Malcolm Saville - Lone Pine Club, etc.

[Moonraker]

Members of the Malcolm Saville Society will have relished the script of the play, Susan, Bill and the Forgotten Promise. This play takes the idea that Susan and Bill, as they grow up, go their different ways, leaving their childhood behind.

There is an audio rendition of the play on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npQLouHZjUA&t=36s

[Splodj]

Girls Gone By are publishing 'The Sign Of The Alpine Rose' next month, 4th (of 6) in the Jillies series.

[Anita Bensoussane]

Sorry if someone has answered this before, but do the Armada editions of the Jillies books have the full text or are they abridged? My copies are Armada paperbacks and I'm wondering whether or not the text is complete. I know people here will be able to tell me!

[Splodj]

According to the second post on page 30 of this thread, the Armada version of Two Fair Plaits was heavily abridged so I assume the others in the Jillies series were too.

I've also read that the Armada Lone Pine books were abridged, and am kicking myself for not getting the previous GGB editions of these. The only Gay Dolphin you can buy now (first hand) is the radio scripts.

[John Pickup]

Anita, according to the official Malcolm Saville Bibliography published by the Malcolm Saville Society, the Armada paperbacks of the Jillies series are NOT abridged but I have read elsewhere that they are.
I have all the Jillies series in hardbacks as well as the new editions currently being issued by GGB.
I used to have all the set in Armada paperbacks and I'm convinced they were heavily abridged. Unfortunately, I haven't got them now so I can't compare the text. The Sign of the Alpine Rose is being published by GGB in the autumn and will have the original text from the 1st edition.

[Anita Bensoussane]

Thanks very much for your replies, Splodj and John. I popped round to Tony's after work so I've been able to borrow the first edition of Two Fair Plaits (Lutterworth Press, 1948) to compare with my paperback copy (Armada, 1966). After a slow and careful look through the two books, comparing a number of complete chapters and a number of random pages, I'm happy to say that the Armada paperback appears to be unabridged - unless I've missed something! All the illustrations by Lunt Roberts are present too, except for the frontispiece. Even Malcolm Saville's foreword is included, describing the London Docklands. Since Two Fair Plaits has the full text in Armada, I expect the other books in the series do too. Your comment about the Malcolm Saville Biography would seem to confirm that, John.

[GloomyGraham]

I've also read that the Armada Lone Pine books were abridged

From what I can remember, some but not all of the Armada Lone Pines were abridged. When I was buying my collection back in the 70s, I used to check each paperback for Malcolm's introduction where he used say things like 'this version is a little shorter than the original but still complete'.

If it wasn't mentioned by him, I also used to check the printing details page to see if anything was mentioned there.

Whenever I found it was a shortened version, I would buy the hardback editions.

[Debbie]

And some of them are abridged in different ways. I have two different Armada versions of Lone Pine London that are subtly different. Not very, but just here and there.

Home to Witchend was first published in Armada so isn't abridged anyway.

[Splodj]

I see that in June the Malcolm Saville Society had an event in London including a walk that "covered possible locations from Lone Pine London and where the Jillies lived" - but there are no details of what these were! I spent some time studying those maps trying to work out the real locations.

I gather that the Gay Dolphin is the Mermaid but transplanted to the site of The Hope Anchor, and Witchend is the farmhouse at the Long Mynd to which his real children were evacuated.

[Moonraker]

Purists believe the Hope Anchor fits the bill, but the Mermaid looks the part!

[timv]

I've done a whole chapter for a forthcoming book on the 'real' sites for the Malcolm Saville books, which helpfully have a lot of real places under their real or semi-fictionalised names; hopefully this will see the light of day before too long. Luckily I used to have holidays in Saville's Shropshire/ Herefordshire countryside around Ludlow (which features in assorted Long Pine books) and did a series of photos of the area in the 1990s for a published book on the history of the Welsh Marches and their castles, which helped in putting it together. A lot of the sites also appear in MS's lesser-known 'Buckinghams' adventure series , which I've also read, especially the first of them 'The Master of Maryknoll' , set in and around Ludlow and Hereford. The Rye and Romney Marsh sites of the Lone Pine series , and the Surrey sites of the 'Nettleford' series around Guildford, are also ones that I know well; one of the best things about Saville's books is their sense of place.

