Dudes in the woods

Robin Hood is a Mediaeval superhero. He doesn’t care much about emancipation, but he loves to skip through the trees.

Gross is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.

DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS IN ROBIN HOOD, ALLAN DWAN, DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS PICTURES, 1922, 127 MINUTES. U.S. GROSS: $2,500,000.

Banner graphic for GROSS - DOuglas Fairbanks as Robin Hood in silhouette at an arched window. The word 'GROSS' and the year 1922 are overlaid

There’s something cynical about this film. It’s as if it knew it was going to be the first in a multi-decade franchise, as if it knew it was likely to create the template for the action hero; leaping, laughing and slapping entitled aristocrats and bureaucrats around with gusto. Wikipedia calls Fairbanks’ Robin Hood an “…acrobatic champion of the oppressed” which accurately expresses the balance of his interests – his vibe.

I don’t want to dwell too much on the content of this movie. It’s a genuine epic – one of the most expensive movies of the era with a huge cast and elaborate, beautifully-detailed sets and the action is joyful and often breathtaking, with really good slapstick elements that must have had audiences in stitches.

But the storytelling’s pedestrian and – with the possible exception of Sam De Grasse as brooding, bitter falcon-botherer Prince John – the acting’s unevolved. Wallace Beery throws his head back in Kingly laughter and/or fury so often I fear he must have done permanent damage to his poor neck (he was a big star, he probably had access to a full-time neck therapist back in his trailer, though).

Levelling up

Of course, what’s interesting about Robin Hood is the economics. Seriously. Is Robin an expropriative socialist? A liberal redistributionist? An effective altruist? None of the above, obviously. In this version, Robin’s an aristocrat – a feudal lord gone off the rails. He steals bags of coins and throws them randomly into crowds. This is not a planned economy. It’s levelling-up as jape. He returns from his crusade a reformed baron – a merry prankster, really – and then laughs his way around Sherwood, winning hearts and minds with his arbitrary largesse.

In this role, Fairbanks defines one end of the Robin Hood character spectrum. He’s the big-hearted if haphazard philanthropist. It’s all jumping through windows, roughing up countless chain-mail squaddies and swinging from vines (yes, vines). He overcomes the cruelty (and there is some surprising cruelty – torture, whipping, hanging…) of Prince John by means of a series of joyful flashmobs. And his generosity is that of a child – “what use do I have for money? I live in the woods!”

Yes, Magna Carta

We’re a long way from the brooding latter-day Hollywood Robin Hoods who are basically comic-book toughs – rugged individualists in Lincoln green. In Ridley Scott’s 2010 version, from right at the other end of the spectrum, Russell Crowe hacks his way across a hostile England with no apparent interest in the welfare of the peasantry. His Robin Hood is a big-picture guy, not a skipping-through-the-woods guy and the director dramatically and implausibly inserts him into history: he somehow contributes to the drafting of Magna Carta: (you have do this in a kind of Irish-Scottish-geordie accent for the full Russell Crowe effect) “If your majesty were to offer justice, justice in the form of a charter of liberties, allowing any man to forage for his hearth, to be safe from conviction without cause or prison without charge…” Achievement unlocked.

In the folklore Robin is always a yeoman – a small farmer – stripped of his land and driven into the forest. In later accounts he’s upgraded. He becomes a fallen aristocrat, acquiring the kind of glamour that’s necessary in the movies – usually just back from the crusades but unfairly robbed of his estates, sharing the woods with vagabonds and freedmen. In the middle-ages this class of landless commoner was a major threat to the dominance of the feudal lords.

The idea of an entirely free man – anonymous, unbound, without loyalty to any lord or parish – was terrifying to the elite. Landless men were harassed, imprisoned, transported, classified as vagabonds, criminalised. Harsh local laws kept the landless to the worst of the marginal land or moved them on all together. Later a law was introduced: “…that all Rogues, Vagabonds, and Beggars do on every Sabbath-Day repair to some Church and Chappel, and remain there soberly and orderly, during the time of Divine-Worship.” – a recognisable example of an authoritarian law that’s presented as a benign improvement – in this case to the observation of the Sabbath. The disciplinary yoke was tight, even at the margins.

For the aristocrats Robin of Sherwood is worse – he’s a freedman who commands the loyalty of others – of a private army, in fact. Essentially the ultimate threat to the peace and wealth of the owner class – Robin thrives outside the baronial economy and beyond the parochial pale. He ridicules the feudal status quo and must thus be chased around, fought and expelled from polite society.

Feudalist realism

But Robin is no freedom-fighter, he represents no challenge to the system and offers no alternative. He’s not a lollard or a leveller, not a utopian. He’s just a guy. A dude. He stages incursions, raids, hilarious stunts. He puts rent collectors and lieutenants in the stocks or hangs them by their braces from the trees, he liberates treasure and hands it out to the peasantry but he offers no vision of liberty or even of equity. The adjustments he makes are local, temporary, essentially trivial. Ultimately he marries with all the pomp of a prince and is accepted back into the baronial fold. Game over.

In this, of course, Robin is the model for all the movie action heroes to come – and especially for the superheroes: an over-achiever who rights wrongs, one at a time, one villain at a time. Not a liberator but a cheerful, reactionary hunk with a big heart.

  • I watched the film on YouTube. A decent print with an orchestral score. There’s a Blu-Ray.
  • You can get these reviews in your inbox over on Substack.
  • Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down is brilliant on all the vagabonds and outlaws and radicals who challenged the feudal norm at the time of the English Revolution and could be describing Robin here:
    • “Vagabonds attended no church, belonged to no organized social group. For this reason it seemed almost self-evident to Calvinist theologians that they were ‘a cursed generation’. Not till 1644 did legislation insist that rogues, vagabonds and beggars should be compelled to attend church every Sunday. Such men were almost by definition ideologically unmotivated: they could steal and plunder, but were incapable of concerted revolt.”
  • Wallace Beery, our Richard I, is probably the most interesting (and ghastly) person in the film, although now largely forgotten. In his Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson calls him “the most notable example of the ugly, stupid, boorish man who was as successful in films as heroes or lovers.” This is the feature that made him a big star. The following year there’d be a sequel: Beery’s character was promoted to lead and Robin was gone all together. Between 1914 and 1916, in a series of shorts, he’d played Sweedie, a comic maid, in drag – a character he’d brought with him from vaudeville. On the Sweedie films he met and quickly married a 17 year-old Gloria Swanson – their marriage soon failed and in her autobiography she accuses him of brutally raping her. He’s a footnote in the second volume of scabrous and brilliant Hollywood Babylon – Kenneth Anger calls him, characteristically. “a turd of a toad” – and he was a drinking buddy of gangster Lucky Lucciano. He not only survived the transition to sound but dominated the new form and his highly-lucrative contract with MGM (which lasted for 20 years) made him the world’s highest-paid actor in the early-thirties. Beery made perhaps 200 films and worked until the year of his death in 1949.
  • Here’s a list of all the top-grossing films since 1913 and here’s my Letterboxd list.
  • And here’s another top-grossing list.

Learning from old movies

GROSS is my first Substack thing. It’s film reviews, which I hope are funny and interesting and unpretentious.

