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The Lost Worlds of John Ford

i
iii

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iv
The Lost Worlds of John Ford
Beyond the Western

Jeffrey Richards

v
 BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of

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First published in Great Britain 2020

Copyright © Jeffrey Richards, 2020

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1988, to be identified as Author of this work.

For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on pp. x–xi constitute an extension of this
copyright page.

Cover design: Charlotte Daniels

Dan Dailey and John Wayne in The Wings of Eagles (1957)

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vi
 For
Robert Gitt
and
Anthony Slide

vii
viii
 Contents

List of Illustrations x
Introduction and Acknowledgments xii

1 John Ford: The Enigmatic Genius 1

2 John Ford’s Ireland 43
3 John Ford’s Empire 123
4 John Ford’s Faith 165
5 John Ford’s Underworld 195
6 John Ford’s Wars 219
7 John Ford’s Navy 267

Conclusion 321
Index 323

ix
 List of Illustrations

1.1 John Ford—1930s portrait photograph 10

2.1 Victor McLaglen in The Informer (RKO, 1935) 60

2.2 The IRA in The Informer (RKO, 1935) 64

2.3 John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara in The Quiet Man

(Republic, 1952) 93

2.4 John Wayne and Victor McLaglen in The Quiet Man

(Republic, 1952) 97

2.5 The archetypal Fordian Family: The Morgans in How Green

Was My Valley (20th Century-Fox, 1941) 117

2.6 The Fordian Family (“our father was the head but our mother
was the heart”): Sara Allgood, Roddy McDowall and Donald
Crisp in How Green Was My Valley (20th Century-Fox, 1941) 121

3.1 The Lost Patrol (RKO, 1934) with Victor McLaglen, Boris
Karloff, Reginald Denny among others 137

3.2 C. Aubrey Smith, Shirley Temple and Cesar Romero in

Wee Willie Winkie (20th Century-Fox, 1937) 141

3.3 Victim of Imperialism Jon Hall in The Hurricane

(United Artists, 1937) 158

4.1 Henry Fonda in The Fugitive (RKO, 1947) 175

4.2 Mary of Scotland (RKO, 1936) with Katharine Hepburn

as doting mother 181

4.3 Mary of Scotland (RKO, 1936) with Katharine Hepburn

as Catholic martyr 187

x
 List of Illustrations xi

5.1 Spencer Tracy in Up the River (Fox, 1930) 201

5.2 Ricardo Cortez and Karen Morley in Flesh (MGM,1932) 206

5.3 Michael Trubshawe, Grizelda Hervey, Jack Hawkins and

Frank Lawton in Gideon’s Day/Gideon of Scotland Yard
(Columbia, 1958) 215

6.1 Henrietta Crosman, Norman Foster and Marian Nixon

in Pilgrimage (Fox, 1933) 227

6.2 James Cagney, Corinne Calvet and Dan Dailey in

What Price Glory (20th Century-Fox, 1952) 257

7.1 The crew of the Glencairn in The Long Voyage Home

(United Artists, 1940) 288

7.2 Barry Fitzgerald, John Wayne and John Qualen in

The Long Voyage Home (United Artists, 1940) 292

7.3 Jack Pennick, John Wayne, Robert Montgomery and Ward

Bond in They Were Expendable (MGM, 1945) 301

7.4 Donna Reed, Louis Jean Heydt and John Wayne in

They Were Expendable (MGM, 1945) 303

7.5 John Wayne and Dan Dailey in The Wings of Eagles

(MGM, 1957) 317

7.6 John Wayne and Ward Bond (as John Ford) in

The Wings of Eagles (MGM, 1957) 319
 Introduction and Acknowledgments

“My name is John Ford. I make Westerns” has been one of the most celebrated
pronouncements of the golden age of Hollywood. It occurred at the height of
the McCarthyite purge on October 22, 1950 at an emergency meeting of the
Screen Directors Guild, of which Ford was a founder member. It was called by
Cecil B. de Mille and a right wing cabal on the board of directors of the Guild
with the aim of ousting the liberal Guild president Joseph L. Mankiewicz who
was opposing the introduction of a compulsory loyalty oath and a black list of
those refusing to take it. Ford denounced the proposed black list, called for the
resignation of the board of directors and a vote of confidence in Mankiewicz.
He carried the day. It is a measure of the respect with which Ford was held in
the industry that he triumphed over the forces of reaction. Ford was admired
not only by the giants of the American film industry (Orson Welles, Frank
Capra, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Samuel Fuller, Martin Scorsese,
Anthony Mann and Steven Spielberg) but also by the titans of world cinema
(Satyajit Ray, Jean Renoir, Mark Donskoi, François Truffaut, Federico Fellini,
Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa). Sergei Eisenstein wrote that the
American film he most wished he had made was John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln.
Ford was chosen in 1973 as the first recipient of the American Film Institute’s
Life Achievement Award and he became the first American film-maker to
receive the country’s highest civilian award, the Medal of Freedom. He certainly
directed some of the greatest Westerns ever made (Stagecoach, My Darling
Clementine, The Searchers, Fort Apache, Rio Grande, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon,
The Horse Soldiers). But he was much more than a maker of Westerns. He
received four best director Oscars but none of them was for a Western. In fact
he made no Westerns between 1929 and 1939. When he was honored in 1972
by a Screen Directors Guild “Salute”, the film he chose to accompany the
ceremony was his Welsh family saga How Green Was My Valley and not one of
his celebrated Westerns.
The literature on Ford is extensive, but there has been an overconcentration
on the Westerns to the neglect of the non-Western films. While he was
xii
 Introduction and Acknowledgments xiii

undoubtedly devoted to the world of the American West and the values it
embodied, he had other current preoccupations, and he explored them in a
series of films that deserve to be better known. His other cinematic worlds
included Ireland, the Family, Catholicism, War, and the Sea, which share with
the Westerns the recurrent themes of memory and loss, the plight of outsiders
and the tragedy of family break-up. The principal object of this book is to
analyze these other worlds. It is not a biography though inevitably elements of
his life and beliefs will feature in the analysis. There are three outstanding
biographies of Ford by Tag Gallagher (John Ford: the Man and his Films, 1986),
Scott Eyman (Print the Legend: the Life and Times of John Ford, 1999) and
Joseph McBride (Searching for John Ford, 2001). This study will engage with
these writers and with other influential Ford scholars such as Lindsay
Anderson, Peter Bogdanovich, Andrew Sinclair, Andrew Sarris and J. A. Place
in what will be a revisionist account, challenging many judgments on individual
films and seeking to re-evaluate titles frequently dismissed as failures or
marginal works, among them such neglected masterworks as Mary of Scotland,
The Fugitive, The Hurricane, Wee Willie Winkie and Gideon’s Day. It is intended
to follow up this book with a second volume, John Ford’s American Worlds
which will re-examine not only his films set in the West but also those films set
in the South and in New England and in America’s historical past.
This book has been many years in the making and during that time I have
incurred many debts of gratitude for help and advice of various kinds. I wish
to thank in particular John Birchall, James Chapman, Stephen Constantine,
Michael Coyne, Estel Eforgan, Allen Eyles, Sir Christopher Frayling, Philip
French, Mark Glancy, Tom Hamilton, Kevin Harty, Joel Hockey, Corinna
Peniston-Bird, Sara Bryant, and Linda Persson. I am grateful to Robert Gitt
and Anthony Slide for making available unpublished interviews with Frank
Baker, Eileen Crowe and Mary Ford. This book is dedicated to them in
recognition of many years of valued friendship. Stills are from the author’s
collection. Thanks are due to Caroline Maxwell for compiling the index.
xiv
 1

John Ford: The Enigmatic Genius

Ford the Man

John Ford, arguably the greatest of all American film directors, was born John
Martin Feeney on February 1, 1894 in the state of Maine. He was the youngest
surviving of the eleven children of Irish immigrants John A. Feeney and
Barbara Curran Feeney. Having failed the entrance examination for the US
Naval Academy at Annapolis, he joined his elder brother Frank in Hollywood
in 1914. Frank, who had rechristened himself Francis Ford, had arrived in
1907 and established himself as a director and star in the fledgling movie
industry. Known henceforth as Jack Ford, the young John Feeney became a
props man, a stunt man and an extra in his brother’s films. None of Frank’s
films have survived. But Ford told Peter Bogdanovich that Frank had been his
greatest influence:

He was a great cameraman—there’s nothing they’re doing today . . . that he

hadn’t done; he was a good artist, a wonderful musician, a hell of a good
actor, a good director . . . he just couldn’t concentrate on one thing too long.

He also acknowledged the influence of Griffith (“D. W. Griffith influenced us

all”).1 But as Frank’s career declined due to alcoholism and poor business
decisions, Jack’s took off. Ford would later employ his brother as a character
actor, often playing drunken old derelicts, which some have seen as payback
for Frank’s patronizing treatment of the young Jack.
Ford began directing two-reelers in 1917 and soon graduated to features
with Straight Shooting. Teamed with cowboy star Harry Carey, he directed 22
films at Universal between 1917 and 1921. The stories were devised by Ford

1
Peter Bogdanovich, John Ford, Berkeley : University of California Press, 1978, p. 40.

1
2 The Lost Worlds of John Ford: Beyond the Western

and Carey and featured a continuing character, a good-bad man called

Cheyenne Harry. Ford recalled of these Westerns: “They weren’t shoot-em-ups,
they were character stories. Carey was a great actor”.2
Anxious to strike out on his own and establish a solo reputation, and jealous
of Carey’s greater earnings (Carey was being paid $2,250 a week to Ford’s
$300), Ford moved from Universal to Fox where in 1923 he changed his billing
from Jack to John Ford and achieved a great hit with his Western epic The Iron
Horse (1924). He successfully weathered the change from silent to sound films
and made no Westerns between 1926 and 1939. Instead he worked in a variety
of genres mainly at Fox (later 20th Century-Fox) and RKO Radio Pictures,
winning his first Oscar for his Irish melodrama The Informer in 1935.
He established a productive relationship with screenwriter Dudley Nichols
and they were to work on fourteen films together. As Stephen O. Lesser writes:

The Ford–Nichols relationship was critical in the developing careers of both

men, although Nichols’ contribution to Ford’s style has become a matter of
dispute. In recent times, the weight of opinion has swung against Nichols,
claiming that Ford only revealed himself as a poet of the cinema once free
from the schematic bonds of Nichols’s screenplays. On the other hand, it was
only after Ford had discovered Nichols that Ford achieved the critical success
needed to fuel his career and establish his reputation. It is safe to say that the
two men shared similar outlooks and worked well together, each bringing
out tendencies in the other that resulted in a symbolic, atmospheric style of
filmmaking.3

Another key relationship in Ford’s career was with Darryl F. Zanuck, head of
20th Century-Fox. Zanuck told his biographer Mel Gussow in 1968:

In reviewing all the work of the many directors I have finally come to the
conclusion that John Ford is the best director in the history of motion
pictures . . . Ford had that enormous sense of the visual. He makes the camera
act . . . He was an artist. He painted a picture—in movement, in action, in still
shots . . . He was a great great pictorial artist.4

