TO HIDE FROM THE ROARING WORLD

Love, Sorrow, and Going to The Pictures in 1920s London
— ​Patrick Hamilton’s Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky — 

The three young working class Londoners at the heart of Patrick Hamilton’s trilogy of novels, Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, have dreams but few expectations. Like many millions in the 1920s, they seek occasional brief intervals of escape from their troubled lives and tangled hearts by going to The Pictures, often followed by Going Out to Tea.
 
The first book, The Midnight Bell, is the story of Bob, waiter at the eponymous pub near Warren Street, and his obsessive and self-destructive courting of a young prostitute, Jenny. Jenny’s life is inevitably chaotic and precarious and at the end of the book Bob, having spent all his careful savings trying to rescue her from it, leaves in despair to go to sea.
 
The second book, The Siege of Pleasure, is the back story of how Jenny originally fell into prostitution after a brief but stultifying stint as cook and general servant to three elderly householders in Chiswick. Apart from a few framing pages set at the same time as the culmination of Bob’s story in The Midnight Bell, the main narrative of The Siege of Pleasure takes place five years or so earlier.
 
The final volume, The Plains of Cement, tells the story of Ella, barmaid at the Midnight Bell pub and Bob’s friend and secret admirer, and is set in the same timeframe as Bob’s story in the first novel. Ella, whose education has been limited but whose intuition is sharp and her heart generous, harbours an unrequited passion for Bob, who regards her just as a kindly friend. Ella is obsessively courted by a pub customer, the considerably older and crashingly insensitive Mr Eccles, whom she finally rejects.
 
Going to The Pictures together with Going Out to Tea, often to a Lyons restaurant, punctuate the trilogy like route markers in a swamp.

The Midnight Bell was published on its own in 1929. The Siege of Pleasure followed in 1932 and The Plains of Cement in 1934. Since the main action of the first and last volumes of the trilogy is concurrent and that of the middle volume is set earlier, we can assume that Hamilton sets the novels and the various expeditions to The Pictures roughly between the years 1923 and 1928. He was therefore writing the trilogy across the transition from silent to sound film, but it was all set during the late silent era. (What is regarded as the first British talkie feature, Hitchcock’s Blackmail, was premiered in London in 1929, in parallel with a silent version).
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Bob finally goes away to sea, therefore, just in time to miss the advent of The Talking Pictures.

Major transformations also took place in Patrick Hamilton’s life between starting the first novel of the trilogy and completing the last. He became a successful playwright with Rope and Gaslight, his beloved mother died, he got married, and he was nearly killed and severely facially scarred in a car accident. And he became a Marxist. As his biographer Sean French (1993) relates, Hamilton’s Marxism was a personal variant that accommodated not only decades of admiration for Stalin and all his works but, in later life, wholehearted support for the British Tory Party, including its epoch shattering 1956 Suez escapade.

But perhaps Hamilton's theoretical understanding of the role of wider economic factors in the shaping of character and motive led to his portrait of the barmaid Ella in The Plains of Cement being deeper and more empathetic than either his earlier rendering of her in The Midnight Bell or his bleak account of the prostitute Jenny in The Siege of Pleasure.

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Working class Londoners dressed up for a date in the 1920s:
Brian Aherne and Elissa Landi in Anthony Asquith's Underground (1928)

THE MIDNIGHT BELL
Desire, Tussauds, and the Sea
​
In the first few pages of the first volume, we learn that Bob the Waiter and Ella the Barmaid live-in at the Midnight Bell pub and have adjacent bedrooms at the top of the building. Their employers (known only as the Governor and the Mrs.) are a kindly pair who are well disposed towards their staff. Ella has worked at the pub longer than Bob, a recent arrival of five months standing. Ella was initially hopeful of a romance with him and early on he took her Out to Tea twice and once to The Pictures. But, ‘There, however, the thing had ended.’  The good natured Ella has instead settled for friendship and good will but, as Bob is uncomfortably aware, she has a very acute sense of his moods and inclinations.
 
One evening, two prostitutes, a dark-haired one accompanied by the blond and beautiful Jenny, come into The Midnight Bell for a drink. And so begins the infatuation that will lead to Bob’s personal and financial downfall. His position as a waiter means that he is mobile and, duties permitting, he can chat to customers seated at the tables, a situation he now quickly takes advantage of.
 
