Kenneth Griffith

Kenneth Griffith (October 12, 1921 – June 25, 2006) was a Welsh actor and documentary film-maker.

Early life

Born Kenneth Reginald Griffiths in Tenby, Pembrokeshire, Wales, six months after his birth his parents both left Tenby, going their separate ways and leaving Kenneth with his paternal grandparents, Emily and Ernest, who immediately became his mother and father. A lively rugby union scrum-half,^[1] he attended the local Wesleyan Methodist chapel three times every Sunday.^[2]

Griffths passed the Eleven plus and attended Greenhill Grammar School, where he met English literature teacher Evelyn Ward, who recognised his writing and acting talent. Before leaving school, his headmaster J.T. Griffth suggested that he drop the English "S" from his name as it was an anglicization, which he did from that point onwards.^[3]

Career

In 1937 he left school and moved to Cambridge, taking a job at an iron monger's weighing nails. This lasted only a day and proved to be the only job he ever had outside of the acting world . He approached the Cambridge Festival Theatre for work, and at the age of 16 was cast by Peter Hoare as Cinna the Poet in a modern-dress version of Julius Caesar.^[3] He became a regular jobbing repertory actor, making his West End theatre debut in 1938 with a small part in Thomas Dekker's Shoemaker's Holiday.^[2]

Griffith volunteered for service with the Royal Air Force in 1939 before the outbreak of World War II. Before training in Canada, he returned to see his grandparents in Tenby, who at his request gave him a leather-bound copy of Hitler's Mein Kampf: he later explained in interview that he wanted to understand what he was fighting against. While training in Canada, he caught Scarlet Fever, which resulted in him taking up stamp collecting, which founded his interest in the first stamp he collected: the Siege of Ladysmith, South Africa.

In 1941, he made his debut in the first of more than 100 films in which he principally played character roles. Released from the air arm of the Royal Air Force, Griffith returned to London, from where he was invalided out of the RAF in 1942.^[3]

He joined the Liverpool, Lancashire-relocated Old Vic,^[2] and in repertory. On return from a tour of South Africa, where he went to Ladysmith, he met his great friend Peter O'Toole.

He can be spotted in many British films between the 1940s and 1980s, notably as Archie Fellows in The Shop at Sly Corner, Jenkins in Only Two Can Play (1962), the wireless operator Jack Phillips on board the Titanic in A Night to Remember (1958), in the crime caper Track the Man Down (1955), and especially in the comedies of the Boulting brothers, including Private's Progress (1956) and I'm All Right Jack (1959). He also portrayed the homosexual medic Witty in The Wild Geese (1978) and a whimsical mechanic in The Sea Wolves: The Last Charge of the Calcutta Light Horse (1980).

His work on sixties TV programme The Prisoner is much appreciated by its fans, because of his appearances in the episodes The Girl Who Was Death and Fall Out. He has appeared in episodes of Minder, Lovejoy and critically acclaimed performances in "War and Peace", "The Perils of Pendragon", Clochemerle and "The Bus to Bosworth", where his personification of a Welsh school teacher out on a field trip won him much accolades back in his homeland of Wales. More recent cinemagoers may have seen him as a "mad old man" in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), as Reverend Jones in The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain (1995), and as the Minister in Very Annie Mary (2001)

Documentaries and political activity

In 1965 the then director of BBC Two Huw Weldon and David Attenborough asked Griffith if he would like to make a film for them on any subject that he chose. This resulted in a groundbreaking series of films on subjects as diverse as the Boer War in Soldiers of the Widow (BBC tx. 27/5/1967), A Touch of Churchill, A Touch of Hitler (BBC tx. 30/7/1971), the controversial story of Cecil Rhodes in The Most Valuable Englishman Ever (BBC, tx. 16/1/1982), David Ben Gurion (The Light), Napoleon Bonaparte (The Man on the Rock), Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, and on one occasion a film commissioned by Thames Television on the story of the Three Wise Men of the New Testament, A Famous Journey (ITV tx. 20/12/1979). Griffith was ordered out of Iran by the country's Foreign Minister.

In 1973 Griffith made a documentary film about the life and death of Irish military/political leader Michael Collins titled Hang Up Your Brightest Colours (which is a line taken from a letter from George Bernard Shaw to one of Collins' sisters after his death) for ATV, but the Independent Broadcasting Authority did not permit it to be screened; it was eventually shown on the BBC in 1993. This was very much seen as blatant censorship by Griffith in the light of there being nothing factually inaccurate in the film.

