The Heroes (II): John Mills

John Mills was born at Watts Naval Training School for Boys on 22 February 1908. Spending his early years in this environment, he was therefore well-schooled in naval procedure and it perhaps accounts for the conviction he brought to so many roles about the Senior Service. In fact, his first film character was that of a singing, dancing sailor called Midshipman Golightly in Midshipmaid (1932). After years of training in the theatre, he brought such a sense of authority in front of the camera that it initiated a career which would span more than one hundred and twenty feature credits – in most of them as one of the stars.

But it could all have been so different if he had not displayed enormous courage as a junior schoolboy. For the chirpy confidence that characterizes so many of his later roles in film and theatre was literally being beaten out of him.

Lewis Mills was sent to board at Norwich High School for Boys, after his schoolmaster father had taken a post at a school which he considered unsuitable as a place of learning for his own family. It was at Norwich that Mills met the scourge of so many public schools at that time – the archetypal bully. Mills was small in height and fair of face, which made him the perfect victim for the torment he was to endure for so long. Each night in the dorm, after ‘lights out’, the young sadist would make Mills stand naked in the middle of the dorm holding a jug of cold water on his head, while beating him on the vulnerable parts of his anatomy should he even fractionally lower his arms. As with so many children locked into this kind of nightmare find, it was considered cowardly to ‘snitch’ to the masters and risk the contempt of other classmates. So, Mills decided his only course of action was to try to deal with the matter himself. His sister, Annette, ran a dancing academy at the time, and one of her dancing partners had been a daring First World War pilot. It was to him, whilst on a brief school holiday, that Mills turned and blurted out what he was suffering. The ex-pilot was an expert on ju-jitsu, so Mills couldn’t have chosen a better champion for his cause.

Over a period of several days, the pilot gave Mills a crash course in the martial art and by the time he returned to the school he was to some degree competent. On the night of his return the dreaded moment came when ‘lights out’ was called. The bully began his usual jeering and tormenting, telling Mills to strip off and go through his hour of agony. But this time Mills refused, and the eventful confrontation came about. It staggered everyone in the dorm – including the diminutive Mills, who, although shaking like a leaf, set about the ‘thug’, using the much bigger boy’s superior weight and height to hurl him around the room. Eventually Mills leaped on the dazed bully, locked him in an arm-hold, and nearly succeeded in banging his head through the floorboards.

The bully’s face looked like a squashed tomato when a housemaster finally arrived to break up the fight. There followed a full enquiry, with the outcome seeing the bully expelled. Mills was also reprimanded by the headmaster for brawling, though he also conceded Mills had shown a good deal of pluck. He was, thereafter, a school hero in the true Tom Brown tradition.

Following in the footsteps of so many other major British film stars, Mills was placed under contract with the Rank Organization, and had enormous subsequent success, achieving international status with such films as In Which We Serve (1942), Great Expectations (1946), This Happy Breed (1944), The Way To The Stars (1945), and many, many others. It has often been commented of the irony that it was not as the gutsy hero, the role played to perfection in countless British films, that he won his Oscar, but for the performance as the village idiot in David Lean’s panoramic motion picture Ryan’s Daughter (1969).

Yet this severely underestimates Mills’ skill as an actor and his natural, humanistic ability to reach down to the truth of a character. And often how cleverly he could subvert the stoic stereotype. As early as the 1941 Anthony Asquith production Cottage To Let, Alastair Sim discovers Mills is actually a Nazi spy, unmasked by a young Cockney evacuee, played by George Cole. With The October Man (1946), Mills is suspected to be a murderer due to his mental instability and memory loss, while even in the fondly remembered and grittily produced Ice Cold In Alex (1958), there is a vulnerability and tension to his sense of failure and needed reclamation of heroism.

Even through his seventies and eighties, Mills remained active, playing demanding roles in the theatre and on television, and character parts in films. From his early childhood, when he had to prove to himself that the disadvantages of being small in height did not mean that he was also small in terms of courage, John Mills continued to shine as one of Britain’s best loved and most admired stars. This was confirmed when he received the ultimate accolade for a British actor – on 28 July 1976, Mr. John Mills became Sir John Mills.

As a personal aside, we worked with John for several years on the series Best Of British. When the first season of ten episodes was agreed with Barry Brown, Head Of Purchased Programmes at the BBC, it was a genuine thrill to secure John’s talents as narrator. During the first recording sessions, however, we were apprehensive since the narration we’d written covered many of his own films. We needn’t have worried; he was a generous collaborator and was genuinely pleased to celebrate British films from the 1930s to the 1970s. He respected our scripts, while at the same time making judicious suggestions.

We ended up recording fifty-seven episodes with John, sharing stories of family and healthy living – he was already ready to recommend a new diet – and of course discussing future projects. The consummate pro, he would always end with a reminder to think of him for any prospective future role. After all he was a working actor, claiming the insecurity of not knowing where the next cheque was going to come from along with the giddy thrill of creating another character.