#Laughton Lodge

[magicmenageriestuff]

My Pop Life #58 : St Elmo's Fire - Brian Eno

My Pop Life #58

St. Elmo’s Fire   –   Brian Eno Brown eyes and I were tiredWe had walked and we had scrambledThrough the moors and through the briarsThrough the endless blue meanders.In the blue august moon In the autumn of 1975 I had a crisis – my girlfriend had left me and meant it, I had left home and gone to live in the nurses’ quarters of Laughton Lodge Hospital, and I walked out of my Cambridge Entrance…

[thedandelionthief]

5, 7 and 3 for the ask game please!

3. What playlists do you have on your phone? the two playlists i listen to most often are my female vocalists playlist and regrettably the one with all my favorite radiohead songs. i have a few others as well, including one where i dump full albums i plan on listening to, and my showtunes playlist!

5. Guilty pleasures? reading the same five books over and over again, reading fanfiction, my all-purpose notebook that i carry around everywhere and would die if anyone read, and my affinity for children’s franchises (most notably MLP and LPS). and certain musicians i like but you can pry that knowledge out of my cold dead hands.

these are mostly boring answers, but my truest guilty pleasures are either 1. lodged so far in the back of my brain i can’t recall them or 2. too guilty to share

7. Celebrity crush? i’ve already mentioned a few women on here, so it’s due time i shoutout some men. i have a hugh laughton-scott obsession that has thankfully toned down lately, but i’m still in love. and i refuse to hockeypost on this blog, but. tyler seguin. that’s it.

[speeding54]

North Rim Grand Canyon Lodge

June 22, 2018 byJean Laughton

[wiccaweysrescuedbordercollies]

❤️💚🤍Wiccs Christmas Advent Calender🤍💚❤️ Who’s behind Door No. 6? It’s none other than our fabulous Romanian Grannies, Dora & Tina. Hi everyone, it’s us, T&D! We are still holding out hope that someone will want a pair of cheeky old ladies to come and live with them. Maybe our Chrismas Wish will come true. In the meantime, we have had a festive photo shoot today.... which we enjoyed.... honestly we did.... For the love of Santa Claus, someone please adopt us before we have to wear yet another Christmas Jumper!!! 🙏🏻 Love, Dora & Tina xxx If you would consider making a donation to help support the dogs over Christmas we would be so, so grateful. You can do so by the methods below. We know times are tough for everyone right now, so even the smallest amount really does help to make a difference to a dog’s life journey. Thank you. 💜💜🐾🐾 Make a Donation: Via PayPal to: https://www.paypal.me/wiccaweys Via BACS to Wiccaweys Rescued Border Collies Sort: 20-63-28. Account: 83912426 Via the Wiccaweys website, link below. Or via cheque to the address below. If you are interested in offering a Wiccs dog a new home once Lockdown is lifted, we are still able to take enquiries. Please give us a call on: 07905 203254. Weekdays,10am-6pm. Weekends,10am-4pm. Calls outside these hours should be strictly limited to emergencies only. Please telephone for a chat, we do not accept adoption enquiries via email, messenger or text. Full details of our adoption procedures can be seen on our website: www.wiccaweys.co.uk Wiccaweys Rescued Border Collies, Brackenmoor Lodge, East Ferry Road, Laughton, Lincolnshire. DN21 3QB All visits to the rescue are strictly by appointment only, and none can be organised during Lockdown. #wiccaweys #ineedahome #pleaseshareme #adoptdontshop #collies #sheepdogs #givemeachance #lotsoflovetogive #newarrivals #weneedahome #pleasesupportrescue #canyouhelp #makeadonation #wiccaweysfamily #christmas #adventcalendar 💚 Goodheart Animal Sanctuaries 💜 Wiccaweys Rescued Border Collies (at Wiccaweys Rescued Border Collies) https://www.instagram.com/p/CIdzPaFFJk8/?igshid=omm7ptvxgkke

[papermoonloveslucy]

HOLLYWOOD WITHOUT MAKE-UP

1963

Produced by Ken Murray

Music by George Stoll

Written by Royal Foster

Ken Murray (Himself, Host) is billed as “the man who makes movies of the people who make movies.” He was born Kenneth Abner Doncourt in 1903 to vaudevillian parents. Murray got his start in show business on the stage in 1920s as a stand-up comedian. He performed his comedy act on the vaudeville circuit. He found success as a stage performer after appearing in Earl Carroll's Vanities on Broadway in 1935. In the 1940s, Murray became famous for his Blackouts, a racy, stage variety show at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood. The Blackouts played to standing-room-only audiences for 3,844 performances, ending in 1949. Later that year, the show moved to Broadway and closed after six weeks. He made his film debut in the 1929 romantic drama Half Marriage, followed by a role in Leathernecking in 1930. He was also the host of “The Ken Murray Show,” a weekly music and comedy show on CBS Television that ran from 1950 to 1953. The show was the first to win a Freedom Foundation Award. Over the course of his career, Murray filmed Hollywood celebrities using his 16mm home movie camera. He began filming the footage to send back home to his grandparents in lieu of writing letters. His grandmother saved the footage, which Murray later used in compilation films like Hollywood Without Make-Up. He died in 1988 at age 85.

