I didn't realise Turville in Buckhamshire was where they filmed it. The wonderful opening sequence here: YouTube - Went the Day Well? (Opening)
Would be nice if you sourced that post to Wiki, as it is word for word what is on this page: Went the Day Well? - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Various other pieces filmed in Turville include The church in "Dead of Night" The first episode of "The Knock" Big chunks of "Midsomer Murders" several episodes of The New Avengers Parts of "A Yank in Ermine" (1955), "A Voyage Round My Father" "Paradise Postponed" and of course "Goodnight Mr Tom".... While with various adhesions...Cobstone Windmill was ...
I hadn't realised how much this film was appreciated by the "younger" forum members. On a minor note, when I first posted a new thread entitled "Went the day well?" I rather stupidly thought that it had not been covered before. I therefore didn't bother to do a search on the title to see if it had been previously discussed. When one of the mods (I believe it was Owen) spotted my faux pas and sensibly merged it with the original thread of the same name I was suitably reminded that a good rule of thumb before posting is to check on the posibility of previous articles covering the same theme. Back on the film itself, how many of you spotted a very young Patricia Hayes and an even younger Harry Fowler ? Cheers, you film buffs Ron
a very young Patricia Hayes and an even younger Harry Fowler ? Cheers, you film buffs Ron Slightly off-topic - Sam Kydd was also a regular face in films of the time. Steve W.
All, I'm reading through D.M.Clarke's quite excellent thesis Arming the British Home Guard, 1940-1944... And I've come across something VERY familiar! This then is the British Army intelligence template for a German invasion, against which all British counter-invasion preparations were made, and it remained so for as long as full-scale invasion remained a planning contingency. It determined that the first threat for the Home Guard (as the LDV became known from 23 August 1940) would be dealing, probably unaided, with German parachutists, who may be dropped in small numbers in order to force the British field army to disperse, and in order to join up with Fifth Columnists. That scenario became, and remained, the principle preoccupation of the Home Guard throughout its wartime existence. In the introduction we noted that the authors of official instructions for the Home Guard made great efforts to make their publications interesting and accessible. This includes what must rank as one of the most extraordinary military manuals ever produced, Colonel G.A. Wade’s The Defence of Bloodford Village. Released in late November 1940, the booklet has a short forward by the Director General Home Guard, Major General T.R. Eastwood, DSO, MC: “The Battle of Bloodford Village and how it came to be successfully defended as a result of the lessons learnt from the dreams of the local Home Guard Commander, makes most interesting and instructive reading.” “The story contains many useful hints that should help other Home Guard Commanders in planning the defence of their villages.” (Shown in inverted commas on the original. Wade, 1940, frontispiece) The 16-page booklet opens with a description of the imaginary village of Bloodford as we might encounter it after Hitler’s war has been won: Overlooked by a picturesque windmill on a hill, the village features an old stone bridge over the River Booze; the half-timbered Bridge Inn, with its lichened roof; Hag’s Pond, still with ducking stool; the Grange; and a huddle of quaint old houses around the village green. On the green stands an old gibbet – and three destroyed German tanks, proud trophies of the village Home Guard. Does anyone know where the inspiration for the classic wartime movie "Went The Day Well?" came from??? 'Cos this is a very familiar description....!
