FIFTY years after Brief Encounter, a great British actor came back this summer to the railway ]unction where Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson played the most heartbreaking scene in the most romantic of all British films.

Sir Ian McKellen, in a black uniform that could have come from the wardrobe of Heinrich  Himler, was playing William Shakespeare's Richard III as a 20th century military dictator.
Two Hundred jack booted storm troopers, hired as film extras, were filming with at least four Hollywood actors in the locomotive sidings behind the railway platform where the two wartime lovers of Brief Encounter agreed in 1945 never to see each other again

In the summer after VE Day, the young David Lean, later to direct 'Lawrence of Arabia' and 'Dr Zhivago,  brought a small film crew and a few actors to shoot a night-time station scene on the West Coast Main Line at Carnforth, Lancashire.
That scene, with music from Rachmaninov, still brings Japanese visitors to Carnforth and earlier this year, Mrs. Mary Whitehouse chose it as her favourite TV programme.

Now another British director, Richard Loncraine, moved into Carnforth, bringing more hardware than Lean; four steam locomotives, a Russian T34 tank, a fleet of armoured vehicles, two troop trains, three anti-aircraft guns and the team of 200 crop-headed extras who played Richard's personal guards in jack boots and SS combat smocks, swinging rifles and packing Schmeisser machine pistols.

In the smoke and dust of the loco yard, with snipers on the roof of the engine shed guarding their King, Hollywood's Annette Bening, otherwise Mrs. Waren Beatty, wrapped in furs as Shakespeare's widowed Queen Elizabeth, cursed King Richard for murdering her two little Princes in the tower.
Sir Ian's black-shirted henchmen included Adrian Dunbar of 'The Crying Game' and Bill Patterson, a TV villain this summer in 'Oliver's Travels'.
They lurked by a sinister black railway coach that railwaymen said was once the exclusive Trianon Bar, on the old Golden Arrow London - Paris boat train.
Richard Loncraine, who brought 'Mississippi Burning' and 'Brimstone and Treacle' to the cinema, was unaware of a 'Brief Encounter' anniversary when he chose to bring his three-ring cinema circus to the loco yard at Steam Town, Carnforth.
Charles Hubbard, his location manager, had tramped dozens of railway yards in Crewe, Carlisle, Birkenhead and Teeside in the search for their railway scene.
'The amazing thing', said Loncraine, 'is that if you pressed me to pick my single all-time favourite film, I would tell you that it was Brief Encounter.
'Yet when we picked this place, I hadn't any idea we were treading in a David Lean location.
'I now see the happy chance as a good omen for our own film. Brilliant.'
The new movie not only stars Robert Downey Jr., Maggie Smith, Nigel Hawthorne, Jim Broadbent and Tim McInerney, but two of the most famous steam engines in the world.
Doctor Peter Beet, one of the farsighted men who rescued railway locomotives from scrap merchants in the 1960s, watched his mighty 97 tonne German Pacific, 0l 1104, roll out for Richard III's military train.
The loco carried Richard's medieval wild boar crest in the place where she had carried the markings of Adolf Hitler's Reichsbahn when she was first rolled out in Berlin in 1940.
Also starring in Richard Ill, though not attracting long-range photographers, who were stalking Ms. Bening, were La France', Dr. Beet's French Pacific. built in 1914 for sleeping car expresses to the Riviera; a British LMS 'Black Eight' wartime freight engine from 1942 and a Lancashire and Yorkshire 0-6-0 built on the eve of the Boer War.

Talking railways to the actor Bill Patterson, Dr. Beet attacked today's railway privatisation managers, blaming them for neglecting the Edwardian stone buildings of Carnforth station which include the world's best known railway 'refreshment room
Regional Railways and Railtrack are both blamed for failing to protect the room where the suburban housewife fell in love with the local doctor in the 86 minutes of Lean's masterpiece.
By that tea urn, David Lean gave a cameo film part to a 15 year old  tea girl, Elaine Maudsley, who had met him on the night shoots and who still lives in Dunkirk Avenue, Carnforth
'It was a very exciting time  remembers Elainie, now 69.
'My part comes in the first two minutes of ' Brief Encounter' . I'm walking up the platform as a passenger waiting for a train'
'The tea room is now just boarded up and forgotten', said Dr. Beet.
'Although people from all over the world are fascinated by this place, the railway managers are completely blind to the importance of what they control and no-one will take responsibility for an important and historic building.
'Some of us are trying to get something done, but it's an uphill battle.'

Lancashire Life, October 1995

<< back

[ Media ] [ Home ]