Sean in later years
Drawing by Bob Smith
One of the highlights of this year’s Glasgow Film Festival, starting today (Thursday), will be a rare opportunity to see ‘The Bowler and the Bunnet’, a documentary about 60s Clydeside, directed by Sean Connery. It was the only time, in the course of his long career, Connery ever adopted the director’s role. To relax, the great Hollywood star took refuge in a rundown Glasgow pub.
It was a photo-opportunity not to be missed. Sean Connery at ease in a Glasgow pub. From newsdesks across the city the order went out, Find 007!
Then aged 37, Connery, for all his pride in his Edinburgh roots, had chosen Glasgow to fulfil a lifetime’s ambition – to step back from his usual role in front of the camera and direct his own movie, a documentary about industrial relations on strike-torn Clydeside, which he colourfully entitled ‘The Bowler and the Bunnet’.
His subject was the ill-fated Fairfield experiment, brainchild of the Scottish industrialist, Sir Iain Stewart, who believed passionately in the idea that all sides of industry were mutually dependent. Connery and Stewart were golfing buddies. They believed that a documentary on the woeful state of industrial relations in Britain, centred on Clydeside, could help Stewart’s flagging campaign. At some stage Connery decided he wanted to direct. With a seat on the main board, the gregarious Stewart took the idea to Scottish Television. A word in the right ear and Connery was signed to make his documentary.
The fact he lacked a ‘director’s ticket’ issued by the Association of Cinematograph Television and Allied Technicians threatened the project for a time; ironic, perhaps, considering the subject matter – the need to improve worker-management relations throughout industry. The problem was solved by STV assigning staff director Bryan Izzard, a larger-than-life character with a history in light entertainment, to accompany Connery on his mission.
Together with writer Cliff Hanley and an STV film crew Connery headed for Govan. Almost immediately a tantalising rumour swept Glasgow newspaper circles: following each day’s wrap, the man known to more than half the world as James Bond could be found supping pints in a hostelry frequented by men who’d spent their working life manning machine rooms and giant assembly halls along the River Clyde.
Cliff Hanley’s wife Anna, is credited with directing journalists, hunting a man who would have been recognised in any part of the world movies are shown, to Govan. How long teams of reporters, accompanied by photographers lugging heavy camera equipment in large leather cases, scoured the byways and watering holes of this ancient burgh, is unknown; although it wasn’t the sort of assignment they would have been expected to rush.
In fact, at the end of a day’s filming, Connery’s undiscovered watering hole was a crumbling building in Cowcaddens, a mile or more to the north. This once-famous thoroughfare was still a thriving community, complete with a variety of shops and houses awaiting demolition to make way for the latest improvement scheme invented by a road-fixated Glasgow city council.
Following their initial surprise at finding the man who was James Bond drinking in their midst (without once hearing him utter the famous line: ‘I’d like mine shaken not stirred’) no-one appeared to find his presence in any way remarkable.
Doherty’s, the pub where Connery parked his custom-built Jensen (to the unalloyed joy of the neighbourhood children) was the sort of broken-down establishment people loved for reasons impossible to explain; notwithstanding the impeccable manners of its gentlemanly owner, Hugh Doherty. Its regular clientele included an assortment of people who lived nearby, as well as workers from the old Buchanan Street railway yards, off-duty policemen, and a real hybrid crew (journalists and production staff and their celebrity guests) from Scottish Television across the road. Thanks to the location of the TV studios well-known faces were a regular sight in Doherty’s. Except, of course, this was no ordinary celebrity – this was Sean Connery.
How did Doherty’s regular clientele react? Following their initial surprise at finding the man who was James Bond drinking in their midst (without once hearing him utter the famous line: ‘I’d like mine shaken not stirred’) no-one appeared to find his presence in any way remarkable.
Most people saw he was there, supped their pints, cleared their chasers, and got on with their lives. For some, of course, it might have been difficult to reconcile the handsome star of the Bond movies, in his designer clothes, with the casually dressed figure seated at the bar. Gone was the immaculate clean-cut image made famous by the world’s most glamorous spy. In its place was a balding figure, badly in need of a haircut, sporting a large Mexican-style moustache. One man said the Connery with whom he exchanged a few words in Doherty’s looked more ‘like Viva Zapata than James Bond’.
Connery, it must be said, was polite, good humoured and not unapproachable, within the bounds of acceptable pub behaviour. Amazingly (and this is surely a sign of the times) no-one betrayed his whereabouts to the papers.
At the height of his box-office fame, Sean Connery had come to Glasgow to help his friend, Sir Iain Stewart, further nothing less than ‘the testbed of an industrial New Deal in Britain’. Naturally enough, being the director, Connery wanted his film to make an impact far beyond Clydeside and become ‘a force for change’.
A recently discovered interview suggests making a documentary about shipyard life in Govan awakened all sorts of ‘dislikes and likes’ in Connery himself. Until then the man raised in Fountainbridge, Edinburgh, never considered himself ‘a particularly political animal at all’.
What he learned, with ‘The Bowler and the Bunnet’, convinced the emerging Hollywood great which side of the barriers he naturally belonged – shoulder to shoulder with ‘the workers’ against ‘greedy’ bosses.
Though rarely seen, ‘The Bowler and the Bunnet’ is an enjoyable piece of work and a credit to the humanity of the man who made it.
Russell Galbraith is a writer and former television executive
Lockerbie
‘Futures have a way of falling down in mid-flight’
(Patricia Coyle)
In Lockerbie,
the sky is red
and the clouds are banked like grieving hills.
In this curled up sleeping town,
humble in its sandstone walls,
you can hear
the hooves of history
clipping the soaking streets
and the high-heeled girls
clattering on a Saturday night
with the cutting wind
ripping up their thin skirts
as they bleed into town,
past the sheep feeding on the ancient land
by Rosebank Crescent
where ‘The Maid of the Seas’,
Pan Am 103,
exploded on a sunk estate.
And life throws strangers together,
throws a suitcase of junk together.
And all our memories are ashes,
all our fantasies smoke.
And no one but the simple bending vicar knows
why The News dropped through our roof that night,
crashed onto our TVs that night.
Only the God in the angry sky has a glimmer,
only the groaning tombstones of Lockerbie have an idea,
the silent sandstone
and the biting rain;
only the old Scots lady knitting
for the refugees,
ducking her head under a leaden sky
for fear
the future lands on her.
And, in a field not far away,
someone’s diary lies rotting;
a love-letter
scattered in the wind;
the wind
that won’t leave Lockerbie
alone:
the red dust on a broken past;
this town’s historic wound
aching on the map.
Keith Armstrong
