Lydia Hayward

by Christine Gledhill

Lydia Hayward—born in the last quarter of the nineteenth century in Sheffield, England, to a father in the entertainment business—started her career as a stage actress, but in her early forties switched careers to become a leading scriptwriter in the British film industry. Her theatrical career has yet to be researched; however, in 1914, according to the website Theatricalia, she was taking roles at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon (n.p.). By 1920 she had become a sufficiently spirited and dependable character actor to be cast as the convention-challenging Lona Hessel in Rex Wilson’s film adaptation of Ibsen’s Pillars of Society (1920), giving a performance that Kinematograph Weekly found “probably the best all-round piece of work” in a well-regarded film (1920, 82). However, thereafter she deserted both stage and film acting, to go behind the scenes as a scenarist, working in the British film industry between 1920 and 1942, where she achieved frequent recognition in the trade press: on May 12, 1927, The Bioscope declared her “the finest scenario writer we have” (33). Indeed, her aim in joining the cast of Pillars of Society may have been to learn the film business, since in her only known interview—made in Australia on April 12, 1939 with The Sydney Morning Herald—she cites as her inspiration a shilling guide on the art of scenario writing, loaned to her when visiting the office of Frank Benson’s Shakespearean company (6).

Lydia Hayward as Lona, Pillars of Society (1920). Private Collection.

Aside from this interview and a couple of brief articles on scenario writing, Hayward has left no account of her story. From official records—birth, marriage and death certificates, census records, and her will—we can piece together a life seemingly as unconventional as Ibsen’s Lona, including a penchant for changing her age according to circumstances. An early marriage in 1900 to Belford Forrest, an aspirant actor but actually the student son of the Dean of Worcester Cathedral—and recorded in the 1901 census as single, living back at home—was followed in 1903 by the birth in the Deanery of their daughter, Helena Travers Forrest. The 1911 census records Lydia living alone in (probably) actors’ lodgings in Hammersmith, London, but includes the existence of two children. Of the second child no more is currently known, but in 1938 Helena was witness to her second marriage to the Australian actor, William Freshman, star of three of Lydia’s later films and twenty-three years her junior, her own age conveniently lowered to forty-seven.

Despite such adventuring, Hayward’s work as scriptwriter sits centrally within the industrial mainstream of British cinema. Moreover, she worked in literary adaptation, for many later critics not a proper cinematic practice. Nevertheless, she carved out a successful career in a largely male dominated film industry and in the process gained considerable respect for her professionalism. We therefore need new terms to understand both life and career—terms not axed on cinematic auteurism or personal exceptionalism, but which, applied to scattered evidence, can be made to reveal something of the horizons of expectation and cultural contexts within which Hayward worked—suggesting the significance of her widely enjoyed films in their own, rather than our, terms. Central to charting her career are, of course, the films she left behind, some of which have survived. But central to understanding the nature and significance of her “invisible” work as scriptwriter are their credits, detailing crew and cast; then trade press sources—reviews, studio news, advertisements—and film press books; and crucially, alongside Lydia’s own two short Bioscope articles and her Australian interview, her one extant film script, preserved under the (male) source novelist’s name.

Challenging for authorial approaches, her film credits highlight a series of shifting partnerships, collaborations, and networks as Lydia moved from studio to studio along with the ups and downs of the British film industry. This calls for a concept of collective creativity, which, expanding the research field to Hayward’s collaborators, enables us to trace the development of her writing as her experience of working with different partners and film genres broadens. At the same time surviving films from the different phases of her career allow cross-comparison with the work of literary authors as well as with the work of successive actors and directors with whom she collaborated.

Monty Works the Wires (1921) pressbook. Courtesy of the British Film Institute, Special Collections. 

