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A Cockney Coster and His Asinine Companion

  By

Christina Hink, King’s College London

22 March 2019

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Through the course of two series and more than twenty episodes, Harry B. Parkinson and Frank Miller invited viewers to cinematically travel through London’s famous and lesser known attractions in a travelogue series entitled Wonderful London. The short films first appeared in British cinemas in 1924 and eventually were exported throughout the British Empire. Each episode, about ten to twelve minutes in length, was shown before the comedies and main feature as part of a larger programme (except in Australia where they were spliced together as a ‘super-feature) and allowed audiences to explore the capital from the comfort of their local venue [i][ii]. Simple in form and comprised mostly of static long shots, the series offered superlative views of the teeming metropolis. Recently restored by the BFI National Archive, the twelve extant episodes afford modern viewers (and the historian) with unrivalled visual insight into London of the mid-1920s.

Scholarship coinciding with the BFI restoration suggests Wonderful London takes inspiration from a 1922 eponymous magazine series. While no evidence has been adduced suggesting otherwise, the relationship remains unsubstantiated. Comparing the two manifestations, however, the connection between the magazine series and the travelogue films is tenable.

Figure 1: Cover From Wonderful London volume 1, number 6

Wonderful London first materialised as a twenty-four issue fortnightly magazine in 1922. Edited by St. John Adcock, readers were treated to articles by contemporary authors and cultural critics, such as Stephen Graham and Alec Waugh, as well as stunning views of the city processed in Photogravure. Each issue generally contained five articles; the contents of which ranged from historical explorations to contemporary insights and travel advices to points of interest in the capital. Like today’s television cliché ‘to be continued’, the publishers included only half of each final article, with the remainder printed at the beginning of the subsequent issue.

In reading the six issues contained in George Walton’s collection at the V&A Archive, I was astounded by the chromatic covers, the exquisite photographs, and the ‘insider tips’. William Pett Ridge’s “From Mayfair to Whitechapel”, for example, takes readers on a walking tour of London. Beginning near Hyde Park Corner and ending in Barking, East London Ridge takes readers past notable stops, pausing to offer advice along the way. Lingering by Burlington Arcade behind Bond Street, Ridge offers my favourite advice: “Courage and a cheque book are required to enable you to patronise any establishment hereabouts.”[iii]

In “London Types”, humourist Barry Pain celebrates the characters distinctive to London – flower girls and kerb merchants, the costermonger, the butler, and the tailor, to name a few. “The internal combustion engine wiped out some interesting London types,” writes Pain, “We had the driver of the horse ‘bus, swift in repartee and able to do miracles.” [iv] Pain concludes his article by inviting readers to investigate the city for themselves: “There are indeed a thousand types that cannot be mentioned in the space of one brief article. Come to London and see them for yourself. It is not at all a bad place.” [v]

Figure 2: “London Types” by Barry Pain

The magazine offers inordinate insights into London of the 1920s, but it is the magazine’s cinematic incarnation that truly has the power to transport modern viewers to another time while revealing a variety of peoples and interest points, some extant and some lost. While each episode is unique and delightful in its own right, I would like to focus on one episode in which a Coster, a street vendor who pedals goods from a cart, takes us through London’s lesser-known periphery.

In London’s Outer Ring a cockney Coster, one of Barry Pain’s ‘London types’, attempts to goad an unconvinced donkey called Rudolph into a joy ride around the fringes of London. Of the roughly fifteen localities the Coster discusses with his asinine companion, nine are extant in some fashion or another today. The model cottage at Kennington Park, Brixton Windmill, St. Augustine’s Tower in Hackney, Hampstead Heath, the remnants of Richmond Palace, Strand on the Green, Hammersmith Bridge, and Old Kent Road remain intact and bare resemblance to their 1920s structures.

