Guinness Is Smiley - Five Years On

POSTED BY CONTROL

This year marks the 46th anniversary of the broadcast of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and it is now five years since the launch this website. Back in 2020, a good friend told me that one of the downsides of focusing on just the two Guinness series was that it might be hard for an audience to find us online. Essentially, as he described it, we are a niche of a niche - for example, we are not about all of John le Carré's novels or even all of the Smiley ones, we are not about all of Sir Alec Guinness's screen performances or even all of his television roles. 

My friend was certainly right because it has taken some time for our audience to grow. I'm reminded of Le Carré's wonderful line about the gathering of intelligence and feel it might apply here: Good intelligence work, Control had always preached, was gradual and rested on a kind of gentleness.

Slowly but surely, we are now appearing regularly in Google search results about both series. As more people have discovered the website, I've been delighted to receive contributions from others who also hold these series in high regard - special mention must go to Chris, John Rundle and Source Merlin who have made this a team effort. 

As we celebrate our fifth birthday we intend to journey onwards - we are even on Instagram these days! I'm also delighted to report that new sources of information about both series are still cropping up all over the place. Step this way and allow me to brief you on the very latest intelligence we have...

LOCATIONS 

Let's start with a really interesting discovery. Both Chris and John Rundle sent me the link to this blog run by Dave Walker who is the Local Studies Librarian for the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Dave's piece is about a house in North Kensington with a room decorated by Charles Conder. An estate agents brochure from 1982 also makes mention of the fact that the property was used in the filming of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. 

Dave included a picture of the property in Lansdowne Road, Holland Park from the estate agents brochure...

This is the location today, although it appears the premises have been altered significantly and divided into multiple dwellings...

Now I have a pretty good visual recall for locations in the series and I could not place this at all and yet there was something familiar about it. 

I decided to approach our BBC insider, Source Merlin, to see if they could shed any light on this. And what Merlin told me knocked some assumptions I had previously made right on the head. It turns out the interiors of the Islay Hotel room (plus the hotel kitchen) and the interiors of Roddy Martindale's club were filmed at Lansdowne Road!  We have obviously known the whereabouts of the external locations of the Islay Hotel and Martindale's Club for a long time. I think there had always been an assumption that the interiors might have been filmed in the same places, as was common with many other locations in the series. 

We have some visual proof to back all this up. We can match aspects in the image below of the reception from the estate agents brochure with screen captures of Smiley and Martindale leaving the club. 

If I had to guess I'd say Smiley's hotel room would have been situated to the side/back of the property in Lansdowne Walk, as indicated in the photo below...

This would have been a relatively quiet spot to film and the shape, size and design of the windows are a match in the screen captures below... 

Also, in the image above on the right hand side, you can see trees in what would be the garden behind Mendel. (It might just be me, but I have always admired the composed way in which George Sewell holds himself on screen.) 

If you read all of Dave's excellent article you will see that the property was originally the London Club House for the Catholic men's organisation, The Knights of Saint Columba. When I saw this I realised why the place looked familiar - I'd been here before. My dad was a member of the Knights of Saint Columba and I can recall him taking the family to London one weekend in the mid-seventies and arranging for us to stay overnight at the club. This would have been a few years before filming took place - small world.

As a devout Catholic, Guinness would have felt very much at home filming here. I suspect he would have visited the Chapel inside the club on more than one occasion and valued the relative privacy the location would have afforded him.

Next we come to an email I received from Geoff Irons drawing my attention to an article in 'The English Home' magazine. Titled 'Gothic Masterpiece' it begins:

Tucked away down a quiet lane in a sleepy hamlet in Hampshire, sits a Grade II listed rectory, completely hidden from view...Built in 1828 on the site of a ramshackle parsonage, the house was designed by architect Henry Harrison...under the watchful eye of Reverend T Douglas Hodgson, who had been appointed the rector of the parish a few years earlier. When the reverend died in 1884 the house fell into disrepair as the church struggled to maintain its upkeep. The onset of decay was so bad it is reputed that the actor Sir Alec Guinness fell through the rotten floorboards when the house was used as a location for the television dramatisation of John le Carré’s book Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in the 1970s. 

If you click here you can see the article Geoff discovered. The first thing you'll notice is the beautiful photo of the front door, hall and stairs. If you compare it with the screen captures below you will see the house is a direct match for the safe house where Ricki Tarr was staying. 

I doubt we will ever know for sure if Guinness actually did put his foot through the floorboards but the house looks in a much better state of repair now than when it appeared on screen. My thanks to Geoff for spotting this article and sharing it with us. 

