Over on the Classic British Flight Sims forum (yes, there is such a thing!) member Calypsos has posted a wonderful find:

Whilst installing an internet connection at a friend’s house this morning, she asked if I was interested in seeing ‘aircraft photos’ she came across in a box of old photos.

What she showed me, will all be scanned and put up on the internet!!!

Her uncle was Erwin Hillier, the director of photography on the 1954 Dambusters film (as well as many other famous films).

The photographs are wonderful 8×10 B/W production stills, about 20 odd of them… I am not sure if they have ever been in the public domain before??

Calypsos is right. He has now posted all the pictures and I don’t think some have been seen since the 1950s, as they don’t appear to be in the BFI’s collection.

The picture above is particularly fascinating to me, as it shows the ‘crew’ of aircraft AJ-J (played by unnamed extras, who may have been real life RAF servicemen) standing behind actor George Baker, in the role of Flt Lt David Maltby, my uncle. This scene doesn’t appear in the final cut of the film. It would be fascinating to know if any unseen sequences of film remain — no special extras kept for the DVD release in those days!

Erwin Hillier is a giant in 20th century British cinematography, although his name is largely unknown to the general public, and it was his skill, along with that of director Michael Anderson and writer R C Sherriff, which made The Dam Busters such an iconic piece of cinema. I will be writing more about him another time.

The British Film Institute is a treasure trove of material for anyone interested in the history of cinema, and much of it is now online. Check out, for instance, its page on Michael Anderson’s classic film, and you will find links to stills, other stuff about the cast and crew, and a wonderful, slightly sniffy, contemporary review from the BFI’s own Monthly Film Bulletin, which ends:

The film is over-long (the flying sequences include some repetition) and the music score is, regrettably, very blatant; but despite these drawbacks, a mood of sober respect is maintained.

Little did the reviewer know how popular the ‘blatant’ musical score would become.

My favourite piece of Dam Busters trivia derives from the scene shown above, showing on the left the great Robert Shaw, later to star in no less a movie than Jaws, where he ends up meeting a spectacularly gory end. Here he plays flight engineer Sergeant John Pulford, which means he gets to sit alongside Richard Todd, playing Guy Gibson, for a large section of the film but has very few words to say. Their on-screen interaction is thought to be a pretty accurate reflection of the real life relationship between Pulford and Gibson.

I was shocked and saddened by the news of the death of Professor John Ramsden, from cancer at the comparatively young age of 62. (Another obituary here.) Just the evening before I had read a chapter of his excellent book about the relationship between Britain and Germany, Don’t mention the war. This is essential reading for anyone who thinks that many Brits need to develop a more mature relationship between ourselves and our German partners and colleagues. Ramsden lists many ways in which the histories of our two countries are intertwined (many pubs called the King’s Head, for instance, are named after Frederick the Great of Prussia) and provides a counterblast to the puerile nonsense frequently peddled by the redtop press and the likes of Jeremy Clarkson.
But it is as the author of the wonderful book on The Dam Busters in the British Film Guide series that Ramsden should be respected and mourned by anyone interested in the subject of this blog. It’s a short book, but an invaluable guide to the film itself, to the times when it was made and to the reaction to it over the half-century since.

I don’t know who watches Channel 4’s Big Brother these days – I certainly don’t, and nor do my two teenage children and their friends – but people who do might be intrigued to know that underneath the house is the water tank used in the 1955 film, The Dam Busters. Although various locations around the UK were used in the making of the film, much of it was actually shot on three huge sound stages built at Elstree Studios. One of these was presumably constructed around the tank (although Jonathan Falconer’s useful book, Filming the Dam Busters, is not specific about this). Other important landmarks in cinema history shot here include The Young Ones (Cliff Richard! Robert Morley!!?) and Monty Python’s Meaning of Life (the one with Mr Creosote).

