Polzeath Stories Film

Before he became a cinematic giant, directing epic masterpieces like Lawrence of Arabia and Bridge on the River Kwai, David Lean made a lesser-known film called "Madeleine"(1950).

This black and white drama, starring his then-wife Ann Todd, was a departure from his earlier work on classics like "Brief Encounter" starring Celia Johnson. Coincidentally she learned to surf in Polzeath and her family still have a front row house here!  

Although 'Madeleine" was mostly filmed in Pinewood Studios  Polzeath was used for a beach scene involving Ann Todd riding across Polzeath beach on a low tide!  It is cut with another riding scene across Harlyn Bay. I wonder if anyone remembers it being filmed?  

The film today is owned by Turner Classic Movies and available on SkyTV (channel 315) and Youtube.   

David Lean's heritage, on both sides of his family, was Cornish and perhaps that was why he filmed the horse riding scene here instead of in Scotland where the true story was set! 

His mother, Helena Annie Tangye, was part of the Tangye family who Lean described as "good-looking people, very artistic with a lot of gift in them." 

I taught at the International School Dhaka where Richard Tangye OBE was the "gifted" Chief Executive and I remember him telling me how his family had built the early engines that are still found in factories all over the world.  Many still working.

An amazing family with two of Lean's uncles involved in the launch of Brunel's Great Eastern. It was the first ship to lay cable across the Atlantic but only because of the newly invented Tangye hydraulic jacks were able to launch it out of the mud where it was stuck at the Isle of Dogs.  As the Tangye brothers said this was an important start to their company:  "we launched the Great Eastern, and the Great Eastern launched us." 

After Madeleine, Lean directed The Sound Barrier and later films included Doctor Zhivago, and Ryan's Daughter.  Today he is considered one of Britain's most influential filmmakers with seven of his films included in the British Film Institute's list of the Top 100 British films

The Gathering Storm, September 1944

The wind, a mischievous sprite, teased the edge of Daphne du Maurier's scarf as she stood on the grassy clifftop. Below, the beach at Polzeath stretched out to a silver sea, the incoming afternoon tide whispering secrets against the sand.

Polzeath, always a place of both solace and unease, held a peculiar magic today. It was the end of the summer holidays, a time for endings and beginnings, for the bittersweet joy of release and the looming shadow of separation.

Her son, Kits, was down there, a whirlwind of energy amongst his friends, oblivious to the anxieties that gnawed at his mother's heart. Soon, he would be gone, off to West Downs, that austere institution where his father, "Boy" Browning, had once schooled. “Boy”, a childhood nickname, now seemed a distant echo, a faded photograph in the war album of her memory. With D-Day gone like the summer she knew that “Boy” was heading the rush to end the war as quickly as possible

A shiver, a premonition perhaps, ran down Daphne's spine. The air, usually so vibrant with the sounds of the sea, was strangely silent. Then, a sudden, unsettling movement. The sky, once so blue, was darkening, not with the promise of rain, but with the ominous gathering of birds.

Rooks, their black wings beating like the wings of some monstrous, unseen creature, circled overhead. Gulls, their cries a mournful lament, wheeled and dipped above the surf. And then, four Cornish choughs, those symbolic, red beaked creatures, seemed to hesitate, their flight disrupted, their calls filled with an unsettling urgency.

A chilling thought pierced Daphne's mind. These were not merely birds, but messengers, harbingers of some unseen, impending doom like the breaking surf at the entrance to the harbour. Just as her husband was about to embark on one of his most perilous missions, a daring leap into the unknown, these creatures seemed to mirror his own impending flight.

“Boy”, with his new Airborne Division and fleet of gliders, his silent, winged machines, would soon be gliding across the English Channel, seeking a distant prey. But what if, like these birds, he too was drawn into a maelstrom, a vortex of unforeseen dangers? The fear, sharp and sudden, pierced her heart.

The image of his glider, a fragile twig against the vastness of the sky, filled her mind. She saw it tumbling, a victim of unseen currents, a silent testament to the fragility of human ambition. The birds, with their eerie cries, seemed to echo her own unspoken fears, a chorus of warnings against the hubris of man.

Daphne turned away, the beauty of the beach now tainted with a sense of foreboding. The sun, once a beacon of hope, now seemed to cast long, ominous shadows. The end of summer, she realized, was not just the end of holidays, but a harbinger of even darker times, a time when the fragility of human life would be brutally exposed.

Her sixteen year old memories of tea with Carl Jung at the Atlantic House Hotel, just a few yards from where she was standing, returned to her. The air in that room over twenty years ago, heavy with the scent of clover and sea salt and the murmur of the waves, had been thick with a sense of the unseen, of the forces that lurked beneath the surface of human consciousness. Jung, with his piercing gaze and his deep voice, had warned her and her parents, on their break from his Polzeath Seminars, about the dangers of the unconscious mind, how the shadows within us could manifest in unexpected and terrifying ways.