Features footage of: Eddie Albert, June Allyson, George K. Arthur, Mary Astor, Lew Ayres, Max Baer, Lucille Ball, Richard Barthelmess, Rex Bell, Edgar Bergen, Sally Blane, Humphrey Bogart, John Boles, Pat Boone, Eddie Borden, Hobart Bosworth, Clara Bow, William Boyd, Fanny Brice, Paul Brooks, Joe E. Brown, Johnny Mack Brown, Virginia Bruce, Polly Burson, Rory Calhoun, Leo Carrillo, Charles Chaplin, Lew Cody, William Collier Jr., Russ Columbo, Gary Cooper, Jackie Cooper, Jeanne Crain, Robert Cummings, Linda Darnell, Marion Davies, Joan Davis, Olivia de Havilland, Dolores del Rio, Cecil B. DeMille, Jack Dempsey, Walt Disney, Kirk Douglas, Marie Dressler, Irene Dunne, Josephine Dunn, Stuart Erwin, Ruth Etting, Douglas Fairbanks, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Charles Farrell, Todd Fisher, Errol Flynn, Joan Fontaine, Glenn Ford, Clark Gable, Greta Garbo, Reginald Gardiner, Cary Grant, Alan Hale, Oliver Hardy, William Randolph Hearst, Jean Hersholt, William Holden, Bob Hope, Hedda Hopper, Walter Huston, Sam Jaffe, Van Johnson, Buck Jones, Hope Lange, Charles Laughton, Stan Laurel, Gertrude Lawrence, Mervyn LeRoy, Charles Lindbergh, Carole Lombard, William Lundigan, Fred MacMurray, Jayne Mansfield, George Marshall, Herbert Marshall, Chico Marx, Groucho Marx, Harpo Marx, Joel McCrea, Victor McLaglen, Adolphe Menjou, Mayo Methot, Marilyn Monroe, Frank Morgan, Wayne Morris, Jean Parker, Louella Parsons, Mary Pickford, Dick Powell, Tyrone Power, George Raft, Gregory Ratoff, Donna Reed, Debbie Reynolds, Buddy Rogers, Charles Ruggles, Albert Schweitzer, George Seaton, Norma Shearer, George Stevens, Lewis Stone, Margaret Sullavan, Robert Taylor, William T. Tilden, George Tobias, Spencer Tracy, Lupe Velez, Jimmy Walker, John Wayne, Johnny Weissmuller, Mae West, Claire Windsor, Robert Woolsey, Jane Wyman, and others. 

The show is also available on DVD from Sprocket Flicks  It has been aired on TV on Turner Classic Movies.

In 1963, when this documentary was released, Lucille Ball was starting her second season of “The Lucy Show” on CBS TV.  

In June 1950, one year before “I Love Lucy” premiered, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were guests on “The Ken Murray Show” on CBS TV. Tap dancer Bunny Briggs and 'Little Rascal' Darla Hood were also guests. 

In 1966, Lucy and Murray were both guests on “Bob Hope's Leading Ladies.” Murray played a television executive named Harvey Sarnoff.  Lucy played herself.  Sort of. 

Lucy returned to Sun Valley to film an episode of “The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour,” using the same locations scene in this documentary.  

Twenty minutes into the documentary, the location turns to Sun Valley, Idaho, where Hollywood stars went for winter sports. June Allyson, Errol Flynn, Martha O'Driscoll, Johnny Weissmuller, Wayne Morris, and Reggie Gardiner have a snowball fight while making a snowman. 

Lounging at the Lodge are Rory Calhoun (center) and Lucille Ball. Sun Valley was one of the Arnaz's favorite vacation spots, accessible by train from Hollywood. Desilu would film “Lucy Goes To Sun Valley” (1958) there. Lucy's good friend Ann Sothern also loved Sun Valley, and is buried nearby.  

Murray says that this is not the only home movies of Lucille Ball that he has. First is a quick clip of Lucy at Chatsworth Ranch with one of her cherished dogs. Lucy and Desi had three dogs at the time.  

This leads to footage of Lucille Ball filming Fancy Pants in 1950 with director George Marshall and co-star Bob Hope. Murray also mentions that Lucy has done quite a few pictures with Hope, including Critic's Choice, which was released in 1963, the same year as this documentary. In 1969, when Lucy wanted to film episodes of “Here's Lucy” on location, including on the Colorado River, she hired Marshall, remembering his expertise with location filming in rough terrain.

Ball also poses with Marshall and her Fancy Pants stunt double, Polly Burson, although Murray does not specifically mention her name. 

Ball is shown doing a stunt where she falls onto a break-away table, not once...

 not twice... 

but three times!

Murray: “Someone once said that Lucille Ball stands alone as the greatest comedienne of our time.  That goes for sitting down, too!”

Lucy Without Make-Up: Literally!  

A movie star, Lucille Ball was rarely scene without full make-up, but when a scene demanded she take a blast of water to the face, she removed her false eyelashes, as she did here in “Never Do Business With Friends” (ILL S2;E31) in 1953.  

