David Lean: A Biography

By Gina Athena Ulysse

The life and its biographer provide a landmark work on the cinema. Emerging from a childhood of nearly Dickensian darkness, David Lean found his great success as a director of the appropriately titled Great Expectations.

There followed his legendary black-and-white films of the 1940s and his four-film movie collaboration with Noel Coward. Lean's 1955 film Summertime took him from England to the world of international moviemaking and the stunning series of spectacular color epics that would gain for his work twenty-seven Academy Awards and fifty-six Academy Award nominations. All are classics, including The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, and A Passage to India.

Kevin Brownlow, a film editor in his own right and author of the seminal silent film trilogy initiated with The Parade's Gone By. . ., brings to Lean's biography an exhaustive knowledge of the art and the industry.

One learns about the making of movies as realized by a master, but also of the highly personal costs of genius. The troubled Quaker family from which Lean came influenced his relationship with his son, his brother, and his six wives. Yet he showed in his work a deep understanding of humanity.

The vastness of this scholarly and entertaining enterprise is augmented by sixteen pages of scenes from Lean's color films, thirty-two pages from his black-and-white movies, and throughout the text a vast number of photographs from his life and location work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Aug 15, 1996
• ISBN: 9781466832374

Gina Athena Ulysse

Gina Athena Ulysse is an artist-academic-activist originally from Pétion-Ville, Haïti. Her creative works include spokenword, performance art, and installation pieces. Her poetry has appeared in several journals and collections. She is the author of Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importers, a Haitian Anthropologist and Self-Making in Jamaica and Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle. Her first book of poetry, "Because When God Is Too Busy: Haïti, me & THE WORLD is based on her one-woman spoken-word performance, which she has presented throughout the US and abroad.

Book preview

PART ONE

A CHILD OF LIGHT

"Miss Clayton has told me a terrible thing about you.

She’s afraid you will never be able to read or write."

DAVID LEAN’S MOTHER TO DAVID, AGED SEVEN

CHAPTER ONE

A FAMILY OF FRIENDS

It is said that famous men are usually the product of an unhappy childhood.

Winston Churchill¹

WHO’s David Lean? said the man on the telephone.

I had tracked down David Lean’s birthplace, 38 Blenheim Crescent in South Croydon, and discovered it empty and derelict. I had slipped a note through the letter-box asking any future occupier to get in touch as I would value the chance of seeing inside. To arouse interest, I mentioned that David Lean had been born here in 1908.

A year passed, and when a developer called me I had forgotten all about the note. Tell you the truth, he said, the name David Lean doesn’t mean much to me or my colleague.

The great film director, I said, holding back my amazement. LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, DOCTOR ZHIVAGO.…

Oh, yes, I’ve heard of them. It’s the name David Lean that we knew nothing about.

All the more reason to write this book, I thought. The developer invited me down to see the house, before it was altered out of all recognition.

David Lean, he mused. That ought to add five hundred pounds to the place. If you want to put a plaque up we’d be only too pleased.

No. 38 was a yellow brick house when it was built in 1908, the year when the Leans moved in, calling it Fairview. The house was substantial, with three storeys. As we approached it through the overgrown garden, I noticed the creepers had encircled the front door as though Miss Havisham lived there. The door had to be pushed violently; on the floor were scores of letters, a museum of junk mail. It was a miracle mine had been found. An old newspaper headline was visible beneath them: Should Empty Homes be used for the Homeless?

We picked our way to the kitchen, partly destroyed by fire. The flames had burned their way through later alterations and revealed the original Edwardian tiles. The electricity had long ago been switched off, and the developer pointed the way with a heavy-duty torch. It lit up the soot-blackened wall, and in the silence I became aware of a curious chafing sound, very soft, very eerie. The torch beam moved slowly up the wall and revealed at the top a spectacular butterfly, slowly moving its wings. The smoke-blackened kitchen had become a habitat for butterflies - quite uncanny, since David was passionate about butterflies as a small boy.

Upstairs, I could see the brambles had reached waist height in the small back garden, and then I saw the reason why the Leans probably bought the house - beyond the garden was a field. In those days there was no fence, and it must have seemed as if the garden stretched to infinity. The fact that the field has survived in the middle of residential Croydon is amazing enough; in those days it probably formed part of a farm, and the rural atmosphere, with trams clanking in the distance, must have been very appealing.

The bedrooms were exceptionally large for homes in the area, I was assured, and equally unusual was the room in which David was born, facing the street, which had a nanny’s room attached. On the floor above were generous servants’ quarters. Even in this fire-damaged state, the house was on offer for £77,000. In reasonable condition, it would have fetched £120,000. And its price in 1908? £60.

And yet when David went back to see it, after living abroad as a tax exile for years, he had been shocked.

My parents must have been very poor, he told me, because it was a miserable little place. A small street in South Croydon - awfully simple and plain.

No. 38 was by no stretch of the imagination miserable unless, like David Lean, you had spent a large proportion of your life in luxury. Nor could his father be described as poor.

Francis William le Blount Lean was a chartered accountant. In the Intermediate Examination of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in June 1898 he had passed first in all England. Even in his finals, in June 1900, he had received a prize for being placed fifth.² Although accountants, even prizewinning ones, were limited to salaries of two or three pounds a week when they were starting out, he was in 1908 a much-respected partner in the firm of Viney, Price and Goodyear. And he had been married for four years.

That Frank Lean was not ashamed of Fairview is suggested by a symbol of family pride, a visitors’ book, bound in red morocco. In it were the signatures of distinguished headmasters - from Leighton Park, Sidcot and the Flounders Institute - friends and relatives of Francis Lean. But the most distinguished name of all appeared against the date of Wednesday, 25 March 1908. The name was written in bold letters in red ink: DAVID LEAN. There were no further entries.³

Frank Lean also announced the arrival of his son in more conventional fashion in The Times:

LEAN on 25th inst. at 38 Blenheim-crescent, South Croydon, the wife of FRANCIS WILLIAM LE BLOUNT LEAN (née Tangye) of a son named David.