2
Bogdanovich, John Ford, p. 39.
3
Robert E. Morsberger, Stephen O. Lesser and Randall Clark, eds., Dictionary of Literary Biography
vol. 26: American Screenwriters, Detroit, MI: Gale Research Co., 1984, p. 229.
4
Mel Gussow, Zanuck: Don’t Say Yes Until I Finish Talking, London: W. H. Allen, 1971, pp. 163–4.
 John Ford: The Enigmatic Genius 3

Ford returned the compliment:

Darryl’s a genius—and I don’t use the word lightly . . . he is head and

shoulders above all producers . . . We had an ideal relationship.5

This is remarkable coming from Ford who detested most producers and
resented any tampering with his films. Zanuck had absolute control of 20th
Century-Fox, choosing the properties, assigning scripts to writers, deciding
the casts, supervising the final edit. With Ford who cut in the camera as he was
filming, Zanuck’s main effect was to reduce the running time of Ford’s films by
editing out what he considered extraneous scenes slowing down the trajectory
of the story. The studio’s fondness for Americana allowed Ford to make his
easy-going Will Rogers trilogy and three masterpieces, Young Mr. Lincoln
(1939), Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) and The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
which brought Ford his second best director Oscar. A third followed for How
Green Was My Valley (1941) before the war interrupted his career. He set up
the Field Photo Unit which became the cinematic branch of the Office of
Strategic Service (OSS) and was employed throughout the war making training
films and documenting the progress of hostilities. Two of Ford’s documentaries
won Oscars, Battle of Midway (1942) and December 7th (1943), although they
were not specifically awarded to the director. Much against his will, Ford was
seconded from the unit to MGM in 1945 to make a tribute to the PT (Patrol
Torpedo) boats, They Were Expendable, which turned out to be another
masterpiece.
Anxious to avoid being tied to a studio, he set up after the war an independent
company, Argosy, with Merian C. Cooper. Their first production, the Catholic
allegory The Fugitive, was a box office disaster and Ford produced his celebrated
cavalry trilogy, Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and Rio
Grande (1950), to recoup the company’s fortunes. He also established a new
partnership with the journalist Frank Nugent who was to script eleven films
for Ford, including The Quiet Man (1952), his long-cherished Irish romance
which brought him his fourth best director Oscar.
During the 1950s Ford became increasingly disenchanted with American
society and his vision darkened. During the 1920s and 1930s he can be seen

5
Gussow, Zanuck, pp. 162–3.
4 The Lost Worlds of John Ford: Beyond the Western

actively subscribing to an optimistic populist view of American history and

society. In his films, the move is always westward: from Europe to America
(Mother Machree, Four Sons, Flesh, The Informer, How Green Was My Valley),
the dream of the immigrant; and in America from East to West, the aim of the
pioneer (The Iron Horse, 3 Bad Men, Drums Along the Mohawk, Wagon Master).
His films reached an optimistic peak with Wagon Master (1950) which tells of
a Mormon trek across the desert in search of the Promised Land.
But with the development of the Cold War, anti-Communist paranoia
fueling the McCarthyite purges and the beginning of civil rights agitation,
Ford turned from the optimistic age of frontier America and the dream of an
ideal society to be created there and began to eulogize settled traditional
societies with what is basically paternalist government, sustained by simple
Christian faith, good neighborliness and time-honored rituals; hence his
affectionate depictions of Old Ireland (The Quiet Man), the Old South (The
Sun Shines Bright) and the South Seas (Donovan’s Reef).
However, he depicts a bitterly divided United States in films about the Civil
War (The Horse Soldiers, How the West Was Won), and he begins to explore the
impact of racism on American society in The Searchers (1956), regarded by
many as his greatest film, Sergeant Rutledge (1960), Two Rode Together (1961)
and Cheyenne Autumn (1964). He celebrates an old-style political machine in
The Last Hurrah (1958) and provides a melancholy elegy for the Old West in
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). His box office appeal began to wane
as two personal projects The Rising of the Moon (1957) and Gideon’s Day/Gideon
of Scotland Yard (1958) failed badly at the box office. The balance of power
between him and his favorite star John Wayne shifted. Increasingly Ford could
only get his projects off the ground if Wayne agreed to star. His health began to
fail and longtime associates noticed his energy levels falling and his increasing
preference for shooting in the studio and avoiding the rigors of location
filming. In a 1959 interview he lamented, “The old enthusiasm has gone maybe.
But don’t quote that. Oh, hell, you can quote it.”6 A lifetime of alcoholism
caught up with him and he had to withdraw from Young Cassidy (1965) as he
had from Mister Roberts (1955). When his final film 7 Women (1966) was both

6
Joseph McBride, Searching for John Ford, London: Faber and Faber, 2003, p. 600.
 John Ford: The Enigmatic Genius 5

a critical and box office failure, MGM canceled his next project and thereafter
he could not raise finance for any of his projects. As he lamented to French
critic Claudine Tavernier, repeating it over and over again, “They won’t let me
make any more films”.7
In the 1930s he had described himself as “a definite Socialistic democrat”8 and
still defined himself as a Democrat in the 1960s.9 But after World War Two he
moved steadily to the right though never as far right as his friends John Wayne
and Ward Bond. With his strong commitment to the military, he supported the
unpopular Korean and Vietnam Wars. However, his disillusionment proceeded
apace in the 1960s. As he told British interviewer Philip Jenkinson in 1970:

I’m worried about these riots, these students. I’m worried about this anti-
racism. It doesn’t mean the Negroes are doing it. They are being influenced
by outside. Some other country. They are agents, the people who are doing
things, that are being arrested . . . and the poor Negroes are getting the blame.
That’s why I think our ancestors would be . . . bloody ashamed of us if they
saw us now.10

In 1971 Ford was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He lived long enough to
receive the first American Film Institute Life Achievement Award and the
Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States,
before he died on August 31, 1973.
Ford was a nightmare for interviewers. He said: “I hate pictures—well, I like
making them, but it’s no use asking me to talk about them.”11 When he was not
answering in monosyllables, he would make things up, embellish or deny the
truth, contradict previous statements. He hated analyzing his films. His attitude
was akin to that of the similarly uncommunicative Rudyard Kipling who
would answer questions about his life and work with the statement “It’s all in
the books”. For Ford his films spoke for themselves and said everything he
wanted to say.
His films were the world as he wanted it to be and it overlapped with reality
to the extent that he twice made feature films about real-life friends, John

7
Gerald Peary, ed., John Ford Interviews, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001, p. 103.
8
McBride, Searching for John Ford, p. 193.
9
Peary, John Ford Interviews, pp. 48, 107.
10
Peary, John Ford Interviews, p. 140.
11
Louis Marcorelles, “Ford of the Movies”, Cahiers du Cinéma 86 (1958), p. 32.
6 The Lost Worlds of John Ford: Beyond the Western

Bulkeley (They Were Expendable) and Frank “Spig” Wead (The Wings of Eagles);
three if you count Wyatt Earp whom he claimed to have known in the 1920s
and who described to him the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, the subject of My
Darling Clementine. He also made a documentary tribute, Chesty, to another
old friend, General Lewis “Chesty” Puller and tried and failed to make a biopic
of his wartime commander, “Wild Bill” Donovan, who was to have been played
by John Wayne. Ford even portrayed himself in one of these films, choosing
one of his closest friends Ward Bond to play him under the name John Dodge
in The Wings of Eagles. It is an embodiment of the mythic Ford. Bond, equipped
with Ford’s hat, pipe and Oscars, projects the image of the irascible but good-
hearted professional, an anti-intellectual who claims to have played Robert E.
Lee in The Odyssey, and who signs “Spig” Wead as a scriptwriter with the
instruction to write about “People! Navy people!”
John Ford the man was deeply insecure, haunted by demons, riven by
contradictions, “an unquiet man” as his grandson Dan Ford called him.12
Although he was extremely well-read, he posed as an illiterate. He dismissed
descriptions of himself as a poet and an artist as “horseshit”, claiming just to be
a hard-nosed run-of-the mill professional doing a job of work.13 On the
contrary, it is clear from his admiration for F. W. Murnau and his close study of
the German Expressionist classics that he consciously sought to produce works
of art but would never admit it lest he come across as an intellectual, an aesthete
or as a pretentious sissy. He also had an acknowledged mission to film the
works of Irish and Irish American writers. A measure of his desire to be taken
seriously as an artist is his move away from Westerns to more general film fare,
his change of studio (from Universal to Fox) and his change of name (from
Jack Ford to John Ford). He was socially insecure. As an Irish American
Catholic from an immigrant family in a Protestant-dominated country, as
someone married to a socially superior Protestant blueblood, and as a college
dropout, he proudly proclaimed himself a peasant and a rebel. But he sought
advancement in the Navy as an officer and a gentlemen and sought to amass
medals and decorations as recognition of his service. He found acceptance in
the studio system where, unlike another famous rebel and maverick, he was

12
Dan Ford, The Unquiet Man, London: William Kimber, 1979.
13
Peary, John Ford Interviews, p. 159.
 John Ford: The Enigmatic Genius 7

able to work. Orson Welles, working mainly outside the system, managed to
complete a dozen films between 1941 and 1985; Ford made over 130 between
1917 and 1965.
Ford was also sexually insecure, a trait detected by many who knew him
best. His work was a means by which he sought to reconcile his personal
dilemmas. For someone who celebrated the family in his films, he was an
unsatisfactory husband and father. For a man proud of the United States, he
was torn between the two sides in the matter of the Civil War. Revering
Abraham Lincoln and coming from the Northern state of Maine, he was
intellectually a Unionist. But as a romantic and an admirer of the chivalric
code, he was temperamentally a Confederate. This is confirmed in a 1949
article by Frank Nugent.14 The fact that he re-read The Three Musketeers once a
year and spent several years trying to set up a production of Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle’s The White Company underlines his commitment to chivalry.15 It is no
wonder that he claimed that he had an uncle who had fought on both sides in
the Civil War and he used the cavalry trilogy to show the two sides being
reconciled by service in the US cavalry.
Harry Carey Jr., who appeared in nine Ford features and one television film,
commented on Ford’s attitude to his actors:

Jack was a man for all seasons, but not a man for all actors. He was kind to
the tough and cruel to the fainthearted, paternal and gentle to the girls. They
loved him, but he was afraid of them.16

It is interesting that he should have detected a fear of women, for Michael Wayne,
John’s eldest son, sensed the same thing: “Ford had respect for women but he also
had a fear of women”.17 Women recognized the sensitivity in him. Mary Astor,
who worked with him in The Hurricane, found him “Terse, pithy, to the point.
Very Irish, a dark personality, a sensitivity which he did everything to conceal”.18

14
Gaylyn Studlar and Matthew Bernstein, eds., John Ford Made Westerns, Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 2001, p. 264.
15
Peary, John Ford Interviews, pp. 98–99; Tag Gallagher, John Ford: The Man and his Films, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1986, p. 545.
16
Harry Carey Jr., Company of Heroes, Metuchen, NJ and London: The Scarecrow Press, 1994, p. 59.
17
Scott Eyman, Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford, New York: Simon and Schuster,
1999, p. 401.
18
Mary Astor, A Life on Film, New York: Delacorte Press, 1971, p. 134.
8 The Lost Worlds of John Ford: Beyond the Western

