Peter Musgrave had been mad about the cinema since his earliest school days, when his father bought him a small projector and he began to collect sound-effects records to give voice to the silent images he projected onto the wall of the family home. When Peter was fifteen his father, who knew somebody at Ealing Studios, wrote to them on behalf of his son requesting an interview. Eric Williams, then head of sound, wrote back asking for the young Peter to come in and see him.
He asked me lots of questions and seemed to be impressed. But after talking to me Eric said to my father, because I was mad keen to start straight away, ‘Look, it’s a dicey industry, stay at school till you’re 16, take your school certificate so at least you’ve got something, then come and see us.’ So with some disappointment I stayed on another year at school.
In 1947 Peter left school and presented himself at the gates of Ealing Studios with a letter of introduction from Eric Williams. Much to his disappointment Williams had been sent to Australia to work on a film, and his replacement Stephen Dalby was left to explain that the studio could no longer honour the letter, due to the fact that several people had been demobbed and were back working in their old jobs. ‘I’m afraid we just don’t have the vacancy for a trainee. You’ll have to go and find something else.’
Peter’s father scurried around and found him a job as a camera trainee at Wembley studios. ‘But it was on a rostrum shooting animation and I absolutely hated this because you were shooting a frame at a time. I think our general output was ten seconds a day, it was soul destroying.’ It was a strange place to work; the studio had been bombed during the war but the government hadn’t yet paid out any compensation so the main stage still had a big hole in the roof. ‘Also, if you opened the back door of the camera room you could see the crowd all going from Wembley Park station processing up to the stadium to watch the Olympics.’
Determined not to give up on his dream of working at Ealing, Peter called Stephen Dalby every month to check if the situation had changed. Finally, after almost a year, a vacancy did come up and Peter took great pleasure in resigning from Wembley. The vacancy was for a trainee in the sound editing department and Peter arrived as Scott of the Antarctic was in the last throes of post-production, and he remembers the enormous time and trouble the sound department spent getting the sound right for the actors walking in the snow.
Another curious problem arose, mainly due to the fact that the film had been shot in colour. As Peter notes:
It was still the old three strip camera where you had red, blue and green films running through the camera. The film went to the Technicolor laboratories and though they could process the negatives overnight they couldn’t print in colour overnight, which soon became the case with Eastmancolor. So cameramen had to be satisfied with a black-and-white print for rushes.
However, if a cameraman or director was insistent on seeing colour rushes and the budget was big enough, they might ask for a master shot to be printed in colour but they’d still have to wait at least five days. In any case, the cutting copy used by the editor would usually be something like ninety per cent black-and-white with the occasional colour shot. Quite often this would turn up unforeseen results.
I can remember on Scott of the Antarctic, the sound editor Gordon Stone returning from seeing the finished film and saying, ‘Well, that’ll teach me.’ You see, everyone in the studio had only ever seen a black-and-white print, so Gordon didn’t know that in one scene there was this little campfire alight because the flames didn’t show up; he’d been caught out and not provided any sound effect for it. It’s things like that which those working on the set might know about but in the cutting room you would never know.
The cutting rooms where Peter worked were compact. There was one long corridor of rooms for editors and their assistants, with a disused viewing theatre bang in the middle where people were allowed to go and smoke, an activity strictly forbidden in the cutting rooms themselves. ‘Though some people did cheat a bit by saying to their assistant, I want this and this, while literally holding a cigarette out in the corridor,’ recalls Peter.
‘But I can assure you, cellulose nitrate film was very dangerous stuff, you touched a cigarette end on that or a match it went up very fast.’
The staff were memorable, to say the least. Gordon Stone was the boss and an ex-marine, and a pleasant man according to Peter. There was also Chris Greenham, who went on to become an excellent sound editor on many prestigious films including The Guns of Navarone (1961) and Superman (1978).
‘He was at Ealing as an assistant. He’d been in the Special Boat Service or something in the war, apparently he used to creep in at night on rubber dinghies to the Greek islands and supply armaments to the Greek resistance and then creep out again.’