There was an announcement, too, in The Friend.⁴

The newspaper Frank Lean normally bought to read on the train was the Daily Mail, and on an inside page of that day’s edition he might have glanced at a Special Law Report headed Oliver Twist Recalled.

Two Poor Law relieving officers in the Chatham and Rochester districts of the Medway Union sued an alderman for libel. The alderman had tried to get a deserted young wife with her sick baby into the workhouse, and the two officers had behaved in such a way as to frighten the life out of her. The alderman was surprised to discover that the counsel for the plaintiffs was none other than (Henry) Charles Dickens, KC, a son of the novelist. Did he not mean to imply, asked Mr Dickens, that what had happened was as bad as the events in Oliver Twist?

As if that was not coincidence enough, the paper was full of events which would resonate through David Lean’s life and work.

A proposal for a Channel tunnel was rejected because it would provide an ideal route for a military invasion. No one was in any doubt which army the paper had in mind. Kaiser Wilhelm II might be a grandson of Queen Victoria, but he was regarded as greedy and treacherous. Ever since the Germans had defeated the French in the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, the English had half-expected the echo of jackboots in Whitehall. The very day of David’s birth, the Kaiser was paying an official visit to the King of Italy at Venice in the hope, no doubt, of forging closer military links. The paper reported a speech by Prince von Bülow, the Imperial German Chancellor, about the relative strengths of the British and German navies. He had no wish to create alarm: We wish to live in peace and quiet with England, he declared. But the speech did nothing to allay the suspicions of those who felt a war with Germany was inevitable.

Had he not been a Quaker, Frank would have been ideal officer material; one can picture him in command at Jutland. Thickset, handsome and dogmatic, he was part of a family so accomplished they were hard to measure up to.

I was always a little bit in fear of the Leans, said David, who would himself one day inspire the same emotion. They were very austere, very dry, very headmasterly.

Grandfather Lean, handsome, tall and bearded, was principal from 1870-1899 of a famous Quaker teachers’ training college called the Flounders Institute in Yorkshire. William Scarnell Lean had assisted William Booth, who later founded the Salvation Army, in his evangelistic work in London (a fact which David would recall when working on the film of MAJOR BARBARA). In 1864, he married Marianna Bevan and had ten children.

He was an eloquent man; they said he had the golden tongue among Quaker preachers and he passed this gift to his son. He was also artistic and although the most puritanical among the Quakers did not approve, he painted watercolours of the Lake District and wrote poetry.

William Lean was seventy-five when David was born and although he had visited Frank and Helena shortly before the happy event, he died that same year without having seen his grandson.

His eldest boy, Bevan, in 1902 became the headmaster of the Quaker School, Sidcot, near Cheddar Gorge, in Somerset, a post he held for twenty-eight years until his retirement in 1930.

I remember the wife of one of my cutters talking to me not long ago, said David, "and she said, ‘You’re not Bevan Lean’s nephew?’

"I said, ‘Yes, he was my uncle.’

She couldn’t get over it. I mean, to hell with my being a film director!

Even more famous in Quaker circles was Frederick Andrews. William Scarnell Lean’s sister, Anna Maria, married this extraordinary man in 1877, when he first took up his appointment as headmaster of the Quaker school at Ackworth, near Pontefract, in Yorkshire. Andrews, who had been a pupil at the school, remained headmaster from 1877 to 1920.

Well over six feet tall, Frederick Andrews was a much-loved figure. Unlike many educationalists of the time, he was fond of children and treated them in a direct, friendly way, which endeared him to them for the rest of their lives.

Despite his religion, Andrews tolerated the theatre, which he enjoyed moderately, but responded with much more excitement when the cinema came into his life. One of his favourite films was Douglas Fairbanks’s THE THREE MUSKETEERS which he saw shortly before his death.

There is no record of David meeting Frederick Andrews, but it seems impossible they would not have met since he lived until 1922, when David was fourteen.

Both sides of David’s family came from Cornwall, but it was his mother’s side which fascinated David. Helena Annie Tangye was known as the beauty of the Tangyes.

My mother’s family I loved, said David. "They were good-looking people, very artistic with a lot of gift in them. The Tangyes were artists, inventors and engineers. There were the two brothers - James and Joseph - who launched the Great Eastern down on the Isle of Dogs. The Great Eastern was Brunel’s ship, the first cable-laying ship to cross the Atlantic. Brunel couldn’t launch it and it became a national joke. The Tangye brothers went there and said, ‘Let us try.’ They used their hydraulic jacks and down she went. They always said, ‘We launched the Great Eastern and the Great Eastern launched us.’"⁵

David’s talents perhaps owed more to this remarkable family than to the Quaker educationalists. The Tangyes were Quakers too, but they had the spark of romance. Their very origins might have been immortalised in a Sabatini novel. In 1404, Tannegui du Chatel attacked the coast of England in revenge for the killing of his brother at Dartmouth the year before. He spent two months here and the records refer to the existence of John Taynggy later in the century.

The family genius, however, did not flower until after the Industrial Revolution. Born in 1833, Joseph Tangye was a farmer and a coal merchant at Illogan, a mining community near Redruth, in Cornwall, and his wife Ann ran the village shop. Ann was a redoubtable figure; during a cholera epidemic, she stayed when everyone else had fled, keeping the village shop open. She had three girls and six boys (although one died young). It was these boys, James, Joseph, Edward, Richard and George, who were to start the famous Tangye engineering company.

As soon as they were old enough, the boys were put to work in the smithy of Ann’s father, Edward Bullock. This suggests the old evil of child labour; in fact, the boys loved the place. Edward Bullock was fond of them and treated them with imagination and tact. He made them all think they were indispensable. Even if there was nothing for one of the brothers to do, he would put him in charge of the Grunt. As the hammer fell, he would call out, Now, Dick, grunt!

The oldest boy James’s earliest memories were of his grandfather among the great pumping engines of the Wheal Torgus Tin Mine. James was later involved in the construction of the Clifton suspension bridge. He became a prominent engineer, developing an idea of his grandfather’s for a safety fuse for blasting powder. In 1855, he joined his brother Joseph in Birmingham and two years later, the celebrated family business began.

