Original subtitles

'We were not The Railway Children to begin with.

I don't suppose we ever thought about railways

except as a means of getting to the theatre and zoo.

We were just ordinary suburban children

and we lived with Father and Mother

in an ordinary, red-brick-fronted villa,

with coloured glass in the front door.'

Ah, come on.

Few films linger in the memory like The Railway Children.

Adapted from the book by legendary children's author E Nesbit,

it is a cinematic rite of passage.

I think The Railway Children contains so many of the seeds

of the mainstream family film that we see today

that have been so acclaimed because it asks the grown-ups

to consider the point of view of the children.

It asks the really, kind of beautiful questions about

what it would mean if we all looked at things

through the eyes of children who simply wanted to do

the courageous thing, to do the right thing,

to speak the truth.

There's no question about it, it's a bona fide classic film.

But it's more to do with an attitude and...

a way of life and a way of living.

And I think that what this captures is an ideal.

A social ideal which should be still with us.

And isn't there something sort of poetic,

and certainly from a child's point of view,

about... they have to do it themselves?

Children have to be the agents of change.

They have to save the trains, they have to bring their father back.

And that's so extraordinary when you watch that as a child,

you think, "I need to be more like this.

This is... I've got to embrace life in this way."

I mean, that's the thing, when you're playing as a child,

you create those worlds where anything is possible.

And this film says to you,

"Well, for these children it all was possible,

and you could perform magical wonders."

Released in 1970, and directed by the comic actor, Lionel Jeffries,

the beauty of the film lies in its simplicity, even its realism.

There is no magic in The Railway Children,

but it is spellbinding.

♪ Should auld acquaintance be forgot

♪ And never brought to mind?

♪ We'll give a thought of kindness yet

♪ For the days of auld lang syne ♪

'You are now peering through a London fog.

This is how the British metropolis looked in the good old days.'

'London in 1902 was the busiest city in the world.

The traffic was so heavy and the hub-bub so great

that you couldn't hear an itch scrap.

And here are some of His Majesty's subjects rubbernecking.

They're all headed for the Royal Palace.

God Save the King.'

The year is 1905 and when their father is wrongly arrested

for selling government secrets,

the three Waterbury children must relocate at haste

from middle-class London to a cottage in West Yorkshire.

Played by Jenny Agutter, Sally Thomsett and Gary Warren,

the resourceful Waterburys have a startling effect

on the village of Oakworth.

Just as they will be transformed by the community that embraces them,

and the railway line that runs by their new home.

They will learn that there is goodness in the world

and the possibility of hope

in the unlikely shape of the old man who waves from a railway carriage.

E Nesbit at her time, was considered to be

one of the eminent children's authors

and would later be a huge influence

on many of the big children's authors

of the 20th century, like CS Lewis.

She liked to tell sort of children's adventure stories

whether they were grounded in reality like The Railway Children,

or a little bit more on the fantastical side.

But she's widely considered to be the kind of progenitor

of the children's adventure story plot

and one which could, you know,

often have some adult themes mixed in.

Happy Christmas.

I love you.

'You'll think that we ought to have been very happy,

and we were, but we did not know how happy

till the pretty life at Edgecombe Villa was over and done with

and we had to live a very different life indeed.'

Thank you, sir. Peter, my boy, come here.

Ahhh!

Ohhhh!

The book was written in 1906 and it's about a family,

quite well off, who live in the outskirts of London

in a lovely house, three children,

and they are suddenly plunged into a crisis

when the father is taken away on a trumped-up charge.

Nesbit was a radical voice in her own way,

a writer who believed in a fairer, more idealistic way of life

than the constrictions of late-Victorian society.

This is a story about family,

class, charity,

and the potential of community.

How would you describe the style of storytelling of author Edith Nesbit?

Well, she developed something of a trope.

So, a lot of her books are about a group of children

who... start the book having a wonderful life

and then the father, usually, either dies or is arrested,

or his business partner absconds with all their funds.

Something dramatic happens to the father

and that tips the family into hardship

and movement to another place.

And in the other place they encounter something, the children,

who are normally not looked after by their mother

who is either ill, or busy writing books or something.

She has to do something to sort of keep them going.

They go off and play in the wild and they encounter something.

It could be something magical like in Five Children and It,

where they encounter this sand fairy called the Psammead,

who leads them on a series of magical adventures,

or in the case of The Railway Children, a railway.

