The Secret Life of Ealing Studios

Britain's favourite film studio

Robert Sellers

• Publisher: Aurum
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781781313978
• eBook ISBN: 9781781314838
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Fotografía

A behind-the-scenes account of life at Ealing Studios – one of the great cinematic success stories of post-war Britain, and a byword for a particular strain of comic filmmaking that continues to inspire imitators over half a century on. This will be the first full narrative history of the studio, focusing on its output in the 1940s and '50s, when the movies made there were in astonishing (and revealing) synchronicity with the national mood. Told through the memories of the people who worked and performed there, The Secret Life of Ealing Studios will explore how a small group of maverick filmmakers, some of Britain's most fondly remembered movie stars, and a lot of unsung backroom boys and girls created pictures that presented a unique and enduring view of British identity, and which have since become classics. Particular emphasis will be placed on the filming of Hue and Cry (1947), Passport to Pimlico (1949), Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), Whisky Galore (1949), The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), The Man in the White Suit (1951) and The Ladykillers (1955), along with war films such as The Cruel Sea (1953). At the heart of the story will be the figure of Michael Balcon - perhaps the closest Britain has ever come to producing a movie mogul in the Hollywood mould - and iconic actors such as Peter Sellers, Alec Guinness, Margaret Rutherford and Sid James. The author is one of Britain's leading entertainment biographers and has a number of successful and critically lauded titles under his belt (his recent book on Oliver Reed, What Fresh Lunacy Is This?, was selected for Books of the Year round-ups in both the Sunday Times and Mail on Sunday ). Robert has a track record of securing original testimony from first-hand witnesses and has already begun interviewing people who worked at Ealing.

Chapter One

Balcon Takes Control

When he reported for duty on his first day of work at Ealing Studios in 1941, Robert Winter could have been forgiven for experiencing a heavy dose of déjà vu as he walked through the gates and wandered the narrow alleyways in between the busy stages. He’d been here before. It’s where he fell in love with the movies for the first time as an eight-year-old child.

It was all thanks to his music teacher, who also happened to be an agent for child extras and got Robert a few days’ work on three Gracie Fields films made at Ealing back in the mid 1930s. He found Gracie enchanting but it was the heady mixture of working on a sound stage that left the most indelible mark.

I was fascinated by it all, the lights, the pungent smell on the set, and especially the orange make-up. Because of the exposure rate of the film the lighting had to be so intense, that’s why the actresses all walked round with orange faces, and almost deep-purple lipstick and painted-in eyebrows. That’s where I first met Carol Reed, he was the assistant director on one of the films. I remember he gave me half a crown because it was my birthday. I was just so gaga and entranced by the whole atmosphere.

Leaving school there was no question of any other career path but the movies. With his father away on war work and not available for consultation about his future, Robert took matters into his own hands and turned up one day outside the gates of Ealing Studios, coming face to face with the formidable security guard, Robin Adair. He was in luck, Adair told him to come back in three months’ time and they’d have a job for him. ‘Because of the war there was a great shortage of people with so many young men going into the armed forces,’ says Robert. The job was basic, just taking the mail round to all the departments, but at least it afforded him the chance to check out the studio and choose which particular field he wanted to specialise in. One morning, arriving at the props department, Robert was surprised to bump into his uncle, having no idea he worked there. By a strange coincidence he also discovered that his aunt had a job at Ealing, too, in Wardrobe. This wasn’t all that unusual. ‘There was a family called the Thriffs who worked at the studio,’ recalls Ken Westbury. ‘The father was a carpenter and his son was a stand-by carpenter. He would literally just stand around on the set all day until he was needed. There was also another son who worked in the machine shop, sawing and planing wood. Then, much later, his grandson worked in the publicity department.’

After a few months’ delivering letters, Robert decided on sound editing and was taken under the wing of sound cutter/editor Mary Habberfield, who worked as dubbing/sound editor on many Ealing films. It was Mary who created the memorable ‘guggle, glub, gurgle’ noise of Alec Guinness’ chemical laboratory in The Man in the White Suit.