[wvss61]

Shemp Howard Solo, Open Season For Saps 1944, starring Shemp Howard of The Three Stooges. Greetings from Australia. Follow for the best variety of classic films, cartoons and funny videos.StorylineAfter his wife complains about the number of nights Woodcock (Shemp Howard) spends at the Hoot Owl Lodge, he takes her on a belated honeymoon. The first person they meet is lodge member Joe Wilson, who asks Woodcock to help him retrieve some ill-advised letters to lovely hotel guest Irene (Christine McIntyre). Woodcock soon finds himself caught between his jealous wife, and Irene's Latin-tempered fiancee Ricardo.Cast Members(Woodcock Q. Strinker)Shemp Howard(Mrs. Strinker)Early Cantrell(Irene)Christine McIntyre(Joe Wilson)Harry Barris(Ricardo Montell)George J. Lewis(House detective)Jack 'Tiny' Lipson(Desk clerk)Eddie Laughton(Bearded guest)Al Thompson(Waiter)Al MorinoShemp Howard Solo YearsShemp Howard, like many New York-based performers, found work at the Vitaphone studio in Brooklyn. Originally playing bit roles in Vitaphone's Roscoe Arbuckle comedies, showing off his comical appearance, he was given speaking roles and supporting parts almost immediately. He was featured with Vitaphone comics Jack Haley, Ben Blue and Gus Shy, then co-starred with Harry Gribbon, Daphne Pollard and Johnnie Berkes, and finally starred in his own two-reel comedies. A Gribbon-Howard short, Art Trouble (1934), also features then-unknown James Stewart in his first film role. The independently-produced Convention Girl (1935) featured Shemp in a very rare straight role as a blackmailer and would-be murderer.Shemp seldom stuck to the script. He livened up scenes with ad-libbed dialogue and wisecracks, which became his trademark. In late 1935, Vitaphone was licensed to produce short comedies based on the "Joe Palooka" comic strip. Shemp was cast as "Knobby Walsh," and though only a supporting character, he became the series's comic focus, with Johnny Berkes and Lee Weber as his foils. He co-starred in the first seven shorts, released in 1936–1937. Nine of them were produced, the last two done after Shemp's departure from VitaphoneBorn Samuel HorwitzMarch 11, 1895Manhattan, New York City, U.S.Died November 22, 1955 (aged 60)Hollywood, California, U.S.Resting place Home of Peace CemeteryOccupation Comedian, actorYears active 1923–1955Known for The Three StoogesSpouse(s) Gertrude Frank (m. 1925)Children 1Relatives Moe Howard (brother)Curly Howard (brother)Joan Howard Maurer (niece)

[chiseler]

REVENGE OF THE PEARL QUEEN

Donald Richie’s assessment of her as “a star who consisted almost entirely of mammary glands” might have been rather fanciful. Nevertheless, there’s no denying that, like her Occidental counterparts Jane Russell and Brigitte Bardot, Michiko Maeda could certainly fill out a swimsuit. Her sinuous underwater scenes in Revenge of the Pearl Queen caused quite the sensation with Japanese viewers in 1956. Brazen, defiant, athletic, Maeda became the literal embodiment of a more assertive type of female sexuality that emerged in the postwar period. There were others who followed in her wake – figures such as Yoko Mihara, Masayo Banri and Hisako Tsukuba. Collectively referred to as the ‘nikutai-ha joyu’, or the ‘Flesh Group Actresses’, the prominent billing of these glamour girls who dared to bare more than the rest served as a promise of erotic allure on the posters of the films in which they appeared.

Masayo Banri

Eroticism itself was hardly an alien concept to the Japanese, but before now, never had it been allowed to flourish in the cinema to such an extent. Indeed, vigilant Japanese censors of the prewar era took to snipping every instance of a kiss, every insinuation of physical intimacy, in imported titles, while the tipping point of Pearl Harbor saw Hollywood’s seditious brand of escapist fantasy completely banished from the nation’s screens along with, indeed, every other title produced in America.

Thus sexual liberation became part and parcel of the postwar democratization project steered by the Allied Occupation. “Japanese tend to do things sneakily. They should do things openly,” asserted David Conde of the Civil Information and Education Service entrusted with bringing Western values to the vanquished nation’s screens, and it was under Conde’s instigation that audiences were first afforded their first glimpse of an onscreen clinch in a local film in 1947, in a title called Phoenix directed by Keisuke Kinoshita.

Nudity was another matter, and it was a Hollywood director, albeit one of European origin whose career was on the skids, who first provided Japanese audiences with a legitimate excuse to see themselves as naked as nature intended, when in the early 1950s Josef von Sternberg headed to Japan to make his directorial swansong, Saga of Anatahan. If this first attempt at a US-Japanese co-production was an opportunity for the Americans to get to know their former enemy in a way they clearly hadn’t when Frank Capra assembled his Know Your Enemy: Japan propaganda pic in 1945, it was clear that the main focus of attention was on the female of the species.

The use of the word “species” seems apt here, as von Sternberg’s ethnological, near-documentary approach seems primarily used to justify the emphasis on his main subject, Akemi Negishi, in various states of undress. The film recounted, with a voiceover track written and narrated by von Sternberg himself, the purportedly true tale of a group of Japanese soldiers stranded on the South Pacific isle of the title seemingly oblivious to the fact that the war has ended. When they discover that one of the two others with whom they share their island is a woman, the sex-starved menfolk end up systematically murdering each another in desperation for her favors.

