The Onedin Line
The Onedin Line is a BBC television drama series that ran from 1971 to 1980. The series was created by Cyril Abraham.
The Onedin Line
United Kingdom
English
8
91 (list of episodes)
Anthony Coburn (pilot episode), Peter Graham Scott
49-51 minutes
15 October 1971 –
26 October 1980
The series is set in Liverpool from 1860 to 1886[1] and covers the rise of a fictional shipping company, the Onedin Line, named after its owner captain James Onedin. Around this, it depicts the lives of his family, most notably his brother and partner Robert, a ship chandler, and his sister Elizabeth, giving insight into the lifestyle and customs at the time, not only at sea, but also ashore (mostly lower- and upper-middle-class). The series also illustrates some of the changes in business and shipping, such as from wooden to steel ships and from sailing ships to steamships. It shows the role that ships played in such matters as international politics, uprisings and the slave trade.
Characters[edit]
Main[edit]
James Onedin (Peter Gilmore), the younger son of Samuel Onedin, a miserly ship chandler, who left his shop and money to his elder son Robert, and a few words of advice to James. He was a 28 year old penniless sea captain with aspirations to greater things. To become a ship-owner, he marries Anne Webster, who is over 30, some years his senior. She is the spinster daughter of Captain Joshua Webster (James Hayter), owner of the topsail schooner Charlotte Rhodes. At first, it is purely a business transaction on Onedin's part and a pragmatic solution to penniless spinsterhood on Anne's part; but a warmer relationship gradually develops.
On Anne's death in childbirth, 11+ years later (at the end of the second series), James has come to love her deeply. Her portrait continues to hang prominently in his home for many years.
Several years later, James considers two possible replacement wives: wealthy and emancipated widow Caroline Maudsley, and the young heiress Leonora Biddulph (Kate Nelligan), ultimately being rejected by both.
After a slow-burning courtship, he eventually marries his daughter's governess, Letty Gaunt (Jill Gascoine). Tragedy strikes in the first year of the marriage when she, unfortunately in James's view, becomes pregnant. The memories of Anne's death have always remained in his thoughts. In due course, Letty also dies, of diphtheria.
By the final series, James is married to a third wife, the exotic Margarita Juarez, and is, by then, a grandfather. He is framed for theft and imprisoned. He is freed when Elizabeth, Baines, and Samuel discover evidence to clear his name. On his release, he takes to the sea again with Captain Baines, on business to South America, stabilising his life for the next 20 years, only to find Margarita as a stowaway. On the voyage home, she reveals that she is pregnant and unable, as was Baines as a cargo captain, to deliver the baby, so the cook is left to do the job. A baby son is delivered, with both mother and son well. James names the boy William, after Captain Baines. By the end of the series, James is in his mid-60s, or older.
James is a charismatic but morally flexible man, whose eye is always on how to make a profit from any given situation. He seems to consider himself amusing. His actions frequently lead to breaks with his nearest family and associates.
Anne Onedin (nee Webster) (Anne Stallybrass), is the spinster daughter of Captain Joshua Webster. In the mid-1850s (before the start of the series) she had been expecting to marry her sweetheart Michael Adams. However, he never returned from his first trip to sea on the "Star of Morn". Anne is now in her early 30s and has nothing to look forward to after her father's death than living on the charity of friends or the workhouse. Having rejected James's offer to form a business partnership with her father, Captain Webster, she proposes and enters into marriage with James, in full recognition that it was a business transaction. She accompanies James to Portugal on his first trip in the "Charlotte Rhodes", on their wedding day. She will subsequently travel with James on many of his trips, including to Australia, the Confederate States of America, East Africa and China.
James's feelings of jealousy become piqued when he returns with his second ship, the clipper "Pampero", to find that Anne's former suitor, Michael Adams, has returned, having previously jumped ship after mistakenly believing he was being made the scapegoat for the murder of the mate of the "Star of Morn". Adams signs on to the next voyage of the "Pampero" with James and Anne, where her conscience is affected when James covers up a death which occurred at the hands of Adams.
Anne is the conscience of James and, when she cannot take his ruthless business behaviour any longer, leaves him to live hand-to-mouth in the Liverpool slums, seriously affecting her health. They reunite after a yellow fever outbreak in Liverpool.
After James spends the money promised for their new house to buy another ship, the "Maria da Gloria", Anne has a miscarriage, brought on by carrying coal from the cellar to her kitchen. This event leads him to sell some shares in the Onedin Line to Lord and Lady Lazenby to finance a fashionable new house for Anne. As Captain Webster opines, "out of guilt".