Australian actor Bill Kerr, a sprightly 86 years old, recently recalled his part playing Flt Lt ‘Mick’ Martin in The Dam Busters. Sitting in the restored Lancaster in the Aviation Heritage Museum in Bull Creek, near Perth, WA, he told a reporter from the West Australian that it had been an honour to play the Australian Dambuster:

“But it took two hours of make up, a wig and a moustache before I really looked like Micky Martin,” he said.
A sprightly Kerr, who calls Perth home, took a trip down memory lane this week sitting in the pilot’s seat of the Avro Lancaster housed at the Aviation Heritage Museum in Bull Creek.
“You know the attention to detail in this Lancaster is incredible — they have done a marvellous job restoring her,” he said. “And the attention to detail in the original film was extraordinary. They even put chocks behind my ears so they stood out to look just like Micky Martin’s.” 

Kerr also told the paper that he got the job straight off the boat from Australia when his agent drove him directly to Pinewood Studios for a casting session. However, this might be a slight exaggeration since by 1954 he had already been in a number of films, including the only film about Bomber Command to predate The Dam Busters, the under-rated Appointment in London. This was released in 1952 and starred a young Dirk Bogarde. It was written by John Woolridge, who had served as a flight commander in 106 Squadron when Guy Gibson was its commanding officer. Some commentators think that the Bogarde character is based on Gibson. 
Bill Kerr’s role in Appointment in London, according to IMDB, was Flt Lt Bill Brown. The cast included other actors on the cusp of a successful career, including Bryan Forbes, Sam Kydd and Richard Wattis, with the female lead played by the well-established Dinah Sheridan. 
John Woolridge not only wrote the script for this film but also, in an unusual combination, its musical score. He was to write more film music over the next few years, before his death in a car crash in 1958. His daughter is the actress Susan Woolridge, well known (in Britain at least) for many TV and film roles. 

Liz Kingsley is an Australian scientist and film critic who runs a lovely website And You Call Yourself a Scientist! This is mainly devoted to, in her words, “mad scientist’s views on other mad scientists. And mad doctors, monsters, murderers, psychopaths, ghosts, freaks, weirdos and things that go bump all hours of the night and day” and contains dozens of reviews, mainly of “B movies”. It also has no fewer than six pages of “immortal dialogue” culled from endless hours of movie-watching.  One topical example, given the current near-hysteria over so-called Swine Flu, from The Andromeda Strain:

First politician:  The decision on 712 isn’t final. It was just postponed for 48 hours.
Scientist:  By then the disease could spread into a world-wide epidemic!
Second politician:  It’s because of rash statements like that that the President doesn’t trust scientists!

However, the site also contains reviews of some more sensible films, such as The Dam Busters, and has some interesting perspectives on the science involved.

The man who, unwittingly, set me off on the track of writing a book about the Dambusters was the actor George Baker, whose birthday is today. In an interview on the BBC Radio Today programme in December 2005 he told the story of how he had been cast to play the part of my uncle, David Maltby, in the 1955 film The Dam Busters. During the making of the film Gp Capt Charles Whitworth, the technical adviser, relayed to him the information that David was sometimes so wound up after operations that he released the tension by shooting china plates with his service revolver. This was a story that no one in my family had ever heard before, and it therefore seemed to me to be important to tell more of the family history before time took its inevitable toll on us all. 
In an email to me a few months later he told me how hard casting director Robert Leonard and film director Michael Anderson had worked to ensure the actors looked like their real-life characters. This was sometimes a bit confusing for poor old Charles Whitworth:

On the desk in front of them [Leonard and Anderson] they had a photo of [David Maltby] and one of me and I must admit that there was a considerable similarity. Then when I met Group Captain Whitworth he fell into the habit of calling me Dave, which was really quite disconcerting. 
[Whitworth] would often refer to an incident thinking that I had been there. This is how the story of the plate shooting came to be told, quite obviously the men of the squadron became extremely tense before and after an operational flight but other indications from the Group Captain told me that [David Maltby] was a very funny man and a delightful companion. I feel very honoured to have had the chance to portray him in the film.