In a manner not dissimilar from the scenes of Polynesian maidens innocent cavorting au naturel around the prelapsarian island paradise of Murnau and Flaherty’s Tabu (1931), Anatahan adhered to the National Geographic-propagated wisdom of the age, that nudity was perfectly acceptable when rendered in anthropological terms and applied to a racial other. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Anatahan was rather more of a success upon its 1953 release in Japan than it ever was in the States, even as von Sternberg upped the flesh quotient in his 1958 recut of the film. It not only introduced an archetype into Japanese exploitation cinema, that of the “Queen Bee” whose sexuality ensures dominion over the men who swarm around her, but anticipated an entirely new endemic genre.

It is Revenge of the Pearl Queen that truly marked the sea change. A cut-price pulp offering from a studio, Shintoho, whose stock-in-trade was cut-price pulp offerings, it lifted the premise of von Sternberg’s story wholesale for its mid-section, integrating it within a tale of blackmail and corporate corruption in which Michiko Maeda’s role as witness to fraud sees her pitched overboard a cruise liner and washed up on a deserted isle full of horny marooned military men who go gung-ho for her. Maeda might not have been the first Japanese actress to bear her amazonian form for the camera, but she was the first to do so in a local production.

Michiko Maeda

Maeda’s eventual rescue follows the scenes that proved the film’s unique selling point; that of her underwater excursions during which she accumulates the bounty of pearls that afford her the means to turn the tables on her persecutors back on the civilized Japanese mainland. The string of titles that followed adopted a similar formula, although this time the narratives revolved around a different kind of sub-aqueous screen siren more rooted in Japanese traditions – the ama, whose close-knit communities of diving girls who eke out a living scouring the ocean floor for shellfish were then still a notable feature of Japan’s coastal culture.

Both Maeda and director Toshio Shimura returned for the first in the short-lived cycle in ama films, The Girl Diver Trembles in Fear (1957), a film that boldly flaunts all the tropes of this peculiar submarine sub-genre: a village community of cuties with slender glistening wet bodies squeezed into a tight white tunics; sequences of them duck-diving in formation beneath the waves and heading to the ocean floor as if performers in an undersea ballet, the diaphanous fabric swirling with the currents to reveal surreptitious glimpses of bare bosoms; beachside catfights between rivals within the group; and a token plot that sees big-city gangsters mysterious surfacing in the village, lured by rumors of caches of sunken treasure.

Maeda’s moon-faced successor, Yoko Mihara, took over the next two entries, Man-Eating Girl Diver (1958) and Girl Divers at Spook Mansion (1959), in a series that began plunging increasingly ludicrous depths. The second of these saw her returning to her seaside roots after acquiring the sophisticated airs and graces of a short stint away Tokyo, lodging in an ancestral Gothic mansion home now reduced to one just further occupant, a girl diver whose brother failed to return from a fishing trip one dark, stormy night. Secret panels, sinister servants, creaking floorboards and black cats springing out of dark corners abound: there’s even hunchback loitering in the garden, while hushed voices talk of legendary treasure in an underwater cave and a mysterious black pearl. The final straw is an apparition that periodically pops up every time either of the comely residents ventures anywhere near a bed or a bathtub.

Shintoho’s final ama release, Ghost Story: Phantom Ama (1960), saw Mihara stepping aside to allow Masayo Banri, a supporting actress in the previous entries, to take centre stage, before the series sank with the bankruptcy of the studio in 1961. Not that the other studios hadn’t come up with their own equivalents in the meantime, with Nikkatsu’s Reef of the Girl Diver (1958) starring Hisako Tsukuba providing but one example.

None of these, it goes without saying, made it to Western shores. Nevertheless, in 1954, several years before the cycle had even begun, the Italian adventurer, photographer and anthropologist Fosco Maraini arrived in Japan to document their real-life inspiration. The result was the glossy photobook, Hekura: The Diving Girls’ Island (1960). Its smorgasbord of the more striking specimens from the village community where he set up camp, captured in front of his leering lens clad in little more than loin-cloths, came accompanied by such gushing prose descriptions as “mythical sea goddesses”, “Valkyries of the sea with mahogany-colored skins”, and “tall, assured, silent, earthenware-colored, diving girls in their twenties, bare-breasted like goddesses.”

The few sequences of 8mm home-movie footage that Maraini was able to capture of the Hekura girls in action underwater showed up later in a bizarre Italian quasi-documentary, Violated Paradise (1963), based on his other great photographic treatment of the country, Meeting with Japan (1960), and directed by a man called Marion Gering, a Russian émigré who, paralleling von Sternberg, was at one point a fairly significant figure in Hollywood, making films during the 1930s with the likes of Tallulah Bankhead, George Raft, Gary Cooper, Charles Laughton and Cary Grant.