Jenny and her friend, with well-honed professional flirtatiousness, comment on Bob’s good looks. The friend opines that he looks like a film star they saw at The Pictures recently, whom Jenny identifies as the smouldering Spanish-American actor Antonio Moreno. Bob bashfully declares that no-one had ever suggested this resemblance before.
 
‘But’, writes Hamilton, ‘the compliment enriched his soul, as he stood there.’
 
Learning that Bob, who is half-American and half-Irish, had an American cop for a father, Jenny again references The Pictures to conjure a mental image of the man, and her friend teasingly suggests that Bob should himself go into the films.

'Tell you who 'e looks like, Jenny,' said the dark one, glancing appraisingly at Bob'.

The flattering glamour of The Pictures then, is the honey in the trap that first ensnares Bob and eventually costs him his precious savings and threatens his sanity. His self-inflicted torture over the ensuing weeks and months consists of multiple chaste assignations with Jenny where she either doesn’t appear at all, appears late, or on one occasion appears early as if to criticise his own punctuality, goads him with signs of devotion or with harsh indifference, and all the time incrementally relieving him of his money while volunteering absurd promises to pay him back.
 
Patrick Hamilton, like his late Victorian predecessor George Gissing, had first-hand experience of the obsessive and destructive pursuit of prostitutes and other desirable but incompatible sirens, and many of his novels feature such obsessions and the occasionally murderous or suicidal feelings engendered.
 
Early on, after Bob and Jenny have spent the evening in a bar and dance hall near Leicester Square, Jenny hints that she will spend the remainder of the night pursuing her profession in nearby Soho. As they part, Bob ruefully reflects that he has lost an evening off which he might more enjoyably (and inexpensively) have spent visiting The Pictures on his own. But, infatuated by Jenny’s beauty, he quickly dismisses the thought.
 
The next morning, as Bob and Ella chat while they prepare the pub for opening, the attentive and intuitive Ella comes near to guessing who Bob has spent his evening with. Embarrassed by how close she has come to hitting the truth, he lies, telling her that he indeed spent a quiet evening at The Pictures. ‘I’ve heard that one before’ retorts Ella, further discomforting him and perplexing him with her perspicacity. ‘Her femininity’, the author informs us, ‘was beyond him’.
 
Some evenings later, looking forward to what he hopes will be a more successful assignation with Jenny the following week, Bob unexpectedly asks an astonished Ella if she’d like to come to The Pictures with him the next afternoon. He broaches the subject by teasingly raising her infatuation with the square-jawed American screen actor Richard Dix (née Ernest Brimmer).
 
‘For although Ella, in her heart of hearts, was a placid and efficient girl, she also worshipped at the shrine of pure beauty and romance. And in Richard Dix both these forces were incarnate.’
​

'Richard Dix,' said Bob. 'Oh,' said Ella. 'Him.'  And wiped a tumbler.

​Bob and Ella’s excursion to the Madame Tussauds Cinema to see Richard Dix in The Gay Defender is one of three accounts in Hamilton’s trilogy of visits to 1920s picturehouses that touch on the cinema experience itself and its effect upon the characters.
 
Madame Tussauds famous museum in the Marylebone Road had caught fire in 1925 and, unsurprisingly for a waxworks museum, had burned furiously for many hours causing damage which necessitated two years of rebuilding work. There had been a small Edwardian cinema in the building but this was replaced for the grand reopening in 1928 by a larger, modern cinema. To this, then, Ella and Bob now proceed…
 
The Gay Defender was indeed released by Paramount late in 1927 and starred Richard Dix and Thelma Todd. Dix played Joaquin Murrieta, a heroic Mexican outlaw figure said to be the inspiration for Zorro (and who may possibly have been more plausibly impersonated by Antonio Moreno).
   
From the environs of The Midnight Bell, somewhere near Warren Street, Bob and Ella take a bus the short distance along the Marylebone Road to Tussauds. Ella is ‘almost’ dressed for the occasion, but Hamilton fails to supply us with further details of this partially successful outfit. We know that she has dark fashionably shingled hair and a trim figure.
 
Bob purchases their two-shilling-and-fourpence seats. Ella views this as a great extravagance but refrains from saying so, intimidated under the scrutiny of the smartly uniformed cinema attendants. In addition to having savings, on which his entanglement with Jenny has already loosened his grip, as a waiter Bob benefits financially from tips to the extent of about a pound a week. Ella, positioned behind the bar, does not. So Bob has spent nearly a quarter of his weekly supplementary income on the cinema tickets, and there is the expense of Tea to come. 