Happy birthday, Mr Baker!

There’s no real way of knowing if you will be working on the Dambusters remake, but if you are a Matte Dept. Supervisor, a Matte Painter, a Senior Water TD, a Shader Writer, an FX TD, a Lighting TD or a Water TD then you might want to consider relocating to downtown Wellington in New Zealand. In the last month, Weta Digital has advertised for people to fill all these jobs. Please don’t ask me what the work entails, as I have no idea. Perhaps the ‘Water TDs” will be involved in producing the new CGI versions of the mines exploding against the dams, which are probably the most laughably amateur bits of the 1955 film. 
However, you could just end up working on The Hobbit, Halo or Lucifer, all of which Weta also has in the pipeline.

Fascinating account of a day’s filming, sometime in early 1954, on location in bracing Skegness for the famous scene in The Dam Busters where Barnes Wallis watches his mine being dropped for the first time. The article, written by a junior reporter, was published in the Skegness Standard, and the journalist himself writes an afterword, telling how he got an exclusive interview with Richard Todd who drove him back to the town. No luxury trailers or personal drivers in those days!
(NB: A link I posted last May to an earlier version of this article now seems to have vanished.)

UPDATE, 16 December 2009: Jackson confirms shooting to start in 2010

While he was recently down under in New Zealand, filming a nature programme for the BBC, Stephen Fry gave an interview to the entertainment section of the Wellington newspaper, the Dominion Post. Most of this was about his travelogue, Stephen Fry in America, which was coming up on air down there, but at the end he spoke briefly about his work on the remake of The Dam Busters.
The article is not available on the interwebnet, but I managed to track it down via a library subscription, so I bring it to you here.

Interviewer: Is it true that you have rewritten The Dam Busters?
SF: Yes, well, I won’t say rewritten. The great New Zealand director, Peter Jackson, asked me if I would be interested in writing a screenplay on The Dam Busters. This was fascinating because – I yield to none my admiration to him as a film-maker; he’s astounding – I had no idea he’d be interested in this story.
It turns out, actually, that it was David Frost who had bought the rights to the Paul Brickhill book The Dam Busters and was desperate to find someone to direct it, and he was told by a friend that Peter Jackson had a huge poster of the original film on his wall in his office and David thought, ‘I’ll call him up’, and the deal was struck. Then Peter got in touch with me. Now the original film is a magnificent film – it genuinely is a masterpiece.
Interviewer: And when will we see your version?
SF: 2010.
Dominion Post, Wellington, NZ, 17 February 2009.

The great man says ‘2010’, but I still think he is being optimistic. IMDB Pro has a few people listed as working on pre-production visuals, but no one else, which would indicate that shooting is still some way away.

Patrick McGoohan may have reached international stardom as Danger Man and The Prisoner, but his first speaking role on the screen was in 1955, in The Dam Busters. He played the guard on the briefing room door, who turns Gibson’s dog away. Here is the clip on YouTube:

A New Year turns (and a happy one to all readers of this blog) but there is no word yet on how the remake of The Dam Busters is going. Screenplay writer Stephen Fry is currently in New Zealand, but is working on a BBC nature documentary, rather than the movie. All the industry gossip about Peter Jackson’s current workload is to do with his forthcoming film version of Tintin, to the cast of which Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are the latest additions. Christian Rivers who is due, as they say in film circles, to ‘helm’ the Dambusters project is currently working on a film called The Laundry Warrior about an Asian warrior assassin. Where does this leave the remake of Britain’s 11th favourite war movie? As there has been no word at all on a cast, I’m not budging from my prediction that it won’t hit the cinema screens until 2011.