And they... they are changed by this themselves,

but also the way they interact with the magical creature

or the world around them, helps them return the family back to... habits.

And normally... unless the father is dead,

normally there is some kind of stability restored

and they get back to where they were.

And this really reflects the author's own life.

I mean, her father died when she was three-and-a-half.

It knocked the whole family off-kilter.

They lost the beautiful agricultural college they were living in.

Then her sister became ill and the family travelled Europe

looking for healthy beach resorts and stuff.

So she, in a way, she's always looking for the father

that she lost herself at that time.

And a lot of her stories echo that kind of

group of children going wild, travelling about,

that really, really was her... her childhood experience.

'We had a father who was just perfect.'

In the book, it is in Kent.

In fact, in the film, they actually go to Yorkshire,

where they, to pass the time, the children pass the time

standing by a fence overlooking a railway and waving to the trains.

As a result of this, they develop

all kinds of sort of friendships

and they have various adventures which follow through to the book

right to the end.

A lot of people have said that E Nesbit's style of storytelling

is strikingly modern.

The Railway Children was written in 1905 as a series

of sort of periodic articles in a magazine at the time.

And she was very kind of interested

in presenting children as...

...in some ways, capable of things that adults often aren't.

They have a certain clear-mindedness and clarity of vision

and courage that grown-ups don't.

And I think that's something that we see

in loads of mainstream films now, and books,

but we didn't see as much as early as she was writing this.

Shot on location in Yorkshire,

The Railway Children is now an institution

with a treasure trove of images that have become memories

and characters we know like friends.

All right, cabby, Scotland Yard.

We're going to have to play at being poor for a while.

We're moving to a darling little house

in the country up in Yorkshire.

What? I know you'll love it.

Is Aunt Emma coming?

No, Peter, unfortunately not.

Don't you want first class, madam?

- No, second, thank you. - Look like first class quality to me.

Are we on the right train - to Yorkshire? - Yes.

Edith Nesbit was a remarkable woman and a troubled soul.

She lost her father at a young age and was unhappily married.

Family, she sensed, was what you made it.

Co-founder of the Socialist Fabian Movement,

she wrote over 16 novels filled with her unconventional spirit.

Here was a modern idiom for the children's book.

that influenced everyone from CS Lewis to Enid Blyton, to JK Rowling.

Edith Nesbit was not only a writer,

but she was also a political radical.

She was a socialist and so a great many of her books,

even the fantasies and the children's books,

contain radical ideas about society.

She was a founding member of the Fabian Society,

with George Bernard Shaw, and William Morris,

and she moved in those sort of circles.

As a result, she was also... had a fantastic imagination.

And so when she needed to write to earn money

owing to her own personal circumstances,

she was able to apply not only various ideas

into children's literature, but to fantasy, ghost stories,

horror, and adult novels as well.

All of these have at some stage within them,

elements of her political ideas, her socialist ideas.

What's fascinating about The Railway Children

is that these ideas are very coded.

They... On the surface it looks like a very sweet children's book,

and it looks like a very sweet children's film about a family.

So E Nesbit was friends,

or at least acquainted with a few different Russian revolutionaries

sort of pre-Russian Revolution period,

and were, you know, had clearly struggled and suffered

for their political views.

Meanwhile the Dreyfus Affair was something which was

internationally known as, you know,

someone who has been accused of treason wrongly,

and it was an anti-Semitic situation.

And I think all of these things sort of lend something to...

a few different things about The Railway Children.

But she is very interested in the idea of characters who are

victimised or removed from their families and their lives

because of their progressive views

or because they've been wrongly accused of something.

And, of course, that's the story of the father in The Railway Children.

You mentioned Nesbit's kind of background, but by 1905

when the book was first published in serial form, was she a literary star?

Was she a best-selling author? Absolutely.

She was hugely successful.

I mean, I think that we...

She doesn't necessarily survive

quite in the way that she ought

as really the inventor of modern

children's adventure stories.

The authors themselves always tip their hats to her.

JK Rowling recognises that Harry Potter would not exist

if it wasn't for E Nesbit.

CS Lewis, he would put some of her characters in his book.

All of the... All of the people who wrote children's stories

from then on were incredibly aware they were in her shadow.

Because prior to that, there had been these sort of

slightly fantastical, slightly fey, slightly coy, children's stories.

