Bill Blewitt: Ealing's salt-of-the-earth film star

[DB7]

Ealing's salt-of-the-earth film star



North Africa. Desert. Night. A tiny Allied outpost is resisting the advance of Axis soldiers. This being a British second world war propaganda film, their survival depends on more than military prowess; it depends on the nine remaining soldiers burying their socio-political differences. There's a hard-drinking Scotsman, a fey Cambridge graduate, a Durham miner still scarred by service in the Spanish civil war and an anarchic Cornishman called Bill. Only the best of British stereotypes will prevail.

The year is 1943, the film is Ealing's Nine Men and Bill is Bill Blewitt, a middle-aged Cornish fisherman-cum-postmaster making an unlikely second career in the movies. It started in 1936, when a chance meeting at a village pub lock-in between Blewitt and director Harry Watt led to Blewitt being cast as the eponymous hero of Watt's The Saving of Bill Blewitt. The film was one of the short, slump-era documentaries made by the GPO (the most famous of which was Night Mail, narrated by WH Auden), this one illustrating the wisdom of the man-on-the-street who resisted investing speculatively to save with the post office. Blewitt rescued this unpromising scenario with what Pat Jackson, who directed other GPO shorts, called his "mesmeric gift of the gab, glorious Cornish accent, twinkling blue eyes, grin as broad as Popeye and the charismatic charm of the Celt". With the patronage of Watt secured, Blewitt was on his way to becoming an unlikely landmark of British film culture.

He was lucky that erudite film-makers found in Blewitt an evocation of the kind of Cornishness popularised by the otherwise austere historian AL Rowse in his best-selling Cornish Childhood. And that his rugged appearance mirrored the weather-beaten fisherman used on the cover of John Betjeman's Shell Guide to Cornwall. Blewitt was perhaps less lucky that local councillors saw Blewitt's minor stardom as an excuse to help sell Cornish cream and cut flowers. After the commercial success of Watt's North Sea in 1938, another factional documentary which starred Blewitt as an imperilled fisherman saved by the GPO's thoughtful management of coastal wireless communications, a worthy told the local press that his presence in films might remind tourists of "happy days spent among people like Bill Blewitt". But any future Blewitt had as the face of Cornish tourism was curtailed with the outbreak of the second world war.

Surprisingly, the war marked the high point of Blewitt's career. He began it guarding the newly installed telephone exchange at Mousehole post office with an axe, and ended it as something of a feature film regular. Regional types were needed to people inspiring stories about the nation pulling together and, more prosaically, the varied landscapes of the West Country and Wales could usefully double for those of north Africa and occupied Europe. After starring in Nine Men, Blewitt appeared alongside the cockney comedian Tommy Trinder in A Foreman Went to France, and had another hit with Ealing's Johnny Frenchman. His final appearance came as a water Gypsy in Painted Boats, Charles Crichton's peculiar directorial debut. Blewitt no longer symbolised communal vitality. He had become the UK equivalent of a Native American in an early cowboy film - tragically noble, skilled but backward, part of a dying breed.

Bill Blewitt had owed his career to an idealism that attempted to nurture a more organic media culture during the interwar years. After the war, this artistic attempt to grow a national media culture out of its constituent parts would take root in organisations like Granada television, thanks to film-makers such as Harry Watt. Film historians can further tell you that The Saving of Bill Blewitt was the first "story" documentary ever made. It is even plausible that the success of the GPO Film Unit's vaguely anthropological work further encouraged the Italian neo-realists to use non-professional actors.

And what's more, Blewitt's home, the Old Post Office in Mousehole, is now available for holiday let.

[Nikonos]

I have a very good friend "born and bred" in Mousehole, who has a whole stock of hilarious stories regarding Bill. He was quite a character and certainly a bit of a hero to the locals. Brought up in hard times though, he would be amazed that he is still fondly remembered...