Pool of London

It is nearly as difficult now to imagine commercial cargo ships docking in central London as it is to think anything unusual about a black West Indian man dating a blonde London local.

This was not the case in 1950 when Basil Dearden filmed Pool of London. Jack Whittingham and John Eldridge’s original story blends race with the love interests of a ship’s crew at a London port call, East End wide boys, a dodgy ‘Gentleman Acrobat’, and illicit diamond trafficking to make a taut crime thriller. Their tight script and variety of character actors, locations, and shooting make it cinematic gem.

Johnny Lambert (Earl Cameron in his first screen role) is a popular and easy-going Jamaican seaman on the SS Dunbar, a cargo ship that makes a regular run between Rotterdam and London. Johnny often stays aboard ship in port to avoid trouble and save money for his education. Dan McDonald (Bonar Colleano) is Johnny’s best friend, an American with big ideas and a girl in every port. Dan occasionally gives Johnny small things to take ashore for him, such as a couple packs of cigarettes. Everyone knows Johnny is on the up-and-up. Once ashore, Johnny returns to Dan what he brought without questions and refuses to take Dan’s ‘tip’.

While idling in a music hall lobby on shore leave as he waits for Dan to ‘meet people’ inside, Johnny meets the ticket-taker Pat (Susan Shaw). Pat is a friendly blonde; her easy chemistry with Johnny leads to several outings. Johnny seems more conscious of being black among whites than his white crewmates and Londoners appear to be with him in their company. But there are several exceptions, the key one of which may include a 1951 British cinema audience seeing a mixed-raced couple in a British film for the first time.

As Johnny chats up Pat, Dan mixes it up with wide boys in a scheme to make a few fast quid. He passes the two packets of cigarettes that Johnny brought off the boat for him to a pin-striped spiv named Mike (Christopher Hewett). Dan knows the packets contain something besides cigarettes; he also knows better than to ask what. Mike, Alf the safecracker (Alfie Bass), and Charlie Vernon the Gentleman Acrobat (Max Adrian), propose a bigger deal.

Dan cannot help himself from bragging to his jealous, gimlet-eyed Maisie (Moira Lister) that he is onto something big. When Johnny sees the possibility of a relationship with an English girl, he rethinks his plan to leave the ship for good and return home to Jamaica for an education. And then things start to go wrong. On Sunday morning the wide boys crack a safe in an office near the Bank of England in a brief laconic sequence that prefigures the heist in Rififi (1955). The thieves flee under pursuit with a take close to a million in present-day US dollars and the denouement unfolds.

Racism is an issue here, but apart from several ‘we don’t like your type’ encounters with strangers, Johnny seems to experience it more by his own presumption than in anyone’s behavior. He is the only black person in the film. He has a pleasant, open face and appears to be well-liked on his ship. He agrees with Pat that London can be forbidding if you do not know anyone, but doors open when you meet people. Johnny takes it hard when he goes to meet Pat at a dancehall and realizes her evening plan is to get together in a group with white friends; but Pat clearly likes him and the film shows her socializing among a set of young working people like herself.

The Pool of the title is a geographical term for London’s natural harbor on the Thames. Shot on location, Dearden and his cinematographer Gordon Dines capture a documentary record of a part of London now past, to include round-cornered, double-decker London trams, the devastation left by wartime German bombing, and sail barges on the Thames.

The film’s opening credits show the ship approach the Pool from the lower Thames, pass through Tower Bridge, and then berth across the river from the Tower of London; the story closes as the ship leaves its berth and follows the tide through Tower Bridge headed back to Rotterdam.In use from the city’s earliest days, the Pool encompasses roughly three miles of the river, from London Bridge to Cuckold’s Point/Lime Kiln Creek.

By the twentieth century, it shared trade with east London’s complex of dock areas until the 1960s. When container shipping became the industry standard, deep ocean ports and higher bridge clearances were required and much of what had been the world's largest port was redeveloped for upscale residential and commercial purposes.

Pool of London 1951 U.K. (85 minutes) Ealing Studios. Directed by Basil Dearden; original screenplay by Jack Whittingham and John Eldridge; director of photography Gordon Dines; editing by Peter Tanner; music by John Addison; produced by Michael Balcon.