Figure 3: Coster and his asinine companion from London’s Outer Ring

Although Eltham Palace endures, it has undergone significant refurbishment since the 1930s. A royal residence “from the time King John signed the Magna… what-d’yer-call-it, up till King Charles lorst ‘is bloomin’ ‘ead”, as our Coster informs us via colloquial intertitle, the palace, according to English Heritage, in the 1920s was in a phase of decline.[vi] Given the picturesque long shots of the palace ground with individuals strolling through leafy overhangs down emptied earthen paths, it is difficult to imagine its deterioration in London’s Outer Ring. In 1933, millionaires Stephen and Virgin Courtauld contracted architects Seely & Paget to redevelop Eltham into a modern home. What remains today is “a unique marriage between a medieval and Tudor palace and a 1930s millionaire’s mansion.” [vii]

Two locales shown in Outer Ring are truly remarkable, as the structures have long been destroyed. The Crystal Palace was originally assembled in Hyde Park to accommodate the Great Exhibition of 1851, which saw an excess of twenty five thousand visitors on its first day alone. [viii] Six months later the Great Exhibition ended and had accepted more than six million people through the Crystal Palace. [ix] In 18XX, the Palace was relocated and reconstituted atop Penge Peak near Sydenham Hill as an amusement site for the masses, where it remained until a spectacular fire destroyed the structure in 1936 [x]. What remains today are remnants of the upper terrace – wide, stone steps leading up to a sizeable scarred lawn.

Figure 4: Crystal Palace c. 1924 from London’s Outer Ring

For the Franco-British Exhibition in 1908, “20 huge palaces and 120 exhibition buildings were built on a 140-acre site by a workforce of 120,000 men.” [xi] Eight times the size of The Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, White City hosted the 1908 Olympic Games and continued to be used for exhibitions throughout the early twentieth century. During the First World War, the larger buildings were converted to manufacture aeroplanes and, later in the Second World War, to make parachutes. The stadium housed greyhound racing and sporting events until it was demolished in 1985. The complex is now occupied by White City Place, a “new and exciting business district.” [xii]

Figure 5: White City c. 1924 from London’s Outer Ring

While the historian may lament the loss of historic London landmarks, London’s Outer Ring, as well as the other Wonderful London, episodes provides unrivalled cinematic views into the past. Our Cockney guide, though, might be disappointed to learn the fate of his two favourite “boozers.” The Maypole in Chigwell, mentioned in Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge, is now a derelict property and permanently closed, while the Burlington Arms on Church Street in Chiswick is now a private residence (a swanky one, at that).

References

[i] Bryony Dixon, “Wonderful London,” In Wonderful London (DVD accompaniment) (London: BFI, 2011) 1.

[ii] “Wonderful London”, The Brisbane Courier, Jul 5, 1926: 17; ‘Wonderful London’, Warwick Daily News, July 13, 1926, 3

[iii] William Pett Ridge, “From Mayfair to Whitechapel”, Wonderful London 1, no. 6 (April 27, 1922): 262.

[iv] Barry Pain, “London Types,” Wonderful London 1, no. 2 (March 2, 1922): 51.

[v] Pain, “London Types,” 57.

[vi] “History of Eltham Palace and Gardens,” English Heritage, accessed Mar 1, 2019, https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/eltham-palace-and-gardens/history/

[vii] Ibid.

[viii] Jeffrey A. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1951: A Nation On Display (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press) 1.

[ix] Auerbach, Exhibition of 1951, 1.

[x] Auerbach, Exhibition of 1951, 200 and 211.

[xi] “History of the White City Site,” BBC, accessed March 2, 2019, http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2004/05_may/11/mv_history.pdf

[xii] Ibid.

Christina Hink is a PhD Candidate in Film Studies at King’s College London. She holds a BA in History from Texas A&M University and an MA in Museum Studies from UCL. She is currently researching silent British and American war films in relation to war and memory, with an emphasis on the representation of women and disabled veterans.

Disclaimer: The IAMHIST Blog is a platform that offers individual scholars the opportunity to present their work and thoughts. They alone are responsible for the content, which does not represent the view of the IAMHIST council or other IAMHIST members.

