Some people’s lives are already mapped out before them, their career path chosen ahead of time. Certainly Michael Birkett always believed he was destined for the diplomatic service, a situation encouraged by his father Norman Birkett, one of the three British judges who presided over the Nuremberg trials. While studying at Cambridge, Michael became an avid cinemagoer. ‘I was seeing seven films a week and I was hooked, so I said to my father, I’m awfully sorry but I’m not going to follow you into law. I want a career in movies.’
By a stroke of good fortune Michael just happened to be at Cambridge with Balcon’s son, Jonathan. As chairman of the university’s film society, Michael managed to persuade Jonathan to get his father to come down and give a talk to its members. At the end of the lecture Balcon opened the floor up to questions. Michael raised his hand. He wanted to know how one got around the tricky task of acquiring a union card. Back then a catch-22 situation operated in that you couldn’t get a union card unless you were working in films, and you couldn’t work in films unless you had a union card.
During the course of the evening and his dealings with Michael, however short these might have been, Balcon had made a positive appraisal of the young man, and so answered the question with an offer of work. His current assistant Tom Pevsner (who would later work as associate producer on the Bond films) had just received his union card and moved to the production side. ‘I have to find somebody else,’ said Balcon. ‘So it can be you.’ That was it, no interview, no nothing.
Taking on Michael was no mere whimsy on Balcon’s part. The producer did have a policy each year of fishing around for a couple of bright young sparks out of the universities. He was also a complete snob, and, as we’ve seen, was content to give jobs to the sons of his gentleman’s club friends, while other applicants toiled for years to get through the gate. Alfred Shaughnessy, for example, was given a job by Balcon after his demobilisation in 1946 as a ‘reader’ in the script department because his application arrived on Windsor Castle writing paper; his mother was living there at the time. One of Shaughnessy’s contributions was to secure Leeds Castle as the D’Ascoyne residence for Kind Hearts and Coronets.
When Michael Birkett left Cambridge he began his job as Balcon’s PA. ‘It was a lovely job. I did all sorts of things for him. If he had to make a speech I wrote it and if he had to do a contribution to a periodical I wrote that, too.’
One day in the office Balcon announced that a magazine had invited him to write a small piece about his favourite picture. ‘God, you’ve got a lot to choose from,’ said Michael.
‘No, no, it’s not our kind of pictures,’ Balcon answered. ‘It’s art, those kind of pictures.’
‘I see. Well, what is your favourite picture then?’
It was obvious that Balcon hadn’t given this any consideration whatsoever. ‘I thought I’d leave that to you, dear boy.’
After much foraging and research, Michael decided that Balcon’s favourite picture would be A Cornfield by Moonlight by Samuel Palmer. ‘I said to Sir Michael, “Your favourite picture is … ”, and he was quite happy with that, and I wrote a frightfully good essay about it. He was a sweet man and we became great friends.’
Michael agrees with the theory that Ealing’s philosophy for making films was to project a certain image of the country to the rest of the world, and that this was an idea that came very much from Balcon himself. ‘It was a romantic view of batty old England. And it’s true that Balcon was very traditional in his outlook, but don’t forget at the same time he was the one who encouraged all sorts of people like Sandy Mackendrick, so he can’t have been that conventional.’
Still, there was more than a whiff of Balcon as headmaster while the creative talent he’d assembled around him acted as the unruly pupils. He never bossed anybody about personally, though; he left that to his right-hand man, Hal Mason. A nice man by nature, it was always Mason who would come on to the set to pick up the pace if it was slacking or give the odd bollocking if it was called for. ‘He was quite a strict guy but very approachable,’ remembers Maurice Selwyn. Certainly Balcon trusted him implicitly since he and Mason would always attend rushes together every day. According to Michael Birkett, Mason was ‘very much in awe of Balcon, very much under his influence. He once said a marvellous thing about some schedule that we were talking about, when to shoot and all that. He said, “We’re going to shoot it on what I like to call Thursday.” And this became a famous expression we all liked to use.’
One curious fact about Hal Mason’s pre-Ealing career, which was mercilessly exploited by staff, was that he had done some male modelling for Brylcreem. ‘Some of the lads used to cut these advertisements out of the Picture Post and stick them up on the door by my printing machine,’ recalls Tony Rimmington. ‘So along with the obligatory pin-up girls we used to put pictures of Hal Mason advertising Brylcreem. And every time we did this they got torn down, so we’d put them back up again. Nothing was ever said, and he left the pin-up girls untouched.’