She was the first person to write books

where she took the children's perspective seriously.

The children were the agents, they were active.

They were sensible, they did what they - or not sensible accordingly.

But the books were told from the children's point of view

and they were functioning real human beings.

They weren't crazy characters.

So, the idea of taking children from the real world

and putting them into an unusual situation begins with her.

First published in serialised form in 1905,

The Railway Children is Nesbit's best-known story.

There had already been versions on radio and television,

in 1951, 1957,

and in 1968 a BBC serial had also starred Jenny Agutter.

Unlike Nesbit's usual approach, there was no magical device or creature.

This book sits squarely in the real-world tradition of Black Beauty,

The Secret Garden, or Swallows And Amazons.

I think it's... it's very apparent that most of the...

or all of the adaptations before the 1970 film, were serial adaptations.

They were a radio or TV series, and that kind of matched,

or mapped more directly onto the kind of periodic way

that the story was originally written.

So really the filmmakers had a challenge when trying to create

a film for the big screen in kind of stitching those things together.

And as a result, I think, it does work quite well

because it gives the film a kind of,

I don't know, it gives it some space almost.

There's a kind of languidness to it that's nice.

Like it feels like kids kind of exploring and playing and learning,

rather than it being very tightly plotted.

But there is definitely a sense

that there's just these various little adventures

that these kids have with the same set of characters

in a revolving door kind of way.

Right away, Mr Mainprice.

Mother should be on the next train in about 15 minutes.

That one was from London, I think.

Hey, there's something going on at the end of the station.

Yes, something's happened. Come on!

She uses a great deal of what was happening around her

as part of the influence of the book.

For example, the Russian refugee who lands at the station, Oakworth,

and sort of falls over, is clearly inspired by one of her friends,

who was a Russian refugee called Stepniak

as well as another man in the same position called Kropotkin,

and these men were Russian dissidents

who were fleeing the Tsarist regime.

Also I think here was the Dreyfus Affair,

which had been all over the news at the time when she was writing this

about the wrongful conviction of a French Army officer

who happened to be Jewish, which created an enormous stir

and actually incredible social division in France

and, in fact, across Europe.

So all of these things, and she was very much aware of these,

being a political and politicised woman.

She drew on these as inspiration

for aspects of... events

that happen in The Railway Children,

all of which are knitted together perfectly.

But, as you mentioned, The Railway Children

is slightly different, isn't it? Because there's no...

as far as I can tell, there's no actual magic in it.

I mean, The Railway Children doesn't have actual magic.

I think there is a character in The Railway Children,

who could be seen as the external "magical character",

who is the old gentleman at the back of the train,

who has a sort of a... a very strange, angelic role.

He comes in and out of their lives as needed

and gives them impossible things.

But he is absolutely not magical, he's the director of the railway.

So... But The Railway Children is very, very real.

They are reduced to penury

by their father being arrested for selling secrets.

He works in the Foreign Office, and they are so out of money

that they have to move from London to Yorkshire.

Something which I think people in Yorkshire find slightly resentful.

"Oh, they're so poor, they have to move to Yorkshire?"

But they move to this small village in Yorkshire,

where they, if you like,

the adventures are all encompassed by the railway train.

The railway line, the railway station, these machines,

this very industrial form of magic.

Jovial British star, Lionel Jeffries,

is most famous for bringing his eccentric persona to films

such as First Men in the Moon, and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

Bereft of reading material while voyaging from America to England,

he borrowed The Railway Children from his daughter.

He was so moved, he personally bought the rights for £300.

Backed by Bryan Forbes at EMI Films,

Jeffries was determined to rekindle a quiet romance

missing in the cinema of the early '70s.

Lionel Jeffries is a really interesting figure in British cinema

and in the industry. He was an actor, in the main.

Generally a comic actor. He has, kind of had a little bald head

and a kind of friendly, little comic demeanour to him,

but not without a certain curmudgeonly-ness, I think, as well.

Probably most well known for being the grandpa

in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang from 1968.

But he was a man who in his personal life

and his sort of professional life,

was a little bit nonplussed by the changing social mores

of the '60s and '70s,

and he was really keen to... make things both as an actor

and then as a director, with The Railway Children,

which was his debut, that were kind of family-friendly.

That weren't into the sex, drugs and violence of that kind of hippy era.

