Gerry Anderson and Roumelia Lane

The Link Between Thunderbirds and a Tiny Street in Boscombe

Jul 5, 2009

How Supermarionation, Twizzle, Captain Scarlet and a very narrow street in down town Bournemouth are curiously connected.

Roumelia Lane in Boscombe, a suburb of Bournemouth, Dorset, is a narrow and slightly dodgy half alley, half street that runs behind the back of some shops on Christchurch Road. The lane is so named because Sir Henry Drummond Wolff used to own the land and it commemorates the time he was a member of the 1878 East Roumelia Commission.

Roumelia Lane the Writer

A Google search shows, unexpectedly, that Roumelia Lane is also the name of an authoress who wrote romantic novels for Mills and Boon. Why on earth was that name adopted? Either the lady visited Boscombe and walked down the back alley at some point or, as is more likely, she saw the street name on the back of a puzzle box. Victory, the jigsaw puzzle manufacturer, had a factory on the lane for several years.

Gerry Anderson and Supermarionation

A further bit of delving shows that this is one of several pseudonyms used by the lady whose real name is Janey Scott. Scott was a prolific writer who also wrote under the name of Roberta Leigh. As Roberta Leigh, she created a children’s TV series and approached Gerry Anderson’s fledgling production company to film it. Strapped for cash, the production company agreed and so stepped on the first rung of the ladder to success.

That children’s television series was The Adventures of Twizzle. A second series written by Leigh, followed called Torchy the Battery Boy. Anderson then decided to branch out on his own and by 1960 had invented the Supermarionation puppet filming technique (not to be confused with the video game Super Mario Nation) which was first formally recognised in the Supercar TV series. One of his most famous TV series created using this technique is Thunderbirds.

The Original Captain Scarlett

So, that is the connection between Roumelia Lane and Thunderbirds. But what about Captain Scarlet other than that too was filmed using Supermarionation? A Boscombe neighbour and friend of Sir Henry Drummond Wolff was Dame Jane Shelley, daughter in law to the renowned poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. When she died in 1899, the Shelley estates in Boscombe passed to one of her great nephews.

He was Shelley Leopold Lawrence Scarlett (later the 5th Lord Abinger) who gained the rank of Captain whilst serving in the Army’s 3rd Battalion, Bedfordshire Regiment. The unanswered question is therefore: Did Gerry Anderson know of the links between Roumelia Lane and Captain Scarlett and purposely call his space hero by that name or is this curious connection simply an example of that social networking theory known as degrees of separation?

The copyright of the article Gerry Anderson and Roumelia Lane in Children’s TV is owned by Elaine Findlay. Permission to republish Gerry Anderson and Roumelia Lane in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.