Logo for Substack newsletter Gross, with an image from The word 'GROSS' in an old-fashioned gothic face is at the left-hand end and a still from 1917 Mary Pickford film The Poor Little Rich Girl at the right-hand end

It’s also my personal low-effort way to learn about the whole span of cinema history. I’m watching every top-grossing film since 1913 and writing them up in a Substack newsletter.

I’ve been doing it for a couple of months now. It’s my Saturday morning treat (like when I was nine or something). I’ve learnt a few things:

  • If I’m honest I was expecting the early part of the journey to be a bit tiresome. I expected to encounter a lot of fairly primitive storytelling from back at the beginning – flat scenes, static cameras, theatrical mugging. This did not happen. Almost everything I’ve watched so far has been in some way impressive or interesting or beautiful – ambitious works, full of love for the form.
  • I expected that for some of these films I wouldn’t find much to say, that they might be entertaining, even beautiful, but not particularly interesting. Also not true. Every one of them has been a jewel of history, culture, politics and technology. Every one brings with it a mind-expanding context, even the really teeth-grindingly awful ones. This horrible, callous 1920 Cecil B. DeMille picture, for instance, tells us so much about morality in the twenties, advances in movie-making tech and about the fate of the big silent stars as sound arrived.
  • I’m also learning about the complex and influential stars of the period – Mary Pickford (the first America’s sweetheart), Mabel Normand (the greatest movie comic you’ve never heard of), Gloria Swanson (the star everyone just called ‘Gloria’) and about the emerging grammar of performance and stardom.
  • I’m surprising myself every week with just how technologically advanced these movies were, just how bold and creative the technicians and creatives behind them were. The jaw-dropping electronic surveillance storyline in 1913’s Traffic in Souls, the vastly ambitious underwater tech developed for 1916’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the imaginative play with light and dark in 1917’s The Poor Little Rich Girl. Nothing here is small or unambitious – everything is grand and overreaching.
Black and white film stills of Mabel Normand, film comic and director of the silent era and Vladimir Lenin, revolutionary and leader of the Soviet state
Mabel Normand and Vladimir Lenin, together at last

Anyway, sign up on Substack and you’ll receive updates about once a week and you can log in to the website to read all the earlier posts. It’s all going to be free until there’s some kind of audience breakthrough or until I develop a spine. Please tell the film fans in your life about GROSS.

  • I’m relying on a couple of lists of top-grossing films for this exercise. This one and this one. Neither is very reliable (and they seem to disagree) but I think that’s okay. The stakes are low.
  • Here’s a Letterboxd list, where I’m logging all the movies I watch.

Chaps in trouble

We’ve got to 1919. The officer class over-reaches itself and gets stuck on the ice. It’s a disaster but it all works out in the end.

Every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed. Part seven.

SOUTH: SIR ERNEST SHACKLETON’S GLORIOUS EPIC OF THE ANTARCTIC, FRANK HURLEY, IMPERIAL TRANS-ANTARCTIC FILM SYNDICATE, 1919, 80 MINUTES.

It’s not an adventure, most of the really dramatic events are missing, there’s far too much penguin footage and we never get to know any of the main characters – but it’s an astonishing document of Ernest Shackleton’s catastrophic 1914 expedition to the South Pole anyway.

The record we have of this wildly unsuccessful mission and the truly heroic recovery orchestrated by its leader only exists because of the photographer sent along on the boat. Frank Hurley was already an Antarctic veteran when he signed on for the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, so he knew something of what to expect.

He took with him a huge amount of absolutely state-of-the-art kit – in the present day he’d have taken crates of drones and GoPros and some kind of virtual reality rig. Everything would have been 8K for the IMAX release (there’d have been a partnership with Apple or the BBC). Hurley’s kit included his bulky ‘cinematograph machine’, a chunky 6-3/4 x 8-1/2″ plate camera and some smaller Kodak cameras, along with various lenses, tripods, and chemicals to process the film.

When Endurance finally sank, Hurley found himself wading into the icy slush that was filling the ship to rescue his exposed plates. And it gets worse: later he had to leave most of his work behind – smashing hundreds of precious glass negatives on the ice so he couldn’t change his mind about which ones to keep. That anything at all survived the arduous journey home and that we have this film to watch is another tribute to Hurley – he seeled his exposed motion picture film and all those glass plates into a tin can and soldered it shut for the journey across the ice and the Southern Ocean.

Four sepia-toned stills from 1he 1914 Shackleton film South. From top left to bottom right: Ernest Shackleton, leader of the expedition; Captain of the Endurance Captain F. Worsley, Lieutenant J. Stenhhouse, Captain of the Ross Sea vessel Aurora; Captain L. Hussey, mateorologist and banjo player

Right at the beginning of this film we meet these four sepia-toned gents. Shackleton himself, the already-famous polar explorer and leader of the expedition to cross the Antarctic (at top left) and three of his senior crew. These gorgeous, fine-grained portraits (made nearly 110 years ago) promise an encounter with the upper-class adventurers aboard Endurance. We’re set up to meet the insouciant officer class tested in the cold. But it never happens.

Hurley wasn’t a storyteller. He had no script and only a reluctant cast. Locations were provided for him by the unfolding disaster of the expedition. He was there to make a high-tech document of the triumphant high-tech crossing of the Antarctic and he plugged on, as the mission collapsed, as the beautiful ultra-modern vessel they relied on was trapped in the ice and gradually destroyed. He created some of the most memorable images of the most forbidding landscape on earth and, incidentally, a record – although a frustratingly incomplete one – of the epic human ingenuity and bloody-mindedness that brought all 28 members of Shackleton’s mission out of the wilderness two years later.

Photographer Frank Hurley shooting under the bow of the trapped Endurance
Frank Hurley shooting under the bow of the trapped Endurance

But there’s no story here. The laughing, officer-class chaps in the picture (with their fabulous upper-class teeth) are never this close to the camera again. Nor are the other ranks below them for that matter. Shackleton is seen occasionally, usually shouting instructions from an ice hummock (we learn what an ice hummock is) or through a megaphone from the top of the main-mast. Early on, before the catastrophe, we see lots of charming footage of the crew caring for the 70 sled dogs kept on-board (I’ll leave you to figure out what happened to the dogs after everything had gone wrong) and there’s evidence of a tough work regime on the ship and on the ice.

Early in the film there’s an intertitle that basically gives the game away, though, telling us what we need to know about the recklessness of the upper-class adventurers who brought all this about. It accompanies some amazing footage of a huge pod of seals sailing, let’s face it, in the opposite direction. It says:

Intertitle reads: A phenomenal sight - migration of Crab-eater seals. They knew by instincer that an abnormal season was coming and flocked North to warmer waters before the sea froze over.

So we learn that, on the way in to the ice chaos of the Weddell Sea, these pig-headed Englishmen were actually warned by the locals and yet they carried on, on into the inescapable bay.

Later it’s mostly hard yakka on the ice as the crew try first to rescue their ship and then, as it breaks up and sinks, to rescue themselves. There’s footage of the crew’s increasingly desperate efforts to rescue what they need from the listing and sinking Endurance and they try out a kind of high-tech prototype skidoo but, an intertitle explains, ‘it proved entirely unsatisfactory’. The dogs tumble down to the ice on a tight-stretched sail like passengers escaping an airliner down one of those emergency slides.

