Christopher Barry had been a script reader for a couple of years now, but it was well known around the studio that his ambitions lay on the production side. ‘I tried pushing it all the time, but the Association of Cinematograph Technicians (ACT) was in my way.’ This went on for quite some time according to Ken Westbury. ‘Chris kept trying to get an ACT ticket so he could go onto the floor, but he kept getting rejected by the membership. Somebody took a dislike to him. I think they mistrusted him because he was friends with the management.’
This kind of blackballing happened back then, as the unions continued to wield a lot of power at the studio. Ken can still remember the shop steward for the National Association of Theatrical and Kine Employees (NATKE), known today as BECTU. ‘He was a real scruffy old stagehand with a dirty old waistcoat with food stains down the front. I’m sure for the management it must have been terrible having to negotiate with this guy.’
Eventually Christopher’s application was accepted. ‘I became a second assistant on account of my (by then) great experience working with producers and directors as non union-grade “assistants to”, and having had many opportunities of visiting the stages and observing work in progress.’ Christopher’s first credit on an Ealing picture was A Run for Your Money, a film that is totally forgotten today due to having the misfortune of being the fourth comedy film released by the studio in 1949, and paling into insignificance in comparison with its illustrious predecessors. The slender plot revolved around two naive Welsh brothers, played by Donald Houston and Meredith Edwards, who win a competition to the bright lights of London to see an England v. Wales rugby game and get up to all sorts of high jinks. The wild and unruly Hugh Griffith appeared in a small role and Christopher remembers spending most of his time trying to entice him out of pubs and back onto the film set during location shooting. There was even room for Alec Guinness, wasted as a newspaper reporter following the brothers around town. ‘I do recall Guinness, who didn’t drive, having to be rope-towed by scene hands outside the Tower of London,’ says Christopher. ‘Fortunately for him, he was not yet then publicly well known!’
Ealing’s other release in what was probably their most glorious year was Train of Events. Like Dead of Night, this was another portmanteau film handled by three directors: Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden and Sidney Cole. Starting with a train crash, we are introduced in flashback to a range of characters who, by the climax, may or may not end up as passengers on the doomed train. The cast was impressive, with Valerie Hobson, Jack Warner and John Clements headlining. There was also a small role for Peter Finch in his first British film.
Following Eureka Stockade, Harry Watt had become a firm champion of Finch and when he learnt the actor was in London brought him over to The Red Lion pub, where he introduced him to his fellow Ealing directors as his protégé. With a bit of persuasion, Watt managed to get Finch a screen test at the studio. Dearden directed it and suggested the budding actor do his test with a scene from Train of Events, playing a Shakespearean actor who attempts to murder his wife. As soon as Balcon saw it, he was so impressed that he cast Finch in that same part in the film. Finch researched his role of a murderer by spending a day at Scotland Yard’s infamous Black Museum.
Upon arriving at the studio for his first day’s work, Finch was told, ‘For God’s sake, don’t tell them in Australia what we’re paying you.’ Ealing had plans to continue making films in the country and didn’t want to have to pay London film rates. ‘You don’t know the Aussies,’ replied Finch. ‘If I don’t tell them, they’ll imagine I’m getting twice as much as I am!’ When the film opened, Finch was especially singled out. Film critic C. A. Lejeune in the Observer described him as, ‘A young actor who adds good cheekbones to a quick intelligence and is likely to become a cult I fear.’
Train of Events was written by Angus MacPhail, the last screenplay he would ever produce for Ealing. An unsung hero of British film, beginning his career back in the days of silent movies when he supplied sub-titles, MacPhail had written or co-written credits on many of Ealing’s films, certainly more than any other writer. He also provided script advice, often uncredited, on most of the scripts produced at the studio.
Tibby Clarke called his knowledge of film ‘encyclopaedic’. A Cambridge man, Balcon had appointed MacPhail as scenario editor at Gaumont-British early in his career and issued the instruction that, ‘No film shall be considered for production until it has his approval … from a story point of view’. MacPhail pretty much performed the same function at Ealing; script conferences were always carried out in his office, during which he chain-smoked incessantly. ‘But his influence was considerable’, according to Michael Relph.
