Dream Repairman. Jim BSL Clark
the possessor of a high-pitched voice, he was also very funny.
Arthur, whom we all called Cabby, became my housemaster and that was the turning point in my life at Oundle. For one thing he inspired us. He made us think, he made us proud, and above all he made us laugh. And he kicked out all those louts who had made our life a misery. No more beatings. A dressing-down from Arthur was far worse than any physical hurt. It is very sad to inherit a group of boys that has lost its spirit and we were ready for Arthur’s magic touch. Though he had not been a housemaster before the war, he took to it directly. It must have been a difficult decision for Mr. Stainforth, the gruff and imperious headmaster, to appoint Arthur. Whether the parents were ever bothered by an obviously homosexual man being in charge of their boys I never knew. Certainly my parents were not outwardly concerned, though I doubt they knew what a real homosexual was, but Arthur was in no way interested in boys, except to attend to their welfare, which he did with enormous vigour and enthusiasm. Our position in the ratings started to rise. Before I left, New House was a positive hit and all due to Cabby.
When I arrived at the school, the projection equipment in the Great Hall was truly primitive. Two ancient machines dating from the silent period had been adapted by a science master who had attached sound heads. Picture and sound were both inadequate and frequently failed, but we did not care. Spending a couple of hours in fantasy land was enough and technical deficiencies were of no concern. I recall falling headlong for Jeanne Crain after State Fair. The senior boys were in charge of the gramophone records that played before the film, Harry James’ “Trumpet Blues and Cantabile” being the favourites in 1945. We saw four films every term, the high spot at the end of school being Field Day, involving mock warfare in fields and villages around town when we put on our OTC uniforms and played at being soldiers.
After Cabby Marshall started booking films, the choices improved, but I was now sixteen and heavily influenced, like most of my generation of cineastes, by Roger Manvell’s excellent Pelican book, Film, probably the first serious study of film appreciation to reach a wide public. It inspired many people to start film societies in their towns since there was now an interest in seeing films that could not easily be viewed outside of London. There had been film societies operating in larger cities for many years, the London Film Society began in the twenties, but the time was now ripe for expansion, and 16 mm projectors and prints were more easily obtained.
I decided to write, with generous cribs from Manvell, a manifesto that was directed toward the headmaster, to persuade him to allow me to start a film society within the school. It would be open only to senior boys and staff and be additional to the regular film shows. Arthur Marshall gave my somewhat fulsome piece to Mr. Stainforth who, much to my surprise, sanctioned the idea, provided a master was in charge and knew what films were to be shown, cautioning, “No smut please, so be cautious with the French films.” During his period in Paris after the war, Arthur had met Francis Howard who was now in charge of an organisation within the British Film Institute called the Central Booking Agency. This provided a source of films for the societies to show. It was arranged that Mr. Howard would visit the school and inaugurate the first meeting when we ran the Swiss film Marie-Louise. This was a great moment for me and eventually led to my very first job in the film industry.
The second most important decision came with the scrapping of the ancient projectors and installation of two new 35 mm machines in a soundproof booth up in the gallery of the Great Hall. Now we had terrific screenings with the enthusiastic help of Mr. Pike, the projectionist. But not before I had run Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and provided a musical accompaniment via a twin-turntable playing generous 78 rpm samplings of Vaughan Williams’ Fourth Symphony and, of course, Arthur Bliss’ Things to Come. This taught me something about film scoring that would blossom later.
The Oundle Film Society was a hit. This was 1947, and it is still active. My education was complete. Now I had to face a future in Boston, Lincolnshire, in a printing factory, while my school friends went off to University. This was not a good time. I was eighteen and trapped in a one-horse town. What to do? Start another film society of course.
Before this time, we’d been to America and back, which was very heady for a sixteen-year-old boy. The war had just ended when Alec Shennan, my father’s business friend in Chicago, invited us over. We either went on the Queen Mary or the Queen Elizabeth—I don’t recall which, but we took both boats there and back. I spent a lot of my time in the ship’s cinema, while Mother took to her bed and stayed there, fearing sea sickness. As soon as we boarded at Southampton, rationing was off. We had grown so used to eating very little that our stomachs had shrunk. We couldn’t look at the food without groaning.
In New York we were first diddled by a cab driver. Our hosts had booked us into the Drake Hotel. Our financial allowance was so pitiful that my sister Hazel and I spent most of our time in Radio City Music Hall, sitting through the stage show, and sometimes the movie, twice. Mother stayed in her hotel room. We visited the Shennan’s in Chicago where our financial straits were somewhat relieved and I bought my first Biro pen. I also visited their daughter’s school of 1,500 pupils. I was appalled by the standard of teaching and also by the pupils calling their teachers by their first names.
While there we saw both Finian’s Rainbow and Brigadoon in their original stage versions. I lugged the record albums back home. I was already very pro-American. This trip only created a greater love, which was to last a very long time.
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Term of Trial
The production manager on The Grass Is Greener was James Ware, and during the course of the film we’d become friendly. We both loved popular music, and he made me laugh a lot. Jimmy had been in the air force during the war and was a live wire, extremely camp, and very funny. He had a wonderful sense of humour and, in those days, could make me laugh simply by the way he spoke. He played the piano like an angel, chain smoked, was obviously homosexual, and was wonderful at his job. He created a happy, relaxed atmosphere around him, and he was a character. The kind we don’t seem to have these days.
After the film ended, he went off to prepare another picture and was instrumental in getting me an interview with its director, Peter Glenville. The film was Term of Trial and was to be shot in Ireland at the Ardmore Studio near Dublin.
Glenville was a theatre director who’d done a few films and had written the script of this one from a novel. It was financed by Warner Brothers and starred Laurence Olivier, Simone Signoret, and Sarah Miles.
This was the period of the “kitchen sink” pictures. Room at the Top, in which Signoret had excelled was already a big hit, and Jimmy Ware had worked on that one too, being a friend of its director Jack Clayton.
That winter I found myself in Bray, a seaside town near the Ardmore Studio, with my two children and my assistant David Campling. David’s wife had agreed to join us to look after my children, though my stepson David was attending a preparatory school in England and would only be in Ireland for the Christmas holiday. He had also changed his name from Andrew to David—for reasons I never really understood. Kate attended a Catholic primary school in the town. Jimmy Ware and an assistant director joined us in the rented house.
It was something of an ordeal. The winter was cold, the house was damp, and we had a resident housekeeper who spent more time in church than looking after the tenants. The cooked breakfast she had agreed to make was always cold, sitting on top of a hot plate powered by two candles. Congealed eggs were her specialty.
Outside there were few compensations. The countryside was near and the views were fine, however, on a Sunday there was a marked lack of places to eat. At that time Ireland was not geared to tourism and unless one was a bona fide traveller, publicans were not allowed to serve alcohol.
Shooting the film was fairly simple, though the crew had no love for the director, whose lack of experience overshadowed all his endeavors. My old friend from Boston, Gerry O’Hara, was the first assistant director and delighted in watching Glenville get into a muddle with angles, more than once chuckling when the director painted himself into a corner.
The producer of the film, Jimmy Woolf, who’d also produced Room at the Top, was with us much of the time. Our cutting room was in the basement of the old house at Ardmore, next to the