An encounter with Erroll Flynn in Swindon

All the teenage girls in town used to fight over who returned his balls from the boundary

A collection of Errol Flynn memorabilia is being auctioned today, in Swindon. It is possible that you never expected the words Errol, Flynn and Swindon to appear in the same sentence – I know I didn't – but there you are; it so happens that the distinguished book auctioneers, Dominic Winter, are based in Swindon, and that they are handling the sale of what is considered to be the world's finest private collection of Errol Flynnery, assembled over many years in, of all other improbable places, Leamington Spa.

Now, before any more cracks about Swindon being an unfashionable, unswashbuckling sort of town for the great swashbuckler's documents to wind up before dispersal to other collectors, it is worth knowing that he was deemed utterly incapable of swashing his buckle when it really mattered (I'm coming to that).

And in any case, Dominic Winter have auctioned documents far more unlikely ever to pass through Swindon, notably a speech read and signed by Louis XVI that is said to have kicked off the French Revolution. Besides, whatever the metropolitan sneers, let nobody say that Wiltshire's largest town is unacquainted with glamour. Diana Dors was a Swindonian, so too is Melinda Messenger, and so too Billie Piper. The Swindon tourist office has missed a trick; they could market the place as the home of the cleavage.

Admittedly, it's a teeny bit of a struggle to find many other showbiz connections with Swindon, although a very nice man at the reference library did tell me that a couple of scenes in a recent James Bond film were shot in the local Motorola factory. I asked him whether Swindon had anything else to offer in terms of theatrical or cinematic associations?

"Erm," he said. "Erm, have you already got Melinda Messenger?" I said I had. "And Billie Piper?" Yes. "And there's Gilbert O'Sullivan. And Mark Lamarr. And, erm, oh dear. Oh yes, Justin Hayward, who used to be in the Moody Blues."

I then phoned the tourist office, where a very nice woman told me that Swindon was also the home of the well-known writer Richard Jefferies. Richard Jefferies, I said? "Yes," she said, with a nervous giggle, "he's a well-known writer."

I called the man in the library again. Richard Jefferies, he told me, wrote books about nature. "And Alfred Williams came from Swindon," he added." He wrote a famous book called Life in a Railway Factory. He used to work in a railway factory."

Not only are Swindonians very nice, they are also admirably literal. But by now I felt as if I was flogging a chalk horse (something else for which the environs of Swindon are famous). It was time to focus on the other part of the story, the bit about Errol Flynn's real-life failings in the swashbuckling department.

This painful subject – painful, at any rate, to those of us for whom The Adventures of Robin Hood vied with Jason and the Argonauts as the all-time favourite source of boyhood reveries – is addressed in a photocopy of a letter written by Flynn's friend Douglas Fairbanks. Apparently, the letter draws attention to the fact that Flynn applied to serve in the armed forces during the Second World War but was rejected, on the grounds that years of energetic carousing, as well as debilitating illness, had rendered him, even at the age of 34, "physically incapable of performing the duties of a serviceman".

The star of The Charge of the Light Brigade, The Dawn Patrol and Operation Burma, physically incapable of performing the duties of a serviceman! How many illusions can be shattered in one week, following the revelation in these very pages that Richard Widmark, one of the toughest of screen tough guys, is in reality a gentle East Coast patrician vehemently opposed to the sale of handguns in America? Somebody will tell me next that Rock Hudson was gay.

Still, Flynn's reputation is at least reinforced in other ways by today's auction, for example in a letter written to the daughter of his local cinema manager when he worked as a humble stage actor in England, just before he set sail for Hollywood. According to a (very nice) man at Dominic Winter, the letter is accompanied by one written by the recipient, years later, in which she recalled that all the teenage girls in town used to watch Flynn play cricket, and fight over who returned his balls from the boundary.

All of which took place in Northampton. Yes, between leaving his native Tasmania and super-stardom in the movies, Flynn was one of the stalwarts of Northampton Rep. So if there is anywhere for his effects to be assembled together, perhaps for the last time, it might as well be Middle England.

b.viner@independent.co.uk