RIP - Peter R Watkins (SCH, 46-52)

There have already been many obituaries in the daily newspapers following the sad news of Peter's death on October 30th, but only the Times mentioned that he was educated at Christ College. They do however write extensively about his career as a film maker, Oscar winner, and the political influence of his work. However, I am going to write about his time in school and feel well qualified to do it. 

For some reason it was decided to ask the new intake for September 1946 to arrive one day ahead of the rest of the pupils and a small group of apprehensive boys duly arrived in the course of the afternoon. We were all in Private Side 2, a smallish dormitory high up on the floor above the headmaster’s house. Peter was in the next bed to me, although none of us were very far apart. Memory is a bit dim, but the other names that come to mind as being fellow sufferers were, Keith Vivian, David Wilson, Tim Owen and Mike Rosser. I think there were 8 of us, and so there are another two whose names escape me.

Perhaps things are different now for new boys on their first day and night away from home, but we were all a bit “emotional” in modern day parlance, and I think there were a few muffled sobs, definitely from our corner. Peter had the added handicap that his mother had provided a pair of pink pyjamas, which gave rise to his nickname “Pinkie” Watkins. This stuck with him for most of his time in school. Boys can be very cruel to each other.

Something that Peter and I shared was our loathing of sport, and the routine that every afternoon was spent either on the rugby field or cricket in the summer. In the Spring term it was “athletics”, which usually was a run to the end of the “long field” along the Usk and back. It was supposed to be a run, but in my case at least was much more of a walk. Bad weather was never a hinderance. And we were forced out onto the rugby pitches no matter how hard it was raining. We were not allowed to use the showers, although as there was no hot water, there was little incentive to use them. Instead about 30 of us shared the bath with about 10” of lukewarm water to try to wash the mud off our legs. The boots were kicked off in the boot-room and lay in a heap until the next day. I cannot remember them ever being dried or cleaned. The same goes for the kit, and we put on the same damp items the next afternoon to repeat the performance. I hated sport and am pretty sure Peter did too.

The spring term of 1947 started with the heavy snow fall in February which resulted in Brecon being cut off from the outside world, and shortages of food, which was pretty sparse at the best of times, and heat, as the coal ran out. To be honest the classrooms and dormitories never got warm, and most of us suffered from Chilblains. Swollen purple fingers and toes, which either itched and often burst were the usual outcomes. We still had the windows open at night, no matter how cold or windy. At least there was no sport. The snow lasted till the Easter holidays, and most of us had to go home by public transport. For me it was the only time I went on the Brecon to Merthyr railway.

Another thing that Peter told me on our last visit was about the time he ran away, because he was so unhappy, and being bullied. A not uncommon occurrence in the boarding schools at the time. Considering he lived in London, this must have been quite a feat. There was a railway in Brecon at the time which went to Newport or Merthyr, to connect to the mainline to London, but where did he get the money for the fare. I know that my father put £1 in the Bank of Krump, which lasted me for the term. As soon as he got home, his parents rang the school and Mr Rutherford (Crump) went up to London to bring him back. I don’t this event was generally known, and most of us knew what was going on, but the grape vine failed on this occasion.

The one thing he did excel in though was the Dramatic Society. We did a different Shakespeare play every year, and this did take up most of the Spring term and was a useful means to escape the daily run up and down the long field! Peter usually took the leading female role, and when full make up and wig had been applied, caused many a heart to flutter. My role was one of the two electricians, John Cape being the other. We also helped paint the scenery and build the sets. Our lighting was all home-made units, as the school could not afford to buy professional Strand equipment with dimmers and real spotlights. Cheap Bakelite sockets and 2-pole switches, cloth covered cable, and 100 watt bulbs was the best we could afford.  I don’t think we had even heard of earthing anything either. Health and Safety would have shut us down on sight. But it all worked, and I think we all learnt a lot, and in both our cases, Peter found fame and fortune in films and me with electrical parts.

