Director: Brian Desmond Hurst
Release Date: July 1949
The Sunday Mirror, 25 July 1948, reported that filming, featuring Yusef Ramart, standing in for James Donald, and Jean Kent had recently taken place in Hyde Park. However the surviving scene in the film appears to show Donald and Kent by the The Fountains in Kensington Gardens. On 30 July the Daily Mirror noted that ‘A full day’s sunshine is worth £10,000 to a unit on location with a colour camera. So “Trottie True,” Jean Kent’s latest film, which has a lot of outside-London scenes, is at least £50,000 to the good as a result of the heat wave.’ The Gloucester Journal added, 28 August, that ‘Roehampton housewives out doing their morning shopping the other day wondered if their eyes had decived them’ when they spotted ‘a man in the nattiest of suit of the 1904 period, a monocle and a dashing moustache’ looking for a tobacconists. The man was Michael Medwin who while he ‘was on location in Richmond Park for the filming of scenes for “Trottie True” had run out of cigarettes and gone shopping in costume. The Falkirk Herald, 22 September, continued that the Richmond Park scenes had utilised ‘the old-fashioned horse-brakes, tightly packed with Gaiety Girls and boys in the costumes of the Edwardian period, [which] made an incongruous picture against the modern traffic.’ A report in the Uxbridge & West Drayton Gazette, 10 September, noted that filming had taken place at Vine Street Station, Uxbridge, on Wednesday [8 September] when ‘The unit “shot” the scene on platform one. Drawn up at the platform were two old-fashioned coaches and an equally ancient engine, lent by British Railways.’ Sadly the scenes ended up on the cutting room floor.
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Jean Kent, playing Trottie True, riding in Hyde Park with the Serpentine in the distance.
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Kent arriving at Debenham House, 8 Addison Road, West Kensington.
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Kent in the entryway to Debenham House.
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The reverse view of the entryway to Debenham House as James Donald arrives.
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Kent's view as she looks from a window at Debenham House into Addison Road.
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Dilys Laye, playing the young Trottie, on the stage at the Bedford Theatre, Camden High Street.
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Laye and Harold Scott in Gloucester Crescent, Camden Town.
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Kent on the stage of the Bedford Theatre.
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The True family home at 24 Gloucester Crescent with Inverness Street to the right.
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Postman Ian Carmichael and maid Gretchen Franklin in Gloucester Crescent looking up at a balloon.
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The view from Inverness Street into Gloucester Crescent.
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Donald and Kent at The Fountains, Kensington Gardens, at the top of The Long Water.
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Passing through Richmond Park en route to a picnic.
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Kent rides up to find Andrew Crawford sitting near the Albert Memorial, Kensington Gardens.
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A nice way to eliminate some white space.