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In the summer of 1960 Barney Platts-
Mills’s father found himself sitting next
to the film director Lewis Gilbert in the
pavilion of Lord’s cricket ground and
took the opportunity to ask him what
he could do with a 15-year-old son who
had just run away from public school
and wanted to be an actor.
The director gave the boy a job at
Shepperton Studios, where Platts-Mills
found himself working in the cutting
room on Gilbert’s film adaptation of
The Greengage Summer, starring Ken-
neth More and Susannah York. Within
weeks he was working on Stanley Ku-
brick’s classic Spartacus and then on
John Schlesinger’s A Kind of Loving.
Orson Welles was in residence at Shep-
perton at the same time and Platts-
Mills recalled trying to avoid the great
man’s bulk in the narrow corridors.
It was a glittering entry point and the
youthful Platts-Mills moved up the
ladder to become second assistant
editor at Pinewood Studios, where he
found “an almost military hierarchy”.
He jacked in the job and headed for
Corfu, where he spent the summer
“sleeping on mountain tops and booz-
ing in tiny late-night tavernas” until he
was taken in by the explorer Freya
Stark.
Back in Britain he moved into televi-
sion as an editor on ITV’s current affairs
flagship programme World In Action.
He did not enjoy that much either and
at 22 set up his own production com-
pany to create “accessible, free, work-
ing-class cinema”. Three years later he
directed Bronco Bullfrog, which as a cult
chronicle of 1960s British working-
class life has come to be ranked along-
side such films as Saturday Night and
Sunday Morning and Ken Loach’s Kes. It
was shot over six weeks on 35mm, cost-
ing a meagre £18,000 to film on location
in the East End of London and using a
cast of non-professional actors. The
idea came out of a documentary Platts-
Mills had made about Joan Littlewood’s
Theatre Workshop and the drama
classes she ran in a draughty hall in
Newham, east London, to keep potent-
ially delinquent boys off the streets.
Making Everybody’s an Actor, Shake-
speare Said was not the happiest experi-
ence. He admired Littlewood enor-
mously but the two fell out. “She was
very vain. Like all directors, she thought
that anyone who did anything other
premiere, jeering Princess Anne as she
walked up the red carpet.
“Princess Anne Met by Skinhead Mob
at Film Premiere”, ran a headline in The
Daily Telegraph. Yet the princess accept-
ed Shepherd’s invitation to see Bronco
Bullfrog at the ABC in Mile End the
following week. When she turned up,
Shepherd bent down to kiss the royal
hand and was dragged away by police.
Bronco Bullfrog was subsequently
screened at the 1970 Cannes film festi-
val and won a Writers’ Guild award. Yet
the distributors, British Lion, did not
know what to do with it, so they tried to
bury the film and the master negative
was dumped in a skip. “Fortunately, oneof the film lab employees found it and
picked it up,” Platts-Mills recalled.
“Otherwise it would have gone forev-
er.” The National Film Theatre event-
ually restored the original print and re-
screened Bronco Bullfrog to renewed
critical acclaim in 2010.
Two years after Bronco Bullfrog, he
wrote and directed Private Road (1971),
starring Susan Penhaligon and Bruce
Robinson. Shot in colour with a profes-
sional cast and a larger crew, Private
Road was a conscious effort to follow a
more mainstream model and won a
Golden Leopard at the Locarno Inter-
national Film Festival. Yet as an inde-
pendent film-maker Platts-Mills foundhaving to worry about distribution
deals, financial returns and “ice-cream
sales” exhausting. He chose to give up
producing and concentrate on screen-
writing, but he made a rare return to di-
recting in 1982 with Hero, a medieval
fable of sorcery and witchcraft set in the
Scottish Highlands. It was his last pro-
duction until Zohra: A Moroccan Fairy-
tale (2010), a love letter to the country
that he had made his second home.
His youthful enthusiasm for life and
all it had to offer never deserted him
and he was proud that into old age
friends were still telling him it was
about time he “grew up”.
