We have ways of pulling your pints

ALONG with a couple of fellow students, I was staying in digs in Swansea in 1961. In those days, cinema-going was at its peak. The town had a wide selection of cinemas, and that summer was notable because of the release of one of the all-time great war films, The Guns Of Navarone. All the principal actors were outstanding — Gregory Peck, Anthony Quinn, David Niven — and among the minor roles few who have seen the movie will have forgotten the tall, fine-featured SS officer Hauptsturmfuhrer Sessler, with his short, almost white blond hair. His cold-eyed inhumanity to the captured sabotage party is seared in my memory. From time to time that summer, our digs hosted a series of interesting characters, including a jolly Indian oil executive and a South African industrialist’s son, who drove an MGA sports car. Then one week, a tall fellow, fine featured and with almost white blond hair, appeared at

dinner. He looked vaguely familiar, and then the penny dropped. He was George Mike ll, the Lithuanian-Australian actor who, with his typical Aryan looks, was in demand to play German soldiers in films including The Great Escape and Sea Of Sand. He was in a touring company with Jessie Matthews, the musical star, appearing in the Peter Shaffer play Five Finger Exercise. George was charming company as he regaled us at dinner with gossip about the making of The Guns Of Navarone two years before. The following Monday, the play was to open in Bristol and, as he was at a loose end, I invited him to spend the weekend at my parents’ pub in a small mining village in the South Wales valleys. The film had been screened there some weeks before and had been a talking point for many. In return for his stay, George insisted on serving in the pub’s two bars. On that busy Saturday night, it was hard to imagine a more incongruous sight: the reviled SS Officer Sessler amiably pulling pints of Hancock’s Home Brewed. I have never forgotten the expressions on the faces of our customers. Thanks for some great memories, George.

Colin Drury, Dinas Powys, Vale of Glamorgan.