Dennis Mallard: The boy who ran away to Ealing to be a film star

If an American child dreamed of being a star, they would run away to Hollywood. In the Britain of 1958, children had to make do with Ealing.

Here's a story from the Chatham, Rochester and Brompton Observer for 17 January of that year that came up when I was searching for something else:

The boy who ran away to be a film star 

His adventure proves to be far from glamorous

Twelve years old Dennis Mallard, who appears very briefly in the new Harry Secombe film "Davy," thought his film career was not developing fast enough. 

He ran away from home on Monday night, aiming to get to a film studio.

While his family thought he was asleep in bed, he was trudging through the cold night wearing only jeans, shirt and blazer, to Dartford, six miles from his home, 119, Milton Road, Gravesend. 

There he hid in the back of a lorry which took him to London. 

He stowed away on another lorry and found himself in Ealing.

Then the glamour of finding the limelight the hard way wore a bit thin and he became frightened. 

He went to a church for help and a clergyman informed the police.

But that was not the end of Dennis Mallard.

I can't find any mention of him having appeared in Davy, which was one of the long tail of inferior Ealing comedies and designed as a star vehicle for Harry Secombe. 

But I have found a page that has him making an uncredited appearance in a Children's Film Foundation production, One Wish Too Many, as early as 1956. 

And the British Film Foundation has him making a similarly unacknowledged appearance in The Violent Playground later in 1958. As this film's premiere was in March 1958, it must (as Flashbak suggests) have been filmed in 1957, before the boy ran away to Ealing.

So it looks as though young Dennis Mallard was already appearing in films by the time he ran away, but as nothing more than an extra.

Researching him is difficult because he does not have an IMDb entry, so I was pleased to find that the British Film Institute has a page for the 1959 BBC adaption of Great Expectations, which lists him as having played Pip, along with the slightly older Colin Spaull and much older Dinsdale Landen.

Yet a clip of the young Pip encountering Magwich in the churchyard from this serial looks nothing like the photo of Dennis Mallard in the local newspaper report that sent me down this rabbit hole. And, sure enough, IMDb has a photo of the encounter, with the boy playing Pip named as Colin Spaull. As this scene is as young as Pip gets in the book, what did Dennis Mallard do?

The answer is on BBC Genome, where he is billed as playing Pip Gargery. Over to Dickens, and the scene thee a sadder and wiser adult Pip returns to the forge, only to find that Biddy, who he has resolved to marry, has wed Joe Gargery:

There, smoking his pipe in the old place by the kitchen firelight, as hale and as strong as ever, though a little grey, sat Joe; and there, fenced into the corner with Joe’s leg, and sitting on my own little stool looking at the fire, was – I again!

"We giv' him the name of Pip for your sake, dear old chap," said Joe, delighted, when I took another stool by the child’s side (but I did not rumple his hair), "and we hoped he might grow a little bit like you, and we think he do."

And if you think Dennis was too old to play this part, he's not. Because Nostalgia Central helpfully tells us:

One major narrative change has Joe Gargery’s proposed marriage to his housekeeper Biddy taking place before Pip goes to London (this revelation occurs much later in the novel and is the last nail in the coffin of Pip’s disillusionment as he was planning to marry Biddy himself).

Let's cut to the chase. Here's a report from the Kent Evening Post for 27 June 1975:

Few people meeting the quiet and unassuming Dennis Mallard at his Leysdown china shop would ever dream of his past. For the man who compared last night's Evening Post search-for-a- star show was once a star of stage and screen himself. 

Dennis. now married and a father of three living in Poplar Avenue, Gravesend, started his carcer at the age of five. 

He went to stage school at Upton Park till he was 11 when he landed his first mal part in a BBC production of Great Expectations. 

After numerous theatre and TV appearances in plays and adverts he landed his own ITV show in which Una Stubbs (remember her as the screen daughter of Alf Garnett in Till Death Us Do Part) was a dancer. 

That was all in the days of early commercial TV – and before Dennis’ 16th birthday. 

"Then I for some reason felt I'd had enough of showbusiness and decided to try and make some money instead. 

"I thought being a market trader was next best thing and began selling china." 

He still keeps his hand in however by doing occasional compering slots and has accepted an invitation to be MC at all the talent competition evenings.

I've not so far found any trace of his ITV series or of an ITV adaption of A Christmas Carol starring Stephen Murray as Scrooge in which he is said to have appeared. But the upturn in his career does seem to have happened soon after he ran away to Ealing.

And there is one thing we know he was doing in 1960: he was in the first performance of Oliver! as a workhouse boy and member of Fagin's gang. Because his name is on the credits for the original cast recording.

Take it away boys...