In 1952, not long after The Cruel Sea entered production, the studio lost its principal benefactor in Stephen Courtauld, a man Balcon had called Ealing’s rock of Gibraltar. The studio had always worked within a very tight financial framework and had looked mostly to Courtauld for security. A member of a wealthy textile family, Courtauld was a keen patron of the arts and had helped the studio secure loans from the National Provincial bank. While remaining very much in the shadows, Courtauld did read all the scripts and his observations were always taken seriously by Balcon.
Approaching seventy, he had now decided to live in Rhodesia with his wife, saying to friends that his decision was partly based on escaping the climate in Argyll, where he lived, and partly due to his dislike of the welfare state. ‘Our first sense of loss was purely personal,’ said Balcon. ‘Because of the respect and admiration in which we held him for his unselfish and altruistic support throughout the years. But there followed a reaction of alarm, as Reg Baker and I realised that the financial burden would from then on rest wholly on us.’
Over the years both Balcon and Baker had ploughed considerable amounts of their own money into Ealing, and yes they still had the backing of Rank, but it was plainly obvious that if they were to continue making films a new source of extra capital would have to be found. After much discussion, Balcon approached the National Film Finance Corporation (NFFC) who agreed to a substantial loan.
There was also the shareholders to think about. While none of them had put in any further money other than their original modest investment, they had loyally remained with the studio despite the virtual absence of any financial reward. Over the years this had become a bone of contention with a large minority of them. ‘I remember reading an article in one of the cinema trade magazines about a shareholders’ meeting at Ealing,’ says Peter Musgrave.
One of the shareholders had the temerity to say, you’ve never paid out any dividends. I’ve had shares with Ealing for X number of years. And a man called Reginald Baker, who was the company’s secretary, stood up and said words to the effect of, how dare this man attack us like this. But it’s quite true, they didn’t ever pay dividends, and some of the films were very successful and must have made a profit. So I don’t blame this shareholder for saying, where’s our penny, but somehow it never filtered out to those that invested.
With this new source of capital from the NFFC, Ealing carried on making just as many films as before. There was Meet Mr. Lucifer (1953), a satire on television, which marked the last Ealing appearance for Stanley Holloway. With the glorious exception of Alec Guinness, few other actors fitted so perfectly into the whole Ealing milieu than Holloway. ‘Oh Stanley was adorable,’ recalls Michael Birkett. ‘He was a great friend of mine. My family used to go on holiday with him before the war, to the south of France. I thought he was a lovely fellow.’
Holloway had greatly enjoyed his time with Ealing, the studio held special memories for him for the rest of his life and he always spoke fondly of the place and the people who worked there. ‘Ealing was a very friendly studio with a general air of family friendliness about it which stemmed from the governor – Michael Balcon’, Holloway wrote in his autobiography. ‘I once defined the “Balcon touch” as – human comedy, based on what human beings would really think and feel and do – or like to do – in odd situations. For this reason it is understandable and popular everywhere, at home and in France as well as America.’
Another comedy was The Love Lottery (1954), an interesting if flawed look at the power of celebrity and a satire on the Hollywood star system. David Niven plays a top-ranking studio star who, in a publicity stunt, agrees to be raffled off for a week. Peggy Cummins plays a young secretary who wins the lottery only to find that her screen idol falls somewhat short of her fantasy. Niven was a big star at the time but Christopher Barry, who worked on the production, says that he was a pleasure to work with. ‘He was very easy-going and showed no star temperament at all.’ Peggy Cummins remembers one incident from her time working on the film. She used to go in early to have her hair done before going into Make-up, and was always driven to the studio by her husband. ‘This particular morning the hair person went to dry my hair but the hairdryer wouldn’t work. My husband, who had nothing at all to do with the film business, picked up the dryer to have a look at it and was given a severe dressing-down by a union official. All he’d done was pick it up to see what was wrong.’