Now, watching the birds, she felt a chilling confirmation of his words. The birds, in their frenzied, almost malevolent gathering, seemed to embody the very fears that Jung had warned her about – the primal fears, the dark urges that lurked beneath the surface of human existence.

A chilling thought crept into her mind. What if these birds, driven by some unseen force, were to turn on humanity? What if the sky, once a symbol of freedom, became a harbinger of doom? She imagined the seagulls, their sharp beaks piercing flesh, the rooks raining down from the heavens, their claws raking at unprotected skin. The image, grotesque and terrifying, lingered, a haunting premonition of a world where the balance of nature had been irrevocably disrupted.

Daphne shuddered, dismissing the thought as the product of a fevered imagination. Yet, the unsettling vision remained, a seed of fear planted deep within her, a seed that would later show itself in a chilling tale of man's encroachment on the natural world, a story she would call "The Birds."

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This Polzeath fiction is based on some truths.

Hitchcock met du Maurier when his film of "Rebecca" was released in 1940. While Hitchcock and du Maurier likely had an ongoing professional relationship, "The Birds," his most famous adaptation of her work, wasn't released until 1963.

Du Maurier married in 1932 and had three children: Tessa (b. 1933), Flavia (b.1937) and Christian "Kits" (b. 1940). Kits friend Simon Courtauld's family of textile fame owned  "Medla" and du Maurier would have had to cross Cornwall to drop Kits off in Polzeath from her home in Menabilly.  Medla is a landmark of a house overlooking what locals call Baby Bay but at low tide becomes part of Polzeath Beach. In Sept 1944 Kits was still too small to have been packed off to his father's boarding school where he first met Simon Courtauld.

The beach at Polzeath was heavily fenced off and had anti tank defences too. Although it was not mined, like the dunes around the coast at Daymer Bay, it would not have been the sort of place kids would be making sandcastles or swimming in 1944. Daphne would more likely have been walking on the cliffs and then driving home to Menabilly on the south coast of Cornwall if he she had been visiting Polzeath on the north coast. Perhaps behind the barbed wire strung across Baby Bay and Polzeath Beach there was space by the concrete Dragon’s Teeth anti-tank-traps for children to play. I have certainly heard of people hanging their clothes and towels on the barbed wire strung across Polzeath beach and sneaking through the wire to swim.

Simon Courtauld went on to write for the Spectator and other publications. This article recalls his friendship with Kits and going to Menabilly in the early 50's https://www.theoldie.co.uk/.../i-once-met-daphne-du-maurier

Sir Frederick Browning (1896–1965) is considered the "father of the British airborne forces". As well as taking 3 teddy bears with him on the glider that took him to the ill fated Operation Market Garden he was the husband of Daphne du Maurier and nicknamed "Boy". A nickname he got in the Grenadier Guards  in WW1 after their tradition of naming soldiers after things that they really weren’t!

"Boy" Browning considered the bridge at Arnhem "a bridge too far" and flew in a glider with his newly formed Airborne Division in Sept 1944 to his HQ in the Hartenstein Hotel in Oosterbeek, Netherlands. The hotel is now home to the Airborne Museum 'Hartenstein', which is a memorial to the battle and a place of pilgrimage for veterans. The Battle of Arnhem was part of Operation Market Garden, in which Allied forces attempted to establish a bridgehead on the northern side of the Rhine and end the war early. My sister's father-in-law, George Chesterton, towed a Horsa glider with his Stirling on Sept 18 to Arnhem and wrote about the “ghastly Arnhem fiasco which has haunted me these sixty plus years” in his book "Also Flew". 

Carl Jung might have met du Maurier in Polzeath in 1923 when she was 16 but this is extremely unlikely. He was giving his famous Polzeath Seminars and about to have his 48th birthday at the time. Jung believed that animals, including birds, represented universal symbols (he called archetypes) that are present in our unconscious minds. He was writing his Black Books, which became The Red Book, when in Polzeath. In it he wondered if birds created psychic wholeness by bridging the space between the human and spiritual world.

The Cornish chough is a red-legged, red-beaked member of the crow family that is a symbol of Cornwall and was once common but numbers began to decline in the 18th century. The last breeding pair in Cornwall was recorded in 1947, and the chough was declared extinct in the county in 1973.  However, they are back and there are at least two breeding pairs that now live around Pentire and Polzeath!

I was honored to be accepted as a member of the Daphne du Maurier Society of North America in July 2024.  They plan a visit to Cornwall in 2025.

My consultant on Browning’s Airborne Teddy Bears is Rebecca Rapson