So, in narrative terms, it’s kind of a mess, but the film is never less than absolutely engaging. It’s so beautifully filmed – Hurley was an instinctive image-maker and was using an up-to-date camera and the best lenses money could buy. He processed his 35mm film using the Paget process, which applies the various lovely tints we see throughout. God knows how he managed all this on board the Endurance (amazing shots exist of Hurley – on another Antarctic mission – washing his film during processing by trailing a frame in the freezing ocean!).

And he was brave – watch this clip showing the Endurance’s solid Norwegian-made bow cutting through the ice and think about how that shot was obtained, then wait for the end of the clip and you’ll see how. Lionel Greenstreet, First Officer of the Endurance, said: “Hurley is a warrior with his camera. He would go anywhere or do anything to get a picture.” Others called him ‘the mad photographer’ (he went on to be a famous war photographer and is known today for assembling composite images from multiple negatives to achieve the drama he was seeking).

The wildlife footage is good (and it must have been startling for audiences five or six decades before the first Attenborough epic) and would have made a delightful secondary storyline if the expedition had succeeded. As it is, the long sequence of penguins and sea lions at the end is a confusing distraction from the action we know had gone on but see nothing of.

The expedition’s escape from the ice is one of the great 20th Century adventure stories and it involved an 800-mile voyage across the Southern Ocean in a hastily adapted open lifeboat (these guys named everything – huts, piles of snow, desolate camps – so this boat was called the James Caird after one of the mission’s sponsors). Hurley had to stay behind with the main part of the crew on the wildy inhospitable Elephant Island (they named their hideout under a glacier Camp Wild), so we see nothing of what must have been one of the most remarkable journeys ever undertaken. As a result the film ends in anticlimax and we have to imagine the excitement and the privations of that voyage. Likewise the four separate attempts to rescue the men left behind and Shackleton’s canny begging and deal-making with the Chilean authorities to secure the ships to do it. But there’s something profound about this giant gulf in the story, something essentially emotionally correct – properly tragic – about missing out the trauma – frostbite, hunger, anger and fear – that must really be the heart of this story.

I wanted class-war on the ice, a story about the collision of the modern and the implacable wilderness, a parable of officer-class hubris and bloody-minded courage. I got none of this but the film is glorious anyway – and gives us a preview of a whole new genre of wildlife and habitat storytelling, of filmmakers and adventurers working together to make entertainment, that these days seems to eat up most of our Sunday evenings in front of the box.

  • South is not, you won’t be surprised to learn, the actual top-grossing film of 1919. That was a Lon Chaney organised crime drama called The Miracle Man, which looks like a blast but is now considered lost. South’s listed gross of  $46,865 would have made it a pretty big deal in Britain, though.
  • The astonishing 1999 restoration of South is on the BFI Player (so you can get it on Amazon Prime if you subscribe to the BFI Channel).
  • Ernest Shackleton was nothing if not an officer and a bit of a prig. After their extraordinary escape from the wilderness he withheld medals from four crew-members he labelled as insubordinate or workshy during the expedition, including one heroic figure who was central to the whole effort and accompanied Shackleton on the epic voyage to South Georgia, Harry McNish.
  • Here’s a list of all the top-grossing films since 1913 and here’s my Letterboxd list.
  • This is the top-grossing list from which I get South’s gross income.

A 1918 double bill: pathos and perfect slapstick followed by a mind-expanding account of the Russian revolution

Mabel Normand and Vladimir Lenin, together at last

I’m watching every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913. You can get these chronological reviews in your inbox over here.

MICKEY, F. RICHARD JONES, MABEL NORMAND FEATURE FILM COMPANY, 1918, 93 MINUTES.
ANNIVERSARY OF THE REVOLUTION, DZIGA VERTOV, MOSCOW FILM COMMITTEE, 1918, 119 MINUTES.

Two photos joined together - in the bottom photo actress Mabel Normand in her 1918 film Mickey. She's dressed for a party, with flowers in her her. Her head rests wistfully in her hand. In the top photo Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin stands in an open space, looking to the right of the frame, hands in pockets, He's wearing his distinctive cap

So, in the second and fifth of the films I’ve reviewed here, from 1914 and 1917, we met the first America’s Sweetheart (for there have been several), Mary Pickford. Now we’ll meet the greatest female comic of the early cinema and a kind of tragic mirror to Pickford – Mabel Normand.

We’ll also meet a genius from another tradition all together, perhaps as far removed from Normand’s generous comedic charm as it’s possible to get in the cinema – Dziga Vertov, the genius who brought us Man with a Movie Camera.

All the (probably fairly unreliable) lists I’m relying on for this journey through the top-grossing films of all time list Mabel Normand’s ‘Mickey’, directed by F. Richard Jones, as the top film of 1918 but one has another, with an implausible gross of $9,685, in the top spot: ‘Anniversary of the Revolution’ (????????? ?????????) by Soviet era genius Dziga Vertov. I can’t explain what this Soviet propaganda film is doing on the list – was it the biggest movie of the year in the communist world?

Anyway, it’s clear that ‘Mickey’ was the real commercial hit here, but I’m very happy to introduce the first film from outside the emerging Hollywood system to our top-grossing list. First, though, the genuine blockbuster.

Mickey – a prequel for Greta Gerwig’s whole acting career

I’m just going to say it. I love this film. Normand, born Amabel Ethelreid Normand in 1893, is a rubber-faced, double-jointed physical comedy genius who can act (she’d also been a director for years and produced this film). In Mickey, a grown-up, 93-minute feature, there’s pathos that never tips over into mawkishness and all the standard devices of the melodramas of the period are deployed cleverly and with irony. There’s a sophisticated awareness of the form – I’m prepared to swear on a bible that Normand winks directly into the lens at least once, throwing the whole artifice of the thing in the air spellinbindingly.

Jones gives us gentle slapstick, with stunts performed by Normand herself (she’s school of Mack Sennett). She hangs from a roof, falls from a window, leaps onto a horse, shins up drainpipes and trees with abandon. The cast – including well-known native American comic actor Minnie Devereux (credited here, with the casual racism of the day, as Minnie Ha-Ha) as a resourceful housekeeper and the man who would later become Mabel’s husband Lew Cody as cad Reggie Drake – is universally brilliant. Acting is breezy, always self-conscious and slyly comic, even in dramatic scenes.

Mickey’s story is the fairytale Cinderella transposed to the folklore United States of worked-out gold mines and snooty East coast plutocrats. There’s a scene where Mickey, recently shipped in from the mine to the Long Island mansion of her aunt’s family, is set to work sweeping the hall of the great house. She gives us pure joy and mischief with the insouciance and the absolute formal discipline of Buster Keaton (others have spotted the Greta Gerwig of Frances Ha here, too). That she is Keaton’s equal, even Chaplin’s, quickly becomes obvious. That she is not as well known is a tragedy (but there’s plenty of actual tragedy to blame for that too).

Anniversary of the Revolution – a prequel for the Soviet Union

I’m going to say it here too. I love this film. It comes from another world, of course. Dziga Vertov (born David Abelevich Kaufman in 1896), who was still eight or nine years from principle photography on his masterpiece Man With a Movie Camera, was 23. He’d been a year younger at the time of the October Revolution. This whirlwind montage of newsreel footage from the period between the February revolution and the beginning of the civil war was his first feature.

