Ned Wilmot, a young apprentice, watches the sailing ship Abbs family, nicknamed the Brute, launched and sees its first death, a crewman crushed by a falling timber. Years later Ned serves aboard the ship under Captain Colchester, while his brother Charlie joins as first mate and courts Maggie Colchester, the captain's niece. The ship's string of fatal accidents continues on the China run, and the crew grows uneasy about her reputation. Escape is an American radio anthology adapted from Joseph Conrad's story The Brute, broadcast in 1948. The lead actors include Dan O'Herlihan as Ned Wilmot and Eric Rolf as Charlie Wilmot.
Characters: Ned Wilmot, Charlie Wilmot, Maggie Colchester, Captain Colchester, Mr. German, Mr. Wilmot
The transcript of “036- The Brute”, an episode of Escape first broadcast April 11, 1948. Press a time to play from that line (a 60-second preview; Potato Plus plays it all). Escape plays Escape free, live around the clock. Search inside this transcript.
Transcript
Getting impatient for baseball season to start. Have a touch of spring fever. Want to get away from it all? We offer you escape. Who are in mid-ocean? A board of jinx ship? Already nine men have died.
And you know that some malignant forces aimed at you from which you cannot escape. Escape! Designed to free you from the four walls of today for a half hour of high adventure. Tonight, we escaped on the North Atlantic in the year 1900, and to a sailing ship whose very name struck dread in sailor's hearts.
As Joseph Conrad told it in his famous story, the brute. Tell it just by looking at her, proud and strong and beautiful on the outside. You couldn't see the black heart inside of her, and you'd never know.
She'd killed at least a dozen men and maybe more. Well, I knew her. for the murder in she debulcy was. I saw the day she killed her first one and I was there too when she finally made a big mistake and killed the wrong person. Well that was a long time later.
Well she had a name all right but after that first day her first killing nobody with the family ever used it again. Everyone else from that day on would look at her half a frayed and half snarling and And they called her the brute.
I remember I was 14 the day my father took me down to the South Thames bowyard to watch the launching of the ship. My brother Charlie was there of course, eight years older than me and very proud of his one girl's strike.
Now that he'd be made an officer on the Apse line. Charlie and father were talking. I just stood and listened to him and didn't say much of anything myself. Look at her dad. Ever seen a ship in your life with lines like that?
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But we didn't find my brother Charlie. And for the first minute, I knew we wouldn't. Because just before I left the ship, there by the helm, in the light of the binnacle lamp, I'd seen the thing he was holding, clenched tight in his hard brown fist.
It was a tiny platinum ring, set with a blue striped diamond. is produced and directed by Norman McDonald and tonight brought to you The Brute by Joseph Conrad adapted for radio by Les Crutchfield featuring Dan O'Hurlough as Ned Wilmot and Eric Rolf as Charlie Wilmot with Nina Codden as Maggie Jeff Corey as Captain Cole Chester Wilms Herbert as German and Parley Bears the
father music is conceived and conducted by Wilbur Hatch next week you will find to the remote hill country of Afghan. Paught in an ambush by the fierce Papen tribes, trapped in a hopeless fight from which there seems no escape.
Next week, we escape with Rudyard Kipling's gripping story, the drums of the foreign ass. Good night then, until the same time next week, when once again, we offer you escape. This is CVS, the Columbia Broadcasting System.
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