Mason also knew full well that most of the crews regularly flouted the stringent no smoking policy. ‘Hal always knew very well that we would stick cigarettes in our coat pockets when he came on set to hide them away,’ says Michael Birkett. ‘So he always used to say good morning and give us a resounding pat on our right-hand side pocket, which made us go “Ouch”.’
Pretty much everybody smoked like the proverbial chimney in the 1950s and to prevent disaster, especially on one of the sound stages, Ealing had its own fireman who used to wander round the studio keeping his beady eye on people. ‘Ted the fireman, that was his name,’ says Ken Westbury. ‘He was quite an officious character, liked to make himself heard.’ After years of demonstrably instilling into everyone the need to stub out cigarettes and the hazards of fire, his moment of glory came one afternoon when some old tyres caught fire in the car park. Michael Birkett was on hand to watch what happened.
When finally the fire people arrived and shouted – right, here we are, stand by for the jet – we all waited for the water to come gushing out, and what actually came out of the fire hose was about half a dozen old cigarette butts and a mouse. That was it; that was all that emerged from the nozzle. It was a classic piece of comeuppance, because this firefighter was always being so smug and rather grand about his importance, more grand than he needed to be, and we said, serve him right.
For years afterwards it was said, rather unkindly, that Charlie Crichton was seen pushing his car towards the flames, for insurance purposes. ‘It was a very old motor car,’ says Michael.
The studio itself Michael found a warm and inviting place in which to work, with a nice, homely atmosphere and lovely co-workers.
Some of the directors were a bit scary, though. Charlie Frend had rather a bad temper, as did Harry Watt. Harry had a great habit of losing his temper and reaching over his shoulder and tearing his shirt in half. Later, as his assistant, I would try to discourage Harry from tearing his shirt off in a fury, because I made sure that he was perfectly all right and happy and didn’t need to do that kind of thing. All the others were charming. Sandy was absolutely lovely and he and I became firm mates.
Most of the directors, after a hard slog at the studio, would retire at the end of the day to the nearby Red Lion. ‘That was a famous watering hole,’ recalls Ronnie Taylor. ‘It was right opposite the entrance to the studio.’ It was where almost everybody went, at lunchtime too, mainly because Ealing, unlike other studios such as Pinewood and Shepperton, didn’t have its own bar. ‘That’s where most of the heavy drinking went on,’ confirms Alex Douet, who lived just down the road from the establishment. ‘With Tibby Clarke very much at the centre of things.’ Jim Morahan, one of Ealing’s most-respected art directors, went straight to The Red Lion after work and stayed drinking there until ten o’clock when he got the bus home to Kingston, having lost his driving licence years before. But that was the culture back then. ‘In those days drinking was a common thing with most of the people I remember at Ealing,’ says Norman Dorme.
Drinking was a deeply ingrained habit. It was odd because you wouldn’t have thought people could function in the afternoons, but the directors and producers, all of those people would invariably be over in The Red Lion at lunchtime, and they weren’t drinking half pints of beer, it was brandies and scotch and so on; it didn’t seem to have any effect.
A little bit further down the green was another pub, the Queen Victoria, and while charming in its own way, this was really the workers’ pub. The creative talent all drank at The Red Lion.
The stars, too. ‘I remember Peter Sellers going there,’ says Michael Birkett. ‘Also people like Tibby Clarke and several of the other writers were always in The Red Lion. Actually, a lot of ideas and stories were formulated during drinking hours at The Red Lion.’
One evening Monja Danischewsky, who was always in The Red Lion, said to the assembled company, ‘Now, here’s a nice opening scene and what I need to know from you lot is what the story could be.’ Everyone put their pints and wine glasses down and listened intently. ‘Well, it’s an antique shop in the West End of London,’ began Danny. ‘And in the window is a twelfth-century illuminated manuscript, obviously very valuable and very beautiful, just alone in the window. Then suddenly there is the revving sound of a motorcar and a brick comes bang through the window, a hand reaches in and seizes the manuscript, and we whip the camera round and we’re just in time to see the getaway car screeching off and on the running board of this getaway car is a bishop in full ecclesiastical robes.’
