Gilbert Adair: The orphan has lost not only his parents but his status

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This post is about another essay by Gilbert Adair, but first a quotation from Sammy Going South by W.H. Canaway. If you've not seen the movie, this is a novel about a 10-year-old British boy whose parents are killed by an RAF raid on Port Said during the Suez Crisis of 1956:

Reminded by the scene he had witnessed, he thought, I’m an orphan! The idea intrigued him. He said aloud, "I'm an orphan!" savouring the words in the air. Then he said, experimentally, “My mummy and daddy are dead,” and wished he hadn't said it, for it made him feel sad. To say "I'm an orphan" sounded not sad, but – well, important. He repeated the words again.

In his essay 'Dr Barnardo's Orphans', Adair discusses this status once enjoyed by orphans:

The prominence accorded to the orphan by nineteenth-century novelists - not only Dickens, not only in this country - became in consequence rather hypertrophied when compared to his actual footing on the social hierarchy, both qualitatively and quantitatively; and, in a much-quoted witticism from The Importance of Being Earnest (Lady Bracknell's observation that the loss of both parents resembled 'carelessness'), Wilde, no devotee of Dickensian sentimentality, mocked what might be called the rampant orphanomania of the Victorians.

But, as Adair says, time moved on and the absence of war and disease meant there were no longer the waves of orphans there had once been. After the Second World War the term came to acquire a foreign, Third World connotation - Korean orphans, Vietnamese orphans. Meanwhile, Barnardo's was diversifying its childcare activities, moving far beyond just the provision of homes for orphans.

Adair, emphasising he means to respect to the children and that he is concerned only with their public image, says the result is that:

There now strikes one as something dated and irreducibly kitschy about an orphan: a Barnardo Boy reminds one of nothing so much as a Bisto Kid. In effect, the social specificity of a nineteenth-century orphan was contingent upon an uncompromisingly normative conception of society, from which he was therefore – if in this manner alone – not alienated, since he had been assigned a codified place within it, however luckless.

Today, or at least in 1986, when Adair's Myths & Memories was published:

When what would have been regarded until quite lately as unimaginable anomalies compete with each other for the attention of the sociologist, the social worker and the investigative journalist (single-parent families, lesbian mothers, test-tube babies), the orphan has lost not only his parents but his status.

It's worse than that. The Children and Young Persons Act 1969 sought to remove the stigma if criminality from children who broke the law and treat them like any other children who are in need of care. But its effect was to spread that stigma to all children in public care.

So it is thar, today, orphans being moved between care placements are likely to find themselves put in handcuffs. We have turned being an orphan into a crime.

Reader's Voice. So your diagnosis is that we have lost the concept of the "well-behaved orphan".

Liberal England replies: Precisely. But I can console myself that I did manage to slip the phrase into my book chapter on Oliver Twist.

Sammy Going South and the morality of employing child actors

The director of Trouble at Townsend wasn't the only one to have problems with a child star being too well fed. I've read accounts of both Carol Reed and Andrei Tarkovsky making the same complaint.

But Alexander Mackendrick's account (from Wikpedia, with no source given) of the making of Sammy Going South suggests that Fergus McClelland didn't just get too well fed but too happy.

"He was a lean, hard, little boy. Tough as old nails ... a really strong character. He had the hunted look of an abused child, which in some ways he was. He came from a disturbed home; his parents were getting divorced and there were problems. So he was the perfect casting. 

"But when he went out to Africa, he started having the time of his life. The unit adored him and, to my dismay, started to feed him ... he put on weight and there was no way I could stop it. So, instead of this hunted and abused child, who’s supposed to be starving and neurotic, you had a sturdy, stocky, well fed little character. A good actor, but the physique betrayed itself."

McClelland talked about his experience of making the film in an interview with Matthew Sweet for BBC Radio 4's The Film Programme in 2010 – it begins at 24:14 – confirming much of what Mackendrick said. 

Fascinating as child actors can be, it's hard to escape the feeling that there's something inherently exploitative about their employment.

Mackendrick made the film for Michael Balcon's Bryanston Film's – Balcon had been his boss at Ealing Studios. Mark Duguid has suggested:

Balcon saw the story as a heartwarming tale of a young innocent's triumph over adversity, against the fantastic scenery of the African continent. Characteristically, Mackendrick's understanding was altogether darker: he saw it as "the inward odyssey of a deeply disturbed child, who destroys everybody he comes up against".

Mackendrick's attempt to satisfy these two interpretations is probably the reason the film doesn't quite succeed.

A motif Mackendrick's was innocent characters who caused chaos and destruction – think of Mrs Wilberforce in The Ladykillers – so it's no surprise he was attracted to W.T. Canaway's original novel. Ironically, you could say the book managed to strike the balance between his and Balcon's ambitions that the film failed to find.

The original cut produced by Mackendrick was severely trimmed before release, and cut again for the US market. There it was given the ludicrous title A Boy Ten Feet Tall, apparently because it was feared white audiences would assume a film called Sammy Going South was about a black boy and stay away.

Sammy Going South is worth watching for its rare reference to the Suez Crisis in British films or novels and for about the last treatment in a film of British colonial Africa. Sammy's parents are killed in a British raid on Port Said, and he sets out to walk to the only other relative he knows, who lives in Durban in South Africa.

And Fergus McClelland's Sammy makes a credible and winning protagonist, even if Mackendrick was right to despair that he looks healthier and happier as his trek goes on.

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