Pursuing this line of investigation, we can discern several distinct phases in Lydia’s career. The first ran between 1921-1924, when Manning Haynes, stage and film actor, involved her in scripting films for Artistic, a small company set up as the British film industry recovered from World War I. Drawing on their association with a loose network of authors, playwrights, actors, and filmmakers living around London, Haynes and Hayward began learning the business of filmmaking by co-scripting an adaptation of Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (1920). The film was a huge success, partly because of the wonderfully natural acting of Monty, Haynes’ dog. On this basis, they concocted a spin-off, Monty Works the Wires (1921), a courtship comedy and Lydia’s only original scenario, which Haynes co-directed with Challis Sanderson. Following these successes, Haynes proposed to W.W. Jacobs a series of film adaptations of his stories (James 1999, 134), with Lydia and Haynes as respectively scriptwriter and director. Together with cameraman Frank Granger and a stable repertory of actors, the Artistic team went on to produce two series of Jacobs films over the next two years, all popular successes. Lydia’s 1939 interview in The Sydney Morning Herald offers a lively glimpse of the improvisatory conditions of work in which they honed their skills and seemingly had collective fun: “when…a visitor came to see us on the set of ‘The Monkey’s Paw,’ I was fixing the curtains on the window, the director, Manning Haynes, was plastering the walls, and the star, Moore Marriott, was hard at work on the carpenter’s bench” (6).

Collaboration—not only on the set but in Lydia’s work with author and director—was frequently noted by trade commentators as key to their films’ success, while to her Australian interviewer she testifies to her happy relationship with Jacobs: “I have done scenarios for 14 [sic] of W. W. Jacobs’ books, and we sit hand in hand at all the trade screenings of the films” (6). Against notions of authorial ownership, Lydia herself was adamant, writing in her June 1927 Bioscope article, “the completed film is the result of the fusion of many minds…No single person connected with the production can point to any section of the film and say, ‘Alone I did that’” (155). Increasingly, the trade press linked Hayward and Haynes as co-creators, suggesting a working ethos that was not simply a matter of studio harmony but could be felt in the film.

“Lydia Hayward: Joint Authoress,” Monty Works the Wires (1921). Courtesy of the British Film Institute, Special Collections.

In this collaborative context, while adapting Jacobs’ stories, Hayward cut her scriptwriting teeth. His tales were much loved for their acute, sometimes acerbically witty observations of human foibles, involving marital mishaps and heterosexual misunderstandings among the boating communities of Wapping and the river Medway. However, as works of a raconteur, his stories posed the difficulty of capturing the narrator’s sly verbal irony in a silent medium. From the evidence of the surviving films and fulsome press appreciation, Hayward’s ear for speech and verbal tone enabled her to translate Jacobs’ knowing turns of phrase and comic vernacular character interaction into sharply witty inter-titles. And she learned to skillfully draw out the comic absurdity of the slight situations around which Jacobs spun his tales, providing opportunity for Artistic’s actors to elaborate his characters as natural vectors of the joke. When the final six films were released in 1924, Kinematograph Weekly’s Lionel Collier declared, “Lydia Hayward’s scenarios are brilliant. It is in a great measure due to her work that the Jacobs spirit and humour have been so carefully preserved” (68).

Following the industry’s recession in the mid-1920s, Artistic folded, Haynes struggled to find work, and Hayward entered the next phase of her career, moving to the larger company, Stoll, where, between 1924-1926, she scripted five films for Will Kellino—one of the “Famous Kellinos,” who toured turn-of-the-century music halls with fast and furious acrobatic acts. The most significant change, however, is that all five scripts were adapted from novels written by women, featuring feisty heroines who implicitly counteracted the acerbic humour Jacobs often aimed at his older female characters. How this choice came about is a matter of speculation. However, in the process of adaptation we might find evidence of a tradition of women’s fiction supporting women’s filmmaking and it seems that Lydia found new opportunities by tapping into modern middlebrow women’s stories.

