Whitstable and Peter Cushing (1913 - 1994)
Peter Cushing (1913 – 1994): The Hound of the Baskervilles; The Curse of Frankenstein.
In this year 2024 we fondly remember Peter Cushing (1913 - 1994) who is one of the best loved and best remembered British film stars of the post-war years. He graced our television and cinema screens in many roles: but his special trademark became sci-fi or historical adventure thrillers; including prominently of course the Hammer Horror films of cinema legend.
What a splendid portrait by Quinton Winter! - you can buy the poster at shops in Whitstable where to this day Peter Cushing is still very visibly remembered as a town treasure. Whitstable in Kent is where Peter Cushing lived out his later years (with his beloved wife Helen who predeceased him in 1971). The small museum in the High Street proudly exhibits scenes from his his life and works; meanwhile the JD Wetherspoon pub chain is to be congratulated upon the eye-catching conversion of Whitstable’s old Oxford Picture House into a newly-opened pub named 'The Peter Cushing'.
Step inside the impressive Art Deco frontage of the pub and you'll find that in addition to the usual JD Wetherspoon menu of fine ales and food there is a veritable mini-museum of cinema history. The walls and staircases display a selection of colourful 1950s and 1960s film posters: there are framed portraits too of famous film stars. In the foyer several items of old cinema equipment (projectors, film cans) have been preserved for display.
First amongst equals in the display, the familiar face of Peter Cushing greets us. We see him looking sanguine as Sherlock Holmes with pipe and deerstalker hat; we see him suitably grim-faced, with terror close at hand, as a lurid poster screams of The Curse of Frankenstein: “NO ONE WHO SAW IT, LIVED TO DESCRIBE IT!”
Peter Cushing (1913 – 1994): The Hound of the Baskervilles; The Curse of Frankenstein.
In this year 2024 we fondly remember Peter Cushing (1913 - 1994) who is one of the best loved and best remembered British film stars of the post-war years. He graced our television and cinema screens in many roles: but his special trademark became sci-fi or historical adventure thrillers; including prominently of course the Hammer Horror films of cinema legend.
What a splendid portrait by Quinton Winter! - you can buy the poster at shops in Whitstable where to this day Peter Cushing is still very visibly remembered as a town treasure. Whitstable in Kent is where Peter Cushing lived out his later years (with his beloved wife Helen who predeceased him in 1971). The small museum in the High Street proudly exhibits scenes from his his life and works; meanwhile the JD Wetherspoon pub chain is to be congratulated upon the eye-catching conversion of Whitstable’s old Oxford Picture House into a newly-opened pub named 'The Peter Cushing'.
Step inside the impressive Art Deco frontage of the pub and you'll find that in addition to the usual JD Wetherspoon menu of fine ales and food there is a veritable mini-museum of cinema history. The walls and staircases display a selection of colourful 1950s and 1960s film posters: there are framed portraits too of famous film stars. In the foyer several items of old cinema equipment (projectors, film cans) have been preserved for display.
First amongst equals in the display, the familiar face of Peter Cushing greets us. We see him looking sanguine as Sherlock Holmes with pipe and deerstalker hat; we see him suitably grim-faced, with terror close at hand, as a lurid poster screams of The Curse of Frankenstein: “NO ONE WHO SAW IT, LIVED TO DESCRIBE IT!”
Art Deco frontage in Whitstable.
,With Peter Cushing in mind, let us now take a literary look at the hyperactive Holmes and the fearful Frankenstein.
The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1902)
In The Adventure of the Cardboard Box (1892), one of the earliest Sherlock Holmes stories that Conan Doyle wrote for The Strand magazine, it was a Miss Cushing from Croydon who received the rather macabre box containing two freshly-severed human ears. Doyle surely would never have guessed how the surname name Cushing would one day become so closely associated with Holmes.
Peter Cushing first took the role of Holmes in the Hammer Horror movie production of The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1959. It was the first-ever time that Holmes was screened in colour. Scenes were filmed in Surrey – not fat from Cushing’s birthplace in Kenley, though he was later brought up in south London.
Thanks to the then-latest cinematic technology and trickery, cinema audiences in 1959s duly jumped out of their seats in horror at the denouement of the film, when an animated snarling hound seemed to jump out at them. The Hound of the Baskervilles is one of the best-known and best-loved Sherlock Holmes classic stories: it evidences Conan Doyle’s mastery of dramatic narrative. An escaped convict is roaming the moors; the ancient curse of a hellhound hangs over Baskerville Hall; the reader becomes impelled to call out and warn the attractive but surely vulnerable Miss Stapleton that danger is lurking, and that the absent Holmes (detained in London on other matters) may be too late to save her …
Speaking on BBC Radio Three, the writer Anthony Horowitz urged us to celebrate Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s wonderful skill as a writer. “He was superb at evoking atmosphere. Think of The Hound of the Baskervilles’– in which the hound, at first, is presented as a myth … and then think of the dramatic way in which Conan Doyle has it appearing for real, on the moors. Think too of the legacy he has given us of imagining Victorian London: the cobblestones glistening; the clatter of hansom cabs; the gas lamps; the clouds of fog rolling in.”
Peter Cushing would reprise the role of Holmes in a sixteen-episode television series that was screened in 1968, co-starring Nigel Stock as Dr Watson. Elsewhere in his prolific career, Cushing continued on the terror track, plying his trade in delightfully-titled melodramatic thrillers such as The Gorgon, The Skull and Island of Terror. He appeared too in television episodes of Doctor Who and in the blockbuster film Star Wars.
Frankenstein – Mary Shelley (1818)
Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night, and stumbled bleary-eyed to your writing-desk, urgently to scribble a note of something important that has come to you during your sleep? It might be something mundane like a new item for the shopping-list or having suddenly remembered where you put your long-lost sunglasses. Or, more imaginatively, it might have been a brilliant idea for a novel, or a promising first line of a potential new poem.