Katharine Hepburn found him “enormously, truly sensitive”.19 Myrna Loy, whom
he directed in Black Watch and Arrowsmith, recalled “John Ford had tremendous
sensitivity, but we seldom see the gentle things he did”.20 Anna Lee wrote: “He
could be absolutely hideous to people, very nasty and unpleasant. On the other
hand he had a very loving heart. He was always kind to me.”21 In part, this
stemmed from the fact that during the shooting of her first Ford film, How Green
Was My Valley, she suffered a miscarriage. Ford was devastated, closed down the
film for a day and thereafter took a particular interest in her well-being.
Australian actor Frank Baker recalled: “He had a strange, old-world quality with
women. He was always very nice to women, always very courteous to them. You
would never hear bad language on a John Ford set . . . God! If you used bad
language in front of women, he’d throw you right off the set.”22 But it is no
coincidence that when he created the Field Photo Farm after the war, it was an
all-male enclave, with a prominent sign reading “No women allowed”. For he was
happiest and most comfortable in all-male company. Dudley Nichols offered
Lindsay Anderson an acute insight into Ford. He said Ford had “one blind spot—
his inability to deal with the man–woman relationship with feeling and insight,
no matter how clearly it is written in the script . . . Ford’s weakness . . . is that he
cannot create in his actors the normal man–woman passions, either of love or
the hate that is the dark side of impassioned love. I should guess he does not
know it, does not understand it.”23 Harry Carey Jr. revealed that it became a
standing joke that Ford hated to direct love scenes and usually left them to the
end of the shooting.24
The dark side of his sensitivity was his reaction to criticism. He knew exactly
how he wanted to make his films and when he was satisfied with a scene that
was it. If ever an actor asked for another take to improve his performance, Ford
might reshoot it with no film in the camera or shoot it and then hand the piece
of film to the actor if indeed he agreed to reshoot it at all. He would accept no
suggestions from the cast about his shooting of the film. When Katharine

19
McBride, Searching for John Ford, p. 114.
20
James Kotsilibas-Davis and Myrna Loy, Myrna Loy: Being and Becoming, London: Bloomsbury,
1987, pp. 57–58.
21
Anna Lee and Barbara Roisman Cooper, Anna Lee, Jefferson, NC and London, 2007, p. 138.
22
Frank Baker, unpublished interview with Robert Gitt and Anthony Slide, July 30, 1977.
23
Lindsay Anderson, About John Ford, London: Plexus, 1981, p. 241.
24
Carey, Company of Heroes, p. 119; McBride, Searching for John Ford, p. 231.
 John Ford: The Enigmatic Genius 9

Hepburn and Will Rogers made a suggestion about shooting a scene, he stalked
off and told them to shoot it themselves. Hepburn did.25 When Helen Hayes
complained about his changes to the script he barked “Get on that set and stick
to your acting—such as it is.”26 He could not take criticism. When a preview
showing of The Informer went down badly, he was physically sick and when
audiences laughed at the love scenes in Black Watch he went on one of his
alcoholic benders. His habit of chewing on a handkerchief all the time he was
shooting bespeaks someone who is intensely nervous.
Coupled with the sensitivity was the fact that he was extremely sentimental
and wept easily. In order not to reveal this to the world, he developed an
alternative personality. This process was observed by Frank Baker who worked
with him for forty years and also encountered the extreme reaction to criticism.
When in Hearts of Oak (1924) Ford criticized his acting in characteristically
extreme terms (“You’re the worst actor I’ve ever seen in my life”), Baker
snapped back “You are the worst director I have ever worked for”. Ford replied:
“As long as you work for me you’re not going to get a screen credit”. Baker
worked for him on twenty-seven films until 1963 and Ford remained true to
his word. Baker never did get a screen credit. Over the years Baker was able to
view Ford at close quarters and concluded:

He was two completely different people, one is the real John Ford. And the
real John Ford is so much different from the John Ford we know, the tough,
ruthless, sarcastic individual. He’s so very different to the real John Ford,
who’s a very kind individual. But he was afraid of that. And the John Ford we
know is a legend, a living legend who was created by John Ford to protect the
other John Ford, the sympathetic, sentimental, soft John Ford. I am quite
assured now that John Ford was perhaps suffering tremendously from a very
great inferiority complex, and sitting right at the fountain of that inferiority
complex was his brother Francis. He knew that this was where it all came
from, and he took it out on Frank for the rest of his life . . . Everything that
John Ford did, I could see the reflection of Frank. Camera angles and
different touches. He’d say “How do you like that?” and I’d say “I’ve seen that
before” and he’d go as cold as anything. He had an amazing admiration of his
brother . . . but he was completely jealous of him.27

25
The films involved were Doctor Bull (Will Rogers) and Mary of Scotland (Katharine Hepburn).
26
The film was Arrowsmith. Helen Hayes, On Reflection, New York: M. Evans and Co. Inc., 1968, p. 189.
27
Frank Baker interview.
10 The Lost Worlds of John Ford: Beyond the Western

Figure 1.1 John Ford—1930s portrait photograph

If one source of Ford’s insecurity was comparison with his brother, another was his
concern about his masculinity. His shyness with women and his preference for
male company led associates to speculate about his sexuality. Garry Wills argues:

Ford, especially in the 1920s, favored brawny types, like George O’Brien, a
weightlifter who posed for muscular nude shots. Ford often stripped
O’Brien’s shirt away at the climax of the action. The fight that ends The Iron
Horse is a good example. He also took off the young Victor McLaglen’s shirt
(The Black Watch, The Lost Patrol) . . . Harry Carey (Senior) and Joe Harris,
who had worked with Ford in his silent days, speculated about the “crushes”
he formed for various beefcakes.28

In an article for an Italian film magazine in 1951 Ford described his feelings for
John Wayne, of whom he says “he is, has always been and always will be my
pal”. It sounds like love at first sight.

28
Garry Wills, John Wayne: The Politics of Celebrity, London: Faber and Faber, 1997, p. 47.
 John Ford: The Enigmatic Genius 11

I have liked Duke’s style since the first time I saw him in 1928 when I went
to USC to recruit a bunch of athletes to play in a football game in Salute . . .
Duke was not as strong or as developed as the other young men I saw . . .
However I was struck by his self-assured manner. I also liked his smile—easy
and natural.

He had “tremendous energy”, “displayed that masculine ease which is the secret
of success on the silver screen” and conveyed to the audience what it was to be
a “real man.” “When acting in a dramatic role, he behaves in the same way as he
would in real life. It is this kind of acting that makes a film both beautiful and
believable”.29 Ford took him up as prop man, stunt man and extra. But more
important he admitted him to his social circle. However once Marion “Duke”
Morrison was spotted by Raoul Walsh and given a new name (John Wayne)
and the star role in his epic Western The Big Trail (1929), Ford did not speak to
him for three years. Wayne never understood why. But it stands out a mile.
Ford was jealous. His protégé had been stolen from him. But once the film
failed at the box office and Wayne retreated to cheap B picture Westerns to
hone his craft, Ford readmitted him to his circle but did not cast him until
Stagecoach in 1939. Ford was furious with Wayne for avoiding military service
in World War Two but eventually forgave this—another measure of his
affection. Wayne repaid him with absolute and unquestioning devotion
throughout his career.
Another means Ford employed to conceal his soft side and assert his control
of the set was observed by Frank Baker:

He always picked somebody at the beginning of a picture and he’d let them
have it. You couldn’t do anything right. And he just sat there with that flat
voice and he would attack you; he would humiliate you. He’d make you
grovel. I could never understand why he’d do that, and he’d do it right
through the picture.30

It could be established players he would pick on (Victor McLaglen in The

Informer, Thomas Mitchell in Stagecoach, Walter Brennan in My Darling
Clementine, Eddie Albert in 7 Women, J. Carrol Naish in The Fugitive, John
Carradine in Mary of Scotland, Donald Sinden in Mogambo, O. Z. Whitehead

29
Studlar and Bernstein, John Ford Made Westerns, pp. 272–3.
30
Frank Baker interview.
12 The Lost Worlds of John Ford: Beyond the Western

in The Grapes of Wrath). One of his targets was stage actors. But more often
than not it was good-looking, inexperienced young actors (Humphrey Bogart
in Up the River, Norman Foster in Pilgrimage, Harry Carey Jr. in 3 Godfathers,
John Agar in Fort Apache, Robert Wagner in What Price Glory) and there must
be a suspicion that he behaved like this to disguise a certain tendresse.
Another manifestation of his sensitivity to criticism and exercise of
autocratic caprice was his tendency to banish people who offended him. Actor
George O’Brien abandoned him when he was in a drunken stupor on their Far
Eastern tour in 1931. Ford banished him until 1948 when he was recalled for
Fort Apache. When Victor McLaglen turned down a part in The Long Voyage
Home (1940) because the salary was too small, Ford banished him also until
1948 and Fort Apache. Andy Devine was playing the driver in Stagecoach
(1939) when Ford got angry with him and said “I don’t know why the hell I’m
using you in this picture” and Devine replied “Because Ward Bond can’t drive
six horses”. Ford did not speak to him for six years and did not employ him
again until 1961. Ben Johnson was banished for 13 years after Ford overheard
him say at dinner during the filming of Rio Grande (1950): “there was a lot of
shootin’ goin’ on today, but not too many Indians bit the dust”. This despite the
fact that Johnson was under contract to Argosy Pictures and being groomed
for stardom.
In her autobiography, Maureen O’Hara, Ford’s favorite leading lady,
explicitly asserts that Ford was gay and at one time had designs on her good-
looking brother James Lilburn, whose acting career he later ruined out of spite.
This revelation, says O’Hara, made sense of several facts about the Ford
marriage, “the separate bedrooms, his insulting her, the periodic drinking, and
the lack of outward affection they showed each other.” She concludes:

I now believe there was a conflict within Ford and that it caused him great
pain and turmoil. These kinds of desires were something John Ford could
readily accept in others, but never in himself. He saw himself as a man’s man
. . . he was also too immersed in the teachings of Catholicism. He would have
seen it as a terrible sin.31

This conflict was her explanation for the punishing drinking bouts.