Interior of the new cinema at Madame Tussauds, visited by Bob and Ella

In the auditorium, Bob and Ella encounter ‘dim shaded lights and heavy carpets’ as well two ‘voluptuous but doll like creatures wearing pert brown dresses and enormous bows in their hair’. Directed down a centre aisle by one of these exotic attendants, they stumble blindly along a row until they find their seats and are transformed into:
 
‘…part of the audience. That is to say their faces had abandoned every trace of the sensibility and character they had borne outside, and had taken on instead the blank, calm, inhuman stare of the picturegoer - an expression which would observe the wrecking of ships, the burning of cities, the fall of empires, the projection of pies, and the flooding of countries with an unchanging and grave equanimity.’
 
In this state, they watch Ella’s heartthrob Richard Dix — or, as the author tartly reminds us, ‘the two-dimensional ghost of Mr Dix’ — in The Gay Defender. They do not speak, except for Ella’s occasional remark of ‘Silly’ when something in the film amuses her. Bob has a different sense of humour and politely acknowledges her amusement with a smile, but does not share it — a situation familiar to many a picturegoer across the decades. Sadly, we will never know what nuggets of silliness may have invigorated Richard Dix’s interpretation of The Gay Defender — it is now thought to be a lost film.
 
They watch a newsreel, and then the main feature starts, a German film called ‘The Spy’. Is Hamilton thinking of Fritz Lang’s 1928 Spione? He is, of course, writing a fiction and not a historical document, but what follows suggest strongly that it could be Lang’s film that the Waiter and the Barmaid are seeing.
 
They decide that they will not be able to stay for the entire Picture, for they have yet to go Out to Tea and be back at the pub in time for their evening shift. This relieves them from engaging seriously with the film and they become talkative.
 
When the female star appears, Ella, again revealing her needle sharp intuition in matters relating to Bob, remarks ‘This is your type, ain't it, Bob?’
 
 ‘It was true. It was his type - a large-eyed, slim and shingled blonde. In calm and loveliness she eclipsed even the little beauty [Jenny] to whom he had given a pound two nights ago.’
 
The description fits well with the appearance of Gerda Maurus, the Austrian star of Spione, and the seductive, manipulative and duplicitous nature of her role is a fine match for Hamilton’s account of Jenny in the trilogy.

‘This is your type, ain't it, Bob?’ said Ella
Gerda Maurus in Lang's Spione

Conflating the vision of loveliness and eroticism on the screen not just with Jenny but with all the women he might now desire, Bob muses on who should deserve to possess such a creature. He decides that the rich are undeserving of this reward and only a heroic figure ‘or, in the last resort, himself’  is worthy of the prize. In other words, he has surrendered himself to the deceitful magic of The Pictures and their beautiful two-dimensional ghosts.
 
His reverie is further enhanced by the pit orchestra accompanying the film: ‘The music played tenderly, and Bob's soul was filled with adoration.’
 
Glancing at Ella beside him in the dark he unkindly wonders if she believes herself to be even the same sex as the vision he has just seen on the screen. But it is not in Bob’s nature to give Ella even a hint of this secret disparagement of her attractions and as they leave the cinema, now pointedly ignored by the uniformed ushers, and go out into the cold evening he takes her arm and leads her over to a little restaurant for Tea. Ella protests that this is extravagant compared to the anticipated Lyons or A.B.C., the affordable food franchises of their day, but Bob will have none of it.
 
The following Monday, a day obliterated by a suffocating brown London fog, Bob makes another expedition to Tussauds Cinema but by himself and in a wild mood. His prearranged phone calls to Jenny’s lodgings, from a coin-operated phone box and so entailing more expense, have not produced his anticipated assignation with Jenny but only repetitious and fruitless exchanges with her monosyllabic landlady. Resolved to spend on himself the money he planned to spend on the object of his longing, he makes his way through the fog to Tussauds and takes a one-shilling-and-threepenny seat. But this time he ‘had no pleasure’, being unable to concentrate on anything but his own disappointment.
 
The fog has thinned by the time he leaves the cinema to walk back to work at The Midnight Bell. But as if to remind him of the darkness of his misery, the kindly Governor shows him the front page of the Evening News which has a ghostly photograph of a policemen working by the light of flares in what should be broad daylight — thereby unwittingly confronting Bob with a gloomy visual metaphor for his own state of mind.
 