They started a huge engineering firm in Birmingham, said David. When I was young, you couldn’t go on any railway station without seeing Tangye Gas Engines, Tangye Pumps, Tangye this and Tangye that.

Edward Tangye was obliged to work on his father’s farm, but he, too, was more interested in engineering. He became a locomotive driver on the West Cornwall Railway and when this work came to an end, instead of returning to the farm, he set out to emigrate to the United States. His ship, in the hands of a drunken crew, was wrecked off the English coast with the loss of two hundred lives. Edward was rescued and, still determined to emigrate, he eventually settled in the wilds of Wisconsin. Once his brothers’ business was thriving, they invited Edward back to England to join them, and he did so. He married his cousin, Ann Cowlin, and they had twelve children, one being David Lean’s mother, Helena Annie.

I remember a ship’s lifebelt, said David, hanging in the house that my grandmother lived in at Knowle - the Manor House - where they had a lovely conservatory with white grapes and black grapes, which I thought was the most glamorous thing I’d ever seen in my life.⁶

The grandmother, who lived to a ripe old age, is remembered by the family as being a woman remarkable for her coldness.

Richard Tangye, the fourth son, had a chip on his shoulder. He was educated at Sidcot, and became a junior teacher there at the tender age of fifteen. Only four-feet-ten, his life was made a misery by the other boys. Ambitious, clever and apparently utterly selfish, he had an excellent grasp of financial matters. Each brother had gifts that complemented the others, and Richard was able to bring what the others lacked - a sense of salesmanship.

The fifth brother, George, also a pupil at Sidcot (its thousandth), followed his brothers into the Birmingham firm. He was a generous, genial man who helped to support Sidcot in his later years, and who lived until 1920, when David was twelve, providing the ideal link for the boy to his family’s history.

A family row broke up the partnership in 1872 when Richard quarrelled with his brothers. Yet he was the one to receive a knighthood - although he received it for his work in municipal affairs and for his philanthropy. Part of this philanthropy was devoted to the arts - an unusual interest for a Quaker. Richard and George felt that a great industrial community like Birmingham should have an art gallery and a school of art, and in 1880 they put up the money for both.⁷

As Edward used to say, David, we’ve certainly come up from the mines.

*   *   *

With this extraordinary background, it is hardly surprising that David should have so prized his Tangye origins. One of his earliest feuds with his brother Edward - born three years later - was waged over the fact that he had been christened Edward Tangye Lean, after Helena’s father.

David was jealous of Edward anyway, though he felt that, as the older boy, the Tangye name was his by right of seniority. David was one of the few people to call his brother Edward; everyone else called him Tangye.

Ironically, when David fell for the actress, Ann Todd, her name was Ann Tangye. She was married to Nigel Tangye, a second cousin. He was precisely the romantic and flamboyant type that David most admired - a pilot and a writer. Fortunately, once the drama was over, Nigel Tangye bore him no malice.⁸

As for his mother, David felt that she had inherited little of the Tangye talent. Women in those days were kept under lock and key, he said. She’d do embroidery, but she had no artistic flair. Of her sisters, Aunt Florence - called Florrie, of course - was very good-looking and painted extremely well.

Another sister, Eveline, left the Quakers, to the dismay of both families, and joined the Church of England.

Florrie and Evvy never broached the subject of religion because it would have meant a head-on confrontation. I think she must have been a flirt in her way. She was always fond of the clergymen, which made things worse for Florence.

David’s uncles were somewhat more imposing characters. "Everyone went in fear and trembling of these brothers. My mother told me, ‘We were always expected to stand up when any of the boys entered the room.’ This applied to the younger brothers, too. The eldest brother was called Claude. He ended up as a rather important gentleman, Medical Officer for Health for Wiltshire.

"Then there was Walter. He was theatened by TB - tuberculosis was a forbidden subject - and was sent to British Columbia in Canada. I remember him coming back one Christmas and telling us about life in the wilds. He had nearly come to grief because he went to pick some berries on a bush and was startled by the arms of a bear coming round the other side. I thought this was terrifically glamorous, as indeed it was.

Then there were two farmers. Reginald and my favourite, Clarence, whom I adored. His wife, Winnie, warm as toast, came from the Eveson family in the Midlands. They were successful coal merchants and they must have been rich. Winnie never got any money from them, as far as I could make out, because she and Clarence were always broke.

*   *   *

During the writing of this book, I was contacted by Dr Sheila Tangye and her sister Hilary, daughters of Reginald, who thought they might be able to shed some light on the family. I visited them at their home in Barnes, and learned about the dark side of the Tangye family.

The Tangyes have the most appalling tempers, said Hilary. We can lay people flat if we want to, we can annihilate people. Dad said that no one could live with Aunt Helena. She had such an awful temper, it’s no wonder Frank couldn’t live with her. He tried to come back and couldn’t bear it.

Their father was the youngest but one of the twelve. David’s mother was his eldest sister.

The family of twelve, said Sheila, was divided into the first few, who were educated in a very liberal and expensive way, and the rest. Reginald went to Blundell’s [at Tiverton, in Devon] until he was fifteen, when he was taken away and given no further education. All Dad remembered of his childhood was ‘Good morning Ma, Good morning Pa, Good evening Ma, Good evening Pa.’ No love, no affection, nothing. He became a farmer - it was the only thing he knew how to do.

Reginald went to British Columbia with brothers Lance and Walter. When Lance fell ill, he brought him home. The First World War broke out and he was unable to go back. He married Imogen in 1916, and David and Edward used to spend the summer holidays with the family in the mid-twenties.

Reginald fell ill with cancer and died in 1933. The awful thing was, said Sheila, that as Dad was dying, Aunt Helena used to visit in her car. She would go up the back stairs and Dad would hear her going from room to room, looking in drawers, but never going to see him.⁹

*   *   *

Around 1910, the Leans moved from Croydon to a village called Merstham, between Redhill and Reigate. David’s brother, Edward, was born here on 23 February 1911.

We had a very pleasant house called the Fryennes, David remembered. I went back only a few years ago. It had a beautiful lawn and it was positioned opposite the church.