One might also surmise that Maraini would have played some role in drawing the attention of his compatriots Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi to the subject for Women of the World, the 1963 follow-up to their seminal shockumentary Mondo Cane (1962). With these majestic maidens from Japan’s hidden coastal enclaves now exposed to a Western world with an eye for Eastern exoticism, it comes as little surprise that they should later surface as one of the main attractions among James Bond’s Japanese escapades in You Only Live Twice (1967).

Fosco Maraini

There’s no evidence to suggest that Maraini himself was to witness any of the locally-produced ama films. He does, nevertheless, reveal a telling early encounter in a coastal resort closer to civilization where the diving girls worked on cultivated oyster beds and lined up dutifully for day-trippers from Tokyo to take photos, wearing white cotton bathing costumes issued by their employers that did a better job of covering up their modesty than the bare essentials used on the remote island of Hekura. The account reinforces what the Shintoho films had already proven - that these tanned, vital, earthy women of the waves were as equal a source of fascination for the modern, metropolitan Japanese male as they were for the foreign thrill-seeker.

by Jasper Sharp

[dulwichdiverter]

Life before Hornblower

How the streets of East Dulwich became an unlikely inspiration for CS Forester’s peculiarly English brand of noir crime fiction  

By Mark Bryant

It’s 80 years since the skilful yet self-doubting seaman Horatio Hornblower first entered the public consciousness via CS Forester’s famous naval novels series. 

The author, who died in California in 1966, lived in East Dulwich for more than 16 years and published almost 20 books during that time.

Forester was born Cecil Louis Troughton Smith in Cairo, Egypt, in 1899 and was the youngest of five children. His father was an English teacher working at a British-style school in the city, and his mother also taught.

Forester claimed his ancestors included a master woodcarver who had worked on the pews in St Paul’s Cathedral; a mathematical instrument-maker who had made Isaac Newton’s telescopes; and the part-owner of the rights to Welsbach’s bestselling gas mantle, which was used in public and private lighting until the introduction of electricity in the 1900s.

In 1901, after 15 years in Egypt, Forester’s mother came back to London with her children and settled at 37 Shenley Road, on the border of Camberwell and Peckham. His father remained in Cairo but regularly returned on leave.

Here he was looked after at first by the family’s maid, who became cook to the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, and later followed his siblings to the nearby Lyndhurst Grove School.  

His oldest brother Geoffrey went on to Alleyn’s School, Hugh won a scholarship to Christ’s Hospital School (where he was a contemporary of the poet Edmund Blunden) and his two sisters went to Aske’s Hatcham School in New Cross.

While at primary school Forester bought a bag of gunpowder from a local shop, poured it into a socket for holding a clothes-line post in a friend’s back garden, stuck the post in the socket and lit a homemade fuse.

Describing “The Big Bang” in his memoir, Long Before Forty (written while he lived in Dulwich), he wrote: “Underneath that clothes-line post was about as much powder as was used to charge a 32-pounder in Nelson’s day.” The resulting explosion blew the post into a garden two doors away and shattered numerous windows in the neighbourhood.

Forester later attended Alleyn’s School where he was a near contemporary of  the future short-story writer VS Pritchett. While at Alleyn’s he also met his future first wife, Kitty Belcher (then at James Allen’s Girls’ School and living in Hawarden Grove, Herne Hill),  who was  the younger sister of a schoolfriend.

At this time the family still lived in Camberwell and every day Forester walked to school from Shenley Road (two miles each way) along what is now Green Dale. However, in 1915 they moved to 58 Underhill Road, off Lordship Lane in East Dulwich and in September that year he  entered the sixth form of Dulwich College as a boarder.

Deemed unfit for military service in the First World War due to his weak heart, he followed his brother Geoffrey and cousin Harry and enrolled as a student  at Guy’s Medical School in  October 1917. However, finding himself unsuited to a medical career, he left in his third year.

In 1920 he told his family he had decided to become a writer and immediately set about writing 6,000 words a day for a fortnight. When he had  finished, a friend, Gladys Roberts,  typed up the manuscript. She suggested the pseudonym “Cecil Forester”, possibly after Mrs Cecil Forrester, a character in Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four. He changed it to CS Forester and sent the book off to a publisher.  

After it was rejected a number of times he wrote another novel, The Paid Piper, in six weeks. Then, while these two books were still doing the rounds he wrote a third novel.

Set during the Napoleonic Wars, as the later Hornblower series would be, A Pawn among Kings appeared in 1924 and was his first published book. He was then commissioned to write, in two months, a non-fiction book about Napoleon which was well received and led to a companion volume on the Empress Josephine.

At about this time his father returned from Egypt for good and settled down at 58 Underhill Road for the remaining 23 years of  his life. However, although Forester was now an established writer, he still had to take on casual jobs to make ends meet.

Then came his critically acclaimed crime thriller Payment Deferred in 1926, which was set in south London. Theatre and film versions appeared starring Charles Laughton, and Julian Symons later included it in his Sunday Times list of the 99 best crime stories.  

He married Kitty Belcher in August that year and, backed by his publishers, bought a 15-foot-long motorised dinghy to go on a boating trip to France and later Germany, resulting in two travel books.

It was in 1927, while he was preparing for their French trip, that Forester bought a set of three bound volumes of The Naval Chronicle (1799-1818) for his library on the boat. After studying these journals he came up with the idea for  the Hornblower series.