Beautifully photographed in Technicolor by Douglas Slocombe, the film was directed by the ever-reliable Charles Crichton. ‘My chief image of Charlie Crichton was of a smiley, pipe-smoking man, very approachable and easy-going,’ says Christopher Barry. ‘And, of course, an excellent director, especially of comedy. I have to say I did enjoy working on this film immensely. Not only were the sets imaginatively designed with use of gauzes and clever lighting, but the dance dream sequences were well conceived, and being on the set with dozens of Peggy Cummins look-alikes was not unpleasant.’
The film’s dream sequences are especially memorable and Betty Collins has cause to remember one of them in particular, for all the wrong reasons. Sometimes members of Ealing’s staff were drafted in to make surprise film appearances. ‘Recording footsteps is now a professional job,’ says Maureen Jympson. ‘But in those days they used to just drag us girls out of the offices and say, go on, we need a few feet, so I remember running up and down many a time on the cobbled street set at Ealing.’ Poor Betty was likewise asked to contribute to a scene in Love Lottery where a crowd of girls all run through a park.
Well, they wanted them all to have the same face and they asked me if I would do a mask for them, so I said OK and it was one of the most horrible experiences I’ve ever had. It was dreadful. They put this plaster on your face, and you can’t move at all and you’ve got to keep your eyes shut and your mouth closed, and you’ve got two straws up your nose to breathe through. I should think it’s the nearest thing to being buried alive. I was there for what must have been an hour but it felt much longer than that. It was horrible.
The film’s biggest surprise is a cameo appearance at the end from Humphrey Bogart, of all people. ‘A real coup du cinema,’ as Christopher calls it.
The Maggie (1954) followed, directed by Alexander Mackendrick. Its story of a rascally skipper of a rusting cargo ship on the Clyde who tricks an American millionaire into transporting a precious cargo, did its best to emulate the classic Ealing comedies of the recent past, but it’s a far cry for such fare as Whisky Galore or The Lavender Hill Mob. Even Mackendrick himself confessed it was the least successful of his Ealing pictures. Perhaps the studio’s magic touch was beginning to wear thin, especially now in the face of stiff competition from other companies churning out genteel comedies that had not only managed to capture something of the spirit of Ealing’s output but were turning them into box office smashes. Such examples include the St Trinian’s films, the comedies of Norman Wisdom, and Doctor in the House, the first of a series of medical mishap films based on the books of Richard Gordon, which was the most popular film at the British box office in 1954.
Again, Mackendrick wanted to shoot The Maggie entirely out on location in Scotland, necessitating hand-picking a small crew to go up there with him. Having only recently joined the sound department, Rex Hipple knew he’d no chance whatsoever of being chosen, so simply sat back and watched with interest to see who got the job. A meeting was called where all twelve members of the sound department were told to return home and ask their wives if they could go to Scotland for three months. To a man the answer was a categorical no! ‘We can’t go,’ they all said. ‘Not for three months.’ Someone Rex knew well by the name of Dick Dale was a bachelor and so didn’t have any commitments.
I thought he would certainly go. Anyway, came the day and the last of the married folk returned saying how they weren’t allowed to go, so they turned to Dick and asked, ‘What about you?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I’ll go.’ But to my astonishment L. C. Rudkin, the unit manager – and this is what I understood to be true – went up to the time clock, got this fella’s card out and went, ‘Look, he’s late every morning. And if he’s late clocking in here what’s it going to be like up in Scotland?’ So he got dropped. ‘I’m really sorry, Dick,’ I said to him. ‘No, it’s my own fault. I love dog racing. I go to the dogs every night. That’s why I’m late in the morning sometimes.’ Then, to my complete surprise, they turned to me and said, ‘Well, what about you?’ I told them I wasn’t married but that I did have a mother to look after. She was ill at the time but said I shouldn’t pass up an opportunity like this. So off I went and it was a truly memorable experience.
