When Peter met Ethel—Embedded in The Bay, snippets from the untold story of Peter Sellers and the Goons and the summers spent in Beachlands
An interesting discussion with the family of Ethel Wood (March 11) has led to a small series of features about the life and times of their Mum, who was a seminal figure in the life of community work in Pevensey Bay.
Bob Wood and his sister Ellen Skingle, together with their spouses, Chris Wood and John Skingle were kind enough to give up some time last week, to talk about the days gone by. Thanks also to brother, Harold Wood and his wife Ann in the Isle of Weight for their contributions.
The series of stories that emerged in the discussion is to form a new feature in Bay Life, The Ethel Wood Years which will explore the rich seam of local voluntary activity that is a marked characteristic of the close knit community.
The Red Cross building in Beachlands, was named in honour of Ethel Wood, following her death in 2000. Today the ‘Ethel Wood Community Centre’ proudly stands testimony to her work.
Ethel was born on the day that that Titanic went down, April 15, 1912 , ‘She always said that her birth was responsible for it’, joked her son and daughter.
The series of conversations about ‘The life and times of Ethel Wood’, includes access to the family archive of postcards, pictures, press cuttings, newsletters and other documents, some of which we plan to publish alongside these accounts.
Here in the first of the articles, Bob and Ellen remember the time when Mum, Ethel, came home from cleaning in Beachlands in the early fifties, with news that she had met someone who went by the name of Peter Sellers.
IMAGE CREDIT: FAMILY OF ETHEL WOOD: GEORGE AND ETHEL WOOD, WEDDING DAY, 1933: INTERLEAVE, ‘TO MRS ETHEL WOOD’: SECTION FROM AGE CONCERN AWARD CERTIFICATE ’25 YEARS UNSELFISH, CARING AND CHEERFUL SERVICE TO THE PEOPLE OF THE PEVENSEY AREA’
When Peter met Ethel
Starting with 370,000 listeners in 1951, the Goons Show eventually reached up to seven million people in Britain (1959), and was described by one newspaper as ‘probably the most influential comedy show of all time’.
The show is recognised as being a major influence on comedy currents that followed, from Monty Python’s Flying Circus through to the alternative comedy movement of the eighties, in which Bexhill born Edie Izzard learnt his craft.
Along the way, everyone from Peter Cook, to John Cleese, John Lloyd and Charlie Higson have acknowledged the influence of the show in their work. As well as Monty Python’s Flying Circus, there are elements of the Goons in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Young Ones, Vic Reeves Big Night Out, The League of Gentlemen and Brass Eye.
As Bob’s wife, Chris, appeared with the tea and chocolate biscuits, the scrapbooks and postcard collection were already being shared round.
We started with some questions about the times in which ‘Mum’, Ethel Wood was undertaking cleaning duties in Beachlands and the day she met Peter Sellers and came home to talk about what she had witnessed.
Do you remember listening to the Goons on the radio?
Ellen: ‘No we were too young really, but I can remember we did listen because we wanted to know if there were any local references in the shows’.
Ellen is right. Episodes were littered with references to the Bay and the locality. In fact one episode of the Goons even had the village in its title. ‘The Pevensey Bay Disaster’ (almost identical to another episode, The Hastings Flyer – Robbed’). was broadcaster in 1957.
Goon buffs point out that on the day the show was recorded there was a serious train crash. Due to the fact that the show contains a train crash, the episode was not broadcast until two weeks after the end of the series. The script was also reused for episode 15 under the title ‘The Hastings Flyer – Robbed’.
Bob : I remember references. Three episodes tied up with events that happened while they were on holiday in the Bay. One was a sea rescue of a swimmer in the Bay. Another one involved the now removed sewerage pumping station in Coast Road. People living around the area wanted it removed. The last one involved the railway but I don’t remember what incident caused The Goons to use the railway as a backdrop’.
The reference to the sewerage pumping station apparently caused ‘a hell of fuss’ with the old County Borough of Eastbourne, and was reported in the local press. There was only a very short outfall at Langney Point and the sewerage could end up in the Bay.
Bob is right. here is the episode that caused offence to the old County Borough of Eastbourne. It began with a rather pointed reference!
SEAGOON:
I wonder how many listeners noticed that while Max Geldray was playing I caught a road to Norman’s Bay Halt and am now addressing you from the beach at Pevensey Bay where the great English channel meets the great English sewerage system.Insurance – The White Man’s Burden
Series 7, Episode 21
First broadcast 28 February 1957
Do you know where Peter Sellers stayed in the Bay and in what circumstances?
