Ealing’s Cinematic Voyage – West London W3 to Pagewood NSW: Studios in the Sand Hills of South Sydney

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Cinema, Local history, Media & Communications, Popular Culture

Ealing is a name synonymous with British film comedy, Ealing comedies of the late 1940s through the 1950s…high quality, well written and acted feature films such as Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Lavender Hill Mob, The Man in the White Suit and The Ladykillers✲.

Ealing’s film association with Australia is less well known. It’s genesis lay with Ealing’s movie mogul and powerful postwar image-maker, Michael Balcon. With the Second World War still raging, Balcon despatched documentary film director Harry Watt to Australia to explore its filmable story possibilities. Balcon was looking to make films which reflected “the strength, diversity and stoicism of the (British) Commonwealth” [‘Ealing Studios in Australia: An Introduction ‘, (Stephen Morgan) (2012), www.thefarparadise.wordpress.com].

Pagewood before Ealing …
Once Ealing committed to Australia as a film production location, it sought out appropriate studios for projects, which it found in the southern Sydney suburb of Pagewood. These studios in fact were already operating as a film production unit…constructed in 1935 for National Studios❄ in anticipation of an expansion of the local film industry as a result of the Film Quota Act (1936) which imposed a minimum domestic quota on the level of film distribution in New South Wales❂. The studios’ first production was Charles Chauvel’s Uncivilised and other significant, early Australian movies were shot there – including Columbia’s “Australian Western” Rangle River (1936) and Ken G Hall’s Dad Rudd, MP (1940) – but a pattern of closures of National Studios (1937-40, 1942-45) hampered its efforts to establish itself as a film production unit [Sydney Morning Herald, 27-May-1936 (Trove)].

In 1946 Harry Watt fulfilled the task set him by Studio head Balcon by writing and directing the first feature for Ealing “down under”. The Overlanders, the story of an epic cattle drive across the continent, made Chips Rafferty an international star and an Australian screen icon.

The success of The Overlanders prompted Ealing to establish a film base in Australia. At the beginning of 1949 it acquired the struggling Pagewood studios❇. Ealing took over a “shambles of a place” (rundown through neglect and misuse by both the Australian and US armies during WWII occupancy), but nonetheless it invested considerable capital into the property to create state-of-the-art film studios with first-rate sound-engineering departments, cutting room and sound stage – a concern worth all up £100,000 [“The studio for indoor filming of ‘Kangaroo’ “, Barrier Miner (Broken Hill), 11-Sep-1950 (Trove)].

Chips Rafferty was chosen to head up the cast of Watt’s next Ealing Australian movie Eureka Stockade (1949) – the dramatic and symbolic story of miner resistance to overbearing British rule on the 1850s goldfields. ‘Eureka’ (released in the US as Massacre Hill failed at the box office (general consensus of critics was that Chips was miscast in the lead role of the 1850s Irish-Australian rebel Peter Lalor).

Bitter Springs directed by Ralph Smart followed…this time with Chips more comfortable returning to the role of courageous pioneering bushman in the Australian outback. The most interesting aspect of Bitter Springs is that it was prepared to tackle the polemical topic of indigenous land rights – in the movie white settlers clash with local Aboriginal people (Pitjantjatjara and Kokatha Mula tribes) over the possession of land. This screen subject was 25 to 30 years ahead of its time, however an assimilationist mindset prevails in its handling…in one scene Wally (Chip’s character) betrays the gross ignorance of Europeans about Aboriginal Australian – when the fair-minded territorial ranger (Michael Pate) questions the planned land grab, Wally summarily dismisses the Aborigines’ claim to the disputed land, stating that the Aboriginal culture was only about 1,000 years old! [Morgan, loc.cit.]✥. One jarring note is that the serious theme of Bitter Springs is undermined by Ealing’s decision to cast comic Tommy Trinder in the movie, Trinder’s character’s constant cracking of jokes tends to deflate the build-up of tension arising from the film’s central conflict between the blacks and the whites [Byrnes, ‘ASO’].

