped and hit Guinness on the head, we had to put a rubber edge along the end of it so it wouldn’t do him a mischief.’
To give you an idea of the kind of efficiency that went on at Ealing, the art department were required to make models of every set that they worked on, as Tony explains. ‘We did the drawing of the set, then took prints off the drawings and stuck the prints onto cardboard and made a little half-inch scale model. We’d then rig up the model in the office and the director would come in to look at it and perhaps make one or two alterations.’ From these models the director had to work out each one of his shots from the script, entrances and exits, dialogue, panning left to right, and all the rest. ‘Then they’d make the director sign a form saying that he had okayed the set and once he’d signed that form, that was it, he couldn’t make any more adjustments because by then it had been costed and gone up to Accounts and marked with a green pen, and then it was built.’ It wasn’t only an efficient way of doing things, but a means to keep costs under control, as last-minute changes were invariably expensive. ‘Ealing were very aware of costs,’ says Tony. ‘For example, instead of building a door properly, that is double-sided, they’d build only one side because that’s the only side you saw on the screen. Why build the other side if no one was going to see it? It was as tight as that.’
Painted Boats (1945) was next on the Ealing schedule, a largely inconsequential film at the time, but like so many Ealing productions is today a rare historical document of a forgotten part of English cultural history. Directed by Charles Crichton, it tells the story of two families living and working on cargo-carrying canal boats – the ‘traditional’ Smiths on their horse-drawn boat and the ‘modern’ Stoners on their motorised vessel – and is very much a eulogy to a very particular way of life, and was certainly intended to remind audiences what Britain had been fighting to preserve. Indeed, the film was instigated by the Board of Trade, who wanted to show the kind of work the canal boats were doing, lugging coal, steel and wood up and down the waterways as part of the war effort.
The film is also interesting in that it featured the last screen performance of an extraordinary English ‘character’ in Bill Blewitt. This middle-aged Cornish fisherman-cum-postmaster was discovered by Harry Watt in a chance meeting at a village pub lock-in. Blessed with, as fellow documentarian Pat Jackson termed, ‘a mesmeric gift of the gab’, Watt cast Blewitt as the lead in a 1936 GPO documentary short that illustrated the wisdom of saving with the Post Office. He turned out to be a complete natural and was subsequently cast in small acting roles in The Foreman Went to France, Johnny Frenchman and Nine Men, becoming something of a personality around the lot. Charles Crichton once saw Blewitt in The Red Lion persuading people he wasn’t Bill Blewitt at all but his twin brother, inventing a whole history. On location for Painted Boats, during lulls in shooting Blewitt would sit outside the pub nursing a pint and tell a fascinated audience long stories about his early days when he was a boy on the canal. ‘Well, he’d never seen a canal before,’ said Crichton. ‘But everyone would believe him, absolutely rapt attention.’