In the coming months, as his infatuation becomes more desperate and damaging, Bob patrols the streets of the West End in search of Jenny during his afternoons off and ‘never dreams of going to the pictures.’

​As Will Self (2016) notes, Bob stalking through the teeming West End in search of the ever unreliable Jenny is in a line of descent from Thomas de Quincey's wanderings in Soho a century earlier, searching for the kind child-prostitute Anne, who had saved his life. But while De Quincey was searching with compassion and hope, Bob is increasingly fuelled by a burning fetishistic rage which can eventually only be quelled by signing up on a ship bound for chilly Iceland.

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THE SIEGE OF PLEASURE
A Servant Problem, Lipstick, and a Gentleman

Jenny's beat — Piccadilly in the 1920s
Valentino in Monsieur Beaucaire showing at the Pavilion

Structured like many a film, with a framing sequence set in the present at its beginning and end, and an extended flashback comprising the central narrative, the second novel initially picks-up where The Midnight Bell ended.
 
Jenny has failed to turn up at Victoria Station to accompany Bob on a Christmas holiday to Brighton and she has spent the twenty-five pounds (nearly £1500 today) he gave her to accompany him.
 
She now needs to earn some money, but is fearful of a furious Bob finding her soliciting on her usual West End beat. Also concerned that a plain clothes man is about to arrest her, she urgently needs to get off the street and so picks up the first punter she can, a shifty looking character in a white silk muffler, and hails a taxi to take them to a hotel in Paddington.
 
In the taxi the punter asks how she became ‘a bad little girl’, triggering the flashback account of Jenny’s backstory that comprises the bulk of the novel.
 
Hamilton’s biographer Sean French (1993) recounts that the author’s initial intention in The Siege of Pleasure was an exposé, in the vein of G B Shaw’s Mrs Warrens Profession, of the economic and social forces that fuel prostitution. To say that the novel falls short of this intention is an understatement. French concludes that the book served instead as an extended revenge on Lily Connolly, a prostitute with whom Hamilton had been obsessively involved. Certainly, while the reader can infer the economic factors determining Jenny’s situation from the plain facts of the story, the narrative voice repeatedly highlights her supposed weakness of character, selfishness, and inability to either empathise or love as being causes and not symptoms of her situation. All the same, because the author may have despised Jenny it doesn’t mean the reader has to, and the story is intense and compelling, sparkling with vivid dialogue and accounts of the people and places that shape Jenny’s precarious life in the underworld of 1920s London.

​Now rolling back five or six years from the scene of Jenny and her seedy punter in the taxi, we find a genteel household in Chiswick where two sisters in their seventies and their eighty-three year old brother are in the grip of the so-called Servant Problem that tormented the middle classes following the First World War.
 
The spectre of women’s emancipation and of bolshevism, together with the blurring of class distinctions and the emergence of new work opportunities for girls such as retail and office work, had unnerved the upper and middle classes in their dealings with servants. Potential employers of household staff became wracked by the possibility that their inferiors would be prone to slovenliness, dishonesty, licentiousness, or (horror of horrors) ‘Answering Back’. The latter crime was the eventual downfall of a long-serving housemaid, the improbably named Audrey Custard, in Hamilton’s novel Craven House (1926).
 
Such are the anxieties of the elderly ladies who interview the eighteen year old Jenny to serve in their Chiswick villa. However, the sisters are in the event delightfully impressed by the applicant, and agree to a trial of a couple of days attendance, on the satisfactory completion of which she will ‘bring her box’ and switch to living-in. Bring her box, Jenny never does.
 
But not because of unsatisfactory work. On the contrary, she proves to be beyond exemplary as a servant and cook, and the sisters privately declare her to be a ‘treasure’.
 
Their only mild reservations, ominously, are that she has previously worked in a factory, that she is quite extraordinarily pretty, and that she ‘makes up’. Unable to do anything to undo the causes of the first two of these qualms, they also rapidly dismiss the third with the consoling thought— ‘But then they all do, nowadays.’
 
The cosmetics industry had exploded during the 1910s and 20s in symbiosis with the Motion Picture industry, addressing itself to the same new mass audience of female consumers with the same promises of glamour and escapism. Exposure to films whose stars were so evidently made up encouraged emulation, and industrially produced products such as mascara, eyebrow pencils, and lipstick (in the new swivel-up tubes) fuelled the consequent demand.
 
