by Michael Gill
Highlanders was a project which had grown from Royal Heritage days, when Michael, happy to be in Scotland again, though in rather grander circles than during his student days, mentioned to the then Lord Chamberlain, Lord Maclean, that he would love to make a series about Scotland, and particularly the Highlands. Lord Maclean responded immediately: ‘You must meet my cousin Fitzroy.’ The meeting was arranged for a day when Lord Maclean, as clan chief, honoured Sir Fitzroy Maclean for reclaiming his hereditary territory of the island of Dunconnel. Of Fitzroy’s many daring military exploits, this was the most recent, though no battles were involved. He had rowed out to the small uninhabited island off the west coast of Scotland and planted the Maclean standard, unopposed. Fitzroy was enthusiastic about television, and delighted to collaborate with Michael on the making of a series about the Highland clans. Collaboration began with enjoyable lunches and visits to the Macleans’ beautiful Adam house on the edge of Loch Fyne. Commissioning editors were less enthusiastic, and at one of our meetings the subject matter swerved to another passion of Fitzroy’s, Russia. He felt it important to bring to general attention the many nations and cultures which coexisted under the banner of the then monolithic-seeming Soviet Union. Michael, Fitzroy and Jerome Gary, a young American producer who had joined the team, made a far-reaching reconnaissance trip over all the Russias, and beyond. It was at the furthest point of this journey, in the Ferghana valley on the borders of China, that Michael felt an overwhelming urge to come home. It was 1981 and I was nine months pregnant with our daughter Chloe. Fitzroy and Jerome waved Michael off, and without a ticket, and without any Russian, miming imminent fatherhood, Michael managed to board plane after plane through a very long day, until he arrived at our home unannounced at midnight.
The Russian series was made, but not by us. Michael’s old collaborator Peter Montagnon had started his own independent production company, Antelope (fast on its feet and smells good). Ted Turner had taken an interest in the company, and Fitzroy had persuaded Turner that his series on Russia should be made.
Later Fitzroy suggested a short series on Yugoslavia, where he had spent so much of the Second World War fighting with Tito’s partisans. It was ten years after Tito’s death, and the strains which eventually blasted Yugoslavia apart were beginning to show. Fitzroy was deeply attached to the country, and was the only foreigner at the time to have obtained permission to buy a house there. He owned a small palace on the island of Korcula, where we took Chloe for her first foreign holiday. Visiting Yugoslavia with Fitzroy was rather like being involved in a royal progress, though with real affection from the people. If we ever went out without Fitzroy, we found that six-month-old Chloe was quite a good substitute crowd-pleaser, babies also being warmly welcomed everywhere in Yugoslavia.
Eventually Highlanders was made, commissioned by ITV to mark the two hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the return of Bonnie Prince Charlie. For a man who had named his two sons Charles and James, it wasn’t a bad pretext. As Michael had noted about Iona, many of the locations were harder to reach than anywhere else in the world. Seas and mountains made short journeys full of complications. I was producing another series for our company at the same time; Nomads, which looked at the lives of travelling people in Mauritania, Mongolia, Siberia and Kenya. Though by definition the nomads were hard to reach, I often thought that the logistics of our series were proving much less complicated than Michael’s Highlanders.
The last film that Michael directed was very close to his heart, a film about Vermeer. It was made for Melvyn Bragg’s South Bank Show, the first time that Melvyn and Michael had worked together since the Monitor days of the early 1960s, and the impetus was given by the international Vermeer exhibition in 1996. Michael had always loved Vermeer’s work, and the chance to spend months examining the paintings, teasing out their meanings, and using the buildings and landscapes of Holland to evoke the age was a pleasure indeed, as was working again with Dutch art historians, fixers and scientists.
Michael explored other projects in the years that followed; a film about Matisse based upon Hilary Spurling’s biography, films about China, changing so rapidly from the closed society he had visited in 1973; but the last series he was to produce was The Face of Russia, written and presented by James Billington, the Librarian of Congress. It had started life as a tenpart series, an acknowledgement of all that Russia had brought culturally to the world, at a moment when Russian turmoil was exporting mainly mafiosi and millionaires. Michael didn’t direct any of them; instead they were made with flair by Murray Grigor, a friend and colleague of long standing. The programmes dwindled to three, cramming in Russia’s journey from religious art to modernism, its unique architecture and the literature which sprang into being fully-formed in the nineteenth century, perhaps, it has been said, following the building of the European, classically inspired St Petersburg, which could allow Russians to step outside themselves, at least theoretically, and to look back, to examine themselves and their world. The last programme dealt with the equally extraordinary birth of Russian music, also in the nineteenth century, and with Russia’s influential twentieth-century cinema.
