The inspiration for The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953) arrived after Tibby Clarke visited a friend in north Wales who suggested they went to see a railway run by local enthusiasts. During the visit Clarke spotted a sign asking for volunteers, which got him thinking: what would be the consequences of a bunch of village folk taking over a branch line after it was closed down? The result was a gentle comedy celebrating a bygone age of steam trains, warm beer and villages unburdened by traffic. Ironically, at the time he was writing the screenplay, Clarke’s neighbour was Richard Beeching, who in the early 1960s, as chairman of the British Transport Commission, was responsible for the controversial widespread closure of local branch lines and stations with the loss of thousands of jobs. And local communities did rise up in protest at these government cuts, just like they do in The Titfield Thunderbolt, but without success.
A genuine 1838 Liverpool and Manchester railway locomotive, the Lion, was used on location, which drew a coal tender, a coach and a guard’s van. ‘We hired it from York Museum, I think,’ recalls David Peers, who was assistant director on the film. ‘And it was brought down to a railway line near Bath.’ The line was no longer in use and so it was ideal for the unit’s purpose. The problem was that it was a single track and the only turntable was next to the London to Bristol main line. Whenever the crew needed to turn the train around so it could be seen going in the opposite direction, they had to get the locomotive to this turntable located at least a couple of hours away. ‘We had hired an excellent driver who was retired from the Great Western Railway,’ says David.
His name was George and he was a Cornish man who knew all about these old engines. What we didn’t know was he rather enjoyed his tipple, which consisted of cider laced with gin. He was reputed to drink seven pints every morning. Well, on this particular day the train had to be turned around, so off went George, but he didn’t stop by the turntable and on he went to join the main express line, no doubt waving to all his old mates as they roared past him, goggle-eyed. Fortunately no accidents occurred, but we had to pay a heavy fine. George returned to Cornwall.
Another accident that no one could have foreseen involved the lethal combination of Sid James and a steam roller. ‘I went straight over a camera with it,’ he later recalled. ‘Thousands of quids’ worth of camera flattened with a steam roller. I couldn’t control it, and the fellas on the crew couldn’t move. The bloody steam roller did three miles per hour but they were petrified. That was popular.’
For the scenes where the locomotive comes off the rails and runs amok through a town and the countryside, casts were taken of the train’s boiler and the side tanks and then secured on the top of a three-ton Bedford truck. This dummy train had to be driven early one morning from Ealing to the location in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, where the sequence was due to be shot. The driver later reported a large number of cyclists falling off their bicycles as he passed them on the road.
Despite another cast of regular Ealing faces (Stanley Holloway, Hugh Griffith, Sid James) and the affectionate jibes at British customs and rituals and other familiar elements, The Titfield Thunderbolt didn’t quite capture the glory days of the earlier Ealing comedies. The Monthly Film Bulletin were not alone in detecting that this entry was unfortunately below par. ‘The script itself is disconcertingly short on wit, and some of its invention appears forced, and Charles Crichton’s handling fails to supply the charm that could still have been the film’s justification.’ Even Tibby Clarke realised its limitations and the film struggled to earn back its production costs at the box office.
There was no such trouble with Ealing’s next production. The Cruel Sea (1953) had been a huge international bestseller, based on Nicholas Monsarrat’s personal experiences in the war commanding a corvette. ‘There’s a lovely story,’ says Rex Hipple.
Apparantly Monsarrat was offered a bag of money by Spencer Tracy, who wanted to play the lead role, and Monsarrat said that if his novel was ever made as a film there was only one studio he wanted to make it and that was Ealing, and only one director and that was Charlie Frend, because of San Demetrio, London, which Frend directed and which Monsarrat had been enormously impressed with. So Ealing got The Cruel Sea for an absolute song.
Frend certainly didn’t take his directorial duties lightly, according to Rex. ‘I went on the floor from time to time when it was being shot and there was always a copy of the Monsarrat novel on Charlie Frend’s lectern, alongside the script. He followed the book very, very closely.’
As for casting, Balcon personally selected Jack Hawkins to play Captain Ericson, having always liked the actor. Hawkins was one of those dependable types and Balcon had used him already in a couple of films, without giving any thought to his potential as a leading man. That was until the premiere of Mandy when Balcon witnessed the reaction of the crowd after the performance. It came as something of a surprise to the actor himself, as he later revealed. ‘I looked around to see who they were applauding and realised with astonishment that they were clapping me.’
A couple of days later in The Red Lion, Hawkins happened to catch sight of Charles Frend across the crowded bar giving him the thumbs up. ‘I’ve just seen Mandy and it was bloody marvellous.’ Hawkins thanked the director for his kind words. ‘Have you read The Cruel Sea, Jack?’ Hawkins admitted that he hadn’t. ‘Drop into my office this afternoon and I’ll give you a copy.’ A couple of days later, Frend phoned the actor at home to see what he thought. The verdict was a positive one. ‘That’s good,’ said Frend. ‘Because you are going to play Ericson. It’s all arranged. You are playing the part.’
As Ericson’s second-in-command, Donald Sinden was cast after Bryan Forbes tested but was rejected by Balcon for not being ‘officer material’. Frend had spotted Sinden in a play and thought him ideal, even though he had never made a film before or even tested for one. The rest of the cast were filled by names that would all soon become known internationally, such as Virginia McKenna and Denholm Elliott. There was also Stanley Baker, who had made his film debut for Ealing ten years before. Baker had read the Monsarrat book and was desperate to play First Lieutenant Bennett, a braggart and incompetent martinet who bullies the junior officers under his command, thus endangering the ship’s morale. ‘I began to beg people to get me tested for the part,’ he said. After telephoning Frend, Baker learnt an actor had already been cast, but his persistence was such that he was told to report to Ealing to test for another role. His audition went so well that Frend recast the part of Bennett with Baker and paid the other actor off. While Baker only appears in the early part of the film, he caught the attention of Hollywood studios and it launched his career.
