Because That Road Is Trodden is included as a bonus item on the BFI’s release of Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush. It’s a strange extra, not thematically linked, no personnel in common. Both were shot in the UK towards the end of the 1960s, this at Bryanston School, a fee-paying private school in Dorset, Mulberry Bush in working class Stevenage New Town. By British standards these places are not even geographically close.
It’s a strange and short film, moody and woozy, about a day in the life of someone called only The Boy (Sebastian Tombs) from waking up in the morning onwards (though minute to minute this is not). It was made by Tim King, a schoolboy at Bryanston, who acknowledges at the end the help he got from the school to make it. Generous of them, considering this is a highly ambivalent portrait of life as a 16-year-old boarder.
“Poetic” is the word most often used to describe it. True enough. There is a subjective and intensely quizzical aspect to the whole affair. Pastoral too, William Blake meets Alan Clarke almost in its transcendent musings coupled to a fierce sense of place.
As the boy goes about his day he considers his life and wonders what’s to become of him. The words “transmogrification”, “metempsychosis” and “transmigration” roll around this well educated man’s head. Change, in a nutshell, against a backdrop of a school set in a grand stately home where change seems to be the last thing on the curriculum.
The boy wonders what sort of a man his education has destined him to become. Perhaps a proper toff (there are shots of Tombs in old-fashioned upper-class regalia complete with top hat). Or maybe more a man of the people, on his arm a girl he can love (cut to Tombs with pretty girl), while the camera picks out different groups of bespectacled boys engaged in the school activities that have brought him thus far – tennis, theatre, art classes, or hanging out and drinking coffee in woolly jumpers in their downtime.
It’s slightly pompous, the way earnest teenage boys are, and the faintly fluting voiceover (not sure who this is by – Tombs? Director King?) is almost enough to turn anyone into a class warrior. Compare also the facilities of the school compared to those at a state school. This is privilege.
And yet. It was a strange time for boys like “the boy”. The British public school (as they’re confusingly called) was a machine designed to produce men to run the British Empire. As Because That Road Is Trodden is being shot, that Empire is all but gone, transmogrified by the “winds of change”, as one prime minister called them, and the second British Empire (the financial one centred on the City) hasn’t quite got up and running.
This is shot simply, in black and white, silent with voiceover added later, there is skill, talent and smarts on display here. It’s been properly edited, which really helps, by David Taylor, a TV pro at the time. But most of those involved had no further dealings with the movie biz. Does that say something, too, about the hard-headed attitude that the British public school encourages? Who’d go into something so fickle as the media when you can sign up with a merchant bank and earn loads of money? One exception is Tim King himself, who two years on from this was working for the BBC.
Fitz Boulting is on the credits as one of the producers. The son of John Boulting, one of the stalwarts of mid-century British moviemaking, Fitz (short for Fitzroy, obviously) also stayed well away from the industry. Dad gets a “thanks” at the end, as does Roy Boulting, Fitz’s uncle and John’s film-making partner. Directors Lewis Gilbert, John Schlesinger and the documentarian Edgar Anstey also get a nod, alongside Wynford Vaughan-Thomas, a celebrated war correspondent (and father of one of the cast).
Not bad for a school movie. Remember as the facetious public school joke goes, it’s not who you know but whom you know.
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