The Lone Pine books' Long Mynd is broadly as in reality, with Prior's Holt where his family were evacuated in WW2 as Witchend (though the house doesn't look much like the imaginary W) and a farm nearby at Hamperley as Tom Ingles' uncle's farm, and the nearby village and railway station of 'Onnybrook' is Marshbrook near Church Stretton; but Saville mixed up real and invented places for Peter/Petronella's uncle Micah's farm at 'Seven White Gates' near the real Stiperstones ridge as the landscape is not exactly described and the actual farm and gates were partly based on a place where he lived in Herts near Wheathampstead. Bits of the scenery around Witchend, eg the White Horse Inn and woods around 'Plowden' in Wings Over Witchend, were also a mix of fact and fiction.

The 'Gay Dolphin' hotel in Rye was placed at the location of the Hope Anchor at the top of Rye hill by the church, with spectacular views across the marsh as in real life - I recognised this as soon as I read the book as we went there regularly in the 1970s-1980s and I am as fond of the view there as Jon and Penny are in the books. The Gay Dolphin Adventure also features real bits of the Marsh, eg Camber Castle, and accurate descriptions of Winchelsea; The Elusive Grasshopper features Lydd and the miniature railway - there are a lot of crossovers with Monica Edwards sites. The physical building of the GD hotel, ie a black and white Tudor one, seems to be the Mermaid Inn downhill from the Rye hilltop in Mermaid Street, complete with real life passages. Bits of the Jillies series are also set at real places which haven't changed much, especially Blakeney in Norfolk in Redshanks Warning; the Jillies live at a flat on the recognisable Cheyne Row on the riverbank near Chelsea Bridge in London. The Docklands of Two Fair Plaits has altered out of recognition and been gentrified; the Surrey sites of The Ambermere Treasure are based on the Dunsfold area S of Guildford but largely mixed up. My one minor complaint about Saville is that he did have a habit of recycling bits of his plots, eg treasure hunts and Mysterious Strangers with Secrets to Hide - Enid was not the only one to do this though she usually gets blamed for it!

[Moonraker]

Most interesting, Tim. I have visited most (if not all) of the Shropshire LP locations and really expected to see Peter on her horse! Your chapter for the new book sounds fascinating. Could you tell us at some point the name of the book? I would like to buy a copy.

[Splodj]

Yes very interesting.

In Grasshopper I suppose 'Dore Street' is Appledore, and he may have had a particular building in mind for the antiques shop. The string across the road location is probably identifiable. Unfortunately the windmill in Winchelsea blew down.

Photos of the real Witchend appear on the web and then seem to be removed, so I wonder if the occupants don't like the house being identified. I maybe completely wrong on this, but there was an article which would not specify the house name to protect their privacy.

[timv]

Thanks for the interest in my book. Negotiations are still at an early stage and I am not sure of which publisher will take it yet, but I will keep you all posted. The owners of the real 'Witchend' and other nearby Saville sites may be wary of tourists in the summer as a lot of the places are on private land but they are close to public walking routes eg the Long Mynd ; sometimes it happens that one owner of a site doesn't mind visitors and lets its location be publicised and the next owner wants to keep it private and tries to keep it quiet.

Saville mixed up the landscapes of bits of his Shropshire and left other areas as in real life in his books, which makes it all a bit complicated; his 'Barton Beach' village where Jenny Harman lives near the Stiperstones ridge in the Lone Pine series is in fact a few miles away from the hills not right next to them, and the 'dingles' (valleys) running down from the ridge were altered too but I have found other sites exactly as described. The road-junction near Alan Denton's farm close to Clun in Secret of Grey Walls (book 4), where Penny runs into the farmers hunting for the mystery sheep-rustlers at night, is real; Grey Walls itself, a farmhouse next to Offa's Dyke, isn't. 'Bringewood' in Secret Of The Gorge is based on a real gorge - unfortunately now on private property. In 'Master of Maryknoll', there is a genuine 'Mary Knoll' location near Ludlow but no big house there. In Surrey, I have a dossier on the 'real' Nettleford series sites, mostly near Guildford. I have been doing the same 'what is real and what isn't' hunt with Monica Edwards' books, and with several other authors whose work appeared with Enid's and Saville's in the Armada paperback series in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It all adds to the fun of detective work; as with my Blyton TV series location site hunts, it provides an interesting hobby and an excuse for a lot of photography!

[Anita Bensoussane]

My one minor complaint about Saville is that he did have a habit of recycling bits of his plots, eg treasure hunts and Mysterious Strangers with Secrets to Hide - Enid was not the only one to do this though she usually gets blamed for it!

To be honest, loads of authors do that, including prestigious writers for adults such as William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and D. H. Lawrence. If authors who write prolifically have a real passion for something they're bound to explore it in a number of texts, though reworked to suit the particular plot.