Kenneth
Edwin Hume (November 30, 1925 - June 25, 1967) was a producer/director, principally from television, who enjoyed a short, strange film career during his 41 years.
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Kenneth
Edwin Hume (November 30, 1925 - June 25, 1967) was a producer/director, principally from television, who enjoyed a short, strange film career during his 41 years.
Kenneth Edwin Hume was born in 1926 in England. He entered the film industry as an editor in his early twenties, but later moved into television where he made a name for himself as a maker of arts-related programs. He entered film industry in 1940 as an assistant editor on a series of films. In the post-war period he formed S.H.W. (Piccadilly) Productions. In 1950 he wrote, produced and directed Cheer the Brave and adapted and directed Hot Ice.
On the August Bank Holiday of 1953, Edward Montagu and Kenneth Hume took two boy scouts to a beach hut at Beaulieu for a bathe, where a stolen camera was subsequently reported by Montagu to Hampshire Constabulary. However, the boys claimed that they had been indecently assaulted and Montagu was charged by the police with both committing an unnatural offence and an indecent assault. At his trial Montagu was acquitted of committing an unnatural offence but the jury disagreed on the lesser charge and the DPP decided that Montagu and Hume should be tried again for indecent assault. Three weeks later Michael Pitt-Rivers, a cousin of Montagu, and Peter Wildeblood, a journalist, were also arrested and their premises were searched without a warrant prior to their being charged with indecency against two RAF servicemen in a beach hut at the Pitt-Rivers estate in Dorset. Not all of the press coverage of the Montagu affair was unsympathetic and some journalists detailed the dubious methods of Hampshire police in their quest for evidence. A month after the Montagu trial David Maxwell-Fyffe, the home secretary, agreed to the appointment of a departmental committee to examine and report on the laws relating to homosexuality, chaired by Sir John Wolfenden, the former headmaster of Uppingham and Shrewsbury public schools and then vice-chancellor of Reading University.
In 1961, the British entertainment world was amazed when Hume -- who was an all-but-avowed homosexual (still a sensitive subject in England, as punitive laws were still on the books) -- married Welsh-born pop singer Shirley Bassey. She defended the relationship, saying he made her laugh. The married life of Shirley Bassey and Kenneth Hume was unusual, to say the least. To begin with they did not live together. Kenneth had a flat in Westbourne Terrace, Bayswater, and remained there after his marriage; Shirley bought a house in Chester Square, Belgravia, and moved in with Sharon, a nanny and a butler. They married and divorced twice within a three-year period (during which she had an affair with the actor Peter Finch, who is thought to be the father of her daughter, Samantha). He committed suicide by drug overdose in 1967, leaving Bassey devastated. "I was so angry with Kenneth for leaving me like that," she said once. "How could he do this to me? And why?"
In 1964, Hume directed and produced a short modern dance film entitled Mods and Rockers, which utilized the songs of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison as performed by a band called the Cheynes (featuring Mick Fleetwood on drums); the short film was later folded into a full-length program alongside a pair of jukebox shorts, Swinging UK and UK Swings Again, retitled Go Go Big Beat for U.S. release. What might have been a clever use of Beatles music turned into a financial and legal disaster -- Mods and Rockers had a fairly explicit homoerotic content that made it an impossible sell in England or America, and it also had a racial content that made it even more difficult to present in the United States. Worse still, the Beatles sued over the movie's marketing and publicity, which featured their name distinctly larger than that of the Cheynes and such matters as synchronization rights to the songs. The movie was later withdrawn and Mods and Rockers was removed from the larger composite feature, and modern showings of Swinging UK or Go Go Big Beat contain only the two jukebox shorts. Hume made one more movie, I've Gotta Horse (1965).
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