Film-maker who played pivotal role in the Scottish industry dies

The Herald Scotland

4 days ago

Died: February 12, 2025
Laurence Henson was one of the key figures in Scottish documentary film-making and its transition to fiction films. Born in Mosspark in Glasgow, he attended St Gerard's Secondary School, where one of his classmates was Eddie McConnell (1936–2018) with whom he would go on to form a very successful partnership in movie-making.
Following his national service, including a spell with the RAF in Borneo, Henson reunited with McConnell, who in the meantime had graduated from Glasgow School of Art, and as amateurs, they made Broken Images (1957), in which a drunk man wakes up in Glasgow's George Square to be confronted by the noble statuary of famous people. The film won one of the ten best amateur films of the year and thus came to the attention of the great John Grierson. The result was not only encouragement for the pair to turn professional, but to establish an important and lasting relationship with Grierson, 'the Father of the Documentary'.
A job as a film editor at STV, including cutting the first football programmes, led to Henson becoming Grierson's assistant on This Wonderful World, the documentary film series, which became required viewing for anyone interested in movies. When the programme relocated from Glasgow to Cardiff, Henson moved with it, as did Grierson's PA, Rachel Collins. She and Henson married in Glasgow in 1961 and had two sons, Stephen and Peter. Sadly, the marriage did not last.
In the early sixties, Henson accompanied Grierson to the Cork Film Festival, where he discovered an affection for Ireland. He also forged a life-long friendship with the late Irish broadcaster, Kevin O'Kelly.
Reunited in film again with McConnell, the pair worked for Robert Riddell Black's Templar Films in Lynedoch Street, Glasgow. The company had just achieved the astonishing feat of winning a Hollywood Oscar for Seawards the Great Ships (1962), the stylish documentary on Clydeside shipbuilding directed by the American, Hilary Harris. Seawards was one of 16 films made by Templar for Films of Scotland, run by Forsyth Hardy whose mission was to gain commercial cinema releases at a time when it was conventional for there to be a short documentary (and often a newsreel) to precede the screening of the main feature. For example, Henson's Why Scotland, Why East Kilbride was screened with The Sting. A promotional New Town film, it was Henson's least favourite work while, as he pointed out, it was viewed by many more people than any of his other films.
Directed by Henson, with McConnell as cinematographer, The Big Mill (1963) celebrated the steel works at Ravenscraig and Gartcosh. It was a classic high-value Griersonian documentary, and it too won international awards. Henson would say that it was the favourite of his works. Two years previously, he had made his directorial debut with The Heart of Scotland (1961). Again, Grierson was his mentor – he provided the outline treatment – and there was yet more support from the great man when Henson and McConnell were setting up their own independent film company. Grierson's Canadian company was International Film Associates; he permitted the new outfit to be called International Film Associates (Scotland). It was under the banner of IFA that Henson was to make the next major move: to add features to his documentary output.
Forsyth Hardy had always wanted Films of Scotland to migrate from documentary to fiction. Perhaps he knew that the life of cinema documentary was nearing its end and that the rising Scottish talent, led by such as Henson, needed a new challenge; so Flash the Sheepdog (1967), from the story by Kathleen Fiddler, was directed by Laurence Henson, who also wrote the screenplay.
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It concerned a London boy who comes to the Scottish Borders and learns the local ways. Made for the Children's Film Foundation, which catered for Saturday Morning matinees, it was an excellent way to learn the trade and led to further commissions for IFA – The Big Catch (1968) and Mauro the Gypsy (1973). The Duna Bull (1972), however, was Henson's pitch to an adult audience, with the whimsical story (based on a real event) of an island community which needed an appropriate beast to sustain their way of life.
Henson's trajectory from amateur via television and documentary to features, was remarkable. He had been fortunate in his association with Grierson and Hardy, and in his partnership with McConnell. But it required character and determination to capitalise on the opportunities that had been presented to him, and the sense that he had benefited from the encouragement of others translated into his own desire to help the next generation of aspiring film-makers.
However, in the late 1980s, Henson's life changed direction in a remarkable way. He had met Ruth Jacob who was visiting Scotland from Dublin, and the upshot was they became partners and moved to Ireland, first to Bray in County Wicklow, and then to Strokestown in County Roscommon, where they became very much part of the community, thus reaffirming his connection with Ireland.
Another change for Henson was that now he was able to pursue his love of language by becoming a poet and being involved with local poetry groups and publications, even though he never lost his desire to make movies, which remained his motivational passion. His profound sense of place, and how the land shapes the people, always shows through in his films. Though a project on the Highland Clearances was an ambition that attracted well-known actors but not the requisite finance, a decades-long scheme did come to fruition in 2014 with Documenting Grierson, thereby completing the circle of his work. In that context, too, Henson ran occasional seminars in Dublin on screenwriting, under the title Writing Movies.
Henson's poetry reveals a man of wit and warmth and of considerable ability with words, but his role in the development of the Scottish film industry was pivotal. He was ahead of most of his contemporaries in the progress to feature films and in the nurturing of talents such as Charlie Gormley and Bill Forsyth, who would go on to make it perfectly natural for Scots to create movies that reflected our culture. For paving that way, and for making excellent films in both documentary and feature, Laurence Henson deserves our overdue recognition and gratitude.
DAVID BRUCE AND STEPHEN HENSON
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