Chips Rafferty ▼

After 1950 however Ealing made few of its own films at the Pagewood Studios, instead it leased out the premises to other movie production companies, eg, to 20th Century Fox who made Kangaroo (1952) at Pagewood with Maureen O’Hara, the first technicolor film made in Australia.

Closing chapters of Ealing Pagewood

In 1952 the Pagewood Studios shut down production◙ (in what was meant to be a temporary move only), but the following year Ealing sold the studios to Associated Television which renamed the studios “Television City” and leased it to independent film producers. A 1954 independent production of the “Treasure Island” tale, Long John Silver, (with Robert Newton) was filmed at Pagewood (interiors) and exteriors shot at the Royal National Park [‘AAARRRHH There Matey! – The Strange and Wondrous Tale of Bill Constable & the Cinemascope Pirates of Pagewood…’ (Bob Hill, Oct 2018) www.apdg.org.au].

Ealing had been trying to make Robbery Under Arms in Australia since 1949 but it was finally completed by Ealing’s parent company Rank Organisation in 1957 – with some footage shot at Pagewood but mostly in London (exteriors: Flinders Ranges and near Bourke) [‘Film World Weather in Australia Disappoints Studio’, The West Australian, 03-Nov-1949, (Trove)].

Pagewood on it’s last legs

The final film to be made (or partly made) at what had become Television City (Pagewood) was a film version of the hit Australian play Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1958/59). ‘Doll’ was made by Burt Lancaster’s HHL company using US and British leads…the production however took radical liberties with Lawler’s play and the film was ultra-Americanised with unsatisfactory results. In 1959 the Pagewood site was sold to General Motors Holden Australia which allowed the car manufacturer to expand its existing plant in the suburb. In the Eighties the studios’ land (and the adjacent bus depot) were redeveloped again, becoming the location of Westfield’s huge Eastgardens shopping mall and a housing estate built by the Meriton Group [‘Pagewood Studios’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

GMH Pagewood ▼


Ealing’s last Antipodean hooray

The Siege of Pinchgut (1959) was Ealing’s last film shot in and with an Australian setting (and as it transpired, it proved to be the company’s final ever adult feature). Harry Watt came back to direct what was a grim convicts-on-the-run drama filmed around Fort Denison (Pinchgut) in Sydney Harbour. ‘Pinchgut’, released in the US as Four Desperate Men, did not succeed at the box office⊛.

Australia closed for film-makers!

Ealing’s venture in Australia was never really a secure one…the follow up films to The Overlanders yielded only disappointing returns. The writing was on the wall for Ealing’s Australian enterprise from the time Menzies’ Liberal-Country Party won power in Australia in 1949 and took an antithetical attitude towards domestic film production. The LCP government refused to renew Ealing’s lease on the Pagewood Studios (a bitter pill for Ealing who’d already spent considerable funds on the Pagewood project). In a move which set the industry in Australia back decades, the government deemed that “film making was not an essential industry” and pointed out that the lease-holders (Ealing) were not an Australian residents in any case [The A-Z of Australian and New Zealand Cinema, (Albert Moran & Errol Vieth), (2009)].

If that wasn’t the tipping point for Ealing, it came with the studios’ own assessment… Balcon authorised the company’s accountant to undertake an financial evaluation of the Australian studios’ viability – which was negative [ibid.]. In the words of Eric Williams (manager at the Ealing Pagewood Studios), ultimately Ealing found it “impossible to maintain continuous production at a range of 12,000 miles”. That there was no Australian sponsor for productions was put forward as an additional disincentive for staying [‘Decision a blow to film industry’, The Mail (Adelaide), 26-Jan-1952 (Trove)].