The cinema, then, had facilitated the popularisation among working class women of an affordable means of routine adornment that has previously been largely the province of actors, ballet dancers, transvestites, and whores.

We learn that the teenage Jenny is at this stage lodging in Camden Town above a pet shop (seemingly not the legendary animal emporium Palmers, but a nearby downmarket outlet). The one picture adorning her room is a photo of Rudolph Valentino torn from a magazine and fixed up with a single drawing pin.
 
Valentino was in a category of film stars, including other Latin types such as Antonio Moreno (mentioned by Jenny in The Midnight Bell) who in the Anglophone world were often seen by male filmgoers as suspiciously eroticised objects of desire unworthy of admiration by respectable women, in contrast to more homely and rugged Anglo-Saxon stars such as Ella’s Richard Dix.
 
Hamilton describes Jenny’s Valentino pin-up —  ‘The charmer’s drooping lids and sensuously ominous gaze followed her around the room’. Having thus set the scene and described Jenny’s humble and otherwise anonymous lodgings, the novelist immediately delivers his cruellest swipe at his own creation: ‘It is doubtful whether Jenny could be said to be the owner of either a character or a conscience.’
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The charmer's drooping lids — Rudolph Valentino

​Jenny has a devoted admirer about whom she is substantially less than enthusiastic, a young electrician called Tom, a pale thin youth who may or may not be consumptive. Devotedly making his way to Chiswick to meet Jenny after her first day in service there, Tom hopes to take her to The Pictures, the only place where she habitually permits him the intimacy of holding her hand.  Straight from her day’s exertions as a servant, though, Jenny is more immediately interested in going out to eat and suggests that they do this before going to The Pictures. Tom, disturbed about the cost to his wallet of doing both, protests that after eating out it will be too late to go to the cinema.
 
‘Not for the Big picture’ retorts Jenny, succinctly terminating the discussion. In the days of continuous programming and double features, as we saw with Bob and Ella’s visit to Tussauds in The Midnight Bell, a visit to the cinema did not necessarily mean watching everything on offer in the programme. Bob and Ella primarily went to see the Richard Dix second feature and stayed for part of the main film, only coincidentally enabling Bob’s enraptured encounter with its ravishing lead. Jenny and Tom are proposing to do the reverse of this and arrive in time to see only the main feature.
 
So first they go to a Lyons. For Jenny, visiting a Lyons, with its distinctive gold and white framed show windows loaded with confectionary and its bright and elegant art-deco interior, gives her almost as much pleasure as The Pictures. Lyons restaurants, particularly the larger Corner House complexes, were designed to offer affordable refreshment for working people in settings that, like the new super-cinemas, provided a glowing fantasy of palatial living.
 
So now the girl who an hour previously had been dutifully acting the part of the perfect servant could herself be waited on by a smart girl in a white apron and amuse herself contemplating the foibles and faults of the other customers. Lyons simultaneously ‘appeased her social cravings’, ‘provided her with entertainment’, and ‘furnished a setting for herself’. In other words Lyons dissolved the distinction between audience and performer. Going Out to Tea at Lyons is not just a supplement to Going to The Pictures, but a surrogate for appearing in them.

Built on the site of the Oxford Music Hall, the lavish interior of this Corner House
emulates the glamour and scale of the movies.

​Jenny having consumed a fish supper plus a cheese roll while Tom makes do with a cup of coffee, Tom purchases Turkish Delight at the confectionary counter on the way out. This is an essential aid to softening Jenny’s demeanour towards him, with particular reference to hand holding at the Pictures.
 
They make their way by bus to a small picture house in the vicinity of Camden Town, probably either a small converted music hall or a purpose built Edwardian cinema. Tom purchases their one shilling seats.
 
Jenny does, as anticipated, allow Tom to hold her hand during the film but herself concentrates solely on watching the film and on eating her Turkish Delight. Tom is happy about this because, her attention being so absorbed, she does not speak, which would inevitably involve contradicting or inhibiting him. He can fantasise silently in the darkened cinema that all is well between them and that Jenny actually will one day be his.

The Palace, Kentish Town — probably the type of 'small cinema' that Jenny and Tom visit

​This fantasy is abruptly shattered once they leave the cinema, and Jenny heads briskly home to her lodgings, leaving Tom with a brief kiss and an undertaking to meet him the following evening, but only on condition that she can bring her friend Violet, who she knows from her factory days.
 
