BELOW – This would be much earlier at Denham – in fact just before the War because Charles Laughton is in costume for ‘I Claudius’ in 1937.

Here he is seated and having lunch with Mary Pickford and Alexander Korda at the Denham Canteen

BELOW – This would be 1947 at Denham and again in the Canteen waiting to be fed. David Niven is in costume as filming of ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ was well underway – it was released in 1948

It does seem as though all the staff and the stars waited for their meals in the Canteen – and this is a surprise to me because I would have expected Alexander Korda to have had his own private dining room. Maybe he did and this was just a publicity still – and it seems from the picture below that that was indeed the case.

When Denham Studios opened in May 1936 it was hailed as Britain’s largest, most up-to-date film studio, located on a 193-acre site on an estate called ‘The Fishery’ north of Denham Village in Buckinghamshire. Equipped with state-of-the-art facilities, it was celebrated as symptomatic of the revival of the British film industry, and of the rise of Alexander Korda’s London Film Productions, the company that built the studios with finance provided by the Prudential Assurance Company.

Denham was by far the largest of the film studios in Britain, but it was soon to be rivalled by J. Arthur Rank’s Pinewood Studios which opened just a few months after Denham in September 1936