 

 

 

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A day at the archives… The Stanley Kubrick Archives, University of Arts London (UAL)

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James Fenwick, De Montfort University

5 December 2017

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Tucked deep in the bowels of the London College of Communication is a discreet room behind frosted glass. Stepping into this room, first time visitors can be forgiven for thinking they are stepping onto the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). A sterile white environment with bold red furniture, this is the home of UAL’s University Archives and Special Collections Centre and the resting place of the Stanley Kubrick Archive. I have spent many hours at the Kubrick Archive over the past seven years, first visiting it as part of research for my Master’s degree and, more recently, for my PhD research into Kubrick’s role as a producer. But all these years later I still feel a shiver of excitement as I step into the Archive and find myself immediately confronted with the weight of cinematic history that it holds. Small glass cabinets are positioned around the central reading room and contain props and other ephemera from the Kubrick Archive: face masks worn during the orgy sequence of Eyes Wide Shut (1999); a 1964 letter from Kubrick to Arthur C. Clarke proposing a collaboration on a science fiction project; or Kubrick’s personal working copy of the A Clockwork Orange (1971) screenplay, replete with his handwritten notes on inserted music sheets for ‘Singin’ in the Rain’.

 

Figure 1: © Luke Potter, 2007, courtesy of the Stanley Kubrick Archive/Figure 2: © Paul Heys, 2012, courtesy of the Stanley Kubrick Archive

Kubrick retained the majority of his business papers, correspondence, and production documents from the 1960s onwards (the Archive does house material from the 1940s and 1950s, but the documentation for the likes of Fear and Desire (1953) through to The Killing (1956) are more sparse compared to Kubrick’s later films), all filed into a system at his home at Childwick Bury Manor. Upon his death it became apparent that this material was of such cultural historic importance that it needed archiving with a scholarly institution. And it is to the great fortune of the academic community that the Kubrick family allowed the Archive to be opened to the public in 2007.

The popularity of the Archive combined with the small space of the reading room means that anyone wanting to visit is advised to contact the archival team several weeks in advance to secure an appointment (archive-enquiries@arts.ac.uk). Reading times are between 1pm and 5pm Monday to Friday, with boxes being retrieved until 4pm. There are locker spaces for any personal items and I’ve even been allowed to store my suitcase at times. The Archive does have a strict copyright policy and I strongly suggest any researcher wanting to visit read it in advance (here). Photography is not permitted of any items that are part of the Kubrick Archive due to an agreement with the donors. Therefore, a laptop is highly recommended to take as many notes as possible.

I would also strongly advocate planning your trip using the online catalogue (here). The sheer size of the Archive is overwhelming (over 800 linear metres of shelving) and I have witnessed many rookies to the Archive over the years expect to find the Holy Grail to Kubrick’s genius. That is until they realise just how much Kubrick hoarded and how much of it is seemingly trivial in nature (financial receipts, commercial catalogues, dispatch notes, order forms etc). The online catalogue is easy to navigate and is broken down into nineteen separate categories, thirteen of which relate to Kubrick’s feature films, while the remaining six categories include entries such as ‘Unfinished Projects’ (contains material on projects such as Aryan Papers and A.I.), and ‘Documentaries’ (this contains material on the two projects Vivian Kubrick directed: Making the Shining (1980) and the unreleased Making of Full Metal Jacket). I usually make meticulous notes of the boxes that I want to look at in order to form the basis of a particular case study, but it does pay to sometimes select random boxes and to peruse their contents. I’ve often come across surprising revelations this way, such as a letter from Peter Schnitzler, the grandson of Arthur, written to Kubrick in 1959. Peter had visited Kubrick on the set of Spartacus (1960) and the two had clearly talked about the prospect of developing one of Schnitzler’s novels into a film (something not realised until Eyes Wide Shut (1999)). As such, Peter offered his grandfather’s notebooks to Kubrick for further research (SK/9/4/1).

