Finding Smiley in Cornwall's Cornwall - Smiley's People Locations

POSTED BY DUNCAN

I have lived in Cornwall now for 14 years and as a boy used to go on holidays to Portscatho. I remember looking out over the bay at the row of little sharp islands with sea birds swooping around them. The Cornwall scene at the end of episode five of Smiley's People has always brought back fond memories of those great holidays I had. 

In one of the scenes in which Smiley and Ann are talking, Gull Rock – the largest of those sharp islands – can be seen in the background. On film, you see George and Ann talking about wellingtons while they walk out on that wonderfully powerful headland... 

Well, through the wonders of location filming you would think Ann's house/estate would be near Gull Rock. That's what I thought anyway. When I found this wonderful website I immediately looked for any references to the Cornwall locations. There was a very good post from Chris which had a timeline and a lot of identified locations which confirmed Gull Rock. Sadly, there were no details about the house that Smiley visits in order to find Ann to warn her not to go to Bywater Street. Here is a section from Chris's original post:

Episode 5

23:03 Paddington Station platform.

23:06 Sleeper interior. Guinness is on record saying that this scene was the only part of the shooting he didn't enjoy. The camera had to be placed in a wall and he felt like he was making a pornographic film. 

23:44 Cornwall, Uncle Harry's place - the house where Ann is staying. The Humber bares the sign of City Taxis in Truro. Location unknown. 

26:50 Gull Rock, Gerrans Bay, Cornwall. Simon Langton said that this was one of the last scenes shot and they were glad to get out of Cornwall before the county was cut off by snow.

Fascinated by the idea, I started to try and find the location of Ann’s house. The first clue was the Truro taxi (a 1967 Humber Imperial) that drops Smiley off. I thought the property must be a listed building somewhere near to there.

I found nothing. The entrance to Ann’s house is unique, as can be seen when Smiley goes round a path at the side of it.

The house has dark stone pillars and large, four-paned Victorian sash windows with shutters. All the houses/estates near Truro have either casement windows or single-pane sashes. Some of the large ones look like castles and others have different styles which have been added to over the years.

I emailed Jonathan, who maintains this website, and asked whether he had any further information which might help me. He had some copied passages from Alec Guinness's diary around that time which mention the locations. Sadly, the handwriting is rather difficult to read. Next to ‘Truro’ he wrote something that looked like ‘Hennings Heaps’ and ‘Beaconsale'. I carried on searching but all to no avail and I gave up looking for a few weeks, a little disheartened. 

Then, late one night after returning from a trip to London, I was on my laptop looking at the website of a new museum in Cornwall called The Story of Emily, which celebrates the life of Emily Hobhouse, one of the first suffragettes. The buildings had been renovated beautifully and for some reason that made me think of looking for Ann Smiley's country house again. In two minutes, I found it! (I know this from my browser history.)

I looked on www.visittruro.org.uk and there was a link to the Trevince Estate Gardens. Following the link, I came across this picture…

I found this film crew shot as well…

Then typing ‘Trevince Estate’ into Google came up with this picture from the Falmouth Packet about a Poldark costume ball which had been held there …

And an even clearer photo of the front of the house...

Hurray - a direct match to the series:

If we look on the satellite image below we can actually retrace Smiley's arrival by taxi and his walk to the front of the house.

Next the interior. Unfortunately, the house and gardens are temporarily closed to the public, so I have not been able to visit myself, but there are a few pictures online to compare…

Smiley enters:

Christmas at Trevince House:

You can actually see footage of a Christmas Fair inside the house here.

This is an excerpt from the Trevince website:

The name Trevince is of Cornish/Celtic origin. It was first mentioned in 1281 and the family has been here since then, for over 25 generations. In the mid-16th century, Margaret Trevyns married Martin Beauchamp. The Beauchamp family can be traced back in Cornwall from him a further 13 generations to Hugh Beauchamp who was, in 1195, lord of Binnerton (between Helston and Camborne).

Nothing remains of the medieval or Tudor buildings but the back of the house (what is now the wing) dates from the late 17th century. In 1863 Edmund Beauchamp Tucker (EBT) inherited the estate and rebuilt the front part of the house to a design by James Piers St Aubyn, a prolific Cornish architect. The builders were Olver, a branch of whom were farming tenants at the time, and have remained so ever since.
 
In this internal shot below, you can clearly see the initials EBT on the fireplace:

The shot that had eluded me was that of the fireplace that Ann tries to light. In the series it appears to be through a door from the hall.

Here are 3 screenshots from the series:

That is an impressive-looking mirror!

Shortly before this article was published Chris did a bit of further digging online and discovered that Trevince had been used fairly recently as the location for a German television film, Teaspoon of Love. (As you can see below, the photo of the film crew I had found was from this shoot.)

The television film is one of a series of very popular Rosamunde Pilcher films and, if you are interested, you can watch it here. 

You'll see a lot more of the estate and, at around the six minute mark, you can see the door from the hall I mentioned earlier, on the left of the screen capture below...

...and at the twenty two and a half minute mark a scene takes place in the same room that Ann lights the fire - and there is that unusual looking mirror once again!

This means we can place all the interior scenes with certainty at Trevince. According to Source Merlin (our BBC insider) the interior scenes and the cliff walk were shot on Thursday 10th and Friday 11th December 1981. (The very last scenes shot for the series were at the Savoy in London a couple of days later on Sunday 13th December.)

Incidentally, if Smiley and Ann had actually taken a walk from Trevince to Gull Rock it would have taken them some time! The two locations are 22 miles apart, as you can see on the map below:

Finally, a shot of Gull Rock - at some point, I will go down there and recreate the shot myself.

Nare Head and Gull Rock, Gerrans Bay.

Our thanks to Duncan for this terrific piece of detective work. If you have content about these series that you think would be of interest to our visitors please do drop us a line at guinnessissmiley@icloud.com