31
Maureen O’Hara with John Nicoletti, ‘Tis Herself, London: Simon and Schuster, 2004, pp. 190–191.
 John Ford: The Enigmatic Genius 13

The person Ford most resembles, unlikely as it may sound, is Alfred

Hitchcock. Like Ford, Hitchcock was a Catholic and an exile (in his case from
England). They were the products of lower middle-class families (Ford’s father,
a saloonkeeper, Hitchcock’s, a green-grocer). Hitchcock’s wife Alma Reville
converted to Catholicism on marriage as did Ford’s wife Mary McBryde Smith.
Both men had sexual hangups and a streak of sadism. Both initially sought
artistic respectability (Hitchcock by filming plays by John Galsworthy, Noel
Coward and Sean O’Casey; Ford by filming plays by Eugene O’Neill, Maxwell
Anderson and Sean O’Casey). Eventually they settled for mastery of a particular
genre (Hitchcock the thriller, Ford the Western). But both believed that silent
films were the purest form of cinema.
As Frank Nugent observed in a 1949 profile of the director:

Ford never has formally surrendered to the talkies. His writers are under
standing orders to keep dialog to an “irreducible minimum”. Ford usually
manages to trim the “irreducible” still more.32

Ford himself said: “I. . .am a silent picture man. Pictures, not words, should tell
the story”.33
One of the best known stories about Ford, repeated again at the American
Film Institute Life Achievement Award dinner, is that on one film a producer
turned up on set to complain that Ford was behind schedule. He promptly tore
a dozen pages from the script and said “Now we’re back on schedule”. The
problem with this story is that it is attached to a dozen different films. So either
it is mythical or he did it regularly as a stunt—and he was a man with a
penchant for practical jokes. Either way it underlines his preference for visuals
over dialog.
Donald Sinden described his method of directing on Mogambo in which he
starred with Grace Kelly:

On the bank of a river a landing stage had been built and at it was moored a
river steamer. The film crew and the camera were positioned on the bank
and without a single word from Ford, Grace and I were bundled on to the
boat which set off upstream. With us came the second assistant who

32
Studlar and Bernstein, John Ford Made Westerns, p. 268.
33
Peary, John Ford Interviews, p. 64.
14 The Lost Worlds of John Ford: Beyond the Western

established walkie-talkie communication with the unit. Round the bend of

the river the boat stopped and turned about. We waited. No one had been
given any instructions. We had no rehearsal; the script merely indicated:
“The boat arrives and the scientist and his wife get off.” Over the walkie-
talkie we heard, “Roll ‘em. Action”, and the boat started to chug forward.
Suddenly Ford’s voice screamed over a loud-hailer: “Grace—Donald—get
below. OK. Donald—come on deck. Look around at the scenery. Call
Grace. Put your arm around her. Point out a giraffe over on your right.
Get your camera out—quickly. Photograph it—the giraffe. Smile at him,
Grace. Grace—you’re scared. OK. You’re coming into the pier. Look around.
What’s in store for you? Natives are running down to meet you. OK. OK.
Cut. Print it.” And that was our baptism of being directed by Ford: exactly
what he had done in the days of silent films.34

Ford the Artist

Ford’s films always had a distinctive look and feel, hence the adjective “Fordian”.
A Ford film was Fordian in its tendency to opt for an anecdotal structure rich
in “business”, comic interludes, gesture and incidental detail. An instinctive
commitment to composition within the frame, the avoidance of camera
movement, the sparing use of close-ups, a love of ritual and a fondness for
improvisation were also characteristically Fordian. The regular use of the same
actors and actresses, the so-called stock company, gave an enduring sense of
family and continuity to his films.
Ford revealed his basic film-making philosophy to Jean Mitry in 1955
saying that the secret was to turn out films that pleased the public but also
revealed the personality of the director. “Directing is a craft. If a director’s films
do not make money, he cannot expect to retain the confidence and goodwill of
the men who put up the wherewithal”. He went on to describe his involvement
in the film-making process. “The cutting: I do it myself. And I plan the film.
When a subject interests me, I also take part in the scripting. If the subject

34
Donald Sinden, A Touch of the Memoirs, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1982, p. 175.
 John Ford: The Enigmatic Genius 15

doesn’t interest me, I am satisfied to do my job to everybody’s best interest.

When I work with a scriptwriter, he outlines the situations, develops the
continuity, writes the dialog. The shooting arrangements and the cutting, I do
myself. We have numerous conferences with the cameraman, the set designer,
and sometimes the actors. Each one knows what he has to do and understands
the picture before starting to work on it. A well-prepared film is shot quickly.”35
In 1967, Ford elaborated on his involvement in the scriptwriting of his films.
“There’s no such thing as a good script really. Scripts are dialog and I don’t like
all that talk. I’ve always tried to get things done visually. I don’t like to do books
or plays. I prefer to take a short story and expand it, rather than take a novel
and try and condense it.” He went on to describe precisely how he worked with
the writer: “I spend the afternoon with him and work out a sequence: we talk
and argue back and forth—he suggests something, I suggest something. That
night or next morning, he knocks it out on his typewriter, blocks it out and we
see whether we were right or wrong”.36 It is clear from this that the scriptwriter
did literally provide the words but that the ideas, incidents, shape and structure,
emerged from the discussion sessions. Here the groundwork was done, the
blueprint prepared for the architect director to start building in the studio.
Rarely did Ford’s name appear on the script credits but he admits to having
actively rewritten several of the scripts he filmed bearing the names of other
writers, to having provided original screen stories for some of his films and to
having worked closely with particular writers for long periods. He wrote many
of the early Universal Westerns together with the star Harry Carey, the credited
scriptwriter often being just the man who wrote down the ideas. He also
recalled completely rewriting (with William Collier Sr.) Maurine Watkins’
script for Up the River and (with Dudley Nichols) rewriting in the space of
eight days a highly unsatisfactory script for The Lost Patrol, presumably by
Garrett Fort, who received a script credit. He worked closely on Young Mr.
Lincoln with Lamar Trotti, without receiving credit and he injected original
material into the scripts of several of his Fox assignments in order to liven
them up. But more significant perhaps than this is the longstanding and richly

35
Andrew Sarris, Interviews with Film Directors, New York: Avon Books, 1969, pp. 197–8.
36
Bogdanovich, John Ford, p. 107.
16 The Lost Worlds of John Ford: Beyond the Western

productive relationships he had with two successive scriptwriters: Dudley

Nichols and Frank Nugent. These relationships signify the two distinct periods
of his career in sound films, pre-war and post-war.

Ford’s Style

Ford’s strengths both in his own words and according to the testimony of his
collaborators were the directing of actors, an eye for composition, the ability to
infuse life and spontaneity into scripts by means of “business”, gesture and
detail, a feeling for ritual and folk music. It is these strengths which dictate
Ford’s narrative style, a style summed up by his own predilection for the short
story which could be expanded, and which suggested a central narrative
framework that is constructed loosely enough to permit the maximum leeway
for the elaboration of a comic incident, the extemporization of a dance or a
fight, the improvisation of a dialogue exchange. What a close study of Ford’s
silent films reveals is the wealth of anecdotal detail, the development of
character, atmosphere and business, at the expense of the central narrative line,
which is sometimes lost sight of completely. This must be seen as Ford’s style,
and it is a style to which talkies must have seemed at first sight inimical. The
introduction of dialogue, the increased importance of stage-trained actors and
scenarists, were factors Ford would have to come to terms with.
He came to terms with them, thanks to Dudley Nichols, the first of his long-
term writing collaborators. Critics have accused Nichols of being a pernicious
influence on Ford. His influence was undoubtedly very strong but it did not
lead to the results that some have suggested. He did not seduce Ford into
stylization, symbolism or theatricality. These were second nature to Ford and
can be seen in many of his pre-Nichols silent films. He did not inveigle Ford
into filming prestige literary properties—for The Fugitive, The Informer, The
Plough and the Stars, The Long Voyage Home were all films that Ford himself
passionately wanted to make. What he did do was to impose on Ford’s films a
tight and controlled structure. When Nichols first came to Hollywood in 1929
and was assigned by Fox to work with Ford, he confessed that he had no idea
how to write a film script. Ford told him to write a play in 50 or 60 scenes and
Ford would turn it into a shooting script. This advice is the key to Nichols’
 John Ford: The Enigmatic Genius 17

influence. His Ford scripts are essentially plays—organized, precise, tightly

structured, carefully introducing and developing characters by dialogue and
interplay, building up logically to a climax. This is aided by the fact that several
of them were originally plays (The Plough and the Stars, Mary of Scotland, The
Long Voyage Home). Even when they were not plays but novels to begin with
(The Lost Patrol, The Informer, The Hurricane, The Fugitive), they are turned
into structures similar to the plays. The notable exception to this is Stagecoach,
which despite its careful narrative structure (the journey framework, the
handful of strongly characterized people thrown together, the hallmarks of the
Nichols scripts), is developed from a short story and allows Ford the greatest
scope for digression in all the Nichols scripts. Thus perhaps the most
characteristic feature of the Nichols scripts with the possible exception of
Stagecoach is that their structure did not allow for the sorts of interpolation
Ford loved. He himself was later to acknowledge this when telling Bogdanovich
that The Informer was not one of his favorite films—“It lacks humor which is
my forte”.37
One might conclude that Ford was in awe of Nichols, playwright and
intellectual (when he turned director, Nichols’ own magnum opus was a
marathon version of Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra which
predictably failed at the box office), for his influence on Ford was never equaled
by anyone else. Both before the Nichols period during the silent days, during
the Nichols period when working with other writers, and subsequently, Ford’s
style is the familiar anecdotal one. The Will Rogers trilogy (Doctor Bull, Judge
Priest and Steamboat Round the Bend) and the Americana classics Drums
Along the Mohawk and Young Mr. Lincoln are all rich in comedy, business,
anecdote, the creation of atmosphere at the expense of strict narrative
development. On all except Doctor Bull, Ford’s chief script collaborator seems
to have been Lamar Trotti. After the war when Nichols turned director himself
and Ford left 20th Century-Fox to found his own production company Argosy,
Ford inaugurated a new relationship—with critic and writer Frank Nugent
and in this relationship Ford seems to have been the stronger personality. The
films they made together (the cavalry trilogy, Wagon Master, The Searchers, The
Quiet Man, The Last Hurrah) brought to perfection the anecdotal style. In all

37
Bogdanovich, John Ford, p. 59.
18 The Lost Worlds of John Ford: Beyond the Western

the films Nugent worked on and indeed all of Ford’s later films this is the
predominant style. Probably the only exceptions are Mogambo and 7 Women.
In Mogambo he manifestly was not interested. “I don’t know a thing about it”
he said in 1955, “I haven’t even seen it. But why should I have deprived myself
of a trip to Africa and the chance to make one more film? One does one’s job.
The film of really personal interest is an exception”.38 The 1966 film 7 Women
is an unexpected reversal to the Thirties, and Nichols’ structure and approach.
The subordination of narrative line to anecdote is something which enraged
traditionally narrative-orientated critics. Ford was habitually accused of self-
indulgence, disregard for plot development, dramatic naïveté. What he had in
fact done was to bring his own style to perfection. Asked what sort of stories he
liked, Ford replied: “Anything with interesting characters—and some humor”.39
These are the aspects that his style of film-making particularly favored. Nugent
described to Lindsay Anderson the process of working with Ford:

Usually a script is written scene by scene, gone over, discussed, rewritten

maybe, then okayed—and you don’t go back over it again. . .With Jack, once
the scene is okayed, you can put it behind you.40

