The rigged system Freda Jackson overcame to become an actress in the 1930s

I wrote about the actress Freda Jackson's background on Central Bylines:

Jackson was born in Nottingham in 1907, the daughter of a railway porter. She was educated at High Pavement School and the city’s University College. In 1933 she was teaching English and Drama at Haywood School, Sherwood, and spending her evenings acting with a local theatre group, when a letter to the director of its repertory company won her an audition at Northampton’s Theatre Royal.

Yesterday's purchase Repertory at The Royal: Sixty-Five Years of Theatre in Northampton 1922–92 tells us what happened after that successful audition:

Miss Jackson's status for her first five months in Northampton was that of pupil, which meant that she received no salary. She had originally applied to Herbert Prentice, by then at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, but, since the pupil system did not operate there, he advised her to try Northampton. The pupil arrangement was confined to actresses, young actors being in such short supply that they could command a salary from the outset.

The dedication of the pupil actress extended not only to support herself without salary, but also to providing an adequate personal wardrobe for modern plays, a much more onerous requirement than for her male colleagues.

Were young male actors really in such short supply, or was it simple sexism that saw them paid from the outset when young actresses weren't.

Whatever the reason, this arrangement made it next to impossible for a young working-class woman to embark on a theatrical career. It explains why maids in Thirties films, of which there were many, were usually played by upper-class girls with unconvincing cockney accents.

We are seeing a return to such an arrangement in Britain today: every well-endowed private school has its own theatre, but the public facilities open to youngsters from poorer homes are under increasing financial pressure.It's no wonder we see the same limited group of privately educated actors snaffling the star roles in British films. And narrowing the pipeline of talent entering the acting profession can only result in a reduction in quality.

Anyway, you can see Freda Jackson above as Mistress Quickly in Laurence Olivier's 1944 film of Henry V.

The other actors in the scene are Robert Newton as Pistol and two who were to be dead within months of shooting it: Frederick Cooper (with the nose) as Nym and Roy Emerton as Bardolph. The boy is unmistakably a young George Cole.

My latest article for Central Bylines: Freda Jackson and Henry Bird

"There has never been anybody like her. To say that she loved acting just would not be enough. We realised only recently when we were looking at some old clippings that newspaper banner headlines had called her London’s greatest actress."

This is the Northampton-born artist Henry Bird paying tribute to his wife Freda Jackson when she died in 1990.

My latest article for Central Bylines pays tribute to them: Northampton's arts power couple.

The long, long apprenticeship of Sir Nigel Hawthorne

Before Yes Minister made him famous in 1980, Nigel Hawthorne served a long apprenticeship in the acting profession. But I had not grasped till recently just how long that apprenticeship had been.

If you click on the arrow above, you will see him in a scene from Going Straight, the short-lived sitcom that followed Norman Stanley Fletcher after his release from the Slade Prison of Porridge.

That scene dates from 1978, but he had a bit part in an episode of Dad's Army as early as 1969. I recall a story that someone had gone to David Croft on Hawthorne's behalf, saying he was a very good actor who was getting many parts and asking if Croft could offer him something. Croft did, though as I recall Hawthorne doesn't really convince as a lorry driver.

But I've now know that Hawthorne's apprenticeship stretched right back to the start of the Fifties, and two of this blog's heroines helped me discover this.

Here's Sheila Hancock writing in The Two of Us: My Life with John Thaw:

I was thrilled to be so near London where someone might see me. I was playing quite a good role but whenever I was in danger of getting a laugh, Frank would intervene with, "No, don't laugh – poor soul – she went to the RADA, you know" (pronounced radar by Frank). "No perlease, perlease have some respect."

Nigel Hawthorne and I watched in awe as he jettisoned the script and went off into wild fantasies of his own It was one of Frank's frequent periods in the theatrical wilderness and no one important came near us, but supporting this anguished man gave us a friend for life.

With the help of the British Newspaper Archive I can tell you that this all took place in 1956.

Two years earlier, Hawthorne had been in the supporting cast when Freda Jackson returned to her alma mater, the Theatre Royal, Northampton, to play Marguerite Gautier in The Lady of the Camelias. He was in the repertory company there in 1954 and 1955.

He was acting with the company at the Pavilion Gardens, Buxton, as early as 1951. Hawthorne had first gone on the stage in South Africa in 1950, and was to alternate between Britain and South Africa for a few years without finding much in success in either.

And we have a part for a third heroine of the blog. Because, just as Sheila Hancock does, Hawthorne said he owed his career to Joan Littlewood.

Here's Markland Taylor reviewing Hawthorne's Straight Face, The Autobiography, which was published just after his death, in Variety:

Hawthorne’s luck changed magnificently when he downed six bottles of Guinness before auditioning for a role in a production of Littlewood’s hit

Oh! What a Lovely War planned for a tour of England and Europe, and was cast.

This led to his invaluable relationship with Littlewood and his career blossomed, leading to highly rewarding work on stage, screen and television.

This was in 1964, so Hawthorne still had 16 years to wait before be became famous overnight. This is a story about talent and persistence, but it may ultimately be one about having the right mentor.

A Canterbury Tale passes the Bechdel test

Good news about A Canterbury Tale, which now seems firmly established as my favourite film. It passes the Bechdel test.

The Bechdel test?

