In 1922, Alfred Hitchcock obtained his first shot at directing for Gainsborough Pictures with the film Number 13 (or Mrs. Peabody). It is considered Hitchcock's first feature film.Clare Greet and Ernest Thesiger were to star as husband and wife. The story was about low-income residents of a building, financed by The Peabody Trust, founded by American banker-philanthropist George Foster Peabody, to offer affordable housing to needy Londoners.

However, the film's budget fell apart, and it was pulled from production after only a handful of scenes were shot. Hitchcock rarely, if ever, spoke about his first directing project, until his biographer, Donald Spoto, asked him about life in the early twenties, and his first films. On one occasion, he said that it was a "somewhat chastening experience".

As with Hitchcock's later lost film The Mountain Eagle, footage from Number 13 has become widely sought after by film historians and collectors without success.