The Mystery of the Snakeskin Belt

The above comes from The Children's Newspaper, 11 September 1948. The film has a couple of interesting connections to The Eagle, still 18 months away from being launched. The IMDB doesn't have much on the film but does reveal that it ran to 132 minutes and was filmed as an 8-part serial by Great Britain Instructional and distributed in the UK (in 1950) by General Film Distributors. Colin Barlow, the young lad who starred as Johnny Travers in the film, didn't have any further film career, it seems. Ursula Strachey and Cyril Wentzel, who played Anne and Jim Travers (presumably mum and dad) don't have any other credits either.

The film was directed by T. E. Frank Cadman (1898-1980), also the film's producer, who had been production manager on a couple of Edgar Wallace adaptations and directed a few comedies in the early 1930s. In the late 1940s he was production controller on Under the Frozen Falls for G.B. Instructional Ltd., released in the UK in 1947, before producing the documentary Pen Pictures from Rhodesia (1948), a series of five short films, and directing The Mystery of the Snakeskin Belt (classified in the UK in August 1949).

The film script was written by Mary Cathcart Borer (1906-1994) who went on the write films for the Children's Film Foundation and for TV, including a school serial entitled The Fifth Form at St. Dominic's (1961). She was also a writer of children's books, including an adaptation of The Mystery of the Snakeskin Belt which was published by Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons in 1951. An interesting woman who I'll have to come back to at some point; she has a near-comic connection as she wrote articles for Look and Learn.

The film was based on a story by Jack Lewis who provides the first of our Eagle connections. Jack Lewis was born John Lewis and worked for the Amalgamated Press for many years and wrote dozens of stories for the penny comics they produced from the 1920s until the 1950s. He was best known under his pseudonym Lewis Jackson, under which name he wrote many well-received Sexton Blake yarns. It was as Lewis Jackson that he contributed a story to Eagle--'Ambush in the Desert' (18 August 1950).

Connection two is another writer, Geoffrey Bond. Although he's best known as the writer of 'Luck of the Legion' for Eagle and moved in South Africa after the war and worked for the South Africa Broadcasting Corporation. Bond also appeared in a role in The Mystery of the Snakeskin Mystery before returning to England in 1949 where he acted in a number of radio dramas, including the radio adventures of another Eagle character, P.C. 49.

Amazing how many comic connections you can squeeze out of simple newspaper clipping.

Update: 13 May 2008

Tony Woolrich has squeezed even more out of it than I managed. "I have Googled a bit further and see that Ursula Strachey and Cyril Wentzel were husband and wife, and her portrait and 2 childhood photographs are in the National Portrait Gallery. He is listed as having been a performer in one or other of the BBC Radio's 30-Minute Theatre series in the 1960s." Following this up, it would seem that Ursula Margaret Wentzel (nee Strachey) (1911- ) was the daughter of Ralph Strachey (1868-1923) and his wife Margaret (nee Severs); she was related to the artist Ray (Rachel) Strachey (nee Costelloe) (1887-1940), who painted the portrait in the NPG. Her husband was Cyril Charles Wentzel.