Another ex-military man was Nick MacDonald, who was something like a former wing commander. ‘Quite rightly, Ealing would welcome back people who had paid their dues in the military or in the war,’ says Peter. ‘So Nick was a bit older than average to be working as an assistant and people tended to sneer a bit behind his back. On one occasion in particular he went to the public phone out in the corridor and was ringing the Air Ministry saying, where is my distinguished flying cross, or something like that, you should have sent it to me by now, and we all thought, he’s doing this out loud to impress everyone. So there was a bit of that around. But I did enjoy working there enormously.’
Another memorable character around the editing rooms was Seth Holt, who had joined Ealing after working in documentaries, at the invitation of his brother-in-law Robert Hamer, and worked as assistant editor on Champagne Charlie and Scott of the Antarctic, in which he also featured as ‘the voice of the Blizzard’ on the soundtrack. Highly intellectual, Peter recalls that Holt and a music editor called Alistair McIntyre would play mental chess together, in other words without the use of a board or pieces.
I was so impressed. They would remember the moves in their heads and sometimes whilst doing a bit of work one of them would pop their head round the door and say, queen 4 to pawn 5. The other one would either respond immediately with their move or go round later and put their head in the door and say, right, I’ve got your bishop. Seth had a lot of charm and was very courteous. And even to a trainee like myself would listen if I did have something to say.
As for Balcon, Peter very seldom saw him. ‘He was far too elevated a man for me to have any dealings with.’ What he did know was that Balcon ran the rushes ahead of everybody else which was a bit unusual.
I think it was at noon when…, Katie Brown [the cutting room manageress] would start ranting at assistants, ‘Where are Sir Michael’s rushes!’, because he liked to see them at noon. Then perhaps privately he might say to a director, I liked yesterday’s work, or I think you’re doing too many close-ups of such and such, or I don’t think we’re really getting the comedy out of this. But he did see the rushes ahead of other people, because the unit themselves generally saw them in the lunch hour.
This is how Balcon tended to work at Ealing, very hands on. It’s true to say that he controlled every aspect of a production, from casting, budgets and costume choices. He would read every script and give notes and suggest re-writes where necessary. It was an immense workload, which more than once led to periods of ill health and nervous collapse.
And yet he was generous and egalitarian when it came to giving his creative staff their heads. Tibby Clarke said that Balcon was anything but dictatorial, that he would give a project the go-ahead if the consensus of opinion was in its favour. Although the creative talent at Ealing did devise ways of getting round Balcon’s prejudices, or in the words of Michael Relph, ‘became expert in producing ideas which catered for his restrictive preferences.’ Balcon was a bit of a prude. He once said, ‘None of us would ever suggest a subject, whatever its box office potential, if it was socially objectionable or doubtful.’ Charles Crichton later recalled that Balcon would sometimes tell his staff to forget all about box office and just make the kind of pictures that they really believed in. ‘But the very next day he would be shoving box office down our throat and telling us to learn much more about showmanship, how to bang the big drum.’
Above all he encouraged the cross-fertilisation of ideas. So all the associate producers and the directors used to read each other’s scripts, criticise them, see each other’s rushes, see each other’s rough cuts. It was very much a team effort. After all, this was the studio with the ‘team spirit’ as the slogan proudly declared on one of the studio walls. Indeed, when Balcon was knighted in 1948, he told Monja Danischewsky: ‘It isn’t me, old boy. It’s the studio that has been knighted.’
This sense of democracy was nowhere better symbolised than in the meetings that were held every week during which Balcon and his team of producers, writers and directors consulted freely together. ‘I read somewhere,’ says Joanna McCallum, ‘that Michael Relph said it was like the BBC used to be, fabulously talented people put together and then coming up with ideas and being supportive of each other.’
