Ernest Thesiger: Master of Horror and Embroidery

Robin Ince's Blog

It is a good portent for 2020 when New Year’s Day is spent discovering that one of your favourite faces from classic horror was also an expert at needlecraft and author on embroidery.

Ernest Thesiger in The Old Dark House (1932)

The Old Dark House is my favourite horror movie of the 1930s. The early thirties has some wonderfully dark and peculiar films, including Island of the Lost Souls, The Mystery of the Wax Museum and Freaks. James Whale was the great auteur of the Universal horror cycle – Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, Bride of Frankenstein and The Old Dark House.

Each film consists of magnificent sets, visual inventiveness, witty scripts and casts who are able to convey the manic, the melodramatic and the camp in a single sentence. The performances of Una O Connor and Colin Clive are about as intense as you’ll find anywhere in early talkie cinema, while Claude Raines is deliciously insane in The Invisible Man. The hit and miss sketch movie Amazon Women on the Moon is worth catching for Ed Begley Jr’s inspired impersonation in the Son of the Invisible Man sequence.

Of James Whale’s company, it is Ernest Thesiger who I have the greatest fondness for (oh okay, and Boris Karloff). Thesiger is the peak embodiment of an Albion campness. In the films, he is refined, skeletal and a little absurd. He is larger than life, and life looks like a thing he views with amused disdain.

Thesiger fought on the Western front during the Great War where he was injured. He was once asked of his experience at the front to which he replied, “Oh, my dear, the noise. And the people.”

John Gielgud wrote of Thesiger, “he was often waspish and sometimes malicious (though less so as he grew older) but he was also very courageous…He was an extraordinary and rather touching character,  an actor of unique imagination, with a most beautiful perfection of speech and period style.”    

The Cosmic Shambles Network relies on your support on pledges via Patreon so we can continue to provide great, new, exciting content without the need for third party ads or paywalls.
For as little as $1 a month you can support what we do and get some great rewards for doing so as well. Click the Patreon logo to pledge or find out more.

After watching The Old Dark House, I went to seek out a biography of Thesiger, but could find none. I place the writing of one on my to do list. What I did find was that he wrote a book entitled Adventures in Embroidery. Sadly, it seems tricky to get hold of at a reasonable price, as does his autobiography, Practically True.

After Thesiger’s own injury in the Great War, he decided that needlecraft may be something other injured soldiers could turn their hands to and so he set up the Disabled Soldiers’ Embroidery Industry.

Fortunately, H L Tyler was similarly disappointed by the lack of Ernest Thesiger information available and so decided to create a website dedicated to his work.

You can read more about his embroidery career here

As Polonius in Hamlet, working on his embroidery backstage, 1955. Pic: University of Bristol Theatre Collection

As a side note, I always enjoy seeing Karloff and Raymond Massey together in The Old Dark House. Massey played Jonathan Brewster, the role created by Karloff in Arsenic and Old Lace, when Frank Capra made it into a movie. In the play, it is remarked that Brewster “looks like Boris Karloff”. This is a better meta joke when it really was Boris Karloff, somehow, “you look like Raymond Massey” didn’t have the same impact, so the movie stuck with Massey’s character looking “like Boris Karloff.”

I began the year, as I often begin years, by reading Kenneth Williams’ diaries. This time in the form of Back Drops, book of his 1982 diary entries that was published while he was still alive. I have never lost my fascination with him and never tire of reading his wit and melancholy. Hopefully, one day, full versions of his dairies will be available, but I have been told that while some of those incriminated in his Letts Diary pages are still alive, we must wait.

Today I read Williams recalling this incident involving Thesiger.

“Ernest Thesiger was getting off a bus with his shopping when the doors closed on him. He immediately cried, ‘Stop! Stop! You are killing a genius!’”

I mention this only as this popped up on youtube swiftly after Thesiger’s embroidery.

Happy new year.

Robin Ince is a multi-award winning comedian, writer and broadcaster.  As well as spending decades as one the UK’s most respected stand-ups, Robin is perhaps best known for co-hosting The Infinite Monkey Cage radio show with Brian Cox.  For his work on projects like Cosmic Shambles he was made an Honorary Doctor of Science by Royal Holloway, University of London.

If you would like to reuse this content please contact us for details

Subscribe to The Cosmic Shambles Network Mailing list here.

The Cosmic Shambles Network relies on your support on pledges via Patreon so we can continue to provide great, new, exciting content without the need for third party ads or paywalls.
For as little as $1 a month you can support what we do and get some great rewards for doing so as well. Click the Patreon logo to pledge or find out more.