Postcards from Lindsay Anderson

Scrawled on the other side of this photograph are the words, “Sleeping in Lindsay’s office”. The woman in the picture is Lois Sutcliffe (later Lois Smith), who in 1948 persuaded Lindsay Anderson to make films.

Perhaps one reason why those films turned out to be so extraordinarily good was that he had to be persuaded to make them. He was not a careerist. He was a passionate, humane, sometimes angry human being who wanted to change the world for the better: he knew that what you said mattered more than how much you were paid to say it.

Lois and Lindsay remained close friends until his death in 1994. Indeed, it was while Lindsay was staying with Lois at her house in France that he died suddenly from a heart attack after a swim in a local lake.

As he travelled around the world, Lindsay took great pleasure from sending postcards back home to his friends, which he would write with his own inimitable combination of intelligence, warmth and humour. As one of his oldest friends, Lois had gathered almost half a century’s worth of these wonderful reminders of his character. They were a treasure-trove that she looked after lovingly.

Shortly before she died, in 2016, she entrusted them to me. I promised to look after them as lovingly as she had. The only tacit understanding was that I should pass them on to an archive before I died. So eventually these cards will wind up at the Lindsay Anderson Archive at Stirling University, but I hope that won’t be for a very, very long time!

Of course, the instinct is to share them. I even had the idea that they could provide the basis for a film about Lindsay. In my naivety, I got in touch with the film producer Andrew Eaton, who I knew had worked with Lindsay and admired him. I assumed he would have been as excited about the idea as I was, but he wasn’t. At the time he had just finished doing something that must have been much more exciting in conventional terms – producing The Crown for Netflix.

I asked Andrew if he could think of anyone else who would be interested in such an idea, but I hadn’t really explained what I had in mind well enough for him to suggest any names. “I’m not sure from your description,” he wrote, “if you want this to be a documentary or drama or maybe a mixture of both, so it’s a bit hard to think of possible collaborators.” What I wanted was for it to be neither a drama nor a documentary, but a personal tribute – and a mixture of a lot of things that I would struggle to set down in a proposal.

I still haven’t given up on the idea, but I have learned since that a film can become a film in all sorts of ways, both good and bad, and if the subject really matters to you, then you have to be very careful about how you make a film happen. In the case of Lindsay, if the final result wasn’t true to him, then I’d rather it didn’t happen. But meanwhile there is that treasure-trove of postcards which I would still like to share – in memory not only of Lindsay but of Lois too.

The first card was sent in 1951 from Wakefield, where Lindsay was in the midst of making the last of his industrial films for Richard Sutcliffe Ltd, the family business that Lois’s husband, Desmond, had managed until he died in 1950 at the age of only 35.

Richard Sutcliffe Ltd manufactured conveyor-belts for the mining industry. It was a down-to-earth – not to say beneath-the-earth – apprenticeship that I think Lindsay must have hugely valued. But perhaps the most important thing was the fact that the job had come out of a friendship and sustained a friendship. As Lindsay would later say, “No film can be too personal.”

The postcard didn’t have the characteristic humour or wit of Lindsay’s later cards, but it was the one that, above all the others, Lois most treasured. I think it was because, over the years that followed, Lindsay developed a very tough, self-protective carapace, but from this card it was clear: she mattered to him.

Postscript

Reading this piece again, I find myself thinking of that saying about how memory is a fickle jade. There is a detail that I got wrong. The film that Lindsay was working on in Wakefield cannot have been the last of the industrial films that he made for Richard Sutcliffe Ltd. It must have been the first film he made after he stopped working for the company – The Wakefield Express, a documentary about the town’s local newspaper. It gives an extra poignancy to Lindsay’s final comment, “Lack your support badly”. For the first time, he was making a film without the friend who had got him started.