To fit them all in, Balcon had an enormous circular table constructed in his private dining room big enough to take about twelve people. ‘It was a massive, handsome animal of a piece of furniture,’ recalled Stanley Holloway. ‘The studio must have been built round it because the legend goes that when the sell-up came it was too large to get through the boardroom door and so still remains as an Ealing echo.’ This may have been the case for a while, but eventually the table had to be dismantled, broken up and, no doubt, put on a bonfire.
Peter Musgrave’s only proper memory of Balcon occurred outside a small preview theatre that was next door to a rather daunting spiral staircase.
As an assistant I often had to carry reels of film from my boss down this spiral staircase at great danger. One day Henry Cornelius had just come out of this little viewing theatre and Balcon was coming along the corridor and said rather bluntly to him, ‘Oh, are you still here?’ Cornelius mumbled something, and then Balcon said, ‘I thought you had finished,’ in a rather pointed way. Because like most directors Cornelius loved playing around and going on and on changing things, so it was obvious even to me that he had overstayed his budget.
Budgets, as we know, were important to Balcon, and it was the same with general finance. Peter’s own wages were, as he is quick to point out, ‘painfully low’, so by the time you’d paid travel costs and rent there wasn’t a whole lot left over. However, it was felt by many that job satisfaction and security commonly made up for the modesty of the pay packet. You collected your wages at the front gate where you also clocked in, there was a little office there run by a husband-and-wife team. ‘The husband was the accountant and he ran the pay department for years,’ remembers Norman Dorme. ‘Apparently he fiddled the books and later bought a hotel on the Isle of Wight, that was the rumour anyway.’
To save money Peter sometimes went without lunch. In those days Ealing stringently adhered to the union rates. If you were a first-year trainee, to the best of Peter’s memory, it was £4 a week. At his interview for Ealing, Peter was asked how much he earned at his previous post, the documentary rostrum camera firm in Wembley that he spent ten months with. ‘£4 a week,’ he said. ‘Well, you’ll be on £4 a week here, too, for two months and then we’ll move you up to £4 10 shillings.’ Which is what they did. ‘Ealing hated spending money on anything,’ admits Peter. ‘They were very tight with budgets and even didn’t like bringing in crowd artists to do the sound effects. Our little crew of sound people would do them and they would be recorded in Ealing’s own theatre.’
Out on location, establishing shots such as people crossing a busy road, or whatever, were very often shot mute by a second unit cameraman, so there wasn’t even a sound crew present. Back at Ealing the scene in question would be projected onto a screen and the required sound effects created, such as walking in time with the character. If it was a woman walking they’d get someone from the typing pool to oblige. Car noises could be obtained simply by taking a tape recorder out into the car park or going to Ealing’s own sound effects and picture library.
‘This was run by a very civil servant-type chap called Jack Middleton,’ says Peter. ‘Very buttoned-up shirt and businesslike he was. If at the end of an Ealing film there was anything useful, say a shot of Parliament Square or Piccadilly or a train rushing past, then he would collect all the spares or outtakes and file them away.’ Very often what happened was a couple of films down the line someone might enquire, ‘Oh, Jack, we want an express train rushing past at night. And he’d say, yes, we’ve got a spare of that from such and such a title.’
Other effects or shots might not be so easily accessible. During one particular dubbing session a director had a very precise memory. ‘I want a barge hooting here,’ he said. ‘We had a very good barge hooting in Painted Boats, reel 4.’ Peter’s boss Gordon Stone stood on a chair and grabbed hold of this big box up near the ceiling which held all the old dubbing charts and found Painted Boats reel 4 and, to his surprise, there it was. ‘Oh yes, he’s right, 610 feet, it will be on effects 5. Peter, go to the vaults and get it.’ When a film was finished all the old tracks were stored in what had once been the air-raid shelter.
‘This was a rather dank place,’ Peter recalls, ‘which was not maintained in any way. And there was a large pool of shallow water inside, because there was no longer a proper door, and that made the place really smelly. So I would have to go in and ferret around these piles of already rusting cans of film. And occasionally I’d have to go back and explain that I couldn’t find this particular track, either because it had been stored incorrectly or destroyed, and there’d be hell to pay.’