PostScript: The failure of Ealing’s Australian venture was merely one chapter in the larger story of Ealing Studios’ global rise and fall. The rising costs and risks of big budget films of the parent company in Britain, large staff numbers and increasing expenditures, all contributed to the toll of financial problems plaguing Ealing and the UK industry as a whole…leading to Ealing’s eventual demise (this accumulation of pressures forced production head Balcon to unload Ealing in 1955).Note: the original 1930s studios in West London (above) were bought by the BBC in the 1990s and resurrected as a facility for hire [‘Remembering Ealing Studios and the golden age of British film’, BBC News, (Vincent Dowd), 30-Aug-2015, www.bbc.com].


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✲ and by association, synonymous also with actor Alec Guinness, the star of most of this “purple patch” of Ealing classics

❄ at the time National Studios was built, Pagewood was largely an undeveloped wasteland of grassy sand hills, although at Daceyville, a few kilometres to the north, a model garden suburb had been carved out of the same sand hills in the 1920s – see my July 2018 blog Planning for a Working Class Lifestyle Upgrade, a Template for the Sydney Garden Suburb: Daceyville, NSW

❂ unfortunately the state government failed to back its own law, not allocating adequate funding to its implementation… when resisted by Hollywood distributors the legislation was killed off by the end of 1937

❇ Pagewood’s rival film production houses in Sydney, Cinesound at Bondi Junction and Figtree Studios at Lane Cove had folded, and turned into, respectively, a cordial factory and a transport depot [Barrier Miner, 11-Sep-1950]

✥ Wally’s band of settlers reinforce the stereotype with “disparaging views about stone-age men who do nothing with the land” [‘Bitter Springs (1950)’ Synopsis, (Paul Byrnes), ASO mobile, www.aso.gov.au]

◙ described by Ken G Hall as “a fatal blow” to the national film industry which would relegate Australia to “the bottom of the list of the world’s 60 film producing countries”

⊛ although an historical point of interest of the movie are shots of what was left of the old Fort Macquarie Tram Depot then being demolished for the construction of Sydney Opera House [‘Siege of Pinchgut’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]

I’m All Right Jack – Not the Musical

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Cinema, Popular Culture, Regional History, Social History

❛ Wherever you look, it’s a case of “Blow you, Jack, I’m all right”. ❜

(Stanley Windrush)

☬ ☬ ☬ ☬ ☬ ☬ ☬

The Boulting Brothers created some of postwar Britain’s most distinctive films across several genres, but it is their joyous 1959 comedy I’m All Right Jack that stands tallest in the film-making twin brothers’ oeuvre of cinematic comedy classics.

I’m All Right Jack takes up pretty much where it’s prequel, Private’s Progress, left off. The protagonist of both movies is the gullible and seemingly gormless Stanley Windrush (played to a tee by Ian Carmichael). Naive and good-natured, the persona of Stanley can be best summed up as epitomising the bungling, accident-prone, upper class twit.

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In Private’s Progress Windrush “pussyfoots” his way through his army war service, causing unintended mayhem and allowing himself inadvertently to be duped…then by mistake he precipitates a chain of events leading to the capture of a division of enemy German soldiers and ends up an accidental war hero of sorts!

In I’m All Right Jack the Boultings reprise several of the previous film’s characters and actors…as well as ‘Stanley’ there is his scheming, unscrupulous “Uncle Bertie”, Bertram Tracepurcel (played by the urbane Dennis Price) and his harassed personnel manager, “Major Hitchcock” (the gap-toothed “professional cad” Terry-Thomas). Richard Attenborough plays “Sydney Cox”, Tracepurcel’s co-conspirator in perfidy and supposedly Stanley’s old friend from the war – the smoothest of smooth con men!

Ian Carmichael (Stanley) ◬ with ‘IARJ’ co-star Liz Fraser

I’m All Right Jack satirises 1950s British society, still coming out of the straitjacket of postwar austerity, with sabre-like sharpness. The Boultings’ film fixes its microscope on industrial relations in a missiles production factory, exposing both the bosses and its blue collar workforce as unconscionable and utterly self-serving, solely out for what they can get for themselves! The Boulting brothers are “equal opportunity satirisers”, skewering management and labour alike to a commensurate degree. For both sides of the workplace divide, self-interest is unchallengingly the “drug of choice”, hence the film’s title⍟. The Boutlings also dish up a few  barbs aimed at the fact-loose world of advertising along the way.