That were kind of doing something

for both children and for their parents.

He was really famous because he always played characters

older than himself, simply because he was bald

and he had a sort of an attitude of someone older.

He had been in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

He was in I'm All Right Jack. He had done First Men in the Moon,

and he was very well liked as an actor.

It was, in fact, on his way back from America,

having filmed Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,

that he first discovered the book The Railway Children.

He then wrote a script himself on spec,

and took it to Bryan Forbes,

who had then had a film deal with EMI.

Forbes was looking for scripts for family films.

This was at a period when the family films were not so frequent.

There had been a few in the early '60s,

but now there was a drop,

and he felt that there was a gap in the market.

He really liked the idea of The Railway Children.

He loved Lionel Jeffries,

and Forbes suggested to Jeffries that he actually direct it.

If you like, he was very interested by the concept of an idyllic,

idealised childhood and he wanted to create that,

particularly... he said at the time in British cinema

there was this move towards the kind of angry, working-class films,

you know, this sort of new edge to filmmaking

that Britain was adopting, the new wave.

And he wanted to try to,

you know, pay tribute or to recreate something that he-

He called it a quiet romance. Yes.

Yeah, something which was gentle

and something which was open to all the family.

And so that was what he set out to do.

He wanted to be faithful to the book,

so... almost all of the events that happen in the book

happen in the film, but he...

he has a... a rose-tinted lens to some degree.

There are harsher scenes in the book.

There's harsher portrayals of poverty,

harsher portrayals of some of the troubles that the kids face.

And he slightly fades those out in favour of...

beautiful, beautiful views of countryside.

The heart of the film is the struggling family

led by Dinah Sheridan's singular, if elusive mother.

We never learn her name beyond Mrs Waterbury.

Wounded, but capable, and noticeably a writer,

she is obviously a cipher for Nesbit.

Nesbit famously ran a Bohemian house and her screen counterpart

takes in a collection of waifs and strays.

The Three Chimneys cottage of the story

is named after the author's unusual home.

I told Mrs Viney to get some meat and bread

and have some supper ready.

I wonder where? Ooh, I suppose she's laid it in the dining room.

Come along, darlings. Up here, let's go and see.

Come along.

I wonder why Daddy hasn't written - to us? - Mummy says he's too busy.

He'll write soon she says. Well, why don't we wave anyway?

Three waves won't matter. We won't miss them!

The story is told through the eyes of Jenny Agutter's Roberta.

Known as Bobbie, this is her rite of passage.

A young teen propelled into the seriousness of adulthood.

As is well known, the young actors were older than their characters.

Agutter never offers a second's doubt,

mixing vulnerability and strength.

So Jenny Agutter was actually in the 1968 BBC television

adaptation of The Railway Children,

and then goes on in 1970 to play the part again.

So she is very well versed in the book and the source material,

and in playing this character.

It's interesting because she, you know,

her energy as an actress is really adaptable and she made

so many interesting films and had so many varied parts in her career.

This is one when she's only 17 years old,

though she's playing younger again.

So she is a little bit old for the part by the time the film comes out.

But she brings to that the right combination for Bobbie,

because Bobbie is both fundamentally innocent,

but also has a kind of precociousness and an awareness,

and she's pretty quick to figure things out.

And when she talks with her mother, she is the first one to work out

what's actually happened with her father.

And she's sort of the leader of the children

as naturally as the oldest child.

And so Jenny Agutter, being that little bit older,

I think she... she gives, like, that kind of wisdom almost.

No actor is more synonymous with The Railway Children than Jenny Agutter.

She was in a previous version, she was in future versions.

What makes her so central to the character of Bobbie?

I mean, I think at this particular point in her career,

Jenny Agutter is 17 years old.

She has a face which, at rest,

can appear younger.

So... But what she is able to do as a result is show the transition

from child to adulthood convincingly,

which is quite hard to do.

You have to be a particular kind of... just to look right.

To be able to be someone who is young but responsible.

So, first of all, she is able to do that.

She has a very open-eyed innocence.

She has a very strong sense of powerful emotions

beneath the surface,

so you feel that she is wrestling a lot with something very intense.

Now it's mainly the loss of her father.

It's hard to play those things

without a particular depth as a performer,

particularly as a young performer, to convey that convincingly.

The idea that a child would faint because of the intensity of the situation.