Went The Day Well Went the day well? We died and never knew. But, well or ill, Freedom, we died for you. Went the day well? The epitaph is by the classical scholar John Maxwell Edmonds, and originally appeared in The Times dated 6 February 1918, page 7, under a short section headed Four Epitaphs. It is the second of four epitaphs composed for graves and memorials to those fallen in battle – each covering different situations of death. Went the Day Well? - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Film review: Went the Day Well? | Film | The Guardian
According to the BFI, the origins for the film come from a Graham Green short story: Went the Day Well? has its origins in a Graham Greene short story, The Lieutenant Died Last, published in an American magazine in June 1940. Greene's story concerns a poacher, Bill Purves, a Boer War veteran, who single-handedly overcomes a Nazi attempt to invade a rural English village. But aside from the central premise of invasion and the retention of the poacher as a minor character (renamed Bill Purvis), little of Greene's story remains in the script by seasoned Ealing writers John Dighton, Diana Morgan and Angus MacPhail. BFI Screenonline: Went the Day Well? (1942) However it's interesting to note the last sentence that mentions to drastic changes to the original work the movie's based on. There's a critical study of the work that might give you more background on the origins of the script and if the work you found influenced it. Went the Day Well? : Penelope Houston : Palgrave Macmillan Cheers Mark
Oooooo! Further into the thesis, Clarke deals with this very thing! Throughout the war strenuous efforts were made to inculcate in the British a ‘watchfulness’ that was close to paranoia. Apart from Fougasse’s cartoons, which showed Hitler or Göring listening-in on every conversation, there were such efforts as the 1942 film Went the Day Well?, in which the population of sleepy ‘Bramley End’ overlook a series of clues and allow the village to fall into the clutches of a party of ruthless German commandos. Loosely based on a short story by Graham Greene The Lieutenant Died Last, which was published in the American publication Collier’s magazine in June 1940, the film uses little of Greene’s original material, and his hero, a poacher called Bill Purves, is reduced to a minor role.The film does though bear a striking resemblance to some aspects of The Defence of Bloodford Village, discussed in the previous chapter. It too starts in an imaginary future, when the German invasion has been defeated “and old Hitler got what was coming to him”. Although Bramley End’s own Home Guard section is ambushed before they can play any part in saving the village, there is no suggestion of bumbling incompetence that we might today associate with the Home Guard. They are, rather, too trusting and gentle – ‘failings’ exhibited by all the villagers. For example, the disguised German commander is greatly helped in putting the village into a state of defence against counter-attack by having the Home Guard’s own very competent defensive scheme explained to him by the Home Guard section NCO, as (in shades of Bloodford) they examine the terrain from a vantage point beneath the abandoned windmill on Windmill Hill. The look of the village, including the windmill, is extraordinarily close to the description of the mythical Bloodford, and once again, the action takes place, not around some vital factory, airfield or military facility, but in a dream of rural England. The production location, Turville, Buckinghamshire, is, quite literally, the quintessential English country village, having subsequently provided the external location for Goodnight Mister Tom, The Vicar of Dibley, Little Britain, Midsomer Murders, and many more. The windmill, Cobstone Windmill, was Professor Potts’ residence and workshop in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and later bought and restored by Hayley Mills. In Greene’s original conception, however, the invaded village has the much more prosaic name of ‘Potter’, and is rooted in a far more convincing 1940s British landscape. There is also some logic to the arrival of the enemy there, in this case, paratroopers: "You would hardly expect to find Potter the scene of the first invasion of England since French troops landed near Fishguard in the Napoleonic War. It is one of those tiny isolated villages you still find dumped down in deserted corners of what we call in England Metroland – the district where commuters live in tidy villas within easy distances of the railway, on the edge of scrubby commons full of clay pits and gorse and rather withered trees. Walk for three miles in any direction from Potter and you will find cement sidewalks, nurses pushing prams, the evening paper boy, but Potter itself lies off the map – the motoring map, that is to say … "That was the odd scene of the ‘Invasion’, though if you examined Potter carefully you may conclude it was not an accident that parachutists landed there. Potter itself could be isolated by a few snips of a wire cutter, and from that little hidden spot in Metroland half a dozen men acting quickly could do an astonishing amount of damage – a mile and a half across unfrequented common and you had the main line to Scotland and the northern coast, and one supposes that the German air chiefs had planned for such attempts which our air defences foiled. Their psychological effect might have been incalculable: they would have destroyed any sense of security Englishmen still feel …" (Greene, 1999, p46-47) BFI Screenonline says of Went the Day Well? - "Turville in Oxfordshire stands in for Bramley End, the sort of village invariably described as 'sleepy'. True to form, the villagers take some time to wake up to the presence of the enemy among them. But when they are roused, they respond with determination, resourcefulness and, when necessary, a surprising ruthlessness. "The film is almost cruel in the way it repeatedly frustrates its audience's hopes. After the Germans' merciless extermination of the village's small platoon of home guards, the villagers make a number of attempts to summon help … "… Most extraordinary is a scene in which the postmistress (Muriel George) throws pepper in the eyes of her unwelcome lodger, then finishes him off with an axe. Shortly after, when her telephone call for help is ignored by a gossiping switchboard operator, she meets her own end, on the blade of a bayonet." Eventually a wounded small boy (further echoes of Bloodford) – an evacuee and poacher Bill Purvis’ sidekick – gets through to the local Home Guard platoon commander, the baker in the next village, who contacts district command. The Army, with Home Guard attached, re-take the village and relieve the besieged villagers defending the manor house – itself an echo of the 1909 anti-German melodrama An Englishman’s Home.