Ellen: They used to come down in the summer and stayed in Beachlands, I think for a number of summers, and they either stayed for 2 or three weeks.
Did they stay in one house or in a number of houses?
Ellen: I think maybe they stayed in one house, because Mum talked about seeing a number of people in the house, with Peter Sellers and his wife (it would have been his first wife, Anne Howe, who he married in 1951).
Bob: I think Peter Sellers stayed in 115 Beachlands. The others, if I remember rightly, stayed in 140,142 or 144 and 146 Beachlands. These houses were renumbered many years ago.
What year are we taking about, when your Mum came home and talked about meeting Peter Sellers when she was doing the cleaning?
Ellen: I think that it must have been around 1952.
Interestingly this time chimes with the days in which Peter Sellers career was beginning to blossom in a variety of ways. A recently discovered set of shorts for broadcast on the BBC was found in a skip in 2011and is to feature as a showcase for the Southend Film Festival 2014, this May.
In the shorts, Sellers is seen in trying out various character roles that would eventually lead to fame and fortune with films like ‘I’m Alright Jack’, the Pink Panther series, as well as the two films now regarded as his best work, Dr. Strangelove and Being There, in which he plays the part of ‘Chance’ a simple gardener mistaken as the President of the United States. The film is breathtaking in its simplicity and depth and is regarded as a sublime masterpiece.
Peter Sellers has been described by English filmmakers the Boulting brothers as ‘the greatest comic genius this country has produced since Charles Chaplin’.
The Southend on Sea Film Festival writes;
We are absolutely thrilled to announce that three Peter Sellers comedy shorts, made in the late 1950s and long thought lost, have been discovered by The White Bus and will be screened at the Southend Film Festival Opening Gala. Dearth of a Salesman, Cold Comfort and Insomnia Is Good For You were made in 1956 but, after their initial release, went missing and have not been publicly screened since then. They were made when Peter Sellers was beginning his move from radio, where he had starred in the massively influential Goon Show, to films, where his versatility saw him achieve fame as the inept Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther films and also, among many other roles, portray the gentle gardener, Chance, in Being There.
At this time, it would appear that Ethel Wood was witnessing him ‘practise’ some of his ‘voices’.
Bob reminded us that in the early fifties, whilst well known, the Goons was on the radio. It would have been perfectly possible for Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan to go about their business in the Bay, partly under the radar, without being disturbed by the kind of celebrity culture, paparazzi, autograph hunting and demand for ‘shared selfies’ that are all much more recent phenomena.
At the drafting stage of this conversation, Dudley Baker-Beale, who grew up in the Bay offered a fascinating insight into the character of Peter Sellers. He gives an account of an ad hoc ‘one-man show’ that Peter Sellers put on in the old St. Wilfrid’s Hall for visiting pensioners, here in Pevensey Bay, around 1964, at the height of the first wave of international fame that surrounded him.
The anecdote, recalled by Dudley’s mother, Violet Baker-Beale, who was responsible for the development of the Anderida Women’s Institute, reveals the extraordinary way in which Peter Sellers ‘spontaneously’ offered a two-hour performance.
See footnote for the full account.
The question of ‘fame’ in the early fifties was clearly different. As well as deference, there was perhaps a sense that Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan were ‘embedded’ in the Bay in those early years of the decade and therefore simply part of the proceedings. They seem to have gone about their business here with little interference.
The anecdote offered by Dudley Baker-Beall, in which he remembers meeting up with Peter Sellers on the beach, when he was a young kid and singing part of the Ying-Tong song to him, as Sellers joined in, appears to confirm the way in which the Goons were very much part of the Bay and accepted as familiar characters that would appear during the summer season.
As already detailed, The Goons Show started with a limited audience in 1951. In fact in the first season of broadcasts, it was not that well known and regarded as something of an oddity on the radio. As also outlined, it was not until the late fifties that it grew to be listened to by as many as 7 million people a week.
What did she say about meeting him?
Bob: I will always remember her coming home and saying that all he did was talk in voices all the time and that she thought it was odd. I remember her coming home and saying that she spoke to Mrs Sellers and asked what he was doing, talking in this way with all these voices. I distinctly remember Mum saying that Peter Sellers wife said ‘don’t worry about him, he always talks like that’.
Peter Sellers, as well as being a comic genius, was the most complex of men. After a chance meeting with a North American Indian spirit guide, he became convinced, for example, that the music hall comedian Dan Leno, who died in 1904, haunted him and guided his career and life-decisions.