Peter and his colleagues were also required to run everywhere; there was no saunter and have a cup of coffee on the way. And often they’d work their lunch hour, making do with a quick sandwich bought from the canteen.
It was resented, certainly amongst the dubbing staff, that if you’d worked your lunch hour why was it that the bosses were so strict about the time clock. A colleague would say, ‘Hell, they’ve written me this note saying I’ve lost 13 minutes this week for arriving late, but what about the two lunch hours I’ve worked, that’s two times sixty minutes.’ But if you were asked to work the lunch hour, you worked the lunch hour.
It would especially grate with the staff when someone was sacked over poor timekeeping or being late. Peter once bumped into his former colleague Chris Greenham, who had just left Ealing. ‘What happened?’ Peter asked. ‘I was fired because of bad timekeeping,’ came the reply. The bosses had sent him repeated warning notes. ‘Admittedly he had been a bad timekeeper,’ says Peter. ‘But he worked like a slave while he was there. But he had accumulated something that by Ealing’s standards was a disgrace, which was something like twenty-nine lost minutes in a week. So they had fired him, and I said, ‘What’s happened to you?’ And he said, ‘I’ve never looked back, I get paid far more, and work on bigger pictures.’ He wasn’t at all sorry.’
This leads to another grievance that existed amongst some of the staff, the feeling that there was an air of superiority around the studio, that if any employee left they’d struggle to find work outside and that they really ought to be grateful to have a job at all; that kind of attitude, almost putting fear into people so they’d stay. ‘There was this feeling while you were there of, don’t leave, you mustn’t leave,’ claims Peter.
It’s true to say that being permanently employed left staff free of worry between productions, a rare blessing especially in so tumultuous and fragile an industry as the movies. ‘The wonderful thing was that we had creative security,’ Charles Crichton explained in a BBC documentary in 1970. ‘There was enough anguish and misery about, the budgets were too low, some of our pet ideas got stamped on, but all the burden of setting up a picture was taken from our shoulders and we were relaxed.’ The price one paid for that security was low wages, lower wages than probably any other working studio in Britain. ‘We were paid less than other studios,’ Charles Frend once confirmed. ‘But on the other hand we were paid all the year round whether we were shooting or not. We didn’t get any share of the profits, but the company used to say, you’re not asked to share in the losses, either.’ As a rule contracts were renewed annually. It was done automatically, without fuss. ‘Astonishing as it seems now,’ said Tibby Clarke. ‘It was considered rather caddish for anyone on the creative side to employ an agent, who would doubtless have gained one better terms than one managed to obtain for oneself.
Eventually this situation reached boiling point, sometime in 1947, when everybody got to thinking, ok our contracts get renewed year by year, but we aren’t getting as much money as we might be worth outside. And so a secret meeting of all the directors and all the associate producers was called which finally deputed Sidney Cole, the studio’s crusading trade unionist, to go and talk to Balcon about money. Cole was the most politically engaged individual at the studio, having arrived at Ealing in 1941 first as an editor and then producer after making several left-wing documentaries about the Spanish Civil War and the working class. According to Cole Balcon was very concerned by these modest signs of revolt. Cole and all the rest were not being ungrateful, they knew that it was Balcon and no one else who had promoted most of them. ‘But Mick suddenly got, I think, very frightened at the idea that we might be deserting the ship.’ In the end Balcon conceded and paid them more money. Still not very much and still a long way off what they might have got as a freelance. ‘I think he was a very mean person in money terms,’ admitted Charles Crichton, who before this mini revolt stirred things up was only getting £25 pounds a week for making features.