Thirty prints of the film were made in 1918 and they were worn to shreds doing daily business on the agit-trains – the hypermodern steam-powered travelling propaganda machines that toured the country during the civil war. It seems unlikely anyone was paying to see it so how you’d calculate a gross for this one is a mystery to me – but I’d love to know if it had a cinematic life in the West. Were people paying a nickel or sixpence to see this movie in New York or London?

The film was considered lost for a century, anyway, so no one saw it in full after about 1919. It’s a documentary that’s almost two hours long, assembled from 3,000 metres of newsreel – a lot of it was probably shot and edited by Vertov on its first outing too – he’d been a newsreel monkey for the Moscow Film Committee for the whole period. It’s been called the first feature-length documentary. That seems plausible – it was worn out and forgotten by the time Nanook of the North came out. I’m sure it’s the first feature film assembled in this self-conscious way using many others as source material.

Vertov’s big edit is a vivid prequel for the Soviet Union. In his film we’re in a country still boiling with revolutionary fervour, about to fight for its survival – against multiple foes, still years from the decades-long retrenchment and retreat from its ideals, ten years before the routine brutality of the Stalin years began and 20 years before the terror.

These are the men and women who brought into being by the force of their will – and against the greatest odds imaginable – capitalism’s only ever viable opponent. They stand around blinking in the sunshine, smoking, getting in and out of ramshackle cars, shouting from improvised platforms. They’re awkward, probably exhilerated and frightened. Improvising a new nation in real time, with excitement and without the knowledge that it would collapse into pain and grief only a few years later.

So the material, by definition, is breathtaking – every figure of any importance from the whole revolutionary period is here, all the people you’ve heard of – Lenin, Trotsky, Kerensky, Kamenev, Lunacharsky, Kollontai – plus dozens of others, many soon forgotten. They’re usually entering or leaving a building – presumably for another interminable committee meeting or a workers’ assembly – or smoking in a courtyard.

But we also see the marches and protests, the vast gatherings on Moscow and Petersburg streets, the milling and circulating proletariat – the revolutionary subject coming into being in squares, on bridges, in railway yards. And some extraordinary, heartstopping events. On the Field of Mars, the dead of the October revolution are interred in a vast mass grave, one coffin after another stacked in a neat pattern while men with clipboards record names and locations. There are riverboats, cars, trucks, armoured cars – we’re conscious of the sweep of the territory, of the pace of events. Trotsky addresses a crowd from a train on his way to the front in the civil war. He stands on the bridge of a river boat, posing like a matinee idol (what exactly is he wearing here? A leather sailor suit?).

Men wave their hats, stand around, staring at the newsreel camera, open-mouthed. Kids run around with school holiday abandon. Soldiers and policemen stride around trying to assert their authority. Horses and dogs are everywhere. What’s the name for the shiver of awe that watching these extraordinary scenes causes? For the uncanny collision of intimacy and unbridgeable distance that these smiling, frowning, laughing, shouting faces produces? There honestly isn’t a second of this film that’s not astonishing or surprising.

Right before your eyes

Vertov, our 22 year-old, in assembling material from hundreds of individual newsreels (aspect ratios vary throughout, it’s chaotic), was innnovating in real time. There’s obviously no consistency as to shot angle or composition. Sometimes framing is wildly off, sometimes the operator swings back and forth across a scene, as if to make sure they didn’t miss anything on the first pass. Scenes begin and end ragged, unresolved.

One of the mind-expanding joys of the thing is the way Vertov cuts the footage of these important figures (many men with big beards and/or big hats) – usually captured on the stairs up to a building, against the gloom of an entrance. He resists the obvious edit – the one that any naive human would grasp at – to top-and-tail the scenes neatly, to remove the comings and goings, the quick departures, the rushing off into the gloom. So in these scenes we have something more open-ended, provisional (something quite YouTube about the way these shots trail off, in fact).

In these cuts Vertov somehow captures the indeterminate nature of the wild Soviet experiment (feel like I ought to make my own edit of all these little endings) and in so doing invents a new form. Every self-conscious film with an ironic take on the material – every doc that makes the process visible, that involves the creator, allows its making to bleed into the narrative – has its origin in these decisions, in Vertov’s willingness to leave the end of the shot in the edit.

A fairytale, a comedy, a fantasy – and a Disney princess 20 years before Snow White

Mary Pickford was famed for playing childlike parts, flighty young women with spirit. In 1917’s The Poor Little Rich Girl, she broke new ground by playing an actual child.

I’m watching every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913. You can get these chronological reviews in your inbox over here.

1917. THE POOR LITTLE RICH GIRL, MAURICE TOURNEUR, ARTCRAFT PICTURES CORPORATION, 65 MINUTES.

An animated GIF of silent movie actor Mary Pickford covering her mouth as she giggles in the 1917 film The Poor Little Rich Girl

Pickford turned 24 a month after the film was released but in The Poor Little Rich Girl she plays a child – to the perfect satisfaction of the rapturous audiences who made this one of the top-grossing movies of 1917.

The actual top movie of the year was Cleopatra, a huge Theda Bara historical romance that apparently cost half a million dollars to make (about the same as 1916 blockbuster 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea) but it’s apparently lost, which is kind of heartbreaking.

Here, we’ve already encountered the on-screen energy and the off-screen business mind of the amazing Mary Pickford – in 1914’s Tess of the Storm Country. We know that by the time of this movie she’d already been a big star for years – since before actors were even named in the credits, in fact – and was essentially an exec on everything she was in, with huge influence over every decision. She’d weary of playing these childlike roles but she was a very pragmatic businesswoman and played essentially the same plucky adolescent until well into her thirties, by which time she was a very rich movie executive.

As in Tess of the Storm Country, Pickford dominates every scene she’s in (other actors must have had mixed feelings about joining any Pickford production – knowing they’d be definitively overshadowed but with a decent chance of a hit). In this film, directed by Frenchman Maurice Tourneur, the overshadowed roles are terrific. They have a real fairytale charm – carefully-crafted storybook archetypes: funny, sinister, cruel, playful, stern.

There are some lovely street urchins, a charming organ grinder, various prickly and supercilious servants, some authentically remote and aristocratic grown-ups. There’s no wooden line-reading here, no static theatricality. In one scene, a dozen servants, in all the costumes of a great house – chef, maid, gardener, butler, chauffeur – enter a scene in a kind of pantomine procession, snaking around the furniture in a way that’ll make you giggle. In another, those urchins party riotously in the house’s fancy garden – a place of shadows and narrow pathways and low-hanging trees – street kids but also nymphs at play.

Still from 1917 fairy tale film The Poor Little Rich Girl. May Pickford, playing a child, a tall man in a top hat, a crystal ball, a person dressed as a donkey
From the dream sequence

Pickford’s Gwendolyn spends essentially the whole of the second act in a kind of coma (for she has been drugged). The resulting dream sequence is delightful – full of proper childhood dread plus also angels and wooded glades and staircases and top hats and crystal balls and other lovely things – double-exposures and back projections are convincingly magical. She’s accompanied by a friendly plumber from real life (he keeps a length of pipe over his shoulder as a reminder) and they encounter a group of hilarious bears, a splendid pantomime donkey, two of the nasty servants who’ve been punished, one with huge ears and one with an extra scary face on the back of her head. You’ll want to watch it all again.