On her reconciliation with James, she accompanies him to China in his bid to regain control of the Onedin Line. During the voyage she ignores the doctor's warning not to get pregnant, knowing how much James wants a son and heir, and, after a difficult voyage back from China, she dies giving birth to a daughter, Charlotte, less than 12 months after her previous miscarriage.
Production[edit]
Conception[edit]
Series creator Cyril Abraham had originally envisaged The Onedin Line as being about a modern shipping company with its boardroom battles and seagoing adventures, but then he discovered that almost all such companies were run by boards of anonymous executives. However, he noticed that most of these companies had their origins in the 19th century, mostly started by one shrewd and far-sighted individual who, through his own business acumen, built up a shipping line from nothing.[8] Abraham stated that James Onedin was not based on one individual but was rather an amalgamation of several characters. Suggested real-life inspirations include Victorian era shipping line owner James Baines & Co. of Liverpool (a leading character in the series was named 'Captain Baines'), Sir Samuel Cunard and various members of the Allan Line family.
An article in Woman magazine published in July 1973 featured an interview with Cyril Abraham in which he recalled how he came up with the very unusual family name Onedin.
He wanted something unique. He had decided to call the leading male character James but still had not found a surname when the BBC agreed to film the story. Then some inspiration - he said:
Actors[edit]
The series made the careers of Peter Gilmore, who played James, Anne Stallybrass, who played Anne, and Howard Lang, who played Captain William Baines, as well as being an important break for Jill Gascoine (Letty Gaunt), Warren Clarke (Josiah Beaumont), Kate Nelligan (Leonora Biddulph) and Jane Seymour (Emma Callon). Peter Gilmore and Anne Stallybass got married in 1987 and remained together until his death in 2013.
Other regular cast members included Jessica Benton (Elizabeth Frazer), Brian Rawlinson and James Garbutt (Robert Onedin), Mary Webster, (Sarah Onedin), Michael Billington / Tom Adams (Daniel Fogarty).
Other featured cast members included Philip Bond (Albert Frazer), Edward Chapman (Thomas Callon), James Warwick (Edmund Callon), John Phillips (Jack Frazer), Caroline Harris (Caroline Maudslay), James Hayter (Captain Joshua Webster), Ken Hutchison (Matt Harvey), Laura Hartong (Charlotte Onedin), Marc Harrison (William Frazer), Christopher Douglas (Samuel Onedin), Roberta Iger (Margarita Onedin), Jenny Twigge (Caroline Onedin), Cyril Shaps (Braganza), Hilda Braid (Miss Simmonds), David Garfield (Samuel Plimsoll), Robert James (Rowland Biddulph), Sylvia Coleridge (Mrs Salt), Sonia Dresdel (Lady Lazenby), Nicolette Roeg (Ada Gamble), John Rapley (Dunwoody), Stephanie Bidmead (Mrs Darling), John Sharp (Uncle Percy Spendilow), Heather Canning (Mrs Arkwright), Keith Jayne (Tom Arnold), Frederick Jaeger (Max van der Rheede), Edward Judd (Manuel Ortega), Elizabeth Chambers (Miss Gladstone), Jack Watson (Dr Darling), Paul Lavers (Francis Polter/David Teal) and Maurice Colbourne (Viscount Marston).
Victoria Thomas is a female child actress who played Charlotte Onedin in Month of the Albatross, A Clear Conscience and Undercurrent.[15]
There are six novels based on the series.
The first five are all by the series creator, Cyril Abraham:
The books are not straightforward novelisations of the television episodes, since the author introduced additional material and also changed a number of details, though dialogue from the series that Abraham had penned himself is utilised. In print, Elizabeth's child is conceived in a private room above a restaurant, not on the Charlotte Rhodes; George Callon lasted considerably longer and died in bed after suffering a stroke, not in a warehouse fire; Emma was Callon's daughter, not his niece;
Captain Webster remarried, his new partner being the irrepressible old crone Widow Malloy, an entertaining character with a repertoire of coarse remarks; Albert did not abscond to Patagonia but died aboard ship following his involvement in retrieving a kidnapped Elizabeth from Daniel Fogarty; Caroline Maudslay and Matt Harvey were omitted altogether (though Matt did appear in two short stories - see below); Jack Frazer's life was extended and he lived to see both Emma's death and Daniel's return from Australia, though his television discovery that William was not his grandson never took place.
The sixth novel, The Turning Tide (1980) ISBN 9780352305732, was written by Bruce Stewart. This deviated even more from the television series and probably from Cyril Abraham's intentions as well. Letty was depicted as a jealous harpy aiming unpleasant remarks at Charlotte; Elizabeth and Daniel ended up emigrating to Australia permanently and James became the owner of the Frazer Line.