The recent demise of Reg Varney saw another rash of newspaper articles recalling someone half-remembered from way back when. Even though he had been the star of at least two well known TV series (not just the awful On the Buses but also the earlier, and funnier, The Rag Trade) the obituaries still had to remind many of us as to who exactly he was, falling back on the old clichés: ‘15 minutes of fame …’, ‘probably best known as …’. Happily still around, even if not acting any more, is Mr Jon Dixon whose 90 seconds of fame played a significant part in the way in which the Dambusters have come to define Britishness. I hope the repeat fees from all those ‘100 Best TV Ads’ documentaries are some sort of compensation.

Last weekend’s Sunday Telegraph had a bit of a scoop which probably confirmed the worst suspicions of some Dam Buster film enthusiasts. Sir David Frost, who is producing the new film with Peter Jackson, told the newspaper’s diary writer, Mandrake, that they had reached a compromise on the name of Guy Gibson’s dog. Its real name was Nigger, but in the remake, which is unlikely to appear before 2011, it will be called Nidge.

In the course of writing this blog I have spent a lot of time over the last six months reading various bulletin boards and discussion forums. In almost every thread that has been started about the remake of The Dam Busters someone raises the name of the dog within the first ten posts. A range of ‘jobsworths’ and ‘do-gooders’ are cited as being the people who won’t allow the original name to be used, with ‘the PC Brigade’ being the favourite culprit. 

Well, if the decision has been made, it’s made. Time for everyone to move on, I think. 

Dambuster aficionados know full well that the scheduled remake of the 1955 film is in the (we hope safe) hands of Mr Peter Jackson, with the multi-talented Mr Stephen Fry providing the words. (Can he improve on the beautifully understated script of R C Sherriff?) But football fans know that there is another Peter Jackson closely associated with events in the so-called Bomber County. This is the bearded one’s namesake, the manager of Lincoln City FC, the mighty Imps, who have just finished a middling season by coming 15th in League Two (what in the old days we used to call the Fourth Division). And, it turns out, this Mr Jackson has recently returned to his post after a skirmish with throat cancer. We wish him well and hope the fans greet him with a blast of their favourite tune (you know – the Eric Coates one) on the first game of next season.

I’ve only had this blog up and running for about a week, but I’ve noticed that I already get many more hits on it than on the companion site devoted to my book. So with that in mind, I thought that I would draw the attention of my blog readers to the remarkable picture of an original Dambusters bombsight which recently came into my attention. This is thought to be the only original wooden bombsight still in existence, and it was used by Plt Off John Fort, the bomb aimer in David Maltby’s crew. Some time in mid 1943 it was given by David to his father (my grandfather) Ettrick Maltby. The full story is told here. 

There has been a certain amount of scepticism as to whether any of the 617 Squadron bomb aimers actually used the bombsight (devised by Wg Cdr Dann) on the Dams Raid (Operation Chastise). Some of them certainly preferred their own makeshift sights and used chinagraph marks and tape on their Perspex blisters. But this artifact would seem to prove that at least one bomb aimer used the type that later became famous through the 1955 film. And he was the one that dropped the bomb which finally broke the Möhne Dam!

This has been on Youtube for several months, but there may be people who haven’t seen it.

It is a compilation of two newsreels from 1943 and one from 1955. The first two show King George VI and the Queen visiting 617 Squadron at RAF Scampton after the Dams Raid. The second shows the aircrew who were decorated for their part in the raid, outside Buckingham Palace after receiving their medals.

The postwar section shows original aircrew mingling with actors and people from the film industry at a reception to mark the premiere of the 1955 film.

Two more pieces which have been on the interwebnet for a while, but may have escaped your notice.

BBC Radio Kent documentary about 617 Squadron’s test runs at Reculver in April and May 1943, including interviews with two people who as young boys evaded security and sneaked a view from the cliff edge.

Young local newspaper reporter Peter Hopper remembers his exclusive interview with film star Richard Todd on location in Skegness, during the filming of The Dam Busters in 1954. The interview and other articles appeared in the Skegness News. You can read his account and the original article here.