The movie’s visual style is spookily like a Disney film from twenty years later. Walt was 16 when this movie was released. Presumably at this point he was busy soaking up the surreal, fairytale aesthetic of this and other (mostly French?) films. Alice in Wonderland, Beauty and the Beast, Dumbo – they’re all brought to mind in the magical interiors, the light and dark of the big house and garden, the (multiple) dream scenes and in the innocence and waywardness of our ‘princess’. The director’s artful play with shadow – and with bizarre imagery – must have run in the family – Jacques Tourneur, his son, was also a brilliant stylist of light – he made the 1942 Cat People and I Walk With a Zombie.

When Gwendolyn regains consciousness and is finally released from her confinement in her family’s fancy home in the city (it’s another archetype so we don’t know where it is but it’s basically a Park Avenue mansion styled as a fairytale castle) to the countryside, audiences must have breathed a big sigh – the atmosphere lightens, the light floods in. It’s a joy (and there’s lots of fun in the mud, tree climbing and so on).

Mary Pickford was in hundreds of films – sometimes shooting two or three per week. I’m no expert but I haven’t seen a weak one yet. They must exist but there’s obviously something about this actress that makes it almost impossible to make a bad film with her in it – and her contribution is always essentially the same: generosity, vivacity, charm. Pickford was screen gold of the kind any studio would treasure.

This review turned into a disquisition on underwater storytelling

This adaptation of Jules Verne’s great submarine romance was the top-grossing film of 1916 – and it wasn’t even the first movie version

A poster for 1916 film 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A huge octopus wraps its tentacles around a circular image of captain Nemo and crew members. Two divers, one on each side of the poster, wear old-fashioned diving helmets
20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA, STUART PATON AND THE WILLIAMSON BROTHERS, UNIVERSAL PICTURES, 1916

UPDATE, 11 October 2023. I found an absolutely gorgeous restoration of 20,000 Leagues, also on YouTube. Watch that one instead of the horrible one linked below!

The project continues. I’m watching the top-grossing movies of every year since 1913. I’m up to 1916 and it’s a vastly ambitious (and ruinously expensive) Jules Verne adaptation.

Look, it’s not a great film – in many ways it’s horrible – but it’s a landmark in all sorts of ways, not least because of these two lads.

The Williamson brothers – what a pair of sorts

The Williamson Brothers, George and Ernest – “who alone have solved the secret of under-the-ocean photography” it says in a card at the beginning of the film – had invented a way to shoot under water (it was based on a patented invention of their father’s). It took them years to perfect it – by the time this project came around they’d shot tens of thousands of feet of film under water and released two or three one-reelers of their own using the kit in 1914 and 1915, to the amazement of audiences everywhere. This film, an early Universal production, was directed by Brit Stuart Paton, but this is really the Williamsons’ movie.

These guys are the Douglas Trumbull or George Lucas of their era – geeks who love film. The little video at the top is from the opening credits of the movie, which tells you something about their status in the project – not mere technicians. There’s a real commitment to the new tech here. The Williamsons knew that audiences were eager for new sensations and ownership of a whole new category – stories set beneath the waves – might make them some serious money. They developed a slightly unhinged, multi-year obsession with making it work. I’d like to know more about the Williamsons and suspect there’s a pretty good film in their inventiveness and their lunatic drive – perhaps made by the Coen Brothers.

A page from a 1913 Scientific American explaining the operation of the Williamson brothers' underwater filming aparatus in a series of eight photographs

The Williamson method involved a patented 30-foot long, collapsible tube (“a portable hole in the ocean“, they called it) with an iron chamber at the bottom end of it. The chamber was cranked down into the water with a camera operator crouching inside it, presumably praying the studio’s insurance was up to date (some accounts of the tech suggest it was all done with mirrors – which seems to be untrue. The detail here is pretty convincing). Specially developed film stock meant the Williamsons could achieve an exposure of 1/50th of a second, making shooting moving pictures perfectly feasible at 16 frames per second. The operator used a conventional camera and shot the undersea world through a thick glass window. No one had to get wet and no special cameras were needed. Scenes were shot in shallow, sunlit water so lighting wasn’t needed – The effect is impressive – and must have been mindblowing in a darkened cinema in 1916. Huge sharks, schools of smaller fish, a reef and a ship wreck are all seen with amazing clarity.

Look! Sharks!

The way the great sharks in particular circulate in the dappled light of the shallows and then loom menacingly out of the haze is beautiful and chilling. The intertitles use the language of the unmotivated shark attack, man-eaters, killing machines, suggesting that the irrational fear of these beasts long pre-dates Jaws – a whole new genre of fiction is proposed right here.

Later in the film, scenes are shot on the sandy bottom as if on a studio soundstage. Actors (stunt performers?) in big diving suits are directed in an awkward analogue of the dry-land process. Shooting began almost 40 years before the invention of scuba diving so these are not the diving scenes we’re all familiar with now in which actors move naturally, oriented parallel to the surface, kicking to achieve smooth motion and exploring with the freedom of a baracuda or an eel.

So the undersea action doesn’t take place in the magical unanchored world of the water column, with free movement in all directions. It all takes place in the two-dimensional setting of the sea bottom. Motion is achieved by literally walking from mark to mark (in weighted boots). Everything’s basically shifted sideways (and down a bit) to the bottom of the ocean.

Meanwhile, Paton’s artful adaptation of the Jules Verne – he blends the storylines from the original book and its sequel ‘The Mysterious Island’ and develops Nemo’s Indian Prince back-story. Also, balloonists from the Union Army, escaping a civil war ambush, crash on the island (I kid you not). There’s a strange and unsettling sequence where a ‘child of nature’, played by Jane Gail, who was already a big star (and was in 1913’s top-grossing Traffic in Souls, which I reviewed here) is bothered by various boorish and/or murderous blokes until we learn that she is actually Nemo’s daughter and the story begins to resolve itself in the standard melodramatic way. In one bizarre scene, Gail, blacked-up and wearing an inexplicable leopardskin shift, is shown how to wear trousers and a nice white shirt. She quickly takes to the new duds.

A man tries to explain clothing to a woman dressed in a leopard skin shift
Your arm goes in here

There’s much in Verne’s stories about Imperialism, liberty and self-determination. Nemo flees India after an unsuccessful uprising against British rule, he sacrifices all for the liberty of the undersea world. I can imagine a viable, low-budget remake – a festival hit with a post-colonial technofuturist vibe. Nemo was transposed, between the first book and the second, from Polish to Indian. Might he be further transposed to the role of undersea warrior for the Global South? A deep-sea superhero with an agenda?

In this film, which simplifies the geopolitics, let’s face it, the freedom idealised is not the ideal of the book’s French Republican author or even the dippy 20th Century freedom of the nature-worshipping scuba diver but the purposeful freedom of the 19th Century adventurer-explorer – conquering an unknown terrain by just walking off into it with a gun (the divers carry weapons that look like Winchester rifles from a cowboy film – we learn they’re powered by compressed air). There’s a hunting scene in which Nemo and his amazed guests stalk sharks in the manner of big game hunters on safari.