Figure 3: © Paul Heys, 2012, courtesy of the Stanley Kubrick Archive

As a confessed Kubrick obsessive, I take absolute pleasure in coming across handwritten letters from the likes of Sir Laurence Olivier (turning down the role of Humbert Humbert in Lolita (1962)), or Vladimir Nabokov (insisting he must be present at the casting of the title role of Lolita). But that is not to suggest the Kubrick Archive is a depository of materials that will easily illuminate the processes of a Kubrick production. Firstly, and perhaps most frustratingly, is the illegible scrawl of Kubrick’s handwriting, which can be found on many items in the Archive, right down to some innocuous requisition form. Senior Archivist Richard Daniels may be at hand to attempt to decipher Kubrick’s writing, though more often than not I have abandoned such hope in ever understanding what on earth he was writing. Similarly, catalogue entries may build up your hopes of coming across an item that will utterly revise the scholarly approach to Kubrick, only to find that the item is in fact just a dog-eared old note filled with doodles and other musings rather than any kind of Rosebud. I found myself so duped at the beginning of my PhD when I came across a catalogue entry that read ‘Kubrick job list’, with a description that suggested Kubrick had outlined by hand a ‘Kubrick company chart’ (SK/16/2/15). I went into a nervous sweat feeling that this could be it; this could be the key to unlocking my PhD research in revealing Kubrick the producer. I made an advance order of the box and arrived prompt at 1pm. I watched one of the staff wheel out the box on a metal trolley ready for its dissection by me. I opened it up and rummaged through the files until I came to it, ‘Kubrick’s job list’, a slice of yellowing, crumpled A4 paper filled with more of Kubrick’s spidery handwriting. Four company names were listed next to a wonky table that had two black dots placed inside of it. Only two companies were decipherable, Peregrine and Polaris. The file told me nothing. My heart sank and, after several more hours in the Archive, I consoled myself in a nearby Elephant & Castle pub with a tepid beer.

This has pretty much been the pattern of my time spent researching at the Archive. I wade through boxes of dusty, dog-eared business papers while a group of students grin as they open a box that contains a jumper worn by Danny Torrance in The Shining (1980). I have to give myself a moment for pause as I gleefully join the students to gaze upon this battered, forty-year old piece of clothing, momentarily dropping my researcher façade and becoming just a fan. And this exemplifies the two halves of the Archive: one is the exciting journey of new ways to engage with Kubrick’s life and work, to touch the objects and clothes that animated his films, and to experience a tangible connection to the man himself. The other is boxes and boxes of paper that document the laborious process of actually making the films we now enjoy. My thesis has drawn heavily on the financial papers, business and production correspondence, distribution reports and other such material to piece together the managerial and administrative structures and functions of a Stanley Kubrick production. And it has revealed just how difficult and exasperating a process this could be for both Kubrick and for those who worked with him.

The hours I have spent researching have been alleviated by the surroundings of the Archive itself, where at any one time there is a hive of activity. If you like a quiet, peaceful research environment, then the Archive may prove quite distracting. I personally thrive off of the activity and at seeing the various researchers, journalists, and students respond to the items they find. Occasionally, Jan Harlan (Kubrick’s brother-in-law and long time executive producer) may stroll in, or you may encounter a volunteer with an amazing story to tell (Joy Cuff volunteers at the Archive and worked as a model maker on 2001: A Space Odyssey). And there is a team of helpful and insightful archival staff on hand to guide rookies around the catalogue and to lend an insight into the Kubrick mind.

