Sadly 1903, the actual centenary year of the Scarlet Pimpernel, has come and gone without particular celebration, but I am glad that Gateway Magazine is giving me this opportunity to remember the achievements of Baroness Orczy, that extraordinary Hungarian Anglophile who was the creator of one of English fiction’s most charismatic heroes - Sir Percy Blakeney, otherwise known as the Scarlet Pimpernel.

Emmuska Magdalena Rosalia Maria Josefa Orczy was born into an ancient land-owning family at Tarna-Ors in Hungary on 23rd September 1865. Her memories of early girlhood, ‘so gay, so romantic, so mediaeval’, were recorded in her autobiography Links in the Chain of Life (1947) and provide no explanation of how she was later to become an ardent Anglophile. Appreciation of life on the baronial estates, with gipsy music and dancing and lots of festivities, was ultimately soured by the ‘grumbles’ of her father’s peasant employees who so greatly resented his plans to mechanize his farms that they burned his crops, stables and farmsheds. Emmuska was then uprooted from the countryside to live in Budapest, where her father became Supreme Administrator of the National Theatre. She was sent to convent schools in Brussels and Paris, and came to England for the first time in the 1880s when her family decided to settle in London. Despite the fact that her knowledge of English was limited, Emmuska quickly felt at home. Writing in her autobiography of her passion for her adopted country she said that ‘there was nothing English’ about her ‘except my love, which is all English’.

It is thus fitting that Emmuska, who wrote over sixty books and half a dozen plays, is best remembered for her quintessentially English creation - Sir Percy Blakeney, the Scarlet Pimpernel. This elegant and dashingly enigmatic hero deftly and doggedly (throughout ten novels and two volumes of short stories!) managed to whisk potential victims away from the fury of the French revolutionary mob and the ever-devouring ‘Mam’zelle Guillotine’.

One hundred years on from his literary conception, the Scarlet Pimpernel remains a cult figure; he has joined the ranks of vivid characters such as Cinderella, Sherlock Holmes and Billy Bunter who are known even to hundreds of thousands of people who have never read the stories in which they are featured.

In some ways Emmuska seems almost as colourful as Sir Percy. As schoolgirls she and her sister wrote and acted in plays of high adventure and romance (a combination which she was eventually to exploit with panache in the Pimpernel books); these imaginary ‘doughty deeds of valour’ represented only one aspect of her talents. She painted well and was musical but, having a perfectionist streak was reluctant to embark on any career in which she might be ‘destined for mediocrity’. Her youthful path appears to have been littered with celebrities who took a great interest in her. Lord Leighton (then Sir Frederick) who was President of the Royal Academy persuaded her father to send Emmuska to art school. She attended the West London Art School and then Heatherley’s; whilst still a student she had three pictures hung in the Royal Academy, but nevertheless decided that painting was not her vocation. Earlier, she had been on friendly terms with the composer Liszt who, although ‘shaking his head sadly’ at her piano-playing had affectionately dubbed her ‘ma poésie’. Emmuska yearned to become a student at Cambridge, but her father forbade this. Fortunately her time at Heatherley’s produced a rewarding spin-off, for there she met Montague Barstow, an artist and book-illustrator, whom she married in 1894. She was later to say that their fifty-year long relationship was from beginning to end one of perfect happiness and understanding, of perfect friendship and communion of thought’.

Emmuska’s autobiography provides atmospheric vignettes of late-Victorian and Edwardian upper-crust London. She attended glittering assemblies in ballgowns with tulle skirts and satin or Moiré bodices. When like ‘every girl in London’ she aspired to an eighteen-inch waist she relished the extravagant fashions of bustles and waterfall backs, and flounced edges on her skirts and frillings on her boots even though these were disfigured by mud during London’s frequently rainy days. She heard Paderewski play, saw Edouard Grieg conduct his Peer Gynt Suite in the St. James’s Hall, and continued to meet many distinguished personalities in the field of the arts. One of her specially cherished memories was of seeing Ellen Terry and Henry Irving in Shakespearean productions at the Lyceum, but as well as serious drama she enjoyed the music-hall (upon which the Princess Alexandra of Wales had conferred respectability when she went to performances at the Alhambra). Always appreciative of larger than life characters, Emmuska responded enthusiastically to Lottie Collins’s singing of Tarara-boom-de-ay!, to Vesta Tilley’s male impersonations, Marie Lloyd’s hearty ditties and Albert Chevalier’s pathos.

