BECTU History Project Interviewee Anne V Coates Interviewer Roy Fowler Track No 1 BECTU History Project Interview no: 251 Interviewee: Anne V Coates Interviewer: Roy Fowler Duration: 9:59:37 The interview was conducted over five days, non-consecutive, without a tape change at the end of each session so that they run through. Session 1: 20.05.1992 Tracks 1-3 ends 0:37:33 Session 2: 29.05.1992 Tracks 3-6 ends 0:05:17 Session 3: 09.06.1992 Tracks 6-8 ends 0:16:36 Session 4: 15.07.1992 Tracks 8-10 to end of tape Session 5: 08.09.1992 Tracks 11-14 COPYRIGHT: No use may be made of any interview material without the permission of the BECTU History Project (http://www.historyproject.org.uk/). Copyright of interview material is vested in the BECTU History Project (formerly the ACTT History Project) and the right to publish some excerpts may not be allowed. CITATION: Women’s Work in British Film and Television, Anne V Coates, http://bufvc.ac.uk/bectu/oral-histories/bectu-oh [date accessed] By accessing this transcript, I confirm that I am a student or staff member at a UK Higher Education Institution or member of the BUFVC and agree that this material will be used solely for educational, research, scholarly and non-commercial purposes only. I understand that the transcript may be reproduced in part for these purposes under the Fair Dealing provisions of the 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act. For the purposes of the Act, the use is subject to the following: • The work must be used solely to illustrate a point • The use must not be for commercial purposes • The use must be fair dealing (meaning that only a limited part of work that is necessary for the research project can be used) • The use must be accompanied by a sufficient acknowledgement. Guidelines for citation and proper acknowledgement must be followed (see above). It is prohibited to use the material for commercial purposes and access is limited exclusively to UK Higher Education staff and students and members of BUFVC. I agree to the above terms of use and that I will not edit, modify or use this material in ways that misrepresent the interviewees’ words, might be defamatory or likely to bring BUFVC, University of Leeds or my HEI into disrepute. 1 BECTU History Project Interviewee Anne V Coates Interviewer Roy Fowler Track No 1 [Track 1] I’m just checking [inaudible]. Right. And, the subject today is Anne V Coates, who is [inaudible] the doyenne of British editrices I guess one would say. [laughs] I don’t think I would go so far as to say that. Oh I would. I would. And we’re in Chelsea Park Gardens, and you can hear the bird sounds in the background. Anne, if it isn’t ungallant, may I ask you where and when you were born for the record? Yah. I was born in, on December the 12th 1925 in Reigate in Surrey. Mhm. And was it of a family that had any connection with... No, my... ...pictures or entertainment of any kind? Not at all, no. My father was a chartered surveyor, and, my mother was just a housewife really, as women were in those days. Yes. And, you as a child, what were your interests? Riding, horses. Ah. Right. Al... almost to the exclusion... Oh well that’s not quite true. When I was very small I did a lot of dancing, did ballet dancing, acrobatic, Greek, tap. Mainly ballet. I was quite good at ballet actually, I passed several exams. And they were considering me for the Royal Ballet School, only it was called Sadler’s Wells Ballet School then or 2 BECTU History Project Interviewee Anne V Coates Interviewer Roy Fowler Track No 1 something. And then I suddenly got into horses. You know how children change their whole lives. Once I discovered ponies I was off in another direction, and I really gave up dancing. Was that something of the time, do you think, or, or, do, do little girls still do that today? I think they do that today a lot. My daughter was very keen on horses; living in the centre of London, here in Chelsea, she didn’t get a lot of chance, but she loves riding. And now living in California she has her own horse. So I think... I think it’s very much in my family. My mother bred ponies as a kind of hobby and showed them and things. So, I think it was... But she came to it, I think, through me, I was the like, the horsey one to begin with. [0:01:56] Yes. What sort of education did a bright, middle-class young lady of that era receive? I went to private school, I went to private school when I was five. I didn’t have any pre-schooling. And... Called Micklefield, which was in Reigate. And then when we moved we had a very good day girls’ school, well it actually had boarders, children from abroad, as far as I can remember, called High Trees, and I went there till I was thirteen. Yes. And that was daily, bicycling, and that sort of thing. And then of course the war came, and, my father... We didn’t evacuate originally, but then my father, when we could hear, because we lived by then in Horley, in Surrey, we could hear the guns at Dunkirk, and my father got fairly panic-stricken then. And also they’d dug trenches across our fields and put – it’s laughable when you think about it, they’d dug these anti-tank trenches, and put wooden poles, like Agincourt, with spikes on them, which my kid brother and I used to jump over on our ponies. And those were supposed to 3 BECTU History Project Interviewee Anne V Coates Interviewer Roy Fowler Track No 1 stop the Germans. But, anyway, he, you know, that summer it got very unpleasant, so my father evacuated us down, took a house down in Woolacombe, in North Devon. And, we did it in a fair amount of comfort, you know. And, there was a very good girls’ school evacuated there called Bartram Gables, so though I had been going to go to another school, they decided to put me in there. And so, at that age I was at boarding school. And then my mother came back. [0:03:30] These were more or less pre-feminist days, so what... I think they were. What were the influences on, on a girl then? Well, I mean, education wasn’t so terribly important. I certainly didn’t take nearly as much advantage of education as I could have done or should have done. I mean I was interested in being out and about with my ponies. At the age of, when you think about it, it’s really strange, I mean I wasn’t really allowed to go to the cinema as a child, because they considered it infectious and amoral and not the place that children went to. We had little home movies, Mickey Mouse and Felix and things like that that my father used to run for us. But I don’t remember exactly the first time I went to the cinema. But, we used to go each year to the pantomime, in London, and saw Where the Rainbow Ends and, Toad of Toad Hall and Wind in the Willows and all those kind of things. But we didn’t go to the cinema, until I was probably, about twelve or thirteen maybe. Not even special treats, like... No. ...Snow White? 4 BECTU History Project Interviewee Anne V Coates Interviewer Roy Fowler Track No 1 No. No? No. Mm. Then we, then we did, then we started going. Because when my, my parents divorced when I was about thirteen or fourteen, and then my father would take us for a treat each school holidays, and sometimes the theatre, and then he started taking us to films. I mean, the first films I kind of remember were things like Lost Horizon. Yes. And, which to me was magical. So, in your young teens then? Yes. Yah. And... Then I saw films like Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, fell madly in love with Olivier you know, and, suddenly, that’s what really interested me in films, seeing films like that. I was reading these books in school and, you know, they were pretty stodgy and heavy and, that sort of thing, and seeing them alive on the cinema, I started becoming interested in the cinema as opposed to, just horses. Because at that time I was going to be a racehorse trainer, I was riding out for a lot of trainers, I used to go to Epsom and... Oh. And funnily enough, what is now Gatwick Airport used to be a racecourse, and there was a trainer there, so he was literally a bicycle ride from me, so I used to go and ride out the racehorses at six o’clock in the morning and... 5 BECTU History Project Interviewee Anne V Coates Interviewer Roy Fowler Track No 1 Mhm. And, then as I say, slowly, I became interested in movies, started reading up about them. As what, a fan, or, or did you get a little more serious [inaudible]? Well to begin with as a fan, and then how they were made. I mean, it’s incredible, because I didn’t know, you know when you look back on it, my children have known about film all their lives, but I mean I didn’t know..