I recently posted a Saturday matinee programme in memory of our defunct cinema. Here I should mention a film which may well have been shown in the EMD during its heyday: The Guinea Pig. Starring Richard Attenborough as Jack Read it tells a tale of class and the school system, with a young man from Wathamstow sent to a public school where he finds himself bullied by his social betters.
Notable not only for its post war exploration by the Boulting Brothers of the British Class system, but the first recorded use of the word 'arse' in British cinema, the film has a twenty year old Attenborough playing Jack, the 14 year old son of a Walthamstow tobacconist.
The screenplay was co-written by the 36 year old Bernard Miles, who also plays Attenborough's father. Warren Chetham Strode wrote the stage play. Jack is Lord Attenborough's version of a simple, uncooth Cockney lad, awarded a scholarship to a top public school as part of a pygmalionesque social experiment. He is incessantly bullied in his first term. When Jack comes home for Christmas, he then finds himself estranged from his old friends. On his return to Saintsbury, he dedicates himself to progressing academically and fitting in. The film was accordingly released as 'The Outsider' in the United States.
The film is, of course, propaganda for the Attlee government. It is also somewhat unrealistic. (It has been seen as a fantasy about applying the unimplemented 1944 Fleming Report, which had suggested incorporating the public schools into the state sector). At the time it was made, in 1948, Walthamstow already had a fine tradition of good teachers and pioneering education (the country's first infant's school was founded here) and already had some excellent schools. It would not in fact have been necessary for young Jack Read to take the Hogworts Express - for such an experiment could have easily taken place locally. Indeed, the possibilities of genuine social mobility through education were already well understood. It was even quite normal until not too long ago.
'..part of a pygmalionesque social experiment'
Not quite fantasy, though: my mother and one of her brothers won what were called Junior County Scholarships in the 1920's, which sent a tiny number (1: 10,000) of state school children in London to select private schools. She had a pretty rough time for a year or two, until she came top in everything and excelled at lacrosse. The scheme was the brainchild of CEMJoad, whose famous studies on separated twins argued that outcomes were largely dependent on heredity,...or nurture..I've forgotten which! Anyway, many years later his studies were convincingly shown to be fraudulent, and then even later still argued to be genuine after all. Blowed if I know, guvnor: I went to a direct grant school with a scholarship, which was a more diluted way of hoovering up talent from the deserving poor, or the broke middle class like us. The school sent 37 chaps to Oxbridge my year, which even at the time I saw as a damaging diversion of talent from the front line, and now view with horror, a genteel version of Katyn.