The unconstrained motion, the fish-like propulsion and the elegant forward movement of a scuba diver would have seemed weird, alienating, to audiences in 1916, as these straight-backed hunters walking the underwater range seem odd to us. If you studied the way the undersea imaginary in the movies has evolved since this film you’d presumably locate some kind of pivot – from ungainly and upright to elegant and unconstrained – in the motion of cinematic divers. But when did it occur? 1930s? WW2? Jacques Cousteau’s 1960s’? And was there a resistance to the idea that divers ought to set aside humanity’s pretty well-established bipedal mode for the swishing to-and-fro of a lower species? We’re used to it now but is there something fishy and inhuman about the movement of a scuba diver?

Pioneer scuba diver and documentary-maker Jacques Cousteau under water in a scuba diving suit
Cousteau doing his thing

20,000 Leagues wasn’t the first film set on a submarine. Interest in undersea adventures and submarine warfare was heightened by the first world war, in which both allied and German forces had used terrifying, high-tech submarines. Only a year before this film was released, 1,200 people had died when a German U-boat sank the ocean liner Lusitania off the coast of Ireland.

An illustration showing the sinking ot the ocean liner RMS Lusitania - the ship has just been struck by a torpedo and is listing dramatically to starboard. Passengers on deck are clinging to rails.

Shipping was under constant attack from the huge German submarine fleet which treated all trans-Atlantic shipping as a legitimate target. These events must have been present to cinemagoers everywhere. A submarine was a source of wonder and of dread – the autonomous drone of its day. A marauding agent of hypermodern maritime destruction (30% of the world’s merchant fleet was sunk by German U-boats during the war).

Appropriately Nemo’s submarine is run on naval lines, uniformed sailors salute and parade on the top deck (they wear a natty oversized floppy beret). The elements of the submarine narrative are all already here: hatches and airlocks, bulkheads, valves and dials. Ratings rush hither and thither with messages. There’s a periscope and a realistic torpedo room and a shiny steel torpedo (carefully polished by the crew before launch).

Illustration of the submarine Nautilus from the 1954 film 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
The 1954 Nautilus was a pretty grand vessel

But this Nautilus is not really Verne’s fabulous, exotic vessel and definitely not the buttressed undersea gothic cathedral of the 1954 Disney film (this is the adaptation that’s meaningful to people of my generation – it was a fixture at Saturday morning pictures throughout my childhood). For the 1916 film a working (but non-submersible) submarine was built. It’s impressive but it’s basically a cigar-shaped boat.

The submarine Nautilus, a life-sized vessel built for the film 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in 1916, on a calm sea. On the top deck a group of five me stand around.

And it’s not grand – the only concession to Nemo’s flamboyance is a saloon draped with fabrics and hung with artefacts from his past as an Indian prince (Allen Holubar, who plays Nemo, is, uncomfortably, blacked up for the role and brings a kind of Santa Claus meets Jack Sparrow energy). Nemo’s saloon is also the location of the big, round observation window at which his guests gather to watch the action outside.

And speaking of action outside, the other dramatic centrepiece of Verne’s book – the battle with the terrifying giant octopus that threatens to envelope Nautilus and swallow it whole – is here rendered as a – frankly pathetic – man-sized flapping rubber toy, something from Spongebob Squarepants – apparently controlled from the inside by an operator (and also patented by the Williamsons – these guys were the Jobs and Wozniak of silent cinema).

The movie may have cost $500,000 – enough to make a pretty professional narrative film even in the present day (almost five times the budget for D.W. Griffiths’ 12-reel epic The Birth of a Nation, released in the previous year) – but it lacks the intoxicating strangeness of the original. It’s a technological testbed for production methods that would one day become routine but it’s also a clumsily-told story and a cheesy orientalist fantasy. Performances are never better than routine and mis-en-scène is awkward and flat (although I reckon this might be more to do with the essentially impossible challenge of matching the interior narrative sequences with the sensational stuff going on through the big window out on the sea bottom). Poor Stuart Paton.

Technofeudalism, neofeudalism, political capitalism and old-fashioned capitalism

It is possible for geniuses to explain things in ways that non-geniuses can understand but sometimes they need to switch formats to do it.

Microverses: Observations from a Shattered Present – a book by Dylan Riley

I’ve spent a stupid amount of time trying to understand Marxism – political science in general, in fact. I ought to have just gone to college or something but it’s too late for that so I buy books and subscribe to periodicals and so on. I follow interesting lefties on Twitter, I read Substacks and listen to podcasts. I’m all over it. But to be honest it’s not really working. I mean it goes in one ear and out the other.

The best I get is a very gradual – almost undetectable in fact – improvement in my understanding. Pretty much the same kind of glacial change I’m seeing in my ability to write poetry (which I’ve also been doing for years) or to construct decent-looking shelves for all the fucking books. This has got to do with my age obvs but also, it’s clear, to do with the fact that I’m doing this in the piecemeal, unsystematic way of a distracted hobbyist.

My kids went off to university and studied this stuff for three years and now they explain it to me like I’m an idiot. I obviously envy their comprehensive, organised understanding, given to them in the time-honoured way by experts and, in fact, by geniuses. But I’m still here, trying to figure it all out.

This guy, Dylan Riley, is one of the geniuses, a big brain who teaches sociology in California and writes books and papers and long articles about Marxism and society and so on. He came to my (disorganised) attention last year when he co-wrote a piece for New Left Review – with an even bigger genius called Robert Brenner (who has a whole area of disagreement named after him) – about the emergence of something they call ‘political capitalism’.

I won’t try to explain it in any detail – I’d certainly get it all wrong – but it’s a fascinating idea that seems to account for the way investors and corporations continue to make increasing profits even as the return on investment declines almost everywhere. The piece has been influential beyond lefty circles and the ideas contained in it have begun to show up in mainstream politics and journalism.

Political capitalism – the delivery of economic outcomes by non-economic means – is known by others as ‘neofeudalism’ and sometimes ‘technofeudalism’. French economist Thomas Piketty has made a career out of explaining this phenomenon and written several enormous books about it, including Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Some Marxists, though – perhaps the more orthodox ones – are dismissive of this whole discussion – where the proponents of political capitalism see a new terrain of accumulation and exploitation, they see only more capitalism. Evgeny Morozov, another genius whose specialism is a Marxist reading of the Internet and computing, has written a very comprehensive and quite sceptical survey of the various flavours of technofeudalism.

Anyway, the piece – and the other stuff he’s written that I’ve dug out since then – is full of deep insights and lofty ideas, as you’d expect, and a lot of it goes whoooooosh over my head while I wrinkle my brow. So I was kind of intrigued to learn that Riley had also written a little book made up of tiny, informal notes that he wrote to himself – in longhand in an actual notebook – during the pandemic.

To be clear, these are not the notes (“400 rolls of toilet paper, 20kg spaghetti”) that I was writing during the pandemic, they’re notes about the genius stuff – and in particular they’re reflections on Covid, lockdown, the bail-outs and so on. So I thought “that’s going to be right up my street, it’s going to be accessible Marxism that I can get my head around, in small chunks that aren’t going to put me off and make me feel stupid.”

