To many, he was the spitting image of Alfred Hitchcock, but there was far more than physical similarity that linked First World War Q-ship hero Harold Auten to the legendary Hollywood director, as Steve Snelling explains.
In later life, naval hero turned movie distributor Harold Auten was amused to be mistaken for Alfred Hitchcock. The resemblance was indeed uncanny. As Auten once remarked: “Alfred and I look alike, talk alike and I have had the greatest difficulty during the past years in trying to tell people I am not Hitchcock.” Such, in fact, was their physical likeness that some newspapers even went so far as to describe him as ‘Hitch’s double’. It was a moniker that appealed to him not just on account of the director’s celebrity, but because he happened to be a personal friend of Hitchcock, having helped introduce him to Hollywood many years earlier. And there was something more they had in common: each in their own way were masters of suspense. But where Hitchcock’s fame rested on producing shocks and thrills of a fictional cinematic kind, Auten’s reputation was based on a real-life drama in a wartime saga of mystery and intrigue renowned for its displays of gallantry and guile.
Contrary to la…