Danischewsky paused for effect, looking at his captivated audience. ‘So there’s your opening sequence, what’s the story?’ Michael Birkett remembers everyone looking at each other and finally saying in an exasperating tone, ‘Come on Danny, if you can’t imagine a plot out of that, how can we?’ One is left to wonder just how many of Ealing’s golden film gems began life over a pint at The Red Lion.
Back in the early 1950s, your average person leaving school or college didn’t take off on a gap year, you went to work or you didn’t eat. When Maureen Jympson left typing college at sixteen, she worked in a succession of jobs, ending up at a factory in West Acton, typing out all the orders. She hated it. One of her duties was to take orders down to the basement, where an elderly gentleman was one of the packers. ‘I’ve always called him my Wizard of Oz,’ says Maureen fondly.
We became friendly and one day he said to me, ‘Why are you working here if you hate it so much?’ I said, ‘My dad told me I had to get a job.’ It turned out this old fella used to work at Ealing; he’d retired and was only working at this factory in his spare time. He told me that I ought to write to Ealing and ask for a job. ‘They wouldn’t want me,’ I said. I was very shy in those days. ‘Why don’t you try it?’ He was very insistent. Anyway, I didn’t do anything for a couple of months, but I hated my job so much I thought, what have I got to lose?
Maureen didn’t hear back for something like five months. Then suddenly, out of the blue, a letter arrived saying would she go for an interview.
So I got my best bib and tucker on and went up to Ealing Studios. And I’m sitting in a line with five other girls and one by one they go in, until I’m sitting there all by myself, and I’m thinking, they’ve bound to have got someone by now. But all these girls came and went until finally this lovely lady ran out of the office and said, ‘I don’t care if you can do shorthand or not, I want you!’ And I started my job at Ealing and it was amazing. It was a magical place. And so to this day I call that man in the packing department my Wizard of Oz, because he steered me towards Ealing and my life changed overnight.
Maureen was just seventeen when she started at Ealing and was ‘as nervous as hell’ on her first day. Her job entailed ordering cars for the important artists and she worked in a tiny office with three other members of staff. She loved the work, and there was the added bonus of bumping into stars.
Alec Guinness was the very first person I ordered a car for and he was absolutely charming. I remember seeing people like Anthony Steel, Audrey Hepburn, Joan Collins – she was the sexiest-looking little thing you ever saw, with this hourglass figure and long dark hair – I remember thinking, wow. I fell madly in love with Dirk Bogarde; he was just gorgeous. And he was also immaculate, often walking with a cane. Audrey Hepburn, she was just not of this world. I used to see her walking in and out of the canteen. She seemed to be ethereal, not like a normal human being at all. She was not a star then, but these people have charisma, it’s a kind of magnetism, and they all have it those big stars, they really do.
When Maureen realised that part of her job would entail meeting stars, she didn’t quite know what to expect; someone with two heads or something.
But when I first saw these people I thought, my goodness, they look just like the rest of us, apart from Audrey of course; they just had this special something that the camera captures. They didn’t mingle with us, though. I found that the stars did keep themselves to themselves. Stewart Granger was gorgeous looking as well, but Dirk had my heart.
While stars tended not to mingle much with the general staff, they were also not pampered. Certainly there was no such thing as star dressing rooms or anything of that nature. ‘They weren’t given star treatment,’ confirms Michael Birkett. ‘Ealing didn’t go in for that sort of thing. They were respected and regarded as stars, but there was no adulation.’
Maureen’s journey to the studio from where she lived in Hanwell followed a regular daily pattern, a ten-minute walk to the bus stop where she caught the 207 that took her up to Ealing Broadway.
Then I usually had to run like hell because I was always late, and they used to stop our money in those days for being late. I used to earn £3.15 for the week and they would dock me 25p every time I was 10 minutes late, so I ended up with not much money at the end of the week. If I didn’t get the bus I would ride my bike to work. There weren’t so many cars around in those days so it was quite safe. We used to clock in and clock out. Not the stars, of course, I don’t think they asked Alec Guinness to clock in.
Maureen’s office was next door to the canteen, which was the social hub of the entire studio. It acted almost like a dating agency, with a large number of people meeting their future husbands and wives there. ‘I remember going out with one boy from the cutting rooms who chatted me up in the canteen,’ recalls Maureen. ‘I drank far too much, I mean I wasn’t used to it, and when he took me home and went to kiss me goodnight I threw up all over him. My mum was so disgusted with me.’
