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By Root 383 0

and lions’ tails and as they approached they began beating their spears on their shields and singing a slow lament mourning the dead in battle. It was an incredible sight and sound. What it must have seemed like to the handful of British soldiers holding down their position at Rorke’s Drift I can only begin to imagine. Their bravery resulted in the award of eleven Victoria Crosses in one day – a unique event in British military history. Of course, as anyone who knows their British military history will have instantly spotted, the final Zulu assault on Rorke’s Drift didn’t involve just two thousand warriors – there were six thousand. Stanley and Cy were four thousand short. Cy Endfield, ever resourceful, had the solution. In the last scene the camera pans round to show the Zulus lining the hilltops in the distance, looking down on the British below. It’s an awesome sight and you would never guess that each of the two thousand warriors up there was holding a bit of wood with two shields and head dresses stuck on the top, instantly trebling the numbers. Genius – and nearly forty years before Peter Jackson’s spectacular CGI special effects in Lord of the Rings.

The Zulu warriors weren’t the only Africans on set. One of the scenes involved a traditional women’s tribal dance and we’d recruited a mix of dancers, some from the tribal lands and some who had left and gone to work in Johannesburg. There was going to be a problem with the censor back home, though, as the Zulu costume involved nothing more than a little bead apron. Cy Endfield, resourceful once again, organised the costume department into making two hundred pairs of black knickers, which would appease the British Board of Film Censors while retaining a veneer of authenticity. He’d just managed to persuade the tribal dancers to wear the knickers when he was told that the city girls were insisting on also wearing bras. This was the ultimate test for a film director: how to get knickers on one set of dancers and bras off the others. He’d just about got it sorted it and the camera was rolling when the cameraman shouted, ‘Cut! We’ve got a lady here with no drawers on!’ The culprit was pulled out of the line. ‘What’s the problem now?’ Cy asked the translator, exasperated. The translator went over and spoke to the dancer. ‘She’s not used to them,’ was the reply when she came back. ‘She just forgot.’ That’s the first and last time I’ve heard that excuse on a film set . . .

South Africa was still in the grip of apartheid. I hadn’t known anything about the politics of the country when I arrived, but it made me increasingly uncomfortable to see how badly the foremen treated the black workers on the set – uncomfortable, and then plain angry. One day, one of the workers made a simple mistake, but instead of telling him off, the brute of a foreman drew back his fist and smashed him in the face. I couldn’t believe it – and started running over, shouting as I went. Stanley got there before me and I have never witnessed fury like it. He fired the foreman on the spot and got all the other white foremen together. ‘From now on,’ he said, ‘on this set, no one treats their workers like this.’ We all shared his outrage, and it was fuelled by another incident. One of our English foremen had ‘gone native’, as you might say, and had taken up with three Zulu wives. We thought nothing of this – he seemed to be having a good time – until one day filming was interrupted by the sound of helicopters overhead. It was the police. They were going to close filming down. Our foreman had committed a crime under the South African miscegenation laws that forbade sexual contact between blacks and whites. Unbelievably, punishment was either a long prison sentence or twelve lashes with a whip – or both. We realised that one of the Afrikaans foremen must have informed on us. With diplomatic skills that wouldn’t have disgraced the UN, Stanley brokered a deal: the foreman would leave the country that night and we would stay to finish the film. It left us all with a very nasty taste in our mouths – and me with