◬ Stanley’s bubble-car at the gate of Missiles Ltd

The film portrays the plant workers as work-shy and devious in their tunnel-visioned pursuit of the singular goal of doing less work than they are required to do✥…Stanley unknowingly upsets the “apple-cart” by demonstrating to the company’s T & M man (the ever-dour John Le Mesurier – another Boulting recruit from Private’s Progress) just how much work can actually be done in a day if one makes a “fair dinkum” effort (and of course this results in him being ostracised by the factory’s union). The factory management show themselves to be equally duplicitous – engaged in enriching themselves through a corrupt, clandestine arms deal with a swarthy, shonky Middle Eastern intermediary.

I’m All Right Jack also takes a comical pot shot at other societal institutions of the day – government for its torpid ineptitude, the English class system, advertising and the tabloid media for their falseness and alarming capacity to sway public opinion – lampooning each of them in turn! The Boultings are showing a Britain that is corrupt at its core, one that unearthed a late 1950s generation of “angry young men” dissatisfied with the blandness of society of the status quo [‘I’m All Right Jack review – Philip French on the Boulting brothers’ biting state-of-the-nation satire’, The Guardian, 18-Jan-2015, www.guardian.com].

Peter Sellers as Fred Kite is the movie’s stand-out, producing a gem of a performance. Kite is the comedy’s pivotal character, the chief shop steward who orchestrates the factory floor’s “go-slow” work culture, zealously obstructing management at every opportunity. “Red Fred” is your archetypal ‘Bolshy’ minor trade union official (with a Hitlerian moustache), but a union ‘heavy’ more ridiculous than menacing…a “Stalinist Don Quixote, tilting with alarming predictability at the windmills constructed by his own class enemies” [Timeout, www.timeout.com]. Sellers’ ‘Kite’ is given to awkward, Gothic turns of phrase and a pompous, halting, almost robotic mode of speech…in his essence he is hilarious as a blinkered Sovietphile idealist: “Ahhh (he sighs wistfully), Russia. All them corn fields and ballet in the evening”❂ [‘ I’m All Right Jack and The Organizer: Bread and Roses and a Lot of Laughs’, Criterion, (Michael Stragow), 19-Jan-2018, www.criterion.com].

Sellers as Kite (centre) ◬

The success of I’m All Right Jack (it was the number one box office hit in the UK for 1959 and winner of a BAFTA award) triggered a number of British films focussing on the world of worker/management relations – including the diametrically different in tone The Angry Silence (1960) (also with Richard Attenborough).

The film climaxes with Stanley, having finally ‘twigged’ to the IR game he has unwittingly been a pawn in, exposing both sides for their greed and duplicity on national television. I’m All Right Jack ends with Stanley ‘retiring’ to a rural nudist colony…he is invited by a bevy of naked women, discretely obscured by a hedge (it was 1959 after all!) to a game of tennis. The characteristically nervous Stanley bolts at the suggestion and is last seen hareing full-tilt across a meadow frantically pursued by the bare damsels.

PostScript: A punchline for the nascent anti-Apartheid movement
The Boultings’ film resonated in unexpected circles. The New Zealand Rugby Union, unwilling to offend South Africa’s racist policy of non-contact between whites and non-whites in sport, declined to select any Māori players for the 1960 All Blacks tour of South Africa (the Nash Labour government was fully complicit in this gutless act of appeasement). The ensuing controversy provoked widespread protests within NZ (a call for “No Maoris, no tour”) and a most memorable placard inspired by the film: “I’m All White, Jack!”