Michael Pertwee said of MacPhail that he ‘possessed a penetrating ability to detect weaknesses in story line, a fund of ideas to replace them, and an unquenchable thirst for alcohol, which he never touched before six in the evening, but you could set your clock by him’. Stella Jonckheere, Ealing’s literary editor during the 1940s, had one abiding memory of MacPhail from the war years wearing his Home Guard uniform, whisky bottles protruding from each pocket of his greatcoat, playing poker with his fellow fire-watchers on one of the sound stages.
Sadly, alcoholism was to force MacPhail into semi-retirement by the early 1950s. At the end of each day he would be driven home to his elegant Bayswater flat in a block that was dubbed ‘Hangover Towers’, since many of Ealing’s film-makers lived there. After a meal cooked for him by a helper that he barely touched, MacPhail would drink solidly for two hours and fall into bed insensible. ‘He was a true neurotic who could not face life outside his work,’ said Relph. ‘He ended up drinking himself to death alone in an Eastbourne hotel.’
With Rank now providing a healthy slice of the budgets for Ealing’s films under their joint agreement, the enormous success of the 1949 trio of comedies was certainly encouraging. However, the recent appointment of John Davis, an accountant by trade, as managing director of Rank had caused strain in the previously cordial relationship. Balcon thought Davis unnecessarily frugal in outlook and had grown impatient by his constant asking of questions about ‘minutia such as plywood and canteen costs’. Rank had also started to intervene more directly in production choices, much to Balcon’s annoyance.
There was something else, too. Rank had begun making cinema sound equipment. Up until then the two main firms in this market place had both been American – Western Electric and RCA. Peter Musgrave, who worked in Ealing’s sound department, confirms that the studio used RCA equipment.
But when Ealing signed that deal with Rank, part of the deal was, if you want new equipment you have to buy it from one of our companies. I remember later when I was demobbed and I sauntered round the studio saying hello to old friends, they had bought some Rank sound equipment and somebody whispered to me, ‘It’s not as good as the RCA stuff’, but they had to take it.
The year 1950 started well for Ealing with the release of one of its most popular films, The Blue Lamp. Based on an unproduced play by Ted Willis and Jan Read, with contributions from Tibby Clarke, who was able to draw upon his experiences as a wartime constable, this was an attempt to show the work of the London police as realistically as possible and in a pseudo-documentary style that would later heavily influence British crime television drama.
Director Basil Dearden received full cooperation from Scotland Yard and some senior officers appeared as themselves on screen. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner at the time, Sir Harold Scott, often visited Ealing to see rushes and to give advice on any technical inaccuracies so they could be corrected.
Jack Warner stars as PC George Dixon, your ordinary, honest copper, who within half an hour of the film is shot dead by a young thug played by Dirk Bogarde, on loan from Rank. Warner later admitted to some misgivings about taking on the role; indeed colleagues warned him against doing it – it was rare in films for the star to die so early on – but instinct took over and Warner accepted. It was a fortuitous decision, because his character would be resurrected by the BBC and made into one of the most successful and long running of all British TV cop shows, Dixon of Dock Green.
Years earlier Warner had learnt a valuable lesson; that sometimes it is the small roles that linger longest in the memory.
In Ealing’s The Captive Heart he had played a Cockney corporal POW. Early in the film he is seen carving a small boat out of a piece of wood. It’s a bitterly cold winter and the stove in the hut is burning low due to lack of fuel. Everybody is looking at Warner and he knows it. Finally this boat he’s worked on for weeks is finished, but he opens the door of the stove and throws it inside. Just then there’s a cry from outside; the Red Cross parcels have arrived. His fellow prisoners rush out, leaving Warner all alone staring at his beloved boat crackling in the flames. Ten years later, Warner was a guest at a party thrown by Rank for some visiting Hollywood dignitaries. ‘I hadn’t met any of them previously but I noticed Richard Widmark staring intently at me from the other side of the room. He walked across, hand outstretched, and said, “You’re the guy who burnt the boat, aren’t you?”’
