The significance of London to Hitchcock can be parsed into two sections. First is Hitchcock in London: the life he had there prior to his relocation to Hollywood in 1939, where he developed the craft, skills, and reputation that facilitated his stellar rise in the United States—all greatly assisted by the talents of those in the London film industry with whom he worked.
Second is London in Hitchcock. Pre-Hollywood, Hitchcock used the British Isles as the precinct for most of his work. London was a notable setting in eleven films: The Pleasure Garden, The Lodger, Downhill, The Ring, Blackmail, Murder!, Rich and Strange, Number Seventeen, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, and Sabotage. None of them are gritty, social tracts; some are as phantasmagorical as North by Northwest and Psycho. Yet all are wonderfully evocative of the London he knew—an environment that never left him. At the time of his death, he’d lived in California more than half his life. But he never knew that place, or anywhere else on the planet, in the way he knew London. His films are set in locations across the globe, but it’s only London that appears to be in the bones of his characters, rather than as the backdrop of their existence. A notable exception could be made for the San Francisco of Vertigo. Even then, there’s something of Hitchcock’s London about it: a city of mists and winding streets, where history piles up on itself and, for all their nosiness, no one really knows anyone else.
Arguably, Hitchcock was not a native Londoner, as the Essex town of Leytonstone in which he was born would have then been too far east to have been enveloped by the city sprawl. He was touched when, late in life, he received a letter from the vice chancellor of the University of Essex, referring to him as “a son of Essex” in his offer of an honorary doctorate. These days, Leytonstone has another world-famous son, David Beckham, who embodies a type of emotionally expressive, seemingly classless Englishness that Hitchcock would have barely recognized as English at all. Yet Hitchcock still has a home there: tiled to the walls of the local Tube station are mosaics of legendary Hitchcock scenes, a kitsch but fitting tribute to a man whose lifelong interest in travel and transport began here as a boy, transfixed by the tram service that ran from Leytonstone into the wheezing city to the west, the place that became the Hitchcocks’ home when Alfred was around six years old.
Through the years, Hitchcock’s social awkwardness and his sense of himself as an outsider may have encouraged some to have spotted “otherness” in his life where it didn’t exist. True, the family’s Catholicism made them anomalous in a nation where followers of the Roman Catholic Church had faced centuries of persecution. Yet Limehouse, Poplar, and Stepney, the East London communities in which the family lived and worked, were among the most diffuse mix of ethnicities and religions to be found anywhere in western Europe. Moreover, it is inaccurate to suggest, as one biographer has, that the family was “not socially respectable.” The Hitchcocks were an unremarkable lower-middle-class family, whom only the tiniest, most elite percentage of British society would have considered anything other than respectable. Likewise, though it’s true that Hitchcock was sensitive about his relative lack of formal learning, he would have had a quality of education superior to most in the East End. It was only in the year of his birth that the age for leaving school was raised to twelve, but Hitchcock attended school until the eve of his fourteenth birthday, after which he studied engineering, followed by classes in art at the University of London, acquiring diverse skills that stayed with him for life. If his American friend John Houseman was correct in saying that Hitchcock bore “scars from a social system against which he was in perpetual revolt,” it was not because he was a member of the downtrodden proletariat, but because of a frustration about the narrow existence prescribed to those from any particular class background, the sense that one must know one’s place, which has long been the ambient hum of English life.
Accordingly, referring to Hitchcock as a Cockney (a label widely applied to him but never used by himself) is not without complication. His childhood London homes were in traditional Cockney terrain, but as with “Scouser” in Liverpool and “Geordie” in Newcastle, “Cockney” is loaded with social complexity. The word is often a designation of class identity as well as geographic location, and the Hitchcocks perhaps considered themselves a little too well-to-do to qualify as true “Cockney.” Unquestionably, Hitchcock was an East Ender who grew up immersed in Cockney culture, felt kinship with it, and recognized all the associated attitudes, traits, and character types—but he was more among them than of them. England being a place where accents carry heavy associations, it’s worth regarding that several of those who worked with him in London found his speech interesting because it was difficult to pin down. When Jack Cardiff first met him in 1930, Hitchcock spoke in a “plummy, posh-cockney voice.” Four years earlier, according to June Tripp, he “spoke in a curious mixture of Cockney and North Country accents with a laboured stress on elusive aitches.”
The primary way in which London shaped Hitchcock’s Englishness, and his identity as a filmmaker, was that it instilled in him a thoroughly urban, modern outlook. The