Mary Shelley (1797 – 1851) said that she started writing Frankenstein after a dream. Her book has a haunting quality: not haunting terror as such; for this element barely exists in the book version, although terror and suspense are of course hammed up in the film adaptations starting with the Boris Karloff classic from Universal Studios (1931) and also including The Curse of Frankenstein starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee (1957). This was the first-ever Hammer Horror Film, quickly followed by Dracula (1958) in which Cushing and Lee were again paired.
The book Frankenstein is surely a literary marvel: a marvel that a teenage girl had the will and the imagination in 1816 to begin such a powerful and luminous flow of writing. Taking the form initially of letters sent home to England by a traveller who has learned the incredible story of Frankenstein and his scientific experiment, the story unfolds in an easy-to-comprehend manner. Mary Shelley’s writing style is not impenetrably archaic and the reader is easily drawn into the narrative sequence that sees the man-monster pursuing its creator from one land to another, to complain of its loneliness. Gradually as the reader becomes drawn into the story it dawns that this is a monster for whom we are meant to feel sympathy, not fear and repulsion. Baron Frankenstein may indeed have gifted life to his hideous creation (‘the Modern Prometheus’) but it is a life that condemns the monster to a lonely, frightened and restless existence.
Mary Shelley: a precocious and enduring talent. A near-contemporary writer of her age was Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 - 1834) whose famous Romantic poem Kubla Khan was said to have been composed from an opium-induced dream. Published in 1816, the poem celebrated the mystic Xanadu.
This article by Jerry Dowlen was published at Books Monthly online in 2014.
The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1902)
In The Adventure of the Cardboard Box (1892), one of the earliest Sherlock Holmes stories that Conan Doyle wrote for The Strand magazine, it was a Miss Cushing from Croydon who received the rather macabre box containing two freshly-severed human ears. Doyle surely would never have guessed how the surname name Cushing would one day become so closely associated with Holmes.
Peter Cushing first took the role of Holmes in the Hammer Horror movie production of The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1959. It was the first-ever time that Holmes was screened in colour. Scenes were filmed in Surrey – not fat from Cushing’s birthplace in Kenley, though he was later brought up in south London.
Thanks to the then-latest cinematic technology and trickery, cinema audiences in 1959s duly jumped out of their seats in horror at the denouement of the film, when an animated snarling hound seemed to jump out at them. The Hound of the Baskervilles is one of the best-known and best-loved Sherlock Holmes classic stories: it evidences Conan Doyle’s mastery of dramatic narrative. An escaped convict is roaming the moors; the ancient curse of a hellhound hangs over Baskerville Hall; the reader becomes impelled to call out and warn the attractive but surely vulnerable Miss Stapleton that danger is lurking, and that the absent Holmes (detained in London on other matters) may be too late to save her …
Speaking on BBC Radio Three, the writer Anthony Horowitz urged us to celebrate Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s wonderful skill as a writer. “He was superb at evoking atmosphere. Think of The Hound of the Baskervilles’– in which the hound, at first, is presented as a myth … and then think of the dramatic way in which Conan Doyle has it appearing for real, on the moors. Think too of the legacy he has given us of imagining Victorian London: the cobblestones glistening; the clatter of hansom cabs; the gas lamps; the clouds of fog rolling in.”
Peter Cushing would reprise the role of Holmes in a sixteen-episode television series that was screened in 1968, co-starring Nigel Stock as Dr Watson. Elsewhere in his prolific career, Cushing continued on the terror track, plying his trade in delightfully-titled melodramatic thrillers such as The Gorgon, The Skull and Island of Terror. He appeared too in television episodes of Doctor Who and in the blockbuster film Star Wars.
Frankenstein – Mary Shelley (1818)
Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night, and stumbled bleary-eyed to your writing-desk, urgently to scribble a note of something important that has come to you during your sleep? It might be something mundane like a new item for the shopping-list or having suddenly remembered where you put your long-lost sunglasses. Or, more imaginatively, it might have been a brilliant idea for a novel, or a promising first line of a potential new poem.
Mary Shelley (1797 – 1851) said that she started writing Frankenstein after a dream. Her book has a haunting quality: not haunting terror as such; for this element barely exists in the book version, although terror and suspense are of course hammed up in the film adaptations starting with the Boris Karloff classic from Universal Studios (1931) and also including The Curse of Frankenstein starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee (1957). This was the first-ever Hammer Horror Film, quickly followed by Dracula (1958) in which Cushing and Lee were again paired.
The book Frankenstein is surely a literary marvel: a marvel that a teenage girl had the will and the imagination in 1816 to begin such a powerful and luminous flow of writing. Taking the form initially of letters sent home to England by a traveller who has learned the incredible story of Frankenstein and his scientific experiment, the story unfolds in an easy-to-comprehend manner. Mary Shelley’s writing style is not impenetrably archaic and the reader is easily drawn into the narrative sequence that sees the man-monster pursuing its creator from one land to another, to complain of its loneliness. Gradually as the reader becomes drawn into the story it dawns that this is a monster for whom we are meant to feel sympathy, not fear and repulsion. Baron Frankenstein may indeed have gifted life to his hideous creation (‘the Modern Prometheus’) but it is a life that condemns the monster to a lonely, frightened and restless existence.
Mary Shelley: a precocious and enduring talent. A near-contemporary writer of her age was Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 - 1834) whose famous Romantic poem Kubla Khan was said to have been composed from an opium-induced dream. Published in 1816, the poem celebrated the mystic Xanadu.
This article by Jerry Dowlen was published at Books Monthly online in 2014.