If comedy remained the dominant mode, the resulting films took a more romantic turn while broadening the class base to include upper-class characters as downwardly-mobile romantic leads or cads bent on leading trusting femininity astray, only to be thwarted by honest toilers. Hayward and Kellino seem to have made a good match. His music hall experience registers in strings of comic “gags,” by performers injecting into their byplay the sassiness and direct address of the music hall skit, adding “pace” to Hayward’s scripts, which were sometimes noted for leisureliness; while Lydia’s sharp-eyed wit and skill at episodic structure, honed through the Jacobs’ adaptations, brought to Kellino’s quick-fire gags a verbal skill at caustic repartee, now given greater license within socially pointed narrative juxtapositions. Cross-class romances are mirrored by cross-class assaults, resonating to post-war social changes, and facilitated by expanding forms of popular entertainment including skating rink, nightclub, and cinema as sites of social class intersection.

Billie takes on Flash Wheeler in We Women (1925), pressbook. Courtesy of the British Film Institute, Special Collections.

We Women (1925), adapted from a novel by the colourful, many pseudonymed “Countess Barcynska,” opens in a skating rink, introducing two friends, played by two popular vaudeville artists, Billie and Dollie: Bee in charge of the pay-box and Paulee, playing violin in the band and subject to the suggestive attentions of the owner, Flash Wheeler: “You certainly can tickle the fiddle, girlie, but you’re working too hard. I could make it easy for you.” Paulee’s struggle against his attentions gets her the sack, but Bee, has an answer for any man who tries to get one over on her or tries to exploit her friend: “You can’t sack me, old four wheeler—you don’t travel fast enough. I resigned 30 seconds ago”—uttered while struggling into the tangled arms of her coat. This is the only one of Hayward’s films to have been unequivocally disliked by the trade press. In its March 5, 1925 review, Kinematograph Weekly declared, “We are quite sure that Lydia Hayward is incapable of including in a scenario two-thirds of what is shown. It has evidently been drastically ‘revised’ by others” (65).

After Kellino left for America, and while Haynes was still seeking to set up new film deals, Lydia embarked on a third phase of her career. Between 1926-1929 she became intermittently involved as scenario editor/writer for Britain’s only woman director of the time, Dinah Shurey—both an intriguing and, frustratingly, the least documented of her moves. Possibly Shurey’s wartime experience led her to make what, for the pacifist-oriented 1920s, struck many reviewers as anachronistic military and naval melodramas, often involving rivalry between two brothers or male friends, combining heroics on the field with tragic marital entanglements—subjects somewhat removed from Hayward’s talent for class and heterosexual comedy.

Working with Shurey cannot have served Lydia’s reputation well and it is noticeable that her involvement is discretely ignored in reviews. However, while The Last Post (1929) was denounced by Film Weekly as “clap trap patriotism” (1929, 13), Kinematograph Weekly’s Collier conceded that its “blend of patriotism and sentiment” would be “successful with the masses” (1929, 53). In this respect, Lydia’s experience with Shurey appears to have broadened her range as a scenarist, skilling her in the construction of melodrama and the pathos of the wounded male to whom she returned in many of her later sound films.

Lydia Hayward in The Bioscope, June 1927. Private Collection. 

Writing for Britannia, however, appears to have been a stopgap, since Hayward alternated work for Shurey in renewed partnership with Haynes and in new collaborations. For Haynes, Lydia scripted his first production for Gaumont, London Love (trade shown in 1926, released in 1927), a crime-laden romance, for which Kinematograph Weekly took Lydia to task on account of its weak and jumpy continuity: “Lydia Hayward has done much better work than this” (1926, 34). Relief, then, was expressed on November 24, 1926 when the Daily Chronicle and Daily Express both reported that Haynes was to set up his own production unit at Pathé, followed the next year by The Bioscope’s headline, “Lydia Hayward Signed Up,” announcing a year’s contract with the company for “the finest scenario writer we have” (1926, n.p.; 1926, n.p.; 1927, 33).

Passion Island (1927) did indeed involve a regrouping at Pathé of colleagues from the former Artistic and current Britannia teams, reuniting Haynes and Hayward, bringing Jack Raymond across from Britannia as Haynes’ assistant while attempting to revive the Jacobs connection with a storyline he reputedly suggested (James 137). Despite a plot summary sounding like a concoction devised over a long dinner, Kinematograph Weekly praised the film for its dramatic story value and continuity “that flows easily” (1927, 27), while The Bioscope congratulated Lydia Hayward for a scenario “of great power…and…atmosphere” (1927, 37).