One of the most reliable writers at Ealing during this period was Jack Whittingham. Born into a life of privilege – his family owned a thriving wool business in Yorkshire – there were servants and holidays abroad and he was educated at a private boarding school. Jack went on to study Law at Oxford and during the war was stationed in Iceland. His work as a Fleet Street journalist brought him to the attention of Alexander Korda, before his move to Ealing, where Whittingham contributed six screenplays in total, including the highly acclaimed Mandy.
By far his most exciting project for the studio was a trip out to Kenya with Harry Watt on a location recce for West of Zanzibar (1954), a sequel to the hugely successful Where No Vultures Fly, the only sequel Ealing ever undertook. Jack also hoped to acquaint himself with the region before settling down to write the screenplay. His stay out there turned out to be something of an adventure and luckily he kept a diary, which today may appear to fall on the side of political incorrectness, but nevertheless reflects the culture shock of a privileged 1950s Englishman abroad.
Getting out to the country proved exhausting in itself. Flying from London they stopped over in Rome (‘very small airfield’), before heading on to Cairo and from there flying over the Red Sea into Aden, which didn’t impress Whittingham at all. ‘What land one can see looks godforsaken: it was! naked, empty desert.’ They landed at 9 a.m. and even that early in the day the temperature was ghastly, ‘Like a Turkish bath’. From Aden they flew into Ethiopia, which, from what brief look Whittingham got of it out of the window, he dismissed as, ‘Grim, brown country, with dried-up rivers.’ As they neared Nairobi, the scenery dramatically changed, ‘The earth becomes really green again – lush.’
The general plot of West of Zanzibar involved a game warden, played by Anthony Steel, investigating a gang of ivory poachers, and very soon after arriving in Nairobi Jack and Harry met and spoke with the chief game warden and the head of the Kenya game reserves. Both were able to impart invaluable information on smuggling and raised points that were to add colour to the film. In the afternoon, Jack and Harry drove out to the game reserve. ‘Almost at once we saw a rhino cow and calf. It was a chance in a thousand. There was a very awkward moment when she started to charge Harry’s taxi, but luckily changed her mind and made off. They can overturn a truck – this small taxi would have been peanuts.’
After a couple of days the two men flew out to Mombasa. While the weather in Nairobi had been bearable, here it was cloying and sticky and unpleasant. The town itself was a sprawling mass of different cultures – African, Arab, Indian and English: ‘Breakfast at the Carlton hotel where a monocled sahib is reading his Times newspaper with a tootling memsahib.’
After lunch they decided to wander though the Indian quarter. ‘Some of it is absolutely squalid with filth. A main drain runs down the street. It is so extraordinary that in spite of all the filth and poverty, every now and again you see a quite ravishing young Indian girl in spotless linen.’
Next they drove around the African/Arab shanty town; again there was the putrid smell of poverty. ‘How do a family of about twelve live in a hut the size of my study’, Jack asks himself in his diary. That evening both men were invited to dine at the Mombasa club, which had the unfortunate disposition of being located almost next door to the main prison. ‘And when the wind blew from the prison you could smell it.’
Out of Mombasa Jack and Harry travel by road and boat to towns and native villages looking for suitable location sites, driving along dust tracks, through coconut plantations and sugar cane fields and coming across the most picturesque fishing villages with huts on the bay made of palm leaves. In one village they ask a woman if they can go into her house but she refuses. ‘Thought we were government spies come to see if her house was clean and tidy.’
After a little over a week they fly next to Zanzibar which from the air Jack describes as, ‘A shimmering greeney-blue loveliness’. Once settled, Jack hires a guide and takes a stroll around the tangle of narrow streets, mingling with the crowds made up of a multitude of races. While there, he speaks with a couple of poachers for storyline material.
Back in Mombasa Jack and Harry arrive to find they may be in a spot of trouble. Both are called to the provincial commissioner’s office, who is in a bit of a flap, worried that the film might end up portraying Arabs as the main baddies. ‘He had a letter from the Arab governor suggesting we might be making out the Arabs to be “slavers and thieves”. He was perturbed from a government point of view by the chance of upsetting the Muslim world.’ The governor made great play of the fact that it was only the Indians who smuggled ivory. In the end Jack and Harry tried to pacify things by promising to lay the blame at all or no doors.