At the end of these films, in 1998, Michael seemed tired. He was 75, and, though he had never envisaged retirement (he told me early in our relationship that he would like to go like Humphrey Jennings, the brilliant documentary director of the 1940s, who went over a cliff backwards while making a film, framing with his hands a ‘marvellous shot’; that sounded good, until I learned that Jennings was only 42 at the time), it began to seem unlikely that Michael would make another film. He worked on his memoir, recalling his early childhood and the war years. He admired our teenage daughter, in her last years at school and soon to go to his old university, Edinburgh. Thinking that deafness played its part in his gradually increasing absence from the life around him, I started on a round of doctors and therapists. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease in 2000. Since then the scope of his life has quietly diminished. Age Concern has helped, as have sensitive and thoughtful carers, doctors and specialists. A talented artist visitor from Age Concern, David Clegg, helped Michael to finish this memoir. David then set up an art project, working with artists Becky Shaw and Eric Fong, who collaborated with five of Age Concern’s dementia clients to create some impressive and extraordinary works of art. Over a period of several months Becky and David visited Michael. They taped a continuing conversation with him, from which Becky drew complex coloured diagrams of the ebbs and flows of the conversation. These mind maps were studded with the images that Michael had described, from grass-skirted Julia in the Louisiades, to horses from cave paintings, to the Mitchell bombers of the war years. Becky compared Michael’s mind to a museum, in which much of value was hidden, but many things could not be retrieved. She constructed, from the mind maps, a large perspex structure, a kind of three-dimensional maze, in which were embedded these icons of Michael’s life. It was displayed at the Serpentine Gallery in 2003, as part of Remembering the Present, the Age Concern project. Family and many friends came, some of whom could find the episodes in which they figured frozen in the perspex museum. It seemed that creativity hadn’t ended after all.
Conversation with Michael becomes increasingly surreal, but bears rewards. The title of this afterword comes from a conversation he had recently with Wendy Ewald, the photographer daughter of Michael’s beautiful cousin Carolyn. She was discussing the pleasures and pains of writing down memories, and he spoke of his increasing difficulty in capturing the words. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘they’re like ants on snow’.
Mary Gill, my mother.
My father, George Arnold Gill, served in the First World War as an officer in the Tank Corps.
This is me at fourteen months being held by my nurse.
My father relaxing in our garden.
My mother and her younger brother Clifford.
My mother’s parents, William and Emily Taylor.
The wedding of Sarah Jane Taylor, my great-aunt, at Cro
ft House, Upper Batley, 1893. My mother is sitting just in front of the bride, with her brothers Tom and Clifford on either side of her.
Fred and Will Taylor, my great-uncles (seated on the right) on their ranch in Colorado, 1884.
Here is my great-grandmother Taylor, in formal pose for a Victorian studio photographer in Scarborough.
William Taylor, my grandfather.
My grandmother, Emily Thomas Taylor.
My grandmother Taylor (on the right) with a friend.
Henry Talbot, my grandmother’s admirer (whom I called Tor), with me in the garden at Winchester.
At Winchester with my grandmother.
My grandfather, George Gill, and me.
Out and about with my mother at Herne Bay.
This is me at eight.
Here I am in my spinal chair with my father, grandfather and dog Patch.
My cousin, Carolyn Taylor.
Stephen Coltham, my tutor, who was an important influence on me as a boy.
No. 28 Squadron RAF, Skegness, 1942. I’m in the back row at the extreme left; Wyndham Davidson, second row from the front, extreme right, looking very serious; John O’Connor, our wild Irishman, in the second row from the front, second left.
Christmas Day menu, 1943.
Jimmy Blair and me in Dublin, September 1943.
Pilot Officer Michael Gill.
The ops board at Hartford Bridge on D+1, 7 June 1944, listing aircraft and crews of the three resident bomber squadrons.
An RAF Mitchell bomber takes off to attack a target in Northern France shortly after D-Day, 1944. (Imperial War Museum)
No. 137 Wing, Hartford Bridge, 1944. I am in the back row, seventh from the right.
The special fog dispersal aid ‘Fido’ in operation at an RAF bomber station, with a Lancaster taxying in the background. We had ‘Fido’ at Hartford Bridge. (Imperial War Museum)
The King and Queen leaving the Officers Mess at Hartford Bridge with the station commander, Group Captain Macdonald, September 1944.
Medal presentation parade at Hartford Bridge, September 1944.
Enjoying a drink at a café on the Champs Elysees with Hillerby, our Met Officer.
In the ops room at Vitry-en-Artois, near Douai, in Northern France, 1945. I’m the one with the pipe.
Germany, 1945. I’m on the right. We both had revolvers.
A knocked-out German Tiger tank on the Vimy–Lens road. Sergeant Metcalfe, Les Rates, me, Leading Aircraftmen Boulter and Nichols, April 1945.
Ruined Cologne, but the cathedral survived.
In Germany, 1946.