Again the film made extensive use of London locations, notably Paddington Green police station and a climactic chase shot during a greyhound derby at White City Stadium. None of the 30,000-strong crowd were notified that a film unit was shooting that evening and Bogarde had to run the gauntlet of what at times was a mob, some carrying razors. ‘My clothes were torn to shreds,’ the actor later claimed. In another scene, chased by Jimmy Hanley’s policeman, Bogarde had to cross over a live electric railway track. ‘I can remember the faces of the train drivers coming out of the tunnel and seeing a man and a policeman in uniform, standing between the tracks. We never got any danger money in those days!’
The Blue Lamp was the most successful film of the year at the British box office (applicants to join the police force went up as a result), and it was also critically well received. Dilys Powell in her Sunday Times review commented: ‘Its style seems to me at least as distinctive, and as well worth study, as the celebrated “documentary” style of Hollywood’s The Naked City.’ The day after the positive reviews appeared in newspapers, a delighted Bogarde phoned up his bosses over at Rank, who since signing him a few years ago had made him play a steady stream of bland film roles. ‘Have you seen the notices?’ The voice at the other end of the line agreed they were good but then dryly went on to say, ‘Unfortunately we haven’t any more mixed-up delinquent parts at the moment.’ Even so, The Blue Lamp represented a huge step forward in Bogarde’s career and growth as an actor. As a Rank contract player he’d always been told not to move a muscle in his face or make any grand gestures in front of a movie camera – ‘Remember, this isn’t the theatre!’
Basil Dearden, an early supporter of Bogarde’s, told him that was all nonsense. ‘Don’t be so self conscious about not acting. I’ll tell you when you’re going too far.’
The Blue Lamp marked the return of Tony Rimmington to Ealing after two years of National Service. He was glad to be back in the art department and would stay for the remaining years of the studio and carry on in the film business until the ripe old age of seventy-seven. Ealing, he says, was very much a part of the reason for that longevity. ‘It was a terrific apprenticeship. Jack Shampan, the chief draughtsman, made me do stuff over and over again until it satisfied him, so he was a bit of a hard taskmaster, but he knew the business and he taught me a lot.’ There was discipline, too, a certain code among the workers that had to be obeyed. ‘You called everyone “sir” back then,’ says Tony.
I’ll never forget Jim Morahan, who was my governor, three pictures before they closed the studio down he came up to me and said, ‘Will you come into the office, Tony.’ I go in there. He said, ‘I’m not telling you this in front of the other people, but you can stop calling me sir from now on, my name’s Jim.’ I said, ‘Thank you very much indeed, Jim – sir.’
Despite the discipline, Tony and the others were allowed a certain amount of freedom to have a bit of fun, although sometimes this could go a bit too far. One 5 November Tony let off a couple of bangers in the office, just for a giggle, and from then on was frisked for fireworks every bonfire night.
The one day everyone could really let their hair down was the annual Christmas party. ‘It was traditional that the art department held a party at Christmas and invited everybody,’ recalls Tony. ‘We used to put money into a pot and just before Christmas went out and bought a load of beer and whisky, nibbles and food. All the separate departments would also hold its own party for their staff; the Plasterers’ Shop, Stills, Editing, and then afterwards all roll up to the art department, which was always the biggest party.’ In the end, though, the management called a halt to it all. ‘They stopped them because people were just getting too drunk,’ recalls Joan Parcell. ‘They were worried about them driving home.’
The next film to go on the floor at Ealing was Dance Hall (1950), directed by Charles Crichton, and Tony Rimmington remembers an unusual encounter with one of the film’s stars.
I was walking to get my wages one day and coming towards me was a beautiful looking blonde bird. Cor blimey, I thought, I think it’s Diana Dors. I averted my eyes because I didn’t want to ogle her and walked past. Suddenly she stopped and said, ‘I say, you!’ I turned round. ‘Yes,’ I said. She asked, ‘Do you know who I am?’ I said, ‘Yes, I think you’re Diana Dors.’ ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I’m glad you recognised me, thank you,’ and walked on. That was one of my first very short introductions to a star – funny people.