 After leaving school, our paths did not cross again until 2009, when Peter and others set up the project to document the AD James era, which we lived through. His main reference were the school photos and attempt to name every boy. He contacted everyone he could find with great help from John Payne who was running the OBA at the time, and I did my best to help. Peter and Vida came to stay with us for a few days, and I provided the transport to go and interview as many boys as possible who were willing to give him interviews and memories of their time in school. It was a very pleasing experience, meeting people who we had not seen for nearly 60 years. For me at least meeting up with people who were close friends was a great experience. Peter came to the school as well to talk about his project the following year, and it seemed to be making good progress. 

The  last time we met was when my wife Jill and I stayed with Peter and Vida in Felletin on our way back from a holiday in Corsica by car, when I decided to go through the middle of France and head for Cherbourg to cross the Channel  instead of the more obvious route via Calais and the tunnel or ferry. Felletin was conveniently about halfway through France. We enjoyed our stay, and seeing his various mementoes, including the Oscar, which was in the attic along with other awards that his films had won.

Peter was a great character, and I was not aware of all that he had achieved until very late in life. I really regret that, and he really deserved greater recognition for all that he achieved. Especially here in Great Britain, as so much of his work was done in other countries.

He is survived by his wife, Vida Urbonavičius; two sons, Patrick and Gerard, from his first marriage to Françoise Letourneur; his brother Paul; and two grandchildren.

 Thank you to George Schoenmann SCH 46-53

 The following is taken from the New York Times:

"Pioneer of the docudrama whose 1965 film The War Game was considered ‘too horrifying’ for broadcast by the BBC

In the late 1960s, the film-maker Peter Watkins wrote to John Lennon and Yoko Ono, telling them: “People in your position have a responsibility to use the media for world peace.” This directly inspired the couple to start their own idiosyncratic protest, known as the Bed-In. Lennon described receiving that letter as “like getting your induction papers for peace.”

Watkins, who has died aged 90, had already nailed his pacifist colours to the mast four years earlier with his 1965 BBC television film The War Game. It used the hypothesis of a limited nuclear attack on Kent to demonstrate the futility of nuclear war, and to show Britain’s feeble defences against such a disaster. This was a film unstinting in its grimness, featuring shots of molten eyeballs and ravenous rats. The critic Kenneth Tynan called it “maybe the most important film ever made”.

After secret consultation and collusion with Harold Wilson’s Labour government, the BBC shelved it indefinitely. “The effect of the film has been judged to be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting,” said the corporation in its official statement.

It won the Oscar for best documentary, somewhat bizarrely for a fictionalised film. (Watkins, who was not short of celebrity friends, asked Elizabeth Taylor to collect the award, to prevent the BBC’s Kenneth Adam doing so and snatching any of the glory.) But it would not be aired on television until 1985.

With The War Game, Watkins effectively invented what is known now as the mockumentary or docudrama. Using documentary conventions to deepen, enhance and fortify dramatic scenes, he allowed the two modes to bleed indivisibly into each other. This was how he challenged and dismantled what he later called the “Monoform”, a common media language that he regarded as a distraction at best, an anaesthetic at worst.

He had already pioneered the docudrama method in his previous film for the BBC, Culloden (1964), which applied modern-day TV journalism techniques to a recreation of the 1746 Battle of Culloden. There was a thrilling frisson here in the disparity between form and content: the 18th-century combatants interviewed on-camera showed no surprise when confronted with technology that would not be invented for more than a century, and were perfectly at ease with the conventions of 20th-century reporting.

“What I’m reaching for is a way to make the audience believe that it is not looking at a movie or a ‘story’,” said Watkins in 1967, “but that somehow what it is seeing on the screen is actually happening at that moment.” In one respect, it was: he intended Culloden to inspire reflection on the conflict in Vietnam, which at that moment was playing out on screens across the world, earning it the title of the first televised war.

But it was the urgency of the subject matter in The War Game, coupled with the minatory tone and the immediacy of the visual style, that made it too much for some to bear. Objections had already been raised in the tabloid press during the shooting of the film. The Sunday People warned its readers that The War Game would “bring the full horror of a Hiroshima into your homes” and asked: “Should [Watkins] be allowed to inflict his obsession with violence and pain on viewers?”