It was a church the Leans never visited; they attended the Dorking and Horsham Meeting House. Frank’s brother, Edmund Wylde Lean, who besides being a Quaker was also a chartered accountant, would bring his two children, Isabel and Barbara, down from Ealing.

David may have regarded himself as an extrovert, but he was also very shy and was silent and awkward when meeting people. His cousin, Isabel, was even more painfully shy. Their first encounter was, to put it mildly, cool and distant. The parents were disappointed. Since the children met so few others of their own age, they hoped that a friendship might be established. Two decades later, Isabel would become David’s first wife.

*   *   *

Saturday, 1 August 1914 was the start of the Bank Holiday weekend and the Leans had gone to the seaside resort of Sheringham in Norfolk. It was unusually hot. David was six years old and Edward was three. The newspapers were full of the talk of war, but the British hoped to stay out of it, assuming an assassination in Sarajevo in the remote Balkan state of Bosnia concerned only the Central Powers and Russia. They were more alarmed by the prospect of civil war in Ireland, between those who wanted Home Rule and those, like Carson, who were arming against it.

When the Germans invaded neutral Belgium, the British government sent an ultimatum demanding the removal of troops by midnight, 4 August 1914. Half an hour before the deadline, King George V held a council sanctioning war against Germany. Next day, the Territorials were mobilised. David was woken at his holiday guest house by an unusual sound.

I remember a motorbike riding along the front at dead of night, the driver shouting ‘Volunteers out!’ I remember it vividly because everyone thought there was going to be an invasion immediately.

The Leans returned to Merstham and before long the family had two soldiers billeted on them. The smell of their uniforms was a faint memory for David of his childhood.

The war caused David’s parents considerable anxiety. Since no Quaker would take up arms - war being contrary to the will of God - Frank would eventually register as a conscientious objector, like his brothers. But the war seemed such a clear-cut issue - a great nation going to the rescue of a helpless small one - that it caused Frank to re-examine his Quaker principles.

The Quakers had been founded in the seventeenth century as an extreme sect of the Puritan movement. Their founder, George Fox, driven to despair by what he saw as the hypocrisy of so-called Christians, claimed that Christ would speak to anyone; you did not need a magnificent edifice or an authorised parson to permit you to speak to God.

While this appealed to many as a simple truth, it struck the authorities as blasphemy, especially when the Quakers refused to pay church taxes of the time, known as Tithes. Quakers were persecuted under Cromwell and Charles II, five hundred dying in English prisons.¹⁰ They were first called Quakers in 1650 by Justice Bennett of Derby when George Fox, accused of blasphemy, bid them to tremble at the work of God.¹¹

Quakers believed that by meeting together in a simple building and sitting in an energetic and expectant silence, God might make use of any worshipper as a minister. They believed in frugal living and absolute honesty in everyday affairs. This, combined with their self-discipline, gave them a reputation which enormously enhanced their business dealings. They stood also for the abolition of slavery, the institution of women’s rights, temperance, the abolition of capital punishment, penal reform and the care of the mentally ill.

Originally they were known as Children of Light, a description which would have appealed to David. Where he would eventually part company with the Quakers was over their puritanism. While they recognised that instrumental music was unlikely to arouse anything but pleasant and sociable sentiments, they felt that the time it took to learn to play an instrument should be put to more valuable uses; the desire for excellence, they felt, put one in spiritual danger. David, who never learned to play an instrument, was nonetheless drawn to music, not to mention the desire for excellence.

The Quakers rejected the other arts, too. The theatre, for instance, could harm the personality.

The art of acting is based on impersonation, wrote John Punshon. Friends were unhappy with this, for it could not be sincere to express a grief or happiness one did not feel and one only had to look at the lives of actors and actresses to see the sort of damage such insincerity could do. There was a subtle form of Quaker humour, wrote Punshon, but the belly laugh is not one of their gifts.¹²

The effect on David was contradictory; while he rejected all the outdated Quaker restrictions, he was nonetheless thoroughly indoctrinated. He never regarded actors with anything less than suspicion and he buried himself in his frivolous amusements as though in a religious order.

I’m not a Quaker now, though I have kept a lot of my Quaker upbringing, said David. Moral overtones, really. Never tell a lie. Never cheat. And be highly suspicious of great show. I find it very difficult when I go into a place like St Peter’s in Rome and see people swinging incense and gold about. I feel it is too ostentatious. Quite wrongly. I don’t know why one shouldn’t be too ostentatious. But that’s from way back in Quaker meeting houses, you know. I think it’s a very good religion, very good. I like the simplicity of it. I think it’s quite good to go to a meeting, which I don’t, and sit for an hour in silence every week, and just think a bit with other people. I don’t know what I am now. I don’t think, as Mrs Moore says, that it’s a godless universe. But I wouldn’t know what God is. I cannot believe it’s all accidental. We’re still trying to find out, like plumbers trying to mend Swiss watches, what makes us tick, aren’t we? I just don’t know. Nobody knows.¹³

*   *   *

In November 1914, a Declaration on the War was distributed by the Society of Friends: All war is utterly incompatible with the plain precepts of our Divine Lord and Lawgiver.

The proper service of a Quaker in wartime was to save life. Young Quakers, who were not expected to enlist, could become ambulance drivers in the Friends’ Ambulance Unit. When it became clear that the war was going to continue, even Quakers had second thoughts. One correspondent to The Friend, Bernard Ellis, argued that it was the first duty of all to overcome the criminal, bind and punish him and to meet force with force.¹⁴ A couple of Quakers remonstrated with Ellis and he returned to the fray in November 1915, amid rumours of conscription. Quakers, he said, should take service in the Army and Navy to preserve the freedom of the country in which Quaker ideals may flourish during the ensuing peace.¹⁵

One of those who responded to this letter was Frank Lean.

The young man Friend finds himself at the present time in a position of no little difficulty, he wrote. Anxious to show himself no coward, the appeal to the man in the trenches comes with great force, but once again it is shown that man’s foes are to be found among his own household!¹⁶

*   *   *

It was a terrible time for Quakers. They were given no clear lead. Even so eminent a Quaker as Frederick Andrews, headmaster of Ackworth, refused to condemn those of his former pupils who joined the armed services.