He is survived by his long-term part-
ner, Catriona Guinness, the daughter of
Bryan Guinness, 2nd Baron Moyne,
and his children, Roland, a master car-
penter, and Ruby, from his second mar-
riage to Sara Wallace. He was previous-
ly married to Caroline Younger, an art-
ist. Both marriages ended in divorce.
Barney Platts-Mills was born in 1944
in Colchester, Essex, one of six brothers.
His mother, Janet (née Cree), was an art-
ist and his father, John Platts-Mills, was
a left-wing Labour MP in Clement At-
tlee’s government and a barrister, who in
the 1960s was defence counsel to the
Great Train Robbers and Ronnie Kray.
Educated at University College School,
London, and at Bryanston School,
Blandford, Dorset, Barney kicked
against authority from an early age.
There were the trappings of privilege.
He owned a yacht, which he moored in
a bay near Cowes to watch Jimi Hen-
drix and the Who playing at the Isle of
Wight pop festival, and he was a gover-
nor of the BFI. Yet he never lost his egal-
itarian impulse and when a bohemian
acquaintance accused him of being
“bourgeois”, he responded by selling off
his priceless antique furniture for next
to nothing. His later working life was
devoted to writing an opera called The
Aviators as well as working on film and
video projects giving voice to disadvan-
taged youth and prison inmates. “I
would rather see the video stumblings
of a schoolkid or any amateur than the
technically polished output of film
school alumni,” he said.Barney Platts-Mills, film director, was
born on October 15, 1944. He died after a
period of ill health on October 5, 2021,
aged 76Dr David Williams
A&E consultant who led the response to disasters in London and campaigned for casualty doctors to be specially trained
When Dr David Williams opened his
front door to a policeman, he knew that
another disaster had hit the capital. On
the morning of December 12, 1988, a
constable knocked on the door of Willi-
ams’s home in Wimbledon to inform
him of a fatal train crash near Clapham
Junction station. Many of the 484 in-
jured passengers were taken to the
A&E department at St Thomas’ Hospi-
tal on the South Bank, where Williams
was clinical director.
A founder of emergency medicine as a
specialism in the UK, Williams had
spent 15 years preparing hospitals for
this sort of incident, but he never got
used to the high-speed police car jour-
neys through London. Indeed, he often
worried that he would end up as a
patient in a casualty ward himself.
Williams could also be summoned
from a family holiday because he was
the sole A&E consultant at St Thomas’.
On August 20, 1989, he was with his
family at a campsite in France when he
was called back to London to lead the
team treating 79 survivors from the
Marchioness, a pleasure steamer that
sank in the Thames after a late night
collision with another vessel, resulting
in the deaths of 51 people.
The importance of the developing
specialism began to be recognised at the
Palace of Westminster directly opposite
St Thomas’ across the river. After his
work overseeing the treatment of six
victims of an IRA bomb detonated on a
bus in Aldwych in February 1996, Willi-
ams was invited to Downing Street
where he was thanked by the prime min-
ister, John Major. Three years later, in
April 1999, Williams was again widely
praised for leading the team that
dealt with an influx of patients,
several maimed, after a racist
neo-Nazi nail bomb attack in a
busy market at Electric Ave-
nue in Brixton.
David Williams was born in
Bramhall, Cheshire, in 1938 to
Frank Williams, a senior en-
gineer at the BBC, and
Kathleen (née Davies).The family moved to London when he
was a small child and he recalled watch-
ing the royal wedding in 1947 from the
BBC stand outside Westminster Abbey.
After attending Highgate School in
London, Williams spent a year as an
English-Speaking Union scholar at the
Hotchkiss School in Connecticut,
where he played Estragon in one of the
first amateur productions of Waiting for
Godot. He went on to study medicine at
Trinity College, Cambridge, and St
Thomas’ Hospital. After house jobs
across London, he adapted to the sleep
deprivation required to be a young
hospital doctor as resident medi-
cal officer at the Middlesex Hos-
pital in central London.
He trained as a psychiatrist
and GP, but in 1973 spotted an
advert in the British Medical
Journal for a pilot pro-
gramme to train 32
A&E consultants.