This has become an accepted measure of the representation of women in a film. It asks whether the work features at least two women who have a conversation about something other than a man.

A great many celebrated films fail this test, but A Canterbury Tale passes. It does so because of the scene above.

Sheila Sim, a Land Girl, goes to work for a woman farmer played by this blog's heroine Freda Jackson. Their wide-ranging conversation mentions a man at one point, but it's about many things.

A post for Lion & Unicorn: No Room at the Inn (1948) and the death of Dennis O'Neill

I've written a post for Lion & Unicorn about the 1948 film No Room at the Inn, which starred this blog's hero Freda Jackson. The poet Dylan Thomas was partly responsible for the screenplay.

No Room at the Inn was based on a 1945 play of the same name by Joan Temple. Like Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, that play was inspired by the death of the foster child Dennis O'Neill on a farm in Shropshire.

And Dennis O'Neill died 80 years ago today.

Read the post on Lion & Unicorn.

Eric Portman proposes a murder in West 11

Before Michael Winner became awful he was rather good. West 11, the postal district of Notting Hill at its seediest, tells the story of a drifter, played by Alfred Lynch, who falls under the influence of a criminal played by Eric Portman.

Lynch is persuaded to travel to Dorset to murder Portman's aunt, so that Portman will inherit her money. What could possibly go wrong?

Diana Dors plays Portman's moll and Lynch's landlady is played by Freda Jackson. In an ideal world, all films would star Eric Portman and Freda Jackson.

That's what I wrote when choosing West 11 as one of my 10 British films that should be better known. I should have mentioned that there's also a walk-on part for David Hemmings.

Here you can see Eric Portman first proposing the murder to Lynch. Portman did seedy wonderfully well later in his career.

You can watch the film No Room at the Inn (1948) online

Good news: you can watch the 1948 film No Room at the Inn online. And it's the 90-minute version that Talking Pictures TV has shown - there used to be a shorter version online, but that disappeared.

The only downside is that it's on a Russian website, but my antivirus software is happy for me to watch it.

You may recall I got very interested in this remarkable film two or three years ago, in the the harder-hitting play it was based on and in its star Freda Jackson.

The play was first put on in the spring of 1945 and was in part inspired by the death of Dennis O'Neill earlier that year - another recurrent subject on this blog.

In the play - here come the spoilers - Mrs Voray does not fall downstairs, but is 'accidentally' smothered by two of the children as they retrieve the coal shed key from her as she lies in a drunken stupor.

It's open to question how accidental that smothering is, but the audience did not mind. A Nottingham Post article on Freda Jackson records that the audience stood and cheered when she got her comeuppance. 

Freda Jackson was a wonderful actor. She was Mistress Quickly in Olivier's Henry V, Mrs Joe in David Lean's Great Expectations and the farmer Sheila Sim goes to work for in A Canterbury Tale.

Yet, perhaps because of the power of her performance as Mrs Voray here, she ended her career playing grotesques. At least she lived to appear in Blake's Seven.

The Exorcism: The scariest thing I have ever seen on television

Written for Terence Towles Canote's 10th Annual Favourite TV Show Episode Blogathon.

What’s the most frightening thing you’ve seen on television? I can remember an episode of Sexton Blake, shown during children’s hour on ITV, in which Tinker, the great detective’s resourceful young assistant was measured for his coffin by a sinister undertaker while he was still alive.

A bit of research tells me that the Sexton Blake story involving Mr Tapp the undertaker was screened in two parts when I was seven years old. 

Don’t listen to the Haunted Generation mob and their claims for the Seventies: we Boomers had a harder time of it in the Sixties.

If I’m allowed to mention films I saw on television, then the scene in the Bob Hope picture The Cat and the Canary where a hand reaches through the wall behind a bedhead and searches the bed while the occupant sleeps hit me pretty hard. 

Until then I’d assumed that if my back was to the wall then at least I was safe from attack by bogeyman from that direction.

Finding The Exorcism

But if I have to name just one frightening programme then it has to be a television play that I saw when I was 12. For decades, as I waited impatiently for the internet to be invented, I didn’t know even what it had been called.

But then I bought a collection of television criticism by the influential Welsh academic Raymond Williams. I began reading his review of a play by Don Taylor called The Exorcism, and it became clear that this was what had scared me all those years ago.

The Exorcism was broadcast by the BBC on Bonfire Night 1972, as part of a series of seven plays called Dead of Night. Originally there were meant to be eight, but the now-famous The Stone Tape came in at 90 minutes and so did not fit the series format. Only three of the seven survive today and the good news is that The Exorcism, which was the first in the series, is one of them.

You can buy those three plays on a DVD from the British Film Institute. The website there describes The Exorcism well:

The best known and perhaps the most terrifying of the episodes – four wealthy, middle-class friends (Clive Swift, Edward Petherbridge, Anna Cropper and Sylvia Kay) gather for a Christmas dinner in a country cottage only to find that the past will not rest while they feast.

But as I don’t want to have to worry about spoilers here, and as I’m sure you are busy, I suggest you watch The Exorcism on YouTube now while I add some spoiler space. 

You may want to have a stiff drink by you.

Are you OK? I did warn you.