He also refused to go on the Michael Parkinson Show unless he could appear ‘in character’. Parkinson famously recorded that his reason for such ‘shyness’ was because (as Sellers put it) ‘I don’t know who I am’.
Perhaps this explains why, on a Saturday in January 1974, Sellers was seen walking down the steps into the studio lights and the big band sound of the Michael Parkinson Show dressed as a member of the Gestapo.
Why do you think Sellers and the Goons came to the Bay. Did they have any known associations with the place, local family connections perhaps?
Ellen: Not to our knowledge, no.
See also the anecdote recalled by Dudley Baker-Beale and reference to the fact that Peter Seller’s mother ‘Peg’ lived in the Bay for some time.
Interestingly, the house in which she lived is now up for sale and the estate agents responsible for the sale have carefully given tribute to the legacy of the home with an explainer;
‘An extremely rare opportunity to acquire a spacious three bedroom detached beachfront bungalow occupying one of the largest double plots in the area. Believed to have been formerly owned by Peter Sellers mother and documented to have been used by Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers’.
local estate agent’s descriptor, April 2014
Did they come to work or was it just a holiday for them do you think?
Ellen: They certainly booked for a few weeks every year with their families, so it looks like a holiday.
With some many scattered references to the Bay and the locality and an episode with Pevensey Bay in the title, it does suggest that the Goons held the place high in their affections.
Perhaps the visits were ‘busmens’ holidays’ of some description, and an opportunity to play with scripting ideas, jokes and voices away from the pressures of working lives in London and weekly live broadcasts, which were known, for example, to evoke in Spike Milligan deep ‘manic despair’ at not being able to ‘deliver the goods’ each week. This led to a well documented ‘nervous breakdown’ in 1952.
Were the holidays perhaps in some way part of a recuperation exercise for Spike Milligan, and an opportunity to work with his scripting colleagues and Peter Sellers in an environment that was part of a rehabilitation?
These are modern terminologies and questions of this description can only be guesswork.
Having said that, the holidaying here certainly looks, in theory at least, since they came together as a ‘team’ in some kind of way, to have been a break from the pressures that they were under and a ‘sharing’ of the experience.
The BBC2 Arena programme broadcast in 2008, included a sequence of Peter Sellers 16mm home movies, which featured everyone from Princess Margaret to Lord Litchfield.
In one set of shots (which appears to have been filmed in either 1961 or 1962), Sellers home movie picks up a sequence with him travelling by car from around the corner of the Bay Hotel and into the Eastbourne Road.
Ethel Wood and her memories of meeting Peter Sellers date to about 1952. The home movie sequence dates from nearly ten years later.
It would appear that the Goons links with the Bay extended possibly through 8.9 or 10 summers.
Dudley Baker-Beale’s anecdote confirms another reason that Peter Sellers, as he moved towards the height of his worldwide fame in the early/mid sixties, would still have been around in the Bay. His mum by then, lived here.
A possible explanation is that he simply bought her the house here. His fame brought significant wealth.
In the Arena film Sellers seems to be making something of a ‘pilgrimage’ back to the Bay. Perhaps it was something he wanted to record about their ‘happy times here’ with his comic colleagues from a few years before?
Spike Milligan also had local links with the area.
He had been stationed at Bexhill with ‘Ack Ack Guns’ practice, and records how since the Royal Artillery at the time had no practice shells, that they would simply shout ‘bang’ at the appropriate moment in their struggle to play a part in the downfall of Adolf Hitler.
People have said that maybe there was something about the spirit of the place that appealed to the Goons and inspired them to write?
Ellen: Not to our knowledge, we have not heard anyone say that.
What is interesting about the Goons is the anarchic nature of the show and the fact that coming out of the Second Word War, in which Secombe and Spike met, in well documented circumstances, there appeared to have been a release of a burst of creativity, anarchy, rebellion against authority and play acting with ‘crazy’ characters that suddenly broke lose amongst the comics and their fraternities.
Is there something about the Bay, perhaps with its history of ‘anarchy’ represented by smuggling, individuality, and old fashioned values, spirit and charm that appealed to Spike Milligan in the manufacturing of his scripts and made him want to come year after year?
The ‘far flung’ realism of the locations and scenes have often been mentioned by commentators.
Here in Pevensey Bay, perhaps Spike Milligan found some material and inspiration that could help to set the scene. Certainly the references in the scripts suggest that he drew on this ‘realism’ to frame some of the episodes in a loose ‘surreal way’.
Interestingly of course, Spike Milligan eventually ‘settled’ in Sussex, in Rye, so perhaps there is something about the area that drew him back to Sussex at a later stage in his life.