And it is. I mean it’s still full of big ideas and a lot of assumptions are made about the reader’s understanding of politics and sociology (get ready for a lot of Durkheim) but it’s also full of nifty, two- or three-line insights – aphorisms, I guess – that genuinely illuminate the whole scene, the whole post-pandemic, end-of-the-end-of-history, collapse-of-neoliberalism thing – but also Trump, music education, the economics of slavery, socialist utopia…

Riley’s language is never less than academic and can be po-faced. He never doesn’t take himself seriously, which is something I also kind of envy, actually. I mean the confidence to lay down idea after idea without at any point feeling the need to make a joke at your own expense or understate your intelligence or whatever.

Like, for instance, demolishing the whole idea of democracy in four lines:

To imagine a postcapitalist political order is to imagine an order without sovereignty—and therefore without the metaphysics of sovereignty and its terminology, such as “democracy”—but with coordination and rationality.

Or illumating the present moment via the ancient state:

The state is an object of struggle among competing political-capitalist cliques. In antiquity two models emerged: the universal monarchy, which to some extent disciplined these groups; and the unstable republic, which allowed them to run rampant. Are there not analogues in the current period? Putin’s Russia could be thought of as the Roman universal monarchy, and the United States the unstable republican form.

That kind of thing.

And it’s one of those books that make you think “come on, geniuses, why don’t you do this in all your stuff? If you can make big ideas clear in a flash and in about 300 words of pellucid prose in one format, why can’t you do it when you’re filling a big, fat book?” Is there something about the stylistic liberty provided by the informal layout that permits these more relaxed, generous, explanatory insights and something about the academic format that inhibits them?

Anyway, Riley’s book is a jewel – and it’s so short you’ll read it in a couple of days – or, since it’s not in any way linear, you can just keep it by the toilet.

A cheesy romance, a seaside class-war, a vehicle for the biggest female star of the time

The actual top film of 1914 was an epic 23-part serial called The Million Dollar Mystery, which it turns out is lost (how do you lose 46 reels of smash hit movie history, I find myself wondering?). So, I watched the second-highest-grossing film of that year instead.

Black and white photo of actor Mary Pickford, sad and barefoot, sitting on the floor of her shanty home in the 1914 film Tess of the Storm Country
TESS OF THE STORM COUNTRY, EDWIN S. PORTER, FAMOUS PLAYERS FILM COMPANY, 1914, 88 MINUTES.

You’ll definitely like Tess of the Storm Country, but only because of absolutely magnetic Mary Pickford – in feisty waif mode, right at the centre of it – owning the whole thing really. She’s surrounded in this cheesy melodrama by many big slabs of men, implausible blocks of motion picture timber – all tragically rendered exactly identical (apart from their hats) by Pickford’s brilliance.

Three male characters from 1914 film Tess of the Storm Country, including, at right, the film's villain, a miserable capitalist called Deacon Elias Graves, who is joyfully reading the text of a law he's just had passed that will make life harder for the landless squatters on his beach-front land

They are either utterly unconvincing landless fishermen or slightly-more-convincing heartless landowners. The miserable, small-town capitalists involved live in the big house above the beach and resent the presence of the squatters below. The film was shot in Santa Monica and Del Mar, so this could literally be the house that Robert De Niro seemed so unattached to in Heat.

Robert De Niro, in silhouette, looks out of over the ocean from his modernist apartment in Michael Mann's film Heat

Of course, this big house is really a classic bourgeois pile, with a columned entrance and a carriage drive, indicating prosperity and respectability (surely demolished and replaced a dozen times since). It menacingly overlooks the strand where the fisherfolk’s makeshift camp cowers.

Two hefty gamekeepers holding a gun menace a fisherman they've detained on a rocky beach
Gamekeepers

Doing the actual menacing, down there in the lower, realm close to the sea, are various thugs in heavy suits – they are gamekeepers – circulating authentically, armed and dangerous, on the beach and in the squatters’ camp. In the exalted upper section of the narrative swooning ladies in hats and some callow students are also present. The intermixing of these two realms becomes a plot point.

The Great Train Robbery’s famous final shot

Tess of the Storm Country was directed by Edwin S Porter, a veteran who’d made his name with the extraordinary The Great Train Robbery. Pickford, who by this time was already essentially co-directing the films she was in, was unhappy with his old-fashioned ways. The Great Train Robbery was the absolute state of the art when it came out. But that was over ten years earlier and the haphazard, static, flat scene-making we see here was already very out-of-date.

The story is flat too, based on a best-selling news-stand romance by Grace Miller White. Pickford apparently disliked the crudity of this standard-issue morality tale – featuring the staples of the era’s melodramas: dignity in poverty, illegitimacy and extra-marital sex, love between classes, murder and a wrongly-convicted man. Hypocricy in authority also makes an appearance. She recognised a hit when she saw one, though, and signed on without further objection.

TV mobster Tony Soprano smokes a cigar in his swimming pool. He looks menacingly at the camera
Conflicted plutocrat

In movies of this period the wealthy could still be depicted as unproblematically wicked. These are not the ‘complicated’ villains of later eras, nor the conflicted plutocrats or tormented mobsters of post-depression or neoliberal America. These are simply capitalist thieves, exploiters of the vulnerable. In this film (as in others of the period) our principle villain, the head of the wealthy family at the top of cliffs, literally whips Pickford’s character Tessibel.

Tessibel Skinner (Mary Pickford) collapses, whipped by wicked businessman Elias Graves (William Walters). A distressed woman enters from the rear to try to stop him

It’s wooden but sometimes it’s actually clumsy too. There’s an arresting scene where Pickford sics a (very old and gentle-looking) dog on one of her gentleman harassers. She sends the dog off out of the left-side of the frame and, bewilderingly, it arrives, barely slathering, at its victim’s location also out of the left-side of the frame. Pickford then sets off by the same filmically impossible route, arriving in time to steal her pursuer’s gun and depart, with the dog, out of the right-side of the frame.

Inter-title from 1914 film Tess of the Storm Country reads, in dialect: "I know we ain't married, Ben, but yer ain't never kissed our baby since he cum."

The film was a massive hit, yielding many times its $10,000 budget. Pickford told a biographer it was “the beginning of my career.” She’d been making films for five or six years, including 75 for D.W. Griffith, so this is meaningful. It was one of the first movies to be made in the emerging Hollywood creative complex and the beaches are all Californian. The community described, though, is somewhere on the New England coast or perhaps even in the old country – the hokey dialect in the intertitles is something between West Country English and Newfoundland Irish. Or something.

Bus drivers, bus conductors and the spirit of Tobruk in Sloane Square

Loyalty and transgression on the number 10s.

Black and white photo taken through the window of a London bus showing part of an older open-platform Routemaster bus in the background, a passenger visible through the smeary glass

I’ve been reluctant to share this story over the years because I’ve always suspected it’s a bit too perfect and that it might be an urban myth or bus crew folklore or something – a story passed around by bus conductors – but, thinking about it, my mum didn’t do that sort of thing, so here it is…

In the 1950s my mum and dad were both London bus conductors. It’s how they met – at Vauxhall bus garage. My mother, Bridie, from Ireland and not long out of her ATS uniform and my dad, George, from South London, between the river and the Elephant. He was a young lad, three years younger than her but they were both in their twenties.