The evening has cost Tom a precious five-shillings-and-threepence. This is approximately £14 in today’s money, which doesn’t seem bad for a meal (for one), a quarter pound of Turkish Delight, and two cinema tickets. But Tom’s wage, at three-pounds-ten-shillings a week, is substantially lower than an equivalent young electrician in London would earn today and Tom has forfeit what he regards as a substantial outlay without in the least enhancing his chances with his intended.
 
The following day Jenny again charmingly and diligently fulfils her full day’s duties at Chiswick, takes her leave of the grateful old ladies, and then sets off to meet Violet in Hammersmith.
 
The next eighty or so pages, the bulk of this short novel, cover just that evening and night and the following morning. This consists of what Hamilton mostly sees as the emergence of Jenny’s irredeemably weak and sordid disposition in hopeless conflict with her common sense and upbringing. We are likely to read it today as the grooming and abuse of a naive teenager.
 
Violet and Jenny soon find themselves in the company of two young men, Rex and Andy. Jenny is introduced to drink, under the influence of which she abandons her promise to meet Tom and is persuaded by Andy that he can get her a well-paid job as a mannequin (i.e. a model) if she sticks around with him. As the inebriated evening progresses Tom appears briefly and Jenny contemptuously and conclusively dismisses him from her life. Late in the evening the four are joined by a Gentleman, who divides his time between whispering banal endearments to Jenny, giving her whiskey, and, bizarrely, yodelling into the night.
 
After closing time Andy takes them all for a fast, drunken, ride in his car and runs down a cyclist, but fails to stop.
 
Jenny has never ridden in a motor car before and has never drunk alcohol before, but for a Christmas sherry and glass of Guinness once or twice. She is now close to unconscious with drink and at the mercy of unscrupulous and inebriated strangers.
 
The following morning she wakes up confused and with a tremendous hangover in what turns out to be the yodelling Gentleman’s flat in Richmond. Initially she is desperate to get to her job and terrified she will be implicated in the car accident. But eventually, having been plied with more drink, she agrees to spend the day with the Gentleman and to take payment from him, thereby abandoning any remaining hope of resuming her career in service at Chiswick. Lunch at a smart restaurant is promised, followed by a visit to The Pictures.
 
Just in case the reader has any residual sympathy for the two old ladies in Chiswick and their servant problem, a short chapter set a few days after Jenny’s disappearance now has them revising their view of their perfect little treasure and convincing themselves that she was probably a thieving dolled-up little slut from whom they have had a lucky escape.
 
Returning to the framing narrative, we find Jenny and her seedy customer having breakfast in the Paddington Hotel. Jenny has remembered where she has seen him before— he is none other than Andy of the drunken hit-and-run incident several years previously. She has remembered not only his face but his name, so manages to blackmail him for extra cash before he scurries away.
 
Much of the account of Jenny’s tumble into prostitution in The Siege of Pleasure is told through her apprehensive inner voice and her vivid assessments of the other characters’ demeanour and motives. This makes for a scintillating and at times darkly hilarious read. If Hamilton is harsh in his account of what he sees as Jenny’s responsibility for her own downfall, he is no more sparing in his treatment of the curtain-twitching snobbery of the old ladies at Chiswick, the spivvy banter of Rex and Andy, Violet’s air-headed and lascivious connivance, and the ignorant and privileged indifference of the yodelling Gentleman.
 
Himself a nearly lifelong alcoholic who died from drink related disease at the age of 58, Patrick Hamilton knew a thing or two about how drink incrementally damages your judgement and consequently your ability to identify your own best interests. Perhaps in spite of himself he left us able to extract a more sympathetic portrait of Jenny/Lily Connelly than he ever intended.

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The Plains of Cement
The Theatre, the Capitol, and the Last of London

Hamilton’s earliest novels had been criticised for their archaic stylistic flourishes, but by the time he gets to The Plains of Cement his dialogue, rather than recalling Charles Dickens, anticipates Harold Pinter.
 
Early in his pestering courtship of her in the saloon bar of The Midnight Bell, the dull Mr Eccles presses his visiting card onto a wary Ella as she serves him. She promptly deposits the card against a bottle behind the bar and, attempting ‘some sort of facetiousness’, retorts pithily and dismissively — ‘I’ll keep that. So I can refer to it.’
 