Watkins was apoplectic at the film’s suppression. “The BBC attitude is that the majority of the lay viewers of this country … must not be allowed to see a film showing that nuclear war is terrible,” he told this paper in 1965. He called this “patronage at its worst, a hell of an insult to the average viewer”. The Observer noted in 1965 that Watkins had a tendency to talk with “a kind of tense, hidden wrath, as if he were about to strike you for some nameless wrong you had done him”.

He went on to apply his scrupulous methods to other subjects. The nearest thing he made to a conventional narrative film was Privilege (1967), set in a Britain of the near-future. Paul Jones, singer with the band Manfred Mann, gave a bleakly impassive performance as Steven Shorter, a pop star appointed by the state, who leads stadiums of teenagers to chant: “We will conform.” Eventually, he begins to chafe against the confines of his role.

In Punishment Park (1971), inspired by the fatal shooting of student anti-war protesters at Kent State University in Ohio, Watkins depicted another dystopian near-future. Here, dissidents and demonstrators can choose either to go to prison or to be released into the desert without food or water, where they are hunted by armed police and the US National Guard. Like much of Watkins’s work, it was improvised by non-professional actors. The film’s harrowing vision was dismissed by some critics as “paranoid”. In fact, it came to represent Watkins at his most prescient.

His masterpiece was the four-hour Edvard Munch (1974), made for Swedish and Norwegian television, and also released in a shorter cinema cut. Watkins brought his singular scrutiny to bear on the life of the maligned and tormented artist, drawing on Munch’s journals as well as incorporating art criticism and an analysis of patriarchal capitalist society. Watkins’s usual documentary devices (interviews, narration, verité camerawork) were fused here with highly cinematic touches such as cross-cutting and flashbacks, resulting in his most formally sophisticated film.

He also considered it deeply personal. “The opposition to [Munch’s] work, especially in his own country … paralleled my own experiences,” he said. “I quickly came to understand that in making a film about Edvard Munch, I was also making a film about myself.”

Watkins was born in Norbiton, south-west London, the son of Ralph, a bank teller, and Peggy. He was educated at Christ college in Brecon, mid-Wales. After completing his national service in the army with the East Surrey Regiment, he enrolled at Rada in London. In his early short films, he was already experimenting with docudrama techniques. For one, The Forgotten Faces (1960), he restaged the 1956 Hungarian revolution on the streets of Canterbury in Kent.

That film, which won him the Amateur Cine Camera award, caught the eye of Huw Wheldon, editor of the arts strand Monitor and later head of documentaries at the BBC, who said: “His talent is extraordinary.” A short spell at the corporation ended unhappily after the furore over The War Game.

He spent the rest of his life in self-imposed exile, living variously in Sweden, Canada and Lithuania. Subsequent films included The Gladiators (1969), which imagined a reality television show featuring teams of soldiers. With hostilities contained on camera, the outbreak of a third world war is prevented.

Resan, aka The Journey (1987), described by Watkins as “a global odyssey for peace,” ran more than 14 hours, and addressed the world arms race and its consequences. The Freethinker (1994) revived and reshaped an earlier project about August Strindberg, which the Swedish Film Institute had initially scuppered by withdrawing its funding.

In 2000, Watkins made La Commune (Paris, 1871), a re-enactment of the socialist Commune uprising. Meeting him that year for the Guardian, Peter Lennon found him “wary, rather rigid and given to a kind of managerial tetchiness, ready to abandon the interview on the spot if I appeared to be straying from what he considered … to be essential issues.”

Distrustful of the media, Watkins withdrew from publicity in the last few decades of his life, preferring to issue “self-interviews” in which he could outline his ideas without fear of manipulation.

He never stopped fighting for the idea that a media revolution could be a catalyst for change. “I do not believe that the anti-globalisation protest will ever reach its true fruition if we leave the cinema and television and the radio in the present position we’re in,” he said. He would likely not have admitted what everyone else could see: that he had already helped to transform it radically, and irrevocably."