When I discovered The Exorcism was on YouTube it took me a while to pluck up the courage to watch it. When I did, it wasn’t as frightening as the first time and not because I was no longer 12 years old. It was more that I knew what was coming. I found I had remembered for 40 years the wine that turned to blood, the total blackness outside the windows and the news bulletin at the end about a bizarre Christmas tragedy.

My motivation for writing this post was to alert readers to this extraordinary piece of television drama. I don’t want to go on saying “Wasn’t it scary when…?”, but if you want to hear a discussion of the play you’ve just watched, then I recommend an episode of A Very British Horror. One of the participants says The Exorcism is the only thing he has watched in the making of the podcast that has given him a nightmare.

What I shall do is offer some thoughts on the individual television play as an art form, some notes on the cast of The Exorcism and, finally, a look at its fortunes after this first broadcast.

The television play

Watching The Exorcism today, it speaks of the year 1972 in three ways. First, it is an essay in folk horror, in that the rational outsiders encounter something dark and rural and come off second best – it is the cottage that has exorcised its new inhabitants, not they who have exorcised the echoes of past horrors.

Second, it is a piece of popular entertainment that wears its politics on its sleeve: there is a discussion of whether it’s possible to be a rich socialist, and the play gives a very definite answer in the negative. Just ask the police officers who had to turn out on Christmas morning.

There would be questions in the House today, but such overt political content was unremarkable in 1972. The BBC broadcast a series call Play for Today between 1970 and 1984 that, by the end, encompassed more than 300 individual plays, and many shared The Exorcism’s politics. It’s been said that if you watched nothing but Play for Today, you would have forecast a Communist revolution in 1979 rather than Margaret Thatcher’s election victory.

And there is a third way in which The Exorcism speaks of 1972: it is a television play that does not aspire to be a movie. Though television drama’s critical standing today is perhaps higher than it has ever been, it does give the impression that it hankers after the sheen of Hollywood. But when The Exorcism was broadcast, the television play was seen as a discrete art form and it, at least, looked to the theatre at least as much as it looked to the cinema.

Don Taylor himself, in his memoir Days of Vision, described the television studio as:

…an empty space. A prepared canvas ready to paint on; the vacuum of an open mind waiting to be filled. It can offer the landscape of the imagination, ready to be entered, a world inside the head as vivid, often more vivid than the world outside the eyes that the film camera photographs so faithfully. It can offer nothingness, waiting to become something, a world waiting to be created out of the chaos of four characterless walls, a shiny floor, and a grid of lights. It is something waiting to happen, a statement ready to be made. One object or person placed within it makes a quite specific and individual point. Two, and the play begins.

You can hear about Taylor’s approach to television drama from his son, the actor Jon Dryden Taylor, in an edition of the podcast The Box of Delights. It’s worth mentioning that part of what makes The Exorcism such a claustrophobic experience is his use of close ups, and another part is that the play takes place in real time - it follows the verities.

I grasped this difference in approach, when compared to today’s television, through watching the 1961 Granada Television production of John Arden’s play Serjeant Musgrave's Dance. When I say it was clear that the aesthetic behind it was that of the theatre rather than the cinema, I don’t mean that Granada had just filmed a stage performance or that the acting was too broad. The cast - Patrick McGoohan, John Thaw, Freda Jackson, Stratford Johns - was far too good for that.

What I mean is that the viewer is aware the performance is taking place in a television studio, and even expects to see the cameras at any moment. You don’t, but you are left wondering if it would matter if you did. Has anyone ever produced Brechtian television?

The cast

Of the four actors in The Exorcism, only Edward Petherbridge is still alive. Like the rest of the cast, he appeared on television far more than on film – it is harder to trace people’s stage careers, but all four were considerable theatre actors too.

Petherbridge is best known for playing Lord Peter Wimsey in BBC adaptations of the Dorothy L. Sayers novels. He also appeared in The Ash Tree – one of the BBC’s Ghost Stories for Christmas. 

Anna Cropper, who is so impressive here, made her career principally in television plays. She was married for a time to William Roache, who has played Ken Barlow in Coronation for 64 years now, making him the world’s longest-serving actor in a continuous role. Their son Linus Roache had a huge reputation as a Shakespearian actor when he was a young man, but his star seemed to fade. He was very impressive in Stephen Poliakoff’s television series Summer of Rockets in 2019. Anna Cropper died in 2007.

Sheila Kay also worked more in television than films, often appearing in situation comedies, and she later trained and practised as a psychotherapist. She died in 2019.

Clive Swift was a mainstay of British television and is the most recognisable face in the cast because of his years opposite Patricia Routledge as Mr Bucket in Keeping Up Appearances. He appeared in the first two Ghost Stories for Christmas: The Stalls of Barchester and A Warning to the Curious. The way he carries off those Seventies threads in The Exorcism is greatly to be admired. He too died in 2019.

The afterlife of The Exorcism

The Exorcism was put on as a stage play in London in 1975. Don Taylor, as his son explains in The Box of Delights podcast, was unhappy with changes that had been made to the script and wanted his name taken off the production. His agent, the famous and fearsome Peggy Ramsay, threatened to disown him if this was how he reacted to his first West End opening, so he relented.

Rachel, the part played by Anna Cropper in the original television production, was played on stage by Mary Ure. She had been married to the playwright John Osborne and been in the cast of his groundbreaking Look Back in Anger. But by the early Seventies, her career and health were in decline, but the opening night of The Exorcism was seen as a triumph.