I’d like to end by just pointing out a few helpful travel tips. The Archive is conveniently located next to the Elephant & Castle tube station, served by the Bakerloo and Northern Line. First time visitors may get confused at the tangle of subway tunnels at Elephant & Castle. The easiest thing to do is follow signs for the London College of Communication / the Imperial War Museum. The entrance to the University is set back a little from the roundabout, as if you were to continue onto St. George’s Road. During term time it is impossible to miss – just look for the gaggle of staff and students outside smoking. The University does have café facilities but I prefer to maximise my time in the Archive and leave refreshments until the end of the day. After all, the BFI Southbank is but a ten-to-fifteen minute walk away. What better way to end a day trawling through the Stanley Kubrick Archive than catching a 70mm screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey and finally realising just how much paper went into the making of it.

James Fenwick has been researching Stanley Kubrick’s role as a producer and of those producers Kubrick worked with. He has published several articles on Kubrick, including ‘Curating Kubrick: Constructing ‘New Perspective’ Narratives in Stanley Kubrick Exhibitions’ for Screening the Past. He has recently undertaken a research trip to the Kirk Douglas Papers in Madison, Wisconsin, funded by the EAAS.

Disclaimer: The IAMHIST Blog is a platform that offers individual scholars the opportunity to present their work and thoughts. They alone are responsible for the content, which does not represent the view of the IAMHIST council or other IAMHIST members.

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‘I want to tell the world!’ The Soho Fair, Belinda Lee and Miracle in Soho (Julian Amyes, 1957)

  By

Jingan Young, King’s College London

3 October 2017

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Directed by Julian Amyes and released in the summer of 1957, Miracle in Soho was executive produced by Earl St. John for the J. Arthur Rank Organisation and co-produced and written by Emeric Pressburger whose original version of the script was written in 1934 under the title The Miracle in St. Anthony’s Lane. Incidentally, the year before the release of Miracle in Soho Hungarian born Pressburger’s successful working partnership with the director Michael Powell had come to an end. Powell would go on to make Peeping Tom which utilises North Soho (Fitzrovia) for its violent opening sequence.

The “miracle” of the 1957 Miracle in Soho occurs after the whispered prayers of Julia Gozzi (Belinda Lee) within the fictional St. Anthony’s Church located in the fictional St. Anthony’s Lane, Soho. Following her prayer for the return of an Anglo-Irish road driller and “incorrigible breaker of hearts” Michael Morgan (John Gregson), the water mains beneath the Soho lane burst destroying the newly-laid asphalt. Morgan returns to repair the road and ultimately the lovers are reconciled.

A failure critically and at the box office, critics upon release of the film were largely disappointed with this constructed Soho set alongside the morally integrated world of its character-driven plot.

Monthly Film Bulletin declared “This depressing production, with its synthetic Soho setting, has characters conceived strictly within the less happy conventions of British comedy”, Variety called it “A rather slow moving sentimental yarn” and Picturegoer condemned its “wispy plot, set in a studio-built Soho street” though hopeful in its introduction to a “peaceful mixture of people, far removed from the gangsters and floozies that usually people the screen Soho.”[i]

The Soho of the film was designed by Carmen Dillon who won an Academy Award for her work on Hamlet (Laurence Olivier, 1948) St. Anthony’s Lane is a self-contained, mammoth Pinewood Studios set. Alongside the “wispy” plot of the Italian Gozzi family’s planned emigration to Canada and the Irish philanderer Michael Morgan’s redemption – the meteoric rise of television may also be to blame for the film’s poor reception.

Splashed on the front-page of What’s On in London in 1957, the film was described as a sentimental little fairy story which abysmally failed in its representation of Soho:

The ‘miracle’ of the title of Pressburger’s sentimental little fairy story, Miracle in Soho, at the Odeon, Leicester Square, is LOVE. It hits philandering, unpleasantly-cocksure labourer John Gregson while he’s digging up the road and overnight magically makes a new man of him. Equally miraculously it hits Italian Belinda Lee, who gives up going to Canada with her family in order to woo him. Silly girl. Of course, this isn’t really Soho at all, but I don’t suppose that’s going to worry anyone except a few fussy Sohoians.[ii]

But the film’s cross-promotion with the Soho Fair and film impresario J. Arthur Rank’s Euro-centric approach during the mid 1950s (with Miracle, the Italian film market) provides the film with a further complexity in the context of British film history.