After completing
the training he
was appointed
as the first A&Econsultant at the Middlesex Hospital in
November 1974. Within weeks he was
in charge of 20 patients who had been
injured in a series of IRA bombs placed
in postboxes across London.
In 1977 he married Anne Walker
Watson, a modern languages teacher,
whom he had met when they were stu-
dents working in the French Alps. She
survives him with their son, Jonathan, a
children’s social worker, and their
daughter, Antonia, a senior civil ser-
vant. He is also survived by two stepchil-
dren: Lucy, a GP, and Martin, a garden
centre director. His children realised
the importance of his work when they
joined him on his rounds at the A&E de-
partment on Christmas morning.
After moving to St Thomas’ Hospital
in 1984, Williams was at the forefront of
developing A&E as a specialism, serv-
ing as president of the British Associa-
tion for Emergency Medicine from 1987
to 1990. His great achievement was to
navigate what he called the “diplomatic
quagmire” of persuading six royal col-
leges to support the formation in 1993
of the intercollegiate Faculty of A&EMedicine, now the Royal College of
Emergency Medicine (RCEM). Willi-
ams was the founding president and
colleagues pointed to his legacy of
more than 3,000 consultants working
in A&E medicine in the UK today and
10,000 RCEM members. “We now have
a royal college where our training pro-
grammes and exams are respected and
recognised in many countries,” said Taj
Hassan, a former RCEM president.
After retirement from Guy’s and St
Thomas’ in 1993, he became a clinical
adviser to the Health Ombudsman, a
member of the Criminal Injuries Com-
pensation Appeals Panel and a magis-
trate. Having kept his mind active, he
continued to play bridge to a very high
standard, winning a three-day compe-
tition in the week before he died.Dr David Williams, A&E consultant, was
born on April 23, 1938. He died of
respiratory failure on October 3, 2021,
aged 83Williams was a pioneer
in emergency medicine Email: [email protected]Anne Gooding and Del Walker in Bronco Bullfrog (1970). Top: Platts-Mills in 2009than what she’d suggested were
damned fools,” he recalled. Yet
he found a deep empathy with
the boys he filmed as they im-
provised scenes from their
lives. One of them was Del
Walker, a 16-year-old ap-
prentice plumber who with
several other boys subse-
quently approached Platts-
Mills and suggested they make a
“proper film”. In consultation with
his cast, he came up with a script
about a pair of runaway teenage lovers,
offered refuge by a young tough whose
nickname gave Bronco Bullfrog its title.
He cast Walker as the male lead and
Anne Gooding, a cashier from the Co-
op, as his heroine. “We got them time off
work and paid them double the wages,”
Platts-Mills recalled. “And we had more
in common than appearances would
suggest. I was telling a story about the
impropriety of telling 15-year-olds what
to do. I’d left school as soon as I could,
the day after my 15th birthday. In thosedays, as far as I was concerned they
could blow all the schools up.”
When the film opened at the Cameo
in Oxford Circus, critics were ecstatic.
“It sends your heart leaping,” wrote Al-
exander Walker in the Evening Stan-
dard. “A smashing and sobering Cock-
ney film,” said Penelope Gilliat in The
New Yorker when the movie opened in
Manhattan, where Platts-Mills hung
out with Andy Warhol and managed to
set fire to his apartment. In The Times
John Russell Taylor praised “a piece of
neo-realism far more rigorous and ef-
fective than anything the Italians at-
tempted even in the movement’s hey-
day”. He went on to write: “One can on-
ly hope it is given a chance to reach the
audience it deserves.”
It was not to be. Despite the critical
acclaim, within three weeks of its open-
ing Bronco Bullfrog was pulled to make
way for Laurence Olivier’s Three Sisters.
Some 200 members of an East End
youth club, led by Sam Shepherd, the
ex-Borstal boy who played the title role
in Platts-Mills’ film, protested at theThe Times critic wrote
that he hoped it reached
the audience it deserved
Barney Platts-Mills
Film director with egalitarian instincts whose best work Bronco Bullfrog was a cult chronicle of Sixties working-class life
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