In 1974 Griffith then seized the opportunity to interview the then surviving (now all deceased) IRA members from the 1916 Easter Rebellion: Maire Comerford, Joseph Sweeney, Sean Kavanagh, John O'Sullivan, Brigid Thornton, Sean Harling, Martin Walton, David Nelligan (or Neligan) and Tom Barry are all interviewed at the ends of their lives in a programme titled Curious Journey. Griffith's approach to television and re-creating the past is that of the enthusiastic storyteller who acts out all the parts himself. By doing so, he created a fascinating new way of making documentaries. His special contribution is that he is able to conjure up the emotional spirit of events in history; he treats the viewer in the manner of a confidant, dramatising his point of view.

Griffith's very sympathetic portrayal caused some concern given the state of tension in Northern Ireland and ATV boss Sir Lew Grade decided to withdraw the film, which was not released publicly until 1994. At the time Griffith furiously retaliated by making the film for Thames titled The Public's Right to Know which gave him, or rather the powers that be, a chance to explain themselves. He took no prisoners. The story on Griffith and his Irish republican sympathies was published in the 15 November 1997 edition of the British-based weekly, The Irish Post, as Beating the Censor, written by Martin Doyle.

Griffith's autobiography was published in 1994 titled The Fool's Pardon under the Little, Brown & Company publishers. Until the very end of his life Griffith was angered and deeply frustrated by what he saw as the "degeneration" of British television film making and was widely known within the industry as the most banned filmmaker in the country. His references to the various commissioning directors were well documented referring to "those priggish cuckoo's" within the BBC. His final estimations on those 'Television people' were their high regard for two things "Hard cash and statistics".

In 1993 BBC Wales presented a retrospective season of five of his documentaries, including the suppressed Michael Collins work, opening the season with a biographical study of Griffith called The Tenby Poisoner (BBC Wales, tx. 1/3/1993) in which talents as diverse as Peter O'Toole, Martin McGuinness and Jeremy Isaacs paid tribute to the quixotic documentarist. In addition to this BBC Wales screened a film on Griffith's life in the "Welsh Greats" Series Two, shown in 2008. In 2001 Griffith was finally recognised for his work by being awarded a life time achievement award by BAFTA.

The political troubles left Griffith "a frustrated and bemused figure". Screenonline described Griffith as "a world-class documentary film-maker" who knew that "refusing to compromise his views has damaged his career".^[4]

A renowned Boer War historian, Griffith was also a supporter of the Afrikaners in South Africa. Although the traditional left-wing view was that Afrikaners were more tied into apartheid than South Africans of British descent, his take on it in a South African television-funded documentary was "provokingly sympathetic" towards the Afrikaners, implying that the sympathetic attitude of English-speakers "hypocritical"; South African television eventually withdrew its funding.^[1] He also made a BBC2 documentary on runner Zola Budd,^[5] which purported to reveal injustices done to her by left-wing demonstrators and organisations during a tour of England in 1988.

Personal life

Griffith, a Protestant, named his home (No. 110 Englefield Road, Islington, London), "Michael Collins House". He "proudly" displayed on his wall death threats from the Ulster Volunteer Force (Northern Irish loyalists) "flanked on one side by a friendlier letter from Gerry Adams". A year or two before Griffith's death Griffith attended a meeting where Gerry Adams praised and thanked him for his documentaries as they had contributed to the peace process. He also cherished Mrs Thatcher's opinion of him as a "dangerous Marxist" ,which was laughable and ignorant as he in no way lent towards the ideology. However, he also had a huge plaster medallion of Clive of India fixed to his living room wall. Indeed, his entire house was crammed like an overly stocked antique shop with a fascinating collection of predominantly Boer War memorabilia, the finest in private hands in the country. To the National Army Museum's shame that they didn't take up his offer to sell it to them. He also housed thousands of Boer War covers in his philatellic collection on the top floor mostly catalogued and researched personally and recorded in volumes in his beautiful hand.

To date Griffith holds the record for the longest career in films for a Welsh actor (60 years).

Griffith was married three times and had five children: Joan Stock (David), Doria Noar (Eva) and Carole Haggar (Polly, Huw and Jonathan).

Griffith suffered from complications associated with Alzheimer's disease in his later years, resulting in an enforced retirement from acting and his documentaries. He died peacefully at home on June 26, 2006 aged 84. He is buried in the churchyard at Penally where he grew up, besides his beloved grandparents, Emily and Ernest.

Notes

External links

• Kenneth Griffith at the Internet Movie Database
• BBC article