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Dutch postcard, nr. AX 171. Photo: J. Arthur Rank Org.

Beautiful stage and film actress Margaret Lockwood (1916-1990) was the female lead of the early Hitchcock classic The Lady Vanishes. In the 1940’s she became Britain's leading box-office star specializing in beautiful but diabolical adventuresses.

Margaret Mary Lockwood Day was born in 1916 in Karachi, British India (now Karachi, Pakistan), to a English administrator of a railway company and his Scottish wife. Lockwood's family returned to the United Kingdom while she was a child, aged 3. She began studying for the stage at an early age under Italia Conti, and made her debut in 1928, at the age of 12, at the Holborn Empire, where she played a fairy in A Midsummer Night's Dream. In December of the following year, she appeared at the Scala Theatre in the pantomime The Babes in the Wood. In 1932, she appeared at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in Cavalcade. In 1933, she enrolled at the RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art), where she was seen in Leontine Sagan's production of Hannele by a leading London agent, Herbert de Leon, who at once signed her as a client and arranged a screen test. Director Basil Dean was impressed and gave her the second lead in his film Lorna Doone (1934) when Dorothy Hyson fell ill. She was billed with her stage name Margie Day.Seven ingenue screen roles followed in ‘quota quickies’ like Someday (1935, Michael Powell) and Midshipman Easy (1935, Carol Reed). Then she played opposite Maurice Chevalier in the remake of the musical The Beloved Vagabond (1936, Curtis Bernhardt). A year later, she married Rupert Leon, a man of whom her domineering mother disapproved strongly, so much so that for six months Margaret did not live with her husband and was afraid to tell her mother that the marriage had taken place.

In 1938, Margaret Lockwood's role as a young London nurse in Bank Holiday (1938, Carol Reed), established her as a star, and her next film would give her even international status. The Lady Vanishes (1938, Alfred Hitchcock) offered her a role with teeth. She starred as a rich young playgirl about a mysteriously disappearing old woman. In this glorious comic thriller she co-starred with Michael Redgrave and there was considerable chemistry between the two stars. Hitchcock guides them with never a misstep through a complex script that progresses from very lighthearted to extremely sinister and then back again, and the result leaves audiences with both the satisfaction of a well-made thriller and the glow of a romantic comedy. The Gainsborough studio production would be Lockwood’s most successful film of that decade. A visit to Hollywood to appear with Shirley Temple in Susannah of the Mounties (1939, Walter Lang, William A. Seiter) and with Douglas Fairbanks Jr in Rulers of the Sea (1939, Frank Lloyd) was not at all to her liking. She returned with relief to Britain to star in two of Carol Reed's best films, The Stars Look Down (1940), as the self-centred, frivolous wife of Michael Redgrave's character, and the Oscar nominated spy thriller Night Train to Munich (1940), opposite Rex Harrison. In 1941, she gave birth to a daughter by Leon, Julia Lockwood, affectionately known to her mother as ‘Toots’, who was also to become a successful actress. The Leons separated soon after her birth and were divorced in 1950. Lockwood gained custody of her daughter, but not before Mrs Lockwood had sided with her son-in-law to allege that Margaret was ‘an unfit mother’.

In the early 1940’s, Margaret Lockwood changed her on-screen image. The turning point in her career came in 1943, when she was cast opposite James Mason in the Gainsborough melodrama The Man in Grey (1943, Leslie Arliss). She played an amoral schemer who steals the husband of her best friend, played by Phyllis Calvert, and then ruthlessly murders her. Spectral in black, with her dark, dramatic looks, cold but beautiful eyes, and vividly overpainted thin lips, Lockwood was queen among villainesses. The film inaugurated a series of hothouse melodramas that came to be known as Gainsborough Gothic and had film fans queueing outside cinemas all over Britain. . Her greatest success was in the title role of The Wicked Lady (1945, Leslie Arliss), again opposite Mason. In thuis outrageous adventure film she played the ultimate in murderous husband-stealers, Lady Skelton, who amuses herself at night with highway robbery. The amount of cleavage exposed by Lockwood's Restoration gowns caused consternation to the film censors, and apprehension was in the air before the premiere, attended by Queen Mary, who astounded everyone by thoroughly enjoying it. In 1946 Lockwood gained the Daily Mail First Prize for most popular British film actress.