Fulfilling, however, as her life had become she was still determined to make her mark creatively. Rather surprisingly, in view of her childhood flair for creating plays and stories, she did not seriously consider a writing career until she heard that two ‘ordinary’ girls from Derbyshire had been able to earn £5 for having a story published in a magazine. In her view it was strange that these girls ‘from the wilds’ who knew nothing of life (!) and no-one of importance had achieved literary success. Surely she, who had known ‘clever people’, was much travelled and had ‘studied art and music, history and drama’ could also ‘write something’. Her husband urged her on, and in the year when her first and only child (a son) was born, Emmuska had her first story ‘Juliette’ published in the Royal Magazine, and a novel The Emperor’s candlesticks published by Pearsons.

A further step on the ladder of her literary aspirations was climbed on a foggy afternoon in London when, going home on a horse-bus after a National Gallery visit, she was so struck by the city’s dark, silent and mysterious atmosphere that she decided to write some stories of detection and suspense. Montague Barstow suggested that she should resist any temptation to become yet another imitator of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and indeed her sleuthing character turned out to bear little resemblance to Sherlock Holmes. The Old Man in the Corner series of stories appeared first in the Royal Magazine and was later published as three separate collections: The Case of Miss Elliott (1905), The Old Man in the Corner (1909) and Unravelled Knots (1926). As well as being very different from Holmes, Orczy’s sedentary, astute and string-knotting detective contrasts sharply with the intrepidly active Scarlet Pimpernel, whom he preceded.

Hardly a sympathetic personality, the Old Man in the Corner (who remains nameless throughout the series) is more concerned with demonstrating his own cleverness than with justice. Without moving from his corner seat in an ABC teashop, where he consumes many glasses of milk and hunks of cheesecake, the Old Man solves case after case which has baffled the police investigators. Background and clues are presented to him by Polly Burton, a young reporter, whose inefficiency at her trade is suggested by the fact that the string-fiddling sleuth often seems to know more about the cases even from the outset than she does! Despite this tetchily arrogant armchair detective’s unappealing qualities, the series captured the public imagination for a period, possibly because the author made up for shortage of skill in constructing her sleuthing puzzles by providing plenty of lively characters.

After her success with these stories, Emmuska longed to create a true hero, who would have a romantic setting. The latter was suggested to her during a six month stay in Paris. As she walked through some of its old streets they still seemed to echo with the footsteps of Robespierre and Danton, of Charlotte Corday and Mme. Roland, with the clatter of the tumbrils and the blood-lust of the revolutionary mob. So she had her setting; but so far the cast was lacking, and particularly its leading character.

It was the stimulus of her beloved London which was to provide this, and in rather bizarre circumstances which she relates in her own picturesque style: ‘Strangely enough the personality of the Scarlet Pimpernel came to me in a very curious way. I first saw him standing before me ... on the platform of an underground station, the Temple... Now, of all the dull, prosy places in the world, can you beat an underground railways station? It was foggy too, and smelly and cold. But, I give you my word that as I was sitting there, I saw - yes, I saw - Sir Percy Blakeney... I saw him in his exquisite clothes, his slender hands holding up his spy-glass; I heard his lazy drawling speech, his quaint laugh.’

Emmuska called this ‘a mental vision’ claiming that although it lasted only a few seconds, the whole life-story of the Scarlet Pimpernel - twelve books-full - was there and then unfolded to her. She wrote the first of his adventures in five weeks, and felt that this was the happiest period of her life. Her romantic feeling for her handsome and courageous hero invested him with an untarnishable appeal, which spilled over on to lesser characters in the saga. The author felt that she knew them all personally; ‘they were more real and vivid to me than the friends of this world’. Above all, apparently, she had a special feeling for Marguerite St. Just, the devastatingly beautiful French actress, who became Sir Percy’s wife.