(Photo: Marti Friedlander)
⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀

✲ directed by John Boulting, produced by brother Roy, and written by John with Frank Harvey from a novel by Alan Hackney (the same creators of Private’s Progress)
⍟ “I’m All right Jack” (of naval origin) was a popular UK expression of the period, meant to signify a smug and complacent self-centredness
✥ a recurring Boulting theme…in both Private’s Progress and I’m All Right Jack Windrush enters a world of “gold-bricks”, people doggedly determined to go the last mile to evade work of any kind
❂ apparently BBC Television in 1979 canned a scheduled screening of I’m All Right Jack for fear that Sellers’ ‘Kite’ might prejudice viewers against the Labour Party in an upcoming election! [ibid.]

The ‘Aggie’, Apia’s Landmark Hotel and One Legendary Samoan Entrepreneurial Hotelier

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Memorabilia, Popular Culture, Regional History, Social History, Travel

An essential part of a tour of Independent Samoa’s main island, Upolu, is a trip to Aggie Grey’s…Samoa’s historic hotel in Beach Road on the western bank of the Vaisigano River. The place is a South Pacific institution, as was its legendary eponymous founder.

Aggie Grey’s Hotel (#77) ⍗

96002492-5F6A-4A82-B47C-08CCB7E50815The ‘Aggie’ of Aggie Grey’s was born Agnes Genevieve Swann✲, the offspring of an English pharmacist from Lincolnshire and his Samoan wife, a local taupou (a ceremonial maiden). Business seemed to be in Miss Swann’s DNA – in her early twenties she opened her first club in Apia, the Cosmopolitan Club, and in 1933 started a Samoan private tourism company, Grey Investments (later called the Grey Investments Group).864D0B42-1B18-4F68-9DD0-62BDB0E91AB7

No luck with ‘Kiwi’ spouses

The early death of Aggie’s first New Zealand husband left her without support and with four children to care for…the addictive gambling of her second husband squandered what money they had. In addition Aggie now had three more children and desperately needed to find a way to revive and consolidate her precarious financial situation.

With the advent of the Pacific War and American involvement, the resourceful and inventive Aggie eventually found the solution in 1942. She had earlier borrowed US$180 to purchase a colonial home which previously had been the “British Club”. As New Zealand’s prohibition laws were in force in Western Samoa⊡, Aggie started ‘Aggie Grey’s’ as a snack bar selling hamburgers and coffee to US servicemen on their tours of duty [Lonely Planet Samoan Islands, (M Bennett, D Talbot & D Swaney) (4th Ed 2003)].

The Hotel, 2006 ⍐

The American GIs in the South Pacific had plenty of money to splash around on their R & R activities, but the prohibition on liquor was a hand-brake on Aggie’s capacity to grow her business. Aggie found a inventive method of circumventing the ban…although serving alcohol was illegal, Aggie got round it by dispensing “medical permit doses” of booze to the American servicemen [‘Aggie Grey: West Point Hotelier, Legend – Apia, Upolu, Samoa’, in The Samoans: A Global Family, Frederic Koehler Sutter, (1989)].

⍗ Aggie Grey: on the maiden Pan Am flight from Pago Pago (American Samoa) to Sydney International Airport, 1962   (photo: John Mulligan)F8AD4C1A-48B6-4D10-9A75-A6D9E3936E97

From a backwater-town bar to a tourist hub

Beyond the war, over the following years, Mrs Grey turned the Apia hotel from a modest “drinking club” to a 200-room international hotel (arguably vying with Suva’s Grand Pacific Hotel for the mantle of the South Pacific’s premier international hotel) [‘Memories of the incomparable Aggie Grey’, Samoa Observer, (Terry Dunleavy), 26-Apr-2016, www.samoaobserver.com].

An ‘aiga welcome

The key to this success can be found largely in Aggie’s management style – her warm interpersonal skills, authentic, convivial personality, and her innate “understanding of the human condition”.  Through her personal example of showing hospitality she imbued “Aggie Grey’s” with an atmosphere of “laid back Samoan friendly fa’aaloalo” (‘respect), conveying to each guest a sense that they were ‘aiga (‘family’) [Dunleavy].