No need to take his word for it: The Defence of Bloodford Village is included in this compendium: Army Wargames Two Centuries of Staff College Exercises
I think it's a good film, less sentimental about the realities than you might expect for the time and place.
In case anyone had had a look at the index you can see on Amazon....I should explain! This is a Home Guard manual from the early May-June-July 1940 period... written very intelligently as a sort of novelisation! Basically - a villager in from "Bloodford" has a series of bad dreams :p In each one he sees the village's makeshift defence...which he's in charge of...let down by various weaknesses and major oversights. After each one he re-visits his plans for the defence plan of the village that is taking shape in his mind and puts right the weakness or oversight he has dreamed about...to the point that when put to the test, the villagers are successful in defending their little bit of Old England It's basically a parable - illustrating for its readers what can happen if certain obvious and not-so-obvious preparations are NOT taken; in one of the dreams, for instance, the protagonist "watches" as his own shot-dead body is hung from the village's old gibbet as a result of one of the oversights!
another thing I dont quite understand is how Jack Higgins got away with what a Court might argue is plagiarism of Greene and similarly with the movie The Eagle Has Landed being what could be viewed as a 'remake', though never declared as such...
There is a strong similarity between 'Went the day well' and 'The eagle has landed' - when I first saw WTDW a couple of years ago, I immediately made connections with TEHL. The use of a church as a central location in both films, however, is not unusual as churches were community focal points in those days. Spies, terrorist bombs and anarchist subversion/revolution are all aspects covered in William Le Queux's 'The Great War in England in 1897' (1894); the enemy disguised in friendly uniform is simply an extension of these themes and based around real fears prevalent in 1940. 'Notes on the German Army - War' (December 1940), published by M.I.14 states: "There is no positive proof that parachute troops or airborne troops have ever landed in disguise or in uniforms other than their own, in spite of countless reports to this effect." Enemy in disguise makes a good story though - WTDW is jam-packed with propaganda from being careful with rations and blackout, to acting on suspicion of fifth column and the maintenance of morale ("Sumfink wot the [Italians] ain't got"). Similarly, the placenames in Bloodford Village are quite common; my native East Sussex has a 'Windmill Hill', a 'Bridge Inn', Bull Farm, Ford Farm etc, so the location of WTDW is a typical English rural setting. The 'dream' scenario in military pamphlets dates at least to 1904 - 'The Defence of Duffer's Drift' by Maj-Gen Sir Ernest Swinton KBE, CB, DSO (orignally published anonymously) was based around the Boer War. The central character, Lieutenant Backsight-Foresight has a series of dreams about defending the Drift, each ending in disaster until the final one ends in success, having learnt from the previous dreams. This was reprinted at least until 1949. The same dream format was used by H.E. Graham in the 1930's in 'The Defence of Bowler Bridge'. This updated the scenario to defend against armoured cars with an anti-tank gun. Many Canadian documents I've read recommend that Bowler Bridge be read. 'The Defence of Bloodford Village' (November 1940) by Col. G.A. Wade MC, is simply a Home Guard take on Bowler Bridge. Interesting to see that the above three titles appear in the Amazon link above - haven't seen this before! One final manual on my shelf is 'Simple Tactics' (1942) by Lt.-Gen A Kearsey DSO, OBE, which includes scenarios for Home Guard training. The book includes a genuine OS GSGS map sheet from an area of Hampshire that allows you to follow the exercises and map refs. At the end is a chapter on fieldcraft that describes the activity of the 1st Battalion, The Blankshire Regt, lead by Lieutenants Fullahope, Fullajoye and Fullasense. The dialogue between "Hopie", "Joystick" and "Sensie" is too cheesy to reproduce here... An interesting bag of literature, but I suspect that many other manuals follow the same format. - Pete