I was a trainee. You had a five-year apprenticeship in editing. You had to do those five years before anybody in any studio would promote you. You had to learn all manner of technical stuff. Sound was a very tricky thing in those days and one of my early jobs was to go through a print of the edited sound track and look for any little specks on the negative, which would make a noise when it was projected, and paint them out by hand. You don’t think of having to do something like that now, but back in those days things were certainly more complicated and time-consuming.

Over the many years Robert worked there, the sound department operated as a true democracy, with plenty of co-operation between productions.

I think we had something like ten cutting rooms, so somebody would say, oh can you do this for me, and you just moved on to somebody else’s picture. As an assistant you always moved from one person who was in a bit of trouble and wanted help to another. I worked with Seth Holt who’d say, ‘Come and have a look at this. What do you think about it?’ That’s how it was, a real community.

Robert didn’t have an enormous amount of dealings with Balcon, remembering him as a very gentle person who’d stop and have a chat with anyone.

One day he said to me, quite out of the blue, ‘Would you like to see my new shoes? Just have a look.’ I had to admit they were beautiful shoes. Then he said to me, ‘Do you know how much I earn?’ Well of course I’d no idea. I was on about £2.10 a week or something. He said, ‘This year I’ve been paid £32,000.’ What other boss would reveal that? But Mick was that kind of person. Not aloof at all. In fact he was a softly spoken man, as was his wife, who used to greet visitors at the front of their house in her Red Cross uniform.

By the time he was asked to take over as Head of Production at Ealing Studios in 1938, after the previous incumbent, Basil Dean, had been forced out by the board following a series of poor performing films at the box office, Balcon had already established himself as one of the figureheads of British cinema. Born in 1896 into a middle-class Birmingham family, Balcon entered the film industry in the early 1920s, producing films out of Islington Studios, which he later bought. Though small, Islington was well equipped and staffed by enthusiastic and talented technicians, including the young Alfred Hitchcock, who quickly came to Balcon’s attention, ‘because of his passion for films and his eagerness to learn’. When Balcon formed Gainsborough Pictures in 1924, he didn’t waste time in giving Hitchcock his first directorial assignment with The Pleasure Garden (1925).

When Gainsborough joined forces in 1928 with Gaumont-British, at that time amongst the largest names in films in the country, Balcon was made Head of Production for both companies. Over the next five years, under his careful stewardship and guidance, Gainsborough, still operating from Islington, and Gaumont, which owned Lime Grove Studios in Shepherd’s Bush, produced some of the most popular and renowned British films of the period. There were the Hitchcock classics The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) and The 39 Steps (1935), the comedy thriller Rome Express (1932), Boris Karloff’s first British horror film The Ghoul (1933), I Was a Spy (1933) with Conrad Veidt and Madeleine Carroll, the comedies of Jack Hulbert and Cicely Courtneidge, musicals with Jessie Matthews, including Evergreen (1934), historical dramas such as Tudor Rose (1936), and even a flirtation with the documentary movement when Balcon, in the face of fierce opposition from the Gaumont board, backed the documentary pioneer Robert J. Flaherty to make Man of Aran (1934).

This success led to Balcon being head hunted personally by Louis B. Mayer to join his MGM corporation, which was setting up its British operation at Denham Studios. Balcon was excited by the challenge of making Anglo-American films for the international market, ‘blending the best from both sides’, but did not take to Mayer’s despotic way of working and, after completing just one film, the overly romanticised A Yank at Oxford (1938), walked out of the deal. Contemplating moving into independent film-making, Balcon went to see an accountant friend, Reginald Baker, on a financial matter. Some years earlier Baker had been instrumental in the negotiations to buy Islington Studios and was now in administrative charge at Ealing. During the meeting Baker suggested that since Balcon was leaving MGM, why didn’t he bring his talents over to them?

