This week, I discovered something wonderful - Errol Flynn came to Hay!
Brian-with-the-Staffies has the little shop behind Rose's Books, now called Belle Books after one of his Staffies (because Denzel would be a silly name for a bookshop!). An old chap comes in to buy old Westerns from him, and they got talking. It seems that the old chap's dad was the gardener at Clock Mill in Clifford at the time that Rafael Sabatini lived there, and he still has the letters that Sabatini sent to his father.
Rafael Sabatini was the author of many books with action-filled plots, some of which were made into some of the best swashbuckling films that Hollywood ever produced. Captain Blood, The Sea Hawk, Scaramouche, and The Black Swan all came from his pen originally - and Errol Flynn was the star of Captain Blood (which made him a star, and where he said the famous line I've used as the title for this piece) and The Sea Hawk - though the plot of the film is almost completely different to the plot of the book.
And some time during the 1930s, Errol Flynn came to visit Sabatini for a quiet time away from the pressures of stardom.
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Rafael Sabatini's second marriage was to the sculptress Christine Dixon, and her son Lancelot was a Spitfire pilot who tragically crashed his plane just across the river after overflying their home in Clifford. Most unusually, Lancelot does not have a war grave but was buried in the cemetery in Hay. There is a beautiful and very touching memorial to him (an angel on the ground) sculpted by his mother there. KateH
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