Lydia’s career now triangulated between Raymond, Shurey, and Haynes. The “exceedingly happy partnership” noted in 1928 by  Collier in Kinematograph Weekly (64) between Lydia and Haynes continued in their inventive adaptation of George Pleydell’s West End country-house thriller, The Ware Case (1928)—the last of their collaborations to be greeted with wholehearted enthusiasm. During this period, Hayward was finally persuaded, in 1927 and 1928, to write two articles for The Bioscope on scenario writing. The first and lengthier of these suggests a search for the literary in the visual: “in the first instance, a film should exist on paper…no producer would accept a scenario in which they could not ‘see’ a film” (1927, 155). For Lydia as adaptor, this required a translation of “a quality which is peculiar to [the author] himself [sic]—but without verbal style.” With the W.W. Jacobs adaptations she had a truly quality literary source. But in the only one of her scripts to survive—Those Who Love (1929) adapted from Guy Fletcher’s 1927 novel Mary Was Love—there is revealed a process of visual translation that circumvents the weaknesses of the original, while deploying skills acquired in earlier collaborations with Kellino and Shurey. The novel is a rambling lachrymose tale, centering on the melancholia of its hero, David Mellor, whose courtship of Mary in flashback is broken off by her death, while his promise that he will “love her always,” and Mary’s that “you will find me again” produce her visionary reappearances that block his later attempt to form a relationship.

Hayward’s script straightens the storyline and cuts sub-plots, while avoiding the novel’s inward-turned psychology through an unfolding series of set piecespictorial visions, comic vignettes, and melodramatic climaxes. The transitions between sequences are accomplished through Hayward’s deft structuring of character interaction and detailed specification of the visual, compositional, and performative parameters of each scene. The script includes shot scale, angle of view, framing of characters in relation to each other and direction of looks; editing devices such as fades out and in, cuts, mixes and double exposure, and iris shots; camera movements such as trucking and tri-cycling. Such visual scripting derived not only from her work as an actress but, seemingly, from her experience on the studio floor, her Australian interviewer reporting, “Mrs Freshman…in many cases aids with the direction, and is on the floor all the time a picture is under production” (1939, 6).  

Hayward’s surviving script turns on a fine balance between the comedy of popular social types—delicately honed in the Jacobs collaborations and more rumbustiously rendered with Kellino—and the lachrymose phantasms of the novel, more characteristic of Shurey’s pathos saturated melodramas. This ability to work the tropes and emotional effects of popular culture into a modern visual medium, along with her grasp of trenchant, vernacular dialogue, enabled Hayward to cross into the sound period. Indeed, the techniques evident in her script for Those Who Love make apparent her hand in rendering the well-loved but mordant and rambling novel Sorrell and Son (1933) into a remarkable film.

However, expectations set by Hollywood, along with changing “modern” social attitudes and rearguard class reaction to cinema as a now dominant mass medium merged in ambiguous responses to Hayward’s 1930s films, which, while often valued for their professional skill and crowd-pleasing mix of humour, pathos, and patriotism, were now felt “old-fashioned.” The works she was skilled in adapting were not modernist texts for minority readers, but populist, middlebrow novels and short stories, cueing into the culture to which they contributed, even as, in adapting them, she drew into cinematic form their slow registration of changing codes of modernity. More crucially, for the history of women’s impact on cinema, her work alerts us to the need not only for an understanding of the horizon of expectation from which films emerge, but for recognition of the processes of co-creation and collaborative filmmaking.

The author wishes to thank Janice Healey for help with birth, death, marriage, and census records.

Bibliography

The Bioscope (2 June 1927): 37.

Collier, Lionel. “Screen Values.” Kinematograph Weekly (24 January 1924): 68.

------. Kinematograph Weekly (3 May 1928): 64.

------. “Reviews of the Week.” Kinematograph Weekly (17 January 1929): 53.