Mr Eccles first manoeuvre in his unlikely campaign to acquire Ella as his bride is to invite her out, not to The Pictures, but to The Theatre which, he has correctly guessed, she adores but has few opportunities to visit. Her initial lines of resistance being defeated, they attend a matinee on her afternoon off, followed by not only Tea but later by Dinner, although Ella is disappointed that the latter turns out to be at a Lyons and not at a smart Soho restaurant.
 
While the fastidious middle-aged Eccles clearly has some private means, the true extent of the wealth that he hints at remains doubtful, just as, while he regards himself as an Army Man through and through, he admits to having never been in the army. We are told that he lives (like Jenny’s late employers) in suburban Chiswick with his dominating Sister-in-Law and, we are unsurprised to learn, is grouchily displeased with his household’s servant girl.

​During the months of his pursuit of Ella and of her vacillating resistance to the dreary prospect of marriage to him, Eccles does not take her to Theatre again, and only twice to The Pictures. Any temptation on Ella’s part to succumb to his plans are driven by either her own lack of self-worth or her desire to better the circumstances of her impoverished and abused mother.
 
But while the reader may long for Ella to be rescued from the ludicrous advances of Ernest Eccles, he is not a wicked or unprincipled man. He is, like Bob, another lonely soul wandering the plains of cement and making ill-judged and hopeless choices in his quest for solace.
 
We learn no details of Ella and Mr Eccles two visits to The Pictures. But the novel does contain a retelling from Ella’s perspective of Bob and Ella’s visit to the Tussauds Cinema from The Midnight Bell. We again hear that she is surprised and delighted by Bob’s invitation, but now in the light of our additional knowledge that it provides an opportunity of respite from being pawed at by Mr Eccles in Regent’s Park. As before, we are told that Ella dresses up nicely, but not to ‘the Nines’, that she protests Bob’s extravagance and that they only watch part of the main feature. But there is no mention this time of either Richard Dix or Bob’s enrapturing German siren.
 
In the final chapters, as the narrative moves into close parallel with that of the climax of The Midnight Bell, Ella learns from the Governor that Bob has left, not for his one weeks holiday in Brighton, but for ever and to go back to sea.
 
Deeply distressed by what she sees as her friend’s abandonment of her to her loneliness, Ella resolves then to end matters with Mr Eccles. She writes a letter to him thanking him for his kindness but firmly asserting that they are ill-suited and must seek no future together. Still thinking of her impoverished mother, though, she does not post the letter but goes on her own to The Pictures.

The vast and luxurious new Capitol Cinema, to which Ella goes alone to try to forget her sorrows 

​The new Capitol Cinema close to the hub of London’s West End in the Haymarket was in 1928 one of the latest American style super-cinemas. Its own publicity, doubling up on both hyperbole and capital letters for good measure, declared the Capitol to be ‘THE SUMMIT and THE CENTRE of the Entertainment World’. With palatial mirrored lobbies and a grand auditorium dripping with gilt and seating upwards of 1500, it was designed to showcase the great spectacular films coming from Europe and the United States and had admission prices to match.
 
For Ella to make her way to the palatial Capitol in her solitude and despair and on the way to buy her favourite Italian cream sweets was an extravagance, but the only way available to her ‘to hide from the roaring world, and try to divert her mind from its aching preoccupations by looking at the shadows.’
 
We are not told what film she sees. But in any case The Pictures fail this time to work their magic.
 
Feeling belittled by the uniformed staff as she buys herself the cheapest ticket, Ella is shown to a seat near the front of the enormous auditorium. She has arrived in the middle of a film and tries her best to enjoy her sweets without making herself feel sick, but is intermittently kicked from behind by a restless group of children. Unable to concentrate or think of anything but her adoration of Bob and his abandonment of her, she gets up and flees the cinema.
 
‘But you cannot walk away from sorrow like that. And in any case there is nothing in the world more dreary, damping, and obscurely perturbing than to come out of a cinema in the afternoon to a noisy world.’
 
Cold and at a loss as to what to do about anything, Ella walks in the dusk towards Piccadilly (Jenny’s loitering ground) and is met by an apocalyptic vision of deafening traffic and swarming humanity:
 
‘…it really seemed as though things had gone too far. It seemed as though some climax had just been reached, that civilisation was riding for a fall, that these days were certainly the last days of London, and that other dusks must soon gleam upon the broken chaos which must replace it.’
 
But a voice calls out from behind her and Ella turns, dumbfounded, to find Bob, who has after all not yet left but has a few more days before his ship sails.
 