Balcon approached the Admiralty and found ‘considerable enthusiasm for the project’, but what couldn’t be provided was a corvette to represent the story’s main character, HMS Compass Rose, a support vessel initially engaged in the Battle of the Atlantic, since all ships of that type had been disposed of sent mostly to foreign countries. Thus began a massive search for the right kind of ship. Just at the point of giving up, Ealing heard of a corvette called Coreopsis that was in Malta harbour. ‘I think it had been leased to the Greek navy after the war,’ recalls Ken Westbury. ‘And there it was, lying rotting in Malta when Ealing picked it up. It was made seaworthy and shipped back to England where it was refitted to become HMS Compass Rose.’
The corvette was put under the command of Captain Jack Broome, who had also been hired as the film’s technical advisor on recommendation of the navy. Broome had served in both world wars and had commanded the escort group of the ill-fated Arctic Convoy PQ-17 in 1942. According to Hawkins, Broome meted out hard discipline to the Merchant Navy lads who had been brought in to crew the ship. For example, anyone getting drunk in the evening, which was quite often it has to be said, got an almighty bollocking. ‘Naturally enough, this did not go down too well with the civilian sailors, and we almost had a mutiny before shooting a foot of film.’
Every day they would sail out from Plymouth with a film crew on board shooting sea footage around Portland Race, a famous strip of rough sea that perfectly replicated the North Atlantic. Returning to base one afternoon, with Hawkins on the bridge, the corvette was coming in far too close to a destroyer moored in the harbour that had just enjoyed a new re-fit. Hawkins watched in horror as his ship’s anchor raked along the side of the destroyer with an ear-piercing sound, leaving a jagged scar. All eyes of the destroyer’s crew fell on Hawkins, who did his best to look nonchalant. Then a porthole opened and a man popped his head out and blasted, ‘Who’s driving your bloody wagon, then? Errol Flynn?’ That accident ended up costing Ealing’s insurers a whopping £10,000.
For the exciting sequence where the Compass Rose spots a submarine and starts shooting at it, what was required were shell blasts hitting the water nearby and the submarine submerging. Ever cautious of budgets, it was decided that hiring a real sub from the navy was a tad too expensive, so it was left to the art department to build a fibreglass mock-up of a coning tower with ten-feet of sub at either end. The model was taken to Portsmouth harbour and, with the cooperation of the Admiralty, Ealing hired the top gunnery crew from nearby Whale Island, home of the Royal Navy’s main gunnery training establishment. Aiming for total realism, Charles Frend wanted the shells to land as near as possible to the model. ‘Right, do your best, lads,’ he said. ‘There is a bit of a choppy sea here today, but try and hit that submarine. We’re a long way off but do your best.’
The sailors were using a three-inch forward gun and had been given eighteen shells. The mock-up sub was sitting on buoyancy tanks and being towed by a minesweeper out of the view of the camera. Listening to all this, the chief gunnery mate asked, ‘Do you want us to hit it?’ Frend replied, ‘Yes, if you can. Do your best.’ Tony Rimmington, who had helped build the model, was later told what happened next. ‘One of these gunners shouted out the range, deflection, sighting, all that, slung one into the breech, let go one round, it blew our bloody mock-up submarine right out of the water. Direct hit. Bang. Good night.’ With the model destroyed, Ealing had no option in the end but to hire a real submarine and dummy charges were placed around it in the water. ‘Which is what they should have done in the first place,’ says Tony.
Back at Ealing a large section of the Compass Rose was replicated on the studio’s largest stage, built on rockers that were mechanical rams that pushed the ship up and down using compressed air. The sinking of the ship was done at the open-air water tank over at Denham. ‘There were water facilities at Ealing, but nothing like the size of Denham,’ says Ken Westbury. ‘So the Compass Rose sinking and the survivors in their rafts, that was all done at Denham.’
It was very uncomfortable for the actors, with much of the shooting taking place at night and tip tanks filled with several hundred gallons of water being poured over them. It was especially hazardous for Donald Sinden who couldn’t swim a stroke. While an aeroplane propeller whipped up an almighty spray, the actors had to jump ten feet into the water on the sound of a whistle. Sinden jumped and hurtled like a stone to the bottom of the tank. After the take everyone got out, but it was obvious to Frend that Sinden was missing. He was still struggling to get himself back up to the surface. ‘Thank goodness Jack Hawkins dived in and brought me out,’ he later revealed.
Another night Ken Westbury recalls getting a right telling off from Frend.
We were still shooting all the stuff of Jack Hawkins and everybody in the water. It was the middle of the night, and I’m being conservative on the film and we ran out before Charlie said cut. He really blew his top. But it was my fault. I was trying to save them money on film. Anyway, the studio was shutting down for the holidays for a couple of weeks and minutes after Charlie had barracked me in front of the whole crew and we’d completed the shot he was saying, ‘Happy hols, everybody’. Charlie was actually a nice, pleasant fella but he did have a nasty temper, then it would blow over and he’d be back to normal again.
During shooting there was a genuine feeling amongst everyone that they were part of something rather special. ‘We all felt that we were making a genuine example of the way in which a group of men went to war,’ claimed Hawkins. Certainly the passage of time has proven them right since The Cruel Sea is often hailed as one of British cinema’s finest war films. It was also much lauded at the time and dominated the British box office, catapulting Hawkins to stardom at the age of forty-two.