Ure had drunk her share of champagne and then took her prescription medication on top of it. The mix was enough to kill her. Anna Cropper stepped in to play the role, but the press made great fun of the idea that The Exorcism was a cursed play.

Nevertheless, its small cast and gripping story have made it a favourite with amateur theatre companies. But would I want to watch it again?

"Like something out of a zoo": Freda Jackson on Errol Flynn

Embed from Getty Images

I've found a 2018 article about Freda Jackson in the Nottingham Post. It's headlined 'The railway porter's daughter from Nottingham who became a Hollywood star', but I don't believe she ever went to Hollywood.

It tells the story of Jackson's career in the theatre, films and television, but let's concentrate on what it has to say about her relations with Errol Flynn - they were in the repertory company at the Royal and Derngate Theatre in Northampton together:

You can understand why notorious womaniser Errol Flynn might have been attracted to Nottingham-born actress Freda Jackson.

Flynn, the dashing actor with matinee idol looks, and Jackson, a dark-haired beauty, shared many a scene together as they learned their craft with the Northampton Repertory Theatre in the years before the Second World War.

The pair reputedly had a relationship but how true that is we will never know - although judging by Miss Jackson’s comments about Flynn after they performed together in a 1934 production of Othello, the attraction might not have been mutual.

"He was not an intellectual man but he was very shrewd," she said in a 1984 interview. "He knew that his supreme good looks were not enough to get him where he wanted to go, so he came to Northampton to learn his job.

"He did learn a lot from us, including how to walk across the stage without looking like something out of a zoo. When he left, he did so in a cloud of unpleasantness after hitting the stage manager, who was a woman."

David Niven's judgement on Flynn, incidentally, was:

"You knew where you were with Errol Flynn. He always let you down."

10 British films that should be better known

Here are some notes on 10 British films that are not as well known as I think they ought to be. It's not a top 10 - they are in chronological order - and I'm sure there are plenty more, particularly from recent years decades, that could fairly be included in such a list.

With those caveats entered, let's go.

No Room at the Inn (1948)

Inspired by the death in Shropshire of the foster child Dennis O'Neill, the same scandal that led Agatha Christie to write The Mousetrap, this had already been a huge success as a stage play. The star of the play was Freda Jackson as the voracious Mrs Voray, who took in war orphans for the money and abused and corrupted them. So hated was she by audiences, the story goes, that she needed a police guard.

Jackson repeats the role in the film, and her skill at playing monsters was so great that she became rather stuck with them later in her career. Before No Room at the Inn, she had played Mistress Quickly in Olivier's Henry V and Mrs Joe in David Lean's Great Expectations.

The tragic Joan Dowling, who was to take her own life at the age of 26, is notable among the children. A word too for Dora Bryan who, in her first film appearance, steals both Freda Jackson's date and the scene.

This dark film ticks so many of this blog's boxes that it has its own label.

Gone to Earth (1950)

The Shropshire hills filmed in Technicolor by Powell and Pressburger? There's no way I was going to dislike this one. Gone to Earth was a novel by Mary Webb, who had the misfortune to be deeply obscure in her lifetime and become hugely popular soon after her death. In the 1930s you would see coaches in these hills with 'Mary Webb Country' on the front.

Gone to Earth is melodrama whose plot has similarities with Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Jennifer Jones brings Hollywood glamour to the role of the tragic heroine and makes a brave attempt at a Shropshire accent, while David Farrar makes a splendid wicked squire. Look out for George Cole in his first adult role.

The 'Maggie' (1954)

The greatest Ealing comedies are still widely known, but there are some that have been all but forgotten. The Maggie is the best of this second group, and in its dramatisation of an encounter between wily Scots and American big business it looks forward to Bill Forsyth's Local Hero.

An American millionaire makes the mistake of hiring a decrepit Clyde puffer to carry furniture to his holiday home in the Hebrides. He ends less happily than Burt Lancaster in Local Hero.

Woman in a Dressing Gown (1957)

The disorganised Yvonne Mitchell considers herself happily married to Anthony Quayle, but discovers that he is having an affair with the stylish Sylvia Syms.

Because this is a British film from the Fifties, the family has to defeat all threats to it. But the scene in Mitchell tries to change her image to compete with Syms, only to find that everything goes wrong, is horribly painful to watch.

Innocent Sinners (1958)

Ignore the title, which makes it sound like a particularly tacky porn film, this is the most interesting of the children and bombsites films I have yet found. Unlike the others, it has a girl at its centre, and the enemies the children encounter are not the murderers they encounter in those other films but snobbish residents and unsympathetic officialdom.

Here, bombsites are not a place of danger but somewhere working-class children can express themselves and find the privacy they lack in their overcrowded homes.

Tunes of Glory (1960)

Alec Guinness playing a red-haired Scottish officer who has been promoted from the ranks in wartime may sound ridiculous, but he is wholly believable here. Tunes of Glory reminds us what a peerless actor he was.

The film is about the lethal clash between Guinness and John Mills, who plays the upper-class officer who is appointed over his head now that the war is over. Both are flawed but appealing characters, and their tragic battle takes place in front a remarkable supporting cast: Susannah York, Gordon Jackson Dennis Price, Duncan MacRae, Allan Cuthbertson.