They go to Tea in a small deserted restaurant. And in an exquisite parting scene almost wholly told through dialogue, the real story of The Plains of Cement becomes clear— Ella’s realisation of the true depth of her love for Bob, and perhaps a realisation that although her love is not reciprocated there is something precious and lasting that is.
 
Ella must hurry back to The Midnight Bell to start her shift, and she asks Bob to post her letter to Mr Eccles, which he promises to do.
 
In a typical Patrick Hamilton touch, the Governor and the Mrs. have decided to move Ella into Bob’s old room, which is larger and better appointed than her own, an act of kindness with the unintended consequence of increasing her sorrow.
 
In the final sentence of the novel the new waiter, an unprepossessing and weedy youth, goes to bed in Ella’s old room and, through the thin dividing wall, hears her weeping.
 
The BBC’s fine and respectful 2005 television adaptation of the trilogy opts for a more subtle and optimistic parting from Ella, with the perfectly cast Sally Hawkins as Ella sitting silent and thoughtful on Bob’s old bed, gently clutching one of his precious history books to her heart.

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Patrick Hamilton and the Cinema
The title of The Midnight Bell had rooted the events of the book in an imaginary but emblematic inner London pub, while incidentally evoking a vaguely ominous ringing sound. Hamilton’s working title for the second novel had been the ironically cosy and whimsical A Glass of Port, but for publication he changed it to The Siege of Pleasure, evoking the obstructive emotional dysfunction of the characters.
 
By the time it came to titles for the final volume and for the whole trilogy it was clear that the novels, though describing the lives, hopes, and sorrows of Bob, Jenny, and Ella, represented more widely the everyday struggles of millions of middle and working class Londoners. The titles of Ella’s story and the trilogy called, to use a film analogy, for not just a wide shot rather than a close-up but for an aerial shot panning majestically across the great dusty expanses of the capital with its millions of souls. The eventual published titles The Plains of Cement and Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky pointed to the universal dimension of these domestic London tales.

The accounts of visits to the cinema in his novels suggest that Hamilton was probably a frequent and attentive picturegoer, at least in the 1920s. But he was cautious about having his work adapted for the cinema and anyone who has both read Hangover Square and seen the 1944 Fox produced film would be likely to agree that his caution was utterly prudent. He disapproved of both of the screen adaptations of Gaslight (1940/1944), although he was rightly delighted by Anton Walbrook’s sinister performance as the murderously obsessive husband in the earlier version.

Anton Walbrook and Diana Wynyard in Thorold Dickinson's Gaslight (1940)

Employed by Hitchcock to write a screen version of his own play Rope (1948), Hamilton engaged in weeks of tortuous (though very handsomely paid) labour at the unfamiliar discipline of writing for film, only to be dropped from the project by the great director without so much as a word of explanation or a thank you.
 
Writing to his brother Bruce, Hamilton said of cinema: ‘Films are fundamentally no good because they are ephemeral, ephemeral. You must write either printed books or printed plays.’  (in: French, 1993)
 
Yet his writing, and in particular the structure of Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky and its acutely observed commonplace dialogue with its Pinter-like repetitions and misinterpretations, is wonderfully cinematic.
 
In the 1920’s some general audiences were still puzzled by parallel editing and montage, let alone flashback narrative, and they required substantial pointers to understand the presentation of non-sequential events. As late as 1939 the initially limited success of Marcel Carné’s Le Jour se Lève was attributed in part to its flashback construction. An achievement of Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky is that it anticipates our appreciation of cinematic displacements of time and character perspective without resorting to tedious cross referencing pointers.
 
If Patrick Hamilton had lived longer and had he developed an interest in writing for cinema that was more than pecuniary he might have contributed significantly to the canon of quality British film in the mid twentieth century.

Patrick Hamilton  1904—1962

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©Ballooon mein Herr, 2019

References
French, Sean. 1993. Patrick Hamilton, A Life
Grey, Richard. 1996. Cinemas in Britain
Hamilton, Patrick. 1935. Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky – A London Trilogy
Hamilton, Patrick. 1926. Craven House
Self, Will. 2016. Introduction to Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (Abacus Edn.)
DVD
Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky. (2005) BBC. Dir. Simon Curtis/Adaptd. Kevin Elyot

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Note
Hamilton was criticised for the stylistic quirk referred to by J B Priestley as “Komic Kapitals”. Will Self (2016) defends their use, pointing out that Hamilton uses them because his characters think in them. Thus encouraged, their use has been adopted very selectively in the above