In 1916, Herbert Asquith’s government presented the bill inaugurating conscription. That same month, at a Quaker meeting, many Friends refused to compromise by undertaking alternate service (hospital or farm work) because they felt that even hospital or farm work would indirectly support the prosecution of the war. During the passage of the bill, which became law in February, a minute was passed at the Kingston Monthly Meeting (of which Croydon was a part) stating that many of our members were not prepared to place body and soul at the disposal of the military authorities.

My father was highly respected, said David. My mother, too. They were obviously sincere people who believed what they said. They were not doing it because they were cowards. Some Quakers, after all, went to the front in the Ambulance Unit and brought in the wounded from the battlefield under fire.

The conscription bill contained a conscience clause, and from March 1916, War Office Tribunals interviewed what became known as Conscientious Objectors. Most of these tribunals were travesties of justice. Some Friends were refused exemption and forced into the army, to be transported to the front, where, if they refused to obey orders, they could be shot as deserters.¹⁷ At his tribunal, however, Frank Lean was exempted on medical grounds.

A few years earlier, said David, he had a mastoid operation and a lump of his ear was taken out. For the rest of his life, his ear looked very strange. You could see a bigger hole there than there should have been and that excluded him from military service.

*   *   *

Because the Leans were Quakers, the Church of England village school would not admit David and in July 1915, the family decided to return to Croydon. Frank bought Warham Mount, a large Victorian house with a splendid garden at 3 Warham Road (since demolished). There had been a Zeppelin raid on Croydon in February, when bombs had killed nine and wounded fifteen, and while such events were hushed up, and dealt with anonymously by the papers as visits, it was common knowledge in the district. Frank may have acquired his house as a direct result since many people fled London for the country.

David was sent to a kindergarten called Miss Clayton’s at 60 Park Lane, East Croydon. Here it became apparent that brilliant families do not always produce brilliant children. By the standards of the time, with their ruthless emphasis on the three Rs, David was dim. By comparison with his brother, who was still only four, he was alarmingly backward.

I remember my mother coming back one afternoon from a visit to Miss Clayton. She said, ‘Dave, Miss Clayton has told me a terrible thing about you. She’s afraid you will never be able to read or write.’ And she burst into tears.

Imagine the tests that must have preceded this revelation. Imagine the frustrated astonishment as Miss Clayton vainly tried to persuade David to write something more than his name, to spell cat or dog. Imagine the growing sense of shock that perhaps she had given a place in her school to a child who was mentally deficient. Had she been told at that moment that the dunderhead before her would become the most accomplished Englishman in his field, garlanded with honours - including a knighthood - she might have retired at once.

As it was, the appalling news filled the Leans with more dread than the war itself. The kindest theory was that perhaps the boy had some brain disease. The suspicion that he was mentally deficient they refused to acknowledge. This was perhaps a good thing, but it had its destructive side, for Frank Lean decided that the boy was being sluggish on purpose and began to bully him. As for David, he often sat glumly and silently - David Lean’s silences would later become legendary in the film industry.

I forget the real miseries, said David. I just block them out, so my childhood is a series of blanks.

David’s problem as a child was one of worthlessness. There was nothing he did that provoked admiration. His father, whom he looked up to, regarded him as a dullard, albeit with hidden reserves. His mother may have thought more of him but he did not value her opinion. She had a pedantic regard for the niceties of behaviour. She felt ill one evening and retired to bed and David asked, Has Mum got a stomach-ache? Helena was shocked and said, Dave, you don’t say ‘stomach’ to a lady.¹⁸

She was the only one to call him Dave and to the end of his life he loathed being called Dave. He associated it, presumably, with being treated like a backward child. He was convinced he had a handicap and he retreated more and more into his private world of fantasy.

*   *   *

An English child in the First World War was not subject to the fears of a child in the front-line villages of France, shelled, occupied, evacuated, shelled again. And not even this Quaker child was made to feel that the war was wrong. For that would be unpatriotic.

War wasn’t awful in those days at all. It was glorious, recalled David. "There was no suggestion that people were getting horribly wounded. The Illustrated London News used to produce these dramatic pictures of scenes from the front and they were stirring, thrilling. But it was generally acknowledged that you never asked anybody a question about the war if they’d been at the front. It was taboo.

We were out on the lawn at Warham Mount. It was a Sunday, a beautiful summer’s day with a clear blue sky. My father said, ‘Listen!’ We all stopped talking and the only way to describe it is to say that the air was moving slightly. My father said, ‘Those are the guns in France.’ The whole place was trembling. Very strange and rather frightening.

On the night of 23 September 1916, the Leans were woken by a sound that chilled them all. It was as though a railway engine with rusty wheels was churning its way through the sky.

My brother and myself went into my parents’ bedroom with its big brass bedstead and my father took us to the window and we saw this silver Zeppelin, lit up by searchlights, with the bursts of the anti-aircraft shells exploding around it.

At half past twelve, the L31 was over Purley and as David and his family watched, the Croydon searchlight picked it up again. Two flares from the Zeppelin drowned it. Ten high explosive bombs and twenty-two incendiaries were dropped on Streatham. The L31 then disappeared from view.

When we came back to the bed, said David, I saw my mother sprawled across it. She had fainted.

Such dramatic incidents, though, were rare. David was far more aware of the long summer holidays, when life in Croydon barely seemed to move, when he felt almost paralysed by boredom. And as his brother became more articulate, David felt increasingly outclassed and isolated.

I think I was my mother’s favourite, and my brother was certainly my father’s favourite, no doubt about that. I think my mother was sorry for me because I was absolutely eclipsed by this young brother of mine.

Edward was emerging as a very bright, very amusing child but quieter than David, who was regarded as an extrovert. They hardly played together at all; the fact that Edward was three years younger was constantly held up as a measure of David’s backwardness.

David did not enjoy the pursuits he was expected to enjoy. Reading was an effort and he avoided it as much as he could. He had no interest in the visits to The Friends’ Meeting House. Boys of low academic ability were forgiven if they shone at sport, but David wasn’t much good at this either, and games requiring mental ability, like chess, completely defeated him. He would spend longer and longer gazing into space, actually deep in thought but to his father, merely confirming his worst suspicions.