A safari had been organised with a white hunter and twelve locals. A lorry followed behind loaded with water, petrol, camps and stores. ‘All this country is still bare-tit,’ Jack remarks, and mentions one memorable day while waiting in the truck when ‘the most lovely pair of tits I’ve yet seen or ever hope to comes out of the bush. She is singing and carrying a gourd on her head.’
Chartering a plane to the island of Lamu, off the coast of Kenya, both stay in a hotel run by a seventy-five-year-old planter nearly deaf and going blind in one eye. ‘His face is scarred all over from his fight with a leopard, which he killed. He only saved himself by thrusting his torn, wounded left hand down the beast’s throat. But alas, the old bugger is a crashing bore.’ The hotel was basic. ‘The lavatory, which stinks, is a simple shaft that deposits its imports onto the sand below in the street. There is no water flushing, indeed no running water at all, and no electricity. There is also a bird’s nest in my room with a very petulant noisy brood of chicks which prevent sleep in the afternoon.’ Jack felt like he was at the end of the world, completely cut off, which to some extent he was; the only way off the place was by charter plane or the weekly boat that brought supplies.
Formerly a large Arab settlement, Lamu felt very different from where they had just come from.
After the bare-tit country, this place is a sharp contrast. All the women wear the veil – that is except the very old and ugly ones. An Arab who took us round said they really don’t see their future wives till the wedding, and very often are keenly disappointed. Then, after four months, they divorce them. But the women keep this silly custom going. They keep veiled unless some prospective husband glimpses them and calls it all off!
Jack starts to explore the island. The town is mainly divided into the old Arab stone-built part and the native huts. It has narrow streets and goats and donkeys everywhere. Again, there is the pallor of poverty hanging over the place. ‘Saw quite a number of Somalis. What magnificently handsome, dark, graceful people. But it is said they would knife you in a flash.’
Pretty much everywhere Jack and Harry go they run into expats, living a post-colonial existence. One such they find on an island by the name of Coconut Charlie, who arrived in 1910 to plant coconuts and stayed ever since.
Unmarried, very English. And now a recluse. He never leaves his house, but is acutely alive and au fait. It comes of listening all the time to the BBC. He was very generous with his gin. He told us that in the old days there was quite a big European colony, with many women. They all changed for dinner at nine, played tennis, and drank a hell of a lot.
Next stop is Garissa in Kenya, and with an Askari guide Jack and Harry go out into a game reserve. While driving they come across a herd of twenty-eight elephants. The driver quickly takes the truck off the road and goes downwind, but the herd has already sensed them. ‘I could see they were going to charge. Frankly, I was scared. Scared, period. If the engine had stalled or we’d got stuck anywhere, we hadn’t a hope. You can’t stop a whole herd with one gun.’
In another village called Katwe in Uganda, elephants were a protected species and quite tame. There were so many of them in the area that road signs had been placed everywhere saying ‘Beware of elephants’. One particular sign that Jack found amusing on the road out of the village read ‘Elephants have right of way’. There were also plenty of lions about, but hippos were seen as the main danger. ‘They will charge a car at night if the lights are on.’
Another fascinating place on this tour was Fort Portal in Western Uganda. ‘The King of Toro lives in a palace on the hill top. He went to Eton and Oxford, and when he visits the hotel the boys fall flat on their faces and stay there till he tells them they may rise, which he is in no hurry to do.’
During this trip Jack and Harry faced their fair share of hair-raising moments. In order to cover as many miles as possible, they often chartered a tiny four-seater plane and landed in some hazardous spots, such as when they went to a place called Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.
The pilot couldn’t land on the road because too many people on it. Circled several times round the travellers’ hotel to let them know we wanted accommodation. Then to our horror landed on an abandoned airstrip upon which the grass was five feet high. The things we do for Ealing!!
