These rural English comedies from the silent era are gobsmackingly beautiful
Set among humble folk along the coast and in the countryside, a delightful series of films by director/writer partnership Manning Haynes and Lydia Hayward has been largely unseen for 100 years.
The aim of the BFI’s new Film on Film Festival is to celebrate celluloid. We will be showing mainly original film prints, from their time of first release, but as the curator responsible for its silent film collections this posed a problem for me. Where later films could be shown in their original nitrate or vintage form, prints from the silent era are now almost all too fragile to screen. So how could I contribute to the programme?
We thought something gobsmackingly beautiful would compensate for the print being a copy, albeit one made directly – film to film – from the original. Of course, there is no field labelled ‘gobsmackingly beautiful’ in the archive database to search on, so you have to rely on memory, but happily I had something in mind.
For a couple of decades between 1998 and 2019 a unique partnership between the BFI National Archive and a group of silent film enthusiasts gathered to watch all of the extant British silent films, an exercise in cinematic archaeology. The British Silent Film Festival was like a massive ‘finds’ table of cinematic discoveries. One of the treasures unearthed as part of this project was a series of films adapted from the stories of British humorist W.W. Jacobs (once as celebrated as Jerome K. Jerome or P.G. Wodehouse) by a female screenwriter, Lydia Hayward, similarly lost to history. Both Jacobs and Hayward are fascinating, but what stuck in my mind was the beauty of the prints – unseen pretty much for 80 years (now 100 years since).
The Jacobs stories are quintessentially English, set in the villages and ports of the south-eastern coast of Britain and among humble folk (for once), primarily the ordinary sailors who plied the coastal trade. Most of the action of the films takes place in beautiful locations from the London docks to the shores of Suffolk, Essex and Kent in all their picturesque glory.
The prints were acquired in the late 1950s and copied to safety stock for preservation, but screening prints were only made in the 2000s when they were revealed to be in almost pristine condition. The obscurity of the film company and the passage of time had saved them from wear and tear. I remember watching the new prints in the basement projection room at the BFI’s London office, feeling like I had been granted the privilege of being a tourist in my own country, seeing those landscapes from so long ago. But above and beyond the lovely aesthetic experience, I soon began to notice the elegance of the filmmaking, the humorous stories and engaging characters.
W.W. Jacobs had a great talent for gentle British comedy and the authentic argot of the coastal communities. Born in 1863, the son of a London commercial dock manager, this Wapping wharf rat wandered freely among the sailors, picking up their dialect and tall tales. He started writing stories for Jerome K. Jerome’s magazines and later, like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, had a long run in the Strand. His stories were collected, and he wrote novels and plays which were hugely popular. Punch, with their trademark pithiness, dubbed them stories of “men who go down to the sea in ships of moderate tonnage”.
Inevitably the film companies came calling and several adaptations were filmed in the 1910s, but it was the films of Manning Haynes and Lydia Hayward for Artistic Films that really brought the stories to life on the screen. This director/writer partnership had met when they were acting during the First World War, and they collaborated on a version of Three Men in a Boat in 1920 (sadly lost) with Haynes’s dog starring as Montmorency. It was so successful that they followed up with another doggy pic, Monty Works the Wires (1921). Jacobs himself sanctioned the films and seems to have taken to Lydia Hayward. She recalled the happy relationship in an interview: “I have done scenarios for 14 of W.W. Jacobs’ books, and we sit hand in hand at all the trade screenings of the films.” Six of these survive at the BFI.
Hayward seems to have been well liked and respected. Almost every piece of press about the films she works on mentions her. For one of the only women working in an above-the-line capacity in the film business she was taken perfectly seriously as a professional. The trade paper The Bioscope called her the “finest scenario writer we have”, while Kine Weekly’s correspondent Lionel Collier said: “Lydia Hayward’s scenarios are brilliant. It is in great measure due to her work that the Jacobs spirit and humour have been so carefully preserved.” Every film she wrote was delivered with great clarity, elegantly paced and economically written, allowing character to emerge and plots to run seamlessly.
I have picked two of my favourite of her Jacobs adaptations for the festival: Sam’s Boy (1922) and the featurette The Boatswain’s Mate (1924). Sam’s Boy features a fantastic child performance by Bobbie Rudd as an orphaned waif, sleeping rough on the London docks, who is adopted by stray dog ‘Matey’ (Monty again). This gives the kid an idea, and he roams around until he spots a sailor and then follows him round calling him ‘favver’. Back on board, assumptions are made and complications ensue among the crew of the ketch, the Nancy Bell, who are played by a competent ensemble cast who reappear in several of the films. All very delightful.
The Boatswain’s Mate features properly famous stars: Victor McLaglen, before he left for Hollywood, and the great Florence Turner as the widowed landlady of a remote country pub. A suitor pays a wandering ex-soldier (McLaglen) to burgle the pub so he can ‘rescue’ her in the nick of time. A shot of Florence in bed reading ‘Dracula’ while munching biscuits gives us the heads-up that she is far from the shrinking violet of his imagination.
She turns the tables on him with great sang-froid, pretends to have shot the soldier and sets him to digging a grave under the cabbages.
The meet-cute between Turner and McLaglen is genuinely charming, and the action is cleverly counterpointed throughout with humorous illustrated titles by an uncredited artist. It’s an almost perfect two-reel comedy.
Sam’s Boy + The Boatswain’s Mate screen at the BFI Film on Film Festival on 11 June 2023.
