I hope many members have decided to read the novels by Paul Scott which are available in Granada paperbacks. There are over a dozen titles, but the four forming The Raj Quartet are The Jewel in the Crown, The Day of the Scorpion, The Towers of Silence and A Division of the Spoils.

These superb books tell the story of the last days of the British in India and are acknowledged by literary critics as being amongst the finest and most remarkable works of English fiction published in the past twenty years.

Paul Scott died in 1978 at the age of 58, after spending the last 18 years of his life writing this series of brilliant and perceptive novels, portraying the social, political and personal upheavals in India in the 1940s.

From these four novels, forming The Raj Quartet, Granada TV are preparing an epic which should be on our screens in the late winter. We are proud to have had Quainton chosen as one of the places for location filming. Our up yard was completely transformed by the construction of two major filmsets, one representing a station called Premanagar and the other Mirat Cantonment. In this issue I have tried to describe how the work was planned and carried out, how our site appeared during and after the filming and, by the photographs, to record some of the remarkable scenes of the past Summer.

Notes:
The text in this Quainton Railway Society publication was written in 1982 and so does not reflect events in the 32+ years since publication. The text and photographs are repeated verbatim from the original publication, with only a few minor grammar changes but some clarifying notes are added if deemed necessary. The photos from the original publication are provided as scans in this internet version of this long out of print publication.

Reference:
The Raj Quartet - Quainton News No. 46 - Autumn 1982