You'll recognised the last-named from gourmet night at Fawlty Towers.

West 11 (1963)

Before Michael Winner became awful he was rather good. West 11, the postal district of Notting Hill at its seediest, tells the story of a drifter, played by Alfred Lynch, who falls under the influence of a criminal played by Eric Portman.

Lynch is persuaded to travel to Dorset to murder Portman's aunt, so that Portman will inherit her money. What could possibly go wrong?

Diana Dors plays Portman's moll and Lynch's landlady is played by Freda Jackson. In an ideal world, all films would star Eric Portman and Freda Jackson.

Our Mother's House (1967)

A fatherless family of children hide the death of their mother from the authorities by burying her in the garden because they fear being sent to an orphanage. 

Among the children are Pamela Franklin, Mark Lester, Phoebe Nicholls (immediately recognisable as Cordelia in the famous television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited) and Louis Sheldon Williams, whose mother wrote a weekly column for Liberal News in the Sixties, as I did for Liberal Democrat News 40 years later.

If all this sounds tacky or exploitative, the wonderful score by George Delerue - innocent, lilting, compassionate - lifts the film to a wholly different level. Add in Dirk Bogarde in a very atypical role, Yootha Joyce and the Crystal Palace dinosaurs, and there's lots to enjoy.

Comfort and Joy (1984)

This is the film Bill Forsyth made after Local Hero and for some reason it appears to have been forgotten. Bill Paterson, who play a local radio DJ, is left by his girlfriend just before Christmas and then finds himself sucked into the Glasgow ice cream wars after witnessing an attack on a van.

I saw this in a cinema when it came out (which is a worryingly long time ago) and have never seen it again, yet I still remember it.

The Last Resort (2000)

Another one I saw in the cinema - the Renoir at Brunswick Square near St Pancras, since you ask. It taught me that Russian is the sexiest accent in the world and that Paddy Considine is a brilliant actor.

Dina Korzun plays a Russian woman who arrives at Heathrow with her young son, expecting to be met by her English fiancé, He doesn't show and, panicking, she asks for political asylum. As a result, she and her son are sent to a rundown resort and forbidden to leave it.

There they meet a bingo caller, played by Paddy Considine, who goes out of his way to help them. He is surely a good man, yet somehow we don't know whether we should wholly trust him. According to the reviews, he and Kozun improvised much of their dialogue.

Eventually Kozun decides she must grow up and return to Russia, a task in which Considine regretfully helps her.

I've found another fan of No Room at the Inn

It can be difficult to keep all your rabbit holes in the air, and it's high time we went back to No Room at the Inn.

This is the film that introduced me to the wonderful actress Freda Jackson. The play on which it is based was in part inspired the death of the foster child Dennis O'Neill in Shropshire in 1945, which was the case that led Agatha Christie to write The Mousetrap. (Those first three links are to labels on this blog, so scroll down for plenty of posts each time.)

I recently came across an article on No Room at the Inn by Meredith Taylor, whose chief interests here are Daniel Birt, the film's director, and Dylan Thomas, who co-wrote the screenplay.

After writing about Birt's previous film, The Three Weird Sisters, he turns to No Room:

A sense of the Gothic also infiltrates No Room at the Inn set in the early months of 1940. We witness atmospheric blitzed streets by the railway bridge next to a rundown house that’s definitely on the wrong side of the tracks: all lorded over by Mrs Agatha Voray (Freda Jackson) doing her damn best not to properly look after three young girl evacuees. 

The children live in squalor and suffer mental and physical abuse under the care of this coarse woman who invites men (local councillors and shopkeepers) for casual sex and bit of cash to bolster her shopping allowance of ration coupons. 

This is good, though Voray is looking after a boy as well as the three girls, and the film is set in motion by her taking in a fourth girl. Indeed, it's Voray's punishment of the boy the precipitates the film's climax.

Taylor continues:

The character of the schoolteacher Judith Drave (Joy Shelton) is remarkable, for we have ... a force for truth-seeking that refuses to be silenced. 

A powerfully written and acted moment occurs when Miss Drave, who has complained about Mrs Voray's behaviour, is asked to give evidence at a town councillors’ meeting. They dislike Ms Drave’s assertive manner. When Mrs.Voray has her right to reply she adopts the manner of a humble woman struggling to do her best during wartime restrictions. 

The schoolteacher sees right through her performance. But the council members (half of whom have flirted with Voray) believe her account of things over the teacher’s. I love Dylan Thomas’s writing here. His social concern is angrily targeted at bureaucratic corruption and ineptitude.

I don't have a copy of the film - it's easy to buy a copy online, but these are significantly shorter than the version Talking Pictures TV has shown more than once. And that is the copy I would want.

It would be interesting if I had that copy to see how much of Joan Temple's original play survived into the screenplay. Often the original source of a film goes unrecognised - the extraordinary atmosphere of Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter is all there in the original novel by Davis Grubb.

Taylor rightly identifies a Dickensian bringing together of different moods as one of the roots of the film's strange power:

Like The Three Weird Sisters there are fascinating if disconcerting alterations of tone – such as the beautifully written bedtime story scene in the room of the young girl evacuees. 