Winston Miller, who co-wrote My Darling Clementine, confirmed this, saying

Ford thought in terms of scenes and not of strict narrative progression.41 Ford
introduced Nugent to the habit of writing potted biographies of the main
characters (“Where born, educated, politics, drinking habits (if any), quirks”),
something he continued in his writing career. But he makes it clear that “the
finished picture is always Ford’s, never the writer’s”. This is because Ford would
add and improvise and cut dialogue he considered excessive. Nugent recalled
that The Quiet Man was filmed with “remarkably few changes”. But Wagon
Master and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon faced script cuts which he considered
“rather harsh”.42
Someone who entirely rejected the idea of Ford making creative input to
the scripts was Nunnally Johnson, who scripted The Prisoner of Shark Island,

38
Sarris, Interviews, p. 199.
39
Bruce Beresford, “John Ford: Decline of a Master”, Film 56 (Autumn 1969), p. 6; Peary, John Ford
Interviews, p. 62.
40
Anderson, About John Ford, p. 244.
41
Ronald L. Davis, John Ford: Hollywood’s Old Master, Norman and London: University of Oklahoma
Press, 1995, p. 183.
42
Anderson, About John Ford, pp. 424–4.
 John Ford: The Enigmatic Genius 19

The Grapes of Wrath and Tobacco Road. Believing that the writer’s role in the
collaborative process of film-making was persistently underrated and the
director’s role overemphasized, he told Lindsay Anderson:

I wrote the scripts without thought of the director to do them and they were
offered to him by Zanuck, who selected all the directors for my pictures in
those days. All were accepted in the form offered, and though I have worked
with directors who made suggestions and contributed ideas, I can’t remember
that John ever said anything one way or the other about them. Nor can I
remember his ever altering or rewriting any of the scripts on the set. It was
on the set, I might add, that John made all his contributions to the picture.
These were in the staging of the scenes, the shaping of the characters and his
wonderful use of the camera. In any case, the pictures he did for me, for good
or bad, were completely faithful to the text of the script.43

Business and Gesture

Ford’s distinctive talent lay not in any one particular photographic style but in
the exposition of character, the flair for detail, the evocation of atmosphere and
most importantly the orchestration of these effects into a coherent totality. A
small but perfect example of this genius can be seen in a little scene in The
Prisoner of Shark Island. Colonel Dyer, old Southern veteran and father-in-law
of Dr. Mudd, decides to sell his sword to raise money to help get his son-in-law
out of prison. He stumps over to a trunk, muttering to himself, flings things out,
reverently taking out a bottle and putting it on one side, and then he pulls out
the sword which Stonewall Jackson gave him and, declaring he’ll sell it and run
through anyone who offers him less than $150, he strides out. The camera is
stationary throughout this scene, which is filmed in medium shot. It is a small
vignette with comic intent but is irresistibly touching. The colonel’s uniform—
Confederate great coat and plumed hat—lend him dignity and a cavalier
presence. The use of Dixie on the soundtrack, beginning quietly and rising to a
triumphant crescendo, stresses the patriotism and sacrifice of the old man. His
reverence for the bottle and the sword tells us volumes about his character,
while he remains for much of the scene with his back to the camera muttering

43
Anderson, About John Ford, p. 247.
20 The Lost Worlds of John Ford: Beyond the Western

to himself. The coordination of costume, music, movement and gesture create

precisely the effect Ford was seeking—a mingling of comedy and pathos.
Ford admitted that he allowed himself to improvise but strictly within the
predetermined framework. “You don’t ‘compose’ a film on the set; you put a
predesigned composition on film. It is wrong to liken a director to an author.
He is more like an architect, if he is creative.”44 In this regard, Ford’s approach
is similar to Hitchcock’s and it explains why he frequently completed his films
in a matter of weeks. Ford recalled improvising the entire Slim Summerville
part in Air Mail, much of the trial sequence in The Informer and bits of business
in the Will Rogers trilogy. The actors who worked on Stagecoach were kept on
the set when they were not actually shooting so that they could be on hand if
Ford came up with extra bits of business or lines of dialogue.45 Ford himself
told Bogdanovich that he liked to keep the writer on the set to create new lines
to cover situations that arose during shooting and that Nichols in particular
was always on set.46 Bogdanovich’s own account of a visit to the locations
where Ford was shooting Cheyenne Autumn provides a revealing demonstration
of the improvisatory Ford, devising lines and action as he goes and which the
script girl frantically writes down trying to keep up with him.47
It is worth pointing to the contrast with Cecil B. DeMille here, a director
who like Ford worked with a stock company, habitually came up with scenes
and lines from his old films when scripting the new ones, and some of whose
films superficially recall some of Ford’s (cf. Union Pacific and The Iron Horse,
Unconquered and Drums Along the Mohawk, The Story of Dr. Wassell and
Arrowsmith). He too took the architectural concept of cinema as his longtime
scriptwriter Jesse Lasky Jr. testified:

A DeMille script was something very different than most other scripts were
or are because DeMille made his film on paper. He actually laid out every
scene, every cut, every piece of business. There was very little creation done
on the set. His scripts were enormous. The detail in them was tremendous.
You not only wrote the dialogue but you timed the dialogue with the business
of the character. So that every step was actually worked out with floor plans

44
Sarris, Interviews, p. 198.
45
Bob Thomas, ed., Directors in Action, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company Inc., p. 164.
46
Bogdanovich, John Ford, p. 107.
47
Bogdanovich, John Ford, pp. 6–19.
 John Ford: The Enigmatic Genius 21

of the set and with the art department and he planned the whole movement.
When you went on the set, it was just about as it had been on paper. He hated
to change, to improvise.48

Unlike Ford, DeMille’s early training had been in the theater. He had written
plays in the Belasco tradition and his view of the cinema was shaped by this
early training. Reams of dialogue, complex and ramified narratives in which
telling the story predominated, one-dimensional characters, a fondness for
shooting in the studio, these are the hallmarks of the DeMille film. He had no
time for the improvisatory flash of imagination and he paid no attention to the
actors. Despite his huge casts, and the regularity with which he used the same
players (Victor Varconi, Julia Faye, Francis MacDonald, Ian Keith, etc.), they
never had a quarter of the individuality that Ford gave his one-scene bit players
like Mae Marsh, Jack Pennick or Hank Worden.
What one misses most of all in DeMille and in many much greater
directors—such as Henry King and Raoul Walsh, favorites of Ford, men of
similar outlook and tastes, excellent directors with a feeling for visuals, pace
and atmosphere—is that whole extra dimension of gesture and incident which
enriches the bare bones of a plot and creates the feeling of an entire universe
recreated on celluloid and not just a story from beginning to end, a universe
which will continue when the film is finished, and in Ford’s case does continue
from film to film.
The gesture or piece of business is used not just for its own sake but to
encapsulate character, convey mood, demonstrate emotion. Ford’s most
characteristic gestures and bits of business are developed from film to film,
linking his work together and deepening in resonance with each successive
use. Sometimes he uses a line of dialogue for this purpose. “A slug of gin, if you
please”—the shabby genteel comic-pathetic line of the would-be respectable
lady turns up in The Long Voyage Home (Mildred Natwick), Gideon’s Day
(Maureen Potter), and Donovan’s Reef (Dorothy Lamour) for instance. Similarly
he sometimes uses catchphrases whose repetition conveys more than speech
after speech of dialogue: John Wayne’s defiant “That’ll be the day” in The
Searchers; the professional’s litany “That’s what I get paid for” which links Wyatt
Earp in My Darling Clementine to Nathan Brittles in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon;

48
Jesse Lasky Jr., Whatever Happened to Hollywood?, London: W. H. Allen, 1973, p. 258.
22 The Lost Worlds of John Ford: Beyond the Western

John Wayne’s “Never apologize, mister, it’s a sign of weakness”; and Ben
Johnson’s “That ain’t in my department” in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.
But more often than dialogue, there is the gesture. Probably the most famous
gesture in all Ford is in The Searchers when Ward Bond as Captain the Reverend
Samuel Clayton, the Ranger leader, deliberately looks away when he sees
Martha Edwards stroking the folded coat of her brother-in-law Ethan, revealing
her deep unspoken love for him. No commentator, however, has noted it is in
fact a combination of two previous gestures in Ford’s work—Lincoln looks
away as the childhood sweethearts in The Iron Horse kiss, just as later Nathan
Brittles looks away while Mac Allshard and his wife kiss in She Wore a Yellow
Ribbon, allowing a private gesture the privacy it deserves, while in Rio Grande
Maureen O’Hara strokes John Wayne’s greatcoat before handing it to him, a
confession of the survival of her love for him. This is a pattern of repetition
which can often be found in Ford. The gesture often sums up a state of mind
and attitude for which visual expression is far subtler than verbal.
Many films are constructed of a rich texture of such gestures. In Wagon
Master, character is encapsulated again and again in this way: in the cavalier
hat-doffing of Harry Carey Jr. (developed from Carey’s similar gesture in
3 Godfathers), in the mincing walk of Dr. A. Locksley Hall (recalling exactly the
similar gait of Otis Harlan in 3 Bad Men), the involuntary cussing of Ward
Bond in moments of stress and Russell Simpson’s reproving stare, the huffing
and puffing on the bullhorn of Jane Darwell.

Comedy

Beyond the individual gesture and something of an elaboration of it is the

development of the comedy sequence. Ford uses his comedy in different ways:
to enliven films he didn’t like and didn’t want to do, to lighten the tone of his
tragedies, to enrich narrative and character in films he did like and did want to
do. He has described himself in fact as a director of comedies who makes sad
films. Very often this comedy was improvised and is one of the reasons for the
freshness and spontaneity of his films.
Repeatedly in the Bogdanovich interview Ford stresses the improvisatory
nature of his comedy: on Kentucky Pride (“we went to Kentucky to do a little
story about horse-racing and we put a lot of comedy into it”), Submarine Patrol
 John Ford: The Enigmatic Genius 23

(“Of course all the comedy in it wasn’t in the script; we put it in as we went
along”), How Green Was My Valley (“Phil Dunne wrote the script and we stuck
pretty close to it. There may have been a few things added but that’s what a
director’s for. You can’t just have people stand up and say their lines—there has
to be a little movement, a little action, little bits of business and things”), and
The Quiet Man (“We had a lot of preparation on the script, laid out the story
pretty carefully but in such a way that if any chance for comedy came along, we
could put it in”).49
This talent came in most useful when Ford was working on projects he
didn’t like. The World Moves On was a film which Ford “fought like hell against
doing”. So in the middle of it he introduced Stepin Fetchit (real name: Lincoln
Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry) as a French legionnaire and gave him some
comic-cowardly antics in the trenches and bits of business involving his
ignorance of the language. Born Reckless was another film he didn’t want to
do – part war film, part gangster film, part comedy – so he inserted a baseball
game into the war episode to liven it up and it is the highlight of the film.
On a second level, Ford uses comedy to lighten the serious and tragic stories.
In Air Mail, he created from nothing a part for Slim Summerville as an engineer
on the air base and developed some memorable comedy for him. It includes
him being ordered to destroy some forbidden whiskey and proceeding to
drink it, a bit of business developed for the cavalry sergeants in Fort Apache
years later. Most notably there is an entirely silent sequence in which Ford’s
genius for the use of gesture and expression is fully displayed.
But mainly the comedy is used to illustrate character and illuminate
relationships. One only has to think of the priceless sequences of the floating
waxworks and the final steamboat race in Steamboat Round the Bend, of the
political convention in Liberty Valance, of the recruit-selection and recruit-
drilling in Drums Along the Mohawk and of the courtroom comedy of Young
Mr. Lincoln, Sergeant Rutledge and The Sun Shines Bright, to demonstrate his
mastery of comedy. It is in fact precisely this fondness for the self-contained
episode which has made Ford’s films so easy to cut. Few directors have seen
their films so consistently reduced in length by the studios. The anecdotal style
lends itself to this without any difficulty. Episodes, comic or otherwise, were

49
Bogdanovich, John Ford, pp. 46, 69, 80, 90.
24 The Lost Worlds of John Ford: Beyond the Western

cut from Ford films sometimes removing entire characters—Steamboat Round

the Bend, The Horse Soldiers, How Green Was My Valley (removing Dennis
Hoey), They Were Expendable (removing Wallace Ford), Cheyenne Autumn
(removing John Qualen), The Last Hurrah (removing Edmund Lowe),
Mr. Roberts, Young Mr. Lincoln, The Sun Shines Bright and there are probably
other examples. Fully half an hour was cut from My Darling Clementine and
The Last Hurrah.