David was developing an inner eye, which perceived different things to his contemporaries. It was as though he was an observer from another time. Taking no notice of cricket, which obsessed his friends, he was fascinated by such mundane matters as methods of transportation.

Horses and trams were an important part of my childhood; the clop-clop-clop of horses’ hooves on cobbles and the noise of tram bells and the tram wheels on the tracks. The trams have disappeared along with the horses. I can remember people going round and collecting the horse manure. I can see the cart wheels, bright silver from friction, the metal lining in place of a tyre, gleaming, highly polished silver, like a railway line. Buses were a rarity in my part of the world. It was nearly all trams and the exciting flash and crackle as the arm travelled along the wire - I used that in DOCTOR ZHIVAGO.

*   *   *

Towards the end of the war, David left Miss Clayton’s - no doubt to her relief - and joined his prep school. He became one of the sixty-five day boys at The Limes, on the summit of Melville Avenue. The school was known as a preparatory school because, like others of its kind, it prepared boys for public school and the Royal Navy. It was unusually well equipped for the period - when some prep schools had more in common with Dotheboys Hall of Nicholas Nickleby - with a science laboratory, a carpentry shop, a gym and extensive playing fields.

The playing fields were lined with poplars and hanging from their branches by silken threads David found puss-moth caterpillars. He became fascinated with butterflies and from this flourished a deep love for natural history. At the end of his life, goaded by nostalgia, he asked his personal assistant to find some examples of these butterflies. By then, the puss-moth butterfly had become an endangered species.

He told me that he used to watch butterflies all the time, recalled Sandra Lean, David’s widow. He would never catch butterflies, however. If a bee entered the house, or a wasp, he would not kill it. He would catch it in a glass and release it out of the window. And the same applied to butterflies. He was fascinated with butterflies and their colours.

One of the few books with David’s name in it which survives from his childhood is The Look About You Nature Book by T.W. Hoare. Judging from its battered state, it was much loved. The fifty-six colour plates were obviously pored over, and the book must have accompanied David on country expeditions. Its cover has almost fallen off.

During the latter part of the morning of 11 November 1918, the boys at The Limes heard a curious series of sounds from Croydon - first the air-raid warning, then the church bells, which had been silent for so long, pealing into the autumn air. The matron, Miss Murray, marched in to the dining hall and told the masters that the Armistice had been signed. None of the boys understood the significance of the word - least of all David - and the masters had to explain it. The boys rushed out to the playground and cheered themselves hoarse. Despite their yelling they could still hear the crowds cheering and the racket from Croydon as maroons were fired and bugles sounded the All Clear. The boys at The Limes would be of military age well in time for the next war.

CHAPTER TWO

THE BREAK

FRANCIS Lean was a pillar of the establishment in the City, where he worked, and in Croydon where he lived. He was particularly valued for his contributions to his religion.

"He used to speak at the Croydon Meeting House,¹ much to my embarrassment, said David. In a Quaker meeting there are no set sermons, anybody can stand up and speak whenever they like. My father used to speak quite a lot and everybody used to come up to my mother afterwards and say, ‘Oh, we did enjoy your husband this morning.’"

Francis William le Blount Lean lies like a dark shadow over David’s life. I tried on several occasions to persuade him to give me a word picture of the man, and each time he managed to avoid doing so. When he was obliged to describe some aspect of his father, it was delivered in dour tones. He gave the impression that had he cast a film of his life, his father would have been played by Charles Laughton, a combination of Captain Bligh and Mr Barrett, of Wimpole Street fame.

And yet Kay Walsh, David’s second wife, recalled him with admiration.

He was extraordinary, because he was an absolute smasher. If you think David and Edward were handsome, my God, this man! He was a beauty. I would have gone missing for him any day.²

Norman Spencer, David’s production manager, met Frank in later years.

He was an all-round man, not at all narrow-minded. David’s mother had a curiously narrow mind, I felt. I always regarded David’s father as a very nice, dignified, square kind of man, a charming Henley gentleman.³

Born in Birmingham in 1879, Frank Lean was accustomed to success. He was the author of a work imposingly entitled Companies Act 1907. A Classified Abridgement of the Principal Provisions Affecting Directors, Secretaries and Auditors. He had a first-class business mind, and it was a pity that none of it was inherited by his son.

He had the sort of brain that analysed everything, docketed everything, and put everything into neat categories in his mind, said a member of the family. David didn’t fit in anywhere.⁴

In the light of his career, perhaps it was positively helpful that Frank and Helena refused to allow David to go to the cinema. Had he been allowed to go on a regular basis, it is possible that the shattering impact that the moving picture made on him would have been dissipated.

My father wasn’t allowed to go to the theatre when he was a boy because it was a place of sin. Gradually, the stage became legitimate and he used to take us all off to the theatre and that was fine. But the cinema..! My parents regarded it as a place of wickedness.⁵

David told Stephen Silverman that his parents were pretty advanced, as a lot of Quakers in those days were, but that they regarded cinemas as absolute dens of vice. They objected to the wildly emotional portrayals of people like Pola Negri and Nazimova. Since the Leans did not visit the cinema anyway, this seems questionable. It was, as Lean acknowledged, much more a question of class.

I suppose the real reason was that the cinema was the entertainment of the common people and there were very common people performing in it.⁶

For much the same reason he was denied children’s comics. "My brother and I used to read The Rainbow in the six-foot forest of artichokes in the kitchen garden. I loved the flow of brightly coloured illustrations telling their stories in pictures. Because of this, I was fascinated by the outside of those forbidden cinemas with their display of stills from their current attraction. Sword fights, ships, deserts and glamorous men and women."⁷

David’s brown studies gradually veered more towards fantasy and magic. If his parents denied him the cinema, his father would sometimes take him to see a magician called Captain Maskelyne and his show.