So she's got this ability...

in a very simple acting style,

to convey very, very intense emotion with very, very little.

She absolutely does not ham it up,

which for a teenage actor is quite often one of the great perils.

'That's me, I'm Roberta.

They call me Bobbie, sometimes lanky.

I'm the eldest, worst luck.' Now, good.

'That's Phyllis, who means well.' Yes, good, good.

Now, my boy.'And that's Peter, who wants to be an engineer.'

And don't forget to watch the dicky bird.

At 20, Sally Thomsett was older than Agutter,

even though she plays Bobbie's younger sister Phyllis.

Thomsett has the timing of a natural comedian.

The sprightly Gary Warren plays the youngest, Peter,

who is behind the more mischievous of the children's enterprises.

They are anything but goody-goodies.

It is very interesting that her younger sister,

who is supposed to be 11, I believe,

was played by the 20-year-old Sally Thomsett.

This seems to beggar belief really.

And I think it's just about camouflaged

within the film well enough.

Like there are enough other things going on and she's not

in so central of a role that you're constantly thinking about it.

And by all accounts, the actress was also asked not to ever be seen

smoking or drinking while she was filming,

because it just would shatter the illusion too much,

of her being a child.

But it is a... it is an unusual choice, I would say.

The locals come to love the pluck of the Waterburys,

none more so than station porter Albert Perks.

Jeffries had earmarked the role for himself,

but Bernard Cribbins offered such sweet comic realism,

much of it ad-libbed, there was no other choice.

He is a wonderful character, capturing both the kindness

and complex pride of a Northern man.

Excuse me, young man, I've got a lot to do cos the station master's having his hair cut in Leeds,

so Perks must be about it. Perks? Who's Perks?

Me, sir, I'm Perks.

It's the casting of this film that makes it...

puts it on another level.

Because Lionel Jeffries was an actor,

he knew the kind of people he wanted.

Dinah Sheridan as the mother,

who, of course, made a big splash in Genevieve,

hadn't... In fact, had sort of more or less

gone into semi-retirement, he persuaded her to play the mother.

He had Iain Cuthbertson as the father.

Beyond that, he had the wonderful Bernard Cribbins

as Perks, the stationmaster.

All around them, if you look,

and it's very interesting to see even in the smaller roles,

there are people who are just fabulous.

Perks's wife, for example, Mrs Perks,

who has one scene more or less, or a couple of scenes,

is absolutely adorable.

We have the carter who brings them to...

up to the cottage in the middle of the night, who is...

he looks like something out of a Hammer Horror film, you know.

He looks like sort of Michael Ripper or something

with his sort of one eye.

And in a way, he's absolutely perfect for that.

The doctor is another great character.

The doctor who lives in this wonderful house.

In fact, it's where the Brontes lived.

He is a character who is called upon frequently

to minister to anybody who is sick or ill.

And yet there is a history to him that he has to convey in maybe a...

a one line, when Jenny Agutter

as Bobbie, Roberta,

says to him, "I've never seen a man cry."

And he says, "Haven't you? I cry all the time."

That's all you know about his background,

but as you've seen him first of all lying on the ground,

in this sort of churchyard, which is in front of the house,

drinking out of a bottle, you know

that somewhere there is a real history behind that character.

All of these are like little touches and they bring something,

they bring a depth of characterisation

to even the smallest character.

Jeffries was so smitten with Oakworth Station in West Yorkshire,

that he kept the name for the film,

helping to boost tourism for years to come.

Bathed in the magical spring sunshine of 1970,

the contrast with London is vital.

The understanding that the downturn in the family circumstances

might result in a better life.

'In 1925, the London North Eastern Railway,

the first to run a passenger train, celebrated its 100th anniversary

by parading some of the old engines before British royalty.

While they lasted, the steam engines

helped to transform Europe and shape America.'

Oakworth Station! Oakworth!

Oakworth.

The four magnificent Victorian locomotives

provided by the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway, were unwieldy props.

Resetting a steam train is no easy business.

Eye lines were often achieved using a runner waving a white handkerchief.

As well as a delivery service for plot, the trains represent so much.

Steam becomes a metaphor for unseen forces.

The tracks a link both to the past and to the future.

Now let's talk about trains, because they are central -

it's called The Railway Children.

What do they mean in terms of them? What do they represent in the film?

