09 Escape (Jan 1960)

The Cast of Royale Studio's, 'Escape' Storyette

The images available for this 1960 set are strikingly similar to Royale's great 'Unapproved School' saga of 1959 with  a captivity plot-line and a harsh punishment scene. Both are largely staged in the famous Royale garden and underground cellar locations. The Original mitchmen article on this set assumed a plot along the same lines as Unapproved School - bullying, escape, recapture, punishment -  but there is no Royale description or thumbnail sheet available to confirm that interpretation and it's possible to assemble the imagery in other ways which reflect the title more closely.

This set differs from 'Unapproved School' in that it depicts a much stronger relationship between the two captives, a comradeship which seems close to homosexual love. Studios in this era did occasionally publish 'duo' images showing two poseurs as friends, sometimes surreptitiously holding hands, but to the best of my knowledge the mutual massaging and comforting depicted in 'Escape' is ground-breaking - for a British Studio at least.

'Escape' seems to depict a quasi-military, detention scenario, but it differs from many other such Royale sets in that none of the participants are portrayed as UK servicemen (see cast picture above). The captives wear civilian jeans and their guards wear military style shorts, belts and boots, but with no specific service identity. Their commandant bizarrely wears a sort of tuxedo jacket with his shorts (and a safari helmet later on), which creates the impression of a fantasy kingdom, somewhere hot, but definitely not Britain. This distancing from Royale's normal world may be an attempt to disguise and make satire of the protest against the oppression of homosexuals which Clavering seems to make in this set. The title, 'Escape', thus acquires a deeper significance.

The set stars Peter George (2nd from left above) and on his immediate left (I believe) Hansjorg Heiner as the two prisoners/escapers. The Commandant (far left) is probably David Tomkins (with distinctive ears), he also appears in Royale's 'Winner Take All' storyette around this time. The two guards look as though they might be two of the many models of Hungarian extraction who posed for Royale, having arrived after the 1956 uprising.

The Royale Studio Open Archive has 31 images from the set but there are continuity gaps and (like Unapproved School and Navy Romeo) it has distinctly separate studio-based and outdoor segments suggesting it could have been a much larger two part set. This may account for other claims about the naming of the set*

Read Royale's 'Escape'

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There are neither thumbnail sheets nor a plot summary available for Royales' 'Escape' storyette. In the post referenced above I have used continuity cues to come up with a sequence, however alternative interpretations are possible and one is presented in 'Escape' with an alternative plot sequence.

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*Re:Titling of 'Escape' 

Most of the surviving imagery comes from the now-defunct 'CosmoLeather' site (Source 13) and came to me labelled as 'Captivity'. The Captivity set name isn't mentioned in the 1960 Royale catalogue (although 'The Captive' set of 3 CP scenarios also featuring Peter George is). Royale did advertise a set called 'The Captives' from July 1959 onwards (starting in Manual Vol 1 No 4) but it was accompanied by a thumbnail from Peter George's 'Roman Captive' story and seems to be no more than a minor renaming of that set. The set title 'Escape' was first mentioned in a Royale ad in Man Alive No 8 in January 1960 and it later appeared linked to a recognisable thumbnail from the set in the July 1960 issue of Zing! magazine so I have settled on that as the 'official' name.