Daily Chronicle (24 November 1926): n.p. Sidney Carroll 1926 Scrapbook. British Film Institute, Special Collections.

Daily Express (24 November 1926): n.p. Sidney Carroll 1926 Scrapbook. British Film Institute, Special Collections.

Film Weekly (21 January 1929): 13.

Gledhill, Christine. “Lydia Elizabeth Hayward (1979-1945).” In Women Screenwriters: An International Guide. Eds. Jill Nelmes and Jule Selbo. Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 606-615.

------.“Reframing Women in 1920s British Cinema: the Case of Violet Hopson and Dinah Shurey.” Journal of British Cinema and Television vol. 4, no. 1 (2007): 1-17.

Hayward, Lydia. “Concerning Scenarios.” The Bioscope (8 March 1928): 34.

------. “On Adaptation: Why A Story is Altered.” The Bioscope (18 June 1927): 155.

James, Anthony. W.W. Jacobs: A Biography. Knebworth: Able Publishing, 1999.

Kinematograph Weekly (16 June 1927): 27.

Low, Rachael. The History of the British Film 1918-28. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1971.

Lydia Hayward.” Theatricalia.  https://theatricalia.com/person/1c2/lydia-hayward

Lydia Hayward Signed Up.” The Bioscope  (12 May 1927): 33.

Rev. London Love. Kinematograph Weekly (22 July 1926): 34.

Rev. Pillars of Society. Kinematograph Weekly (30 September 1920): 82.

Rev. We Women. Kinematograph Weekly (5 March 1925): 65.

The Sydney Morning Herald (12 April 1939): 6

Archival Paper Collections:

The Stills Collection at the British Film Institute contains the following:

Small pressbooks for: Monty Works the Wires (1921), Not For Sale (1924), We Women (1925), Confessions (1925), Second to None (1926), London Love/The Whirlpool (1927).

Digitized stills for: Pillars of Society (1920), Sam’s Boy (1922), The Ware Case (1928), The Last Post (1930).

Undigitized stills for: Monty Works the Wires, A Bachelor’s Baby (1923), His Grace Gives Notice (1924), We Women, Confessions, The Gold Cure (1926), Every Mother's Son (1926), Second to None, London Love/The Whirlpool, Somehow Good (1928), Those Who Love/Mary Was Love (1929).

Shooting script for Those Who Love/Mary Was Love (1929).

Filmography

A. Archival Filmography: Extant Film Titles:

1. Lydia Hayward as Scenario Writer (at Artistic, with director Manning Haynes and short story writer W.W. Jacobs)

A Will and A Way. Dir.: Manning Haynes, prod.: George Redmond, sc.: Lydia Hayward from story by W.W. Jacobs (Artistic GB, TS. 1922; R. Jan. 1923) cas.: Johnny Butt, Cynthia Murtagh, Charles Ashton, si, b&w, 35mm, 2 reels, 3,540 ft. [Orig. R., 3,570 ft./47 min. 36 sec.] Archive: BFI National Archive.

Sam’s Boy. Dir.: Manning Haynes, prod.: George Redmond, sc.: Lydia Hayward and Manning Haynes from story by W.W. Jacobs (Artistic GB, TS. 1922; R. Feb 1922) cas.: Tom Coventry, Johnny Butt, Kate Gurney, si, b&w, 35mm, 3 reels, 4,272 ft. [Orig. R., 4, 300 ft./57 min. 20 sec.] Archive: BFI National Archive.

Head of the Family. Dir.: Manning Haynes, prod.: George Redmond, sc.: Lydia Hayward from story by W.W. Jacobs (Artistic GB, TS. 1922; R. Mar. 1923) cas.: Johnny Butt, Daisy England, Charles Aston, Cynthia Murtagh, Moore Marriott, si, b&w, tinted (1,050 ft.), 35mm, 5,461 ft. and VHS, 89 min. 38 sec. [Orig. R., 5,550 ft./73 min. 20 sec.] Archive: BFI National Archive.