They were wonderful illusionists. You’d see a blank stage and a lake would appear, and then a swan swimming on the lake. I don’t know how the hell it was done. They also did sawing people in half, which I suppose is looked upon as commonplace now. But it was absolute magic to me.⁸

Another illusion showed a motor-cycle and rider circling around the stage, then entering a wooden crate which was hoisted in the air. A ray was aimed at the crate which disintegrated, leaving no trace of motor-cycle or rider …

I always see myself as Captain Clive Maskelyne, in tails, saying, ‘Now ladies and gentlemen, watch carefully. Yes, it’s a door. Yes, it’s opening. Someone is coming in…’ It’s as if I were telling a story, in very simple terms, and I would think to quite a low-brow audience.⁹

Fortunately, David was able to visit the cinema by proxy, thanks to the charwoman at Warham Mount, a lady of Irish origin called Mrs Egerton.

"She loved the cinema. She knew I wasn’t allowed to go, so she described the cinema to me. I couldn’t understand it. I remember saying, ‘But what happens when they talk?’

"‘Well,’ she said, ‘they open their mouths and then writing comes up on the screen - what they’re saying.’

"‘Writing comes … what do you mean? It can’t look any good.’

"‘It does. It looks as if they’re talking.’

I learned about the movies from Mrs Egerton. She was a stout woman with a jolly, sweet face. She was very respectably dressed in the kind of Cockney way that people like her dressed in those days. She had a tremendous sense of humour and was very warm. She really loved me. It was the first love, I think, that I ever experienced.

Mrs Egerton was married to a horse-cab driver who wore a bowler hat and moustache.

I can still see him with a whip, sitting on the top of his cab. And it seemed rather incongruous, because loving her as I did, I found it rather hard to accept him.

It was entirely fitting that Mrs Egerton should have adored Charlie Chaplin, though she could hardly have known that he had borrowed his walk from a South London horse-cab driver.

We had a huge kitchen in the basement of Warham Mount, said David. "She imitated Chaplin very well and she would sit me on a kitchen chair and I remember her walking round and round our great kitchen table with her toes turned out, then breaking into a run and skidding round the corners on one leg. I used to roll around with laughter. When I finally saw him, she was absolutely bang on.

"Mrs Egerton represented the public of those days and my mother couldn’t possibly have understood what Mrs Egerton appreciated in Charlie Chaplin. When my mother expressed her distaste of Charlie Chaplin, something happened to her mouth. It was because he was a common, vulgar little man. He would pick up a child, and you could tell that the child had peed on his lap. Now that appalled her. She regarded it as a considerable lapse of taste.

"I learned later from my mother, who was somewhat put out by it, that Mrs Egerton came to her one day and asked if she would contemplate Mrs Egerton adopting me. I could hardly believe it and I still don’t understand it to this day.

I really loved Mrs Egerton, but I never dreamed of running away with her and never considered myself unloved. But she was my first ‘other woman.’ She was gay, she laughed a lot and she had a large dose of that lovely cockney vulgarity. By comparison, my mother and father seemed to belong to a museum - ruffles, stiff collars, ties and politeness. Mrs Egerton had sex.¹⁰

*   *   *

Since 1920, David’s school, The Limes, had been under the headmastership of Major Harold Atkinson.¹¹

The very mention of his name brings back his smell, said David. Brilliantine in his hair, Turkish cigarettes - he seemed terribly sophisticated. Nothing about The Limes excited me. I was not good at anything, but it was all reasonably pleasant.¹²

A former pupil of The Limes who remembered the schoolboy David was Maurice Cooke of Purley.

I tell you one thing that has always puzzled me, he said. David was two years older than me - I was born in 1910 - and yet we were always in the same class. We moved up together. He can’t have been very bright, can he?

And that, of course, was the problem. It was to the Major’s credit that he and his staff managed it with such tact that David was only vaguely aware of it.

I don’t know if he noticed, or if anyone else noticed. I doubt it. He was never depressed or anything. Major Atkinson was a very fine teacher, very fair and was particularly strong with boys who weren’t good at something - football, for instance. He was a great encourager.¹³

David had a toy engine to play with at home, but it was only when Frank and Helena took the boys to Cornwall on holiday that his love affair with steam engines began. (He later haunted railway stations to watch the trains.)

Paddington was the magic place, said David. "That’s where the great holiday started. My father always took me down to see the engine of the Cornish Riviera Express that was to pull us down to Cornwall. I loved these steam engines and that’s probably why I put them in my films.

You left for Cornwall about ten-thirty in the morning and you got down there about five. First stop Exeter. It was Dawlish where the train suddenly came out beside the sea. That was very exciting. We stayed at the Carbis Bay Hotel. There were tremendously long beaches with hardly anybody on them. Yet I remember my mother walking miles down the beach, away from my father, my brother and myself, and only then did she get into her bathing costume. She went into the sea as far as her middle and that was all, and we didn’t go anywhere near her because she was undressed, as it were. The prudery was extraordinary. I think I’m still a bit of a prude now because of all that.¹⁴

*   *   *

Towards the end of David’s days at The Limes, he began to notice, whenever he came home, that the atmosphere at Warham Mount was becoming more and more strained. Helena was depressed, and when Frank came home in the evening, he was tense and silent.

Rumours passed like an electric current around the Lean and Tangye families. Of those relatives who were told - or who sensed - what was happening, only one did anything for David.

"I don’t know if they saw things going on that I didn’t see; I rather suspect they did. But for my eleventh birthday, Uncle Clement gave me a Kodak Box Brownie camera. It seems nothing now, but in those days it was the most enormous compliment. To be given a camera under normal circumstances, you’d have to be at least seventeen. It was the first time somebody gave me something which made me feel special.

Everybody said, ‘He’ll never be able to use it’ but actually I became very good and mad keen for taking pictures.

The Box Brownie had been introduced in 1900 at five shillings. Fifty thousand were sold within the year. It was a simple affair, the equivalent of today’s point-and-shoot cameras, except that it used roll film with only eight exposures. It had a good lens, and David learned about photography by printing his own films.

"When you took photographs in those days, you printed them on daylight printing paper. You put the negative into a frame, you held the frame up to the sunlight and as the sun penetrated, it got darker and darker and when it reached what you thought was the correct density, you took it out and put it in hypo. It was a sort of secret of mine. I felt, ‘I can do this’, and so I just loved cameras. I still do.

