Now largely forgotten, the studio at the Hertfordshire new town of Welwyn
Garden City opened in 1928 as a state-of-the-art home for British Instructional
Films (BIF), who had achieved success with historical re-enactments and the
innovative Secrets of Nature series. Though BIF's non-fiction output continued,
chief H. Bruce Woolfe soon focused attention on the company's feature film
operations, with early productions including Anthony Asquith's A Cottage on
Dartmoor (1929). BIF was subsequently absorbed by John Maxwell's British
International Pictures (BIP), and Welwyn, now hastily adapted for the sound era,
became an extension of the larger BIP studios at Elstree. Welwyn was also hired
out to external companies such as Gaumont-British, who made use of the extensive
back lot to construct a Belgian town square for Victor Saville's WWI drama I Was
A Spy (1933).
Many film industry personnel got their training on the 'B' pictures produced
at Welwyn during the 1930s, often as a result of the much-maligned quota
legislation of 1927, and a new production company, Welwyn Studios Ltd., was set
up in 1935. Welwyn boasted some important contributions to the pre-Hammer horror
cycle of that decade, culminating in The Dark Eyes of London (d. Walter Summers,
1939), with the fading Hollywood star Bela Lugosi. Unlike Elstree, the studio
was not requisitioned during the War; subsequent propaganda titles included Mein
Kampf - My Crimes (d. Norman Lee, 1940), while Alfred Hitchcock returned from
America to direct two ill-fated shorts intended to aid the French resistance,
Bon Voyage and Aventure Malgache (both 1944).
Welwyn continued to be used by various production companies throughout the
1940s, including its latest owner, Associated British Picture Corporation
(ABPC). The Boulting Brothers' crime classic Brighton Rock (1947) was made there
during a productive period in the latter half of the decade, which also brought
the Herbert Wilcox/Anna Neagle collaborations I Live in Grosvenor Square (1945)
and Piccadilly Incident (1946), and Thorold Dickinson's eerie gem The Queen of
Spades (1949). The facilities were becoming dated, however, and commercial
pressures eventually forced ABPC to sell up in late 1950.
Simon McCallum
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