In July of 1955 the Mayor of Westminster officially re-launched Cosmopolitan Soho to the world. The fair was co-organised by the Soho Association and the proprietor of the York Minster pub Gaston Berlemont who conveyed to a reporter from The Spectator that he got the idea at the deconsecration service at St. Anne’s, Soho’s parish church until it was bombed. He recalls to the reporter: “Now there was no church […] there should be a fair in her honour.”

Soho’s multifarious reputation in the public sphere as a cosmopolitan space continued to publicly obstruct the new planning philosophy and technique which was transformed during the Second World War. Drawing on Soho’s reputation for cultural and ethnic diversity the fair’s organisers were able to “create an idiosyncratic mood of celebration that could be marketed to local and national audiences via the media and entertainment industries” (Mort, 2010, 198).

The week-long Soho Fair was recorded by Pathé News in the form of short newsreels such as Soho Goes Gay! (British Pathé, 1955) and was screened in British cinemas throughout the summer. “A good place which can do fine things” declared a promotional piece published in The Observer titled “A Fair Week’s Run for the Real Soho.” The same publication would later report: “The idea that Soho is a romantic little ‘Continental Quarter’ in the heart of innocent England – a myth – almost became reality yesterday afternoon.”

The New Statesman was horrified: “There used to be – I daresay there still is – an admirable honesty about Soho. It does not pretend to be something: it just was. But the bell is tolling. Soho is having a Fair […] Someone has had the idea of producing Soho to the world so that it is not only to be Soho, but also to pretend to be.”[iii] In the same hyperbolic vein, The Spectator magazine reported the fair to be filled with absurdities:

There are many absurdities at the Soho Fair…A garish Dutch organ plays in Golden Square, painted with Elizabethan musicians and Victorian odalisques: a band of West Indians pours out Latin-American rhythms…Bohemian young Frenchman…a dark, Celtic Lady plies a spinning-wheel in Shaftesbury Avenue. [iv]

In 1956 J. Arthur Rank “supped with the devil” in extending his efforts in promotion by advertising on new platforms which included purchasing advertising slots in commercial television and popular magazines. Rank produced a 20-min promotional film Full Screen Ahead (1957) to be screened in Rank’s cinemas. The film took the audience on a day out at Pinewood [Studios] with a visit to the set of Miracle in Soho. Fan magazine Picturegoer ran several profiles of the then twenty-one-year-old Belinda Lee in an attempt to reinvent Rank’s star:

Belinda Lee has set the Rank Organisation quite a problem. All because she wants to live down her past. At twenty-one, the nicest, least-spoiled star in Britain really has a past…Miss Lee is making Miracle in London. And the talk around Pinewood is that it gives her the sort of dramatic role that could change her whole career. Belinda Lee sees it that way, too.[v]

Penned by Derek Walker, his series of articles for Picturegoer “Belinda Lee Covers Up Her Past”, “Lee – a Star by Friendly Persuasion and “A Star By Friendly Persuasion – Part II. Why She’s Not a Blonde Bombshell” legitimizes Lee as a serious actor and in Part II accounts for Pressburger’s casting of Lee in the role of Julia Gozzi as merely happenstance.

Pressburger saw her photograph outside of his offices at Pinewood and there and then decided “that, is just what I want for Miracle in Soho.”[vi] Steve Chibnall recounts the Rank Organisation’s big idea of 1955 – 1957 which involved forgoing the American film market for Europe where “British-based actors such as Herbert Lom and Belinda Lee would play sympathetic Italian characters.”