Under contract to Ealing one was also very seldom allowed temporary leave to accept a highly paid freelance job elsewhere. When Douglas Slocombe, who had aspirations to become a director, was approached by revered documentary filmmaker John Grierson to helm one of his productions he jumped at the chance. But there was one proviso. “I have to tell you that I’m under contract to Ealing. I have been there for years and hope to remain there. If you want me to do it, you will have to ask Ealing if they will release me for two or three months.” The next day Dougie was walking through the main entrance foyer when he was grabbed by Hal Mason. “I would keep out of Mick’s way if I were you Dougie.” Through the thick wooden door of Balcon’s office Slocombe could hear him shouting down the telephone at Grierson: “I won’t have my people taken away from me!” And that was the end of Slocombe’s directing aspirations. As Charles Crichton once observed: ‘I think Mick was quite a jealous man. He did sometimes think he owned us.’
Something very similar happened when Tibby Clarke was courted by Hollywood. With several hits under his belt at Ealing, he was approached by William Wyler to work for a couple of weeks re-writing the script of Roman Holiday (1953). Surely working with such a film-making maverick would only enhance his reputation at Ealing, plus the money was good, so Clarke asked Balcon’s permission. Thinking about it for a few minutes Balcon said, “This offer from Paramount isn’t good enough.” Which came as a surprise to Clarke since the fee in question was six times his wages at Ealing. “It’s your value to them we have to consider,” said Balcon, before revealing his own figure of how much the Hollywood studio ought to be paying. It was an astronomical sum.
“That’s ridiculous,” said Clarke. “They’ll never pay it.”
“Nonsense old boy, you’re worth it – to anyone except us,” Balcon finished with.
Of course Paramount refused to pay, as Balcon knew only too well they would. Instead they asked Clarke’s fellow Ealing scribe John Dighton, who had shrewdly not agreed to go under contract.
This all might be considered as unfairness on Balcon’s part, but he was loyal to his workforce and he expected loyalty in return. One illuminating story from Monja Danischewsky has Balcon and himself in the projection theatre at Ealing watching a private screening of The First of the Few (1942) the stirring tale of R.J. Mitchell, the designer of the Spitfire, played by Leslie Howard. In one scene Mitchell unveils his plans for a plane prototype to the company board he works for. They reject the idea. Spurned, Mitchell says something along the lines of, “In that case, I’ll take it elsewhere.” At this point in the film Balcon suddenly rose to his feet and glared at the screen, jabbing his finger accusingly at Leslie Howard’s retreating figure. “You come back!” he blasted. “You designed that plane in the company’s time. It isn’t your copyright. It belongs to the company.” That’s rather how he felt about his staff, he’d nurtured them, developed their talent and they belonged to him.
Arriving in 1947 at the studio was a young eager cameraman by the name of Ronnie Taylor, who had begun his career at Gainsborough in 1941 before going into the army. After the war he had returned to the studio but things had become a bit slack there, not a lot was happening. ‘Ealing got in touch and asked the head of the camera department at Gainsborough if I could be loaned out to Ealing for a few months.’ It turned out to be a much longer stay.
It didn’t take Ronnie long to suss the place out.
Michael Balcon ruled with a pretty firm hand, compared to Gainsborough which was a very relaxed atmosphere. The producer in charge of production at Gainsborough was Ted Black, the brother of George Black who was a famous stage producer. Balcon had a fella called Hal Mason in charge of production at Ealing, who dealt with the riffraff as it were. Hal Mason was very strict. He was on the floor more than Balcon. Balcon was hardly ever seen, at least by me, but he ran a very efficient studio. Although I didn’t like the fact that we had to clock in and clock out. Ealing was run in a very strict manner in that regard, because I never had to clock in at any other studio I worked at.
This efficiency and discipline also extended to how one presented oneself. ‘You had to be fairly tidy,’ remembers editor Peter Tanner. ‘Mickie Balcon used to say some of the directors were the scruffiest lot he’d ever seen. But we had to wear a tie every day there, and if you had screenings you had to wear a suit. I suppose that was how we got the image of Sir Michael’s young gentlemen.’
