The Scarlet Pimpernel
A London Production That Found an American Audience
The Scarlet Pimpernel arrived on American radio in the summer of 1952 as something genuinely unusual: a full adventure series recorded in London, sold across the Atlantic by a British syndicate, and aired on NBC as a summer replacement for The Cavalcade of America. That summer run lasted from July 1 to August 19, 1952, Tuesdays at 8, thirty minutes a week. The show did well enough that NBC kept it going as its own standalone series, moving it to Sundays at 6 starting September 21, 1952, where it ran until September 20, 1953. Fifty episodes in total — roughly twenty-two and a half hours of surviving audio — came out of that combined run. After the American broadcasts wrapped, the BBC picked up the series for broadcast in Britain, so the production traveled in both directions across the Atlantic.
The show was produced by Towers of London, which at the time was the world's leading dealer in recorded radio programming. Harry A. Towers ran the operation, having co-founded the company in 1946 with his mother, Margaret Miller Towers. Towers knew how to package a radio property, and the Scarlet Pimpernel was exactly the kind of title that could move on both sides of the Atlantic — a recognizable British literary character, an Adventure setting with built-in stakes, and a production polished enough to compete with American network product. Writer Joel Murcott traveled to London specifically to adapt the material, working to keep the scripts close to Baroness Orczy's original novel.
The Story and Its Source
Baroness Emmuska Orczy — born Emma Magdalena Rozália Mária Jozefa Borbála Orczy on 23 September 1865, in Hungary — conceived her most famous character while standing on a platform of the London Underground. She came to Britain as a child, settling in London in 1880 at the age of fourteen. What she eventually created was one of the most durable hero templates in popular fiction.
The story is set during the French Revolution, in the reign of Louis XVI, when the guillotine was doing steady work in Paris. Sir Percy Blakeney moves through London society as a foppish, almost laughably vain dandy — exactly the sort of man no one would suspect of heroism. In moments of crisis, he becomes the Scarlet Pimpernel, slipping into France with his companion Lord "Tony" Dewhurst and a network of followers known as the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel to pull condemned men and women out from under the blade. Standing in their way is Citizen Chauvelin, the calculating agent of Robespierre who serves as the Pimpernel's principal nemesis. The radio series followed this structure faithfully. Contemporary reviewers noted that the scripts stayed "very close to the dialogue of the original Baroness Emmuska Orczy novel of 1905."
Orczy had originally written the story as a stage play, co-authored with her husband Montagu Barstow, opening in Nottingham in 1903 and reaching London's West End on 5 January 1905. It ran for more than 2,000 performances, becoming one of the most-staged shows in British theatrical history. The novel itself came out in 1905 — only after the play succeeded, and only after Orczy had submitted the manuscript to twelve publishers before one would take it. She followed that novel with more than a dozen sequels, from I Will Repay in 1906 to Mam'zelle Guillotine in 1940.
The character's reach across popular fiction is hard to overstate. Marvel Comics co-creator Stan Lee called the Pimpernel "the first character who could be called a superhero." The secret-identity structure that defines Zorro, the Shadow, Superman, and Batman all trace a line back to Sir Percy Blakeney managing his dual life as London socialite and revolutionary rescuer.
Marius Goring in the Lead
The production's central strength was Marius Goring, who played Sir Percy Blakeney for all fifty episodes. He was not new to the role. In 1949, Goring had played Sir Percy in a six-episode BBC radio series — so by the time the 1952 NBC production went into recording, he had already inhabited the character once before on radio and brought that experience with him.
