THE YEARS OF THE LION
SIR,—I hope you will not regard me with suspicion if I say that I have decided after deep thought to dis- claim the knighthood which Mr. Kingsley has given me in your columns.
I am less worried about Mr. Kingsley's generosity in this respect than by the absence of it in the rest of his letter. I was certainly not questioning the dynamism of the British Lion Board: I merely wrote to give the Boulting brothers a chance to correct what I took to be an oversight on their part when they said that the Whole of the £3 million loan to the British Lion Film Corporation had been `sunk with- out trace.' Instead, Mr. Kingsley supports the offend- ing words with arbitrary chapter and dubious verse.
I was quoting from memory of something that happened eight years ago, so I willingly accept his statement that my figure of £1 for the new company's balance-sheet valuation of the old films is incorrect. (The 1955 NFFC Report says that it was upon the
re-issue rigbtssand not upon the first-run rights that no value was placed.) He does not, however, answer my question about the income since received.
Since I read Mr. Kingsley's letter I have obtained copies of his company's balance-sheets and see that, whatever the 1956 valuation of the old company's films, it was written up in the next two years by £177,343. Quite apart from this, revenue actually received from the old films totalled £459,847 in eight years, in addition to the £316,600 from the FIDO deal. With the aid of these figures can Mr. Kingsley or the Boultings now answer my question? Or are we to deduce that of the present £1,590,000 valuation of the company nearly £1,000,000 is due to income from the old films, to say nothing of the Pay Tele- vision rights which presumably exist?
I find it disingenuous to make the chapter end not with the formation of the new company in 1955 but with the re-organisation of the Board in 1958, 1 was merely seeking a modicum of fairness to those responsible for running the old company, and I see no reason to set off against the income subsequently received from their productions the losses made during the first three years' operation of the new company—three years, incidentally, when Mr. Kings- ley was a director of 'British Lion and when the company was apparently controlled by the NFFC of which he was the Managing Director.
I know Mr. Kingsley is a chartered accountant, but 1 would hate to have to rest a case on the tendentious arithmetic with which he concludes his letter. When he was Managing Director of NFFC he and his colleagues set up the new British Lion and invested £600,000 in it. Three years later that Board appointed him Managing Director of British Lion Films and sold him some shares. The new Board of British Lion Films was extremely success- ful, and the £600,000 was repaid. For some reason beyond me Mr. Kingsley now deducts that from the £795,000 paid to him and his colleagues for shares which they seem to have bought for £1,800. The directors of the company are personal friends of mine and I greatly admire the work they have done; but I still think that, having received directors' fees and emoluments of about £200,000 in five years and a capital profit of nearly £800,000 on their share- holdings, they need not grudge others some credit.
9a Bathurst Street, W2
JAMES H. LAWRIE
[Sorry. We knighted you.—Editor, Spectator.]
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