Francon goes to Hollywood: Ingrid Bergman at the head of Nant Francon. Her expression perhaps suggesting a recent visit to Bethesda.
Moel Hebog’s snow dusted summit had finally shaken off its
early morning cloud cap and the luminous glow of the lazy winter sun was
gradually lifting the land out of February’s lengthening shadows . At least the
short early morning trip from Nantmor to Beddgelert, in an open topped WW2 Jeep,
promised to be a dry affair, if guaranteed to suck the marrow out of the gnarliest
bones. For Ruth Janette Ruck-wife of the
rock climber and smallholder Paul
Orkney Work-the journey had been unplanned the preceding evening until she
took the call. At first she thought it was a hoax. But who would invent such a
scenario and who did she know with an accent like that? No...the caller appeared to be genuine even
if his request bordered on the surreal.
For the next four months, Ruth Janette Ruck would be propelled into a world
which was light years removed from the hum-drum
of a smallholders life in 1950’s
rural north Wales.
Ruth Janette Ruck and her husband ran a small mixed holding
on the southern slopes of Moel Dyniewyd; a Moelwyn outlier which contained the
delightful valley of Nantmor. A quiet land laced with small farms, grey chapels and
abandoned nettle limed ruins, cast amongst river meadows and steeply inclined
fields where only the native sheep could cling on. Broad strands of sessile oak
woodland divided the fertile lower meadows from the bare mountain slopes above.
Unlike the gaunt bare valleys of Northern Snowdonia, Nantmor’s westerly
location-close to the sea- gave it a fatter, richer aspect and character.
The Chinese City of Yangchen created on the slopes of Moel Dyniewyd
The telephone call that Ruth had taken had come from a
representative of Hollywood movie giants, Twentieth Century Fox. Ruth and her
jeep were needed to transport members of the film direction team on a location
shoot for a movie which the company were planning to shoot in North Wales.
Although the film was set in the mountains of Northern China and although the
company had scoured various locations in the Far East including Hong Kong and Taiwan,
it was finally decided that the mountain areas within the Snowdonia national
park were closest in character to the story’s location.
The film ‘The Inn of the Sixth Happiness’ was based on the
real life story of Gladys Aylward, a self appointed Christian missionary who
after being turned down by official agencies, managed to fund her own journey
to China where she procured a placement with an elderly female missionary who
ran a Christian guest house in the remote the inland city of Yangchen, in the
mountainous province of Shansi.
It was a dark period in China’s troubled
history. The country was in the midst of it's second Sino-Japanese war In the midst of this chaos, Gladys Aylward’s greatest achievement- and the central focus of
the planned film- came when she guided a party of over 100 children through the
mountains to escape the advancing Japanese army who were carrying out a bloody
campaign under the standard of the
rising sun. Her epic trip through the
mountains of Shanshi was a feat of
courage and endurance for which she received official commendations from both
the UK and the PRC governments.
In real life, Gladys Aylward was a short rather dumpy woman
with a rich cockney accent. Naturally, Hollywood, as ever sensitive to
authenticity, cast a tall, beautiful Swedish woman-Ingrid Bergman-in the role.
She would be supported by Robert (Mr Chips) Donet playing a Chinese mandarin
and Curt Jurgens as a mixed race officer in the People’s Army. The Inn of the Sixth Happiness being a
Hollywood movie couldn’t resist throwing some romantic interaction into the
film and throughout the movie, the Bergman/ Jurgen characters simmer in their
passion. A highly unlikely scenario in the circumstances and one which the real
Gladys Aylward absolutely denied.
Ruth arrived at the Royal Goat Hotel in Beddgelert and
describes the early morning scene.... There was the quiet of early morning with
the smoke of newly lighted fires pluming upwards, and Will Bryn Felin going
from door to door with the morning milk. The only thing which jarred with the
timelessness of the scene was the limousine parked outside the hotel with a uniformed
chauffeur in attendance.... Eventually, a contingent of movie makers emerged and
joined Ruth and her sheepdog Mit in the boneshaker and off they went. Covering
all points of the compass and exploring every narrow lane and axel snapping,
sump splitting track between Beddgelert and Nant Francon.
Eventually the director Mark Robson and his team settled
upon Nantmor itself as the main location for set construction, where, according
to Janette Ruck This Chinese city of Wangcheng was beautiful.... It fitted
perfectly into those wild surroundings and lent splendour to the great sweep of
Moel Hebog behind it. Other sets were being built too. A complete Chinese
village appeared on the terraced workings of an old copper mine near
Beddgelert, and a graveyard with plaster monuments in the village of
Llanfrothen.