Norma Bates (yes, not Norman, though the film has its moments of Hitchcockian darkness) who is played by Joan Dowling, re-interprets the Cinderella story in a ripe, savagely Cockney manner. She comforts the children who are desperate to escape the mean house and its mean housekeeper. 

It’s a spellbinding moment of Dylan Thomas poetics: a joyful spin on Cinderella, beautifully shot and executed. And its lyricism is made more poignant by intercutting with Mrs Voray in the pub getting drunk with the sailor father of one of the evacuees. 

You can see that bedtime story scene in the video above.

Taylor is critical of the ending of No Room at the Inn, and I would add that the film's prologue, which involves one of the children being caught shoplifting some years later, just isn't strong enough to sit with the darkness of the rest of the film.

This structure of a present-day prologue followed by the rest of the action taking place as a flashback is taken from the play, but that began with the police arriving to find Mrs Voray dead and the play then showing us what had led up to this.

The censors meant that her death in the film had to have been caused by falling downstairs, but in the play she is smothered, more or less accidentally, in a drunken sleep by one of the children. The girls are trying to get her keys off her so they can rescue the boy, who has been locked in the coal store on a freezing night.

I should add that Taylor avoids this big spoiler, but I am not so considerate when a film is 75 years old.

But we can end in agreement as he praises the two best performances in the film:

Freda Jackson brings a full-blooded intensity to the role of the selfish and uncaring Aggie Voray. She was a sensation in the play and that’s why they made a film version which launched her considerable career on stage and in the cinema. 

Jackson probably became a role model for actors portraying more authentic working class women. I wonder if Pat Phoenix (Elsie Tanner) of Coronation Street was influenced by her?

As for all of the child actors in No Room at the Inn well they’re brilliant -especially Joan Dowling who’s street-wise confidence cannot hide her emotional damage. She deserved a prize but unfortunately the BAFTAs didn’t begin until 1954.

Later. It's worth adding that it easy to find a DVD of the film for sale online - it was even on YouTube for a while. That version runs for about 60 minutes, but the one that has been shown more than once by Talking Pictures TV is significantly longer.

Freda Jackson and Stratford Johns in Serjeant Musgrave's Dance

When I saw the cast of this 1961 television play included two Liberal England heroes - Freda Jackson and Stratford Johns - I had to have the DVD of it.

Serjeant Musgrave's Dance is a play by John Arden, first performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1959 to a less than ecstatic reception. Arden himself adapted it for television, and the general view after it was broadcast was that he had made the story easier to follow.

As Wikipedia explains:

The work follows three privates in the British Army and their sergeant, all of whom are deserters from a foreign imperialist war. Serjeant Musgrave and his men, Hurst, Sparky and Attercliffe, come to a northern English coal mining town in 1879, posing as a recruiting party. The community is in the grip of a coal strike and cut off by winter snow.

The soldiers have with them a store of arms and the body of Billy Hicks, a soldier from the town they are visiting who died in that imperialist war.

When Musgrave calls a meeting in the town square:

Instead of recruiting townsmen, Musgrave takes out a Gatling gun. The gun is loaded and pointed at the audience. Then the soldiers hoist up the skeleton of Billy Hicks on a lamppost, still dressed in uniform. Musgrave dances below it reciting a rhyme:

... Up he goes, and no-one knows, who it was that raised him. ... He sits on your back and you'll never, never lose him....

Musgrave talks about the atrocities that followed the soldier's death, and explains that since this single death caused five on the other side, five times five townsfolk should be killed to avenge their deaths. 

Whether Musgrave is right or has been seized by religious mania is left open, but his plan fails when his men argue amongst themselves and the dragoons arrive.

First, a word about the look of this television play. Though it originates in the theatre, there is nothing stagey about it. This is television in the round. 

At one point the camera shoulders its way through a crowd for a tight close up of one actor's face and, though you don't see cameras or cables, it's obvious that the production is taking place in a studio. There is a strong sense that its makers were exploring the possibilities of a new medium and had not yet settled for making television dramas as much like cinema films as possible. 

Patrick McGoohan gives a powerful performance as Musgrave, and you can see a little of him in the video below, along with Ian Bannen, who played the role at the Royal Court,

You can also see Stratford Johns in the video, with stick-on whiskers, playing the mayor, who also owns the coal mines. Musgrave has marked him out as the first against wall and he is no leader.

One of Musgrave's men is played by a young John Thaw in what may have been his first screen role, with the result that the two actors who dominated British police dramas for almost 40 years, as Barlow, Regan and Morse, share the screen here.

And Freda Jackson, as she always seems to be, is magnificent. Sympathetic but no pushover, she holds her own with McGoohan's Musgrave.

Someone writing about her brassy Mrs Voray in the 1948 film No Room at the Inn said the performance looked forward to the powerful Northern women of Coronation Street more than a decade later. The soap opera had just started at Granada when Serjeant Musgrave's Dance was filmed at their studios. And again you feel she would have been wonderful in it.

As to John Arden, I can remember that when BBC Radio 4 broadcast his Pearl, a new play written specially for radio, it was treated as a big occasion. But looking it up, I find that was 45 years ago and I can't recall hearing him mentioned since.

How No Room at the Inn launched John Osborne's theatre career

If you thought you'd heard the last of No Room at the Inn, you were mistaken.

