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Plaque honour for top screenwriter
From the Bolton Evening News, first published Monday 29th May 2000.
A PLAQUE in memory of Leigh-born Hollywood screenwriter James Hilton is at last set to be unveiled in his home town.
So far, clues to Hilton's presence in Leigh have been noticeable only by their absence with council chiefs admitting only seven months ago that there was nothing planned to commemorate his life.
This will be put right at 1.30pm on June 2 at Leigh Town Hall when Hilton, one of the town's most famous sons, will be the subject of a presentation.
The plaque unveiling -- celebrating the 100-year anniversary of Hilton's birth -- follows a report in the Bolton Evening News last October when a number of Hilton mementoes went under the hammer at Christies in Los Angeles. Auction hunters walked away with a variety of goods including a typed manuscript of Lost Horizon signed by Hilton which went for £17,000 -- none of them came to Leigh.
At the time Tom Sherratt, deputy council leader of Wigan Council, said there were no plans to buy the mementoes or put up anything in the town in his honour.
He explained that the council was unlikely to be able to afford to buy them -- a view mirrored by many local history groups.
But now it seems the town is well aware of Hilton, previously one of Hollywood's hottest properties following popular novels such as Goodbye Mr Chips and Lost Horizon.
A James Hilton Society was recently set up in Nottingham with the aim of maintaining interest in the screenwriter's life and work and it is gathering interest in Leigh,
And St Joseph's Players, a Leigh theatrical group, recently staged a version of Hilton's 1942 novel Random Harvest.
A council spokesman said: "Interest in James Hilton has started to grow and the suggestion for the plaque has come from the people of Leigh.
"Mr Hilton is a very famous author and we felt it was right to honour him especially with the centenary of his birth being this year."
And explaining why they had not erected a plaque earlier, he explained: "With dead, famous people you have to be careful in case their popularity wanes over time.
"We feel that with the level of interest in Mr Hilton now and the fact that he was a very popular and well-known author and screenwriter means this is the right time."
Ironically, the council is proposing to erect a "monument" inside the town hall containing various mementoes of Hilton with proposals including a photograph, copies of his books and a biography.
The spokesman said: "The reason we didn't buy anything from the auction was, as Mr Sherratt explained at the time, due to the council having to go through a statutory and legal process which takes six to eight weeks.
"The council doesn't have cash washing around and if it did people in the town may not want it to be spent so frivolously.
"There is also a danger in that by commemorating one famous person, you set a precedent which is why we wanted to be careful." JAMES Hilton was born in 1990 in a terraced house on Wilkinson Street, in Leigh.
He was educated at Cambridge University and became a journalist for the Manchester Guardian.
But his writing talents switched from news to fiction. The utopian novel Lost Horizon, about the search for the mythical Shangri-la, shot him to fame in 1933.
Two years later, he moved to Hollywood and sat on the governing board of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and was vice president of the Screen Writers' Guild.
Hilton's impact on Hollywood from the 1930s to the 1950s was felt as late as 1967 when Goodbye Mr Chips was made into a musical in a £4 million picture starring Peter O'Toole.
At one time he was reputedly the highest paid script-writer in Hollywood. He had written 21 novels by the time of his death at Long Beach, California on December 22, 1954.
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