I mean, the trains are...

have a very, very big job to do

because they represent a series of different metaphors, if you like.

So, at the very beginning,

it's the breaking of the train

that begins the crisis.

The toy train breaks and that is the moment

that everything turns upside down.

Then the train takes them

to their exile, if you like, in the Yorkshire village,

but it also then starts to provide the adventure.

It becomes the train that passes through their station

and they feel that it's going to where their father is.

So they... The reason they wave to the train,

the reason they begin to engage with the train,

is because they feel that by imbuing the train

with their good wishes for their father,

their good wishes will travel to where their father is.

This is where magic comes in because that's the point where they...

they wave to the old man, isn't it?

Yes, because they are waving to the train to give love to their father

and that's... It's like they can conjure the old man up.

Yes. Almost as if, yeah, absolutely, as a magical father figure.

But then the train is also...

Gradually as it goes on, they become more perilous.

The landslide is not peril for the children, it's peril for the train.

But the children hurl themselves into danger

by standing on the tracks with these red petticoats.

And then there is this race.

This paper chase through the tunnel

where a boy falls and breaks his leg.

At that point, the train is a dragon-style monster.

And it's one of the most memorable scenes from childhood cinema.

The boy with the broken leg - on the rail. - Yeah.

Just getting it off as the train... ...as the train thunders past.

Like the pivotal 9.15 calling at stations,

the story is consciously episodic.

Nesbit's tale has the ring of Dickens.

The injustice meted out on the innocent and trials overcome

before the restoration of fortune.

The story is an odyssey of adventures:

the eccentric locals, the tunnel, the landslide.

The injured runner dragging his broken leg from the rail,

and the beneficent old gentleman played by William Mervyn,

who will be an agent of hope.

Charming. Charming.

There we are. Thank you, madam.

Yes, thank you. Quick as you can, please.

Oakworth Station!

Right away, Mr Cryer. Thank you, Mr Perks.

The famous ending is certainly sentimental,

but the film has earned its tears.

It was a tricky scene to create. The steam had to part like a curtain

to reveal Iain Cuthbertson

as the returning father, followed by Agutter's heartfelt cry.

There is a winning theatricality within Jeffries' direction.

Is there any other film that finishes with the principal cast

waving the audience goodbye?

Obviously, it is an episodic film, but essentially what drives the story

is... how will they reclaim their father?

How will he return and the family be restored?

And the way that Nesbit writes it and certainly Jeffries directs it,

it's kind of a miracle, isn't it? Yes.

And the miracle figure, the character, the angel from...

...of fate if you like, or the person who will save them

is the old gentleman on the train, who has remarkable powers.

Starts off very simple. He buys them a hamper when they need it.

But then when they ask him to search for the family

of the Russian refugee, he manages to find them.

And then Bobbie asks him if he could perhaps find her father.

And he says, "Well, yes, to be honest, I have always thought

it was a slightly dubious conviction.

I'll see if I can get him out of jail."

I think probably the most memorable moment in The Railway Children

has got to be that ending.

And if you think about the history

of great scenes in train stations in film,

this has got to be kind of one of them, of many great ones.

But when she kind of goes, "Oh, Daddy,"

and like he emerges from the steam almost like a ghost,

and you know that... not only has she been right

and justified in proclaiming his innocence this whole time,

but they are actually reunited and he has been exonerated.

It's one of the great happy endings of, you know, any family film.

Daddy! My daddy!

And it's sort of seeped into the consciousness of everyone,

in the same way as, you know, "Play it again, Sam."

It's just somehow become one of those wonderful moments in film.

And it's led up to beautifully.

Most of this film is done in very short bursts.

The scenes are quite short.

This one is... He takes his time over.

Exactly as Jeffries predicted, there was a huge appetite

for a more traditional form of storytelling in 1970.

The Railway Children might have lost out at the BAFTAs

to Ken Loach's more modern take on childhood, Kes,

but it was Jeffries' film that became firmly established

as a holiday tradition on television.

It is amusing to note that it wasn't until 2013

that the BBFC received a complaint

that the film encouraged children to walk on railway tracks.

So The Railway Children was released around Christmastime

when it came out and it pretty much immediately recouped its costs.

It was a success.

I think it came out at a time where audiences had been seeing

both on the news and in their lives, a lot of tumultuous stuff.

You know, economically, socially, a lot was going on in the world

and in England in 1970.

