GB
1959
1hr 24mins
Dir: Gilbert Gunn
Starring: Donald Sinden and Barbara Murray
During the Second World War, a light anti-aircraft post is awakened by the arrival of a group of ATS girls
This popular colour comedy was to have been titled Girls in Arms as director Gilbert Gunn had filmed Girls at Sea the previous year, but it was released as Operation Bullshine, though with the tagline ‘A Salute to those Wonderful Girls in Arms’. It features a scene at Braughing station in Hertfordshire with a careworn ex-LNER J15 Class 0-6-0 arriving on a train of old GER stock, repainted into LNER teak livery for the film and scrapped shortly afterwards. The train also appears in a later scene where we see the station in finer detail, though the external shot of the station forecourt actually used Standon, the next station up from Braughing. The theory is that possibly the production crew wanted a flat road and ‘run in’ to the forecourt suited to the screen script of a motorcycle rushing to the station before the train departed. Standon lent itself better to that requirement than the downward sloping approach to Braughing. We will of course never know, but there must have been a reason behind the switch in location. Thanks to Paul Dunn for this helpful insight.