Diana Dors appeared in the film, along with an equally young Petula Clark, as one of four factory girls who leave behind their monotonous jobs to go dancing every Saturday night. Seen very much as an emerging sex bomb-type figure in British cinema, Diana was disappointed to be told she had to stuff cotton wool down her bra to prevent the imprint of her nipples through her tight sweater. The film was rather dismissed by the critics. The Sunday Express opined: ‘Story is trite but atmosphere authentic. I could almost smell the cheap scent and perspiration.’
Dance Hall was written by Alexander Mackendrick and Diana Morgan, the only woman on Ealing’s staff of writers; indeed one of the few female writers working in any British film studio at the time. Diana felt the studio was a tough place to work at but very enjoyable. ‘As the only woman writer I had to be very tough,’ she later recalled. ‘And I was. It was very much like the boys of St. Michael’s. It was like a school.’ She remembered one incident on that film. There was a scene where the actor Donald Houston has a row with his girlfriend and storms out of the dance hall and just stands there alone outside. Mackendrick and the other writers were all convinced that he was contemplating suicide. ‘How do you know?’ said Diana. ‘Do you have a balloon coming out of his head saying – I’m contemplating suicide. Is there a special look on his face.’ This went on all day between Mackendrick and Diana, Angus MacPhail, everybody. At a quarter to six Mackendrick looked at his watch and realised that the Red Lion pub was opening. ‘The bitch is right,’ he declared, and everyone went for a drink.
Next up was Cage of Gold (1950), a showcase for the charms of Jean Simmons, who plays a young bride who remarries again believing her husband to be dead, only for him to return with a dastardly plan to extort money. A big star at the time, Ken Westbury recalls that the actress celebrated her twenty-first birthday on the set. ‘Stewart Granger had a thing about her in those days and as a birthday present he bought her a Bristol car, which in those days was a pretty pricey sports car.’
This routine melodrama was enlivened by some location shooting in Paris and the unit were given permission to shoot inside a busy bank. ‘But the manager was having a job getting his customers inside so, in the end, we got thrown out,’ relates Ken.
‘There was Basil Dearden on the dolly being pushed out through the doors saying, “What’s going on? You can’t do this to me!”’
Ken enjoyed working with Dearden, without doubt Ealing’s most prolific and professional director.
He was a lovely director. He always did his homework so was always on top of things, especially from a technical point of view. He was very good at doing long, complicated takes where the actors are moving around and the cameras are following them. If we were doing tests on actors for the next film he used to practise on those. And he knew exactly how he was going to edit a film. He was a real character, too, he used to stroll around the set like a peacock.
This was Maurice Selwyn’s recollection of Dearden: ‘He was very dapper. He was always dressed as if he was going to a ball.’
Dearden had something of an outsider status within the studio, not being a university man like so many of his colleagues. He was very much a self-taught man and had worked as a manager at several theatres owned by Basil Dean before joining Dean at Ealing when the theatrical impresario took over the studio. ‘He always used to say to us that one of his jobs around Ealing when he first arrived was to make sure there was toilet paper in the lavatories,’ recalls Ken Westbury. While not looked down upon by the other directors, there was a feeling that he was not quite ‘one of them’, a feeling reinforced by his non-participation in the lengthy drinking sessions over at The Red Lion, unlike his partner Michael Relph who was a regular member of the drinking fraternity. Douglas Slocombe once described Dearden as ‘a loner’.
* * *
After the success of Ealing’s 1949 comedies, the public were eagerly awaiting more of the same. In June 1951 they finally got it with the release of The Lavender Hill Mob. This now classic Ealing comedy outing had a strange beginning. Tibby Clarke had been contracted to write a drama called Pool of London (1951), which was to have the River Thames as its backdrop. The plot dealt with the theft of gold bullion from the Bank of England. After discussing the matter at length with the director, both were stumped as to how the villains could smuggle the bullion overseas without the authorities being alerted. At home that evening Clarke noticed an Eiffel Tower paper weight that a friend had brought back for him from Paris. A light went on inside his head, what a perfect ruse, remoulding the gold into innocent-looking miniature Eiffel Towers for the European black market. The only drawback was that the idea seemed more attuned to a comedy film than a semi-realistic drama. Just for fun, Clarke wrote out how the plot would work as a comedy and after a couple of hours he had a two-page story outline. The next morning Clarke bumped into Balcon getting out of his car.