The Skipper’s Wooing. Dir.: Manning Haynes, prod.: George Redmond, sc.: Lydia Hayward from story by W.W. Jacobs (Artistic GB, TS. 1922; R. Apr 1923) cas.: Tom Coventry, Johnny Butt, Moore Marriott, Roy Travers, Cynthia Murtagh, si, b&w, 35mm, 3 reels, 5,611 ft. [Orig. R., 5,200 ft./69 min. 20 sec.] Archive: BFI National Archive.

The Monkey’s Paw. Dir.: Manning Haynes, prod.: George Redmond, sc.: Lydia Hayward from story by W.W. Jacobs and play, “The Monkey’s Paw,” by Louis N. Parker (Artistic GB, TS. Feb 1923; R. Mar. 1923) cas.: Moore Marriott, Marie Ault, Charles Ashton, Johnny Butt, Tom Coventry, A. B. Imeson, si, b&w, 35mm, tinted (3,100 ft.), 2 reels, 2,947 ft. [Orig. R., 5,700 ft./76 min.] Archive: BFI National ArchiveLibrary of Congress (35mm), Nga Taonga Sound & Vision.

The Boatswain’s Mate. Dir.: Manning Haynes, prod.: George Redmond, sc.: Lydia Hayward from story by W.W. Jacobs (Artistic GB, TS. Oct 1923; R. Jan 1924) cas.: Florence Turner, Johnny Butt, Victor McLaglen, si, b&w, 35mm, MP4 (24 min.), 1 reel, 1,843 ft. [Orig. R., 1,814 ft./24 min. 11 sec.] Archive: BFI National Archive.

2. Lydia Hayward as Scenario Writer (for Granger-Davidson)

A Bachelor’s Baby. Dir.: A. H. Rooke, sc. Lydia Hayward from novel by Rolf Bennett (Granger-Davidson GB, TS 1922; R. Feb 1923) cas.: Haidee Wright, Tom Reynolds, Malcolm Tod, Constance Worth, si, b&w, 35mm, 4,995 ft. [Orig. R., 5,200 ft./69 min. 20 sec] Archive: BFI National Archive.

3. Lydia Hayward as Scenario Writer (at Stoll with director Will Kellino)

His Grace Gives Notice. Dir.: W.P. Kellino, sc.: Lydia Hayward from play by Lady Troubridge (Stoll GB, TS. May 1924; R. Jul. 1924) cas.: Nora Swinburne, Henry Victor, John Stuart, Eric Bransby Williams, Mary Brough, Gladys Hamer, si, b&w & tinted, 35mm nitrate, 2,159 ft. [Orig. R., 5,900 ft./78 min. 40 sec.] Archive: BFI National Archive.

Not For Sale. Dir.: W.P. Kellino, sc.: Lydia Hayward from novel by Monica Ewer (Stoll GB, TS. Nov 1924 [RL]; R. Mar. 1924 [BFI]; Oct. 1924 [IMDb]) cas.: Nora Swinburne, Henry Victor, John Stuart, Eric Bransby Williams, Mary Brough, Gladys Hamer, si, b&w & tinted, 35mm nitrate, 2,159 ft. [Orig. R., 6,460 ft. /86 min. 8 sec.] Archive: BFI National Archive.

We Women. Dir.: W.P. Kellino, sc.: Lydia Hayward from novel by Countess Barcynska (Stoll GB, TS. Feb. 1925; R. 1925) cas.: Billie & Dollie, John Stuart, Charles Ashton, Nina Vanna, si, b&w, 35mm, Digital Betacam and DVD (67 min. 16 sec.) [Orig. R., 5,000 ft./60 min. 36 sec.] Archive: BFI National Archive (35mm, 4,544 ft.). [Note: IMDb credits Countess Barcynska, as Oliver Sandys, and W.J. Roberts as contributing to the script but they are not listed in the film's credits].

Confessions/Confessions Corner. Dir.: W. P. Kellino, sc.: Lydia Hayward from magazine story by Baillie Reynolds (Stoll GB, TS. May 1925; R. Nov. 1925) cas.: Joan Lockton, Ian Hunter, Moore Marriott, Gladys Hamer, Fred Raynham, Eric Bransby Williams, si, b&w, 35mm, 6,650 ft. [Orig. R., 6,329 ft./76 min. 39 sec.] Archive: BFI National Archive.