Maureen has never forgotten one of the secretaries, a very glamorous girl, who had her eye on one particular director and was determined to catch him.
One day we were queuing up at the canteen to get our tea and coffee, and this girl managed to manoeuvre herself so she was standing next to this director and then fainted in very melodramatic fashion right in front of him. He ended up marrying her, of course, and she used to come into the canteen wearing this mink coat which she used to drag across the floor, and us girls would watch open-mouthed going, ‘I want one of those’.
Maureen herself met her future husband in that canteen, second assistant editor John Jympson, who in the 1960s was to become one of the country’s most in-demand editors, working on films such as Zulu (1964), A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Where Eagles Dare (1968). ‘I used to say to my friends over lunch, that boy keeps looking at me, and that boy eventually became my husband. So he asked me out, we had egg and chips and a cup of tea; no drinking this time.’
When the studio shut up for the day, the canteen was turned into a sports club every night with table tennis tables and darts. It was also utilised for the occasional do and, of course, the Christmas party, where Maureen was chased up and down the studio by various male members of staff. ‘But it was all quite innocent, there was no nastiness.’
As for the food served in the canteen, in the words of Michael Birkett, ‘it was nothing special; nothing too awful either, we ate it without too many complaints.’ Maureen classes it as being quite good, homemade fare like shepherd’s pie, nothing very exotic. ‘And I remember things like big white rolls with ham and cheese in them. I lost a tooth on one of those. It had a stone in it. It was like a school canteen, you got a tray and went up to the counter where all the food was laid out and you collected what you wanted.’ Or if you so desired you sat at a table and took advantage of the waitress service.
As for the top brass, directors and the like, along with top-ranking actors, they had their lunch in a small private dining room just off the main canteen. ‘The dining rooms were very, very structured and divided up into sections,’ Norman Dorme recalls. ‘There was the workmen’s canteen down the far end where you sat on stools along a counter. And then the rest of us, the technicians, we sat at tables. And then there was a directors’ dining room where senior staff, or heads of department or special guests had lunch, and the door was always shut.’ Betty Collins seems to think they had exactly the same food as the rest of the staff, ‘just served rather more poshly. I don’t think anybody felt put out by it’. Even so, it smacks of segregation. Madge Nettleton does recall during her time at Ealing seeing John Mills and his wife sitting quite happily at one of the canteen tables. ‘They weren’t going to bother to go in the private room. It didn’t sit well with some people.’
Incredibly there was even segregation in how everyone arrived to work. Most of the staff were required to clock in and out every day at the front gate office. Of course heads of department, directors and senior staff did not have to clock in, perish the thought. ‘They were trusted,’ says Peter Musgrave. Even more revealing is the fact that there was a back gate where the blue collar workers – the carpenters, the painters, electricians et al. – were required to clock in; none of them were allowed to enter the studio by the front gate.
More than one of the veterans interviewed for this book spoke of a very definite class system operating at Ealing. Rex Hipple saw the studio as almost a microcosm of England. ‘Jim Clark, one of the editors, said that it was a bit like a boys’ school, which I suppose in a way it was. It was clubby as opposed to clique, if that isn’t a contradiction.’ Robert Winter did feel that the creative talent were seen as being above everyone else. ‘The people who were the heads of department, you had to recognise them as a sort of superior being.’
Jim Clark, who later worked as John Schlesinger’s editor on several of the director’s films including Midnight Cowboy and Marathon Man, started in the business as a runner in a documentary production company until he was unexpectedly invited to join Ealing as a cutting room assistant. He never really warmed to the place, not finding it as cosy and maternal as many of his other colleagues did. ‘Ealing was fine if you’d been to boarding school because it was run on the same hierarchal lines. It was class-ridden. You knew your station and stayed in it, or incurred wrath in high places.’
Betty Collins, however, doesn’t agree. ‘I got the sense at Ealing that it was totally classless, you never felt that somebody was above you. You could say hello to Alec Guinness as much as you could say hello to the fellow that was sweeping up on the stage, you felt no different about it.’ Betty has more sympathy for those who found the practice of clocking in to be a burden, and the fact that you were fined for being late. ‘If you arrived at five minutes past nine, you lost a quarter of an hour’s pay. If you got there at sixteen minutes past nine you lost half an hour’s pay. It was quite strict, but you got used to it. A lot of people did resent it, though, it really did irk a lot of us.’