Ritual and Music

Another important aspect of Ford bearing on his narrative style is his love of
ritual, the staging of an occasion that would allow for a regular pattern of
people and action, a rhythm of formal movement and positioning, which is at
once aesthetically precise, reflective of an ordered world view and dramatically
self-contained. Ford rarely missed a chance to introduce such an occasion into
his films and such occasions give his films a unique pattern which is also at
odds with conventional narrative development. In the words of Joseph McBride
and Michael Wilmington, the fabric of Ford’s films consists of “dances, marches,
births, deaths, drinking parties, brawls, courtships, funerals, wakes, weddings,
church meetings, elections, speeches, trials, operations, dinners, riding contests,
ceremonies of war and peace, arrivals, departures, more arrivals, more
departures”.50
The funeral is perhaps the most common of all these rituals in Ford and
whether it involves military order or family grief or communal religious
sentiment, it constitutes an affirmation of identity, communal feeling and a
sense of the order and fitness of things. There are funerals, burials, wakes
formal and informal, in The Iron Horse, Lightnin’, 3 Bad Men, Hangman’s House,
Seas Beneath, The Lost Patrol, The Informer, The Plough and the Stars, Wee
Willie Winkie, The Grapes of Wrath, The Long Voyage Home, They Were
Expendable, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Searchers, The Last Hurrah,
Cheyenne Autumn, 3 Godfathers. To this one might add executions, formally
conducted in The Plough and the Stars, The Prisoner of Shark Island, The

50
Joseph McBride and Michael Wilmington, John Ford, London: Secker and Warburg, 1974, p. 28.
 John Ford: The Enigmatic Genius 25

Fugitive, Four Men and a Prayer and Mary of Scotland. Even the business of
birth and death itself is given a ritual flavor in Ford with the death of General
Herkimer in Drums Along the Mohawk being rapidly followed by the birth of
the Martins’ child, the death of Ivor in How Green Was My Valley by the birth
of his son Gareth, the death of Private Dunker by the birth of a black child in
The Horse Soldiers—and on each occasion characters comment on the process.
The dance in Ford is generally a joyous celebration of community spirit,
often given an added dimension by the arrival of an outsider during the course
of the merrymaking. The outsider, after a brief awkwardness, either integrates
into the group (Earp in My Darling Clementine and Gruffyd in How Green Was
My Valley) or remains outside it (Lincoln in Young Mr. Lincoln, Thursday in
Fort Apache, the Cleggs in Wagon Master). Particularly impressive as
demonstrations of community feeling are the Grand Marches in Fort Apache
and The Sun Shines Bright, and the hoedowns and barn dances in Drums Along
the Mohawk, The Grapes of Wrath, My Darling Clementine and Wagon Master.
It is symptomatic of Ford’s failing faith in the values he had once hymned that
the last dances to appear in his work—the settlers’ hoedown and the cavalry
dance in Two Rode Together—are meaningless, desultory affairs, completely
lacking the splendor and spirit of the earlier dances. Dances noticeably decline
in prominence in the last ten years of his career.
The fight, which with other directors is a violent free-for-all, is conducted in
Ford according to strict rules, within an enclosing circle of spectators and is
often stopped by some senior character who insists on a restart according to
the Queensberry rules; thus the fights in Wee Willie Winkie, How Green Was
My Valley, Rio Grande, The Quiet Man, The Searchers, What Price Glory,
Donovan’s Reef and Two Rode Together.
Some Ford films are almost entirely composed of rituals and it is this which
dictates their narrative structure. This is particularly true of the cavalry trilogy,
a ritual pattern of ceremonial and ordered movement, with a succession and
an interweaving of parades, drills, processions, funerals, flag-raisings, charges,
retreats, dances, dinner parties, serenades, within which the story lines are
conducted rather than vice versa.
Closely related to ritual is Ford’s use of music. His devotion to folk melody
is unquestionably part of the overall style and his films echo to the haunting
melodies of lilting Irish tunes and the stirring strains of American marching
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GALLANT LITTLE

WALES: SKETCHES OF ITS PEOPLE, PLACES AND CUSTOMS ***
 PETERS, ENGRS., BOSTON

By Jeannette Marks
GALLANT LITTLE WALES. Sketches of its
People, Places, and Customs. Illustrated.
THE END OF A SONG. Illustrated.
THROUGH WELSH DOORWAYS. Illustrated.

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

Boston and New York

Gallant Little Wales

 THE LADIES OF LLANGOLLEN

Gallant Little Wales

 Sketches of its People, Places
and Customs

BY JEANNETTE MARKS

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1912

COPYRIGHT 1912, BY JEANNETTE MARKS

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Published October 1912

CALON WRTH GALON
 Preface
As a guide-book this volume will be found to contain too few
unpronounceable Welsh place-names to be adequate, but as an
introduction to the North Welsh land, its customs, its village life, its
little churches, its holiday possibilities, its history and associations,
its folk-lore and romance, its music, its cottages and castles, Gallant
Little Wales should be useful. It is my intention to follow this book
with a companion volume on South Wales.
I wish to express my debt to Mr. Henry Blackwell, who has always
been quick to lend me volumes from his priceless Welsh library and
who went over some of my manuscript for me. I am under
obligations also to Rev. Gwilym O. Griffith of Carnarvonshire, North
Wales. Thanks, too, I owe to Miss Dorothy Foster for her work upon
the map which appears as a separate page in this volume.
The English know where beauty and comfort, good care, and good
Welsh mutton are to be had for a moderate tariff. But long before
the Englishman went for his vacations to these British Alps and the
American followed him, excursions were made into Wales. The
Roman spent a summer holiday or so both in North and South
Wales, and left there his villas and his fortresses and his roads. The
Roman, having set or followed a good example—and who shall say
which it was?—and having with Roman certainty got what he
wanted, departed, leaving the country open to other invaders who
pillaged and plundered. Nor, since that time, has the country ever
been without an invader.
I, too, have gone my wonder-ways in Wales, plundering where I
could. I, too, Celt and Celt again, have followed its beauty and felt a
biting hunger for a land which, once loved, can never be forgotten.
As did another Celt, William Morris, in his poems, so in prose this
little book and I have wrought in an old garden, hoping to make
“fresh flowers spring up from hoarded seed” and to bring back again
—“back to folk weary”—some fragrance of old days and old deeds.
Friendliness, solitude, memories, beauty for the eye and beauty for
the ear,—he who would have one or all of these, let him go and go
again to gallant little Wales.
Jeannette Marks.
Attic Peace, May 13, 1912.
 Contents
I. Welsh Wales 3
II. A Village in Eryri 17
III. Hilltop Churches 30
IV. Dr. Johnson’s Tour of North Wales 59
V. Welsh Folk-Lore 86
VI. The City of the Prince of Wales 105
VII. The Eisteddfod 117
VIII. Cambrian Cottages 133
IX. Castle and Abbeys in North Wales 155
Appendix: Suggestions for Some Tours 177
 Illustrations
The Ladies of Llangollen Frontispiece
Conway Castle 10
From an old print.
The Queen’s Tower, Conway Castle 24
From an engraving by Cuitt, 1817.
The Great Hall at Conway Castle 32
From an engraving by Cuitt.
St. Winifred’s Well, Holyhead 40
From an engraving by Cuitt, 1813.
The Eagle Tower of Carnarvon Castle 52
From an engraving by Cuitt.
Gateway of Carnarvon Castle 66
From an engraving by Cuitt.
A View of Denbigh Castle 80
From an engraving by Boydell, 1750.
Ruthin Castle 92
From an engraving by Buck, 1742.
The Compleat Angler in Wales 100
The Tower of Dolbadarn on Llanberis Lake 112
Llanberis 124
From an old print.
Beaumaris 140
From a proof before letters by Turner.
A Welsh Waterfall near Penmaen-Mawr 148
From an engraving by Boydell, 1750.
Beddgelert 160
From an old print.
The Summit of Snowdon 172
From an old print.
Map Inside front cover