‘How’s Pool of London going?’ he asked.
‘There’s been quite an unexpected development,’ Clarke answered.
‘Come in and tell me about it.’
In the office Clarke explained what he’d been up to. Balcon wasn’t best pleased. ‘Why the hell haven’t you been doing what I told you to do and get on with the Pool of London story? How dare you alter the whole studio programme.’
Clarke placed his story outline on the desk and requested that Balcon merely read it. ‘No! Take it away.’ Clarke left rather sheepishly, but his storyline remained behind.
Once his anger had subsided, Balcon took the sheets of paper and began to read. The idea was inspired and he immediately called Clarke back in. ‘I’ve read that outline of yours,’ Balcon began, as if their altercation of a few hours ago had never happened. ‘I think we have a comedy there. Show it to Charlie Crichton, see what he thinks.’
‘What about Pool of London?’
‘Oh you’ll be no good at that,’ said Balcon. ‘I’ve picked another writer.’
With The Lavender Hill Mob now a go project, Clarke began his research in earnest. He had the means of smuggling the gold abroad but no idea how to steal it in the first place. The logical answer lay with the experts and the Bank of England itself, so he decided to pay them a visit. Told to fill in a form stating the nature of his business, Clarke wrote: ‘Information required on means of stealing gold bullion’. Forgetting to say that he wanted the information for a film, his enquiry caused, not understandably, a great deal of concern. After a lengthy wait, Clarke was shown to a rather grand office. ‘This,’ said an officious-looking man seated behind the desk holding his form, ‘is the most extraordinary request I have ever had to deal with. Tell me, are you personally proposing to steal our bullion?’
When Clarke revealed the information was needed for a film, the relief on the man’s face was palpable. ‘We’ll get the manager of the bullion department up here,’ said the man, reaching for a telephone. ‘He’s better qualified than I am to advise you on this robbery.’ In the end several heads of department were called into the office, forming something of a committee to work out the best way to rob its own vaults. All Clarke had to do was sit back and listen, making the odd note.
‘The method used in the film is entirely the result of their willing cooperation,’ Clarke revealed in a 1988 interview. ‘I don’t suppose security would allow anything like that today.’
During the course of his research Clarke also managed to gain access to a gold refinery on the Thames and was amazed to see gold bars being treated with casual indifference, as if they were tins of baked beans. Even so, upon leaving the premises his boots were washed down in case they had any gold dust on them.
Still, Clarke had great trouble with the script, which had to be written and rewritten several times before it satisfied all concerned. In the end it would win him an Academy Award. The basic plot has a timid bank clerk, another plum role for Alec Guinness, teaming up with an enterprising maker of souvenirs (Stanley Holloway) to pull off the perfect robbery. At one stage Clarke was going to ignore these two characters once the robbery has been committed and instead follow what happened to each gold Eiffel Tower, thus incorporating a whole host of new characters. Quite rightly, associate producer Michael Truman said this would be disastrous and to keep the focus of the story on Guinness and Holloway.
For a long time Clarke couldn’t come up with a suitable ending, either, until he remembered an incident that occurred during his days as a reserve policeman in the war, when one night his superintendent’s car was stolen from outside the police station. This incident leads to the frenetic car chase that concludes the film. Ronnie Taylor was on the second unit and worked on this famous sequence. ‘We filmed all round the back of Shepherd’s Bush and Notting Hill, a lot of the car stuff was shot round there. We had to get permission and cooperation from the police because we had to close a lot of roads.’
Another classic scene is one in which Holloway and Guinness have to escape from the top of the Eiffel Tower. During rehearsals Crichton called over to Guinness, ‘Alec, there is a trap door over there – where it says “Workmen Only” – I’d like you to run to it, open it and start running down the spiral staircase. Stanley will follow.’ Guinness obeyed and later wrote about what happened next.