The character’s name itself may have been inspired when he visited Alleyn’s School in 1922 for the unveiling of an honours board to those who had fallen in the Great War – one of those listed was Private Edward S Hornblower.

After their travels Forester and his wife lived in the attic of 58 Underhill Road and their first son John was born in the house in October 1929. He would later attend Alleyn’s School.

That same year Forester published another biography, Nelson, and his first naval story, Brown on Resolution – the only one of his books to be filmed twice. The first version, in 1935, starred a young John Mills.

In the autumn of 1930 Forester and his family moved into a flat in Gothic Lodge, on the corner of Mount Adon Park and Lordship Lane. The house was once the home of William Henderson, the brother of the newspaper proprietor, James Henderson, who built Mount Adon Park (see The Dulwich Diverter, November/December 2016).

The same year he published his second crime thriller, Plain Murder, which, along with Payment Deferred, was praised by the Guardian in 2011: “These two short novels establish Forester as the improbable pioneer of a very English form of noir crime fiction – domestic, darkly ironic and as hard as a hanging judge.”

The last book published while he was living in Dulwich was Death to the French (1932), a novel of the Napoleonic Wars which directly influenced Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe books (its hero, Matthew Dodd, even appears in Sharpe’s Escape).

Forester moved to Sydenham at the end of 1932, where he wrote The African Queen (1935) and the Hornblower series, beginning with The Happy Return in 1937.  

However, though many of his most famous books were written elsewhere, he gained his first success as a writer – as well as his pseudonym – while living in Dulwich. In all he published nearly a third of his total output while in the area, including biographies, crime thrillers, travel books, historical fiction, drama, verse and short stories.  

Before moving to the USA during the Second World War, Forester often returned to Dulwich, especially when his parents were still alive and living on Underhill Road.

His son John even remembered visiting his grandfather’s house and sailing homemade model boats on the old boating pond (drained in the 1960s) situated below the bandstand in the gardens of  the Horniman Museum nearby.

In an article for Holiday magazine in 1955, Forester acknowledged the influence of his early years in Dulwich and Peckham on his work. To paraphrase slightly, he wrote: “No writer ever quite escapes his own childhood. I have gone back to that part of London again and again in my books for events, for people, for stories, for tiny details, for settings and houses and furniture.

“When we left Peckham, we moved to a house in Dulwich; halfway between these two homes Mr William Marble of my Payment Deferred later buried a corpse in his back garden, and not far from there Randall (of The River of Time) spent his married life.

“It was while I wandered along those same quiet streets much later on, in the 1920s, that plots formed in my mind; Rifleman Dodd went through his adventures one evening as I walked along Court Lane, and The Gun played its part in the Peninsular War in Spain as a result of watching workmen removing a fallen tree down towards Herne Hill.

“These books were written in all sorts of odd places in the world, but that was where they had their start.”

..................................

Dr Mark Bryant is a former secretary of the London Press Club and lives close to Forester’s house in Underhill Road. His wife attended Lyndhurst Grove School, Forester’s primary school in Peckham.

[speeding54]

North Rim Grand Canyon Lodge 

June 22, 2018 by Jean Laughton

[wiccaweysrescuedbordercollies]

💚💜Please welcome Princess Anna💜💚 This beautiful young lady is a new arrival this week, along with her 7 equally gorgeous siblings. You may remember we had a fundraiser in January to help get them all on the Happy Bus. It really is like a fairytale for our Princesses, from being found dumped in a swamp and close to drowning, to being saved by Fairy Godmothers and now at Wiccs to find their Happily Ever Afters. 🥰 💜🐾🐾 🐾 🐾 💜 💜 General Adoption Enquiries 💜 If you are interested in offering a Wiccs dog a new home, please give us a call on: 07905 203254. Weekdays,10am-6pm. Weekends & Bank Holidays,10am-4pm. Calls outside these hours must be strictly limited to emergencies only. Please telephone for a chat, we do not accept adoption enquiries via email, messenger or text. Full details of our adoption procedures can be seen on our website: www.wiccaweys.co.uk Wiccaweys Rescued Border Collies, Brackenmoor Lodge, East Ferry Road, Laughton, Lincolnshire. DN21 3QB All visits to the rescue are strictly by appointment only. #wiccaweys #ineedahome #pleaseshareme #adoptdontshop #collies #sheepdogs #givemeachance #lotsoflovetogive #newarrival #weneedahome #pleasesupportrescue #canyouhelp #makeadonation #wiccaweysfamily 💚 Goodheart Animal Sanctuaries 💜 Wiccaweys Rescued Border Collies (at Wiccaweys Rescued Border Collies) https://www.instagram.com/p/CLcOkQBF181/?igshid=17cdu8a442414

[wiccaweysrescuedbordercollies]