A series of Onedin short stories by Cyril Abraham, set between Series Two and Series Three, appeared in Woman magazine in 1973: For The Love Of A Lady; Amelia; The Woman from the Streets; The Mistress and the Wife and The Choice. The plots involved: two seamen who were rivals for the same woman; Robert's encounter with the attractive Amelia; an appearance by Sarah's destitute sister Constance; a social gathering that revolves around the naming of the first Onedin steamship; and the first appearance in James' life of Leonora Biddulph.
A later tale by Abraham, For Love of the Onedins, appeared in a short-lived magazine called tvlife. This story, covering Leonora's wedding, occurs between Series Three and Series Four and features Matt Harvey, who was Elizabeth's love interest during the fourth series. There is a slanging match between Elizabeth and Sarah, who each disparage the circumstances of the other's wedding day until Leonora intervenes to restore peace.
A final story was published in the Daily Mirror, entitled Cat and Mouse. It was set during Series Four and Matt Harvey made his second appearance in print.
Cyril Abraham had planned to write a whole series of novels about the Onedin Line, but he died in 1979 after completing the fifth novel, The White Ships. The story was eventually to have seen James and Elizabeth as two wizened old autocrats, both determined not to relinquish their hold on the shipping business. James would have died as a very old man, leaving the family divided over control of the company. Cyril Abraham had intended the Onedin saga to continue right up to the 1970s.
Additional books[edit]
In June 1977, "The World of The Onedin Line" by Alison McLeay was published. The hardback book (ISBN 978-0715373989) was a historical and factual look at the world and places in which The Onedin Line was set.
Peter Graham Scott's autobiography British Television: An Insider's Story (McFarland & Company, 2000) includes a full (25-page) chapter on the setting-up of the series and his time as producer (and occasional director/writer) on the first 42 episodes, along with six behind-the-scenes black-and-white photos.
Broadcasts[edit]
The pilot was produced by Anthony Coburn and was broadcast as a one-off BBC Drama Playhouse production on 7 December 1970. It was announced in September 2010 that a copy of the pilot episode was discovered in the American Library of Congress. Until the discovery it was thought that there was no recording of the episode in existence.
The story and the cast were basically the same as the resulting series with the exception of Sheila Allen playing Anne Webster/Onedin; Anne Stallybrass took over the part for the series. The series was originally aired in the United Kingdom by the BBC, from 15 October 1971 to 26 October 1980. In the Netherlands, broadcasts started in 1972.
In the mid 1980s, the BBC repeated the series in a daytime slot. From 1992 UK Gold repeated the series in full, ending repeats in 1998, before moving to sister channel UK Gold Classics in October 1998 when that channel was launched, although it was only available on Sky Digital on weekends between 6pm-2am and the showing only lasted around six months.
In 2000 it reappeared on UK Drama and has been repeated in full on that channel in more recent years. In 2007 MAX restarted a broadcast of the first series, with one episode every weekday (Monday through Friday), starting 10 July 2007. The UK digital channel Yesterday began running the whole series from 27 July 2010. As with many of the vintage series run by the channel, the episodes are slightly cut, from the c.50m length standard in the 1970s to the c.46m standard on Yesterday. As of 6 January 2018, the UKTV channel Drama began repeating the series from the first episode at the rate of four episodes a week. Talking Pictures TV started a weekly repeat on 4 September 2022.
Home media[edit]
Home video versions of the series have been made available in various versions over the years. For series one, edited versions were made available by BBC Video on VHS in the 1990s. These edited masters saw a re-release in the UK on DVD from Universal Playback in 2003. The Australian (from ABC) and Dutch (from Memphis Belle) DVD versions of series one also derive from these edited versions. In North America, Canadian company BFS Video released the first four episodes uncut on VHS in 2001, with these and the next four episodes arriving on DVD in two double-disc sets two years later.
It would not be until 2007 that all 15 episodes of the first series became available uncut on DVD, in the UK from 2 entertain in a four-disc set.
Series two follows a similar pattern, with edited versions arriving on VHS and DVD in the UK from the same companies listed above. The version from the Netherlands is sourced from the same masters. The Australian version, however, has all 14 episodes uncut on four discs, and was released in 2008.
Series three to eight are available on DVD from Memphis Belle in the Netherlands, and all are uncut. All series are also available in Germany.
Series three and four are available uncut in the UK and Australia.
All current DVD editions are uncut, apart from the Australian series one and the Dutch series one and two. The earlier edited UK versions of the first two series are still available from a number of sites.