A very dizzying sight to the ground greeted me. But I completed half a spiral before I noticed that three feet in front of me the steps suddenly ceased – broken off. I sat down promptly where I was and cautiously started to shift myself back to the top, warning Stanley to get out of the way. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ the director yelled. ‘Down! Further down!’ ‘Further down is eternity,’ I called back. No one had checked up on the staircase and no one apologised; that wasn’t Ealing policy.
Instead it was decided to replicate the characters’ rapid descent down the tower back at the studio. This represented something of a challenge for the art department. In the end a section of the tower’s spiral staircase was built at the studio, which went up to about twenty-five feet, with a vertical axel going through the middle of it, behind which part of the Eiffel Tower structure was replicated in timber painted black. On action, the crew revolved the axel and all Holloway and Guinness had to do was run up and down, literally on the spot, to create the illusion of movement, thanks to back projection. For many of the technical boffins and craftsmen working at Ealing, this was one of the joys of working at such a place, responding to a problem and coming up with a viable solution to make it work. ‘We all saw it as a challenge,’ says Tony Rimmington. ‘And when you saw it working you got terrific satisfaction; well, we’ve beaten that one, I wonder what they’ll come up with next?’
A big financial success, The Lavender Hill Mob won the Best British Film at that year’s BAFTAs and was highly praised by critics. In the Observer, C. A. Lejeune wrote: ‘An outrageous comedy, but the observations of detail and character are so true, the sense of a familiar place so sharp, that few will resent the gusto with which the outrage is perpetrated.’ Guinness put much of the success of the film down to Crichton’s astute direction: ‘He had a feeling for the idea of getting away from drab reality into a world of fantasy.’
Again, the supporting cast are wonderfully chosen, with Alfie Bass and Sid James as a pair of Cockney spivs hired to be part of the gang. James had made sporadic appearances in British films and did one day’s work on It Always Rains on Sunday, but The Lavender Hill Mob represented his first big breakthrough. Crichton cast him after seeing his distinctive face in a B picture at his local cinema. Two years later, a pair of TV scriptwriters called Galton and Simpson were looking for an actor to play Tony Hancock’s pal in a BBC radio series. They knew the actor they wanted, could see his face in their mind’s eye, but for the life of them couldn’t come up with the name. They remembered seeing him in The Lavender Hill Mob and so began a search to see if it was playing anywhere. They tracked it down to a cinema in Putney showing it on a re-release. ‘We had to sit through the entire film until the credits came up,’ recalled Ray Galton.
The film also boasted early appearances by two actors who were to go on to win international fame. Guinness had recently starred on the London stage in a poorly received production of Hamlet, featuring a young actor he considered his protégé. His name was Robert Shaw and Guinness arranged for him to appear in The Lavender Hill Mob in a small, uncredited role as a police chemist. It really is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance, but nevertheless it marked Shaw’s film debut.
There was also a small role for a twenty-one-year-old actress who had only recently begun in films – Audrey Hepburn. Alas, no one at Ealing noticed anything special about her. Balcon later admitted that she ‘struck nobody as star material’. Actually that’s not strictly true. During their short scene together, Guinness did recognise something. Yes she might only have had one line, in the film’s Latin-set opening sequence, which she didn’t say in any particularly impressive way, ‘but her faun-like beauty and presence were remarkable’. After the scene was shot, Guinness got on the telephone to his agent. ‘I don’t know if she can act, but a real film star has just wafted on to the set. Someone should get her under contract before we lose her to the Americans.’
Nobody did. In fact actresses on the whole were pretty shabbily treated at Ealing and there was a conspicuous lack of really solid parts for women in many of their films. The critic Kenneth Tynan categorised Ealing’s output as, ‘men at work, men engrossed in a crisis, men who communicate with their women mostly by post-card.’ This was a little bit unfair, but Ealing did seem to shy away from films that dealt with female issues or sexual politics. Diana Morgan felt that her fellow scriptwriters just didn’t want anything to do with such matters. ‘The boys were so terrified of any trace of sentimentality that if you wrote a love scene with any feeling in it you had it thrown back at you and they said – nauseating!’ As Bryan Forbes joked: ‘Sex was buried with full military honours at Ealing.’