‘Wangcheng’ the main focal point of the outside filming was
constructed on the craggy slopes of Moel Dyniewyd. The main crag of Dyniewyd is
the site of one of Paul Work’s best routes, the delightful ‘Christmas Climb’. A
route which was one of Menlove Edward’s last climbs, completed with its
progenitor a few months before he committed suicide. Edwards was another one
time Nantmor resident who lived just up the valley from Paul and Ruth in the
tiny cottage of Hafod Owen, and whose ashes were scattered in the valley just
months before the film shoot.
One of the other main film locations was the head of Nant
Francon just beyond Ogwen Cottage where the film company were forced to base
their activities. Access along the old road which runs parallel to the A5 was
impossible to all but 4x4’s at the time. It was at this location- where the
hillside runs up to and spills over in
Cwm Idwal -that the main filming took place which detailed the exodus through
the mountains. Much of the battle footage was also filmed above Nant Francon
and below the West Face of Tryfan. Eagle eyed film watchers familiar with
Snowdonia will watch the movie with a wry smile as Ingrid Bergman and Bert Kwouk - best known perhaps as Peter Sellers
Pink Panther accomplice Cato - lead their ragged caravan under the shadow of Y
Garn and the distant Devil’s Kitchen.
The small village of
Beddgelert, would have been a
fantastical surreal place for anyone passing through at the time with bloody
Japanese soldiers, Chinese peasants and panniered war horses wandering up and down the high street
. A High Street alive with local, American and Scouse accents. Most of the
Chinese characters including the Chinese child refugees were recruited from
Liverpool’s Chinese community. Back in Ogwen, Ruth continued her role as a cast
and props runner in her Jeep. Regularly running Ingrid Bergman up from Ogwen
Cottage to the shoot location in her increasingly clapped out and gradually
disintegrating boneshaker. Thankfully for Ruth, the film company had by now
commissioned half a dozen extra Land Rovers to relieve the burden.
Back on Dyniewyd, the unwitting visitor cresting a
neighbouring hill would have witnessed a sight which was guaranteed to knock
them back on their heels. Japanese bombers strafing a impressive oriental
walled city as peasants ran from the rice fields for their lives. Below the
walled city, hundreds of extras and crew mingled out of shot on the mountain’s
lower slopes. Down the road in the Aberglasllyn Pass, the film crew shot the
river crossing scenes with Ingrid Bergman and Bert Kwouk leading their young
Scouse charges through the fast flowing waters of the Afon Glasllyn.
By late June the film was in the can. In Ruth’s words... It
seemed hard to imagine the countryside with no cars and people blocking the
roads, no curly eaved pagodas on the hills, no sampans floating on the quiet
waters of Llyn Dinas. The end came. The children left first. The vans, Lorries
and buses went home. The casual goodbyes of constant travellers were said and
the film makers slipped out of our lives. A few men were left to demolish the
sets, but in a short time these too had finished, had loaded their last truck
and departed. There was not a fragment of pagoda, not a bamboo pole, not a rice
bowl left to tell us that China had ever been to Wales. The turf was replaced,
the rubbish gathered, the hills restored to the sheep and mountaineers and the
grey stone villages in the valley were quiet again.......I turned again to work
which was governed by the sun and moon and the slow revolutions of the
seasons.
An old climber once told me though, that years later you
could still happen upon a ‘curly eaved’ Chinese building in the hills around
Dyniewyd so perhaps the set managers were not quite as diligent as Ruth Ruck
suggests? Sadly, in my many visits to this beautiful area, I have never come
across so much as a sandal or chopstick.
The film was released in 1959 and became one of the year’s
highest grossing films. Its appeal continues to this day and despite it very
much being stylistically of its time, modern film fans still consider it
something of a classic of the genre. For Gladys Aylward, the central character,
the film with its romantic undertones was not to her taste and she refused to
be associated with it or exploit its success by giving interviews or attend
screenings.Ruth Janette Ruck returned to the smallholders life and wrote
two books which anticipated the escape to the country/good life boom by several
years with her Faber & Faber published Hill Farm Story and Place of Stones.
An essay ‘Wild Mountain Time’ appeared on Footless Crow which contains a potted
climbing biography of her partner- Paul Orkney- Work. Ingrid Bergman died aged
67 in London.
John Appleby:2014