This was the play by Joan Temple that, like Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, was inspired by the death of Dennis O'Neill, a 12-year-old foster child, in 1945.

After No Room at the Inn had cleaned up in the West End, it went on a national tour, though without its star, the awe-inspiring Freda Jackson.

As there were so many children in the cast, the company needed a tutor for them to make up for the schooling they were missing. 

That role was taken by a young man keen on a career in the theatre - he even fancied writing plays. And he used it as a route to becoming an assistant stage manager and then a member of the cast.

His name? John Osborne. He was the archetypal Angry Young Man of the Fifties and the author of the epoch-making play Look Back in Anger.

How theatre audiences reacted to Freda Jackson's performance in No Room at the Inn

Back to Freda Jackson, who played the villainous Mrs Voray in Joan Temple's play No Room at the Inn and also in the subsequent film. The play, like Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, was inspired by the death of Dennis O'Neill.

I've come across a couple of accounts of how theatre audiences reacted to her performance.

Her son Julian Bird, who became an actor himself in his sixties after a career as a psychiatrist, spoke to the Guardian:

“I was brought up in a theatre family,” Bird says. His father, Henry Bird, was an artist who designed sets. His mother, Freda Jackson, was an actor, “a name in the 40s, 50s and 60s”. 

She was the lead in the play No Room at the Inn, about the abuse of evacuees during the second world war, which was so scandalous that she needed police protection when it transferred to the West End in 1946. “There were always women at the stage door wanting to kill her.”

And I recently found this comment on the IMDb page for the film:

I was Ronnie and my stage name was Stanley Conett (Stanley Heinemann) I played that part for 427 performances at the Winter Garden. Then toured England and Scotland with the show. 

Also I did the BBC version. It is a pity that you have published the wrong actor's name for the Winter Garden version of the show. I was too tall to be in the film version. 

The Theatre version often caused the audience to erupt with shouting and curses at Freda Jackson. The show ended with the girls suffocating Mrs Voray and it was different in the movie.

All of which goes to support the claim from the Nottingham Post that:

Such was the power of her performance, audiences are said to have stood and cheered when her character was finally vanquished.

August Strindberg and Gravesend star in Trivial Fact of the Day

The Swedish dramatist August Strindberg once lived in Gravesend. That's our Trivial Fact of the Day taken care of.

I discovered it through my admiration for Freda Jackson. The video above shows her in the town with Michael Redgrave to present a plaque honouring the centenary of Strindberg's birth.

A paragraph in The Stage (Thursday 20 January 1949) tells us exactly what was going on:

Strindberg

The centenary of the birth of August Strindberg falls on Saturday next. The occasion is being marked by the placing of a commemoration plaque on Gravesend Pier, where, in 1893, Strindberg first set foot on English soil and was welcomed by J T. Grein. 

The plaque is the gift of Anthony Hawtrey, together with Michael Redgrave, Freda Jackson, and the members of The Father company now playing at the Embassy, and to open at the Duchess on Monday next. 

Sponsored by the Strindberg Society, it is to be carried down the river in Sir Alan Herbert's boat and presented to the Mayor of Gravesend.

J.T. Grein was an impresario and critic who helped establish modern theatre in London. 

Anthony Hawtrey was an actor and the director of the Embassy Theatre in Swiss Cottage, from where many productions transferred to the West End, including No Room at the Inn, which made Freda Jackson famous and which he directed. 

Alan Herbert was better known as A.P. Herbert and was a considerable figure of the day.

The plaque is though to be in storage somewhere in Gravesend, while there is talk of selling the pier to Uber Boat, which runs a service from it to the City of London.

Behind the scenes of David Lean's Great Expectations

A search for more footage of Freda Jackson turned up this video. Anthony Wager played the young Pip in David Lean's classic adaptation of Great Expectations, which was released in 1946. 

The film first shows him at home with his family and, if it's not evidence of what children were like in 1946, it is at least evidence of how people liked to think they were like.

So we see the boy washing up and feeding the chickens to show he is not spoilt. It's interesting that there's no sense here that some jobs are for boys and some for girls.

And as so often in vintage films or photographs, some elements have aged faster than others. So, while a whiff of modernity still clings to those Thirties windows, the children look thoroughly quaint to us.

Then it's over to the film set. First we see Anthony doing his lessons - again, we're reassured he's not getting above himself - and then there are some wonderful shots of the actors taking lunch in full costume. Somehow they look even more Dickensian here than they do in the final film.

Finally, Freda Jackson appears. She plays Pip's sister Mrs Joe, who has brought him up "by hand". Here she douses him under the pump and I get the impression that if you were doused by Freda Jackson you stayed doused.

Anthony Wager, latterly appearing under the name Tony Wager, had a long acting career, but never reached these heights again. He died in 1990 at the age of 58.

There is a touching little site that honours his memory. It was posted by his sister Marilyn, with whom we have seen him at the start of this film.

The Canterbury premiere of A Canterbury Tale

I've been looking at the contemporary reviews of A Canterbury Tale and it's fair to say they are not enthusiastic.

But the Faversham News and East Kent Journal has a nice account of the film's premiere, which took place in the city:

The Friars Theatre, Canterbury, was crowded out on Thursday afternoon, last week, when the new film "A Canterbury Tale" had its first showing. Incidentally, the occasion was a historic one in the film industry, for it was the first time a world premiere had been given in a provincial theatre. 