After poisoning several husbands in Bedelia (1946, Lance Comfort), Margaret Lockwood became less wicked in Hungry Hill (1947, Brian Desmond Hurst), Jassy (1947, Bernard Knowles), and The White Unicorn (1947, Bernard Knowles),

HARRY PECKMAN, THE BLUE MOUNTAINS POET (1846-1934)

Harry Peckman was a true ‘Blue Mountaineer’. Born at Kurrajong in 1846, he lived the whole of his life in the Blue Mountains region and died in Katoomba in 1934. As a young man, in the days before the western railway line was built, he drove wagons and coaches on the road between Penrith and Hartley. Then, when the Mountains developed its reputation as a tourist destination, he began taking visitors to the local scenic attractions.

In the early 1880s he and his brother, John, established livery stables in Parke Street, Katoomba, at the back of the Carrington Hotel. Their business flourished. Both men were expert horsemen and knew the Blue Mountains intimately and their patrons soon included a growing number of holidaying dignitaries and their families. In 1887 Lord and Lady Carrington were taken over the newly opened Six-Foot Track to Jenolan Caves1 while, in 1893 the Duchess of Buckingham and Chandos was entertained with a billy tea and damper picnic at Govetts Leap2.

But knowledge of horses and the bush were not the only skills Harry possessed. To the many visitors who engaged him he became known as ‘the poetical whip’ who would take them to places off the beaten track and entertain them en route with selections from his repertoire of mostly self-penned songs and recitations. As more than one observer commented, his verses, performed in the midst of a grand, open landscape, provided visitors with a glimpse into the heart of the Mountains that no other driver could offer.

While no one could claim that Peckman was a great poet, it is clear that his skills as a performer made up for any deficiencies in craft. “No free verse for this poet”, observed cartoonist and journalist Hal Eyre in 1922, “but rhymes tuned to the beat of his horses’ hoofs.”3 His subjects ranged over the Blue Mountains itself and included dramatic and patriotic war ballads and heart-felt ‘farewells’ to friends who had died. There were also tributes to popular heroes like the sculler Edward Trickett, the first Australian to win a world sporting title, and the popular aviatrix Amy Johnson who visited Katoomba in 1930.

Like many self-educated men, Peckman was clearly a wide reader and his verses are dotted with various literary and Biblical allusions. He was also acquainted with a number of Sydney literary figures who sought him out when they visited Katoomba, among them the poets Roderick Quinn and Henry Lawson.

Though he performed for the gentry his audience was in the main a popular one and his work, when published, appeared almost exclusively on privately printed broadsides and later, when a newspaper became established in Katoomba, in the local press.

It seems that he was performing his songs and poems and peddling his broadsides from the time he worked as a young labourer and coach driver in the Hartley area in the 1860s and 1870s. In some of his reminiscences, recorded by local journalists, he mentioned the lively sessions of song and recitation he participated in at this time, particularly at ‘Kelly’s in the Glen’ halfway to Jenolan Caves.

Some of his work attained for him what is possibly the highest accolade a popular audience can bestow, a passage into the anonymous oral or ‘folk’ tradition that carried it to places far removed from the Blue Mountains.

Towards the end of his life Harry Peckman experienced hard times and, though visitors still often sought him out even in the late 1920s, he watched as the age of the motor car gradually rendered his coach and pair obsolete. At the time of his death he had become something of an icon, a symbol of a past era. On a slow news day the local journalists would seek him out and trawl his still alert mind for reminiscences of the ‘old days’.

For his 88th birthday, in August 1934, his friends organised a party. He performed his poems for the last time and, some seven weeks later, died. His grave in Katoomba Cemetery looks out over the tributaries of the Grose River that flow into what he once described as “the Hawkesb’ry silver Rhine”.

His name is publicly remembered in Peckmans Plateau and Peckmans Road, both in Katoomba.



Note: In 1993, nearly 60 years after his death, a small biography and collection of Peckman’s surviving poems and songs, The Prince of Whips: The Life and Works of the Blue Mountains Pioneer Harry Peckman, Jim Smith and John Low, was published. Copies of this book are still available, for more information send a Flickr mail to Blue Mountains Local Studies.

© 2008 John Low

1 For an account of this trip see Smith, Jim. From Katoomba to Jenolan Caves: The Six Foot Track 1884-1984, Katoomba: Second Back Row Press, [1985], pp. 33-4.
2 Duchess of Buckingham & Chandos. Glimpses of Four Continents, London: John Murray, 1894.
3 Hal Eyre wrote of his experiences touring with Peckman in the Sydney Daily Telegraph of 13th September 1922 and 26th September 1922. Three caricatures of Harry were also included