As for the talent, Ronnie Taylor liked most of them. He thought Robert Hamer a fine director; he even courted his secretary and eventually married her. Some of the others he had less time for. ‘Charlie Crichton was a bit grumpy actually. He had a good sense of humour but he was a bit of a grouch. But he made some fine films.’
As for the facilities, they were an improvement over Gainsborough, says Ronnie: ‘The stages weren’t bad, they were pretty good actually. And the camera and sound equipment was first class. It was quite modern for its time.’ This wasn’t the opinion of everyone, however. ‘It wasn’t hi-tech at all,’ claims Robert Winter. ‘You were lucky to have a telephone in your office.’ Ealing was, though, the first studio in the country that had a gantry system, with all the electrics coming into the studio via the roof, not from the walls which was the norm at the time in British studios, leaving sundry cables all across the floor. ‘There were these big girders and they hung gantries off them which were suspended on chains,’ recalls Ken Westbury. ‘The electric cables were dropped straight down, so there was virtually nothing on the floor. Ealing was the first studio in Britain to do that.’
Most people remember the stages at Ealing as well equipped but modest. Robert Winter recalls that the largest stage wasn’t insulted against outside noise, ‘so dialogue did prove a problem if an aeroplane flew over or whatever’. Another drawback was the size; they were somewhat small. This was always one of the disadvantages of Ealing’s situation, it couldn’t be re-developed or enlarged since it backed onto property and Walpole Park, so construction of sets and shooting schedules had to be meticulously timed due to the lack of stage space. This was fine since most of the movies made there never required a huge amount of space. The lack of a backlot also necessitated a reliance on location shooting.
However, when large-scale sets were required, that’s when a craftsman’s or technician’s skills came into play. A good example of this was when the Art Department was asked to re-create the interior of Beverley Minster for the film Lease of Life (1954) ‘First of all we used a foreground model,’ relates Norman Dorme. ‘Anything that was bigger than the stage we’d use a foreground model, which is a hanging miniature. So that gave you the top half of the set. Then we built the first five or six columns and the first two or three rows of pews for the people. We had maybe five rows of people and then they went into painted cut-outs, rows and rows of just plywood cut-outs scenic painted. The trick was lining everything up, and also trimming the foreground miniature so it sat perfectly on top.’
That trick was often used. So, too, were glass shots, which were achieved by painting details on a piece of glass, which was then combined with live-action footage to create the illusion of a set or a background. Ealing used this method of optical effect quite often says Norman.
There was a scene in The Cruel Sea when these two NCOs from the Compass Rose ship visit the home of one of their sisters. They go back a few months later, walk down the same street, turn the corner and the house has been bombed, the roof has gone and everything. We shot both of those scenes on the same day with just a piece of painted glass from a scenic artist for the damaged building. Back in those days we didn’t have special effects, there was no such thing, really. Special effects was mostly run by the Art Department. It was only later on they became these huge empires.
Imagination played a huge part, too. On Whisky Galore (1949) Jim Morahan was art director and achieved a believable effect with an almost childlike simplicity. It was an establishing shot of a sailing boat anchored at sea. Morahan took with him to the Scottish location a small model boat. ‘He lined up the shot with a rock out at sea,’ recalls Norman, ‘placed the model ship in the foreground and sat it on the water and it worked very well, done so simply, all in camera. Nowadays it would all be done optically and they’d be a special department set up to do it and it would go on for months. Then it was done on the day, on the spot.’
Ealing did possess its own model stage, which measured about 80 by 100 feet according to Tony Rimmington. ‘Inside was a permanent tank that was something like 5 foot high, which they used a lot for the whacking great models we had to build for The Cruel Sea and other stuff like that.’ The model stage was constructed during the war and according to Ken Westbury involved no machinery at all. ‘It was built by just two workmen and was completely made of brick. One guy was the bricklayer, the other guy was his labourer who also dug the holes out for the foundations. I think they might have had some help to put the girder roof on.’