Jack was never less than amazed at the lives of the people he encountered. In Kilwa, an island off the southern coast of Tanzania, after looking around the Arab town and the sultan’s old harem, Jack popped into the local hospital. Two African boys had just come in with injuries from being mauled by a lion. Their father had managed to fend the animal off using an axe, but not before the first boy had suffered a lacerated arm, hand and thigh. The second boy had a torn left arm and thigh.
Now here’s the incredible thing. The father carried those two boys four days through the bush into Kilwa. The Indian doctor told me they arrived with their wounds stinking, septic and badly swollen. They were in great pain – but pleased with themselves as heroes. They will recover.
By the end of the trip Jack had found the experience overwhelming and exhausting. ‘The weeks of moving on, so fast, travelling so far, living on our nerves, are a hell of a strain. Harry is very tired, too. When we get back we’ll have travelled over 16,500 miles in six and a half weeks. That’s an average of about 400 miles a day.’
Harry Watt ended up directing West of Zanzibar, he was perfect for this kind of outdoor movie, since he was very much a down-to-earth type of guy whom crews liked and respected. ‘He was quite a character,’ says Ken Westbury. ‘When he lost his temper he literally used to throw his hat on the floor and jump up and down on it.’ Yet he was also capable of enormous generosity.
There was a local black guy working with us in Kenya and at the end of the picture, before Harry flew back to England, he gave this man the money to buy a small farm. It wasn’t a lot of money by our standards, a couple of hundred quid, but it was enough for this guy to buy a farm and probably change his life. He was like that, Harry, the socialist type, though not overly so.
Ken particularly remembers filming on an Arab dhow, a traditional sailing vessel.
The toilet facilities was a barrel that hung over the side they called ‘the thunder box’. The other thing about those dhows was, whenever you wanted the sail put up or down, the Arab sailors had to go through this ceremony first called ‘throwing away the wind’, this big ritual. So you couldn’t just say, OK let ’em down, they had to go through this whole rigmarole beforehand. And Harry Watt would sit on the thunder box with his copy of the Sunday Times and say, ‘Let me know when you’re ready, boys’.
The shoot was long and arduous and so Ealing had sent over one of their most experienced production managers to oversee it. ‘However, within a few days he had gone stark staring mad,’ recalls David Peers.
Apparently he saw black people as dangerous men who would kill him as soon as an opportunity arose. We had no choice but to ship him back home where he underwent treatment. And that is how I got the production manager’s job. I stayed in Kenya for three months and had the time of my life. Kenya was a fabulous country, the red dirt roads were full of surprises, you never knew what was round the next corner.
The downside was that much of the shooting took place around the time of the Mau Mau uprising. ‘Whenever we were in or near Nairobi we had to carry guns,’ David confirms. He also remembers flying to Entebbe and from there making his way with the unit to the famous Murchison Falls to shoot game footage and Anthony Steel paddling his canoe. One unusual task was trying to get lazy crocodiles to move off the sandy strand that bordered the river. ‘Many of them just lay there with their jaws wide open while little birds sat on the teeth and picked the remains of their last meal from them. We tried to stir them by throwing empty Coca-Cola bottles into their mouths, but unless you got a direct hit they had no effect.’
A professional hunter attached to the crew said that the only thing to do was to approach them from behind and make a hell of a racket as you ran towards them. David was deputised to join the hunter for the job.
We disembarked upstream and picked our way down towards the crocs. At a given signal we began to run holding a tin plate and a fork with which we tried to make as much noise as possible. I thought they would never move, but at the last moment they slithered into the water and we just prayed that the cameras were turning and we were not in shot.
David was sorry to have to leave Kenya, it had become almost like a second home to him, and he had enjoyed life in the sun.
I landed back at a cold London Airport and went straight to the studios. As I walked into the canteen I saw a girl sitting up at the counter having her lunch. A newcomer and very attractive. I enquired who she was. Liz Webster, they said. I thought; I must get to know this lovely and interesting girl. I did. Eighteen months later we were married.