From writing plays to winning Academy Awards to playing Poirot, Peter Ustinov was one of the most urbane and recognizable figures in the UK in the second half of the 20th century. Less well known is his 1942 sojourn in the humble Ayrshire seaside town of Troon, where, as a private in the British army, he was seconded to work on a military training film directed by Carol Reed. Ustinov was doing the writing and was 21 at the time. In his 1977 autobiography Dear Me, he recalled his experiences of Troon, including what appears to be the apparently homoerotic behaviour of one of his superior officers:
"When eventually an application arrived to join Carol Reid in Scotland in order to write a film about the techniques of combined operations, I was marched in to see the colonel...
A few days later, I left for Scotland after all... I still belonged to my old regiment, but was seconded to the Directorate of Army Psychiatry... I travelled up to Glasgow by train and was put up for the night... The next morning, I left for Troon. It was in the pleasant, if rather baleful, surroundings of a half-deserted seaside town with a particularly strident colony of gulls that I first met Carol Reed and Eric Ambler. Carol was a captain who behaved as though the war was a superb invention of Evelyn Waugh's. He had a tendency to daydream, which was most engaging and blissfully unmilitary, and his mind was tremulous with tender mischief....Since I was the only member of the unit who was not an officer, I fell victim to a superannuated makeup man from a small film studio who was now a lieutenant and whose battle dress supported medals from the 1914 war. This man, perfectly docile in peacetime, and an excellent make-up man within the limits of his epoch, consisted on commandeering a military vehicle every Friday and driving with me to a disused boarding house for which he borrowed the keys. There I would wait in the entrance hall until he had set up all his paraphernalia. When he was ready, he would call like a child during a game of hide-and-seek, I would knock at the door.
'Come in,' he would command.
I would open the door to see him seated majestically behind a tin box at the head of the dining table. I would then march up to him, salute, sign for my pay, gather the miserable pittance into my pocket, salute again, and march out. There I would wait once more while he collected his props and perhaps his thoughts as well, and when he appeared at length all chipper with a kind of post-orgasmic glow, we would drive back to work in the same commandeered vehicle while he regaled me with tales of great paydays of the past in Gallipoli and on the road to Mandalay.
Among Carol's first initiatives was to interview a colonel who had become famous as a fearless leader on various dangerous excursions up sheer cliffs and rocky promontories...
Before we had achieved very much, the famous raid on Dieppe took place [19th August 1942], which occasioned a fundamental revision of all landing procedures, and it was realised that whatever film we managed to produce, it would be out of date long before reaching the screens. We were sent home, but not before I had entered a local talent competition at the local theatre in Troon. My chief rival was an 11-year-old lad in a kilt who sang 'Annie Laurie' ingeniously and consistently flat. Here was obviously a great future talent for atonal and dodecaphonic scores. His only drawback on this occasion was that he foolishly chose a melody that was known. I scraped home by improvising a Bach cantata, doing all from vocal timbres and the instruments of the orchestra as well. The first prize was ten shillings, which I accepted gracefully, using a heavy Scotch accent in case it be suspected that my talent was not local. I have always had slight feelings of remorse at having robbed the unmusical child of his ten bob, but my excuse was that, not for the first or last time in my life, I was flat broke."
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