Despite her euphoria about The Scarlet Pimpernel, the book was rejected by twelve publishers to whom she offered it during 1902. Her husband, supportive as always, helped her to revamp the story into a play. This was accepted, and produced at Nottingham’s Theatre Royal in the autumn of 1903 with Fred Terry in the leading role. It had its first London season in 1905 and was produced in New York in 1910. Achieving phenomenal popularity, until Terry died in 1933 the play was regularly revived in London and the provinces. Translations of it were presented in Germany, Spain, Italy and France. The Paris production was, it seems, rather garbled with an explosive Gallic hero (who was for ever expostulating and clenching his fist) replacing the restrained and dignified English milord. Similarly, when the 1934 British film of the story was dubbed in French, its star - Leslie Howard - was transmogrified into a French emigré, because the fiery-hearted and nationalistic audiences would want no Englishman to put down any of their countrymen. Such are the roots of literary vandalism!

Despite its long lasting international success, the dramatic version of The Scarlet Pimpernel received damming critical notices. The Sunday Times reviewer ‘sat for three hours trying in vain to find something to praise’ while the even less sympathetic Daily Mail critic commented that ‘the only good thing about this play is its name - the scarlet pimpernel is a little flower that blossoms and dies in one day, which is the obvious fate of this play …’. Fortunately, like so many critics before and since, those who so uniformly wrote off the Orczy/Barstow play utterly misjudged the response of the public, whose appreciation spilled over from the theatrical presentation to the novel, which was published to coincide with the London production in 1905.

From then onwards, Emmuska was a prolific writer, concentrating mainly on the Pimpernel books and other historical adventures, with the emphasis placed firmly on romance. The shadow of the guillotine seems an unlikely breeding ground for the tender passion, but this is potently conveyed in the Blakeney epics. The novels are highly wrought and intensely atmospheric. Particularly effective are the contrasts between the rabble-ridden, blood-running and squalid streets of revolutionary Paris and the sumptuous splendours of the court of King George III in England.

Sir Percy Blakeney seems to have been equally at home in both, adroitly switching from being the Prince of Wales’s favourite ball-and-supper-party guest to disguising himself as a loathsome looking old merchant, a smelly hag or simple fisherman in order to rob the guillotine of its prey. Baroness Orczy uses her novels to express a great deal of social comment; much of this is idealistic and aspirational, although elitistly flavoured.

Generally speaking, artisans and even middle-class people did not show up too well in the books. In spite of her attraction to strongly chivalric ideas, she writes about the ‘lower orders’ with a distinct air of condescension, especially if they step out of line and fail to respect their ‘betters’. And, of course, nothing could be more disrespectful than putting the heads of these betters under the guillotine!

Sir Percy, however, falls heavily in love with someone from a different class - and a foreigner to boot, whose political opinions are in opposition to his. Her republican tendencies put some strain on their marriage until Marguerite becomes disillusioned by post-revolutionary ruthlessness, and learns of Sir Percy’s’ heroic exploits. Their relationship then once again becomes idyllic and wildly romantic, with Marguerite playing a plucky part in some of her husband’s most cliff-hanging rescues.

On the whole, however, Sir Percy prefers to draw his helpers -The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel - from the aristocratic classes (Sir Andrew Ffoulkes, Lord Anthony Dewhurst, Lord Hastings, etc.).

Villainy pops up throughout the series in generous dollops, often in the form of Monsieur Chauvelin, the brooding, hate-filled, intellectual agent of the French Revolutionary Government who is the arch enemy of the Scarlet Pimpernel but never manages to outwit him, even when the odds are stacked toughly against the apparently indolent but amazingly astute and energetic Englishman.

After the enormous success of her book and play, Emmuska became a literary celebrity, showered with letters from fans from all over the world. However, she was often irritated by these, as some of the writers addressed her somewhat carelessly as ‘Dear Baroness Pimpernel’. Compensation came in accolades from distinguished natives of the country she had so staunchly adopted who assured her that in Sir Percy she had created what was ‘best and truest in the English character’, and that he was ‘such a gentleman’.

A surprising footnote to her appreciation of her own hero is that she remained lukewarm about Leslie Howard’s extremely English-gentlemanly interpretation of him, remarking that this actor was certainly very attractive and charming, that he knew how to make love - but that he was not Fred Terry: ‘Fred Terry was the ideal Sir Percy and there cannot be two ideals in one’s mind of the one character.’ Terry, of course, died before the film was released in 1934 and, sadly, his portrayal of the Scarlet Pimpernel has not been recorded for posterity. It is intriguing too that Alexander Korda, the film’s producer, failed initially to go overboard for Howard. He favoured Charles Laughton, an extremely able actor, but hardly an appropriate choice, until a bombardment of protest letters from Pimpernel enthusiasts persuaded him to engage Leslie Howard. One feels that there could have been no better choice. For many of us his screen image perfectly fused with the literary one; though made in black and white, the film’s definitive quality even managed to suggest the ‘lazy blue’ of Sir Percy’s languid gaze! (It is fascinating to note that this quintessentially English film sprang from a story by a Hungarian baroness who couldn’t speak a word of English until she was fifteen, was made by Alexander Korda, a Hungarian producer, was half-scripted by another Hungarian, Lajos Biro, and that Leslie Howard, that most English of actors, was actually the offspring of Hungarian immigrants