It is also noteowrthy that time is such a regularly occurring surreal theme in the Goons. The notion of time capsules and the breaking of a traditional sense of time is utilised to comic effect over and over again.
Pevensey Bay has often been described as a time capsule of some description. It is not impossible to see a way in which the locality, if not inspiring the writing of Spike Milligan in some way, as with the Second World War, did at least inform the work. and give it ‘a frame of reference’.
One Goon show ‘biographer’ noted;
The settings for the shows were a revolution in themselves. Rather than the tepid everyday world of Britain in the ’50s, Milligan set most of the shows in foreign locations, especially India, North Africa, South America, the Wild West, places where he had lived or had been posted during WWII, or had been fascinated with when a boy. It gives the shows a “boys-own story” atmosphere to the plots, and also an extraordinary sense of realism.
A typical joke written by Spike Milligan involved ‘time transference’
‘If time causes calendars, calendars can cause time. If you drop a bundle of 1918 calendars on German troops in 1916, then they will all go home, thus shortening the war’.
Co-incidentally the episode in which time is most warped and played with for comedic effect is titled The Treasure in the Tower”, in the 8th series (1959) Of course to any local person ‘Treasure in the Tower’ could possibly call to mind a Martello Tower. As well as being Napoleonic ‘fortresseses’, they are in themselves, time capsules of some description.
Did you ever meet Spike Milligan or Peter Sellers yourselves?
Ellen and Bob: No we never met them.
We then sat in a circle and attention turned back to ‘Mum’, Ethel Wood, and her marriage photograph (1933) and the fact that she knew so much about the history of the locality.
‘The Boxes’, (now ‘the Sandcastle’ private residence on the seafront), came up in the conversation a number of times, somewhere again, where ‘Mum’ Ethel, worked as a cleaner and knew the whole history of ‘the house’.
Ellen produced a 1988 copy of the Eastbourne Local History Society Newsletter in which her Mum gets an honourable mention;
The Boxes, according to Ethel Wood, who looked after it, was two 1914-18 Army huts joined together and extended’.
Ethel ‘looked after the Boxes’ from 1928 to 1933, on behalf of Nicolas Princep, youngest son of Valentine Princep’.
It was Nicolas, the youngest who left his mark on Wallsend Pevensey Bay when he had the magnificent villa built the seafront in 1934 to replace a collection of Army Huts called The Boxes’, the name was transferred to the new villa, afterwards called Courtlands, and now Sandcastle.
As well as all the snippets of information flooding out from the family, with them came a collection of postcards, news clipping, newsletters and photographs from the ‘Ethel Wood Years’ .
I was spellbound by the hour. My tea was left to go cold as I began to take stock of the material and its value in documenting the time spent here by the Goons and the way in which they were embedded in local folklore and the community history of Pevensey Bay in the nineteen fifties.
It was Bob who delivered the punchline to end the episode in which we heard the story of the day that ‘Peter met Ethel’.
Sellers, it is worth recalling, played four main characters in the Goons and nineteen minor ones. In Dr. Strangelove he played all four main characters. In ‘Being There’, the conceit is so well crafted that he is both a gardener and in some way, the President of the United States, simultaneously.
He clearly was the most complex of men and most certainly only appeared (from the outside at least) to ‘be himself’ when he was acting the part of a character.
Michael Parkinskon and his account possibly comes closest to defining Peter Sellers and his view of himself. ‘I simply don’t know who I am’, is a recollection that rings true.
But what a quite extraordinary body of work he has left.
It is also worth remembering that the English filmmakers, the Boulting brothers were very well placed to describe him ‘the greatest comic genius this country has produced since Charles Chaplin’.
Bob stood up as the circle began to break up. He slide his hands into his pockets and paused for breath.
Fittingly, he introduced the anarchy back into the proceedings at the curtain call.
An impish grin filled his face with the memory of the mirth that his Mum brought home that day.
‘Yes’ he reminded us, ‘that is what she said’.
She asked Peter Seller’s wife why he was making all those odd noises and voices, to which she definitely replied;
‘Just ignore him, he does it all the time’.
- – -
When Ethel met Peter
Embedded in The Bay, the untold story of the Goons and the summers spent in Beachlands.
author: Simon Montgomery
all rights reserved
NOTE: The anecdote recollected by Dudley Baker-Beall about Peter Sellers and an’ impromptu 2 hour performance’ for pensioners in the old St. Wilfrid’s Hall in Pevensey Bay, around 1964, will be available shortly.
