The Wicked Lady (1945)

Mason Meets His Match!

“You’ll hang for this, you scoundrel!”

There’s an Arcadian vision of Olde England, which, I think, dies in the Brash New World of the 1980s. Merrie England. The Village Green and Ducking Pond. Half-timbered cottages. Stocks, Dancing around the Maypole, the Ale House, a benevolent Squire. England in Camera Colour. Not, of course (and despite the books of Sir Arthur Bryant, the champion of English rural exceptionalism) that it necessarily existed. For its creation — and I accept that this is a generalisation — is, to some extent, a fantasy of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

As I have argued before, this is a fag end of the Arts & Crafts movement. A reaction to industrialisation. Take the so-called ‘traditional’ British pub. Actually, in reality, an ‘Olde England’ themed makeover of the 1920s and 30s — in the same way that today, our gastropub, with its dubious modern abstracts, faux bookshelves and tables of scrubbed pine, is a relic of the 1990s. The horse brasses, stained beams, framed sepia photographs, pewter flagons, ‘Tudor’ firebacks, harvest jugs and corn dollies! We assume these things to be traditional pub trappings. Except they’re not. They’re a early-to-mid 20th-century take on the past.

“Do you always take women by the throat?”

And in the days following the First World War, the primary style for the new housing developments was Mock Tudor. Cludobethan. An Englishman’s Home is his Castle. Homes Fit for Heroes to Live In. The Mock Tudor defines Englishness. I mean, only the British (and Americans) could manufacture cars (the Morris Traveller) in the Mock Tudor style. This went hand in hand with the growth of motoring: the ribbon development of the new semis, built alongside the tarmacadamed A Roads. In 1934, the publication of the new Shell Guides urged the motorist to quit the suburbs for the countryside during the weekends, an exploration of the quaint: to visit a ruined castle (the Ministry of Works), an antique shoppe or half-beamed tea rooms, which in turn, encouraged local antiquarianism, tales of witches, ghosts, smugglers and highwaymen.

And 17th and 18th century piracy — as a theme — caught the zeitgeist of the 1930s. There was a spate of films: Treasure Island (1934), Captain Blood (1935), and Jamaica Inn (1939), based on Daphne Du Maurier’s romantic novel of 1936. No coincidence that Waddington’s Buccaneer (the board game) was first published in 1938. In the same year, the Shulton Company of America launched Old Spice for Men, a macho scent intended to capture ‘the essence of colonial times’, with imagery of blue square rigger stamped on an 18th-century apothecaries bottle.

“Vanity of vanity… all is vanity!”

Which takes us to Leslie Arliss’ magnificent melodrama, The Wicked Lady (1945), produced by Gainsborough Pictures: a smash hit in crisp black and white, and the most popular film at the British box office in 1946. You probably know the plot — for there’s nothing like robbery, adultery and murder to draw in the crowds, especially if it’s carried out in a buxom, low-cut bodice — a heavenly vision which later caused problems with Puritanical American censors. The film is set in the 1680s. Margaret Lockwood stars as Lady Skelton, a bored Lady of the Manor who joins forces with the dashing highwayman, Captain Jackson (James Mason), for a spot of highway robbery. Patricia Roc also stars as the angelic Mistress Caroline, a sort of foil to the wicked Lady Skelton.