I was also pleased to hear from Pete Boardman who sent me a couple of photos from his recent visit to the tin pavilion on Hampstead Heath. 

Pete was also kind enough to send me an account of his visit:

I travelled down to London and walked north from Hampstead Heath station, via The Magdala Pub, where the pretend bullet holes from a real murder can still be seen, and once on the Heath proper, a mother with child in pushchair introduced me to George the alarmingly tame Heron. I plodded up the hill and along the tree-lined track, then across the sopping grass lawn towards the pavilion my shoes now soaked, and I felt like stopping and stamping like Smiley did on the way back from his tiresome dinner with Roddy Martindale. 

Nevertheless as I strolled towards pavilion, I felt butterflies in my stomach, as much triggered by a young man doing extremely rapid martial arts exercises (accompanied by associated noises) under the cover of the building, than the sense of literary history. I wondered whether he would be a match for Fawn, he looked like he might. I thought best to engage with him rather than silently lurk, so I introduced myself and asked him if he'd heard of the book. He didn't show any inkling that he knew of 'Smiley's People', but had a vague recollection of the title of 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy', so I explained the plot and the pivotal role the tin pavilion had in 'Smiley's People'. 

The man watched me respectfully insert a brass drawing pin into the only reachable wooden part of the building, the roof eaves, and then follow it with a long yellow chalk mark. I really hope someone on a similar mission to myself goes and visits the pavilion and sees the drawing pin and chalk mark that I left and whispers the words "Moscow Rules" as I did in reverent recognition. 

RESEARCH

We previously reported here on the correspondence held at the BBC Written Archives Centre in Caversham and Alec Guinness's diaries which reside at the British Library. Thanks to John Rundle and Dave Dodd, we can now highlight two additional archive collections of documentation relating to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley's People.

Firstly, Dave Dodd emailed us to draw our attention to the fact that screenwriter Arthur Hopcraft's papers are held in the Special Collections Archive at Salford University. 

There is a lot of relevant material in the physical archive but you can view some fascinating highlights in their digital archive. You'll find an episode breakdown for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, including casting notes, here and an early draft of the script for episode one here. This version of episode one includes lots of handwritten additions and the now iconic opening scene is missing.

Dave also noticed an outline of a book about football that Hopcraft had provisionally titled Thunderboots. Jerry Westerby actually drops this phrase into the conversation he has with Smiley in episode six.

Hopcraft also wrote the screenplay for A Perfect Spy and you can read his handwritten breakdown of the book here. I think it is wonderful that so much of this material is available online and if you'd like to see more from the collection you can email the University and make an appointment: library-archives@salford.ac.uk

In terms of paperwork discoveries, that's not all we have to report.

Our good friend John Rundle has discovered that a collection of Marcia Wheeler's papers are held at the BFI in Berkhamstead. 

Marcia was Production Unit Manager on Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Production Associate on Smiley's People. Unfortunately, none of this material is online but you can arrange to visit the BFI and review her paperwork for both series. For more information email Speccoll@bfi.org.uk

There are no charges for accessing the material that the BFI and Salford University hold but it is important to remember that, as a private researcher, there are restrictions on the use of the content. If burrowing in the files is your thing then I can recommend a day or two exploring these archives.

LINKS

My thanks to everyone who has contacted me over the last five years with leads, locations, articles and links. You have helped enormously. I have been regularly updating our Links page over the years (my thanks to Dave Dodd and John Rundle for the most recent additions) but you'll notice that the page now shows the date it was last updated at the top. 

There is a wealth of information about these series out there on other websites, so if you spot something you think may be of interest to visitors here do drop me a line at guinnessissmiley@icloud.com and I'll look to include it. I've also updated our Locations page in the same way and will keep this up to date as we add new content.

AND FINALLY...

I'm very fortunate that my lovely wife proofreads these articles for me. Regular visitors to this website might remember we covered the opening and closing titles of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy last year. In that article, I noted that there was a company manufacturing copies of the matryoshka dolls and what an excellent Christmas present they'd make. Anyway, Mrs Control took the not-so-subtle hint and on Christmas morning I was opening my own set of replica dolls. They now occupy pride of place on my desk. 

Chris suggested that perhaps I should bring the dolls along on future location visits and have them appear in some of our photos - I think he was joking! 

Right, it must be about time for a cup of jasmine tea...

Screencaps (c) BBC 1979

Thanks to Pete Boardman for allowing us to include his photos of the tin pavilion