2:57pm Friday 26th June 2009
The Railway Children (1970)
The late Labour MP for Bradford South Bob Cryer, his wife Ann and their son John (both later to become Labour MPs) featured in this EMI Film Productions adaptation of E Nesbit’s popular novel.
Directed by Lionel Jeffries and shot at Oakworth Station, Keighley Station, Oxenhope and Haworth between May 10 and June 12, 1970, the film was released in time for Christmas that year and has grown as a family favourite ever since.
The rights to the story – about a family of children living in the countryside following the arrest of their father on a trumped-up charge – were snapped up by Jeffries for £2,000.
He wrote the script which, thanks to the support of British movie great Bryan Forbes, got the financial backing (£350,000) of The Beatles’ recording company EMI.
Crew and cast totalling 80 came to West Yorkshire in the early summer of 1970. The economic impact on Keighley and Haworth must have been considerable.
The times were changing. The Swinging Sixties were about to give way to the self-indulgent and somewhat sceptical Seventies.
The Railway Children, about an earlier time, represents a piece of sustained nostalgia, hence its continued popularity in a rapidly changing mad, mad, mad world.
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