The Gold Cure. Dir.: W.P. Kellino, sc.: Lydia Hayward from story by Sara Jeanette Duncan (Stoll GB, TS. Oct. 1925; R. Apr. 1926) cas.: Queenie Thomas; Eric Bransby Williams; Moore Marriott, Jameson Thomas, Gladys Harmer, si, b&w, 35mm, 5,526 ft. [Orig. R., 5,700 ft./69 min. 5 sec.] Archive: BFI National Archive.

4. Lydia Hayward as Scenario Writer (for Manning Haynes & First National-Pathé)

Passion Island.  Dir.: Manning Haynes, ass. dir.: Jack Raymond, prod.: G.A. Atkinson, sc.: Lydia Hayward from improvised story by W. W. Jacobs (never published) (First National-Pathé  GB, TS. June 1927; R. Apr. 1928) cas.: Moore Marriott, Randle Ayrton, Lilian Oldland, Gladys Hamer, Johnny Butt, Jack Raymond, si, b&w, 35mm [Orig. R., 7,500 ft./ 90 min. 55 sec.] Archive: EYE Filmmuseum, Lobster Films.

The Ware Case. Dir.: Manning Haynes, prod.: J.B. Sloan, sc.: Lydia Hayward from play by George Pleydell (First National-Pathé GB, TS. Apr 1928; R. May 1928 [BFI 1928; IMDb 1929] ) cas.: Stewart  Rome, Ian Fleming, Cameron Carr, Cynthia Murtagh, si, b&w, 35mm (7,363 ft.), Betacam and DVD (89 min. 21 sec.) [Orig. R., 7,789 ft./93 min. 12 sec.] Archive: BFI National Archive.

B. Filmography: Non-Extant Film Titles:

1. Lydia Hayward as Actress

Pillars of Society, 1920.

2. Lydia Hayward as Co-Scenarist (with director Manning Haynes at Artistic)

Three Men in A Boat, 1920; Monty Works the Wires, 1921.

3. Lydia Hayward as Scenario Writer (with director Manning Haynes, adapting W.W. Jacob short stories)

The Constable’s Move, 1923; An Odd Freak, 1923; The Convert, 1923; Lawyer Quince, 1924; Dixon’s Return, 1924.

4. Lydia Hayward as Scenario Editor and Scenario Writer (for Dinah Shurey at Britannia Films)

Every Mother's Son, 1926; Second to None, 1926; Carry On!, 1927; The Last Post, 1930; The Last Post, 1930 [with added sound, music, and dialogue].

5. Lydia Hayward as Scenarist  (for Manning Haynes or Jack Raymond at Gaumont, First National Pathé or British and Dominion)

London Love/The Whirlpool, 1927; Somehow Good, 1928; Zero, 1928 (TS.); A Peep Behind the Scenes, 1929; Those Who Love/Mary Was Love, 1929 [part sound].

C. DVD Sources:

DVD collection of W.W. Jacobs films, scripted by Lydia Hayward. Forthcoming release, BFI.

D. Streamed Media:

The Boatswain's Mate (1924) is available online via a subscription to BFI Player.

Credit Report

Because the frequent delay between trade show and release dates was a serious impediment to the careers of film workers in the British film industry, and because Rachael Low, among the most comprehensive sources of credit information, uses trade show dates as closer to production date, I have listed first the trade show [TS] followed by the release date [R] as recorded in the GBB database.

Occasionally there are discrepancies between Low, IMDb and the GBB’s online database of archival information, which I have noted.

There are also discrepancies between the footage and running time of the original release and that of the material preserved in the British Film Institute. I have listed the format, reels, and footage of material made accessible by GBB, and noted the original release data recorded in the archive's database as [Orig. R.].

Citation

Gledhill, Christine. "Lydia Hayward." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2016.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-cak6-6f05>

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