O whistle, an' I'll come to ye, my lad;
Tho' father, and mother and a' should gae mad,
Thy Jeanie will venture wi' ye, my lad.
Reading Rob Young's The Magic Box reawakened my interest in finding out
exactly where M.R. James had set The Globe Inn in
'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad.' It's a well-known fact the
the seaside town Burnstow is a fictionalised Felixstowe but as the Globe Inn
doesn't exist - nor has it ever - he must have based it on somewhere. Over the
years I have assumed that it could have been The Victoria, now a disused pub
slowly decaying as it has been left to rot by a miserable local resident*. As it
is situated at the hamlet called Felixstowe Ferry next to the Links just
northeast of Felixstowe itself. When I used to teach the story and, indeed, the
film version, I always referred to it as where the story was originally set.
However, over the years other suggestions have been made. Indeed a good friend
of mine recently told me that The Fludyers Arms was a highly likely candidate.
The curiously named Fludyers Arms** originally opened in 1839 and is probably
more likely to be the Globe than The Victoria. The latter pub was open then and
photos of it can be found from 1894. James wrote the story in 1904 and he
definitely visited the town, quite often by all accounts. However, for some
reason, I have never considered it as the Globe. I'm really not sure why, but
somehow it doesn't quite fit the bill even though it is in about the right
place. A BBC news story from October 2020 suggests a building close to what is
now the refurbished The Fludyers Hotel and to me fits the bill more easily. M.R.
James was a medieval historian and provost of King's College, Cambridge. His
good friend Felix Cobbold, from the Suffolk brewing family, was the college's
bursar. Cobbold lived in The Lodge, Felixstowe. James often spent time,
particularly New Year at the Lodge. According to Robert Lloyd Parry, an actor
interviewed for the BBC story believed the story was partly inspired by his stay
at the house. In the story James describes the view from his protagonist's room
at the fictional Globe Inn:
On the south you saw the village of Burnstow. On the north no houses were to be seen, but only the beach and the low cliff backing it. Immediately in front was a strip - not considerable - of rough grass, dotted with old anchors, capstans, and so forth; then a broad path; then the beach.According to Parry it is clearly the view from the upper storeys of the Lodge as, "It's the only place you can get that view." Well, I will have to take his word for that. As for the Lodge, well it's now called Cranmer House and is a Grade II Listed Building worth £1.5million. I'm guessing I'm not likely to be popping upstairs for a butchers for sure. So, having lived here in the town since 1988, I have often walked past this house regularly. In fact, there's hardly a week goes by that I don't walk past it unless I'm away, of course. Neither of the two film versions of Oh, Whistle were filmed in Suffolk. The 1968 Jonathan Miller version for the BBC was filmed in Norfolk and the 2010 remake with John Hurt was filmed in Kent. Obviously I feel that's a shame but, presumably, those alternative locations lent themselves better to the wild, solitary coastlines more in keeping with the story than modern Felixstowe. James wrote a second story partly set in Burnstow, The Tractate Middoth (1911) which has been made into a film by Mark Gatiss. Interestingly, the protagonist meets a Mrs Simpson who runs a boarding house in the town. A real Mrs Simpson stayed in Felixstowe for six weeks in 1936 waiting for her divorce. Evidently she hated it. Still, that's a whole other area of interest to some - certainly not me! As for the James story, it's not one I know so I'm not sure exactly whereabouts it's set.
I often wonder how much of modern Felixstowe would seem familiar to M. R. James, probably a fair amount to be honest. Ghosts don't seem to be much of a literary topic nowadays. I know the experience seemed to give way to alien sightings towards the end of last Century. Also, horror as a genre tends to be very graphic and, indeed, more horrific now too. I'm sure there are plenty of ghosts out there too just waiting for their stories to be told.
* The story goes she wanted to stop people from drinking there because they were too noisy!
** Named after an MP but was originally The Felix Hotel.
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