Gallant Little Wales

 I
Welsh Wales

It is a vanished past that haunts the imagination in Wales, so that

forever after in thoughts of that country one goes spellbound. It is
the beautiful present, the cry of the sheep upon the mountain-sides,
the church bells ringing from their little bell-cots and sounding
sweetly in valleys and on highland meadows, the very flowers of the
roadsides,—foxglove, bluebell, heather,—that keep one lingering in
Wales or draw one back to that land again. There are little churches
of twelfth-century foundation, gray or washed white,—their golden
glowing saffron wash of long ago unrenewed by the Welsh of to-day.
There are little cottages, white or yellow or pink, with their bright
doorsills of copper, their clean, shining flagstones, their latticed
windows, and all the homely and dignified tranquillity within. There,
towering above, are bare rock-strewn summits upon which the yew
still stands, and, by its side, springing from the tuft of grass which
the wind has not swept away, grows the white harebell; the yew
monument to a thousand years, the harebell a fragile thing of
yesterday. And above these church-crowned hills are mountain
summits, gray and craggy, stripped of everything verdant, places
where there are “shapes that haunt thought’s wilderness,” and
suggestions of an endless, unending journey.
It was Bishop Baldwin, I think, accompanied on his famous
twelfth-century journey through Cambria by Gerald of Wales, who
said, getting his breath with difficulty as he surmounted a Welsh hill,
“The nightingale followed wise counsel and never came into Wales.”
Were this true, the reply might be that Wales has no need of
nightingales, so many and so beautiful are the wind-played songs
over the rocks, and so incomparably lovely are the voices of the
Welsh people themselves. In any event, had the nightingales come
into Wales, a plump one—as it seems Bishop Baldwin himself must
have been—would never have remained long in the mountain
fastnesses of northern Wales,—at least not in the neighbourhood of
Snowdon or Nant Francon or Twll Ddu,—the “black hole” of Wales.
Neither, if Bishop Baldwin ever climbed to a Welsh mountain-top,
would this princely prelate have liked the views there. A comfortable,
fat living in some Welsh community like Valle Crucis Abbey, near the
river Dee, by Llangollen, would probably have been far more to his
liking. Even now these mountain inns are not of the accepted kind,
but merely a cromlech over which the wind still plays its devil tunes,
a cave or the ridgepole of a long sharp mountain crest, broken by
crags down to the very edge of the sea.
Wales is a land of mountains, of little alpine heights ranged on the
western coast of Great Britain. Set between plain and sea, full of hill
fastnesses, its turbulent history is partly explained by the topography
of Gwalia. Independence, lack of unity,—these words summarize
most of the early history of Wales. To the different parts of Cambria,
alpine Snowdonia, the pasture lands of Berwyn, the moorlands and
vast coal-fields of the south, came two races: one short and dark,
the Iberian; the other tall and fair, the Celtic. These are still the two
peoples of Wales. And after them came Rome; but Rome is gone,
has vanished, except for her walls and foundations and roads, and
these dark and fair races are still there, mingled, their racial traits
still impregnable, still intact.
When you add to what might be called the natural and inherent
difficulties of the necessary mountain climbing in Wales, those of the
Welsh language, you have a combination that is beyond words to
describe. Even the veriest tyro a-visiting Wales will tell you that the
language defies all description and the most conscientious efforts to
master it.
One warm day we were making a melancholy progress up a
mountain-side when steps passed swiftly and a voice said in Welsh,
“Stepping upwards?” The young man, an itinerant Welsh minister,
was travelling in the same direction with us and it did not seem
polite to say “Goodbye,” although I could think of no other Welsh
words. Finally two inept ones came to me, “Da iawn” (very good),
and I spoke them. But then, not content to let well enough alone,
something more had to be said and I kept on repeating those words
like a parrot. The Welshman looked around doubtfully, as if he
wondered what the “Very good” was all about, and I heard him
murmuring to himself and saw him hasten upwards a little faster.
“Say something else,” my companion whispered.
“I am going to if you will just give me time,” I snapped back.
But I didn’t say anything else; I couldn’t, for not another thing
would come. If any one feels disposed to criticize an alien because
he is unable to speak Welsh, then let him go test its difficulties for
himself, its long words, its savage consonants, its poor little vowels
lost like some bleating lamb upon rocky mountain-sides. You just get
it satisfactorily settled in your own mind that “Dad” means father,—
very natural and proper,—when suddenly you discover that “Tad”
and “Nhad” and “Thad” also mean father and are one and the same
word. With mother or “Mam” you suffer a similar though not the
same fate. To begin with, the Cymric alphabet differs from ours: it
consists of thirty-one letters, some of which, “mh,” “ch,” “dd,” “ff,”
“ng,” “ngh,” “ll,” “nh,” “ph,” “rh,” “th,” never occur in the English
alphabet as letters per se. Your honest grammarian will tell you flatly
that in the case of “ll” there is no sound in any language
corresponding to it. Most like it are the Spanish “ll” and the Italian
“gl.” Then what to do? Do as you would have to do in rope skipping:
watch the rope, run and jump in if you can. The “c” is hard in Welsh,
never soft like “c” in “city”; “ch” is like the guttural German “ch”; the
“dd” sometimes like “eth”; “f” like “v”; “ff” like “f”; “g” is never soft
as in “giant,” but like “g” in “get”; “i,” both long and short, as “i” in
“pin” and “ee” in “fleet”; “o” is short like “o” in “got” or long like “o”
in “note”; “p” as in English; “s” is like “s” in “sin”; “u” is sometimes
like “i” and sometimes not; the “w” is like “u”; “y” has two sounds,
first like “u” in “fur,” second like the Welsh “u.” A few words will
illustrate Welsh pronunciation. “Cymru” is pronounced, as nearly as
one can suggest its pronunciation, as if spelled “Kumree”; “Gwalia”
as if “Gooalia”; “Mawddwy” as if “Mauthooy”; “Wnion” as if
“Oonion”; “Pwllheli” as if “Pooltheli”; “Dolgelley” as if “Dolgethley.”
I have had some experiences with my “small” Welsh which I
would not exchange for those of “big” German in the past, or of any
other language in which I have been trained to read or speak. I
remember one experience that happened when we were in search of
a certain little church of ancient foundation, set upon a hilltop. In
Wales there are many of these little churches on the hilltops, like
Llanrychwyn and Llangelynin, and also little churches by the sea, like
Llandanwg, almost at the foot of Harlech. Within their mediæval
lychgates and high stone walls the dead are crowded close in their
last sleep. Sweet places are those old churches, with the yew
standing sentinel near them, and about them the shelter of the
valley or the wide sweep of the hilltop view. This time it was a hilltop
church for which we were searching. Again it was “Da iawn” which
graced the conversation, but in how different a manner!
We were in need of tea, and at the cottage next to the church, the
only cottage upon that summit, I rapped with my stick and said to
the old woman who came, “Dyma le da i gael te” (this is a good
place to have tea).
“Yiss,” was her reply, her face brightening; “Te?”
“Yes,” said I; “tea and bread-and-butter.”
“Jam?” asked she, remembering what I had forgotten.
“Yes,” I answered.
She spread the cover in the place on the turf to which we pointed
and smiled brightly at me, as if she, too, appreciated the beauty of
that place with its wide mountain and valley landscape, the trustful
sheep browsing near me, and down at our feet the magnificent pile
of Harlech Castle looking across the wide flat marsh at its feet and
over the sea toward the palace of King Mark.
“Da iawn” (very good), said I emphatically.
 And her answering smile told me that we understood each other,
even if we could not speak each other’s language very well.

CONWAY CASTLE

From an old print

Changeling Welsh words are begot of elves and fairies. Even as

those words are full of poetry, of romance, of a wild emotionalism,—
the “Scream of the Celt” it has been called, but in Wales it is a
subdued scream,—so, still, are the superstitions about fairies and
elves living among these Welsh hills and valleys. Childish tales they
may seem to you, if you are fortunate enough to be told anything
about them at all by the Welsh peasants, who are both suspicious
and shy of the “foreigner.” The tales one may hear even now in
Wales are full of a haunting race life. The Welsh speak of the fairies
as the “little folk” or the “fair folk” or “family”—“y Tylwyth Teg.” And
well do these little creatures deserve the name, for they are friendly
in Wales. Ghosts there are, too, and the death portents, the old hag
of the mist and others that groan or moan or sing or stamp with
their feet. And there are “Corpse Candles” and “Goblin Funerals.”
Shakespeare knew a deal about Welsh folk-lore, but where he got it
from no one has yet discovered. With Shakespeare “mab” meant a
little thing, just as in any Welsh village to-day “mabcath” means a
kitten.
No matter where I have been I have found the Welsh conscious of
the beauty and significance of their land, its legendary lore, its
history, its marvellous natural attraction. They have always been
eager to give me information about some landmark, some incident
about which I might be inquiring. Over their shop counters, across
the doorsills of the humblest of Welsh cottages, by some kitchen fire
where the brass tea-kettle sang and glowed in the subdued light of
the ingle, they have poured forth titles of books and data,—things
for which I was searching, or needed to know. One old man, eighty-
six years old and bedridden, held my hand in an eager, childish
clasp, while he tried to tell me something about a church, the poor
tired mind working like a rundown clock, the half-sightless eyes
looking at me in petition to help him recall the days that had slipped
so far away. He asked me about friends of his,—people who had
died before I had thought of being born. He corrected my few words
of Welsh, a ghost of a smile about the old mouth, but he could not
recollect what I wanted to know. Without the information I was
seeking, I went away saying “Nos da” to him, which was, indeed,
good night.
When Dr. Samuel Johnson made his memorable tour of Wales, he
wrote, “Wales is so little different from England that it offers nothing
to the speculations of the traveller.” He seemed wholly oblivious to
the strong racial difference between Welsh and English, which alters
not only the visage of the people, but also the visage of the very
country. He was so indifferent to the grandeur of Snowdon scenery
that, going around the base of that mountain of eagles in a chaise,
he spent his time keeping account of the number of sheep for “Miss
Thrale,”—his little favourite “Queenie.” I do not believe that
Johnson’s disgust would have been the least appeased by knowing
that in the years to come other great people were to go and go
again to Wales, as to a beloved lap of rest: Wordsworth, Shelley,
Kingsley, Froude, Newman, Huxley, Tyndall, Tennyson, Arnold, Tom
Taylor, John Bright, Carmen Sylva, and many another. The good
Doctor scorned Welsh rivers, called them brooks and offered to jump
over them. He would have despised such a cottage kitchen as I have
lingered in many a time impressed by its beautiful and dignified
simplicity. Sweet places are these old kitchens, hospitable, warm,
cheerful. Sunlight or firelight, one or the other, you may have always
in them. Bright they are with fuchsias and little gleaming leaded
window-panes, with polished oak and polished brass and copper,
with the shining face of a grandfather clock, with pewter, with lustre
pitchers and creamers, with gleaming pots and kettles, and the salt
glistening on bacons and hams hanging from the blackened oak
rafters. Gay are they, too, with the life and laughter of children, with
the good cheer of contented older people, with the purr of the house
cat and the bubbling of the tea-kettle. More homelike, more
motherly, more charming old kitchens, it has never been my good
fortune to see.
There was only one thing in Wales which profoundly satisfied the
great Doctor and that was its castles, Harlech and Conway, and
Carnarvon Castle most of all. Almost every Welsh town has its
historical traditions of importance, but Carnarvon, the city of the
Prince of Wales, even more than others. There Elen, the Great Welsh
road-maker, was sought and won by the Emperor Maximus. Of that
little city, once the Roman city of Segontium, there is a description in
the “Mabinogion,” the classic of Welsh literature and one of the
classics of the world. The Roman Emperor saw in his dream but
what we see now, a fair and mighty castle, rocks, precipices,
mountains of great height. The Prince of Wales was born, according
to legend, in Carnarvon Castle, and there investiture ceremonies are
still held. But veracious history assures us that he was born in the
town, outside the castle of which he himself had built the very tower
where he was supposed to have been born. Tumultuous, confused,
legendary is Welsh history, full of the more or less mythical deeds of
their great King Arthur, their brave Prince Llewelyn, the fate that
overtook the hopes and ideals of this prince, their last fight for
independence and their loss of it; their submission to the yoke of
conquerors and the history of English princes who were put over
them. It is a wild, sad, eventful history whose sorrows and tragedies
seem only to have bitten all that is most Cymric in Welsh Wales
deeper into Welsh lives and hearts, so that to-day, despite all that
conqueror or civilization can do, their language, their lives, are still
separate.
And the Welsh Eisteddfod, a festival of song and poetry, is a
revelation of the unique national Welsh spirit. From every hamlet in
Wales, even those reached only by Welsh ponies, visitors travel on
foot or by train to this feast of song and to witness the Gorsedd, a
druidical ceremony old as the Eye of Light itself. “Gallant little Wales”
shows itself to the least and last participant in the Eisteddfod as
Welsh Wales. Educationally this Eisteddfod ceremony is of great
value to Wales, democratic, representative, instructive; and nowhere
could the fact that Welsh educational ideals are quite different from
those of England—popular and progressive, with something of the
so-called American spirit in them—reveal itself more completely than
in this assembly of the people. Wales is essentially a democracy—a
democracy of song, a democracy of poetry, a democracy of
education and religion, and the Eisteddfod is the popular university
of the people. To comprehend what is deepest and best in Welsh
Wales one must go to the Eisteddfod and hear the Welsh, sensitive,
capable of the “Hwyl,” imaginative, passionate, fervidly patriotic,
sing,—
HEN WLAD FY NHADAU (OLD LAND OF MY FATHERS)

“Old mountain-built Cymru, the bard’s Paradise,

The farm in the cwm, the wild crag in the skies,
The river that winds, have entwined tenderly
With a love spell my spirit in me.”