The Scarlet Pimpernel and its sequels have inspired several other films, as well as stage, radio, TV and taped adaptations. There were two silent film versions, the 1917 Hollywood production, which starred Dustin Farnum, and the 1928 English offering which featured the Shakespearean actor Mattheson Lang as Sir Percy. After London Films made the Leslie Howard film in 1934, they were further inspired by Orczy’s hero to make two more films about him. These were The Return of the Scarlet Pimpernel (1937) with Barry K. Barnes and The Elusive Pimpernel (1950) with David Niven as Percy and Margaret Leighton as Marguerite. 0rczy’s resilient romantic adventurer was also the indirect inspiration for one of Leslie Howard’s last films, Pimpernel Smith (1941) made by British National Films. In this the Scarlet Pimpernel’s exploits were transposed from late eighteenth-century France to contemporary Nazi-occupied. Europe, with Howard as an apparently vague and absent-minded - but actually incredibly quick-witted and courageous - English university professor snatching from under the noses of the Gestapo many of their intended, victims (just as Sir Percy had robbed the guillotine of its fodder).

Longrunning radio presentations followed, at first from the BBC in 1949, and then from 1952 from Radio Luxemburg, all starring Marius Goring. In 1954 this actor also recorded 52 Pimpernel radio programmes for NBC Radio, and in 1956 he produced and played the lead in the series for the new ITV channel.

Interestingly all the radio programmes focussed on adventure to the virtual exclusion of the many wonderful romantic episodes in Orczy’s original saga and its literary sequels. The world of television was less cavalier about the tender passion. As early as 1950 the BBC transmitted a 110 minute TV version, adapted from the stage play, with James Carney as Sir Percy and Margaretta Scott as Marguerite: this was repeated in the following year. The BBC then screened The Elusive Pimpernel in 1969, a series featuring Anton Rodgers as Sir Percy and Bernard Hepton as Chauvelin. In 1982 ITV’s two-and-a-half hour The Scarlet Pimpernel was a memorable ‘one off’ which, with Anthony Andrews in the lead, Jane Seymour as Marguerite and Ian McKellan as Chauvelin held a fine balance between swashbuckling adventure and romance. Anthony Andrews, though not like Les1ie Howard, the definitive Sir Percy Blakeney, was impressively insouciant and foppish by turns, and his sword duel with McKellen which was the climax of the production had touches in it as satisfyingly done as in the classic Ronald Colman/Douglas Fairbanks Jnr. duel in the 1930s film of The Prisoner of Zenda.

The most recent TV adaptation was in 1998 when the BBC broadcast two series starring Richard E. Grant, with Martin Shaw as Chauvelin. Despite entertainingly updated tongue-in-cheek moments and well-conceived technological uplifts, these series so drastically departed from the original narratives (even killing off Marguerite in childbirth and. leaving Sir Percy with a baby daughter to bring up) that Baroness Orczy might not have recognised this version of her ‘darling Pimpernel’

Stage productions continued. Fred Terry went on playing the Pimpernel role until the end of the 1920s even though he was then so corpulent that he had to do his on-stage love-making and swashbuckling from a wheelchair. After his demise Donald Wolfit revived the play at the Q Theatre’ in l936, playing Sir Percy, with his wife, Rosalind Iden, as Marguerite. In 1938 Derrick de Marney played the lead role, with Dorothy Dickson as Marguerite and Esmé Percy as Chauvelin, at the Embassy Theatre in London.

The next significant theatre production came much later - in 1985, when Donald Sinden had a whale of a time swashbuckling to end all swashbuckling, at first at Chichester and then at London’s Her Majesty’s Theatre.

The most recent stage adaptation seems to have been a Broadway musical version which, with Douglas Sills as Sir Percy and Christine Andrews as Marguerite1 has concentrated on the story’s romantic elements.