And so seeing this film which is quite nostalgic,

audiences do like the comfort, I think,

of seeing this kind of slightly more old-fashioned

traditional world view, for better or for worse.

And there are, of course, elements in the film

that are far more... prickly and left-wing as well,

so it does contain that too.

But I think audiences generally felt very comforted by the film

and I think that's part of the key to its success over the years.

There's something extraordinarily quietly brave about this movie,

and the reason that I say that is because of...

how many different agendas it holds.

It isn't a film that you can sort of watch and think,

"That was a charming film about a family who didn't exist

and you know, got on with life in spite of the fact...

"Well, because they were quite wealthy, and it all ended happily."

That's not the case.

The case is that, first of all, a family film, a true family film,

which means that a film that can be enjoyed by children

and their parents together at the same time,

was quite rare at that period.

There weren't many around, which is one of the reasons why

Bryan Forbes was very keen to make it

and why Lionel Jeffries took this on board,

because he wanted to go and see films like this

with his own family, his own kids, and there weren't any around.

They had the cartoons, you know,

but most of them had been stopped round about the early '60s.

So we're talking about the late '60s, '70.

So he wanted to fill that gap.

These films, and this happened a lot around this time,

there is a little bit of a generation gap in the film industry

and a little bit of a cultural clash

because things are changing around this time.

Social and sexual mores are changing, attitudes around politics,

respectability, all of these things are going on.

And so you have these different factions of the film industry.

And I think films are capable of being revolutionary or radical

or influential in a lot of different ways.

So the fact of Kes being nominated for a BAFTA

the same year as The Railway Children,

I think you could pose it as, "Well, this one film is radical

and you know, socially realist and bleak and political,

and The Railway Children is quite a sentimental family film."

That's not really a good characterisation.

I think The Railway Children is hugely influential in that it

presented adult themes about loss, about family building,

about parenting, about community,

within a children's film.

There are political undercurrents in Nesbit's writing

that Jeffries allows to flow into the film.

Among its themes, the film celebrates the power

of socialism to overcome injustice.

It's not polemical, that's the other great thing about Nesbit's work.

Political she was, but polemical she wasn't.

Nesbit was creating, there's no question about it.

She was embroidering and embellishing

a reality to create an idyll.

A sort of socialist fantasy.

But it was so rooted in reality,

so rooted in real people, real problems,

that... you never once doubt

that these people are doing

what they are saying they're doing on the screen.

And I think that that as an idea, as a sort of, a little ambition,

social ambition to aim at,

in terms of how you behave to other people,

how you conduct yourself in society, whatever society it is.

And how you... have, you know...

You are generous to those who have nothing and whatever,

without being patronising, I think is vitally important.

The fact is that it's non-exclusionary within the story

and outside of it,

which is why it is so incredible.

Which is why families still today,

if they do sit around and watch films together or go to the cinema,

each of them will find something in it.

How do you think The Railway Children, in a way,

sort of ennobles the concept of a family film,

as something so much more than just a film for children?

Because I think it's a film for adults.

It's a film that treats children seriously

and for adults it's a reminder of something incredibly precious.

I think it's because of the depth of storytelling

that Nesbit puts into it.

It's because of the themes and the ideas

and the motifs that she introduces.

It's because she sets it up to be a story

which talks about the injustice of the Dreyfus Affair,

about the need for comforting the refugee.

And about the sort of... the magic of this theme,

which draws all of that together, in this case a railway.

She writes a very, very deep,

rich set of stories,

and therefore it stands up, I think.

And that's why it's...

it's not like those stories which is,

well, at the end of the day if a family all pull together...

It's not about that. It's about all the discoveries

and the learnings that we as an audience make as well as the kids.

They're dealing with very serious themes.

They're very, you know, epic and historical themes.

But because the film is quite light in the way it jumps across them,

it's very... accessible to children.

It's accessible to discuss the Dreyfus Affair with children

if you say, "Someone's daddy was sent to jail unfairly,"

and you get it.

So that's why, I think, it has this great power,

because she doesn't shy away from enormous stories.

She just tells them in a very light way.

This film endures because it treats children as adults

and reminds adults of childhood.

Agutter was established as a star.

Thomsett became a regular of British sitcoms,

while Warren departed acting for the rag trade.

But they remain forever young.

They will always be The Railway Children.

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