In the formative days the hotel thrived as a result of Aggie’s ability to network… forging business links with the world outside Samoa – with the management and crews of TEAL (forerunner of Air New Zealand), and in encouraging celebrity A-listers (especially from the US) to make Samoa and Abbie Grey’s a regular stopover on route to film assignments in French Polynesia [ibid.]. Accordingly, the likes of Hollywood stars Marlon Brando, Dorothy Lamour, William Holden and Gary Cooper✥ et al would be regular AG guests. Aggie sought to capitalise on the celebrity aura by naming each of the hotel’s fales (rooms) and bungalows after visiting movie celebs.

The Marlon Brando fale (№ 93) at AGs ⍗2524870C-9E00-4B23-B52E-2902F0576EAC

The hotel’s postwar success rested on a number of contributing factors. The arrival of trans-Pacific airlines (TEAL/Air NZ, Pan Am, QANTAS, then later Virgin’s Polynesian Blue) brought increasing numbers of tourists to replace the WWII servicemen. Aggie also had the right people behind her…a son with a good head for business, and a irreplaceable and devoted handiman, a “Mr Fixit” by the name of Fred Fairman, who Aggie could always rely on to keep the ‘wheels’ of the hotel running smoothly [ibid.; Sutter, loc.cit.].

Aggie Grey’s made it’s owner very wealthy…Aggie, a stalwart of the Samoan hospitality industry, continued at the hotel’s helm into her old age. In 1988 she died age 91, having long been one of the most respected members of the Apia business community.A4D39039-C9AF-4652-950C-20E6EC898B91

Footnote: In December 2012 Cyclone Evan severely damaged Aggie Grey’s, closing it down for over three years. In August of the following year, management of the hotel complex, still under repairs, passed to the Sheraton’s hotel chain. Aggie Grey’s reopened in 2016, now operating under the name Sheraton Samoa Aggie Grey’s Hotel & Bungalows. A second Aggie Grey’s complex in Upolu, Aggie Grey’s Lagoon Resort, was opened in 2005 off a coral reef in the west of the island (a joint venture between the Grey family, the governments of Samoa and New Zealand and Virgin Samoa). 🇼🇸 

 

PostScript: Prototype for Bloody Mary?

One of the US servicemen who frequented Aggie Grey’s during the War was travel adventure author James A Michener. Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific was later adapted into the hit Broadway musical South Pacific. One of it’s main characters, the loud and formidably forceful “Bloody Mary”, was widely thought to have been modelled on Aggie Grey, a comparison that didn’t endear itself to the Apia hotelier! [‘Lonely Planet’, op.cit.].

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⍐ ‘Return to Paradise’ – Samoan film set & resources of ‘Aggie Grey’s’  🇼🇸 (see below)

– — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — –

✲ ‘Grey’ was the surname of Aggie’s second husband from New Zealand

⊡ New Zealand administered Western Samoa as it was called at this time, under a League of Nations mandate

✥ Cooper in fact made a movie in Samoa, Return to Paradise in 1953 (pretty stock standard South Seas adventure stuff), and of course Aggie came on board to contribute to the production …Aggie Grey’s hotel providing logistical support and a base for the project’s accommodation, and the indefatigable hotelier personally supervised the catering unit for the film [Dunleavy]

New York – Once was (Briefly) “Nieuw Oranje”

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
International Relations, Popular Culture, Regional History

America’s greatest city, the vast metropolis of New York, can claim an interesting and varied history of nomenclature. Until the English hold on New York was established permanently in the late 17th century (permanently that is until the American Revolution!), the settlement changed hands and names several times.

⇩ Manhattan Island 36811F8E-D75C-46AC-87ED-19993BDAB5BAAnyone with a rudimentary grasp of the early colonial period of America will know the early Dutch association with the area of New York. Based on the earlier exploration of the area by Henry Hudson, the Dutch West India Company (WIC) established a trading post on the southern tip of Manhattan island in 1624. The Dutch named the post New Amsterdam✲, the capital of its American colony Nieuw Nederlandt (New Netherland) – comprising an area including the hub of modern-day New York City, a strip of upstate New York including Beverwijck (now Albany), centre of the WIC fur trade, part of Connecticut and New Jersey and bits of the coastline down to the Delaware.