💚💜Happy Valentine’s Day💜💚 Roses are Red Violets are Blue Here is a beautiful Collie Girl Just for You! We can’t give you a dozen red roses for Valentine’s Day, but we can bring you one little Rosy, who was a new arrival at Wiccs yesterday. 🥰 A beautiful, extremely intelligent 7 month old girl who we are all looking forward to getting to know. We are unable to take specific adoption enquiries for Rosy at the moment as she is under assessment. 💜🐾🐾 🐾 🐾 💜 💜 General Adoption Enquiries 💜 If you are interested in offering a Wiccs dog a new home, please give us a call on: 07905 203254. Weekdays,10am-6pm. Weekends & Bank Holidays,10am-4pm. Calls outside these hours must be strictly limited to emergencies only. Please telephone for a chat, we do not accept adoption enquiries via email, messenger or text. Full details of our adoption procedures can be seen on our website: www.wiccaweys.co.uk Wiccaweys Rescued Border Collies, Brackenmoor Lodge, East Ferry Road, Laughton, Lincolnshire. DN21 3QB All visits to the rescue are strictly by appointment only. If you would like to make a donation, you can do so by the following: Via PayPal to: https://www.paypal.me/wiccaweys Via BACS to Wiccaweys Rescued Border Collies Sort: 20-63-28. Account: 83912426 Via the Wiccaweys website, link below. Or via cheque to the address above. #wiccaweys #ineedahome #pleaseshareme #adoptdontshop #collies #sheepdogs #givemeachance #lotsoflovetogive #newarrival #weneedahome #pleasesupportrescue #canyouhelp #makeadonation #wiccaweysfamily 💚 Goodheart Animal Sanctuaries 💜 Wiccaweys Rescued Border Collies (at Wiccaweys Rescued Border Collies) https://www.instagram.com/p/CLRcibZFWLs/?igshid=1vofp04ddnlw4

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💚💜Happy New Year💜💚 A wonderful start to 2021! Yesterday evening we were contacted by Ian and Josie from Sunflower Park, they had found a little old dog straying on a main road. They bought him over to us for scanning. He was exhausted and very thin. A microchip was found and the call was made. Reggie had been missing since the 19th December, when he chased something through the woods where he was being walked. The woods were a good hour from home, and his family and friends had been back looking for him ever since. There had been no sighting at all, until he reappeared on the road yesterday evening. We settled Reggie down for the evening, he wolfed down his supper and then crashed out to sleep. His family were here first thing this morning to be reunited. Reggie was very pleased to see them! One theory is the cheeky chap got himself down a hole and has only just dug himself out. Whatever happened, Reggie isn’t telling! Welcome Home Reggie!!! 💜🐾🐾 🐾 🐾 💜 If you are interested in offering a Wiccs dog a new home, please give us a call on: 07905 203254. Weekdays,10am-6pm. Weekends,10am-4pm. Calls outside these hours should be strictly limited to emergencies only. Please telephone for a chat, we do not accept adoption enquiries via email, messenger or text. Full details of our adoption procedures can be seen on our website: www.wiccaweys.co.uk Wiccaweys Rescued Border Collies, Brackenmoor Lodge, East Ferry Road, Laughton, Lincolnshire. DN21 3QB All visits to the rescue are strictly by appointment only. If you would like to make a donation, you can do so by the following: Via PayPal to: https://www.paypal.me/wiccaweys Via BACS to Wiccaweys Rescued Border Collies Sort: 20-63-28. Account: 83912426 Via the Wiccaweys website, link below. Or via cheque to the address above. #wiccaweys #ineedahome #pleaseshareme #adoptdontshop #collies #sheepdogs #givemeachance #lotsoflovetogive #newarrivals #weneedahome #pleasesupportrescue #canyouhelp #makeadonation #wiccaweysfamily #reunited #happynewyear #goodnews 💚 Goodheart Animal Sanctuaries 💜 Wiccaweys Rescued Border Collies (at Wiccaweys Rescued Border Collies) https://www.instagram.com/p/CJgEvNvl_1l/?igshid=2i23ilornlmr

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💚💜Wiccs Proudly Presents...💜💚 Romanian Granny Dogs, Tina and Dora, in the snow - or as they call it, a mild frost. 🥰 If you are interested in offering a Wiccs dog a new home, please give us a call on: 07905 203254. Weekdays,10am-6pm. Weekends,10am-4pm. Calls outside these hours should be strictly limited to emergencies only. Please telephone for a chat, we do not accept adoption enquiries via email, messenger or text. Full details of our adoption procedures can be seen on our website: www.wiccaweys.co.uk Wiccaweys Rescued Border Collies, Brackenmoor Lodge, East Ferry Road, Laughton, Lincolnshire. DN21 3QB All visits to the rescue are strictly by appointment only. #wiccaweys #ineedahome #pleaseshareme #adoptdontshop #collies #sheepdogs #givemeachance #lotsoflovetogive #newarrivals #weneedahome #pleasesupportrescue #canyouhelp #makeadonation #wiccaweysfamily 💚 Goodheart Animal Sanctuaries 💜 Wiccaweys Rescued Border Collies (at Wiccaweys Rescued Border Collies) https://www.instagram.com/p/CJYyXpfFAo_/?igshid=1jj4q8gmbuh0o

[wiccaweysrescuedbordercollies]

