A short video introduction By Ken Loach: https://vimeo.com/13105600
This social explosion of a seminal film was released in the year of 1966. The following trivial anecdote occurred the year before in 1965 and thus, a valid excuse for posting as such in this film’s penultimate half century anniversary.
In 1965 I was a ‘model-perfect’ [sic] pupil at Harry Lucas Secondary School in Farm Street Hockley. The school never quite achieved the introduction of ‘Rhodes Scholar Status’ for its students despite the monumental efforts (mainly in vain) of its headmaster, Mr John Walker. The man looked for all intents and purposes like the Scottish actor David Haymen with perhaps a touch of the Bill Paterson’s about him: small in stature with a definite aura of menace.
He was born into abject poverty in Little King Street, just off Great King Street. This pearl of information was divulged to me during one of his many, many lectures I personally received – delivered with his customary wagging finger whilst a cane swished the air with swash! It would be many years later before I came to appreciate his devotion to his calling, and it was a devout calling for him, for he had the wherewithal to be headmaster in any school of his choosing yet, he chose the school most near to his abject poverty birthplace.
And so it came to pass, that about this time of year in the year of 1965 and certainly around the Easter holidays, Johnny Walker addressed the morning school assembly. On stage with him were one or more probably two strangers. These strangers (so Walker went on to explain) were going to make a film, a cinematic film about the area we lived in. The strangers were looking for people from the area to cast in this film, including pupils from Harry Lucas School. We were told to ask out parents for their verbal consent (or words to that effect) and the following day the two strangers would go from classroom to classroom and watch us during playtime to pick and cast those pupils they needed for filming.
You can imagine the buzz from the school assembly that day - we had visions of Hollywood stardom with starring-roles in another Cliff Richard ‘Summer Holiday’ or the prospects for realising my secret desire of kissing Hayley Mills on a deserted island somewhere in the Pacific. With these fanciful notions filling our heads all of the day and most of the night, and our parents informed of the pending auditions - zinc baths were filled, children were bathed and it wasn’t even a Friday!
The following morning school assembly looked and smelled like a Sunday’s apparition: children adorned in pristine pressed clothes; hair Brylcreemed or starched to within an inch of coiffured perfection whilst shoes shone sans scuffs – many boys polluted the air with Hai Karate aftershave scent, whilst girls dabbed just a soupcon of Woolworth’s eau de cologne, ‘Soir de Paris by Bourjois’ behind their ears just as Audrey Hepburn had shown them.
The result from this monumental midweek transformation was nothing...zilch...zero!Not a single school pupil was selected, not one. Johnny Walker was most probably the only person with an induced proud smile that day - proud that his pupils had risen to the occasion yet the occasion was not what the filmmakers needed. As we all now know, they required a bleak and barren landscape with a bleak and barren cast, a cast of dirty, snotty, downtrodden and disheartened poor souls. If only they had said that from the outset, I could be snotty, I could be dirty and I definitely know I could play the downtrodden and disheartened, all I required for that desolate motivation was the knowledge I would never kiss Hayley Mills...
FACTS:
1) Fifteen days after the screening of ‘Cathy Come Home’, Shelter was launched by five church housing-association trusts on the tide of public emotion.
2) The writer for ‘Cathy’, Eton and Oxford-educated Jeremy Sandford had experienced first-hand the lives of those in Battersea after moving from fashionable Chelsea. When a neighbour and her children were evicted and placed in a centre for homeless families, he started to investigate the homeless problem. Sandford wrote articles about homelessness for Sunday newspapers and a radio documentary before penning the script that was to become ‘Cathy Come Home’.
3) After ‘Cathy’ was screened, the standard local authority policy for separating homeless families, with mother and children taken into shelters and fathers having to fend for themselves was abolished.
LINK:
Ken Loach's Youtube Chanel. https://www.youtube.com/user/KenLoachFilms where the full length feature of 'Cathy Come Home' can be viewed.