In this round-up of the Scarlet Pimpernel in performance, I have not, so far, mentioned the ‘Carry 0n’ version which was filmed in 1966 as Don’t Lose Your Head, with Sid James as Sir Rodney Ffing (pronounced Effing), known not as the Scarlet Pimpernel but as the Black Fingernail. Kenneth Williams played Citizen Camembert - a comic derivation of the villainous Chauvelin, of course.

There have been at least two excellent tape-recorded versions of Baroness Orczy’s stories. The first, a reading of The Scarlet Pimpernel by Robert Powell was made in 1990, and Hugh Laurie, in 1997, recorded both the original story and one of the sequels, The Triumph of the Scarlet Pimpernel.

Although Emmuska’s other stories are overshadowed by her most popular character, they are extremely readable and entertaining; fast-moving plots, simple but strong characterization and, above all, the author’s sheer story-telling skill brought many readers to them. Lacking the subtleties of the Pimpernel books’ leading character, however, most of them have proved to be ephemeral in their appeal. Read with hindsight, they are wonderfully expressive of early twentieth-century ambitions, ideals and animosities.

Special mention should be made of Orczy’s attempt to create a female character in the Sir Percy mould. In Lady Molly of Scotland Yard (1910) the eponymous heroine is another aristocratic, enigmatic, efficient and adventurous righter-of wrongs, but everything that worked so well with the Scarlet Pimpernel seems to have misfired with Lady Molly. Her attempts to appear nonchalant are simply arch; pretending indifference to an assignment which she actually relishes, she comes across as a self-indulgent poseuse. Though written several years after the first Pimpernel book, the tone of Lady Molly’s exploits is curiously archaic. Criminals are sometimes referred to as ‘miscreants’ with ‘fell purposes’. Foreigners - and that occasionally includes the Scots - as well as the native ‘peasantry’ take some bashings and so too do trades unions and socialist clubs, which are loosely equated with ‘the ever-growing tyranny of the Mafia’. Censure of this nature of course reflected some of the fears that lay beneath the smooth surface of Edwardian society. Emmuska was generally more at ease when describing, its securities and splendours than its partially obscured conflicts. Lady Molly is not really a competent detective, even though everyone at Scotland Yard defers to her, and she eventually achieves her goal of proving the innocence of her fiancé, Captain Hubert de Mazareen, who is serving a life sentence for a murder which he didn’t commit. Although Lady Molly’s sidekick and chronicler - Mary Granard, who used to be her maid - speaks of her ‘dear lady’s’ beauty and charm and brain and style, and considers her ‘the most wonderful psychologist of her time’ the stories provide little hard evidence of all this. Logical elucidation is conspicuous only by its absence, and mysteries are unravelled by fanciful feminine charm and extremely predictable hunch-playing. Like Sir Percy, Lady Molly is adept at assuming improbable disguises but she uses these to less convincing effect than he.

The Lady Molly stories flirt with feminism of the woolly variety which bears no relation to that of any of the organized suffragist movements of the time. Mood and local colour are strongest at the level of refined affluence, with Lady Molly ‘graceful and elegant in her beautiful directoire gown’, or consuming toasted muffins in a Regent Street teashop after a matinée performance of Trilby. Atmospheric whiffs of parma violets and the Russian leather of her ladyship’s luxurious accessories further enliven the narrative so that, despite their limitations as sleuthing fiction, the Lady Molly stories have a certain vintage charm for today’s readers.

Emmuska, however, must have realized that one book was sufficient, and she abandoned Lady Molly in favour of novels set in Hungary, Holland, Russia, Italy and France, in a variety of historical periods. She and Montague Barstow moved out of London in 1908 to live at Minster in Thanet. A little later on they bought a house between Maidstone and Ashford where they created a fine garden of rhododendrons, azaleas, pines, mountain ash and roses. After the ending of the First World War they had to move to a gentler Climate. Monte Carlo became their home until Montague died in 1943. Baroness Orczy remained an Anglophile until the end of her life, visiting England frequently, except when she was trapped in Monte Carlo during the Second World War. She died in London on 12th November 1947, secure in the knowledge that with her ‘demmed, elusive’ elegant and intriguing character, the Scarlet Pimpernel, she had left a glowing ideal for posterity.