Chibnall says:

When Rank had a star such as Belinda Lee, who they believed would appeal to the Italian market, they used the most talented of Studio Favalli’s illustrators to promote her films. Arnaldo Putzu painted his first British posters for her breakthrough role in the social realist crime film The Secret Place (1957), Cesselon depicted her as an Anglo-Italian girl in Miracle in Soho (1957).[vii] (Steve Chibnall, 2016)

In the year of Miracle in Soho’s release Belinda Lee endorsed cosmetics such as Vitapointe of Paris in The Daily Express. Marketing for the product even managed to incorporate Pressburger’s film for the tagline reads: “I want to tell the world! I’ve found a hair dressing cream that works miracles!”[viii]

Despite the film’s resolution, the redemption of the self-serving, philanderer Michael Morgan through the love-of-a-good-woman manifested through Julia’s prayer, the doubts vehemently expressed by Julia Gozzi’s siblings Mafalda (Rosalie Crutchley) and Fillipo (Ian Bannen) on emigrating to Canada are never fully developed and their initial reservations on leaving Soho and their desires to cultivate new businesses in Soho there are abruptly dropped by the film. The failed redevelopment of the Soho lane is also abandoned in favour of the title love story.

Miracle in Soho may not have achieved Pressburger’s intentions, and one wonders what the final film contained within his earlier scripts set in a Berlin synagogue would have been like, but the film is a welcomed addition to a metropolis massively riven by discord and furthermore contributes to a post-war Soho film canon (and one I have found to be larger than most expect!) that contains an exhaustive array of crime narratives following Spivs and prostitutes.

[i] Films of that year included the Oscar-winning David Lean’s The Bridge on The River Kwai. Clem. “Review: Miracle in Soho.” Variety. Jul 24 (1957): 26. “MIRACLE IN SOHO.” Monthly Film Bulletin 24, no. 276 (1957): 104. “Miracle in Soho”, Picturegoer. London 34.1161 (Aug 3, 1957), 14.

[ii] “Miracle in Soho”. What’s On in London. July 12th, 1957. Courtesy of Steve Crook. The Powell & Pressburger Pages Online.

[iii] Interview with the Soho locals and the Fair’s origins see “A Fair Week’s Run for the Real Soho.” The Observer (1901- 2003); Jul 10 (1955), 10. Edward Hyams laments the old Soho where you could “if you had the odd taste for it, see actors, artists and writers eating.” See his piece “Pretending to be Soho”, The New Statesman and Nation 50, Jul 16 (1955), 65 – 66.

[iv] Part of The Spectator’s Notebook, this amusing short piece gives a first-hand look at the origins of the Soho Fair. See “THERE ARE MANY Absurdities at the Soho Fair.”  The Spectator 195, no. 6629 (Jul 15, 1955): 86.

[v] Derek Walker’s profile is accompanied by several images of Lee as “pin-up” in “Belinda Lee Covers Up Her Past.” Picturegoer. March 16, 1967, 5.

[vi] Ibid., 5.

[vii] Ironically says Chibnall, Rank’s big ideas would be made possible in the 1960s by American investment based on the success of British films in the USA. See Steve Chibnall, “Banging the Gong: The Promotional Strategies of Britain’s J. Arthur Rank Organisation in the 1950s.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television (2016), 12.

[viii] The black-and-white advertisement uses a large photograph of Lee to promote Vitapointe of Paris with a tagline below that reads “Just 1 minute brushing – and my hair is shining! By Belinda Lee.”, The Daily Express. September 26, 1957, 13.

Jingan Young is an award-winning playwright and screenwriter. She holds a BA (Hons) in English with Film Studies from King’s College London and a Master of Studies in Creative Writing from the University of Oxford. She is currently reading for a PhD in Film Studies at King’s College London where her thesis examines the cinematic representations of London’s Soho in post-war British cinema. She welcomes anyone who may wish to add to her ever-extending list of Soho films. She also blogs and tweets about her research @sohoonscreen and sohoonscreen.wordpress.com

Disclaimer: The IAMHIST Blog is a platform that offers individual scholars the opportunity to present their work and thoughts. They alone are responsible for the content, which does not represent the view of the IAMHIST council or other IAMHIST members.

 

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