❤️💚💜🤍Merry Christmas All!!🤍 💜💚❤️ If you would consider making a donation to help support the dogs over Christmas we would be so, so grateful. You can do so by the methods below. We know times are tough for everyone right now, so even the smallest amount really does help to make a difference to a dog’s life journey. Thank you. 💜💜🐾🐾 Make a Donation: Via PayPal to: https://www.paypal.me/wiccaweys Via BACS to Wiccaweys Rescued Border Collies Sort: 20-63-28. Account: 83912426 Via the Wiccaweys website, link below. Or via cheque to the address below. If you are interested in offering a Wiccs dog a new home, please give us a call on: 07905 203254. Weekdays,10am-6pm. Weekends,10am-4pm. Calls outside these hours should be strictly limited to emergencies only. Please telephone for a chat, we do not accept adoption enquiries via email, messenger or text. Full details of our adoption procedures can be seen on our website: www.wiccaweys.co.uk Wiccaweys Rescued Border Collies, Brackenmoor Lodge, East Ferry Road, Laughton, Lincolnshire. DN21 3QB All visits to the rescue are strictly by appointment only. #wiccaweys #ineedahome #pleaseshareme #adoptdontshop #collies #sheepdogs #givemeachance #lotsoflovetogive #newarrivals #weneedahome #pleasesupportrescue #canyouhelp #makeadonation #wiccaweysfamily #christmas #adventcalendar 💚 Goodheart Animal Sanctuaries 💜 Wiccaweys Rescued Border Collies (at Wiccaweys Rescued Border Collies) https://www.instagram.com/p/CJN9D7RFcPI/?igshid=1bedxdca2qvlh

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❤️💚🤍Wiccs Christmas Advent Calender🤍💚❤️ Christmas Eve 🥰 If you would consider making a donation to help support the dogs over Christmas we would be so, so grateful. You can do so by the methods below. We know times are tough for everyone right now, so even the smallest amount really does help to make a difference to a dog’s life journey. Thank you. 💜💜🐾🐾 Make a Donation: Via PayPal to: https://www.paypal.me/wiccaweys Via BACS to Wiccaweys Rescued Border Collies Sort: 20-63-28. Account: 83912426 Via the Wiccaweys website, link below. Or via cheque to the address below. If you are interested in offering a Wiccs dog a new home, please give us a call on: 07905 203254. Weekdays,10am-6pm. Weekends,10am-4pm. Calls outside these hours should be strictly limited to emergencies only. Please telephone for a chat, we do not accept adoption enquiries via email, messenger or text. Full details of our adoption procedures can be seen on our website: www.wiccaweys.co.uk Wiccaweys Rescued Border Collies, Brackenmoor Lodge, East Ferry Road, Laughton, Lincolnshire. DN21 3QB All visits to the rescue are strictly by appointment only. #wiccaweys #ineedahome #pleaseshareme #adoptdontshop #collies #sheepdogs #givemeachance #lotsoflovetogive #newarrivals #weneedahome #pleasesupportrescue #canyouhelp #makeadonation #wiccaweysfamily #christmas #adventcalendar 💚 Goodheart Animal Sanctuaries 💜 Wiccaweys Rescued Border Collies (at Wiccaweys Rescued Border Collies) https://www.instagram.com/p/CJL_NPjlP13/?igshid=192bftrwwhjd7

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❤️💚🤍Wiccs Christmas Advent Calender🤍💚❤️ Who’s behind Door No. 21. At the time of the Winter Solstice and the returning of light to the world, we remember and honour those friends and family no longer with us, both Animal and Human. We also send love and strength to those who may make their journey across the Rainbow Bridge in the coming days and our hearts are with their families. 🌈💜 May their crossing to the Summerlands be peaceful and they be bathed in golden light, young and restored once more 💜🌈 🌈💜🌈💜🌈💜🌈💜🌈💜🌈 If you would consider making a donation to help support the dogs over Christmas we would be so, so grateful. You can do so by the methods below. We know times are tough for everyone right now, so even the smallest amount really does help to make a difference to a dog’s life journey. Thank you. 💜💜🐾🐾 Make a Donation: Via PayPal to: https://www.paypal.me/wiccaweys Via BACS to Wiccaweys Rescued Border Collies Sort: 20-63-28. Account: 83912426 Via the Wiccaweys website, link below. Or via cheque to the address below. If you are interested in offering a Wiccs dog a new home, please give us a call on: 07905 203254. Weekdays,10am-6pm. Weekends,10am-4pm. Calls outside these hours should be strictly limited to emergencies only. Please telephone for a chat, we do not accept adoption enquiries via email, messenger or text. Full details of our adoption procedures can be seen on our website: www.wiccaweys.co.uk Wiccaweys Rescued Border Collies, Brackenmoor Lodge, East Ferry Road, Laughton, Lincolnshire. DN21 3QB All visits to the rescue are strictly by appointment only. #wiccaweys #ineedahome #pleaseshareme #adoptdontshop #collies #sheepdogs #givemeachance #lotsoflovetogive #newarrivals #weneedahome #pleasesupportrescue #canyouhelp #makeadonation #wiccaweysfamily #christmas #adventcalendar 💚 Goodheart Animal Sanctuaries 💜 Wiccaweys Rescued Border Collies (at Wiccaweys Rescued Border Collies) https://www.instagram.com/p/CJGffwVlVCq/?igshid=1rf8jmjhu1nga