Music was played by the Band of The Buffs prior to the curtain going Up on the picture, in which, by the way, they appear.

To Kent people the film has a particular interest inasmuch as it was largely filmed in Canterbury and district and some beautiful glimpses are given of the countryside in the neighbourhood. There are also "Village pageant" sequences of Chaucer's pilgrims. 

For the rest, the story concerns the detection of a mysterious night assailant who resorts to throwing gum on girls' hair if he sees them with soldiers! 

Eric Portman figures as a magistrate bearing the name of a one-time prominent East Kent family—that of Culpepper. It will be recalled that it was while parts of this film were being shot ,in the Canterbury district that the famous screen actor paid a visit to the Odeon theatre at Faversham sortie months ago. Other leading figures in the cast are Sheila Sim, as a Land Girl, and Sergeant John Sweet, of the U.S. Army. and Dennis Price, as two soldiers. They are the three pilgrim "detectives." 

Mr. Michael Powell (who, with Mr. Emeric Pressburger, produced the film) was, at the conclusion of the showing, introduced by Mr. R. C. Overs, the , manager of the theatre, and had a great reception. lie apologised for the absence of Mr. Emeric Preasburger, his co-producer, and Mr. Junge, co-designer, and explained that they were aliens. There could not, he thought, be a finer tribute to the brotherhood of man, than that those two men, although aliens, should have collaborated in the making of this film. 

Mr. Eric Portman and others of the cast were afterwards introduced and received ovations.

The clip above shows Sheila Sim going to work for Freda Jackson, who is currently this blog's favourite actor.

Freda Jackson and Errol Flynn in Northampton

Freda Jackson, my new favourite actress, was the daughter of a Nottingham railwayman but learnt her craft in repertory theatre in Northampton.

Another young actor in the company at the time was Errol Flynn and it is is rumoured that he and Jackson had a fling.

As NottinghamshireLive once put it:

You can understand why notorious womaniser Errol Flynn might have been attracted to Nottingham-born actress Freda Jackson.

Flynn, the dashing actor with matinee idol looks, and Jackson, a dark-haired beauty, shared many a scene together as they learned their craft with the Northampton Repertory Theatre in the years before the Second World War.

But, quoted in the same article, Jackson (looking back across 50 years) was not complimentary about Flynn's acting:

"He was not an intellectual man but he was very shrewd. ... He knew that his supreme good looks were not enough to get him where he wanted to go, so he came to Northampton to learn his job.

"He did learn a lot from us, including how to walk across the stage without looking like something out of a zoo. When he left, he did so in a cloud of unpleasantness after hitting the stage manager, who was a woman,"

Jackson next saw him at a charitable event in the 1950s and recalled:

"I almost didn't recognise him. He had lost his good looks by then, and it was hardly surprising when you consider the life he had led."

Knowing the stories about them, the actor Michael Keating asked Freda Jackson about Flynn when they were filming an episode of Blake's 7. She would say no more than:

"Oh, he was a naughty boy. He was a very naughty boy."

West 11: Another early Michael Winner film

Last time I praised an early Michael Winner film the post was quoted in a book. So here goes again with one he made when he was only 28..

If it had no other virtues, the street scenes of Notting Hill would make West 11 interesting. When the film was made in 1963, this was an area of poverty and racketeering landlords.

And beneath the opening titles we see Alfred Lynch walking past 25 Powis Square, where Performance was to be filmed a few years later..

For me the glory of West 11 is its cast, which might have been chosen with me in mind. Not the leads, Alfred Lynch and Kathleen Breck, who are a little underpowered, but the supporting players. Eric Portman. Freda Jackson. Even David Hemmings in a bit part.

There are other faces to look for: Diana Dors in her best era, Kathleen Harrison, Patrick Wymark. The Mosleyite agitator at the street meeting is the unlikely figure of Brian Wilde.

The cast could have been even more impressive. According to Flashbak, the film's producer Danny Angel turned down the idea of casting Julie Christie, Sean Connery and Oliver Reed because they were "nothing more than B-picture artists".

West 11 is available cheaply on DVD, and Talking Pictures TV has shown it too. There's plenty in it to enjoy, notably Eric Portman's turn as a seedy confidence trickster who leads Alfred Lynch astray,

Freda Jackson in Olivier's Henry V

My new favourite actress Freda Jackson didn't just play termagants like Mrs Joe (Great Expectations) or Mrs Voray (No Room at the Inn). Here she is as Mistress Quickly in Laurence Olivier's Henry V from 1944.

This is the scene following the death of Falstaff. With the lines "he's in Arthur's bosom, if ever man went to Arthur's bosom" and "a' babbled of green fields" we are close to the mystic Englishness of another wartime Freda Jackson film, Powell and Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale.

The other actors in the scene are Robert Newton as Pistol and two who were to be dead within months of shooting it: Frederick Cooper (with the nose) as Nym and Roy Emerton as Bardolph. The boy is unmistakably a young George Cole.

I saw this film at the cinema when I was only eight or nine. I remember it was judged that it would be too grown up for my sisters' friend's younger brother but not for me, which pleased me no end. What I made of it I can't recall, though I do remember the battle scenes.

Henry V was not a play I studied at school, so it remained a private enthusiasm.