It wasn’t long into Balcon’s reign before war clouds began to gather and conflict with Germany looked inevitable. Balcon had already begun developing ideas about how Ealing and the British film industry in general should play its part. These thoughts were written down in a memorandum entitled ‘How to put films to work in the national interest in wartime’, and sent to the relevant government department. It was totally ignored. Even when hostilities began, Ealing was at first given no official guidance on how it might help with the war effort. For a time it looked as if the entire film industry might be put into mothballs when the government ordered all cinemas to be closed, fearful of mass carnage should a bomb fall on a packed auditorium. Within days George Bernard Shaw had written to The Times with his thoughts on the matter: ‘What agent of Chancellor Hitler is it who has suggested that we should all cower in darkness and terror for the duration?’ As Shaw put it, denying entertainment to soldiers and civilians was ‘a masterstroke of unimaginative stupidity’. Within weeks the order was rescinded and the cinemas were back open.

Other industries, too, faced upheaval, not least newspapers. Straight from leaving school, Madge Nettleton had gone to work in the Features Department at the Daily Express in Fleet Street, staying there for five years.

I loved the job. I would have stayed there forevermore, but six months into the war I got my notice to leave with a month’s money, myself and several other people. We couldn’t do anything about it, the papers just dwindled in size. They went from eighteen pages or so down to about four. I was 21 and didn’t know what to do. I’d only been used to working on a newspaper.

It was then she remembered what one of her former bosses, an arts editor, had told her; that should she ever come unstuck in any way, to give him a call. Now was certainly the time to take him up on his offer and Madge got in touch. He was no longer in the newspaper business, he told her: he was currently over at Ealing Studios: ‘I’ve got an idea for a cartoon for one of those Ministry of Information films.’

Ealing had started to provide short films for the Ministry of Information and other government departments. These were a mainstay of cinema programmes, along with cartoons and newsreels, and were largely instructional in tone: take for example Go To Blazes (1942), Ealing’s ten-minute comedy short starring Will Hay explaining how to deal with incendiary bombs. Perhaps the most famous of Ealing’s wartime shorts were their ‘Careless Talk’ trilogy – All Hands, Dangerous Comment and Now You’re Talking – which were seen by something like 20 million people in 2,000 cinemas from May 1940. These highlighted the danger of gossiping about military matters, however small or seemingly insignificant, in pubs and other public places where one could be overheard. ‘These films were a reminder that the only safe subjects to discuss in public were football and mothers-in-law’, joked John Mills, who appeared in them.

If Madge wanted to help on the film her old boss could only manage £5 a week, he said. Well, that was a lot of money in those days, so Madge made her way to Ealing only to discover there was, in fact, hardly any work for her to do. ‘I think he gave me that job out of pure kindness.’ In a small office five draughtsmen were working away at a series of drawings. And all these years later Madge can still remember what that animated short was about. ‘It was to do with herrings and The Ministry of Food trying to get people to buy herrings because they were cheap and good for you. It’s like they do nowadays, they try and palm something horrible off on you by telling you it’s jolly good.’ When the short was finished, it was presented without much success. ‘It wasn’t any good,’ admits Madge. ‘And they all got the sack, except me. I was offered the job of production secretary and I got more money, too.’

It sounds rather grand, production secretary, but Madge’s duties were no more than those of a regular secretary. Occasionally she’d get the chance to help on a movie, such as when a crowd scene was being filmed and extras were hired to come dressed in the clothes of a particular historical period. Then Madge would be asked to stand at the gate at 7.30 in the morning to watch them all arrive to check what they were wearing was appropriate. ‘Because some of them used to creep in not looking at all right.’

She did at least get her own office, but there was nothing grand about that, either. ‘It was very small with an old cast-iron radiator by the window and two desks and that was about all.’ There was the odd sprinkling of glamour and excitement, such as the day Michael Wilding and Michael Rennie paid her a visit.

I was thrilled because Michael Wilding was rather nice-looking and had a lovely speaking voice. I can’t imagine why he went off later to America and married somebody like Elizabeth Taylor. It was astonishing, really. Anyway, when he came into my office I was struggling to sharpen a pencil and he took it off me and got a penknife out of his pocket and did it straight away. And that’s what Ealing was like, everybody was very friendly and always happy to help each other out, there was no side to anybody, even the stars.