I was not the kind of child who rushed to their parents and said, ‘Look at this!’ because I didn’t think my opinion was of any account. I always had this brother who was way ahead of me. I might show an unusually good photograph to my mother, but that was one of the awful things. Nothing I did really impressed anybody. Nevertheless, that Box Brownie really started me off.¹⁵

*   *   *

In 1921 there was a dismal change of existence for David. The family moved from Warham Mount to Park Lane in East Croydon, near Miss Clayton’s and the Quaker meeting house. The curious thing about the move was that it was in no sense an improvement. Whereas Warham Mount had four storeys and a beautiful garden, the new house - 97 Park Lane - had a much smaller garden and was a semi-detached house of three storeys.

We can’t have had a drop in our standard of living. It must have been that father was preparing to leave us when we moved to that miserable little house at Park Lane. He must have been preparing for the break.

Frank Lean had met a handsome, red-haired war widow. So deep was the injury caused by this liaison that I have been asked not to identify the woman. I shall call her Margaret Merton. Born in 1888, she came from a prosperous middle-class family. Her father was that unusual figure in the Edwardian era - a militant atheist.

Margaret was a pianist of ability, who gave public concerts in Croydon. There are two versions of how she met David’s father. One is that Frank attended a charity concert at which she played. The other is that they met at a charity dance in George Street, Croydon. Since Frank loved music but could not dance a step, this seems less likely. In any case, Frank was immediately attracted to her and became friendly with her small son, Stephen, aged six.

At first the friendship was platonic. Margaret was even invited to Warham Mount for tea. Stephen remembered her coming home and saying, It was extraordinary. They didn’t have a carpet on the stairs, they had lino!

Perhaps because they sensed their marriage was doomed, and they did not want its disintegration to be observed by their Quaker Friends, Frank and Helena decided to make a clean break. In March 1921, a letter of resignation arrived at the Kingston Monthly Meeting (which in those days included Croydon). Theodora Clark and Percy Harris were asked to visit the Leans in order to compile a report.

The report survives. I expected to read an honest appraisal of their marital state - Quakers being famous for their honesty - and possibly stern admonition from the two Friends. Instead, the report, dated 11 May 1921, merely quoted how the Leans (one can safely assume Frank did all the talking) had fallen out of sympathy with Quaker ideas.

"1. They find our meetings for worship very frequently lacking in interest. They consider that the advantages of our freedom are outweighed by the necessity of having, from time to time, to listen to unedifying addresses. They feel, too, that the music and especially perhaps the opening hymn, in the Congregational Church Service, is distinctly helpful in inducing a spiritual uplift and sense of unity in the congregation. They find the absence of music in our meetings a definite loss.

"2. They are not in sympathy with the pacifist position and consider that the Society stresses this matter far too much. In their opinion, Friends fail to realize that the freedom and security of life and property which they now enjoy are due largely to the baulking of the German attempt to invade this country by the entry of England into the war.

3. In their judgment, the Society of Friends concerns itself too much with political matters and is too prone to offer advice to the Government on various questions that arise from time to time.

The visitors expressed their regrets, hoped that the resignation would not sever friendships, and assured them of a welcome should they ever decide to return to the Society.

"We enquired as to David and Edward and it appears likely that they will attend the children’s class at Purley Congregational Church, but the parents did not desire that their names should be removed from our register unless and until the boys themselves, on reaching maturity, should express a wish for this to be done.

In conclusion we made it clear to our Friends that we all wished them Godspeed in their new surroundings and assured them that they had the cordial sympathy and understanding of their Friends in Park Lane.¹⁶

The resignation was accepted.

*   *   *

The breakup of the marriage was an agonisingly slow process, with Frank slipping away whenever he could to see Margaret, who had taken a flat overlooking Kew Green. She and Frank felt compelled to come together, but they resisted it as long as they could.

Divorce in those days was worse than bereavement. Married couples would often endure any torment rather than inflict this fate upon themselves. The stigma sometimes led to suicide. It was not uncommon for the husband to take a mistress and for life to continue, in all outward respects, as before. This is what happened in this case - for a while.

David never knew why his father left. In later years, however, Edward’s wife, Doreen, became a confidante of Helena who said that she felt it had been her fault that the marriage had failed.

I had had a miscarriage after Edward was born, and I refused to let my husband anywhere near me.

Coolness developed into hostility, and the tension between his parents quickly became all too apparent to David.

My most vivid memory is of hearing loud voices at 97 Park Lane, and going upstairs and finding my father in my mother’s bedroom, he in his braces, my mother in tears, and my father turning to me as I came in and saying, ‘David, I can’t stand it any longer. I’m going.’¹⁷

When Frank made the final break, he and Margaret left the district and went to live in Hove.

Brighton we always called it. If Brighton came up in any conversation it was a terrible thing because that was where they were.¹⁸

*   *   *

David and Edward suffered a double displacement; not only had they lost their father, but he had moved into another family, with a substitute son.

Stephen, when he first met Frank, was instructed to call him Uncle, which became Uncle Bluncle, eventually shortened to Buncs. Because of the delicate nature of the relationship, everybody else found this a convenient way of referring to him.

Buncs evidently felt guilty for the rest of his life.

David’s mother, said Stephen, retreated into her Cornish Tangye background and absolutely refused any question of a divorce. The family was very much split - not so much on her side as on Buncs’ side. They were Quakers, too, and Buncs I know had terrible struggles with his conscience. Two or three of his brothers and sisters came out on his side. The others cut off from him.

Surprisingly, Stephen recalled being taken several times to the Meeting House at Park Lane, but once Frank resigned he seemed to abandon all his hold on religion. He even took Margaret and Stephen to the cinema every week!

*   *   *

The final split occurred in 1923, when David was fifteen. When my father left, he said, "I became the mainstay for my poor mother, who collapsed under the strain of the breakup of her marriage. She was desperately unhappy. She used to spend her time crying and to this day I cannot abide tears. If my wife starts to cry, I say, ‘Stop crying!’ in a