This social explosion of a seminal film was released in the year of 1966. The following trivial anecdote occurred the year before in 1965 and thus, a valid excuse for posting as such in this film’s penultimate half century anniversary.
In 1965 I was a ‘model-perfect’ [sic] pupil at Harry Lucas Secondary School in Farm Street Hockley. The school never quite achieved the introduction of ‘Rhodes Scholar Status’ for its students despite the monumental efforts (mainly in vain) of its headmaster, Mr John Walker. The man looked for all intents and purposes like the Scottish actor David Haymen with perhaps a touch of the Bill Paterson’s about him: small in stature with a definite aura of menace.
He was born into abject poverty in Little King Street, just off Great King Street. This pearl of information was divulged to me during one of his many, many lectures I personally received – delivered with his customary wagging finger whilst a cane swished the air with swash! It would be many years later before I came to appreciate his devotion to his calling, and it was a devout calling for him, for he had the wherewithal to be headmaster in any school of his choosing yet, he chose the school most near to his abject poverty birthplace.
And so it came to pass, that about this time of year in the year of 1965 and certainly around the Easter holidays, Johnny Walker addressed the morning school assembly. On stage with him were one or more probably two strangers. These strangers (so Walker went on to explain) were going to make a film, a cinematic film about the area we lived in. The strangers were looking for people from the area to cast in this film, including pupils from Harry Lucas School. We were told to ask out parents for their verbal consent (or words to that effect) and the following day the two strangers would go from classroom to classroom and watch us during playtime to pick and cast those pupils they needed for filming.
You can imagine the buzz from the school assembly that day - we had visions of Hollywood stardom with starring-roles in another Cliff Richard ‘Summer Holiday’ or the prospects for realising my secret desire of kissing Hayley Mills on a deserted island somewhere in the Pacific. With these fanciful notions filling our heads all of the day and most of the night, and our parents informed of the pending auditions - zinc baths were filled, children were bathed and it wasn’t even a Friday!
The following morning school assembly looked and smelled like a Sunday’s apparition: children adorned in pristine pressed clothes; hair Brylcreemed or starched to within an inch of coiffured perfection whilst shoes shone sans scuffs – many boys polluted the air with Hai Karate aftershave scent, whilst girls dabbed just a soupcon of Woolworth’s eau de cologne, ‘Soir de Paris by Bourjois’ behind their ears just as Audrey Hepburn had shown them.
The result from this monumental midweek transformation was nothing...zilch...zero!Not a single school pupil was selected, not one. Johnny Walker was most probably the only person with an induced proud smile that day - proud that his pupils had risen to the occasion yet the occasion was not what the filmmakers needed. As we all now know, they required a bleak and barren landscape with a bleak and barren cast, a cast of dirty, snotty, downtrodden and disheartened poor souls. If only they had said that from the outset, I could be snotty, I could be dirty and I definitely know I could play the downtrodden and disheartened, all I required for that desolate motivation was the knowledge I would never kiss Hayley Mills...
FACTS:
1) Fifteen days after the screening of ‘Cathy Come Home’, Shelter was launched by five church housing-association trusts on the tide of public emotion.
2) The writer for ‘Cathy’, Eton and Oxford-educated Jeremy Sandford had experienced first-hand the lives of those in Battersea after moving from fashionable Chelsea. When a neighbour and her children were evicted and placed in a centre for homeless families, he started to investigate the homeless problem. Sandford wrote articles about homelessness for Sunday newspapers and a radio documentary before penning the script that was to become ‘Cathy Come Home’.
3) After ‘Cathy’ was screened, the standard local authority policy for separating homeless families, with mother and children taken into shelters and fathers having to fend for themselves was abolished.
LINK:
Ken Loach's Youtube Chanel. https://www.youtube.com/user/KenLoachFilms where the full length feature of 'Cathy Come Home' can be viewed.