Black and white photo of a young George Bowbrick, wearing his London bus conductor's uniform and Brylcreme in his hair, sitting in the driver's seat of a bus - in the early fifties
George Bowbrick, bus conductor, apparently pretending to be a driver. This is not his story

There were so many stories from that period. I imagine working on the buses is all stories, even now. My dad was the storyteller in the family so most of them were his but mum used to tell this one story that I always felt was so rich in meaning – about the period, about the people she worked with, about London and working life and all that.

My parents worked on the 10s and the 73s, both long routes that ran right through town. I’m pretty sure the number 10 went from Vauxhall to Kings Cross (via Victoria) and then out into the Eastern suburbs – Wanstead, Woodford and so on (bus nerds, correct me).

Black and white photo of a young Bridget (Bridie) Bowbrick in the early fifties, wearing a spotted party dress and a cardigan, handbag hooked over her right arm, smiling quizzically
Bridie Bowbrick, née Quirke, bus conductor. This is her story

Along the busy bit of the route – through the West End – the buses were crowded almost the whole time and they ran frequently – at the busiest times of day they’d leave the garage every 90 seconds or two minutes. London’s population had peaked in 1939 but even in 1951 it was still above eight million. It was teeming with working people day and night.

A lot of mum and dad’s stories centred on the strange, sometimes quite intense relationships the conductors had with their drivers. It was a partnership and a hierarchy. The driver was the boss, skipper, sometimes a father figure, and the conductor was a kind of apprentice – often younger and less experienced. The war had thrown everything in the air, of course, as it had before. Women had entered the bus service to cover for conscripted men and then, afterwards, many men brought the driving skills they’d acquired in the forces back to the buses. Drivers, consequently, in this period, were often literally battle-hardened military men. They’d driven tanks and ambulances and trucks in theatres of war all around the world.

According to mum, these men were charismatic – fearless and sometimes a bit unhinged. The way my mum put it, if you’ve been chased by Nazis across the Libyan desert you probably feel a bit less concern for what you’re told to do by a man with a notebook and a peaked cap. Managers and inspectors deferred to these men, left them to it.

So this story takes place on a number 10 going approximately North, in the early evening. The route’s still busy with commuters, it’s dark and it’s raining. My mother’s on the platform. Behind her, bunched up by traffic and rain, she can see five other 10s, in a line going back down the Kings Road. This is the worst-case scenario. Her bus is at the front of a convoy of others, during rush hour and in the pouring rain.

Bus conductors hate this. If you’re at the front of the convoy, all the crews behind you will make it their business to keep you there – that way you get to every stop first and have to pick up all the passengers and, of course, take all the fares, fold all the pushchairs, shove all the luggage into that space under the stairs, help all the pensioners into their seats by the platform…

Meanwhile, if they’re lucky, the buses behind won’t have to pick up more than a handful of passengers and their conductors can continue to lounge at the back of their half-empty buses all the way through town, watching the city go by. There are various strategies for dealing with this terrible situation if you’re the crew at the front – you can stall and wait a bit longer at each stop or try to persuade passengers to hang on for the next one – “the one behind’s empty!”

But ultimately it’s not up to you. The drivers behind will make a superhuman effort not to pass you – it is, after all, their duty to their conductors. And these are very loyal men, as I’ve already explained, men schooled by war, by years in the cabin of an armoured car or at the wheel of an ammo truck. They will not yield.

A London Transport RTL1125 bus waiting for a new crew from Gillingham Street, probably in the 1950s
This number 10 is of the right vintage – it could even be the one in Bridie’s story. It’s from London Bus Route Histories.

So, my mother and her driver – I’m pretty sure his name was Len, a Desert Rat – communicating through the bus crew’s code of taps with the conductor’s budget key or by banging on the roof of the cab – are resigned to their fate. The whole schlepp through the West End will be a nightmare and it will not ease up till the quieter roads beyond when the drivers behind might finally give up their stations in the convoy and generously overtake, waving sarcastically as they go.

But, on this occasion, on this rainy night, Bridie’s driver has a better idea. Sloane Square is coming up and he has a plan to get out of this bind. All six buses are now in a tightly-packed convoy with no gaps. The scene is set for an audacious escape. Our driver is going to do something so bold, so wrong (so in contravention of the rules in the drivers’ handbook) that he will be remembered for it for years afterwards – and quite possibly disciplined for it, if anyone can pluck up the courage to do so.

Map of Sloane Square area in London with the route of the No 10 bus (now defunct), from Kings Road, through the square and along Eaton Square shown overlaid
Pretty sure this is the correct route through Sloane Square

He doesn’t tell Bridie about his plan – there’s no code he could use to communicate this kind of transgression anyway – he just does it. The bus enters Sloane Square and proceeds clockwise around the oblong, past Peter Jones but then, instead of exiting the square in the prescribed manner, through Eaton Square and up to Victoria, he does the unthinkable and continues round the square, past the Royal Court, past the tube station and on round. You’ve already guessed it. His plan is to join the back of the convoy, escaping from the bind in one brilliant, incisive move, bold like he’s back at Tobruk. And this is a bold move. In the code of the buses there’s really no greater transgression that deviating from your route (or even getting out of timetable order). It’s right at the top of the list. If they were seen they’d be in real trouble, and the driver might even be dismissed. And it’s worse – there are very often inspectors at Sloane Square. This is high-risk.

The thing is, though, it doesn’t work. Our driver doesn’t break out. He doesn’t break out because driver number two sees the first one dodge the exit from the square, instantly divines his plan and – I told you they were bold – follows! So now two buses have broken the rules and two have headed back round the square. And, obviously, the third bus follows too. And it goes on, no one backs down. The fourth, the fifth, the sixth – they all follow!

They don’t stop at one circuit either. The whole convoy is now, like a big, red fairground ride, going round and round Sloane Square. And this is now a game of chicken. The first driver to lose his cool and turn off the square will inherit all the passengers for the rest of the journey across town. He will dump his conductor right in it and there will be hell to pay. It’s a matter of honour.

This is now all a bit wild, unprecedented, a thrill for all involved. The conductors are all hysterical – shouting to each other as they circle the square. The way my mum put it, this was a career high and the absolute peak of naughtiness in her whole respectable working life. She was giddy with excitement, giggling on the platform, swinging out as the bus took the corners of the square. She told me they made several circuits – passengers beginning to yell and complain, ringing the bell – before one of the drivers gave it up and turned North.

But the thing is, it wasn’t Len. It was one of the other drivers and Bridie was liberated, relegated to third or fourth place in the line of buses. Her heroic driver had taken an enormous, bold chance to save her a bit of work on a miserable Winter’s night. You can imagine what this did for their bond.

  • I’d love to have met Len – mum and dad stayed friends with a lot of their old friends from the buses – but my mother told me he died not long after this.
  • If you ever jumped onto the second or third bus in a convoy like this you’ll remember the disorienting experience of getting the bottom deck to yourself while the bus in front is so full it’s popping rivets.