And the reason for that was very simple. Balcon was an extremely moral person and a little parochial, and this heavily coloured the kinds of film subjects he undertook. Certainly it can be seen as one of his failings that he distrusted any approach in story values to what might be called sexual themes and when that kind of material came up, he was very inclined to soft pedal and play it down in a rather genteel attitude. ‘And that morality applied to not just the sexual side of life but to all aspects of life,’ says David Peers. ‘He was quite clearly the boss and you had to submit clear-cut ideas for the films that were made under him.’
It was the same behind the camera, where men dominated the top positions. Ealing’s sole female contract scriptwriter was Diana Morgan, and while she enjoyed working there admitted it was ‘a very male studio’. Her rather unsavoury nickname among her male colleagues was ‘the Welsh bitch’. When Kay Mander, a blazing presence in the British documentary movement, who had won a British film award for her 1948 French-language film La Famille Martin, approached Balcon for work, he turned her down flat saying a woman director would not be able to control a male film crew. This was an attitude that pervaded the whole industry at this time, not just Ealing.
Back at the studios and working on The Lavender Hill Mob was Maurice Selwyn, who had left the studio in 1947, when he and his twin brother Lionel were called up for National Service. The army were keen to keep the twins together, but they separated out of choice when each had the opportunity of joining different units doing photographic work. At the end of his army service, Maurice returned to Ealing to ask for his old job back but there was nothing for him. ‘When I left Ealing to do my National Service there were four camera crews. When I came back there were only two, with an occasional third. I was devastated.’ Instead, Maurice decided to go freelance and, as it happened, worked a couple of times at Ealing, notably on The Lavender Hill Mob. It was a memorable shoot. ‘We stayed in Paris for three weeks, and it was a wonderful experience. I remember shooting Stanley Holloway and Alec Guinness on the steps of the Eiffel Tower. The unit hired the Eiffel Tower for two or three hours a day; a figure that has always stayed in my mind is £30 for each session, which at the time was a lot of money.’
When film work began to dry up towards the end of 1951, Maurice reluctantly left the business. He had married and, in an attempt to seek a more stable income, became a store manager for Marks & Spencer, working in a vastly different atmosphere.
On a personal basis, Ealing Studios was very relaxed. I never addressed the directors by their first name, but cameramen and camera operators would always be on first-name terms. And appearance-wise, too, nobody cared what you looked like; all they cared about was how you did your job. So going from there to the discipline of Marks & Spencer was quite a culture shock, suddenly wearing a suit, with a white shirt and stiff collars. I’ve always been grateful for the fact that my first five years of working life was in a job which I absolutely loved. It got under my skin and it stayed under my skin ever since.
While Maurice’s brother Lionel remained in the film industry as a sound editor, Maurice never went back to the business. But his memories of those times remain strong.
There was a phrase that used to be bandied about to describe some of Ealing’s personnel, ‘Michael Balcon’s young gentlemen’. And I was asked once, are you one of Michael Balcon’s young gentlemen? And I probably replied, well I’d like to be, but I’m a nobody. Because I was never anybody that was terribly important in the studio, but I like to think that I was recognised as someone who was enthusiastic, and energetic and reliable.
In the 1990s, Maurice and his wife were invited to a private tour of Ealing Studios. As they came upon one particular corridor that Maurice instantly recognised, he looked up at the door fitting which was exactly the same; it hadn’t been replaced after all these years.
I said to the young woman who was taking us round, this door will open better if you push the handle down but give it a slight push before you pull it open, and sure enough that’s what she had to do. There is a unique smell about a film studio, certainly that was true of Ealing, which is I think a mixture of plaster and paint, and on the odd occasion I’ve been back to Ealing, walking past the stages there is that same wonderful smell that takes me back instantly to the good old days.