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⇧ 17th century map of Nieuw Nederlandt

The English already had a foothold on Long Island and were keen on securing New Amsterdam and New Netherland for themselves…the English king Charles II granted his brother James, Duke of York rights to a large chunk of land on the Atlantic Seaboard. James duly launched an invasion fleet in 1664. Under pressure, the unpopular Dutch governor Pieter Stuyvesant failed to muster any significant support for its defence and was forced to surrender the settlement without any bloodshed. The occupying English force renamed it New York in honour of the Duke and future king of England and Ireland, James II. Richard Nicholls became the New York colony’s first governor.

A much less familiar fact is that New York was known by two other names at different periods in its history. The first European to set eyes on New York harbour was Florentine Giovanni da Verrazzano in 1524 …. Verrazzano named the place New Angoulême after his patron Francis I of France (formerly the Count of Angoulëme). Verrazzano never attempted to establish a settlement there✥.

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Manhattan Transferred

In 1673 during the Third Anglo-Dutch War, a sizeable Dutch fleet led by Admiral Cornelis Evertsen the Youngest AKA Keesje de Duivel (“Little Cornelis the Devil”) and Jacob Benckes, turned up in New York harbour, demanding the city be surrendered to it. Evertsen knew from intelligence gathered that the English governor (Francis Lovelace) was absent and the settlement’s defences were in a shabby state with Fort James being poorly garrisoned. After a brief military flexing of muscle by the Dutch, the English acting commander surrendered without resistance – in a reversal of the events and results of 1664! [‘The End of New Netherland’, (American History From Revolution to Reconstruction and beyond’), www.let.rug.nl].

New York was renamed Nieuw Oranje (New Orange) in honour of the Prince Willem of Orange (ironically the future King William III of England and Ireland). The officer commanding the Dutch land forces, Captain Anthonij Colve, was appointed governor-general of the restored Dutch colony. The Dutch coup was short-lived however, within a year the English had regained the settlement through the Treaty of Westminster – by which the Netherlands received Suriname in South America as a swap. New York was New York again – this time for good!96CCC6E2-B0B8-4820-ACBE-495885D53447

PostScript: New York by metonym✪ or other informal name

Aficionados of mainstream American popular culture know Gotham or Gotham City as the supposed abode of the superhero Batman, courtesy of the long-running DC comic strip-cum-TV and film series (Gotham City is modelled on NYC albeit evoking the darkest possible manifestation of the city). The original attribution of ‘Gotham’ to New York however long predates the Batman phenomenon (the first Batman comic hit the book stalls in 1939). Its genesis was a creation of the mind of celebrated 19th century writer Washington Irving…Irving first referred to Gotham/NYC in a satirical periodical on New York culture and politics, Salmagundi, in 1807, and the association caught on with the public [‘Gotham City’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

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There are a host of other nicknames for New York but by far the most popular, the most affectionate, is “the Big Apple”. The term gained currency on provincial racecourses circa 1920 and was made popular by newspaper reporter John Fitz Gerald, [‘Why is New York City nicknamed the “Big Apple”?, Elizabeth Nix, 23-Jul-2014, www.history.com].

As The New York Times‘ Sam Roberts remarked of the city’s Dutch name of 1673/1674:

(New York) “was the Big Orange before it was the Big Apple”! [quoted in ‘When New York was officially named New Orange’, Ephemeral New York, 07-Mar-2011, www.ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com].

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✲ the colonists followed this later by naming the adjacent island, present-day Long Island, Nieuw Amersfoort

✥ leaving aside the undocumented and speculative claim made on behalf of Norseman Lief Ericsson who may conceivably have been the first to visit the site of New York over 1,000 years ago

✪ metonym: the use of a (descriptive) name in place of the proper) name because it is closely associated (eg, the “White House” in lieu of the US Presidential Palace)