Born on 23 May 1912 in Newport on the Isle of Wight, Goring came from a distinctive family. His father, Charles Buckman Goring, was an eminent physician and criminologist, author of The English Convict; his mother, Kate Winifred, was a professional pianist and suffragette. He was educated at the Perse School in Cambridge, then studied at universities in Frankfurt, Munich, Vienna, and Paris, becoming fluent in French and German. He trained at the Old Vic dramatic school from 1929 to 1932 and began his stage career at the Old Vic, Sadler's Wells, and the West End, drawing notice for his Feste in Twelfth Night in 1937 and Romeo to Peggy Ashcroft's Juliet at the Old Vic. In 1935, he co-founded the London Theatre Studio alongside Michel Saint-Denis, George Devine, and Glen Byam Shaw, a training school for actors, directors, and designers that closed in 1939 when the war began.
During World War II, Goring joined the army in June 1940 and eventually became supervisor of BBC radio productions broadcasting to Germany. Because his surname shared associations with Hermann Göring, he performed under the alias Charles Richardson. After the war, he appeared in four films for the directing team of Powell & Pressburger, most notably as Conductor 71 in A Matter of Life and Death (1946) and as Julian Craster in The Red Shoes (1948).
Goring was a founding member of British Equity in 1929, served on its council from 1949, and was its vice-president on multiple occasions. He was appointed CBE in 1991 and was also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He died of stomach cancer on 30 September 1998 at his home in Rushlake Green, East Sussex.
After the radio series, Goring carried the role of Sir Percy forward into television. The 1955–1956 British ITV series The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel was produced by Towers of London for Incorporated Television Programmes and screened beginning 28 September 1955 — one of the first drama series on the new British commercial network, which had only begun transmitting in London the week before. Goring not only starred but co-produced the series and wrote one episode, "The Flower Woman." His wife, actress Lucie Mannheim, whom he had married in 1941, appeared in seven episodes. Patrick Troughton played Sir Andrew Ffoulkes in most of the run. Originally planned for 39 episodes, the series ultimately ran to 18 filmed and broadcast.
Harry Towers and the Production Behind It
Harry Alan Towers was born on 19 October 1920 in Wandsworth, London, the son of a theatrical agent, and trained as a child actor at the Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts. During World War II, he served in the Royal Air Force, becoming prolific as a radio writer and eventually heading the RAF radio unit on the British Forces Broadcasting Service, reaching the rank of Pilot Officer. That background made him exceptionally well-suited to the business of producing and selling radio programming internationally.
Towers of London, which he co-founded with his mother in 1946, built a catalog that included other notable productions: The Lives of Harry Lime and The Black Museum, both featuring Orson Welles, and Secrets of Scotland Yard with Clive Brook. The Scarlet Pimpernel was among the company's most ambitious productions — an original 50-episode series designed from the start for American network placement, with a genuine literary property, a respected lead actor, and writing handled by a dedicated adapter.
The series featured rousing orchestral scoring and sound effects that reviewers associated with the British radio drama style. That production identity was part of what made it distinctive on American airwaves. In a radio landscape full of domestically produced programming, something recorded in London carried its own texture.
Towers later moved into film production in the early 1960s, eventually producing more than 80 feature films, often writing screenplays under the pseudonym Peter Welbeck. He died on 31 July 2009 in Toronto, Canada.
What the Series Delivered
The first surviving episode, "The Rescue of Madame Susanne Florey," aired July 1, 1952. The second, "Rescue of the Duke de Montreaux and Daughter," followed on July 8. That opening pair established the formula: a specific condemned figure, a rescue plan, Chauvelin or his agents in pursuit, and Sir Percy deploying both his wits and his disguise. The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel — bound by an oath of secrecy that kept their identities safe from enemy agents — gave each episode the texture of something larger than a single adventure.
The combination of a well-known source novel, a lead actor with stage and screen credentials, and scripts that honored the original material gave the series a reliability that carried it through a full year of Sunday evening broadcasting. The character itself had already proven across novels, a long-running stage hit, BBC radio, and contemporaneous BBC television productions in the early 1950s that it could sustain serial treatment without wearing thin. Goring's doubled familiarity with Sir Percy — from the 1949 BBC series and then this extended run — gave the performance a confidence and ease that comes through in the recordings.