The atmosphere was special, too. As Madge remembers it, everybody addressed each other by their Christian names. ‘It didn’t matter who you were, you got called by your Christian name. Always. Never anything else. So the place always sounded very friendly.’

By the time of Madge Nettleton’s and Robert Winter’s arrival at Ealing, the war had inevitably affected the kind of films Ealing were making. From thrillers and comedies, including Cheer Boys Cheer (1939), about a small traditional brewery fighting a takeover by a large corporate competitor, and The Four Just Men (1939), crime novelist Edgar Wallace’s tale of a clandestine band of vigilantes who fight tyranny and protect British interests around the globe, the shift was more towards stories with a propaganda flavour. Or in Balcon’s words, ‘first-class war subjects realistically treated’, with what he termed as, ‘a departure from tinsel’. Yes, the aim remained to make the best possible films that people wanted to see, but at the same time those films should carry some kind of message, ‘Or an example which would be good propaganda for morale and the war effort’, Balcon decreed.

The first of these was undoubtedly The Proud Valley (1940), directed by Pen Tennyson and starring the celebrated American singer and actor Paul Robeson, who Balcon was particularly eager to work with. Based on a story by communist sympathiser Herbert Marshall from the left-wing Unity Theatre, Robeson plays a stranger who is accepted into a south Wales mining community and is given a job down the pit. After an accident the colliery is forced to close, putting the livelihood of the entire village in jeopardy, and the miners march on London to demand it be reopened.

War was actually declared halfway through production and Robeson never forgot his anxious and weary journeys to and from the studio, watching as London began to mobilise with anti-aircraft guns appearing on the streets and the arrival of the blackout. It was a harrowing time. Robeson’s wife had all their belongings already packed and three days after the end of filming the couple sailed back to the United States due to mounting fears over German naval presence in the Atlantic. The film’s original ending was also changed, from the miners taking over the abandoned pit to run it themselves as a workers co-operative, to the more patriotic idea of the pit reopening in the national interest. As one of the miners exclaims, ‘Coal in wartime is as much a part of our national defence as guns or anything else.’

A more straightforward war picture was Convoy (1940), inspired by a radio broadcast Balcon heard in which eyewitnesses described an enemy attack on Allied shipping. Approaching the Ministry of Information and the Admiralty with the idea of a film saluting the brave sailors who protected merchant ships, Balcon received enthusiastic support, including equipment and naval advisers.

For the director, Balcon again chose his young protégé, Pen Tennyson, the great grandson of the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword by Martin Scorsese
• Welcome to Ealing
• Chapter One: Balcon Takes Control
• Chapter Two: New Blood Arrives
• Chapter Three: Waving Goodbye
• Chapter Four: Bombs Over Ealing
• Chapter Five: “Mullet Sighted”
• Chapter Six: Peace Comes To Ealing
• Chapter Seven: The Kids Take Over
• Chapter Eight: Continental Charm
• Chapter Nine: Low Wages – High Expectations
• Chapter Ten: Ealing Goes Down Under
• Chapter Eleven: A Comedy Bonanza
• Chapter Twelve: A Very Male Preserve
• Chapter Thirteen: Union Trouble
• Chapter Fourteen: Drinks At The Red Lion
• Chapter Fifteen: Hello And Goodbye To Audrey
• Chapter Sixteen: All Hands On Deck
• Chapter Seventeen: African Adventures
• Chapter Eighteen: Shooting For Real
• Chapter Nineteen: Sellers & Co
• Chapter Twenty: “I’d Steer Clear Of The Film Business”
• Chapter Twenty-One: Ealing Shuts Down
• Chapter Twenty-Two: Ealing Gets A New Home
• Chapter Twenty-Three: The Dunkirk Spirit
• Chapter Twenty-Four: The End Of An Era
• Filmography
• Sources and Acknowledgements
• Index
• Illustrations
• Copyright