Chorus: Land, Land,

Too fondly I love thee, dear Land,
Till warring sea and shore be gone,
Pray God let the old tongue live on.”
 II
A Village in Eryri

“Curates mind the parish,

Sweepers mind the court,
We’ll away to Snowdon,
For our ten days’ sport.”

Kingsley’s Letter to Tom Hughes.

At the centre of a wide meadow with valleys running in towards

the centre from east and south and west lies a little village of North
Wales. All the cottages are gray, gray as the stones of St. John’s, but
they are of the crisp, compact gray of slate, and not the crumbling,
fretted stone of Oxford. Occasionally some cottage nestling to the
craggy side of one of the valley roads is whitewashed with white or
pink, or fitted so neatly into the jutting rocks of the mountain-side
that only the humble façade, a screen of blooming roses, is visible.
Whitewash, roses, gleam of copper doorsills, running water, flash
gaily in the midst of the gray of Beddgelert. Above the houses is the
blue roadway of sky walled in by craggy mountain-summits, the
sides of the mountains carpeted with myriad tufts of heather,
lavender or purple or pink, and in autumn with the vivid yellow of
the prickly gorse. Bees desert tiny gardens of well-hedged roses for
this wide principality of bracken and heather, where around tufted
blossoms they hum to the tossing of some stream casting itself
down the hills. Up the rocks clamber ivy and sheep; about the moist
edges of the pools and over the cushions of damp moss, black and
brown watered-silk snails measure leisurely in well-fed content; and
in little terraced glens of thick sod and along the roadways grow
bluebells and columbine and foxglove and elfin white birches. But
above these troops of upland bluebells and slender, swaying birches
hang rocks, wild, rugged, whipped bare even of heather. And from
the rough spine of Craig-y-Llan stretches away towards Snowdon
and Pen-y-Pass, a wilderness of naked rocks, weird, jagged, shining
gray and black in utter desolation.
At the meeting of the Colwyn and Gwynen rivers, with the hollow
sound of rushing water in its village lanes and the tinkling of sheep
bells scattering from the overhanging hills, the meadow strips lie
beside the valley roads, deep green with abundant grass or yellow
with grain. Life, however, has been strenuous in this village of
fourscore mountain huts, and many fathers and sons have had to
labour to clear the grassy fields. For these honest, independent,
thrifty Welshmen, slate and sheep are the chief means of support.
The rivers yield, too, a fair quantity of salmon as pink as some of the
mountain huts, salmon weighing from one to eighteen pounds. In a
flood, although the torrent sometimes reduces the number of
inhabitants, the catch of salmon is greater, and the villagers face the
delicate task of balancing an all-wise but unscrupulous Providence.
The way to a Welshman’s heart, nevertheless, is not through his
stomach; the Welsh think but little of what they eat. Before English
tourists came to the village the inns of the place, Ty Ucha—now the
Saracen’s Head—and Ty Isaf, provided a bill of fare consisting of oat
and barley bread, ale, porter, and eggs. English and Americans,
unlike the Welsh, do not go lightly on a holiday without consideration
of what there will be to eat. And our lodging-table, set by as kindly
and generous a hostess as three wanderers ever found, bore slender
chickens whose proportions suggested mountain climbing, mutton
tender as the ivy the poor sheep had been nibbling, salmon trout
fresh as the stream pouring by the corner of our cottage, Glan Afon,
pound-cake filled with plums, and tawny mountain honey. And, too,
there were vegetables for whose mere names we felt a careless
indifference. Even the loaf of bread Baucis and Philemon set before
their wanderers was no better, I am certain, than the bread of
Beddgelert, light, sweet, with crackly golden-brown crust. Often
have we done nothing but watch—and joy enough it was—the
mammoth loaves coming home from the village bakery across the
village bridge, little children staggering under them, small boys
bearing them jauntily, mothers grasping them firmly under one arm,
a baby tucked away under the other.
At the inns, of which the Royal Goat is most pretentious,—it has a
piano,—there is much quiet holiday life led by quiet holiday people.
The simple folk who come to stay are for the most part the Welsh
people themselves, for whom Beddgelert is in the nature of a shrine,
a place canonized by the brave deed of one of their own Welsh
greyhounds, Prince Llewelyn’s Gelert. The visitors who travel through
the valley during the holiday month of August are English and Welsh
tourists on the coaches driving over Llanberis Pass, said to be the
highest coach drive in the world, and going to Carnarvon, the
ancient Roman city of Segontium, fourteen miles distant from
Beddgelert.
In the last hundred years the village has harboured many a
distinguished man who, giving thanks for his undiscovered seclusion,
has come and gone unknown. Wordsworth came there with his
friend, Robert Jones; Shelley, living at Tan yr Allt, a few miles out of
Beddgelert, must often have passed through its lanes, his ragged
brown hair whipped by the valley wind, his great eyes blue as the
roadway of sky overhead; Kingsley, with a quick smile for the jolly
little urchins perched venturesomely on the sharp slate coping of the
bridge, Frederic Temple, Derwent Coleridge, J. A. Froude, Professor
F. W. Newman, Huxley, Tyndall, all found holiday rest in this quiet
meadow sheltered by its rampart of mountains. Gladstone came
there, too. A village cow with an eye for distinction endeavoured to
hook the Prime Minister and had afterwards the satisfaction of being
sold for a large sum of money. There also in the valley was born
“Golden Rule” Jones, of Toledo fame, a good man, and but one of
many good men who have gone forth from this fastness of peace to
dream ever afterwards of a return to its gray houses, its streams, its
hills and heather and wilderness of crags.
 Ty Isaf and Ty Ucha are the oldest inns of the village. Ty Isaf is at
the entrance of the lane leading to the church, and it was there, not
so many years ago, that the minister was still expected to drink a
cup or two of ale before entering the pulpit or fail in due prelusive
inspiration. At Ty Isaf was kept the Large Pint of Beddgelert (“Hen
Beint Mawr Bedd Gelert”), a pewter mug which held two quarts of
old beer. Any man who could drink this quantity at a breath might
charge the amount to the lord of the manor; if he failed, he paid for
it himself. But so often was the heroic deed accomplished by
capacious Welshmen that it is recorded the tenants paid but half
their rent in money. It would be interesting to know for how many
goblins, fairies, “Lantern Jacks,” flickering “Candles of the Dead,”
Hen Beint Mawr was responsible! Now over every little inn is the sign
“Temperance,” for Welsh revivals have played havoc with these noble
drinking-feats. One signboard, I can never pass without a smile, has
gone so far as rather to insist upon the temperance issue in the
words, “Rooms and Temperance.” Incidentally, the rector of the
Episcopal Church has given up his potation, and next door the Welsh
Calvinistic Methodist minister, also unsupported by home-brewed
beer, wrestles with his flock. Beddgelert Sabbath-keeping has all the
force of an unbroken tradition. A gentleman riding a-hunting on
Sunday was confronted by an old woman who shook her Welsh Bible
at him and showered vindictive Welsh l’s on his worldly head. Nor
was our own experience much happier. Our drinking-water was
fetched from Ty Ucha, and we had good reason to believe it was
responsible for wretched feelings. One Sunday morning I consulted
our Welsh hostess, explained to her what we thought of the water,
and asked whether we might have some brought from another
spring. We were told that it could not be drawn on the Sabbath, but
would be brought to us on Monday morning! In every cottage there
is a mammoth Welsh Bible, and groups of smaller Bibles both Welsh
and English. We went into one deserted mountain hut to take
pictures of the interior; inside, together with an old trunk, a rusty
fluting-iron, kettles, pans, a portion of the woven couch strung over
the wide fireplace, and old clothes, we found two Welsh Bibles, one
English Bible, and a torn portion of “Pilgrim’s Progress.”
 THE QUEEN’S TOWER, CONWAY CASTLE

From an engraving by Cuitt, 1817

Indeed, the religious spirit of the place is a tradition but

infrequently broken in the past thousand years. Edward I had
burned the priory (now St. Mary’s Church), which was erected as a
hospitium in connexion with a small chapel and schoolhouse in the
second half of the sixth century; Henry VIII endeavoured to crush its
power, and then in 1830 the good villagers themselves entered upon
the pious task of renovation. In order to make the renovation as
thorough as possible, they tore down all the rare wood-carving,
using it for kindling-wood, and in some instances making pieces of
household furniture from it; they put in a false ceiling of clapboards
hiding the fine Gothic arch of the roof; the ceiling, together with the
walls, they whitewashed, and completed their pious task by boarding
up several exquisitely shaped lancet windows. Fortunately the
renovation has been followed by a restoration, and now the priory
may be seen in some of its ancient beauty, with the old yew tree
spreading low over the gravestones and the Gwynen pouring by its
northern walls, singing the same mountain song it sang when the
canons regular of St. Augustine, barefooted, gray-habited, with
crucifix and rosary, marched solemnly from chapel to hospitium.
The name Beddgelert, the Grave of Gelert (?), brings hundreds of
Welsh people to see this town each year. It is not an uncommon
spectacle to see a man, as he stands by the dog’s grave, brushing
away tears, or a little child crying bitterly. The story is of Prince
Llewelyn’s greyhound, who saved his master’s baby by killing a fierce
wolf, and then was slain by his master’s sword, for the Prince,
entering, saw the cradle overturned and the greyhound’s mouth
covered with blood. The name of the place, however, has nothing to
do with the myth of Gelert; the little hill on which the grave stands
had for hundreds of years been called “Bryn-y-Bedd,” the “Hill of the
Grave,” a mound where the Irish chief Celert, a far earlier hero than
the dog, may have been buried. There are parallels in other folk-lore
for this tale, and one even in the Sanscrit has been discovered in
which, in place of Northern wolf, a snake is the evil agent. There is
an unmistakable twinkle in a Beddgelert eye whenever the story is
told. Alas! that the greyhound buried there was not presented to
Prince Llewelyn by his father-in-law, King John, in the year 1205,
but, the petted possession of two Beddgelert spinsters, was
presented by them at the beginning of the nineteenth century to the
sagacious David Prichard, the first owner of the Royal Goat Hotel,
and promptly interred by him in the famous mound.
Every one of the three valley roads of Beddgelert is filled with
incidents of Welsh legend and folk-lore. Even in our materialistic age